Over the Fence

by Mary Monroe

  He leaned up against the dresser facing my bed and started talking fast, but in a low tone. “Listen, Milton, old buddy, I’m hatching a good scheme that might make us some big money.” I couldn’t wait to hear what he had up his sleeve.

  “What is this scheme? Easy money, I hope.” I eased down on the side of the bed.

  “Pffft!” Willie Frank waved his hands in the air. “It’s better than that, and I ain’t talking about no chicken feed. The only thing bigger and easier would be if we woke up one morning and found dollar bills growing on one of our trees.” We laughed. “Anyway, you know me and my kinfolks supply most of the booze to almost every bootlegger in our county, right? And we do business with a few that live in some of the dry counties.”

  “I know that because I seen you do it.”

  “And you know how lamebrained and careless they can be. It’s high time we start using their faults to our advantage.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Once we deliver a order, we’ll sneak back during the night, when the bootlegger is alone. We’ll go in through a window or unlocked door and take back as much of the shine as we can carry.”

  “How do you know which ones don’t keep track of what we deliver to them? Some of them jokers been in business for twenty, thirty years. If they was too dumb to keep some kind of records, they wouldn’t still be in business.” I let out a loud breath and stood up. “Hmmm. On top of that, we could be taking some risks.”

  “So what? There is always risks involved when it comes to making money. If we don’t pull off a successful deal but one time, we’ll still make a nice piece of change.”

  “Hmmm. I guess that’s worth taking a risk for,” I agreed.

  “Damn straight. We can resell the same supply two or three times to either the same customers or new ones.”

  “Willie Frank, for somebody that ain’t never set foot in a schoolhouse, you one of the smartest men I know. Hell’s bells. Why didn’t I think of that?” I laughed and slapped the side of my head.

  “You ain’t no dummy yourself. You came up with the idea to recycle your guests’ unfinished drinks,” Willie Frank reminded. “They say great minds think alike. I could sure use some extra money.”

  “Lord knows I could, too.”

  As long as I’d been hustling, I ain’t never had enough money to do nothing real nice for myself and my woman. It made me sad when Yvonne complained about how Joyce bragged about them glad rags she got from the catalog, which was way out of our price range. Yeah, we made good money bootlegging, but as unpredictable as the law was, there was no telling how long we’d be able to stay in the business.

  “When things get real busy tonight, let’s go visit Cleotis Bates,” I said. “We can start by taking back that double order we delivered to him Sunday night. I know for a fact he don’t lock his doors. And he go to Aunt Mattie’s place every Tuesday night, right after his Bible study and choir practice at his church down the street from her.”

  We waited until we had a standing-room-only crowd before I hid a couple of jugs of shine. Then I told Yvonne that we was almost out and that me and Willie Frank had to make a run to his house to get more.

  “Milton, how did you let our supply get low?” she hissed in a low tone so none of the guests in the living room could hear her. “From now on, I’ll be keeping track of our supply. Y’all go now and hurry up and get back here. There ain’t no telling what might happen if we run out completely while I’m up in this house with all these thirsty people.”

  “Baby, we’ll be back in less than a hour,” I assured her.

  Our plan didn’t go well. When we got to Cleotis’s neighborhood, we parked behind some trees and walked to his house. We peeped in his front window and seen that one of Aunt Mattie’s girls was with him.

  “I don’t believe this shit! Every Tuesday for the past five years, that horny pig been going to Aunt Mattie’s house to do his business with one of the girls. That double-crossing sneak! I swear to God, you just can’t depend on nobody no more! Maybe this ain’t going to be such a good plan, after all,” I griped. Me and Willie Frank had already started trotting back to his truck.

  “You could be right. Don’t worry, though. We’ll come up with another moneymaking scheme real soon.”

  * * *

  Each day, I got a little more anxious to get more money. But I lost interest in stealing back liquor we’d already sold and delivered. In the meantime, I had to depend on the paycheck I got from the grill and on Odell’s deep pockets. I kept myself occupied so I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it.

