"They ain't even got no dryer and they nasty! Where we gon' sleep, on the floor?" Money asked.
"Nasty ain't the word for it," added Freda. "Mama, you never even let them spend the night over here without leaving their bags outside to air out, and now you want us to go over there and live?" She crossed her arms and started crying. Everybody started crying.
"Mama, can't we stay somewhere else? What about Grandma Honey? Or Granddaddy Buster?" asked Bootsey, who was getting so that she had to put her two cents in whenever she could.
"They nasty too," interjected Freda.
"I don't like Grandma Acquilla," Angel said. "She's too mean, and all she do is spit snuff."
"If y'all open those little ignorant mouths and say another word about the subject, I'm gon' get your daddy's leather belt and beat your asses till they turn purple. Lula is the only one who got enough room and enough heat, and she's my sister and it's free and it ain't like it's gon' be forever. And since it's so damn nasty over there, maybe y'all will get a chance to help keep it a little cleaner. Do something for somebody else for once in your lives. Now leave me alone, please. I got a lot on my mind. Freda, get me one of my nerve pills and a beer, would you?"
For the next two months they endured life with the Wilsons, and it was more like living in the Detroit zoo. There were eleven kids running wild between two floors, all under the age of fifteen. And before they had been there a week, Mildred found out that her children knew what they were talking about. Lula was past simple, she was closer to stupid and beyond filthy. And no matter how much Mildred's kids did around there to clean up and pick up, Lula's would come right behind them and tear up, mess up, or junk up what they'd just done.
Then Mildred found out that she wasn't getting as much money as she thought from the house. She needed at least a few thousand dollars in order to move herself and the kids, the furniture, buy a decent car, and then find a place to live. She didn't have any intention of staying more than a few weeks with Leon. Shit, she still had to give Crook his part of the money. For three whole days she calculated and recalculated her figures, which only made her head hurt. Maybe the time ain't right, she thought. If it don't fit, don't force it.
And she changed her mind about moving to Arizona. Just like that.
The kids couldn't have been happier.
"Mama, we don't have to stay here, do we?" asked Bootsey.
"Naw, not much longer. I'm thanking. Just give me a minute to figure this shit out."
Mildred wanted her house back, but the agent had already consummated the deal and sold it to a big black woman named Carabelle, who dressed like a man, kept her hair in three skinny braids, and ran a brothel full of tired whores. Mildred approached her in the dry cleaners about buying the house back, but Carabelle, who smoked a pipe, simply blew smoke in her face. No deal. Carabelle had plans for that house. Mildred knew how to fight fire with flames and figured if she told the agent what Carabelle's line of business was, the note would be reconsidered. But he just told her that what that woman did for a living was her business, so long as she paid the bill.
"Now where we going, Mama?" Freda asked.
"Give me a minute. Just give me a hot minute," Mildred said. She patted her feet as she let her mind wander up and down the streets of South Park. Then she made a loud snap with her fingers and walked to the telephone. Baby Franks, an old friend of hers and Crook's, a World War II veteran who was fond of loose women, owned a house on Thirty-second Street, right at the railroad crossing. Mildred knew it was vacant because she always passed it on her way to see her daddy.
It was a big old house sitting in the middle of two acres of land, with a rolling front yard so long and so wide, most of the other inhabitants had used a riding lawn mower to cut the grass. There were pear trees, apple trees, a plum tree, and blackberry bushes in the woods that stood at the edge of the back yard. The rooms were huge, and everything else about it was quite decent. There was even a real fireplace in the living room. So what if there were only two bedrooms. Money would just have to sleep on the sun porch.
Seven
S
POOKY COOPER WAS NO GOOD
and Mildred knew it. He was quiet. Slick was a better word, according to everybody in town. And he was so handsome that even he did a double take in the mirror when he combed his hair and mustache. Though he was supposed to be black, they said his daddy was white, and he resembled Clark Gable. He talked with a southern drawl, almost as if he were trying to prove his blackness. He was also married to a bony woman who looked like she was dying of cancer. Kaye Francis. Nobody ever did figure out how she snagged Spooky in the first place, and it was hard to ascertain if her three babies had anything to do with it.
