The fire truck pulled up to the house with sirens blaring. Mama stepped out of a cloud of black smoke with a fork in her hand, and asked, real casual, “What the hell going on out here?” like her stupid ass wasn’t the reason for all the commotion. When the fireman told her she had to move her grill off the porch before she burned the whole place down, Mama threw up her hands in exasperation: “Where I’m supposed to cook then?”
“It’s up to you, ma’am,” said the fireman with a shrug. “As long as you keep the grill outside.” That’s when Mama moved her little cooking operation to the front yard. She’d be out there in her faded housedress and a plastic shower cap pulled over her Jheri curl, like she was in the privacy of her own kitchen, not out on full display. As hungry as I was, I would pray for the middle of the month when Mama would run out of food stamps and was low on food, and stop cooking in the yard. Eating ketchup sandwiches for dinner was better than getting teased all day long by kids in class who passed Mama on their way home from school. I felt like I was living in hell. Every day I wished for someone to come along and save me. That’s when Mr. John showed up.
Sweetie and I were sitting on the porch handclapping “Miss Mary Mack” the first time Mr. John offered to buy us food. He pulled up to the curb in front of Mama’s house, leaned out the window of his green El Camino, and yelled, “Hey, you girls hungry? I’m finna go to Church’s to get something to eat. Y’all want to come along?”
Mr. John was a bricklayer with a big friendly smile. He lived up the street from us, and earlier that summer he’d given my older brother Dre a job helping him mix concrete. In the afternoon, Mr. John would drop Dre back home dog tired and covered in dust. I was in the kitchen with Mama when he came inside one day to say hello.
“How you doing, Mildred?” he asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, pulling on a smoke. “Gettin’ by.”
Mr. John looked around the kitchen. I saw his eyes move from the burned-out birthday candle stubs stuck to the counter, to the ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, to the stove with nothing cooking on it. I guess he figured that “gettin’ by” meant “broke as hell,” because the next day he showed up with a couple of bags of groceries from the Super Saver filled with bread, spaghetti, grits, pigs’ feet, fatback, dried beans, rice, and a package of bologna. He also brought Mama a six-pack of Schlitz Malt Liquor and a dime bag of weed. “You didn’t have to do all that,” she said, giving him a big smile. “You a good man.”
Mr. John started dropping by a lot after that. He’d sit at Mama’s kitchen table and laugh at her jokes. The attention put her in a jolly mood, which made things easier on us kids. By “easier,” I mean she stopped acting like she was gonna blow our heads off every time she got mad.
Mama always had a quick temper. But she was a tiny woman, barely one hundred pounds, and with all of us kids getting big, it was getting harder for her to whoop our asses like she used to. Instead, when she’d get mad because we left the dishes in the sink, she’d reach into the side pocket of her painter’s pants, grab her little .22 pistol, and shoot into the air. “I told you to clean the gotdamn dishes!” POP POP POP! Mama fired that pistol the way other parents raise their voice. Every time she got aggravated, we feared for our lives. I used to wonder, If we so poor, where the hell you getting all these bullets from? But after Mr. John started coming around, Mama didn’t shoot as much. The two of them would talk and laugh and drink their asses off, just like a couple of teenagers in love. Then he’d get up and go back home to his wife.
I don’t know what Mrs. John thought of the arrangement, but Mama was happy as a pig in shit. Suddenly she had everything that was missing from her life: attention, groceries, and beer. Mr. John would bring her a forty of Schlitz in the morning before he went to work, and a six pack in the evening. Thanks to him, Mama stayed buzzed, and we weren’t hungry. It felt like Mr. John coming around was the best thing to happen since we left Granddaddy’s liquor house. Then there he was one afternoon, leaning out his car window offering to take me and Sweetie to lunch.
“Y’all hungry?” he asked again.
The two of us ran over and slid into the front seat beside him, giggling about all that crispy chicken we were about to eat. Sweetie sat in the middle, I was by the window. If you’d seen us that afternoon, you would have thought, Look at that daddy taking his two little girls out for a drive!
We were a few blocks from the house when Mr. John said, “I got to make a stop real quick.” He took a left at the next corner and flipped on the radio. The sound of Marvin Gaye filled the car.
Get up, get up, get up, get up
Let’s make love tonight
Wake up, wake up, wake up
’Cause you do it right
Mr. John sang along as he drove us up the street, past Booker T. Washington High School. He had a nice voice, I remember. Deep, like Barry White.
He turned left again, onto Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, toward the low stone entrance of the Westview Cemetery. Then, without saying a word, he drove his car through the gates.
I figured Mr. John had some dead relative he needed to see. Why else would we be driving through the grounds, past the rows of tombstones that seemed to go on forever? I was about to ask him, “Who died?” when he turned off the main road and pulled to a stop under the shade of a giant willow tree.
“Why we here?” I asked.
He turned to me and smiled. “We gonna play a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“A singing game,” he said. “Rabbit, turn your head and look out the window. You gon’ sing until I tell you to stop. You do a good job and I’ll give you five dollars.”
“What I’m supposed to sing?”
“It don’t matter.”
“I don’t know any songs.”
“You know that song that was just on the radio, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“So sing that.”
I didn’t understand this stupid-ass game. But I did understand “five dollars.” So I turned my head and stared out the window. Not far from where we were parked, somebody had left a bunch of flowers tied with a white ribbon on a grave marked by a stone that said in big block letters, mother.
“Sing, Rabbit,” said Mr. John.
“Get up get up get up let’s make love tonight,” I began. Behind me I heard the sound of the driver’s-side door opening, the rustle of leaves, and Mr. John whispering to Sweetie, “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
It was hot as hell in that car. I could feel beads of sweat dripping down my back. I didn’t know the lyrics. “Ooooooh baaaaby,” I sang, off key. “La la la motion, like the ocean, magic potion baaaaaby . . . get up get up get up.” I rested my head against the window and closed my eyes.
It felt like a long time had passed before Sweetie finally walked around the front of the car and pulled open the passenger-side door. I slid over to let her in. Her mouth was shut tight, her head down. She wouldn’t look at me. Instead, she stared at the floor, twisting her fingers into knots in her lap. Mr. John said, “Okay, Sweetie. You look out the window now.” Then he turned to me.
“Lay back,” he said.
“Why?”