FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  RooAmber Childress had made her way to the tray line, her heart beating so wildly that she felt feverish and worried that she might need to take the rest of the day off, when all of a sudden his voice called out, “Excuse me?”

  She knew it was him, but she didn’t want to turn around and be right about that. The whole vibe, all in the cafeteria and all over her body and all between her legs--was a sinful, repulsive one.

  “Excuse me”, came the ruggedly masculine voice again, but this time more forcefully.

  RooAmber turned to look at him--and in doing so, lost it. A hot trickle of urine escaped her bladder and coursed down her leg, dragging like a quiet syrup down her pantyhose. The sea and turtle’s blood swept over her in hives.

  His eyes nearly knocked her down, the intensity of his gaze seizing her as though she were under arrest, the Stevie Wonder song, “Golden Lady...I’d Like to Go There” gently caressing his imagination.

  He asked her, anxious and passionate, “Don’t I know you?”

  And that’s when RooAmber’s mouth fell open, because it all came back to her like a shot...he was the smart, handsome rich boy who always sat in the middle of Ms. Swann’s class at Wilson High whenever RooAmber went down the hall to run an errand for Ms. Petree. The door would be open as RooAmber passed, and for some reason, her fleeting eyes would always catch him--just for a split second.

  “You’re the quarterback”, RooAmber said now with astonishment. “Shane Roberts! Number 32. Tiger Time. Ohmygod! Dunbar, Cardozo and Roosevelt--they all stomped you in the field.”

  Shane burst out laughing and said, “Hey--our offensive line at Wilson was kinda weak, what can I say?” Yes, that was it, they knew each other!

  RooAmber smiled her prettiest smile, not on purpose, but because of the childish joy that comes with a good memory. Shane had graduated and gone off to Howard University after RooAmber’s freshman year at Wilson, but obviously, he remembered her, too. He said, “You sure have filled out since high school. I remember you being this stuck up skin and bones cheerleader with a short Toni Braxton hair cut. Now you’ve got curves and flowing hair.”

  “It’s a hair weave”, RooAmber said coyly. “But the curves...POW...that’s all mama’s.”

  As his eyes traveled her body, he noticed the sparkling diamond wedding ring on her marriage hand, and in that moment, something stopped between them. RooAmber stood up straight, slightly ashamed.

  “How long?” he asked regarding the ring.

  “Seven years.”

  “Almost ten years for me”, said Shane, raising his hand so that she could see he had one, too.

  “Wow. Ten years. That’s impressive these days.”

  “So you work for the Post.”

  “Brynn Duke’s office. He’s a pretty cool guy to work for. Constantly bores me with his stories about once being a young, courageous white reporter in Africa, as if I know a damned thing about Africa, but other than that, I’m enjoying the experience.”

  “Africa.” Shane said the word and it hung there between them like a foul odor.

  “You’ve been to Africa, too?”, she asked, as though she didn’t care to hear about it.

  “No. I’ve never been.”

  “Neither have I.”

  And, of course, when they said these words--these two honey-pineapple skinned American blacks, the one with the pod shaped nearly Ashanti-like forehead and the Ajowan nose, and the other built as though he were a Zulu marksman, they didn’t think about what their words meant. They were beautiful and ignorant.

  Which is all it takes.

  ••

  RooAmber tried to let Scotch kiss her that night, but for some reason, it felt ticklish. Her beige hand pushed against his hairy white chest and her skin felt unusually cool against the paradise silk that covered their bed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You always like me to make love to you.”

  “I don’t know”, she said. “I feel all tingly inside. So tingly that it tickles to be touched. I’d rather not be touched right now.”

  She kept hearing a song playing in her head. It had been following her every since she ran into Shane Roberts. It wasn’t from her own CD collection, but was one from the kind of music that Scotch listened to. He was heavily into jazz, reggae and early soul music. RooAmber’s collection pretty much consisted of Tupac Shakur, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, the Winans, En Vogue, Anita Baker and of course, Boyz II Men.

