by J. J. Murray
When I came home, I decided not to be evil anymore. The house was spotless. Even the refrigerator where all his drips used to be ... Spotless. And that space behind the toilet seat that collected his pubic hairs ... It sparkled. I even opened the door to the baby's room. I peered in and saw a completely dustless room, the scent of lemon wax in the air. Jonas had been keeping it up, keeping it prepared. He still thinks we can have a child. He had a nice meal of pork chops, greens, and rice cooking. He smiled at me. "How was your day?" he asked.
And I forgave him. My heart just burst, and I forgave him. And when I did, bony Jonas Borum started to look good. My coochie got moist, and I grabbed his bony ass with both my hands. "Upstairs," I whispered, and we left all that food simmering on the stove, humping till the chops burned, the greens became mush, and the rice turned to plastic. We did it a second time till the smoke alarm came on, and were at it a third time (a record for our marriage) when the neighbors came to our door, saying that they'd seen some smoke. "Are y'all all right?" they asked.
"Which window was the smoke comin' from?" I asked them while Jonas played with my ass out of their view.
Oh, the days and nights that followed! But no child. We did it every way possible, even read up on how to know the best time for conception. Still no child. I had Dr. Duckworth check me out. I was in perfect working order. Then we checked Jonas. Low sperm count? How was that possible? His sperm were hitting on all cylinders before! "Take cool showers instead of hot baths," Dr. Duckworth advised him, "and wear boxers instead of briefs. Hot and tight is not the environment for one's seed to be properly planted."
Jonas told me all this in bed, then added, "And Doc Duckworth also says I should `marshal my resources,' you know, save it up, only do it once in a while."
I kissed his pointy nose. "Long as you service me in between"
We were like newlyweds, doing foreplay for days at a time. All the stops were sticking out on that organ at church ... but Jonas's organ was barely making a squeak.
I talked to Dr. Duckworth about it. "Is there anything else we could be doing?"
He ticked off a list: "Intrauterine insemination, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, gamete intrafallopian transfer, intracytoplasmic sperm injection."
"Which has the best chance?"
"One I didn't mention."
"Which is?"
"Donor insemination."
I had to sit down after that one. "Donor, as in somebody else, not Jonas?"
"Yes. Success rates can be as high as sixty percent after five or more attempts"
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "What exactly are you saying?"
"He didn't tell you?"
"No "'
"Well, um, I can't tell you if he didn't. You'll have to ask him"
And I did. At the dinner table later that night. While we were eating spaghetti and meatballs. "What did Dr. Duckworth tell you about your sperm, Jonas?"
He choked. "Please, Ruth, not while I'm eating."
"He wouldn't tell me, but it has to be bad. Are you ... Are you sterile?"
"No," he said with authority. "Just low sperm count. And remember, all it takes is one sperm and one egg. As long as I have that one sperm, we'll be fine"
Without saying it, Jonas was telling me that he had been shooting blanks. I even read up on the whole sperm thing and found that men today have lower sperm counts, poorer quality of sperm and semen than ever before, and up to half of all miscarriages are from bad chromosomes. My eggs were fine. His shit was bad. The two miscarriages, the stillborn boy, the boy who died at birth-they weren't my fault! At first I was relieved, but then ... I was pissed. I had spent over seven years grieving silently for something that I didn't cause to happen, and Jonas had been letting me take all the blame. Jonas's weak-ass sperm just couldn't complete the job.
Instead of confronting him with this like I could have, I started hinting at adoption. "Who wouldn't think we were good candidates, Jonas? I mean, we're the perfect candi dates. Who would deny a preacher and his wife from adopting a baby?" I showed him all the literature. "So we can't have one of our own. Least we can make one our own. There are plenty of children waiting for a good home. I mean, we have that room upstairs all ready to go, and-"
"I'd rather keep trying."
I touched his hand, and he pulled it away. "Jonas, it just wasn't meant to be. We have to accept that this is God's will-"
"No!" he thundered. "We'll keep trying!"
