Sugar Page 7

  She picked up and left with the next man that said, “Sugar, girl, you somethin’ else! You something special! Oohh wee! Girl, I could really get use to this type of lovin’ six days a week and twice on Sunday!”

  They left Short Junction on a slow-moving train to St. Louis, surrounded by the sweet smells of fried chicken, sweet biscuits and by the steady buzzing of talk about the girl that was found dead in Bigelow, some twenty or so miles down the road. They said she was beaten so badly her own mamma didn’t recognize her. Women covered their mouths and gasped in shock. A man called out over the sea of “I don’t believe it!” and “Can you imagine?” and revealed the worst thing of all: “ Her—her . . . privates were cut out and laid on the ground beside her.”

  Sugar didn’t believe the whole story, small-town folk will stretch a story until it became a tale. But she did believe that that was a sign that her departure was right on time.

  St. Louis was where life began picking away at her with the same slow, steady reverence of the train that brought her there.

  She was awed by the buildings that stood taller than the pine trees in Arkansas, her eyes burned against the bright light of day that bounced off of the glimmering sidewalks. Sugar was completely unprepared for the fast-stepping, high-fashioned, quick-talking black people that moved around her like bees around a hive. She wanted to be one of them.

  He dropped her off with a woman he called his sister. She lived in a brownstone house that looked like every other house on that street—the only distinguishable qualities about them were the variety of potted plants that graced the windowsills and the color of their doors. Mary Bedford’s door was red.

  Step behind the red door and you were accosted by the sweet smell of Midnight in Paris perfume. The perfume had been worn for so long by Mary and the women that worked there that it seemed to seep from the walls and move from room to room on the back of the air driven by the constantly whirling ceiling fans found in every room. Throughout the house the hardwood floors were so polished that you could look down and see what color drawers you wore.

  The parlor had one small loveseat with a glass table in front of it. Other than those two items, the room was bare.

  Farther down the hall was a small eggshell-colored kitchen. An ice box, stove and square white countertop table with two chairs filled the space to capacity, leaving little room for the sun’s rays to settle. A bathroom, painted years before in pink and mauve, was adjacent to the kitchen. You could often find yourself sitting on the toilet and craving for the bacon that sizzled right on the other side of the wall.

  The basement was for gambling. Plenty of men had nearly lost their lives over ill thrown dice or a slightly bent card, but Mary didn’t play that shit, and would have you cut into unidentifiable pieces if you tried to pull a fast one.

  He promised, without looking at Sugar, that he would be back in a while. Mary Bedford shoved some bills in his hand, closed the door behind him and told Sugar, “He ain’t coming back, so don’t look for him to do so. He’s a liar, a cheat and a thief. But you’ve laid down with him so I suppose you know all that.”

  Mary Bedford was copper colored, short and stocky with breasts that resembled overripe melons. She wore a long black curly wig that touched her behind and often got caught in the spaces between chairs and sofas. Her laugh was loud and harsh and her teeth were yellow from smoking two packs of Luckys a day.

  “You sure are black, gal” was the second set of words to her. And she reminded her of this fact every day after that.

  “Your mamma black like you? Ah, it don’t matter, they got a lot up here that like ’em like you. What’s that they say? The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice?” She laughed.

  Sugar was scared. Her heart beat a hundred miles an hour in her chest. The fear was plastered across her face and she fought to keep her tears from falling.

  “Is your juice sweet, honey baby?” she asked her. Sugar could smell the left-behind scent of some man coming off her breath.

  Sugar wanted to yell at her, hit her, but seeing she was standing in her house, she decided it was just better to leave and reached for the door.

  “Gal, you don’t know a soul in St. Louis, so make it easy on yourself. You. Not me. So go on up to the first room on the left and take off all your clothes.”

  All Sugar could think was: This woman must be funny or something. She’d heard tales about city women doing it with one another. Sugar had experienced quite a few things in her fifteen years, but laying with a woman wasn’t one of them.

  “For what?” Sugar said in her most vicious Lacey voice, placing her hands on her hips.

