Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

“I am.”

“Aw, fuck.”

On the drive home, I figured I should tell Joseph to put a few bucks on Jefferson. Then I remembered that he didn’t have any money.

It wasn’t quite nine P.M. when I parked Secretariat on Washington Street outside Hopes, shoved through the door, and found Yolanda perched on that same bar stool.

She was dressed in a mint-green business suit with no blouse visible beneath the jacket, and black high heels she didn’t need to make those legs look great. She wasn’t wearing any gold tonight. Instead, a sterling pendant dangled from a silver chain and fell between the swell of her breasts. Two empty stemmed glasses rested on the bar in front of her. Yolanda was a sipper. She must have been waiting for a long time.

As I took the stool next to her, she caressed the pendant with the fingers of her left hand and fixed her eyes on me.

“This was sweet,” she said.

“But did it work?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“It was Rosie’s idea,” I said.

“You still talk to her?”

“All the time.”

“Does it ever worry you that she talks back?”

Oh-oh. How could I make the woman I wanted a relationship with understand my relationship with a dead woman? Buying time to find the words, I waved the bartender over and ordered another martini for Yolanda and a Killian’s for me.

“Better make mine a club soda,” Yolanda said. “Martinis are like breasts. One is too few, but three is too many.”

“I disagree.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“There can never be too many breasts-as long as they come in even numbers.”

“Mulligan, you’re such a boy.”

“Um.”

“So can we get back to Rosie?”

“Sure. The way it works is, I talk and Rosie listens.”

“What do you talk about?”

“I tell her what’s going on in my life. I ask for her advice.”

“And she gives it?”

“We knew each other so well, Yolanda. I can always sense her answer.”

“But do you actually hear her voice?”

“Not the way the Son of Sam killer heard a demon whisper orders in his ear. I mean, it’s not like I’m psychotic. But whenever I need her, she’s there. In fact, she’s with me now.”

Yolanda leaned back to look at the empty stool on the other side of me. “She’s keeping a pretty low profile. What’s she saying?”

“She’s warning me not to say anything stupid.”

“Too bad she didn’t tell you that the last time.”

“Maybe she did. Koko Taylor’s wailing from the jukebox probably drowned her out. That’s another woman who speaks to me from the grave.”

“You really remember what was playing on the jukebox? Or did you just make that up?”

“Yolanda, I remember everything that happens when we’re together.”

“Smooth line, white boy. Ever use that one before?”

“Never. I swear. You’re the only Yolanda I know.” My nerves were bringing Mulligan the smartass to the surface again.

She sipped, smiled slightly, and stared at me over the rim of her glass.

“You look hungry,” she said.

I was sure I did.

She laughed then. “For food, I mean. Eat yet?”

“Not since breakfast.”

“Me either. I’m famished.”

I tossed some bills on the bar, and we strolled to the Trinity Brewhouse, our hands tangling. We took a table by the mullioned windows that look out on the Providence Public Library.

Over drinks, hers another club soda and mine a Pickman’s Pale Ale, we talked about work until the food arrived. The calamari appetizer and a Cobb salad wrapped in a tortilla for her. The nachos appetizer and cowboy burger for me. Yolanda reached across the table, plucked a gooey nacho with her fingers, and popped it between those lips I longed to kiss. She’d always helped herself to my plate whenever we dined together.

“Mulligan?”

“Um?”

“Did I ever tell you about my parents?”

“No, you never did.”

“They met in a Chicago candy factory where they both worked the line. Mama always smelled like sugar. Daddy smelled like sugar and cigarettes.”

“How sweet,” I said.

“Please. No more jokes tonight.”

“I’ll try.”

“They’d moved up north in the early sixties, Mama from Mississippi and Daddy from East Texas. They must have had it rough down there because I could never get them to talk about it. Daddy’s gone now, and my mama still won’t talk.”

“Probably didn’t have it all that easy up north either,” I said.

“They found steady work, but we never did have much. Clothes somebody else wore first, furniture handed down by church folk, and an apartment on the second floor of a walk-up on the West Side. Every damned day, we had to fight the roaches for it.”

That sounded like the way I was living now, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.

“The city was split into black and white back then. Still pretty much is, I guess. The only white folks I knew growing up were the teachers at the for-shit public schools I attended. White cops were on patrol, but they never got out of their cars unless they were looking to shoot somebody. To get to my elementary school, I had to cross West Madison, which hadn’t been rebuilt since a twenty-eight-block stretch was looted and burned ten years before I was born.”

“On the night of the King assassination,” I said.

“That’s right. My folks never talked much about that either.”

She paused to nibble at her Cobb salad and perhaps to consider how much more of her past to share with me.

“For my first eighteen years, white folks were a mystery to me,” she said. “I’d decided not to trust them. I didn’t have any white friends at all till I got to Illinois State.”

“Your parents must have given up a lot to pay for that.”

“They did what they could, but I still had to take out twenty-five grand in college loans.”

She stopped talking again and toyed with her food.

“I’d like to hear more,” I said. “I want to know it all. But I can’t help wondering why you’re telling me this now.”

“I’m getting to that,” she said. “At college, the black kids mostly kept to themselves. Hardly anyone dated outside of that circle. The few white boys who did ask black girls out mostly treated them like whores.”

“Did that happen to you?”

“No. But to a couple of my friends.”

“That’s why you vowed not to date white guys?”

“It was more than that. Interracial dating wasn’t just rare back then. A black guy risked his life just being seen with a white girl. In some places that’s still a sin. But black girls were expected to stick to their own kind, too. Sisters who dared to date white boys were either pitied or scorned. Older black folks, especially, thought they were letting themselves be used and saw them as traitors to their race.”

“Times have changed, Yolanda.”

“Maybe that’s true,” she said. “But time changes slower for some folks. A lot of older black people, like my mama, still think stirring the pot is a mistake.”

She paused for a moment to sip from her drink.

“These days, some black women seek out white men out of desperation,” she said. “With so many brothers behind bars, it’s a numbers game. But mostly, most young people don’t think about race as a barrier anymore. Somebody looks good, they go for it.”

“But not you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I’m not that young. It’s taken me a long time to even think about letting my guard down.”

“And now?”

“Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately.”

“Why me? You’re a goddess, Yolanda. You can have anybody you want.”