CUYAHOGA COUNTY COURTHOUSE, CLEVELAND, OHIO

JULY 1972

Diane, Sarah, Carolyn, Mary, Sarah, Emily, Linda, Norwegian baby…

Sam slid through the night on the 98 north toward Lorain. Couldn’t ever stay away from home too long.

Yvonne would be fine. Wouldn’t be the first time he slid away. He always came back bearing gifts. She was ungrateful anyway. He’d given Yvonne the Eastern Star ring the green-eyed girl from the motel pool hall had given him before he killed her. Yvonne turned around and gave it to the white bitch she worked for. No taste. No class.

All that receded behind him as he sped through the twists and turns of the Tennessee mountains before sleeping at a truck stop, scarfing a burger at the neighboring diner just after dawn, and hulking back out the door, not exactly refreshed. You had to sleep with one eye open in that kind of place. These degenerates would steal your car out from under you and put a cock in your mouth for good measure while they were doing it.

Somewhere, two days behind him, the sun was sinking into the Atlantic, and Bessie Mae was likely crying into a jelly jar full of wine. She hated when he left, liked to throw histrionic tantrums that never worked to keep him.

The screen door at the house in Lorain had a trick latch, easy to trip. “Mama!” he bellowed to Fanny, his voice catching. This mama thing was trickier than it was supposed to be.

From the kitchen came a shriek of alarm that turned into joy. Fanny limped out of the kitchen on swollen, diabetic ankles. She and Sam clung to each other and wept. He smelled the lavender water in her hair, the liver and onions on the stove.

“You sit down. Almost never cook since Big ’Un died, but I made liver tonight. Must have had a premonition.”

“You always did have the sight.”

“Don’t talk witchcraft in my home. Talk truth to your mama for once. Why you here, Sam?”

“Seeing my mama. Is that a crime?”

“Anyone can make it one, it’d be you, son.”

She put the liver on the table.

“Sam,” ventured Fanny as he shoveled in bite after bite, barely stopping to breathe. “None of those no-account friends of yours around here this time. And none of them around Paul’s. We got babies around here now to think of.”

“Who popped ’em out this time?”

Fanny swatted Sam’s head. “You just stay away from Broadway and those floozies. They never caused you anything but heartache.”

“I promise, Mama,” said Sam with a grin that never reached his eyes.

Sam slept for nearly a day. It was funny—he either slept ten, twelve, even fourteen hours at a time or barely at all. There was no in-between. He went to church with Mama Sunday morning and hit the stroll that night. What are you supposed to do when there’s an animal trapped in your chest, clawing to get out? Sit and knit?

He swung around the corner, and the lights of Broadway swirled in the metallic paint of his car hood. It was late May 1972, and clothes were falling from the women piece by piece all along the stroll as the lake sucked up the winter winds and returned them north. The stroll was seedier with every passing year, the flow of money from the steel industry grinding to a near halt after the ten-year boom that followed World War II.

Sam rolled down the window just as a delicious-looking little Puerto Rican ho stepped onto the street in front him, her curly black hair ringed with a halo of pink neon. She walked to the car on two thick bow legs, unsteady on her feet, already a few drinks into the night.

Sam swung his car around and pulled up next to Lucy Madero. Might not even be a one-night baby. Needed some cleaning up, but this could be a proper ho.

Sam was leaning toward killing Lucy when she tried to pick his pocket playing pool. He gave her a sharp backhand to the side of the head that dropped her.

“Don’t never steal from me again. You steal for me, you understand?”

She stood, wiped the grit from the bar floor from her knees, and agreed.

Something about how quickly and completely she bent to his will made him like her. They got a fifth of whiskey and went back to her hotel room, where they passed out talking on top of the bedspread.

