Mama Ruby (16 page)

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Authors: Mary Monroe

BOOK: Mama Ruby
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CHAPTER 31
“M
ISTER, HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND
?
I KNEW YOU WAS
too good to be true!” Othella shouted, almost choking on her words. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing or seeing. She plopped down on the couch, sitting so close to Ruby their knees touched. Glenn remained at the other end, looking at them like he was inspecting two sides of beef.
Before they realized what was happening, Glenn stood up and unzipped his pants. A second later, his dick was in Othella’s face, dangling like a one-eyed snake. He guffawed as he grabbed his dick and shook it from side to side. “I ain’t too good to be true, but I’m true to be good. Now like I just asked, which one of y’all want to go first, hmm?” Still shaking his dick, he dipped his head and looked from Ruby to Othella with a silly grin on his face.
“I’ll tell you what; if you want to keep that slimy thing in one piece, you better put it back in your pants and zip it up right now,” Ruby advised. She and Othella had already seen more dicks than a lot of girls their age. But neither one of them had seen one as long as the one they were looking at now. It had to be at least twelve inches long. But, it was so
thin
it resembled a pencil, and it curved to the side at the bottom tip like a meat hook. Ruby and Othella were thinking the same thing: something that long and thin, and curved at the tip, poking around inside a woman wouldn’t have been much fun at all. And sucking it, well, that would have been even less fun. Ruby almost gagged just thinking about sucking on something that “deformed,” especially since her mouth had never even been close to a man’s private parts before. She wasn’t about to start giving blow jobs on this one!
“Let’s get one thing straight right now. I don’t tolerate no child sassin’ me!” Glenn warned, shaking a finger in Ruby’s direction as he stood rooted in his spot like a tree. “And another thing is, if y’all think you’re gettin’ outta here leavin’ me all worked up, y’all got another think comin’. I don’t let no females sleep in my place and eat up my food for free! Now I’m askin’
again,
who is goin’ to suck my dick first? It don’t matter to me, ’cause I ain’t choosy.”
“Look, sir. You took our money so we could sleep here last night, and if you wanted some pussy from us, too, you should have told us from the get-go,” Othella said, shaking her fist at Glenn.
“Pussy?
Don’t flatter yourself, girl!
Who said anything about me wantin’ some pussy? Don’t make me laugh!” Glenn let out a laugh that was both hard and long. “I don’t want no pussy from no dingy little hoochie coochie gals like y’all. I done had every nasty woman’s disease in the book, and I’m gettin’ tired of runnin’ back and forth to a doctor to get pills and shots in my butt.” He looked from Othella to Ruby, shaking his head. “If y’all give me the blow jobs I deserve, I can take y’all with me to my lady friend’s place or to my son’s place. I can say that y’all is my cousin’s kids from Texas or somethin’. Y’all can stay with me and my boy for free, eat three meals a day for free, and all me and him would want is an occasional blow job.”
“Well, you ain’t gettin’ no pussy, no blow job, or nothin’ else from us,” Ruby said, standing up in front of Glenn, with her breath on his face. She was so close, he moved back a few steps.
“I got news for you, Big Bertha—
somebody
is goin’ to suck my dick today,” Glenn sneered.
“You are one crazy-ass old man.” Othella stood up, next to Ruby. “Ruby, don’t waste no time talkin’ to this fool. Let’s get our shit and get the hell up out of here.”
“Uh-uh! Y’all ain’t goin’ no place!” Glenn barked. Before Ruby or Othella could say another word, he had his hands on Othella’s shoulders, pressing down so hard, she thought he’d cut off her circulation. She sucked in her breath and with all of her strength, she pushed him away. He was surprised at how strong she was for such a petite young girl. “Be still, bitch!” he hollered, slapping the side of Othella’s face. “You know you want this good dick down your throat. I seen the way you was lookin’ at me when I was walkin’ around in my long johns last night. You been beggin’ for it ever since you set foot into my place. I ain’t blind.”
