Whispers in the Night (18 page)

Yet my mother warned me about Jack; she could see through him. “Jack tries to act like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, but I get a bad feeling about him,” she said just before she got sick. “He reminds me of Felix, my second husband. Something doesn't feel right about him. Don't marry him. Please don't, Maya.”

I was stubborn. I wanted Jack.

When we got married, I wanted to stay with my mother because she was not well. He didn't want to live with her. We got a place in Brooklyn in Brownsville, a dump, where we gave parties, drinking and drugging. I got tired of that. He didn't want to leave the house. We got into a fight because I went to work as a secretary. I was always good in typing and stuff. When we went out, he would always put me down, talking about my fat ass.

“Man, she definitely got a lot of junk in the trunk,” Jack said, teasing me before the guys. “She got a J-Lo ass and she can fuck. I got to give it to her, she can tire a nigger out, but that's about all. She can't cook or do anything around the house.”

He told me he was screwing a coworker, bragged about it. One night, one of his crew told him about himself, said he should respect me. “You shouldn't talk about how your lover swallows come all night,” he said to Jack, who wanted to punch this guy out.

And jealous, oh man. Jack started to check the car's gas gauge to see if I was going where I should go. He monitored the phone bill to see if I was making any calls to guys, itemizing it. He was slowly isolating me and I wasn't having it. I told my mother about it and she said I should get out of there. He wants to control you, she said.

My sister Inez said I changed. I got really quiet, shy, and meek. I never went anywhere except when Jack took me. I never went to family events, except for my mother's funeral and Christopher's baptism. He would snap his fingers like he would do for a dog and I would sit on his lap or in a chair near him. He would smack me in public or punch me and I never thought about calling the police. I was scared to go against him.

“You don't know what he would do to me,” I told my sister. “He's crazy.”

One Easter, he beat me so bad that I had to go to the hospital. He broke my jaw and busted a few of my ribs. The doctor who saw me never asked me about abuse, so I didn't volunteer anything about my husband doing this to me. He never brought up domestic violence, so I didn't either.

I went that spring after the hospital visit to a place where women went for counseling. A woman who knew my symptoms understood everything about me. We talked and cried together, but I would not leave him.

I took a long lunch with some coworkers, a few laughs and drinks, and Jack was waiting for me when we left the restaurant. He didn't say anything when he called that afternoon. But when he picked me up, he was all smiles until he pointed the gun at my heart and said I was a bitch.

“Who did you fuck?” he said.

“I don't know what you mean, baby,” I said.

“I saw you with that man,” Jack said. “I saw you with him.”

“That was my boss and there were four other people there too,” I quickly explained. “We were talking at lunch. We were celebrating a deal that came through.”

“Are you fucking the bald white guy?” Jack asked. “Is that the man?”

“He's my boss, damn it,” I answered and he slapped me across my face with the gun, hard enough to bust my lip and bloody my nose. I saw stars for a time.

He didn't say anything until we got home. Then he started yelling and screaming about how I was going to have his baby, it was time for him to claim what was mine; then a baby would announce what was his. He blackened my eyes and I had to take off the next day.

“You oughta thank me for killing your black whore ass,” Jack said, holding the gun in my mouth. “You know that. You cunt bitch! You will have my baby or I will kill you. That is final!”

 

 

I left him after that, a second time. I switched jobs. I cut off all ties with my family, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, everyone. I got a new place. I got a new man.

I forgot all about Jack. I turned twenty-one.

Then one day, I got off at my subway stop, on the number two train, and there he was. He was driving a red Honda, was wearing a suit, and leaning against the car.

“Did you really think you could leave me that easy, bitch?” He held the gun at his side.

I saw it. He knew where I lived. I lived only two blocks from the train stop. I was screwed. I silently prayed and continued walking.

A day later, I got another order of protection, one of fifty thousand the city courts grant a year. The judge said it would be the only thing I would need to start a new life. The maximum time for the order was a year. I figured I could use that time to put my life together. The catch was that I, as a battered woman, had to accompany the police officer when he served the order. Since Jack had moved, we had no choice but to serve it to him on his job.

The officer handed it to Jack, who was a salesman at a department store. He sold electronics, such as TVs and stuff. I didn't want to go but the cop said I would be safe.

A crowd of coworkers gathered around Jack as he was handed the order. The cop said the words and warned Jack not to come near me. A boss was standing near Jack.

“You got me fired, you bitch!” Jack shouted. “You got me fired.”

