by Mary Monroe
Even with all the distractions that I had at my disposal that night, Floyd was never far from my thoughts. But with Earl sitting in my living room and me so horny I was ready to hump a doorknob, I managed to push Floyd a little further back in my mind.
I had almost lost interest in Earl by the time we got to be alone. And if one of Moanin’ Lisa’s old boyfriends had not made a booty call to her cell phone, I might not have had a chance to be alone with Earl at all that night. Once I did get him alone, my feelings changed. He had a musty, metallic smell about him that irritated my nostrils. Whatever it was, it was all over him. His hair, his clothes, and his breath all had the same foul odor. And now that I could see him in better light, he didn’t look so good, either. He had droopy, owl-like eyes and lips that were as big as mine and Moanin’ Lisa’s put together. Kissing him was like kissing a raw kidney. But recalling what Valerie had said about him, I decided to overlook the way he smelled and looked.
Even though I didn’t particularly like Earl and I didn’t want to pursue a long-term relationship with him, I still needed to get laid, so I did. I was pleased to discover that it was well worth my time. Since Floyd was the only man I’d ever slept with and I had enjoyed sex with him, I didn’t think it could get any better than that. But once Earl got down to business, I was all over the new bed I had picked up at Goodwill the week before. Unlike Floyd, Earl didn’t have a big dick like all black men were supposed to have—like Valerie had led me to believe. His dick was about the same size and color of a Tootsie Roll. But he knew how to use it. And what he couldn’t do with that teenie weenie, he did with his tongue and fingers.
Knowing that Floyd was rotting away in a cell with only his hand to give him some pleasure (at least that was what I hoped), I felt so guilty afterward that I threw away Earl’s telephone number. After he left several messages on my answering machine I changed my telephone number.
My one-night stand with Earl didn’t stop me from having more encounters with other men. And even though none of those relationships led to anything substantial (one of the men I dated worked part-time dressed as Mickey Mouse at Disneyland) I enjoyed the distraction. It was important for me to keep myself occupied so I wouldn’t spend so much time thinking about Floyd.
CHAPTER 30
There was a part of me that wanted to forget about Floyd. And I told myself that it was the reasonable thing to do. That was what I was going to concentrate on now that I knew there would be no future for us. But all that changed when I visited him that Saturday morning. I had booked a room in a cheap motel near the facility so that I could drive up the night before in my new Honda Civic.
I had never been near a maximum security prison so I didn’t know what to expect. Even my imagination didn’t prepare me for what I saw when I got there. It seemed like everything was funeral parlor gray. The uniforms the guards wore, the walls, the floor, and even some of the white prison officials had pasty gray-looking faces. The few black guards I saw were so mean and evil looking I couldn’t tell them from the brooding black prisoners I saw being led from one point to another.
When a grim-looking guard trotted Floyd out to the visiting area, I gasped so hard I choked on some air. For one thing, he wasn’t dressed in the same drab gray I’d seen so far. Not that what he had on was any better. He had on a baggy orange jumpsuit with a long number that reached all the way across the top of the one pocket that covered his heart. His hair was matted and dotted with lint. He looked like a scarecrow.
There was a glass partition on the long row of tables in the visiting room. I couldn’t touch Floyd, and the only way we could communicate was on a telephone. He didn’t seem surprised or particularly happy to see me. He plopped down on the hard-looking chair facing me and picked up the telephone. With a very deep sigh and a weak shudder, he gazed at me with his head tilted slightly to the side. It looked like he was going to burst into tears. That was exactly what I felt like doing myself. Then he bowed his head like he was about to pray.
“How are you doing?” I asked, clutching the telephone, which still had the sour smell of a previous visitor’s breath. I had to blink hard and several times to hold back my tears.
“Well,” Floyd began. He paused and shrugged. “Bad.” When he looked up, I understood why he’d bowed his head a few moments earlier. He had two black, bloodshot eyes; a knot the size of a large meatball on his forehead; a purple bruise on the side of his nose; and a bandage on the front of his neck. I didn’t even want to know the story behind his injuries.
