Mama (12 page)

"How much do you charge?"

"How much you thank it's worth?"

"I don't know, I ain't never thought about it before."

"You'll find out after you finished, honey, believe me, you'll know how much it's worth to you."

Mildred took him to the Starlight, the same place, she remembered, where Sissie had tried to strangle Janey Pearl when Sissie caught her with her husband. Crook had spent many nights up there with Ernestine, too. As a matter of fact, the only time anybody from town went to the Starlight was when they were creeping.

It was snowing so hard that at first Mildred was going to change her mind. She was nervous and scared and didn't know whether she could go through with it, but this felt like the only alternative she had. Hell, her kids weren't babies any more. They ate like grown people; grew out of their shoes and clothes so fast it seemed like as soon as she bought them new ones for Christmas, by Easter they needed the next size. Some things just can't be passed down another year. Fuck it, Mildred thought, pulling up to the motel. I'll do this till I can thank of somethin' better.

Her skin felt like little ants and maggots were crawling all over it every time he touched her—a complete stranger, and a white man at that—but Mildred had drunk three stiff shots of Jack Daniel's before she'd opened the car door, and once inside, offered him some and took three more. She told him that her name was Priscilla and she was a widow. That her husband had died of a heart attack and left her with an unpaid insurance policy and seven growing kids. Mildred was so dramatic about it, even she started crying. It took exactly five minutes to make his tiny penis droop with satisfaction. And Mildred went home with one hundred dollars.

She hadn't known just how many people actually crept at the Starlight, but when she started recognizing the cars parked outside her room, she decided to take this fellow to a motel in Canada. Now the kids were going to school in brand new everything and she met him every Sunday for three months, till she couldn't stand it any more. He had started to really like her. Even wanted to meet her kids. Mildred told him he must be nuts. Besides, she was tired of getting drunk every Sunday and lying to her children about a part-time job where she could never be reached by phone. The kids, however, weren't the least bit suspicious.

Ever since Carabelle had moved into Mildred's old house on Twenty-fifth Street, she'd been giving weekend parties—well, not exactly parties; more like a combination casino, restaurant, brothel, and cabaret. Mildred had even gone a few times. Her kids' old bedrooms had been turned into trick stops. The sun porch had little card tables and folding chairs situated so people could eat the platefuls of greens, macaroni and cheese, barbecue, chitterlings, and potato salad that Carabelle sold for $1.50 (the two pieces of white bread were free, she said), and one corner of the living room had been made into a bar. Drinks were a dollar. Didn't matter what proof you wanted, they were all the same price. Folks danced to records in the dining room. There was always a crap game going on in the basement. The serious gamblers came in through the back door and went straight downstairs. The room was always full of smoke and loud voices, and cursing and grumbling and heavy drinking.

Whenever Mildred had run into Carabelle at the dry cleaners or the drug store or the liquor store, Carabelle always flashed a wad of twenties at least six inches thick. Hell, Mildred thought, my house is big enough for a party. And everybody know I make the best barbecue sauce and potato salad in South Park. She made up her mind that she would finally do something that would make her a lot of money.

The kids were excited. They made signs out of cardboard and used bright paint to make sure they could be read at night. Then they put them all over town—in Stinky's Liquor Store, in the Shingle, at the pool hall, at the A&P, in the beauty and barber shops, in the parking lot at the welfare and social security offices, outside the telephone company on a telephone pole, and at Detroit Edison under a streetlight. Mildred's phone was jumping off the hook from folks calling to make sure it was for real. They should've known better, because everybody knew that when Mildred said she was going to do something, she did it.

She had the kids clean up the whole house and she cleared all the furniture out of the way to make room for people and dancing. Freda and Money cleaned thirty pounds of chitterlings and hog mogs—took them almost nine hours—while Mildred had Bootsey and Angel chop up celery, onions, and bell peppers for the potato salad. Doll's job was to roll plastic forks and knives inside napkins and put a tiny rubber band around them. Mildred's sauce simmered for two days, and she hired Deadman to watch the barbecue grill. When Freda saw him, she couldn't bring herself to say anything, and he acted like nothing had ever happened. Mildred turned her bedroom into the gambling room, but refused to have any whores.

