by Mary Monroe
“Did you party last night after you got your diploma?”
“No, ma’am. I came straight home. I haven’t felt much like partying lately.” Our eyes met and I was glad I could not read minds. I didn’t even want to know what was on hers, but I knew what she was thinking, anyway. I was convinced that she and Valerie would both be thinking about what they’d done every day for the rest of their lives. I knew I would. What could be more serious than murder? Especially with the body of the victim being under a few feet of dirt in the murderers’ backyard. The look on Miss Naomi’s face made me dizzy all over again.
“Lo, what you saw here that night couldn’t be helped. And I hope you realize that,” Miss Naomi said, glancing over her shoulder and then mine to make sure we were still alone on the porch. “Zeke had made up his mind to kill me, so having the cops get him out of my house and me getting a restraining order would have done no good. I was a dead woman walking. And I know Valerie must have told you that if I had left him, he would have gone after somebody else in my family. I could have hidden myself and my kids, but what could I do to save the rest of my family? And everybody knows that the cops can’t do a damn thing until after a crime’s been committed. Well, their help wouldn’t have done me no good if I was dead.”
“I know all that and I might have done the same thing you did, if I’d been in your shoes.” I stopped long enough to scratch the side of my thigh and to shift my weight from one foot to the other. At one hundred and ten pounds, I felt like I weighed a ton. “But what if Mr. Zeke was just selling wolf tickets?” I asked in a meek voice.
“What if he was doing what?” Miss Naomi looked at me out of the corner of her eye and folded her arms.
“You know, uh, bluffing. Maybe he was making all these threats just to keep you under his thumb,” I explained. “He wouldn’t have gotten away with anything. I know he didn’t want to spend any time in jail. And that’s where he would have spent the rest of his life if he had done something real bad to you, or anybody else in your family.”
“Something real bad? What in the—what’s wrong with you, girl?” Miss Naomi gasped. “He did something real bad to us for years. You seen him do it with your own eyes. He was already half crazy. He went all the way crazy after they kicked him off the police force. He had nothing else to lose, and according to him, nothing to live for,” Miss Naomi said with a wave of her hand. “And just so you know, he killed his first wife.”
“What? I didn’t know—”
“Nobody else knew about it. Just me. I just told Valerie about it last night, so she’d stopped feeling so bad about what . . . about, uh, what she did.” There was a faraway look in Miss Naomi’s eyes now. And a slight smile on her face as she continued talking. “It happened in Florida years ago. He told everybody that her death was an accident, and everybody believed him. They had no reason not to. He was in the church, and everybody just loved him to death back there. The wife fell off a bridge and was drowned while they were out fishing during a Fourth of July picnic. He told me out of his own mouth that he pushed her off that bridge, then stomped on her hands as she tried to hold on to the ledge. All because she was going to divorce him. If he was still alive today, I probably wouldn’t be.” Miss Naomi dropped her head, and we just stood there in silence for a moment. She looked back up at me with her eyes narrowed and her jaw twitching. “I hope to God you never have to walk in my shoes. If you do, you’ll see why me and my child did what we did.”
I gave her a quick nod. “Uh, when you talk to Valerie, tell her to write or call me up when she gets settled,” I said, backing off the porch. “And, I’ve said it once but I’ll say it again, you and Valerie don’t have to worry about me saying anything to anybody about what happened . . . uh, that night. I don’t care what happens between Valerie and me, I will never ever tell anybody about what I saw. I swear to God I won’t.”
“I know you won’t. You can’t now,” Miss Naomi told me. Her last comment disturbed me. Not because she had said it in a threatening manner. As a matter of fact, she’d said it in a charming voice and with a smile on her face. What disturbed me was the fact that she seemed to know me better than I knew myself.
CHAPTER 22
When August rolled around and I still hadn’t heard from Valerie, I didn’t think I ever would again. I rarely saw her mother. When I did, I didn’t ask about Valerie, and she didn’t mention her, either.
