Deliver Me From Evil (11 page)

“Get your spic ass away from this car!” Wade yelled, slapping the window.

I opened my eyes and looked up. A young Latino man stood next to the car, waving a cheap watch in one hand and a used DVD in the other. He frowned at Wade, then looked at me with a leer on his face.

“And don't be eyeballing my woman, amigo!” Wade hollered, slapping the window again. “How come you so quiet back there, baby?” Wade asked as we drove off, turning his head around just far enough so he could see me. There was a glazed look on his face. His jaw twitched. He narrowed his eyes and licked his lips, moaning under his breath the same way he did when he went down on me. It was no wonder that the only other time I'd seen such a look of ecstasy on Wade's face was during sex. “You ought to be shouting for joy! I can't believe my woman is going to be a fucking millionaire!”

I didn't like hearing Wade refer to me as his woman. In all the years that I'd been hopping in and out of bed with him, he had never referred to me that way. And, it was all because of the money. Money that I truly felt I deserved and couldn't get from my husband any other way.

It amazed me how money could have such a profound effect on people. I never thought that I would see the day that it would mean so much to me that I would be a part of something this extreme.

“A million dollars is not that much money in this day and age, Wade,” I said in a strained voice.

“Oh, no! You are hella funny, baby! To you, it might not be. You been living so close to it for quite a while now. A big, fancy house in the hills, a husband with his own business, credit cards up the asshole … Everything I ever wanted!” Jason said, adjusting the rearview mirror so he could see me better. I didn't like the hungry look on his face, not that I liked any other look on his face, either.

“Tell me about it, my man!” Wade yelled, waving his hands like a country preacher. It seemed like everything Wade did or said now annoyed me.

“Uh, I'll have to decide exactly how much I want to keep now,” I said, sitting up and moving close to the edge of the seat. Jason and Wade looked at each other at the same time.

Jason reacted in a way that made him turn two shades darker. “So? And what the fuck are you trying to tell us?” he asked, talking so loud, my ears rang.

“I mean, I could sure use the additional money, and I know both of you could, too,” I said meekly. “The pie is a lot sweeter and bigger now. Uh, but y'all don't have to worry, because you'll get paid.”

Wade and Jason looked at each other at the same time again, each one frowning like he was in pain. “Get paid? Get paid? What the hell! Woman, what's wrong with you? You goddamn right we are going to get paid! And we better get paid right! Tell us what the hell you mean by that,” Jason demanded through clenched teeth, his eyes back on the road now. “Man, I knew this bitch was cuckoo when you told me what she was cooking up, but I didn't know she was this damn crazy.”

“Well, to be honest with you, baby, me and Jason are the ones that's been taking the most risks,” Wade told me. He looked out the window as he spoke, like he was afraid to look in my eyes now.

“What risks?” I asked, gripping the back of the front seat.

Wade twisted around to face me, making it look like his head was on backwards. He blinked and then glared at me. “Woman, don't play dumb. You know damn well that if this thing falls apart, me and my boy here are the ones who will likely end up in the joint,” Wade insisted, talking with his lips barely moving.

“If things fall apart, I'm in trouble, too. I could lose everything, including my freedom,” I insisted.

“Just as long as you treat me fair, I ain't going to complain,” Jason said, with a groan.

“What do you call fair?” I wanted to know, my anger rising.

“What the hell do you think I mean? I am in this thing just as deep as you, and I expect to get paid for my troubles. That's the deal!” Jason yelled, swerving to avoid hitting a man on a bike.

“Keep your eyes on the road, brother. You ain't Batman, and this ain't the Batmobile,” Wade barked, grabbing the steering wheel. Riding in a car with Jason behind the wheel was like riding on a roller coaster. A few seconds later, he turned a corner on two wheels. I looked at him in the rearview mirror. That single serpent's tooth at the top of his mouth looked like a stiletto now.

“Like I said, I made a deal here!” Jason hollered, still driving like a madman.

“A deal between you and Wade,” I reminded.

