The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (23 page)

“I never took you for a fool,” I said. “I never mistook your kindness for weakness.”

She sighed. “Well, I don’t suppose you meant to. I don’t suppose my father meant to do that to my mother either. But he did.”

“I’m not him.”

“You’re not far off.”

“I’m not him,” I said again.

For the first time that evening, Sissy looked me in the eye. “I put aside my better judgment for you. I did when you came to my house and asked me to go out walking on our first date, and I’m doing it now. I’m terrified, but I’m doing it anyway. I want you to understand that.”

She came over to my side of the table to clear my plate. The lilac powder and hot-comb smell of her knocked me out. The nylon whisper of her stockinged thighs brushing together made my hands twitch.

“Baby,” I said.

She put those plates down and led me into the bedroom. When I woke up at 6:30 to get ready for work, she was still asleep, but the room was warm, and I realized she had gotten up sometime before dawn to turn the heat on for me.

“What the fuck?” That’s Mills talking. We’re shouting at each other. The blood is pounding in my temples and my palms are slick. “What the fuck?” he yells again.

“There’s something out there, man,” I say, pointing to the dark thing just off shore.

“That’s a goddamned rock, Shep! And you ain’t even aimed all your shots at the water. You just discharged half a round into a beach full of live mines. What the fuck?”

“You don’t see that? I’ve been watching it for hours.” I raise my rifle again, staggering a little with the effort.

Mills is mad now.

“Put that down! Put it down!”

I lay the rifle on the sand, and Mills is up in my face poking his finger into my chest and shouting. I shove him away; the force of it makes me fall backward onto the sand. He’s on me, all swinging fists and flying spittle. He’s half drunk himself and only manages to land one on my shoulder before Pinky comes and breaks it up. He pulls me to my feet, says maybe I should take a break, maybe all three of us should take a break. The other guys in the squad have stopped digging. It’s dark but I swear one of them is looking at me and shaking his head.

“I don’t need a break. I’m protecting you motherfuckers. There’s some kind of sub out there. What the hell else was I supposed to do?”

“You figured you could shoot the sub?” Pinky says.

“Right there, two hundred feet out, to the left.”

“That ain’t nothing. It’s a rock.”

“Look close,” I say.

“Look like a rock I’m looking at close,” Pinky says.

Mills is standing a few feet away from us, but I can tell he still wants to take a swing at me. “I see it. It’s a fucking rock,” he says.

“You got to calm down.” Pinky leads me over to a stand of mangroves, and we sit on the sand. It takes me a few minutes to realize that he’s taken my rifle from me and propped it against the roots of the trees. I think I might throw up.

“It was a sub,” I say, though now I’m not so sure. Pinky lights a joint and hands it to me.

“Alright, man. Okay. If it was a sub, don’t you think they’d come out by now? We been here all day and night.” Pinky’s laughing. “You was going to sink a sub with a rifle, huh, man?”

We sit and pass a joint for a few minutes. My nerves settle. I don’t know if it’s the joint or Pinky. It’s true, if they were going to get us, they would have by now. He calls over to Mills, “This nigger really thinks he saw a sub.”

Mills doesn’t answer.

“Come on, man. We ain’t blown up. Come on and help me laugh at this fool.”

Mills walks over and sits. It’s like that with us. One minute you’re angry enough to draw blood, the next you’re sharing a joint. I want another beer but I don’t think they’ll give me one.

Pinky has a tattoo on his arm that reads Black Patti. He says she was the one that got away. I need a good laugh, so I say, “Tell us about Patti.” Pinky has a thousand Black Patti stories.

“No man, not now.” Pinky says.

“Come on. Mills here wants to hear it,” I say. Mills cracks a smile.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s hear a little Black Patti.”

“What’d she do?” I ask.

“What’d she give you?” Mills adds.

Pinky’s grinning now. He says, “That bitch gave me the mess around.”

“I used to go around her house, made a date first and everything. Then I would show up, and her mama would answer the door and tell me Patti wasn’t there. So I say, ‘Respectfully, ma’am, where’d she go?’ And that big woman would rear up and say, ‘I believe Patricia had another engagement.’ So fa la la, that damned lady. She had her nose so high in the air she could smell the birds farting. She thought she was Leontyne Price. And she’d slam the door in my face. Then I go to a party and damned if Black Patti wasn’t there with some other cat.”

Mills pulls a beer out of his back pocket. We pass it between the three of us.

“Now y’all know Patti was knock-kneed. She was not a nice-looking woman. But she could wind. I’m telling you she could put it on you. She had me all messed up.”

“She was shaped like a chicken, right?” Mills says. “With little bitty chicken legs.”

“And her mama ain’t know nothing about how she was,” Pinky says. “I remember this one time she had me come over in the afternoon. Her mama was sleep in an armchair with the
Ladies’ Home Journal
in her lap. And how about she was snoring with her head hanging down? Reading about how to make a lemon meringue pie and she’s making noises like a truck. So me and Black Patti go to her room and we get it going. I don’t know how long we was at it. But I had a good start. Patti liked to pretend she was shy, you know. So you had to sweet talk her. You had to say, ‘You sure are a pretty girl,’ and call her sugar and spice and all that stuff. She did have a pretty smile, I’ll say that about her. And she smelled like heaven, like silk and rich ladies. She had a little dresser covered with perfume her mama had bought so Patti could get the Negro doctor lived around the corner. So anyway, we going good when Leontyne starts hollering in her fa la la voice. ‘Patricia, Patricia, Dr. Nelson has come calling. Isn’t that a delightful surprise!’ ”

“Aww shit,” Mills says.