I knew that was not the last I would hear from Jack. I just knew it.

 

 

Three weeks passed. Daniel was my new man. Tall, thin, quiet, and almost serene. He looked like a basketball player, but he didn't play sports. He was a runner and ran in the marathons, the New York variety and the Boston one. He dressed very well, casual and classy. Always Bill Blass. I loved to drive his car, a vintage Thunderbird Sportster.

Now I was in his arms and nude, like that first time, for he held my heart within his cupped hands, a love I'd never known with any other man. His kisses were soft and heated. I could dream with him of a future and possibilities, unlike Jack where there was only darkness and hopelessness. I felt his dick inside me, the fire of it, the surging power of the hardened flesh. He took his time to drink in my scent and my sensitive nub, causing me to buck underneath him, easing him farther inside until he flowed so sweetly and tenderly. Skin on skin, sweat, touching and writhing.

Funny thing was that Daniel never liked to lie around with me. He kissed me on the lips and ran off to the shower.

I lay in the soiled covers, smelling the aroma of freshly made love, and wondered why it was taking so long for Daniel to shower. I listened. No water, no splashing. The door was ajar. I tiptoed to the closet, grabbed my robe, reached for the gun in the top drawer. It was loaded. I opened the door and eased down the hallway until I pushed the bathroom door open.

“Oh, shit,” I gasped. Daniel was sprawled on the tile floor, his hands up to his throat, a gaping hole in his neck. Blood poured from the wound with every beat of his heart. He tried to speak, tried to warn me, motioned with his limp arm toward something.

I turned and faced Jack, his ugly face wearing a distorted smile worthy of his deed.

“If I can't have you, nobody will,” he said, matter-of-fact. His gun was held down at his side. “I told you that I will kill you and anybody else that got in the way of our happiness. You will have my baby.”

I shot Jack. He fell against the wall with the first shot, then pitched forward. I shot him again, this time in the chest. He slumped over with his gun hand trying to lift up, and I kicked the gun out of his grasp and shot him one last time. The bullet went through his forehead.

I dialed 911 and asked for help. They put me on hold. Daniel was still alive, but barely. His eyes were glassy and his hands were twitching. He was losing a lot of blood. He was going to die.

 

 

I went crazy that summer. They locked me up. I don't know how long. I was crazy as a motherfucker. Totally insane. I did shit I wasn't supposed to do. Early on in my imprisonment, I stuck my hand through a pane of glass. My mouthpiece tried to get me put in a minimum-security prison, but they decided on a place for the criminally insane. One of the guards there tried to dry-hump me, thrusting himself on my leg and ass, like a dog in heat. I felt his dick. It was soft and limp against my butt.

This blondie made him leave me alone. This other son of a bitch with him followed me all day. I kicked him in the balls and he yelped like a scalded cat. Every time I tried to get some shut-eye, somebody fucked with me.

These folks were real nuts. One girl swallowed crushed glass. Another chick jammed something jagged up in her pussy and bled to death. I would catch the inmates having sex all the time with each other, or with the guards.

When I told my sister Inez what was happening, she said nobody liked a tattletale. My other sister, Barbara, brought a couple of her church sisters to pray over me, made me hold a cross and read from the Old Testament.

“A woman is born of sin and trouble,” Barbara said, pointing to my heart. “The Bible says that. Read the Old Testament. Remember Eve led Adam to sin. She ruined him. She turned him from God and all of His glory.”

“What are you saying, sis?” I asked.

“You killed him, a man,” Barbara replied. “God will never forgive you. Killing is a cardinal sin. Didn't matter what he was doing to you. You should have left him. You don't kill him, for heaven's sake. Now look at you, locked up in here like some animal.”

I remembered how Barbara was working as a clerk on a temp job about two years ago, just barely making ends meet, and her boss, a cracker, offered to give her a raise if she would let him feel her ass. If he could see her bare buttocks. And she let him. A woman is a sinner, yeah, right. Damn hypocrite!

 

 

A year into my sentence, I was put in a straitjacket following a stunt I did. I tried to cut an assistant's throat with a jagged can top. They put me in a harness so I couldn't do any more mischief. That was when I made friends. Selma and Jan, both nutcases of the first order. Jan would tell the most outrageous lies imaginable. We would all listen to her and howl with laughter.

“When I was an actress, another actor brought in a soiled Kotex in a mayonnaise jar, saying it was used by Barbara Stanwyck,” Jan laughed, cracking herself up. “Do you believe that?”

