let em

“mmm”

“Im gone go bump th doe man and see if he got a piece.”

Letty smiled a ray of rancid rainbow.

5’1 or 5’3 he guessed.  Wadnt no 5’2.  Tatted up like her momma didn’t give a fuck.  A little bump in his chest somewhere reminded him of another girl, another stripper, another piece of meat in the wily trades of men.

She caught his eye and may have winked, which sent Letty whom everyone called Lessy to the potty to laugh in the stall. 

Men with huge dicks walk a bit different she whispered to a man sticking a 10 in her g.  Lets the whole world who cares to know.  The roxi’s in  her were turning everything a little less than, like life was amped up but she was at regular speed.   She kept seeing > signs.  In the glass of the bowl, in her reflective panties, in her eyes in the cracke john mirra.   Pulling his head she thought momentarily of licking his ear but these was Halliburton boys, fresh oft the rig and in Hub City to be jackass’s but not to take a good shower.

When she threw up the front row moved toward anywhere that wasn’t there.  Same time a rukus in the commode and a gunshot out the back. 

A week later a tall boy walks in and politely asks after Robert-Earl.  No one really wanted to tell him.

Everything I did the hardest I ever done.  I worked all my life with Daddy at whatever we was doing then so I always knowed I could throw a bale a bit harder than most.  I was always taught to be polite even if they weren’t, so I thought Id just ask after Katys old boss.  Figured with his lip Id go on ahead.  His eye popped out with that first one, his ocular cavity crushed, and I walked toward the back looking at the mirrors for boys coming up on me.  I know I punched some girls and I hope to high hell they aint no videotape a me but when it started in earnest it couldn’t be helped.  I know one of em kissed me on the back of my neck while I was stomping on this colored boys.  Heard later he got paralyzed some.  Gottim a check anyway. 

I learned that night why mama said them Carthage boys is hard. Robert-Earl. I had a drown his brother in front a him and it wernt no easy thing.

Amocitea

Your Daddy aint gonna recognize you.

Still that little girl.  When under all of it, peach flame tripped along at the word.  She wanted so much for him to swoop, it was pure.  A clean thing, her vision of Daddy just doing what all real animals did.  Maybe he was too human.

That golden blanket that she just expected to keep on being, didn’t; and she stepped out really believing that they was gentlemen in this South, in this here state.  One night looking deep in her own eyes while everyone elses in the room were on her crotch she realized that this southern thang was  a crock.  She spected Margaret Mitchell probably just cold wishin like every other Dixie brat split-tail.  It was a precious pity that she thought in that manner, she thought…probably affecting her self-image or the like.

She’s hurt I felt.  Hurt people, hurt people but with such a swirlin tide, a man just got to decide when to jump in, not if.

Once I heard that Grady involved everybody in his business, I knew I hadda get us outta town.  I didn’t really think Momm’d come wit her doctors here and whatever else she was into.  Since Id come back from the Wilderness I had taken to wearing full length skirts and not shaving.  I know my flesh well and I knew that just like this skirt, I could put it back on rrrrrreeeeeaaaalllllly quick.  And that’s the plan, back to the hotel to make us some money.

Half-way from the bus-stop to the club I thought just maybe I was being a bit drastic, but I cant remember what my next thought was after that.

Bo adjusted the mirror on the 91 Olds to see if he’d indeed gotten dip on his collar.  A birth canal in the back seat caused him to blink for a second longer than average.  The strip-club owners Daddy used to be a Marine and it showed.  Punching and biting his way out of the trunk into the car was a feat, Bo’d be the first to tell ya.  He’d blindfolded, zip tied and hit the man with 75000 Watts but this Minotaur was now in the backseat.  Fucking Carthaginians. 

They realized quick they’d done fucked up with this one.  She prayed aloud all day long, was unfailingly polite and every chance she got she tried to kill em.  Lessy had knocked her tooth out purely on accident but after he reckoned the diamond to be fake, he sent it on to the boss.   Almost all his spare time went to kittens. More had received some care from a witch the Dixie Mafia used for dogs.  Little bitch had fought harder than any man ever would.  In the end she’d ripped off a testicle and with that they put her in box.   She calmly told em she couldn’t breath.

I hada shoot him through the seat and we wrecked.  He was hurt even worse, so I lit a floor mat afire and ran off in the other directin than Angola, Fuck that, Daddy’d worked there as a guard for 3 days till they done found out he’d been in Parchman for vehicular homicide.  Mamma said that great clouds a nephalim hung over those places.  I couldn’t see them but I smelled em.  Mamma and Katy-Rob always had eyes for that type of thing.  Maybe they both lyin though. 

I figured theyd run they dogs from around the car so I needed to get gone.

Did not like taken anything from white folks, I did not know how I was gonna pay for that ladies car I done wrecked but it’d get done.  The little Kawasaki three wheeler cranked up nice and I left them my hunting license to show good faith.

You aint gonna believe this shit.

Francis-Jean Prichideaux III really could have done without hearing another person say that.  It seemed to preface every comment.  As a boy he’d felt something akin to the feeling he had now when other nut-brown Acadian boy’s ud say, “Wanna see something…hold my beer.”

Nothing good eva come outta dem type a commentary’s.

What?

Claudius came over with a note.  Says here that Similies had another big da-doo.

Whan?

Last night.

Itd been 2 weeks since they colored boys come up in that terrible place and Blanc Bebbette got taken, now what dis shit?

Dixie Mafia used for dogs.  Little bitch had fought harder than any man ever would.  In the end she’d ripped off a testicle and with that they put her in box.   She calmly told em she couldn’t breath.  More heard, “I feel free.” thought long and hard about that medicine Melodina  gave him,  the plan was he was, of a time, to go back.  ER out the wustion.  She told him he could still sire a brood, if he chose.

