Loving Women (34 page)

There was a small hill leading over the dunes to Fort Pickens and
I started up there on the second Sunday, brimming with confidence, when a truck came roaring over the rise, right at us, black, faceless. I panicked, and whipped the wheel around, driving it straight into the path of the truck, and then pulled it the other way, while Eden yelled “Right!
Right
!” We ended up stuck in the sand as the truck roared on. My hands shook. And I was so afraid I couldn’t move: frightened of taking this ton of rubber and steel in my hands again and ending up mashed in the grille of another truck. Eden lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She said: “Better get back on the horse, child.”

And I did. We got the car out of the sand, pushing and heaving until we got traction, Eden laughing through it and telling me I’d remember that moment all my days. And then I took the wheel again and went up over the rise, more slowly now, thinking
right
, go to the
right
, if someone comes barrel-assing down the road,
go fucking right
. But the road was empty and I shifted gears more smoothly and Eden laughed out loud and hit the dashboard with the palm of her hand. “Yeah! Good!
Go do it
!”

She let me drive back to the mainland across the causeway that day, and then switched seats with me for the ride home through traffic. “You got it, don’t you worry now,” she said. “You
got
it …”

I had some money from the drawings, and I said (trying to sound like a man) that I would pay for the food from now on (since that’s what men did). After all, she did the cooking; and another thing: when we went off in the car for drives or lessons, I should pay for the gas. “It’s only fair,” I said, and she shook her head in an amused way and said, “If you say so.”

Most of the time we went to Stop & Shop and picked up steaks at thirty-three cents a pound or shrimps for a quarter a pound and black-eyed peas for a nickel (ah, the fifties!) and with water, spices, salt and care, she’d turn these plain goods into food I’d never tasted before and have seldom tasted since. The process was as mysterious as art; casein wasn’t art, it was something you used to make art; peas in her hands were the same. She prepared for meals the way a painter might prepare for a new canvas, first studying the newspaper, reading the ads for bargains and in her quest often expressing high moral outrage. Look, she’d say, at this A&P ad: round steak has gone up to fifty-nine cents a pound! That’s a
damn shame
! And a five-pound bag of oranges is now thirty-seven cents (her voice rising).
In Florida!
But then she would see a twenty-eight-pound
watermelon for $1.10 and Peter Pan peanut butter for thirty-five cents and her anger would ebb and we’d go off to the A&P, instead of Stop & Shop or Plee-Zing on T Street. She said she hoped I didn’t think she was cheap. But she felt responsibility, she said, ever since I insisted on paying for the food. “People work hard for their money,” she said, “they better spend it hard. Not easy.” And when the food was back home, she would begin the magical process of changing it. Food had never been so sensual.

As the days grew longer and warmer, she moved some of the plants and flowers outside, making a small garden beside the trailer. She bought two folding chairs at Sears, and we’d sit outside sometimes and look at the small lake that fed the River Styx, with the trailer like a silver wall between us and the bumpy dirt road that ran through the colored district.

“I saw your friend, that Bobby Bolden, around here the other night,” she said one Sunday afternoon. She was quiet for a long moment. “He’s got a white woman in a house back there in the woods.”

“That bother you?”

She gave me a funny look. “Well, I wonder about it.”

“It’s their business, I guess.”

“Yeah. Till someone makes it
their
business.”

“Like who?”

“Oh, hell,
any
body.… Some black lady jealous of a white woman. Some damned redneck. You never know …” She looked at me. “This is the South, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”

We didn’t talk about it any longer that day.

In the spring she taught me the names of the world. She named the trees in the swamps, mostly cypress and tupelo, and the great hardwoods in the bottom land, oak and sweetgum, hickory, magnolia and red maple. I’d pluck leaves from each new tree, discovering that I could always draw a tree if I followed the basic structure of the leaf. In the higher land, she showed me the difference between slash pine and longleaf pine, and the dogwood and wax myrtle that grew at their base, and sometimes we would just sit there in the stillness and she’d point out warblers and woodpeckers and we’d close our eyes and hold each other and listen to the soughing of the wind through the longleaf pines.

