Eva's Man Read online

  “Come on,” he said.

  The chair scooted and scraped, and he had hold of her arm. I didn’t see them until they got to the bedroom. He had her arm and he was undoing her blouse. My eyes must’ve been all wide and scared. Daddy looked at me and kind of smiled. It was a love smile for me but a hurt smile for him. I don’t know what kind of one it was for her. It must’ve been a love/hate one for her.

  He said, “Close that door, will you, honey.” He said it just like that. Real soft. Real gentle.

  I got up and closed the door that separated the living room from their bedroom.

  Then it was like I could hear her clothes ripping. I don’t know if the gentleness had been for me, or if it had been the kind of hurt gentleness one gets before they let go. But now he was tearing that blouse off and those underthings. I didn’t hear nothing from her the whole time. I didn’t hear a thing from her. “Act like a whore, I’m gonna fuck you like a whore. You act like a whore, I’m gonna fuck you like a whore.”

  He kept saying that over and over. I was so scared. I kept feeling that after he tore all her clothes off, and there wasn’t any more to tear, he’d start tearing her flesh.

  3

  A naked hanging light, a bed, a table, a yellow shade torn on the side. He made patterns with his fingers on my belly.

  “Do you want me to use a rubber? I mean, when we do it?” he asked.

  “Naw, not if you don’t wont to.”

  I was seventeen when my cousin Alfonso and his wife came from Kansas City, Kansas. My mother said they were the cowboy part of the family. Some had stayed in Georgia, but some had gone West. She said she was the only one of the family who had come north, and she wouldn’t have done that if Daddy hadn’t wanted to make the move.

  Now Alfonso and his wife, Jean, and Alfonso’s brother Otis had come to live in new York. They couldn’t get themselves a place to stay at first, so they stayed over at some hotel. Mama said she wished she could let them stay with us, but they saw what kind of space we had.

  Jean and Otis came and visited us every now and then, but Alfonso was over there nearly every other day. He’d keep getting mad at something Jean did—we never did know what it was she did—and then he’d be over to our place. Mama said it must’ve been something she did back in Kansas City, and he just kept it in his memory. Otis never did know what it was either, but he said when they were in Kansas City, there was a certain hotel in Kansas City, and every time Alfonso got mad at Jean—it was like a spell or something that come over him—every time he got mad at Jean, he would take her down to this hotel and start beating her out in front of it. He wouldn’t take her inside, he’d beat her outside. Couldn’t nobody do nothing with him, and they would send for Otis. Otis was the only one that could do anything with him, and he didn’t even know how.

  “All I would do is go down to the hotel,” Otis said.

  He was sitting on the couch in the living room. He was a big man but not fat. He had come by himself one day.

  “Yeah, I would just go down to the hotel. I wouldn’t do nothing, I would just kind of grab hold of his arm and say, ‘All right, Alfonso. That’s enough, Alfonso,’ and he would stop. And there Jean would be bruised all up. I don’t know why she ain’t left him. It was my idea we come here. I told Alfonso he probably have more opportunity here, you know, but the real reason was I wanted to get them away from that hotel. I thought it might help.”

  “Has anything started up since they been here?” Mama asked. “Yeah, that’s what I came here to tell you, Marie. He got drunk last night and took her down in front of that hotel—the one we staying in—and started beating on her. But the woman stay with him, though. That’s what I don’t understand. She stay with him. If I was her I would’ve packed my bags a long time ago.”

  Mama said nothing.

  “You know,” Otis said quietly, as if somebody might overhear. “I almost suggested to him that maybe, you know, something was wrong with him, you know. But I ain’t asked him since.”

  “What did he do?”

  “It ain’t what he did, it’s the way he looked. If anybody had a look that could kill, it was that one, and I ain’t lying. The way I look at it now, it’s her that’s staying with him. If she can stand getting beat . . . You know what I’m trying to say?”

  Mama nodded. She was staring down at her nails.