“I miss you,” I sniffed, placing the palm of my sweaty hand on the glass. “I miss you so much.”
“Is that so?” He asked with a sneer, which threw me off balance.
“Excuse me?”
“It took you long enough to get here. . . .”
“Floyd, coming here was not easy for me—”
“You think it was easy for me?” he hollered, cutting me off in the middle of my sentence. He paused and motioned for me to continue.
I cleared my throat and composed myself. His outburst had startled me. “Floyd, I had to prepare myself to come into this place,” I said, knowing that it was a flimsy excuse. But it was true.
“I wish I could have prepared myself,” he said with another heavy sigh.
“Like I just said, I miss you, baby. I miss you so much I can hardly stand it. Let’s try and make this a pleasant visit for us both,” I told him, giving him a pleading look. It must have worked because he immediately changed his attitude.
He cleared his throat and coughed into his hand. “How have you been?” Somehow, he managed to smile in spite of the grim reality of his situation. “It looks like life is treating you good. You still working?”
I nodded. “Not for the dentist, though. I work in the administrative offices for a cruise line now. They’re paying me a lot more than Walgreens and Dr. Oglethorpe did. The benefits are good, and I’ll even get to take some cruises at the employee discount.”
“I see,” he muttered, and then gave me a weak nod. He looked down again and when I coughed he returned his attention to me. “I want you to get on with your life, Lo.”
“My life includes you,” I said firmly. “I promised that I would stand by you, and that hasn’t changed.”
“Look, I still love you and I always will. But you deserve more than this,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. “I want you to be happy. That’s all I ever wanted for you. But I can’t do nothing for you no more.”
My mouth dropped open and I shuddered. I didn’t like what I had just heard. “Are you telling me that you don’t want me to visit you? Are you telling me that you don’t want to see me anymore?”
“I’m telling you that I want you to move on with your life. If you want to come up here, that’s up to you. I’m just telling you that you don’t have to. I won’t like it, but I can get used to it. I got a lot of time on my hands to get used to you not being in my life no more. You deserve more than what I can give you, which ain’t nothing no more.”
“Floyd, you can’t do anything for me, but I can do things for you to make this . . . this thing easier. I know you don’t have any family, or any real friends. I don’t either. I want to stay in your life. I want you to stay in my life. Even like this,” I said. This time I made a sweeping gesture with my hand. “I can visit you on a regular basis; I don’t have much money to spare, but I’m sure that I can afford to give you a few dollars from time to time to buy things you can’t get otherwise. Don’t turn your back on me, because I am not going to turn my back on you.”
He scratched his chin and looked at me so long I got nervous and had to look away. “I never thought things would end up like this,” he said in a voice just above a whisper.
“Neither did I,” I replied. “Floyd, it doesn’t matter one way or the other now, but I have to know the truth.” I had to pause and catch my breath and build up my nerve. He sat up straighter in his chair and narrowed his eyes. I don’t know what made me look be
hind him, but when I did I saw his shadow on the gray, concrete wall. It was so distorted it frightened me. He looked like some kind of monster from behind. When I looked back at his face, he looked like some kind of monster from the front, too. His bloodshot eyes had a fiery glow about them now, and his nostrils twitched and flared as he gritted his teeth. The injuries on his face made him look even more sinister. But I didn’t let that stop me from saying what I felt I had to say. “Floyd, I have to know in my heart the truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“The truth about what?” he croaked. His lips were so dry they looked like they were going to crack at any moment.
“Did you do it?” I asked, looking him straight in the eyes. The glow in his eyes intensified. His eyes looked like two balls of fire.
“Did I do what?” he hollered into the telephone, rising.
“Did you rape and kill that girl?” I couldn’t believe what I was saying and thinking. And from the horrified look on Floyd’s face, he couldn’t either.
“Get the fuck out of my face and don’t you never speak to me again!” he roared. Then he hung up the telephone and signaled for the guard to take him back to his cell.
