by Mary Monroe
“You brought this on yourself so you ain’t got anybody to blame but yourself. I told you that I was going to bury your black ass before the weekend was over! Why—why won’t you die, bitch?” As hard as it was to believe, Mr. Zeke tightened his grip on Miss Naomi’s throat even more, until she was purple in the face. Her eyes were rolled back in her head and her tongue was flapping out the side of her mouth like the tongue in a loose shoe.
“Oh Lord, Mr. Zeke! Please don’t do this!” I shouted. It never occurred to me that I was in danger of getting choked myself. My mind couldn’t process that thought. My only concern was getting some help.
As soon as I picked up the telephone Valerie started coughing and sitting up. First she looked at me, and then she looked at Mr. Zeke still sitting on her mother’s chest choking her. Miss Naomi had stopped struggling and gasping for air. It took about two seconds for Valerie to get up off the floor, grab the biggest knife on the counter, and plunge it into Mr. Zeke’s chest. The whole scene played out like a scene from a bad movie. It didn’t seem real. I covered my eyes for a moment, but when I opened them nothing had changed. This was as real as it got, and I was smack-dab in the middle of this mess!
“Valerie . . . no,” I managed, placing the telephone back on its cradle. She pulled the knife out but she didn’t stop stabbing. I was too disoriented to count, but the knife went in and out of Mr. Zeke’s chest several times. I didn’t even realize Miss Naomi had stood up until it was all over. Valerie ran and grabbed her mother around the waist, and they stood there crying for the longest time.
“He won’t hurt us anymore,” Valerie finally said. She let out a loud breath and released her mother and then turned to me. “You didn’t see anything,” she told me.
I couldn’t talk. All I could do was shake my head, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Mr. Zeke lying there on that floor in a pool of blood that was getting wider by the second.
Floyd answered the telephone huffing and puffing like he was out of breath. “Hey, baby. I know, I know,” he said, laughing and gasping for air. “I just ran a few laps on the basketball court and lost track of the time. But don’t worry, we’ll pick you and your girl up on time. And don’t you laugh when you see me in that damn tux because I’m telling you right now I look like a fucking penguin.” He paused and laughed. Somehow I managed to laugh along with him. “Now I hope y’all ain’t expecting corsages, too. I forgot all about that little detail—”
“Baby, stop talking and just listen,” I said in a low but firm voice. “You and Ollie don’t have to worry about taking me and Valerie to the prom now.”
Floyd took his time responding. In the background on his end I could hear Glodine bitching at her husband and her foster daughters about a mess in the living room. Then her voice got louder as she addressed Floyd. “Boy, get your nasty self off that phone and get ready for that damn prom.” Floyd ignored Glodine like he usually did. I waited until I heard her voice moving farther away.
“Did you hear what I just said?” I asked. It was not easy for me to remain composed. And I was anything but that. But I had to make Floyd think I was.
“Oh? Y’all can’t go to the dance after all, huh?” He didn’t even try to hide how relieved he was. “Uh, somebody sick or something?”
“Something like that,” I said, almost choking on my words.
“Well, what do y’all want to do then?”
“I’m going to stay with Valerie until she feels better,” I said stiffly.
“Baby, you sounding mighty funny? Where are you?”
“I’m at Valerie’s house. She’s, uh, real sick.” There was a long moment of silence before Floyd spoke again.
“You know my boy wasn’t too crazy about going to no prom in the first place, but he got used to the idea. Valerie is kinda cute and, well, you know . . . Um, we thought that afterward, we’d cruise around for a little while and, you know, get into something. Get a motel room and some beer. My boy’s counting on having a good time. Is your girl too sick to do that later on?”
“Uh-huh.” There was more silence. “She’s too sick to do that, too.”
“Oh. Listen, why don’t you call me when you get back home. Me and you can hook up and do something on our own. I know of at least three parties in the Valley. And I think I got enough to get us a room. . . .”
