Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398)

by Mosley, Walter

  A mother and father with three preadolescent boys were standing there. The boys had the jitters in their legs.

  “Let the lady go first,” the youngish blond woman said when an older gentleman, dressed in army surplus, came out of the crude toilet.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Boys feel the urgency more than women.”

  The father was staring at me. I was familiar to him but he couldn’t place my face. This wasn’t unusual. The odd thing about porno is that the face was usually the least memorable part of the experience. That’s why I had a false tattoo and platinum hair. Those white marks against black skin made me stand out. Maybe the father just thought that a black woman in a pale schmatta was an odd visitor for a desert campsite.

  “Here with your family?” he asked me as the boys crammed into the outhouse, slamming the tin door behind them.

  “No. I used to come out here with my father when I was a kid. We’d make canned chili in a tin pot on a pit fire and pour it over a paper plate lined with Fritos. I was out this way last night and figured that it would be nice to sleep under a million stars and remember my dad.”

  “Not as many stars as there used to be,” the man said with only mild lament. “Now civilization is closing in and the stars are fading.”

  He was an ugly man with friendly features: thin and Caucasian-brown with big dingy teeth and patchy hair sprouting from his chin. I had done a guy like that in a porno art film called Amateur Nights, made at a deserted gas station in Twentynine Palms—not that far from where we stood.

  The pale-skinned wife was chubby and very pretty. She had the unconsciously haggard look of a feminine woman who lived in a house of maleness. She survived in an atmosphere of shouting, stomping boys and a man who cared but didn’t really understand.

  The door to the outhouse banged open and the brood of boys tumbled out, not quite zipped up or tucked in.

  “I’m Sadie,” the woman said to me. She held out a hand.

  “Sandy,” I said as we shook.

  “You can go in now. Albert and I have already gone.”

  The aluminum toilet seat was wet because the boys hadn’t put it up. They just pulled down their pants and had swordfights into the hole—getting their piss everywhere.

  I used the stiff toilet paper to dry everything and then did my business. The mess and turmoil didn’t bother me. I liked boys—always had. I liked their grins and hopes for triumph in battle. They made me laugh.

  At the center of the camp was a huge pile of red boulders that might properly have been called a small hill. There were ridges and natural footholds that led up so you could climb the full thirty feet to reach the top.

  I did this.

  The west side of the stone hill was flanked by an eight-foot-high, twenty-foot-long stand of spiky cholla cactus. The yellowy white needles numbered in the tens of thousands and some were as much as six inches long. There was a breeze at the top of the stone hill and you could see across the desert for miles.

  It was my living limbo: the place that stood between an old life that had withered and died and a new one that had no form as yet. There was nothing I’d miss from the days I’d spent with Theon and, so far, nothing I could look forward to.

  The children laughed, screamed, and sometimes cried across the camping area while the mother and father used stern voices to try to rein them in. The sun burned down on me like the memory of a thousand fuck scenes under intense electric light.

  I got weak and dizzy up there but refused to come down. As long as I was on that red rock hill no one, except the little family, would know where I was.

  “Excuse me, miss,” the oldest of the three boys said.

  He had climbed up into my little retreat.

  “Yeah?”

  “My mom said that you might be thirsty up here and she wanted me to bring you some water.”

  He held out an ice-cold eight-ounce bottle of water. I drank it in one steady gulp.

  “That was good,” I said.

  “You were real thirsty,” the dusty boy said in wonder. “My parents said that you could come to eat breakfast with us if you wanted to. It’s really more like lunch but we call it breakfast because it’s still morning.”

  His blue-green eyes were filled with innocent desire. It reminded me of something. I couldn’t quite remember what.

  “Darryl’s in love,” Errol, the second-oldest boy, sang.

  We were all sitting together at the wooden picnic bench next to the family’s campsite. White bread with bologna and mayonnaise was the entrée alongside watermelon on ice in a big Styrofoam cooler and Kool-Aid mixed up in a three-gallon jug with a spout at the bottom.

  “You leave Darryl alone, Buster,” Albert Freemont told the middle son. He rubbed Darryl’s head and the boy both scowled and grinned.

  “You look so familiar, Miss Peel,” Albert said.

  “I live in Pasadena. Do you spend any time there?”

  “No. We’re from Bellflower.”

  I shrugged and stood up. I hadn’t had sex with anyone in more than forty-eight hours and it felt good—really good.

  “Where you goin’?” Darryl asked.

  “Darryl,” Sadie said.

  “What?”

  “You shouldn’t be so nosy.”

  “That’s okay.” I squatted down and kissed the ten-year-old on his cheek while both brothers oohed. “I just have to get back to my life.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “In this life you never know.”

  I was exhausted by the time I got home. It was late afternoon and I barely had the strength to stagger through the front door and turn on the alarm system. I made it to the twelve-foot, white cotton-covered couch in the polar bear living room. There I stretched out with the pistol next to my head. Sleep came down on me like a limp corpse.

