“Buy time on every radio station in town.”
“Ouch, not so rough.”
“Go on the air and announce you are an illegitimate bastard with no notion of paternal lineage. Hell, say the whore gave virgin birth if you want, just put a stop to rumors of my involvement.”
“I haven’t heard any rumors of your involvement.”
“I’m faced with snickering at the club. Even my wife has started to doubt my innocence.”
Skip’s wife switched her attention from the head to the ball sac.
“You should have thought of that thirty-four years ago.”
“Last warning, hear. Tomorrow, your name is mud.”
After Skip hung up I couldn’t lift my head and release the phone for fear of cold-cocking Katrina. I simply hung there with a twisted neck while she mangled my privates.
When Katrina came up for air, she asked, “What’d Skipper want?”
“The usual.”
“Let’s trade places.”
That’s when Gus walked in.
“You got that nice Gilia girl fooled into thinking you’re all right. Why you want to go sticking your pork where it don’t belong?”
Gus was baking pumpkin pies—dozens of pumpkin pies. She’d taken one look at me spread-eagle on the wall and marched straight into the kitchen where she banged pans together until Katrina gathered up her pom-poms and went home.
I stuck my finger into a cooling pie. Gus swatted at me. “That’s not for you.”
“Twenty-five pies and I don’t get a bite?”
“You don’t deserve a bite. Get out of my way.”
“She asked me to do it.”
All my women can be fierce when they decide I’m stupid, but Gus can look bigger and meaner than any of them. “Ever’ time a woman ask you to do something, you have to do it?”
“I can’t very well say no.”
“What you can’t do is pork any woman that lets you pork her.”
“Why not?”
“God
Throughout adulthood, I have been promiscuous as hell when I’m single and monogamous as hell when I’m not single. No exceptions; no compromises. Should Gilia and I ever formalize the connection, I would be true and blue for however long we stuck together, right up to death do us part. But in the meantime, according to my take on right and wrong, it was perfectly fair to relax with Katrina. I was in the right.
Of course, this nifty rationale blew to smithereens at the thought of Gus telling Gilia what Katrina and I had done on the climbing wall.
“What’d you come back so soon for?” I asked. “I thought you were gone for the afternoon.”
Gus straightened. “I got home and found your letter in my apron. Figured you better read it.”
“Someone sent me a letter?”
“Black woman. A black woman writes a letter it must be important. Black woman isn’t going to send you chitchat.”
“You opened my letter?”
“’Course not. I’ve got morals, unlike others in this room.”
What I needed was coffee. Unfinished blow jobs always make me crave coffee. For some reason I can’t explain, I’ve had a number of unfinished blow jobs in my life. It’s like the women get down there and start making lists of places they’d rather be.
“You need these grounds, Gus? I want to make a new pot.”
“Don’t you go throwing out my grounds.”
“That’s why I asked. I never throw out old coffee grounds without permission.” I spread a
“So, if you didn’t open my letter, how do you know it’s from a black woman?”
Gus went into her apron pocket and sailed the letter across the room. “Handwriting’s a black woman’s.”
The address was in blue ink—large letters with big loops and carefully dotted
“You can tell a person’s race and gender by their handwriting?”
Gus slammed a pie onto the counter so hard the other pies jumped. “I should get paid extra for working with a handicapped boss.”
“Just wondering.”
“’Course I can tell black from white and man from woman. I’m not blind.”
I turned the letter over. A Christmas Seal picture of a tiny angel and star held down the back flap. “Is my handwriting black?”
“No.”
“Part black?”
“Your handwriting’s Chinese.”
Mr. Callahan,
I wish to speak with you regarding the matter you broached at my home Saturday afternoon last. If it is convenient, would you meet me after Sunday services at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Benbow Ave. I shall be on the front lawn around 11 a.m.
Mrs. Atalanta Williams
The trouble—besides guilt over Atalanta Williams, anxiety over Gilia, confusion over sex with Katrina, and the perpetual sorrow of being alive because my mother was group raped—was sleep. I couldn’t do it. Or, I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn, but once there, I couldn’t wake up until it was time to go to sleep again.
The entire week I stumbled around with swamp water on my brain; trance movements from home to Tex and Shirley’s to work to the Ramada to the Exercycle 6000, and then, more exhausted than I thought humanly survivable, I lay in my bed and zing—the swamp turned into a beehive. My skin itched. Someone else’s rock video lit up the backs of my eyelids and I thought of everything that had ever happened or would happen anywhere in the universe. I dickered with God.
Sunday morning, twenty minutes after I drifted into the blessed relief of sleep, Ivan Idervitch leaned on my front porch doorbell. Ivan Idervitch is the nine-year-old from across the street and down a couple, and when you first see Ivan what you notice is his horn-rimmed glasses. They make his eyes big as Ping-Pong balls, but for some reason I don’t notice the eyes, just the glasses. I always try to be nice to Ivan because his parents make him wear suspenders. My mother made me wear dickies in Wyoming when none of the other boys wore dickies, so I know how it can be.
Ivan Idervitch rang the doorbell for like ten minutes before I managed to pull on a bathrobe and stumble down the stairs. Shannon and Eugene were still doing whatever disgusting thing they did, and Gus was nowhere near. She only takes one day off a week and she chooses which day based on whenever she feels the urge.
“Here.” Ivan thrust a pink paper at me.
“What’s this?”