Ruby flopped back down on the couch. She was so stunned she couldn’t move or speak. All she could do was watch in horror at what was taking place in front of her.
“If you don’t turn me aloose, you are goin’ to be real sorry later on,” Othella advised her attacker as she fell back onto the couch.
“I’m real sorry now!” Glenn yelled. “I didn’t know y’all was goin’ to be this much trouble! My wife wasn’t half this much trouble when I needed to do my business with her!” He snatched Othella off the couch by her hand and pushed her down to the floor onto her knees. Using both of his hands, he guided her head to his crotch. His dick was dripping juice and generating indescribable funk. “Now you get to suckin’ and I don’t want to feel no teeth! Suck, lick, and swallow, young lady!”
Othella was struggling so much that Glenn fell. But he was back on his feet within seconds, his hands back on Othella’s shoulders, his dick still awaiting the blow job he thought he deserved. Somehow Ruby managed to rise again, but she was in a daze. She was still too stunned to speak or do anything else.
“Ruby Jean—do somethin’ quick!” Othella yelled.
Ruby finally moved a few steps toward Glenn. As soon as he realized that, he grinned at her and held up his hand. “Hold on, sugar. You next,” he told her. His dick, looking like an overcooked pepperoni and still dripping fluids, slimy and smelly from no soap and water in the past two days, was now in Othella’s mouth. The more she struggled, the deeper it went. “Ruby . . . do . . . somethin’!” Othella choked.
Ruby finally got her wits about her. She knew she had to do something drastic, and she had to do it fast. She moved closer to Glenn and slapped his hand so hard he stumbled, but he didn’t fall and he didn’t pull out of Othella’s mouth.
“You stop that! Take that nasty slab of meat out of my friend’s mouth!” Ruby ordered. She repeatedly slapped Glenn’s face with both hands, like she was playing patty cake.
“Shet up, hussy!” Glenn hollered, ducking his head. Ruby may as well have been slapping the couch because her attack on Glenn was doing no good. He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. Then he placed both hands behind Othella’s head and pushed harder into her mouth.
“Mr. Glenn! You behave yourself! Stop that right now!” Ruby shrieked, clapping her hands the way her mother used to do during her Sunday school lesson when she wanted to get Ruby’s attention. “I’m warnin’ you for the last time! Or I’m goin’ to put somethin’ on you that voodoo can’t take off!”
Glenn still refused to stop. By now he was so worked up, he couldn’t wait to get his hands, well, his dick into Ruby’s mouth, too. She had such a big juicy mouth and such thick lips, everything a woman needed so that she could blow on a man properly, he thought with glee.
From the minute these two heifers agreed to spend the night in his apartment, he knew that he’d struck gold. What did they expect a man to do when a good time got thrown into his face like a ham bone to a dog? Even if they went to the cops and claimed he’d forced himself on them, what judge in his right mind was going to believe them over him? He’d say that they had aggressively propositioned him, but because he was a spiritually strong man, he’d resisted the temptation. Being a deacon in his church, he would swear that he’d never get fresh with two young girls!
Then he’d tell the judge that the stout dark one had attacked him, cussed at him, and held him down by sitting on his legs while the little yellow one went through his wallet. By the grace of God, he had managed to get the bigger one off him, and he slapped them both. That’s when they threatened to run to the police with their outrageous lies. Yeah, that was all he needed to say, he told himself. He’d been in a similar situation a few weeks ago. That wench had gone to the cops. By the time he got through telling his version of the story—how she’d drugged him, ate his food, and then robbed him—the cops arrested
her
! Just let these two wenches try to make a fool out of him. They’d be sorry they ever left wherever it was they came from.
“Mr. Glenn, I told you—turn me aloose,” Othella begged, her mouth so full of his meat she felt stuffed. All Glenn did was tighten the grip on her shoulders and push even deeper down her throat.
