A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “Come on over here,” he said. “Let me see you.”

  She inched a little bit closer but stopped midway at the computer desk and leaned over to check her email.

  He told himself to calm down. He had waited this long, he could go a few minutes longer.

  “What?” he said, her back to him. “You nervous?”

  She giggled, then turned around, twirling the ends of her long black hair. He looked at her, really looked at her, the smooth chestnut skin, the straight white teeth, the big lips. He’d like to get those lips around his—

  “No, I’m not nervous,” she said. She had such a sweet voice. Alicia’s, on the other hand, was so low she got mistaken for a man on the telephone sometimes. Alicia carried herself like a grown woman was the thing, and her voice was just a part of that.

  “Come over here,” he repeated, stretching out his long thin fingers.

  She came but with reluctance and sat on the bed beside him, not on his lap where he had wanted her.

  “Let’s just talk for a little bit,” she said.

  “We been talking though,” T.C. said. If it had been any other day, he would have bit his tongue, but the truth was all they had done was talk. He called her more than he called his own MawMaw, and more times than not she would answer. Sometimes when they’d run the distance of their normal topics, her classes at UNO, how they would touch each other when the time came, she would just sit on the phone and breathe. That had been plenty for him then, but now—

  “What you wanna talk about?” he asked, sighing.

  “I don’t know. How was your day?”

  He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “How was my day? You know I just got home from jail, right?”

  She nodded.

  “You know that then? So my day was nothing. I woke up, ate breakfast, stood up for roll call, I got processed out, now I’m here with you.”

  “You glad to see me then?” She smiled. She was teasing him now, seeming more comfortable.

  “Hell, yeah, I’m glad to see you.”

  She started tracing her fingers along his chest. He wanted more than anything to move her hand down, but he restrained himself.

  “Tell me again how glad you are to see me,” she said.

  He felt himself relax inside. This was the girl he knew, the girl who’d let him sneak his hand inside her jeans but wouldn’t let him see what he was feeling. From what she’d been saying on the phone though, she was ready for the real thing.

  She got on her knees and straddled him. It was on now. He pulled her down, closer to him, kissing her, his hands fumbling with her clothes in an awkward fever. It wasn’t his style. Alicia used to tell him that he made love like a woman. He didn’t like to hear it that way, but he knew what she meant, that he took his time, that he used his mouth, that he treated her body like it was holy ground, but this was a different story and one he would have to make up for later.

  He flipped her on her back and climbed on top. He was startled by how slender her waist was, her titties round as buttermilk drops from McKenzie’s before they closed down. He put them in his mouth one by one, alternating back and forth, feeling finally as if he was at home in his body, as if God had put her here with him now as an apology, and He was forgiven, for the half-crazy mother, the runaway father, the learning disability, the deferred basketball dreams. Sometimes in his early-morning thoughts he believed that God was condoning his drug activity. Where else would such pure inspiration have come from, the carefully laid-out plans? And he’d become angry with his Maker when he was caught, as if he’d been betrayed by the true author of the crime, but now all was forgiven. In this world, even if he hadn’t come in as a completed man, he had been made one now.

  “My turn,” she said, and she eased her face down, down, down. His dick was throbbing now with the weight of the urge inside him. Ordinarily this was his favorite part, but there was something about this girl’s titties that wouldn’t let him go, that seemed to contain the whole of existence inside them, and if he could just stay connected—

  She didn’t have to pick his dick up to slide it in her mouth, it was already upright. She wrapped her big lips around it and bobbed her head up and down, up and down. She had done this before. He didn’t have many more bobs left in him. After that, he would put his mouth between her legs. That wasn’t his thang. He didn’t love the smell of pussy and it seemed to always be there, lurking, no matter how clean the girl was, but she was earning it right now. She was giving him life and any minute a fraction of that very force was going to burst inside her.

