by Mary Monroe
CHAPTER 12
Floyd didn’t like condoms, but I made it clear to him that if he wanted to keep fucking me he was going to wear them. “I’m clean, baby. Other than a slight case of the clap a couple of months ago, I ain’t never had no diseases,” he insisted. We were on the well-used couch in Viola’s living room as usual. I was glad we didn’t have to worry about Viola’s interference. That woman could sleep through Armageddon. We could hear her snoring all the way from upstairs to the living room downstairs, but we whispered and spoke in low voices, anyway.
“I’m glad to hear that. But catching a sex disease is just part of the reason you’re going to wear protection if you want to be with me,” I told him, giving him a hard look. “The last thing I need complicating my life right now is a baby.”
“Girl, stop tripping,” he said, dismissing my outburst with a wave of his calloused hand. “I know how to pull out the dragon in time. You don’t have to worry about getting pregnant. At least not by me. . . .” He put on the condom anyway.
Unlike Valerie and some of the other girls I knew, I didn’t have to worry about stretching out in the backseat of somebody’s car, or on the ground, or helping some boy scrape up enough money to rent a cheap motel room. Viola usually went to bed as soon as it got dark. So when Floyd wanted to spend some time with me, we made our plans earlier in the day. We’d agree on a certain time and then I’d call him up at an alternate phone number that he’d given to me. That worked for the first few weeks until that bitch Glodine found out. As it turned out, that phone number was a second line that she had recently installed in her house. I almost had a fit when she picked up the phone one day and started fussing as soon as she heard my voice. “Girl, if you want to snuggle up and do whatever it is you and that boy do, you better figure out another way to hook up with him. And if I was you, I’d be a little pickier about the dudes I keep company with. You can do a lot better than Floyd. His family tree didn’t grow nothing but thugs and lowlifes. And he didn’t fall too far from that tree. He is going to cause you some serious grief someday. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled. I didn’t have enough nerve to ask Floyd’s foster mother what she meant by her last comment. I didn’t even want to think about it. But when I didn’t hear from Floyd for the rest of that week, Miss Glodine’s mysterious comment was all I could think about.
L.A. was a big city but there were a lot of small circles of busybodies that carried news from one end of the city to the other, and beyond. It was a boy I knew only casually from school who told me that Floyd hung out with members of the Crips. I didn’t ask Floyd about it the next time I saw him. I didn’t have to.
About a week later he got picked up for questioning by the cops along with half a dozen confirmed gang members. Three members from the deadly Bloods, the Crips’ worst enemy, had turned up dead in an alley behind a bar a few blocks from our neighborhood. Floyd had fought with one of the dead boys over some weed that one of Floyd’s close friends had stolen. Some bigmouth had started a rumor that Floyd had been involved in the theft. Whether that was true or not, nobody was able to prove it. But Floyd’s run-ins with the cops didn’t stop there.
Some of his friends stole a car, and when the cops located it, abandoned on a street in Brentwood, a jacket that belonged to Floyd was in the car. It was easy enough for him to explain to the cops that the jacket had been stolen from his locker at school. It seemed like every other week Floyd got caught up in something that involved the cops. How he managed to stay out of jail was a mystery to me.
“I know you are crazy about your boy, but sooner or later his luck is going to run out and you’ll be visiting him in County,” Valerie commented.
“I don’t think so,” I said without hesitation. “I think I know the boy better than you do. Floyd just got a job at that new movie theater at the mall and he’ll be working six nights a week, so I don’t have to worry about him spending too much time with his homies. With school, his job, and spending time with me I don’t think I have to worry about visiting my man in County, or any other jail,” I said.
Valerie looked at me with a lot of doubt on her face, and she wasn’t the only one. Viola had some concerns about how my association with Floyd was going to impact my future. “I didn’t raise no fool, so I know you got enough sense in your head to keep your nose clean. But sometimes just being around the wrong person can land you in a mess of trouble,” Viola told me.
Floyd managed to keep his nose clean for the next few months, and as far as everything else was concerned, it was business as usual. The day before Christmas I went to Valerie’s house to drop off some gifts that Viola and I had picked out. Since Viola was on a fixed income and the people I babysat for from time to time didn’t pay that much, if they paid at all, we rarely purchased anything expensive or fancy. We usually bought all of the females on our list a scarf, some handkerchiefs, or cheap cologne. The males all got socks, some undershirts, or cheap cologne. This year we had a few extra dollars left over from the money that Viola got from Luther’s life insurance, so we got a little more creative: gift certificates from various discount stores for everybody. Even Mr. Zeke.
“You back again?” Mr. Zeke said with a smirk before I could even get in the door. He seemed to be in a good mood. And he had to be, because Valerie told me that he was massaging her mother’s feet when I’d called her up earlier. But I knew from experience that his good moods could change in the twinkling of an eye.
