His Third Wife Read online

  “Brothers or no brothers, he’s going to prison. Intent to distribute,” Emmit pointed out. “And you know that. Makes me wonder why you’re even asking.”

  “We went to school together. He’s a good man.”

  “A good man who likes white girls and weed,” Emmit laughed. “Now how’s a Rastafarian going to get pulled over doing ninety-three in a BMW with a topless white girl in the passenger’s seat and a trunk full of pot? If the court don’t kill him, those nappy-headed Rasta women will.”

  Jamison nodded along with Emmit’s equation for the perfect storm. But, really, the more he’d thought about it, the storm just seemed a little too perfect. Ras had been his roommate at Morehouse for one year. He knew the man was harmless.

  “You stay away from that, son. You’ve got enough heat on you right now. Last thing you need is a white girl with her little pink titties out in the front seat of your car.”

  Jamison nodded again. What he wouldn’t tell Emmit—or rather thought he couldn’t tell him—was that just a week before Ras got caught doing ninety-three on 85N, his old roommate had agreed to close a major deal Jamison had been hoping to pull off with the starting five players of the Atlanta Hawks. Before the last mayor shut down the city’s midnight basketball program, Ras had been the director, and for years he’d been talking about getting the NBA players together to sponsor his program. Once the program had been shut down, Ras had continued to finesse the relationships, and when Jamison got into office, he’d shown up at Jamison’s door with his dreadlocks down to his waist and told the new mayor of his plan—the starting five players had committed to donating a million dollars per year each to a scholarship fund for as long as they were contracted with the Hawks. The kick was that the scholarships would pay full college tuition, room, and board for college-bound black males from Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods. When news of Ras’s arrest got out, the players got skittish about the deal, considering their squeaky-clean NBA images. Jamison hadn’t been able to connect with any of them since.

  “That may have been your boy way back when,” Emmit started, leaning into Jamison, “but this is me telling you to stand back. Don’t go around here asking questions about that man.”

  “But he just had weed—”

  “Eleven pounds. Listen to me, son,” Emmit said. “Don’t make that your cross to bear. Not because he’s your old roommate—who gives a shit about that? And not because he’s some drugged-up community organizer—more will come along. Let it go. That’s for your own good.” Emmit winked and clicked back on his heels. “Now, I believe my brothers are waiting on me at the Rainforest. You coming along?”

  “Yeah, I’ll stop by. Just give me a second,” Jamison said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Jamison went to say hello and good-bye to a few more familiar faces, but through each of those conversations his mind was still on Ras and Emmit’s advice to stand down for his “own good.” He hadn’t even mentioned to Emmit that he’d intended to do anything, but here the old brother was giving him such solid directives. That wasn’t uncommon coming from Emmit’s ilk. They were always doling out advice, and since Jamison had started out on his campaign trail they’d been whispering in his ear what he could and couldn’t do. And Jamison was no fool. He knew he had to listen most times. Because those men talking to him were listening to someone else. But something about the situation with Ras was picking at his gut. So, with this on his mind, Jamison went along smiling and shaking more hands. He spoke to the chapter president about making an appearance at the fraternity’s annual blood drive and promised to donate a thousand dollars in new furniture for a home they were building for a single father of three who’d lost his house to a fire that had claimed his wife and youngest child. After he had finally made a horseshoe shape through the crowd and had even stopped to take a few pictures with some of the younger brothers, he was heading to his car when he felt a light tap on his shoulder. He thought it was Emmit reminding him about the Rainforest and turned quickly to tell him that he was on his way right behind him, but it was one of the younger brothers he’d just taken a picture with inside the community center.

  “I’m ssss-sorry to disturb you, Brother Taylor—I-I-I mean Mayor Taylor,” he said nervously. Jamison noted that he had a slight stutter because he paused between many of his words to refocus his tongue.

  “Brother, it’s fine,” Jamison allowed, smiling.

  The man stood for a second and just looked Jamison over the way he always thought white people tended to do whenever he traveled to speak in areas outside of the city.

