“Somebody ought to give her a comb,” the detective with his back to me said.
“I already gave her one. She gave it back to me.”
He wouldn’t let me comb my hair after we made love. “What if we go out?” I asked.
“We ain’t going out,” he said.
He put his leg across me again. Afterwards he sat up in bed, smoking, making wings of his nostrils. He said he was a dragon, then he said he was a train.
“Do you like oysters?” I asked. He nodded.
“At Easter we used to put a hole in eggs and suck them hollow.”
“What does that have to do with oysters?”
I feel like an egg sucked hollow and then filled with raw oysters, I was thinking.
“Do you like them raw or cooked?” I asked. “Either way. No, raw better.”
“Let’s have a party,” I said suddenly. “Just the two of us.”
“I’m all fucked out,” he said. I laughed.
He put his arm around my waist. “You’ve got a little waist.”
“Something I inherited,” I said. “My mother had a little waist.
And her mother.”
I danced for him, my hair uncombed, my shoulders careless. I danced and laughed. He sat cross-legged on the bed and watched.
“You should be all fucked out,” he said. He wasn’t joking. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” I said. I wasn’t joking either.
He kept watching me. I stopped dancing and sat down, sweat in my hands. I was frowning.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I’m tired, that’s all.”
“I said you were all fucked out.”
I didn’t like that. I wished he would stop saying that, but I didn’t tell him. I sat with my thighs close to his. He plucked at my breasts. I laughed. Then I shut my mouth. I have a dark line along one of my teeth.
“What do you really do?” he asked.
“I work in a tobacco factory when I’m not laid off,” I said. “What else have you got to say?”
“Nothing.”
“Eva, why won’t you talk about yourself?”
I said nothing. He laid me down and sucked on my belly.
I ran till my breath turned brittle. Freddy caught me and put himself up against me.
“Y’all boys get away from here,” Miss Billie said. She was laughing. “He’s just like a little banny rooster, all stuck out in front.”
“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked my mother. “Nothing.”
“Sometimes I swear, woman, you . . .”
He didn’t finish what he was going to say.
Elvira raised her dress up. “This damn elastic is cutting me. I swear I wish they issue some bloomers that fit sometime. Shit.”
She kept twisting and twisting, her hands under her dress. “If I had some scissors I’d cut the damn things, but they won’t let me have no scissors.” The elastic ripped. “Shit.”
A scar on her knee. Knots in her thighs.
The man with no thumb said, “If you married me, I’d go a long way.”
“Eva’ll tell you where you can go in a minute, buddy, if you don’t stop worrin her,” Alfonso said.
The man with no thumb laughed. “Naw, she ain’t none a your cousin. I caint believe a bastard like you got a cousin like that.”
No, sweetmeat, that’s what he called me. A sweetmeat like that.
Alfonso kept grinning and watching the man eat pigfeet with his thumbless hand.
“Ask him how he lost his thumb, Eva, he’ll say his wife did it. Why don’t you go home to your wife?”
“What about yours, man . . . Naw, she ain’t none of your cousin. A sweetmeat like that.”
He pointed at me with his thumbless hand, then he picked up another piece of meat. “I know I be gone somewhere then,” he said.
“Aw, cut it out, man,” Alfonso said. “She ain’t studin you.”
“I wont her to take me places,” the man with no thumb said. “Shit,” Alfonso said.
I was in the room alone, pretending the floor was the ceiling. He was out doing whatever it was he did when he went out. He’d left the door partly open and a gray cat came in and walked around. It didn’t see me at first, but then it saw me and walked around some more and went under the bed and came out again. I didn’t touch him. I waited till he went out and then I got up and shut the door.
When Davis came back he said, “There’s cat shit in the room.”
I didn’t tell him how it got there. I said I didn’t know either.
“Want a comb?” the detective asked.
I ran my hand through my hair and shook my head. I wanted to sit there and plait it up, but I didn’t. I just sat there. He put his comb back in his pocket. He kept looking at me. He was looking like he was thinking of something else. Then he was looking like he was half afraid of me.
The captain came in like he was in a hurry. “She the woman?”
“Yes sir.”
“She talked yet?”
“No sir.”
The captain picked up a long yellow sheet off the desk. He looked over it so fast he couldn’t have been reading it, then he looked at me.
“She got any marks on her?” he asked, still looking at me.
“No, not a mark one. We had one of the policewomen check her over.”
“No scratches, or nothing?”
“No sir.”
“He didn’t beat her or anything?”
“No sir.”
“Yeah, I don’t know where I’d be if I had you. I’d be in hightime by now.”
“Shit,” Alfonso said.
There was a long table in the room. They told me to sit anywhere I wanted to. I sat in the first chair I came to. The redheaded detective sat a chair away from me, the other sat across from me, the captain remained standing. Before he said anything, there was a knock on the door, and a policeman came in and handed him a sheet of paper and then left. The captain looked at the