  He was so enshrined in the world of her bedroom he didn’t hear the knocks, and it wasn’t until Bon Bon yanked her mouth from him that he realized they had been sounding for some time. It must have been her goddamn mama, but Bon Bon would know what to shout to send her off, and in a minute they could get back to business.

  Sure enough, Bon Bon yelled through the door, “Not now,” but she darted around the room for her clothes too, sliding into her panties and some shorts. Before she could slip her top over her head, the door burst open and a man as big as T.C. was tall busted in. T.C. froze; he was still acclimating to the knocks let alone this new disruption, and he didn’t know enough to search for his boxers, pull them over his dick, which was straight as an arrow despite everything.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” the man shouted. He reached over to her desk and slammed her computer off it. T.C. heard it land with a crack. Then the man walked over to her drawers, pulled the top one out, turned it over, and emptied her socks, panties, and bras onto the floor. A receipt floated out too, drifted to the carpet. T.C. eyed it; whatever it had been for cost only $13.10, but for some reason Bon Bon had kept it.

  Finally T.C. snapped back to attention, repeating the man almost verbatim. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Bon Bon didn’t say anything. She had managed to slide her shirt on. She tossed T.C. his pants, and he stepped into them, his eyes on the maniac in front of him, whose green eyes lit up as if they were electric.

  “It’s not what it looks like, baby,” Bon Bon said, but T.C. wasn’t sure which one of them she was talking to. He had decided once he got his clothes on, he was going to bolt for the door. Tiger would have just made it back to the Ninth Ward, but this was an emergency. This mothafucka was crazy, there was no doubt about that, and Bon Bon, just watching him ransack the place as if he came over every Saturday to throw her shit around, must have been nuts too.

  He was pulling on his shirt when the man got in his face. Bon Bon stepped in then, trying to protect him, but she was 110 pounds soaking wet, and when the man pushed her out of his way, she fell onto the bed in a soft thud. There was nothing between them now, and T.C. couldn’t do anything but back up when the man pushed closer. Before he knew it, he was cornered against a wall between the bed and the dresser; there was nowhere else to go.

  “Look, man,” T.C. said. “I didn’t know nothin’ about you. I thought she was free, we wasn’t dating or nothin’ like that, it wasn’t nothin’ serious. Let’s just put it behind us.” He had never been in this situation before, but because he was always the peacemaker among his friends, because he didn’t love this girl, and because the comfort of his own bed beckoned to him, his words streamed out like gravy on a plate of rice.

  The man didn’t budge. It wasn’t that T.C. was scared to fight, but he was tired. He’d had to become someone he wasn’t the first few weeks of jail. You would think his height would have been a deterrent, but men made knives out of metal scraps from the ceiling, hid them in their boots in the Orleans Parish Prison, pulled them out if you so much as stepped in front of them in line. He would never lose the scar that stretched like a Y alongside his belly, and that was enough. The idea of bustin’ this nigga’s head open, which he was sure he could do, was like asking a man who had just finished a marathon to climb Mt. Everest. No, if he wasn’t going to bu
st a nut, he needed to excuse himself and call Tiger. Maybe he should have gone home in the first place, to see if his mama made him a welcome-home meal.

  T.C. repeated himself. “I told you, wasn’t nothin’ going on between me and her,” but the man still didn’t move.

  “Nothing, Bakari, I swear, nothing,” Bon Bon added, in her squeaky little-girl voice.

  “Look, I promise you, you don’t want none of this,” T.C. said, his voice more solid this time. “I will crush you,” he added when the man still hadn’t backed up. “I will crush you,” he repeated, his voice like stone.

  The man pushed him now. T.C. didn’t fall, but to his surprise, he staggered a bit. He began to wonder if the accumulation of his day—watching his hopes dashed, being on the other side of jail and still running into it—had taken something vital out of him. The man pushed him again, harder this time, and in the seconds it took him to regain his footing, the man pulled out a knife. Bon Bon had been trying to mediate from the sidelines still, but when she saw the knife, she stopped talking and started screaming.