  “Scotch--there’s this song in my head, it won’t leave me alone. It’s by that new wave jazz singer you always listen to. The real pretty black one--Cassandra something or other.”

  “Who, Cassandra Wilson? Which album?”

  “I don’t know her music, but it’s a song by her, you always play it when you’re waxing your car. I just have to hear it. Maybe that’ll put me in the mood.”

  It turned into an adventure. They pulled out his Cassandra Wilson CDs and listened to the beautifully languid music, one ethereal track going into the other until finally they found the song RooAmber was haunted by.

  Track #9 on the New Moon Daughter CD. A song called “Until”.

  “Oh, god I love it!”, swooned RooAmber as she snuggled on the living room couch clutching a huge pillow against her breasts and tummy.

  Scotch didn’t see what was so special about the song, it seemed a rather simplistic love ballad, but as RooAmber listened to it over and over again, the broodingly intelligent lyric flowed from the singer’s heart and hands with such an effortless calmness that it reminded RooAmber of floating in the sea looking at the sky, or cradling a small bird’s egg in her palm, her nakedness wrapped in the warm body of some ancestral lover from not only a past life, but a past world, the words so precise and so perfectly tangled that they brought RooAmber to a quiet, enchanted stillness.

  “Scotch go on to bed, I just want to listen to it one more time.”

  ••

  Shane Roberts climbed atop Rosaria that night, his tongue dipping into her mouth as though he were trying to lick her tonsils, his penis entering her with a tender manic jabbing she hadn’t felt in years.

  “Ouuuh!”, she cooed in ecstacy, surprised by the fervor and lasting of Shane’s lovemaking. It felt like the old days when they’d first met again. She couldn’t help but scream out, “Fuck it, Shane!”

  Bam, bam--he fucked it hard. His eyes tightly closed as his mind captured and caressed the perfect cocoa brown ass--Tangie Brown’s rear end, as he remembered it--his mouth, in this fantasy, devouring her hot twin cinnamon titties...his dick...wading through slicks of rich brown fudge to pierce, poke and stir the pink taffy inside.

  Tangie Brown. Say My Name, Say My Name. Tangie Brown.

  “Oh god, yes!”, screamed Rosaria. Then she did what all non-black women do. She tried to copy the flavor of a black woman by calling as a black girl would, “Fuck me, daddy. Ouh, daddy...it’s YOUR pussy!”

  When it was over, she caressed his sweat-covered back and whispered in his ear, “It’s been years since you made me feel this way...desirable. I love you so much, Shane. You’re my black king.”

  He felt so ashamed that he couldn’t look at her. If only Rosaria hadn’t kept calling him ‘daddy’, he might of been able to push Tangie Brown and her unsurpassably perfect chocolate bubble booty out of his mind.

  He rolled off her, wiped the yoke from his penis and with the bed covers, slipped out of bed and went down to skinny dip in the pool.

  “Shane?”

  The water roared with a thud when he dived in.

  His aquaman-like strokes taking him gracefully to the bottom of the deep end, and then...out of nowhere...a nightmare.

  He saw his son Sergio swimming in the ocean. The boy moving gracefully through brown coral and dancing purple sea anemones. The water clear and crisp as moonlight.

  And then, suddenly--she grabbed him! Shane could see it!

  A mermaid. Half woman, half dolphin. Black as tar, nappyheaded. Lips full and juicy as a jellyfish.
r />   Pulling Sergio by the feet, pulling him down...out of life.

  Drowning him!

  Shane’s eyes bolted open!

  He shot to the surface like a torpedo as he heard his mother-in-law, Gerta Maria, screaming his name from the hall balcony, imploring him to come at once.

  Shane hurried out of the pool, his eyes looking up as though searching for God, but seeing only the late night sky draped behind a glowing moon. So bright it seemed to be burning.

  “It’s Sergio!”, yelled Rosaria from the boy’s window. “Shane help!”

  Shane grabbed a towel from the sauna room as he dashed through the darkened house and up the stairs. He burst into Sergio’s bedroom as though expecting to find and kill an intruder.