Less than a week later, Lucy waited uncomfortably on the green-and-yellow-flowered couch in Fanny’s living room, wearing a pair of sunglasses. She grabbed her minidress by the hem and attempted to wiggle it down. Sam climbed the stairs to say goodbye to Mama. The house was quiet that day, the grandkids and great-grandkids giving Fanny a chance to recover after emergency surgery for a blood clot in her leg. Henry Jr., with whom she shared the house now, was working his job at the steel plant.

“Don’t leave me, Sam,” Fanny cried, writhing in pain.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. He lay on the bed beside her, his arms around her thighs, her leg below wrapped in bandages, her foot turning a strange shade of gray. He felt the warmth of her, the woman who had loved him, had changed his diapers and fed him and made sure there were shoes on his feet, even when they’d had holes in them. A wave of tears rose and broke.

“Forgive me, Mama. I disappointed you.”

“I forgive you. You a rolling stone, Sammy, but you’re my good boy and I love you.”

Sam wept into the thighs of her housedress while she stroked his hair until she dropped off to sleep.

An hour later, Sam and Lucy were on the road to Cleveland, twenty dollars in Sam’s pocket, stolen from Mama’s nightstand. They drove a ’68 blue Pontiac Bonneville Sam had traded the Wildcat for. Didn’t like to keep anything for too long. In the glove box was Lucy’s .45. Guns were a magnet for trouble, but she insisted.

She’d been wrong, and they got popped for armed robbery outside Cleveland.

Jean and Lucy were cellies on the fifth floor of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse. Male prisoners were locked up on the floor below. Jean didn’t think much of Lucy, with those shifty eyes and too little fabric covering too much skin. Serve her right when night fell. The stones of the drafty old edifice held a chill that was no match for regulation blankets.

On the night Lucy showed up in her cell, Jean wore a pair of maroon slacks and a shapeless shift over a body she preferred not to think much about. It had carried her through fifty-seven hard years. Even the very first year she’d spent on this planet, they’d called her ugly. When you start out an ugly baby and are then orphaned at a young age, you learn to use your wits. Jean had supported her brothers and sisters all throughout their teenage years in east Arkansas by shoplifting from the Goodwill and reselling the merchandise.

Jean’s real name was Orelia Dorsey. Back in Arkansas, they called her the Black Mare, because she was blue-black and carried a mare’s leg pistol. It was the same pistol she used to shoot a handsy sheriff’s deputy in the ass, landing her on a chain gang when she was twenty.

People liked Jean straight off, even with that unfortunate head of short, matted hair and a scrunched-up face like an apple doll. She exuded a natural warmth, swore like a sailor. No one had ever bought Jean a doll in her life. Maybe that was why she had taken up her hobby of crocheting bottle cozies that looked like dolls. No chance of getting a crochet hook or yarn in her current cell. Supposed she had nothing better to do than talk to the sneaky slut in the next bunk.

Jean told Lucy about how she’d dressed as a man and ridden the rails to St. Louis, where she had stepped up her shoplifting game and began to steal from Dillard’s and other snooty department stores, selling the goods at half price. She couldn’t resist bragging she knew everyone from Tina Turner to Bo Diddley. She’d even met Josephine Baker once.

Jean told Lucy that she’d joined the circus, just for kicks. She tap-danced with a group of Black girls called the Brown Dots, a take-off on the singing group the Ink Spots. When they were in towns where Black people weren’t allowed to perform, the Brown Dots did the laundry. She got tired of it after a while and set up shop in St. Louis before moving to Cleveland, after she caught her jazz musician boyfriend fooling around with some Indian and shot at them both through the screen door with her Smith & Wesson Lemon Squeezer.

“You sure like to shoot people,” said Lucy.

Lucy told Jean she’d been arrested with a guy she called Mr. Sam. They held up a liquor store in Westlake on their way to town from Lorain.

“What the hell were you doing working in a white neighborhood like that?” asked Jean.

“Coincidence,” Lucy replied.

So many cases of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the morning, when dawn lit the sky the palest shade of blue, Jean heard a man’s voice singing “Just My Imagination.”

