God Still Don't Like Ugly (31 page)

Muh’Dear cussed under her breath and gave me the most disgusted look that she could come up with. She narrowed her eyes into slits and spoke through clenched teeth. “I’d rather kiss a cobra on the lips. That sucker couldn’t turn me on with a monkey wrench.” She started to laugh so I didn’t know how serious she really was.

I was exasperated and I didn’t try to hide it. Since Muh’Dear was having so much fun tormenting me, I wanted her to know how I felt.

I gritted my teeth and rolled my eyes at her. “You didn’t say anything mean to Daddy, did you? I hope you didn’t. Not with a priest up in here.” I held my breath and waited.

With a twinkle in her eyes, Muh’Dear told me, “Girl, I know how to behave.” Then she let out her breath and pursed her lips, a thoughtful look on her face. “But I still ain’t forgot what he done to us.”

I looked at my feet. “Daddy’s not that well. I’m glad he’s got Lillimae. She takes real good care of him,” I offered.

Muh’Dear giggled; I frowned.

She stopped giggling and cleared her throat. “And I hope I live long enough to be as big a burden to you,” she said. A serious look suddenly appeared on her face. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know you’ll always be there for me, too.” She squinted her eyes so hard that her pupils crossed as she waited for me to respond.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I mouthed. I exhaled when Muh’Dear rubbed my back and gave me a quick smile before she pranced across the floor to a spot next to Daddy and tapped him on the shoulder.

There was a look on his face that I could not describe. He didn’t look surprised or annoyed, but I couldn’t tell if he was glad to be facing Muh’Dear or scared.

With all of the gloom in Jean’s house, a warm feeling came over me as I watched my parents greet one another with a hug. I smiled for the first time since walking in Jean’s door that day.

It was just a shame that it took funerals to bring out the best in some people.

CHAPTER 59

Rhoda didn’t make it to my house after the gathering at Jean’s. But Muh’Dear, Pee Wee, and Scary Mary and her entourage did. I didn’t know what Muh’Dear and Daddy had talked about at Jean’s house. But they must have had a pleasant conversation because she sat right next to him on my living room couch.

My parents were not acting loud and ugly, they were not scowling, and they were not rolling their eyes at each other. However, they did look uncomfortable and they were the only ones in the room who had not removed their coats. Muh’Dear’s hands were cupped in her lap and her legs were crossed at the ankles and her face was as stiff as a mask. Daddy’s arms were folded and his eyes looked as unfocused as a newborn baby’s. I moved closer so I could hear what was going on.

At about the same time, Pee Wee plopped down on the arm of the couch next to Muh’Dear and whispered something in her ear and a broad grin appeared on her face. Whatever it was Pee Wee said to her, it must have been interesting enough for her to share with Daddy because she leaned over and whispered in his ear and he grinned, too.

I had always been able to count on Pee Wee to lighten my load.

Tonight was no different. He steered Muh’Dear and Daddy into conversations so neutral (sports, his barbershop, politics) that there was no way they could step on one another’s toes. My fear that they would lock horns had almost dissipated.

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“White folks sure don’t grieve the way we do. Did y’all see how that Vinnie and the rest of them wops was drinkin’?” Scary Mary said, speaking in a low voice even though no white people were present.

“Them dagoes don’t like to be called wops,” Muh’Dear insisted with a nod, looking at Daddy like she needed a confirmation from him. Daddy looked like he could have been knocked over with a feather. His face remained expressionless as he blinked and nodded.

“Anyway, I didn’t see none of them dagoes shed a single tear.”

Scary Mary continued, “Us, when we have a funeral, we boo-hoo for a straight week.”

“Everybody else was drinkin’ just as much as those Italian people.

And that frail old woman in the wheelchair cried nonstop the whole time we were there,” I reminded.

Scary Mary, pacing the floor like a panther, gave me an exasperated look and threw up her hands. Her floor-length, robe-like black dress swished with every step she took.

