One House Over Page 7

  Odell put his arm around my shoulder. “I want to marry Joyce as soon as possible. But if she don’t want to be my wife, I’ll understand,” he mumbled.

  I swallowed hard and looked around the room. Sadie and Buddy were busy waiting on customers, but I knew they had heard at least part of the conversation. I expected them to start running off at the mouth about me the first chance they got to everybody who would listen. But I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I felt like a real woman.

  “Do you want to marry this man, baby?” Daddy asked. This was another question I couldn’t believe he was asking. I knew that Odell was probably my last chance, so I was going to take him and run before he changed his mind.

  I nodded.

  “Y’all ain’t even been together that long,” Mama pointed out. “Do you really love this man? You know how we feel about marriage. It’s a one-way street and once you get on it, it’s for life on account of divorce ain’t part of God’s plan. When a couple get married, they is duty-bound to stay together until death claims one of them.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “We’re not even married yet, so there is no reason for you to even be thinking about something like divorce!”

  “Marriage ain’t no fun and games, girl. It’s a real big step,” Daddy piped in, sounding tired now. He was running out of steam, so I knew that this hot discussion wouldn’t go on too much longer.

  “I don’t care,” I choked.

  “Joyce is not going to deal with this on her own,” Odell said. I was glad to hear him say more about this situation. “I’m just as responsible for this as she is, and I’m going to stand by her all the way.” His words were like music to my ears. He’d just said exactly what I wanted him to say.

  “What’s the big deal about us getting married?” I wailed. “I don’t want to raise a baby on my own.”

  “You ain’t going to raise no baby by yourself as long as me and your daddy is alive,” Mama said. “But if you don’t really want to marry this man, you ain’t got to.”

  I was disappointed to hear that Odell had suddenly become “this man” in her eyes. She and Daddy knew how I felt about him, and he’d just made it clear to them how he felt about me. A couple of weeks ago, when they realized how serious our relationship had become, they had mentioned the fact that Odell had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and hadn’t done much with his life since then. And they never let me forget that he’d worked in a whorehouse. I had argued with them that all that was in his past and he deserved to be judged by what he was doing with his life now. I also reminded them that they’d had enough faith in him to give him a job, and they’d encouraged me to go out with him, so he must not have been too bad. I couldn’t understand why they were reacting the way they were now especially when they’d previously been afraid that I’d never get married at all.

  “I think we need to talk about this some more when we get home. We’ll pray for guidance all night if we have to,” Daddy decided. He looked from me to Odell, and then he added with a smirk, “Just the family.”

  “I’m having Odell’s baby, so he’s family now. And if we need to talk about this some more at home, he needs to be there,” I insisted.

  “That’s all right, baby,” Odell said, holding up his hand. “I’m real sorry this had to happen before I got a chance to properly court Joyce and ask her to marry me.”

  Mama opened her eyes so wide, she reminded me of an owl. “You mean you was going to ask her to marry you anyhow?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. I made up my mind right after I met Joyce that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.” Odell stopped talking and looked at me and smiled before he continued. “Matter of fact, I had planned to ask her to marry me anyway this coming weekend.”

  “Huh?” I mouthed. His last statement surprised me as much as it did my parents. “You mean you don’t want to marry me just because I’m pregnant?”

  Odell squeezed my shoulder and started talking in a slow, gentle tone. “I had a itching to propose a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t think it’d be a good idea if I rushed things. I needed to be sure you loved me.”

  “You know I do,” I squealed.

  “Humph!” Daddy shrugged and looked from Mama to me. “It sounds like y’all done already made up your minds, so it don’t matter what me and Mother say, huh?” He suddenly stopped talking and started coughing so hard, he choked on some air and Mama had to slap him on his back.

  “Daddy, I can see how hard this is on you and I’m sorry. That’s why I wanted to wait until we got home to finish this discussion,” I told him, trying to sound as apologetic as I could.

