Great-Grandmother said, “No.” Then she looked embarrassed. Then she said, “She wanted me to kiss her inside her hand.”
Great-Grandfather started laughing. He worked in tobacco. He rolled his own cigarettes, but never rolled them tight enough. He had spit and tobacco juice on the tips of his fingers. Then he wanted to know where the ham was, and two of their chickens must’ve got lost. When she told him about the sick baby in the wagon that turned out not to be a baby after all, he roared.
“Don’t you think that’s funny?” I asked Davis.
He said, “People play tricks like that all the time. They don’t have to be gypsies neither.”
I asked him if that’s where the word to gyp somebody came from.
They kept his penis in the icebox, wrapped up like a ham, and then in the courtroom, wrapped up in a silk handkerchief, like a jewel.
Davis squeezed my ankles. I squeezed the boy’s dick. It was like squeezing a soft milkweed. I reached down and squeezed the back of his neck. The musician made me put my hands down between his legs.
“Do you think some things are meant to happen?” I asked Davis.
He said he didn’t know what I meant.
My great-grandmother kissed the gypsy Medina in the center of her palm.
I reached down and squeezed Davis” hand.
When we made love he wiped me off between my legs with his silk handkerchief.
My great-grandmother looked inside the gypsy’s palm and said she saw time there.
My great-grandfather said she was crazy.
I changed my position so I could kiss Davis inside his hand. “Then do you think there are some things we can’t help from
letting happen?” I asked.
He laughed hard and put his whole hand on my belly.
“How did it feel in your mouth?” Elvira asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Why didn’t you chew it up and swallow?” I told her not to fuck with me.
My great-grandfather’s fingertips were stained brown.
“Shit, woman, what’s a man got to do to make you love him?” my father asked my mother.
She said it didn’t happen because she didn’t love him. She said she never knew how he was going to love her now. He said, “Act like a whore, I love you like a whore. Shit, woman,” he said, “what’s a man got to do?”
She said she never knew how he was going to love her now.
“How did it feel in your mouth?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” I said.
She asked me what did she have to do. I told her she didn’t have to do nothing, because whatever she did, the answer would still be the same. She lay on her stomach. Her dress stuck to the crease in her ass. She wanted to know what she had to do.
“You ought to have them check your kidneys,” the guard said.
When I walked past her she touched my behind.
Davis said I had a pretty behind. He was up against me. I could feel him hard.
“I thought you were asleep,” I said. “No,” he said.
He put his lips against the back of my neck, his arm around my waist.
“It don’t take you that long to pee,” Elvira said. “When you tensed up and nervous it does.”
She started laughing, then she said, “I seen the guard get a feel.”
Davis turned me around and put his tongue in my mouth.
“I bet he wasn’t even that good. I bet you just hadn’t had a man in a long time.”
“How long has it been, Eva?”
“A long time. A long time . . . I thought you knew already.”
He went in like he was tearing something besides her flesh.
“The trouble with you is you don’t feel nothing,” Elvira said.
“A real long time,” I told him.
“Has the woman talked yet?”
“Naw, Captain, she ain’t said a word,” the detective said.
I was sitting in a chair in the Detective Bureau Office.
“She looks dangerous, too, doesn’t she?” the detective asked.
“They all look dangerous.”
My hair was uncombed. It was turning into snakes. Davis kissed the top of my head.
4
Mr. Logan hadn’t been seen in about three days. Floyd Coleman waited until my father came home before he knocked on our door. Mama went to the door, but he asked to speak to Daddy. She told him to come in. He came in a little bit, but he was standing in the door, nervous.
“What is it?” Daddy asked.
“You ain’t seen Mr. Logan, have you?” Daddy said, “Naw.”
“Ain’t nobody seen him,” Floyd Coleman said.
“Maybe he decided to keep to hisself for a change and stop messing with other people’s business,” Mama said.
The way she said it made Daddy look at her. She moved away from them and sat down in a chair. I was standing near Daddy. I was fourteen then.
“We think maybe he’s over there sick, or dead. We scared to go look.”
“Did you knock on his door?”
“Yeah, Lawson kind of tapped on his door . . . We scared to go inside. We thought maybe you might go take a look. He might be over there sick or something.”
Daddy said, “Shit,” and went out the door. I started to go too, but Mama said, “Wait, Eva.” I just stayed standing there. I could see Mr. Lawson.
In about ten minutes Daddy came back. “We gon take him to the hospital. He been over there sick for three days. Too proud to call anybody.”
He went to get his coat. I asked if I could go too. Mama said naw, I couldn’t go.
“Let her go,” Daddy said.
Mama said, “Naw, because that ain’t no place for no girl.”
“What, the hospital?” I asked.
“Naw, in that car with all of them men, and one of em dying.”
“I didn’t say he was dying,” Daddy said.
“Well, she caint go,” Mama said.
Daddy said he didn’t have
