Eva's Man

by Gayl Jones

  I picked the loose skin from around my nails.

  The foreman at the plant sent for me. “I thought maybe you could tell me how most of the niggers feel about the union. Whether or not they in favor of it.”

  I said I didn’t know how anybody else was going to vote. I said I just knew how I was going to vote. He said there was ten percent more black people there since he was foreman, and that he liked people that showed gratitude. I said I didn’t know how anybody else was going to vote. He asked me how I was going to vote. I said I knew how I was going to vote. He said he had some money for me if I wanted it. I said I didn’t know how anybody else was going to vote. He said never mind that. He said he didn’t mean that. He said he had some money for me. I said by the time the voting was over, it would be time for me to be back on the road again. He said I didn’t seem like

  I belonged around there anyway. He said I could be on the road before the voting was over. He sent me out and called somebody else in. He said he didn’t like people who didn’t know how to be grateful.

  I picked the loose skin from around my nails. I sat on the bed. Davis scooted his chair up to me. He sat backwards, straddling the chair, his arms up over the back.

  “You had that look in your eyes again,” he said. “What look?”

  “Sometimes when I look at you and you don’t know I’m looking at you, you set your jaw a certain way, and then you get this look in your eyes.”

  “What kind of look?”

  “I don’t know what kind of look. It’s just there . . . You hard to get into, you know that.”

  “I didn’t think I was so hard.”

  “I don’t mean that way,” he said.

  I grinned at him. He grinned back at me, then frowned.

  When the psychiatrist told me his name was David Smoot, I laughed. He asked me what was wrong. I said nothing. He had a mustache and goatee and reminded me of the musician.

  “Why did you kill the man, Eva?” I didn’t answer.

  “Did Davis know why you killed him?” I still didn’t answer.

  He leaned toward me. He said he didn’t just want to know about the killing, he said he wanted to know about what happened after the killing. Did it come in my mind when I saw

  him lying there dead or had I planned it all along. His voice was soft. It was like cotton candy. He said he wanted to know how it felt, what I did, how did it make me feel. I didn’t want him looking at me. I had my hands on my knees. My knees were open. I closed my knees.

  “I want to help you, Eva.” I said nothing.

  “Talk to me.” I wouldn’t.

  “You’re going to have to open up sometime, woman, to somebody. I want to help you.”

  I looked at him, still saying nothing. He sat watching me for a long time and then he said, “I’ll see you, Eva.”

  He got up and left. I listened to his footsteps down the hall. I kept my knees squeezed tight together. I heard a woman a few cells down from me laugh, twice, then she was silent.

  “I guess what you done excites people,” Elvira said.

  “How did it feel, Eva?” the psychiatrist asked.

  My mother got an obscene telephone call one day. A man wanted to know how did it feel when my daddy fucked her. “How did it feel?” Elvira asked.

  “They told me you wouldn’t talk. They said I wouldn’t get one word out of you,” the psychiatrist said. “Did you feel you had any cause to mutilate him afterwards? Why did you feel killing him wasn’t enough?”

  “How did it feel?” Elvira asked.

  “How did you feel?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “How did it feel?” Elvira asked.

  “How do it feel, Mizz Canada?” the man asked my mama. She slammed the telephone down.

  “Eva. Eva. Eva,” Davis said.

  “My hair looks like snakes, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  I don’t want to tell my story. Can I have a cigarette? Thanks. Why don’t you go away. Can I have another cigarette before you go away? You know, I used to make these things.

  The gypsy Medina’s hair was as thick as a black woman’s. In a picture my grandmother’s hair was heavy against her face. My Grandmother Medina was married three times. She had fourteen children. About eight of them were born living. One of them was born choked by her own umbilical cord, another was born with the fever, another they couldn’t explain, another . . . Her hair was as heavy as a black woman’s.

  “How much would you take for it?”

  “I wouldn’t take nothing.”

  “Five, ten, fifteen . . .”

  “I said I wouldn’t take nothing.”

  He sent me away, and called somebody else in. “I just spoke with one nigra, but she . . .”

  “Alfonso—that’s my cousin—he used to beat his wife outside this hotel. He wouldn’t beat her inside, he had to always take her outside and beat her. And they used to always have to go get his brother to make him stop, because that was the only one he would listen to.”

  Alfonso, sitting in the Froglegs restaurant, brought me a beer. “I’ll tell your mama you let me suck your tiddies.”

  “Naw you won’t.”

  “I’d have you in Chicago right now if things was the way I wanted them. Have you right in Chicago. And then I wouldn’t just be wonting no conversation neither. A man wonts more than conversation. I ain’t the kind of man to just wont conversation . . . You see that bitch over there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That ain’t really no bitch, that’s a bastard. Dress up like a woman and then come in here. Shit. He don’t bother the men that knows him. Most of us know what he is. He just pick up on the men that don’t. Most of the ones that hang around here don’t fool around with him. Sometimes she makes pickups, drunks or strangers. They find out right quick, though. They start messing around her. Naw, I don’t even git drunk when I come in here, cause I know how I do when I’m drunk. I wouldn’t get mixed up with that bastard for nothing. Wake up the next morning and find his wig in my face. Shit . . . Yeah, I have you in Chicago right now.”