When Mildred had worked at the Shingle, Spooky had often flirted with her but never actually came right out and approached her. He wasn't one of those husbands who had offered her more than a free drink after she and Crook were divorced. Oh, she'd watched him, but he had always made her feel too fluttery inside, so she had avoided his eyes all those years. And now, here he was knocking on her front door.
Spooky was puffing on a cigarette like a gangster and pulling his pants up like a pimp so his penis bulged and so Mildred could see that his socks were silk and his pointed-toe shoes were expensive. She opened the door and tried to remain cool, especially since it was one of those rare occasions when she was alone in the house. As the saying goes, you always want what you can't have. To Mildred, there was something so mysterious about Spooky it made him damn near taboo. And his seeming off-limits only made him more desirable.
Mildred knew she looked okay. Connie James had just pressed and curled her hair and she hadn't wiped off her peach lipstick yet. She sat her plate of collard greens and ham hocks on the dining room table and went to open the screen door.
"What brings you way over here, handsome?" Mildred heard herself asking.
"Oh, I was just driving in the neighborhood, and I said to myself, Baby Franks rented that house to Mildred, didn't he, and I just wondered if you were home. Can I come in?"
"Yeah, come on in. Have a seat. Ain't got nothing in here to drank but a beer. What you know good?"
The truth of the matter was Mildred already knew Kaye Francis had put him out—everybody knew it. She had finally gotten tired of all the women calling her house, claiming Spooky was the father of their brand new baby, or had given them gonorrhea, or owed them some money. A lot of people thought Spooky had married Kaye Francis because her people had money. She was the one who had bought him that white Riviera he was driving. Didn't make any difference to Mildred one way or the other. At this moment, all she knew was that he had been curious enough to stop by to see her, and for the first time in her life, Mildred felt whorish. She didn't want to talk about anything, just do it while the kids were gone and then put him out. Her panties were already getting slippery, and when Spooky put his cigarette out and finished his beer, Mildred felt a lingering weakness inside.
It had started to rain, and the sky was growing darker and darker. She walked to the sun porch to close the windows and a flash of lightning crackled and lit up the whole sky.
"You gon' get caught in this storm, you know," she said.
"I'm already caught in the storm," he said.
This would be the first time Mildred wouldn't stop to think about her kids. She was just glad they were gone. She and Spooky sat on the sun porch, listening to the thunder and the rain falling in the drain pipes.
"My daddy always saying a thunderstorm is the Lord doing his work and we should be quiet," she said, unable to think of anything else to say.
"I'm a quiet man," Spooky said.
She offered him some greens and corn bread, but he said he wasn't hungry. At least not for food. Mildred couldn't finish hers either. She turned off the television.
"Why don't we go into the living room," Mildred whispered.
Her heart hadn't pounded so hard since she fell in love with Crook. She had forgotten that feeling. Spooky Cooper sat beside her smiling into her eyes, and the gap in his tooth only added to his charisma and charm. He bent over and kissed her like a movie star, then led Mildred to her bedroom like he already knew where it was.
Spooky knew his power, and Mildred couldn't resist. His black eyes had hypnotized her, especially when he told her that he had always yearned for her, long before he ever married Kaye Francis, but she had married Crook. Spooky wasn't really lying, but his timing was brilliant. He knew how picky Mildred had always been when it came to men, and the only piece of a man she had had since she moved into this house was old smelly Rufus, who often stopped by to see the kids and lend her ten or twenty dollars, which he never made her pay back. Rufus had the hots for her too, and though he drank too much, a few times Mildred had let herself get loose enough to ignore his funk, his scratchy whiskers, and his unbrushed teeth. The kids liked Rufus because he was generous with his money and he was so silly. They would have never guessed in a million years, though, that their mama had actually slept with him. To Mildred, Rufus was like a spare tire when she had a flat.
Now, she had a real man in her bedroom. And one who smelled like Aqua Velva, not Old Spice, thank God. She was so nervous that you'd have thought she was going to bed with the president of the United States.
