“You eat food like you’re making love to it.”
I laughed and went on eating. I closed my eyes, swallowing. I had to pee again. Beer always made me have to pee. I got up and went to the toilet, came back and sat down again. I drank the rest of the beer.
“Is there anything else, ma’am?”
“No, thank you.”
I paid and left. I wanted to be fucked. I wanted him to fuck me up my ass.
I went back, but he wasn’t there. The sheets and bedspread were gone. There was only the mattress, stained with the blood and whiskey. The glasses and whiskey were gone. They’d taken him. I sat on the floor. My knees hurt. I watched the walls.
They saw me go up and then they followed me up, and they were speaking in whispers, and then they came in.
“Yes, she’s the one. I saw her go up. look at her sitting there. Just look at her. What kind of woman can it be to do something like that?”
Otis said it was like they were working some kind of blues ritual. He said he couldn’t stop watching.
A man sucking the milk from her breasts. He is sucking blood.
James said he wanted to tell me something. He asked me if I remembered that time in the reformatory I’d said, “You look like a man who’s worried about something.” He said I’d just said it in passing and probably didn’t remember it, but he said he remembered it because he was a man worried about something. And then he told me that twenty years ago he’d killed a man. It had been twenty years and they still hadn’t forgot. The man who owned the restaurant still wouldn’t let him come in the place. I don’t like to talk about the particulars, he said, but it was over a woman.
I didn’t tell him that I already knew.
“Yeah, I’m a man that’s worried, because I haven’t forgot it either,” he said.
The queen bee. Men had to die for loving her.
James said he was dying to kiss me. He said he was dying to kiss me. He leaned over. He said my kiss was full of teeth.
5
“Let’s play,” he asks.
The sweet milk in the queen bee’s breasts has turned to blood.
PART THREE
1
Nothing you wouldn’t know about. Nothing you wouldn’t know about. Nothing you wouldn’t know about.
The man in his office lays me on top of his desk. He pulls my dress up, takes his pants down. I won’t. I won’t take anything. How much will you take? I won’t take anything. You frustrate a man. He gets up and goes to the bathroom. After that he keeps watching me.
The young boys whistle at me. They are walking behind me. They have taps on their shoes, they keep whistling until they pass me, and turn around and look at me.
“I thought she was a chick.”
“Hello, Mama.”
“She’s a good-lookin mama, for a old woman, though,” one of them says. He whistles again.
“She looked young from the back.”
“Yeah.”
He’s got taps on his shoes. He’s chewing bubble gum. The foreman keeps watching me.
“I been watching you work,” he says. “I been watching how you work. I been watching you.”
I rubbed his back and thighs. I thought of what he said about the mustard, and wiped him with toilet paper between his ass. Something I’d never done with a lover. Something I’d never thought of doing. He was on my breasts, sucking blood. He kept laughing. “The blood ducks. The blood ducks.” I spread my legs.
“What about once you close them?” Elvira asks.
“They stay closed,” I want to answer, but I don’t answer. “How could you tell?” he asks.
“I saw it in your eyes.”
I tell him it’s nothing he wouldn’t know about. Nothing he wouldn’t know about. James is on the floor with me. He tells me he is dying to kiss me. He leans over and puts his tongue on me. I don’t open my mouth.
“Open your mouth.”
I tell him I didn’t know I was supposed to open my mouth. “They stay closed,” I tell her.
James, his hair combed, asked me to marry him. He came to get me when it was time to leave. We walked to his car. When he started driving, I thought he was taking me home.
“She good-lookin for a old woman, ain’t she?”
I didn’t know where we were going. I asked him. “You look like a flower,” he said.
“That don’t answer where we going.”
“You can get out of the car anytime.”
“I don’t want to get out of the car.”
“Then wait and see. And when we get there, you can say turn back, and I’ll turn back.”
The car stopped in front of the justice of the peace. I didn’t tell him to turn back.
“Do you want me to turn back?”
“No.”
He said he was dying to kiss me. He said he was dying to . . .
We were married.
I went and told my parents, without him. They just sat looking at me.
“You’re married?” Daddy asked finally. Mama stayed saying nothing.
“Yes.”
Mama didn’t say anything.
“Mama, aren’t you going to say anything?”
“What do you want me to say, honey?”
“It’s just that we never dreamed . . .” Daddy said.
Then he said they were happy for me, then he kissed me. Mama looked at me hard, then she leaned forward and gave me her cheek to kiss. I told them I hadn’t dreamed either.
I keep watching the man with no thumb until he sees me. “I could tell you wanted me. I could tell.”
“Naw, I didn’t want you neither.”
“I could tell you wanted me. I was the first one that aroused