  “Don’t worry about me getting upset. You the one with a baby in your belly, so you need to be worrying about yourself. I just hope y’all making the right decision.” Daddy’s voice was getting weaker by the second. “A baby is supposed to be a blessing. . . .”

  “Sure enough,” Mama agreed with her voice cracking. “Oh well. What’s done is done. Now we just need to move on.” All of a sudden, her mood changed. Her eyes softened, and there was a hint of a smile on her face. “I . . . I never thought me and Mac would live long enough to enjoy a grandchild. It’s been a dream for a long time, and it’s finally going to happen.”

  Odell looked straight into Daddy’s eyes first, then Mama’s. “Y’all will live long enough to enjoy this baby and several more.”

  This was the moment when I knew for sure that Odell Watson was the man God had been saving for me.

  Chapter 12

  Odell

  FROM ALL THE STUFF I’D HEARD FROM BUDDY AND SADIE, AND THE things Joyce had told me out of her own mouth, I had been under the impression that her mama and daddy couldn’t wait for her to get married. Now I wasn’t so sure. They had not reacted the way I had expected. Instead of hugs and kisses, and congratulating me, they’d just stood there looking at me like I was crazy and talking all kinds of bullshit. What was the matter with these people? I didn’t even want to think that they thought I wasn’t good enough for their daughter. So what if I didn’t have much education and nothing other than myself to offer? As long as they’d been waiting to see her get married, they couldn’t be crazy enough to think that a better man would come along some day.

  Even though Millie had eased up a little and started gushing about being a grandmother, I was still apprehensive. I decided not to go home with Joyce and her parents to continue the discussion. I knew she wanted to marry me, but I didn’t know if she’d still want to by the time they got through with her. Right after I’d confessed that I’d been planning to propose to her anyway, the three of them left abruptly. The fact that they’d left in such a hurry was something else for me to worry about. It seemed like they couldn’t get away from me fast enough. They didn’t even say good-bye. If Joyce stood up to her folks and decided to marry me anyway, I wasn’t so sure it was the right thing for us to do now. I kept thinking about all I had to gain if I went through with it. If I had not been in such a rush to make love to her, things might have turned out much better. Even though she’d been ready, willing, and able to hop into bed with me, I still should have held out.

  Had I screwed myself out of a job by sleeping with the boss’s daughter? If that happened, I had nowhere to go and only enough money to pay this month’s rent. And I had too much pride but not enough nerve to go back to the same “friends” who had let me sleep on their couches during my downtime. I couldn’t stoop low enough to beg Daddy and Ellamae to let me stay with them until I got back up on my feet. I’d rather live in a hole than live with them again.

  The more I thought about the situation, the more worried I got about losing everything I had accomplished since my last job. I didn’t have a damn thing to fall back on. I had to come up with a backup plan. And I didn’t know where to start. I couldn’t rob any of the banks still in business. That was too risky anyway. Everybody was still conversating about the stories in the newspaper and on the radio about what had happened to a yo
ung white couple over in Louisiana just a couple of months ago back in May.

  Bonnie and Clyde had become such well-known outlaws, some of the news reports didn’t even have to mention their last names no more. They had robbed banks, grocery stores, gas stations, and shot and killed folks for four years before the law shot them to pieces. If the cops could do something that extreme to white folks, there was just no telling what they would do to a colored man for committing the same crimes. With my luck, they’d lynch me and let me hang until the rope rotted. And then they would shoot me to pieces. I had to be smart and figure out a safe way to keep my ass out of the hole I had already got too close to.

  When I finished my shift and got back to my dreary room, I stretched out in the same rollaway bed where Joyce and I had created a baby. And I was on pins and needles. For the first time in my life, I was really scared.

  I got back up around midnight, slid back into my clothes, and decided to take a walk so I could get some fresh air and clear my head. Since I didn’t have no key to the house, I had to prop open the front door with an empty Dr. Pepper bottle so I could get back in.