"Make yourself comfortable," she told him as she glided to the bathroom. Spooky had already taken off his clothes and was lying in her bed like a king. Mildred closed the bathroom door and took a quick douche, brushed her teeth and gargled, sprayed some Topaz between her legs and on the balls of her feet—like the good old days—and Q-Tipped her ears and navel. She didn't own a sexy nightgown, but it wouldn't have mattered. Spooky was so smooth and so cool that she wouldn't have had it on a minute before he would have skillfully slid the straps from her shoulders.
She turned out the bathroom light and tiptoed back to the bedroom. Before she knew it, Spooky was holding her in his arms and kissing her like she was breakable. He touched her skin in places she had forgotten could be ignited by a man. She'd never felt her body throbbing like this in all of her thirty years. She didn't even feel the house shake when the train rumbled past her bedroom window.
And Spooky took his time with her. He licked her skin in slow motion, the way a kitten licks milk from a bowl. He swirled his tongue around in her ears at 33 rpm's, until Mildred felt like she would boil over. She had never, ever, experienced this kind of passion before. And when the room grew completely black and his warm pressure amplified inside her, she screamed out his name three octaves higher than her normal voice. Spooky calmly rolled over and lit a cigarette, knowing full well his mission had been accomplished.
During the weeks that followed, Mildred made him park his car four blocks away from the house. His wife had become a reality to her. Word had already hit the streets that Mildred Peacock had made Spooky Cooper fall in love with her. And it was true. Supposedly it was impossible because there had been so many women who would have given anything to be with him and Spooky hadn't given them the time of day. Mildred hadn't asked him for a thing in return and had not posed a single question to him about his wife. She knew how to make a man feel like one; everything Spooky had done to her, she had given back to him three times over. And the first time Mildred moved her head below his waist, she gave Spooky so much pleasure that he thought she knew what she was doing. Most of her girlfriends had always said they didn't go that way. The men said they would never eat at the Y. Just about all of them were lying, and would do damn near anything behind closed doors, so long as it guaranteed some kind of pleasure.
Spooky went so far as to walk in the rain to be with Mildred, and this was something he had never done for any woman—got his shoes wet. What the hell, Mildred thought, she was fucking a dream and loving every minute of it. Spooky had been the first man to drive her far enough to bring her to a full orgasm. And Mildred got greedy. She didn't just want more of him, she wanted all of him.
But Spooky was still sneaky and no good, and when Mildred sat the kids down to tell them that he was going to be spending quite a bit of time there, they stared at her like she was crazy.
Freda, as usual, spoke for all of them. "Mama, that's Miss Francis' husband! I know you wouldn't mess with no married man. Please don't tell us you like him, Mama. Everybody know he hang out at Carabelle's and Miss Moore's. He a ladies' man. What you got that ain't none of them got?"
"Shut up, would you," Mildred snapped, not even bothering to correct Freda's grammar. "I like the man and he likes me, and I don't care whose husband he
used
to be, he makes me feel damn good, better than your daddy ever did, and if you knew how long it's been since your mama felt like this, all y'all would be happy for me."
"Happy? Everybody at school know he take money from women, and you ain't got none, so what he want with you?" Money asked.
"If y'all don't shut up, I swear..." and Mildred couldn't say another word. She ran some bathwater and soaked in the tub. In her mind all she could see were Spooky's black eyes. And as the bubbles burst over her brown skin, the only thing she could feel was warm air leaving his lips and penetrating every pore of her body. The hot water felt like Spooky's passion spreading like an oil slick between her legs. And at that moment, as Mildred let her shoulders slide farther into the water, she couldn't remember her children, by name or by face, and in her heart, she didn't even have any.
"Whose deal is it?" Mildred asked.
Zeke swirled the ice melting in his glass. "I guess it would be kind of hard to figure out since we kicking y'all ass. Come on, Geraldine, let's run a Boston on these mothas. Show 'em how to play some real whist." Geraldine was his wife. Deadman was Mildred's partner and although he wasn't that bright, the boy knew how to play a hell of a hand; knew how and when and what to bid, and it seemed as though Deadman could read Mildred's mind or see right through her cards when she looked at him and started whistling. It was as if she were giving him some kind of secret signal that only Deadman understood. And when Mildred could get away with it, she would kick his foot under the table like she was doing now, before he had a chance to bid an uptown or a downtown, and sometimes he would switch his bid completely around.