“Don’t you know Patti pushed me off her! I tried to hold on to her ’cause we was in the middle of something, you know. So she’s there with her bra undone and starts whaling on me. She smacking me all in my head and neck like I was a wayward child. Then she’s kind of hissing at me under her breath, ‘Dr. Nelson is here. Get up, you fool. We have to finish this later.’ She pushed me right down to the floor, and I’m laying there stunned. She had strength like she been working in the fields. I saw stars. There’s Patti staring at herself in the mirror and spraying herself with damn near every perfume on that vanity. I’m on the floor tangled up in my pants. Then she looks at me and says, ‘Oh, you gon’ get out of here.’ She starts smacking me again. That bitch smacked me all the way to the bathroom and out the window. I’m falling out the window and last thing I hear is Patti’s momma, ‘Patricia, let’s don’t keep Dr. Nelson waiting.’ I’m half naked so I get behind a bush and damned if Patti don’t come outside with a silver tray of lemonade. I’m behind a bush with grass up my ass, and Patti’s having a beverage on the porch.”

Mills is slapping his thigh laughing. “And how long this went on?”

“A year. A whole year climbing out windows and getting stood up. I had a broken heart.”

Mills guffaws.

“I did, man. I think Patti worked some roots on me. I was walking around town all jacked up. I went to the hardware store and cried all over the wrenches.” Pinky’s laughing at himself now.

“Some women get in your soul,” I say.

Mills and Pinky look at me. “It ain’t all that deep, man. Damn.” Mills says. “What happened after a year?” he asks, but just then our commander walks over.

“Y’all want a fan and some drinks with umbrellas? Get the fuck up so we can finish and get out of here.” He spots the beer Pinky tries to hide behind his back. “And throw that away,” he orders. He probably has one in his own pocket.

I pick up my rifle and walk, carefully, back to my post. It’s true, that black thing isn’t big enough to be a sub. Could be a mine though. Could be a buoy attached to a mine. Could be a diver’s back, if he were dressed in black and his head and legs were submerged. But why would he float like that? That doesn’t make sense. Pinky and Mills said it was a rock, so it’s a rock. The pot has stopped working: I’m so tired I can’t feel my legs, but the fear is vibrating in me like an engine. I walk to the edge of the sea and throw up in the water. Maybe it’ll wash out to that floating diver. Heh. That’d be a nasty surprise for him.

Sissy bought some new houseplants and borrowed a rug from her mother’s house. The apartment looked nice, more like a home than it had before. I guess that was because we’d earned it, because we’d survived something.

We had been back together for two weeks when a couple of big guys knocked on the door. They’d come to collect on a debt I thought I’d taken care of. I didn’t have enough money to settle up, and all my begging and pleading didn’t stop them from taking that armchair I’d bought and the sofa and table and bed with the pull-out drawer. As a down payment, they said, until I could pay them what I owed.

At least I can say I didn’t run away that time. When Sissy got home, I stood in the empty living room and told her what happened. I remember I had my hands in my pockets because I wanted to be a man about it. I didn’t want to fidget or cover my face with my palms. Those guys had emptied the pull-out drawer under the bed, just turned it upside down and let the contents spill out onto the floor. Sissy’s things were in a pile in the middle of the room: a camisole and a slip, her music box with the lid that broke when it hit the floor. There was a shoe print on the folded handkerchief with our blood and gold inside. I don’t know why I didn’t think to pick that stuff up. To this day I wish that I had. I wish she hadn’t had to see her private things scattered on the floor like that.

Sissy looked at me the way her mother must have looked at her father a hundred times, with disgust and resignation and disappointment. She stared at her precious things for a long time then picked them up and packed them into her suitcase. “I’ll be back for the rest of it,” she said.

I started crying then.

“I’m sorry.” I said. “I’m sorry. I was going to pay them when I got … it’s from before.”

Sissy rushed at me, her hands balled into fists. She hit me in the gut. I mean, she punched me hard enough to wind me. Do you know that I was relieved? Sissy was on me with both fists, and I was so relieved because something true was happening between us. She was going to leave me for good, because I was the ruin of her. I have looked at my father many times and wondered how he could stand knowing he was my mother’s ruin. He was too weak to leave her. Mother should have thrown him out and saved them both, like Sissy was saving the two of us.

My squad puts the last mines in the ground. The beach is dotted with little mounds of sand where the mines are buried. If the enemy is coming, they’ll come now. We’ll be out of here in twenty minutes, and I realize that I have spent the last twenty-four hours thinking I was going to die. They only have twenty minutes left to kill me. I trot up and down the beach with my rifle sights on the dark thing out there. Twenty minutes ticks down to fifteen. My legs are shaking and my chest is tight, but I keep moving. I want to see my daughter. I want to explain to Sissy that I couldn’t possibly be the same fool after what I’ve been through tonight. In my hours on this beach I have been so close to death that I am almost my own ghost.

We’ve finished packing our gear. I try to get another beer, but Mills refuses me. Behind his back, one of the other guys tosses me one. Mills sees him and says, “You want him shooting at invisible monkeys this time?” The guy shrugs. “Could have been worse,” he says. We walk toward the junk, and all I can hear is the frog song swelling and the hiss of my beer opening.

Our junk is black and old and stinks of rot and fish like everything else in this bay. I take my place on the starboard side in the rear, and we push away from the shore. The black hump in the water is just visible through my rifle sights. I beat you, I say. We clear the shallows, and two of us open a hatch at the back of the ship. A retractable plank is lowered, and two of the hands roll the sea mines down the gangway. They slip with a little splash into the black water. They will detonate when something interrupts their magnetic field. I was told that fish are not big enough to do this nor a man swimming alone. We head toward the open water.