“I killed you once, I don’t want to have to kill you again.”
“Look, I . . .”
He told the boy to get out. The boy looked at me and then looked back at James and then left.
“We weren’t doing anything.” James just looked at me.
“We weren’t doing anything, James.” The way he was looking made me feel like I had to keep saying that. He told me to shut up. He was looking at me, just looking. Then he sat down, not beside me on the couch, but in the chair. He had his hands on his knees.
“She didn’t enjoy being with a man or nothing,” he said. “She just did it, you know. She didn’t care one way or another. She never loved no man. never did. Not one single day in her life. A woman that’ll just fuck because it’s there—cause he’s got something down between his legs—a woman like that can’t love a man.”
He didn’t say anything else. He was just sitting there, real hard, and then he just reached over and grabbed my shoulder, got up and started slapping me.
“You think you a whore, I’ll treat you like a whore. You think you a whore, I’ll treat you like a whore.”
Naw, he didn’t slap me, he pulled my dress up and got between my legs.
“Think I can’t do nothing. Fuck you like a damn whore.” Naw, I’m not lying. He said, “Act like a whore, I’ll fuck you like a whore.” Naw, I’m not lying.
I squeezed my legs around his neck.
“You look like a woman who’s been hurt in life,” he said. He was dressed younger than his age. The lines around his eyes looked like worry lines.
“Naw,” I said.
When he got off the bus, he came back with apples and candy. “I thought you had to change here,” I said.
“I do.”
He sat back down beside me. “I’ve got fifteen minutes,” he said.
He gave me the apples and candy. I gave them back to him.
He said, “Please.” I took them.
“Denver,” he said. “And then California, and then maybe down to Mexico.”
There weren’t any people sitting in the seats near us, they were out getting snacks and coffee.
“You know why I came back here,” he said.
I said nothing. He said when he first saw those eyes of mine, he knew I could love a man. He said when he first saw my eyes, he knew I could love a man.
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
“No.”
“Sometimes a man and a woman get off the bus.”
“No.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “That was the last thing I was trying to do.”
I said nothing.
“All right,” he said. He got up. He looked down at me while he was standing, but when he got off the bus, he didn’t look back.
When James first laid me down in the bed, he kept saying over and over again that things was all right. I couldn’t tell whether he was telling himself or me.
I screamed up at him, “Why didn’t you kill her then!”
Before I left school and went off to work at the tobacco company, I went back to new York—there was somebody there I wanted to see.
He was sitting in the Froglegs restaurant. I was over by his table before he looked up and saw me. He looked at me hard. Then he said, “Damn.”
I asked him if I could sit down.
“I reckon you can. I think I glimpsed a ass back there. If I didn’t, I got stuck for nothing.”
“I got your letter.”
Moses laughed. “What makes you think I’d write to you? You ain’t promised me nothing.”
“I figured the only nigger that could know my nigger ‘from way back’ was you.”
“Alfonso know him.”
“I mean twenty years way back. Alfonso probably got the story from you. He didn’t know him back twenty years.”
“And I did?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t want a beer, do you?”
“Naw, thanks.”
“What you want?” He grinned. “I guess you don’t want the five?”
“Naw.”
He looked angry again. “You know, I can’t even hold a damn cigarette in this hand. When it burns down I can’t even feel it.”
He had a couple of burnt places on his fingers. I started to say I was sorry, but didn’t.
“What do you want, lady?”
“Why do you call me that?”
“Any woman that treat a man like a gentleman have got to be a lady.”
I frowned.
“Naw, you don’t treat a man like a gentleman, you treat him like a . . . cockroach. I started to say bedbug. But you don’t even treat a man like a bedbug. When I found out who you done married, I said Shit. I kept telling myself, Shit. The onliest reason you married the nigger was because he was safe.”
“How could he be safe if he killed a man?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t’ve married me, and I’m as old as him, but I ain’t safe . . . Y’all still together?”
“No.”
“You leave or he send you away?”
I said nothing. Moses looked at me hard.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a man who used to hang out at the train depot, because he was waiting for this woman to return to him, you know, but he hung out down there so much he forgot why he was there. You seen these old men hanging around down at the train depot, they don’t even know why they there any more. I hang around down there at the train depot myself, except I know why I’m there, cause I work there. You know, if you ever down there between eight and five, look me up.”
“I don’t travel by train,” I said, getting up.
Moses started laughing, then he stopped, he shouted, “One of these days you going to just meet a man, and go somewhere and sleep with him. I know a woman like you. One of these days you . . .”
Elvira and me ended up in the same cell, because they moved us to make room for the new people.
“You know why