“But you the one getting the money! Wade ain't the one controlling this project, girl. That's you! We can't get nothing without you!”

“You got that right. But like I said, your deal is between you and Wade. I didn't make any arrangements with you, Jason.” I was so angry, I was about to explode. “I want to make sure you understand that
whatever
you get is up to Wade. You are not getting a damn dime from me!” I boomed.

Wade glanced around at me, then back at Jason. “Brother, you ain't got nothing to worry about. I told you I was going to break you off real nice. Now I will just break you off a little bigger piece of the pie.” Wade exhaled and turned to look at me again. “Happy?”

I stared at him and blinked before I nodded.

But I was a long way from being happy. I was glad that Jason got us stuck in a traffic jam and that the car had come to a complete stop. I reared back in my seat and closed my eyes, but I knew I was not about to go to sleep.

I had too much to think about—past, present, and future.

O
ne of the happiest periods in my life began about six months after my fifteenth birthday. I finally got to know what real love felt like. Not with another lover, but with someone who was probably as starved for affection as I was: an old woman who had already buried three husbands and had one foot in the grave herself.

Odessa Wheeler moved into the apartment across the hall from me and my parents. The same week she moved in, I began doing all kinds of errands for her to earn a little extra spending money. Even though I had no trouble stealing the things I wanted (including the portable color television in my bedroom), I actually felt good about myself when I paid for something with money I'd earned.

Every time I ran to the corner store to pick up this or that for Miss Odessa or when I helped her move a piece of furniture, she paid me a few dollars and often gave me a big hug, too. “Christine, I don't know what I'd do without you. You are precious,” she told me one Saturday afternoon. I left in a hurry after she told me that because I didn't want her to see the tears in my eyes. I couldn't remember the last time somebody said something so nice to me.

It didn't take long for me to reach a point where I looked forward to the hugs more than I did the money. This was so new to me that I didn't know how to handle it at first. It made me want to avoid a lot of the people who had had a negative effect on me. Sadly, this included my parents.

“Now, Christine. Today is Mother's Day, and you should be spending it with your own mother,” Miss Odessa told me. I had just steamrolled into her living room that Sunday evening, with a Mother's Day card for her.

“My mother doesn't celebrate Mother's Day,” I said glumly, handing Miss Odessa the card, which I'd bought at Walgreen's and which had set me back three dollars.

“That's not the point. She is still your mother,” Miss Odessa told me, fanning her face with the card.

Miss Odessa was so old, her hair was completely white and lines crisscrossed her face like a road map. But I figured that she must have been a good-looking woman once upon a time to have had three husbands. She had small, dainty features on a heart-shaped face, and her skin was the same color as honey. She was not a big woman, but what was left of her body had begun to sag so severely that bras and girdles did her no good. Decked out in a pale blue cotton dress and the matching hat that she'd worn to church that morning, she stood in front of me, with one hand on her lumpy hip and the other hand waving the Mother's Day card at me.

“This is a real special day for mothers and their children, Christine. Even to the mothers that don't deserve to be mothers,” she added, giving me a stern look. It didn't bother me when I got scolded by Miss Odessa. As a matter of fact, I was glad when she did.

I gave her a sheepish grin, shuffled my feet like an idiot, and shrugged. I don't know why, but one thing I couldn't do was sass old people. Even when they were mean to me. I figured it had something to do with that incident when I was a little girl and stepped on that old man's head in our old house and thought I'd killed him. Even though I had found out that that man had died of natural causes, to this day I still felt a twinge of guilt about stepping on him and not telling anybody about it.

“Are your kids coming to spend Mother's Day with you?” I asked.

A sad look immediately appeared on Miss Odessa's face. It was the same look that slid across my face when people asked me something I didn't want to answer. But she answered me, anyway. “I doubt it,” she replied in a hollow voice, shuffling across the floor to one of two shabby easy chairs in her congested living room. She had one of the smallest units in our building, but she had more possessions than anybody I'd ever seen. As petite as I was, I often had to walk sideways to get around in her apartment, and I still sometimes managed to knock over something along the way. “They hardly do anymore. Not since they all grew up and moved into their own places. I had me three husbands, a bunch of kids, and I still ended up alone,” she said, with a dry laugh.

