Eva's Man

seeing. I never did know how he found out. Sometimes I think Mr. Logan told him, sitting outside his door all the time the way he did, seeing everything. I wasn’t afraid of him like I used to be when I was little, but I still hated to pass by him. He would always find something to say to me. Most of the time he would ask me how school was, and say, “Yeah, you got to get your education. You doing right to stay in school. If I’da stayed in school, I’d be a son of thunder right now. Couldn’t nobody touch me.” I used to think to myself, Wouldn’t nobody wont to touch you. I didn’t mind so much what he was saying as the way he was saying it, and the way he was looking at me. He never did try to show me anything, though. I thought Daddy might’ve been passing by one day, and Mr. Logan stopped him and said, “Your wife had a visitor this morning.” That would sound just like him.

Tyrone’s band went out to play where Daddy worked. They only played out there for one night, though. Tyrone played saxophone.

At first Tyrone was a little nervous about playing out there, because that afternoon I heard him tell Mama, “it ain’t no way I can back out.”

“You don’t need to back out. Just go there and do your job.

John’s an intelligent man.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. The way he acts. You can trust a man that gets angry. But you can’t trust a man that takes things calm.”

Mama said nothing.

“I don’t even understand the situation I’m in,” Tyrone said. “I’m in it, but I don’t understand it. You and your husband’s some strange people. Any other man . . .” He didn’t finish. I was just hearing it, so I didn’t know if Mama put her hand up or what.

Mama was thirty-two then, and Tyrone, he was twenty-two. I looked on him like he was a man, though, even though he was as close to my age as he was to hers.

When Tyrone got through playing out where Daddy worked, nothing happened. Maybe something did happen. Daddy came home and he said something about him for the first time. He didn’t mention his name or anything. He said, “I seen your buddy tonight.”

“What?”

“I seen your buddy.”

Mama was silent. Then she said, “Oh.”

What was really strange, though, was they still slept together. They’d close the door that separated their room from where I was sleeping, but like I said, the way the house was made, I could hear when they were making love. I’d always heard them making love, and it seemed strange to me when later I’d run across people who’d never heard their parents making love. But I suppose it seemed strange to them that I had. But they made love as if Tyrone wasn’t happening. I used to wonder what was going through her mind. Not his, but hers. It wasn’t until later I started wondering what would be going through his.

After that night, though, whenever Daddy saw Tyrone, he would say, “I seen your buddy today.” That was all he would say. He would always see him outside the house somewhere, on the street or at the store or something, but never at home. The only thing he would see at home was that package of cigarettes opened upside down.

I don’t know what I thought of Tyrone. He was just a man there. I never would say anything to him, and he never said anything to me. Whenever I came home from school and saw him sitting there, I’d say Hi, and then I’d go back in the living room. And then Mama would be in the kitchen fixing supper. Daddy had supper where he worked and then he’d come home in the late evening. So Tyrone would eat supper with us, and shortly after that he would leave.

When we sat at the table him and Mama would be talking but I never would say anything, I would be listening to them. He would mainly be talking about funny things that would happen when him and the band went different places to play. He was talking about this one woman who was drunk and dancing and then suddenly lost her bloomers. She was still dancing up a breeze and her bloomers were down around her ankles. I didn’t think it was funny, but Mama laughed.

Sometimes Tyrone would wear this little round straw hat and dark glasses. He said that was his working outfit.

The first time Tyrone really said anything to me was one day I came in the house, and he was sitting there like he always was. We said Hi to each other, and Mama hollered at me from the kitchen. I went back in the living room. After a while he followed me in there.

“Do you play jacks?” he asked.

I nodded, but I thought I was too old for jacks, even though I was just twelve.

He took some jacks out of his pants pocket and sat down on the floor. I sat down on the floor.

“I haven’t done this in a long time,” he said, laughing. “Most the boys I know don’t play jacks,” I said.

He said nothing and handed the jacks to me to flip first. I missed after the first two throws. When it got his turn he got up to his fours without missing.

He won the game. We just sat there.

“Do you want to play another game?” he asked. “I don’t care. If you do.”

He said nothing. He was just sitting there with his legs folded, moving the jacks around. I don’t know what made me look where I was looking. When I first started looking there, I didn’t realize that’s where I was looking, and then when I realized, I kept watching down between his legs. I don’t know how long he saw me watching there, but all of a sudden he took my