• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 275 0

the men claimed to know him. She thought this odd, given the fact that the Promise Land was filled with transplants from the banks and everyone knew everyone and there weren’t but a dozen families over there anyway, someone was bound to know him, Y’all lying to me, she said as she began to suck the wine down like it was going to get her what she wanted, who she wanted, Y’all do too know Boyd, and someone asked her what he was to her and she smiled and said, Friend, slyly, and someone else said, What you doing getting friendly with a boy, try a grown damn man on for size and then there was some dancing and soon she found herself sandwiched between two men obviously eager to see her in the so-called office of the body shop which featured for furniture a sprung-cushioned seat torn from a bus, its Naugahyde ripped and patched with duct tape, the coiled springs visible between the worn cushion and uncomfortable as hell when they pushed her down atop it and began their zipper music which she drowned out with screams which they tried to silence by filling her mouth with their flesh.

She did what she had to do: used teeth to get out from under them. Remembering the taste of blood, metallic, sharp, she threw up over the side of the boat, Sarah holding her shoulders, stroking her hair as she heaved, offering her water when her stomach was way empty, when she had nothing left inside her except shame, fear, and worse, the memory of what happened next.

Tearing crazy drunk and disheleved through the streets of the Promise Land, screaming his name. Everywhere children and dogs. Her dress torn, her eye blackening, and a little blood staining her cheeks. Who knew where her suitcase was? She could not remember running from the body shop, how she managed to elude four drunk men, three or four more in the work bays; she could only surmise they let her go out of fear. She could imagine, later, that they had nothing at all to fear, for all they had to say, what they surely would have said had she managed to end up in the police station to press charges against instead of the opposite, She wanted it, hell, she asked for it, she knew what the story was once we left out of the grill, she promised us all a slice, on and on in the impudent imagery of men talking about sex, slices, pieces, pokes, lays, all their idiotic words for things they didn’t understand.

And someone—a stunned mailman—told her where he lived. What he did not tell her was that he had moved in with his sister and her family. She found out quickly enough, knocking the door nearly down, crying out for her Boyd. The door slivered open and a woman holding a sleeping child, who favored Boyd in the set of the eyes and the slope of the nose, took one look at her face and shut and bolted the door. Which did not make Maggie go away as desired. Made her bang louder, call his name in a register so low and wild with want and need that it set dogs to howling, touched off a siren even. Which drew closer. Which stopped in the street in front of her.

At the police station she went slack. The wine began to wear off and she slipped into a near catatonic state. Soon and swift came the shame. There was one boy policeman who talked to her sweetly enough to get the name of Woodrow out of her, and then Crawl. He wrote it down on a sheet of paper and went away to confer with his higher-ups and in a few minutes came back to the cell where they said they were holding her for her protection (for when she told them what had happened at the body shop they went a little easier on her, treated her a bit differently than when she was simply drunk, disorderly, disrupting the peace of the Promise Land) and said to her, “Captain says this is some nigger.”

“Captain ought to know there’s another name for them.”

“You sure now, ma’am?”

Maggie looked up at the boy. He seemed younger and very far away.

“Sure about another name?”

“Sure you wanting us to call this fellow?”

“Fellow is an improvement. He’s a man. It’s his daddy brung me over here, and if I know Crawl, it’s his daddy will come and get me out of this