by Mary Monroe
CHAPTER 10
A few of Viola’s relatives stayed with me until the hospital released Viola three days after Luther’s funeral. Once home, Viola tried to behave like it was business as usual. Even though she was mourning her husband, she hobbled into the kitchen to bake some tea cakes. For the first time in years, I actually ate every single one that she piled onto a large plate and handed to me with a warm smile. It was the least I could do. Hurting the feelings of somebody I loved was one thing I tried to do as little as possible. So in addition to allowing Viola’s dreaded tea cakes to wreak havoc with my bowels, later that night I helped Valerie capture a stray dog that was running around in the middle of the street. Since Valerie’s arm was in a cast, I helped her bathe the homely, one-eyed mutt in Viola’s kitchen sink. She named him Pete, her grandfather Paw Paw’s real name.
The first time Pete pissed on the floor in Valerie’s house, which was a few days after we’d rescued him, Mr. Zeke gave her a mighty punch in the face with his fist. Then he kicked Pete halfway across the floor with his steel-toed boot. If anything, the dog just seemed dazed. Valerie seemed twice as dazed, even though this type of violence had become routine for her. She already had a broken arm in a cast, but that injury no longer fazed her. She took her latest assault in stride, shielding her head with her arms as I stood by and watched. She was lucky this time. The cast on her arm had protected her somewhat, so all she got was a busted lip.
“Mr. Zeke, please don’t hurt her too much,” I begged, standing a safe distance away. Unlike a lot of the neighborhood kids who had stopped coming to Valerie’s house, I didn’t feel that I was in any real danger. Mr. Zeke seemed to be the kind of brute who knew where to draw the line when it came to other people’s kids. “You can’t keep beating up people the way you do!” I yelled.
“Dolores, I advise you to vacate the premises,” Mr. Zeke warned. “I done put up with you sassing me one time too many. If I wasn’t a gentleman, I would have coldcocked your fresh ass a long time ago! Now you get the hell out of my house while you still able!”
He didn’t have to tell me to leave but one time. Something told me that the line Mr. Zeke had never crossed was getting thinner by the minute. As I shot across the floor toward the door, I noticed Valerie’s younger brother and sister, William and Elizabeth, called Binkie and Liz, crouching behind the door leading from the living room to the kitchen. I ran and I didn’t stop running until I was in the Scotts’ yard. Old man Scott, a mole-like geezer who usually kept to himself, ran out on his front porch. He was waving a broom, fussing and cussing at me for trampling his lawn—again. I took off running some more, and I didn’t stop until I was in Viola’s house, in my room with the door locked, praying that Valerie would survive the night.
I could not believe that Valerie and the rest of her family let Mr. Zeke get away with so much. But strangely enough, nobody in the neighborhood wanted to talk about it much. Not even Viola.
“What goes on in that house ain’t none of our business. There’s a lot of mens like that Zeke and there always will be as long as there are women desperate enough to groom ’em,” Viola managed when I gave her an update. Her hair looked like a thorny gray helmet. There was a look of despair in her small black eyes that hadn’t been there before Luther’s death. She smelled like Bengay and sweat, but that didn’t bother me. I was just thankful that she had survived her heart attack. And if Dr. Miller knew what he was talking about, she’d be around for at least another ten years.
Viola was on the living room sofa in her gown, covered up to her chin with a thin blanket. The night before, as she lay in the bed she’d shared with Luther for more than fifty years snoring like a grizzly bear, Floyd had taken my virginity on that same couch.
It had lasted only two minutes, but it had seemed more like an hour. I didn’t enjoy it. And the way Floyd took off running afterward, with his pants still unzipped, made me assume he didn’t enjoy it either. But he called me when he got home later that night and told me that I was special and that we would have a special relationship. That made me feel somewhat better for the moment, but when I didn’t hear from him for the next two weeks, I didn’t know what to think.
I was glad that I had Valerie to talk to about it, but she was so preoccupied when I told her that when I mentioned it to her again a day later, she acted like she was hearing it for the first time. Viola was doing much better, and one of her church sisters had volunteered to come stay at the house until Viola was her old self again. So I didn’t have to miss much more school or hang around the house.