When Friday night came, cars were lined up for more than ten blocks, alongside the railroad tracks and up and down Moak and Thirty-second Streets until daylight peeked through the drawn curtains and Mildred had to make everyone leave. After she paid Deadman, gave the kids ten dollars apiece, and paid Gill Ronsonville for running the crap table, she had made more than seven hundred dollars. She put it in a Tiparillo cigar box and put it on the highest shelf in her bedroom closet. Then she started humming Nancy Wilson's song. "And you don't know and you don't know and you don't know, how glad I am." Mildred knew she was on to something good.

The kids cleaned up the house again the next day, and Saturday night was a repeat performance. For the next several months Mildred had these parties twice a month. She felt like she was on easy street.

Then she got busted.

Carabelle didn't like Mildred taking away all her business, and one Sunday morning, after Mildred had just put out the last of her customers—all except two or three die-hard gamblers and a couple of her friends who were too drunk to move—there was a knock at the door. The police had received a phone call from an anonymous neighbor complaining about the noise. Mildred knew this was bogus because her neighbors had been the first to show up. When they searched the house and found the crap table on the premises, they hauled everybody downtown, including Mildred. She was fined two hundred dollars, put on probation for a year, and released. This marked the end of her parties. And even though Baby Franks, the owner of the house, had been one of the highest rollers, when he found out Mildred had been arrested, he suggested it would be better if she found another place to live. Said he didn't want a lot of illegal hanky-panky going on in his house. Mildred didn't hesitate to start looking because she had something she never had before: some money in her pocket.

***

The city had started excavating to build those housing projects that nobody believed would be built, smack dab in the middle of South Park between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-eighth Streets, and from Moak to Manuel, which was a good ten acres. It had been estimated that about two hundred or more low-income families would have a decent, cheap, and modern place to live. But these dwellings wouldn't be ready for at least another six to eight months. Mildred told Baby Franks she planned to move into one of them, and since he was a righteous, churchgoing man, he said he could wait until then.

Mildred had never learned how to put money in the bank—never had enough to save—so she kept her cigar box hidden in the garage. Then the engine in the Mercury blew up and she had to buy a new one. The gas station attendant told her that if she wanted to go on living, she'd do best to replace the two balding back tires, too. Then she needed snow tires. After all, this was Michigan. Then it was two dollars here and ten dollars there, till the box was empty. So when Prest-o-Lite finally called her, Mildred was glad to take the job. But after she'd been working there a while, she couldn't decide which was worse, scrubbing white folks' floors, waiting on people in a bar, cooking hamburgers and french fries, taking care of dying old people, or winding spools of wire from three-thirty to eleven-thirty at night.

While she sat bent over a conveyor belt, her kids were doing things at home that would take Mildred some time to catch on to. Money and Bootsey had become the biggest rogues in South Park, stealing from the Rexall Drug Store everything they could drop into a pillowcase—candy bars, games, toys, cigarettes for Freda, who was now smoking almost five a day. Angel and Doll were practicing pressing and curling each other's hair, and Angel had talked Doll into letting her cut hers, since it hung down past her shoulders. Angel cut a gigantic plug out and didn't even tell Doll until the next morning when she went to comb it. They were both afraid to tell Mildred.

One Saturday, Mildred was relaxing, watching a rerun of "That Touch of Mink," when a police officer knocked at the door. He was holding Money and Bootsey, one in each hand. When he told her what they were guilty of, Mildred was not as alarmed and angry as she was embarrassed. She thought she had taught them better. Her nerves felt like they were shredding and her temples were pushing against her skin. She wanted to explode, out instead of whipping them, she did something worse. For a solid month, she wouldn't let them leave the front yard, not even to go to the mailbox. They couldn't turn their heads in the direction of the TV, let alone watch it. And they had to be under the covers before the sun went down. For two budding teenagers, this was pure hell, especially when Mildred's shift got changed to days and there was no way they could even think about sneaking.

