by Pearl Cleage
For example, when Eddie walked over this morning to tell Joyce some of the oldsters, mostly holdovers from the glory days who had wanted to end their lives here in peace, were really nervous about the break-ins. I wasn’t ready to talk about last night yet, but Joyce wasn’t here, so I knew it was only a matter of time.
“You doing okay today?” he said, looking at me while he waited for the tea I’d offered to cool off enough to drink.
“Doing fine,” I said. “Thanks for being a port in a storm last night.”
“My pleasure,” he said.
I changed the subject and asked him who he thought was doing the break-ins. He said Frank and Tyrone without blinking. I told him Frank reminded me of the kid who killed the Koreans in Menace II Society and he had never heard of it. He doesn’t have a television, and even though I gave Joyce and Mitch a VCR about five years ago, they never even hooked it up.
I convinced him that if he wanted to understand Frank and Tyrone, he needed to see at least two or three of these angry-young-black-man movies. He hadn’t been to the city for a while and things have gotten a lot worse a lot faster than anybody thought they would. It’s important to keep up, I told him, so you don’t get careless and let your passport lapse or forget to keep a little getaway money stashed somewhere you can get to it without using your ATM card.
Of course, he doesn’t have an ATM card, but the principle was the same and he agreed to hook up the VCR if I’d rent the videos. I said that sounded good and we made a date for Friday. Well, not a date date. A friend date. Joyce and Imani will be here to chaperone, and by that time, I hope he will have forgotten about last night.
He got all the way to the end of the driveway before he stopped and came back. I watched him walking and remembered how beautiful he looked in the moonlight.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, real serious, propping his foot on the bottom step.
“Ask away,” I said.
“Why were you crying last night?”
“Which time?” I said, trying to play it off.
“Outside,” he said, serious as hell. “When you were watching me.”
I hesitated. Because, I thought, I’m not going to be around long enough for us to fall in love. “I don’t know,” is what I said.
“Would you tell me?”
I decided to lie. “Yes.”
He smiled and nodded like that was the right answer. “Good enough.”
And I nodded and said it back to him like it was my idea. “Good enough.”
And it was.
• 13
“tonight?” i say.
“She just got the orientation packet from the school and she needs some help deciphering it,” Joyce says, guiding a bottle into Imani’s wide-open mouth. To be so skinny, that is the eatingest baby I’ve ever seen.
“You have to go tonight?” I say, and Joyce looked at me.
“You know Aretha. The longer she sits there staring at all that stuff she can’t quite figure out, the more likely she is to figure it’s a mistake for her to be going up there in the first place.” Joyce wiped a little milk dribble off Imani’s chin and cooed at the baby. “Isn’t that right, sweet girl? Isn’t that exactly right? Besides, she can’t get over here and back at night by herself.”
“But what about Eddie?” I said.
“What about him?”
I took a breath and tried to speak gently. Imani’s eyes were already at half-mast, signaling sleep. The child can sleep anywhere. “He’s coming over to watch a movie with us tonight, remember?”
“I’m sure you can handle it.”
“That’s not the point.” I sounded petulant even to my own ears.
Joyce laid Imani over her shoulder and began to tap her back, gently encouraging a burp. “What is the point?”
“That we invited him,” I said.
“You invited him,” she said. “I wouldn’t invite anybody to see those movies. They just depress me and I’m already so depressed about angry young brothers I can hardly stand it.”
I couldn’t argue that. These doomed homeboy movies are pretty intense. Joyce saw my surrender and she couldn’t resist a parting shot as she got up to put Imani down for her nap.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I think you’re old enough to have company without a chaperone on the premises.”
“It’s not like that and you know it,” I said.
Joyce just nodded, but I heard her chuckling all the way down the hall.
By six o’clock they were headed out and I felt pretty cool about Eddie coming. All we were going to do was watch a movie and talk about it. No big deal. No stress. Eddie and I were just friends. Joyce’s chuckling was her problem, not mine.
So I kissed them both good-bye, sent regards to Aretha, watched Joyce buckle Imani into her car seat, and waved as they tooted the horn and turned out of sight. Then all of a sudden I got really nervous. It wasn’t a date or anything, but standing in the empty house, it damn sure felt like one. I felt really weird and I couldn’t figure out how to relax. Before I got here, I hadn’t realized how much I was depending on vodka to calm my ass down in moments of stress and weirdness. But since nobody here is a big drinker, I’ve cut way back and it’s been cool, except right now I keep thinking about Eddie coming over and the more I try not to think about it like a date, the more it feels like a date until I actually dash upstairs at the last possible moment, take a shower, put on perfume and a black linen sundress that always makes me feel like my cool self, and dash back down as Eddie walked up in the yard and waved. He was wearing black drawstring pants and a black T-shirt that showed the muscles in his chest and his arms.
“You look great,” he said, handing me a bunch of sweet purple grapes.