  Mary just laughed. “So’s I could check your hair for lice. Can’t have lice, you know. A lot of you country bumpkins got ’em.”

  Sugar clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. It was obvious to her where she’d been left. A whorehouse. Same shit, different state. “Shoot, I don’t need to get butt naked for you to check my hair.”

  Mary just flipped a wisp of hair away from her brow and said, “You do for me to check them pussy hairs of yours.”

  Sugar spent five years with Mary. They weren’t easy years—years done on your back never are—but they were years that could have been done harder somewhere else. Mary passed along forty years of know-how to Sugar and Sugar became second in charge of the house when Mary was away.

  One Sunday as they sat together in the kitchen, absorbing the street sounds and smells of summer, Mary turned to Sugar and stared at her long and hard. “You leaving soon, ain’t ya?” she said matter of factly. Mary never held her girls, they were free to go when they wanted to but hardly ever did.

  “Thinking about it,” Sugar replied without looking up from the magazine she was lazily flipping through. Mary sighed and scratched at her head. Her face was absent of the Monday through Saturday stage makeup she wore. Her salt and pepper hair was braided in a hundred pickney braids that stood straight up in the air. She looked older than her forty-five years.

  “Hmm, figured that. Lemme ask you something, Sugar. Why you act like you hate everybody? Especially men. You talk to them like they dogs in a gutter somewhere.” She continued, weary of waiting for her reply, “If you hate ’em as much as you act like you do, then baby, I’m sorry to say, you in the wrong business.”

  Sugar had had little episodes with a few of the men that came to visit the house. She’d cuss ’em and maybe even get in a slap or two. “She a little spitfire ain’t she, Mary!” they’d say, wiping their lips on their way out through Mary’s red door. Then to Sugar, “I’ll see you next week, you little devil, you.” They always came back.

  “First of all I don’t hate everybody. I don’t even hate anybody. Men . . . well, really no need to talk to them any better than I do. ’Sides, this here is business, a business that involves very little conversation,” Sugar replied.

  Mary pondered that for a while.

  “Still, I can’t believe you get all the requests you do when you never even offer a smile or a kind word—”

  “Well, it ain’t hurting nothing, is it? It’s obvious they like the way I talk to them. Shit, Mary, I could talk about their mammas and they’d still come back for more.”

  “Is it ’cause you didn’t know who your daddy was? Is that why you talk to men like you do, treat them like you do? All men ain’t like your daddy. All men don’t walk out and leave their babies—”

  Sugar viciously cut her off. “It ain’t about me not having no daddy or no mamma, it ain’t about nothing, I just . . . I just . . .” She slammed her hands down on the table in frustration, causing Mary to flinch with surprise. Something in her wanted to let go, but she didn’t know how.

  Mary was quiet for some time. They just sat and watched and listened to the children play and laugh below them.

  “Sugar, ain’t you ever had no good times?” she said with a bit of sadness in her voice.

  “What you mean?” Sugar said, knowing all too well what she was talking about. Sug
ar had seen good times being had all around her, in the Lacey house, in Mary’s house, but never had one that she could call her very own.

  “It seems to me,” Mary began, and then decided to get up and stretch, “Whew, seems to me that I ain’t never see you look up from whatever you were doing and just smile.”

  “Just smile? Smile at what? At who?”

  “Smile into the air, girl!” she said and waved her arm through the air.

  “That’s crazy . . . smiling into the air,” Sugar said and turned her head away.

  “Naw, chile, it ain’t crazy, you smiling into the air ’cause a good long-time-ago thought caught you off guard. Not ’cause you crazy,” Mary said, sat down and looked back out into the world.

  “I guess you right, then. I ain’t never had no good times.”

  Sugar saw the way Mary’s eyes looked. Not hurt, but worried. Worried that she was sitting down with a twenty-year-old woman who had never had any good times.

  “You better start, ’cause time is running and a life without good times ain’t a life worth having.”

