God Don't Play (8 page)

CHAPTER 15

T
hat telephone call had really disturbed me. Even more so because poor Jade had experienced my tormentor’s wrath. I had ignored the telephone in the kitchen when it rang again about an hour later, glad that the others had ignored it, too. After the ringing had stopped, I shuffled into the kitchen and checked the answering machine. The caller had not left a message. I turned off the ringer and the answering machine before I returned to my spot at the table in my backyard.

“Oh, let old lazybones stay right where she’s at,” Pee Wee teased. He paused and shook his finger at me. “I’ll exercise her sure enough, later on tonight,” he threatened, immediately covering his mouth.

“Watch that smutty mouth you got, mon,” Otis teased, his Jamaican accent more pronounced than usual. “There is young peoples in de midst.”

“Like I don’t know what’s going on,” Jade scoffed, rolling her eyes and slapping Pee Wee’s butt with the palm of her hand.

Pee Wee ignored Jade’s gesture, not because he knew I was looking, but because he knew that I trusted him. I trusted him with all my heart. I knew that as long as he was married to me he would never do anything inappropriate with Jade or any other female. Pee Wee was the only man on earth I could say that about. Daddy didn’t like me feeling that way, but with his own track record he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

“I’m tired!” Charlotte yelled, out of breath. She darted across the yard and fell to the ground, fanning and wiping sweat from her face. “Mama, can I have some beer, too?”

“What’s wrong with you, girl?” I asked harshly, giving my daughter one of my meanest looks.

“My throat is dry,” Charlotte whined. She screwed up her face, and then coughed and pounded on her chest all at the same time.

“Have you lost your mind? You are a child, and children do not drink beer,” I managed, glaring at my daughter like she had asked me for the Hope Diamond.

“Jade drunk some beer!” Charlotte pointed out, stomping her foot.

Charlotte and Jade both had friends their own ages, but they had a special friendship that was slightly disturbing. At least it was to me.

As strict as Rhoda and Otis were with Jade, she still got away with more than a lot of kids her age. I knew that they allowed her to drink a little wine every now and then, falling back on the excuse that some of the most prominent families in town allowed their children to drink wine occasionally.

Rhoda’s father had an older half brother, named Johnny, who had returned to his home in Alabama several years ago. This half brother, who happened to be White, was as shady as he could be. Despite his morals, he had been a fun person to be around. And one thing that I could say about Rhoda’s uncle Johnny was, even though he was a notorious womanizer, he had never said or done anything inappropriate to me like Mr. Boatwright had done.

Rhoda often visited her uncle down South, usually with Jade in tow. From what I had managed to piece together from stories Jade had shared with me, that same old White man was just as crazy about Jade as he was Rhoda.

All of the kids in our neighborhood had called him Uncle Johnny, even me. This Uncle Johnny had spoiled Rhoda rotten when she was a child. Pee Wee had told me that the same old man had even taught her how to shoot a gun.

In addition to expensive toys and clothes, Uncle Johnny used to give Rhoda big bottles of wine, way before she reached legal age. It had been nonalcoholic wine, but to me, wine was wine.

I felt the same way about beer and as long as I could help it, my daughter was not going to drink beer until she was of legal age. I had enough to deal with. I didn’t need to have to deal with a miserable situation like an alcoholic child, too.

“Mama, can I please have a little sip?” Charlotte pleaded.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pee Wee about to react. He slapped his hands onto his hips and started moving toward Charlotte with a stern look on his face. But I got to her first.

“Jade’s a lot older than you. How many times do I have to remind you of that?” I ignored the sneer that I got from Jade and for once, I was glad she was not my child.

CHAPTER 16

I
didn’t like breaking up a party, especially one that I had initiated. But I needed some space so I could rearrange my thoughts. And besides, as much as they tried to hide it, Jade and Charlotte had worn themselves out with all that running and jumping around. Pee Wee, Otis, and Rhoda seemed to be dragging, too.

I feigned a headache. In a way, I did have one. My head felt like it was about to explode because it was crowded with so many thoughts. To make it look good, I slapped an ice pack on my forehead and did some serious moaning and groaning. But it wasn’t even necessary for me to go to that extreme.

“We should be leavin’ anyway,” Rhoda told me in a tired voice, walking along with me as I hauled the leftovers to the kitchen. “Bully doesn’t like to be alone too much, even in a house as cozy and nicely decorated as mine. Lord knows what that runaway wife of his will say to him. That’s when and if she calls my house tonight. You know how tacky British woman can be. They don’t understand men like we do, especially if their man is a brother.”

