You know, you a celebrity in here, you know that? Yeah you are.” She sang, “I heard it through the grapevine, how much longer will you . . .”
I licked the palms of my hands. I bit shadows. I put my legs around his neck. He wrapped me in elbows.
“Shit, there’s those that won’t ask you if they can do it for you, just do it. Especially right in here, they got some crazy people, crazier than I am. They just be thinking they be doing something you wont done. They won’t know no different.”
Smell in my bloomers. Fuck and urine.
“He was good, wasn’t he? I bet he was good.”
He said I was good too. He asked me what he was doing to me. I said he was fucking me. He said I was doing hell to him. He called it my stringray. He was on my ass, coming in through that way. I wanted to tell him how I was feeling. But I never would tell him.
“Let me make it feel sweet for you, honey.”
“You haven’t had it in a long time, have you?”
“You hard, why you have to be so hard?” She sounded like she wanted to cry, but then she got evil. “Knifed a man when you was seventeen. Killed a man when you . . . Couldn’t be much younger than I am, are you?”
I said nothing. “How did it feel?”
He’d undressed me and he was sweating. And then he held onto my shoulders and drew me toward him and I was naked and sweating, not with my own sweat, but with his sweat. He had no tenderness, no none, and then he laid me on my back on the bed. He didn’t play first. No, he went in before I was ready. He made sounds in his throat like when you got to go doodoo.
“Felt good, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I bet it felt good.”
“Yes.”
“You could’ve shared it with me.”
“No.”
“What did he promise you to make you kill him?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you promise him?”
“That I’d stay with him. That I’d always be there. In that room.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer. “Did you tell him?”
“No.”
He liked my hair that way. He’d never let me comb it. No, he’d never. He’d be doing it and make my pelvis rise up and my ass shake and he kept kissing me and asked, “What am I doing?” I kept wanting him. He kept saying Oh, oh, oh, oh. And I kept wanting him. I just kept wanting him.
“What am I doing?”
“You fucking me.”
“What am I doing?”
“You fucking me.”
Every Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon James said he had to go down to the train depot. He said he had this friend who had a wife that they let out of the narcotics Hospital every weekend so she could be with her husband, and every weekend she would make him buy her a bottle—not any narcotics—just a bottle. He said the man was scared of her, because every Sunday evening when he took them back to the depot, the man would have a new scar on him. He said that the man was scared that one of those weekends she would kill him, but he still went and got her.
“What your doctors been telling you?” Elvira asked. “What?”
“About what you did?”
“They think I was trying to fuck him when he couldn’t fuck back.”
“What you think?”
“I think I was trying to get fucked.”
“Eva?”
“What?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“No.”
“What did you like him to do?”
I liked him to get up against my ass and come in that way. I never told him what I liked, so he didn’t do it a lot. I don’t know if he liked it or didn’t think I liked it. I liked it when we’d go to sleep, lying ass to ass. He said when I stroked his ass it made him come faster. But that meant he didn’t want me to.
“Eva.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Fuck you then.”
I’d hug him and afterwards I could smell his smell on me. Cologne and aftershave and blood. I smell his smell on me.
The letter said: “I hope you and your old man is living together pretty. I thought you didn’t like old mens. Well, anyway, that ain’t why I’m writing you. I’m writing you because I know your nigger from way back. Me and him used to be friends. I just wonted to ask you if James find the town depot yet, because he still looking for that woman to come back.”
James said, “That from one of your lovers?”
I didn’t show it to him. I put it in my pocket.
“It’s from my mother,” I said. “She told me to tell you hello.”
“It’s sweet, ain’t it, honey?” I said yes, it was sweet.
“I know everything about you, you know,” Elvira said finally. “He wasn’t your man neither. You probably thought you were the only one. He just had to have a woman, not you, just any woman. It didn’t matter who. He woulda had me, if I’da had him.”
“He waited three days.”
“Just to make it better. You know how a woman gets after that, and a man when he’s been waiting for some. You thought you were the only one. But you weren’t. And you just didn’t wont to think about who’d be next, that’s all.”
I told her to go to hell. “I’ll do it for you.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Afraid I won’t go deep enough?”
2
One day this boy from school showed up at the house. James wasn’t at home and we were just sitting there talking. I don’t even remember what we were talking about. He knew I was married, so he wasn’t trying to start anything. But when James came back, he looked at me and then looked at the boy. It was one of them kinds of looks you can’t describe, but it was like his whole body
