Bailey's Cafe

  There is nothing in back of this cafe. Since the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility, the back door opens out to a void. It takes courage to turn the knob and heart to leave the steps. Jones opened the door, his bulk shielding Sadie from the sight of that endless plunge, and then he turned to look down into her eyes.

  —Old girl, I didn’t mean to hurt you in there.

  —I know, Jones, she whispered.

  He held her face between his large, callused palms and traced along her eyelids with his thumbs. She closed them and he leaned over to press his lips to hers. Sadie had her first real kiss. If she smiles now, we can do this, he thought. She opened her eyes and smiled. So it became a full silver moon, streaked with navy blue clouds, the sounds of the river hitting a pier, and the feel of damp wood beneath their feet when he escorted her off the back steps. Then her right hand up on his shoulder, his left around her waist, as the iceman and the two-bit whore began to dance.

  She had worried needlessly about the dinner; he was charmed by the place. He told her how happy he was that she’d finally invited him in. He was beginning to think that maybe she didn’t like him. Or maybe she couldn’t cook. Well, after you finish my food, you might still think so. It was getting easier and easier to feel at home with this man. Would he like a bit of apple cider before they sat down to eat?

  He guided her gently through the two-step, keeping time from the rhythm of the waves. Just the sound of their feet sliding along the wooden planks. And the sound of his voice. Old girl, I’m gonna tell you, what you see is what you’ll get. I’m pushing sixty, fighting arthritis, but my pension will take care of two.

  He carved the chicken; they both liked the wings, so he winked and told her it was a good thing God made ’em in pairs.

  The sliding along the planks. The sound of his voice. What I have, you’ll have. What I eat, you’ll eat. Wherever I lay my head, there’s a place for you.

  He helped her clear the table and wash the dishes. Insisted on polishing the crystal himself until it shone. The night was warm enough for them to go out on the porch and sit in the rockers. In the still of the night they could hear the new radio playing from the living room.

  —And I want you to know, I ain’t talking nothing improper. You get my name, such as it is, along with the whole bargain.

  Yes, so easy to feel at home with this man. And she would keep him in her home, since it seemed he wanted to stay. Nights just like this, sitting on the porch, stretching into eternity. Nights full of music. Nights full of peace …

  —So what do you say, old girl? We got ourselves a deal?

  Thank God, she knew how to keep a place for him. And thank God, it would always stay that way.

  Sadie shook her head no. It was a deal she just couldn’t live with. She moved out of his arms and left him standing in the middle of the pier. At the back steps she retrieved her satchel. Her fingers closed tightly around the quarter in her pocket as she looked up at Jones’s sky. She knew this dear sweet man was offering her the moon, but she could give him the stars.

  EVE’S SONG

  This summer the talk in here is all about Dewey’s upcoming election—and Eve. The Indians closing in on the pennant—and Eve. The first new line of Chevys since the war—and Eve.

  Taking them in order of importance for the cook: Cleveland jumps on the bandwagon, getting Larry Doby from the Negro Leagues along with the immortal pitching arm of Satchel Paige. So now the Cleveland Indians are kicking butt all up and down the American League. Surprise. Surprise.

  Next—

  I knew the clutch wasn’t staying in automobiles. Women are driving now. When we went overseas they took our jobs and started making their own money. A big mistake. They talked back enough as it was, and with a lot of them still making good money, they even got the auto makers listening to them. It’s too hard for them to work those gears in high heels and straight skirts. So guess what? No clutch.

  Next—

  Everybody knows I don’t think much of Truman since he dropped the A-bomb. Like I said, I understand what all that was about, but it’s still hard to forgive. And although it’s really blaming the messenger for the message, I’m not gonna be too sorry to see him lose this one. The only reason he’s getting my vote is because the choice comes down between a man I don’t like and one I don’t trust. Reading the papers, that puts me in the minority again. But it’s a position I’m used to living with. After all, I can’t find a thing wrong with what goes on at Eve’s.