  “Yeah, I could go places if I had you,” the man with no thumb said. “I could go high places.”

  “Yeah, I been places,” Alfonso said. “I bet I been places and done things you ain’t never even heard of. like I been to parties where everybody’s naked, for instance. I bet you ain’t never even heard of that.”

  “Yes I have.”

  “Naw you haven’t.” I said yes I had.

  “I bet you haven’t.”

  I said nothing.

  “Yeah, I been like you too,” he said. “Just like I was new in the world. I remember the first time I went up north, went up to Cincinnati, and I was sitting in this restaurant and there was this white woman at this restaurant, and she kept looking at me for me to dance with her, you know. You know I wasn’t going to dance with no white woman. The others was dancing, though . . . Yeah, I been a lots of different places. Places that make you old before your time. I’m old in the world now. Won’t even let me suck on your damn tiddies. To some women that ain’t like nothing but shaking hands. To some of em fucking ain’t nothing but shaking hands. Shaking hands and dancing. Meat and the gravy too. Ain’t even as old as you, some of them.”

  I told him Mama was going to take me to north Carolina for a coming-out present.

  “Coming-out?”

  “For graduation.”

  “Aw. north Carolina? North Carolina ain’t shit. I’d take you up to Canada. What’s in North Carolina?”

  “We got a friend that lives there, we ain’t seen in about ten years or something. I think Mama wants to go more for her than for me. I said I’d like to go, though. But I think she feels she needs to get away for a while. And then, she hasn’t really had any close friends since Miss Billie left. No woman she can really talk to, you know. I think she wants to get away for herself . . . I don’t mind, though.”

  “Shit, I’d have you up in Canada somewhere. When y’all leavin?”

  “Day a
fter tomorrow.”

  “Shit, well when you come back you ain’t been nowhere. If you was with me you would’ve been somewhere, come back and know you been somewhere.”

  I shook my head and started laughing. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You laughing at me, ain’t you?”

  “Naw, I wasn’t laughing at you.”

  “Yes you was . . . You know you frustrate a man.” I asked him how.

  “You already got me beating my meat over you.” I said I didn’t know what he meant.

  He said shit, then he told me what he meant, then he said, “Coming-out present, I wish I could give you a going-in present . . . I want to see you when you get back.”

  “I won’t be any different.”

  “I don’t care. I still want to see you, you hear?” I said I heard.

  “Way it is now,” Alfonso said, “when you get back, you have to say ‘I ain’t been nowhere.’”

  “You know what I think,” the psychiatrist said. “I think he came to represent all the men you’d known in your life.”

  “Who?”

  “I got something out of you,” he said. He was proud of himself.

  Davis returned, bringing whiskey.

  “I thought you might sleep,” he said.

  “No, I haven’t been sleepy,” I said. “Did you take the comb? I couldn’t find it.”

  “Yeah, it’s in my pocket. You don’t need it.” He poured himself a glass and me a glass.

  “Thanks, I can’t drink a lot, I think my kidneys got infected.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “One or both?”

  “I feel it along here.” I touched the v along my pelvis.

  He glanced at me and opened the window. “Not enough air.” He watched me touching myself. “An excuse for not drinking,” he said.

  “No, it doesn’t hurt then. I’ve been going to the bathroom too much, that’s all.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t have any ice.”

  “I don’t like it with ice in it.”

  He stood watching me, then he came over and touched where my hands had been. “Women’s problems,” he said. “It’ll go away.”

  “Hers was a crime of passion, and his was a crime of coldness,” somebody said.

  We were at another long table. I only stared at them. “Why won’t she talk?”

  “My mother told me once that they buried my grandmother in sand and then went away and forgot about her, and then they remembered, and when they came back she was sucking sand. I don’t know how long she’d been there. But Mama said that’s why in later years she couldn’t see or hear well . . . Fourteen children.”

  “That’s because they didn’t practice birth control in them days” was what Davis said.

  “When they came back she was sucking sand.”

  I stopped working out there then, and then I went up to Connecticut and found work in tobacco there.

  7

  I had a feeling my mother wanted to get away more for herself than for me. After the musician, things weren’t really the way they were before. After Daddy first lost his temper, things seemed like they’d gotten back the way they were. She didn’t take on any other man. I never saw her let another man get close to her even in friendly talking. She’d always stand kind of at a distance when she even talked to Floyd Coleman, and I know nobody would think she was studying him. She never did even make any real close women friends after Miss Billie left, and the women she’d gone to the nightclub with, she’d stopped going around with them. That’s why I thought going to north Carolina and seeing Miss Billie again might be good for her. She’d have somebody she could talk things out with, because I knew she didn’t feel she could talk things out with me.

  Miss Billie was fatter. She still had the two gold earrings and the wooden bracelets. She hugged Mama, calling her “girl”, and then she hugged me. She had a little front room. When they first came there she wrote and said they lived up above a store, but about five years ago they moved into a house. The front room had a fireplace and a mantelpiece, a couch and coffee table and a couple of armchairs and an upright piano.

