Eva's Man

by Gayl Jones

  “Then let him. I’ll be grateful.”

  He laughed, even in his nostrils. I sat up on the bed and drew up my knees.

  “We’ll go out and have something to eat later,” he said. “No, I’ll bring something up.”

  “Okay.” I blew breath on his neck, then looked at my toenails that needed cutting.

  “Do you have any scissors?”

  “In that drawer over there.”

  He didn’t get them. I got up and got them. He stayed on the edge of the bed. I sat back down bending. When I finished, I scraped the filings into a heap and put them in the sack he used for a trashcan. But it didn’t matter though, because the floor was already dirty.

  “I could sweep the floor,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to sweep the floor,” he said, irritated again. I frowned. He smiled and put his tongue between my teeth. “I’ll be through tomorrow,” I said.

  We lay down again. He put his thigh across my belly to feel me, nothing more, then he felt my thighs and my belly. When it was evening, he fed me eggs and sausages and beer.

  “Did the eggs get cold?” he asked. “No, they’re fine.”

  “Mine got cold.”

  “Here, take mine.”

  “No,” he said hard, then softened. “I have doughnuts.”

  “They’ll give me the cramps.”

  “I thought you were about through.” I am.

  He ate one doughnut and put the rest away.

  5

  I sat on the floor. My knees hurt. I watched the walls. After a while they came up. I could hear them outside the door talking, whispering. They saw me go up and then they followed me up. “Yes, she’s the one,” the landlady said. “I saw her go up. look

  at her sitting there. Just look at her. What kind of woman can it be to do something like that?”

  One of the cops came over and pulled me up. I didn’t even know what he looked like. I just saw red hair growing on the back of his hand.

  “She ain’t nothing but a whore,” the landlady said. “I seen her up in there, but I didn’t figure she do nothing like that. If I’da known she was going to do something like that, I’d’ve had her right out of here. Her and him too.”

  They put me in the car. The cop with the red hair on his hands sat in the back beside me. The other one was driving.

  “They ever find out who it was that called?” the cop driving asked.

  “No. The landlady said she didn’t call.”

  “Think the woman called?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They sat me in a chair in the Detective Bureau Office. They didn’t handcuff me, they just had me sitting there. Then they took me to get my fingerprints and picture taken, then they brought me back to the chair in the office.

  He called me Sweet. He said my tongue was like honey in his palm.

  “Should I close the window?” he asked. “No, it’s still kind of hot.”

  “I’ll close it a little. It might get cooler. I don’t want to keep getting up.”

  He got up and came back to bed. I kept on my panties, but there was still a little stain in his bed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  He put his leg between my legs and drew me close so he could feel my breasts against him, so he could feel between my thighs.

  “I forgot to put mustard on the sausage. You told me to put mustard on the sausage.”

  “That’s all right. It was good.”

  He said my hair was a woolen halo. He stroked it back with his hand. He wanted me, but I couldn’t. He withdrew his leg and turned his back to me.

  The next day he fingered me down between my legs, then he touched my navel. “I ain’t never seen a bitch, I mean a grown woman, with a navel that long. Didn’t you wear a bellyband when you were a kid?”

  “Yes, but it kept slipping down.”

  “Should I wear a rubber?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Naw, I was thinking . . .”

  He didn’t tell me what he was thinking.

  “I thought I’d forget where to put my legs,” I said, joking. But he wouldn’t let me joke. “Has it really been that long?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “No, I was only guessing.” I grinned up at him.

  He kissed me, laughing. “I’m not screwed out yet, are you?”

  “No.”

  He came in from the back this time.

  The landlady rolled her eyes at me. The landlord wouldn’t look at me. They went in the back room to give their statements. The detective with the red hair growing out of his knuckles and the back of his hand sat on the desk watching me. The other detective came in.

  “She talked yet?”

  “No.”

  “Look at those eyes. A woman got to be crazy to do something like that.”

  “Or want you to think she’s crazy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do something so people will think she has to be crazy to do it.”

  “What did they do with it?”

  “Freezer.”

  “Somebody better put a note saying ‘This ain’t a piece of sausage’.” He laughed.

  The detective with the red hair didn’t laugh. “When’s the captain coming?” he asked.

  “I just called him. He said he’d be right in.”

  The detective with the red hair looked disgusted. He looked at me, then looked away from me. He got down from the desk and stood over by the filing cabinets. The other detective said nothing. He stood with his back to me, his hands clasped behind him. I stared down at my hands. They were dry. The skin around the nails was peeling. The detective was standing up at the cabinets with his ankles crossed. I looked at him below the waist. I hadn’t meant to look there. I looked away from him. I picked at the skin around my nails.

  “Somebody ought to give her a comb,” the detective with his back to me said.

  “I already gave her one. She gave it back to me.”

  He wouldn’t let me comb my hair after we made love. “What if we go out?” I asked.

  “We ain’t going out,” he said.

