Roy
Good-bye” isn’t my strong suit; I’m more of a “see you later” kind of person. When I left prison, I didn’t even say good-bye to Walter. He picked a fight on the yard and got himself put into the SHU the day before my release. As I gathered all my belongings and stacked it all on Walter’s side of the cell, I wondered if maybe good-bye wasn’t his forte either. Missing him in advance, I wrote a note on the first page of the notebook I was leaving behind.
Dear Walter,
When the door is open, you have to run through it. I will stay in touch. You have been a good father to me these years.
Your son,
Roy
Before this, I had never called myself his son. I meant it, but I was struck by a silly fear that Big Roy would find out or even that Olive would know from the grave. But I let the note stay put. On his pillow, I left a picture that Celestial sent of me and her on the beach in Hilton Head. Other men had pictures of their kids, why shouldn’t Walter? Your son, Roy, that’s who I was.
Now it was time to pay my respects to Olive, down at what used to be called the “colored cemetery.” This graveyard dated back to the 1800s, to right after slavery ended. Mr. Fontenot took me here once to rub etchings off the crumbling tombstones; now he was under this ground himself. There were other places to be buried; these days cemeteries are integrated along with everything else, but I never knew of anyone who didn’t choose to lay their family down at Greater Rest Memorial.
Big Roy sent me on my way with a big bouquet of yellow flowers wrapped with green holiday ribbon. I drove the Chrysler along the potholed road in the middle of the cemetery and stopped when the pavement ended. Exiting the car, I walked ten paces to the east and then six to the south, with my flowers behind my back like it was Valentine’s Day.
I passed trendy grave markers engraved with the likeness of the person buried below. These stones were shiny like Cadillacs, and the faces transferred onto rock were almost all young guys. I paused at one, covered with pink lipstick kisses, and did the math in my head: fifteen years old. I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”
Using Big Roy’s directions like they were a pirate’s map, I turned right at the pecan tree and I found Olive’s resting place, exactly where he promised it would be.
The dusky gray of her tombstone dropped me to my knees. I landed hard on the packed dark earth where grass grew only in determined little patches. Across the top of the stone was etched our family name. Underneath was olive ann and to the right of that roy. I lost my breath, thinking a grave had already been laid for me, but then I realized that this resting place beside my mother was my father’s. I know Big Roy and I imagine he figured that he may as well get his name on there since he already hired the stonecutter. When it came time to bury him, I wouldn’t be charged for anything but the date. I ran my hands over both their names and I wondered where I would be planted when the time came. It was crowded in the cemetery. Olive had neighbors on all sides.
On my knees, I stuffed the flowers into the tarnished metal vase affixed to the stone, but I didn’t stand. “Pray,” Big Roy had said. “Tell her what you need her to hear.” I didn’t even know where to start.
“Mama,” I said, and then the crying came. I had not cried since I was sentenced and I had humiliated myself before a judge who didn’t care. On that horrible day, my snotty sobbing had merged with Celestial and Olive’s mournful accompaniment. Now I suffered a cappella; the weeping burned my throat like when you vomit up strong liquor. That one word, Mama, was my only prayer as I thrashed on the ground like I was feeling the Holy Ghost, only what I was going through wasn’t rapture. I spasmed on that cold black earth in pain, physical pain. My joints hurt; I experienced what felt like a baton against the back of my head. It was like I relived every injury of my entire life. The pain went on until it didn’t, and I sat up, dirty and spent.
“Thank you,” I whispered to the air and to Olive. “Thank you for making it stop. And for being my mother. And for taking such loving care of me.” And then I was still, hoping to maybe hear something in return, a message in a birdsong. Anything. But it was quiet. I gathered myself and stood up, dusting the dirt off my khakis the best I could. I laid my hand on the tombstone. “Bye,” I mumbled, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
I was at the BP station, filling up my daddy’s Chrysler with gas, when I finally heard what I think was my mama’s voice in my ear. Any fool can up and go. Whenever she started saying what “any fool” could do, she followed up with how a “real man” would handle the problem. Another favorite of hers was talking about what dogs were capable of. As in, “Even a dog can make a bunch of puppies, but a real man raises his kids.” She made dozens of those observations. She aimed them at me constantly and I did my best to be the real man she had in mind. But she never told me anything about saying good-bye, because as far as she was concerned, real men didn’t have any need for farewells because real men stay.
With the gas nozzle in my hand, I paused to hear if she had any more wisdom to share, but apparently that was all I was going to get.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said aloud, and turned the Chrysler in the direction of the Hardwood.
I owed Davina Hardrick a real good-bye and some kind of thanks, too. Maybe I should give it to her straight and point out that she would be smart to rid herself of me, damaged goods that I was. I wasn’t what they call “relationship material.” All that was the truth, and I wouldn’t even have to mention Celestial. But even as I was going over this in my head, I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. What transpired between Davina and me was sexual, but it was more than that. It wasn’t on the level of me and Celestial when we were trying to have a baby. It was kind of like dancing late at night when you’re so drunk that the beat is in charge, so you look the woman in the eyes and you both move to the music the same way. That was part of how it was, and the other part was that she fucked me back to health. I would never actually say that—some words women don’t care to hear—but that’s what happened. Sometimes the only thing that can cure a man is the inside of a woman, the right woman who does things the right way. This is what I should thank her for.
