Chapter 20

WHEN Lappy was picked up in Little Rock for harassing a white woman, he didn’t realize that they would arrest him and beat him to within an inch of his life. He was drunk and high and in that state of mind, had tried to plead his case.

“My mama is white and my daddy’s mama was white so that make me three-quarters white. I got more cracker in me than nigger,” he told the four white cops that were taking turns kicking him.

They didn’t understand a word Lappy Clayton was saying. His lips were swollen at that point, both of his front teeth were gone and his tongue was split at the tip.

His court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty to the charges of attempted rape, even though the only thing he’d done was slide his hand down the woman’s thigh. And she’d actually grinned at him when he did it.

She had had quite a bit to drink and didn’t seem to notice the kink in Lappy’s hair.

The place was smoky and no one could hear over the jukebox, but people kept talking anyway. Lappy was half drunk too when he stumbled in from a card game.

The woman had looked dead at him when he walked through the door and Lappy knew that the new position she moved her legs into (crossed at the thigh instead of ankle) was for him.

All he could think of, from the moment he stepped across the threshold until the door banged shut behind him, was running his fingers across those thighs and getting a head start on how it would feel to lie between them.

Ten minutes later someone was pulling him up by his collar and asking her if she was a monkey lover.

She screamed back, “What?” and then, “I didn’t know!” Someone called Lappy a half-breed nigger coon and then threw him out of the bar and onto the wet ground outside.

A sharp pain cut through him as the heel of a boot met with his spleen.

Lappy puked and watched as the okra and grits he’d had earlier in the evening ebbed slowly down and over the sidewalk into the gutter.

By the time the pain faded into a dull thud, spiked black heels were at his nose and he could hear the woman from the bar saying, “That’s him. That’s the one that tried to rape me.”

Lappy looked up and saw that her legs were parted and he could see as clear as day the smiling lips of the woman’s vagina. He would never forget that.

Lappy laughed and pointed at it and that’s when the boot came down on the side of his face and sent his two front teeth scrambling behind the okra and grits.

That was in ‘58 and Lappy spent five years doing hard labor. He’d worked the chain gang for three of the five, and during that time the woman who had accused him of rape found God and felt that Lappy Clayton would be the first soul she’d try to save.

She would have thought twice about it had she known about his crimes, crimes that involved more than a misplaced hand or lascivious desire. She would have hollered attempted murder if she knew what Lappy Clayton had done in his lifetime. But she didn’t and went right down to the judge that had convicted him, a distant cousin on her mother’s side, and said that she had been coaxed into lying by Ned Jeffers, who had been dead two years by then.

“Never was an attempt. In fact the man just came in to ask for directions. I heard him ask for it. He didn’t even look at me. Not once.”

“That boy threaten you, Janey?”

“Nossir.”

“Some other niggers threaten you?”

“Nossir.”

“Why you all of a sudden changing your story?”

“I’m telling you it was never mine to begin with. Ned made me tell it.”

“Ned ain’t had no reason to do it.”

“Ned hated the coloreds.”

“True. Nigger’s what killed his brother in Alabama.”

“So you know for yourself he ain’t look kindly on them.”

“You saying you like them?”

“Nossir, but I believe in God and I don’t hate nobody.”

“They animals, they ain’t people.”

“They a living creature.”

“Yeah. So you saying Ned had you lie to revenge his brother?”

“Yessir.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want this on my conscience no more.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lappy walked after five years and three days. Forty of the eighty dollars he’d had in his pocket that night was returned to him.

He dressed himself in the clothes he had been wearing when he was convicted and asked the men he’d spent every waking moment with during those five years if he still looked good in his clothes.

They’d laughed at him and shook their heads, amused that Lappy seemed oblivious to the fact that his clothes were board-stiff and stinking with five-year-old dried blood and vomit.

Janey, Jane Ann Clementine, sent her maid’s young son to meet Lappy when he stepped from behind the large iron gate of the prison.

“Ms. Janey said to give you this,” the boy, who was no more than twelve years old said, handing him an envelope. “She said I’m to take you to Elijah’s place.”

Lappy opened the envelope and found six crisp ten-dollar bills staring back at him. He stuffed the money into his breast pocket and followed the boy the ten miles into Carnery.

They arrived at a small green-and-white house just before nightfall. The boy knocked on the front door and then hurried away.

When the door opened Lappy came face-to-face with what he thought was a woman. She was wrapped in a blanket that covered her from the neck down. She had amber skin, high cheekbones and wore makeup that seemed a bit too heavy for the hour.

“You Lappy Clayton?”

