Eva's Man

by Gayl Jones

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You let me do it once.”

  “Naw.”

  He had another dirty popsicle stick he pulled out of his pants pocket. “Let me ‘zamine you again.”

  “Naw.”

  Just then Mr. Logan was coming up the stairs. “Mr. Logan, make him leave me alone.”

  Mr. Logan just looked at me, grinning, and walked on by.

  He kept cornering me until he rubbed himself up against me and then he ran up the stairs laughing. I didn’t even like to go outside unless I was with Mama and then he wouldn’t bother me. Once we were with Miss Billie, and Freddy Smoot passed us.

  “That boy’s just like a little rooster, ain’t he?” Miss Billie said. “Just like a little banny rooster.”

  “He is bad,” Mama said.

  “I caint even stand for him to look at me,” Miss Billie said when we got in the house.

  “Who, Freddy?”

  “Naw, that shit out there. That ole shit out there.”

  “You let me do it once.”

  “She don’t know how to act,” Miss Billie said. She was talking about her daughter, who was fifteen. “All she do is think about that boy. That’s why she got her hand caught in the door, cause she too busy thinking about that boy. Come crying to me. I told her she didn’t have no business with that boy.”

  “How’s her hand?”

  “It’s coming along all right. It hurt her like the devil, though. I told her to go and let the doctor cut it a little so he can release some of the blood. But she said naw. That’s why it hurt so bad, all that pressure on it. I told her to go and let him cut it a little right by the nail, and it would stop hurting. But naw, all she got her mind on is that boy. They get like that when they that age, though.”

  “Some of them like that before they that age,” Mama said. “Yeah, well, all I hope is she ain’t let him had none, cause once she let him get some, she ain’t gon rest till he get some more.”

  “Naw, once they done it, they ain’t satisfied till they done it again.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about,” Miss Billie said.

  “You let me do it once.”

  “I ain’t gon let you do it no more.”

  “When you gon let me fuck you again, Eva?”

  “You didn’t fuck me before.”

  My mother said his mother wasn’t no good. The men she had coming in there. White and black men.

  “She ain’t nothing but a whore,” Elvira said about one of the women in the psychiatric ward.

  “She don’t look like one,” I said.

  “Don’t none of them look like none,” she said.

  “I only knew one whore,” I said. “Some woman that lived in the same building we did.”

  “Did she look like one?”

  “Naw. Mama said she was.” Elvira laughed.

  “Once you open your legs, Miss Billie said, it seem like you caint close them.”

  “What you say?” Elvira asked.

  “I said what they used to say when I was a little girl.” She asked me and I told her.

  She looked at me hard. “What about once you close them?” she asked.

  I sat squeezing my legs together, holding my knees. I had on a long skirt.

  “You look like a lion,” Davis said.

  He was standing at the table peeling onions. He was going to make me his favorite salad, he said. Tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes bits of ham and cheese, if he had ham and cheese. Today he didn’t have ham and cheese.

  “You look like a lion, all that hair.”

  “It’s the male lions that have a lot of hair.”

  “Then you look like a male lion,” he said, laughing. “Eva Medusa’s a lion.”

  “Medina,” I said.

  “Medina,” he said. “How’d you get a name like that?”

  “It was my grandmother’s name.”

  “How’d she get that name?”

  “I don’t know. I think one time some gypsies came by their house, and one of them”s name was Medina, and her mama thought it was a pretty name.”

  “Aw.”

  The onions made tears in the corners of his eyes. He wiped them on his sleeve.

  “I don’t know if it’s true or not. That’s what they told me.”

  “If they told you, then it’s true.”

  “I can help,” I said.

  “Naw, you still got the cramps, ain’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Elvira laughed. “Once you close them, do you keep them closed?” she asked.

  I stared at the ceiling.

  “I knew a man once,” Elvira said. “He drove every woman he had crazy. I don’t mean easy crazy, I mean hard crazy. Had some of em committing suicide and stuff, and even when these women knew how he’d done all these other women, they still wonted him. I guess they figured he wouldn’t get them, figured they was different or something. He was good-looking too. But every one of em that went with him just got plain messed up. He messed up every woman he went with. That’s the way I think of that nigger you had. That’s why you killed him cause . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  “Or maybe you that kind of a woman. Do you kill every man you go with?”

  I stared at her.

  “They call her the queen bee,” Miss Billie said, “cause every man she had end up dying. I don’t mean natural dying, I mean something happen to them. Other mens know it too, but they still come.”

  “Why do they still come?” I asked.

  We were in the kitchen and Mama was making Miss Billie and herself and me some lunch. Miss Billie was sitting at the table. I was standing up beside Miss Billie, playing with her gold earrings, and she was hugging me around the waist. Mama was peeling some hard-boiled eggs.

  “They come cause they think won’t nothing touch them.

  They think they caint be hurt.”

  “Eva, why don’t you go back in the living room and play. I call you when lunch is ready.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  I made a circle inside Miss Billie’s hoop earring. “The queen bee,” she said.

