We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  The bartender nodded like he’d heard the line a hundred times. “You on vacation?”

  “Black people come to Alabama for vacation?” Jerri said. The bartender looked up from his own drink, an inscrutable expression on his face. Jerri couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or interested. “No offense,” she said.

  “I don’t own Birmingham. If I did, I’d sell it.”

  Jerri managed a tiny hiccup chuckle to let him know she’d meant no harm. “I’m from North Carolina, like that’s much better.” Though she knew it was. No place in North Carolina got nicknamed Bombingham. “It’s nice here.”

  Jerri had no idea if Birmingham was a nice place or not. All she’d really seen was the interstate. Even this new hotel was in a could-be-anywhere franchise ghetto on a short street full of chain restaurants, copy places, and hotels. Clean, new, but every one of them as nondescript as a roll of toilet paper and nearly as interesting. Jerri sopped up the spilled gin and tonic with a paper napkin. There had been days she’d have asked for a new drink and insisted that she’d been cheated out of half of what she’d paid for. Ah, the luxury of free.

  “What’s your name?”

  The man pointed wearily to his name tag, like he was sure that Jerri had already seen it. “Boles.”

  “Hmm, I’ve never heard that before.” Jerri thought the name had the pretentious, canine sound of an English butler.

  “Had it all my life,” Boles said, though his tone wasn’t scolding. “Boles was my mama’s name. So I got it.”

  “Boles what? What’s your last name?”

  “Boles.”

  “Boles Boles?” Jerri almost laughed but something on Boles’ face stopped her. “Now you’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not.”

  Jerri nodded into her drink, turned the plastic tumbler up to get the last drops, the crackling sound of the thin plastic tumbler limber in her hand. She considered asking Boles his middle name (it couldn’t be Boles, could it?), but thought she might sound mocking. “Can I have another one of these?”

  Boles hesitated, seeming like he was about to object, but thought better of it and turned to the liquor bottles on the back wall. Jerri watched him carefully to make sure he didn’t just pretend to add the gin.

  “Well, I’m glad you like your name. I’ve never liked mine.”

  “What is it?”

  “Jerri Hightower.”

  “Jerri, not Geraldine?”

  “Nope. I was named for a high school friend of my daddy’s. Boy or girl, I was going to be Jerri.”

  “That’s an honor to have somebody’s name. Don’t you know that?”

  “Jerry’s not dead. He got twenty years for rape, but they say he didn’t do it.”

  “Dead or not, it’s still an honor.”

  “I guess,” Jerri said, but she felt burdened. What was wrong with a Mirabelle, Antigone, a Zora? “Where’s a good place to eat around here?”

  “Depends on what you like.”

  “Simple, but not McDonald’s simple.”

  “Papa’s is good.”

  “Is it cheap?”

  “Depends on how much money you got.” Boles handed Jerri two drinks. “You might want some water.”

  Jerri ignored the water and felt chastised but ducked her head to hide it on her face. “What name would you be if you weren’t Boles?”

  “My name is Boles.”

  “I know, but if you weren’t Boles.”

  “I’m not going to change my name.”

  Of course he wouldn’t. People like Boles and Jerri didn’t dream of such things. They took whatever was given and made do. But forty years ago during the summer of love, white people did it every day. You wouldn’t find a Boles hanging around when Peace, Sunshine, or River slid off the lips just as easy. Not that Jerri knew about any of that firsthand. She hadn’t been born until October of 1967, too late for the legendary partying, too late to get a name she didn’t have to associate with hard prison time.

  Jerri finished the second drink in two large gulps, the ice cubes clunking uncomfortably on her front teeth. She never drank that fast. Hardly ever. But she had been stupid for a long time. Too long, she thought, but to save her life, she couldn’t figure out how to stop it. If she wasn’t saying, “I can’t remember,” she was declaring, sloppy shouldered with a sad-lipped mouth, “I just don’t know.”