When I arrived at her place, I rang the doorbell and waited, but I knew she wasn’t there. I contemplated dropping a note, kind of like the one I left for Walter, but that didn’t feel right. A Dear John was bad, and a Dear Jane was worse. This wasn’t about me trying not to be cliché. It was about me trying to remember how to be a human being. How you would go about paying somebody back for reminding me what it felt like to be a man and not a nigger just out of the joint? What kind of currency would make us even? I didn’t have anything to give but my sorry self. My sorry married self, to be a little more exact.
I went back to the car, turned over the ignition, and flipped on the heat. I couldn’t sit there until she got back, wasting time I couldn’t afford to lose and burning gas I couldn’t afford to waste. I rummaged through the glove compartment and found a golf pencil and small pad. I should at least use a full-size sheet of paper if I was going to leave a note. I got out of the car and searched the trunk, but there was nothing in it but my duffel bag and an atlas. I sat on the fender, using the palm of my hand as a desk as I tried to think about what to write. Dear Davina, Thank you very much for two days of restorative sex. I feel much better now. I knew better than to even press pencil to paper with that idea.
“She at work,” said a voice behind me.
There stood a little knucklehead about five or six years old, a felt Santa hat crooked on his peanut head.
“You talking about Davina?”
He nodded and forced a candy cane into a sour pickle wrapped in cellophane.
“You know what time she’s coming back?”
He nodded and sucked on the pickle and peppermint.
“Can you tell me what time that is?”
He shook his head no.
“Why?”
“Because it might not be your business.”
“Justin!” said a woman from the porch next door, where the French teacher once lived.
“I wasn’t talking to him,” Justin said. “He was the one talking to me.”
To the woman on Mr. Fontenot’s porch, I explained, “I’m trying to find Davina. Justin said she’s at work and I was wondering what time she would be home.”
The woman, whom I took to be Justin’s grandmother, was tall and dark-skinned. Her hair, white at the temples, was braided across the top of her head, like a basket. “How do I know it’s your business?”
Justin smirked at me.
“She’s my friend,” I said. “I’m leaving town and I wanted to say good-bye.”
“You could leave her a note,” she said. “I’ll give it to her.”
“She deserves more than a note,” I said.
The grandmother raised her eyebrows like she figured out what I was talking about. Not a see you later but a true farewell. “It’s Christmastime. She won’t get off until midnight.”
I couldn’t spend the whole day waiting for the opportunity to disappoint Davina in person; it was 4:25 p.m., and I needed to get on the road. I thanked the grandmother and Justin before getting back in the car and headed toward Walmart.
I walked through the store, scanning all the aisles until I found Davina in the back, near the craft supplies, cutting off a length of something blue and fuzzy for a thin man wearing glasses. “Give me another yard,” he said, and she flipped the bolt a couple of times and whacked at it with a pair of large scissors. She noticed me as she was folding the fabric and attaching the price tag. Handing it to the man, she smiled at me, and I felt like the worst person in the world.
When the man walked away, I advanced to the table like I, too, needed something measured and cut.
“Can I help you, sir,” she said, smiling like this was some kind of holiday game.
“Hey, Davina,” I said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“You okay?” she asked, eyeing my dirty clothes. “Did something happen?”
“Naw,” I said. “I just didn’t get a chance to change. But I need to talk to you right quick.”
“I don’t have a break coming up, but grab some fabric and come back. I can talk to you here.”
The fabrics, arranged by color, reminded me of Saturdays with my mother, the way she would drag me to Cloth World in Alexandria. Grabbing a bolt of red fabric flecked with gold, I returned to the cutting table and handed it to Davina, who immediately started pulling the cloth free.
“Sometimes people ask how much we have so we have to measure it all. So I’ll do that while you talk. What’s up? You here to say you miss me?” She smiled again.
“I’m here to say that I’m going to miss you,” I said.
“Where you going?”
“Back to Atlanta.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You going back to her?”
I nodded.
“That was your plan the whole time, wasn’t it?”
She snatched hard at the cloth until the spool was bare and the fabric was stretched out on the table, looking like a movie-star red carpet. She measured it against the yardstick at the edge of the table, counting under her breath.
“I don’t mean it like that,” I said.
“I distinctly asked you if you were married.”
“And I told you I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t act like you didn’t know.”
“I want to say thank you. That’s why I’m here, to say thank you and good-bye.”
Davina said, “I want to say fuck you. How about that?”
“What we did was special,” I said, feeling like a jackass, although I had not uttered a single lie. “I care about you. Don’t be like this.”
“I can be however I want.” She was mad, but I could see that she was trying not to cry. “Go on then, Roy. Go on back to Miss Atlanta. But I want two things from you.”
“Okay,” I said, eager to do something and show her that I was cooperating, that I didn’t want to hurt her.
“Don’t scandalize my name by talking about how when you got out of jail you were so desperate that you knocked off some girl from Walmart. Don’t say that to your friends.”
“I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t like that.”
She held up her hand. “I mean it. Don’t taste my name in your mouth. And Roy Hamilton, promise me you will not ever come banging on my door.”