“That Vinnie ain’t got no nature,” Fanny Mae, Scary Mary’s most outspoken prostitute, growled. Even though she was in her late forties and had eyes like a frog, she was Scary Mary’s most popular employee. On any given day, horny men lined up to fuck her.

Over the years, Scary Mary had employed dozens of women. Fanny Mae had been with her the longest. Like Scary Mary, Fanny Mae was a hard-looking, coarse woman from a rough little town in the Deep South where the women ate poke salad every day and carried switch-blades in their bras, even to church. I thought I would scream when Fanny Mae’s weapon fell out of her bra during P.’s funeral. I was thankful that I was the only one who noticed it.

“And how Jean could put up with his Mickey Mouse dick in the bedroom is beyond me,” Carlene, Scary Mary’s youngest and newest prostitute, added. Looking more like a girl from some Asian country than a Black girl born in Pontiac, Michigan, Carlene was still learning the ropes. She had once implied that by being young and pretty, she was a cut above the more seasoned women in Scary Mary’s stable. But Scary Mary had brought her back down to earth by telling her, “Gal, I don’t care how young and pretty you think you are. To them tricks, you just another piece of tail. And you better believe that the cat you got between your thighs smell just as fishy as the rest of ours. When it comes to turnin’ tricks, it ain’t the beauty, it’s the booty.” Carlene was lucky that Scary Mary had rescued her from a brutal pimp in 246

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Cleveland. Carlene continued, “Even after Vinnie got with Jean, he never stopped comin’ to the house. She want somethin’ else to cry about, somebody ought to tell her that.”

I couldn’t figure out what it was about Scary Mary and her women, but I enjoyed their company. In addition to Pee Wee, they were the support system that kept me going. I was glad they had all come home with us. This was one night that I needed as many distractions as possible.

Poor Daddy. He didn’t know what to do with himself. I hoped that I was the only one who had noticed him sneaking glances at Fanny Mae’s and Carlene’s big legs in their short little dresses. I could also see that Daddy was clearly embarrassed, but he laughed along with the rest of us at the prostitutes’ comments.

Once while Muh’Dear was laughing, I saw her place her hand on Daddy’s knee. Then the atmosphere shifted to a more serious mood.

“I’m sendin’ my baby girl up to Toledo to stay with my mama ’til they catch the maniac that killed P.,” Fanny Mae said.

“And I pray they catch that devil soon,” Scary Mary growled, slamming the top of my coffee table with her fist. “I pray he dies in the most unspeakable way possible.”

CHAPTER 60

Alot of people in Richland didn’t approve of Scary Mary and her role in the sex industry. When she had tried to buy a motel to expand her shenanigans on a very conservative street, the people in that neighborhood made a fuss that caused such an uproar that people as far away as Cincinnati were talking about it. Our city newspaper ran a quote from an unidentified man who not only lived in the neighborhood that Scary Mary wanted to corrupt but who was also one of Scary Mary’s regular tricks. “Sure I get a lot of good sex from Scary Mary’s girls. But that doesn’t mean I want them operating in my backyard where my kids can see them!”

I don’t know what else went on, especially behind the scenes, but Scary Mary promptly abandoned that idea. She quietly continued to run her operation out of the big house she lived in across town three blocks from the church we all attended.

Even though I had spent some of my earlier years living in the same house of shame with Scary Mary and the prostitutes she had working for her then, I never felt truly comfortable being in that environment.

But that didn’t stop me from visiting Scary Mary’s house from time to time. I knew that she was not the one-dimensional she-devil some people made her out to be. Sure she was immoral, greedy, manipula-tive, and opportunistic, but she was also generous, sensitive, patient, wise, and spiritually stronger than any other woman I knew. Her ad-248

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vanced years had not diminished her strength. In fact, to me it seemed like the older she got, the stronger she got. That’s why I went to Scary Mary’s house after everybody had left my house. Daddy had already turned in for the night and I had left Lillimae sitting in front of the television.

Usually, when I did visit Scary Mary’s house, I rarely went beyond her kitchen. Even on the days when her house was closed for business, which was usually during holidays, a day after a raid, or a funeral. I didn’t like to roam around too much in Scary Mary’s garishly furnished house because I didn’t like listening to all of the moaning, groaning, and noises from bedsprings creaking coming from the three bedrooms upstairs.

