Also by Jervey Tervalon . . .
Be sure to read his powerful national bestseller
DEAD ABOVE GROUND
“Hard to put down. . . . [Tervalon’s] characters are so beautifully drawn that readers will probably find them reappearing long after the book is finished.”
—USA Today
“Tragic, violent, but ultimately transcendent, Dead Above Ground draws the reader in and never lets go.”
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“A terrific read—scintillating and sultry, filled with murder, mystery, and mayhem. Dead Above Ground is a blazing fever of passion, vengeance, tears, and the ultimate triumph of a woman’s heart. Tervalon has woven magic.”
—Jewell Parker Rhodes, author of Douglass’ Women and Voodoo Dreams
“The city [of New Orleans] shimmers to life through the perfect pitch of the people who inhabit the tale.”
—Los Angeles Times
“An arresting and profound literary experience. . . . An electrifying novel. . . . Through these complex, superbly crafted characters, Tervalon shows us that it is possible to be ‘dead above ground’ in more ways than one might expect.”
—Gambit Weekly (New Orleans)
“An affectionate but unblinking look back at the lives and legends of [Tervalon’s] own family. . . . His characters, the city, and the era all ring true.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Gripping. . . . Plenty of violence washes through these pages, but it never seems overdone. . . . Strongly sustained, with well-weighted characters that avoid stereotyping.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A Cape Fear-like tale of revenge for long-past crimes. . . . The charms here are in the details of the world Tervalon so richly evokes and in the pointed restraint of his prose.”
—LA Weekly
“Well-crafted . . . engaging.”
—The Seattle Times
“Effortlessly lyrical. . . . Tervalon has shown a knack for turning the stuff of urban struggle—hunger, violence, ferocious love—into relentlessly rhythmic cautionary tales.”
—Code
“[A] complex and menacing family tale.”
—The Oakland Press
“A unique, heart-pounding epic that delivers powerful images, sumptuous language, and beguiling characters.”
—African Sun-Times
“Spellbinding . . . a mesmerizing tale. . . . Truly a book that blazes with passion, murder, mystery, vengeance, tears, and finally, the triumph of the heart. This is a must-read.”
—Mysterious Bookshop Newsletter (Los Angeles)
“Be warned: don’t read this book unless you want to be taken out of your seat. . . . [A] brisk, tightly woven tale of family, love, and murder.”
—Pasadena Weekly (CA)
“Tervalon’s writing is crisp, his setting colorful, his plot engrossing and well paced, his characters beautifully drawn.”
—Orange Coast Magazine
Praise for the previous fiction of award-winning author
JERVEY TERVALON
“Great literature has no agenda; it’s not propaganda. Tervalon offers no ‘solutions’ . . . but [he] succeeds in his larger mission, which is to show us [a] particular way of American life. . . . He’s given us a portrait of people who live in a certain world at a certain time and do the best they can.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“An urban masterpiece, a gritty, haunting West Side Story—esque . . . epic of stunning violence yet overpowering beauty.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Tervalon’s prose is both unrelenting and nonjudgmental. . . . [He] reminds us that sad tales and lost souls may tear our hearts apart, but they don’t stop life from continually renewing itself.”
—Quarterly Black Review of Books
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in memory of
LOUVERSA THIBODEAUX HARRIS
and
“PEPSI” (PECOLA TAYLOR)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much thanks to the Nu Nu chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and to the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I would also like to thank those beautiful book groups and their members who made Dead Above Ground such a success: Beverly Ware; Angela Harvey and her reading group; Marcia Sorey of Cover to Cover Book Club; Natalie I. Sanders; Wanda Poston of the Sister Circle Reading Group; L. Charmayne Mills Ealy’s reading group; and Denise Dowdy of the Tabahani Book Circle; Linda Gueringer of Sassy Sistahs; Vivian Ewing of The Book Club.
Thanks, too, to those institutions that make this writer’s life easier: Occidental College for the Remsen Bird Visiting Artist position, and the Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Thanks to PEN Oakland Center for the Josephine Miles Award and to the ever lovely Blanche Richardson at Marcus Books for the nomination. I very much enjoyed my afternoon at the Chester Himes Black Mystery Writers Conference and Award Program.
Also, thanks to the folks at Peet’s Pasadena for my office away from home with all the good coffee, sweets, and a clean restroom this writer could need: Dylan, Zha Zha, Brendan, Leora, Anissa, Shaun, Jill, Nachi, Lisa, Scott, Andrew, Ryan, Mike, Paul, Oksana, Chris, Molly, Jen K., Jen H., Matt, Erica, Becky, and Tyson. And special thanks to Asha Parekh for her help with final-stretch revisions. And to my peeps: Eric “I Got Her Number” Chow, Jonathan “Cash Money” Gold, Tim “Philly Forever” Stiles, Lance “Married Bug” Kaplan, Cristian “How Late You Gonna Be?” Sierra, Bob “Hardest Working” Blaisdell, Marco “Nobody Gets Hurt” Villalobos, and Peter “Room Temp Cheese” Nye. And my man, Max Schott, for workshopping this a while ago. And my wonderful and beautiful cousin, Ellen Hazeur, who did so much for me in New Orleans!