I fell twice trying to make it back to my car so fast. I broke the heel off one of my shoes when I fell, and scraped both knees. I was the only person who Floyd had to count on, and now I had ruined any chance he had to survive with his sanity intact. If I could have kicked my own ass, I would have.
Instead, I kicked the front tire on my car before I got back into it. Then once I sat down in the driver’s seat, I placed my head on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. I had just put both of my big feet in my mouth. Now I didn’t know how I was going to patch things up with Floyd. And I didn’t know if he was going to let me.
CHAPTER 31
“I saw Eddie Murphy, your favorite star, today. He dropped in for a few drinks this afternoon. Before I knew it, he was all over me! I had to beat him off with a stick to make him get his big head out from up under my dress.”
“That’s nice.”
“He wanted me to spend the night with him. But I told him he wasn’t my type.”
“That’s nice.”
“What the fuck is the matter with you? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said!”
It took me a moment to remember where I was. I looked around my tiny living room and back to Valerie. She occupied the cheap plaid sofa that I’d picked up at a flea market. One of her long shapely legs was draped across the arm of the sofa, and she was rotating her bare foot. There was a tabloid magazine in her lap with a grinning Eddie Murphy on the cover. An empty wine bottle, two empty wineglasses, and a fried chicken container from KFC sat on the table next to the wine bottle.
“I’m sorry. I was thinking about something else,” I told her. I wobbled up from the red beanbag on the floor facing the sofa and shuffled across the floor to the kitchen area. “Let’s pop open another bottle,” I said, removing my last bottle of Merlot from the noisy, round-shouldered refrigerator.
“Did you hear anything I said in the last five minutes? I asked if you wanted to move into Binkie’s old room.” Valerie yelled from the across the room.
“In your mama’s house? That house?” I asked, whirling around. That house with the body of a murdered man buried in the backyard. From the way I screwed up my face, you would have thought that I was referring to the Bates Motel from Psycho, one of the scariest movies of all time.
“Yes, in my mama’s house. My house now. Connie’s moving in with her boyfriend.”
“Uh, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it,” I said, returning to the living room area.
I poured myself some more wine. Then I plopped back down on my beanbag so hard that the bones in my back and neck made a cracking noise, like I was being broken in two. In a way I felt like that was the case. I had not heard the first part of Valerie’s conversation.
As hard as it was for me to believe, even though she’d repeated it twice, she had told me that she’d rented one of the rooms in that house to Moanin’ Lisa. Sharing a house with Valerie and Moanin’ Lisa didn’t bother me. I was used to Valerie’s gossiping by now. As a matter of fact, she was very entertaining at times. The day before, she’d talked about how the star of a primetime TV show came into Paw Paw’s on a regular basis, got so drunk she slid off the stool, and never washed her hands after she’d used the bathroom. She’d even passed that information on to two of the tabloids. And I couldn’t count the number of stories she’d shared with me about some of her fly-by-night lovers who flew in and out of her bed. I’d heard so many graphic descriptions of dicks—what they looked like, smelled like, and felt like—that I was beginning to seriously feel that I had been shortchanged in that department. After all, I’d only been with two men.
Then there was that thing with Moanin’ Lisa. I had to admit that by now I found her moaning and groaning almost as entertaining as Valerie’s gossiping and graphic reports on her sex life. I had reached a point where I looked forward to her ramblings. She was the only person I knew who could turn a simple visit to her gynecologist into a Greek tragedy, which she regaled Valerie and me with while dabbing tears and snot off her face with a soaking wet tissue. “Y’all, I just know that Dr. Hoffman’s got something else up his sleeve other than his hairy white arm the way he fingers my pussy during my exams. . . .”
