“OH, NO,” RYDER SAID, HIS HAND POINTING INVOLUNTARILY at someone or something beyond the car windshield.
When Lee saw her husband’s pointing finger, she wanted to bite it, like it was a wiener.
Ryder was pointing to a black man coming out of a drugstore.
“What?” Lee asked. The word barked out of her. She knew she ought to sound more sweet. But he’d gone too far. For what Ryder done last night, she hated him. Would hate him forever.
She noticed that Ryder hesitated.
What? she thought impatiently. Staring at the closed glove compartment, she waited with her lips sealed. She wouldn’t ask again.
Finally he said softly, “He’s one we got good. Least I think it’s him.”
He stopped the car for a red light and streams of colored passed in front of them. They had to wait. She had nothing but contempt for Ryder mumbling about how he hadn’t meant to come this way on the niggers’ streets. Niggers doing their Saturday shopping.
But actually she felt safe enough. It was broad daylight. Sunny.
“Lock your door,” he said.
He had insisted on taking her downtown so she could get some decent hose with a seam in the back, like the Lord intended. Ryder had claimed he just hated those panty hose things. That was why he done what he done, he had claimed afterward. He let her wear them all summer long, but they made her legs look naked. Like she wasn’t dressed decent for the public.
Last night, he had taken his knife and cut out a diamond in the crotch. Yeah, he was a little drunk—it was Friday night—but he said he’d been wanting to do it over a month. He said he could taste how bad he wanted to.
He had held up the panty hose, laughed, and showed her the empty diamond, laughed. Lee burst into tears. She just sobbed. She blubbered out about how she had been specially selected by the company, selected at random, to test out panty hose. Through the mail. It meant she was special. Specially selected.
Finally he had said, “It’s my Friday night and you don’t stop that blubbering, I’ll have to whup you.”
“Just go ahead. Just go ahead,” she had said, banging her hand on the kitchen tabletop. She was sure he wouldn’t;he’d already gone too far.
So he had had to. He just grabbed up her rolling pin off the sink drain—the wood still looked a little damp from where she’d rinsed it off—and hit her on the shoulder with it. There was a crunch that must have scared him, so he turned her around to beat her butt where she was well padded.
Then she had gotten down on all fours and tried to crawl under the table. He grabbed the back of her hair and said, “Now you bark, Lee, you want to go on all fours.”
“Wolf!” she said. She was crying. “Woolf, wooolf.”
“I want you to say ‘bow-wow,’ ” he sneered. “Like in Dick and Jane.”
No real dog ever said bow-wow. He made her ridiculous.
“Bow-wow,” she had sobbed. “Bow-wow.”
But he was sorry afterward, he said. He’d meant it as a joke, cutting a hole in her panty hose. (But secretly she knew he thought it might be fun to do her through the diamond sometime. Yes, that was what he wanted.)
To prove he was sorry, he had gotten up this Saturday morning to take her to Loveman’s. He loved her, he really did, and he wanted her to have nice things from the nicest store in town.
And there was that colored man coming out of the drugstore. Oh no! he’d exclaimed.
“What’d y’all do to the colored?” Lee finally asked. She knew he liked her to say nigger, but really that was pretty low-class talk when you could just as well say colored.
She wondered if she’d have had such hurt feelings about her panty hose if he’d just used her scissors instead of his knife. Trimmed it neat, instead of stabbing into the mesh.
“Well, we hurt him pretty bad,” Ryder said soberly. “Him or somebody who looks like him.” Not his usual tone at all.
And what could make Ryder sound like that? Almost she liked him a little better.
Lee clicked her Juicy Fruit gum in her teeth a few times. Its flavor was about worn out.
Juicy Fruit gum! Long ago a lady in a pretty house off Norwood Boulevard had introduced her to Juicy Fruit, when Lee was a little girl, maybe eleven or so. Such a sweet, soft-spoken woman, old, with her leg in a heavy brace. Lee saw it all again—sometimes her mind just left like that and stood on the edge of her pictures. Now she was seeing Norwood Boulevard and long ago. Her imagination just worked that way—just carried her on off.
Lee had approached a door with fifteen little glass windowpanes to sell some of their extra tomatoes from the garden, door to door. “I don’t need any tomatoes,” the lady with the leg brace had said, “but let Aunt Pratt give you a stick of gum.” Juicy Fruit was the gum.
And then, after she said thank you so nicely, the old lady invited her in and had the maid fix Lee a pimento cheese sandwich, with the crust cut off the bread.
“What you daydreaming about, Lee?”
“Just a sweet old lady who gave me a sandwich when I was a kid. Off Norwood Boulevard. Aunt Pratt, she called herself.”
“I know her,” Ryder said. “We’re kin.”
Lee didn’t believe him for a minute. She knew he’d make up anything that made him sound important.
After a silence Ryder mumbled, “I kind of hate to say it.” He swallowed. “We took his balls off.”
“Oh, no, Ryder.” She made herself say it so sweet.
When you’re afraid, be sweet: it was as though the woman behind the glass door were telling her how to act. Aunt Pratt was trying to help her. Lee replayed how she’d just spoken—so soft, as though she was pleading with Ryder to be good. But that had already happened. He couldn’t change cutting that black man’s balls no matter how sweet she said Oh, no, with her chin tucked down and her mysterious brown eyes looking up at him.
And besides, he would hit her no matter how she looked up at him, pleaded with her eyes. She never could be too sweet or too pretty not to hit.
“You can look back at him,” Ryder said generously. (Whenever they drove downtown, he told her she must always look just at him, at the side of his face, that he would point out to her anything she ought to see on the street.)
Lee glanced back quickly at the colored man. All dressed in brown.
“I’d do it again,” he said. “We should of done a dozen. Should of, last spring.”
