FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Page 20

  Silently, jealously, the boy prayed.

  At one point, Shane wanted RooAmber to taste a piece of his lobster caramel and reached across the table, carefully forking a buttery piece into her soulful mouth. She ate it, with downcast eyes, and the sexiness of her wide nose wrinkled just ever so. And then they talked about his still-in-the-closet magazine idea, “The Nappy Rhino”. RooAmber laughing and telling him, “A scared man can’t win. You’ve got to just do it, Shane.”

  How beautiful and appealing she was when ambitious, he thought to himself. And she kept looking at his burnished orange hands. The masculinity and cleanliness of them making her skin tingle.

  “Dad”, interrupted Sergio. “What about mom? I bet she’s worried about what’s taking us so long. We should go home.”

  Shane looked at the boy as though he’d just been kicked in the balls. “Go home?”

  Sergio nodded, saying, “Everybody’s done eating.” He thought--no wonder grandmother told me to hold daddy’s hand and to stay with him. She must of known about this skank lurking in the streets. Then he looked at RooAmber, hatefully, while saying to his father, “And mom is home waiting for us with the new baby.”

  For some reason, the part about the new baby always rings a special bell for women who are seduced by the sweet evil of adultery. RooAmber Childress could not, it seemed, have a child. She looked at Shane and said, “Sergio’s right. It’s been a wonderful lunch, but you really should be getting back home to your wife. Judging by what a sweet little man you are, Sergio--I can tell your mother’s a wonderful woman.”

  “She’s the best”, said Sergio with a snotty attitude. “That’s why my father chose her to be his wife. Because she’s the best.”

  There was no way, RooAmber realized, to look Shane in the eye without realizing how deeply they felt about one another, and also, how hopeless and pathetic they were. She didn’t see any point in torturing themselves by prolonging the goodbye.

  After two years--not a single spark had dwindled. For between them was a whole giant, unexplainable de ja vu. Their two perfect sets of celestial eyes enrapturing their loneliness like the slowness of a sad flute.

  Reluctantly, Shane said, “Fine. But I need a minute to speak with Mrs. Childress alone. RooAmber--I’ll walk you up to your room. Sergio, I want you to stay put. I’ll be back in less than five minutes to pay the check, but I need you to hold the table. I’ll be right back.”

  Butterflies filled the child’s stomach as his blood raced with worry.

  “It’s been so nice meeting you, Sergio. You’re a very intelligent young man, just like your dad.”

  Shane stood up and escorted RooAmber out of the dining abbey.

  Silently, Sergio Roberts recited the lord’s prayer.

  Shane walked RooAmber through the garden, into the Carriage House and up the grand staircase as though they were prisoners marching to their own execution.

  The beheading! Katanga wielding the sword. It flashed through Shane’s mind, the head of Shango Ogun rolling across the cavern...swick!!...but, of course, he didn’t know what he was seeing and it flashed so quickly, that he hadn’t really absorbed or acknowledged it.

  He tried to take RooAmber’s hand, but she wouldn’t let him.

  When they reached her door, she turned to him, her stomach full of the same butterflies that fluttered in Sergio’s. How would it end? For it seemed even more intense this time. Too forbidden.

  “I’ll always want you”, Shane told her truthfully. “I want you and I love you. I won’t apologize for that.”

  “It’s wrong Shane”, she said. “There is nothing right about it. You have a wife, I have a husband. Adultery is a sin. It’s dirty and it destroys everything. When I was a child, my mother used to preach to us that...’All love feels good...but not all love is good for you’. Sin is like dirt.”

  “I’m married to the wrong woman, RooAmber. I know that.”

  “Well, Shane...I’m happy in my marriage. And I’m sorry that you’re not, but either way, we have to say...”

  Shane grabbed her. Grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth, and she didn’t fight it.

  She couldn’t fight it.

  Passion’s naked eye, the sweetness of life and life’s unfairness, dismissing all words and inserting only feeling, only beauty, only thoughtlessness--the ancient moments of time and light enrapturing both the Sky and the Sea in a free fall, a kiss. A remembrance between these two lost souls of Africa, who had known each other for 26,000 years. 0, how can it possibly ever be cured or put away? Original sin. This sexual memory between Africans.

