What They Found (12 page)

I crossed the avenue, looking behind me, looking for
the woman from the shop to appear at the corner, her voice screeching like the wail of a police car as she pointed a long brown finger in my direction.

Pedro had been right. I wasn’t hard enough, wasn’t cold enough to do what had to be done. I hadn’t even asked her for money. I had just sat there, numb and scared and feeling sorry for myself.

The short walk to Pedro’s crib took longer than it should have. My legs were stiff. Sheila came to the door and showed me in. I gave Pedro the piece and he asked me what happened. I noticed he didn’t touch the gun.

“I chickened out,” I said. “The woman I was going to take off got so scared it blew me away.”

“Eddie, running steel is either you or it ain’t you,” Pedro said. He picked up the gun, sniffed it, then opened a drawer and put it away. “Carrying a gun is like hanging a sock full of cotton in your pants. It may make you feel good to show it off, but when the deal goes down, you can’t pee through it. But some cats need that. You just found out what they spend their lives trying to learn.”

As I left Pedro’s place I knew that everything I had been thinking before was real. I was still black and poor and didn’t have a thing to show for who I was except some empty pockets. I wanted to beat up on myself, or maybe get so high I couldn’t think about nothing except laying down and going to sleep.

I knew what I was about. It was being a fake man. One
of them stick figures that little kids drew. Even with a gun it didn’t make any difference.

I went up to Jeannie’s house. She was still fine and she was only seventeen and didn’t have but one baby. I was going to tell her she needed to find her another man. Maybe, if I ever got my stuff together, I could help her take a course or something. She had more going for her than I did, and if anyone was going to help Little Eddie it was going to be her. Like all the other baby mamas around the hood she was going to have to carry the load on her own.

“Where were you yesterday?” She stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. “I’m telling your son you were going to show any minute and you don’t even have the decency to call me! What’s wrong with you?”

“Yo, Saturday’s his birthday, right?”

“Yesterday was his birthday, Eddie!” The anger was all over her face. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Man, look—I thought—Jeannie, I didn’t have nothing to bring him and I don’t think I’m—”

“Later for that noise!” Jeannie stood aside so I could come in. “That’s your son. He’s not interested in what you got out some store. You supposed to be here for his birthday and stuff. What’s wrong with you? I’m trying to build you up so he can look up to you and you don’t even show!”

“Yo, I’m sorry.”

“He’s in the bedroom,” she said. “You go on in there and talk with him so he knows he got a daddy. And don’t even
think
you’re going to get next to me because you are not!”

I started to tell her that she couldn’t tell me what to do, but she brushed me off with a wave before I could even get the words out. I went into the bedroom Little Eddie shared with Jeannie. He was sitting on the floor at the end of the bed pretending he was talking into Jean-nie’s cell phone. When he saw me he put a finger to his lips, letting me know I should keep quiet.

“Who you whispering secrets to?” I got down on the floor with him. “You got a girlfriend?”

He handed me the phone and I put my arm around him. He still couldn’t talk too clear and I couldn’t understand what he was saying but I knew it had something to do with the cell phone. Jeannie came in and sat down on the bed and watched as I played with Little Eddie. Once in a while I looked up at her and she seemed happy to have me there. I wanted to say something to her, to lay out the way I felt about not having nothing to bring to Little Eddie, about not being able to get a place for the two of us. But it all seemed like same old same old.

I hung for a few hours, then said I had to split.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“I don’t know, to my moms’ house, I guess.”

“Lay here for a while.”

“Hey, look, girl, I really feel bad not to show with nothing,” I said. “No matter what you saying about how he wasn’t looking for me to bring him nothing from the store. It still messes with me. You know what I mean?”

“What you think?” she asked. “I don’t have a ring, I don’t have your name. You think it don’t mess with me? What I got is hoping that it gets better, that we’ll be a regular family one day. As long as I see you’re still acting like my man and Little Eddie’s father I still got that hope and that’s what keeps me going. Maybe you have to be a woman to understand that. What you think? You think a man can understand that, too?”

I sure as hell didn’t want to, but I was crying. I was thinking about the women I had been dealing with all day—Mama, the woman in the tailor shop, and Jeannie. They were trying to hold their worlds together the same way I was trying to make mine.

