One Safe Place Read online

  Her response is soft and guiding, non-judgmental

  She is essential to my existence

  My soul is in emotional poverty without her

  Her faith is challenged at times

  Man is always trying to play God

  I need her and God to save me

  She tells me, I’m all she needs and wants

  We are in this world together as one

  The train rolled back into Seattle. Tylowe and Psalms agreed to meet in a day or two to devise a plan.

  Meeah, Tylowe’s wife—the ex-wife of Elliot Piste—picked them up at the train station. They dropped Psalms off at his property. Tylowe had another issue. She asked about the small bandage on his hand, and he blew it off as nothing, no big deal. He had other problems, yet their marriage—was it in trouble? Problems and their priority was a problem in itself.

  CHAPTER 2

  Damaged Goods

  Psalms Black

  It’s morning, and her nipple has been between my lips since first light. I suckle as I tread back and forth from dreams to waking with sweeping thoughts moving in angles of time. I often solve problems in my dreams—letting dilemmas drift like beach wood floating out at high tide and then settling on the shore at low tide. Like each wave, volumes of thoughts flood my mind and the washout leaves me with objectives and schemes.

  I am safe with her. I don’t know if it’s manly or not to suck on her breasts as if I’m four months old and not have a sexual thought, but I feel safe. Nothing else matters when I’m this close to her, even though she gives me worry. The world could explode, but this room would survive with her firm, gumdrop nipple between my tongue and the top of my mouth. I drink her skin ever so gently, but as if I’m sucking survival.

  I dream, hoping the world won’t shatter around me. A fractured humanity surrounds us. A man walked into a Seattle restaurant, and for no reason, gunned down ordinary folks who were enjoying a meal. A mother taught her mentally troubled son to shoot guns of mass destruction, and then he turned the guns on her and twenty-six other people. For every one of us, it wouldn’t take much more than a grain of sand from the universe to send any one of us to an end. A negative, reactive, evil heart can seemingly end the world in a heartbeat.

  What does all that mean? I don’t know. I dabbled in music and played sports in college against the best to get a higher degree of education in the ABCs. The ABCs can never teach us to stop the evil of the XYZs. Mainly what I can do and what I do is fix people’s problems. By nature I’m a soldier—a bodyguard—who at one time signed my life over to my country to die for someone I was to protect for my daily bread—bread as in my money. I am an ex-Secret Service agent.

  For sure, I’m not one to analyze myself for what I do. I let others question the sanity of my reality; although, how someone might go about probing into me, they should tread lightly.

  I’ve been in a semi-fetal position most of the night, glued to her sweet potato-colored skin, feeling safe. She is my soul mate, without being my lover.

  My lips stay connected to the solace of her breasts as I peer over at her slightly cleft chin. When she smiles, her cleft goes deeper; when she’s sad, it can grow wider. Her full bottom lip hangs ever so slightly enticing me to suck on her nipple harder.

  The window is open a bit, and the smell of the Puget Sound’s ocean water floats in. The bottom edge of the curtain rumples in the breeze. The filtered brightness is making me squint, but I still see dust particles floating in the air. I hear a loud motorcycle; it’s most likely a youngster. The revs are too high for early morning, at least before it’s time to show off while cruising around Alki Beach. A moment later, another motorcycle goes the other way; whoever that is, they are proud of their Harley—the low rumble is smooth. Listening is survival.

  A ferry horn blows in the distance. She pulls her nipple out of my mouth abruptly, and sits up and swings her feet out of bed.

  “PB, you want some grits? I have some turkey sausage.”

  I grunt. She understands my stares, grunts, and sighs although our times together have always been limited. It’s been months since I last lay down next to her. A troubled woman since she was birthed in to a family of dysfunction, it seems she loves trouble in an illogical sense. It seemed that she’d been self-serving most of her life, for her own survival. Now it seems she is helping to serve others who have troubles. I always worry about Evita. She is never too far from trouble. I have worried about her since we were kids. I’ve been her savior—many times. When those times occur, I wonder if she lives close to the edge just so I can save her. Then again, that’s what my psychological evaluation from the United States Armed Forces said. I have a rescuer syndrome to a certain degree—and that’s good, if you are paid to fight, kill, or protect.