  At first, it seemed to go on forever, as kisses should, but then--there was a scream. Loud and shrill. A child’s scream.

  “Noooo!” Sergio hollered as he came into the hall, his eyes crazed as though he were seeing one of his parents dead. “Get your hands off my father, you bitch!”

  “Sergio!”

  The boy turned and ran. Much faster than he needed to. He was almost flying, he ran so fast.

  And RooAmber shrunk inside herself--seeing the father running after the son, and remembering her own life--unseen women taking her mother’s men. Her mother crying at night. Unseen women calling on the phone. Unseen women with their slim, sassy legs and their frisky shaking tails. She, Dinari and Sula, three black angel children, without a father to raise them and without a steady man to inspire and uphold the honor of their overworked, overburdened mother.

  She remembered that agony--that agony that men are so ready to inflict on innocent children--and promised herself that she wouldn’t be the one to cause pain in the lives of Shane’s wife and children. She would leave Sag Harbor immediately. Yes. Pack her bags and go...but then, just as she turned the brass knob and entered her room...she heard it. Shane screaming, “Sergioooooo!”

  The desperate rebuke of what sounded like a bus horn. Bomp!...Bomp! The careening squeal of the screeching brakes, the burning tires—the sound of Sergio’s young body flying fifteen feet in the air after it was hit...and then bouncing on the asphalt.

  15

  •

  “0 Shane...0 my love! Fuck me.”

  In the blackness of the room, a lonely Sag Harbor moon peering through the colonial bay windows as though it were a ball of white fire alighting dark oceans--their bodies found the source of his pain.

  Writhing entwined, like two dolphins riding the black rhythm of the Sea, they damned their souls within each other’s flesh, the sweetness of life singing hymns to the devil...and the beat of their hearts making the sound of ancient drums. RooAmber spread her legs wider...her nipples burning.

  “He’s dead”, the doctor had told Shane, Rosaria and Namibia only nine hours ago. “Your son is dead.”

  It still rocked Shane’s soul--the sound of Rosaria’s bloodcurdling scream. Her wiggling body falling into his arms, her crying eyes looking up into his, begging him to bring her son back, to do something.

  And in that moment, he had felt like the lowest man that had ever walked the earth.

  ••

  Pale faced and red eyed, Rosaria Roberts stared into the glass of warm brandy that Namibia served her. Her mind obsessed with how her son could be in her presence one moment, and not just gone, but dead the next. How could God let that happen to her?

  “Esmerelda’s sleeping like a log”, Namibia whispered in the spaciousness of the Boule mansion kitchen as she sat down across from Rosaria and began spreading the rose patte on crackers.

  She wondered if she should tell Shane about the little nappyheaded gingerbread colored boy that had come out of Tangie Brown’s black pussy. His other son with the big beaver-toothed smile and the Denzel Washington face. The celestial, Cicely Tyson-like eyes. My lord. Namibia wasn’t about to give Shane and Rosaria’s marriage such another cold blow.

  That nasty bitch Tangie. Calling on the instances when the bank made a flub to whine in her college educated ghetto twang, “Mrs. Roberts--I didn’t get my check this month. Should I contact Shane?�
�

  Three thousand dollars a month. And the bitch still demanded that Namibia fix her up with a job--a cushy one, courtesy of a friend at Merrill Lynch. And Namibia’s detectives even reported that the dark whore was spending her monthly stipend on her little ghetto trash hip hop boyfriends.

  “How dare you name that child Shane, Jr.!”, Namibia had once raged at the low class slut by maternity ward telephone. “Don’t you know that my son just got married to a fine young Italian woman? Shouldn’t she, his lawfully wedded wife, have the right to bear him a namesake?”

  But Tangie had been crude as ghetto girls are. “Fuck Shane’s wife. Stringy headed white bitch. And fuck that nigga, too. My baby’s name is Shane Junior. And I will put his daddy’s name on the birth certificate.”

