Sugar (28 page)

“You likes her more than well enough,” Pearl said as she removed his plate from the table.

“Well, to tell the truth, I thinks a man could do real well with a woman like that.” Seth leaned back and rubbed his stomach heartily.

“Sure could,” Pearl said, watching him sideways. Her heart was hopeful.

At nine, Sugar heard Seth come up the porch steps and knock softly on the screen door. Everything he did was soft. Like how you’d expect a woman to be. Gentle. She heard him calling her name from beneath her bedroom window, over and over again. But she wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. She just lay there enjoying the sound of her name in his mouth.

The shame of what she was about to do had taken her voice away, left her mute with remorse. She didn’t know that at the time. Sugar thought she was doing it for Seth. Told herself the money would come in handy, help him to buy that business up in New York, help fulfill his dreams and make a better life for the both of them.

Then Sugar convinced herself that she was doing it for Pearl. Lappy wasn’t a man to play with and he had told her that if Sugar didn’t oblige him Pearl could be the one to suffer. She didn’t want that.

But looking back, being open and real with herself, Sugar realized that she did it because of who she was and you can’t change a person overnight or during a week home on holiday. What she was had been hammered into her.

The woman who Seth fell for, well, that wasn’t Sugar. Not the real Sugar. The one he loved was a lie someone conjured up on the front porch of #10 Grove Street.

He would have found out sooner or later. Life is just that way, there’s only so much you can do in the dark before it comes to light. If nothing else, Sugar learned that much. Who’s to say his best friend in New York wasn’t a customer of hers in St. Louis?

But that realization hadn’t come yet. Even as she lay there and listened to Seth calling her name she still knew that she would let Lappy and his friend use her body one last time, and then she could just disappear. Their money in her pockets, Seth on her arm, the two of them burning up the road to New York, to a new life.

She heard Seth half walk, half run back to his house and she knew he was going to try and phone her. That phone rang a million times and then stopped and rang a million more times before he ran back and started banging on the door, Pearl and Joe with him this time. Six hands banging on her door. She thought she would go mad. But she lay there, sane as could be, still as the night.

Lappy Clayton’s car pulled up and Pearl, Joe and Seth stopped calling her name.

She heard the car door slam, his footsteps as he left the car and approached the house and the breeze as it wrapped around the dogwoods.

“She ain’t there,” Seth said. He was mad that she ain’t answer him. Mad that he didn’t know if she was dead or alive. Mad that some high faluting, half breed nigger was walking up her front porch.

“C’mon, Seth. C’mon, now.” Pearl’s voice was scared. Sugar couldn’t see what was happening, but she knew Pearl was pulling at him, coaxing him back over to the house. Last thing she wanted was her baby tussling with the likes of Lappy Clayton.

“Go on, son,” Joe commanded him.

“Daddy, I’m trying to tell the man she ain’t there! So he might as well head back to where he come from!”

Sugar whispered in the darkness: “Please, Seth.”

Maybe she was talking to God. She didn’t know. All she knew was didn’t nobody step to Lappy Clayton and expect to walk away unmarked.

Lappy ain’t said a thing. He didn’t even take a moment to snuff at ’em. Didn’t even look Seth over more than once. He just called Sugar’s name out one time, loud and sharp, and there she was opening the door.

Seth’s face changed instantly and his lips moved to form the question, why? Sugar didn’t respond. How could she? She knew he was thinking all the wrong things, and whatever his thoughts were, were far better than the actual truth.

She wanted him to say her name one more time, not that it would have made a difference in the life she’d chosen to keep when she swung that door open for Lappy, but so she could feel something, for the last time.

Seth stood in the yard and watched as Lappy Clayton stepped into Sugar’s home and closed the door behind him. Seth couldn’t stop shaking his head. He couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching his fists.

What had just happened?

“Lying bitch! If she had a man, why didn’t she come out and say so?! Why!”

His parents stood behind him, saying nothing, not even breathing. Pearl’s mouth hung open, and disbelief spread quickly across her face as she watched the scenario unfold before her. What the hell was Sugar doing?

Seth stormed past them and slammed into the house. By the time Pearl and Joe got up to the door of his room, half his clothes were already in his suitcase. His face was filled with anger.