Right now the chose was in nose.  That moment, eternal, universal, when you know for certain that thing are bout to get lit.

I hada shoot him through the seat and we wrecked.  He was hurt even worse, so I lit a floor mat afire and ran off in the other directin than Angola, Fuck that, Daddy’d worked there as a guard for 3 days till they done found out he’d been in Parchman for vehicular homicide.  Mamma said that great clouds a nephalim hung over those places.  I couldn’t see them but I smelled em.  Mamma and Katy-Rob always had eyes for that type of thing.  Maybe they both lyin though. 

I figured theyd run they dogs from around the car so I needed to get gone.

Did not like taken anything from white folks  I did not know how I was gonna pay for that ladies car I done wrecked but it’d get done.  The little Kawasaki three wheeler cranked up nice and I left them my hunting license to show good faith.

You aint gonna believe this shit.

Francis-Jean Prichideaux III really could have done without hearing another person say that.  It seemed to preface every comment.  As a boy he’d felt something akin to the feeling he had now when other nut-brown Acadian boy’s ud say, “Wanna see something…hold my beer.”

Nothing good eva come outta dem type a commentary’s.

What?

Claudius came over with a note.  Says here that Similies had another big da-doo.

Whan?

Last night.

Itd been 2 weeks since them colored boys come up in that terrible place and Blanc Bebbette got taken, now what dis shit? Least he didn’t have any crackers around to be yapping about…”oh what now you gonna do colored ssherrff”

         The problem we have with God honey is related to expectations and not based in the hard VERITAS of life.  See here, what happens when youo to church?

I listen to the preacher

Right, sure but when you’re singing a good Hallelujah song. Or something real once make you cry every time.  That jut Him leeting us know that we are cared for.s like that one goes, “Lord You are more precious than silver…

Lord You are more costly than gold.

Together, “Lord You are more beautiful than diamonds.

And nothing I desire compares to You.”

Lord, honey you have a voice like angel blast-furnace.  When you get that deep purple swell….

Purple and Gold.

Yesssa, and that is the real thing and it is a thing that belongs in this world yet has a hand fully in the next.  But what you looking for there is that feeling to keep on keepin on.

Yessir.

But it don’t.

No.

Is that Gods problem or yours?

I feel like sometimes it is Him.

Cause you just go home and go straight to sinning.

And I wonder why in all His Greatness, I just can’t get a little help in that department.

But you care don’t ya?

I care a great deal.   I expect it’s my conscience.

Yes.  But a conscience ain’t a stopper, it’s just a fuse light indicator.

So then where’s the stopper?

That’s the catch.

Meaning its all up to me.

Honey, you ever look at a real life hero?

Maybe Rooster Carley?

Hmm.  Ain’t none. He died 2000 years ago, therebouts. Now we just hunker down.  Oh you gone sin.   I’m gone sin.  Yo Mamma, Lawd have a way.  Its not about ‘not doin’ its about accepting your place in grace.

My place in grace.

From behind him mamma stepped, lightly, elegant specter.  White on white on white, yet the air hovered lightly around it as if mistrusting.  Mama’s essence was rebellion.  Born with a dead twin boy, she lay never crying once in granny’s arms.  Said she wouldn’t look nobody in the eye.  They was alarmed from the get go.  Mamma was said to have spent some of her teen years in Walnut Gove.  She supposed to have found God in there, in the gladiator school.  Once when she came home to the Shady Acres #3 after being out for a minute, she took me and we sat behind the dumpster; she told me about the first love of her life while she smoked up a cool bill a rock.  Some people get all crazy scared of people on hard drugs, like they got special powers or summin.  I ain’t but but a buck and change and I’m telling you I have cold knocked fuckers out who go too close.  It’s best just to warn white folks up front, but when mamma slumming or Im at school and we dealing wit regular street niggas, I just stay loose, if mamma grab and go…then well, Im just down wit mine.

Oh Daddy.

I love my Daddy…

What are ya’ll ssscheming on.  Lemme see your billfold.

Daddy’s trying to tell me all the war we got with sin is just an illusion.

Woman, that’s not what I said.

That we have to learn to accept our weakness as part of life.  And personally for me, cause I listen to all them preachers and I read all them books and I pray on the Bible…I do it all with a knife in my belt and Im down for the clan but I do not wanna keep on living this way.

Ooh its one of them talks, you…what your daddy is remise in sharing is that there are other forces at work in this world.

NO.

Well talk later honey.

We never did. 

I believe Mamma occupies some special place in this world, like a gold key that is made for just one lock, the most magnificent things await behind it; but you put that fucker in your back pocket with a handkerchief and they key is lost in the Misty Mountains.    Myrrh and aloe and decay and female sex and the heat after summer rain and moss and Cyprus and dawn and linen white.  Mamma mind was fine.  Mammas body was the problem.  She worshipped it to hurt her. 

She saw a movie once at the Motel 6 in Latham Springs Texas called Jennifer’s Body, she said that though the metaphor was sloppy and the genre “totally let LA” a poor excuse, yet she understood that somehow this connected us, because I was watching her becoming self aware. 

Of an aspect only I believe, but a crack in the wall blinked a purple light in my eye and I realized that indeed “the affections of the heart are Divine”.  If God dropped the veil once in a while, it somehow ran through my mother.

But even though I am slower than other folks, I can tell you that if Daddy believes that things are moving behind the scenes and mamma sees em too.  Man, these things are making them worse…not better.