Love (12 page)

Besotted attention didn’t spoil the boy. He knew his duty and splashed in it, could smile even as his father bragged about him in front of yawning friends. Bragged about his arm with a ball, his cool head in an emergency. How he had extracted a bent nail stuck in a little girl’s cheek better than any doctor could have. I saw that one myself. I’d brought the lunch they wanted one day while they wasted time on the beach—knocking pebbles into the sea with baseball bats. Down a ways, a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, was casting into the waves. For what, who knows. Nothing with scales swims this close to the shore. At some point, the wind turned and the homemade fishhook hooked her. Her fingers were dripping red when Billy Boy got to her. He was deft enough and she was grateful, standing there cupping her face without a tear or a moan. But we took her back to the hotel anyway. I sat her in the gazebo, cleaned her cheek, and spread aloe gum and honey on the wound, hoping she was too strong for lockjaw. Over time, as usual, Mr. Cosey plumped up the story. Depending on his mood and his audience, you would have thought the child was about to be dragged into the water by a swordfish if Billy Boy hadn’t saved her. Or that he had removed a hook from a little baby’s eyeball. Billy smiled at the fat, cherished lies, and took his father’s advice in everything, including marriage: to wed a devoted, not calculating, girl. So Billy Boy chose May, who, as anybody could see, would neither disrupt nor rival the bond between father and son. Mr. Cosey was alarmed at first, not being privy to his son’s selection, but was made easy when the bride was not only impressed with the hotel but also showed signs of understanding what superior men require. If I was a servant in that place, May was its slave. Her whole life was making sure those Cosey men had what they wanted. The father more than the son; the father more than her own daughter. And what Mr. Cosey, widower, wanted in 1930 should have been impossible. That was the year the whole country began to live on Relief the way Up Beach people did—if they were lucky, that is. If not, they killed themselves or took to the road. Mr. Cosey, however, took advantage. He bought a broke-down “whites only” club at Sooker Bay from a man honest enough to say that although he swore to God and his pappy he would never sell to niggers, he was happy as a clam to break his vow and take his family away from that bird-infested sidewalk for hurricanes.

Who would have thought that in the teeth of the Depression colored people would want to play, or if they did, how could they pay for it? Mr. Cosey, that’s who. Because he knew what a harmonica player on a street corner knew: where there was music there was money. Check the churches if you doubt it. And he believed something else. If colored musicians were treated well, paid well, and coddled, they would tell each other about such a place where they could walk in the front door, not the service entrance; eat in the dining room, not the kitchen; sit with the guests, sleep in beds, not their automobiles, buses, or in a whorehouse across town. A place where their instruments were safe, their drinks unwatered, their talent honored so they didn’t have to go to Copenhagen or Paris for praise. Flocks of colored people would pay to be in that atmosphere. Those who had the money would pay it; those who didn’t would find it. It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else’s blood. Mr. Cosey didn’t care. He wanted a playground for folk who felt the way he did, who studied ways to contradict history.

But it had to be special: evening dress in the evening; sport clothes for sport. And no zoot suits. Flowers in the bedrooms, crystal on the table. Music, dancing, and if you wanted to, you could join a private card game where money changed hands among a few friends—musicians, doctors who enjoyed the excitement of losing what most people couldn’t earn. Mr. Cosey was in heaven, then. He liked George Raft clothes and gangster cars, but he used his heart like Santa Claus. If a family couldn’t pay for a burial, he had a quiet talk with the undertaker. His friendship with the sheriff got many a son out of handcuffs. For years and without a word, he took care of a stroke victim’s doctor bills and her granddaughter’s college fees. In those days, the devoted outweighed the jealous and the hotel basked in his glow.

May, a sweet-tempered daughter of a preacher, was bred to hard work and duty, and took to the business like a bee to pollen. At first the two of us managed the kitchen, with Billy Boy tending bar. When it became clear that the queen at the stove was me, she moved to housekeeping, bookkeeping, provisioning, and her husband booked the musicians. I think I deserve half the credit for the way the hotel grew. Good food and Fats Waller is a once-in-a-lifetime combination. Still, you had to admire May. She was the one who arranged everything, saw to the linen, paid the bills, controlled the help. The two of us were like the back of a clock. Mr. Cosey was its face telling you the time was now.