“Seth.” Pearl wouldn’t cross the threshold. She felt that Seth’s anger would surely blind him and possibly cause him to mistake her for someone else. “Seth?” she called again, above the slamming dresser drawers.

“Mamma.” He answered between clenched teeth, then held up one hand and looked at her like she was the enemy.

Joe placed his hands firmly on her shoulders and backed her away from the room. She turned questioning, concerned eyes on her husband. “He a man, let him deal with this as a man,” Joe said. His words usually made sense to Pearl, but now they were meaningless bunches of letters.

“Seth, baby, please. What you doing? You ain’t planning on leaving right now, tonight?”

Seth moved past them like the wind. Joe and Pearl followed. He was halfway out the door before his father’s voice stopped him.
“Boy!”

Seth’s face was wet with angry hot tears. What he wanted was to just keep moving, let the cool air dry his face and maybe settle his soul. He wanted out of that house, away from Sugar, Bigelow, and all of the bad things that always seemed to happen there.

“You ain’t gonna disrespect me and your mamma by just slamming out of this house and not saying good-bye, I don’t care what’s paining you.” Joe knew his son was hurting, he felt the pain his son was experiencing. It spilled from Seth, infecting both of them.

He wiped at his tears, and turned to face his parents. His face was a pot of emotion, swirling and bubbling, threatening to boil over. He brushed his trembling lips against his mother’s cheek, moving quickly away from her so as not to get caught in her embrace. He shook his father’s hand. Pearl wept as Seth sat in his car, engine running, staring at the shadows that moved behind the thin curtains of Sugar’s bedroom. He heard Lappy’s laughter and then the lights went out. Seth’s tires screamed against the black tarmac, and then he was gone.

Chapter Eighteen

P
AIN
was an unwanted friend of Sugar’s. She couldn’t seem to get away from it, no matter where she went. Sugar looked behind her and pain was there. Looked beside her and pain was there, looked ahead and pain was beckoning her to hurry and catch up.

From the moment Lappy entered her house, she knew he had been drinking and drugging for most of the day. His face was haggard and his eyes bloodshot. He smelled of booze and reefer. When Lappy lay down on top of Sugar, pain came and lay down on top of him, making Sugar’s burden and misery greater. Sugar just pulled in as much air as her lungs would hold and let them both get on with what they had been destined to do.

She didn’t ask where his friend was, or if she was gonna get the same amount of money for just doing him. She didn’t want to speak because she was still hearing Seth’s voice calling to her in the corner of her mind. It was a light echo that was quickly fading into the darkness that surrounded her and she strained to hear it over the creaking of the bedsprings and the howl of wind outside her window.

She looked up and over the shoulder of Lappy and caught sight of the dry leaves flying by like wingless birds. The cold that followed the morning gale was seeping in fast and all she could think of was, she should have lit the fireplace. But then she remembered she didn’t have any firewood. And then she remembered she didn’t have no Seth either.

“Who you think you are, huh? Who you!” He yelled and raised his hand as if to strike her. Sugar cringed and waited for the impact. “You bitch. I set you up at the Memphis Roll, I get you your customers and you treat me like some junkyard dog! Nah, baby, it don’t work that way. You hear me, Sugar? I’m the man and you the bitch!” His words were hot and angry.

Lappy lowered his hand and turned Sugar roughly over, taking her from behind. She didn’t even stop him when he began to get rough and scream obscenities at her. “You gonna learn your place. You hear me, you whoring bitch!”

She felt his hands on the back of her thighs and the only thing Sugar could think of were clusters of blackberries. She felt his tongue on her back and she saw the smooth stones that sat in the shallow part of Hodges Lake. With each of Lappy’s thrusts Sugar could hear Seth calling her a lying bitch.

“Look up at me, gal,” he says. “You embarrassed me. Made me look like a piece of shit. Everybody saw it. You and your
friends.
” “Friends” came out wet and obscene. “Sitting up in the Roll like they own it. Like they had something to do with you being there.” Lappy was breathing heavy like he needed air, sweating like the temperature just rose forty degrees instead of dropping twenty. He clutched his stomach as if in pain, but the smile that spread across his face said something different.