“Dada crying.” Little Eddie was standing, leaning against the edge of the bed.

“He’s your daddy,” Jeannie said, slipping her arm around my waist, “but I think he got some girl in him, too.”

I put my arms around her and hugged her close. Then Little Eddie got mad at me hugging his mama and started hitting me. It felt good.

“H
oney if you asked that smiling, charming, sweet-talking boyfriend of yours what a steady paycheck looked like he wouldn’t have a clue.” Maxine peered over her Armani glasses as she sipped a double latte. “He got Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message all wrong. Harrison Boyd does not have a dream, he’s got a scheme. What do you need his sorry butt for?”

“Maxine, maybe you don’t understand what it is to love a black man who has hopes that aren’t that easy to come by,” Abeni answered. “Sometimes you just have to have faith in a man. I think there will come a day when Harrison will definitely get over. And I want to be the black woman by his side that day.”

“Oh, I get it.” Maxine rolled her eyes. “It’s a black thang
and I wouldn’t understand because I’m not as black as you. Is that the four-one-one?”

“I didn’t say you weren’t black,” Abeni said. “But check it out, Maxine, you’re nineteen and you already have an associate degree, and you have a smoking job. Do you really think that life is that easy for every black person out here?”

“No, I don’t,” Maxine said. “But I know this. If I got my game together I don’t want to be hanging with anybody who doesn’t even have a game. And you, my ebony princess, are a fine chick. You’re in college, pulling some heavy grades, and how old are you, twelve?”

“Going on nineteen.”

“You’re going on nineteen, you have a head on your shoulders, and one day you will own your mama’s beauty parlor. So you’re going to have your smarts, your business, and your sweet, sweet self. What do you need a sorry-butt Negro like Harrison for? He’s just one of these smooth-talking dudes looking around for a crutch and thinking he’s found one every time he sees a black woman. Two years ago he was going to start his own basketball league. Last year he was bringing in drugs from the Middle East.”

“Rugs, Maxine, you know he was trying to import rugs for all the new apartments in Harlem,” Abeni said. “And that was a good idea. It would have worked if he had spoken Arabic.”

“Now what’s he going to do?” Maxine tilted her head sideways. “Or doesn’t it matter just as long as he’s anatomically correct? Are you really that desperate for a man?”

“I am not desperate.”

“Well, girlfriend, it’s up to you. But sooner or later you’re going to have to make up your mind about that man. ’Cause the way I see it, he’s going to sweet-talk you into marriage, a bunch of cute little babies, and a long hard life before you wake up.”

“Maxine, Harrison is okay, he just reaches a little too far sometimes,” Abeni said.

“You need to be like your sister,” Maxine went on. “That girl is into her books, working around the shop, and that’s it. I’ve even seen her fix stuff around the shop with her tool kit, so she don’t even need a man.”

“Noee fixes stuff because she has a knack for it, which she got from our father,” Abeni said. “And that has nothing to do with needing a man.”

“Yeah it do, girl. That’s God’s way of telling her to keep her legs closed and her nose sniffing out slick-talking dudes like Harrison!”

It was hard to argue with Maxine. Harrison was twenty, had dropped out of high school three years earlier, and had been chasing one idea after the next. Somehow they all seemed good when Harrison was sitting in front of Abeni explaining how he would get rich if he
just followed a few simple steps. Harrison was a big man, with a round face that made her want to smile when he came around, and you did not say no to those soft brown eyes.

Yesterday he had taken both of her hands in his, and with that low, sexy voice of his said, “The thing everybody is forgetting about is high-density cable. Brothers are out there buying some smoking sets and hooking up the high-density but they’re getting tired of having to watch reruns from 1970 and old movies that somebody’s colored. What they need is some today television. Some short, hard-hitting pieces that speak to the African American community.”

“And that’s what you’re going to be making?” Abeni had asked.

“Abeni, it can’t miss,” Harrison leaned forward. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking if I can get you and your family to come in with me, we can bust in on the ground floor.”

Yes, it had bothered Abeni to listen to yet another of Harrison’s schemes. Nothing that Maxine had just said was new except for the last comments about making up her mind about Harrison. Abeni wasn’t even sure how much she cared for him anymore. She knew she was tired of making excuses to her mother and hearing the jokes around the beauty parlor about Harrison’s latest schemes.

