Then she jumped high, squealed, and came down in splits. Twenty-five years out of high school, yet the woman had the flexibility of a teenage gymnast. She hung a pom-pom on my penis and pranced around the room, doing kicks over her head and shouting “Go, team!”
Playing Jesus was okay; I’d always had a crucifixion complex. Also, I was exactly the same age as Christ when they nailed him.
What I didn’t like was hanging from a climbing wall with a pom-pom on my dick. I’d never even climbed the climbing wall, which was actually a bunch of Matolius Simulators bolted to oak. I only bought it for Shannon because a few years ago she decided she had to go out to Wyoming and climb the Grand Teton. That summer, she did—zipped right up the sucker. She came home all jazzed for rock climbing, but by Christmas she was into mountain biking and had abandoned the climbing wall, never to touch it again. I’d forgotten we even owned the thing until Katrina realized the possibilities of suspending Jesus six feet off the floor.
So, the phone rang and Katrina brought it over on the long cord, and she stood on top of a Nautilus bench press bench to prop the phone between my shoulder and ear.
“Cowboy, your life is about to take a turn for the worse.”
“Is this Skippy?”
Katrina dropped down a couple steps and commenced to suck.
“I recently purchased a seven-millimeter Mauser with your name etched on the stock.”
“Skip, I fail to see why you are angry with me.”
“Consider this a last warning.”
“I’ve never done anything to you.” I looked down at the part in Katrina’s hair. Her scalp was a concrete-colored furrow aimed at my belly. She was working amazingly hard, for a married woman.
“Tomorrow your S is going to hit my F.”
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the blow job. It feels terrific, but over the years men have taken a superior attitude toward women who give oral pleasure. Appreciation gives way to power, which leads to the cocksucker charge.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Buy time on every radio station in town.”
“Ouch, not so rough.”
“Go on the air and announce you are an illegitimate bastard with no notion of paternal lineage. Hell, say the whore gave virgin birth if you want, just put a stop to rumors of my involvement.”
“I haven’t heard any rumors of your involvement.”
“I’m faced with snickering at the club. Even my wife has started to doubt my innocence.”
Skip’s wife switched her attention from the head to the ball sac.
“You should have thought of that thirty-four years ago.”
“Last warning, hear. Tomorrow, your name is mud.”
After Skip hung up I couldn’t lift my head and release the phone for fear of cold-cocking Katrina. I simply hung there with a twisted neck while she mangled my privates.
When Katrina came up for air, she asked, “What’d Skipper want?”
“The usual.”
“Let’s trade places.”
That’s when Gus walked in.
“You got that nice Gilia girl fooled into thinking you’re all right. Why you want to go sticking your pork where it don’t belong?”
Gus was baking pumpkin pies—dozens of pumpkin pies. She’d taken one look at me spread-eagle on the wall and marched straight into the kitchen where she banged pans together until Katrina gathered up her pom-poms and went home.
I stuck my finger into a cooling pie. Gus swatted at me. “That’s not for you.”
“Twenty-five pies and I don’t get a bite?”
“You don’t deserve a bite. Get out of my way.”
“She asked me to do it.”
All my women can be fierce when they decide I’m stupid, but Gus can look bigger and meaner than any of them. “Ever’ time a woman ask you to do something, you have to do it?”
“I can’t very well say no.”
“What you can’t do is pork any woman that lets you pork her.”
“Why not?”
“Goddamn, you’re a fool.” Gus stalked to the oven, thrust her hands into mitts, and began shuttling pies in and out.
Throughout adulthood, I have been promiscuous as hell when I’m single and monogamous as hell when I’m not single. No exceptions; no compromises. Should Gilia and I ever formalize the connection, I would be true and blue for however long we stuck together, right up to death do us part. But in the meantime, according to my take on right and wrong, it was perfectly fair to relax with Katrina. I was in the right.
Of course, this nifty rationale blew to smithereens at the thought of Gus telling Gilia what Katrina and I had done on the climbing wall.
“What’d you come back so soon for?” I asked. “I thought you were gone for the afternoon.”
Gus straightened. “I got home and found your letter in my apron. Figured you better read it.”
“Someone sent me a letter?”
“Black woman. A black woman writes a letter it must be important. Black woman isn’t going to send you chitchat.”
“You opened my letter?”
“’Course not. I’ve got morals, unlike others in this room.”
What I needed was coffee. Unfinished blow jobs always make me crave coffee. For some reason I can’t explain, I’ve had a number of unfinished blow jobs in my life. It’s like the women get down there and start making lists of places they’d rather be.
“You need these grounds, Gus? I want to make a new pot.”
“Don’t you go throwing out my grounds.”
“That’s why I asked. I never throw out old coffee grounds without permission.” I spread a New York Times Book Review on the counter and dumped out this morning’s grounds.
“So, if you didn’t open my letter, how do you know it’s from a black woman?”
Gus went into her apron pocket and sailed the letter across the room. “Handwriting’s a black woman’s.”
The address was in blue ink—large letters with big loops and carefully dotted i’s. There was no return address.
“You can tell a person’s race and gender by their handwriting?”
Gus slammed a pie onto the counter so hard the other pies jumped. “I should get paid extra for working with a handicapped boss.”
“Just wondering.”
“’Course I can tell black from white and man from woman. I’m not blind.”
I turned the letter over. A Christmas Seal picture of a tiny angel and star held down the back flap. “Is my handwriting black?”
“No.”
“Part black?”
“Your handwriting’s Chinese.”
Mr. Callahan,
I wish to speak with you regarding the matter you broached at my home Saturday afternoon last. If it is convenient, would you meet me after Sunday services at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Benbow Ave. I shall be on the front lawn around 11 a.m.
Mrs. Atalanta Williams
19
The trouble—besides guilt over Atalanta Williams, anxiety over Gilia, confusion over sex with Katrina, and the perpetual sorrow of being alive because my mother was group raped—was sleep. I couldn’t do it. Or, I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn, but once there, I couldn’t wake up until it was time to go to sleep again.
The entire week I stumbled around with swamp water on my brain; trance movements from home to Tex and Shirley’s to work to the Ramada to the Exercycle 6000, and then, more exhausted than I thought humanly survivable, I lay in my bed and zing—the swamp turned into a beehive. My skin itched. Someone else’s rock video lit up the backs of my eyelids and I thought of everything that had ever happened or would happen anywhere in the universe. I dickered with God.