And we did, nightly till either he or I started crying from the sheer pain of the act itself or the heartache from the futility we felt. He eventually drifted away, started staying out later, had lame excuses for being late-and I didn't care anymore. I didn't care for the next six years, and I didn't want to care. I didn't care to care. Every Sunday I put on my fake smile and made the world think I was happy and fulfilled by standing at his side and shaking hands, but inside I was lost in sorrow. Though I was fertile, I was barren, and Jonas wouldn't even put an adopted baby into my arms, our lives, or that empty room.
I received a phone call late one night, while Jonas was out who knows or cares where, from Joe Beverly, the private investigator I had hired before. "Got some information for you about your husband from another investigation of mine. You interested?"
' 'No.
"You oughta be "
"I'm not. Please, just-"
"You'll need to get an AIDS test"
Oh ... no. I managed a weak, "What?"
"I been followin' this other guy around, can't tell you his name; but I catch him with this other guy who you know very well, and they ain't exactly been drinkin' beer and playin' cards, if you know what I mean."
Oh ... God ... no ... this ... isn't ... happening. I let the phone fall from my fingers to the floor. Cold. Dizzy. A voice saying "if you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again." Hands shaking. That alarm sound from the phone. The front door opening, the little moan in the hinge Jonas promised to fix giving him away. Steps. A skinny hand reaching to hang up the phone. Light from the bathroom. Water running. My feet running to the bathroom, hands tearing at the shower curtain, nails scratching flesh, fists pounding bone till blood streamed down the drain....
"Get out," I heard my voice crying. "Get out," it echoed again and again till I was alone in the bathroom, splashed by the shower, sucking on bleeding knuckles, a whale of a woman wailing away. I stayed there all night and much of the next day till I found the courage to stand. I looked down at my legs, and they held me up just fine. I looked at my fists, and they looked like they could go a few more rounds. I felt my body, and though there was a lot to feel, at least it felt. I called Tonya on the phone. "Tonya, I'm divorcing the bisexual preacher I married," I said with a firm voice.
"Daa-em. No wonder this neighborhood has gone to hell," she said.
"Can you go with me to get an AIDS test?"
"Oh, no, Ruth ... sure. I'll pick up Naomi, and we'll be right over."
I offered my knuckles instead of my arm to the doctor at the free clinic, but he stuck me in the arm anyway. "Results could take as long as three weeks," he said.
"I'll manage," I said.
And I did.
And I have.
And I will.
`three
I didn't have HIV or AIDS and wasn't dying. At the time, I didn't count it as a blessing. I wanted to die so I wouldn't feel so hollow, so alone, so empty, so lost. To top it off, the new "me" fit in well in the neighborhood around Antioch. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Vine Street, living here as long as I have, knowing most of the folks because of the church, but I don't. I've missed out on so much being a preacher's wife, like I was above it all somehow. I just haven't noticed shit, like the low-riders cruising by rattling manhole covers with rap rhapsodies till all hours of the night, like the scarcity of green grass on lawns, like the absence of adults when children are out playing and often wearing nothing but dirty diapers, like the abundance of little girls with
no hips pushing strollers carrying their babies. Tonya and Naomi, who have lived on Vine next door to each other since the day they were born and even work sideby-side at the phone company, have had to set me straight often. It's strange, but I simply do not know the people I've tried to serve all these years. But now we have something in common we're all lost on Vine Street now.
On a hot, sticky July afternoon just ripe for gossip, we were sitting in rickety old green lawn chairs, the kind that maybe last the summer before splitting, on the porch of my apartment house, an old Victorian someone thought would be worth more if it housed six skinny apartments with no water pressure and healthy roaches. Whenever we'd see someone out walking, Tonya and Naomi would give me the low-down between sips of sweetened iced tea.
"Who is that man, and what is he doin' with that jar?" I asked. I nodded at a skinny dark man sitting under a tree with a Mason jar covering one ear.
Tonya leaned in. "Don't know his name. We just always called him Jar-Man. Man is the stankest thing you've ever smelled. Too many forties of Old English and too much of this." She rubbed a finger in the crook of her left arm. "Man has got to be the oldest living heroin addict in Calhoun. Walked by him once, and girl, it was spooky. Heard him sayin' somethin' about `why we got sea gulls 'round here when we ain't got no sea?' "
I've always wondered that, too. They get blown here by a hurricane or what? Calhoun is at least two hundred and fifty miles from the Atlantic.