I felt that pulse between my legs again, but I ignored it, thanked him for the grapes, and made some tea while he hooked up the VCR. We settled in on the couch with a more than respectable distance between us and I cued up the video, Menace II Society. I hadn’t seen the movie for a while and I had completely forgotten the opening scene where the father suddenly pulls out a gun and blows a man away for an insult during a card game. It is a very sudden and scary and violent moment and it happens in front of the young child who grows up to be the hero. Maybe hero is the wrong word. He’s the one we get to watch as he careens full speed ahead toward the terrible, inevitable death we know he’s going to die at the end of the movie.
When that first murder happened like five minutes into the movie, I felt Eddie’s whole vibe change. We were sitting on the couch and it was like a blast of cold air came in the room. I looked over at him and his face looked like it was made of dusty brown rock. He was staring at the screen like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. I knew the double murder scene in the store was coming up, which is even more sudden, more senseless, and more random.
“I told you it was pretty bad,” I said.
He just nodded. “You got that right.”
I turned back to watch the two young black men change the course of their lives by shooting, and witnessing the shooting of, a frightened Korean grocer and his wife. Eddie’s chill had become glacial and this sure didn’t feel like a date anymore. It felt like a disaster. When the young killer proudly shows his friends the stolen security camera’s videotape of the murders, Eddie got up and turned away. I reached for the remote, clicked off the VCR, and waited.
“They’re training people to look at this for fun,” he said so quietly it was like he was talking to himself. “They’re going to make them love the shit, and once you learn to love it, it doesn’t make any difference who it is. You just love it.”
This was the first time I’d heard him curse. He heard it, too.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking at me. “I just . . . I had years around that kind of death energy. All those months in ‘Nam. All those years on the street and in the joint, nothing moving through me but death energy, and I ate it up.” He closed his eyes and took a slow breath. “I got good at it, too
.” He tried to smile at me, but I could feel him making up his mind. “This time I need to tell you something.”
“But do you want to?” I said, giving him the same out he had given me the other night.
“Yes, I do.”
“Then tell me.”
“I want to tell you why I was in the joint.”
“You don’t have to,” I said quickly, not sure if I was ready to hear it.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I want to.”
It was my turn to take a breath. “Then tell me.”
He sat down on the couch again, but on the edge of the seat, back straight, at attention. “When I came back from ‘Nam, I was crazy. I didn’t care about anything or anybody. I had seen too much, done too much. I had learned to kill people with my hands so fast they didn’t have a chance to holler. I knew how to make people give up information they never intended to tell a living soul. I was good at that. The best, they told me, because I never got anxious and killed somebody before they told me what I wanted to know. They thought I should be real proud of that.
“When I got back to Detroit, the union jobs had dried up, but there is always a place for somebody like me in the life. I was young and wild and didn’t care about killing people for somebody else’s reasons. That’s what I was trained to do. I did a lot of coke, so I could stay up for days at a time. The kind of dreams I was having, I never wanted to go to sleep if I could help it.”
Eddie stood up again and walked over to the window. “After a while I started working for some of the dealers. Collecting money. Scaring off people who wanted in without paying the dues. Taking care of people who got stupid and tried to steal the money or the drugs or the customers.” He took another breath and stood there looking toward the lake, barely visible under the thin new moon.
“Just tell me,” I said.
His hands were hanging at his sides like they didn’t belong to him. “That’s how I met Sela. She was working for a mean pimp and she thought I could help her move up to something better. She had already seen a little bit of everything, so she wasn’t scared of me and my bad dreams and she didn’t care how I made my money as long as I always had some. I hadn’t been with a woman whose name I remembered since before I went to ‘Nam and I was lonesome, I guess, so we hooked up and she moved in with me.
“She got tired of it fast, though, and started tricking again, so we broke up, but right after that I started dealing for myself and making a lot of money, so she came back, but it still wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to be right. It was just something we were doing until we could think of something else to do. When she moved in with the guy who was supplying me, I didn’t give a damn.
“Then one day, I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, she called and asked if she could come over. Said she missed me and just wanted to say hello.”
He shook his head, clenched and unclenched his fists slowly. I had said tell me, but now I wasn’t sure if I was ready to hear it, whatever it was. He had said death energy, and I swear, I could feel it in the room.
“So she came over and started hugging me and asking me did I have any coke around since her old man didn’t have anything coming through and she sure wanted to get high. That was music to my ears. I’d been hoarding big drugs for this drought, waiting for it. I intended to sell what I had for top dollar and move on. I didn’t know where, but I figured if I brought out the coke I had now when people were crazy for it, I could buy myself a little time to figure things out. Now, without meaning to, Sela was letting me know this was the time for me to make my move.
“That’s how stupid I was. I thought she just wanted to get high with me for old times’ sake, so I let her see me take out the stuff from where I had it stashed and we did some of it together and then some more. We were flying . . . Then, all of a sudden, her old man busted up in my place and put a big gun in my face and told me I didn’t work for him anymore. He asked her where the coke was and she hopped off my lap and went over to my stash and gave it all to him like I wasn’t even there.