I noticed the dreamy-eyed look Rhoda got on her face every time she mentioned Bully. He must possess some very good dick, because for a houseguest he held a very high position on Rhoda’s priority list. She had told me herself that she enjoyed cooking special meals for Bully. Even when she prepared hot dogs or hamburgers for dinner, she thawed out a steak for Bully. Jade had spilled the rest of the beans on him. To me, he sounded like the houseguest from hell. He left his dirty clothes and toenail clippings all over the house, and he ate and drank like a hog. When it came to meat, he only ate steak and lamb. And he had to have bread from a Scandinavian bakery way across town. And as much as he liked to drink, Budweiser beer and Wild Turkey weren’t good enough for him. He had to have some kind of Guinness brew or Remy Martin cognac. He was so lazy that when Rhoda wanted to make up his bed, she had to do it with him in it. That Bully. He took hour-long baths and chatted for hours at a time on the telephone, racking up hundreds of dollars worth of calls (that Rhoda and Otis had to pay) to people in Jamaica and London. He even had the nerve to complain when his meals were late.

“And Lord knows Bully will have made a mess in my kitchen and I’ll be up all night cleanin’ it up.” It was one of the few times that I’d seen Rhoda complain with a smile on her face.

“Well, the way my head is throbbing, all I want to do is crawl into bed,” I muttered. “I’ll call you from work tomorrow.”

After Rhoda and her family had left, knowing I had a headache, Pee Wee saw that Charlotte got herself ready for bed. And when he finally came to bed, I pretended to be asleep.

This was one of the few times that I was grateful for middle age. Especially middle-aged men. In some ways, it had slowed Pee Wee down more than it had me. With so much beer in his belly and him being tired from jumping around in our backyard, he was out like a light in no time, purring like a cat. This was the first time in years that his snoring didn’t bother me. When I finally did get to sleep, I woke up every half hour or so with thoughts whirling around in my head like gnats.

I left to go to my job at the Mizelle Collection Agency the next day an hour ahead of my normal time. That way I didn’t have to see Pee Wee before he left to go to the barbershop that he owned and managed. He had inherited it from his late father, so it meant a lot to him. He enjoyed his work so much, he often stayed on the premises long after the last customer had come and gone.

We had an agreement that he would get Charlotte up and off to the child-care center that Rhoda operated out of her house during the summer months. I took care of her the rest of the year. I didn’t complain about having to get my daughter up and out of the house nine months out of the year when Pee Wee only did it for three months. I looked forward to it. But Pee Wee was such a hands-on kind of daddy that I thought it was good for him to do some of the things that most men left to their women to do.

Other than Mr. Royster, a bowlegged security guard in his late sixties, I was the only one in the office. Over the years it had become my home away from home because it was where I went when I needed some time and space to be alone.

Right after I graduated from high school I had worked briefly as a switchboard operator. Then I moved to Erie for about ten years. But when I returned to Richland, the phone company gave me my old job back. I remained on that switchboard for several more years.

Two years ago I landed a receptionist job at Mizelle’s, the biggest collection agency in Richland. Unlike at the phone company, where I’d only been qualified to work as an operator, Mr. Mizelle, the owner, had promoted me to a management position a year ago. They would have given me the moon to stay because I was the third person to fill that position that year. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. Even before Shakespeare created Shylock, the ferocious collector in one of his plays, collection agents had been despised. The company often had to bribe and beg employees to stay. Ironically, we shared the first floor of a small office building with the IRS, the only other group I knew of that was even more despised than collection agents. But I felt like some of the other brave people who stayed: it was a job and somebody had to do it.

Some of the same angry people who had to visit the IRS for an audit also visited us on the same day to make arrangements to pay off a bill that they’d ignored until we stepped in. More than a few angry deadbeats had stormed out of the office spewing threats. That’s why we had to have a security guard. And an armed one at that.

Mr. Royster’s age and the fact that he was so bowlegged fooled a lot of people. But this old brother was sharp and fearless, and he knew how to use that gun hanging off his bony hip. Before he came to work for Mizelle’s, he’d worked at one of the downtown banks. One day, a masked man entered that bank, armed with a gun himself. Mr. Royster had saved the day by shooting the would-be robber in both legs, incapacitating him until the police arrived. I felt safe at the office with our bowlegged security guard there to protect me.

My only hope was that he would never have to use that gun on my behalf.

CHAPTER 17

I
f Mr. Mizelle had not promoted me, I probably would have returned to my old job at the telephone company, or moved on to another place of employment by now. Bill collectors were not very popular in Richland.

