Eva's Man Read online

  “How did it feel?”

  A red swollen plum in my mouth. A milkweed full of blood. A soft milkweed full of blood. What would you do if you bit down and your teeth raised blood from an apple? Flesh from an apple? What would you do? Flesh and blood from an apple. What would you do with the apple? How would you feel?

  “All women need the fork in their road,” Alfonso said, laughing.

  “Come home with me.”

  “I’m not good tonight. I’m bleeding.”

  “Then we’ll wait.”

  Blood on my hands and his trousers. Blood in my teeth. “A woman like you. What do you do to yourself?”

  I got the silk handkerchief he used to wipe me after we made love, and wrapped his penis in it. I laid it back inside his trousers, zipped him up. I kissed his cheeks, his lips, his neck. I got naked and sat on the bed again. I spread my legs across his thighs and put his hand on my crotch, stuffed his fingers up in me. I put my whole body over him. I farted.

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I thought I told you.”

  “No.”

  The blood still came through. “Bastard.”

  I reached in his pants, got my comb, took the key he’d promised, washed my hands, finished my brandy, wiped his mouth, and left.

  I no longer smelled of perfume and menstruation, I smelled of brandy and sausage. People were watching me. I remembered I hadn’t combed my hair. I stood back inside a doorway and picked it out. They passed and glanced at me and walked on.

  I went into a liquor store. “Do you have a telephone?”

  “Yes, over there.”

  I went toward where he pointed, but didn’t see it. I looked back at him.

  “No, around the corner.”

  I found it, and called, and told them about the man in the hotel room.

  “What’s your name, lady?”

  I wouldn’t tell them. I hung up. I walked out. I went to the toilet of a filling station, picked out my hair again. I’m Medusa, I was thinking. Men look at me and get hard-ons. I turn their dicks to stone. I laughed. I’m a lion woman. No, it’s the men lions that have all that hair. I got close to the mirror and fingered the streets under my eyes. The mirror needed cleaning. I peed. I went out.

  I went back to the bar where they sold the good cabbage and the well-done greasy sausage, where they cooked the cabbage with smoked bacon.

  “Yes ma’am?”

  “Cabbage and sausage, please. And put a lot of mustard on the sausage. A can of beer.”

  I ate, drank beer. I ate plenty. I was already full from the cabbage and sausage he’d fed me, but it was good to eat again, to think about being naked and being taken. No, fucked. To think of my legs wide open, and my fingers up his ass.

  “You eat food like you’re making love to it.”

  I laughed and went on eating. I closed my eyes, swallowing. I had to pee again. Beer always made me have to pee. I got up and went to the toilet, came back and sat down again. I drank the rest of the beer.

  “Is there anything else, ma’am?”

  “No, thank you.”

  I paid and left. I wanted to be fucked. I wanted him to fuck me up my ass.

  I went back, but he wasn’t there. The sheets and bedspread were gone. There was only the mattress, stained with the blood and whiskey. The glasses and whiskey were gone. They’d taken him. I sat on the floor. My knees hurt. I watched the walls.

  They saw me go up and then they followed me up, and they were speaking in whispers, and then they came in.

  “Yes, she’s the one. 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?”

  Otis said it was like they were working some kind of blues ritual. He said he couldn’t stop watching.

  A man sucking the milk from her breasts. He is sucking blood.

  James said he wanted to tell me something. He asked me if I remembered that time in the reformatory I’d said, “You look like a man who’s worried about something.” He said I’d just said it in passing and probably didn’t remember it, but he said he remembered it because he was a man worried about something. And then he told me that twenty years ago he’d killed a man. It had been twenty years and they still hadn’t forgot. The man who owned the restaurant still wouldn’t let him come in the place. I don’t like to talk about the particulars, he said, but it was over a woman.

  I didn’t tell him that I already knew.

  “Yeah, I’m a man that’s worried, because I haven’t forgot it either,” he said.

  The queen bee. Men had to die for loving her.

  James said he was dying to kiss me. He said he was dying to kiss me. He leaned over. He said my kiss was full of teeth.

  5

  “Let’s play,” he asks.

  The sweet milk in the queen bee’s breasts has turned to blood.

  PART THREE

  1

  Nothing you wouldn’t know about. Nothing you wouldn’t know about. Nothing you wouldn’t know about.

  The man in his office lays me on top of his desk. He pulls my dress up, takes his pants down. I won’t. I won’t take anything. How much will you take? I won’t take anything. You frustrate a man. He gets up and goes to the bathroom. After that he keeps watching me.

  The young boys whistle at me. They are walking behind me. They have taps on their shoes, they keep whistling until they pass me, and turn around and look at me.

  “I thought she was a chick.”

  “Hello, Mama.”

  “She’s a good-lookin mama, for a old woman, though,” one of them says. He whistles again.

  “She looked young from the back.”

  “Yeah.”

  He’s got taps on his shoes. He’s chewing bubble gum. The foreman keeps watching me.