  “I do what I can. Whenever he starts I go over there and touch his arm or take him by the shoulder and say, ‘That’s enough, Alfonso, all right, Alfonso,’ and then he stops.”

  He had his arm thrown over the couch. Even though he didn’t take up the whole couch, it looked like he did. Me and Mama were sitting in chairs.

  It was late one night a few days later when I heard it: “Never know how you’re going to love me.”

  “Open the cell, please. I want to go to the toilet.”

  “You must have bad kidneys,” the guard said.

  “What do you want?” Elvira asked, late one night.

  I hadn’t been sleeping, but thought she was asleep. I told her I didn’t want anything from her.

  “Well, you ain’t getting nothing from that nigger of yours, neither, cause he’s dead.”

  She started laughing. It was an almost noiseless laugh.

  “It’s like you sitting on a pot, sitting right on a pot, but afraid to shit,” Elvira said.

  I asked her if she was the pot or the shit.

  She laughed hard this time. It was a short hard laugh, not a long one.

  “I seen one of these men the queen bee got a hold of,” Miss Billie had said. “He was laying in this restaurant on the floor. Some woman had shot him. Naw, it wasn’t the queen bee that done it. What happened was that somebody told this woman this man of hers was down in such and such a restaurant with another woman. And what happened was he had his back to the door and he looked like this other man and she shot him . . . When you in those kinds of restaurants, though, you should never sit with your back to the door, cause no telling who might see you and think you somebody else. That’s why when I go out I don’t never sit with my back to the door. No telling who might come in . . . Yeah, she found out she had the wrong man, but he was dead then . . . I don’t know how long they sent her up for. And that man was one of the queen bee’s men too. And other men still after her. Sound like a lie, don’t it? But it ain’t, it’s the truth. It’s sho the God’s truth.”

  Mama said she hadn’t known anybody like that, like the queen bee. But she said she would be more scared to be the queen bee than to be any of the men.

  “Suppose you really loved somebody,” Mama said. “You’d be scared to love him.”

  Miss Billie said she hadn’t never looked at it that way, but it must be hard on the queen bee too.

  “Couldn’t love who you wont to, have to love who you didn’t wont to,” Miss Billie said.

  I sat in the living room with my hands on my knees.

  “I know you ain’t had to go to the toilet that much. What you in there doing, woman?” Elvira gave another hard laugh.

  I sat back down on my cot.

  “Scared to do it in here . . . Naw, you ain’t crazy. When you first come you was crazy, but you ain’t crazy now. They gon keep thinking it, though. Cause it’s easier for them if they keep on thinking it. A woman done what you done to a man.”

  “You the pot or the shit?” I asked.

  I lay down and turned my back to her. I watched two cockroaches on the wall.

  “What’s the matter, Eva? What you thinking?”

  I watched the cockroaches and wondered how small cockroach turd was, how much liquid was cockroach piss.

  “What do you want?”

  Freddy Smoot’s mother standing in the doorway kissing a man. She had on a tight-waist dress and purple lipstick. Got it on the man, he wiped his mouth off, kissed her again, wiped his mouth off. She had long thick hair and dark lines around her eyes. She got real close to the man and kissed him with her tongue out. Mr. Logan tried to show
me his thing. I ran in the house and shut the door before I could see it. He had white stuff in the corners of his eyes. “Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot.” His stick has a bubble in it.

  I felt her breath on my neck, but when I turned around she was laying on her cot with her eyes closed.

  “I know what’s wrong,” she said.

  The cockroaches on the wall got close together.

  “What does Miss Calley think about all of this?” Mama asked. Miss Calley was Otis’s mother. She was my mother’s sister, but old enough to be her mother. Otis was older than my mother by two or three years, and Alfonso was almost as old as she was. So Mama had always called her sister Miss Calley, and when I saw Alfonso and Otis, I thought of them more as uncles than cousins.