“No.” Every woman patient on the ward screamed in glee.

“My father got drunk one night and called the FBI, saying he shot J.F.K.,” Jan continued. “My mother thought he was crazy. She left him after that with a deacon from church. The old man went queer and ended up with a sex change in Soho as man and wife. My brother said the last he saw of him was when he spotted him with a bunch of skinheads in the Village, wearing a red Mohawk.”

Selma always laughed at her lies. She was a stout girl, had her tits bandaged up. I caught her leaning over, sniffing Jan in her crotch with a broad smile on her face. “You don't use it much,” she said, sticking out her tongue coyly.

I was tied up for several hours of the day, my “agitation” hours as the hired help called them, and Selma and Jan took turns letting me smoke. They fed me cigarettes while they railed against men and their superior, arrogant sex. Selma said she was married once, had one girl, who was assaulted by her minister. The girl never recovered, lost her head, was doped up on meds and had a seizure and walked out in front of a bus downtown.

“I understand why you don't want to be a breeder,” Selma said, her lips in a snarl. “To be honest, I wish I had never brought a child into this world. They hate children. They hate babies. Men love sex, that's all. If we didn't have pussies, they wouldn't want to have anything to do with us. Think about it.”

I wished I had kept my mouth shut. Jan had the bright idea of collecting all of the knockout meds from her pals on the locked wards. When they had a cupful of them, they fed them to me until I lost consciousness and fell back on the bed. Millie told me all about it later; how Jan held the flashlight so the girls could see, and how Keisha, another inmate, tied my arms down, and how Selma went to work with a needle and thread. Something about an African ritual or rite, closing the window of the body to the soul, Selma said to the girls.

When I awoke afterward, the pain was horrific. I howled in agony. The nurses and orderlies rushed into the room, saw the bright pool of blood soaked into the covers, and pulled them back. I was writhing back and forth, out of my head with physical torment; it felt like a hot butter knife had been put between my bare thighs. One of the orderlies fainted and two nurses carried him out.

“Oh my God, how could anyone do this!” the head nurse yelled, pointing at my neatly shaved, stitched-up sex. “It's not funny. This is not funny at all.”

Nobody was laughing, except me. The pain made me delirious, hysterical. Stitched up like a gaping wound. Neuter. A zero woman reborn.

Rickey Windell George

T
ears ran from Gail's eyes—wide in the dark. Rolled from the left, over the bridge of her nose, and into the salty pool that was forming in the right.

Rap music oozed through the wall at the back of her head, muffled but thumping, making her brain ache. This was not the sound, however, that was eating away at her insides, at her heart and soul. Somewhere near, in her own apartment, a sound like the howling of a wild dog swelled.

“It ain't right,” she said, strands of saliva and tear water connecting her lips. “It just ain't right.”

There was movement then in the bed beside her, a body turning, a man's shoulder coming into view beyond the slope of her silhouette. Then a three-inch Afro and a wrinkled brow, and at last a drowsy pair of arterial eyes emerged as he hoisted himself onto one elbow to look down on Gail's dark contours.

“Haven't you heard?” he said. “Hell is for children.”

A fresh tributary of salt water broke across Gail's face, dropped off her cheek, and stained the pillow. How many times had she asked the question of a few moments past? How many times had she gotten one stupid answer or another?

Somewhere in the bowels of the apartment, a cry broke through the hazy dark, clearly human this time, clearly the sound of pain.

“He's hurting,” Gail said.

“Sheets never hurt nobody. Besides, ain't got no choice. You want him bangin' around, bouncin' off these walls all night?”

“How'd you like it?” she protested, anger burning like fire in her stare. “You want to be all tied down?” Gail was up then, back like a board, body thin as a rail, naked and black—midnight ebony.

A strong arm was slipping around her then, the long skinny fingers wriggling eagerly—
like the legs of a cockroach
, she thought, as the digits brushed her visible rib cage en route toward a breast. God in heaven, were those her ribs showing? Was she trying to starve herself?

“Get your hands off me, Karl.” Gail snatched away, snatched up her robe from the floor on her side of the bed, and began on with it. She was as disgusted with herself as she was with him.

“Always the same bullshit,” he said and flounced back down in the mess of sweated bed linens. Then breathing out through his mouth and wiping perspiration from his brow, he said: “Did it get hotter in here?”

