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of me naked and hard. I stared at it and cringed away. It was terrifying—horselike—monstrous—deformed—impossible!
    He stooped down and sank his teeth into my chest. I screamed and rolled across the bed.
    He pressed himself against me and whispered, “I’m going to croak you, sissy, if you holler again. Now git on your knees and break down like a double-barreled shotgun.”
    I blubbered, “Christ! Jesus! Please, Lovell, don’t, don’t. I’m too tight and close built. I can’t let you do it. I’ll do anything but that.”
    He laughed and started grinding my flesh, from my face to my feet, between his teeth and saying, “Git on your knees like I told you.”
    The pain was so bad, but I was afraid to scream. I got to my hands and knees. I was trapped with my head against the wall. Then horrible rending pain exploded through the raw core of my being like I had been halved by an axe. I screamed and a merciful bludgeon smashed down on the back of my neck. I jetted into blackness.

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    L ovell was grinning as he held a long switchblade knife above his head. It was a gleaming blur as it plunged toward my throat. I scuttled away and heard the whoomp of the blade hit the pillow.
    I screamed and opened my eyes. I was sure my head and the back of my neck were encased in fiery lead. I slapped the top of my head to find out if I was wearing the wig. I wasn’t. A jolting fist of pain clouted my insides.
    There was no beamed ceiling! There was familiar robin’s egg blue paint spangled with golden early-afternoon sunshine. I was lying in a fresh clean bed, and I heard the bellow of a truck.
    I panicked. Where was Dorcas? Had she seen the female clothes I had borrowed from Lucy? I listened for movement in Dorcas’s bedroom next door. I couldn’t hear a sound.
    I inched my aching body off the bed and went to the closet. The gray suit I had left at Lucy’s was hanging there. I patted the suit pockets for my ring of keys. I glanced at the dresser top. The ring was there, and I felt relieved.
    I caught a flash of white in the inside pocket of the suit jacket. I pulled out the sealed envelope and saw Tilly scrawled across it inMike’s handwriting. I slid the letter back in the pocket, and fuzzy bits and pieces started to blizzard my mind.
    I remembered the attic and how Lovell punched me into unconsciousness each time I came to and screamed under his torture. Then he had forced me to empty that quart bottle of whiskey with him.
    At some hazy time Rabbit had banged on the door and Lovell had gone down the stairs to bounce a bad craps loser. I had been too punished and drunk to try escape.
    Much later I had stood reeling with my clothes on. I had stood and looked down at Lovell’s ugly face—mouth gaped open—snoring.
    I had searched his pockets and found my wad of money and my keys and his switchblade knife. I had gone back to the side of the bed and stood there above him with the deadly point of the blade almost touching the leapy heart pulse in his chest.
    I sobbed and shook. I had wanted so much to drive the knife into his rotten heart. I really had. But then I remembered that Reverend Martin Luther King had said, “Black folks have got to stop killing each other,” and I just couldn’t do it.
    I remembered Lucy giving me the letter from Mike and telling me how he had waited for hours at her place for me to show. He had missed me at Stel’s by ten minutes.
    Then I remembered driving home to the mortuary, and I had thought about turning head-on into the traffic whizzing by me. I had felt so stupid and hopeless, and not really caring about anything except dumping the treacherous bitch, Sally, once and for all.
    When I reached the mortuary Dorcas was pulling the hearse from the curb carrying the remains of M. Phleps with a caravan of cars following. I had completely forgotten, under Sally’s influence, that his