A Taste of Honey

by Jabari Asim

  “Did he die?”

  “Don’t know. But I suspect he learned his lesson.”

  Rose stood up. Her hands were trembling, so she pressed them to the table to steady them. “That’s a terrible story,” she said, her voice breaking.

  Pristine knew her time was up. “It’s just a story,” she said. “I don’t even know why I recalled it just now. I didn’t come over here to tell it.”

  “What did you come over here for, to tell me to leave my husband? I took a vow.”

  “I see. And he didn’t?”

  Silence hung between the two women like a veil. Finally, Pristine spoke.

  “I thought you could use a friend, Rose. Maybe I’m not that friend, but you’ll never make one if you don’t leave the house. There’s a community rally coming up at Good Samaritan. Maybe you’d like to come. The Justice Singers are supposed to show. Please, just think about it.”

  “All right,” Rose said quickly. “I will.”

  Later, when Pristine told Reuben about her visit next door, she didn’t mention the bacon.

  “A community rally? You haven’t even been to one yourself.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t start. I’m a member of the community, so I’m invited. Anyway, I don’t know if she’ll think about it at all. I do know that she would have said just about anything to get me out of her house.”

  As time passed, an uneasy peace rode the reliable spring currents breezing through the women’s backyards. Rose sang, Pristine gardened and minded her rambunctious boys, and occasionally the women’s eyes met above the fence. The looks they exchanged grew warmer in time, and Pristine imagined the two of them had reached some kind of understanding. Rose felt something else entirely on her part, something more like a mildly obsessive jealousy that she wasn’t proud of. She took to keeping up with the Joneses, noting their noisy comings and goings, the boisterous pattern of their days. She knew on Friday evenings they ventured to Kroger and came back loaded down with groceries and Top Value trading stamps. Sundays she pictured them enjoying the ice cream Reuben brought from Horack’s Dairy.

  But her favorites were the ordinary days, the ones devoted to no particular occasion or cause. She found something to do on her porch as dusk descended, or hovered unseen just inside her screen door and watched the boys stretch for errant tossed balls in the gathering shadows; she spied Pristine expertly retrieving her crisp, sun-bleached sheets, plucking them from the line, folding and settling them in her wicker laundry basket in what appeared to be a single compact, graceful motion, then pausing at the sound of a car entering from the near end of the alley, a clothespin hanging from lips already blooming into a lovely, expectant smile. Pristine even knew the sound of her husband’s engine, the stubborn wheeze of his carburetor as he backed the Rambler wagon into the battered garage.

  Rose looked on steadily as Reuben, paint-spattered and sweaty, gathered the tools of his trade, stacked them on his jerry-rigged yet reliable shelves, and stepped into the yard with all the enthusiasm of a saint at the gates of heaven. If it wasn’t too dark, a miraculous streak of sun sometimes found his gold tooth and gave his grin a mischievous glint. Soon enough his wiry arms were stretched around two laughing boys and a loving wife. Rose saw it all, craned her neck to follow them as they ambled through the back door and disappeared into the golden glow of the Jones kitchen. She breathed deeply, as if her neighbors’ affection gave off an aroma to savor, like the ribs Reuben was fond of grilling over hickory on summer nights.

  Rose acquired the habit of eating her solitary dinners near her kitchen window. The Joneses kept their shades low, but their shadows could be seen from time to time. Hungrily watching their silhouettes, Rose pictured them eating at the table, inhaling satisfying mouthfuls of Pristine’s lovingly prepared dishes between warmhearted exchanges and laughter-filled recollections of busy, fulfilling days. Reuben was probably describing some kooky character he’d bumped into while dropping Ed off at SuperMart, or a fender bender he’d witnessed while touching up the sign in front of Yeatman Clinic. From time to time, she knew, the sign painter reached out and rubbed the nappy heads of his boys. Or extended his strong fingers and touched his wife’s hand for no reason at all.