  My friend Mintfurd has said, in street terms, I have a Captain-Save-A-Hoe compulsion. He would be one of the few men living to say such a thing, because I trust him, and know what he really means.

  I have saved Evita more times than I can remember. She is not the only one I have saved or rescued, but for her to live, I would give my life. It’s a love thing that I have no words to explain. It’s not that she has ever done one damn thing for me. That brings into question, is love about what someone has done, or is it just birthed into our emotions like a flicked-on light switch? Or maybe a light with dimmer control?

  Evita is strangely beautiful. Her brown skin turns copper when she tans. She is not pretty, but strangely beautiful. Most men won’t turn their head on a first look, but if she stares at you, you see it. You almost don’t want her to smile, not because her teeth are bad, but because her lips are spread wide and full; you get lost in them. Her eyes are narrowly close but are opal dark, and round. She is the reflection of a black woman, showing a mix of Native American complexion on her skin. Her hair—au naturel black. I can comb my thick fingers through it and not get tangled. It goes down to her middle back. When it’s wet, her hair takes on a curly perm appearance. It looks like nothing could go through her hair, not even a bullet. Like me, a blended mix of bloodlines highlights her features.

  Her family, like my black grandfather and many Northwest long-timers, came back to the States after World War II, or the Korean War, and stayed in the Northwest. They thought, why in the hell enlist in the Army to get away from the Jim Crow South, then taste freedom, and then go back down South? No. Hell no!

  Servicemen returned to the States by planes and big ships after surviving on foreign soil and finished serving their enlisted time on military bases near the Seattle-Tacoma area. Those men heard, “Hey, boy!” less often, and found work for decent wages instead of in cotton fields. They found jobs in steel mills and shipyards, railroad yards, and maintenance-type jobs at the Boeing Airplane Company, instead of the back-breaking, disrespectful, sharecropping jobs of the South.

  Before the 1960s, in the rural South, many household still had wood stoves, well water, the life-threatening, overtly corrupt police, and bigoted justice systems. Former soldiers took their G.I. Bill money and bought nice houses in neighborhoods that had indoor plumbing for the first time in their lives. They could sit on a toilet inside their own home, and then take a hot bath in that same room: no more outhouses. Some houses in the Northwest had two inside toilets.

  Coming home after World War II and later, the Korean War, to big cities like Seattle and Tacoma and their surrounding areas, black men and women could cook on gas or electric stoves and had heat coming through vents or hot water radiators. Former soldiers could bring their families up from the South. The migration of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, cousins, and girlfriends to Seattle and Tacoma is how many blacks came to live in the Northwest.

  In the Northwest, Negro children went to schools with other kids who did not look like them. They sat next to them; they played sports and music with other races and religions, and learned more in the schools. Some went to local colleges or trade schools. The police are corrupt anywhere, but were at least in the Northwest,
they were not hunting you down with white hoods.

  Most thought, “Why should I go back down South and deal white-hooded white men, threats of lynching, and having to cross the street when a white woman walked on the same side of the street?” Black men found that they could stay on the same side of the street; they could even party, date, or marry any woman, whether Asian, Native American or even white…for the most part. Racism had, and has, its cancerous veins. Southern blacks still found them- selves not equal, but the whites in the Northwest had better hearts or less violent attitudes than what people of color had dealt with down South.

  My grandfather’s vintage stereo with a high-end tube amplifier and turntable, and all of its speakers encased in beautiful walnut is in the living room. I hear pops and clicks from the record playing along with bongos, and a mesmerizing organ driving thick bass, horns, and strings. Curtis Mayfield’s voice enters and sings of a runaway child.

  Evita, who had taken her dark nipple away from my lips, peeks in the room. “Is that too loud for you?”

