Ugly Ways (11 page)

Lord, it was like it was yesterday.

The cat's haunches rose and her body looked like it disappeared between her shoulder blades. She was looking right into my face again and I could hardly believe it, but the cat's eyes turned from pale yellow to green to glowing orange to fiery red right before my eyes.

I may not have known much about cats, but I knew this wasn't no ordinary cat and this cat meant me some harm. I turned to run and got all twisted up in my feet. To look at me now you wouldn't know I used to be real clumsy. But my feet got all tangled, and I fell down them steps. Hard, too. I tumbled down those steps and landed in the yard with a thud. I was sure I had broke some bones, but all I could see was that red-eyed black and white cat coming at me.

I just let out a scream, jumped up, and ran all the way back home just sure that devil cat was on my tail. Mudear just laughed when I told her about it. And she promised that she wouldn't let no cat get me. Then, she told me to go on out to play and just forget about that old cat.

I went out, but I didn't wander far for a while and I sure didn't forget about that singing cat I can almost hear it now.

La-la-la-la-la-la-la.

Uh-um-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.

Ernest bent slowly and picked up his boxer shorts and rolled them together in a ball with his T-shirt that he threw in the natural wicker laundry hamper at the far end of the room. He turned out the overhead light and went to his side of the bed. He sat down gingerly and stretched his long frame out carefully on the edge of the king-sized bed so as not to disturb it. Then, he remembered that his wife was not lounging across the other side, taking up more than three-fourths of the wide mattress. In the dark, he reached his hand out a bit and touched the empty side of the cool cotton sheet decorated with a fall motif of leaves and grapes and fruits of the harvest just to make sure she wasn't still lying there, her arms flailed out at her sides, her legs seemingly akimbo to her body, snoring lightly with her dark full lips parted. "The sleep of the innocent," she called it.

Without her, the bed seemed enormous to Ernest. Over the years, their marriage bed had gotten bigger and bigger, he thought, remembering the slender cot they shared as newlyweds in a rented room, then the twin bed somebody in her family gave them. Then, the double bed of the first bedroom furniture he ever bought, made of thin plywood and painted with a cheap stain. It was right after Mudear changed that they moved up to a queen-sized bed, good sturdy furniture. Then, Esther took up so much of that with her careless sleeping that he finally bought their first king-sized bed, then the present bed with a fabric canopy that the girls bought. They had shared that bed until the paramedics came and took her to the hospital.

He was still having trouble believing that Mudear had become sick, much less died. Although he had imagined killing her numerous times, he had never envisioned her actually being dead, especially being
killed
by something as ordinary as pneumonia. It seemed that one night he had trouble sleeping because of her sudden hacking cough and a few nights later—nights she had spent in bed rather than roaming around the house and yard—she had had trouble breathing and was carted off by the paramedics to die in the Mulberry Medical Center. She hated the fact that it was not called a hospital. "What you gonna tell people? 'She in the
Medical Center'?
"

Hell, she was strong as a mule. Never really had a sick day in her life. Had that perfect eyesight and all her teeth, God knows she got her rest and nutrition, didn't know the meaning of stress and tension. The way she pampered herself youda thought we was rich as cream. She shoulda lived forever.

Resting the side of his head on his bare arm on the pillow, he felt his thick salt-and-pepper hair growing long and beginning to curl over the frayed top of his sweat-lined pajama collar. Women still liked to play in his thick shaggy hair. Women he didn't even know would come up behind him as he sat on a bar stool at The Place and stick their fingers in his hair and twirl it around while they struck up a conversation.

"Shag" was his nickname from childhood. He could still hear it ringing again sometimes the way it had in the fields and lanes on the outskirts of Mulberry when he was a boy growing up in the country. Mudear had even called him that for a second when they first got married. It was, he thought for the first time, her pet name for him. But it had been so long since Mudear had a pet name for anything, let alone him, that it was hard to remember if he liked her calling him that or not.

But I was so full of myself then, he thought, so sure about how things should be, so sure about always being right, that I guess I was ... He stopped thinking for a while, struck by the weight of what he was about to say to himself.