  If there had been anyone around her to care, she would have cried, right there at a bar, but she was thirty-nine, forty too quickly and too soon and had outgrown easy tears. Once when her cheeks were still chubby with baby fat, not food fat, and the only gray hairs she detected were laughable little distractions not on her chin and ripe for the picking, she’d been a crier. Anything might set it off. Once she’d sat at her father’s table, just a teenager with her little brother and father, her mother working second shift then, and just as they were passing around the beans or chicken or whatever it was, she’d burst into soap-opera tears. For a second her father and brother had stopped moving, even stopped chewing, and watched her solemn unhappiness. But quickly, her father had summed up the situation, pointing his thumb in Jerri’s direction, “That’s the corniest thing I ever saw.”

  “I’m traveling across the country to California,” Jerri said, the fumes from the gin making her dizzy.

  “You got people there?”

  “No. It’s not like that.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I don’t know. You ever heard of the summer of love?”

  Boles shook his head slowly, turned his mouth downward like he smelled something offensive. “Don’t believe so.”

  “Well,” Jerri started, but she wasn’t sure how to explain what she meant. “It’s romantic.”

  “You got a man with you?”

  “Not that kind of romantic.”

  “You know another kind?”

  “I walked out on the man. It’s just me.”

  Boles poured a splash of orange juice into his drink, the yellow liquid floated down into the clear like a handheld avalanche. “He’ll be looking for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No, he won’t.”

  “Yes, he will. A man won’t let you run. Mark my words.”

  Jerri nodded into her drink, pretending to take in what Boles said, but she knew Doug wouldn’t chase. She’d found text messages from Rob who was supposed to be his friend. Their friend. Their male friend. At first, she hadn’t been able to make any sense of the messages, but like those mind-numbing magic pictures from the ’80s, once she concentrated on a couple of words, the whole nasty picture shifted into focus. She wasn’t angry now, not really, but at that moment, she’d felt the familiar mule kick she recognized instantly as betrayal. Had she known they were together all along? She couldn’t be sure. In the best impersonation of calm and collected in her life, she’d put Doug’s phone back where she’d found it and wrote him a rancid note in lunatic scribble, changed her mind and threw the note away and instead left him a balled-up piece of paper beside his phone. That Doug wouldn’t understand the trash she’d left behind or even notice the wad didn’t hit Jerri for days.

  “That’s a long time on the road, girl. I drove all that way and then to Carolina and back years ago. I had to then, but I wouldn’t do it now. That’s why they make planes,” Boles said, forming his hands into the shape of a flapping bird.

  “It’s a dream. You have to live your dreams, don’t you?” Jerri shook the ice cubes, liking the jingling noise. “Can I have another one of these?”

  “That’s a lot of liquor for you all at once.”

  “I’m old. I know when I’m going to be sick,” Jerri said, her voice louder than she intended.

  “Be careful is all I’m saying.”

  Jerri almost asked for two drinks, just to prove she could, but she wanted food later and was already over her limit. “I’m always careful. It’s boring,” she said and popped a couple of peanuts into her mouth.

  “Nothing wrong with that, baby
.” Boles smiled. “There’s a lot worse things in the world than being bored.”

  “You know what, Boles? I bet boredom has killed more people than all the wars put together.”

  Boles grabbed a soiled rag from under the counter, moved it in slow circles in front of her. “You are young, aren’t you?”

  JERRI’S ROOM was a hotel chain’s idea of a spa retreat. It was expensive at a hundred twenty dollars, but she wanted to spend her first night on the road in as much style as she could. The bed was high and fluffy, with a large quilted mattress pad that made it look luxurious. Still Jerri swiped the comforter to the floor where it landed like a snow drift. No telling what invisible filth she had just avoided.

  Beside the bed was a hard little brown loveseat, a shiny cherry-wood-look coffee table, and on the opposite wall a television on a swivel stand aimed directly in the center of the room. In what looked like a design afterthought, somebody’d placed a high-back chair and a desk along the wall opposite the sofa. Ah hope! Otherwise, who was writing anything other than a suicide note at the Best Western in Birmingham, Alabama?