  “I been watching you work,” he says. “I been watching how you work. I been watching you.”

  I rubbed his back and thighs. I thought of what he said about the mustard, and wiped him with toilet paper between his ass. Something I’d never done with a lover. Something I’d never thought of doing. He was on my breasts, sucking blood. He kept laughing. “The blood ducks. The blood ducks.” I spread my legs.

  “What about once you close them?” Elvira asks.

  “They stay closed,” I want to answer, but I don’t answer. “How could you tell?” he asks.

  “I saw it in your eyes.”

  I tell him it’s nothing he wouldn’t know about. Nothing he wouldn’t know about. James is on the floor with me. He tells me he is dying to kiss me. He leans over and puts his tongue on me. I don’t open my mouth.

  “Open your mouth.”

  I tell him I didn’t know I was supposed to open my mouth. “They stay closed,” I tell her.

  James, his hair combed, asked me to marry him. He came to get me when it was time to leave. We walked to his car. When he started driving, I thought he was taking me home.

  “She good-lookin for a old woman, ain’t she?”

  I didn’t know where we were going. I asked him. “You look like a flower,” he said.

  “That don’t answer where we going.”

  “You can get out of the car anytime.”

  “I don’t want to get out of the car.”

  “Then wait and see. And when we get there, you can say turn back, and I’ll turn back.”

  The car stopped in front of the justice of the peace. I didn’t tell him to turn back.

  “Do you want me to turn back?”

  “No.”

  He said he was dying to kiss me. He said he was dying to . . .

  We were married.

  I went and told my parents, without him. They just sat looking at me.

  “You’re married?” Daddy asked finally. Mama stayed saying nothing.

  “Yes.”

  Mama didn’t say anything.

  “Mama, aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “What do you want me to say, honey?”

  “It’s ju
st that we never dreamed . . .” Daddy said.

  Then he said they were happy for me, then he kissed me. Mama looked at me hard, then she leaned forward and gave me her cheek to kiss. I told them I hadn’t dreamed either.

  I keep watching the man with no thumb until he sees me. “I could tell you wanted me. I could tell.”

  “Naw, I didn’t want you neither.”

  “I could tell you wanted me. I was the first one that aroused you. I could tell.”

  “Naw.”

  “Have you ever been kissed down there before?”

  “Naw, and I . . .”

  He said he was from new Mexico.

  “What are you doing all the way over here?” I asked. “Traveling,” he said.

  He asked me what I was doing all the way over here. I said I was traveling too.

  He takes me up to an old room.

  It is a dream.

  “My name is Moses Tripp. I came to take you on a trip.”

  He sits snapping his fingers. “Every trip. Every trip. Every trip.”

  “How high do you want me to take you, honey baby?” James says he wants to get real high up in me.

  “I been dying to.”

  2

  When I asked Otis what did Uncle Nutey do, he said he was sitting on the church steps naked. He just took off all his clothes and went and sat naked on the church steps. The cops came by and picked him up and put him in the asylum.

  My breasts are rocks that turn to bread and then to milk.

  Blood is inside my breasts.

  What would you do if you broke bread and blood came out?

  The gypsy Medina tells me: Toss his blood into the wind, and it will dry.

  God is God, she says, because he can turn milk and sweat into blood.

  The owl corners me, lays me on the floor, begins to dig and peck.

  “Don’t let your man know.”

  “I won’t tell him. If you don’t tell your woman.” There is a dead eel between his legs.

  I am sitting in a restaurant. The men who work with my father ask, “What are you doing here, sweetheart?”

  “That’s John Canada’s daughter.”

  “I don’t care who she is. She’s sweet.”

  “Naw, she’s nothing but a little bitch just like all the rest of em. Think they wont your love, and they wont your money.”

  “Better not let John hear you saying that.”

  “What? That she’s a bitch or she’s sweet?”

  “Or that she’s a sweet bitch . . . Man I ain’t got no more ambition in life than chasin womens.”

  “Making love and making money.”

  They come over to me and look me over.

  “Naw, you can’t tell them nothing,” Miss Billie says. “They got to learn for themselves. Got to get stung by the bee before they can see.”

  “Mama, where does the bee sting?”

  “Your heart,” Mama says.

  “Down in your drawers,” says Miss Billie. Is your heart in your drawers?

  3

  Joanne said every time her father fucked her mother, her mother would say, Praise God Praise God. What would your mother say?

  Nothing. She would just make little noises, and my father would make noises like he was soothing pain away.

  Did you take my rubbers?

  No.

  She was under sand. And he came and put a hole—not for air—but so he could stick his thing in.

  Why do you care for him so much?

  He told me to look at his hand. He told me what his hand had done to women.

  Suppose he had told you he would stay? He puts himself in me.

  4

  “Is this the savage woman?”

  “Yes, here she is.”

  They stare me in my eyes.

  Did you have a bad night?