"I tried witnessing to him back in the day," Naomi said. She has always been the most religious among the three of us, leaving tracts everywhere, even putting "Do You Know If You Are Saved?" on top of the tip she leaves when we eat out together. "And I got an earful. The man said he had a booger he just couldn't flick, said that his addiction was a child he didn't whip now to chase later."
A booger I can't flick ... a child I don't whip now to chase later. Jar-Man was a genius in disguise. He could have been describing my depression ... or my ex-husband. Yeah, I'd like to whip the boogers out his ass.
"Heard he showed up over at Slim Reaper's wake and gave a big speech," Tonya said.
That gave me a jolt. "I was at that wake," I said, remembering. "I know him." More like I knew of him.
Slim Reaper was a local punk who got killed a couple years ago by his girlfriend, a sweet little member of our church named Danielle Owens. Danielle was a bright girl, a good student, so pretty in other words, everything I wasn't when I was her age-but when she found out Slim was messing with a rich white girl, she emptied a gun into his belly. Never knew what she saw in Ty "Slim Reaper" Williams, the boy who hung out at the corner of Vine and Fourteenth selling crack. Heard Danielle gave birth to his child in prison. Out of shame, mostly, and my duty as the wife of a preacher, I went to Ty's wake. "But Jar-Man, or whatever his name is, wasn't all stank then. He was wearing a suit." I squinted at the man. "He looked like anybody's granddaddy. I even thought he was Ty's granddaddy at the time."
"What'd he say?"
Fact is, the man wouldn't shut up. "What didn't he say. He told Ty's entire life story, said Ty was born with a splintered spoon in his mouth, called his mama, who was right there grievin', he called his mama a big of bag of bones and moans ""
"That's cold," Tonya said.
I rolled my eyes. "But it was true. She didn't give a shit about her boy till the day after he died when she got to go on the TV." I have never understood that. Her own boy's out there dealing, being a player, and she didn't do a thing to stop him. Saw her on the TV saying that she tried to beat the streets out of him, but it wasn't the streets that killed him. It was his pecker. "Jar-Man said something like `Ty played musical stares on the corner,' said he `profited without honor sellin' bags of fix.' "
"Jar-Man soundin' like a poet," Tonya said.
He was, at the wake anyway. "Sometimes you get what you stray for," he had said, and I had taken that to heart. You either get what you pray for or you get what you stray for. I prayed for a man ... who ended up straying.
"Heard he got thrown out of the wake," Tonya said.
I nodded. "Man ended his speech, least I think it was the end, with `ain't nobody here gonna miss Slim Reaper's narrow ass one damn bit."'
"That's a bit much," Tonya said, "but I ain't missed him, have y'all?" Neither Naomi nor I answered. A neighborhood boy, only nineteen, dead, and nobody missed him. "You heard about what happened to that Myers boy last month, right?"
"I saw the blood on the sidewalk myself," Naomi said. "Over on Fifteenth. I hear he's still in a coma."
"Isn't he called Guitarman or something?" I asked.
Naomi sighed and nodded. "He was real good with a guitar."
"Probably thought he was the second coming of Jimi Hendrix," Tonya said.
Naomi frowned. "You remember how he used to play for the Christmas show when he was little?"
"He only knew `Silent Night,' Naomi." Tonya hummed the song badly.
"But he played it beautifully. He is a good kid, Tonya."
"Pul-lease," Tonya scowled. "Boy had lung dung from all those blunts he smoked. I spoke to him once. I said, `Hi,' and he says, `I wish I was.' Boy was just beggin' in the street, gave us all a bad name"
"Jesus had a soft spot for beggars, didn't he?" Naomi asked. Tonya looked away. "And I knew Kevin Myers, knew his mama, Nicole. She raised him right, tried to keep him in Sunday school at Antioch, tried to keep him in school, tried to get him a job. I watched that woman dragging him from the street many times." She turned to face Tonya. "All the boy ever did was play that guitar and get change from folks, Tonya. Somebody cut up that boy for some change, for a lit tle bit of silver. It isn't right for anybody to get beat up for a song"
As hot as it was, I was starting to feel cold. "Ain't no one in this neighborhood who isn't dead or in a coma? What about Evangeline?" Evangeline was a woman who sat on a bus bench and read fortunes. "She seems full of life."