  Jamison held his hand out to remind the man to introduce himself.

  “Oh,” he said excitedly, taking Jamison’s hand. “I’m Keet Neales . . . Brother Keet Neales.”

  “Great to meet you, brother.”

  “I wanted—wanted to thank you for taking that picture with me.”

  “It’s always an honor.”

  “And I wanted to just speak to you f-f-for a second. I’m a police officer,” Keet revealed.

  “Okay.” This was no news to Jamison. Keet had been chatting with a group of five fellow officers who’d invited Jamison to join their mentoring program session before the next meeting.

  “I’ve been on the force for a few years and I’m—I’m looking to get out.” There was a pause. “I want to—want to go into politics.”

  Both Jamison and Keet seemed relieved that Keet had gotten this all out. The tension between his tongue and nerves had his doughy complexion turning a light rose from forehead to chin.

  “That’s great. We could always use a few more of our own out there,” Jamison said in his public, media-friendly voice. Really, at that point, his words meant nothing. It was just about pleasantries. His mind was still on Ras. And most every day someone was cornering him to tell him about his or her new venture into politics. It was like writing a book—everyone wanted to do it and had the greatest ideas, but when it came time for the follow-through and people realized they’d have to roll up their nice shirts and get their hands bloody just to make an outline for the thing, they bowed out before they finished the first try.

  “Really? You think so?” Keet was beaming like a little boy. His color returned. His eyes drank Jamison in.

  “Sure. The more the merrier.” Jamison patted Keet on the back the way the older brothers had done to him. It signified that the conversation was over. He smiled and started toward his car again.

  After three steps, he heard, “So—so, can I come work for you, Mayor Taylor?”

  Jamison didn’t stop. “Get your resume to my assistant. Let him know you’re my frat brother.”

  Keet watched Jamison walk all the way to his car before turning back to return to the community center.

  In 1976, Brother Renaldo Lex showed up at his three-bedroom bungalow in East Atlanta with a five foot papier-mâché palm tree one of the students in his art class had made as a final project. His girlfriend, Pearl, with whom he’d had three children but had never married, stood out in the driveway looking confused as he pulled the palm tree out of the back of his van. Pearl didn’t say anything though. Renaldo was a failed painter who’d missed out on so many opportunities to do what he’d loved; questioning him about just anything threatened to send him into a drunken rage. Still, Renaldo was a reasonable man and the house was actually Pearl’s so he told her what the tree was for on his way into the house. “Building me a bar in the basement. A place where my frat brothers can come and drink.” Pearl just smiled at the man she loved, and like most women in love with men like Renaldo, she secretly hoped his plan failed fast enough so that no one got hurt or killed—or hurt and then killed.

  When Renaldo set the ugly palm tree in the middle of the floor in the unfinished basement, “Rainforest” was the first word that came to mind, so from there everything else he brought to go into what Pearl was calling his “little lair” had to match that “theme”: the life-sized orangutan from a local arcade that had closed down, str
inged lights decorated with miniature plastic bananas, dingy mosquito nets from the Salvation Army, and so on. Soon, lumpy green couches, hard brown chairs, and tables edged a tacky tiki bar that had WELCOME TO THE RAINFOREST etched into a wooden plate on the front of its overhead glass holder.

  Thirty-six years later and no one was hurt or killed and Renaldo’s old basement bar was still serving drinks to frat brothers. It was open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. No one worked there, but everyone got served, the bar was always stocked, and the little money the Rainforest made paid off Pearl’s mortgage ten years before Renaldo died of a massive heart attack in his classroom, so she was still a happy woman.

  While Jamison was sure the old dust that lined almost every surface in the Rainforest had been responsible for the little rash he’d gotten on his neck just three hours after he’d pledged and been invited to the Rainforest as a rite of passage, he still frequented the hideaway to reminisce about some romp he’d been pressured into there that had proved to him that he was still a boy or else make fun of its dated décor that hadn’t changed one bit since 1976. The old joke was that the only thing that changed at the Rainforest was “the bottles and the brothers—due to those who’d passed on like Renaldo (and may God—who is frat—bless his soul).”

