Eva's Man Read online

  I said, “Yes.”

  “But I figure when you live with your parents, you owe them a certain courtesy, don’t you think?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “I think so too . . . I wouldn’t be afraid to bring a man home, though. I mean, if I wanted a man.”

  I looked over at her, but said nothing. She was twenty-seven, but didn’t look twenty-seven. She didn’t really act twenty-seven. She started jumping to catch the leaves from the branches that were low enough. When she got a leaf she would smell it, and then hand it to me to smell. One of them smelled like mint.

  “This smells like pepper grass,” she said. “What does pepper grass smell like?”

  “Like pepper,” she said. She jumped for some more leaves. “This reminds me of jumping for leaves to feed the goats.”

  “Did you have goats?”

  “Yes, we had two of them. A male and a female. They used to chase after me all the time and I was scared to go out in the yard, so they got rid of them. The doctor put Mama on a diet of goat’s milk for a while. I don’t know why, though. Sweet milk would turn sour on her stomach. Now she drinks sweet milk.”

  I said nothing.

  “I guess we ought to turn back,” she said. I said, “Okay.”

  She didn’t jump for leaves as we went back. She held the ones she had and then would occasionally let one or two drop to the ground.

  “No, not there. Over here.”

  I had started for the house, but she pointed to the garage. It was a big wooden building that looked as much like a barn as a garage. There was a small pickup truck, beside not inside the garage. She opened the door. Inside, hanging from the garage ceiling, were rows of tobacco leaves. She shut the door. Some light came in through little cracks. She went and sat down against the wall. I followed her, and sat down.

  “It’s nice in here,” she said. I said nothing.

  “Daddy’s curing tobacco for the man he works for. They didn’t have enough room at his place, so they brought some back here. I know all about tobacco. I know as much about tobacco as a man.”

  “You don’t work in it, though. Your mother said you a seamstress.”

  “Yeah, I work for this ole white woman got a shop. In a couple of years, though, I’ma get my own shop.”

  “My great-grandfather used to work in tobacco. My grandfather too.”

  “I know how to twist tobacco. That’s the way they used to do it in the old days. Twist it by hand, you know.”

  She grabbed a piece of tobacco down from the ceiling and started smelling it, and gave it to me to smell.

  “Have you ever done it?” she asked. “Done what? Twist tobacco.”

  “Naw. Done it. You know, with a man.”

  It was cool in there, laying back against the wall. I didn’t answer.

  “I asked you have you ever been with a man.”

  “No. Have you?”

  “No.”

  She closed her eyes, her mouth was hanging open a little, then she made a sucking sound.

  “Mama keeps asking me when am I going to get a man,” she said. “I don’t want a man.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Not for her it’s not.”

  “You not her.”

  “That’s what I told her. But you know how parents wont grandchildren. They wont there to be a lot of generations.”

  “That’s good too.”

  “Whose way you looking at it?” she asked, angry. “Hers or mine?”

  I said both ways. “That ain’t no help.”

  She said nothing for a while then she took hold of my hand like she was studying my palm, and started tracing her finger along my hand, but barely touching the lines.

  “It tickles, don’t it?” she asked. I said, “Yeah.”

  She let my hand drop.

  “He said he could tickle me somewhere else better.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind who.”

  She got up real quick. “Your mother doesn’t worry you about it, does she?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “Having a man.”

  “Naw.”

  “I guess you too young, though. Wait till you my age.”

  I stood up because I thought she was going, but she didn’t go. She touched my waist and said that I had a little waist. She kept her hand on my waist and then she walked out of the garage. I followed her. Before she got to the house, she turned. “I don’t wont to go in yet. let’s go back.” We went back to the garage. She pulled a mat from the corner and lay down on it.

  “There’s room for two people,” she said. “No, there’s not.”

  I stooped down, watching her. She frowned and closed her eyes.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  She opened her eyes and looked at me hard. “Who?”

  “That boy,” I said.

  She said nothing, then she said, “He showed me what a man could do for himself. I mean, if I couldn’t do it . . .”

  “You mean he . . . beat his meat?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Naw, he didn’t beat it, he did something else.”

  “What?”

  She wouldn’t tell me. She kept staring up at the tobacco leaves. I picked up a buckeye and started playing with it. She took the buckeye away from me and threw it to the other end of the garage. She told me about how when they first came there, there had been this little girl who’d been playing with a buckeye. At first she was just playing with it, and then she picked it up and started sucking on it, and then she ate it. Nobody had seen her do it. When she started getting sick, they rushed her to the hospital, but she died. She said ever since then she couldn’t stand those things. She said the little girl must’ve thought it was a nut.

  “This is how they used to do when they cured tobacco,” she said, twisting a tobacco leaf. “She thought it was a nut, so she ate it.”