  Of course, Namibia had given Tangie Brown an initial twenty thousand dollars not to do that. An initial twenty thousand...and then three thousand a month...for the materialistic little black slut ghetto bitch.

  Rosaria looked up now. “Has anyone called about Shane?”

  “No, but you have to remember”, said Namibia Agatha Roberts, “that my son knows Sag Harbor like he knows the back of his hand. He’s probably walking the docks or sitting at Otter Pond staring at the moon, but wherever he is, he’s blaming himself for this. You know how much Shane has always wanted a son, so this is really hard on him, Rosaria. You’ll need to have another son as soon as possible, my darling. But you have to realize that him not being here has nothing to do with you.

  With fresh tears, Rosaria nodded, saying, “I don’t know how I’m going to tell my mother that Sergio is dead.”

  “Don’t worry about that now. We’ll telephone her after you’ve had a good night’s rest.”

  “I don’t know if I can sleep without Shane next to me. Tonight, I need him more than ever.”

  “Women always need their men, Rosaria, but a strong woman must prepare herself for the fact that they aren’t likely to be around every...”

  Rosaria tuned out whatever Namibia was saying, because the one thing she couldn’t stand about black women was when they started talking all that “I gots to be a strong black woman” bullshit. Whoever heard of such excuses for not having men, and were there really any men who wanted a big strapping strong black woman when he could have a small, weak, tender-pussied sweet girl whose pale skin bruised at his very touch? Rosaria thought she knew better.

  “Did you hear what I was saying?”

  “Oh, sorry. What did you say, Mrs. Roberts?”

  “I said--did you notice how Shane stared at that mural they had in the hospital?”

  “Oh yeah, he loves African artwork.”

  “He looked terrified to me. Absolutely thunderstruck! Just mortified when he saw that mural.”

  And Rosaria remembered it, too. The three of them going towards the cafeteria at Long Harbor Hospital to get coffee, and Shane stopping in his tracks as though he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning when they came upon the hospital’s mural of ancient goddesses. He barely noticed the paintings of Athena, Aphrodite, Freya, Kuan-Yin, Isis and Lakota.

  He stared only at the black mermaid goddess, his mouth agape and his eyes bulging with horror as he noticed her silvery tail poised as though slashing through the Sea and her hands covering bare breasts, her head adorned by a short lawn of black afro and the sheen in her chocolate fudge skin so radiant that she seemed to be moving.

  “Shane, you look startled.”

  In a flashback, he saw the black hands of the mermaid grabbing Sergio by the ankles, yanking him under water, drowning him.

  “I don’t remember this being here”, Shane complained to his mother. “These are supposed to be the goddesses of the world. Who is this dolphin creature?”

  “That’s the goddess Ajowa, the sea goddess of West Africa. The Yorubans call her Yemaya-Olokun. She’s the goddess of love to some Africans, the goddess of rain and prosperity to others. The hospital just added her to the mural last summer”, Namibia reported. “I thought it was strange, too, when I first saw a kinky haired, chocolate fudge mermaid painted on the wall, but I’ve gotten used to it. A few years ago, some of the local blacks protested that there was no goddess to represent the actual slave people that were brought to the Americas from West Africa in record numbers. They pointed out that the goddess Olakun (Ajowa) is even more powerful than Isis in African mythical culture and demanded that she be added to the wall.”

  “I’ve seen that thing before. In real life.”

  “What?”

  ••

  Pressing her hand against his chest beneath the Sea, RooAmber felt connected to the earth’s core. It became a ballet of sorts, the pull and sway of the universe, the sweetness of life and life’s unfairness encapsulating them in slow motion’s remembrance.

  It seemed like everything was being born.

  The two lovers that started rain. Earth and moon, Sun and Sea--the birthmark of the world (birds) and the outer edges of songs (butterflies). The every inch...of everything. Shane and RooAmber.

  Coagulating in their blood, its marrow and their very souls as though it was all there ever was and ever could be.