  When I reached a little park two blocks from the boardinghouse, I sat on a bench for over a hour, trying to come up with a plan. I needed a drink, but I didn’t have no alcohol in my room, and the few colored bars within walking distance had closed for the night. I went back home and got into the jalopy Mac had sold me. Without giving it much thought, I drove to the last place I ever expected to visit again: Aunt Mattie’s whorehouse.

  “What you doing here?” she barked when she opened the door and saw me standing on her front porch. “Didn’t I tell you not to bring your sorry ass back around here?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you sure enough did. But I got a problem.”

  “You’ll have a heap more problems if you don’t get your black ass the hell away from here!”

  “Please give me a break, Aunt Mattie. Can I come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “Naw! Whatever you got to say, say it here and you better say it quick. I got things to do.”

  Matilda Pennington, a well-known battle-ax that everybody called Aunt Mattie, was real unpredictable. It was no secret that she dabbled in hoodoo. When I was a little boy, me and my friends never knew if she was going to threaten to put a hex on us for raiding the two pecan trees in her front yard, or get drunk and chase us with a switch. She was a small woman with a heart-shaped face that was probably pretty at one time. Now she looked like a dried-up, droopy-eyed witch with wrinkles on every inch of skin you could see, and a head full of long, brittle white hair that always dangled around her shoulders like snakes. She had been chewing tobacco for so many years; the few teeth she had left had turned the same shade as her copper-toned skin. Nobody knew how old she was, but like a lot of other elderly people in town, she’d been born into slavery.

  Aunt Mattie didn’t have no relatives that I knew of, except a husband that nobody had seen in over ten years. She claimed he’d run off with another woman. But before she fired me, one of her girls got drunk one night and told me a gruesome story that chilled me to the bone. According to her, Aunt Mattie had hacked her cheating, violent, controlling husband to pieces with a hatchet, stuffed his body parts into gunnysacks, and buried them in her backyard. I didn’t ask that crazy old bitch about it because I didn’t want her to know I’d heard the rumor. If she’d killed one man, what would stop her from killing one more? If I hadn’t been so greedy and careless, she never would have caught me trying to empty the pockets of Mongo Petty, one of her regular customers. Aunt Mattie had cussed me out and had given me fifteen minutes to collect all of my belongings and get out of her sight, or I’d be “real sorry.” I’d done it in ten minutes because I didn’t want her backyard to be my final resting place.

  “Um, I never told you how sorry I was about what I done to Mongo. He worked too hard for his money for me to be trying to steal it,” I said, trying to sound as humble as I could.

  “Well, you ought to be sorry on account of you didn’t even get nothing from him. Mongo was lucky I walked up when I did. I wonder how many others you clipped that I didn’t walk up on in time.” Emptying an unconscious trick’s pockets was nothing new in Aunt Mattie’s house. Usually, when one passed out, she’d order me and Rufus to take his money and everything else of value. Then she’d make us haul him away from her house and dump him on a rival madam’s porch two houses over. Since Mongo had already passed out, if I had waited a few minutes longer, she probably would have had me clip him anyway! I was so mad with myself for jumping the gun, I would have kicked my own ass if I could have.

  “I swear to God, except for the ones you had me and Rufus do, Mongo was the only one. And I only did what I did because I’d been drunk myself that night and somebody had picked my pocket and stole my money. One of the girls claimed she’d seen Mongo going through my pockets, so I figured he was the one. I thought I’d just be getting back what belonged to me in the first place.” I was so used to lying, it felt natural. I swallowed hard and tried to look as pathetic as I could, which wasn’t hard for me to do.

  “Well, do say. It don’t matter now no more no how. What you come back here for? I heard you was working for them snooty MacPhersons now.”

  “That’s true. But . . . uh . . . I might not be there too much longer.”

  “Why come? You can’t even stock shelves right?” Aunt Mattie sneered.

  “No, it ain’t nothing like that.”

  “And another thing I heard was that you and that horsey gal of theirs done got real tight,” she smirked. “Mosella told me at church last Sunday that you and Joyce been eating at her place quite a bit lately.”