“Thing’s quieted down now,” she answered, her own voice quiet with fear.
“Don’t you ever sit by no nigger on no bus. You get off and walk if you have to. I don’t want Birmingham to end up like Montgomery. We can’t have that.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She knew he knew she wouldn’t dare or want to do such a thing. Her thoughts speeded up as though they were running away. Sometimes when he was bad, she knew he really had meant to be funny. Maybe she ought to laugh when he seemed mad. Maybe he got madder if she didn’t recognize his joking. He was sorry about the rolling pin; he had as good as said so. They were shopping now.
She heard his regretful voice again:We took his balls off. She saw him holding out the crotch of her panty hose, both his hands up in the panty hose, the ends of his fingers caught against the stretched film. The diamond shape was empty, the fabric cut away, jagged. She saw the palm of his hand through the clear space, saw his fingers stretching out the mesh away from the diamond space. His knife lay on the scratched metal top of the cook table.
“Didn’t I ever tell you how we done it?” He hesitated. (Was he regretful? Did he want her to say it was all right?) “Thought I had.”
“No, hon,” she whispered. She kept her eyes on him. Saw him swallow and his Adam’s apple go up and down. He licked his lips. Maybe he didn’t want to describe it. Or maybe he was relishing it. His high cheekbones seemed to press his eyes into slits. He popped in a square of Chiclets gum; she could hear his teeth crunching through the candy coating. She watched his hands. She thought, Unlock the car door—run!
“I held his shoulders. Helped to hold anyways.”
She could feel his hand on her own shoulders, last night, pushing her down, her crawling away fast, almost under the table.
“He was on his back, on the floor. Kicked like a jackrabbit.”
If it was her, she’d want to bite. She shivered. Bite like a werewolf woman. There were some, but just in that one comic book (quick, quick, she would picture them). There had been one werewolf woman just as powerful as any of the pack loping over moonlit hills. If Ryder was to come at her with a knife in his hand, she’d spring to bite his neck on the jugular vein.
“Took two to hold each leg. Two others just jerked his pants down. We had took him to a deserted house.”
He stopped again. Maybe he was sorry. But he glanced at her, made her ask.
“Then what?” she whispered obediently. She was almost too afraid for her voice to work, but he’d be mad if she didn’t ask.
“One held up his pecker. Other stretched out his balls a little—” Something like a sob escaped from Ryder. Suppose it was Ryder on his back, Lee thought. Ryder went on quietly, “Then they just did it.”
She sat silent, horrified. The silence was a ringing in her ears. The people on the street disappeared. She could feel the man’s balls in her own fingers. His parts were soft and helpless. She could feel the soft marbles inside the sack, the skin of the sack corrugated like corduroy with fear. His body trying to suck in his balls to hide them.
Again, she heard the strange rattle, or hiccup that had come from Ryder’s throat.
“Straight razor. Just a few swipes,” Ryder said. “That’s all it took.”
She couldn’t speak. It was like a hand was to her own throat. The stomach bile was wanting to rise, and she fought to keep it down.
Suddenly, Ryder slapped the top of the steering wheel with the flat of his hand as though he was slapping a horse. “Man,” he said enthusiastically, “we poured turpentine on him. Still screaming like he’d gone crazy. Scalded him good with a quart can of turpentine so as he wouldn’t forget. Gave him the warning. Tell Shuttlesworth.”
Ryder gripped the steering wheel, tucked his lips into his mouth, wagged his head from side to side. “Man!” Then he laughed. “That turpentine saved his life. We didn’t mean to, but it stanched the blood flow. Saved him. We didn’t kill him. That was him, walking around.”
“I don’t remember when you did it.”
She didn’t want to remember. What had he done to her about that time? She wanted to think of something else.
What might she do to him, if she couldn’t stop herself and he was asleep on his back?
No: she wanted to think of something nice for right now.
Something for this moment driving to Loveman’s Department Store, something that had nothing to do with blood and screaming in an empty house. She wanted him to step on the gas; she didn’t want to look at colored Birmingham, all those colored folks looking at fall clothes in the windows. Step on the gas.
But those white robes she sewed—those robes, she saw them haunting, weaving around a black man. White-hooded men floating in robes she herself might of sewed, those men, one holding a straight razor, doing what they did. The colored man, pants gone, his naked brown legs kicking, and he would never be a man like them again. Bright blood on the hems of the starched white robes, robes they had given away on hangers, Christmas presents, with a big red bow at the base of the hanger hook.
But who’d want to be a man like them? Not her. She just hoped he’d had his children, that poor man. That man in the old brown hat, walking beside the Rexall drugstore.
Too much traffic to hurry, but Lee determined to put that stuff out of her mind. It was a fine, clear day. Actually, you couldn’t see the face beyond the hat brim.
Now she’d picture something nice. Just project it right up on the blue sky between the tall buildings.
Maybe Ryder would take her up to Loveman’s balcony to get a crustless pimento cheese sandwich. But she knew he wouldn’t. He’d feel out of place up there with all the women and little girls eating a chocolate sundae. He’d call it a sissy place.
Pimento! So delicate and strange. Sometimes she even dreamed about eating a bread triangle, light as a cloud with filling of orangy pink. And about the genteel old lady behind a glass door grid.
“Reckon we could get some ice cream?” Lee asked quietly. “It’s awful hot for September.”
“Weather oughta turn after Labor Day,” he agreed.
He saw a parking place and sped toward it, though there were no cars between him and it.
“After we get your new hose, tell you what I’ll do. We’ll go over to Woolworth’s lunch counter or down at White Palace? Which one would you like, hon?”
He actually looked at her, turned his head all the way, smiled. Showed his yellow teeth.
She still hurt from the rolling pin, the kicks, but after he beat her, he was always sorry.
They had some good times then.