  When I didn’t feel like doing none of the things I normally did to keep myself busy when I wasn’t working, like fishing, taking Yvonne on picnics, or visiting folks in our old neighborhood, I relied on Willie Frank. He would pick up me and Yvonne and drive us to the hills so we could socialize with him and some of his relatives.

  “Milton, you as close as family,” his mama had told me during a recent visit. “Maybe one of these days, you and Yvonne can talk Willie Frank into finding hisself a wife so he won’t grow old alone.”

  “Aw, Mama Perdue”—that was what she’d told me and Yvonne to call her, and we called her husband Papa Perdue—“Willie Frank ain’t going to grow old alone. Me and Yvonne will move him in with us before we let that happen.”

  That conversation had took place earlier this month, the Saturday before Labor Day. We had all just come from fishing in the creek behind the three-bedroom, tin-roof shack Willie Frank lived in with his mama and daddy and eight other kinfolks. He shared a bed in the living room with his paraplegic grandfather and two of his teenage nephews. He slept at the head of the bed with the old man, and the kids slept at the foot. The family made a good living manufacturing and selling homemade alcohol. But their money was tight because they had to pay off them greedy revenuers and corrupt lawmen so they wouldn’t shut down their still. On top of all that, they had to support a bunch of unemployed relatives that was too lazy and/or slow witted to work. It was a miserable environment, which was the main reason Willie Frank spent so much time at our house.

  I was worried about my buddy not having a main woman in his life. Every time I mentioned that subject, he shut me up by telling me how much fun he was having with the women that worked for Aunt Mattie. “If they wasn’t colored, whore or not, I would have married one by now,” he confessed, with his eyes twinkling.

  I didn’t know what I’d do without a good friend like Willie Frank. He was loyal, honest, dependable, and a heap of fun. Me and him smoked a lot of the rabbit tobacco he grew in his backyard. It made us feel right mellow. Yvonne had smoked it a few times, but it didn’t relax her the way it did us. She didn’t like the way it stunk up the house. When I wanted to roll a few cigarettes and indulge myself, she made me do it outside. As important as Willie Frank was to me and Yvonne, I had to keep in mind that he was still white. My daddy used to tell me that no matter how good you treated a snake, it would always be a snake, and biting folks was their nature. But so far, Willie Frank was the only man, colored or white, that had never let me down, especially when it came to business. And, as hard as it was to believe, neither had Odell.

  CHAPTER 12

  YVONNE

  ABOUT A HOUR AFTER OUR GUESTS LEFT TONIGHT, ME AND MILTON cleaned up and went to bed. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy, though. It was a few minutes before midnight. Right after my head hit one of the flat pillows on the saggy bed we had picked up at a secondhand store, I started tossing and turning like a flea-bitten hound. I leaned over and lit the kerosene lamp we kept on the wooden crate we used as a nightstand by my side of the bed.

  “What’s wrong, sugar? You seem kind of jumpy tonight,” Milton noticed, turning on his side to face me.

  “I am kind of jumpy.”

  “Why come? You seemed like you was having as much fun as everybody else tonight.”

  “That Joyce is one of the most complicated women I ever came across!” I hissed.

 
“Aw shit. Here we go again. What’s wrong now? Did she say something you didn’t like tonight? And while we on the subject, I bet she talks to Odell about some of the things you say that she don’t like.”

  “I’m sure she do.”

  “Well, in that case, y’all in the same boat.”

  “And if we keep loading bad blood in it, it’s going to sink,” I said.

  “All right, now. Let’s talk about this and get it over with so we can get some sleep. Or do something else more fun.” Milton liked to sleep buck naked, but I always slept in a gown. He slid his hand inside my panties and started poking between my thighs as he talked. “Since we already on the subject, I’ll mention how I didn’t like the way she screwed up her face when I handed that last drink to her in a jelly jar. Like she ain’t never drunk out a jelly jar before. With the crowd we had tonight, I couldn’t wash the good jars and cups fast enough to keep up, so I had to start serving drinks in whatever was available. She lucky she didn’t have to drink out of a soup can, like Willie Frank. That woman ought to know by now that we ain’t got none of them fancy glasses like her and Odell. What all did she say to you?”

