One Safe Place (33 page)

Take a break, and lick the bowl clean

Slight rest

We dream, and turn fantasies into what we do

I'm mesmerized by your velvet skin, and how you feel against my chocolate peel

I do, as you say, and I place my teeth lightly, but tightly around your breasts, where normally my head would rest after you have drained me

You're holding me tight

We love being perfect at what we do

Your love, my love

You and I, there is no greater love, when we make love

Good love.”

“Okay, Mintfurd, let me go get a gallon of water. I've sweated that much, I'm sure. Goodnight, Big Boy.”

“Goodnight, Darcelle.”

Hearing Mintfurd call her name once more, Darcelle felt more wetness. His voice seemly vibrated deep between her thighs, but now he had recited intense erotic words and each line vibrated on her clit. She hung the phone up and pulled off her panties; all she had on was a T-shirt. She closed her eyes and played a movie of Mintfurd's face sliding in and spreading her legs wide apart. She let her fingers be his tongue for an encore.

T
wo more people left the room after they had sexed all over Evita. She learned that screaming produced more harm than good in her situation. An injection of some kind of drug had put her in La-La Land. It took hours to recover from the drugs injected in her, and she had lost count of time. All her earlier calculations of distance, doors and the window were rendered useless.

Several times a day, they used Evita's body for nastiness. Men and women came and used her body. Some used forceful sexual intercourse, and some performed softer, but just as destructive, abusive molestations. Evita realized she was a pawn in a sex game. Freaks paid to come do her any way they wanted. The only saving grace was that at least the men wore condoms. She believed she was getting injections of pain-killers near her genitals and anus to most likely keep her calm.

Her tattoos were an attraction for the freaks; many of them licked and sucked all over them. She was a fantasy for those who wanted to commit rape, but didn't have the means or balls. She was a toy, a human dildo.

Evita knew of such things. She had participated in human toy shops while living on the wretched side of her past life. She had pimped and whored a couple of decades ago. The human sex toy
business was for buyers who had money to waste, and had a lot to lose if caught, so they paid only the best organizations to provide their kink and to not get caught or outed.

The illicit organizations often kept some kind of proof to make deals with if they didn't get caught. The rich and ignorant users of the game never seemed to understand they were recorded, photographed, or both. All of the foul records of the foulness were a setup to protect the head of Humpty-Dumpty's mini-mafia. The masterminds behind them needed one safe place to protect themselves from spending time in prison.

Who used these illicit organizations and paid crazy money? Cops, politicians, CEO, wealthy business owners, and their housewives and husbands who couldn't get freaky, dick-hardening sex at home.

In the days when Evita had her hands dirty in the human toy business, kidnapping had not been a part of it, nor did holding anyone against their will. At least Evita didn't run her game like that. She had a history of abuse and that wasn't the game she wanted forced on someone else. She knew a few of the kids in her program had a taste of the new rules in the game now. The new players in this game beat, killed, discarded, and acquired the newer human toys.

Evita understood she was a human toy worth a bit more than the average. She was an adult with a young person's body, with scars and tattoos, and a black woman. Most human toys were young and many were underage, and often Eastern European or from South of the Border. To some eyes, Evita's deeply tanned flesh with her rare and beautiful tattoos, and no silicone implants, made her highly marketable. She knew her feet were a selling point for foot fetish freaks. They were perfect, with lovely arches, straight toes, and no imperfections. Since she'd been captured, many users had
licked and sucked every inch of her feet, both men and women. Several men had ejaculated on her feet.

Her rare and beautiful tattoos had the freaks grunting, almost chanting, in religious tongues. Her body was a work of art that lined her scars. Like mapping out a travel plan, men rubbed their dicks along Evita's tattoos. A tattoo of a painted face covered her ass, with the tongue seemingly coming out her asshole. It was perfect in design and color, and the customers licked along every inch, going in and out of her body, using fingers, tongues, toys, and dicks. Several women tried to force their nipples into her pussy or rubbed them on Evita's male-female genitals.