One Sunday we drove west on route 98, hugging the sparse coast until we ran out of road. We moved inland then on a two-lane blacktop and parked the car under some live oaks hung with moss. We carried a picnic basket deep into the woods. When we were out of sight of the road, we heard a snapping sound and saw a white deer scamper away, and then Eden pointed out a possum and the tracks of a bobcat. “There’s prob’ly some black bear in here too,” she said. “Now
they
could kill ya … But not to worry, they been most hunted off.”

The woods had a deep loamy smell that seemed to enter her, slowing her movements, making her more languorous, her voice more raw. She took my hand and made me bend under low-lying branches, then shoved me away from a pile of leaves (“Copperheads love them leaves”) and made me walk around a fallen log (“That’s where the cottonmouths live”) and laughed at my city ways of walking and told me the names of the bugs: ticks and fire ants, chiggers and deer flies and black flies all mixed up with the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums. If you got a tick under your skin she said, patiently, quietly, you had to smother him, cover him with nail polish, force him to fight his way back out. Chiggers made a little tube under the skin and you had to scrape them away, tube and all, gouging them right off the surface. “Chiggers love the leaves too,” she said. “Best thing you can say about a copperhead is they eat the chiggers …”

Just knowing the snakes were around made me feel creepy. But Eden talked about them in a casual way. “There’s hardly any rattlers around here anymore,” she said. “Nobody knows why. They just moved away, went someplace else.… Coral snakes could hurt you a little. They’re tiny things, a real pretty color, but you’d have to be tryin to kiss one for it to do you any damage. The cottonmouth, well, you don’t want to mess with him in any shape or fashion. He’s big, color of gunmetal, fat and ugly with a head like a triangle. Stay away from that sumbitch.” She smiled. “Mostly, snakes are harmless. Don’t bother them, they don’t bother you. Just cause the poor things ain’t got legs, ain’t no reason to kill em.”

Then the darkness of the forest began to lift and bright yellow shafts of light cut through the trees; we suddenly saw a red wall, and she told me that was because the red buds had bloomed on the slash pines. And when we moved past them, we came to the river. It was about thirty feet wide, gurgling over smooth stones, and was
the reddish color of tea.
A red river
! I thought, remembering the old Gene Autry song about remembering the Red River Valley. And she said it was that way because of the tannin in the cypress trees. Clean brown sand lined the river banks, and in the center of the river there was a wide flat boulder, the water coursing around it. The air was free of insects now, and I could see fish in the river, lolling in the eddies along the banks or moving without effort against the current. Catfish, she said, and bass and perch.

For a long while we stood there in the stillness along the bank, saying nothing, hushed by the solitude. Then we walked to the sand along the banks. Eden looked at me and put down the picnic basket and pulled her blouse out of her trousers. I did the same with my shirt. She wriggled out of her blouse and laid it flat across the top of the basket. She unzipped her jeans then, and I was undressing too; she laid the jeans and her panties across the basket and then breathed deeply and removed her brassiere.

“Come on, child,” she whispered hoarsely.

We waded into the cold river. I held the basket and clothes above the water, my feet slipping on the stones. The water was up to her breasts and her skin was pebbled with the chill and her nipples hard, but she moved to the boulder, which lay like a dry, bone-colored island in the middle of the river. She slipped and almost went under and made a yelping sound and then giggled and righted herself as the swift water pushed against us. She reached the boulder first and pulled herself up, dripping and glistening, the muscles taut under her skin. She took the basket from me and I heaved myself up. We lay there side by side for a long time, her legs apart, her black V drying in the hot sun, the two of us engulfed by the sounds of unseen insects and animals and birds and the gurgling rush of the river. Only our hands touched. My cock felt thick and lazy. I let one hand trail in the cold river.