  Rosaria held their son in her creamy white arms, his face almost purple from nearly suffocating to death.

  “What the fuck happened?” Shane demanded.

  “Black nigger bitch tried to kill him”, said Gerta Maria in Spanish, her cryptic dark eyes blaming Shane.

  Rosaria shot her mother a look that begged her to shut up. She told Shane, “Sergio was hyperventilating, bumping into walls in the hallway. I thought he was having a heart attack or something, but it was a nightmare.”

  “Don’t let her get to me”, the boy cried to his father, suddenly. “She’s coming to kill me.”

  Shane came and knelt beside his son, tenderly caressing the boy’s wavy mixed hair. “Who?”

  “She’s black and ugly”, Sergio cried out. “Black and ugly like an African person’s mother. Dark and nigger looking like those women you see around Berry Farms in South East. She’s a mermaid and she always grabs me by my ankles in my dreams when I’m swimming. She grabs me by my ankles and tries to drown me.”

  Shane got goose bumps listening to the racism in his son’s words, and not only that, but from realizing that he and his son had been startled by the same exact nightmare and the same time as well.

  Gerta Maria caught the look in Shane’s eyes and immediately looked at her daughter to say in Spanish, “Your husband’s fucking a goddamned African woman. Mark my words. A pure nappy jungle bitch like the kind they brought to Puerto Rico on slave ships. Your husband’s fucking one.”

  There was no way Rosaria would ever believe that, because she was too white and beautiful for Shane to be doing something like that.

  Sergio reached out and wrapped his arms around his father’s neck, clinging to him as he cried, “Don’t let her get me, dad!”

  ••

  The next morning, Shane found himself standing in the shower, his mind so numbed by confusion that he could hardly feel the water pelting his dark orange naked body.

  He thought about the way his wife had decorated their home--African masks, paintings of black women with babies strapped to their backs, sculptures of African kings gracing the walls and rooms, but why had she done that if she thought them so inferior, he wondered? And then there was Sergio. Posters of Michael Jordan, Biggie Smalls and Michael Jackson hung on his son’s bedroom wall as though they were Gods, yet he knew without a doubt that his son hated being black, and that in particular, the boy had a phobic fear of the type of women it took to give birth to those men--African looking black women.

  It suddenly dawned on Shane that if his wife and son could adore black people in parts (for instance Michael Jordan’s athletic talent but not his dark skin), then surely, they also loved him in parts, and probably, for the parts that they thought his light complexion signified as missing.

  The African womb parts. Color, nose, hair, lips.

  At breakfast, Gerta Maria served him a plate of eggs and salsa, tortillas with melted cheese and bacon crumbled in rice. She herself had a glass of thickened sweet rice milk.

  “I feel bad spirits around this house”, she told Shane in English. “You’re bringing them here.”

  “What are you talking about, Gerta Maria?”

  “There’s something on your mind and it’s coming to life”, she said, casually. “You’re one of those kind we got back in Puerto Rico that misses the savage life, misses the oonga-boonga tribe.”

  “I’m a black man, Gerta Maria. Your daughter is married to a black man. When are you going to accept that”

  “Her father was white. German. Daughters should marry their fathers.”

  Shane couldn’t hold it back any longer. He blurted out, “Her father was married to a white woman and you were the dark brown Puerto Rican maid working in their house, Gerta Maria. I guess you think getting fucked upside the washing machine on the laundry porch by your married racist white employer, a German man who frequently referred to you as washerwoman, is superior to the life I provide for RooAmber? You’d rather her be some white man’s whore than married to a black savage who treats her like a queen.”

  “Who in the hell is RooAmber?” she asked.

  Shane nearly turned white!

  “You meant Rosaria, right?”

  Gerta Maria studied his face, smiled an evil smile, and then went outside to have a cigarette.

  ••

  RooAmber Childress got to work late, because she had spent a large part of the morning searching for Cassandra Wilson’s New Moon Daughter CD so that she wouldn’t have to constantly borrow her husband’s to hear the song she liked.

  As soon as she got to her desk in Brynn Duke’s office, she borrowed his portable CD player and flipped it in. She skipped the other gems on the album and went straight to track #9.

