“Yeah.”
“That ain’t really no bitch, that’s a bastard. Dress up like a woman and then come in here. Shit. He don’t bother the men that knows him. Most of us know what he is. He just pick up on the men that don’t. Most of the ones that hang around here don’t fool around with him. Sometimes she makes pickups, drunks or strangers. They find out right quick, though. They start messing around her. Naw, I don’t even git drunk when I come in here, cause I know how I do when I’m drunk. I wouldn’t get mixed up with that bastard for nothing. Wake up the next morning and find his wig in my face. Shit . . . Yeah, I have you in Chicago right now.”
“Yeah, I could go places if I had you,” the man with no thumb said. “I could go high places.”
“Yeah, I been places,” Alfonso said. “I bet I been places and done things you ain’t never even heard of. like I been to parties where everybody’s naked, for instance. I bet you ain’t never even heard of that.”
“Yes I have.”
“Naw you haven’t.” I said yes I had.
“I bet you haven’t.”
I said nothing.
“Yeah, I been like you too,” he said. “Just like I was new in the world. I remember the first time I went up north, went up to Cincinnati, and I was sitting in this restaurant and there was this white woman at this restaurant, and she kept looking at me for me to dance with her, you know. You know I wasn’t going to dance with no white woman. The others was dancing, though . . . Yeah, I been a lots of different places. Places that make you old before your time. I’m old in the world now. Won’t even let me suck on your damn tiddies. To some women that ain’t like nothing but shaking hands. To some of em fucking ain’t nothing but shaking hands. Shaking hands and dancing. Meat and the gravy too. Ain’t even as old as you, some of them.”
I told him Mama was going to take me to north Carolina for a coming-out present.
“Coming-out?”
“For graduation.”
“Aw. north Carolina? North Carolina ain’t shit. I’d take you up to Canada. What’s in North Carolina?”
“We got a friend that lives there, we ain’t seen in about ten years or something. I think Mama wants to go more for her than for me. I said I’d like to go, though. But I think she feels she needs to get away for a while. And then, she hasn’t really had any close friends since Miss Billie left. No woman she can really talk to, you know. I think she wants to get away for herself . . . I don’t mind, though.”
“Shit, I’d have you up in Canada somewhere. When y’all leavin?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Shit, well when you come back you ain’t been nowhere. If you was with me you would’ve been somewhere, come back and know you been somewhere.”
I shook my head and started laughing. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You laughing at me, ain’t you?”
“Naw, I wasn’t laughing at you.”
“Yes you was . . . You know you frustrate a man.” I asked him how.
“You already got me beating my meat over you.” I said I didn’t know what he meant.
He said shit, then he told me what he meant, then he said, “Coming-out present, I wish I could give you a going-in present . . . I want to see you when you get back.”
“I won’t be any different.”
“I don’t care. I still want to see you, you hear?” I said I heard.
“Way it is now,” Alfonso said, “when you get back, you have to say ‘I ain’t been nowhere.’”
“You know what I think,” the psychiatrist said. “I think he came to represent all the men you’d known in your life.”
“Who?”
“I got something out of you,” he said. He was proud of himself.
Davis returned, bringing whiskey.
“I thought you might sleep,” he said.
“No, I haven’t been sleepy,” I said. “Did you take the comb? I couldn’t find it.”
“Yeah, it’s in my pocket. You don’t need it.” He poured himself a glass and me a glass.
“Thanks, I can’t drink a lot, I think my kidneys got infected.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“One or both?”
“I feel it along here.” I touched the v along my pelvis.
He glanced at me and opened the window. “Not enough air.” He watched me touching myself. “An excuse for not drinking,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t hurt then. I’ve been going to the bathroom too much, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have any ice.”
“I don’t like it with ice in it.”
He stood watching me, then he came over and touched where my hands had been. “Women’s problems,” he said. “It’ll go away.”
“Hers was a crime of passion, and his was a crime of coldness,” somebody said.
We were at another long table. I only stared at them. “Why won’t she talk?”
“My mother told me once that they buried my grandmother in sand and then went away and forgot about her, and then they remembered, and when they came back she was sucking sand. I don’t know how long she’d been there. But Mama said that’s why in later years she couldn’t see or hear well . . . Fourteen children.”
“That’s because they didn’t practice birth control in them days” was what Davis said.
“When they came back she was sucking sand.”
I stopped working out there then, and then I went up to Connecticut and found work in tobacco there.
7
I had a feeling my mother wanted to get away more for herself than for