“Uh, I just came over to drop off a few things from me and Viola,” I told him, talking fast. I looked past him, hoping to see Valerie or anybody else who lived in this sad house. As mean as Mr. Zeke was to everybody, as far as I knew the only people he ever beat on were Valerie’s family. I had heard the rumors about him beating up people when he was still on the police force. But since I’d never seen him do it, I didn’t count that. Just like I didn’t believe that Floyd was having sex with his foster mother. And that was one thing that I wouldn’t believe unless I heard it from him, or saw him fucking her with my own eyes. It was the one thing that I would never ask Floyd. If it was true, I didn’t want to know. Hearing something and seeing something were two different things, and I applied that to everybody I knew. Especially Mr. Zeke. However, despite how nice he was to me just then, there were times when he looked at me like he wanted to slap the shit out of me. Like at that moment. His attitude had changed just that fast. He had replaced his smile with a scowl.
“Can I put everything under the tree?” I asked, still rotating my neck so I could look past him. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything else, Miss Naomi limped into the room on the same feet that Mr. Zeke had massaged. She was wiping blood off her face with a damp washcloth. I looked from her to Mr. Zeke.
“Hi, Dolores,” Miss Naomi muttered, her voice sounding like it was about to crack in two. “Uh, you can leave that stuff on the coffee table there.”
I was glad when Valerie eased into the room and beckoned for me to follow her to her room upstairs. “How come the house is so quiet?” I asked. “It feels like a funeral parlor up in here,” I said as soon as we got inside Valerie’s room and shut the door.
“One of these days . . . one of these days I am going to make that bastard wish he was never born,” Valerie assured me with a firm nod. It was only then that I noticed the most recent wound on her lip and scratches on both sides of her neck.
“I saw the cops over here again last night when me and Floyd passed by,” I said, sitting down next to her on her unmade bed.
“For all the good it did. Mama told him again that she was going to have him removed. And he told her again that he would crucify her, and then beat the dog shit out of the rest of us. She called the cops anyway, and all they can say is they can’t arrest a man for what he might do. Tell me something,” Valerie said, pausing to catch her breath. “What good is the law if they can’t protect us from something that somebody might do?”
I shrugged. “You are asking t
he wrong person, girl. By the time the cops do something to help, it might be too late.”
“They keep saying that they can’t do anything to him until he does something. If you ask me, a threat is something. If somebody threatens the president, they throw them up under the jail and throw away the key.”
“Well, what about the beatings? If that’s not something, I don’t know what is.”
“Yeah, right! Mama is so scared that he will do something really crazy, she never goes all the way and presses charges.” Valerie stood up and started pacing back and forth at the foot of her bed. It made me sick to see such a pretty girl with such a look of despair on her face.
“Look, if the social services people even think that a child is being abused, they remove the kid until they investigate,” I offered.
Valerie shook her head, and I could tell that with the scratches on her neck it was painful for her to do so by the way she flinched. “That’s not enough. Been there, done that. They didn’t do anything that other time but give us lip service when I told my gym teacher about what Zeke did to poor Binkie. After that, Zeke said if we ever tried to sic the white folks on him again for mistreating us kids, it would be the last thing any of us ever do.”
“I noticed that your mama was limping when I came in. . . .” I mentioned.
“Oh that,” Valerie said with a sigh and a shrug. “He told her to take down the Christmas tree ’cause Binkie and Liz didn’t clean off the back porch like he told them to do. When she didn’t take it down fast enough, he knocked it down. It fell on her legs and pinned her to the floor until me and Binkie helped her up,” Valerie explained.
“Oh. Well, I left the gifts for everybody on the coffee table,” I mumbled. “By the way, just how old is Mr. Zeke?”
“What?” Valerie stopped pacing the floor and stood in front of me with her arms folded and a puzzled look on her face.
“How old is your stepdaddy?”
“Why? What’s his age got to do with anything? Young asshole, old asshole. The only difference is years. What’s your point?”
“Just answer my question,” I suggested.
“Fifty-something now. Why?” Valerie asked, giving me a thoughtful look.
“He drinks a lot, and that can’t be too healthy for him. He smokes. He won’t live forever at the rate he’s going,” I said in a serious tone of voice. I noticed a strange look appear on Valerie’s face, like she was in a trance. “Did you hear what I said? I said, Mr. Zeke won’t live forever at the rate he’s going.”
“Paw Paw drinks and smokes and he’s eighty,” Valerie reminded me. We paused when we heard a fresh commotion being played out downstairs. Something hit the living room wall with a loud thud. Somebody screamed. Pete was barking up a storm. Mr. Zeke was cussing so loud, his voice was the only one we could hear. We looked toward the door at the same time; we shook our heads at the same time.
“Yeah, but most people are not as lucky as Paw Paw. I don’t think that Mr. Zeke will be as lucky as your grandfather,” I stated, my eyes still on the door. Locking it did no good. Mr. Zeke broke through locks like he was breaking rubber bands. But Valerie locked her door all the time anyway. If nothing else, it slowed him down when he stormed her room.
“No . . . he won’t be,” Valerie said in a hollow voice. Despite the ruckus taking place downstairs, she smiled for the first time in days.