After a while, she sat up and looked at my face and ran her fingernails over my stomach and then leaned forward and took me in her hot tight mouth.

Chapter

37

O
ne chilly Wednesday evening in April, when Eden was working late, Sal, Max and I waited outside the locker club for Bobby Bolden. Traffic moved quickly down the highway. The lot in front of Billy’s was almost full.

“Can you imagine the balls on this guy?” Sal said. “Inviting us to dinner at his
chick’s
house?”

“He’s got a death wish,” Max said. “Or
we
do.”

I saw a lot of Sal and Max around the base, but after meeting Eden Santana, I’d only been back to the Dirt Bar twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drinking and the noise and the fun; I loved all that, the recklessness of it, the lack of rules. I just wanted Eden Santana more. To be with her, I had to have more money than I made as a sailor, so I usually spent Monday and Wednesday nights drawing my little ink portraits. Sal and Max (and most of the others) knew I had a woman and kidded me about her, but I didn’t care. On this evening, Sal was insisting on a invitation to
my
girl’s house too, promising he would even wear socks for the occasion and use a knife and fork. I was glad Eden was at work; we wouldn’t see her at the trailer on the way to the place in the woods where Bobby Bolden lived with his white woman. I didn’t want them to inspect her; I didn’t want her to think I was just another crazy kid sailor.

Then a blue ’49 Mercury pulled into Billy’s parking lot. Bobby Bolden was behind the wheel. He honked and we hurried across the highway. I glanced at Billy’s window and saw Red Cannon and Chief McDaid staring at us from beyond the neon sign. I got in the car beside Bolden. Sal and Max slid into the back.

“What the hell are you doin with a lowlife good-for-nothing Mercury?” Sal said. “I thought spades only drove Buicks and Cadillacs.”

“We use these when we gotta leave a body in the trunk,” Bobby Bolden said in a dry way. “Don’t wanna waste a good set of wheels on the dead.” He was driving up the highway, away from town, toward the lumpy dirt road where Eden and I had picked him up in the rain.

“Should we lie on the floor?” Max asked.

“Won’t help,” Bobby Bolden said. “They kill black men aroun’ here just for
leanin
on a Mercury.”

“If they stop us,” Max said to Sal, “start singing ‘Mammy.’ ”

On cue, they started singing the old song, trying to sound like Al Jolson, and were up to the part about the sun shining east, the sun shining west, and them knowing where the sun shone best when we bumped over the gravel road and went under the live oaks and past the silver trailer. The evening light was fading now. The lake looked black. Bobby Bolden glanced at me. And I glanced to my right and felt The Boulder suddenly fill my stomach. This was Wednesday. Eden Santana was supposed to be working at Sears. But the car was parked in front of her trailer. She was home. With the lights out.

“ ‘Maaaaaaa-uh-uh-me, Maaaaaaaaaa-uh-meeeeee …’ ”

“Now you gonna get us killed by the
niggers
,” Bobby Bolden said.

“It’s the Klan we don’t want cutting up our ass.”

“I wunt talkin about ya
color
,” Bobby Bolden said. “I was talkin bout ya fuckin
singin
.”

We all laughed, but I glanced back at the trailer as we followed the gravel road into the woods and I wasn’t thinking about the Ku Klux Klan or anything else.
The car was there
. I imagined her in the half light with some man. Some
man
. Showing him my drawings. Laughing at his remarks. Through the woods I saw small unpainted houses, some with the doors wide open and lanterns inside on tables. Black kids moved around in the fading light, playing ball or running through bushes. There were no streets.
She’s making him shrimp with the red sauce and a salad. She’s bracing her feet against the roof of the trailer
. Bobby Bolden pulled the car through an opening in the bushes and down a narrow path and stopped in front of the house: one story with a front porch and a peaked roof. In the
darkness, I could make out peeling traces of white paint. The shades were drawn and the front door closed.
She’s got the door locked and his trousers are folded over a chair and there is ice clunking in a glass. They will whisper for a long time
. We got out of the car.