  My rest was a dead thing too: an unprotected body under a ton of soil backhoed in more to hide the stench than to protect the deceased.

  The color of the darkness was not black. It was a mottled and opaque gray, revealing nothing but its formless self.

  The ringing phone broke through the gray from time to time, and bodiless voices spoke out. I didn’t recognize them; I didn’t care. Light sometimes pressed in from the bleak landscape behind my closed eyes. Jets passed over me. Men took turns urinating on the grave above. I moaned out loud and prayed in a language unknown to me (and maybe to everyone else). I felt pains in different parts of my body, which, at rare intervals, forced me to shift position.

  In that sleep I realized that death was an impermanent situation, a transition from bubbling thought to inert thing. The grave was also ever-changing but at a much slower rate. The ground was like glass—liquid but seemingly solid, flowing and yet so slowly that it would take centuries to move appreciably. And the thing that was my remains would flow with it, no longer rotting or stinking, writhing under ten thousand men, their eyes closed and dreaming of women who had unknowingly betrayed them.

  The phone made its chimes at irregular intervals. The voices of men and women nattered at me. The doorbell rang but I slept on. The sun rose and set, rose and set. I remember staggering through the darkness to the toilet, twice. Somewhere Theon lay dead, his flesh slowly collapsing toward the earth.

  Then there was somebody screaming loudly, beseechingly. Maybe there was a fire and a lost child, an explosion on a street somewhere named after a person I didn’t know or in a language I didn’t speak.

  I was forced up out of the coffin of sleep, grasping my father’s pistol.

  The alarm system was blaring. Lights were going on and off all over the house. It was day, maybe morning, maybe afternoon.

  Whatever door or window the voice says, you go in the opposite direction, Theon had told me when the sophisticated system was installed. He had been worried about men like Richard Ness coming after him in his sleep. He was still my husband, still taking care of me in his wrong-headed way, still alive.

  The phone began to ring. That w
as the security company calling.

  “Back door intruder,” the recorded voice was saying over and over.

  Whatever door or window the voice says, you go in the opposite direction.

  I headed for the back door.

  With an arm jutting through the broken window the intruder was just undoing the lock as I made it to the kitchen.

  “Back door intruder!” the recorded voice spoke.

  The telephone was ringing.

  I was still at least half-asleep.

  “Stop!” A single warning before I allowed myself to pull the trigger.

  “Police!” a man’s voice responded. It was simultaneously a plea and a command.

  Perry Mendelson, the upper half of his light brown suit coming through my shattered back-door window, held up his hands to ward off bullets and suspicions.

  “It’s us, hon,” Lana Leer screeched from somewhere behind him. “We thought you were dead, baby.”

  I was holding the gun so that Perry was looking down the barrel. He was scared. That made me smile. I lowered the pistol and went to the wall panel to disengage the alarm. Then I answered the ringing wall phone.

  The security company had a special ring that bypassed the answering machine, so it would have rung all day.

  “Everything’s all right,” I said into the receiver.

  “Mrs. Pinkney?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is the code phrase, please, ma’am?”

  “Brer Rabbit.”

  “And what are the last four digits of your social?”

  “Two, two, two, nine.”

  “And your maiden name?”

  “Peel.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “My friends thought I was dead and they broke the back-door window.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I told you I’m fine and I answered your questions. Now I need to go look after my window.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it took you so long to get to the phone,” the male security operator said. “One more minute and I would have had to call the police.”

  Perry and Lana had come into the kitchen. She was looking worried while he seemed embarrassed.

  “I was dead asleep,” I said. “I guess I’ve been depressed or something. It took me a while to realize that the alarm was even going off. But I’ve turned it off and I’ve answered your questions. Can I go now?”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the operator said. “Certainly. Have a nice day.”

  I hung up and turned to my visitors.

  “Do you have a permit for that pistol?” Perry asked.

  “Yes.” I did. I registered my father’s illegal piece when I turned eighteen. “I even have a carry permit after I was stalked by this crazy guy from Glendale.”

  “What happened to him?” the cop asked.

  I didn’t blame him for asking. He had broken into my home—a policeman. He needed to get some control back. Maybe if he showed some authority I wouldn’t bring him up on charges for breaking and entering.

  “Fuck that,” Lana said in an unusual show of anger. “Where have you been for the last three days?”

  “Three days?”

  “It’s Thursday,” Lana said. “Linda’s been calling you morning and night. She even made me give her your red phone number.”

  My red phone.

  “I was sleeping,” I said. “All those days?”

  “You really been asleep all this time?” Lana said.

  “What are you doing here, Officer Perry?” I asked.

  “Ms. Leer called me.”

  I looked at the waif-woman.

  “It’s true,” she said. “When you didn’t answer I called down to the police department and asked for Mr. Mendelson.”

  “I’d called twice myself and I was worried,” Perry added.

  “Worried?”

  He looked down at his feet and it felt to me that an empire, somewhere, had crumbled without warning.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “And then I need a bath. Come on.”

