Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“It was still wonderful,” my little friend said. “It touched a lot of people. You gave ’em a lot to think about.”

Lewis had gone out among the mourners and was lining them up along the left side of the pews.

“Are you ready?” Lana asked.

“Ready for what?”

“For the people to walk by and pay their final respects.”

“Oh.” For some reason this responsibility had escaped me. “Sure.”

Moana Bone was the first in line. Her once fine features were heavy, made more so by an overabundance of makeup. Her body had thickened to the point where she had no real figure anymore.

With surprising strength she gripped my hands and said, “I’m very sorry for you, my dear. What you said up there is in the hearts of all us whores. We do the heavy lifting and they flush us down anyway.”

“Do you know my name?” I asked, feeling numb and reckless.

“They call you Debbie Dare in the cast list, but your real name is Sandra Peel. I always loved Theon but you were better for him than I could have ever been.”

Her eyes were on mine like some kind of emotional predator tracking down a simple nod.

“Hey, Deb,” Myron Palmer said after Moana wandered off. Standing next to him was a mousy woman wearing a loose, dark green shift. Her face was once pretty and her gestures recalled that younger beauty.

“I wanted to thank you for letting me be a pallbearer,” Myron said. “You know, I really liked Theon and, and, and I styled myself after him as much as I could.”

“Thank you, Myron.”

I shook his hand, which was both soft and strong, and then offered the same gesture to the woman he was with. She took the proffered hand and said, “You have my condolences, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“Have we met?”

“No. I’m Myron’s friend Nora.”

“Brathwait?”

“He told you about me?”

“You were the love of his life. I don’t think he’s had a single day where he hasn’t thought of you.”

“Your speech was beautiful,” she said. “Myron and I have just reconnected over Facebook recently. I’m trying to get him to leave this profession and do something else — maybe still in film.”

Our middle-aged Russian housekeeper, Julia Slatkin, came up after half an hour.

“I am so sorry for you, my child,” she said.

“You didn’t have to come to this zoo, Julia.”

“I love you and your people,” she said. “Theon was a good man. He was a man and so he was always a little lost. Men are like boys and sometimes the only thing we can do is put them to bed.”

I hadn’t even been worried about crying until she spoke those words.

“He did awful things,” I said.

“And he has paid for them,” she replied with Jude-like certainty. “There’s only so much revenge that God can ask on any man’s soul.”

“Those were really nice words you spoke up there,” hunched-over Kip Rhinehart said after what seemed like hours of pity and commiserations.

I was thinking of how lovely it would be to sit down in the polar bear room, bring my father’s pistol (the pistol that failed to save his life) to my temple, and pull the trigger...

“I heard,” Kip, the canyon cowboy, went on, “that you’re havin’ money troubles and might not be able to make that mortgage. If that’s so you’re welcome to come up and live in one’a my rooms. It gets a little lonely up there and... and I wouldn’t bother you or anything. I’m kinda old for that nonsense.”

I was imagining the red spray across the white fabric that I chose to accent my ebony skin.

“You think about what I said,” Kip muttered after I thanked him.

Linda Love came up with a small band of directors. They said the right words but didn’t really mean them. A has-been actor was just that in their business. Neelo Brown shook my hand and kissed my cheek. He’d been an awkward adolescent — a virgin at eighteen. It was decided among his aunties that I would be the one to initiate him into the sexual life. I took him down to Ensenada for his birthday and came into his room after a night of dinner and trying to teach him how to dance. I did it to build his confidence but after that he was always a little in love with me.

Anna Karin, Newly, Perry Mendelson, Chas and Darla the accountants, and my son’s guardian, Delilah, came up singularly and in pairs. All the while I was thinking about Suicide — that handsome man who joined me every once in a while, all silence and smiles.

Toward the end of the procession two men wearing identical suits and faces approached me. They were pale and thin, of equal and normal height, but still they seemed small. Their eyes were barely gray and their lips... nonexistent. The one on the left walked up to me and took my hand. “John,” he said, and then moved my hand to his brother, who said, “Ronald.”

“Threadley,” they both said together. It was like a routine from an old-time vaudeville act.

“We rarely involve ourselves with the day-to-day,” Ronald said.

“But we felt driven to come here and say our good-byes to your husband,” John added.

“It’s not the business he brought us,” Ronald said.

“... but his belief in our ability to provide the requisite care,” the brother added.

I wondered which one was born first and if they’d die on the same day.

I thanked them and smiled for them. I almost told them that we’d be seeing each other soon.

Before the coffin was sealed I tucked Myrtle May’s unopened diary next to Theon’s heart. The night-blue-and-chrome hearse was parked outside. People had been drifting away toward the burial site. It was up on a hill, I was told, a place where anyone visiting could look out on the faraway mountains or down on the valley where Theon grunted and strained and came on command.

Almost everyone had gone. I was standing in front of the chapel waiting for Lewis to come with a car for me. The Threadley brothers were there, and Lana too.

I felt the weight of the past week or so lift from me. The day was sunny and gorgeous. I said good-bye to the world then and there. It would be my last day and that was a deep relief.

I could finally let go.

“Bitch!” a woman yelled.

I turned to my right. A light-skinned black woman wearing jeans and a pink blouse was rushing at me. There was something in her hand. I knew immediately what was happening. The woman was certainly Annabella Atoll, Rash’s girlfriend. She had, I imagined, come from a background like mine and saw Rash as a good partner to move away from what she was. He saw in her a life that he had missed, but when she sloughed off the old skin he lost interest and then met me.

The knife arced down across the left side of my face, slicing through skin and eye with razor-sharp accuracy. Then almost immediately came the upthrust under my right breast. There was pain but not that much.

The twins were amazing. One of them tackled Annabella. Her strength was fueled by hate-driven adrenaline, though, and she almost threw him off. But Lana grabbed something and hit my would-be killer in the head — twice. While my friend and one twin subdued Annabella, the other twin lowered me to the ground and applied pressure to the wounds.

I could hear my rasping breath and see Suicide just behind John — or maybe it was Ronald. There was screaming and hollering and I was back in the living room where my father stumbled in and died. My good eye was open wide; I knew this but saw nothing. The world around me was moving but I was absolutely still. This contradiction seemed like a great revelation to me.

Waking up in Neelo’s clinic was not a big surprise, not really. There were oxygen tubes in my nostrils and other plastic hoses down my throat. My left eye was bandaged and a searing pain ran down that side of my face.