Even with Viola recovering so rapidly and somebody in the house to help out, I was nervous about leaving the house for more than a few minutes at a time. For some reason I was afraid that something would happen to Viola while I was gone, just like it had with Luther. But spending time with Valerie was one of the few things I enjoyed and one of the few distractions I had in my life. Anything that helped me keep my mind off what would happen to me if Viola died was a blessing. Besides, my sex life was one thing that I wanted to discuss with Valerie in person. Mr. Zeke often eavesdropped on her phone conversations, anyway, so I was not about to go there on the phone.
“Well, now you know why the rest of the world is so crazy when it comes to sex,” Valerie told me, scratching the skin on her arm at the bottom of the cast. She had told everybody else that she had fallen down some steps. The last time she had injuries to explain she told everybody that she had run into a wall, just like her mother did a few times a month. And so did everybody else who lived in that house when they had injuries to explain. Even though nobody believed them, nobody wanted to talk about it. But everybody agreed that they were either the clumsiest people in town or the most stupid.
Six months earlier Valerie had confessed to me that she’d fucked some boy from Compton for the first time on the ground in Griffin Park for giving her a ride home from a party. Unlike me, she claimed she’d enjoyed her first sexual experience, but she also made it clear that it was not her favorite subject to discuss. “Some people say that money is the root of all evil. That’s a damn lie. Sex has caused more problems for some people than money. Like my mama,” she told me with a tired and heavy sigh. You would have thought that we were discussing something as unpleasant as cramps, the way she kept screwing up her face and rolling her eyes as she spoke.
“Your mama can get another man. Why does she put up with Mr. Zeke and his beatings?” I asked, more interested in talking about Valerie’s business than my own. “Is she that big of a fool for a man?” I asked boldly. I could tell that Valerie didn’t appreciate my choice of words, and I immediately wished that I could take them back. But she just rolled her eyes again and shook her head with the most disturbing look I’d ever seen on her face. She looked like she had given up on life completely, but something told me that Valerie was going to come out blasting with both guns some day.
CHAPTER 11
“My mama was a damn fool when she first got involved with Zeke. But she was lonely and didn’t want to raise three kids by herself,” Valerie told me. “But she’s not a fool now because she sees him for the asshole he is.” I was glad to see that the expression on Valerie’s face had changed. Her eyes had softened and the scowl had disappeared.
“Then why won’t your mother get a divorce? Or at least kick him out of this house,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my hand. Valerie’s bedroom was almost twice as big as mine, but she shared it with her little sister, Liz. Her brother, Binkie, occupied one of the other bedrooms by himself. And her grandfather, Paw Paw, who had never fully recovered from a stroke a year ago, occupied the bedroom next door to Valerie so she could keep an eye on him.
Waiting on Paw Paw hand and foot was bad. He used a bedpan, but when he couldn’t get to it, he soiled his underwear like a newborn baby. Valerie never complained about having to clean him up. She just started putting diapers on him. I’d actually seen her smile as she emptied his bedpan and clipped his long, lethal-looking toenails. I a
dmired her for being so caring.
What Valerie did complain about was the fact that Mr. Zeke was just as mean to his elderly father-in-law as he was to the rest of the family. He had sucker punched the old man’s face that morning for interfering when Mr. Zeke had lined up all the kids for a whupping to make sure he got the one responsible for drinking one of his beers. It broke my heart to see that eighty-year-old man propped up in his bed with two black eyes and other injuries. “Vally, one day Zeke will get what he deserves. Sooner or later, that devil will meet his match,” Paw Paw mumbled through a swollen and busted lip when Valerie and I delivered his dinner tray.
“And it will be sooner than later if I have anything to do with it,” Valerie vowed, helping the old man sit up.
“I still say your mama should just get a divorce,” I insisted, opening the window at the top of Paw Paw’s bed, which was cluttered with old magazines and newspapers. Thanks to Valerie, the rest of the room was as neat as a showroom. Despite the old-fashioned oak furniture, the bright white walls and stuffed animals strewn about gave the room a youthful look. It had belonged to Valerie before Paw Paw moved in.