I got hired as a cashier at a Walgreens working part-time on the night shift in the same little strip mall where Floyd worked at the Tri-Plex. Between the two of us we didn’t even make enough to afford a decent apartment. Therefore, every chance we got, we interviewed for better jobs. Unfortunately, the other jobs that we were qualified to do didn’t pay much better than the ones we already had. Almost every place wanted to hire somebody with experience.
“How in the hell do these people expect somebody to get experience if nobody will hire them in the first place?” I lamented to Floyd.
“Dolores, until we get more training and shit, we still won’t get better jobs, anyway,” Floyd told me in a tired voice. He was just as frustrated as I was, and that didn’t help matters much. When I got frustrated I wanted to mope around and complain. When he got frustrated he wanted to fuck. By now I was so use to him shaking his dick at me, I rarely complained anymore. I had another good reason for not complaining so much anymore and trying to fill all of Floyd’s sexual needs. And it was a reason that disturbed me. I had begun to notice that sometimes when I refused his demands, he eyeballed other females in ways that made me uncomfortable—right in front of me! But since his friends did the same thing when they were with their girlfriends, I didn’t think that it was anything for me to be concerned about.
I had no intimate interests in anybody but Floyd, and I had no reason to believe he’d cheat on me. But I wasn’t naïve. I knew that if God had created a woman who could keep her man from straying, it probably wasn’t me. Whenever I had a remote feeling that Floyd was losing interest in me, I paid more attention to him. I supported everything he wanted to do. And I was proud to tell people that he was going to serve Uncle Sam. That was one thing that I ended up wishing I had kept my big mouth shut about.
Floyd didn’t join the military like he had said he would. He had told me and everybody else he knew that he’d be gone before July. But he waited until the end of summer to tell me that he hadn’t joined because he had flunked the physical. “I guess I had one injury too many when I was growing up. I never got proper medical attention in time after some of these beatings, so I never healed right. You stuck with a cripple, baby,” he said, laughing.
I knew that Floyd had been abused a lot before I met him. By men like Mr. Zeke most of the time. That was one of the reasons it was so easy for me to put what happened to Mr. Zeke in the back of my mind.
“Floyd, I would rather have you crippled than not at all,” I assured him. I didn’t tell him, but I was glad that he wasn’t going anywhere. I had a lot of respect for the military, but I didn’t agree with a lot of things our government did. It seemed like every time I looked up there was some ruckus going on somewhere in the world. And it was usually men like Floyd who got caught up in all that bloodletting in some off-the-wall country that Uncle Sam should not have stuck his nose in to begin with.
Knowing how dependent I was on Floyd, Viola spent a lot of time trying to encourage me to make more friends. “I see you moping around this house, and I see you standing on the back porch looking toward Valerie’s house. I bet she ain’t sitting on no porch down south twiddling her thumbs. She done probably latched onto her one of them juicy-butt country boys and got herself married by now.”
I didn’t attempt to make any more friends, but I did continue to spend more time looking for a better job. After a lot of networking with people I met during some of my dead-end job interviews, I heard about some incentive programs that the state was offering to foster children. The main requirement was that you had to have graduated from high sc
hool with at least a B+ average. I was in good shape, but since Floyd had graduated by the skin of his teeth with a C–average, he didn’t qualify. “Baby, you go for this. Something else will come along for me,” he told me. He couldn’t hide his disappointment. And for a minute, he acted like he was jealous that I’d made it. But I didn’t let that stop me, because I was working to improve his future as well as mine.
I signed up for one of the programs immediately and took a thirteen-week business course five days a week. One week after I’d completed the program, a dentist who belonged to our church hired me to be his receptionist. Since I worked days for him, I kept my night time job at Walgreens. My income increased considerably, and at my suggestion, Floyd and I opened a joint savings account.
