by Mary Monroe
“You told me I could stay here for a while.”
“And I meant it.”
“I’ll be paying my way, so you don’t have to worry about me freeloading off you,” I assured him. He took my hand and guided me to the couch. We sat down, and I set the pillowcase next to me. “I’ll keep your house clean, cook, do all the washing and ironing, and anything else you want.”
Milton’s response brung it home to me. “Baby, if you want to do all that, it’s fine with me. As long as you happy, that’s all I care about.” And then he kissed me.
* * *
Around 4:00 p.m., somebody stomped up on the porch and pounded on the front door. “Yvonne! Yvonne! Uh, Yvonne! I know you in there!”
It was Lester. My heart almost stopped. Not because I was scared, but because I was mad.
Milton zoomed out of the kitchen, where we’d been fixing supper, and flung open the door. “What the hell do you want, man?” he boomed.
“Where Yvonne at?” Lester yelled.
I shot into the living room like a bullet, still holding the three-legged skillet I had just greased to bake some corn bread. “What do you want, butt breath?” I taunted.
Lester rushed up to me and got so close in my face, his foul breath made me cough. “Give me back my money, bitch!”
“What money?”
“You know what money!”
“I don’t know what you talking about.”
“You took every dime I had to my name, and I ain’t leaving here until I get it back!”
“Lester, I ain’t got your money,” I said calmly. I sniffed and turned to Milton. “Please make this fool leave.”
“All right, fool. You heard the lady.” Milton waved him toward the door. His tone was as calm as mine. “Now start stepping.”
I could see that Lester was twice as mad now. His nose and both jaws was twitching. So much blood had drained from his face, he looked almost as pale as a ghost. “I ain’t going no place!” he screamed.
Before I realized what was happening, his hands was wrapped around my throat. But he didn’t have time to do no damage. Milton lunged at him, and in a flash, he was on him like white on rice. He socked him in his face, and that made him turn my neck loose.
“What the hell—” Before Lester could finish his sentence, Milton punched him in the stomach, and he fell flat on his back.
The next thing I knew, Milton dropped down and straddled Lester. Then he pulled a switchblade out of nowhere and held it right above Lester’s crotch. “If you don’t want to leave here with your balls in your hand, you better get the hell up out of my house,” Milton warned. He stood up, with the knife still opened.
Lester was still sprawled on the floor, with his hands up in the air. I had never seen a man look as scared as he did. “All right, man. Let me up,” he begged, with snot oozing from his nose and blood trickling from his lips. He stood up, wobbling like a three-legged chair. “Maybe I misplaced my money.”
“Or maybe that hussy you dissed Yvonne for took it!” Milton suggested. “I don’t want to see your high-yellow punk ass on my property again. Next time I might forget I’m a Christian!”
Lester scrunched up his face and started backing toward the door. “All right! You can have this useless heifer. She can’t cook or fuck worth a damn. That’s why I had to get myself a real woman. I just kept this raggedy bitch around because I felt sorry for her!”
I went up to Lester and punched him so hard in his crotch with my fist that he howled so loud, he almost busted my eardrums. When he hit the floor this time, I bounced that skillet off the side of his face. It left a gash that looked like a third eye. Me and Milton stood over Lester as he moaned and groaned and wiggled like a worm. He got up again and staggered out the door, holding his crotch and screaming about how sorry I was going to be.
“I guess we showed him.” Milton slammed the door shut and locked it. When he looked at me, we busted out laughing at the same time. He closed his knife and put it in his hip pocket. “You ain’t got to worry about him or nobody else bothering you so long as you with me.”
For the first time in my life, I felt like I meant something special to a man.
Milton reared back on his legs and gave me a curious look. “Tell me this, how did you end up with such a jackass?”
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Well, he ain’t always been a jackass. He used to be sweet as pie and as meek as a lamb. He would take me on picnics once or twice a month and surprise me with gifts whenever I had the blues. When he borrowed a car and took me to Tuscaloosa to meet his mama the year before I went to jail, I was convinced that he was the man for me.”
“What convinced you?”
“His mama. I liked her right off the bat. She was a lot like my mama was. I thought if I got close to her, I wouldn’t miss my mama so much. A month later, Lester was in a bad car wreck that caused a little brain damage. That’s the reason he started being mean to me sometime. I overlooked it because of all the good times I’d had with him in the past.”
“What about your friend girl?”
I had to cough to clear the bile rising in my throat. “Other than being a two-faced slut, she ain’t got no excuse for what she done,” I growled.
“If she got her own place, I wonder why Lester didn’t go there to lay up with her.”
“Katy got a lot of men friends knocking on her door all hours of the day and night. Since Lester thought I’d be gone for a while, they probably thought it would be more private and safer to get it on in his place.”
“Damn! If he wanted to be with her, why did he have you staying with him in the first place?”
“That’s something you’d have to ask him, because I don’t know. Maybe he felt sorry for me because I didn’t have no place else to go when I got out of prison. I don’t want no man feeling sorry for me. I want one that will treat me good, show me some respect, and never let me down . . .”
“You got one now.”
I thought I’d melt into the floor when he kissed my hand. I felt like one of them girls in the fairy-tale books. “Okay,” I giggled.