Scary Mary occupied the only bedroom downstairs near her kitchen—she had beds and a jukebox in her basement that she put to use on really busy days and nights. When she had what she called

“civilian” overnight guests, meaning people not involved in her sordid business activities or her prostitutes’ children, she assigned them to her basement.

Business was slow at Scary Mary’s place the night I went there after P.’s funeral. Not because of a lack of tricks but because three of the women who worked for Scary Mary were spending time with family members and doing other things a lot of people don’t think prostitutes do. Ida Mae, one of the absent women, was working for free with some church group to help collect clothes for underprivileged kids.

Another prostitute named Ethel, a singer that never got the break she needed, was entertaining terminally ill patients in a cancer ward at a nearby clinic. Lucille had taken her kids to Disneyland. The house seemed like such a lonely, quiet place with just Scary Mary, Carlene, and Fanny Mae present.

Carlene, clutching a large glass of red wine and wearing a flowered bathrobe, pulled out a seat for me at Scary Mary’s kitchen table.

Fanny Mae, wrapped up in a pair of white flannel pajamas that made her look like a pear-shaped mummy from the shoulders down, set a cup of steaming hot coffee on the table in front of me.

Scary Mary, perched on a stool by her sink, was coating her legs with Vaseline. Why she was wearing a see-through negligee was a mystery to me. Her long, flat breasts flapped when she moved and it was not a pretty sight. Large, pink sponge rollers were dangling off her red wig.

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“So, Annette, you run off and leave your daddy and your off-white sister in the house alone?” Fanny Mae asked, picking her teeth with a straw from the broom she had just used to sweep the kitchen floor.

Her hair was also rolled with pink sponge rollers. She was going through menopause and was always having hot flashes.

I sighed. “They won’t miss me. My daddy’s asleep and my sister was watching
I Love Lucy
reruns. She encouraged me to get out of the house. I know I won’t sleep much tonight.”

“Well, a whole lot of folks won’t be sleepin’ much tonight or no other night ’til they catch whoever killed that little white girl,” Fanny Mae said, fanning her face with a pot holder.

“And I’m one of ’em,” Scary Mary croaked. “I won’t stop prayin’

for that to happen until it do. I heard from one of my contacts at city hall that the po’lice done made P.’s case their number one priority.

Praise the Lord.” Scary Mary waved her hands high above her head, the same way she did in church when she got happy.

“Hmph! Do say. I wonder if the po’lice would be investigatin’ this hard if it was a Black child involved,” Fanny Mae scoffed, clearing her throat and toying with a loose thread hanging from the cuff of her pajama-top sleeve.

“Let’s hope we don’t have to find out,” Carlene said in a strong, loud voice. “Not that I don’t care about white kids,” she added in a noticeably softer tone. Carlene’s hair was in braids and her face was covered in a pasty-looking white facial mask. It made her look so much younger than her twenty years.

“Annette, I know you feelin’ this whole thing way down deep. That child was crazy about you,” Scary Mary said gently, now sliding Vaseline on her face and neck.

“And I’ll be feeling it for a long time,” I admitted. So far I had ignored the coffee cup in front of me. But I did want something to drink. Without asking, I lifted the glass of wine out of Carlene’s hand and took a long swallow. After diffusing a belch, I let out a long, deep sigh.

I stayed at Scary Mary’s house until almost eleven that night.

When I got back to my house, Lillimae was still up. Still sitting in the same spot in front of the television that I had left her in, she was soaking her feet in a hot pan of water.

For the first time I noticed how rough her feet looked. She had cal-luses as big as walnuts. I knew it was because of her walking around 250

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outside, stepping on rocks and other debris in her bare feet so much when she was relaxing at her house.

“If you used Vaseline you wouldn’t have to do that,” I advised, frowning at the dead skin floating on top of the water in the pan. I stood in front of her, stretching and yawning as I removed my coat.