We didn’t have a date in mind, but I wanted to get married and move out of Viola’s house as soon as we could afford to. I was careful about what I spent my money on. I needed to have enough to fall back on in case I had to move out before I was ready. Viola’s health was rapidly deteriorating, and that nephew of hers now reminded me of a vulture, ready to gobble up everything she had that he wanted as soon as she took her last breath.
Now that I was making more money, I didn’t mind occasionally covering the cost by myself when Floyd and I checked into cheap motels. He had become my lifeline, so to speak. I honestly didn’t know what I would have done with myself if he had not been there for me. The only thorn in my side was the fact that Floyd still “socialized” with some of his friends who spent more time in jail than out. I knew him well and I believed him when he told me that I didn’t have to worry about him having any more brushes with the law.
Ironically, I was more worried about me having a brush with the law than I was Floyd. I had panic attacks when cops got too close to me. By not communicating with Valerie, I never knew from one day to the next if it would be my last day of freedom.
On New Year’s Eve Floyd took me to the West Hollywood apartment of one of his Mexican friends to spend a few nights. He had offered to house-sit for this friend, who was in Mexico on a mysterious vacation. This friend was a drug dealer whose connections were in Mexico, so I knew that he’d gone down there to do more than romp on the beach and visit his grandmother. Knowing how the friend made his money gave me something else to be concerned about—drugs were a magnet for turmoil. Not just from other thugs, but the cops, for sure. But Floyd had assured me that his amigo had a “financial arrangement” with the L.A. cops, so we had nothing to worry about by being in his apartment. Things were fine the first night. We celebrated the arrival of the new year in style with a bottle of champagne and a fuckfest that almost wore me out.
Two days into the new year, while Floyd was out getting more for us to drink, somebody knocked on the door. And they didn’t knock the way normal people knocked. Whoever it was, they were banging on the door with something hard. It sounded like they were trying to knock the door off its hinges. When I saw two large, beefy-faced white cops through the peephole I almost had a heart attack. Viola and everybody else knew that I was at this address with Floyd. My first thought was that the cops had accosted Floyd and forced him to tell them where I was. It didn’t take me long to realize what a ridiculous thought that was, but I still didn’t open the door. By the time Floyd returned, fifteen minutes later, I was hyperventilating. He found me in the bathroom with the door locked, hiding behind the shower curtain.
“Dolores, is there something going on with you that you don’t want me to know about? I am not blind or stupid. I’ve noticed for the past few months that whenever we go out somewhere and the cops get too close, you start twitching like you got cerebral palsy,” he said, escorting me back to the living room. “You ain’t got no reason in the world to be that scared of no cops. If anybody ought to be scared to deal with the cops, it’s me.” He laughed, pulling me down into his lap on the couch.
“Viola’s hairdresser is related to Rodney King. People that used to come to the house to visit Luther knew Rodney’s family. A lot of folks I know don’t like the cops because of what they did to Rodney, and got away with. I don’t like cops,” I mumbled, reaching for a glass of the wine he had poured.
“I don’t like cops either, but I don’t hide from them because I don’t have no reason to. And if it’ll make you feel any better, they were still downstairs when I walked up. They were looking for my boy. He failed to show up in court for a bunch of outstanding warrants.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. “Well, I still don’t want to be here in case they come back, anyway,” I said. “Cops make me nervous.” I finished my drink and started gathering my things.
“Dolores.” Floyd grabbed my arm and gently spun me around. “Baby, you don’t have no reason to be getting nervous about nothing. Or do you?”
“What? Wh-what do you mean by that?” I asked, forcing myself to laugh. “I haven’t done anything illegal,” I said in a flat voice.
“Do you know somebody that did?”
“What? Why are you asking me all this shit all of a sudden?” I wailed. My heart did a flip-flop. I could feel sweat sliding down the center of my back, and it felt like hot wax.