“I’m going to spend the night at Valerie’s,” I said quickly.
“Damn. Is she that sick?
“Uh-huh.” I coughed. “And I don’t feel too good myself. . . .”
Floyd sighed. From the way he did that, I could tell that he was highly disappointed. But this was one time that I didn’t care. “Later on then. Give me a call back when you get a chance. If you ain’t too sick. . . .”
I hung up without saying another word. Miss Naomi handed me a damp washcloth to wipe the front of my dress where I’d thrown up. I felt like I was about to throw up again so I ran to the sink and did it there this time.
“Is Mr. Zeke really dead?” I managed, not turning around, my head still hanging over the lip of the sink. I don’t know why I had to ask. If that pool of blood on the floor had been any bigger, I could have gone swimming in it.
“Dolores, you need to pull yourself together. We need your help,” Valerie informed me. I stood up straight and spun around. “Listen to me,” she said, whispering. “It was either him or me. You know that, don’t you?” Valerie didn’t give me a chance to answer. “And my mama. After he got on my case about me going to the prom, Mama told him she’d filed divorce papers yesterday. That’s when he really snapped. He grabbed a shovel out of the garage and ran in the backyard and dug a . . . a . . .” Valerie paused and swallowed so hard her eyes crossed and looked glassy, like the eyes on a cheap doll. “He dug a grave out there in the backyard.”
I gave Valerie a puzzled look. “A grave? What do you mean he dug a grave?” I asked, my jaws tightening like somebody had slid my head into a vise.
“You heard what I said. You know he didn’t play,” Valerie replied, blinking hard. “He started threatening to bury my mama a long time ago, but I didn’t believe he’d go through with something that crazy. I realized I was wrong when he dug that grave. But I tell you one thing: there was no way in hell I was going to stand around and let him finish off my mama. This whole family has suffered enough on account of that man.”
I looked past Valerie at her mother. She stood over Mr. Zeke, looking down at his body with a look on her face that sent shivers up and down my spine. There was a wild-eyed, desperate look in her eyes. Like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck. I couldn’t tell if she was sorry, glad, mad, or what about what had just happened. She looked up at me and exhaled. Then she started blinking like she had something caught in her eye, but I realized she was doing that to keep from crying when she snatched a dishrag off the counter by the stove and wiped her eyes and nose. The front of her dress was ripped almost down to the waist.
Bruises were all over Miss Naomi’s neck, and I could see bald spots on her head where her husband had pulled out clumps of her hair. “Dolores, we need your help,” she told me.
CHAPTER 16
There was a lot going on outside Miss Naomi’s front door. It seemed like a whole different world, and I guess it was. Old Mrs. Scott next door was yelling about somebody trampling her lawn and rose garden again. A dog was barking as though it had cornered a squirrel in a tree. A cat was screeching like somebody was beating it. And somebody was gunning the motor in a loud car. This was one time that I wished I was on the other side of Miss Naomi’s front door.
Viola took her time answering the telephone when I called home. I breathed a sigh of relief when she finally picked up on the eighth ring. I didn’t know anybody who shut down as completely as Viola did at the end of each day, now that Luther was gone. It was almost like she ceased to exist after a certain hour, which was usually around eight o’clock. Other than her wheezing and heavy breathing, there was absolutely no background noise on her end of the l
ine. I knew that she had already turned off every single light except the one in her room, where I was sure she was right now. “Gal, how do you expect to get ready for that prom the way you lollygagging and dragging yourself around all this time? I can’t stay woke waiting on you to be on your way so I can lock up. I was just fixing to call over there,” she told me. “That Zeke done calmed down?”
