wide in terror.
“Baby, it’s okay. Daddy had a seizure is all.”
The child looked down at the open eye, which had filled with blood.
“I saw…,” he said. “You stuck his eye with that. How’d you do it?”
“Were you spying on your mother?”
“No. I was just-”
“Spying. Well, when you spy, you never know what you’ll see.” She laughed and patted his head. “Did you hear me warn him?”
“Yes.”
“See, you have to listen to Mother. It isn’t who you know or what you know, baby. It’s what you know about who that matters.”
“Is he dead?” Martin had gone down on his knees like a prisoner awaiting interrogation and prodded his father’s cheek with his finger. It came away red, and he inspected it carefully before he wiped it on his pants.
“Deader’n Kelsey’s nuts,” Eve said. “Help me. Lift up his feet and I’ll pull ’em. Else he might snag something. Wait a minute, let me get a towel before he bleeds all over the floor. Nothin’ harder to clear up as that.”
Young Martin had followed his mother, who pulled his father through the house by his thick wrists. Martin had struggled to hold up the feet, using the cuffs of the pants as handles. He looked at the towel that she had wrapped around the head and noticed the spot growing as they went. They went through the kitchen and down the stairs and stopped in the yard, where she leaned him up against a tree.
“Are you cold, baby?” she asked.
The child shook his head. His feet were wet, and it was cool.
“Wait here,” she said, and ran back into the house.
Somewhere a dog barked a promise. Martin remembered that. Three times. Then tires had squealed out in front of the house as a drunk in a large loud car stopped, one car door opened and slammed, and a shrieking woman opened up. “Youthinkyou’resoooo-hot! You sack… of… shirt.”
The driver yelled something unintelligible that was muffled by the trees, and the tires squealed as the car turned the corner. Seconds later a house door slammed, rattling the glass.
His mother came out their back door and strode up holding a shotgun-naked except for her shower cap and reading glasses. She jerked the towel free from Milton’s head and pushed the gun barrel hard against the pierced eye, resting the butt on the ground between his splayed legs. His father’s hand made a fist in the grass beside his leg, and he made a noise that sounded like a fish being stepped on.
“He’s not dead,” Martin had offered. “Gonna stick him in the other eye?”
“Reflexes prob’ly. Go in the house so you won’t mess up your good pj’s. Now, if anybody ever asks, you were asleep and never heard a sound or nothin’. And Daddy had been drinking somethin’ awful for days and crying about how he never did amount to mithin’. Give Mama a kiss.”
Martin kissed the cheek she offered. “Didn’t ’mount ta nuthin’,” Martin practiced. “Drunk all the time lately. Cryin’. An’ didn’t you warn him afore you stuck his eye out? You bet you did.”
“No, Martin, Now, listen to Mama. You forget the warning and stickin’ the eye part, because it didn’t happen. You say that, you’ll get us both electrocuted or hanged and put in the cold ground where the worms will eat our faces off.”
“Turn us into old skeleton bones.”
“Exactly.”
Martin nodded to himself even as he had nodded to her that night. She had smiled at him, kissed his forehead, mussed his hair, and directed him by turning his shoulders facing toward the back door. “Go inside and say your prayers and get ready for bed. I’ll be in to tuck you in.” She pulled him to her and pressed his face against the furry place between her legs. He could recall the smell, a strangely comforting blend of musky perspiration and a hint of stale urine. Then she had pushed him off toward the house.
He had knelt on the braided rug, folded his hands, and begun his prayers as soon as he got inside. He always minded. He’d heard the blast, and it looked as though someone had fired a flashbulb outside. Before he was finished praying for all the things he had to keep up-now his father’s soul going to heaven had to be included-he heard his mother turn on the shower and pull the curtain. Then he finished with the Lord’s Prayer, climbed into bed, and listened to Eve singing her South Pacific song, which she usually did with the hi-fi on full blast.
“I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair… gonna wash that man right outta my hair… gonna wash that man straight on outta my hair… and send him on his wayyyyy!”
The next morning he had awakened and had gone out to see if he had imagined it all. There was what had once passed for his father, the first stiff he’d ever seen, with half of his head gone. The sight would always remind him of a ruined picture, with the pierced-eye side turned to one gaping hole-the skull all but empty. The remaining eye bulged out a full inch at the end of the optic nerve bundle. It fascinated Martin, and he had crouched for a better look while minding that he didn’t get any of the ick on him.
The shotgun had been placed so his father’s thumb was hooked inside the trigger guard. The bark on the tree behind him was deeply gouged and stained deep rusty brown. The drying brains were coated with crawling blowflies, and a trail of ants entered the pajama-pant leg and fanned out through the opened shirt collar across the face and inside.
“Life is competition,” his mother had told him, shocking him. “It’s eat or get et. And never let anyone do you bad less you pay ’em back fivefold.” He turned to find her standing on the steps with a cup of coffee in her hand and a cigarette pegged into the corner of her lips. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come, and I’ll fix you some eggs like you like ’em. Then I better call the cops and say I found him. Maybe I’ll say you found him and you can like stare at ’em with your mouth open and not answer their questions so you don’t let nothin’ slip out you shouldn’t. Seems like nobody reported the shot. The hell is wrong with people these days?”
The police hadn’t seemed all that interested, and the questions they asked had been met with Martin’s straight face.
“Boy might best see a psychiatrist,” one cop said. “This can turn a kid nuts. Turns grown men nuts.”
He remembered how he had slept with Eve in the years after that night. He wondered whether he had instigated the bedroom play or had merely understood her needs. He was twelve at the time, maybe thirteen when the sex started. He remembered that he had had pubic hair and his mother had taken that as a sign to start his education. The first step was to teach him how to touch her in that special way-how powerful it had made him feel to be able to create the orgasms in her-control her breathing with the pressure and motion in his fingers. He loved to watch her lose control and flail and make the noises she had made only for his father before. She had never discussed it, but she had shown him how wonderful an orgasm could feel. She had rubbed his erect penis with warm lotion until it had throbbed-hurt, but hurt in a divine way, and had taken it in her hand like a bar of soap and rubbed her hands together vigorously until the thing erupted, squirting from his navel to his lips. It made him feel good-no, beyond wonderful. Martin felt blessed to have had such an understanding, giving, and strong mother.
Her love was an all-powerful and totally giving thing. It was instruction. A lesson for a better life. “This is what girls all want,” she’d say as he started rubbing at her. “For a big man like you to get them to a special place. The place where the cat goes in his mind when he purrs.”
He called up the memory of a black girl his mother had brought him for his pleasure. He had loved her skin, the ebony breasts with the hard purple nipples, the soft hair in her armpits, the narrow waist, the hard rounded buttocks, the muscular legs, the dark slippery-wet vagina that reminded him of an orchid. The smell of her breath, of her sex, their sweat and his semen. Eve called her their maid, but her real job was to please Martin sexually. His mother must have paid her well, because she was with them three days a week for a year or so. She told Martin that she liked fucking a lot better than doing housework-in fact, she loved to fuck. Any way Martin wanted it. Any way at all, and she was eager to teach him new ways to please her. Martin spent most of their sessions experimenting, keeping copious notes, and when she was away, he would dream of what they would do next time and write it down in detail. She seemed to love it. Not that it mattered to him. She, the person inside that sleek, black, seallike skin, meant no more to him than a squirrel playing in the oak trees outside the window. She was hardly more in his mind than a sock to toss off into.
After that girl came around, Eve’s own lessons in physical love had ended. He missed them, but growth is change, and change is good. But the spiritual love, the undying gratitude he felt for her support and comfort, had
