“I swear to God, except for the ones you had me and Rufus do, Mongo was the only one. And I only did what I did because I’d been drunk myself that night and somebody had picked my pocket and stole my money. One of the girls claimed she’d seen Mongo going through my pockets, so I figured he was the one. I thought I’d just be getting back what belonged to me in the first place.” I was so used to lying, it felt natural. I swallowed hard and tried to look as pathetic as I could, which wasn’t hard for me to do.
“Well, do say. It don’t matter now no more no how. What you come back here for? I heard you was working for them snooty MacPhersons now.”
“That’s true. But . . . uh . . . I might not be there too much longer.”
“Why come? You can’t even stock shelves right?” Aunt Mattie sneered.
“No, it ain’t nothing like that.”
“And another thing I heard was that you and that horsey gal of theirs done got real tight,” she smirked. “Mosella told me at church last Sunday that you and Joyce been eating at her place quite a bit lately.”
“I’m real fond of Joyce and I enjoy her company. We’ve had some good times.”
“I bet! And there’s no telling what some of them good times was. She ain’t cute, but a gal with legs as long as she got could have done real good working for me. Poor thing. She is such an oddball. She got some nerve trying to talk all proper. I guess she think she too good to speak the way a normal colored woman is supposed to.”
“Someday I hope to speak with more better grammar like Joyce do.”
“Like I just said, she tries to talk proper, but she slips up now and then. She ain’t as smart as you think. Matter of fact, for years a lot of folks thought she was retarded.”
“Joyce ain’t no more retarded than me or you. She finished high school and she’s been working at a school for years and years, helping the teachers with the kids.”
“That don’t mean nothing. Look at all the things a dumb dog can be trained to do. A smart enough idiot can learn how to do just about anything. Roosevelt is one of the biggest idiots in the world and he was smart enough to make it to the White House.” Aunt Mattie laughed. And then she got quiet and gave me a suspicious look. “Let me ask you again, what you doing back here?”
“I think I done got myself in a fix and I didn’t have nobody else to turn to for help but you.”
Aunt Mattie’s eyes got big and her mouth flew open. “Me? Humph! If you think I’m the only one you can turn to for help, you in a bigger fix than you think! What in the world do you want me to do for you?”
“Give me another job.”
“Pffft!” Aunt Mattie waved her hand at me like she was shooing a fly. “You done lost your mind or I ain’t hearing right. I gave you a job and you fucked it up. What’s wrong with the job you got now?”
“Things ain’t working out for me there.”
“Oh? What did you do? They fixing to fire you on account of they caught you trying to rob them too?”
“No, ma’am. It ain’t nothing like that. It’s just that . . . well, the job ain’t what I expected, and I was thinking about leaving on my own. I need something to keep me from getting bored and me and Buddy and Sadie don’t get along too good.”
Aunt Mattie narrowed her eyes and glared at me. Her beady black eyes looked like ink spots. “Is that the only reason you dragged your tail back over here?”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” I hoped I sounded distressed enough for her to take pity on me. It had worked with Mac.
“Humph! I’ll tell you one thing right now, I don’t need nobody working for me that I can’t trust. I can’t have no independent thief mingling with the men my girls service. If I did, it wouldn’t take long for me to be out of business.”
“I can understand that and I don’t blame you. But I can do anything else you want me to do that’ll keep me from coming in contact with your tricks. I know quite a bit about cars, so I can keep yours in good running condition and I play a mean piano. I can fill in when Rufus needs to take a break.”
“Two of my girls play the piano just as good as Rufus do, and they always happy to take over when he ain’t available. I already got a good mechanic and I got a feeling he robbing me blind, so I ain’t about to take a chance on having two crooks shaking me down by claiming one thing or another need to be done on my car. For all I know, you might take off with my car.”
I could see that I wasn’t getting nowhere with this old bitch, and I was sorry I had come to her. “Aunt Mattie, thanks for listening to me. I’m sorry I disturbed you. If you change your mind, send one of the girls to get me. I got a room at that boardinghouse on Pike Street. Now you have a blessed—”
She cut me off with a weird question. “You squeamish?”
“No more than anybody else, I guess. Why?”
“Some folks is more squeamish than others. Anyway, Emmet had a stroke day before yesterday, so I need to find somebody to replace him.”
I gulped. Emmet Williams was a retarded man in his sixties and had one of the worst jobs in the whorehouse industry. He emptied the spittoons that guests used to spit their tobacco
