Bonnie and Clyde had become such well-known outlaws, some of the news reports didn’t even have to mention their last names no more. They had robbed banks, grocery stores, gas stations, and shot and killed folks for four years before the law shot them to pieces. If the cops could do something that extreme to white folks, there was just no telling what they would do to a colored man for committing the same crimes. With my luck, they’d lynch me and let me hang until the rope rotted. And then they would shoot me to pieces. I had to be smart and figure out a safe way to keep my ass out of the hole I had already got too close to.
When I finished my shift and got back to my dreary room, I stretched out in the same rollaway bed where Joyce and I had created a baby. And I was on pins and needles. For the first time in my life, I was really scared.
I got back up around midnight, slid back into my clothes, and decided to take a walk so I could get some fresh air and clear my head. Since I didn’t have no key to the house, I had to prop open the front door with an empty Dr. Pepper bottle so I could get back in.
When I reached a little park two blocks from the boardinghouse, I sat on a bench for over a hour, trying to come up with a plan. I needed a drink, but I didn’t have no alcohol in my room, and the few colored bars within walking distance had closed for the night. I went back home and got into the jalopy Mac had sold me. Without giving it much thought, I drove to the last place I ever expected to visit again: Aunt Mattie’s whorehouse.
“What you doing here?” she barked when she opened the door and saw me standing on her front porch. “Didn’t I tell you not to bring your sorry ass back around here?”
“Yes, ma’am, you sure enough did. But I got a problem.”
“You’ll have a heap more problems if you don’t get your black ass the hell away from here!”
“Please give me a break, Aunt Mattie. Can I come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Naw! Whatever you got to say, say it here and you better say it quick. I got things to do.”
Matilda Pennington, a well-known battle-ax that everybody called Aunt Mattie, was real unpredictable. It was no secret that she dabbled in hoodoo. When I was a little boy, me and my friends never knew if she was going to threaten to put a hex on us for raiding the two pecan trees in her front yard, or get drunk and chase us with a switch. She was a small woman with a heart-shaped face that was probably pretty at one time. Now she looked like a dried-up, droopy-eyed witch with wrinkles on every inch of skin you could see, and a head full of long, brittle white hair that always dangled around her shoulders like snakes. She had been chewing tobacco for so many years; the few teeth she had left had turned the same shade as her copper-toned skin. Nobody knew how old she was, but like a lot of other elderly people in town, she’d been born into slavery.
Aunt Mattie didn’t have no relatives that I knew of, except a husband that nobody had seen in over ten years. She claimed he’d run off with another woman. But before she fired me, one of her girls got drunk one night and told me a gruesome story that chilled me to the bone. According to her, Aunt Mattie had hacked her cheating, violent, controlling husband to pieces with a hatchet, stuffed his body parts into gunnysacks, and buried them in her backyard. I didn’t ask that crazy old bitch about it because I didn’t want her to know I’d heard the rumor. If she’d killed one man, what would stop her from killing one more? If I hadn’t been so greedy and careless, she never would have caught me trying to empty the pockets of Mongo Petty, one of her regular customers. Aunt Mattie had cussed me out and had given me fifteen minutes to collect all of my belongings and get out of her sight, or I’d be “real sorry.” I’d done it in ten minutes because I didn’t want her backyard to be my final resting place.
“Um, I never told you how sorry I was about what I done to Mongo. He worked too hard for his money for me to be trying to steal it,” I said, trying to sound as humble as I could.
“Well, you ought to be sorry on account of you didn’t even get nothing from him. Mongo was lucky I walked up when I did. I wonder how many others you clipped that I didn’t walk up on in time.” Emptying an unconscious trick’s pockets was nothing new in Aunt Mattie’s house. Usually, when one passed out, she’d order me and Rufus to take his money and everything else of value. Then she’d make us haul him away from her house and dump him on a rival madam’s porch two houses over. Since Mongo had already passed out, if I had waited a few minutes longer, she probably would have had me clip him