The kids were squirting each other with the hose in the yard when a coal-black Plymouth pulled up their long driveway and a young man who looked much older than his twenty years stepped out. He had little duck lips and pretty electric-white teeth and he wore a Charlie Chaplin hat on his nappy head. His deep chocolate, almost charcoal skin was so black it looked like it had a film of dust on it.

Mildred had rented out the small upstairs room to him. The room had two entrances, one from outside and the other through a door off Mildred's bedroom. The kids wouldn't be able to play hide-n-go-seek there now.

From the start, Billy Callahan played rock and roll music so loud and had so much company, particularly teenage girls, that after a few weeks Mildred cussed him out, which was how they became friends.

"Look, you little beady-headed niggah," she told him one night. "I know you young and hot and frantic, but you ain't the only one living in this damn house. Some people go to bed at decent hours, you know."

It was three-thirty in the morning and Billy was wearing only his matching red nylon underwear, but he was not embarrassed in the least and said, "I-I'm sssorry, Mildred. I pppromise not to bbblast it so llloud from nnnow on." He didn't stutter as badly as Percy did, and for some reason the kids and Mildred thought that on Billy it was rather becoming. There was something about him that made you trust him instantly and Mildred soon began to rely on him for things that needed to be done around the house, since Deadman always claimed he was so busy these days.

Within a few short months, Billy had become so friendly with all of them that he was like a member of the family. Mildred often cooked a big dinner and sent a plate upstairs to Billy by one of the kids. She felt sorry for him when she saw cans of ravioli and spaghetti in the trash. He could also play a better hand of bid whist than Deadman. Billy tuned up the Mercury for Mildred, let the kids borrow some of the latest records, and when the plumbing broke in his bathroom, Mildred let him take a shower downstairs.

The kids thought nothing about how friendly Billy and Mildred were actually getting, but they did notice that he wasn't the sweetest-smelling young man to be around. In that sense, Billy reminded them of Rufus. "We should tell him," Bootsey said.

They couldn't agree on the best way to tell him, until his birthday gave them an easy way out. They gave him a shaving kit—Old Spice, with soap and deodorant and aftershave lotion. Billy was tickled to death, and for the next few days he smelled real spicy, but it wasn't long afterward that the sweet smell began to mix with funk. This drove the kids crazy.

"Maybe it's just his own personal scent," Angel said.

"Scent, my ass," Freda said. "That niggah just scared of soap and water, is all. He probably don't even wash up, just 'wakes up and sprays that Old Spice over his old funk. We can't drop no more hints. Let's just let him stay funky."

One night Billy was playing his music so loud that Freda couldn't sleep. She had a civics test in the morning, so she went to Mildred's room to complain. She knocked on her mother's door—a rule Mildred made them abide by—but when she didn't get any response, she eased the door open and saw that Mildred's bed was empty. The door that led upstairs was open. Freda thought that was odd, at this time of night. A pang of fury enveloped her when she realized what her mama might possibly be doing upstairs with that boy. Before she knew what she was doing, she was tiptoeing up the stairs. She stood outside Billy's door and pressed her ear against it. The Four Tops were on the record player, but he had turned it down. Freda cracked the door open. A red glow filled the room. A colored bulb was hanging from a cord. Billy always changed the color to fit his mood. Freda walked through his small makeshift kitchen, and lying there in the middle of an old double bed was her mama, naked, wrapped up in his arms.

Freda felt as if her eyes were full of dirt and rocks and sand and she found herself screaming.

"Get up! Get your ass up! Right now!"

Mildred and Billy both woke up and covered themselves.

"Get up!" Freda screamed.

But Mildred wasn't ashamed and she wasn't about to move. She glared at Freda. "If you don't get your fast ass back down those steps in less than the time it takes me to get up, I'm gon' beat your ass till you won't be able to move again. You getting too grown, Freda. You know that. And if you weren't so damn nosy you wouldn't see every damn thang. Now get on back down those steps, get back in your bed, and I'll see you in the morning."