“It was a good scam,” I said. “Three out of four places would have just thrown you out and said not to come back. But you should at least have the two bucks so that the one hardnose won’t send you to jail.”
Jessa was wearing an orange sundress that had little white buttons all the way down the front. The collar had a little dirt on it. Her red purse was scuffed.
“If I had two dollars I would have gotten a burger someplace,” she said, smiling at me. “My boyfriend took off with our money, two weeks behind on the rent.”
She didn’t have to ask where she was going to sleep that night. I might be a coward, but that doesn’t prevent me from being a fool. Watching that girl masticate her meat loaf had wiped any caution from my mind.
I had seen Jessa every third day after paying for her meal. I even went into my sacrosanct bank account and came out with money for her weekly rate on a room down on Grand.
That woman knew how to talk to a man.
But eight days before Useless came knocking, I had gotten information from a guy who worked at the front desk of Jessa’s downtown rooming house.
“Mr. Minton,” Gregory Wallace, the night manager, said, speaking to me as if we were equals. He was a white guy from Idaho. He’d never understood racism. There are many white people like that, even in the South.
“Yeah?”
“You know your friend Jessa had another boyfriend before you,” the skinny young man said.
“Uh-huh.”
“This big mean guy called Tiny.”
Greg had my attention then.
“What about Tiny?” I asked.
“He’s been comin’ around on days that you’re not here. And last night he asked me what the name was of the guy paying her rent.”
Gregory had a pale, crooked face, with permanently bloodshot eyes, but he looked to me like a savior right then.
“Thanks, man.”
I hadn’t gone back to the rooming house for a week. That meant it was time for the rent to be paid and so Jessa would be looking for me. My phone had been off the hook for three days. I’d taken sixty-five dollars from my savings account to give to Jessa if she came by, but I intended to tell her that she needed to leave me alone.
So, Three Hearts notwithstanding, I had to turn Useless away. Because if he was there when Jessa was, I would most certainly come to grief. Useless was like monosodium glutamate for problems; he brought out the evil essence and magnified it.
I had just finished rehearsing my speech to Jessa for the thirteenth time when her gentle knock came on my door.
I pulled the drape back to be sure she was alone, took a deep breath, and then opened up.
She was wearing a tan dress that hugged her slim figure and somehow wrapped around her calves.
“Hi,” she said, letting her head loll to the side.
“Hey.”
“Can I come in?”
No died on my lips as I backed away from the door. She swayed twice and crossed the threshold. She pushed the door closed, and I shivered.
Jessa Brown reached out as if she was about hold my hand, but instead she unzipped my pants and reached down into my shorts with quick and deft fingers.
“That’s what I need,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You know a girl can’t give up a treasure like that.”
I took half a breath and held it.
I am what the genteel folks call well-endowed. Some women like that. It gives them a de facto sense of power, I believe.
I’m small and weak and scared of my own shadow, and so my sexual prowess is one of the only things I have to be proud of in a masculine way. So when a woman looks me in the eye like that and tells me she needs me, I can’t say no.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.
“No.”
“Huh?”
“Let’s do it right here on the floor, with your pants down around your ankles and me riding that monster.”
Chapter 3
There we were, lying on the wood floor, naked where it counted. Jessa’s feathery touch was keeping me excited, and her kisses on my shoulder and cheek delivered me from fear.
I would be thirty years old later that year, but in my heart I was still a kid. When a woman laid her hands on me, there was nothing I could do. That’s why I hadn’t as of yet entertained the idea of marriage. My auntie Three Hearts had always told me, “A man shouldn’t say I do until he can say I don’t.”
I was a long way from no in the presence of a woman like Jessa.
She was a good seven years younger than me, not pretty but fetching. White women were another taboo that I liked breaking now and again. But there were other qualities about that girl.
The first thing was that she didn’t feel compelled to talk and didn’t mind listening. She liked masculine company and so never complained about toilet seats, dirty dishes, or the errant eructation. And when she did talk, she knew how to speak to a man.
“How come you haven’t been by to see me, lover?” she said with her head on my chest and her left thigh over both of mine.
“Tiny.”
“Him? Why you worried about him?”
“Because he’s big and the jealous type.”
“Big? He’s not even half of you.”
“Maybe not in the bed. But I’m not talkin’ about love, J. I’m talkin’ about gettin’ my ass kicked — hard.”
Jessa sat up to look down on me. “I’m not gonna tell Tiny about you. I don’t tell him nuthin’. He just came back because he thought I’d take him in. But you know I’m easin’ him out. By next week he’ll be gone and forgotten.”
“I don’t know if we should be seeing each other,” I said. I might have been more convincing if my voice hadn’t gone up an octave.
“Come on, lover,” she said, looking deep into my eyes. “You want this.”
I did. I really did. Even though I knew better, I saw no use in that knowledge. The only reason I learned things was to be in a situation like I was there: lying on the floor in the entranceway of my bookstore, all tangled up with a girl that made my blood boil.
She kissed me.
“I can’t let you go, Paris,” she whispered.
Jessa Brown was from a whole slate of southern states. Her mother had moved around quite a lot. Her family was from the Midwest somewhere, but she never saw them because they called her and her mama trash. She could barely read, but she sang beautifully and had come to Los Angeles with a man named Theodore who had promised to get her an audition.
I didn’t know that much about her, but it was enough to know that she was trouble.
But there I was on that floor, floating in a dream and not even thinking about waking up.
That’s when the front door slammed open, breaking the lock and splintering part of the frame.
Jessa was on her feet in no more than a second. I was on my back, moving backward on all fours, under the shadow of one of the largest white men I had ever seen.
“Tiny!” Jessa shouted, and I remembered, quite clearly, why I stayed away from women like her.
“Kill you, bastard!” came from Tiny’s lips. He had a movie star’s voice, loud and strong.
It was his threatening tone that got me to my feet.
It was my youth and sexual prominence that saved my life.
Tiny was mad but not blind. He did a double take when he saw my diminishing erection. That one moment of hesitation was enough for Jessa. She grabbed a hardwood bookend from one of my shelves and threw herself at the behemoth. I didn’t wait to see how it went.
With my pants in one hand and my drawers in the other, I made it up the staircase in triple time. At the top of the stairs I kept a large oak bookcase that only had towels and sheets on it. This light load was by design. I tipped the bookcase over so that it blocked entrée to the second floor. Then I scooted out the window and onto the tar paper roof.