  We only stayed there from that Friday till Monday because Mama couldn’t get longer than that off from work. I’d spent most of my time with Charlotte. She’d kept wanting to go in the woods. She never did talk about the boy again or what he’d done, but she would keep talking about her mother wanting her to marry. I stayed with her because I wanted Mama to get to talk to Miss Billie. When we were coming back on the bus, I couldn’t tell if she had. She had that same look of strain around her eyes that she was beginning to have now. She lay back on the seat and kept her eyes closed most of the time.

  “Did you like Charlotte?” she asked once. “Yes.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Just talk. She likes to walk in the woods a lot.”

  “She seems more settled down than she used to be,” Mama

  said. “I know she gets hell, though.”

  I said nothing. I looked over at her, and then leaned back against my seat and closed my eyes.

  “I told Mama if she had another child I’d raise it, but I said I wasn’t going to have one myself. That made her real mad,” Charlotte said.

  8

  “It ain’t Alfonso, it’s Jean,” Otis said. He’d come to see us again, this time it was about eleven o’clock at night and Daddy was home too.

  The way he was looking when he first came in, nobody was saying anything, just followed him back to the living room and waited for him to start talking. He threw his arm over the couch again.

  “We had to pass this hotel, and then she said—said it real quiet, I almost didn’t hear it, ‘I had to think he was you before I could do anything,’ she said. I just looked at her, you know.

  “‘Then why in the hell did you let him fuck you then? I don’t wont nobody fuckin you.’

  “‘I didn’t let him fuck me.’

  “‘I said I don’t wont nobody fuckin you.’

  “‘I didn’t let him fuck me.’

  “Then there wasn’t no words, just him hitting her. I guess I was kind of hypnotized, you know.
Just standing there. He got in two hits before I took his arm. ‘All right, man, it’s all right now.’ She starts it, Marie. Not him. She starts it and then he finishes it. She’s the one wonts it, though, Marie. I’m living in a crazy house.”

  Mama said nothing. Daddy got up and went in the kitchen. I didn’t think he was coming back, but he did. Otis was already talking again when he got back.

  “It was like I didn’t wont to cut in, you know. like I wanted to just keep watching. like they were working all that blues out of them, or something. I didn’t even wont to put my hand in, but then I knew I couldn’t just stand by watching like that.”

  “Naw,” Mama said finally. Daddy said nothing.

  Otis just sat there, and then Daddy told him he had some Old Crow back there in the kitchen, and Otis said he’d better just have a sip and go.

  “It’s like they my mission in life, you know what I mean, man?”

  Daddy said he knew what he meant.

  When I looked at Mama, she said she was going to bed.

  She shut the door, and I got the sheet and blanket out of the cedar chest and made up my couch-bed.

  “He’s got his hands full,” I heard Daddy tell Mama. “He feels that if he just up and leaves them, whatever happens to them will be his responsibility.”

  Mama said nothing.

  “That’s a hell of a situation to be in.” Mama said, “Yes.”

  I sucked in my stomach.

  Alfonso reached over and took my hand. I pulled it away and put it under the table.

  “Don’t nobody believe you my cousin now.”

  I said nothing. I touched the foam on the top of my beer.

  Alfonso frowned. “You wouldn’t do anything for me, would you?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  I wanted to tell him it wasn’t me he was worrying about, but I didn’t know what that would make him say.

  We sat there, saying nothing.

  “You see that woman over there,” he said after a moment. I looked at the woman. “Yes.”

  “She’d do anything for me. If I asked for five dollars right now, she’d give it to me. You don’t believe me?”

  “I believe you.”

  “Yeah, she’d do anything for me. She likes me. She’s been trying to get me ever since I started coming here. You didn’t see the evil eye she give you, did you? naw, but I seen it. Yes-sir, if I went up to her right this minute and asked her for five bucks, she’d give it to me. Give it to me and wouldn’t ask for nothing in return. I wouldn’t do that, though. I wouldn’t go up to her and ask, because I’m not that kind of a man. I mean a man that know a woman wonts him and then take advantage of it. But that’s the way some men do, though. I ain’t that kind of a man, though.”

  He had gin this time. He drank.

  When he took me home, he took me home through this back alley. When he stopped, I stopped. He put his hand down in my blouse. It surprised me at first, and I just stood there, but then when he started to bend his head down—

  “Naw.”

  “I just wont to suck your damn tiddies.”

  “I said naw.”

  “What’s that? Where’d you get that?”

  He stood away from me. I put the little knife back in my pocket. He stood there saying nothing for a long time, and then he started laughing.

  “Shit, a tiddy ain’t shit,” he said when we were walking back.

  He drew tiddies on the wall and the landlord came in and bawled him out, told him to be sure he did pay the rent Monday. I was afraid to ask him again to let me help him. When the landlord left, Davis started laughing, and then he pulled up my skirt. He said my knees were like globes. He caressed them with his palms.

  “It’s like you were a husband,” I said.

  He looked at me hard. He was frowning.

  “I mean you slept with me while I was bleeding, like a husband would, and didn’t try to arouse me till I was ready.”

  “What’s a man for?”

  I didn’t answer. He parted my thighs.

  “Why you want me?” I asked.

  “Only to ride you.”

  “You said you used to work with horses.”