CHAPTER 13
Except for the ongoing violence in Valerie’s house, things were fairly quiet in my life. The days, weeks, and the months drifted by, taking me closer to my uncertain future. As much as I wanted to enhance my education, I didn’t have any plans for college. For one thing, I knew Viola couldn’t afford to send me, and I didn’t expect her to, anyway. Another thing was the fact that she had more than a few relatives who thought it was their business to remind me that I was not a blood relative. And my grades were not that great, so I knew that there was no chance of me getting a scholarship. But I had some reasonable career goals. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was I wanted to do with my life. But I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to end up like my mother and so many of the other kids who’d started life in the same boat with me.
Graduation was still six months away. But I had already filled out several applications for jobs. But the jobs I applied for were ones that nobody else I knew would take, even if they came gift wrapped. Like stocking shelves at a nearby Walgreens, a boring security guard job at an office building downtown, and even a position in a car wash working the cash register.
I already knew what Valerie’s plans were. She would eventually take over running the bar that her mother had inherited. That was all she wanted to talk about when the subject of jobs came up. She totally ignored the fact that a lot of folks had told her she should pursue a modeling career. I’d even told her myself. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to be a small fish in a big pond. By being my own boss, I will be the biggest fish in a small pond,” she told me with so much conviction I knew she was serious.
I eventually stopped trying to tell Valerie what to do with her life. My only concern, and the main thing that she was concerned about, was how she was going to deal with Zeke when she took over the bar. In addition to his many other flaws, that man was about as self-centered as a pimp. Not only was he a brute who thought the world owed him something, he was a lazy-ass brute. After he lost his job on the police force, he didn’t even pretend to be interested in trying to get it back.
He screamed when Miss Naomi offered to let him work in her bar as a bouncer. He made it clear that the only job he would accept in her “Mickey Mouse” bar was manager, and head manager at that, which meant he would supervise Miss Naomi and everybody else. Miss Naomi refused to let that happen, telling him that it was bad enough he was running the show in her house, she wasn’t going to let the same thing happen with her bar. Mr. Zeke whined and wheedled and she still refused, even after he threw a telephone book at her. As far as him getting another job someplace else, that didn’t even register with him. When he was not at one of the Indian casinos gambling away money that Valerie’s mother brought into the house, he was in the living room slumped in a chair in front of the TV with the remote in one hand and a bottle in the other.
Then there were the other women. According to Valerie, her stepfather had women coming out of both his ears. I had no idea what women saw in Mr. Zeke. He had nothing I would want. He was not a good-looking man. He didn’t look like a baboon or anything like that, but he was no Denzel. He must have been real good in bed because I couldn’t see any other reason why Valerie’s mother married him in the first place. With so many stupid women in L.A., he would have no trouble at all finding him another meal ticket. I brought up the subject to Valerie on a regular basis, and her response was usually the same: “Zeke’s gotten too old and too comfortable to try and find him another nest with a goose that lays golden eggs like my mama does,” she told me, with a look of extreme disgust on her face.
One thing that I was sure of was that Floyd was the only man I wanted in my life. Despite his minor brushes with the law, he was smart and he had a lot of ambition. “I can’t think of a better way to jumpstart my future than to get what I can out of the military,” he told me, more excited than I’d seen him since, well, since the last time we had sex. His plan was to enlist in the military and soak up as many benefits as possible. I was proud to share this information with everybody who would listen. Knowing how limited our options were, Floyd even suggested that I pursue a future with the military, too. “If nothing else, you’ll get a chance to see the world at Uncle Sam’s expense.”
“I’d like to see the world. But if I do it at Uncle Sam’s expense, I probably wouldn’t get to see the places I want to see. And all the rest of that military rigmarole is too rigid for me,” I said. I laughed but I was serious.
As much as I loved Viola, I couldn’t wait to get out of school and into a place of my own. I wanted something that I could call mine. I wanted to have so
me control in the next place that I called home. It made my blood boil when Viola’s relatives came to visit. Those people had no shame. They did whatever they wanted to do in Viola’s house, and that included my bedroom. Things disappeared from my room so often you would have thought that I’d been burglarized. One day I came home as one of Viola’s nieces was leaving the house wearing one of my best blouses, even though it was two sizes too small for her. Another one of the reasons I felt such a need to have my own place was because I’d never had a blood family that I could call my own. Once I got a good job, whether I had a husband or not, I planned to have several children.
Floyd was the one who had first brought up the subject of us getting married. “I don’t care what I have to do to keep my family together. As long as I got a breath in my body, I will never allow a child of ours to end up in foster care like us,” he vowed.
We talked about where we wanted to live and how many kids we wanted to have. The only thing we didn’t have on our agenda yet was our wedding date. There were other concerns, though. Not on my end; my mind was made up. But every time we talked about getting married, no matter how well the conversation was going, Floyd would always sink into a slump of uncertainty and paranoia. “I just hope things don’t change while I’m in the service. The last thing I ever want to get in the mail is a ‘Dear John’ letter from you. I don’t know what I’d do if you found somebody else.”