Both Jean and Lucy sat up in their bunks. They listened at the walls, pressed their faces to the bars to see if they could hear footsteps in the hall, but there was nothing but the creaking and stirring from the other cells. Jean finally noticed a small hole in the floor where the old stones were crumbling. Emerging through the hole was the tip of a funnel. She got down on her knees. It was the end of a newspaper rolled into a cone.

The song was coming from the cell below. “Lucy?” said the cone.

Lucy scuttled over and looked as confused as if the floor itself really had talked.

“He’s under us, you ding-a-ling,” Jean said.

Through the cone, Jean heard chuckling.

“Lucy,” the voice called again, softer this time.

Lucy maneuvered herself down onto the cold floor and put her ear to the cone. Jean cozied up beside her.

“Whatchu ladies wearing up there?”

Lucy giggled and talked to this Mr. Sam nearly all day. Why anyone wanted to talk to that wet-brain hooker was a mystery to Jean. Jean had loved a handful of men and a few women during her five decades plus, but it never seemed to matter how well she cared for them, how much she cooked for them, the cars and clothes she bought or stole. They always left in the end for a moron like this bowlegged kitten, purring into a hole in a jailhouse floor.

A dense loneliness settled over Jean. Why had this man’s voice pressed that bruise? That was a poisoned well, and no good would come of it. Keep your chin up, keep food on the table, keep sharp, and you won’t wind up begging on the corner or worse.

A couple of hours later, a deputy escorted Lucy from the cell. The voice in the floor called to Jean. “Who are you, now?”

She should pretend to be asleep.

“What’s your name? Come on. Come talk to me.”

“Ain’t you all talked out yet?”

“Tell me your name.”

“Name’s Jean.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Came up with it myself.”

“Did you now? Why’d you do that? Did your mama name you something terrible?”

Jean giggled. “Yes she did, bless her soul in heaven. Named me Orelia. Now who can say that? I named myself Jean after the film star Jean Harlow. You know who that is?”

“Ooooooeeee, yes I do. Pretty blond hair, mouth like a heart, neck like a swan. You telling me you look like Jean Harlow and I’m trucking with that bowlegged, beady-eyed bird?”

Jean knew that whatever happened between her and this man from that point on, he would never love her more than he did now—porcelain skin, satin robe, platinum waves. Jean in black and white, larger than life.

“No. My own mother used to say I was ugly as a bucket of homemade sand, and that’s the truth. I’m Jean on the inside.”

“That’s who I’m meeting. I’ll picture you that way.”

Lucy later confided to Jean in a whisper, “They’re pressing charges. No way around it. But they’re not gonna stick me with this.”

“Can’t say I blame you,” said Jean. “We gotta look out for number one, right?”

“I’m not going down for him, no, ma’am. I’m not going down for no man, and this one I barely know.”

“Seems about right,” said Jean.

“Does it?”

“Oh yeah, honey. Don’t go down for no man. Not if you can help yourself.”

Jean was released. So was Lucy. Sam was left to face the armed robbery and assault charges.

When Sam saw Jean sitting on the other side of the visitor’s glass for the first time, he almost jumped. She knew what he saw. She wore a pair of slacks, orthopedic shoes, and a shapeless flowered blouse.

He picked up the phone.

“I’m Jean,” she said.

“You Jean Harlow? You…are a sight for sore eyes.”

Jean laughed, showing wide, Chiclet teeth.

“Listen, I got to tell you something That girl you got is no good. She’s planning to turn state’s evidence on you.”

“Lucy Madero? On me?”

“Of course. Why she out there and you in here? I’m a good woman, Sam. When you get out of here, I’ll wait. I want to take care of you. I can teach you how to take care of yourself.”

“I don’t need no woman to teach me how to take care of nothing.”

“You get your ass popped right and left. You’re doing something wrong. I’m the best booster in all these United States.”