“I wish,” Valerie said with a heavy sigh, punching the sides of Paw Paw’s pillows. “It’s not that simple anymore.” Valerie flinched and so did the old man when she checked a large Band-Aid on the back of his neck.
“If I were a younger man, I’d get me a gun and blow his brains out. Or”—Paw Paw paused and took a sip of coffee from the cup on his tray, then a sip of Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle on the same tray—“if I could get around better and if somebody was to help me get my hands on a piece, I’d do it now.” Paw Paw’s face was lopsided from his beating, and because one side of his mouth was full of buttered bread. The pink Pepto-Bismol outlined his thin lips like cheap lipstick. Valerie and I looked at each other, but neither of us acknowledged Paw Paw’s comments.
Paw Paw was doing better by now. He was snoozing like a baby when we checked on him. Afterward, I followed Valerie back downstairs where we resumed our conversation about the Mr. Zeke situation. Even though we were in the living room alone, we kept our voices low and we looked around every few moments to make sure that slimy devil had not slipped up on us.
“Your mama can’t get the cops to get him out of this house? And him being a cop, can’t she go to his boss or somebody down at the precinct and tell them what’s going on? He’s getting away with all this shit because she’s letting him. What if she packs you all up and leaves town? Let him stay in this house by himself if he doesn’t want to leave!”
“Dolores, my stepdaddy told me, my mama, and all the rest of my family that if Mama leaves him, she better take every single person in her family with her because everybody she leaves behind will die. I got my sixty-year-old auntie Valerie living on Crenshaw with her cats. She’s in the middle of all that gang activity, but she doesn’t want to leave. We’ve got cousins in Compton and Glendale. And what about Paw Paw? We can’t leave him here, and trying to run away with a sick old man that can barely walk . . .”
“I get the picture,” I said, holding up my hand. “Well, at least when you graduate in a couple of years you can get up out of here,” I offered.
“Girl, are you crazy? There is no way I am going to leave Mama and the kids, and Paw Paw, here to fend for themselves with that sick motherfucker. As long as he’s here, I’ll be here,” Valerie vowed. “Everything I love is in this house.” The mutt that had already caused Valerie to have a showdown with Mr. Zeke limped into the room and leaped up on her lap.
I promised Valerie that I’d help her housebreak Pete because Mr. Zeke had advised her to be prepared to suffer more consequences every time he stepped in some dog mess in his own house. And that was another thing. The house that he had a habit of referring to as his actually belonged to Valerie’s mother. Paw Paw had signed it over to her and had made her promise that she would keep it in her immediate family after he died. He had even made her make Mr. Zeke sign some kind of prenuptial agreement before she married him. This was to make sure Mr. Zeke would never get his hands on property that he didn’t deserve.
Mr. Zeke was coming in as I was leaving. He had the nerve to have on a Bob Marley T-shirt and a pair of short baggy shorts. The kind that only boys my age should wear. With his thick, high butt and his long legs, he looked like a stork. “Girl, don’t you never stay home?” he asked, breathing through his mouth. His snake eyes looked tighter than they’d ever looked before. As a matter of fact, they looked like they were closed. I didn’t know how the man could even see me. But this man saw everything he wanted to see. When he got a few feet in front of me he stopped, placed his hands on his hips, and looked me up and down. “Girl, you need to go home and wash your dirty neck. I could plant a tree up under your chin.” Mr. Zeke shook his head and laughed. That was the only way I knew he was just teasing me. But even when he was trying to be funny, he was a fright.
“Uh, I just came over to see how Valerie was doing,” I managed, rubbing the side of my neck. He was right. My neck was dirty, and it usually was. It was the place on my body that I paid the least amount of attention. I could hear Valerie’s siblings scrambling around, running for cover.
A few seconds later, something happened that took me completely by surprise. As hard-hearted as Mr. Zeke was, for the first time since I’d met him, he seemed to soften before my eyes. Suddenly, he didn’t seem like such a physical imposition anymore. He cocked his head and smiled at me. If it was possible for him to behave like this, it was possible for me to change my opinion of him—for the better. Even though I knew what a monster he was most of the time, I felt kind of sorry for him, anyway. He was the only person I knew that nobody liked. And I knew some gangbangers over in South Central who would torture their own mothers, but a lot of people still liked them. One thing Luther and Viola had taught me was that it didn’t take any more energy to love than it did to hate.