Despite Othella’s vigorous protests and Ruby’s threats, Glenn Boates was determined to get what he had convinced himself he deserved. That measly dollar that Ruby had given to him was not enough to cover the night they’d slept in his home and the food that they had gobbled up. Who did they think they were to try and take advantage of his kindness? Well, by the time he got through flooding their young mouths with his sweet jism, and them licking his balls, he’d be happy and their young asses would know better the next time.
“Look, fuck face, this is the last warnin’ I’m givin’ you,” Ruby said, beating on Glenn’s chest with both of her fists. He pushed her to the side with a mighty shove. She stumbled and fell, hitting her head on the leg of the couch. She was in such a daze again that she could barely move. But her mind became clear within seconds and she had some thoughts that she couldn’t get out of her head fast enough.
One thing that Ruby couldn’t figure out was what it was about sex that made men, and boys, act like such fools. Why would they want to do it with somebody who didn’t want to do it with them? After Ike and the rest of those boys had stopped wanting to give her pleasure, she didn’t chase after them the way some girls chased after boys who no longer wanted them. Nobody had to tell Ruby that there were too many more men in the world for her to get all worked up over the ones that didn’t want her. What was it about men that made them act like every piece of ass was the last? she wondered. And what made a man so weak that he didn’t care where, who, or what he stuck his dick in? Even a strong man like her father. And it was bad enough that he had cheated, but what made it even worse was the fact that he had done it with an ignorant, low-class slouch like Simone.
Ruby blinked and rubbed her eyes as she watched the scene taking place in front of her like it was in slow motion. “Mr. Glenn, please, please, please let us leave your place right now,” she begged, rising and rubbing the side of her head that had hit the couch leg. “We won’t tell nobody what you done to us!”
Othella was frantic. “Ruby Jean, I told you to do somethin’!” she yelled again, choking on Glenn’s dick. “Hit him! Bite him!” She gagged, and almost threw up. “Make this motherfucker un-ass me!” Othella gagged again, and this time she did throw up. The eruption included everything that she had eaten for breakfast and several ounces of green bile. It spattered on Glenn’s hand, foot, and the floor.
“You can go on and puke, little bitchy poo! I don’t care! I’m goin’ to make y’all clean up my whole place before y’all leave anyway,” Glenn laughed.
When Othella finally bit him, he slapped her face so hard she almost blacked out.
“Now you bite my dick again, and I’m goin’ to bite you back!” Glenn threatened.
“YOU STOP THAT!” Ruby roared, slapping Glenn’s forehead and biting his arm.
“Fuck you,” Glenn calmly said. Then he pushed her to the side again, and she fell back to the floor. He guffawed some more. He was so worked up by now and enjoying himself so much, that he got distracted. He loosened his grip on Othella’s head, blocking Ruby completely out of his mind. He would deal with her in a few minutes when it was her turn.
Ruby wasted no time getting up and running behind Glenn and kicking him in his butt. And she hit him much harder than he’d hit her. As a matter of fact, she kicked him so hard in his butt crack, that he farted and fell again.
But even that didn’t stop Glenn. He got up and slid his pants all the way down to his ankles.
“Y’all got me all worked up, so neither one of you is leavin’ here until you both suck off this hard-on
twice
apiece! That’ll be my dessert for my lunch and my supper! You can’t come up into my place and tease me like y’all done! I’m a man! I expect to be treated like a man! But them blow jobs ain’t goin’ to be enough now!” he hollered, glaring at Ruby. “I’m goin’ to go get a switch and whup both of y’all for comin’ up in my place—
cussin’
like sailors, pukin’ on my clean floor, and actin’ like savages ! I want what’s comin’ to me!”
“All right, old man! You asked for it,” Ruby warned. “Since you want to be so hardheaded, you goin’ to get what’s comin’ to you!”
Othella closed her eyes. But when she heard a click, she opened them. That was when she saw the switchblade in Ruby’s hand.
Glenn saw it, too, and it distracted him. He released Othella’s head and moved back a few steps, but it was too late. With one mighty swoop, Ruby sliced off half of Glenn’s dick.