  “She bragged about her teacher’s aide work at that uppity Mahoney Street School again. In the next breath she told me I should go back to school so I could get a real job.”

  “You already got one. If waiting tables ain’t real, I don’t know what is.”

  “Milton, she got white folks’ attitude. She don’t even know what being a regular down-home colored woman is all about. She even try to talk all proper like a white woman. She ain’t even got that down pat. When she was running off at the mouth about her job, she used ‘ain’t’ twice in the same sentence.”

  “That just go to show, she ain’t as smart as she make herself out to be. And working at a school with college-educated teachers probably ain’t the fairy-tale job she try to make us think it is. Them folks might have her cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors for all we know.” We laughed.

  “I doubt if that’s true. And I doubt if her job is half as hard as mine is at the grill. The bottom line is, her cheesy black ass grew up on easy street, so she wouldn’t know hard work if it bit off a piece of her butt.”

  I stopped talking and thought about what I’d just said. I suddenly realized that some of Joyce’s remarks hadn’t been that bad. A few had even been kind of nice. She’d gave me a good compliment about the new flowered curtains I had put up at every window in the living room. And when a clumsy ox dropped his jar of moonshine on the floor and it broke into a million little pieces, she squatted down with me and helped clean it up.

  “She can ruffle my feathers real easy, but I will admit that that was a good point she made about me going back to school. It wouldn’t hurt for me and you both to get more education. Maybe I’m being too hard on her. I guess she thought she was just being nice and helpful by suggesting that. And then again, I don’t call making fun of folks being nice and helpful.” Some of the issues I had with Joyce was too bothersome to dismiss, though I didn’t like to stir up a mess. But this was one I couldn’t overlook, because it involved Milton. I was the only person who could make a sport of my man and get away with it.

  “Huh? Who did Joyce make fun of, Yvonne? Bowlegged Sally Rhine?”

  “You.”

  Milton’s body froze like a block of ice. He stopped poking me, but his fingers was still between my thighs. “Me? What did you say?”

  “When you took so long to count out the change when you broke that dollar bill for Willie Frank, she shook her head. She didn’t know I could hear her on account of she was whispering. She told Odell that them fourth grade kids at her school can count better than you.”

  “Say what?”

  “Uh-huh. Like you some kind of idiot or something.”

  “That bitch! That heifer! She ain’t the Queen of Sheba she think she is!”

  “That wasn’t all. A few minutes after they got here tonight, she pulled out a handkerchief and started dabbing at my lipstick.”

  Milton snickered. “Excuse me for laughing, but that’s funny. That was her way of telling you that you had on too much lipstick, huh?”

  “Thank you!”

  “Oomph, oomph, oomph! I declare, Joyce and Odell sound like the kind of folks that could be your best friends and worst enemies at the same time. I can tell that Joyce is really starting to get under your skin. She is almost twice as big as you, but you could probably whup her ass with one hand behind your back.”

  “Lord almighty, sugar! I hope it never get to that. I don’t want to start beating up on the neighbors. I don’t want to go back to jail.”

  “I feel the same way. As long as we careful, we won’t never have to worry about doing time again.” Milton frowned at the scar in the palm of his right hand, which a guard had sliced open during a jailhouse riot. He never complained about it, but it was a sensitive subject with him. Then his voice got sad. “If the laws ever convict me again, they’ll have to kill me, because I’ll never do another day in no prison camp. Shit.”

  “Let’s move on to something else. Like concentrating on having a closer relationship with Joyce and Odell, and what’s in it for us. If you know what I mean.”

  “Sugar, I know exactly what you mean. I been thinking about going up to Odell and asking him to let me open a line of credit at the store. With all them free drinks him and Joyce gulped down tonight, it’s the least he can do,” Milton snarled.

  “I been meaning to talk to you about that. If we don’t start asking them to pay for their drinks, like we do everybody else, I don’t think they ever will. I wish we hadn’t started off like that in the first place. I don’t know what we was thinking!”

