“My father used to carry a jackknife around in his pocket all the time,” I told Davis. “Guess what it had printed on it?” I asked.
He had to change buses before I did. Before he got off the bus, he gave me a good look. I gave him back the look.
“You know, sometimes when I meet a woman like you, you know, one I know I’m not going to see again, I wonder if you could’ve been the one.”
mq
I said nothing. He got his bags down. He was a little, attractive man, dressed younger than his age. He had lines all around his eyes.
“No, what?” Davis asked.
“In big gold letters, ‘Trust in God’,” I said. I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t laugh at first, then he laughed loud and grabbed me around my waist. I could feel him hard against my ass. He took me before we got into bed.
When he came out of me he was sweating, but I wasn’t. “Don’t you ever sweat?”
“No.” I smiled.
“You made me tired,” he said. I was watching the ceiling. We were in bed now, and sweat had dropped from his forehead into my eyes.
“You’re too serene,” he said. I said nothing.
“How do you feel about it, Eva?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I thought he’d been looking at me, but he hadn’t. He was watching my belly, stroking it again. I smoothed his cheek with my hand. I kissed his neck. He lay down. I put my forehead under his chin inside his neck. He grinned, staring at the ceiling. He put my hand on his dick, swelling.
“You did this. look what you’ve done. It’s your fault,” he said.
“It’s not my fault,” I said. “But I’m not sorry.”
“Want to play again?” he said.
“Yes.”
2
“You see that woman over there,” Alfonso said. “She’d do anything for me. If I asked her to give me five dollars, she’d give it to me.”
Elvira pulled a scab off her knee. “How’d you do that?”
“I don’t know. I must’ve scraped my leg up against something and didn’t know it.”
“You shouldn’t pick at it,” I said. “You care all a sudden?”
“Yeah, that’s Sweet Man up over the mantelpiece,” Miss Billie said. “Good-looking, ain’t he? For a old man. He don’t look as old as he is, though. It’s a shame the way men keep up, ain’t it? And there I be walking down the street and look like my knees give out. Tha’s why I got all these scars and bruises on my legs. My knees give out, and people think I’m drunk. They don’t believe me when I tell em it’s my knees.”
“Yeah, when you start carrin,” Elvira said.
“French woman come up to me and ask if I wont a suck job. Ask me right out loud if I wont a suck job. Ask me right out loud where everybody can hear if I wont a suck job. She come up to me and ask me, she didn’t whisper, she ask me right out where everybody could hear, she ask me if I wont a blow job. They use to things like that, though. They don’t act like they do around here. Got theyselves a mule and put the mule in a tent, and then lined up.”
“You was a little bitta thing, the last time I seen you,” Miss Billie said.
Freddy Smoot grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise my arm and pulled me up under the stairs. He got real close to me.
“I’ma put it in you like Mama’s men put it in her.”
I didn’t try to run. I just stayed with him. He still had my arm. He held my arm and unzipped his pants and took his thing out. Then he kept looking from my eyes to his thing. And then all of a sudden he pushed me away from him, and turned and zipped his pants back up, and went upstairs. I didn’t know what he’d seen in my eyes, because I didn’t know what was there.
Tyrone said, I put your hand on it because I thought you needed it.
The scab was still ripe. Blood ran down her legs. She wiped it on the hem of her dress.
Davis came back into the room. I was sitting in the dark. I must have scared him. He jumped, then got angry. He put the light on.
“What the hell you doin sittin up in the damn dark. It ain’t natural. You ain’t natural.”
I had my hands in my hair. “I’m natural,” I said. My voice was real quiet.
He laughed a little. “Shit, if you was natural, you wouldn’t even be here, woman. You wouldn’t even a let Davis Carter lay a hand on you. Not for free.”
“What you mean?”
“Anything you decide I mean, baby.”
“You don’t know.”
“I know you can’t leave me alone.” I shook my head. “Naw. It’s you.”
He looked at me for a moment, almost frowning, then he went out. Before the door closed, I heard him laugh. Hard.
“Say something, Eva.”
“There’s nothing.”
“What can I do?”
“Try.”
“What do you want me to do, Davis?”
“I said try, woman.”
I looked at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. Then he was looking, but he wasn’t. I passed my hand through my hair.
“You might as well do it,” he said. I didn’t ask what he meant.
3
“I’m going out,” he said.
“Bring home some brandy. I feel like that instead of beer.”
I hadn’t meant to call the place home.