Gail was on her feet now, tying the sash, eyeing Karl as she did. The radio man had said they'd broken a Louisiana state record the day gone by, he'd said it was hot enough to fry bacon on the sidewalk and that the thermostat wasn't apt to dip below ninety-eight even after sundown. Sweating atop the sheets and washed in the flimsy light flung in through the safety bars at the window, Karl's caramel-colored skin was lit in the shadowy shades of blue projected off the neon sign across the street. Even his high-yellow hard-on was cyan tonight. Once upon a time on a hot summer's evening like this, he'd stolen Gail's heart, and Lord knows her better judgment. Once upon a time, those drowsy eyes and that narrow ass of his were all she could think of. He was not especially handsome, but he'd seemed so to her. Now all Gail could think was what kind of no-account bastard he was, hot for fucking even with his son tied to the bed up the hall, moaning, sealed up behind a dead-bolted door like the hunchback chained in the bell tower.

Karl's lips were moving but the words were lost to her.

There was a moment of blurred unreality then. There was a trickle between Gail's legs that her fingers chased after. Her fingers coming back red, she determined that it must have been that time of the month, but could not even consider the whereabouts of a pad before another desperate moan was emitted somewhere in the dark beyond her room.

“—I get sick of this shit,” was the tail end of whatever Karl was saying.

“Sick of what? You don't do a damn thing. You've never done a damn thing. All you're good for is tying him down and locking him up.”

“He's got to be tied down, you know that.”

“You should help me.”

“Help you what?”

“Help me with Martin, goddamn it! He's your son, too.”

Karl's eyes shifted, the whites bloodshot, the lids heavy. “I'm tired.”

“And I'm not?”

Karl adjusted then, turned his back and narrow ass to her. “It's cause of you we keep going in these circles.”

Another moment of unreality then: the room turning slowly, the little boom box on the dresser top, so easy to grasp and to pitch at a motherfucker's head. “I should give him away, right? Dial a number and make him go away?”

In the moment of silence that followed, the dark stream running down Gail's right leg arrived at her ankle. Then at last Karl's answer rang out. “We shoulda put him down the incinerator the day he was born.”

Gail's breathing seemed it would stop that instant. It felt as though this man—this lanky son of a bitch in her bed—with the healed knife wound on his belly and the scar from that bullet on his chest, had stomped her in the heart.

He really didn't give a damn.

He didn't care if the boy lived or died so long as he was gone away somewhere,
in a place
was how the whites liked to say it. There wasn't a day that Gail didn't imagine the possibility, though she wished she could say there was. Her life was an unrelenting trial and it was because of Martin. If she were to put him “in a place,” then everything would be so much easier. Each time she more than grazed the thought, however, she was reminded of the place where she'd spent her growing years: Sister Mary Hellena's home for orphaned girls, also known as hell on earth.

That was all right, though, wasn't it? Hell was for children, to hear Karl tell it.

Gail didn't remember leaving the bedroom but found herself in the darkened main hall moving toward the call of her child—now a mix of frantic shrieks and convulsive sobs. She could hear his bed jumping, banging, and creaking as he thrashed upon it. Martin's door was at the end, the last one on the left, and it seemed the walk—the dread—would never end.

The noise was earsplitting up close and the scent—God, yes, there was an almost unbearable stink—was heavy in the air as the room grew near.

“Defecation,” the social worker liked to say.

“Shit!” Gail had corrected just days earlier. “Don't dress it up! He shits on the goddamned floor and then he plays in it!” Gail's arms outstretched almost like Christ on the cross, and turning in the middle of the room, she said: “He wipes down the walls with it. Sweet baby Jesus in heaven, I've seen him eating it.”

The social worker was a fat white woman with a man's bowl haircut. She looked quite literally like someone had put a large soup bowl upside down over her head and simply shaved whatever hair there was that spilled out around the rim. Her eyes held all the compassion of ice cubes and her personality was none the warmer. “So toileting is still a problem?”

A problem?
Gail thought, giggling at the stupidity of the question inside her head. Martin was fourteen and the size of a man, and he could not tell a toilet from a water fountain, or his ass from a stump in the ground.

“A problem?” Gail answered the question with the restatement of those two ridiculous words, and without realizing it she'd begun to turn again in the middle of her living room, like a child's spinning top slowly running out of steam. In snatches she glimpsed the kitchen through the entry: orange painted walls, white linoleum floor, a cutting board on the counter, a meat cleaver on the board—glinting silver light.