“How you doing in school, Dolores? You better keep your nose in them schoolbooks and not up some boy’s butt. You don’t want to end up married to no booger like me.” Despite his brutal nature, every now and then, Mr. Zeke seemed like a normal person. “That’s how stupid women end up.” He laughed. I laughed, too, but it saddened me to hear him refer to Valerie’s mother as stupid. However, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering why the woman had not come up with a plan to get out of her messy marriage. Maybe she really was stupid.
“How’s Sister Mason?” Zeke asked, tilting his big head even more to the side. I was glad to see that he was still smiling at me. As long as he did that, he didn’t seem so threatening and ugly.
“She’s fine, sir,” I said as graciously as I could while trying to move past Mr. Zeke and get out the door.
“Tell her if there’s anything she need done around the house, just call me and I’ll take care of it. Old Luther was a good old brother, and I still owe him a few favors.”
A week later Mr. Zeke got fired from the police force and things got even worse for Valerie’s family. The same day he got fired he stormed the house that evening and lit into Binkie with a belt just for giving him a mean look. As soon as Liz entered the living room, he grabbed her and boxed her ears so hard she heard a ringing noise for the next two hours.
Valerie knew that if she interfered it would only make matters worse for everybody. She stayed in her room and prayed for herself and her family. “He didn’t even give a reason as to why he attacked little Liz,” Valerie lamented to me when she called me up later that night after Mr. Zeke had passed out drunk on the living floor. Valerie wore a pair of dark glasses to school the next day to hide a black eye that she swore she got when she tripped over her dog and stumbled into a door. I didn’t know if any of the other kids believed her, but I didn’t. She didn’t want to tell me what had really happened, and she didn’t have to. I already knew. As it turned out, I was wrong. Miss Naomi and Valerie’s siblings backed up her story. But that still didn’t make me feel any better about what Mr. Zeke w
as doing to that family.
One of the reasons that Mr. Zeke got away with so much was because the family made excuses for him: “He’s depressed. He’s confused. Nobody understands him. He’s weak.” There was no excuse for the excuses they made for that man. And it was not because they cared about him, it was because they were so afraid of him at that point that they didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t even imagine what he would do to them if they stood up to him more often.
Valerie’s mother sometimes worked up to twelve hours a day running the bar. But when Mr. Zeke was unemployed, she had to come home every day around noon to fix him some lunch. Some days he’d still be in bed when she got home. The first time she stepped into that house with a box from Kentucky Fried Chicken, he snatched it and flung all twelve assorted pieces around the kitchen. Then he bounced the empty container off her head. He was very picky when it came to his meals. A big ox like him didn’t even deal with typical lunch items like sandwiches. Miss Naomi had to fix him whatever he wanted, and it was usually something elaborate and time-consuming. One day she had to prepare him some barbequed spareribs, turnip greens, yams, cornbread, garlic mashed potatoes, and peach cobbler.
It did no good for Valerie to volunteer to take care of Mr. Zeke’s lunch. Even though it would have meant she had to take an extra-long lunch period from school herself. Mr. Zeke made it clear that if Miss Naomi didn’t come home every day to take care of him, she’d suffer.
When Floyd finally did get around to calling me five days after Mr. Zeke was fired, he was appalled when I told him the latest about Mr. Zeke.
“That nigger’s crazy,” he snarled. Then he mumbled a few cuss words under his breath. “Just like my old man.” I didn’t encourage Floyd to reveal any more details about his own daddy. I already knew all I wanted to know about that man, anyway. I felt the same way about the sperm donor who had helped create me. What I really wanted to discuss with Floyd was us. I wanted to know where our relationship was going. Right after I asked him he got quiet for a few moments, and that made me nervous. “Girl, you don’t have to worry about our future. It’s already been set up.” That was all I wanted to hear. If he thought that and it was good enough for him, then it was good enough for me.