And the biggest love for the girls: Gina, Giselle, and Elise.
—JERVEY
CHAPTER 1
City lights shot toward Jordan as he slammed on the brakes. He hit oil or water or something and slid out of the turn at the top of that steep hill on Carrillo doing fifty at least. Burning rubber and fishtailing, the back of the Triumph started coming around and for an ugly second he was sure he was dead, that the TR-6 would smack up against a curb, flip, and go bouncing down the hillside and explode like in some silly-assed action movie.
He got his wits about him, yanking his foot off the brake and steering out of the spin. The Triumph sputtered to the side of the road.
He sat there, engine idling, getting his head clear. Santa Barbara twinkled like colored glass below him.
It was a sign. He needed to turn around, go back home to bed. No good would come of it, but he put the car into gear and continued on.
* * *
Jordan arrived, but he lingered behind the steering wheel, straining to see if he had the right house. Sometimes he parked a block away because all of the houses on Carrillo had high hedges or walls to ensure their privacy, but it also made finding the right address difficult, and when he did find the house it unnerved him to head down steep, narrow steps to the ornate wooden door that looked too much like the entrance to a tomb. Something seemed diabolical about that door and the Spanish-style house in general; it played on his secret fear that Mary might eventually get so
mad at him she’d slip some arsenic in the wine, or a knife in the ribs.
Theirs wasn’t a wholesome relationship; Jordan regretted it for many reasons, but even more so now that he was interested in Trisha. He rang the bell half hoping Mary had given up on him and had gone to sleep. He turned to leave.
Too late—he heard quick steps; the door opened and there was Mary smirking at him in a tight black slip that revealed her ample cleavage to its best advantage; but it wasn’t her breasts he paid attention to, it was that smirk. Mary wasn’t a bad-looking woman—she had a nice shape and a pretty enough face—but that damn smirk drove him nuts.
“Why are you so late?”
“I’m late?”
“Two hours late!”
“Two hours? How do you figure?”
“Ten, that’s when you said you’d be here.”
“You want me to leave?”
She paused to consider his offer, fingers twisting her thick brown hair as she thought it over.
“Yeah, go home. I don’t need the aggravation.”
“Neither do I,” Jordan said, turning to head back up the stairs, but before his foot touched the first step Mary jerked him into the house.
“You asshole! You’re staying. I didn’t wait all this time for you to walk out!”
She pushed Jordan ahead of her through the dark hallway, almost causing him to fall flat on his face.
“Serves you right,” she muttered from behind him.
She rented a room on the ocean side, from the weird-ass owner. Jordan had only seen him a few times but that was enough. So blond he looked bleached of color, dressed like a shaman, leading a workshop of loser New Agers, burning incense, chanting endlessly and purifying themselves by night swims in the frigid ocean water, all of that going on below the bluffs while he and Mary were angrily screwing their brains out.
Mary pushed him once more into her bedroom and onto her big bed.
“Get undressed!” she said.
“I’m leaving my shoes on,” he said, to piss her off
“Not on my bed,” she said, and slid on top of him before he could unbuckle his pants.
“So what’s it gonna be, a dry hump?” she asked.
That did it. Whatever self-consciousness he felt with her was gone. She got his fly open and before he could rip open a condom she tossed it aside and worked him in.
“I’m back on the pill; you don’t need that.”
He didn’t feel right barebacking, but he gave in without much of a fight.
“Put your hands on my ass!”
“No, your tits,” he said.
He held her breasts, but she pulled his hands off and forced them to her cheeks.
“Grab my ass!”
He did, hard; wanting to squeeze her cheeks until she stopped with the smirk.
“Oh, yeah! That’s the trick!” she shouted.
He wasn’t giving in.
She couldn’t make him come. Not this sex-crazed white girl. She didn’t have the power.
“Do it!” she shouted.
He came so hard it hurt. As fast as he came he wanted to go, go so fast she wouldn’t notice he was gone until she heard the roar of the Triumph burning out.
She rolled off him, sighing and rubbing herself.
“Man, you pounded me. Guess you couldn’t find someone to give it to, horny bastard.”
“Yeah,” he said, feeling that if she said another word he’d jump right out of his skin.
“You’re not going to start with that post-fucking depression. That I don’t understand. Why can’t you enjoy yourself without making everything such an issue? It’s just sex.”
“I’m not depressed.”
Suddenly modest she pulled the sheet over her breasts and propped herself up with a pillow and stared at him.
“Why are you covering your eyes like you’re facing a firing squad?”
“I’m thinking.”
“You better not be thinking about leaving. You leave, that’s the last time you leave. You don’t fuck and leave.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking.”
“What are you thinking?”
She was right. He wanted to leave more than anything he had ever wanted in his life.