  “I’m real fond of Joyce and I enjoy her company. We’ve had some good times.”

  “I bet! And there’s no telling what some of them good times was. She ain’t cute, but a gal with legs as long as she got could have done real good working for me. Poor thing. She is such an oddball. She got some nerve trying to talk all proper. I guess she think she too good to speak the way a normal colored woman is supposed to.”

  “Someday I hope to speak with more better grammar like Joyce do.”

  “Like I just said, she tries to talk proper, but she slips up now and then. She ain’t as smart as you think. Matter of fact, for years a lot of folks thought she was retarded.”

  “Joyce ain’t no more retarded than me or you. She finished high school and she’s been working at a school for years and years, helping the teachers with the kids.”

  “That don’t mean nothing. Look at all the things a dumb dog can be trained to do. A smart enough idiot can learn how to do just about anything. Roosevelt is one of the biggest idiots in the world and he was smart enough to make it to the White House.” Aunt Mattie laughed. And then she got quiet and gave me a suspicious look. “Let me ask you again, what you doing back here?”

  “I think I done got myself in a fix and I didn’t have nobody else to turn to for help but you.”

  Aunt Mattie’s eyes got big and her mouth flew open. “Me? Humph! If you think I’m the only one you can turn to for help, you in a bigger fix than you think! What in the world do you want me to do for you?”

  “Give me another job.”

  “Pffft!” Aunt Mattie waved her hand at me like she was shooing a fly. “You done lost your mind or I ain’t hearing right. I gave you a job and you fucked it up. What’s wrong with the job you got now?”

  “Things ain’t working out for me there.”

  “Oh? What did you do? They fixing to fire you on account of they caught you trying to rob them too?”

  “No, ma’am. It ain’t nothing like that. It’s just that . . . well, the job ain’t what I expected, and I was thinking about leaving on my own. I need something to keep me from getting bored and me and Buddy and Sadie don’t get along too good.”

  Aunt Mattie narrowed her eyes and glared at me. Her beady black eyes looked like ink spots. “Is that the only reason you dragged your tail b
ack over here?”

  I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” I hoped I sounded distressed enough for her to take pity on me. It had worked with Mac.

  “Humph! I’ll tell you one thing right now, I don’t need nobody working for me that I can’t trust. I can’t have no independent thief mingling with the men my girls service. If I did, it wouldn’t take long for me to be out of business.”

  “I can understand that and I don’t blame you. But I can do anything else you want me to do that’ll keep me from coming in contact with your tricks. I know quite a bit about cars, so I can keep yours in good running condition and I play a mean piano. I can fill in when Rufus needs to take a break.”

  “Two of my girls play the piano just as good as Rufus do, and they always happy to take over when he ain’t available. I already got a good mechanic and I got a feeling he robbing me blind, so I ain’t about to take a chance on having two crooks shaking me down by claiming one thing or another need to be done on my car. For all I know, you might take off with my car.”

  I could see that I wasn’t getting nowhere with this old bitch, and I was sorry I had come to her. “Aunt Mattie, thanks for listening to me. I’m sorry I disturbed you. If you change your mind, send one of the girls to get me. I got a room at that boardinghouse on Pike Street. Now you have a blessed—”

  She cut me off with a weird question. “You squeamish?”

  “No more than anybody else, I guess. Why?”

  “Some folks is more squeamish than others. Anyway, Emmet had a stroke day before yesterday, so I need to find somebody to replace him.”

  I gulped. Emmet Williams was a retarded man in his sixties and had one of the worst jobs in the whorehouse industry. He emptied the spittoons that guests used to spit their tobacco and snuff into, dumped and cleaned out the piss and shit buckets people used when they couldn’t make it to the toilet in time, and emptied trash cans that the whores filled up every night with cum-stained tissue. If all that wasn’t nasty enough, Emmet also helped change the bedsheets after each fuck session. Working on a chain gang appealed more to me.