  Emmit and Scoot were at the tiki bar in the Rainforest plenty drunk when Jamison walked in. They pointed at him and laughed, hollering something purely nasty that Jamison dared not commit to memory. As always following a chapter meeting, the bar was packed with brothers—well, as packed as a bar could be that was housed in the basement of a three-bedroom bungalow in East Atlanta. There were even a few women peppered here and there between brothers and on laps. No wives or girlfriends or longtime sweethearts or sorority sisters to worry about. Just women who knew what they were there for and abided to such planned and unplanned activities as they came.

  One woman met Jamison midway through his entry with a beer in her hand.

  “I heard you liked Golden Monkey,” she said, her arm outstretched. She was much shorter than Jamison. Had a petite, hard body and a face that made him wonder how beautiful her mother must be. Soft lips. Colored pink.

  Jamison took the beer and kissed the woman on the cheek.

  She walked away. She’d come back to say hello later.

  “You made it, young buck,” Scoot said, watching Jamison as he took a seat on a stool at the bar beside the one that was no doubt struggling to support Scoot’s jolly girth. “Thought you were going to stand us old ladies up.”

  “Never that. You two are my favorite sweethearts.” Jamison clanked his beer against Scoot and Emmit’s glasses of Jack Daniel’s.

  As usual, time was easy but ferocious in the dank, harshly decorated basement. There was an endless stream of jokes and laughter. Toasts. Women taking shots off of one another. Old stories. Card games. Brothers being carried out and in. And then the men were all four hours older. And then five. Six.

  Jamison was on his third Golden Monkey. He knew better than to move off of his stool. The petite girl had returned and was standing beside him, laughing at Scoot’s old-timer “Shine and the Titanic” jokes and rubbing Jamison’s back like they’d known each other for a long time or not at all.

  Emmit had gone outside to talk with another brother he’d been in business with for a while. They were silent owners of a massage parlor on Piedmont in Buckhead. It was crewed by dozens of non-English-speaking Vietnamese women who might be underage but were definitely illegal. The place catered to a stable list of regulars—cops and lawyers, businessmen who claimed to visit the Lotus Health Club because they liked the authentic Vietnamese food and cheap drinks. Emmit, who’d served in the Vietnam War for two weeks before it ended in 1975, had absolutely no visible ties to the parlor. According to business and tax records, the sole proprietor was a Vietnamese woman named Lang. Her daughter, Natalie, had finished at Spelman two years before Jamison. She was half black and had tiny elf-like ears like Emmit’s, but she’d never met him.

  “So, what’s going on at de mayor’s office,” Scoot asked after he’d finished telling his jokes.

  “Lots of paperwork and baby kissing,” Jamison said.

  “Ass kissing, too. I’m sure of it.”

  “Now that’s always on the menu.”

  “I was playing golf with Governor Cade the other morning and he seemed pretty entertained by your recent headlines.” Scoot chuckled.

  “I’m sure he was,” Jamison said, shaking his head disapprovingly. Governor Cade was a white-haired Republican who openly longed for the old South that had been dying since he was a boy. Not that he wanted segregation and for the world to be unkind to those who hadn’t been lucky enough to be born in his world, white, and male, but he dreamed of a place where things could be less complicated, and there were clear lines he understood and he could move as he wished. Simple. Every man was responsible for his family. And how he fed them was his own making. He was one of the suburban business types who avoided “colorful” Atlanta and only mixed crowds when a deal was at stake. Since Jamison had been in office, he’d only seen the governor at press conferences and sometimes at events where they’d been forced to take pictures together. Jamison noticed that Cade hardly spoke to younger black men and mostly sent messages to him through the likes of Emmit and Scoot. “Don’t take it too hard, young man,” Scoot said. “We all get caught with our dicks in the sucker sometimes. You just have to get a better strategy next go round.”

  When Emmit walked back into the bar, he was following behind a woman in blue shorts, black fishnet tights, and stylish wire-rimmed glasses. Her hair was long and blond and messy. She kissed the woman beside Jamison on the lips and ordered a drink for Emmit.