Sugar looked up past that mouth and into his eyes and there she saw what Jude saw fifteen years earlier, and she wasn’t even scared.

Poor Sugar lay beneath Lappy waiting for the end, but realizing, after he began to speak, that she was just at the beginning. His words would have left her emotionally handicapped had it not been for the faith she did not know she possessed.

Lappy laughed with glee and began his tale where he should have climaxed. His voice was thick and he dribbled hot spit into the folds of Sugar’s ear. His breath was like fire on her cheek and she could feel his heart beating so hard against her chest that she thought he would drop dead on top of her. But the more he spoke, the faster he slammed into her. It was as if the words alone motivated him, but Sugar was no more than a hole in the mattress by then. Her body had gone numb a lifetime ago.

He spoke of a car trip. A ride through the Arkansas countryside. Drunk and speeding down a lonely country road in an almost new 1936 Ford. He remembered the heat of the day and the sound of the car’s engine as it suddenly shut down. Not knowing much about cars except how to drive them, he cussed most of the two miles he walked up the road in the hot sun toward Bigelow. He was just rounding a bend in the dirt road when he saw the ribbons, yellow and light, appearing for brief instances above the tall colorful wildflowers. Had the girl stopped jumping, the flowers would have hidden her completely from sight, but he saw the ribbons and evil propelled him toward her.

The girl smiled when she saw him coming, pushing the flowers aside and down, crushing them beneath his fine leather shoes. She wouldn’t have been there, but she was supposed to meet a friend. A boy from Sunday school who’d passed her a note that said she was pretty and that he liked her. Liked her very much. She liked him too and had liked him for a good many years of her youth. She thought it was funny how they’d been in the same Sunday school class for years, and only this year had he finally noticed her.

Can’t tell Mamma and Daddy,
she’d thought as she stuffed the note into her brand-new white laced brassiere. She liked the way the paper felt against her budding breasts. “Knobs” her mother called them.

No, they would forbid it. “You don’t meet no boy no wherever. A well-raised young man would come to your house, sit down with your family.” She’d heard it a million times from her mamma’s mouth and had never defied her, but today, today was different.

The girl wouldn’t have been jumping up and down either, but she couldn’t see the road over the flowers, couldn’t see if he was coming along. She was too scared to stand too close to the road, too far out in the open, someone would see and tell her parents. So she stayed hidden in the thick field of flowers and jumped up every once in a while, snatching peeks at the road.

She smiled at Lappy because she was young and innocent. Nevertheless, her heart had jumped a bit at Lappy’s approach and the smell of liquor that preceded him. The path through the flowers was a popular shortcut among the locals, but the girl did not find his face familiar. And if he was not familiar to her, then she was not familiar to him and he couldn’t tell on her. And if he could, who would he tell? He didn’t know whose child she was.

The thought of running like the wind did not even cross her mind until Lappy’s heavy hand was crushing her windpipe.

Lappy’s hands were closing hard around Sugar’s own windpipe as he told her how Jude’s scared eyes pleaded, how her knees buckled under his strength.

“She didn’t die quick, you know,” he said quietly, his eyes turned up, remembering his deed. His hand went slack around Sugar’s throat; just enough to let a piece of air through. She gagged and felt her stomach turn over.

It was true, the girl’s life stubbornly left her body in spastic jerks and twitches that rustled the long fragile stems of the flowers and drove her body deeper into the soft earth, soiling her white and yellow dress.

Lappy watched until death had replaced life and then he raised the child’s dress above her waist and stared down at the clean white cotton panties that seemed to glow against her smooth brown skin. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled from it the switchblade he carried for protection and slowly cut the material away from her body. She was still a child and only barely a woman. Hair as light and sparse as the coat of a newborn cat covered the flesh that sheltered her womanhood.

Lappy lowered his face and inhaled her scent. He hurridly unzipped his pants and removed his penis. He tried to enter her, but her flesh was young and did not give enough to allow him inside. He cussed in frustration and spat in her face. His hand was up now, up over the girl, the blade glimmering in the high afternoon sun and then it was down, slicing through her skin, splintering her pelvis bone. Over and over again, until he’d separated her life-producing organs from her body.