Three to four times a day, these people touched Evita's body revoltingly. She knew her captors were trying to keep their customers separated by hours. She noticed the two who were watching her at first were no longer there. Another pair guarded her now, and took her to use the bathroom and to shower. The hood came off when she was not being used as a sex slave. Being allowed to see handlers' faces, she knew, meant that one day she was going to die. Evita assumed other sex slaves were in different parts of the house. She alone could not produce enough money for The Voice, assuming he was the head pimp.

She knew The Voice now; she was aware who Pretty Boy was. It took a while, but she remembered that accent, and that he loved to take a belt to a woman's ass. It was a former client from her days of running in human sex toy joints. He would never let his face be seen. He came in with a leather face mask, as did others who thought it made them weirder.

The word in her friendly circles that came to her joints was that he was a minority owner of the Seattle Supersonics before he and others sold the team. When she first met The Voice, he was the
owner of a moving company that had gone national, but later, he was shut down for ripping people off. He kept his hands in many small, lucrative ventures, and amassed money, but once again, he had participated in unscrupulous business deals and lost it all.

Evita serviced him and his friends with bondage, S&M, and other kinkiness. With Evita being a rare hermaphrodite, she was a valued prize in the human sex toy business.

From time to time, she heard foghorns from big ships outside. She had to be on the western side of the Puget Sound on one of the islands, across from Seattle. Maybe she was in a house near a bluff of Vashon Island, or Bremerton, or Whidbey Island. She had to be up high, because she couldn't hear any wakes—waves made by big ships and tankers—against the shore. The people holding Evita never opened any windows, and the blinds were kept closed. But, she thought she detected ocean water smells.

Bathroom and shower time—to pee, shit, and wash off the explicitness of foul folks—was the best part of her day.

That was when they changed the sheets, too.

T
he plane tips its wings. I see a ferry crossing the Sound and it reminds me of my grandfather. The blue ocean waters of Puget Sound look calm, and the islands still have more trees than man-made structures. There are still more lakes and more parcels of land from when only Native Americans owned and ruled the land.

My grandfather often found hidden burial grounds, where small native villages were surrounded by old growth trees. Whenever the land's new owners wanted something built over them, my grandfather often told them it wasn't possible and couldn't be done. He knew they wouldn't give a damn about the sacrificed dead souls. He would tell them the ground had problems, and whatever they built there would not be safe and sound. He would smile, and say ghosts would come and swallow up the house, and suggest they build houses a hundred feet away from this spot.

When my grandfather found the Native American grounds, the new owners wanted to put a garden or golf course in that parcel of land. He said the water table was too high, that it would change the land in time, and destroy anything as it reshaped it. Although my grandfather had no Northwest Native blood living in him, he had Southwest Navajo kinship flowing through his heart, and he respected life differently from the people he worked for who now resided on the land.

The plane tips its wings again, and I see a little house next to a big one. It feels strange in my soul like fiery, melting silver pouring through my veins.

Looking out of the plane window, I see the sunset's red streaks in the blue water. I see the islands in the Sound between Seattle and Tacoma, Vashon Island and Whidbey Island. I see a reflection of the past. Her face. Her face . . .staring through the window overtakes my vision. A little white girl, not much older than me: she used to stare in the windows of the little house on Orcas Island. She came from the big house, the little castle. Grandfather and I might be eating, and she would peek in one of the windows. Sometimes, as Grandfather was doing his Bible study, she would appear in another window.

When my grandfather would read to me by the fire at four years of age, the little white girl would be there, staring in the window. She would have such a sad face. There were times when she would raise her hand in almost a wave, and I think I remember smiling, but I never waved back. In some ways, she might have frightened me.