  As evenings lengthened into the depth of night, shadows no longer danced behind the shades next door. Long after the younger boys had been bathed and put to bed and Reuben and Pristine had shared a can of Stag and watched Max Roby deliver the final newscast of the night, Rose would move across her desolate flat to the front window. Sometimes she’d sit there and stare out at the dark, quiet houses of Sullivan Avenue. The streetlights might occasionally shine on a lonesome traveler, maybe Austin Burk, the undertaker’s scary son, or Talk Much, the long-limbed, laconic man who sometimes worked with Reuben. He was known to stop and place his palm against the edge of a building as if taking its pulse. Talk Much? Walk Much was more like it, Rose thought. A few doors west, an occasional car would roll down Vandeventer Avenue, a recalcitrant muffler ruffling the stillness. What did Paul’s car sound like? That would be a good thing to know.

  It also would be nice to know what Pristine had that she didn’t. Her well-meaning neighbor wasn’t bad-looking, especially when she smiled. But Pristine was thin, while she, Rose, was what admiring men liked to call a healthy girl. Childbearing hips, she’d heard the girl watchers whisper on those brief, rare occasions when daylight found her roaming free. Hips to keep a man warm at night. How Paul used to love to stroke those hips, curves that had known the touch of no other man. They used to talk about making a baby—a girl, Rose often predicted. They’d name her Marie, Rose’s favorite name in the whole world. Nowadays Paul seldom looked at her, except maybe to determine exactly where to place his fist. Who would bother to look at her now? Who would see beneath the welts and bruises?

  That man outside Curly’s funeral had looked at her. Gabriel had looked in her, or so it had seemed for a strange, disconcerting moment. He’d made her feel naked as Eve and just as shameful. And what did she have to be ashamed about? All she’d done was sing a joyful noise unto the Lord.

  On such nights, curled up in her chair near the window, Rose would wrap her arms around herself and nod. Her chin bumped against her chest as weariness overtook her. The hiss of the radiators gave way to imagined murmurings, soft lips and warm hands, babies with flake-gold eyes. And finally, the sweetness of sleep.

  Planning the Perfect Evening

  everything was going bad. Nothing made sense anymore. No one showed up when they said they would. No one believed him when he said he was good for whatever he owed. Everywhere he looked he saw Guts Tolliver’s fat reflection. He was convinced the leg breaker had spies watching him from high in the trees, monitoring his movements from chimney tops and alleyways. Clinging to the shadows no longer helped.

  When he finally crept from the darkness and made it up the stairs of his immaculate home, he often found Rose sitting in the kitchen, staring out the window as if she was watching TV. Nothing to see but the neighbors’ yellowing, tattered shade.

  She hardly moved when he came in, her relaxed, splendidly indifferent posture practically begging him to slap some sense into her, as if that was possible. He rolled up his sleeves and stepped toward her without so much as a “Honey, I’m home.” Time was, a woman hopped up and made herself busy when her man came through the door. Time was, insolence didn’t go steaming out of a woman like sewer gas. Where was she getting this new, foul attitude? True, he kept her nosy ass out of his business, but that gave her no excuse for not being able to tell that he was in distress. That he had concerns beyond her understanding.

  Rose suddenly snapped alert, as if waking from an absorbing dream. She looked at him like she’d never seen him before, had never rocked him to ecstasy between her thighs. She recovered, curving her lips from round surprise to smiling recognition, but she was too slow. He was drunk but not too tore up to miss her momentary confusion.

  “You look tired, Paul,” she said. “You need some res
t. Come on, let me run you a bath. Get some food in you and lie down.”

  “I never loved you anyway. Everybody was always talking about your voice. Your goddamned voice.”

  Rose winced. “Stop it, Paul.”

  “I said, I’ll fix that. I’ll shut that bitch up even if I have to marry her.”

  “Paul, that’s not true.”

  “You didn’t think I really wanted you, did you? What you got I can get anywhere. I’m Paul Whittier, don’t you know.”

  He needed to get to her before she started that awful warbling. She’d taken to singing even while he slapped her plump jaws, split her lips—again—beneath his knuckles. Did she think a few lilting notes would stay his hand? She had another think coming.

  Stinking up Rose’s bed, his long, boot-clad feet smearing mud across her intensely vacuumed throw rug, his hands still throbbing from giving the ball and chain exactly what she needed, Paul settled into his evening snore. He burrowed his stubbly jaw into his pillow, trying mightily to resist the lure of a tantalizing scent emanating from the kitchen. Through the fog of his alcohol-soaked breath and the belligerent bite of his festering B.O., he struggled to identify the source of the aroma. Just as he descended into the best sleep he’d known in weeks, the answer landed lightly, perfectly on the tip of his tongue: bacon.