  Eve was my first customer. We opened on a Tuesday, and she took that overdone hamburger I put in front of her without a word. Not that she ate anything but a small piece of the bun; she’s a vegetarian. But I didn’t have to explain the routine to her, like no one had to explain it to me. Her place, she says, has always been right down the block from this cafe.

  Too bad that Sadie couldn’t have found that brownstone the way she found us. And I knew there was no use in directing her there. A woman is either ready for Eve’s or she’s not. And if she’s ready, she’ll ask where to find it on her own. Not that finding her place is any guarantee of getting a room. Eve is particular.

  —Particular? Lord, Jesus. They’re all sluts and whores and tramps.

  —Come on and admit it, Bailey. She’s got a good game going, and the nerve to bad-mouth me. Every pimp don’t need to wear pants.

  —A house full of nothing but sluts and whores and tramps.

  Eve lets out rooms in her house to single women. Sometimes they pay her, sometimes they don’t. I don’t know how she decides when to charge or not. I figure it’s none of my business since I’m not a woman and would have no reason to go there looking for a place to stay. I do know that charity has nothing to do with it. Eve is not a charitable person. You can look into her eyes and see that. She wears small rimless glasses that magnify those deep brown eyes. And it’s a plain brown face that doesn’t scowl but doesn’t appear pleasant either. It appears, well, just there. Cut and dried. I’ve never heard her laugh, never even seen her laugh inside the way Nadine taught me it can be done. I’d go so far as to say she’s a woman without a sense of humor. She’s a stylish woman, though. Tailored silk suits. Oxford heels. But if you look real real close, there’s always a faint line of dirt just under her manicured nails.

  —She runs a whorehouse. Nothing but a whorehouse.

  —Every pimp don’t wear pants.

  —She’d sell her own mama for a dime.

  Eve knows exactly what some people think about her. And she honestly doesn’t care. And all that I can honestly say is that the women who come straggling in here and ask about Eve’s look just like any other women in the cafe. Some are older than others. Some wear makeup, some don’t. Some are very pretty, some are quite plain. The only thing they have in common is that they need a place to stay. And I tell them the only thing I can: Go out the door, make a right, and when you see the garden—if you see the garden—you’re there.

  But does she know about delta dust? That’s what I ask any time I’m tempted to let a woman stay here because of the pain in her story: Daddy beat up on her. Mama beat up on her. And every blessed soul in between. But does she know, does she know about delta dust? Early last summer one came here who’d had Lucky Strike spelled out on the inside of her thigh with a lit cigarette butt. A reminder to get the right brand the next time she was sent to the store. I estimated it must have taken him a good hour to spell out the name of those cigarettes because the letters were so evenly matched and she had full, sorta bell-curved thighs. And she could have used a place to stay too. Had left Mr. Lucky Strike for a new man who’d gotten her pregnant before going back to his wife. From there on in, her story shifted into the familiar key of and-nobody-loves-you-when-you’re-down-and-out, so that my mind began to wander: My impatiens needed pruning. They were threatening to take over the back steps, and if you let them alone too long, they crowd out every flower in the yard. But I still let her finish her story
—they always need to finish their stories—even though, looking at the flesh that had healed into deep craters with a scaly film, I knew I wouldn’t take her in. Although hers was the worst I’d heard, except probably for Esther’s, and I’d still kept Esther for other reasons. That kind of woman hated men. And there was no more room available for that kind in my boardinghouse. Esther was enough. Besides, with all that this woman had been through and would still keep going through—they always manage to keep going through it—she didn’t know, just didn’t know, about delta dust.

  A thousand years ago and I can’t wash it off; I still find a few grains of it in the bottom of the tub after I’ve pulled the stopper. I don’t know why I keep thinking I can; it’s no more possible than washing away my fingerprints or my color. I guess because it’s only dirt, and there’s something that makes you believe you can wash away dirt. But it’s not a part of me—it is me. I became it, on that long walk from Pilottown to Arabi. The walk that took a thousand years. When people ask me how old I am and I say, About a thousand years, they think I’m being coy. But it’s the gospel truth.