  “Turn it up,” I tell her, as my first word of the day. She knows that’s one of my favorite LPs, Superfly by Curtis Mayfield.

  She sways to the music as her always covered, very African American ass comes to the nightstand and removes an empty bottle of Bootlegger’s Black Beer. I watch her upside-down question-mark ass walk out of the room. Her hips slam dust particles with each step she takes.

  I’ve known Evita for thirty-plus years. We have slept in the same bed. I have smelled her scent. I have held her close. I have never seen between her thighs. I have not tried. She said no, and that’s the way it’s been.

  As a teenager, she was my first sexual experience. Evita let me watch her fingers move under her panties, but she didn’t remove them. It made me go crazy, and I stroked myself so hard I thought I might yank my skin off. At some point her voice wheezed as her body jerked. She turned over onto her stomach and pulled her panties down just far enough to expose her bubble butt. Seeing the long crease between her ass cheeks made me animalistic. I straddled her ass, and humped her and stroked my hardness. She knew how to seductively move her ass as if she was experienced. She was. She made it clear; I could not put my hardness in her pussy. She kept her hand cupped over her pussy.

  She did offer her asshole. Evita took her other hand and spread her ass for me to see, and I thought about it, but my lack of experience had me confused about what to do. All I knew to do for sure was to masturbate, and so I did, and came for my first time. I groaned to the depths of one of the volcanic mountains nearby while my cum ran down the crease of her ass, and disappeared under her cupped hand covering her pussy.

  That happened after a time I had rescued her. I guess she was rewarding me.

  Every once in a while we crawl in the same bed, like now, and act like an old couple whose sex life is over. But we hold each other as if we had the best orgasms a man and woman have ever experienced.

  I have never tasted her sweetness. She says it will ruin what we have. I have never understood that, but you don’t pressure someone you love…right? After so many years, I never even think about sex with her.

  We don’t have a sad affair concerning us never having had sex; as a matter of fact, she has recited the rap part of Prince’s “Lady Cab Driver” many times:

  “This is for the women, so beautifully complex

  This one’s for love without sex.”

  I always laugh, and think of how I’ve had sex with many other women, and have sex right now with only one, but Evita and I make love in a way that will always be reserved for her, a safe place. She is the one for love with no sex, and I have another for love and sex.

  Damaged goods. In her early twenties, she had a boyfriend, a man much older than her. She wanted out of the relationship; he beat her and cut her from her skin on down to her soul. He broke a wine bottle, sliced her all the way through, and inserted lifelong wickedness into her womanly parts. With the boyfriend passed out in a drunken stupor, and her life slipping away with each pulse of blood pumping out her body, she found the strength to call me. I just happened to be home on a summer college break.

  I arrived to find a dying Evita, brave in spirit, but with an almost lifeless body. Before I arrived, all she could do was wrap her lower body in sheets. The sheets were so bloody, I wanted to remove them and put other clean towels and sheets around her, but she begged me not to. Her boyfriend had mutilated her to the point that she’d rather die than for me to see what he had done.

  I got her to the hospital, and now many years later she is here, living in one of my houses. He sliced one of her breasts, but she made the best of the disfigurement. She had vines tattooed over the long scar, with hearts hanging as the fruit, and blossoming flowers and multicolored flower buds waiting to bloom attached to the vines. One wilting, unopened black rose, with teardrops falling, is tattooed over a scar near her navel. As far as I can tell, the teardrops keep flowing past her waistline; no telling how far the teardrops fall. She lives, but a lot of her heart died years ago.

  Wilted. The ex-boyfriend, God rest his soul. I’m sure I sent him to go live with Satan. His ass is burning now and forever more for killing a part of Evita’s soul. One may ask, “Doesn’t that make you judge and jury?” I believe in justice, but not a justice system set forth in laws put in place by so-called impartial men. Judges, lawyers, and the police have motives different from mine. The money they make from the jobs they create from crime is not my motivation. Real justice—my justice—is pure from any form of monetary gain. Call me an executioner, and I know what that is.