“I should have asked you a long time ago. I didn’t just start noticing how nervous you get whenever the subject of cops comes up. Now if there is something I need to know, you need to tell me now. We can’t even be thinking about getting married if one of us got something to hide.”
I sucked in my nervous breath and looked Floyd straight in the eye. “I don’t have anything to hide,” I assured him. He just stood there with his arms folded, looking at me. “Do me a favor and drop this,” I said. “And don’t bring it up again,” I warned.
CHAPTER 23
A month later I quit my job at Walgreens when Dr. Oglethorpe promoted me from the receptionist position to bookkeeper. Not only did it mean an even higher salary, but there was a lot of overtime. And working for a dentist did a lot for my morale. Days would go by without me thinking about the way my relationship with Valerie ended.
It was a Friday night in March when the bottom fell out of my world. Again. For the second time in less than a year I had to deal with a traumatic situation that could destroy me.
I had worked a full shift at Dr. Oglethorpe’s office. And because two of my coworkers had called in sick, everything was behind. I spent several hours during the day filing and doing whatever else I could to help out. The office was located in a quiet, low-crime location, so I didn’t mind staying a couple of hours longer by myself. Besides, Floyd was going to sneak in and keep me company when he got off work.
He helped me do some more filing, grumbling about it all along. But he did it anyway, because he knew that it was the only way he was going to get what he wanted from me that night. There was a vinyl couch in the waiting room, but I didn’t want to fuck on it. “Would you want to sit in some doctor’s waiting room on a couch where somebody’s been fucking their brains out?” I asked Floyd as he ushered me from one spot in the office to another. He was behind me with his arms wrapped around my waist. His dick was so hard against my behind it felt like the tip of a baseball bat.
“Look, baby, I don’t care where we do it. I want me some pussy, and I want it now,” he said, almost out of breath.
“We can get a room when I get off work,” I said with a laugh, slapping his hand. “Now please behave and act like a gentleman. If that’s possible with your nasty self.”
“We can save that money. And I don’t want to hook up at Viola’s house tonight. Not the way her nephew comes and goes!”
The last time we’d made love in Viola’s house, Noble had let himself in seconds after we’d put our clothes back on. From that day on, I caught him looking at me too long and too hard. Now when he saw me, he usually looked at my titties before he looked at my face. My days were already numbered in Viola’s house. I’d been out of school for almost a year now, and even though she kept telling me that I could stay as long as I wanted to, I felt like I had worn out my welcome. As far as
I was concerned, I was living on borrowed time. The last thing I wanted to do was aggravate Noble even more than he already was. Despite the fact that Viola loved me, she was a weak old woman, in and out of her mind, and in and out of the hospital. She could be easily persuaded by a shark like Noble. I knew that if he wanted to evict me, it wouldn’t be that hard for him to make that happen.
Floyd and I made love on the floor next to the X-ray machine. Then we did it a few times on the swivel chair that I sat in off and on for eight hours a day, five days a week doing Dr. Oglethorpe’s books.
Afterward, we cleaned up our mess and locked up. Then we took the bus back across town. With a smile on his face, Floyd walked me to my door. After a tongue-bath of a kiss that must have lasted at least five minutes, he ran off the porch and sprinted across the street to Glodine’s house, whistling all the way.
It was Glodine who came banging on Viola’s door a few hours later. I was so groggy when I stumbled downstairs to the living room in my housecoat, I stumbled and walked into a wall, even with the lights on. Then I stubbed my toe on the leg of a chair and had to hop to the door on one leg. I looked through the peephole, expecting to see Floyd standing there with his dick in his hand. All I saw was a huge eye peering into the peephole. Since I couldn’t tell who it was, I ran to the window and snatched the curtains back. To my everlasting horror, it was that damn Glodine. Seeing her irritated me more than my injured toe. As a matter of fact, the minute I realized it was her at the door, my toe stopped throbbing.
“Glodine! What in the world do you want at this hour?” I hollered, as I flung open the door.