  He put his leg across me again. Afterwards he sat up in bed, smoking, making wings of his nostrils. He said he was a dragon, then he said he was a train.

  “Do you like oysters?” I asked. He nodded.

  “At Easter we used to put a hole in eggs and suck them hollow.”

  “What does that have to do with oysters?”

  I feel like an egg sucked hollow and then filled with raw oysters, I was thinking.

  “Do you like them raw or cooked?” I asked. “Either way. No, raw better.”

  “Let’s have a party,” I said suddenly. “Just the two of us.”

  “I’m all fucked out,” he said. I laughed.

  He put his arm around my waist. “You’ve got a little waist.”

  “Something I inherited,” I said. “My mother had a little waist.

  And her mother.”

  I danced for him, my hair uncombed, my shoulders careless. I danced and laughed. He sat cross-legged on the bed and watched.

  “You should be all fucked out,” he said. He wasn’t joking. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” I said. I wasn’t joking either.

  He kept watching me. I stopped dancing and sat down, sweat in my hands. I was frowning.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “I said you were all fucked out.”

  I didn’t like that. I wished he would stop saying that, but I didn’t tell him. I sat with my thighs close to his. He plucked at my breasts. I laughed. Then I shut my mouth. I have a dark line along one of my teeth.

  “What do you really do?” he asked.

  “I work in a tobacco factory when I’m not laid off,” I said. “What else have you got to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Eva, why won’t you talk about yourself?”

  I said nothing. He l
aid me down and sucked on my belly.

  I ran till my breath turned brittle. Freddy caught me and put himself up against me.

  “Y’all boys get away from here,” Miss Billie said. She was laughing. “He’s just like a little banny rooster, all stuck out in front.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” my father asked my mother. “Nothing.”

  “Sometimes I swear, woman, you . . .”

  He didn’t finish what he was going to say.

  Elvira raised her dress up. “This damn elastic is cutting me. I swear I wish they issue some bloomers that fit sometime. Shit.”

  She kept twisting and twisting, her hands under her dress. “If I had some scissors I’d cut the damn things, but they won’t let me have no scissors.” The elastic ripped. “Shit.”

  A scar on her knee. Knots in her thighs.

  The man with no thumb said, “If you married me, I’d go a long way.”

  “Eva’ll tell you where you can go in a minute, buddy, if you don’t stop worrin her,” Alfonso said.

  The man with no thumb laughed. “Naw, she ain’t none a your cousin. I caint believe a bastard like you got a cousin like that.”

  No, sweetmeat, that’s what he called me. A sweetmeat like that.

  Alfonso kept grinning and watching the man eat pigfeet with his thumbless hand.

  “Ask him how he lost his thumb, Eva, he’ll say his wife did it. Why don’t you go home to your wife?”

  “What about yours, man . . . Naw, she ain’t none of your cousin. A sweetmeat like that.”

  He pointed at me with his thumbless hand, then he picked up another piece of meat. “I know I be gone somewhere then,” he said.

  “Aw, cut it out, man,” Alfonso said. “She ain’t studin you.”

  “I wont her to take me places,” the man with no thumb said. “Shit,” Alfonso said.

  I was in the room alone, pretending the floor was the ceiling. He was out doing whatever it was he did when he went out. He’d left the door partly open and a gray cat came in and walked around. It didn’t see me at first, but then it saw me and walked around some more and went under the bed and came out again. I didn’t touch him. I waited till he went out and then I got up and shut the door.

  When Davis came back he said, “There’s cat shit in the room.”

  I didn’t tell him how it got there. I said I didn’t know either.

  “Want a comb?” the detective asked.

  I ran my hand through my hair and shook my head. I wanted to sit there and plait it up, but I didn’t. I just sat there. He put his comb back in his pocket. He kept looking at me. He was looking like he was thinking of something else. Then he was looking like he was half afraid of me.

  The captain came in like he was in a hurry. “She the woman?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “She talked yet?”

  “No sir.”

  The captain picked up a long yellow sheet off the desk. He looked over it so fast he couldn’t have been reading it, then he looked at me.

  “She got any marks on her?” he asked, still looking at me.

  “No, not a mark one. We had one of the policewomen check her over.”

  “No scratches, or nothing?”

  “No sir.”

  “He didn’t beat her or anything?”

  “No sir.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know where I’d be if I had you. I’d be in hightime by now.”

  “Shit,” Alfonso said.

  There was a long table in the room. They told me to sit anywhere I wanted to. I sat in the first chair I came to. The redheaded detective sat a chair away from me, the other sat across from me, the captain remained standing. Before he said anything, there was a knock on the door, and a policeman came in and handed him a sheet of paper and then left. The captain looked at the paper, then said, “Her name is Eva Medina Canada, father John Canada, mother Marie Canada, born Columbus, Georgia, 1937. When she was five they moved to new York. She’s been in trouble before. When she was seventeen she stabbed a man. She wouldn’t talk then either, wouldn’t say anything to defend herself. She was given a six-month sentence. She spent the first three months in a girls” reformatory, and then she was old enough to be fingerprinted and put in prison for the remaining three months. She wouldn’t even tell why she stabbed him. The man claimed, ‘I wasn’t doing nothing but trying to buy the woman a beer.’ She was married. She was married in 1955 to a man named Hunn. last job she had was in a tobacco factory . . . You want to talk, Eva?”