“You might say that,” I said. Since there had never been any love between Viola and Mr. Zeke, I knew that it would please her to hear that he had calmed down forever. Not to say that she wanted to see him dead, though. Viola was the kind of sanctified old sister who had too much respect for life to even think about something that morbid. What I could tell her and what I couldn’t depended on Valerie and her mother and how they wanted to finish this thing they had started. They stood side by side, a few feet in front of me, with folded arms and impatient looks on their faces. Miss Naomi’s blue plaid dress and Valerie’s white terry cloth housecoat were almost as bloody as Mr. Zeke’s shirt. “Uh, I just called Floyd and told him I can’t go to the prom,” I said into the telephone in a stilted voice.
“What do you mean by that, girl? As soon as you made it to the twelfth grade, which was a leap some folks never thought you’d never make, all you talked about was going to that prom.” Viola let out a short laugh that sounded like a chicken clucking.
“I know, I know. But something came up and I don’t want to go now,” I said, my voice cracking. “See, Valerie is real sick and I need to stay with her.”
“Done finally got herself pregnant, I bet,” Viola insisted, clucking some more.
“Uh, not nothing like that. She ate something earlier today that didn’t agree with her and she’s been throwing up ever since. And on top of that, she’s real constipated. . . uh . . . and has been for three days.”
“Well, where is her mama at? Where is them other two kids of Naomi’s at? Binkie and that little sister of hissen. Why you got to be the one to stay with her? And anyway, you ain’t no Dr. Feelgood. What she expect you to do about her being constipated—escort her to the commode and squeeze her butt?” Viola was not the kind of woman to make fun of people, but every now and then she said something about somebody that made me laugh. She laughed long and hard at her last comment. Under the circumstances, I was glad that I was able to let out a little laugh myself. I didn’t want her to notice anything different about my voice.
Miss Naomi, her eyes still looking like they were going to pop out of her head and roll across the floor, motioned for me to get off the telephone. “Uh, Viola, can I call you back in a little while?” I was also anxious to get off the phone so I could return my attention back to the scene of the crime.
“You can call me back but it better not be tonight. As soon as I hang up this phone, I’m getting in my bed. And you know once my head hit that pillow, I wouldn’t know if the house was on fire.”
“I’ll see you in the morning then.” I hung up before Viola could say anything else. “What do we do now?” I asked, looking from Valerie’s face to her mother’s. Then I looked at Mr. Zeke on the floor and shivered. And then something strange came over me. For the next few moments I felt profoundly sad. There was something about death that made everybody seem equal. It was the only thing that every living thing would experience on the same level. And that was: once it was over, it was over. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. One body couldn’t be more or less dead than another. However, in Mr. Zeke’s case death seemed to take on a whole new meaning. For Valerie and her family, it meant life. My main concern was what kind of life it would mean for them now. Freedom or jail? What if it meant Valerie and her mother would develop such remorse that their guilt would eventually destroy them, anyway? I couldn’t figure out why I was thinking about these things when there were other things that I needed to focus on first. “What do you want me to do?” I whimpered.
“All you need to do is be a lookout. Make sure nobody comes into the house. And if they do, don’t let them past the living room,” Valerie informed me. “Binkie might show up, and he got a key. If he comes home, you keep him in that living room even if it means you got to sit on him. Paw Paw might wake up and holler for some water or help to get on the bedpan. Other than that, we don’t have to worry about him.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked, looking toward the door.
Valerie didn’t answer my question. Instead, she looked at her mother. Before I knew what was going on, Valerie lifted Mr. Zeke’s legs and Miss Naomi lifted him off the floor by his shoulders. And then they hauled him toward the back door.
With my arms wrapped around my chest I went into the living room and tried to act normal. I made sure the door was locked and then I turned off the light. I sat on the sofa in the dark, shaking so hard my teeth clicked and clacked like castanets at a salsa party. I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually Valerie came into the living room.
“Lo, can you come out to the backyard?” she asked, looking toward the room her grandfather occupied.
“What for?” I asked, my breath fluttering around inside my throat like a loose kite.
“We need you to hold the flashlight. That’s all,” Valerie told me, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “That bastard weighs a ton, and we want to make sure he’s, uh, all the way, uh, you know . . .”