  By late afternoon...Shane Roberts walked into her office, his eyes warming her flesh with just the slightest glance and his brown orange skinned buffness rocking her lust button like some annoying car alarm.

  RooAmber removed the head phones and said, “Mr. Roberts. I’ve never seen you in this office before and I never expected to.”

  “Well, that’s because you were never in this office before, so I didn’t have any reason to come down here.”

  “I beg your pardon”, replied RooAmber with a fake coldness.

  “I came to invite you to a business lunch”, Shane told her. “Strictly business, Mrs. Childress. I had Mr. Duke lend me a copy of your resume. You’re a smart woman and I’ve got a business proposal for you.”

  RooAmber wasn’t going for that shit. Her mother’s attitude came out of her, as she put her hands on her hips, flashed her eyes like a young, coy Diana Ross and snapped, “Exactly what kind of business proposal?”

  “I’m thinking of starting my own magazine, RooAmber. I’ve tried getting on at Newsweek and Time, Emerge. But it finally dawned on me that what I need to do is start my own affair, and...”

  “And what?”

  “I’ll need someone to run it. Someone who can work for, at least in the beginning for a reasonable salary, but be completely devoted to the magazine. On top of that, I’m planning a black magazine. I need someone like you.”

  RooAmber took a deep breath and said “Why don’t we make it an after work lunch. There’s a lot we’ll need to go over.”

  ••

  Shane took RooAmber to the wharf on D Street and they had a wickedly delicious seafood lunch. First, he got them a huge bag of spicy shrimp, which they picked and munched, removing the shells and savoring the meat--then he got them brown paper bags stuffed with fried soft shell crabs, some separate crab legs covered in bay seasoning and two frosty cold beers.

  They sat next to the river eating and talking merrily.

  “There’s no city like chocolate city”, RooAmber said.

  “I think you’re right”, said Shane.

  “And do tell me. What was a rich Georgetown negro like you doing at Wilson High, Shane Roberts?”

  Shane laughed. “Well, I wanted to feel like I was blacker--you know--connected to the real folks and not the bougie Jack and Jill set. I had grown up admiring the writings of Malcolm X and Richard Wright. Plus my best friend Clayton was a student at Wilson, so I followed him. People forgot I was a rich blue vein society boy once I kicked some asses on the football
field.”

  “This magazine sounds really exciting, Shane.”

  “Of course it does--there’s nothing on the market like it yet.”

  Shane’s plan was to start a magazine called “The Nappy Rhino”. It was to be a black men’s outdoors magazine, featuring glossy color photos of black tribesmen hunting lions in Africa, Jamaican men catching swordfish in the devil’s triangle, black Spaniards chasing the bull in Madrid, black Peruvian men catching chiclet monkeys, and of course, American black men riding bulls in Texas, hunting deer in the midwest, bungee jumping in California and skeet shooting in New England. RooAmber thought it was an idea whose time had come.

  “But”, RooAmber asked in an icy tone. “Are there going to be any black women in it? We like to do all that kinda stuff outdoors, too, and we’ve always been physical, outdoorsy women. Or are you planning to hire a bunch of white and biracial bikini babes from BET music videos and exploit them by having them pose Sports Illustrated style as little fantasy pussy points in the...”

  “RooAmber, why are you coming at me like that?”

  Shane told her, “I’m offering you a job that will require you to be the very person who makes those decisions. It’s a job that will require you to be closer to me than anyone in my life...even my wife.”

  RooAmber licked the bay seasoning on her lips and shook her head.

  “I can’t do this.” Last night. It wet between them.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re a married man, I’m a married woman, and it’s obvious to me that we’re on the verge of making a very stupid mistake.”

  Shane stared at her, impressed by her refusal to play games. He nodded and said, “I spent all night thinking about you, and by the look on your face, you spent all night thinking about me. Now I’m scared, RooAmber. Because I love my wife with all my heart, and yet every since I ran into you yesterday, I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. If I never see you again, I want you to know that you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”