CHAPTER 32
I
T WAS A GOOD THING THAT GLENN HAD CLOSED UP THE
restaurant below. Because the screams coming from his apartment were bloodcurdling. Othella��s screams were as loud as Glenn’s. She was screaming so loud and hard, she thought her tongue was going to pop out of her mouth. Ruby dashed across the floor and covered Othella’s mouth with her hand.
Glenn’s screams were suddenly reduced to a whimper, as he passed out and fell backward onto the floor with his hands cupping his bloody crotch. His severed penis lay on the floor next to his leg, like a discarded bone.
Othella removed Ruby’s hand from her mouth and asked, “Ruby Jean, what have you got yourself into?” She coughed, wiped her lips with her sleeve, and spat Glenn’s juices onto his dingy carpet. She had performed a few blow jobs on some of her former boyfriends. Technically speaking, it wasn’t such a bad procedure. When she did do it, she always pretended that it was a stick of sugarcane in her mouth. But Glenn had bad hygiene, and he’d forced himself on her so it had not been a pleasant experience this time. Like intercourse, something as intimate as a blow job should only be done for love or money, she thought. Glenn had offered her neither. And a man with a slab of meat between his legs as smelly and crooked as his was would have to pay her a whole lot of money to do it willingly.
Othella was too afraid, and too stunned, to get closer to the injured man. “Is he dead?” she asked, hopping from one foot to the other like a scared rabbit. “That horny demon.”
“If he ain’t, he ought to be!” Ruby hissed, spit flying out both sides of her mouth.
“I never thought you’d . . . What is the matter with you, Ruby Jean? We could go to reform school. You can’t go around cuttin’ off men’s dicks!” Othella looked up at the ceiling and shook her head. She rotated her neck and then rubbed it before she returned her attention to Ruby. “You cuttin’ Lonnie’s throat that time was bad enough, but this is the worst thing I ever seen you or anybody else do!”
“Men can’t go around makin’ young girls suck their dicks or do anything else that we don’t want to. Now let’s grab our stuff and get the heck out of here.”
“I’m with you on that! We can’t stay around here no longer!” Othella yelled, wiping her lips some more. She could still taste Glenn in her mouth.
Ruby hopped over Glenn’s body and dashed across the floor to the kitchen.
Othella slid into her shoes and put on the thick jacket she’d worn. “Shouldn’t we take somethin’ out of here for all the trouble he put us through?” she asked, almost losing her breath.
There was a puzzled look on Ruby’s face. She was at the sink, washing Glenn’s blood off her knife. She dried it with the same cloth that they had used the evening before to dry Glenn’s dishes. “Like what?” she asked, looking around the room with a frown. “Out of all of this junk up in here, there ain’t nothin’ we can use.”
“He might have some money in his pockets,” Othella said, standing over Glenn. She made sure not to step in the pool of blood that was slowly forming beneath his body.
“And he’s goin’ to need it to pay a doctor to stitch him up,” Ruby said with a sharp nod.
Just then, Glenn came to. He was moaning and groaning, both hands still covering the place where the rest of his dick was, bleeding like a stuck pig.
“What . . . what happened?” he asked, looking up and around. “What did you gals . . .” Glenn was in absolute disbelief when he realized exactly what Ruby had done to him. “You BITCH! You done cut off my dick!” he hollered, rising with both hands still on his crotch. “I’m goin’ to kill y’all!” he threatened, stumbling across the floor. But he was too slow and in too much pain. When he saw the top part of his penis on the floor, he stumbled and fell again. “Get a doctor, y’all,” he whimpered. “Please . . . y’all . . . got to help me!”
“Ruby, we got to do somethin’,” Othella rasped. “We can’t leave this old man like this.”
“Do you want to go to that reform school you said we’d go to? You want to find out how bad they treat colored girls in them places? This was self-defense.”
“Then let’s find a peacemaker and tell him that,” Othella pleaded. Even though she had avoided stepping in Glenn’s blood, the bottoms and sides of both her shoes were now covered in it. She didn’t realize that until she felt Glenn wrap his fingers around her ankle, forcing her to look down. He pulled her down on top of him.