“Yeah.”

The woman stepped back and swung the door open. Lappy stepped into a large room that was broken into three smaller rooms by three walls. Each wall had a cross painted or hung on it. There were candles burning in every corner and a single bed sat in the center of each room.

“Toilet out back. Water pump there too,” she said as she eyed Lappy. “You got some good hair,” she added.

Lappy looked down into the small face and thought about how it would feel to have those tiny pink lips kiss his neck. He hadn’t had a woman in five years.

“Where’s Elijah?” Lappy asked, giving the house a once-over before taking a step toward the room to the far right.

“Where’s your teeth?” the tiny pink lips asked.

“Got knocked out.”

“I know a man that could fix that for you.” There was a pause and Lappy saw the tiny pink lips stretch into a devious smile. “Did it happen in jail?”

“Nah, before that.”

“But you were in jail, right?” The voice became excited.

“Yeah,” Lappy responded, thinking that he would have those lips on his neck, and elsewhere, quite soon.

“Me too.”

Lappy cocked his head. “Yeah, where?” Lappy knew some women that had been in jail. This one didn’t look like any of them. If they went in soft, they definitely came out hard. This woman standing before him didn’t even look rough around the edges.

“Evensberg.”

Lappy laughed. “Nah, baby, you must be confused. Evensberg is a male prison.”

“Uh-huh, I know.”

Laughter.

“I’m Elijah, pleased to meet you.” Elijah smiled deviously, snatched a glance at Lappy’s crotch and then extended one delicate hand toward him in greeting.

It was a halfway house that had been set up by the good Christian white women of the Salvation Methodist Church. Lappy figured that all or at least most of them had had a piece of some black dick at one point or another in their lives.

The old ones that came to pray over them hardly ever looked at the men. The young ones, well, it was all they could do to keep their eyes fixed on anything else but the men.

Lappy knew that look: curiosity straining behind their good Christian values and the prejudices that had been instilled in them at home. He saw the moisture that formed beneath their noses, the way they licked their lips after each sentence and how they giggled their way through the Scriptures.

He wanted to fuck them all, but most of all he wanted to kill them, because in them he saw Janey, Jane Ann Clementine, and he blamed them all for what she’d done to him.

He ran his tongue along the empty space in his gums and thought about the whips the guards had used to open up the skin on his back just before sending him out to work, bareback and beneath the scorching sun, and how bad it hurt when the bleeding wounds began to fester in the heat.

Lappy Clayton looked at those women and thought about all of those things and clasped his hands tightly behind his neck and grinned.

He crossed his legs and smiled as he recalled the child in the field of wildflowers: her yellow ribbons, the scent of the earth as he drove her body into it. He could still feel her fists pounding against his neck and face and the sputter of her final breath as it wafted across his cheek.

But best of all, whenever he wanted to, he could go to that place in his mind and see how easily her womanhood gave way to the sharp edge of his blade. Just thinking about it filled him with joy and his chest swelled with laughter.

The second one came years later when he’d almost forgotten about the girl in the field. She was a beauty, that one was. Feisty and forbidden is how the men of Rose described her. She was easy for Lappy to get: She liked money, and the color of his skin intrigued her. Her breasts were still heavy with milk when they met and would leak whenever they made love.

They’d argued about a woman she’d suspected Lappy was seeing, and he was and had admitted it before shoving her aside and walking out. The scene that followed was horrible. She ran up to him in the street, jumped on his back and began clawing at his face. Lappy threw her off, slapped her twice and started off again. “I’ll kill myself!” she screamed. “I will!” she cried before turning and running off.

Lappy had just laughed at her.

“What the hell are all of y‘all looking at?” he’d asked the people that had hurried out and onto their porches to see what the commotion was about.

No one replied, but one man met Lappy’s gaze and their eyes held steady before Lappy blinked and the man turned and started after her.

“Grace Ann.” Lappy sighed.

Taking her life had been sweet. He’d loved her hard, biting at her breast, taking in the milk and then spitting it back into her face. She never let go of him, even though her face was twisted in pain and his hands were wrapped around her neck locking her screams away in her throat.

She melted beneath him and he dragged her naked body across the gray sandy shore and into the waters of Miracle.

The current craved her and tugged relentlessly at her until Lappy knew he would not be able to hold on to her body much longer.

He pulled the knife from his pocket and sliced at the taut skin around her neck, the soft skin of her belly. He took his time, carving long deep fissures into her flesh while the waters yanked and snatched at her.

Finally, he let go and allowed Miracle to have her, and placed that bloody memory neatly beside the first.