pretended not to hear him. “Hurry up and eat your links. Then I’ll give you the real thing.”
“Mama’ll be home soon!” I snapped, slamming the refrigerator door so hard it shook.
“Not tonight. The judge givin’ his poker party tonight. We got plenty of time to have a good time.”
“You mean you have a good time. I thought—” Before I could finish my sentence, Mr. Boatwright slid his knuckles along the side of my face.
“You sassin’ me over a little poontang?”
“I’m not sassing you. I’m sick of doing…what we do. You know it’s not right. Why can’t you get a girlfriend your own age. Somebody who wants to do it with you.”
Mr. Boatwright looked confused. He leaned back on his legs and put his hands on his hips. “Like I said, I could get any woman I want.”
“Then why don’t you?” I had lost my appetite. I wrapped the links back up and put the package in the refrigerator.
A long uncomfortable moment of silence passed. “You know I could make your life a livin’ hell, girl.”
“You already have,” I assured him.
Mr. Boatwright gave me one of his meanest looks. One that took so much effort, his nostrils started flaring. “I’ll remember that the next time you need money for the movies or books or somethin’.” With that, he hobbled out of the kitchen and went to the living room.
I went to my room and lay down on my bed, proud that I had stood up to him. I just had to do it more often. Minutes later, he entered my room. “What do you want?” I barked.
“You can’t tease me like you been doin’ all day and get away with it,” he said hoarsely. He rushed over to the bed and grabbed my arms and pinned them behind me. “Come on now, girl. This ain’t gwine to take but a minute. Look on the bright side.” That was the bright side. It took only a minute to satisfy him. As long as he was happy, he was good to me, and being alone with him so much, that was important.
On one side of our house was an empty lot. On the other side lived a widower named Caleb Davis and his thirteen-year-old son, Jerry. Caleb was a barber, and he had his shop in his house.
He and Scary Mary came to the house almost every day. Sometimes three to five times all in the same day, even when Mama was not at home. They would sit and drink beer with Mr. Boatwright and complain about almost everything. Mostly, they trashed other people, and it seemed like every time they got together one of them had some mind-boggling physical ailment that they liked to discuss in great detail. They tried to outdo one another. Scary Mary had high blood pressure and various female problems. Caleb complained about high blood pressure and ulcers, but the thing Caleb had, which ranked him way up there with Mr. Boatwright’s fake leg, was a bullet lodged in his head from a war injury.
Caleb was nice, but I didn’t trust him or feel comfortable around him. In fact, I didn’t trust or feel comfortable around any male. Not even a preacher or an undertaker. I was convinced that they were all boogiemen. All because of what Mr. Boatwright had done to me.
Yet, I liked Caleb as much as I could like any male. He brought me candy and rib sandwiches and other tasty stuff and always said something nice to me. “That’s a mighty pretty frock you got on, possum. Them some nice T-strap shoes you wore to church today.”
Caleb was much taller and thinner than Mr. Boatwright, but they looked enough alike to be brothers. They were almost the same shade of brown, and each had a wide flat face.
I didn’t let Caleb in when I was home alone. I didn’t want to find out if he was a rapist, too.
Caleb’s son Jerry was called Pee Wee because he was short and puny. With no encouragement from me, this boy eased himself into my life and became in many ways my shadow. Mr. Boatwright and a lot of people were convinced that he liked boys. He was what we called “funny,” and it was no wonder. He was swishy, and he didn’t play sports. He cooked, made most of his own clothes, and hung around with girls and old folks.
Even though Mr. Boatwright thought that Pee Wee was funny, he liked him, as did Mama. Pee Wee was a major gossip and never ran out of scandalous things to tell them.
He wandered into our house without knocking almost every day.
“You seen my cat?” he asked one evening.
I had just come home from returning some books to the library and had left the front door unlocked. I didn’t hear him come in. I was in the kitchen when I whirled around and saw him standing in the kitchen doorway. I gave him one of my meanest looks. Down South people entered a house without knocking. It was not just a Black thing—even the white folks did it. It was a country thing. I didn’t like it there, and I didn’t like it in Ohio. To me, it was the height of arrogance. What if I had been naked?
“You look here, boy. From now on, you knock before you come in this house. You don’t live here.” Funny or not, and even though we had a vague relationship, he was a male, and I didn’t trust him.
“Girl, what’s wrong with you?” he exclaimed. He snatched open our refrigerator and drank from a carton of milk. Pee Wee was not bad-looking for a boy. He was medium brown, with more than a few zits on his square face screaming to be popped. His eyes were too small and too close together, but his pleasant smile made up for it. Like so many Black boys in the early sixties, he wore his hair cut close to the head. One reason I tolerated him was that he baked cookies for me.
“You can’t just walk in this house without knocking. Burglars do that,” I told him.
He gave me an incredulous look. Then he let out a short, sharp laugh. “Girl, what burglar would risk goin’ to jail to bust in here with all this junk y’all got?” He made a long, low, sweeping gesture with his hand. “Ain’t nothin’ in here nobody would want, specially me. Now, y’all got any more of that cake bread from yesterday? Hi, Brother Boatwright.” Pee Wee rushed across the room to pat Mr. Boatwright’s shoulder.
I didn’t even know Mr. Boatwright was in. A lot of days I came home to an empty house. Mr. Boatwright spent a lot of time at Scary Mary’s claiming to give Bible lessons to the prostitutes. A minute didn’t pass before Caleb and Scary Mary marched in and planted themselves at the kitchen table with Pee Wee and Mr. Boatwright. I was pleasantly surprised when Mama walked in shortly after they did. She dropped a bag that was full of beer onto the table. Her faded, ripped scarf was tied in such a messy knot, she had to struggle to get it loose.
“You off mighty early today, Sister Goode,” Caleb said. He rubbed his head on the spot where the bullet was lodged.
Mama dropped her scarf and coat on the kitchen counter and let out a long sigh. Her cheap, ill-fitting stockings had rolled almost all the way down her legs. “Judge Lawson is goin’ to visit some ex-colleagues in Cleveland. He wanted to get a early start, so he sent me home early with pay, bless his heart,” Mama explained. I stood back against the wall as she dragged a chair from the dining room into the kitchen and sat near the rest of the crowd. When Mama crossed her legs, I noticed quarter-sized holes in her secondhand shoes. Everybody’s hands were spread out on the table like at a séance.
“Anybody got any juicy news today?” Mr. Boatwright began. He looked directly at Pee Wee. By then everybody had a beer on the table. All the adults that is. I could see Pee Wee’s mouth watering for one of the beers. But he knew better than to drink in front of that many grown folks that included his own daddy.
“Well, that uppity undertaker’s brother done finally outdone hisself,” Pee Wee started. All eyes turned to him.
“Let me tell this one here,” Caleb interrupted, holding up his thick hand in his son’s face. I never noticed before, but Caleb had two gold-plated teeth.
“But Daddy—” Pee Wee pouted.
“Young’n, don’t you sass your daddy,” Mama advised Pee Wee. She turned to Caleb with a large smile. “Go on, Brother Davis.”