Lillimae shook her head. “My skin’s too far gone for that. It wouldn’t even absorb no Vaseline. The soles of my feet are so tough, last month I stepped on a nail and I didn’t even bleed.”

“And everybody thinks that white skin is so fragile.” I sighed and crossed over to the television to turn on the eleven o’clock news.

Before I knew what was going on, Lillimae gasped. “Listen to that,”

she hollered, waving her arms. “Move out the way!”

I stumbled backward and moved off to the side of the television and listened to a special news report. I could not believe my ears. The police had a man in custody for P.’s murder!

And it wasn’t Vinnie.

CHAPTER 61

It was too good to be true. The man who had raped and murdered P. was off the street.

“He looks like somebody’s old grandfather!” Lillimae roared, wringing her hands, standing with her feet still in the pan of water. “Who would have guessed that a man his age could still get a hard-on!”

“You’d be surprised,” I said nastily. “Some of those slimy old devils never run out of juice.” Of all the men I had ever known intimately, including Pee Wee, old Mr. Boatwright was the one who could get a hard-on the quickest and keep it the longest.

The elderly white man on the television screen was attractive in a subtle kind of way. He had a head full of neatly coiffed gray hair, large eyes with pencil-thin eyebrows, and a nice set of teeth. He had the nerve to be smiling as the police escorted him, in handcuffs, into our police department. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, the suspect looked more like a banker than a sex-crazed child rapist and killer.

According to the news report, a twelve-year-old girl had been abducted on her way home from a neighborhood convenience store in Canton, twenty miles south of Richland. Some time during the night, she had escaped from her abductor and had been found wandering naked down a dark, rural road. She had been raped, beaten, and left for dead in an area near a cow pasture. Well, the girl lived and she was able to identify a neighbor as the perpetrator. Her clothing, her 252

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blood, and other evidence had been found in his car. The police had picked up the man at the home of one of his six adult sons. One of his sons lived in Richland in a house one block from the house that P.

had lived in. As soon as the police questioned the man about P., he confessed.

I turned off the television and let out a deep sigh of relief.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Lillimae mouthed. The news had excited her.

She mopped sweat from her face and then fanned herself with the tail of her housecoat. Then she lifted her feet out of the pan of water and blotted them with a towel. We toasted with fresh cans of beer before we turned in for the night.

I went to work the next day feeling better than I had felt in weeks.

Even though thoughts of Jerome and Rhoda were still haunting me, I now had a different issue to address. I had misjudged Vinnie and I had to humble myself and restore what was left of my relationship with him and Jean.

Jean had not returned to work yet and I had no idea when or if she ever would. Rather than call her house, I decided I would just drop by on my way home from work that day.

I called home to let Lillimae and Daddy know I was going to be late getting home because I wanted to go by to see how Jean and Vinnie were doing after hearing the news about P.’s killer being in custody.

But before I could tell Lillimae what I planned to do, she cut me off.

“They are not goin’ to charge the man that was on the news last night for killing that P.”

“What do you mean? That little girl identified him and they found her clothes and blood and stuff in his house!” I screamed. “He’s got to be the one!”

“For that little girl, yeah. But not for P.”

My tongue started to ache but I ignored the pain and continued in a weak voice. “Lillimae, the news said that the man confessed. His son lives right around the corner from Jean’s house.”

I heard Lillimae suck in her breath and sniff. “They just said on the news that the man has mental problems and was in the county nut-house up until two days ago.”

“But he said he killed P. Maybe he slipped out of the asylum that day. Maybe . . .”

“Annette, the man did confess to kidnappin’ P. But he also confessed to kidnappin’ every other missin’ child but the Lindbergh GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

253

baby.” Lillimae sniffed again and cussed under her breath. “Now what did you call to tell me?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled. “I was just calling to see how you and Daddy were getting along.”

I hung up the telephone and spent the rest of my lunch hour sitting in my car in the telephone company parking lot with the worst headache I ever had before in my life.

