“I don’t know,” she said. “He told me that he might be gone one night. He promised to take me to the show by Friday, but he never came back. You like the movies, Paris?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, Thad.” She kissed me.
“What did he do for a living?”
“Who?”
“The man who lived here.”
“Why you wanna know?”
“It’s just this feelin’ I got ever since comin’ up in here,” I said, and then I shivered.
“What kinda feelin’?”
“Somethin’ bad,” I said. “I get like that sometimes. Once, when my uncle Victor was up in Jackson, Mississippi, I woke up in a sweat callin’ out his name, and then a week later we found out that he had been killed that very night in a juke joint around there.”
I figured that either Charlotta would think I was crazy or her superstitious side would come out—either way she’d stop being suspicious about my questions.
“You know I got a bad feelin’ about Kit too,” she said. “Before he left he told me that he was about to make a whole lotta money. So much that we could go to the show seven nights a week. He said that he was gonna buy a proper farm and hire people to do all the work for him.”
“He was gonna make money on a farm?” I asked.
“No, stupid. He was gonna buy the farm with all the money he made.”
“What money?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But you better be sure that no poor niggah livin’ in a roomin’ house gonna make money like that the honest way.”
“Were you scared to be with him?” I asked. “I mean, knowin’ he was maybe stealin’.”
“I didn’t know nuthin’,” she said in a rehearsed sort of way. “Nuthin’ for sure. And anyway, he didn’t have the money yet. He only said that he was about to get it.”
“What you mean about white people?”
“I never heard’a this Kit friend’a yours,” I said. “And maybe if he says a lotta money he really just means the twenty-fi’e cent it cost to get into a movie house. But if he was talkin’ about real money, then you know it’s got to be a white man somewhere in it. White peoples got all the money and they hang it in front’a our eyes just like I used to hold a sugar beet out ahead of my mama’s mule.”
“Maybe you do have some premonition in you, Thad,” Charlotta said.
I was glad that she used my made-up name, but at the same time I realized that she was bound to let my secret out before the week was over.
“You know,” she continued, “Kit said that him and this friend’a his knew some white man that was gonna give ’em the money.”
“I knew it,” I said. “That’s the way it always is. White man come an’ tell a whole lotta lies, and then the next thing you know your house is up for sale and you lookin’ for a hole to hide in.”
“If you lucky,” Charlotta agreed.
“Did you call his friend?” I asked.
“Say what?”
“Did you call Kit’s friend? The one who was in business with him with the white man.”
“Why I wanna go an’ do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, making a big gesture with my hands. “I mean, I thought you was all worried that he might be in the hospital or dead. Maybe if you found out somethin’ from this friend’a his then maybe Miss Moore wouldn’t be so fast to give away his room.”
I could see that Charlotta hadn’t considered looking for Kit herself. She was a fair-weather friend; glad to drink your whiskey and lie in your bed, but not concerned with washing the sheets or ironing your shirt for work the next morning.
“Why you so worried about Kit in the first place?” she asked me. “He ain’t blood to you.”
I had pushed as far as I could without taking Charlotta into my confidence. So I decided to let it go.
“You right, baby,” I said. “Why I wanna be all in some man’s business when I ain’t never even met him, and here I got a beautiful woman lyin’ in my bed?”
I let my fingers trail over her nipples and a ripple of pleasure went down her body.
“Yeah,” she said, urging me on and agreeing with the same word. “Why you wanna be worried about BB when you here with me?”
My heart was already thumping. Charlotta’s fingers were tickling my thigh. But I had to pull away.
“You not talkin’ about Bartholomew Perry?”