When we were just the two females, things went along fine. It was when the girls got in the picture—Christine and Heed—that things began to fray. Oh, I know the “reasons” given: cannery smell, civil rights, integration. And May’s behavior did go strange in 1955 when that boy from Chicago tried to act like a man and got beat to death for his trouble. Mississippi’s answer to desegregation and whatever else that wilted their sex. We all shivered about what they did to that boy. He had such light eyes. But for May it was a sign. It sent her to the beach where she buried not just the deed but a flashlight and Lord knows what else. Any day now some Negro was going to rile waiting whites, give them an excuse to hang somebody and close the hotel down. Mr. Cosey despised her dread. I guess it was too close to home. Having grown up the son of a stooge, he danced all the harder. Whether the place thrived or didn’t, the decline started way before 1955. I foresaw it in 1942 when Mr. Cosey was making money hand over fist and the hotel was a showplace. See that window over there? It looked out on paradise, one me and May made, because when Billy Boy died, Mr. Cosey bought the barber chair the two of them used to take turns in and, for a year or so, just sat in it. Then suddenly he revved back up, ordered some fine silverware, and joined us in keeping the hotel the hot spot folks enjoyed. Handsome dog. Even in those days, when men wore hats—and a man in a hat looks so good—he was something to see. Women trailed him everywhere and I kept my eyes open for who he might pick. The hooked
C
’s on the silverware worried me because I thought he took casual women casually. But if doubled
C
’s were meant to mean Celestial Cosey, he was losing his mind. Still, I was knocked out of my socks in 1942 when he did choose. Word was he wanted children, lots of children, to fill the mirror for him the way Billy Boy used to. For motherhood only an unused girl would do. After playing around awhile, Mr. Cosey ended up in the most likely place for making babies and the least likely for a virgin. Up Beach, where every woman’s obituary could have read “Death by Children.” It was marrying Heed that laid the brickwork for ruination. See, he chose a girl already spoken for. Not promised to anyone by her parents. That trash gave her up like they would a puppy. No. The way I see it, she belonged to Christine and Christine belonged to her. Anyway, if he was hoping to change the blood he once tried to correct, he failed. Heed never gave him a tadpole, and like most men, he believed the fault was hers. He waited a few years into the marriage before going back to his favorite, but back to Celestial he went. You’d think since one of his women had a stroke after rooting with him in the sand, he’d avoid the beach as a setting for fun. But he didn’t. He even spent his wedding night there, which proves how much he liked it. Good weather or foul. Me too.

Mosquitoes don’t like my blood. Once I was young enough to take offense at that, not understanding that rejection could be a blessing. So you can see why I liked walking the shore route home however muggy the weather. The sky is empty now, erased, but back then the Milky Way was common as dirt. Its light made everything a glamorous black-and-white movie. No matter what your place in life or your state of mind, having a star-packed sky be part of your night made you feel rich. And then there was the sea. Fishermen say there is life down there that looks like wedding veils and ropes of gold with ruby eyes. They say some sea life makes you think of the collars of schoolteachers or parasols made of flowers. That’s what I was thinking about one hot night after a postponed birthday celebration. Off and on, whenever I felt like it, I stayed in my mother’s house in Up Beach. I was on my way there that night, tired as a dog, when I saw Mr. Cosey with his shoes in his hand walking north back toward the hotel. I was up at the grass line, hoping to catch a breeze strong enough to get the smoke and sugar smell out of my uniform. He was further down, sloshing through the waves. I raised my hand and started to call out to him, but something—the way he held his head, maybe, or a kind of privacy wrapped about him—stopped me. I wanted to warn him but, weary and still out of sorts, I kept on walking. Down a piece I saw somebody else. A woman sitting on a blanket massaging her head with both hands. I stood there while she got up, naked as truth, and went into the waves. The tide was out, so she had to walk a long time for the water to reach her waist. Tall, raggedy clouds drifted across the moon and I remember how my heart kicked. Police-heads were on the move then. They had already drowned the Johnson boys, almost killed the cannery girl, and who knew what else they had in mind. But this woman kept on wading out into black water and I could tell she wasn’t afraid of them—or of anything—because she stretched, raised her arms, and dove. I remember that arc better than I remember yesterday. She was out of sight for a time and I held my breath as long as she did. Finally, she surfaced and I breathed again watching her swim back to shallow water. She stood up and massaged her head once more. Her hair, flat when she went in, rose up slowly and took on the shape of the clouds dragging the moon. Then she—well, made a sound. I don’t know to this day whether it was a word, a tune, or a scream. All I know is that it was a sound I wanted to answer. Even though, normally, I’m stone quiet, Celestial.