  T.C. looked at her instead of the knife itself. The adrenaline he’d experienced during altercations in jail, that force of survival, seemed to drain out of him now, and he didn’t know if he was going to be able to get the knife out of the man’s hands without slicing himself up, maybe somewhere you couldn’t simply bandage up again.

  He looked into the man’s face. Where had he seen him before? Of course everybody in New Orleans was light bright and damn near white, but this man had red hair too, and those eyes—he recognized him from somewhere, even if it was just a picture. He was certain of that now.

  Then the man waved the knife under T.C.’s chin, and he would have swiped him if T.C. had snapped his head out of the way a second later. T.C. looked up at the window behind him. He could try to climb up, but the man could cut his legs while he figured out the lock. He turned back to Bon Bon, begging her for help with his eyes the way he had been begging her a few minutes earlier for a different matter, but she was just as paralyzed as he was, her screams like sirens from that night four months back when he had been only a mile from home, and the door to his world had come crashing in. T.C. looked back at the knife and heard the click of a burner cocking across from him. They all turned to the doorway. Bon Bon’s mama was there, pointing a Glock 19 in the air with both hands.

  “I’ll blow both y’all motherfuckers’ heads off if you don’t listen up,” she said. “I tried to raise Bay Bay right,” she went on. “I guess it wasn’t enough, but I did what I could. Now I’m going to give you one minute to get your shit and get the fuck out of my house.”

  The man slipped the knife in his pocket and sprinted out of the bedroom door. T.C. wasn’t cornered anymore, but he stayed where he was. What was he going to do? If he ran out now, he would just get sliced in the street, maybe more brutally because there was no mama to defend him. He looked at Bon Bon again. She was crying this time.

  “Mama,” she said in a soft, shaking voice. “It wasn’t T. It was Bakari. You know how he is.”

  “All I know is I won’t have that in my house,” her mama said, looking as if she were mad enough to turn the burner on her own daughter. She was still aiming at T.C. though. Bon Bon got up and pushed her arm down. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay,” she repeated.

  But her mama was shaking her head. “It’s not this kind of house. I won’t have people thinking I’m running that kind of house.” They were both crying now.

  “Nobody thinks that, Mama. It was just a silly argument. Everybody has these silly arguments.”

  “No, they goddamn don’t.” The mama’s hands were shaking and T.C. thought the burner might fall on the floor and go off.

  “And not goddamn here.” She turned to T.C. still shaking her head. “Now I know that nigga is out there waiting for you. You can stay for a few minutes, long enough for him to leave or for you to get your lil’ skinny ass a ride. It’s one o’clock. I’m gon’ go in my room and watch my stories. If you still here when I’m done, I’m gon’ call my husband. He got a permit for this gun, and he know how to use it, and I swear to God if you here when he get back, you gon’ wish that man out there had sliced your dick clean off.”

  “Mama,” the girl shouted.

  “Don’t you ‘mama’ me.” The woman wobbled toward the door, the hem of her muumuu trailing behind her. “With your fast ass.”

  Bon Bon closed the door.

  “What the fuck?” T.C. said, not as loud as he wanted to; he was still mindful of Mama Muumuu in the next room.

  “I’m so sorry.” Bon Bon was all over him once the door closed, petting him and kissing his face. “I didn’t know he was coming.”

  “I guess you didn’t,” T.C. said. “And get offa me with all that.” He shrugged her off of him, and she slid to the side of the bed.

  She started crying again. “Don’t do me like that,” she whimpered. “I waited for you.”

  “You couldn’t have waited that long, you got the green-eyed monster coming in here like he had some claim to you.”

  “No, baby, you don’t get it. I haven’t been with that nigga since back in the G, and even then that was just my lil’ trade, but he’s crazy. He won’t leave me alone. He shows up every few months; I thought it was done ’cause I hadn’t seen him in a while, but here he is. He’s crazy, you gotta believe me, I waited for you.” She edged closer to T.C. as she talked, rubbing his chest. “I waited for you,” she repeated. By the time she was finished, she had wrapped her arms around his stomach.