  Scoot and Emmit and half the other brothers their age in the bar watched the girl’s soft buttocks move around in her shorts as she purposefully leaned over the bar. The woman beside Jamison stopped rubbing his back and started rubbing hers.

  Scoot kept on joking like nothing was happening, but Jamison reminded himself that he’d need to leave soon. There was a time in any night like this in a place like that when men like Jamison had to be gone. The men were seven hours older, and the beer and liquor was setting in. Night was outside. Things could go any way from there. And though not one soul had any intention of remembering that Jamison was there, the potential for a snitch in the sacred space grew as he became more powerful.

  He looked at the women. They were girls. If men ever thought like that, Jamison might discern that they were a little more than half his age. Just young enough to be Emmit’s granddaughters. They were laughing.

  “You okay, baby?” the petite girl named Iesha asked Jamison. “You want some more beer?”

  She almost fell into Jamison, but Scoot caught her and all of her attention transferred to him then.

  “He don’t want no beer, girl. If you came here thinking you’re just going to be serving up beer all night, you’re mistaken,” Scoot pointed out, but his voice was more playful than commanding.

  The girl’s answer wasn’t: “I came here for more than that.”

  It seemed everyone in the bar heard this affirmation, and there was this invisible ear turning.

  The girl in the fishnets was all the way up on Emmit’s lap in the chair, whispering something in his ear. The way his muscled, gray-haired arms were wrapped around her waist made her look like a child about to be carried upstairs to bed. But then there were hands firmly placed on her butt.

  Jamison turned to listen in on Iesha making promises to Scoot. He wondered if his beer had worn off yet. He tried to step down from the stool and realized it hadn’t. It was 2 AM. Too late to drive home with even a little bit of alcohol in his system. No way any cop would miss that chance to get his name in the papers. He thought of calling Val to come and get him. Leaf. He sat up a little more and laughed at something stupid Scoot was saying to Iesha: “You can bounce up and down on my stomach for thirty minutes until this Viagra
sets in.”

  Jamison glanced over at Emmit to avoid seeing Scoot pull his infamous bottle of Viagra from his shirt pocket. Awaiting his spectatorship was another vision he’d seen previously but was never quite prepared for—Emmit’s whole tongue was caged in the mouth of the girl on his lap. She was gyrating over him to some song no one else heard, but they all, men and women, watched like they were privy to her tune. The bartender, a younger brother who volunteered at the Rainforest to get to know the older brothers, cleared a mess of empty glasses from behind Emmit as the girl pushed him back into the bar.

  Jamison tried again to busy himself. He pulled out his phone and looked for something he wasn’t really seeking. His last text message had been received at 10 PM. It was from Kerry: Are you coming to Tyrian’s golf tee on Saturday morning? He keeps asking me about it.

  Jamison heard the other brothers in the bar cheering. He responded yes to Kerry’s message. He looked at her name for a few seconds. Looked at the talk button. Heard the cheering. Saw the girl’s boots on the bar. He remembered Kerry’s hair. How long it had been when they met. She’d always worn it out, too. He thought to press talk but knew it was the beer pushing him on. Then the phone rattled in his hand. It was a message from Kerry: You respond five hours later at 3 a.m.? Really? WTH?

  The cheering stopped. Iesha had pulled the blonde off of Emmit, and the two girls, who Jamison had seen take on drink after drink, were stumbling to the back of the bar area, where there were two bedrooms and a bathroom.

  “Young girls will kill you for sure,” Emmit said, elbowing Scoot.

  “Nah, they won’t kill you until they get that money out of you,” Scoot said. He got up and tucked his shirt into his pants in a way that was meant to make him look dignified. He grabbed another drink off the bar and gave a military salute to his comrades before waddling toward the back of the bar area.

  Emmit made the sound of a plane taking off and moved his stool over closer to Jamison’s. He was drunker than Jamison had ever seen him. His eyes were red and his breathing was so heavy his head tilted back and forward with each breath.