COCONUT GROVE, MIAMI, FLORIDA

DECEMBER 1965

Buttons was a cute, fat motherfucker. He nestled in Jackie’s lap as Sam peeled the Lincoln out of the driveway at 2:00 a.m. It was a crapshoot if it would carry them the roughly thirteen hundred miles due south to a place called Coconut Grove in Miami. Last time he was in OSR, the mother who birthed him had written to him out of the blue about this mystical place, edged with white sand beaches and sparkling turquoise ocean.

Sam hadn’t seen Bessie Mae since he was four, but she had learned her only son was in the pen somehow and wrote to say she had the magic beans. Money. She’d gotten a little inheritance and could put him up at the rooming house she managed.

“I wonder what a coconut looks like,” ventured Jackie.

“Like a big, hairy nut.”

Sam and Jackie drove as far as the hills of North Carolina before the transmission gave out. They sold the Lincoln for Greyhound fares, tearfully surrendering Buttons to the ticket seller. Sam consoled Jackie by managing to get it up long enough to fuck her in the back of the bus. Pussy was somehow more palatable in motion.

In January 1966, Sam and Jackie McDowell saw their first coconut. Sam also saw his mother for the first time he could remember. Though it had been twenty-odd years, Bessie Mae knew it was Paul’s eyes in her doorway.

Bessie Mae melted into the arms of the strong son, come back for her at last, with a wide-eyed, yellow heifer standing behind him, shoulders bowed forward. Bessie Mae was a little red thing, just north of forty. She smiled, revealing a gold-streaked grill, missing four lower front teeth.

“My baby!” she screamed loud enough that the neighbors stood up from their dinners and appeared behind screen doors.

Jackie stood on the porch, her straightened hair already starting to frizz in the Miami heat, while Bessie Mae dragged Sam around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, introducing him to the neighbors.

“My son! My boy!”

In 1966, Coconut Grove was a historically Black neighborhood turning bohemian enclave. White, long-haired kids brought the beginnings of gentrification along with their flower petals and shake weed. It was a steamy stew of bars and corner stores, slipshod apartment complexes, and shotgun shacks, all infused with the sulfurous, briny smell of the neighboring bay.

Black and white residents alike knew Bessie Mae. They’d all heard about this mythical son she now offered up like a prize pie at the county fair.

Sam and Jackie moved into the room recently abandoned by a grass dealer. Bessie Mae wanted one thing: a grandchild.

A week passed, and then another and another, and still no sign of a pregnancy. Sam came home one night to discover a pencil-eraser-sized hole in the door of their room. When he confronted Bessie Mae, she admitted to having drilled it but insisted she had the right to monitor what was going on. It was her house after all. Bessie Mae glued her eye to that hole every night, looking to get to the bottom of it.

A few months later, Sam came home late after prowling the local bars and saw Bessie Mae in her doorframe, backlit by the bare light bulb in the corner. Without a word, he dropped his coat on her floor as he followed his mother into her bed. She wrapped him in her arms, and he breathed in the scent he had missed for so long.

“Mama,” he said, rubbing his tears into her neck. It was a word he had previously only used for Fannie. Until then, he’d called Bessie Mae by her Christian name. “Can I call you Mama?”

“You always were a greedy little son of a bitch,” she said. “It’s okay, baby. Mama’s here.”

“You’re my wife and mama and everything else.”

“I know, baby, I know.”

The loose, lazy folds of her skin, its clammy texture, the thick yellowing in the corners of her eyes—all a giveaway of her overtaxed liver—disgusted him. Yet his mouth found her breast and suckled the fruitless nipple. Could have bitten the thin skin clean off if he’d wanted. Hallucinatory visions of devouring her flesh pulsed through his body.

He woke up in the bed he shared with Jackie but didn’t remember getting there.

The next night, Jackie cooked up some gumbo while Sam lurked in the doorway, itching to pick a fight, storm by her, and get the fuck out. His body ached to careen through the nighttime streets, the pool halls and juke joints. His thoughts turned and burned.

One of his Mama’s skinny-legged, foul-mouthed friends, half-drunk on Mad Dog, leaned in the doorway.

“Handsome devil, ain’t you,” she said and gave fat Jackie a look. “That must be a hell of a gumbo.”

Jackie’s shoulders slumped.

Sam upended the gumbo, scalding the front of a screaming Jackie’s thighs. He seized the butcher’s knife off the chopping block, spun, pinned the disrespectful hag to the doorframe, and plunged the blunt end of the knife into her stomach over and over.

He dropped the knife and savored the look on her face. He loved the moment they realized they’d underestimated him.

Aw hell, he had only been kidding around, only used the knife’s handle. Still, she was so terrified it nearly made him come.

Bessie Mae walked in the door as the drama queen blew by hollering for the police. Jackie dabbed her burned legs with a wet towel.

“Mama’s here now, sugar,” Sam said to Jackie. “She’ll finish cleaning up. Pack our stuff.”

Sam knew better than to hang around and let some lying whore call the cops on him again. Jackie’s aunt had been writing from Cleveland, begging her to come home. He’d had a recent craving for the road. He missed the way the world rolled by like movie scenery. The keys to his stepfather’s blue ’64 Bonneville rattled in his pocket. Jackie tugged their two suitcases behind him.

Bessie Mae kneeled at the doorway, clinging to Sam’s knees.

“Don’t leave me again, baby!”

“I’ll come back, Mama.”

He shook her off his leg and headed due north.

Ohio was colder than Miami and bereft of coconuts, but it was home. Jackie’s aunt tearfully greeted the crumpled couple. She fed them and put them to bed on the living room floor. The cops woke them up.

Jackie’s aunt had called them the minute the sun rose over the river.

Cleveland PD arrested and charged Samuel Little with Diane’s rape, but in the end, her statements to the police didn’t match the evidence. She told them he broke in through her window, but the snow on her ledge was undisturbed. Male footprints clearly indicated a walk to the back door and back out again. The charges were dismissed.

Sam knew no one listened to a nigger-loving hooker, which was why she’d lied in the first place. After all, he hadn’t raped the vindictive bitch. He’d only strangled her.

The problem was Jackie’s mother had engineered a divorce in the meantime. In return, though, Sam learned a valuable lesson.

If you choose victims no one believes, you get your car keys handed back to you.