* **

It took her two entire days to run all of the issues through her mind, and might have taken longer than that if Harrison hadn’t called her.

“I got to see you tonight,” he said. “I feel something momentous is going to happen.”

He got her to agree to meet him in the New Pam-Pam’s restaurant across from Harlem Hospital at seven-thirty

Abeni was tired, she had worked all day, had done four stylings from wash to set, and had “touched up” Mrs. Gunning’s hair so that her bald spot didn’t show.

“Do you think I should comb my hair straight back or to one side and maybe a little to the front?” The elderly lady looked at Abeni in the mirror.

“I just think if you keep your chin up and put a little dark powder on the top of your head your bare spot won’t show so much.” Abeni smiled back at her. “You’ve got nice eyes and you want to keep the focus on them.”

Mrs. Gunning hadn’t appreciated Abeni’s suggestion and mentioned it to Mama Evans.

“She don’t like it, but you were right,” Mama Evans said. “I’ll bet you the next time you see her she’s going to have that chin up and batting them eyes all over the place.”

Harrison was already in a booth in the New Pam-Pam’s
when Abeni arrived. He held up his hands as if he were framing her in a shot as she made her way to the back.

“You have star quality,” he said. “Some people have to work like a dog just to look presentable on film, but I think you have it naturally.”

“Harrison, we have to talk,” Abeni said, feeling more tired than she’d thought she was.

“Don’t tell me your mother doesn’t see the opportunity to invest in Abeni Studio Productions?” Harrison leaned back in his seat. “I just can’t believe a woman that perceptive is going to let a chance like this slip by.”

“I didn’t even tell her about your filmmaking,” Abeni said. “Because I don’t believe in it myself.”

“You
what?”

“No, that’s wrong.” Abeni held her hand up before Harrison could interject his ideas. “What I don’t believe in anymore is you. I think—I know—I need some serious distance.”

“Abeni, honey, what are you saying to me?” Harrison asked. “You know I’m Harrison Boyd and I know you are Abeni Evans. So, knowing who we are, and what we mean to each other … go on and tell me what you are trying to say.”

“What I’m saying”—Abeni hoped she would get the words out—“is that we—Harrison Boyd and Abeni Evans—are through. You need to pack up your ego and your dreams and go your way, and I need to pack up my
ego and my dreams and go my way. I’m really sorry, but I have to make a choice about what my life is going to be about.”

At least that’s what Abeni told Mama Evans she said.

“And that’s when he got down on the floor and started acting like a fool?” Mama Evans put down the jar of Miracle Gel.

“That’s when he got down on the floor and started begging me not to leave him,” Abeni said. “Everybody was looking at us.”

“I know they were because Ethel—you know her, she got good hair on the top of her head and naps in the back—was in the New Pam-Pam’s and she told Zinnia Lucas, and once you tell that girl something you might as well put it in the
Amsterdam News.
So what did you say?”

“I was too embarrassed to say anything,” Abeni said. “Harrison is over six feet tall and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds, so you can’t miss him.”

“And he was crying, too?” Mama Evans asked.

“Mama, he wasn’t like shedding a few tears, he was bawling and throwing himself around and crying so loud people from the front counter came back to take a look.”

Harrison’s getting down on his knees and crying so loud had shaken Abeni up. But it had been so embarrassing
that she was speechless and didn’t say one way or the other what she was going to do. People at the counter were looking at them and shaking their heads. Abeni took a deep breath and just looked at Harrison for a while; then she just got up and left. She called Maxine the minute she got into the house and told her what had happened.

“And I know you are not thinking about taking him back?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Abeni said. “I really think he loves me, even if his plans don’t always work out.”

“Don’t always work out?” Abeni heard Maxine suck her teeth over the phone. “Girl, Harrison Boyd is just a dog like every other two-bit hustler out there. And don’t come talking nothing about love to me. If you need some cute dude—and Harrison is not that cute—to support for the rest of your life go and adopt you a little Vietnamese baby or something. He doesn’t need a woman, he needs a mama who can come around with a sugar teat in one hand and a checkbook in the other.”