  “Yeah, that’s how I got away from my . . . wife. Brought some horses up this way, and stayed.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were married.”

  “I thought I told you.”

  “No, you didn’t tell me.”

  Big rusty nails sticking out of my palms. But I let him fuck me again. And when he finished he lay down with his head on the pillow. I wanted him to stay closer longer, to stay inside me longer, but he didn’t, and I didn’t ask him to. I leaned over and put my tongue in his mouth.

  “Where you going?” Daddy asked.

  I was going out as he was coming in from work. I told him Alfonso was taking me over to the Froglegs restaurant.

  “Jean going?”

  “Naw. She doesn’t like to go out.”

  “You used to didn’t like to go out.” I said nothing.

  “She used to stay up in the house too much,” Mama said from the kitchen.

  “If she need to go out, she ought to find somebody else to go out with,” Daddy said. Then to me, “If I was you, I be scared of him, the way he treat Jean.”

  “He’s not a bad man,” Mama said.

  Daddy told me to go on if I was going. I went out.

  Davis said the landlady would always bring him the Sunday’s paper. She’d bring it to him on Monday, after they got through with it, but she never failed to bring it to him.

  “Yeah, she’s got her eyes all out for me. If I was a certain kind of man, I bet I could get out of my rent too, but I ain’t that kind of a man. Got her eyes and her ass all out for me.

  What you frowning at?”

  a “Nothing.”

  “I ain’t studying her, though. I’m studying you.”

  He plucked at my nipples and asked me to give him a smile.

  I showed the dark line along one of my teeth.

  “You keep going out with me,” Alfonso said.

  The man with no thumb passed by our table but didn’t sit down.

  “How you doing, buddy?” he asked Alfonso. He didn’t say anything to me.

  “Aw, I’m doing everything,” Alfonso said.

  “Go high places,” I heard the man say as he kept walking. “He don’t believe we cousins now,” Alfonso said.

  “We are, though,” I said.

  “He’s talking about you taking him high places, I could take you high places. Take you so high you’d start talking to Jesus.”

  I said nothing.

  “Shit. You frustrate a man. Shit.”

  The man with no thumb passed by our table again. “She make you feel like a king, don’t she, buddy?”

  “Naw, she don’t make me feel like no king, shit.”

  He got up from the table. He looked at me hard, and then he left me in the restaurant. I thought he was coming back but he didn’t. At first I thought he was standing around outside to get some air or smoke, but when I went outside to look for him, he wasn’t there. I came back in the restaurant and sat down.

  A man sat down across from me. He didn’t look old enough to be my father, he looked old enough to be my grandfather.

  “My name’s Moses Tripp,” he said.

  I didn’t give a shit what his name was, I was thinking in the kind of language Alfonso would use. I didn’t want him sitting there and I was wishing Alfonso would come back.

  “Alonso coming back?”

  I told him my cousin’s name was Alfonso. “Shit, that nigger ain’t none of your cousin. He coming back, or are you free?”

  I said he was coming back.

  “Well, I just take up some of your time till he come back.”

  I sat there. I didn’t know whether to get up and try to go home alone, or wait for Alfonso.

  “If I had the money, baby, I’d buy you a beer, but I ain’t got the money. I just got enou
gh to, uh . . .” He cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything.

  I just looked at him.

  “You look so sweet,” he said. “You look choice. That’s how you look. Choice . . . I got, uh, five dollars. You think that’ll do?” He slid it across the table at me.

  I got up and went out. He followed me out. I was thinking I should’ve known he’d follow me out.

  “Do it for me, huh? Come on, honey. This is my last five.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Least feel on it for me. That ain’t fair. Five dollars for a feel, that ain’t . . . Alonso ain’t got nothing I . . . let me.” He reached for me down between my legs, then he screamed and pulled his hand back. He called me “bitch”.

  I could feel him filling the whole crease in my behind. He put his arms around my waist and fingered the front of me. Charlotte said the girl put it in her mouth, because she didn’t know it was poison, she thought it was a nut. When the cops came, Moses Tripp said he wasn’t trying to do nothing but buy me a beer.

  I told Elvira, “He claimed he wasn’t trying to do nothing but buy me a beer, but that wasn’t all he was trying to buy.”

  She told me not to tell it to her, there wasn’t nothing she could do for me. She told me to tell it to them.

  “I didn’t tell anybody,” I said. “I just let the man tell his side.”

  “How you doing?”

  “Awright.”

  “That’s more than me,” the man with no thumb said. “I ain’t even doing.”

  Where’d you get the knife from anyway? Daddy asked. I told him that that was the little knife that Freddy gave me.

  I thought that was a play knife, Mama said. Naw, it was a real one.

  Where was Alfonso during all this? Daddy asked. I didn’t answer.

  I thought you said you went out with Alfonso. I did.

  I thought it was a rubber knife, said Mama. Then where was he? Daddy asked.

  I said nothing.

  You won’t talk to them, but you could talk to us, my father said. It’s not even like you. Stabbing a man.