  I led the odd allies through the hallway, past the guest bedroom, leaving them while I went into the smaller bathroom where no one had died.

  I went in and did my business, dropped the rest of my clothes on the floor, and then went back to open the door for Lana and Perry. He was surprised to see me naked; I knew he would be. With some men, maybe all men, my sexuality gave me various advantages. Sometimes it was them wanting to take my clothes off; with others they were driven into a shell, seeing my body and not knowing whether to run or to scream.

  When I bent over to turn on the bathwater I’m sure Perry looked away.

  I took pity on him and poured bubble-bath gel under the stream. Then I climbed in to let the rising water and bubble line slowly hide my dark body.

  “Is there any other reason you’re here, Officer?” I asked.

  “Um,” the policeman uttered.

  “What’s wrong with you, hon?” Lana asked. “Linda says that if you aren’t on the set by this afternoon she’s going to fire you.”

  “Hm,” I mused. “How are you, Lana?”

  “What?”

  “How are you?”

  “I understand that your husband’s dead and all, baby, but you have commitments.”

  “Who’s that guy?” I said. “The carpenter that works on the sets on all Linda’s shoots?”

  “Richie,” Lana answered, upset to be derailed from her line of questioning.

  “Richie—that’s right. Call him and ask him to fix the window you guys broke. There’s an extra set of keys in the knife drawer in the kitchen. The security code for the alarm system is bilbo.”

  The bubbles were rising quickly and so Perry chanced a glance in my direction.

  “We’ve identified the woman who was with your husband,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Her name was Myrtle May. She was a minor from out near Barstow.”

  “And how did she know my husband?”

  “We haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “Hm.”

  “Myrtle’s mother told us that she found out about her daughter’s death from a black woman who came to her home in the late hours of the night a few days ago.”

  “Really? And what does that have to do with her identity?”

  “Was it you?”

  “No.”

  I expected the tightening of his eyes. Seeing this expression made me smile.

  “Would you like to put me in a lineup?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You seem to think I’m lying.”

  “What about Linda?” Lana asked me.

  “You know, Lana, dear, I haven’t shaved my pussy in three days—no, five. It’s all stubbly.”

  “Deb,” she pleaded.

  “No, honey. I’m not going back. Theon was my husband and I have to bury him and then … then I have to settle his affairs.”

  “You have to work,” Lana said, taking on the unwieldy mantle of maturity and logic.

  I put my feet up on either side of the tub and laid my head back against the edge. I was still exhausted.

  “You haven’t met the woman who works harder than I do, babe. You know it; I know it; Linda fuckin’ Love does too. I’m tired, I’m broke, my husband is dead, and I need a moment. Like that guy with the candy bar on the TV commercial.”

  Perry Mendelson was staring at me now that my nakedness was mostly covered. He was feeling something—what, I couldn’t tell.

  “Linda’s gonna be mad,” Lana said again, “real mad.”

  I wanted to say more but I was too tired under the hot water. I closed my eyes for a minute or so and when I opened them again Lana had gone.

  Perry was still there though, still staring.

  “Was it you who went out to Barstow in the middle of the night?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not trying to
get you in trouble. There’s no crime in notifying parents that their daughter has died.”

  “There is if I was aware of what my husband was doing with an underage minor.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “I just want to know what happened.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s my job.” The words sounded feeble—no, they sounded distant, as if the man who spoke them had moved past that identity but had not yet picked up a new one.

  I realized then that he had somehow identified with me, that the last vestiges of his professionalism had deduced that I had shed an identity the night my husband died.

  “Do you want to fuck me, Lieutenant Perry?”

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “That’s not why you’re in a woman’s bathroom when she’s naked in her tub?”

  “You asked me in.”

  “Do you do everything a woman says?”

  Anger replaced innocent confusion in his face.

  I laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound.

  Perry turned and walked away without another word.

  I didn’t miss him or Lana. I liked them both but they wanted answers that I either did not have or found intolerable. I was no longer able to function as a proxy for other people’s desires.

  My life, I felt, was like moisture on the cars and leaves, gates and painted walls of morning. I was evaporating like that dew and I had only a few minutes of life to say good-bye.

  I considered putting my head under the water and breathing in. I’d known whores who had killed themselves in that manner.

  But I was too drained even to want death. It was too much work to die—hardly worth the effort.

  “I want my money,” Richard Ness said.

  There were one hundred and thirty-nine messages on my phone. He counted for sixteen of them. He never really made a threat, because he knew that could be used against him. He didn’t even say my name, just that he wanted his money. In court he could have said that he was calling Theon. He had no proof that my husband was dead. Lieutenant Mendelson hadn’t even shown him a badge.

  There were dozens of messages from sex workers who had known Theon either through me or from doing business with him. Prince Spear, Mocha Elan, Aphrodite Affair, Darlenee Fox, Johnny “On the Spot” Myles, and many others left their condolences on the tape.