Read Online Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim - Free Book Online Page A

was a series of cast-iron skillets.
    ‘I like those,’ said Bobby, pointing at the wall. ‘They look like giant fish hooks.’
    ‘Ain’t they neat? Alvin put them up for me.’ She sounded proud of her brother.
    He finished his drink and wiped his wet lips with his arm when Vanetta wasn’t looking. ‘Can I see your bedroom, Vanetta?’
    ‘I don’t see why not.’ He stood up and she walked with him down a dark hallway – like his own apartment’s, but shorter – and stopped at an open door.
    It was a nice-sized room with two tall windows facing the back, though the view was blocked by another apartment building. The bed was mahogany, and made up neatly, with an old-fashioned quilted spread and two big pillows stacked up against the headboard. On the bedside table lay an illustrated bible, next to a small lamp. A small chest of drawers sat across from the foot of the bed; on top of it a brass picture frame held a photograph of a handsome man. He was dressed up in a fancy frock coat and a high-collared shirt. His head tilted slightly, almost rakishly, and a dazzling smile was bursting across his face.
    ‘Is that Mr Simms?’ Bobby asked. He knew Simms was Vanetta’s last name.
    ‘No. I don’t keep no pictures of that rat.’ This time ‘rat’ was not meant nicely.
    ‘Was he a rat?’ Bobby asked, pointing at the picture.
    ‘Earl? No.’ Her voice softened in recollection. ‘He was my first husband. My first boyfriend too. Handsomest man I ever saw. And a gentle man.’
    ‘He sure looks young.’
    ‘Too young for me, you mean?’ Vanetta laughed. ‘He must have been thirty-five years old when he had the picture took, but I wasn’t more than sixteen or so. I was only fourteen when we got married.’
    ‘Fourteen?’ Bobby was nonplussed. ‘Where is he now, Vanetta?’
    ‘In heaven, baby. Leastways he deserves to be.’
    ‘Did he get sick?’ He knew about that after all.
    Vanetta hesitated. ‘No. He got killed in an argument on a river boat.’
    He thought at first she’d said ‘accident’ – that seemed to kill people too. But no, she hadn’t said that. ‘An argument? What was he arguing about?’
    ‘It was about cards. It happened in a card game.’
    ‘A game?’ asked Bobby, bewildered.
    ‘Yes, but it wasn’t no game really. That’s how Earl made a living. Playing cards.’ She shook her head and looked sorrowfully at the photograph. ‘He was good to me, Bobby.’ She made it sound a rare occurrence in her life.
    What had made Vanetta, he often wondered in an un-articulated way. Was it Mississippi and a childhood that sounded magical? Certainly most of her stories were set there, including a few he made her repeat over and over. The black widow spider that bit her in the outhouse when she was about Bobby’s age – she wouldn’t say where it had bit her, laughing each time Bobby pressed the point. He winced as he imagined it crawling up from the privy pit below. She’d got so sick, she said, that she almost died.
    And the rascal preacher (he was a rat too, Bobby figured) with an eye for the girls in the congregation. Once when Vanetta had been twelve years old, she had shaken his hand in the line after service and the minister had tickled her palm with his forefinger. When she’d told her daddy, he’d threatened to shoot the minister if he did it again.
    They made other expeditions on the South Side, deep into the ghetto where Bobby’s father would never have taken him. Bobby felt safe with Vanetta, and she never communicated any apprehension to him. Once on 63rd Street, they stopped at a barbecue takeaway, and while they waited for their order of batter-coated shrimp (‘srimps’ said Vanetta, and he had learned by then that it wasn’t his business to tell her how to talk), a younger woman with straightened hair and a scab on her face shouted at Vanetta, ‘What you doin’ wit that white boy in here? He ain’t yours, now is he?’
    Bobby had been astonished; it never occurred