  I didn’t have an age when I lived in Pilottown. Godfather always told me that since I never had a real mother or father and wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him, he would decide when I was born. And I guess to make his point, whenever I’d ask what day was my birthday, he kept changing it year to year, month to month. As many times as I’d ask, that’s as many as he’d keep changing it. He was patient that way, when he wanted to teach me a lesson. One evening, out of spite, I went to him more than twenty times in the course of an hour to ask for my birthday. And I picked the hour just after he’d cooked dinner and washed the dishes, knowing full well he prized that time for reading the Scriptures. More than twenty times, because I’d go back to my room and note it on my slate—and each time it was a different date. He didn’t ever slip up and give me the same date twice. I would have taken that as a clue that it was probably the day I was born. The very day he said he found me in a patch of ragweed, so new I was still tied to the birth sac and he had to bite off the umbilical cord with his teeth and spit it out to save me from being poisoned: And going through all that for any she-creature earns me the right to decide when it was born.

  By the time my breasts were showing and Godfather stopped putting my underpants on the yard line because of the stains that wouldn’t wash out, I figure he’d given me a birth day and year for every box on the Sinai Church calendar. And by that time, I’d stopped caring because whatever my age it was old enough to start making a difference to the men—and women—in Pilottown. The men had only one question in their eyes when they looked at me then, and mine had only one answer: He would kill us both with his bare hands. But the women’s eyes held other questions, unnatural questions, as their heads followed us when we rode by in the wagon. Why was he still cooking and cleaning for me? Why had he never married? Why was no boy ever allowed to come and call? Or even walk me home from church? But Godfather would stare them down and mutter softly, It’s none of their damn business what goes on in my home. But he did stop bathing me on Saturday nights in that old tin tub, and the dark brown homespun he used for making all my dresses was cut loose and full from the shoulders to the hips. They now hung on me like the ugly brown sacks they were. Did those women understand what they had done with their slitted eyes and evil questions? I was now forced to go through months and months with no one and nothing to touch me.

  It was always a silent house anyway, except when he was angry. Godfather grunted his way through speech, and when he was in the pulpit those grunts were just faster paced and louder, so the words resembled rounds of thunder. It got him the reputation for being a good preacher, and it was very effective, those sounds coming from such a large man. The barrel chest, the stalky arms, the salt-and-pepper hair beaded with sweat. But at home he was a looming, silent presence, and I grew up understanding that too much talk—which for a child is little but a string of questions—was to be clamped down with a Hush your chatter, and that to continue beyond his patience was to make him angry.

  And his anger was much worse than the quiet—Godfather laughed when he was angry. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Quick and sharp falsetto bursts that were like shards of glass on my ears. Each burst a little higher in range than the last—each new burst after some ragged interval. So you’re caught waiting between them in a leaden leaden silence so heavy your heart feels like groaning under the weight and then the lightning vibrations of that shattering laughter coming from nowhere to send your heart pounding and flying into little pieces. He never hit me with his hands; he didn’t have to with a laugh like that. I would do anything to keep from hearing it.

  But when the Saturday-night baths stopped, anger was the only thing left in my home to touch me. There was no reason for his callused palms to be on my shoulder as he poured the water over my back. Grim-faced and concentrating as the lye soap was scrubbed in descending circles on my skin until it tingled. My ears and fingernails—a deep scowl as he wrapped the rough washcloth around his pinkie finger to unearth any hidden speck of grime. And so now I had no reason to reach out to him to balance myself in the slippery tin tub, sometimes only pretending to slip just so I could be allowed to reach out for his arms. And to know that just this one time he would permit me.

  Yes, I fault them—not him—for what happened later. And I thought about those righteous righteous women every time my bare feet split open and bled afresh on that trek from Pilottown. They were so concerned about my age, and by the time I reached Arabi there was no doubt about how many years I’d lived: close to a thousand. And I don’t spend a lot of time with the right or wrong, good or bad of what I am—I am. But I wouldn’t have needed to leave east of the delta if Godfather hadn’t thrown me out of the church. To be thrown out of his church was to be thrown out of the world. The town had only three buildings that qualified as such: the school, the cotton exchange, and the church. He was the preacher in one, the scale foreman and bookkeeper in another, and no one attended that drafty school past the ninth grade. And since he had thrown me out, there was nobody who would dare to take me in.