For supper, we ate the rest of the smothered possum and greens Milton had cooked the day before with the corn bread and rice pudding I made. I walked around the rest of the day with my chest puffed out.
* * *
The anger I felt toward Lester and Katy had eased up. But on Sunday it came back with a vengeance, and I got mad all over again. I had made Lester suffer, but I still had to get back at Katy. She made herself scarce the next few days, so I couldn’t catch her on the street and give her the ass whupping she deserved. By now I didn’t even care if she called the police on me if I beat her up. No matter what happened, I knew Milton would be there for me.
Katy cleaned rooms at a motel in the next county, seven or eight miles away. The only way she could get to and from work was to ride the bicycle she had made a lot of sacrifices to buy. She treated it like it was the most important thing in her life. There was a yellow ribbon tied to one end of the handlebars, and a gold ribbon on the other. Her name had been printed on the seat in red paint. That cute contraption was mine now, and I had plans for it.
The following Saturday night, around 7:00 p.m., when Milton left the house to go play cards with some of his friends, I decided to make my move against Katy.
I found a cap in Milton’s bedroom dresser drawer and tucked my hair up under it. Then I put on a dark blouse and the only pair of britches I’d brung with me. It wasn’t too dark outside yet, so I didn’t take no flashlight or coal-oil lamp with me.
The lights was on at Lester’s house, but not at Katy’s. If she wasn’t out with another man or her friend girl from work, I assumed she was with him. She’d come to his house around this time almost every night after I got home from prison, to listen to the radio with us. Just to be sure she hadn’t changed her routine, I tiptoed up on his porch and put my ear to the door. I was right. They was inside whooping it up and singing along wit
h some honky-tonk singer on the radio like they didn’t have a care in the world.
I walked to the end of the road first. Then I went behind the houses on Katy’s side of the road and trotted up to her back door. I had brung a butter knife with me to pick her lock, but I didn’t need to use it, because she’d left that door unlocked. Just as I was fixing to grab the bike from the corner in her living room, my bowels signaled me that they had a itching to move. Katy had a inside toilet, but I wanted to let nature take its course in a more fitting location. Because of what she had done, I decided her bed was the best place to do my business. What made it so enjoyable was the new white bedspread I had gave her for her birthday three days ago. I wiped myself off with a pink headscarf I found in her dresser drawer, the same one she wore around her neck when she went to church.
I tried to imagine the horrified expression on Katy’s face when she seen my stinky calling card smack-dab in the middle of her bed. I wondered how she would feel the next time she wallowed in that bed with another man. Even if she suspected I was the culprit, she couldn’t prove it. One thing I liked about the folks in this part of town was that if they seen somebody breaking into a house—unless it was their own—they didn’t interfere or blab.
With part of my deed done, I felt better. Now I had to take care of the mission I had come to do in the first place. It took less than a minute to grab the bike and roll it out the same door I had come through.
Once I made it to the end of the block, I got on the bike and pedaled toward Tyler’s Swamp, a mile and a half away. When I got there, I stood on the bank and flung that sucker into the snake-infested water.
CHAPTER 5
MILTON
I WAS A CRIMINAL AND HAD NEVER HAD A PROBLEM ADMITTING IT. I had never been married, but I was ready to settle down. As a Christian, I had a right to have a wife. I wanted to tuck her away in a nice house, treat her like a queen, and eventually have enough money so I wouldn’t have to bust into other folks’ homes and take their property. That was easier said than done, though.
I had been in love and shacked up with a few other women, but nary one had been the kind of woman I wanted to marry. I was very anxious to get to know Yvonne better, and it seemed like she felt the same way about me.
I had asked her if she wanted to go with me to the card game tonight, but she wanted to stay home. “I’d rather iron them clothes of yours in that basket sitting on your bedroom floor,” she’d said. Had I stumbled into the kind of woman that was God’s gift to men? I wondered. I was so impressed, I doubled the points I’d already gave her.
I wished I had stayed home myself. The card game turned out to be a bust. I didn’t know why, but no matter how often I played, I usually lost. But that didn’t matter. Gambling was fun, and I enjoyed it.
When I got back to my house a few minutes after 11:00 p.m., minus almost every dime I’d left home with, Yvonne was sitting on my front-porch bannister. August was the hottest month in the whole year. But after the sun went down, it could get right chilly. She was shivering when I walked up.
“How long you been sitting out here?” I asked.
“I decided to take a walk before I did the ironing, and forgot to leave the door unlocked.”
“Let’s go inside.” I put my arm around her shoulder and led her into the house. We plopped down on the couch and hugged until I reared back and looked at her face. Being so light skinned, her nose was red, and so was her eyes. They was also a little puffy. I didn’t know if it was because she’d been sitting in the night air so long or because she’d been crying. If she’d been crying because she was missing that asshole she’d left, that could ruin the plans I had in store for her. I was going to do everything I could to make her want to stay with me. “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t never want to do nothing to make things harder on you.”
“Milton, what I’m going through ain’t your fault, so you ain’t got nothing to be sorry about.”
