Pernicious (20 page)

         
The man next door stepped out onto his patio deck. He usually did whenever Perry sat by her pool, in her bikini.
     
Perry wondered if the man had constructed the deck primarily to ogle her, his being the only elevated deck on the block, affording him a bird’s eye view of her backyard.

         
As usual Perry gave him an eyeful. She had on a pair of Ray-Bans and a black-and-white two-piece bikini, the sunglasses covering more flesh than the bikini.

         
Perry scooted her lounge chair right, to offer a frontal view, and casually spread her legs. The man, sweeping the deck, never took his eyes off her.

         
Perry cranked the chair full recline, stuck her hand inside the bikini bottom and sensuously licked her lips. She could have sworn she heard the man groan.

         
“What the hell!” A woman’s voice. “Ike, what did I tell you about this?”

         
“I was just sweeping.”

         
“Go inside and sweep! I’ll sweep out here!”

         
Another look at Perry and Ike hurried into the house.

         
A long while the diminutive, gray-haired woman stood on the deck, looking disgusted, staring down at Perry.

         
Finally: “I once believed a dog bitch wouldn’t defecate the area she lives in. I no longer think it’s true.”

         
Perry quickly cranked the chair upright. “I’ve always believed a flabby-ass, desiccated old hen ain’t worth plucking! I
know
it’s true!”

         
“You ought to be ashamed! Exposing yourself to young boys! This used to be a good neighborhood, with good, decent people.”

         
“You need to stop your husband gawking at me!”

         
The woman started down the stairs…halfway down she stopped. “Do you know who I am?” Hands on her hips. “I was on the city board of directors for twenty-two years. I know the chief of police personally.”

         
“I don’t care who you know and I damn sure don’t care who you are! I know what you’ll be if you step your stale ass in my yard. A fucked up, flabby-ass, desiccated old hen!”

         
“I’m not frightened of you,” retreating up the stairs. “You don’t scare me.” Before going into the house and slamming the door: “You need Jesus!”

         
Granny’s just jealous, Perry thought.
Can’t blame her for that. If I was saggy and wrinkled and my man couldn’t stop watching the beautiful, young, smooth-skin girl next door, I’d be jealous, too. No, I wouldn’t, I’d kick his ass.

         
She smiled and reclined again.

         
The woman reminded her of Willie’s mother.
Old, combative and tore up over a sorry-ass man. What was her name? Humped Hussy, probably. The way she and Willie carried on you’d think they were fucking. My mammy this and my mammy that. If his mammy
really
loved him so much, she would’ve introduced him to soap and water a long time ago. Then he wouldna went around smelling like a damn muskrat all his life.

         
She removed the Ray-Bans and closed her eyes. The water purifying machine droned, a robin chirped from above, sounds of children playing echoed from the front. A light breeze carried the smell of chlorine. Her eyes felt heavy; she needed rest, but Willie pervaded her thoughts, making peaceful sleep impossible…

         
Willie was working the vacuum machine at Jiffy-Spray Car Wash. The other male employees rotated surveillance on her as she sat in the office waiting for her car. Willie didn’t give her a second look as he dragged a vacuum hose into her Mercedes SLS AMG.

         
Willie wasn’t an ugly man. Medium height. Light-skinned. Reddish-brown hair, which he wore in an unusually large afro. His eyes were like no other Perry had seen, narrow slits, below dark, thick eyebrows.

         
Perry walked over to him and said hi, the sound of the vacuum machine drowning her voice. She hit the machine switch and said hi again. Willie didn’t respond, simply stared at the ground.

         
He’s shy.

         
Willie reached to turn the machine back on, and Perry caught his hand. “That’s good enough.”

         
She reached into her purse, retrieved a twenty and a pen and scribbled her name and number across Andrew Jackson’s face.

         
A malodorous mixture of overcooked hamburgers and a leaky sewer pipe assaulted her nostrils, which she attributed to the machine.

         
“Call me,” she told him before driving away.

         
She didn’t think he would.

         
Later that evening she picked up the phone and heard mumbling and men laughing in the background.

         
“You fine,” the caller said, and then she remembered him. Barely audible he added: “You rich, too. Ain’t ya?”

         
Despite his incoherent rambling, Perry agreed to a date. The following weekend she picked him up at his mother’s apartment and was appalled to find him unshowered in dirty clothes. That strange stench hit her again and she realized it emanated from him.

         
“We had a date, remember?” she said.