  It didn’t seem like much when he first discovered me pressed to the ground, my nose buried in the peppermint grass. A border of mint grass grew wild along the dirt walkway to the back porch steps. The strangest thing, that grass, the way it was mixed in all unruly with the tangled weeds and dandelions that passed for a back lawn while it grew straight and neat along the dirt walk. It was thickest and sweetest along that walkway, and that’s why I chose to sprawl there on my stomach, so I could bury my nose in it. You see, Billy Boy had an awful smell to his sweat. Always had, his mama said, even from a baby. His nickname stuck from then, and he didn’t mind people calling him what they did because he’d kept that baby’s brain. And the stomping only made him sweat more, and also something about our game excited him. Maybe he could sense, in his own small way, what it was doing to me. The vibrations of the earth. Stomp, Billy, stomp. I can’t remember when the game began. It might have started with hide-and-go-seek or tag. Or it could have been just some of the silly nonsense children invent to pass the time. The best toy is your imagination, and with us, the only toy. No, it couldn’t have been tag, because that would have meant touching. Yes, it was probably hide-and-go-seek, because then I would have been pressed to the earth, hiding under a bush or rock shelf. And Billy would have been It since kids like him are always It—so grateful to be allowed to join in and slow to leave when the rules keep changing up to keep them from ever winning. And, yes, with hide-and-go-seek you only have to call out, I see you—there’s no touching—and I wouldn’t have been too afraid to play that game.

  So it was hide-and-seek, and I was pressed up under a juniper bush. Low to the ground, trying to blend in, with my brown hair, brown skin, and brown sack dress. And it would have been early evening because Godfather led a prayer meeting at church then, and if he were home he would have found some excuse to get me away from the ot
her children. And it couldn’t have been too close to suppertime or I would have known to be up on the front porch waiting for him to come in and ask me what I wanted him to cook for us that night.

  So the game first began in the early evening. In the summer. And near the Louisiana delta that means the air is cream and the lingering heat from the sun throbs just under the rich soil. And I felt the warm earth against my warm flesh, pressed so hard into the ground I could hear my heart beating in my ears—beating in time with that last throbbing warmth of the sun in the packed dirt under my stomach and thighs. And then the vibrations of Billy Boy stumbling and crashing through the low bushes as he came closer. So close: the vibrations: the pounding of my heart: the quickness of my hot breath against my arm. And underneath it all—through it all—just a tremor. A slight tremor of the earth moving. And his hulking figure coming through the twilight. Man-size feet carrying that infant’s brain. But the tremors stop as he stands still in the clearing to begin searching for us. And the loss of that sensation hits me in the middle, a dull, aching pain. It makes me sit up, flushed, my arms wrapped around my waist—Here, Billy—and his face is all smiles: he’s found someone. But I have to be quick: Stomp, Billy, stomp. His smile disappears. Blankness. Confusion. Yes, stomp. He’s so eager to please—Yes, a new game. And he raises his knee high and pounds that man-size foot into the ground, to be followed by the other. First one—then the other. One—then the other. And I hurl myself back on my stomach to press as tight as I can into the earth and the tremors, the tremors on my arms, legs, thighs. I part my thighs ever so slightly and arch my pelvis hard into the soil—there, yes, now I can feel it even down there. So close to the earth—the tremors. Stomp, Billy.

  A new game that none of the children but us wanted to play. On the edge of the cotton fields. In the crepe myrtle groves. In blind Miss Lemon’s backyard. Stomp, Billy. And after my breasts began to round out the top of the brown sack dresses, the tremors would scrape the coarse cloth against my small, aching nipples, against the tight throbbing between my spread legs. The earth showed me what my body was for. Sometimes I’d break my fingernails from clawing them into the dirt or bite my arm to keep from crying out. And Billy Boy stomping up dust as I humped myself into the ground—him sweating and baying at the clouds.