“I know that, sugar. But I don’t like you sitting out there in the dark by yourself. There is a lot of randy men out here just laying for a woman to get their hands on.”
“I can take care of myself,” she insisted.
“I know you can. I seen you do it. I almost felt sorry for Lester when you batted his face with that skillet.” I laughed. I cleared my throat and got serious again. “But you ain’t always going to be that lucky. I’ll get a key made for you as soon as I can, so you won’t never have to sit outside waiting on me again. Want me to get you a blade to keep in your brassiere in case somebody else mess with you?”
“No, don’t do that. I don’t want nothing to do with no knife. That’s a little too extreme for me.”
“What about some lye?” The kind of lye I was talking about was a harsh solution that some folks used to unclog pipes and kill pests, like roaches and boll weevils. Women that dabbled in hoodoo or was just plain mean put some in old pill bottles and carried them in their brassieres. They used it to splash on their enemies. Enough could burn a person’s skin off down to the bone.
“Thanks, Milton. But I don’t want none of that kind of lye. There is enough disfigured colored folks in Branson already. And once you give me a key, you ain’t got to worry about me stealing nothing and taking off while you gone.”
“Yvonne, anything I got you can have, so you ain’t never got to steal nothing from me.”
* * *
That night in bed, after we’d made love, Yvonne sat up and poked my side. I sat up, too.
“Milton, I hope you never have to use that knife because of me.”
“That’s a odd thing for you to say at a time like this,” I teased.
“If you cut somebody, you’ll go to jail. And there would be no telling when I’d see you again.”
“Well, as long as nobody bothers me or you, I ain’t got no reason to use my knife.”
“I’m worried about Lester coming back.”
“Why? He ain’t got no reason to come over here again unless he want another whupping.”
“Well, I don’t think he believed me when I said I didn’t take his money.”
I was sure enough curious now. “You said you didn’t . . .”
Yvonne cocked her head to the side and blinked at me. “Milton, don’t be naïve. I’m a thief.”
“Oh.” I waited for her to go on.
“You know I took his money.”
I tried to act surprised, but I wasn’t. I’d known from the get-go that she had stole Lester’s money. That wasn’t none of my business. But it was good to know she hadn’t come to me empty-handed. “How much money we talking about, sugar?”
“Almost three hundred and fifty dollars. He been saving for years to buy a car. He always kept his cash in a sock in a drawer and was stupid enough to let me know,” she said with a smirk. “I got it all, and it’s still in that same dingy sock.”
I gazed at Yvonne in awe. She had a smug look on her face. “That’s big money for such a little bitty woman,” I commented.
“I know.” She suddenly got as giddy as a fox in a henhouse. “Guess what else I done?” She didn’t give me time to guess. “I got back at Katy while you was at that card game.”
“Oh? Did you steal something from her, too?”
She bobbed her head like a rooster. “Yup. While she was whooping it up with Lester in his living room, I broke into her house and took her bike.”
I gave Yvonne a concerned look. “How did you get in? Picked the lock?”
“I didn’t need to. She’d left her back door unlocked. But I had a butter knife to jimmy it if I had to. See, when I lived with my aunt and uncle, I was all the time losing my key. My uncle taught me how to pick a lock with a bobby pin or a butter knife.”
I scratched my chin and gave Yvonne another concerned look. “Taking somebody’s property is one thing, but you don’t rub it in their face. When Katy see you riding her bike, you going to have a mess on your hands. Where is it now? I know folks over in Lexington I could sell it to or trade it fo
r a different one.”
“Pffft! I didn’t take it to ride around on. I took it to the swamp and dumped it in. Now she won’t be able to get to work, and she’ll lose her job.”
“Oh well. She and Lester had it coming.” I laughed, but only for a few seconds. There was something more serious I needed to bring up. “Um . . . with that much cash, you could move into a nice house on the upper south side, where all the classy colored folks live. Is that what you going to do?” I held my breath and prayed in my head that she’d say what I wanted to hear.
“Yeah, but when I do move, I hope you’ll be moving with me.” She stared into my eyes and rubbed the side of my arm. “You told me you wanted to move to a better neighborhood when you could afford to. How much do you need to do that?”
What she’d just said had me busting at the seams, but I didn’t want to let her know that. I thought that if I seemed too eager, it might spook her and make her think twice about taking me with her if she moved. “I got a few bucks saved up. With that and your stash, we got enough to rent a house on the upper south side. The only thing is, there ain’t nothing available over there right now. I been checking every other week for the past four months. Why don’t we set the money aside for now? When a house come up for rent, we’ll look into it.”
“Okay. Now let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow night we’ll go out and have a few drinks to celebrate our future.”
* * *
Right away we started spending more time socializing with the local bootleggers so we could pick up some pointers about the business. We learned a lot from Delroy Crutchfield because he had been in the game longer than anybody we knew. By the middle of October, we knew enough to be on our own. It was a struggle to get the drinkers to take us serious. But getting into the swing of things and learning the ropes was fun.
It wasn’t long before me and Yvonne was ready to make a permanent commitment to each other. We became man and wife in Delroy’s living room the last Saturday night in the month, in front of a dozen drunks. One was the preacher that married us.