  “He always threatens me, but it ain’t never got that ugly before.” She leaned her head against his chest.

  “What kind of threats he make?” T.C. asked.

  “That if he sees me with another man, he’s going to kill me, that kind of stuff.” She was whispering in his ear. His dick was getting hard again.

  “I wouldn’t let that happen. I’m tired today, from everything, but if he came over here again like that, I would take care of him, you know I would,” T.C. said.

  “I know you would, T.C., that’s what I love about you.”

  She was straddling him again now. He let her. What the hell. Mama Muumuu was in the next room with The Bold and the Beautiful. He could hear the theme song as he slid inside her daughter. It wasn’t anything like what he’d imagined all those months, not with the terror of the past fifteen minutes hanging over him. No, it was more a physical release than an emotional satisfaction, but he would take it.

  He didn’t last long, and he rolled over as soon as he was done. The mother’s show was coming off, he could hear the song again. Bon Bon was laid out beside him, snoring; maybe he was better than he gave himself credit for. He dialed up his boy Tiger.

  “Already, my nigga?”

  “Yeah, and hurry up too. I gotta story for you.”

  When the horn sounded twenty minutes later, T.C. opened the front door, glanced in both directions, and ran out like suicides at basketball practice. He jumped in the car, and Tiger sped off.

  T.C.’s mama hadn’t made a welcome-home dinner nor was she in such a welcome-home mood. The block looked good though. It had been only four months, but Miss Patricia had finally finished her house, gotten rid of that FEMA trailer that hugged the brown grass beneath it. New Orleans East wasn’t Uptown, but it was coming back together. Most of the brick houses of his childhood had been gutted and restored. Yeah, some off in the distance still had windows boarded up, roofs torn down. T.C. had to squint to see them though.

  His mama gave him a hug—one long tight squeeze—reached up to the side of his head, and cupped his ear in her hand the way she used to.

  She was on beer number two, and she sat back down to tend to it. Unfolded laundry covered the rest of the couch and potato chip crumbs ground into the carpet at her feet. T.C. sat on the edge of a table crowded with stacks of coupons and unopen
ed bills. He hadn’t been into the kitchen behind him yet, but he could smell the dirty dishes no doubt lining the sink. Alicia used to tell him that he had OCD, he was so anal about organizing drawers and making up beds, but for most of his life, his room at the end of the hallway had been the only one he could keep clean.

  “I thought you had another two weeks,” his mama said.

  “Overpopulation,” he said. “They wanted to make room for the real criminals, Ma.” He laughed, a short grunt. She didn’t join him.

  “Hmph. I woulda picked you up.” Her taped stories were on pause, but she was still staring at the screen stuffing cheese puffs in her mouth, the orange powder shining on the tips of her fingers.

  “It’s all right, Ma, Tiger got me,” he said.

  She opened her mouth to respond to that but shut it before any words came out. T.C. knew she still blamed Tiger for his selling drugs in the first place.

  “You know I would have,” she repeated, turning to look in his eyes for the first time. “It’s not like I’m still teaching.” She had taught art education at Schaumburg Elementary for fifteen years, but after the storm the state took over the school districts, fired 4,500 teachers; his mama just happened to be one of them.

  He decided to change the subject. “I saw Miss Patricia finally got out the FEMA trailer,” he said. “It looks good.”

  “Umhmm. And she finally got that extra room in the back she wanted. Pool table and everything.”

  “I didn’t know she played pool.”

  “She don’t.”

  T.C. and his mama had spent three years in a trailer themselves. Most of the block had. Most people didn’t have the money to rebuild outright. The Road Home program was supposed to pay the costs, but the government used the prestorm value of the house to calculate aid. For T.C. and his neighbors, out there in the East where there was no central plaza, no fancy restaurants and no whites, that money came out to much less than it would cost to repair.