  I said nothing.

  “I’d be way away from here,” the man with no thumb said.

  Alfonso said he was taking me to see Otis and Jean, but they weren’t there. He said why didn’t we play cards till they came. He said he didn’t like to play cards at the table, he liked to play cards on the floor. I had on pants and I sat with my legs folded. He said he couldn’t do that. He said he was too stiff to do that. When he tried to sit like that his knees stuck up, he wasn’t limber enough. I cut the cards. I saw where he was looking and changed the way I was sitting. He dealt.

  “I thought you said they were coming,” I said after we’d played awhile.

  “They be here,” he said.

  He was sitting with his knees stuck up. I didn’t like where I was looking now. He saw where I was looking. He put down his cards and pulled on my arm. “Come on, girl.”

  “Come on, what? Naw.”

  He had pulled me over where he was and started kissing on the side of my neck. I stood up and he pulled me down again, this time my leg across him. He had hold of my hand. This time when I felt it, it wasn’t inside pants. It felt like a wrist. It was throbbing like a wrist. It felt as big and round as a wrist. I said naw, and broke away from him and for the door. I thought he would grab hold of me before I got there, but he didn’t. I got out. He didn’t come after me.

  “You scratched me down there.”

  We were sitting at a table in the Froglegs restaurant. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I still got the scar.”

  He got up and came back and pushed my beer over to me. “It’s about time you had some meat and juice too,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “They ain’t there. Why don’t you come home with me?”

  “Naw.”

  “Why you out with me again? I thought when I asked you, you’d turn me down flat. I asked you anyway, though. You said Yes. That surprised me, you know that. It honestly did. I thought we had something going, but we ain’t . . . What if I asked you to come home with me? Otis out with some vamp and Jean staying with some girlfriend of hers that’s been having a bad time with some man.”

  “Naw.”

  “I’ll tell your mama you let me suck your tiddies.”

  “Naw you won’t.”

  He laughed, and told me to drink my beer.

  “You know where I’d like to take you? I’d like to take you out to Chicago and then to Kansas City and then out to California,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “You don’t believe me. I would. Don’t you want to go those places?”

  “Not with you.”

  “You hard on a man.”

  “I told you to tell people I’m your cousin. You haven’t been telling yourself, have you?”

  “Shit. You went out with me again. You just wont me to take you out somewhere so you can meet somebody.”

  “I don’t want to meet nobody.”

  “Shit, I ain’t never met no hussy that didn’t want to meet nobody.” He was mad. “That’s all, you just wonted me to flunky for you.”

  “Naw I didn’t.”

  “Must not be nobody here good enough for you. I ain’t seen you looking.”

  “I’m not looking for nobody.”

  “Yes you are. You lookin for the meat and gravy, only I ain’t the right meat and gravy.”

  “I didn’t say I was looking.”

  “Shit. Drink your beer, woman. You want another one?”

  “Naw
.”

  “Naw, you bed not get drunk,” he said. “Tell your mama I had my teeth all in your tiddies.”

  I said nothing. I looked at my beer.

  “Yeah, you out with me. Won’t do nothing but feel, though.” I said nothing.

  “Why don’t you come home with me?” I shook my head and then said, “Naw.”

  “There was a woman,” I told Davis, “called the queen bee. I don’t even know what her real name was, but she was a real good-looking woman, too. People used to say she was marked, because she had three men, and each of them died, you know. After the first one died they didn’t think nothing about it, but then after the second one, people started whispering, and then after the third one, they were sure. I guess she was sure too, because she met this man she was really in love with, and then she killed herself.”

  “I’d rather hear about you.”

  “No. I don’t like to talk about myself.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “You make a man wonder what’s there.”

  “You see me.”

  “Naw, there’s more to you than what I see.” He put his hands inside my thighs. “Yeah, there’s more to you than what see.”

  “You out with me,” Alfonso said. “But that’s all.”

  “The queen bee. I don’t know if she knew that’s what people called her. It must’ve been hard, though. She must’ve been sucked hollow. She must’ve had nothing left.”

  “Naw, those men kept bringing it to her. She must’ve sucked them hollow. That’s why they died. Cause they had nothing left.”

  “Naw, it was harder on the woman.”

  “Shit, I don’t even think it’s a real woman anyway,” Davis said. “Somebody you just made up.”

  “Yes, there was a woman called the queen bee,” I said.

  6

  “She’s educated, though,” the captain said. “She spent two years at Kentucky State, then quit and went to work at

  P. Lorillard tobacco company in Lexington, then she came up to Connecticut and got in tobacco there. Been on the road all her life, just like a man . . .”