I know now that the little white girl was my mother. That is the message she passed down through Gabrielle. I wanted to meet her years ago, but lawyers met me instead, offering money, and a shut-the-hell-up clause. I signed legal documents that told me to keep my mouth closed. Not even a wave, not even a hello, not even a face to face.

What world has she been in? Did she have nightmares of her black son born out of wedlock, the shame of her perfect, white world? Maybe. Has time been cruel in her dreams? What kind of world has she lived in that made her refuse me when I reached out? Is her nightmare that the world will find out she once had a child with a man who didn't kidnap her over forty years ago? Is it a horror of reality that she and he blew up other peoples' worlds?
Now she wants to meet me…does she want to blow mine up, to hurt me, too?

As this plane is about to land, I can't help but sit here and think I might be a man who has problems with women as it stands right now:

My Mama Dearest, Gabrielle, and Evita.

I have trusted Gabrielle wholeheartedly, and now that trust is gone after her decision to alter my, and her life, with her death decree. How dare she make a ruling about people close to me out of pure shrewdness, as if making a decision to send a smart bomb in to kill a terrorist?

I reflect on my relationship with her. Maybe she and I were irrational to cross the line as we did when we became lovers. If we had been exposed, the government could have been sidetracked in all that it was doing for the American people, right and wrong. Think of the headline:

SECRETARY OF STATE IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH HER SECRECT SERVICE AGENT.

That would have overshadowed deliberations about whether we should have gone to war to stop a man from killing his own people.

She and I, as black people, would have been burned in a modern-day burning at the stake. In some circles, the conversation would have been all about how we hurt other black people. We would have hurt many people no matter who they were. I say all this, but when I'm in her presence, I'm the happiest. I'm confused right now about what is right and wrong, and I need to be clear. If it is true that we were irrational, then anything we have done is wrong—but it can't be, can it? We did nothing wrong other than fall in love while on the job. Now she's done with that job and they want her dead. The irony of it all.

Evita has caused me a lifetime of hero shit, as well as having my
grandfather put a notch on his belt that he didn't need when he took a man's life to protect her. Then I do the same thing years later, saving her ass. I have tricked my heart and mind in to a form of love…is that irrational, too?

We do care about each other, but she is never going to be my woman in the classic sense. Shit, I have known it since the beginning, but I enslaved my head into some ass-backward thinking.

I look over to Suzy Q and she is asleep, holding a trophy: the reigning Jell-O wrestling champ. Her crazy ass has told me the truth about Evita. I need to stop thinking she is my soul mate. I care about every breath Evita takes, but with this latest little act of floating away as if it has no effect on others, I'm pissed and concerned all in one.

Now my birth mother says she wants to talk to me. How can I not have a warped way of thinking when it comes to what good this is going to do for me now?

I understand why my father wasn't in my life. I'm sure I'm feeling like a lot of grown-up children, wondering where the other parent went or where they were. Like a lot of hurt children, I'm going to have to find out what she wants…now that she has pulled her head out of her ass some four decades later.

I
t was 4 a.m. when Psalms finished sitting down first with Mintfurd, Suzy Q and Velvet, and then with Tylowe and Meeah. So much was going on. Things were starting to mix together where they shouldn't, but it seemed it couldn't be helped.

Temporarily, Tylowe and Meeah would move into the condo with the kids. The crazy shakeup of their world needed to be slowed. At first Tylowe and Meeah thought to take them home, but Meeah's motherly sense made them reconsider. Having just moved them to Seattle, moving again would be too much stress for them. The main thing was to keep their kids from living in fear.

All calls from the condo, both cell and landline, were recorded in the computer system Mintfurd had set up. Other than to pay her bills, the great-aunt had made no calls from either. What to do with her to maintain her safety was still up in the air. For the Russian, Sasha Ivanov, to kill an old lady would be like flicking a bug into a fire. If she pursued her intention to secure the kids' money, she would circle back repeatedly until she got what she wanted. It was a matter of security. Safety for the kids and the great-aunt had to be maintained, and the condo was the place to be until…