“Valerie, I can’t believe this is happening,” I said. “I don’t want to be any more involved in this mess than I already am,” I bleated. “We could all go to jail, and to be honest with you, I don’t think that what you and your mama are doing is the right thing. You can’t get away with this.”
“We already have,” Valerie assured me with a nod. “Only four people know what happened here tonight, and one of them is dead. Nobody else will ever know . . . unless one of us tells them.” Valerie paused and gave me a look that scared the daylights out of me. “Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” I managed. Then I followed her to the backyard where Mr. Zeke’s body lay on the hard damp ground at the edge of the grave that he’d dug with his own hands.
CHAPTER 17
I knew that almost everybody who knew Mr. Zeke disliked him on some level. He had a few brooding male friends who came around and went to the bars to raise hell with him. But Mr. Zeke was the kind of man who didn’t have a lot of use for other men.
However, he loved the ladies, and he didn’t care who knew it.
Even the other women he claimed he fucked whenever he felt like it. The problem with that was that these women didn’t realize what an asshole he really was until it was too late. By then they couldn’t get rid of him and had to put up with his mess until he decided to move on. There was a Mexican woman in an East L.A. barrio that he’d been fooling around with right up under Miss Naomi’s nose. Every time I ran into that woman at the nail shop we both went to, she talked about him like a dog—in English and Spanish. Miss Naomi didn’t even try to break up that relationship. “Every minute that Zeke spends with one of his whores is one less minute that I have to spend with him,” she’d said.
What I couldn’t understand was, if there was another woman crazy enough to get involved with Zeke, why was it so hard for him to leave Miss Naomi? Why would any man in his right mind want to hang around a woman who hated him, especially when he had another woman he could pester?
Despite the fact that I was scared shitless and desperate to leave, I stayed at Valerie’s house the night that Mr. Zeke died. As hard as it was for me to believe, he was buried like an old bone in the backyard under the fig tree next to the barbeque grill. The same barbeque grill that Mr. Zeke had kicked over the weekend before because Miss Naomi had burned the ribs and chicken wings.
They had asked me to help them scoot him into the grave, but I had promptly refused. Just being at the crime scene was bad enough. Had I touched Mr. Zeke’s corpse I would have felt even worse. I already felt like I was in a trance as I watched Valerie and her mother mop Mr. Zeke’s blood up off the kitc
hen floor. I had also refused when they asked me to help them clean up his blood. Every time I got too close to that bloody mess I started gagging. I had already thrown up so much that it felt like my insides had been turned inside out.
As soon as they had finished mopping and sopping up blood, they continued to work on the linoleum floor with Mop & Glo. By the time they finished, that floor was shining like gold. Then everything that Mr. Zeke owned was stuffed into large garbage bags. They disposed of his clothes, shoes, and other knickknacks, like tools and his collection of Miles Davis albums, in Dumpsters all over L.A. They made several trips in Miss Naomi’s station wagon, and by morning they were still dumping. They had even thrown out every single picture that included Mr. Zeke. The last thing to go into a garbage bag was a half-empty bottle of beer that he’d popped open with his teeth and left in the refrigerator the evening before.
I didn’t sleep at all that night on the couch with the pillow and blanket that Valerie had tossed into my lap. For one thing, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that there was a dead body in the backyard. Not that I believed in ghosts, but I almost jumped out of my skin every time I heard a creak or any other odd noise. At one point during the night, I dozed off for just a few moments. I woke up real quick when I thought I heard a man’s voice whispering my name.
When Binkie and Liz came home the next morning, the first thing twelve-year-old Binkie wanted to know was why I was sitting in their living room at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Valerie and Miss Naomi had just left to dump the last of Mr. Zeke’s belongings. I still had on my soiled prom dress, but I had on one of Valerie’s robes. The strange thing about that was I didn’t even remember putting the robe on.