  I dreamed an old man came with a canoe and he had a troubled expression, till he saw me, then he started smiling. He handed me one oar and he took the other one. I thought we were going to plunge both oars in the stream, but he lay me on my back in the canoe. Water seeping in my skin. He put one nervous hand on my belly, the other over my eyes.

  When I woke up, he said, “I didn’t do it.” He kept saying, “I didn’t do it.”

  Then he scooted down along my body until his head was at my waist.

  “Did you take my rubbers?” he asked. “No.”

  “Where’s your man?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  He said, “Things like this happen in hell.” He put his tongue on me.

  The queen bee’s men had dice. They were asked what they were gambling. They said they were gambling their lives.

  She kept telling one man to go. She kept telling him to go.

  When he left, she got up on the table and spread her legs open like a book. The men tossed dice.

  “Man, she told you to go. Man, you ain’t got what she need.”

  “Whore,” he called her, then he took off his shirt and threw it between her legs. Then he left.

  The men won the shirt first, and then the meat.

  She was a river. There were fins. She’s a river. They keep coming back to her until she swallows them up.

  Davis put his tongue on my navel.

  “I don’t go any further than this. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “I’d only do that with a woman I’d lived with for years. I’d only do that with my wife.”

  Semen in his drawers.

  “A woman like you, what do you do to yourself?”

  “Nothing you wouldn’t know about.”

  What did Uncle Nutey do?

  If he had told you he would stay?

  “Once you close your legs, you keep them closed.”

  5

  Kiss me, the man says. Give me a kiss.

  The woman does not.

  The man says, loneliness, you feel loneliness when there’s no one you can go to, for anything—no one woman you can go to—I couldn’t find one woman.

  He’s naked, on the church steps. The woman takes her clothes off too and holds her hand out to him. She tells him she has time in her hand, that time is a toy, something they can play with.

  The man sits smoking wind. He tells her he is a son of flesh and thunder.

  If I had you, I’d do more than eat and live, he says. I’d be able to love again.

  He has no thumb on one hand, and the other hand is slashed red. It drips between his legs.

  Your breasts are loaves of bread, he tells her. You look like a woman who’s been hurt by love.

  Yes, I was hurt by love. My soul was broken. My soul was broken.

  He puts his hand out to caress her throat, not the bloody one, but the one with the thumb gone. She can’t feel the thumb gone.

  She kisses him. He has an iguana’s tongue. Her body shivers with love, by the fistfuls. When he leaves her, her memory turns into blood.

  What is my body made of, she asks, that there is no sweat inside.

  She stands naked on the street. She asks each man she sees to pay her her debt. But they say they owe her nothing.

  The owl is perched on the stairs.

  “I’ve come to protect this woman,” he says.

  But he turns into a cock, and descends. A lemon between his legs. She has made the juice run.

  I caress his throat. I kiss him.

  PART FOUR

  1

  I lay on my back watching a female cockroach climbing the wall. An eggsack was hanging from its ass. Some people like to squash that kind. I didn’t like to squash any of them, because of that white stuff coming out. Sometimes I’d think of pulling the eggsack out before it was time to come out. Not with my hands, but with tweezers. I liked to watch them copulate, the male coming in through the ass, hanging onto the female’s back. I’d think of how small their genitals must be.

  The cell had a basin for washing up, but I had to go out to go to the toilet. I thought of cockroach piss, then I tho
ught of him. An erection. He took my hand and put it on his thing. “It’s your fault,” he said. “You did it.”

  “I’m not sorry,” I answered. He asked if I wanted to play. I said yes. But then we were turning forward rolls and backward rolls like I used to do on those long mattresses in gym class. And then we were using ropes for swings, and we were naked, and the ropes cut into our asses. I could see a red cut along his ass. I couldn’t see my own, but I felt it burning, stinging, blood on the tips of my fingers. I touched his. He was bleeding too, but he was laughing. I didn’t want to, but I started laughing too. He raised his arms and I kissed him inside his armpits. He asked, “What next?” I smiled but didn’t answer. Then I said, “You never know.” He watched me in silence, then he said, “Let’s play again.” I scratched his behind.

  “Have you started yet?” he asked. “No, I haven’t started yet.”

  “We could rub asses and become blood what-ya-ma-call-its,” he said, laughing.

  I hugged myself, my hands inside my armpits. I was bleeding again.

  “I don’t like a woman bleeding, it’s nasty,” he said.

  “Get up close to me, honey, it helps the cramps.” But he wouldn’t. He turned away instead.

  He did it while I was sleeping. I was bleeding but he went ahead and did it. His eyes were blood-colored like the eyes of those men who work in metal factories drilling holes in things with their visors on to help protect their eyes. Then I woke up and told him to hurry up and do it, but he took his time. He went in slow and came out slow. But still it was so good. Then he got dressed and went out for some reason he wouldn’t tell me and I just stayed laying there, with the towel under me to catch the blood, still feeling him, and then he came back. He told me to get dressed.