YOU WANT ME TO be all bent out of shape because some college girl got my boy to help her off her old man? You want me to act like I’m so shocked. Let me tell you, it takes a lot to shock me these days.
Where I come from, you shit in a hole in the ground until the hole got all filled up. Then you took out your shovel.
I was one of thirteen myself. My mother was sixteen when I came along, and I wasn’t her first neither. My dad? Who knows.
Christmastime, growing up, they’d come around from the church with these packages people wrapped up for kids like us with labels on them that said “Boy, seven.” or “Girl, ten to twelve.” Year I was six I said I wanted a baby doll. In my package was a baby doll all right. Only had one arm though. “What can you expect,” says my mom. “Watch out for that Santa in the department store. He’s probably just some old man wants to put his finger up your butt.” You think I listened for them reindeer? Who had a chimney?
One thing I was always proud of. My hair. I mean, up until I was ten years old, I had this pure gold hair, clear past my rear, naturally curly. Poor as we were, I always kept that hair clean and brushed. Did without my lunch milk three weeks in a row to buy me a hair bow. I always figured, those rich kids over Lancaster, they might have a million dollars and still they didn’t have hair like mine. You know what I’m saying. It was my special thing, ain’t nobody was going to take that away.
First day of fifth grade, the school nurse does a head check like always. She gets to me and gets this look on her face like she just swallowed a prune pit. “What’s the matter?” I say, but she just writes something down on a piece of paper and says, “Here, take this to your mother.” She don’t know and I don’t tell her that my mother can’t read.
But I can. It says I got these head lice bugs crawling around in my gold hair. Egg sacs too. I got to use this special shampoo every day to kill them. That plus we got to wash all our sheets and towels (well, that’ll take about a minute, I think) and vacuum up the whole house too. And then there’s a long list of other what you call precautions.
Now I don’t want to tell my mother this, knowing how she’ll cuss and scream. Other hand, I got to get these bugs out of my hair. Got to get that shampoo. So I wait and wait, and finally I do it. “Ma,” I says. “I got head lice. We need to get this special shampoo or the other kids might catch it. Maybe they got it already.”
My ma, she don’t say nothing, just goes to get the scissors. I’m hollering “No, don’t cut it,” but she just gets my brothers to hold me down and they go at it, right at the roots. When it’s over, I’m pretty near bald. What’s left, she pours kerosene on that. “There,” she says. “You just let that set a while.”
After a few months my hair started to grow back, but it wasn’t gold no more. Just ordinary brown like everybody else.
It was one of my brothers was the first one to jump me. I couldn’t say which one, it was dark.
Thirteen years old, I start to feel like I got some kind of bugs again, only this time they’re crawling inside me. I lie there on the floor and there’s this wiggling going on in my belly. I didn’t notice no missed period on account of I never got no period in the first place. But my ma figures it out. “You’re knocked up,” she says. She didn’t ask me who done it on account of, whoever it was, it was family, so why bother?
That baby was born dead. Strangled on his cord most likely. I looked at him before they took him away. Spitting image of my brother Arnie, so at least I figured that part out.
Once it happened, seems like it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. Sure enough, maybe four, five months later, I get that feeling again. This time it’s a girl. That’s Regina there. Same one made me a grandma herself when she was just fourteen. Thirty years old and I turned into a grandma. Can you beat that?
After Regina, then comes Russell, so quick I still had Regina sucking on my tit when I’m pushing Russell out. One hungry mouth on one tit, one on the other. Seemed like all I was was a bunch of holes. One to put a dick into, two to take milk out. I could talk about my uncle that liked to do it from the rear to boot, but there’s kids around.
After Russell comes Sheila, then Roseanne, then Clyde—no, then Vera, then Clyde. Clyde had a twin, but there was this woman over in Greenfield that called me up when she heard I had two of them. Said she heard I had an extra I hadn’t counted on—now isn’t that the truth—and would I be interested in talking about maybe seeing my way to letting one of them go to this lovely childless couple she was working for, where the woman had one of those operations that make it so you can’t have no babies. “Where do I get me one of those operations?” I wanted to ask her.
She gave me five thousand dollars cash, so long as I got this blood test showing Babe was the father, and not no brother of mine or nothing. And that was the truth, it was Babe. By that time my brothers was both over at the county farm, so you knew it wasn’t them.
Russell, for some reason he had really took a shine to that little sister of his—Crystal we called her, for the month or two we had her, before they took her away. Search me why, out of all the babies come and go around our place, he had to take a shine to the one that wasn’t sticking around, but that’s what happened.
Day they come for Crystal, he’s sitting on the step holding her. Didn’t cry or carry on or nothing. He just holds her real tight until the lady comes that took her away. Don’t ever let them tell you money don’t matter in this life, I tell him. Money’s behind everything. A person got enough money, they can do anything. Go anyplace. And get away with it.
First time he got arrested was throwing rocks at cars down on the freeway. He was twelve. They sent him to a reform school kind of place for a couple of months. That’s where he learned how to hot-wire a car.
Fourteen years old, he’s back at juvenile detention for holding a knife up to a teacher. Out a few weeks, they have him back for breaking and entering. Then he had what you might call a quiet stretch. That’s when Charlene, my cousin’s girl, announces she’s expecting, and Russell done it. Who knows? The baby come out good anyways, but hasn’t been no baby since that Crystal that my boy wanted to hold on to. He’s got a look in his eyes now, that boy, like nothing would scare him. I said that to him one time. “Why should I lose sleep over nothing?” he says to me. “What’s the worst a person could do to me? Kill me, and alls you do is save me the trouble.” Life sucks, and then you die. That’s his what you call philosophy, he told me one time.
You ask me, how could he do it? Answer’s simple. She was going to have someone kill her old man anyways, it was just a matter of who. If Russell didn’t hold the guy down, somebody else would, and then it would of been them got the cash. So if it’s going to happen anyways, why not take advantage?
You want to know if I’m wailing in my bed over this here Suzanne Maretto business, the answer is I cried my last tears a long time ago. Maybe he done it, maybe he didn’t. If he didn’t do this, it’s only on account of he was doing something else. I knew a long time ago I wasn’t likely to see that boy grow old. Or if I did, the only reason would be they had him locked up someplace out of trouble. So now maybe I’ll get to see him grow old after all.