In turns the social worker sensed the change, saw the bulging capillaries in the other woman's eyes, felt the heat coming off her body. Gail was a woman on the edge.

Typically Martin spent his days at school, in the special class that he was taken to by way of the special blue bus. It was summertime, though, and school was over, and those few precious hours of reprieve were just a memory. It was the sound his body made hitting his bolted bedroom door that had pulled Gail's thoughts back from the cleaver. She liked to imagine that her son was trying to break the dead bolt, liked to give him credit, that at least his actions were efforts at escape. But he slammed the walls and the window boards and the floor equally as often as the door. Perhaps he just liked the sting of the impact?

“You're a stupid bitch,” Gail said to the social worker. “Yeah, I got a problem. I have to lock my son in his fucking room all day. I have to board his window so he don't jump out. I need help!” Her hands went up to her head, gripping the thick puff of her hair, pulling—the pain had felt good, made her feel real. “Why won't somebody help me?”

“No one will come out here, Gail. Not to this neighborhood and not to deal with Martin. It's an awful thing to say, but you should really start considering the inevitable. Martin is getting big and these outbursts much more dramatic and frequent.”

“I ask you to get someone out here to help me and all you can talk about is how I should give him away.”

“It's my recommendation that we seek institutionalization.”

“You want to take my baby away from me?”

“Gail, I don't place this kind of suggestion lightly. Yours is an extraordinary case—”

Martin's door thumped and rattled with his weight again.

Gail's eyes locked on the fat woman, shimmering liquid hatred. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

 

 

Now, in that long hallway for the some-odd thousandth time, Gail wondered if it wasn't time to dial the number. The fat lady had left in a rush, but not before leaving a card—a magic number that could make Martin go away. Gail reached the knob and the mechanism of the dead bolt and she wondered if she could do it again. If there was help, if she was not so alone, perhaps she could go on.

The one Therapeutic Support Specialist brave enough to come to Kindred Green—Mr. Lucas—had not returned after the day Martin smeared ejaculate in his face. He'd been a godsend for the few days it lasted, helping with feeding and bathing, but when the boy had brought his dripping hands out of his oversized diaper and slammed the slimy palms in Mr. Lucas's face, the heyday ended. The boy must have tackled him, taken him down. Martin had been cleaning his hands with the man's face—in his beard, across his nose, wriggling his gummy fingers in the man's gaping mouth—and giggling insanely when his mother, hearing Mr. Lucas's stifled screams, came and wrestled Martin loose. Everything ended in screams where Martin was concerned—his or someone else's.

Martin was screaming as the rod of the dead bolt retracted from the jamb.

“I'm leaving!” Karl was in the backdrop, in the hallway now, but not on his way to lend a hand. He'd gotten into his jeans and was headed for the front door. Even now, Martin—all one hundred and sixty pounds of him—was wailing just on the other side of his bedroom door.

“Please,” Gail appealed to Karl. “Don't leave me by myself again. Just help me settle him down.”

The front door was already ajar in the man's grasp. The hallway's lone bulb played a game of tricky lighting in the murk, made sweaty highlights on the tops of the man's shoulders, made the rivers of moisture on his chest seem dark as oil.

“Please stay.”

“What for?” Karl asked. “We both know how this goes. Sleepless night, wailing mongol—”

“Don't you dare call him that! He ain't no mongoloid. He's our son.”

“Whatever,” Karl said. “We know how this plays out, how it always plays out.”

“If you help me it might be different.”

Karl looked back. Was the expression smug or sad? Gail couldn't tell. Whichever it was, the front door closed just the same and then, utterly alone, she was pushing her way into Martin's room. Though she couldn't see their swarming little bodies she could hear the hum of flies swimming in the pitch-black. She fished for the light switch, found it, and gasped at what she saw.

Martin was there on his bed, one hand free of the sheet ropes where the bedpost had broken. He was completely naked where he'd torn his pajamas and the giant diaper off with his free hand. Writhing awkwardly, straining against the remaining restraints, he was masturbating so fiercely that his penis appeared bruised and raw.

Gail thought about the sheets, how he must have fought to get that hand free. It was so very wrong to tie him down, but at the same time bizarre compulsions ruled his sad life, and it was impossible to predict what he would do. It was impossible to keep him safe at night without restraint. The boards at his window, which allowed only a peek of light in the day, seemed equally cruel, but what was she to do? He'd put his fists through the glass once already.