  Jerri took off her pants and eased into the covers, karate-chopped the extra pillow to make a remote cozy for her hand. If Doug were there, he would have rolled his eyes at her: “If all you wanted to do is watch TV we could have stayed home.” Ass. She should have left him years ago. That she hadn’t wanted to leave him at all was a fact Jerri wasn’t ready to examine.

  Nothing, nothing, reality, dating show, judge show, sports. Okay, news. Every day of the summer of 2007, you could count on some old remember-when footage from forty years back with seas of white kids, swaying and jerking to freaky atonal music. What was the neatest trick of time? That everybody looked young and earnest? Or was it that all of them to the last doe-face were stunningly gorgeous? It was impossible for Jerri to believe that they weren’t all beautiful to each other. Jerri loved it, though her own youth had been preppy and buttoned down. All of her ’80s friends had tried hard to look like New England Scotty dogs, clean, plaid, and adorable, all with the background of keyboard synthesized music/electronic sounds that sounded like successive pulsing tones of a telephone.

  Drugs and sex and parties and fool talk into the night? Yes, yes, and yes. But all that mess had been hidden and shameful, tucked away like the morning’s first gin cached in the bowl of the chandelier. Those white kids wore their sin like a jeweled crown. Jerri watched the old days with the same yellow-tinged nostalgia she reserved for her own home movies. Never mind that after Jimi Hendrix there wasn’t a black face for miles. Never mind that her own parents, far from being the free-spirit flower children from the television, had been busy trying to hide the fact of Jerri’s existence until they could graduate and produce the fastest growing fetus the world has ever seen. Four mere months and it’s an eight-pounder. Step right up.

  JERRI WOKE TO RAPPING on her door. Why was the room the color of oatmeal? Why were there paintings of pastel flowers everywhere? Why was she in a nursing home when for the life of her she couldn’t remember falling asleep in one?

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Boles.”

  “What?” Jerri rushed into her pants and stumbled off the high bed to the door. “What do you want?” Without the bulk of the bar in front of him, Boles looked smaller and kinder in his too-large shirt.

  “Hey, you all right?” Boles said and searched the hall behind him like he wasn’t sure he’d found the right room.

  “How did you know where I am?”

  “I work here.”

  Jerri knew there was something wrong about Boles being at her door, but she couldn’t pull the words together to object.

  “You want to go to Papa’s? I haven’t eat either.”

  One of Jerri’s socks was hanging off her foot, a clown’s foot, and the other had disappeared into the bedclothes. Jerri knew without looking that her hair puffed in the back like someone had pushed her from behind. If she hadn’t drunk so much and so fast she was sure that she wouldn’t be putting on her shoes and finding her way out the door with Boles.

  PAPA’S WAS AT THE EDGE of the downtown area in a squat warehouse building. There were no windows, no flowers, nothing to let the wanderer-by know that she was seeing a restaurant except for the large vertical sign: Come to Papa’s. Stay and Eat. Papa’s was not quaint. Jerri followed Boles into the cafeteria-style line where they were separated from cooks and servers by a high partition behind which a phalanx of stainless-steel bowls bubbled full of rich Southern foods. Sweet potatoes, cream corn, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy—white and brown—stews, country-fried steak, pork chops, and that was all at first glance, happy as sweet little newborns behind the glass. Mama’s here, Jerri thought.

  “The pork chop is good and the greens. I always get the greens,” Boles said. In this better light, Boles looked even older than Jerri had thought, at least sixty, older than her parents.

  Jerri didn’t want greens. Let Boles have them with his country ’Bama self. She picked the baked chicken, lima beans, fried okra, sweet potatoes, and buttermilk pie. Too much, but she hadn’t eaten for hours. “I’m buying my own,” she said.

  “All right then.” Boles shrugged.

  The two of them sat at a booth near the drink machine. A white woman older than she wanted you to think brought them tea in glasses big as pitchers of beer. “Ya’ll let me know if you need anything else,” she said.

  Jerri watched the retreating back of the waitress, a slim woman with impressive bubble curls bouncing on the tops of her shoulders. “You ever notice that in these places all the people cooking are black and the waitresses are white?”