I don’t deny her unstoppable good looks—they did arrest the mind—and while how she made her living saddened me, she did it in such a quiet, reserved way you would have thought she was a Red Cross nurse. She came from a whole family of sporting women although, unlike them, she had not understood the fatal attraction of gold teeth. Hers were white as snow. When Mr. Cosey changed—well, limited—her caseload, neither could break the spell. And the grave didn’t change a thing.

I can watch my man from the porch. In the evening mostly, but sunrise too, when I need to see his shoulders collared with seafoam. There used to be white wicker chairs out here where pretty women drank iced tea with a drop of Jack Daniel’s or Cutty Sark in it. Nothing left now, so I sit on the steps or lean my elbows on the railings. If I’m real still and listening carefully I can hear his voice. You’d think with all that strength, he’d be a bass. But, no. My man is a tenor.

5

LOVER

Sandler admitted he could have imagined the look but not the glisten. That was definite. Vida credited neither. The proof, she felt, was in her grandson’s walk. Whatever the sign, both agreed that Romen was seeing someone, maybe even going with someone. They liked those terms—“seeing,” “going with”—suggesting merely looking, accompanying. Not the furious coupling that produced the unmistakable look Sandler believed he had detected and a moist radiance he recognized at once. But Vida was right about the walk. Romen had developed a kind of strut to replace his former skulk. Of Sandler’s feelings—resignation, pride, alarm, envy—he chose to focus on the last, trying to summon the memory of adolescent heat, its shield of well-being created by the accomplishment of being spent. He remembered his own maiden voyage (free of embarrassment, now) as a ferocity that had never mellowed into routine pleasure. Romen’s entry might be as cherishable as it was enviable, and although it would probably end in foolishness or misery, it seemed unfair to cut off the boy’s swagger when it was fresh. He believed toppling him now—introducing shame along with sound advice—was more likely to pervert future encounters without stopping them. So he watched the new moves, the attention to hygiene, the knowing smile replacing guffaws and sniggers, the condescension in his tone when he spoke to Vida. Most of all he savored the skin beauty as well as the ripple Vida noticed in his walk. Also, he appreciated the fact that Romen had stopped swinging his leg and grabbing his groin every minute in that obnoxious way that signaled more “want” than “have.” Let him preen awhile, thought Sandler. Otherwise he might end up dog-chasing women his whole life. Forever on the prowl for a repeat of that first first time, he might end up like Bill Cosey had, wasting hours between the elbows of women whose names he couldn’t remember and whose eyes he avoided. Except for one. Other than her, Cosey had said, he never felt connected to a woman. His adored first wife thought his interests tiresome, his appetite abusive. So he chose the view he saw in the eyes of local women, vacationers, slightly tipsy vocalists whose boyfriends had not joined them on the tour. Thus buoyed up and simmered down, he had released his wife from class, given her the hall pass she wanted. Or, in Cosey’s own words, “when kittens sleep, lions creep.”

“You wrong,” Sandler replied. “Lions mate for life.”

“So do I,” said Cosey, laughing softly. “So do I.”

Maybe, thought Sandler, but it was a mating that had not changed Cosey’s bachelor behavior, which, after years of eligible widowerhood, he hoped to end by marrying a girl he could educate to his taste. And if that had worked out for him as planned, Cosey might have limited his boat activity to fish caught with a hook instead of a wallet. Sandler had come to enjoy the fishing trips. Still in his twenties, he didn’t like to pal around with old men, but since his father had moved away . . . of course it wasn’t like being with his own father, but the conversation between them got easier. Dipping a ball of cotton in bacon fat, Sandler had smiled, saying, “My father taught me this.”

Cosey looked at the bait. “You and him close?”

“Close enough.”

“He still living?”

“Oh, yeah. Up north with my sister after Mama died. Old men feel better with their daughters. Young girls easier to push around.” He caught himself and tried to clean it up in case Cosey was offended. “I wanted him to stay with us. I mean it’s his house we living in. He’s way too stubborn, but he must have his reasons.”

“Fathers can be hard,” answered Cosey, unaffected, it seemed, by the old man–young girl comment.

“Yours wasn’t. I hear tell he left you a trunkful of money. That so?”

“Well, he had to leave it to somebody.”

“My old man did all right by me too,” said Sandler. “Not with money. Never had none, but I could always count on him, and he knows he can count on me no matter what.”

“I hated mine.”

“Sure enough?” Sandler was more surprised by the candor than the fact.

“Sure enough. He died on Christmas Day. His funeral was like a gift to the world.”