He hesitated.

“I’ll get you a car to get you started. You can drive me around. Can’t hardly see, so I hate to drive.”

“You are a real pip.”

If not for the fact that she could see her own reflection in the bulletproof glass, superimposed over this handsome man’s face, she could almost believe she was Jean Harlow. This man was her future.

Jean wore the one dress she owned and sat demurely in the courtroom during Sam’s trial. Lucy showed up to testify on behalf of the state, but her character came into question. The jury voted to acquit.

Jean lived in a red, doll-sized house in town. There was a knock on the top half of the door she had roughly sawn through the middle in order to act as a makeshift store for her boosted goods. She pushed her face out into the darkness and squinted up to where Sam stood, framed by a light swirl of snowflakes and a gray-white sky, wearing only the summer suit in which he’d been arrested.

She threw the bottom half of the door open and wrapped her arms around his waist.

“Don’t just stand there, woman. I’m freezing to death.”

He looked around the strange living room, barely bigger than a closet, packed floor to ceiling with clothes and shoes and purses. Nice stuff, not Goodwill garbage.

“This my shop right here. I sawed the door so no one can come busting in.”

Jean dug through pile after pile until she found what she was looking for—a tan wool men’s coat with a black fur collar.

“This should do.”

Jean fed and bathed Sam and led him to her bed.

She knew she wasn’t his cup of tea, but she also knew a man had to choose between treacherous whores and smothering mothers. Smothering mothers don’t turn state’s evidence, and treacherous whores can’t cook for shit.

He kissed her wrinkled neck, hugged her. She closed one hand around his cock with a kung fu grip as he closed his eyes and imagined that they were somewhere on a savannah in Africa, surrounded by the night sounds of the jungle. He imagined she was a princess and he went to her hut and sneaked her out. Together they found a grassy knoll next to a creek, where they made love under the stars, and he held her head under the shallow water until she stopped thrashing.

In the real world, he managed to ejaculate and not actually kill her. A minor victory. He’d have to do it again if he wanted to stay.

That wasn’t all. Within days, she was schooling him on the tricks of her shoplifting trade. She didn’t want him getting popped, so he only had to drive. She walked into department stores with an empty garment bag and waltzed out with it full of stolen merchandise. She belly crawled behind a counter and scooped shelves full of jewelry into her bag with the hidden pocket.

The world had pegged him as a petty thief, the commonest of common criminals. What idiot would get arrested every three days for penny-ante possession, assault, or theft and secretly be committing the most heinous of crimes? No one would suspect such a rube to be capable of murder after unsolved murder. These cops and their derision. These snotty cunts and their turned-up noses. This whole damn world that never gave him what he deserved. He was showing them all. He held his secret in his heart. He held his babies in his soul, and they were his, his, his. Each one of them the most delicious piece of candy, except they never dissolved, never left him, never went away.

Jean trotted him around town and showed him off, much like Bessie Mae had when he had first arrived in Miami. She protected him, and for a moment, he allowed her to fold him to her breast and rock him like a baby into the night. It was almost enough. She didn’t even complain when he stopped fucking her because he couldn’t stomach it.

What was it about pussies? He liked thighs just fine, liked faces, liked necks above all. But he wasn’t a pussy man, or a titty man for that matter. He was unapologetic for his absences, reckless with his promises, disastrous with follow-through. She forgave and forgot.

“We should open a restaurant,” he told Jean while amped and riffing one night. “You’re the best cook this side of the Mississippi. We could have a life right near Mama in Coconut Grove.”

“I’ve never seen a coconut!”

Why were all these bitches so interested in coconuts?

In the car, Jean snored in the passenger seat, her head lolling on its hinge. He glanced at her and turned away in disgust. No neck at all to speak of. Lucky for her, he supposed.

Sam breathed deeply and plunged south, south, south. Back to the deep, lush cover of the Everglades, which ate human bodies like air.