         
Willie grinned and rolled his head, a gesture she assumed was his way of saying yes. She took him straight to Taco Bell. She’d reserved a table at an Italian restaurant, but Willie’s odor called for fast food. After he gobbled four tacos and three burritos, she took him to her house and gave him a tour.

         
“All this yours?” Willie asked.

         
Perry laughed. He was amusing. “Yes, sugar. You can’t get these thangs with ass or face. You need money…and lots of it!”

         
In the dining room, on the sofa, Perry held her breath and allowed him to kiss her. When Willie attempted to fondle her breast, she exhaled and jumped to her feet.

         
“Willie,” she said politely, “the tub you saw upstairs, you can use it if you like. I have men clothes that’ll probably fit you.”

         
Willie rolled his head in that
aw shucks
manner of his and said, “Uh-uh.”

         
She took him home. Immediately.

         
Two days later she called him and scheduled another date, thinking surely he got the message and took a bath.
      
Wrong! Same clothes, same stench. And again he steadfastly refused to utilize the tub or the shower.

         
Maybe the funk addled my brain, Perry thought, wondering why she instigated a relationship with him.
 
Perhaps the appeal was his boyish charm. The way he walked with his head cocked to the side. The way he couldn’t look her straight in the eye. The way he would sit quiet for hours.

         
What she didn’t learn until later was that most, if not all, of Willie’s boyish charms were attributed to crack cocaine. Though aware of his flaws, Perry decided to marry him.

         
He could be trained, she convinced herself. A little guidance and instruction, she could change him from a spineless crackhead into a real man.

         
Her plan was doomed from the start, partly because Willie resisted a personality transformation, and primarily because Perry was an impatient martinet. The more she yelled, screamed, cursed, and belittled, the more crack Willie smoked.

         
Crack was an enigma to Perry. She’d heard of it, yet had never seen it or anyone smoke it. Willie taught her more than she wanted to know about crack.
   

         
Initially she’d acquiesced his smoking at her house--in the backyard, of course. The privilege was short-lived. Cocaine, and no doubt Perry’s criticisms, made Willie extremely paranoid, which made Perry extremely nervous.

         
Sweat would break out in large blotches on his face, his already strange-looking eyes would buck wide with fear, and his mouth would scrunch up, making it impossible to understand a word he said.

         
She could have dealt with all that, at least for a little while. Then Willie added a new wrinkle. Instead of simply sitting in the dark with sweat bubbling his face, his mouth apoplectic, Willie started inexplicably shouting and running, as if he were on fire, and hiding.

         
When Perry found him bunched up inside a cabinet, or hunkered down in a closet, or frozen solid underneath a bed, Willie would say, “You trying to kill me, ain’t ya?”

         
No, that wasn’t her intention. Not then.
  

         
Two events changed her mind.

         
A thirty-piece sterling silver set disappeared, simply got up and walked away. Willie swore up and down he didn’t take it.

         
Perry contemplated killing him.

         
Then, during a routine physical, the doctor informed her she’d contracted trichmoniasis, an STD.

         
Willie became a dead man walking.

         
A glitch occurred when the insurance agent asked Willie to submit an oral fluid test. Willie stuttered and stammered and balked, providing the man with sufficient doubt to request a complete physical.

         
Perry took him home and made an offer: “Enter rehab, graduate, and I’ll buy you a Cadillac.”

         
He agreed. Entered rehab the very next day and snuck off hours later.

         
She’d invested too much money in him to let bygones be bygones. The Cadillac Escalade had been bought. She had to go get him.

         
Freeing him from his mother and re-entering him into rehab proved far less difficult than getting him to go fishing at night.

         
Perry shook her head, attempting to shake the memory from her mind. She didn’t want to recall Willie in the creek, making one helluva racket, splashing water and screaming for his mother.

         
“Mama! Mama, come help me!”

         
Silly bastard, his mammy couldn’t help him. All he had to do was stand up.

         
The sound of him drowning, she feared, would follow her to the grave. In her worst nightmares, and often when her mind wandered, she heard his blood-curdling gurgle.

         
He couldn’t just drown like a normal man would’ve. Naw, he had to scream like a little bitch.

         
Otherwise she could have walked calmly and quietly to the bank. Instead she ran, desiring to distance herself from the noise as quickly as possible.

         
The bank was muddy, and then she heard a sloshing sound that almost drowned out Willie’s wailing.

         
Phhhruuuuuup!

         
With both hands she pulled her right foot free, and it came out shoeless. “Shit!” She was in no mood to search for it, not with Willie whooping and hollering. She ambled up the trail, keeping low to avoid headlights.