  “She don’t know what to think. She always have thought Alfonso was crazy. You know, like she say our Uncle Nutey went off his rocker, she thought maybe Alfonso might’ve inherited some of it. I ain’t even told her about the last two times Fonso beat up on Jean. You know, she told Jean that she could come stay with her, but Jean say she didn’t wont to. Actually, what Mama thinks is that Jean just as crazy as Alfonso and that they need each other.”

  “Miss Calley still making those clothes and selling them to people?”

  “Yeah, you go in there and she still got those clothes hanging up in there all over the house. Only thing is she still using a lot of them old patterns she got and people just ain’t wearing them kind of clothes any more. You know, sequins all up over the top and everything. It’s all right when people get her to make something specific for them, but some of them clothes just hang up in there.”

  “They’ll come back in style. That’s the way clothes do.”

  “Yeah, I reckon. Me and Alfonso send her money. That’s the only reason I hated to come out here, leave her alone like that. I mean, Daddy’s there, but he’s down at the garage most of the time, and she got so she had all her family with her. But, you know, I feel like I’m the only one that can handle Alfonso. You know what I mean.”

  Mama nodded.

  “You know the one question that’s always been in my mind?” He took his arm off the back of the couch and leaned forward.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s how long and hard he would beat on her if I hadn’t come all them many times, because every time he’s started beating on her, I’ve been there to stop it . . . Do you think he would’ve ended up beating her to death?”

  Mama said nothing. She just looked at him. “Somebody would’ve stopped it,” she said finally. “The cops would’ve come and stopped it.”

  “Naw, I be scared he’d turn on the cops, and then he be getting his self killed then.”

  Mama said maybe he was right.

  “Yeah, I know I’m right,” Otis said. He stood up stretching. “I wish I could do something to help,” Mama said.

  “Naw, I didn’t come here for you to help,” Otis said. “I don’t think there’s nothing anybody can do. I think the onliest person could do anything is Jean, if she’d leave, but she won’t leave . . . Except maybe she’s right, though. Maybe he be worser off if she did leave and he didn’t have nobody to beat on. You know, maybe that woman know more than any of us do.”

  Mama said, “Maybe.”

  Otis grinned at me, and told Mama goodbye, and left.

  Miss Billie said, “Yeah, I guess I would be more scared if I was her than him.”

  I used to think the queen bee looked like a bee and went around stinging men, but once we were walking down the street and Miss Billie said, “There she is.”

  “Who?” Mama asked.

  “The queen bee,” she said under her breath.

  She didn’t look any different from Mama or Miss Billie or Freddy’s mama.

  “You just sitting right on a pot and scared to shit,” Elvira said. “Sitting right on one.”

  “Naw, I ain’t never got into nothing over no woman,” Davis said. He was playing with my ankles.

  I closed my eyes. He was laying with his feet toward my face, playing with my ankles.

  “Why did you come here, Eve?”

  “My name’s Eva.”

  “Why’d you get so angry?”

  “I don’t know. I just never liked to be called Eve. I don’t know why.”

  “All right, Eva, baby. You don’t mind if I call you baby, do you?”

  “Naw, I don’t mind.”

  He squeezed both my ankles. “You a good-lookin woman,” he said. “A real good-lookin woman.”

  “You looking at my feet,” I said, laughing.

  “Honey, baby, I know what your face look like. By the time I get through with you, I want to know you inside out.”

  He didn’t see the lines in my forehead. I looked down at his shoulders, the back of his head.

  “You know that song. I don’t want to love you outside, I want to love you inside,” he said, laughing. “Go something like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and laughed some. “Eva, Eva, sweet Eva,” he said.

  “You could be so sweet to me, if you wanted to,” Elvira said. “I’ll help you stuff a candy bar up your ass,” I said.

  “You ain’t so hard as you think you are. You just wait. You ain’t near so hard as you think you are. You think cause you can bite off a man’s dick, you can’t feel nothing. But you just wait. You gon start feeling, honey. You gon start feeling.”

  She laughed her laugh.