Tonya smirked. "That overdressed wench who works roots on folks? She ain't nothin' but a junkie. She think she some voodoo child with all them extensions. They say she even got plaited breath, and her real name Betsy Johnson"
"How you know so much?" Naomi asked.
Tonya looked at her hands. "Well, I asked her for some numbers this one time, and ... They hit."
Naomi waved a long finger at Tonya. "You told me you got a raise."
Tonya smiled. "Well, in a way, I did. Right?" She laughed. "Evangeline be right about seventy percent of the time "
"You've gone back?" Naomi shouted.
"Dag, Naomi. How you think you got your last birthday present? Shit."
"That watch broke, Tonya. Bet you got it from Soapbox Sam"
I smiled. Soapbox Sam Harris stood on an old milk crate at the corner of Eleventh and Vine preaching most daysand selling whatever he could sell at night. "I like him." Tonya and Naomi raised their eyebrows. "What? He's funny, got a nice smile, and he always says hello to me. And he's a better preacher than Jonas will ever be."
"He a crook," Tonya said. "He a fence or something, and I bet he even sellin' crack." She waved her hand toward the street. "He got himself at least four, five chaps running loose around here"
I can see why," I said. "He's a handsome man"
Naomi grabbed my arm. "Hold on, now, Sister Childress. It's too hot to be horny over a sixty-year-old man"
"I ain't horny," I said. "Just bein' honest" I nodded toward a whisper-thin child spinning around a thin, leafless tree in front of a brick two-story across the street. "That one of his children?"
Tonya squinted. "Think so. Angie something-or-other. Think she kin to Deacon Rutledge in some way. She's so skinny, if she turns sideways, she disappears. She's so skinny, if I cough from over here, she'll fall down over there."
I ignored Tonya's laughter. "She's pretty." Thin legs, dark skin, bright eyes, a blue bow in her hair. "Bet she has Sam's eyes"
"But Sam don't do for her like he should," Tonya said.
"He does more for her than that Donnie S
malls did for his daughter, Teresa," Naomi said, and I shiver at the mention of those names. Donnie Smalls had killed his wife, Evie, with a shotgun not two blocks from Antioch one hot August night ... with his seven-year-old daughter's finger stuck in the barrel. Teresa had tried to stop it with just one tiny finger and her finger got blasted right through her mama's chest.
"Let's not talk about that," I said. "I'm tryin' not to be depressed, y'all, and you ain't helpin' me a damn bit."
"Yeah we are," Tonya said. "Lots of folks out there ain't got shit, got it worse than you, while you at least got us"
"Some comfort"
Jar-Man. Guitarman. Evangeline. Soapbox Sam. Angie. Teresa. Six souls completely untouched by their neighborhood church ... but they were getting by just like me. I stood and stretched my back and looked up Vine toward Dude's Take-Out and Hood's Grocery. Lying in front of Hood's was a man holding a plastic bag.
"Lord Jesus," I cried. "Bag Man's fallen out again."
"He'll be all right," Tonya said. "He just drunk."
I turned to Tonya. "On a day this hot, he shouldn't be out lyin' in the sun" I moved toward the stairs. "Y'all comin'?"
Naomi stood, but Tonya kept her place. "I'm tellin' you," Tonya said, "the man is just drunk as usual."
While Naomi and I race-walked to Hood's, I remembered other days Bag Man (a.k.a. Larry Farmer) had fallen out. He wasn't a drunk. He just didn't eat right. I bet he had diabetes or something, and coffee and cigarettes ain't enough to live on. He collected empty soda and beer cans from the dumpsters around Vine and recycled them down the way into a cup of coffee and a smoke. I had found him a few times over the years lying out in front of the church. A glass of iced tea or a mug of hot cocoa would bring him around, and he'd be off limp-hopping down the street with his carefully tied plastic bag of dripping cans and bottles.
Sweat rolled off me by the time I got to Hood's and looked down at Larry, who had to be pushing seventy, maybe even eighty. His face was creased red-raw by the sun, his smile uneven, teeth green-brown and gapped, his legs shaking, his chafed hands reaching out. This was a man in need, yet folks were still walking in and out of Hood's, walking around him, even crossing the street before they came to him, like he was nothing more than a puddle of mud.