“I’m goin’ to kill you, bitch!” Glenn said in a weak voice.
Ruby shot across the floor like a cheetah. She leaned over Glenn and began to pry his fingers from Othella’s ankle, but his grip was too strong. His fingers remained clamped around Othella’s ankle like a vise. When Ruby bit his fingers, he released Othella, but then he grabbed Ruby around her neck and began to choke her.
Just as Ruby was about to pass out, Othella crawled over to Glenn and bit his arm and he released Ruby.
“You no good dog!” Othella yelled. “You almost killed Ruby Jean dead!” Othella turned to Ruby, rubbing her shoulder. “You all right?”
“Let’s get out of here right now,” Ruby whispered, holding her neck and coughing. “If we stay here too long, he might kill us.”
As Glenn lay on the floor cussing, writhing in agony, bleeding profusely, and praying, Ruby and Othella gathered their things and bolted.
The same elderly couple who had been in the restaurant the day before was approaching. Ruby and Othella ran past them like the Devil was in pursuit. They didn’t stop running until they’d reached the end of the fourth block from the restaurant. They spent the next twenty minutes sitting on top of their suitcases on the sidewalk, mumbling disjointed prayers and hyperventilating.
“You think that old couple got a good look at us?” Othella asked as soon as she was able to think and speak clearly again.
“I don’t think so. Even if they did, can’t nobody prove we done nothin’ to nobody. Ain’t nobody seen us do nothin’ to nobody.” Ruby sniffed.
“What about Glenn?”
“What about Glenn?” Ruby asked dumbly.
“He’s goin’ to tell somebody what we . . . um . . . what you done to him. You cut half of that man’s dick clean off!”
“He was makin’ you suck it! What else could I do?” Ruby wailed.
“I guess you’re right.”
“You damn right I’m right!” Ruby shrieked.
“And if it hadn’t been you or me, it would have been some other girl, I guess,” Othella said, already feeling less guilty about what had happened.
“Not no more he won’t,” Ruby scoffed, removing something from her jacket pocket. She dropped it to the ground. For a moment, Othella did not know what she was looking at. And when she realized what it was, she could not believe her eyes.
It was the top half of Glenn’s severed dick.
Glenn Boates didn’t die that day. But he would have if Mr. and Mrs. Charles Townes hadn’t arrived in time. The way those two strange teenagers with suitcases had run by made the nosy Townes couple suspicious. And since they were personal friends of Glenn’s, they had every reason to go to his apartment to check on him.
Mr. Townes, a retired doctor, stopped Glenn from bleeding to death. He and his wife transported him in their truck to another black doctor in the area, and that doctor patched Glenn up and filled him with painkillers. But there was nothing that either of the two doctors could do to restore Glenn’s manhood: his sex life was over.
When Ruby and Othella decided to wander around again, Ruby left Glenn’s severed body part on the ground. But before she walked away, she covered it with some leaves, pushing the leaves along the ground with her foot the same way she’d helped her mother spread manure in her garden.
“That ain’t goin’ to do no good.” Othella looked at the mound of leaves with a grimace on her face. She hoped that as long as she lived, she’d never see a man’s dick—well,
half
of a dick—in a predicament like this again: on the ground with dead leaves and dirty rainwater. “Sooner or later a stray dog or some rogue coon is goin’ to sniff it out and . . . eat it,” Othella said, wincing.
“It don’t matter that much, I guess. Glenn is a real old man. He don’t have too many years left to use his pecker, anyway,” Ruby offered, trying to justify her actions. “And he ain’t got no wife that he needs to pester in the bedroom no more. He said so hisself.”
“That’s all true, but that was a real bad thing that you done to that man, Ruby.” Othella noticed that Ruby’s hands were shaking. She didn’t know if it was because she was nervous, scared, or what. And she didn’t want to know. Just knowing that Ruby was capable of such an extreme level of violence was enough at the moment.