CHAPTER 62

When I got home that evening, Daddy was already in the bed asleep and Lillimae was in the kitchen organizing dinner.

“Is Daddy all right? He sure sleeps a lot,” I said with concern.

“That’s because he likes to sleep. He slept through the last hurri-cane we had,” Lillimae informed me.

Just as I opened my mouth to speak again, the telephone rang. It was Pee Wee calling me from Muh’Dear’s house.

“Your mama told me to call your house and see how everybody was doin’,” he said. I could hear Muh’Dear mumbling in the background.

One thing that had always pleased me was the fact that Pee Wee and Muh’Dear got along so well. Even during the times when Pee Wee and I were not sleeping together, he’d kept up his relationship with my mother. Especially after Daddy King died.

Muh’Dear had always wooed Pee Wee with lavish meals and juicy gossip. Two or three times a month he dropped by Muh’Dear’s to see if she needed anything done around the house. She had become so fussy that she was almost impossible to please. She had called three different plumbers to come to the house to take care of a leaky faucet in her bathtub and she was still complaining about it leaking. Now Pee Wee was over there with his toolbox. Even when something in Muh’Dear’s house wasn’t falling apart, Pee Wee went over there to check on things anyway.

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“We are all doing fine,” I said tiredly. “Daddy’s resting, Lillimae’s fixing dinner, and I’m just . . . I’m just here.” There were times when I couldn’t stop myself from sounding like a sick old woman. Like now.

“You don’t sound too good at all,” Pee Wee remarked. He didn’t sound too good himself.

“I’m not,” I admitted.

“Well, since you still got company, I won’t ask if you want me to come over to . . . uh . . . keep you company. But I’ll be home in a little while. You want to come over to my place? And you won’t have to worry about steppin’ in no mess or helpin’ me wash my dishes. I had a lady from the church come to the house to do some light cleanin’.

She got my floors lookin’ so spiffy we could eat off of ’em.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t feel like socializing tonight. Tell Muh’Dear I’ll call her tomorrow.”

I still wanted to see how Jean was doing. And as much as I hated to admit it to myself, my original suspicions about Vinnie’s involvement in P.’s murder had returned.

Two days later I invited Muh’Dear to the house to have dinner with Daddy, Lillimae, and me.

“They’ll be going back to Florida in a couple of days and I don’t know when we’ll see them again. And I know you don’t plan to visit Miami anytime soon,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Muh’Dear replied tiredly. “I got to take Frank in small doses now.”

I didn’t put any pressure on Muh’Dear but I told her that if she changed her mind about having dinner with us, she was welcome to join us. Scary Mary and Carlene came over to dinner, even though I had not invited them.

“How come Carlene’s not working tonight?” I asked Scary Mary in a low voice as she and Carlene followed me to the kitchen.

One thing I could say about Scary Mary was that she was still an as-tute businesswoman. But she now treated the prostitutes who worked for her more like a stern nanny than a madam. Scary Mary’s only child, a severely retarded woman in her forties named Mott, was in some kind of a group home in Toledo. The only other family that Scary Mary had, that I knew of, was Florence, her blind, thirty-six-year-old foster daughter. Florence had tried to be my friend during our teens, but I had shunned her for Rhoda. Now Florence lived in Toledo, too, with her husband and two kids. Scary Mary didn’t get to 256

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see her much because Florence’s straitlaced husband didn’t approve of Scary Mary’s lifestyle. Since Carlene was the youngest of the prostitutes, Scary Mary used her to fill the familial void in her life.

Leaning against me as I opened my refrigerator to get her a beer, her tongue almost touching my ear, the old madam told me with a mysterious chuckle, “Carlene’s back went out the other night. She got this real frisky trick that can’t make up his mind what he want to do once he get in the bed.” Scary Mary sniffed and winked her eye twice as she snatched the bottle of beer out of my hand and flipped off the top with a pancake flapper. “These men. They out of control. Oooh, dicks is tricky these days. In my day a man wasn’t so complicated in the bedroom. If he was a real good lover, he didn’t even make no noise when he did his business. He’d pile up on top of you, slide it in, slide it out, and climb off and go to sleep like he supposed to.

