you’ll sleep in the bed or in the swamp. Take your pick.”
“You ain’t somebody that can tell me what to do,” she said. They stared at each other. Suddenly she spit on the floor. His face was a mixture of puzzlement and anger, mystification and indignation. He looked at her, wide-eyed.
“Who the hell you think you are, Missy Cross-eyed?” he said, almost a whisper.
“I ain’t cross-eyed,” she said.
“Worse,” he said. “Cross-eyes can pop back right. You marked for life.” He sat back in the chair with a sigh of satisfaction at his own pronouncement. He put the wilted cigarette between his lips and lit it with another of the wooden matches. He inhaled deeply, held his breath. Then the smoke came out in a whoosh. “You know what this here is? This here is what the colored folks call reefer. Makes you feel good. Here,” he held out the cigarette to her.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“I reckon you’d prefer a drink of corn likker, huh? A cocktail?” He held the cigarette with his pinky finger cocked outward, a parody of someone with manners.
“No,” she said. She stood up again. “I better be goin.”
“You ain’t goin nowhere,” he said. He had a sly, crooked grin on his face. His missing teeth were like holes in a picket fence that needed painting. His gray eyes, milky and oyster-like, were fixed on her. “I got that door locked, and them windows, too,” he said, “and I got the only keys.” He patted the side of his loosely fitted overalls. She looked around. She could see the shiny new padlocks on the two windows and the door, glistening in the flickering light of the lamp. He must have done that when she was gobbling down the food. She was trapped. A gnaw of panic ate at her stomach.
“I . . . I got to pee,” she said.
“Over yonder. They’s a thunder mug by the bed.”
“Ain’t you got a privy?” she asked. She tried to keep her voice from shaking.
“Fergit it,” he said. “You ain’t goin outside.”
She could see the white chamber pot sitting on the floor across the room. She imagined that there was some of his leavings in there. Maybe what she’d been smelling was not just the turnip greens cooking. She felt her stomach shiver. Bile rose in her throat and burned the back of her mouth. She thought she was going to vomit. She stood very still, willing the nausea to go away. Finally, it did. At least for a while, she thought.
“I ain’t squattin on that chamber pot with you lookin,” she said.
“Why not? Don’t you want me to look at your little coozie?”
She ignored his question. He was still sitting at the table. She took a step or two toward the chamber pot. He was now sitting with his back toward her, looking at her over his shoulder. He was grinning. Her bladder was about to burst. She knew if she didn’t pee soon she’d wet herself. “Turn your back,” she said, “and don’t peek.”
“Awwww, I want to see your little—”
“Turn your back!” she yelled, her voice like an unexpected rifle shot. He jumped like somebody’d poked him with a stick. “I swear, if you don’t turn around and close your eyes, I’m gonna piss all over this house. Wet it down real good.”
“You do that and I’ll whup you good with a belt,” he said.
“That won’t get the piss up off the floor, will it? Nor the smell.”
He paused, as though he were thinking the situation over. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Minnie. Now turn around.”
“All right. But you better not try to run. You can’t get out of this cabin noway.” He turned himself toward the table. She walked lightly and carefully toward the chamber pot, her eyes darting here and there like a hungry hawk’s. She spied a stained and rusty wooden-handled butcher knife on a small work table. It had crumbs of cornbread clinging to it. She quickly picked it up and held it close to her body. She pulled her underpants down and sat on the chamber pot. It was clammy against her buttocks. She knew she had to hurry, because she knew he would turn around, to try to get a look at her. She slipped the knife under the quilt on the bed. He turned so quickly she thought he might have seen her, but he didn’t react if he did. He just stood up and walked two or three steps toward her. “Look at that, would you, little Miss Cross-eyes settin on the thunder mug.” She could hear her pee draining into the pot.
“Don’t come any closer,” she growled.
“Damn,” he said, “you could teach old Nora Lee a thing or two.” He took another step. The overalls fit him like a clown suit. “Do you bite like her, honey?” he asked.
“I’m warnin you,” she said.
“Come on,” he said, “let me see it. I’ll let you see mine.”
“I don’t want to see nothin you’ve got,” she spat at him.
He unbuckled his overalls at the shoulders and let them drop around his ankles. His long johns, once white, looked like mottled cream. He pulled open the flap and let his thing out. It was long and straight and pale white as a lizard’s belly. Her stomach lurched. He was shuffling toward her. She felt it coming, hot and determined, no way to dam it up, and she leaned forward and puked the turnip greens and half-digested lumps of cornbread, spewed it all out onto the rough boards of the floor. She heaved, still sitting on the pot. He jumped back, kicking his overalls away from her vomit.
“Goddam, girl,” he said. “You gonna clean that up. What the hell ails you?”
“I told you,” she said, when she could stop gasping, could get her breath back. “Stay away from me!”
“You done done it now,” he said. “Git up off’n that pot and git that dress off and git on that bed. Do like I’m tellin you now, and I won’t hafta hurt you.”
She sat for a long time, her head down. She could hear him breathing, rasping. She could smell him, rancid and acidulous. Smell the decay of her own vomit, from the floor and her own mouth. She felt dirty, filthy. She needed a dipper of water. To rinse her mouth. To wash the muck and the grime from her mouth. She tried to spit again, but her mouth was dry.
All her sad, sorry life came down to this moment, her sitting in the sallow yellow of the lamp, on a grubby chamber pot, Alexander Mossback Frill standing there pumping his hand up and down on his thing. The old man was someone she had never even seen before an hour ago, never even known of his existence, and now it seemed like he held her life and whatever future she had in his grip. Well, he didn’t. She wouldn’t let him have that. She had the power to deny him that. To deny him everything.
“All right,” she said.
“Say what?”
“I said, ‘all right.’” She pulled her underpants from around her feet and stood up. She pulled the frayed dress over her head and stood there, naked. Then she fell backwards on the bed, spreading her legs like she’d seen her sister Evalene do in the bushes with the boy. The old man’s eyes were wide and heated. He stepped out of the overalls and yanked the bottoms of his long johns down his legs, his thing wobbling, and Minnie let her hand snake beneath the quilt and grip the knife. All right. She was the Devil’s handmaiden, her mother said. She was a freak, a monster, and maybe this old man was the Devil. Maybe that was it. Well, she had an answer to it, whatever it was.
He had one knee on the bed, leaning over her. He was trying to arrange himself, get between her legs, and she couldn’t see his face. She pulled the butcher knife out, at the same time pulling him forward, off balance, and let his own weight impale him on the knife. He grunted, then screamed. He straightened up. The knife was in his chest; it had gone precisely between two of his ribs. He screamed again. He was looking at her with shocked disbelief, with a kind of incredulous disappointment. She reached up and with the heel of her hand hit the butt of the knife hard,