Free Midnight by Odie Hawkins Page B

Jesus.’”
    â€œThey’ll be back next week.”
    The Japanese woman came. And a French couple from Cannes and a host of Ghanaians.
    And he took a walk down the rutted street and became acquainted with Patience Hlovor, while trying to bargain with the woman selling sweet potatoes on the corner.
    â€œYou shouldn’t pay that much for that,” the woman whispered out of the side of her mouth.
    Bop turned to stare at the woman who had spoken to him. What the hell was two hundred cedis. Shit! That wasn’t even a half a dollar. Cedis were like play money.
    â€œHow much should I pay for it?”
    The woman edged him aside and began to talk to the vendor in Ga. It was too cold.
    He took a few steps back to frame the scene in his head. Two African women on the side of the road, arguing fiercely in this musical language that sounded mostly like uhh huhhh in his ears for the sake of a quarter. It took him back home inside himself.
    He suddenly felt like he wanted to cry; the women, these women could be his mother or sister. He was touched that they would argue over him.
    â€œThere, I only paid a hundred fifty.”
    â€œThank you, madam.”
    He bowed and she hid her face behind her hands. How could someone with balls be shy?
    She was older than he was, he could see that, maybe forty, but she was chocolate and muscular. She made him feel that he was looking at a peasant, like a Haitian refugee type.
    They walked down the street together and wound up in her room. She was the maid of this big man named Papa. She had status in the neighborhood.
    She sat and talked to him with so much wisdom and love that he felt ashamed of the way he was. He couldn’t forgive himself for contracting AIDS.
    I didn’t have to do it, I could’ve waited for a good clean ho .
    Did Elena say she was coming by tonight?
    She didn’t show up that night or the next morning. He sprawled in bed, watching the sun come up. I ain’t sick, I don’t feel tired, I like the food, but I got AIDS; everybody in Africa has AIDS, they say this is where it comes from .
    He started praying: “Dear God Almighty, Jesus Christ in Heaven, Our Lord, don’t let me have AIDS, please.”
    Elena came in the afternoon and destroyed all his resolutions. This time she left the condom in place. Strange shit. After she left he sprawled out once again. It felt nice to lay on your ass all day; I could do this indefinitely .
    â€œWe won’t be able to get in next week, but the week after. Stay cool.”
    The Vernons were giving him another week of being by himself, to think. The messenger smiled at the thousand cedis note.
    I’m in a black country, run by black people; everything is black but they have potholes up ’n down the street.
    He couldn’t figure out a lot of things, why people were so poor and lived in shacks. He thought about the streets that he walked. They didn’t have sidewalks; they walked on the side of the road. The English never felt the African needed to be on equal footing, so he made him walk beside the road. Bop didn’t know that. He was ignorant of the history of the country.
    He freaked out on the women; they walked in front of him like mobile shelves, their hips were as well balanced as the things they carried on their heads.
    He got up to get himself a cold, neat gin from the bottle in the fridge.
    â€œHelene likes a little gin in her tea in the evenings.”
    He propped his head up on the brick-hard pillow and sipped his gin.
    Yeahhh, Chester was right, there’s a lot of pussy to be had in Ghana. But I got AIDS. What does it matter?
    By the time he had sipped through his third neat, cold gin, he had convinced himself that he didn’t have AIDS.
    Elena is too fine to have AIDS. She ain’t been fuckin’ no dope fiends, that’s for sure …, ’cause they ain’t got none. She’s real clean; that’s why she went to take that shower.