  Like gymnasts, the two dolphins twirled among the coral and darkness, the night ocean attending them like a warm, fluid whiskey, its fire and sugar welding their openings together in some symbiotic aching--kiss of life, kiss of fire, kiss of time.

  Freely falling.

  RooAmber opened her eyes.

  Shane was like a shadow on top of her, his penis stroking ever gently, but with a deliberate ownership as well. After all, he was a lion. Hi strong, hard chest pressing down against her naked titties as the smoothness of her legs tried to navigate the vigorous rhythm of his hips, their arched grisle-like boldness, the flatness of his tummy muscles inserting every inch of his thick, hot meat-sceptor inside her.

  Find my prayer...open it with your hands.

  Don’t let us wait for death. Not for the next world.

  But let our love be now. Where magic

  remembers us.

  It felt so good that all she could do was moan, soft and sweet, the wetness of her pussy sloshing as silky and effortlessly as the sea itself.

  “I love you”, Shane panted in her ear. “I love you, RooAmber!”

  She opened her legs wider and heard the creek of the bed, the tingle of the windowpanes, the smacking stoned ferocity of his helmet hard buttocks bouncing getty-up, getty-up between her pyramid legs.

  “0 Shane!”

  “I love you.”

  She gnashed her teeth into his shoulder, trying to silence her dick-induced screams, but the odor of sin and the gruesome irony of fuck-nut sent her into a dazzling sporadic hullabaloo. She couldn’t be quiet.

  She just couldn’t.

  And like two wild wasps, they were sliced by beams of burning sunlight and fell right off the edge of the world.

  ••

  Moments later, as they listened to the peace and quiet that filled the room, white moonlight fell across their purple shadowy bodies like a magic beam, and RooAmber pressed her hand to Shane’s chest, whispering, “You should go to your wife. I think she needs you now more than ever.”

  “I can’t face her right now”, he said with new tears.

  RooAmber didn’t push, because he had already threatened to kill himself, and in fact, when she had opened the door to her room and saw him standing there--a grown man reduced to manic sobbing and protestations against God that were so mercurial and dangerous that all he could think to do was take his own life, RooAmber had let him in.

  All the way, she let him in, because she had known the jaundice of suicide and its frantic seduction. She had been on medication for years, because of the power of sorrow and the powerlessness that very sensitive feel to the point of wanting to take their own lives. She couldn’t see Shane do that, so she had kissed him and promised him that he was loved--and had pulled him into her bed and washed over his burning wounds like a healing sea tide, but now--she had r
egrets.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “My husband. And how I don’t deserve such a good man.”

  As inhuman as it was, there was a part of Shane that didn’t understand how a black woman could feel guilty about cheating on her white husband. In Shane’s black-man’s mind, it wasn’t a real marriage and whatever the flame there was between them, it wasn’t real love. On the other hand, he could see black men and white women as “married” and truly in love. He could see that as natural, but not RooAmber’s marriage to a white man.

  Shane took her hand in the darkness and told her, “I want you to leave Scotch Childress and by my wife. I’m going to divorce Rosaria...”

  “Shane, no!”

  RooAmber jumped out of bed and turned on the light.

  “Yes, damnit!”

  “Your wife just lost her child and you’re talking about leaving her!? She’s devastated right now. She’s confused, she feels cheated by God and betrayed by everything she’s ever believed in or trusted. The last thing she needs is to find out that you’re cheating on her and the last thing she needs is for you to walk out on her.”

  “O.K. Then I’ll get her some counseling, I’ll wait six months and then I’ll tell her that I want a divorce. That’ll give you plenty of time to deal with saying goodbye to Scotch.”

  Tears of rage and confusion damned up RooAmber’s eyes and she shook her head saying, “No. I can’t leave my husband. I love him. And this is nasty, what we’ve done in this room. It’s wrong!”

  “It’s not wrong, RooAmber! We belong together!”

  “No, Shane.” RooAmber stared at him as though he were some crazy bank robber wanting to her drive the getaway car. She told him, “People have to pay...for the dirt they do.”

  ••

  Carolina Colony, 1654

  The Bob Sullivan Plantation

  •