Along with the fourteen collectors I supervised, some days I spent half of my time on the telephone. On a regular basis, I heard so many cuss words from the people we had to call that profanity now sounded like a separate language to me. The turnover among the collectors was incredible. By the end of my first month of employment three of the collectors had left that place, running out like somebody was chasing them with a shotgun. And one time a man did show up with a shotgun and threatened one of the collectors.

The verbal abuse that we had to put up with when we called up people was so extreme that I started seeing spots in front of my eyes when I got an angry person on the telephone. And most people did get angry when we called them up and threatened them with legal action for not paying a bill. Muh’Dear used to cuss out bill collectors or avoid them. I’d even done it a few times myself when I was younger and didn’t know how to plan and stick to a budget.

After a man I’d called—about his delinquent account with a furniture store—told me to suck his dick and then hung up on me, I started planning my own resignation. That was when I got wooed into staying by Mr. Mizelle himself offering me that promotion.

I was just as surprised as the rest of my co-workers. Especially the ones who had more education than I did and a background more closely related to the business. Gloria Watson, a bitter woman who rarely had anything good to say about anybody else, started rolling her eyes at me the day the announcement was made. Even when I hired one of her nieces as a temporary receptionist, that ungrateful wench continued to hold a grudge against me.

Gloria’s behavior did not surprise me. She had a major chip on her shoulder. It got even bigger when the names of several members of her crude, irresponsible family appeared on our list. The old man who had told me to suck his dick was Gloria’s older brother, and the father of the niece that I’d just hired.

“As long as Gloria Watson ain’t signin’ your paycheck, you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about,” Pee Wee had said when I told him.

“I’m not worried about Gloria,” I said, forcing myself to laugh. It was easier to laugh about Gloria than to take her too seriously. I came across women like her, some even worse, on a regular basis. My time and energy were too critical for me to waste on their foolishness. But Gloria was in my space so she could not be entirely ignored. “I just don’t feel comfortable around her when she treats me that way. If I’d known she was still going to treat me like shit, I wouldn’t have hired her niece. I’d have given that temp job to Jade.”

Jade had just graduated from Richland High School at the time and was eager to start her first real job. Up until then she’d only earned her spending money babysitting and running errands for me and some of the other neighborhood mothers.

Three weeks after I’d hired Gloria’s niece, that lazy devil started showing up two to three hours late—often with alcohol on her breath! Some days she didn’t even bother to come in at all. For a while I let all of that slide, but the day I caught her smoking weed in the ladies’ room was the last straw.

“You know, they say that your own folks can sometimes be your worst enemy,” Gloria said, talking with her back to me in the break room. It had been two weeks since I’d fired her niece, but the tension between us was still like a poisonous gas.

I noticed how Gloria had waited until we were alone. She had become so disgruntled that the only time she spoke to me was when she had to, or when she had something to get off her chest. My firing her niece had upset her more than it upset the niece. As a matter of fact the niece had grinned and sighed with relief. She didn’t even seem to mind being escorted out of the building by our bowlegged security guard.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, not even bothering to look up from the box of Kentucky Fried Chicken that I had picked up for lunch.

Gloria was just as big as me. But the way she pranced around the office, wearing outfits I wouldn’t wear to a Halloween party, you would have thought that she was as petite as Jade. For the past year she’d been bringing in Weight Watchers’ lunches and going to the gym down the street three times a week on her lunch hour. She was firmer now and didn’t jiggle as much, but she was still a very large woman and the biggest bitch I knew.

“You know what I mean.” She paused and sucked on her teeth until I looked over at her, standing there with one hand on her hip and a scowl on her face. “Black folks oughta be tryin’ to help other Black folks get and keep a job.”

“If you are talking about your niece, anybody else would have fired the girl a long time ago. I warned her several times about her tardiness and it did no good. What was I supposed to do, let her continue to work here just because she’s Black?”

“That ain’t what I said. She’s got three kids and she needs a job more than you and me do. You didn’t have to fire her. Yeah, she was late now and then, but at least she came to work.”

I gave Gloria an incredulous look. “Is that how Black folks are supposed to look out for each other? She didn’t follow the rules, and I was not supposed to do anything about that? Well,” I said, rising, “if you were the boss, you could supervise your way. Until then, let me do my job the way I think it should be done. And, by the way, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spend so much time on personal telephone calls. It sets a bad example.”

I didn’t wait around to see Gloria’s reaction. I waltzed out of the break room and returned to my office and shut the door. I couldn’t ignore the increased tension between myself and Gloria.

The note, the blacksnake, and the telephone call probably had come from her! If not her, then
who
?