  Miss Billie was still hugging me, and then stood back, with her hands on my shoulders.

  “This caint be that little girl?”

  “Yeah, that’s Eva.”

  “Naw, this ain’t that little girl. How long has it been? About twelve years, ain’t it? Honey, I wouldn’t know you, you growed so . . . Y’all have something to eat?”

  “Maybe a little later,” Mama said. “We had some sandwiches on the bus. It’s still with me. Maybe Eva might want something.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Y’all sit down . . . Honey, I just don’t believe that’s you.

  Marie, you ain’t aged none. Still looking pretty.”

  “Yes I have aged too,” Mama said, laughing.

  “Well, it ain’t the kind you can tell. Maybe little round the eyes. You still thin. Me, I done got all fat. Don’t even eat that much and look like a cow.”

  “Naw you don’t. What you got looks good on you.”

  Miss Billie sat down in a chair. She was sticking out around the waist like older women do, but her legs were still thin.

  “I finally got my piano,” she said.

  “Yeah, I see you have,” Mama said. “It’s real nice.”

  “You know I always did want a piano.”

  Mama said, “Yeah.”

  “You know, if y’all tired, you can go on back in the house and lay down. Sweet Man ain’t home yet.” She laughed. “Aw, I call my man Sweet Man.”

  Mama laughed.

  “That’s his picture up there on the mantelpiece. He’s good-lookin for a old man, ain’t he?”

  Mama said yeah he was good-looking.

  “Yeah, he’s out working and Charlotte’s out working too. She work as a seamstress.”

  “How is Charlotte?”

  Miss Billie shook her head. “I don’t know. She twenty-seven, but she don’t act twenty-seven. Ain’t got a man or nothing. Ain’t got a man one . . . I tell you about it.”

  Mama said nothing.

  “Yeah. Sweet Man works out there for James Beam, you know. Jim Beam we call him, like that whiskey. Works in tobacco. He be home around suppertime. Charlotte too . . . Yeah, that girl’s something else. I tell you about it. Y’all don’t wont to lay down?”

  Mama said maybe a little bit before supper, but she was enjoying talking to her now.

  “Eva, you tired?” Mama asked me. “No ma’am.”

  “Eva, where’s your bracelet?” Miss Billie asked.

  “She lost it when she was playing around the playground. Not more than a couple of weeks after you gave it to her.”

  Miss Billie frowned. “I should’ve told your mama to keep it for you. It was too big for you anyway.”

  She sounded like she was angry, but then she looked at me. “Eva lookin all hurt. I ain’t mad at you, baby,” she said. She reached over and touched my arm. “That a girl. You sho have growed. You know, I see y’all coming up the walk. I recognized you, Marie, but I said naw, that ain’t that little girl that used to sit up in my lap. Taller than me now.”

  “Taller than me too,” Mama said.

  “Well, Charlotte ain’t gon get her bracelet till she get married,” Miss Billie said, sitting back.

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend?” Mama asked. “Naw, she ain’t got no boyfriend.”

  “Eva doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Yeah, but Eva ain’t no twenty-seven neither.”

  “That’s true,” Mama said.

  “I know it’s true,” Miss Billie said. “You got to be true to your ancestors and you got to be true to those that come after you. How can you be true to those that come after you if there ain’t none coming after you.”

  I remembered just before we left, Daddy said he was glad he wasn’t going because that woman would drive him crazy in two days wit
h her crazy talk.

  “But that’s the times for you,” Miss Billie said. “They ain’t like they used to be.”

  “Naw, times change,” Mama said.

  “They sho do. My mama had ten children. And I ain’t had but one. But a lot of that’s on account of Sweet Man and me getting split up the way we did, and then when we did get back together, I felt like I was too old to start bringing children into the world again. And Sweet Man said he didn’t wont to be no old man raising no babies. But then if I had’ve had another child, I’d have somebody else to count on, cause Charlotte ain’t gon do nothing.”

  Mama said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you about it,” Miss Billie said again. She reached over and touched Mama’s knee. “It’s good to see you.”

  Mama said it was good to see her too.

  “It’s good to see both of y’all,” Miss Billie said.

  After supper me and Charlotte went for a walk in the woods. It was June and didn’t get dark early. Sweet Man had stayed

  talking to Mama for a little while—he hadn’t met her before—and then he excused himself and said he was going to take a bath and a nap.

  “Jim Beam wont him down there at five tomorrow,” Miss Billie had said. “He’s kind of shy, though, that’s his real reason. You know, he talk a little bit to peoples and then he kind of shies off. Always been that way. I mean he likes peoples, but he always after a while, shies off, you know. He wanted to meet you and Eva, though, I talk about y’all so much. Y’all my family.”

  “Your father’s nice,” I told Charlotte. “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t know what to say to me, or just wasn’t talking, then when we got further into the woods, she started talking.

  “When we first came here I was afraid to walk in the woods by myself, then I got so I wasn’t afraid,” she said. “They don’t like me to go, though. Not unless I’ve got somebody with me. Once or twice I’ll sneak off and go. I’m twenty-seven. I ought to be able to go without sneaking off, though, don’t you think?”