  Sugar left not too long after that conversation. There was something else she could do. Something that she’d been doing for years. First in the fields of Short Junction amongst the poppies and daisies and then later, alone in her bathroom, beneath the heavy sounds of the shower masking it away from the world. Or so she thought. Her voice had soothed Mary many nights as she listened to it filter through the walls of the house. Sugar could sing like an angel.

  Mary hugged her tight at the bus stop. Sugar swore she saw tears swimming in her old eyes. Mary shoved a card in Sugar’s hand. “He’s an old friend of mine, lives in Detroit, owns a record company there. Tell him I sent you and he’ll be sure to talk to you.”

  Al Schwartz - President

  SAVOYRECORDS

  Detroit, Michigan Ph. #KL-2-5893

  Sugar hugged her back hard and thanked her. For the first time she felt different. Special. Not just Sugar Lacey from Short Junction, Arkansas, but Sugar Lacey, ready for the world. Sugar daydreamed all the way to Detroit. She believed her days of working on her back were over and done with.

  She arrived and called Al Schwartz as soon as she stepped off the Greyhound.

  “Mr. Schwartz, Ms. Mary Bedford said I should call you to—”

  “Who?” The whining, annoyed voice crackled back at her.

  “Mary Bedford—”

  “Mary Bedford,” he repeated, “Mary Bedford? Listen sweetie, I don’t know a Mary Be—”

  “Mary Bedford of St. Louis,” she said, cutting him off.

  There was silence for a while.

  “Yes,” he said. The Hollywood had left his voice.

  “Well, she said I should call on you while I’m here—”

  “Oh really. Did she now?”

  She felt it, the sleaze. She could detect sleaze a mile away.

  “Yes, Mr. Schwartz. She said I should call on you and that you might be able to help me. You see, I’m a singer.”

  Silence.

  “Okay, sweetie, if you’re a friend of Mary’s and she specifically asked you to look me up, well, then fine. Where are you now?”

  “I’m at the bus station.”

  “Hop a cab and come on by.”

  Detroit was even bigger and busier than St. Louis.

  “Say, listen,” Sugar said to the cab driver as she ran her fingers over the business card. “What type of name is Schwartz?”

  “Jewish,” he said.

  She had never met a real live Jew before. Well, not that she was aware of.

  She walked into a building that had marble floors and marble walls. She walked into the elevator, a bent-over old black man mumbled a hello and then asked her which floor. “Fifteen,” she replied and moved to the back. The elevator crept through each floor. Sugar smoothed down her tight red dress and fluffed at her short strawberry blond wig. The old man looked over his shoulder at her once.

  A large desk sat no more than five feet from the elevator doors. Behind it was a woman whiter than the whitest white person Sugar had ever laid eyes on. Her skin was the color of talcum powder and you could see tiny river veins threading through her face, neck and hands. Her red hair was swept up into a beehive; her lips were so thin they disappeared when she frowned. She looked at Sugar with her baby blue cat’s-eye-shaped glasses and asked her to have a seat.

  Sugar sat for nearly an hour and a half. The woman behind the desk kept looking at her like she was a piece of rotting meat. Sugar knew that look. That look slowly stole away the special feeling she’d had with her all the way from St. Louis.

  Wasn’t that something, one look from a pale white girl with bad hair and glasses sent her reeling back to Short Junction and no good-time thoughts.

  The box on the desk buzzed and some words came out.

  “ ’Scuse me,” she said, snapping her fingers in Sugar’s direction, “Mr. Schwartz will see you now.”

  She pointed toward a door at the end of the hall.

  Al Schwartz was small, balding and white. He smiled and Sugar saw that his teeth were too big for his mouth.

  “Well, hello, Miss. Uh . . . what was it again?”

  “Sugar,” she said as she shook his hand. It was clammy.

  “Please sit.”

  Sugar looked around the large office. Fancy. White thick carpet, gold records hung on the wall. Pictures of Mr. Schwartz and a variety of singers Sugar knew and didn’t know.