  “Don’t even worry about that. All the stuff we steal from MacPherson’s evens things out.” Milton pulled his finger away from my crotch and licked it. I liked to see him taste my juice before we made love. From the dreamy-eyed look on his face, I knew he liked the way I tasted. I knew he was ready to get it on, and so was I. But I had a few more things to get off my chest first, so I gently pushed him to the side.

  “I swear, sometimes Joyce sound like a broke record. She told me for the umpteenth time tonight that she and Odell still trying to make a baby.”

  “Maybe they ain’t trying hard enough, or maybe they don’t do it often enough.”

  “Oh, they do it often enough. I also overheard her say that they fuck almost every night. Except she didn’t say ‘fuck.’ She said ‘make love.’ That proper-talking bitch. She just as white as she can be.”

  “Something is wrong,” Milton suggested.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Maybe her eggs done dried up. Or his jism is too weak to swim up far enough to reach her baby-making section.” I laughed.

  “Odell told me he loves kids so much, he would like to have at least three or four. I don’t care about having none, one way or the other, but I feel for the people that do and can’t.”

  “I feel for them, too. Anyway, Joyce is coming over again tomorrow evening so I can show her how to knit.”

  “Yvonne, we can’t afford to do everything for them for free. We done gave them enough free alcohol to fill a bathtub. Now you going to give Joyce free knitting lessons? I don’t want to be friends with them that bad. We didn’t get this far being too generous with none of our resources.”

  “I know, baby, and I know when to quit. But I’m thinking ahead. She love them pot holders I knitted, and asked me to show her how to make them. I told her I’d love to so long as she supplies all the material and include enough for me to make us a few more. I got a lot of material already, but I ain’t about to use it up on the woman whose folks own the store I stole it from,” I chuckled. “Speaking of the store, if Odell don’t give us a line of credit when you ask him, try to get him to give us a big discount every time we buy something. That would be just as good. Maybe even better. We need to take advantage of every opportunity that come our way. Such as they got a car and a telephone. We c
ould get a lot of mileage out of them things. Think of the bucks we could save by not having to take that damn bus or pay somebody to haul us around.”

  “That’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.” Milton paused and gave me a pensive look.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “And they got the nerve to serve us elderberry wine when we go to their house. Next time Joyce and Odell come over, give them the cheapest alcohol in the house.”

  “Milton, what could be cheaper than the recycled stuff we give them now?” We laughed.

  “Just always make sure it’s part of the cheapest recycled batch. Meanwhile, let’s stick to our original plan and keep on trying to be good friends with them, too. They could be the best meal ticket we ever get.”

  “You got a point there. And one more thing, maybe Joyce and Odell ain’t as uppity as we think. Some people just naturally crude and rude and say a lot of stupid shit that they don’t mean. But we can overlook that so long as they don’t say nothing too bad to or about us. Besides, I don’t think they got much street smarts. If we do some sensible plotting, even if it mean kissing every inch of their butts and licking their cracks, we’ll have them eating out of our hands. By the time we get through milking them, we’ll be better off than they is.”

  CHAPTER 13

  MILTON

  I SPENT A LOT OF TIME THINKING ABOUT SOME OF THE THINGS bouncing around in my head. The one I thought about the most was my sweet arrangement with Odell. If he ever decided to stop paying me, I’d go up to Joyce lickety-split and blow the whistle like a diesel train. I’d tell her everything. Even about all the money he was stealing from her parents to give to his other family and me. Being the lovestruck fool Joyce was, she just might be crazy enough to forgive him! The thought of that chilled me to the bone, so I pushed it to the back of my mind.

  It didn’t matter what was going on between me and Odell. I still considered him and Joyce good people. The biggest complaint I had—even before Odell put me on his payroll, so to speak—was how fickle they behaved from time to time. I couldn’t decide if they was friends or foes. They would cruise by in that shiny black car, see me and Yvonne dragging along down the street, and wouldn’t even acknowledge us, let alone offer us a ride. Other times we’d bump into them in public, and they would grin and fawn over us like we was long-lost kinfolks.