me one of the bear claws, which looked like somebody had been playing with it. I shook my head. “Uh, listen, me and Jason, we decided to go call my man from a pay phone today, like you suggested.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, sitting up. I made sure that the covers were still up around my chin. “I wish you had done that yesterday when you called him.” I dragged my fingers through my matted hair and slid my tongue around inside and outside of my mouth. The taste of my gums, teeth, and lips was enough to make me sick. But I didn’t want any coffee, any of the beaten-up bear claws, or anything else in my mouth except some mouthwash or toothpaste, which I didn’t have. But more than anything, I wanted this episode to be over and done with. “What about those pictures we took yesterday?” I said, looking from Wade to Jason.
“What about them pictures?” Wade asked, talking with his mouth full.
“What are you going to do with them?” I wanted to know.
“We are going to use them. What did you think I took ’em for, woman?” Jason snapped.
“Jason, I wasn’t talking to you,” I said, shaking a finger at him. “I was talking to Wade.”
“Well, I’m talking to you. And while I’m doing it, I want to tell you that you got one hell of a mouth on you, girl. No wonder you couldn’t keep your husband happy,” Jason sneered, talking and chewing at the same time. A hard look crossed his face, and he stared at me with so much contempt, I felt a sharp pain shoot up my back.
“I didn’t want you involved in this in the first place. And if it was up to me, you wouldn’t be here now,” I reminded. “This is my”—I paused and tapped my chest with my finger—“my game. If you don’t want to play it by my rules, you can take your fucking bear claws and get the hell up out of here. And, with your lovely record, I know I don’t have to worry about you blabbing about any of this.”
Jason was still chewing, but the look on his face had softened. He blinked and swallowed hard. “We ain’t going to use them pictures unless we have to,” he muttered, looking at Wade.
“Jason, I’m in the room, and I’m the one talking now. I asked the question about the pictures, not Wade. You can address me,” I said, with a smirk. “After we get the money, you won’t ever have to see me again.”
“Woman, I don’t know why you be tripping. We are all on the same side,” Jason said, speaking to me but still looking at Wade. Then he slurped from his coffee cup like a hog at a trough.
“Both of y’all need to chill out. We got business to take care of,” Wade said, shaking his fist in Jason’s face but looking at me. “Baby, you better stay in the room while we’re gone. I seen a pay phone about two blocks down the way.”
“What are you going to say to my husband this time?” I asked, still glaring at the side of Jason’s face. I flinched when he let out a loud belch.
“First, we need to find out where my man’s head is right about now. If things are going our way, I’ll tell him when and where to drop off the money.” Wade paused and gave me a thoughtful look. “Once we get our money, well, it’s over. You do what you got to do. I do what I got to do. Any questions?” He looked from me to Jason.
“Hell, yeah! I got a question! When do I get paid?” Jason asked in an anxious voice, moving toward the bed. Crumbs decorated his chin and lips. It was only then that I noticed that Jason looked cleaner and neater than he’d looked the day before. He wore a nice crisp plaid shirt and a pair of jeans that somebody had taken the time to iron. The creases in the legs were razor sharp. Whatever he was doing to the women in his life was working. Or, if he was as lucky as Wade, one of the women taking such good care of him was his mama.
“Calm down, brother. You’ll get your money when old J.R. gives me my money,” Wade said firmly, giving Jason a hot look.
“I think you mean my money,” I said, ignoring the ominous feeling that suddenly came over me. The feeling that I had was one thing, and that was bad enough. But the way that Wade looked at me gave me a chill that went all the way down to my bones.
CHAPTER 9
I didn’t know how long Wade and Jason would be gone this time. And even though I was nervous and on edge, I was glad to be alone so that I could have some time to myself.
I had no appetite. The way my stomach was feeling, I didn’t think I’d eat again until I knew for sure what Jesse Ray was going to do. My throat was dry, but by now the coffee that Jason had brought was too cold to drink. I emptied one of the cups and used it to get some water from the faucet in the bathroom. I was only able to swallow a few sips, and I almost threw it back up. The water was cloudy and tasted like metal.
I tried to get some sleep as I crawled back into the bed and curled up under the covers, still naked. Maury Povich was on the TV screen, with some trashy-looking, big-footed woman screaming at the married man she’d been having an affair with.
But no matter how tired I was or how hard I tried to doze off, all I could do was lie there and think. There were a lot of things on my mind that I needed to sort through. My future was the most important. But I couldn’t ignore my past and the things that had happened to me then that had driven me to my present point of desperation.
I had spent most of my childhood looking for love, but in all the wrong places. And I had tried just about every trick in the book to get it. I didn’t have any family other than Daddy and Mama. At least none to speak of. But from the vague stories that both my parents had told me, usually in whispered voices, I had a few family members left somewhere in some little rural village in Guatemala occupied mostly by blacks and Indians.
After enduring forty-eight hours of the worst labor any woman had ever experienced, according to Mama, she had given birth to me. “And you was such a homely little beast. You had eyes like a dead fish, hair like barbed wire, and a snout like a pig,” she often told me, adding, with a mysterious smirk, “Praise the Lord, your face eventually settled in the right direction.” That was as close as my mother ever came to telling me I was good-looking. And coming from her that was quite a compliment.
My untimely, unplanned, and unwanted birth had occurred at home, in the two-bedroom apartment that my parents had lived in at the time, on a dead-end street in North Berkeley, California. We moved from that place when I was eight, but I will remember it until the day I die. Eight other people, from the same oppressed Central American country as my parents, had lived with us. They slept on the living-room floor, on cardboard pallets lined up like corpses. And that was literally the case with one man. One night, as I stumbled through the living room to get to the bathroom, I stepped on the man’s head. He was an ugly old creature that we called Abuelo Pato, Spanish for Grandpa Duck. He looked more like a frog than a duck to me, and the one time that I mentioned that to my mother, she slapped me halfway across the living room. When he didn’t move or say anything, I knew something was wrong. But I didn’t say or do anything. After I did my business in the bathroom, I stumbled back to bed.
The next morning, when I found out that the man I’d stepped on was dead, I thought I’d killed him. I was the only child in the house, so I didn’t have a high position. I stayed in a child’s place. I spoke when I was spoken to, and nobody bothered to ask me anything about the dead man. I walked around in a daze for the next few days, convinced that I’d caused a man’s death. Each time somebody knocked on our front door, I almost jumped out of my skin, terrified that it might be the cops coming to haul me off to jail. I was just about ready to pass out at the funeral when the preacher saved me by muttering something about the old man dying from a heart attack in his sleep. My life returned to normal, which was not saying much.
There was not much in my life for me to be happy about. I had no friends or real toys to play with. The television that we had only got two stations: One was a home shopping channel, which was useless because nobody in our house was interested in costume jewelry or Ginsu knives. The other channel was in Korean.
It was no wonder I was always doing or saying something to upset Mama. Like the time