That’s the way their talk was when it was just the two of them. The one time Sandler was invited to one of Cosey’s famous boat parties, he promised himself afterwards that he would never go again. Not just because of the company, although he was uncomfortable being jovial with middle-aged white men, one of whom was holstered; the well-to-do black men also made him feel out of place. The laughter was easy enough. And the three or four women stimulating it were pleasant. It was the talk, its tone, its lie that he couldn’t take. Talk as fuel to feed the main delusion: the counterfeit world invented on the boat; the real one set aside for a few hours so women could dominate, men would crawl, blacks could insult whites. Until they docked. Then the sheriff could put his badge back on and call the colored physician a boy. Then the women took their shoes off because they had to walk home alone. One woman at the party stayed aloof, sober, slightly chiding. Deftly warding off advances, she never raised stakes or temperature. When Sandler asked him about her, Cosey said, “You can live with anything if you have what you can’t live without.” Clearly she was it, and in the photograph from which his portrait was painted, Sandler knew Cosey was looking at her. Hanging once in back of Vida’s desk, then above Heed Cosey’s bed, the face had a look he would recognize anywhere. One that Romen was acquiring: first ownership. Sandler knew that sometimes the first was also the last and God help the boy if he got soul-chained to a woman he couldn’t trust.

But that was his male take on it. Vida would certainly read it differently. The big question now was, who. Who was the girl who burnished skin and oiled a boy’s stride? Romen went to no parties, was home when told to be, entertained no friends at home. Maybe she was older, a grown woman with afternoon time on her hands. But Romen’s weekends and after-school evenings were filled with chores. When did he have time? Sandler put the question to Vida, who was urging him to speak to Romen.

“I need to know who it is before I start lecturing him,” he said.

“What difference does it make?”

“I take it you content with his sheets?”

“I’ll worry about the laundry,” said Vida. “You worry about VD. Which, by the way, doesn’t come with a biography. I work in a hospital, remember? You have no idea what I see.”

“Well, I’m going to find out who she is.”

“How?”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Sandler, he’s not going to tell you.”

“Must be a way. This is a wee little town and I don’t want to wait until somebody’s daddy or brother bangs on my door.”

“People don’t do that anymore. That was in our day. Did you bang on Plaquemain’s door when he was courting Dolly?”

“Would have—if you hadn’t been sold on him soon as he walked in the door.”

“Be serious. Plaquemain had two years of college. Nobody around here could hold a candle to him.”

“Thanks for reminding me. Now I think about it, maybe we should leave it up to his college-y father. When are they due?”

“Christmas, Dolly said.”

“See there? Just three weeks.”

“The girl could be pregnant by then!”

“Thought VD was worrying you.”

“Everything is worrying me!”

“Come on, Vida. The boy doesn’t stay out late; he cut loose those raggedy friends and you don’t have to drag him out of bed anymore to go to school. He’s ready before you are, and works good and steady at the Coseys’. Overtime, too.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Vida. “Oh my Lord.”

“What?” Sandler looked at his wife and then burst out laughing. “You have lost your natural mind, woman.”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “No I haven’t. And ‘steady’ is the word, all right.”

Suddenly Sandler saw thighs rising from tall black boots, and wondered again how icy the skin would be to the touch. And how smooth.

The boots, probably, which she never took off, freaked Romen as much as her nakedness—in fact, they made her more naked than if she had removed them. So it seemed natural to steal his grandfather’s security uniform cap. It was gray, not black to match the boots, but it had a shiny visor, and when she put it on and stood there in just the cap and the boots, Romen knew his impulse was right. All of his impulses were right, now. He was fourteen doing an eighteen- or maybe twenty-year-old woman. Not only did she want him; she demanded him. Her craving was equal to his and his was bottomless. He could barely remember himself before November
12
. Who was that wuss crying under a pillow because of some jive turkeys? Romen had no time for that sniveling self now. The halls of Bethune High were parade grounds; the congregation at the lockers was the audience of a prince. No more sidle along the walls or safety searches in crowds. And no trumpet blast to be heard. It was that simple.