Because of a tricky dick, I gave Carlene a few days off.” I had heard this story before.

“Again,” I muttered, grabbing a beer for myself.

“Uh-huh. Again.” Scary Mary nodded. “But I ain’t no fool. The girl is just plain lazy.” She sighed and shook her head, smiling like she had a secret. “She so young and I’m so old, but I’m crazy about this child,”

Scary Mary said, massaging Carlene’s back. “I see myself in her when I was her age.”

I glanced out of the window over my sink, thinking about how I’d felt the same way about P.

Shaking her head and backing away, Carlene retorted, “My back is out! And I ain’t lazy!” Carlene had on a rumpled trench coat. She slid her hands into her pockets and shifted her body into a position so extreme I thought she was going to fall across my kitchen table. She fished a stick of Juicy Fruit chewing gum out of her pocket and stuffed it into her mouth.

“Gal, you won’t get far in this business ’til you start suckin’ dick,”

Scary Mary hollered, snapping her fingers in Carlene’s angry face.

“Nuh-uh . . . nuh-uh,” Carlene replied, shaking her head and cracking her gum. “I ain’t puttin’ no nasty, stinky pecker in my mouth. Ain’t no tellin’ what kinds of health problems I’d end up with.”

Scary Mary slapped her hand onto her hip and got so close up in Carlene’s face, their noses touched. “All them chitlins, Big Macs, and GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

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fried chicken you eat is doin’ a lot more damage to your health than you slurpin’ on a few peckers, honey child.”

Carlene dropped her head and started sniffling. Scary Mary snatched a handkerchief out of her bra and wiped tears off of Carlene’s face and we returned to my living room.

God answered a lot of people’s prayer the following Saturday night.

Right after I returned from taking Daddy and Lillimae to the airport, Pee Wee rushed over to my house, frantic and out of breath, with his latest eyewitness report. He had just come from Jean’s house. He told me that Carmine Antonosanti had confronted Vinnie with some information that P. had shared with Rhoda’s daughter Jade during P.’s last sleepover at Rhoda’s house.

Rhoda and her husband had brought Jade to Jean’s house to tell her story. In a child’s words, Jade told how P. had revealed to her that

“Mr. Vinnie made P. do the nasty with him almost every day.”

Instead of denying the allegation, Vinnie Gambiano had cooked his goose by confessing that he had killed P. “by accident.” Jean and Rhoda had attacked Vinnie with lamps and chairs. They had literally beaten him out of his clothes. Vinnie fled from Jean’s house wearing nothing but his underwear and one shoe.

Not less than an hour later, the police found Vinnie on the ground behind Antonosanti’s restaurant with a bullet in the back of his head.

Old Mr. Carmine Antonosanti, one step away from the grave himself, had already admitted executing Vinnie and turned himself in to the police.

I was surprised when Rhoda showed up at my house with Muh’Dear and Scary Mary later that same night. Rhoda’s face was bruised and her hair was askew from the mayhem she had participated in. But there was a triumphant grin on her face. It would be one of the most memorable nights of my life.

“Vinnie was lucky I wasn’t there to help them gals whup his ass,”

Scary Mary said angrily, shaking her gnarled, liver-spotted fist.

“
Lucky
is one thing Vinnie ain’t,” Muh’ Dear added. “But I blame Jean for this mess. She should have done somethin’ the first time her baby told her Vinnie touched her,” Muh’Dear said, handing Scary Mary a can of beer from the big bag she had brought along with her.

“With all the grown women ’round this town screamin’ for somebody to pester them, ain’t no grown man got to go around rapin’ no child!”

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“From what I heard, Jean didn’t believe that child ’til it was too late nohow!” Scary Mary said hotly. Her jaws moved so fast and hard that her false teeth started to click and slip. “That child didn’t have to die!”

“Kids do tell lies against folks they don’t like! It ain’t no secret P.

didn’t like Vinnie!” Muh’Dear offered, sitting down so hard on one of my chairs it squeaked.