I could feel him filling the whole crease in my behind. He put his arms around my waist and fingered the front of me. Charlotte said the girl put it in her mouth, because she didn’t know it was poison, she thought it was a nut. When the cops came, Moses Tripp said he wasn’t trying to do nothing but buy me a beer.
I told Elvira, “He claimed he wasn’t trying to do nothing but buy me a beer, but that wasn’t all he was trying to buy.”
She told me not to tell it to her, there wasn’t nothing she could do for me. She told me to tell it to them.
“I didn’t tell anybody,” I said. “I just let the man tell his side.”
“How you doing?”
“Awright.”
“That’s more than me,” the man with no thumb said. “I ain’t even doing.”
Where’d you get the knife from anyway? Daddy asked. I told him that that was the little knife that Freddy gave me.
I thought that was a play knife, Mama said. Naw, it was a real one.
Where was Alfonso during all this? Daddy asked. I didn’t answer.
I thought you said you went out with Alfonso. I did.
I thought it was a rubber knife, said Mama. Then where was he? Daddy asked.
I said nothing.
You won’t talk to them, but you could talk to us, my father said. It’s not even like you. Stabbing a man.
I thought it was a toy knife, Mama said.
When my father asked Alfonso where he’d been, he said he’d gone down to the liquor store because it was cheaper there, and he was going to sneak it in. He told me to wait for him, he said. He didn’t count on Moses or anybody bothering me. When he got back, they already had me down to the police station. He didn’t know where I was till somebody told him.
Daddy said it all didn’t sound like Eva.
Mama said I wasn’t a bad girl. She said she didn’t know it was a real knife Freddy gave me—if she’d known it was a real knife she would have taken it away from me.
Nobody knew why I knifed him because I didn’t say. Alfonso said Moses must’ve done something to me, but they gave me this test, and couldn’t find that he’d done anything. They took him down to the medical center and bandaged him up and then sent him home. They said I shouldn’t have been carrying a concealed deadly weapon, and Moses Tripp told them that if he hadn’t put his hand in the way, I would have gone straight for his heart.
Charlotte took my finger and put it in her mouth. She said she was showing me what the little girl did. I pulled my finger out.
Elvira put up her finger. She said she wanted me to show her how I did it.
I told her that wasn’t what she wanted. “He grabbed at me down between my legs.”
9
My breath in spite of the sausage and cabbage and beer had a good taste, he said.
I belched. “Excuse me.”
“That’s all right.”
“You’re like a lost woman,” he said. “Who were you lost from?” I didn’t tell him.
“Were you ever married, Eva?”
“No.” I wouldn’t tell him that. “Who gave you your first fucking?” I still didn’t answer.
“You keep all your secrets, don’t you?”
I made a fist, squeezing my fingers in my palms. He took my fist apart.
“Why won’t you talk to me, Eva?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“Well, since you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to you. let’s see . . . No, it makes me feel crazy.”
“Tell me about the horses.”
“Most people don’t like the way they smell. My wife didn’t like the way I smelled when I came back from the horses.”
“Is your wife the one you wanted to send the money to?”
“What money?”
“You said when you sent money home you didn’t like to send just a little bit.”
“Naw, I meant my mama.”
“Aw.”
He held me around the waist, but I kept my back to him. I could feel his breath on my neck. Hot and dark and close.
“You know, the horse business is a funny business,” he was saying. “There’s a lot of money in it, but the only people that makes the money is those that owns the horses and the big bookies, not the little ones, the big ones. The rest of us, we don’t get nothing. We train them, we rub them down, we stay with them when they sick, but we don’t get nothing. You know, I saw this movie star down to the farm once, what’s his name, Dale Robertson. You know, the one plays in The Tales of Wells Fargo?”
I nodded.
“He had this beautiful woman with him. Yeah, a lot of movie stars go in the horse business. They like to come see the races, and then they buy theyselves a couple of race horses, you know. You be down to Keeneland or down to the Derby you see a lots of movie stars. Yeah, it’s the big men that gets all the money. The rest of us we don’t get a thing. You know what I mean?”
I nodded again. “Say something.”
“Yes, I understand.”
He turned me toward him, and went in me.
10
I didn’t talk about my husband. He was the part of my life I didn’t talk about. James Hunn was fifty-two when I married him. I was eighteen. I married him out of tenderness. Not in a moment of tenderness, not like when you let a man sleep with you in a moment of tenderness. It was like a whole series of tendernesses. He kept coming to see me when I was in the reformatory, and then those three months when I was in jail. He was the only one I would talk to in all that time. Him and the girl they put in the cell with