It amazed me how much I actually had in common with this old woman. Miss Odessa was even older than my parents, and from what I'd learned from her in bits and pieces that day, all five of her kids lived in or around Berkeley, but they practically ignored her. Her youngest son had a new wife and a year-old daughter, whom Miss Odessa had never met, and they lived just six blocks away.

I could see the sadness in the old woman's eyes when she talked about her children. I decided to change the subject for now and avoid it in the future. In the next breath, I started rambling about something I'd seen on television, and before long we were laughing.

As footloose and fancy-free as I was, I was fairly sensitive. It didn't happen that often, but I got emotional from time to time. I had cried off and on for two days when, a few months before, old Mr. Royster next door died.

I spent the rest of the evening stretched out like a python on one of Miss Odessa's two living room sofas, watching one rerun after another. She liked beer, and she usually kept a couple of six-packs in her refrigerator. She kept dozing off, so I could have drunk as many of her beers as I wanted to, but I didn't. I didn't need a buzz to feel good when I was with her.

It was a school night, and if Miss Odessa had not chased me home around eight o'clock, I would have stayed even longer, watching more television and poring over the magazines that she had stacked up in boxes throughout her apartment. She also had an incomplete set of encyclopedias, which I found fascinating. Through them, I entered a whole new world, and I started to see a lot of things in my old world in a better light, including myself.

E
ven though Miss Odessa had become a positive influence in my life, I was still running with a wild crowd.

I had not seen Wade Fisher around the neighborhood in over a year. And whenever his name came up, I changed the subject. I'd almost forgotten about him completely until Miss Odessa and I ran into his mother at a fruit stand at the Ashby Street weekend flea market one Saturday afternoon two weeks before the Fourth of July.

“Oh, Wade is already doing so well in Hollywood! He's got him an agent and an apartment near the big studios. And, he got him a Jewish agent, so I
know
my baby is in good hands,” Miss Louise squealed, spit dribbling from both sides of her mouth. Somehow she had managed to slide her stout, bell-shaped body into a denim jumpsuit that was two sizes too small and thirty years too young for her.

She opened her matching denim shoulder bag and whipped out a sealskin wallet. My first thought was that she was going to show me how empty it was and then put the bite on me for “a few dollars,” like she usually did when I ran into her. But she surprised me this time. With her eyes bugged out and her tongue licking her bottom lip, she flipped open her wallet to a picture of Wayne in the spot where her driver's license should have been. It was a good head shot of Wade. He looked every inch a big Hollywood star. But I had a feeling that was not the case.

“What has he done so far?” I asked in a casual voice. My question made Miss Louise uncomfortable, because her mouth dropped open, and she gave me a look that made me uncomfortable, too. “Uh, I go to the movies a lot and I watch a lot of television, but I haven't seen Wade in anything yet,” I said, with a forced smile.

“My boy's done a lot of stuff,” Miss Louise snapped, like she was saying it more for her benefit than for mine. She patted her wig and sucked in a loud breath. “But you know how them Hollywood bigwigs do black folks. Black actors can't get too far in them movies, because the producers and directors usually edit them out of whatever they put 'em in when they run over budget or some other stupid reason.” Miss Louise let out a sigh that made her screw up her face in such a pained way that I thought she was going to cry.

Miss Odessa fished a pair of horn-rimmed glasses out of her big straw purse and held them up to her eyes. Then she looked at the picture with so much awe on her face, you would have thought she was admiring something holy. “Well, the boy is certainly handsome enough to be in the movies,” she said, swooning.

“Oh yes. The boy goes to parties where all the biggest stars go. And, you ought to see all of them pretty girls chasing him all over that Hollywood. Them white girls especially. He all but has to beat them off with a stick. I don't know what it is about my boy that drives the girls so crazy, but his daddy had the same problem. Irresistible is what he is,” Miss Louise said, with a proud sigh, looking directly at me.

