COCONUT GROVE, MIAMI, FLORIDA

MAY 1973

There was Mama and then there was Mama. There was Mama Fanny, who he thought was his mama but was really his grandmama, and then there was the mama who birthed him. The mama whose titties he had sucked so dry they never came back. The mama who he had only really just met.

Now she was gone? Gone, Lord, gone!

“Why, God?” asked Sam as he threw back his head and bellowed at the roof of his 1970 gold Pontiac LeMans with the whitewall tires. Jean had bought it for him with the meager proceeds from Samuel Little’s Southern Kitchen, the restaurant they had started up in Miami in her attempt to go straight.

Jean cleaned out the car every morning. An earring here, a shoe there. He called her a nosy old nag, a sniveling dog. She kept them for herself if there was still a pair.

“Why?” Sam asked again.

Left hand on the wheel, he beat his breast with the right as he sped toward Coconut Grove. Sam let up on the gas, not wanting to get arrested for some pissant traffic violation. Not yet thirty-four years old and already he had a jacket so long it could keep the rain off half of Miami.

His poor mama had been just forty-nine, and the drink had taken her fast. Only weeks before, her eyes had gone yellow and her stomach swelled so that she thought she might be having a miracle baby. She was gone, and now he’d never really know her. She had loved him. Oh, how she’d loved him.

He’d shown up after she was already dead, took one look at her tree-bark corpse lips, and turned tail. Never did like a dead body. Dying he loved. Dead creeped him out.

He pulled up and dropped his forehead to the steering wheel. Neighbors gathered on their porches, waiting for news. Sam trudged up the walk. He expected Jean’s outstretched arms.

Instead, she cocked her hip and dropped a hand to it.

“She’s gone,” said Sam, hands at his sides. “Mama’s gone.”

His shoulders heaved, and the neighbors turned their heads away in respect. No shame to cry when your mama dies. Women as far as two blocks down blotted tears from the corners of their eyes.

“I got to get back to the restaurant when you’re done with this squalling,” said Jean. “Those half-wits can’t cook a proper chicken.”

“Woman. My mama just went to meet Jesus. You’re talking about chicken?”

“Did you crawl back up in that womb one last time?” asked Jean. “Everyone knows you were fucking her instead of me anyway.”

Since the neighbors had averted their eyes to give a crying man some privacy, no one saw Sam grab Jean by the collar. She was on her back in the middle of the street before anyone thought to grab a shotgun. Sam kneeled above Jean’s prone body. Their German shepherd, Buster, broke through the screen door and ran around them in circles, barking. The neighbors pressed to the edges of their porches.

Sam raised one powerful fist and wordlessly brought it down onto Jean’s face and chest again and again. He punched her square in the tits, dead in the sternum, cracked a rib with two knuckles alone.

He remembered how they’d gone absolutely wild for the beach, running from the car while it was practically still moving and gathering every coconut she could fit in her arms, like a child gathering daffodils.

He softened and switched from a closed fist to an open hand, slapping her face back and forth until she was good and bloodied.

“Sam!”

Sam looked up straight into a double barrel, his neighbor behind it.

“Back away, Sam. I don’t want to shoot you, but I’m not going to let you kill Jean.”

The pavement below him swam, like heat waves rising from Georgia asphalt in summer. He looked down and saw an immobile pile of bloody laundry beneath him.

“You take care of my dog?”

“I got Buster. Get the fuck out of here.”

Sam loped toward the Pontiac. The neighbor’s wife ran to Jean’s side.

“Why you gotta do this?” she cried, cradling Jean’s head. “What demon lives in you? You ain’t right.”

Sam took one step toward the woman, and the man racked the shotgun. “Start driving. Keep going.”

Diane, Sarah, Carolyn, Mary, Sarah, Emily, Linda, Norwegian baby, Air Force baby, Marianne, Maryland baby, Prince George baby, Cuban baby…

No one could take the road from him. Every mile erased the mile before it, unlimited possibility. He wondered if he had killed Jean, but the thought left his mind as quickly as it entered. Probably not. Tough old bird.

Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana…

He’d taken the money from the smock pockets on Jean’s blouse. It would get him through a couple of days if he slept in the car. He’d boost a few steaks in Mobile, maybe see Memphis. Mobile to Memphis, how ’bout that? Just like that white boy with a cold sang about on the radio.

Always wanted to see Biloxi. New Orleans…

His thoughts trailed behind the Pontiac, littering the freeway. Ideas and memories and plans whirled into the night sky, spiraled down the drains of truck stop showers.

The last time he’d left, Jean had pitched a hissy with a tail on it, accusing him of flirting with the lunch crowd of secretaries at their restaurant. He’d upended the deep fryer, a tidal wave of boiling grease pouring across the floor. That time, he’d headed to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of men’s suits, a round-trip ticket, and $200 from the register in his pocket. Thought maybe the island life would be paradise. Maybe he’d stay forever.

Inside of two weeks, he’d sold every suit plus the one on his back and couldn’t find shit for a stroll. What was he gonna do? Dress a palm tree in a little black dress, put some lipstick on it, and call it a ho?

He’d returned to Samuel Little’s Southern Kitchen to find Jean hunched over an industrial-sized steel pot. Can’t expect a man to take talk like that lying down. Best lady he ever met, except for Mama. Even if she could piss off the pope with the mouth on her.

This time, Sam arrived in a city decorated like a damn wedding cake, crawling with drunks leaking dollar bills onto the piss-soaked cobblestones of Bourbon Street.

A gypsy who looked more like a Mexican read his palm in front of a cathedral. She predicted long life, trouble with the ladies, the soul of an artist. He had a haint on his tail, and for another five dollars, she could do some hocus-pocus and shoo it away. He didn’t give her the extra fiver or even the fiver he’d offered to begin with. Something told the woman not to signal her cousins on the next corner. Let this one go—far and fast.

You didn’t need the sight to know that.