  I went in the living room and got my jacks.

  I had on a skirt with an elastic waistband. He put his hand inside my underwear until he touched the edge of the pad.

  “Some women wear these so they won’t have to do anything.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t wont to do anything.”

  “Now all I got to put on this is vinegar,” he said, going back to the salad. “When the vinegar touches the egg it smells like . . . a woman’s smell.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  He didn’t answer. He had a sack full of paper plates. He got out two, and two plastic forks. He dished himself up a plateful and me a plateful. I stayed on the bed, but put my feet on the floor. He put my plate in my lap. He sat down beside me on the bed. He ate the lettuce and onions with his fingers and the bits of egg and tomato and cucumber with his fork.

  “Egg’s the same thing a woman’s got up inside her,” he said. “That’s why it smells that way. It smells like fuck.”

  I frowned.

  He said, “Excuse me.” He took a bit of my egg on his fork, and gave me a bit of tomato from his plate.

  “You don’t wear earrings,” he said. “Naw.”

  “Most women who look like you do wear earrings.”

  “What’s that suppose to mean?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I put my finger inside Miss Billie’s hoop and made a circle.

  “I don’t wont Eva to hear things like that,” my mama said.

  Davis saved most of his egg and ate it last, and then he folded my plate and his and put them in the sack he used for a trashcan.

  “That was good,” I said.

  “It’ll take a age for this room to air out,” he said, then he put his arm around my waist and kissed me.

  She wanted to take me and Freddy to the pa
rk, but Mama wouldn’t let her take me to the park. She told Freddy’s mama I was too bad to be taken to the park, but I knew it was only because she didn’t want Freddy’s mama to take me.

  I saw Freddy’s mama and a man kissing in the doorway. I was sitting out on the steps. Freddy was at school. I could see them up on the next floor, looking up between the stairs.

  “You old enough to be in school, ain’t you?”

  It was Mr. Logan. He had put his chair outside his door and was sitting. I’d been too busy watching Freddy’s mama.

  “Naw sir,” I said.

  “Well, you look like you old enough to be in school,” he said. I looked back at him and got up from the stairs. “See you, Mr. Logan,” I said and went inside my door. I was scared of him after what Miss Billie said. I kept expecting something white to come out of him.

  That was our first year living in that building. My parents came from Columbus, Georgia, but I was five when Daddy moved us to new York, so I tell people I came from concrete. That same day I was sitting on the steps, Mama asked me to go to the store for her. I took a shortcut through this alley and that’s when I saw Freddy and some more boys.

  “There’s Eva, we can get some.” I ran till my throat hurt . . .

  Miss Billie had a bag of groceries. “Y’all get on away from here,” she said.

  She waited for me until I got what Mama wanted, then she walked me home. She said they were a bunch of wild horses.

  “We woulda got you if you didn’t have that old woman to protect you.”

  He had me cornered on the stairs. “Miss Billie ain’t no old woman,” I said.

  “Well, she ain’t no young woman. My mama’s a young woman.”

  I started to tell him what my mama said about his mama, but I didn’t. He was laughing.

  His mama was standing in the door kissing a man.

  The light was swelling from the ceiling. Davis said I was pretty. He put my chin in his palm. “You so pretty,” he said. “Come lay on the bed with me, honey. I won’t do nothing.”

  But his hands made rhythms in my belly. I could feel I wanted him already.

  “Who are you? Where did you come from?” he asked playfully, stretched out beside me. He’d taken off his trousers. I was down to my panties, the sanitary kind, with the plastic strip in the crotch. I was still afraid I’d stain the bedspread, so he put a towel under me. He stroked my thighs.

  “Sometimes I wonder myself,” I said.

  He said he could smell perfume and menstruation. He said he didn’t like it. I kissed his mouth.

  “I got all that egg smell out, and now you smelling up my room again.” He laughed.

  I laughed back at him.

  “Now if it was another smell . . .” he said.

  I sat up in bed and started singing, the song about staying until it was time for going. He said he liked the song. I lay down beside him again, scratching under my breasts. I could tell he wanted to suck them, but he didn’t. I asked him to get closer because it helped the cramps.

  “All that blood,” he said. “I never could help feeling it was something nasty, even with . . .”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He got up against my belly.

  Freddy said him and his mama were moving to a house in Jamaica, new York, a house with a upstairs.

  “So.”

  “You gon miss me, ain’t you?”

  “Naw, I ain’t gon miss you.”

  He started laughing. “I’m gon miss you,” he said.

  He kissed me on the cheek and ran upstairs. I put spit on my hand and wiped my cheek off. He ran back downstairs.

  “Here.” He put it in my hand. “What is it?”

  “A knife.”

  It was a little pearl-handled pocketknife.

  “I’m gon miss you,” he said, and ran back upstairs.

  Miss Billie had on wooden bracelets. She had on five wooden bracelets on one wrist.