“He handed her the gun and dipped his finger in to test it, but she was too greedy and when I saw her look away from me toward what she really wanted, I knocked the gun out of her hand and ripped his throat open before it hit the floor.”
I closed my eyes. My mind was saying don’t tell me/don’t tell me/don’t tell me so loud I thought he must hear it, but he didn’t hear anything. He was back there in that room, fighting for his life.
“He dropped the bag of coke all over the floor and when I looked at Sela, she fell down and started pushing her face all up in it, trying to get as much into her nose as she could because she’d been on the street as long as I had and she knew the penalty for turning. She kept saying, just let me get high first, baby, just let me get high first.
“So I did.”
• 14
when Joyce got back, I was still sitting on the couch in the dark and Eddie had gone home. I tried to get him to stay, but he wouldn’t. I don’t even remember what all I said. I think I told him I was glad he had told me and then I got all hung up on apologizing for using the word glad because it seemed so wrong after what he had just said. Glad wasn’t in it.
Then we just looked at each other for a minute and I opened my mouth to say I understood, but I didn’t. Then I thought I’d say I was sorry, but for what? Or it doesn’t matter, but of course, it mattered. People died. But he’d paid his debt to society, hadn’t he? He’d learned his lesson and turned his life around and become a good neighbor and a good friend and a good man, hadn’t he? Didn’t people have a right to change, to grow, to get better?
All that was going through my head and I kept opening my mouth and closing it like a fish flopping on the dock, trying to catch a breath, until he said he thought he’d better go, thanked me, for what, I can’t imagine, and walked out through the back door and was gone.
Joyce didn’t even see me until she came in to turn on the lamp. Imani was sleeping against her shoulder and when Joyce saw me and jumped, Imani jumped, too, without waking up.
“What are you doing?” Joyce said. “Are you okay?”
“Eddie told me what he did,” I said.
“He told you everything?”
I had a sinking feeling. What a terrible thought. What if there was more?
“Sela?” Joyce said, and I felt a flood of relief.
“Yes. Everything.”
She sat down beside me.
“Pretty scary stuff,” I said, earning myself the prize for best understatement of the week.
Joyce nodded, rubbing Imani’s back slowly in one of those comforting-to-the-bone mother moves that you are too young to appreciate when you get them, and too old to ask for when you need them. “He was living a terrible life and he did some terrible things, but he’s not that person anymore. I’d trust him with my life. With all of our lives.”
“He killed a woman!”
“He killed a man, too.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Listen, little sister,” Joyce said, shifting Imani to a more comfortable position and sighing like she couldn’t understand what was the problem. “Ain’t none of us sixteen years old anymore. We’ve done some good stuff and some bad stuff, but it’s all our stuff at this point. I figure the best we can do for each other is try to understand and move on the best we can.”
“I never killed anybody, Joyce.”
“That makes you perfect?”
I hesitated. She had me there. “You know, if I wanted to be driven crazy by a bunch of complicated Negroes, I could have stayed in Atlanta,” I said.
“You were crazy when you got here,” Joyce said.
“So what am I supposed to do now?”
“About what?”
“About Eddie!”
“Why do you have to do anything about Eddie?” Joyce arched her eyebrows at me to announce a trick question, but I heard it, too, and I arched my eyebrow right back.
“I don’t.”
“Then don’t.” Joyce shrugged, and then grinned at me. “Guess what.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a joke to tell you, but don’t laugh out loud because you’ll wake up Imani.”
I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. What was wrong with Joyce? A bad joke was hardly what I had on my mind.
“Ready?”
“Joyce, I don’t—”
“Come on, now! Indulge me. Here goes . . . Why won’t southern Baptists have sex standing up?”
“I don’t know,” I said, remembering all those Southern Baptist Conventions in Atlanta when downtown would fill up with grim-faced Christians notorious for their bad driving and worse tipping. “Why?”
“Because somebody might think they’re dancing.”
We looked at each other and started giggling like maniacs. Imani slept on, blissfully unaware of me and Joyce snickering our way into hysteria.
“You win,” I said, gasping. “That was pretty funny. I’m amazed.”
“Horizontal bop,” Joyce said.
That set off another round of giggling until we were both wiping our eyes.
“Now,” Joyce said, composing herself after we’d finally laughed ourselves silly. “What are you going to do about Eddie?”
“You told me I didn’t have to do anything!”
“I lied,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You were right. I’m only going to be here for the summer. There’s no reason to complicate things.”
Joyce laughed so loud at that, Imani did wake up with a start. Her little tiny fingers grabbed Joyce’s shirt and her eyes were huge.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Joyce crooned, immediately maternal. “Auntie Ava is trippin’ again, as the young folks say. Come on, darlin’. Let’s put you to bed.”
She stood up and Imani’s eyelids drooped and closed.
“Why am I trippin’?” I said.