“Mary, I got to go. I have to prepare for my class tomorrow.”
She began to cry.
“I’m not going to argue. I’m not going to get mad at you. But you know you can throw everything we have away if you walk out on me.”
God, he wanted to go.
“Why don’t you face it? You’re scared to admit we have a relationship. So, you run.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t want to admit you have feelings for me.”
“I admit that. I have feelings for you.”
“But you’re not serious.”
“I can’t be serious. I explained that.”
“What, that you can’t be serious about a white girl?”
He couldn’t bring himself to respond. Instead he pulled the pillow over his head and unexpectedly started to drift off.
He woke later that night feeling her ass pressed against his crotch, grinding slowly, so slowly he suspected she might be sleeping and the grind was a horny reflex. He twisted a bit until he was inside of her. He did her slowly, hoping, fantasizing that she’d sleep through it and he wouldn’t have to listen to her rant about their relationship. The women he had the best sex with were the ones he wanted to run the fastest from. He was doing her comfortably and effortlessly, rapturous without the effort. No weight of responsibility, just the pleasure of luxurious carnality, but at the peak of the pleasure curve he thought of Trisha and her virginity; twenty-one and still a virgin.
How did that happen?
Christian family? The isolation of being a black girl in a very white world? The idea of her having that kind of restraint appealed to him, not because she was fresh or he’d be the first. It was that he imagined she had to be more uncomfortable about her sexuality than he was self-conscious about his own. They’d be perfect together. It had to be better than sleeping with people who make your stomach churn.
Fully awake, Mary slammed into him harder and harder, a piston of passion.
It was almost like magic; as soon as he came, the feeling of being trapped like a rat returned.
“Did you like that . . . ?” she whispered, turning her head for him to kiss her.
“It was great. . . .”
“Every night. You can come over every night and have me all you want.”
“That sounds great,” he said, without conviction.
A long moment passed.
“Are you still seeing that sorority girl?”
Jordan had forgotten he had mentioned Trisha to her.
“I’m not seeing her the way you think.”
“What . . . you’re not fucking her?”
“She’s a virgin.”
“Oh, a challenge?”
“It’s not like that,” he said, regretting ever mentioning Trisha to Mary.
“You think this Trisha is it, don’t you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“An African American girl from Santa Barbara; she probably comes from a family with a little money. You must think you’ve hit the jackpot.”
Jordan rushed out of bed and dressed so fast he had to stick his boxers into his pocket.
“Yeah, I know. This is it,” Jordan said, slamming the door on his way out. Mary talking to him about Trisha got him feeling more the self-loathing dog than he thought possible.
He drove home, racing over the seaside hills more relieved with each mile he put between them.
* * *
He opened the door of the dumpy duplex on Milpas and took four or five steps into the dark living room, kicked something soft, and sprawled face-first onto the dirty carpet.
“Oh, man!” he heard a voice say, and a big burst of a gasp. A light came on and there was Ned, his housemate in his boxers, laughing at
Jordan and the crumpled man at his feet. It was a very confused Arturo. Jordan helped him up off the floor.
“Sleeping in front of the door? What’s up with that?”
Arturo checked himself over, dusting off his suit. He seemed to always buy the same sharkskin suit, narrow lapels and cuffs, a kind of Man from Uncle, sixties, secret-agent thing.
“I was pretty buzzed. Next to the door seemed like a good idea.”
“Yeah, he’s been downing mixed drinks at an art opening,” Ned said.
“Miko was there.”
“Miko? She’s still torturing you?”
“Oh, man, you don’t know. Now she’s going out with some dumb-ass surfer painter who cleans hot tubs.”
“Nothing lower than a hot-tub cleaner,” Jordan said, with a straight face. He had to clean hot tubs just last quarter when a course he was supposed to teach was canceled.
“He picked a fight with this big doofus,” Ned added.
“He thought I was some kind of punk!”
“Yeah, he threw you into a hedge.”
“Ned had to hold me back.”
“Yeah, the next time he threw you over the hedge. Art tells me he’s gonna say hi to Miko, next thing I know it’s like Daffy Duck charging this big beef-eating white boy. Art’s got a lot of heart. He stood up to him and got thrown about ten feet.”
Art slumped onto the couch, already starting to nod.
“That’s what happened. This stupid couch hurts my back,” he said, sliding to the floor again.
“What hurt your back is getting tossed like a beach ball.”
“I made my point.”
“What’s that? You can take a licking and keep on ticking?”
“You nitwits leave me be. I need my sleep.”
Ned laughed and headed back to his bedroom.
“I wouldn’t have missed that for the world,” he said, and shut the door.
Jordan turned to leave but Arturo called to him.
“Hey, you have a spare blanket?”
Jordan nodded and pointed to the sleeping bag on the far end of the couch.
“Oh, yeah. Ned put that out there for me. I thought it was a pillow.”
Jordan turned off the light.
All the Trouble You Need Page 1