Putting up with Valerie and Moanin’ Lisa was one thing. But the situation with Floyd was responsible for the many nightmares and sleepless nights I had to struggle through, and that was more than enough for me. However, the main thing was—moving into a house with such a gruesome history didn’t appeal to me at all. Just thinking about it gave me chicken skin. But Valerie wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“Look, Lo, I know Miss Viola didn’t raise you to be a fool. I’m serving you up what they call a fatted calf—milk that cow while you can! You’d be living practically rent free. Utilities are included, and so is cable, and furniture. And I know you can find better things to do with your money than keep paying rent on this dump,” she said, looking around my living room area with a huge frown on her face. “And to sweeten the pot, you can have the first three months free. I won’t even charge you a cleaning or security deposit. Just promise me you won’t tell the Moanin’ Lisa about our deal, though.” Valerie took a deep breath and cleared her throat. She pursed her lips like she was about to speak again, so I waited until she motioned for me to speak.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said again.
“What’s there to think about? Listen, if you don’t like my company, that’s fine. If that’s the reason you don’t want to live with me. But this is a one-time offer.” Valerie held up both hands and gave me a guarded look. She took a long drink from her wineglass, and cleared her throat again, coughing like she had swallowed a fist. She shifted in her seat as if she was going in for the kill. In a way I guess she was. “I’m trying to do you a favor because I have a longer history and a more serious relationship with you than anybody else. And to tell you the truth, I thought you’d jump at the chance.”
For a woman who had killed a man and buried him in her backyard, Valerie went on about her business like she didn’t have a care in the world. By anybody’s standards, her killing a man was a lot more serious than my ongoing dilemma with Floyd. But I had a different kind of history and relationship with him than I had with her. And, as far as I was concerned, more of a commitment. Valerie didn’t need me as much as Floyd did. Naturally, he was still high on my list of priorities. It had been six months since my disastrous visit to the prison and I had not communicated with him one way or the other. I wanted to, and I planned to do just that as soon as I figured out a way to ease back into his life.
The day after Valerie offered me a room in her house, I got home from work and there was a birthday card to me from Floyd. It was a generic card with a message so neat and elaborately written it looked like he’d practiced his penmanship for days:
Ha
ppy birthday, Lo. . . . missing you . . . I am sorry,
Your fool forever, Floyd
I didn’t even take the time to remove my jacket. I called Valerie immediately.
“If that room is still available, I’ll take it. I’d like to start saving some money,” I told her.
“Good. Then maybe you’ll buy yourself a decent wardrobe,” she said with a laugh.
“I will,” I said back, laughing. I had plans for the money that I was going to save by moving in with Valerie. I had to do whatever I could to make Floyd’s ordeal more bearable.
CHAPTER 32
I didn’t miss my tacky little studio apartment with its leaky faucets and thin walls. It was good to be back on my old block, even though it saddened me to see new tenants occupying Viola’s house. What I saw was enough to make me scream, so I knew that Viola was probably spinning in her grave. Crabgrass had practically taken over the whole front yard, and a rusty old car that looked more like a canoe sat in the driveway, propped up on cement blocks with three flat tires. Two homely, naked boys with bald heads shaped like peanuts were running around in the front yard chasing a cat with sticks.
Glodine and her husband were still in the house across the street from Viola’s. But with Floyd no longer under her roof there was no reason for me to ever go into that house again. Not that I would have been welcome, anyway. The one time I tried to reach out to Glodine by paying her a visit to let her know that I had moved back to the neighborhood, she looked at me like I’d stolen her purse. “You the one that got all mixed up with that Floyd, ain’t you? Stuck with him even after he raped and murdered that girl to death,” she said, glaring at me from her slightly opened front door. “LoReese? That’s your name, right?”
“That’s right,” I said, blinking. “LoReese.” I wanted to defend Floyd, but at this point in time, it was no use. His fate was a done deal, and there was nothing I could do to change that. It was bad enough that the system had written Floyd off, but it hurt to know that Glodine had, too. But she was so ignorant she couldn’t help herself. However, I liked the way she’d reduced my name from Dolores Reese to LoReese. I even changed my badge I wore at work to reflect my “new” name.