  “I wish I could get Charlotte away from that boy. She’s just too restless. It ain’t right for no little girl to be that restless. If she was a woman it would be something different. Even if she was eighteen. I told her I would send her down there to her daddy in north Carolina. She said if I did, she would run away. Ain’t got nothing but that boy on her mind. I told her she gon get more than her hand stuck in the door if she don’t start thinking about something else. But they like that, though, ain’t they? They just won’t listen.”

  “Eva said Freddy and his mama are moving to Jamaica,” Mama said.

  “Well, I guess she musta found a better locality,” Miss Billie said.

  Elvira asked, “What about when you close them? Do they stay closed?”

  I asked her if she had another cigarette. She was going to light it for me, but I said I’d light it myself. She’d wanted to light it in her mouth and then pass it to mine.

  I usually didn’t smoke, but every now and then I’d want one to give me something to do. At first they wouldn’t let Elvira have any cigarettes, and then when she started improving, they’d let her have cigarettes.

  “Yeah, they thought I was too crazy to even have my own cigarettes,” she said, stuffing them back in the pocket of her dress.

  She asked me again if once you closed your legs, did you keep them closed. I asked her what did she think.

  Miss Billie gave me one of her wooden bracelets. That was when I started to school. She said they were ancestors bracelets. She put it on my wrist. She said something about being true to one’s ancestors. She said there were two people you had to be true to—those people who came before you and those people who came after you.

  “They heirlooms, ain’t they? Ain’t you suppose to give those to Charlotte?” Mama asked.

  “I wanted Eva to have one,” Miss Billie said.

  Miss Billie said she was going to her husband in north Carolina. He was down there working in tobacco, and she said if she was going to have to work in a restaurant up north, she might as well work in one down South, and be with her husband.

  “I’m going on account of Charlotte too. You know how I was all worried about her and that boy, and that once it happened I wasn’t going to be able to handle her.”

  “Did anything happen?”

  Miss Billie said the first time he tried to do something, Charlotte came home crying and said she didn’t even want to see him again.

  He was up against my belly. “I ain’t never got in no trouble over no woman,” he said. “I know mens that kill on account of a woman. I ain’t even fought over no woman.”

  “What would you do, just let her go?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’d just let her go. If she wanted to go, I’d let her go.” He started laughing, and squeezed my waist. “Now, if she didn’t want to go, that’s another story. If some man was trying to take her somewhere and she didn’t want to go, that would be different.”

  “I knew a man that killed another man on account of a woman.”

  “Was you the woman?”

  “Naw. I didn’t know her. I just knew the man . . . My cousin told me about how this man killed another man and they put him in jail for seven years. He killed him in the same restaurant we used to go in. He said they wouldn’t even let him in that restaurant no more. He could come and peek in or he could send somebody in there and get him something, but he couldn’t come in. Alfonso—that’s my cousin—Alfonso said it was all on account of his temper. People were scared of him just on account of his temper. Alfonso said he wouldn’t bother people he liked. Alfonso said he wouldn’t bother me.”

  “He didn’t kill nobody on account of you?” Davis asked. I said nothing.

  “Alfonso said he wasn’t a bad man, he just had a bad temper,” I said finally.

  “Alfonso shit. I can feel you want me now, don’t you? I can smell you want me.”

  “I can’t now, Davis.” He got away from me.

  “I’d like to, but I start getting pains afterward if I don’t wait.”

  “Yeah, some women
are like that,” he said.

  I played with Miss Billie’s wooden bracelet until I lost it. I came home crying because I lost it. I went back looking for it, but I couldn’t find it.

  “You should’ve left it here,” Mama said.

  “Miss Billie told me to wear it all the time. She said I shouldn’t take it off.”

  “Well, ain’t nothing you can do about it now.”

  “I’ma keep looking for it.”

  “Somebody else probably got it now.”

  “If I see it on em, I’ma take it off.”

  “You won’t know if it’s yours.”

  “Yes I will. I’ll know if it’s mine.”

  “Eva, hush.”

  I was eight years old when I lost Miss Billie’s bracelet.

  2

  What I remember about the musician was that he was ten years younger than my mother. He was shorter than my father, and a half an inch shorter than my mother. When my mother and the musician started going together, my father said nothing. He knew what was going on, but he didn’t say anything at all. My mother knew he knew, but she would bring the musician home when my father wasn’t there. My father would know he’d been there, though, because the musician used to open his packets of cigarettes upside down. He wouldn’t open them where the red string was, he’d always turn them over and open them. I asked him why once. He said he didn’t know why, he’d just always been opening them like that. And so when my father came home, whenever he’d been there, there’d always be an empty packet of cigarettes in the house, opened upside down. After a while it got so every day there was that packet of cigarettes. Once I saw my father pick up the packet and put it down again. I couldn’t see the expression on his face. I was twelve. I’d just come back in the living room with my homework. When he turned around and told me hello, he didn’t have any kind of a look on his face. He just looked like a man who was going

  about his business. He sat down and read the paper.

  The musician’s name was Tyrone. Mama met him when she went out to this dance-hall with some girlfriends.