When he approached the lockers that first day, they knew. And those who didn’t, he told—in a way. Anybody who needed to get drunk, or tie somebody up, or required the company of a herd, was a punk. Two days earlier Theo would have knocked him into the wall. But on November
13
, Romen had new eyes, ones that appraised and dared. The boys hazarded a few lame teases, but Romen’s smile, slow and informed, kept them off balance. The clincher came from the girls. Sensing something capable in his manner, they stopped rolling their eyes and smothering giggles. Now they arched their backs, threw back their shoulders in great, long deceptive yawns. Now they cut question-and-answer glances his way. Not only had Romen scored, the score was big time. A teacher? they wondered. Somebody’s older sister? He wouldn’t say—even resisting the “Your mama” that rose to his lips. In any case, he had neck now. And when he wasn’t stretching it, he was gazing through the classroom window dreaming of what had already taken place and imagining new ways to do it. The boots. The black socks. With the security cap she would look like an officer. Hard enough to drill for oil, Romen adjusted his chair and tried to focus on the Eighteenth Amendment the teacher was explaining with such intensity he almost understood her. How was he supposed to concentrate on a history lesson when Junior’s face was a study? Her breasts, her armpits required focused exploration; her skin demanded closer analysis. Was its perfume flowery or more like rain? Besides, he had to memorize the thirty-eight ways she could smile and what each one meant. He needed a whole semester to figure out her sci-fi eyes: the lids, the lashes, irises so shiny black she could be an alien. One he would kill to join on the spaceship.

Junior had use of the Coseys’ car. To shop, go to the bank, post office, do errands Mrs. Cosey needed done and Miss Christine didn’t want to do. So if he skipped sixth period, or if study hall preceded lunch, Junior picked him up on Prince Arthur Street and they drove to one of their preplanned spots. The plan (hers) was to make it everywhere. To map the county with grapple and heat. On the list, but not managed yet, was Bethune High (preferably in a classroom); the cineplex, the beach, the abandoned cannery, and the hotel. The phone booth on Baron Street near Softee’s was her favorite, and so far they had accomplished only one other outside-her-bedroom adventure—a backseat adventure one evening in Café Ria’s parking lot. Today he would meet her behind Videoland, for some fast stroking before she drove him to Monarch Street, where he would pull leaves from the gutters. Then she would drive him home, stopping maybe at a different phone booth on the way. Exciting as all that travel was to anticipate, indelible as this town was becoming (he sort of owned Café Ria now, and Theo too), nothing beat the sight of a straddling Junior in bed, booted, hatted, with a visor throwing her eyes into shadow. Theo, Jamal, and Freddie could keep whatever tenth-grade party girl in plastic heels they found. Where was the neck in that? No arms tightening but their own; no eager mouths but their own; no eeeee’s of pleasure but their own. Most of all no privacy. Instead they needed a chorus of each other to back them up, make it real, help them turn down the trumpet screech in their own ears. All the time doing it, not to the girl but for, maybe even to, one another. He, on the other hand, gripped and nibbled on, had a woman of his own, one who stepped up and snatched privacy right in the middle of a stupid-blind public.

Romen raised his eyes to the clock. Two minutes—forever—before the bell.

Junior kept the motor running. She had no driver’s license and wanted to be in position to take off if noticed by a cop cruiser. She was hungry again. Two hours earlier she had eaten four strips of bacon, toast, and two eggs. Now she thought of getting burgers and shakes at Softee’s to take back to Videoland. She could do two things at the same time. Even three. Romen would like that and so would her Good Man. Sometimes he sat at the foot of her bed—happy to watch her sleep, and when she woke he winked before he smiled and stepped away. Funny how being seen all the time, watched day and night at Correctional, had infuriated her, but being looked at by her Good Man delighted her. She didn’t have to turn her head to know his foot was on the door saddle or that his fingers were drumming a windowsill. The aftershave announced his entrance. And if she was still enough, he might whisper: “Nice hair,” “Take it,” “Good girl,” “Sweet tits,” “Why not?” More understanding than any G.I. Joe. Her luck was still holding: a cushy, warm place to stay, a lot of really good food, a (paying) job—more than she expected when, because of her age, Correctional had to release her. But the bonus of Romen was like the plus sign after an A. The ones she got when she had been a model student. Considered model until they made it seem as though she had killed him. Why would she do that? Mess up just when she was about to graduate.

Killing the Administrator was not on her mind—stopping him was. Some girls liked his Conferences; traded them for Office Duty, sexy underwear, trips off campus. But not her. Junior, already prized for her keyboard skills, always had office work. Besides, cotton underwear was just fine; and the thrill of off-campus trips was erased by the watchful eyes of townspeople as you strolled through the aisles, or put your elbows on the Burger King counter. Anyway, she got her sex from Campus A or from a girl crying for home. Who wanted or needed an old man (he must be thirty, at least) wearing a wide red tie pointing down to a penis that couldn’t compete with raw vegetables, bars of soap, kitchen utensils, lollipops, or anything else inventive girls could conjure?