I guess, he thought slowly, I guess I was like Mudear.

He had tried over the years to discern why he was the kind of man he was when he and Mudear had gotten married, when the girls were little and still able to love their daddy. For so long, he had found it impossible not to place all the blame for his behavior on the capable, culpable Mudear. How could he do anything else but blame her?

If she hadn't been such a heartless bitch, he reasoned. If she hadn't turned the girls—his own children—against him. If she hadn't burned the okra every day. If she didn't always have to have her say. If she hadn't taken so long with the stew meat that time. If she hadn't had to clip articles out of the newspaper to prove he was wrong about something.

Sure, he had slapped her a few times after they were married a couple of years. But that was how things was then, he thought. Then, a man controlled his household, his wife, his family. Wasn't even no big to-do about it. Just a couple of taps really just to shut her up and let her know who was who and what was what. Most mens did that every now and then at that time, he thought. That's how it was then, it was a way to rule your house. You said something and your woman did it. If she didn't, you showed her that she better. People understood that then.

But he had finally, over the years, accepted that the more that Mudear had done for him, the more he figured she should do for him. And the more he feared all the things she knew how to do.

Maybe it was seeing her so capable, so able to take care of everything that was thrown her way. She never seemed to buckle, but rather to steel herself and go forward. He had to admit, it had scared him. He remembered his twenty-year-old mind trying to take all of Esther in, even before the change, and being overwhelmed by this woman he had married.

He knew that he was the first man she ever knew, ever to touch her in her private places. But she came to lovemaking that first time as if she had been made for it. She wasn't shy or modest about her body. She reveled in her strong little body—short big legs, a miniature hourglass figure—and the first time she saw him naked she had reveled in his, too. His was the first penis she felt and really looked at in the light. He could tell by the bemused, inquisitive expression she had on her face as if she were discovering maleness ... in him. He let her examine him, but he didn't like it. It was too much for him.

He still remembered lying in their little newlywed bed while Mudear knelt by the bedside table lamp moving her face closer and closer to his penis, scanning him with her mouth hanging slightly open. Then, she lifted his dick up with her finger and gently blew on the underside.

Even in his arousal, Ernest thought in panic, "Good God, she's gonna touch my johnson with her mouth!" And he rolled out of bed away from her and stood glowering down at her upturned smiling face. He stood there silently, his feet astride, his hands in fists hanging at his sides. He found he had no words to express his outrage at her behavior. So, finally, he stormed off to their bathroom, his turgid penis bobbing in front of him as he walked.

Even the way she walked around their first rented room with no clothes on as if it were the most natural thing for a newly married woman to do. Like she had been doing it all her life. It made him uncomfortable.

He would watch awhile, then throw her her old cotton robe he would find rolled up in a ball among their damp and sweaty bed linens to cover herself and she'd just catch it, a good solid catch, too, laugh, and throw it back at him with her naked self.

She never did have no shame, he thought.

His mind was spinning so fast going over and over his life with Mudear that he just about gave up on getting any sleep and thought about getting up and exploring the night the way Mudear had done for more than thirty years.

He couldn't say why Mudear was never molested or attacked or disturbed as she gardened at night near the red dirt and asphalt streets of busy East Mulberry and then the narrow roads of the development called Sherwood Forest. It was just hard for him to say why.

Mulberry could be a strange litde town like that. A rich old-name white Mulberry man hires two drifters to kill his wife in her bed in her mansion behind high gates with dogs prowling the property, to rip the diamond rings from her bloody fingers, to make it look like a brutal robbery. And an undistinguished black middle-aged woman gardens off the streets of Mulberry alone in the middle of the night unmolested, not even bothered or harassed by idling teenagers that her neighborhood, the development, had plenty of. Spoiled teenagers, teenagers with no thought of a job, teenagers with expensive cars, teenagers who whined for money, big money, to attend a music concert, from what he overheard in the driveways and doorways of his neighbors' homes.

Not like our girls, he thought. Always got a job. Not asking for anything. Doing for themselves.