  ————

  Club, cutlass, pliers, band saw, broomstick, garrote, piano wire, pistol, dagger, box cutter, baseball bat, his own 14 EEE work brogans, a lace from said brogans, chopsticks, ice pick, knitting needles, straight razor, brass knuckles, his knuckles, a crutch, the crook of his arm—it was easier to conceive of a weapon that Guts Tolliver had not used to dispatch some unfortunate soul to the hereafter than to establish with certainty a comprehensive catalog of his instruments of death.

  Guts’s upper lip was clean-shaven, but his bounteous jaws sported a thick fringe of beard that brought to mind portraits of those black senators and congressmen who dared to darken the legislative branch for a brief, tantalizing span following the Civil War. It also brought to mind a certain six-hundred-pound wrestler who wore sofa-size overalls and carried a giant horseshoe into the ring. Guts’s resemblance to Hayseed the Magnificent was a source of not pride but discomfort, and the fact of his anguish was made abundantly clear through a sensational and bone-chilling demonstration of the versatility of the shoelace. Guts was picking up a pair of freshly polished wingtips for his employer at the shine parlor next to Curly’s confectionery when a low-level denizen of Gateway’s underworld—known for all eternity as “that damn fool”—greeted the corpulent assassin with a “What’s happenin’, Hayseed?” Folks known to hang out thereabouts swear up and down that the parlor’s proprietors are still scraping up what’s left of that late, unlamented, loose-tongued simpleton. If anyone had found the temerity to ask Guts himself about the incident, he simply would have shrugged and admitted that he didn’t sweat the details.

  Not that Guts didn’t have a tender side. That very aspect of his complex, unpredictable personality took hold of him as he wheeled his Plymouth toward the western end of Sullivan Avenue. He was planning the perfect evening, which for him always included the same two indispensable ingredients, Pearl Jordan and banana pudding. Pearl was as petite as Guts was grand (“gross,” some might think but never say out loud) and admirably undaunted by the eventful journey to his heart that the vast, uncharted reaches of his midsection promised. Guts had long ago given up the pleasures of being on top—led to that epiphany by a pair of brave but shallow lasses who found themselves nearly loved to death beneath his immeasurable folds—and learned to accept satisfaction where he found it. Not even Guts dreamed that joy would arrive in a lifelong companion who practiced twirling atop her mountainous man until she could ride him to mutually transporting extremes, pausing at appropriate intervals to lean forward and lovingly spoon more banana pudding into his happy, waiting mouth.

  His previous surveys of Paul’s block, conducted under a hard hat and with the assistance of an ostentatious clipboard, had enabled him to ascertain that the man’s front door was barricaded by an inordinate number of locks. He soon deduced that the padlocks, chains, and dead bolts were intended not to hold the world at bay but to keep his wife in. She was lovely, Guts had seen, although a bit round for his tastes. But hey, to each his own, right?

  The basement door in back of the Whittier residence was little more than reinforced plywood and could be torn from its hinges if locks turned out to be a problem. He could kick it in with an expertly placed 14 EEE or subdue it with a muted grunt and a wedge of shoulder, but he chose instead to just lean on it, rub the coarse grain, and mumble sweet nothings until it popped open as easily as a Washington Avenue whore.

  And he was in. He spied a pull chain above the husky shadow of the clothes dryer and gave it a tug. Used the amber glare to make his way to the stairs.

  Some claimed Guts Tolliver was light on his feet, a nimble-toed wonder of aerodynamic bulk. Whoever heard such talk reserved judgment, preferring to see such a marvel before stamping it with the official seal of belief. Rose failed to witness Guts’s miraculous manipulation of space because her back was turned when he materialized in her kitchen. Trancelike she flipped the bacon with a large, two-tined fork, oblivious to the random pops of hot grease. Then she was all too aware of the giant standing just a pounce away, a great gloved finger pressed to his generous, oddly sensual lips. She briefly considered defending herself with the fork before quickly realizing it would snap feebly before penetrating even the second layer of the stranger’s abundant flesh.

  The ogre in her kitchen had the nerve to tip his hat.

  “Lord Jesus,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “No danger of that, ma’am. Besides, looks like somebody’s already done that.” Embarrassed, Rose touched a hand to her blackened eye.