Ruby gasped. “Let me remind you, girl. That was a real bad thing that he was doin’ to you, too—and was goin’ to do to me!”
“I know, I know. But . . . well, it was still a real bad thing for him the most. I could have got over what he done to me, sooner or later. I been forced to do even worse things by some of Mama’s friends, and I got over that. But what you done to Glenn, he won’t never get over. Dicks ain’t like hair; they don’t grow back. He won’t be able to have no more kids.”
“I . . . I wish he hadn’t provoked me. I didn’t really want to cut his dick off! I was aiming for his hand but he moved it at the wrong time. . . .”
“It don’t matter what you was aimin’ at,” Othella mouthed. She couldn’t imagine the pain that Glenn had experienced, and would probably experience for a while to come,
if he was still alive
. “Can a man die from gettin’ his dick cut off?”
“Them dudes in Italy don’t die,” Ruby pointed out.
“What dudes in Italy?”
“Them dickless dudes that they train to sing like girls. Sopranos,” Ruby explained. “Remember we read about them in Miss Spark’s class?”
“Oh yeah. Them eunuchs. But they don’t go through what Glenn went through.” Othella sniffed. “I wonder how he’s goin’ to pee now.”
“What if it had been a little four-year-old girl he tried to mess with?” Ruby asked, getting angry all over again by just thinking about Glenn attacking a little girl. “Men like him, they don’t care where or what they put their peckers in. Before my aunt Della died, she caught one of her field hands screwin’ one of her sheep.”
“A sheep?” That piece of information disgusted Othella. She shook her head and cringed. “Men are so unnatural,” she mouthed. “I wonder what all Glenn would have done if you hadn’t cut him.”
“After he got his blow jobs, he probably would have killed us. You keep that in mind when you think about what I done to him,” Ruby suggested.
“I will,” Othella replied with a shudder. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the heebie jeebies.”
They walked for another hour. Then they stopped in front of a large gray house with a sign tacked to the front wall of the wraparound porch that read:
ROOMS TO LET
. An old wooden icebox with the door slightly ajar lay on its side on the porch. A dusty red truck, at least ten years old, sat on the street in front of the house. There was an old mattress standing on its side in the cargo area.
Ruby and Othella saw a few black folks walking around the area, so they assumed, and prayed, that this was a black-owned rooming house.
They were relieved when a large, friendly-looking black woman in her sixties, who resembled Ruby’s mother, opened the front door and greeted them with a big smile.
“Y’all look like you’d be nice tenants. Don’t give me no trouble and y’all can stay here as long as you want,” the woman told them. She even sounded like Ruby’s mother. With her crisp white apron over a floor-length, flowered duster, her thick gray hair in a bun, she seemed harmless enough. For the first time since they’d arrived in this city, Ruby felt comfortable.
“I got two rooms available, but I’m savin’ one for a friend who’ll be comin’ to spend some time with me soon. If y’all don’t mind sharin’ the other room, y’all welcome,” the landlady told them, still smiling.
After their violent encounter with Glenn Boates, this nice old lady was a refreshing relief. This turn of events seemed too good to be true.
And it was.
In addition to the ten dollars a week
each
that Ola Mae Logan said she wanted, she expected Ruby and Othella to scrub the floors of all eight of the rooms in the house as needed, and do all of the housekeeping that she didn’t have time to do.
“The first time one of y’all don’t pay your rent on time, I add another dollar for each day it’s late. You will be responsible for spreadin’ the roach paste in your room once a week—and you have to pay for it out of your own pocket. This ain’t no charity house, and I ain’t the Red Cross.” The landlady paused to catch her breath. The big smile was no longer on her face. She continued with her arms folded, looking and acting more like a prison warden now. “No visitors without my approval, no electric hot plates in the room, no pets, no wild parties, no men in the room after ten, and no alcohol ’less you got enough for me and my other tenants. And if y’all don’t give me a thirty-day notice before you move out, I’ll see you in court. Any questions?”
“Is that all?” Ruby asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

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