  “They told me hysteria was one of your problems,” I said. “Yeah, and I know what yours is. Got to go pee, my ass . . .”

  “Y’all ain’t the only people in the world. There’s more people in the world than y’all,” some woman from another cell hollered. “Honey, we know you here too,” Elvira said.

  “Eva, sweet, sweet Eva.”

  He ran his hands between my thighs, and stopped when he hit my bloomers, the sanitary pad.

  “I hope you got enough of these things,” he said. “Yeah, I brought enough.”

  “Cramps any better?”

  I nodded. He kept his warm hand on the inside of my thighs. “Shit or piss one,” Elvira said.

  The gypsy Medina, sitting in my great-grandmama’s kitchen, said, “There’s something in my eyes that looks at men and makes them think I want them.”

  “Why did you come over and say something to me in the first place?” I heard Mama ask Tyrone.

  “There was something in your eyes that let me know I could talk to you.”

  “Didn’t you see anything in the other women’s eyes?”

  “Naw.”

  Davis said, “There was something in your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “I could tell by your eyes how you felt. I could smell you wanted me.”

  “I couldn’t help looking.”

  I told Davis what the gypsy Medina and her husband did. They told Great-Grandmama they had a sick baby in the wagon, and said they didn’t have any food, and asked her if she could give them some food for the sick baby. Great-Grandmama was still living in Georgia, in the country, and kept chickens. She gave them two of the chickens, and some milk and ham. When they left, Great-Grandmama’s cousin who lived down the road came up to the house and said, “I seen them gypsies” wagon stop up here. You didn’t give em no food, did you?” GreatGrandmama said, “Yeah, I gave them something.” Her cousin said, “I didn’t give em nothing. I went out there and looked in the wagon and that baby was as big as I am.”

  Great-Grandmama said she liked Medina, though. She would have given them the food just for themselves. When my grandmother was born, she named her Medina.

  Davis said, “Don’t look at me that way. Don’t look at me that way until you’re through bleeding.”

  “You know where they keeping his penis,” Elvira said. “They keeping it in the icebox, so it won’t get all shriveled up, so they can use it for evidence. They took it out of that silk handkerchief you had it in and wrapped it in Glad Wrap. When you go to court, though, they gon put it back in that silk ha
ndkerchief. Which one of em had to show the penis around? Did they try to make you look at it?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t.”

  “Just like in that Bible story, ain’t it? Except got his dick on a platter.”

  “Yes.”

  “You lied. They said you didn’t bite it all off, like you told me.”

  “I did.”

  The gypsy Medina sat in my great-grandmother’s kitchen. Her hair was thick gypsy hair. She said she had gone to those white people’s house and these white people had sent them around to the kitchen where the negroes was.

  My great-grandmother’s cousin said, “They was up there to my place talking about these peckawoods. They peckawoods too. They don’t even know they peckawood. You know, like that old man from Syria that keeps that store down at Frogs Crossing.”

  Great-Grandmama nodded.

  “He come talking to me about what the peckawoods done to him. I told him he’s a peckawood too.”

  Great-Grandmama said, “If he don’t think he’s one, he ain’t one.”

  Her cousin said, “Shit.”

  The gypsy Medina, Great-Grandmama said, had time in the palm of her hand. She told Great-Grandfather, “She told me to look in the palm of her hand and she had time in it.”

  Great-Grandfather said, “What did she want you to do, put a little piece of silver over top of the time.”

  Great-Grandmother said, “No.” Then she looked embarrassed. Then she said, “She wanted me to kiss her inside her hand.”

  Great-Grandfather started laughing. He worked in tobacco. He rolled his own cigarettes, but never rolled them tight enough. He had spit and tobacco juice on the tips of his fingers. Then he wanted to know where the ham was, and two of their chickens must’ve got lost. When she told him about the sick baby in the wagon that turned out not to be a baby after all, he roared.

  “Don’t you think that’s funny?” I asked Davis.