Eva's Man

I said I would just stay alone. It’s easier being a woman and alone in different places than it is in the same place. It had been a long time since I’d even said anything to a man . . . the cabbage was good, kind of greasy. They cooked it right with the sausage. I was sitting in the darkest corner. I saw him before he saw me. Tall, dark-skinned, good-looking man. Remind me a little bit of the way my husband might have looked when he was young. I didn’t know him when he was young. He was old when I knew him. But it might’ve been why I wanted him over there—I mean, reminding me of a man I used to be married to. He just reminded me of him up to the point he came to the table, though, because after that he was just himself. He’d been looking for a place where to sit, and then when he saw me he came over where I was.

“You alone?” he asked.

I could tell he was from down South. I was from the South too. I’d sort of thought it before he opened his mouth.

“Not if you join me,” I said.

He pulled back the chair and sat down. I was nervous, but I tried not to show it.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Medina. Eva Medina.”

“Medina your last name?”

“Naw. It’s my middle name.”

“You ain’t scared of me, are you?”

“Naw.”

“I’m Davis. Where you from?”

“Any place the train takes me.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing right now.”

“You hard to get next to, you know that?”

“Not so hard.”

I had sweat in my hands. I put one hand under the table and held the fork with the other. I wasn’t eating.

“You on the road now?” he asked. I said, “Naw, I’m here.”

He laughed. The blues singer came out onstage again. It was a little narrow stage close to the tables. He stopped talking and we listened. She sang “The Evil Mama Blues” and “Stingaree Man”, “See See Rider” and “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues”. While she was singing, he looked over at me and said, “She’s fine, ain’t she?” I nodded. She was still singing when he started talking again. He said he was from somewhere down in Kentucky. He worked with horses. He spent all his life working with horses. It was horses that brought him this way north.

I didn’t tell him that I knew all about men that worked with horses, that I’d spent three years of my life in Kentucky. I let him go on talking.

“I seen this ad in the paper, these people wanted you to bring some horses up to new Hampshire, so I did. And now I ain’t been home in almost a year. Do you follow the races?”

“Naw.”

“I don’t bet on the horses myself,” he went on. “The last time I bet on a horse, I didn’t make nothing but a hundred and eighty dollars. Now that ain’t no kind of money. You know what I wanted to do was send some money home, but then all I had to send was that paycheck and a hundred and eighty dollars, but you know that ain’t no kind of money. When you send money home, you don’t wont to send just a little taste, you know what I mean? You wont to wait till you get some real money.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“They call it the devil blues,” the woman was singing, low now. Davis looked back. “She real fine,” he said, then he looked at me. “I can tell you something about you,” he said. “You ain’t been getting it, have you?”

I didn’t think he’d said that, but he had. I didn’t know what to answer.

He looked at me. “I don’t expect you to say nothing. I can read your eyes.”

“Can you?”

“Yeah, that’s why I came over.”

“You couldn’t see my eyes then.” He nodded. “Yes I could.”

The waitress came over and asked him if he wanted something.

“I’ll have the same,” he said, pointing to my plate. “But don’t put any mustard on the sausage.”

When the waitress left, he told me mustard always looked like turd to him, baby’s turd, and then he smiled and said he hoped he hadn’t spoiled my stomach.

“No, my stomach’s hard.”

“I’ll bet it is,” he said. He looked at me carefully. “A woman like you. What do you do to yourself?” he asked.

I said nothing, then I said, “Nothing you wouldn’t know about.”

He laughed. “A mean, tight mama, ain’t you? A old woman got me started. Old to me then. She was thirty-nine and I was fourteen and she lived next door and she got me started.”

I was silent. “I’d’ve thought you got yourself started,” I said finally.

“You a hard woman, too, ain’t you? I know you got yourself started.”

I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of a boy with a dirty popsicle stick digging up in my pussy, and then he let me feel his dick, and it was like squeezing a soft milkweed.

“I got started like everyone else does,” I told him. “I opened my legs. My mother said after you’ve done it the first time, you won’t be satisfied till you’ve done it again.”

“Have you ever been satisfied?”

“What do you think?”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Where do we go?”

“Come home with me.”

“I won’t be good tonight. I’m bleeding.”

“Then we’ll wait.”

His hand scraped my hair and he ate his food, then paid the bill and we left.

What Elvira said those people think I am, Davis probably thought so too. It’s funny how somebody can remind you of somebody you didn’t like, or ended up not liking and fearing—fearing is a better word—but . . . I hadn’t said anything to any man in a long time. And I’d never said Join me before. He probably thought I was in the habit of sitting there in that dark corner just so men would . . . Yeah, they’d come where I was. “Shit, bitch. Why don’t you stay in the