“He's my son and I love him to death, but the boy is a ladies' man. The girl he's with now is white, but she's a nice girl, and I think I can deal with her in the family if I have to. She rich. You want to see her picture?” Miss Louise asked, already flipping open her wallet to another compartment. This time she plucked a picture out of the change compartment. Miss Odessa leaned so far forward to look at this picture, it looked like she'd suddenly developed a hump on her back.

“Oh, my God, what a beautiful girl,” Miss Odessa said, looking at the picture like it was something good to eat.

I glanced at the picture so fast, all I saw was a blond blur and two rows of sparkling white teeth. “Tell Wade I said hi and best of luck,” I mumbled, backing away. I didn't want to hear any more about Wade's glamorous new life, and I certainly did not want to look too long at a picture of his pretty new girlfriend. I wasn't looking where I was going. I stumbled and accidentally backed into a stand across from the fruit vendor, where a boy was selling old comic books and lemonade.

“What can I get for you today, baby sister?” the boy asked. This boy was also from the neighborhood, but he and I ran in completely different circles. I didn't even know his name, but I knew that he was always involved in some kind of moneymaking venture. One week I saw him running up and down the street selling newspapers, even going up to cars waiting on red lights to change. The next month, he was on the street selling something different each week: newspapers, bean pies, roses, and fish sandwiches. When he got tired of doing that, he sold lemonade on the sidewalk in front of his mama's house. I even used to see him rummaging through Dumpsters, fishing out aluminum cans and empty pop bottles.

“Is that lemonade fresh?” I asked. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Miss Odessa was still talking to Wade's mama. Given the way Miss Louise was waving her arms and wiping sweat off her face with the back of her hand, I assumed she was still bragging about Wade. Then I saw Miss Odessa pull a wad of bills out of her purse. Miss Louise's hand looked like a lobster's claw as she reached out and snatched the money. She did it so fast that I would not have witnessed it if I had blinked. That's when I looked away and focused my attention on the boy and his lemonade in front of me.

“I made it myself out of lemons from my own tree,” he said proudly. Before I could even tell him that I didn't have any money, he filled a large Styrofoam cup and handed it to me, tossing in a wedge of lemon.

“Uh, I spent all my money getting my fortune told,” I explained, pointing to a booth down the same aisle, occupied by a gypsy psychic. She had told me that I'd meet a tall man who would one day be very important to me. I didn't pay too much attention to her prediction, because every psychic I'd ever been to had told me, and most of the other girls I knew, the same thing. “I'll have to pay you later,” I said. I drank until the cup was empty.

“You're Christine Martinez, right?”

“You know my name?” I gasped.

He nodded. “Martinez is Spanish or something, right?”

I nodded. “My folks are from Guatemala. How do you know my name?”

“I asked around.”

I gave him a surprised look. “I don't know you, do I?” I had had sex with so many boys, I couldn't remember a lot of the names or faces. There was a possibility that I'd already been with this boy! If that was the case, I had to change my ways because I didn't like the way I felt about myself at that moment.

“No, we've never met,” he said, shaking his head. “I know some of the kids you hang with, so I didn't think I was your type,” he said, with a chuckle. “Hey, maybe I'll see you around somewhere. Movies maybe?”

He was not bad looking. He had a round, cinnamon-colored face with shiny black eyes. His lips were rather generous, and he was a little too thin for my taste. He was tall, at least six two. His lanky arms looked like they could wrap around me twice. “What's your name, anyway?” I asked, turning to leave. “I know your mama is Miss Rosetta Thurman because she goes to the same laundromat that we go to.”

“Jesse Ray.” He paused and stuck out his chest. “My family and my friends call me J.R.,” he said proudly.

“J.R.,” I repeated. “I like that. It's easy to remember,” I told him. “Well, I hope I see you again.”

“You will,” he replied, with a wink and a mysterious smile.

Something told me that I would see Jesse Ray again. Because he looked at me like no man had looked at me before, like he was already sizing me up and planning our future.