  I’m a former bullet catcher who’s fortunate that I never had to catch one. Nowadays, I catch pain for others and fix troubles for the intended targets. Sometimes trouble remains, but the bull’s-eye is eliminated. Sometimes my justice is purely avenging, and sometimes it’s to prevent me from avenging on a level that only God and the devil understand.

  I stare at the light coming through the curtain. I can’t see anything clearly, but I know what’s out there. I smell the ocean, and hear waves and seagoing vessels on Puget Sound. From the front of the house here on Alki Beach, the islands are to the west and downtown Seattle is to the east. I know what is out there. People making the world go around; some wanting to spin in the wrong direction.

  I know a beautiful woman who is partly dead inside. I know she is spinning like a warped record, and sometimes the needle has to be moved manually. Then she sings:

  “This is for the women, so beautifully complex

  This one’s for love without sex”

  And for me, I love her no matter what.

  Evita calls me by my nickname, PB, for Purple Black. I’m a light- brown-skinned man, the shade of honey spread thin over white bread. Under my right eye, I have a small birth mark. It resembles a grape stain, and it’s a dark purple, wine color. As a teenager, a few started calling me Purple Black, aka PB. My birth name is Psalms Black.

  I’m watching Evita as she comes back and forth into the room while she makes my breakfast.

  “PB, I may go to Atlanta next week, to hang out with Esperanza,” she says to me. Her expression is asking me to not ask or say anything. I didn’t plan on saying anything—she is free to do what she wants to do. That look was really more about her wanting me to say something.

  Evita’s slippers swish-swish away, and my eyes stay glued to her ass as Curtis Mayfield sings, “Give Me Your Love.” Being close to her is confusing at times to my sense of responsibility, but at least with her somewhere near me, I know she’s in one safe place.

  CHAPTER 3

  Drifting in Place

  Along Lake Washington, bits of sunrise crept around the edges of the curtains into the Dandridge house. Meeah and Tylowe lived on Lake Washington, a body of water that was twenty-two miles long in the middle of urban Seattle and surrounded several other smaller, suburban cities.

  Meeah reached for a remote control. Holding a button down, the grand master bedroom’s mo
torized curtains lifted by rolling up. Floor-to-ceiling windows with a 170-degree view of the lake entered with the eastern sunrise. The brightness reflected off the serene lake and the hardwood floors.

  Tylowe opened his eyes to the view of him and Meeah. A mirror above the bed reflected him covered up, but his wife’s beautifully naked body lay on top of the covers. For the beauty he viewed, he put another man in prison and gained the legal and moral rights to love her. She was as beautiful as the day he first crossed paths with her ten years ago, on the end of an open-air pier in Vancouver, B.C. Now her brown, leaf-colored skin had gained some freckles—angel kisses on the bridge of her nose and under her eyes. The freckles highlighted Meeah’s natural beauty, and Tylowe loved kissing her face.

  A few added pounds had spread throughout her body, but that also increased her sexiness in his eyes. Ten years ago, she had long, straight hair, but now she had gone natural. If one looked, a few strands of white hair could be found in her mane, but not many. On most nights, Tylowe buried his face into her hair as the two spooned and slept. The softness and scent of the Jamaican oils acted as a sleeping agent to sweet dreams.

  The mirror reflected her naked body stirring. Her fingers roamed her husband’s chest, moved up to his face, and traced his handsome features. His eyes stayed pinned to the mirrored reflection above, enamored with her curves and how her body movements easily persuaded his heart to push blood faster throughout his body. Her ass teasingly swayed and rose, then slowly humped the air. One hand reached back and squeezed her ass for him to see in the mirror above. Her fingernails dug in, then she provocatively released and moved her hand underneath herself. She arched her back even more, and slapped her pussy lips. She angled herself knowing he could see. Her finger slid inside her wetness, and played for him to see that it felt good. She gasped and lowered her ass. Meeah moved closer to her husband and placed her head on his chest, and placed that wet finger under his nose. He kept staring at her body in the mirror, and he took in her scent. Blood moved throughout his body faster.