  He sat behind his big shiny black desk, grinning at her with big teeth and rubbing his hands together like she was going to be his next meal.

  “So, Sugar, how is ole Mary?”

  “Oh, she fine,” she said, trying to keep the pleasantness in her voice, trying to keep a smile on her face.

  “That’s good. I haven’t seen her for quite some time, at least fifteen years or more,” he said, kind of absently. “So, you sing, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where have you performed?” he asked, getting up and coming over to sit on the desk right in front of her. His legs were open a bit. Just a bit.

  Sugar leaned back in her chair. She smelled his sweat, and it didn’t smell good.

  “Well . . . just church,” she lied.

  “Church? Really,” he said, closing his legs. “You’re a church woman, are you?”

  “No,” Sugar says and his legs open up again. Wider this time.

  “Hmmm, interesting,” he said. “So, how do you know our Mary?”

  “Our Mary”? Mary always said she didn’t belong to anyone. Maybe he hadn’t heard that.

  “I worked for her for a while,” Sugar says. No need for her to lie about that. She hadn’t realized that some lives were based on the lies people told to get by.

  “Really . . . interesting,” he said again. Sugar supposed he liked that word a lot.

  “And Mary said you should call me?” He seemed a bit surprised.

  Sugar’s smile was beginning to waver and she thought, We’ve been down this road before. How many times does he want me to answer that question?

  She did not answer him, not verbally, she just nodded her head because she felt that if she opened her mouth she might say something that might not be too nice. Mary begged her to be nice. This is Mary’s friend and Sugar wanted to be nice, but she knew he wanted her to be nicer than she had intended on.

  “Nice dress,” he said and those teeth were showing again. He was closer now, so they were even bigger. She made a bet with herself that he was a biter. She didn’t want to fuck him, she knew he’d leave marks.

  “Thank you,” she said. Quiet again.

  “Yes, um, red suits you well,” he said and his eyes traveled over her. She could feel them; sleazy, slimy little things that felt like fingers, moving down and over her breasts, across her stomach around her behind and then down between her legs.

  They sat there in silence for a while. Him smiling. Her, not smiling.

  His legs were wider and his hands were pla
ying around the zipper of his pants. She didn’t even look down at what was going on there. She just kept looking at those big teeth.

  “Sugar . . . I want you to do one thing for me. Just one, before I hear your sweet voice.” His voice was thick. She’s familiar with that sound. She grew up hearing that sound.

  “Just . . . just . . .”

  He couldn’t even finish. But still, she wouldn’t look down. She heard the zipper of his pants come undone. She smelled his dick before she saw it.

  “Just suck it?” Sugar innocently asked, still looking at his teeth. He couldn’t talk, he just nodded yes, yes, yes.

  “No, I don’t do that anymore,” Sugar said. “I’m a singer now.”

  His eyes flew open; and his voice became clear.

  “You don’t do that anymore? You don’t? Oh. I’m sorry . . . the rules are you suck, you fuck and anything else I want you to do, then you sing. Those are the rules.”

  Sugar looked at the pictures on the walls. Then down to his dick then back to the teeth.

  “Did you tell Frank Sinatra that too?” Sugar said and got up to leave.

  “You ain’t no fucking Frank Sinatra . . . you ain’t even no Bessie Smith! What you are is a colored whore!”

  Sugar was out the door walking past the pale woman behind the desk and hoping she didn’t see the tears in her eyes. But that man, Mr. Schwartz, he couldn’t let her go just like that. He ran out of his big office, zipping up his pants, and he screamed:

  “You ain’t gonna get nowhere without me, now bring your black ass back in here and do what I tell you to do! Do what Mary sent you here to do! You don’t really think I would just hear you sing just because you’re—” He was stumped for a while, like he was trying to find a word that would insult her more than asking her to put his penis in her mouth.

  “—you!” he finally screamed.

  She wanted to turn around, to go back and slap him around for a while. He was so small it would have been easy to do. But she kept on walking and telling herself that he was a friend of Mary’s and she had promised to be nice.