  “Did I notice?” Boles said. “You asking me if I noticed?”

  THE FOOD WAS FILLING, too much, but they ate quickly like starved people.

  “You better get on it, I’m way ahead,” Boles said between bites of greens. “You don’t put a plate of good food in front of me and expect it to sit around.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m a good eater. It’s my hobby.”

  Boles nodded sagely, like he’d known plenty of people with an eating hobby, no news to him. “Where do you want to go after this?”

  “After this?” Jerri was surprised at the question. She hadn’t considered spending the entire evening with Boles. “What do you usually do?”

  Boles raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips, worrying the question with great seriousness. “Nothing.”

  Jerri sucked her lip, hoping she looked superior and worldly, but the truth was she mostly did nothing, too.

  “Well, I can take you on back,” Boles said.

  Jerri knew the same familiar routine that went on in North Carolina went on everywhere. Ugly, tired people, haunted run-down restaurants, malls, and movies in cotton and buy-one-pair-get-one-free shoes. Nobody ever bothered to tell Jerri that most of life was spent just that way, going through the motions, doing the routine, trying to make it out alive from one minute to the next. Even if they’d told it, Jerri doubted that she would have believed it.

  “How long you taking to get to California?”

  “A month. I don’t know. As long as it takes.”

  “You got money?”

  “What would you say if I told you that I’m taking all the money I’ve got in the world for this trip? Every little dime I’m flushing right down the toilet.”

  “It’s your dime baby; if you want to flush it, flush it.” Boles’s pressed his hand over hers. “That’s life, ain’t it? You don’t see none of it back.” Boles grinned with one side of his mouth like something was set into motion that only he understood. Even young in his best most vital days Boles must have seemed like an old man, with his half-closed eyes and slow ways, he must have worn a sense of the everyday tragic as real as the custard crust now stuck in the crease of his lip. “You look out for yourself. There’s all kind of fool out there.”

  Years ago, Jerri had slept with a man she only just met when she’d visited her cousin in Florida, the first an
d only time she’d done such a thing. As soon as she got back home, she warmed to Doug like she didn’t know was possible, listened to him, waited to really hear him for the first time, loved him for sure. God keeps count. That stranger’s flabby middle, his thick yellow-tipped fingers came back to her with a clarity she wouldn’t have believed possible. So this was how the scale gets balanced. Jerri winced to hold back tears. She was still Baptist enough to believe that the payback you do for wrong, though inevitable, was still always a hellish surprise.

  Jerri tried to slide her hand from underneath Boles’s, but she couldn’t budge it. She picked at her chicken with her free hand, red at the bone, careful not to look in Boles’s eyes. She didn’t want to see the crazy that might be on his face that she’d completely missed before.

  “I’m here now. Whatever’s gotta happen, gotta happen.”

  Boles grinned at her, then sighed like something had become resolved and clear to him. “You’re all right,” he said and gave her hand a friendly pat. “You’re a good girl.”

  “I want to go back to the hotel,” Jerri said.

  Boles picked the last of the crumbs from his pie with his moistened finger, as if he hadn’t heard Jerri at all. “You got any kids?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jerri sighed.

  “Wouldn’t you know?”

  “It’s a joke, Boles.”

  “What’s funny about that? Where I come from a joke is supposed to be funny.”

  “I just want to go back to the hotel. Okay?” Jerri hoped she sounded in more control that she felt.

  “We’re going.” Boles said as he slid out from the booth, brushed his clothes of crumbs, let the paper napkin float off his lap and onto the floor.

  THE HOTEL was a few blocks from the restaurant, a five-minute trip in Boles’s low-riding car. Jerri opened her door, eager to get back to her room.

  “What are you rushing around for?” Boles said.

  Jerri stood outside the closed car door not sure why she waited. It was hot, the air stiff and motionless already, a harbinger of the stifling summer heat to come, but Jerri saw stars bright as headlights even in that polluted night on franchise row. It was hard not to believe that it was one of those moments, when the main character looks heavenward and takes a deep cleansing breath, the night fulfilling some kind of promise she believed with new certainty would be kept.