  Guts wrapped Rose’s neck in the crook of his arm as casually as a letterman escorting his sweetheart to the homecoming dance. He was still holding her that way when he steered her into the bedroom and roused Paul with his foot.

  “Let’s go, fella,” Guts said. “I’m tired of playing hide-and-seek. Aren’t you?”

  Paul blinked in terror. He wanted to be dreaming. Guts could almost hear him making those bargains he’d heard countless times in similar situations. Please God, he was thinking, begging. Please let me be dreaming.

  But no.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Paul. However, I do have orders. My employer wants you and me … to have a little discussion.”

  Paul said nothing. He looked at Rose, then at Guts. He considered offering his wife’s body for his freedom or, failing that, her life for his. Rose read his face and saw him weighing the options. Paul saw that she understood, and in that moment they both were lost.

  Paul yanked the alarm clock from the nightstand and hurled it at the intruder’s head. Guts ducked gracefully (he was used to that sort of thing), at the same time gently nudging Rose’s head and shoulders beneath the trajectory of the clock as it hit the wall and shattered.

  “Time really does fly, doesn’t it, Paul?”

  Guts was especially proud of that pun, but he restrained himself out of respect for the wife. He released her, picked Paul up by the nape of his neck, and headed toward the back stairs.

  “Call the police!” Paul shouted.

  “Don’t do that, ma’am,” Guts advised. “Right now only Paul’s in trouble. My employer has no quarrel with you.”

  Rose nodded.

  “And, ma’am?”

  “Y-yes?”

  “I do believe that bacon’s burning.”

  Returning to her trance, Rose turned off the stove. She faced the kitchen window, tuning out the sound of her husband being bumped and stumbled down the stairs. Staring at her neighbors’ yellowing and tattered shade, she lowered herself into her chair.

  Standing between Guts and Guts’s car tucked neatly behind the garage next door, Paul understood that he had nowhere to run. Helple
ssly, he began to whimper.

  Guts sighed. He reached into the waistband of his pants and, to Paul’s puzzled horror, retrieved a peppermint candy. He leisurely unwrapped it and tossed it into his mouth. “Now, Paul,” he said. “I’m going to tell you a couple things about me. I love a woman named Pearl. I have had men in your position do exactly what you thought about doing a few minutes ago. In their desperation, they offer me their wives, their mothers. Some of them even offer their daughters, Paul. I always turn them down, and you know why? Not out of some exalted sense of morality. I turn them down because I have a woman and I’m satisfied with her. I love her. The other thing to know about me? I love banana pudding. Not the kind that comes in a box, understand. My Pearl makes it in a big stainless-steel bowl. Well, not a bowl exactly. It’s actually a pot but the handle’s fallen off. Anyway, Pearl puts vanilla wafers all around and tops it off with homemade meringue. You see? Pearl, pudding. Pudding, pearl. That’s all I need in this world. Tonight I plan to see my woman and she plans to give me … my just deserts.”

  Guts was awfully proud of that pun, but he restrained himself because no small degree of subtlety is required when jamming a dirty rag in your captive’s mouth, binding his wrists and ankles with electrical cord, and stuffing all six feet, one inch of him into the trunk of your Plymouth.

  The car had barely rolled the length of the alley and busted a hard left onto Prairie Avenue when Ed Jones dragged the family trash cans to the alley for morning pickup. He turned and looked up and down the alley because he was sure he’d heard an engine idling, seen the twinkle of a taillight, and maybe even caught a mouthful of garbled sentences. But now there was nothing. Just an empty stretch of alley and the intermittent fussing of Shame, Mrs. O’Gwynn’s irritable dog.

  Guts was headed to the river. Above its sullen, brown depths stretched the Poplar Street Bridge, a fabled expanse of steel dividing one racially polarized, Dixie-flavored midwestern state from another. His employer’s instructions called for depositing the passenger in his trunk on the far side of the state line and prohibiting him from troubling the Gateway side ever again. He’d pay with his kneecaps and not his life because the boss had a soft spot for him, got a kick out of watching him the way a bunch of sadistic third-graders watch a hamster toiling away on his wheel. The boss derived welcome distraction from seeing Paul run and run and run, knowing all the while there was no way out.