Mudear would have laughed if she knew that her husband had ever considered her safety. It went against everything that Emest knew Mudear believed.

"Shit," Mudear used to say. "A man no matter how much he love you will send you out to face the world alone, will sit by and watch your heart break, will let you work yourself into the grave taking care of him and then stand over the open hole and cry and cry and yell, 'Oh, baby, why you have to leave me? Why you have to go before me? Aww, baby, how you 'spect me to live 'out you?'

"Yeah, but yet and still before you cold, he be walking around looking for another fool woman to take care of him while your ass be six feet under.

"A man don't give a damn about you."

Poppa had to laugh at the memory of what he had overheard Mudear tell the girls as she worked their asses to the bone.

He had heard Mudear say so many times if anyone dared to mention dying, death, or age to her, "Hell, I'm gonna eat the duck that eats the grass off all ya'll's graves."

Well, Esther, he thought again, it didn't work that way, did it?

Then, he felt funny, sneaky for thinking that way about Mudear even though she wasn't still around to give him that look that said, "Negro, have you lost your mind talking to me that way? You got your womens confused.

"You oversporting yourself."

For a while he couldn't remember what he had been thinking or what he was about to do when his dead wife intruded on his thoughts. He had to rub his face with the dry palms of his hands to clear his head. My mind wanders so lately, he thought. Oh, yeah, I was thinking about getting up.

But he realized he had no desire to go walking in the night. That was her thing, he thought.

Poppa picked up the remote control on Mudear's bedside table and fingered it for a while. Mudear had said the remote control was one of the world's best inventions. He clicked on the television at the foot of the bed. It came on one of the home shopping networks. The television was a portable model but a wide-screen one. Mudear couldn't stand the small ones. Said she couldn't make out the screen. She needed glasses but insisted that her eyes were as good as always and better than most because she had night vision. And then, even if she did really need glasses, no optometrist was gonna come out to the house and pay a visit with all his equipment and lenses and frames and stuff in the backseat just for her. Although that's probably what she expected.

She did get one of the girls to get her some of those drugstore reading glasses though. She didn't need 'em for much. 'Cause she wasn't much of a reader. All she ever did was leaf through a magazine or two to look at the pictures or peruse the stack of mail-order catalogs she kept all over the house, next to her bed and her La-Z-Boy and the phones. Mudear loved the pictures, moving or standing still. She called herself a TV baby. Like a baby boomer.

She did love her TV. There were three television sets in the house. All large screens: the twenty-two-inch in the bedroom. The big projection television in the rec room and the thirty-seven-inch Sony in the living room. He had purchased the one in the living room just so he could get to see the baseball games and the boxing matches that he loved. Just watching those young strong bodies at the height of their form punching away at each other and taking it gave him some hope for himself and for all men. Many times he wondered if men, males, "man-kind" as Mudear called all men, were going to survive.

Poppa turned up the sound and watched a few minutes of the woman on the screen selling dollhouses. Even while she was up here in this bed nearly dying, she was busy spending my money, Emest thought. But I got to admit she didn't waste no money on those little china dogs and doodads that they sold on TV. She went for the good stuff. Equipment and stuff for her garden, light bulbs that were guaranteed to bum for a hundred years, a speed videotape rewinder.

And then, too, as she would remind him, her girls paid for and sent her just as much stuff as he did. More, really, 'cause they could afford it.

He casually flicked through all the stations, sixty-four of them altogether, including all the movie channels and Playboy. Mudear insisted that she had to have all the stations that the cable company in Mulberry offered, so she'd know what was going on in the world. And he had to admit that she did make good use of them. Mudear was interested in everything that came on TV. She looked at nature shows, afternoon talk shows, music videos, Sunday morning discussion panels, feature films, documentaries, the Weather Channel, foreign films, Larry King, game shows, soap operas, cooking shows, fishing and hunting shows, concerts, CNN, CNBC, and C-Span. She never bothered with the copies of
TV Guide
that one of the girls got her a subscription to. She would just turn on the television and flick through the channels until she found something that caught her interest. And when her interest waned, she'd just find another channel.