Suicide's Girlfriend Read Online Free PDF

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    Oyekan’s face grew hot. People would gather in the sunshine outside his mother’s little house, chewing on cane, trying to hear the conversation inside, between his mother and brother. Biki, too, and at her side the old gray and yellow dog that followed her always, to the fields and the pump and the market. Biki might understand; before his departure she teased that he would be like Daniel Ojay, who went to USC to study chemical engineering and never returned, broke his betrothal. Oyekan’s mother, however, would not understand. His mother would pull on the clothes and hands of Oyekan’s brother. She would plead: “How can this be? Is he in trouble there? Is he in jail? Is he sick?”
    â€œI thank you, Mrs. Scotty,” said Oyekan. “But I would have to write—”
    â€œOf course. Of course, you would, dear.” She lowered her head after that, as if afraid; the exact gesture of his mother when she learned of the scholarship to the U.S.
    â€œMrs. Scotty . . .” Oyekan began, but, outside, Mr. Scotty began to honk the horn of his auto impatiently, and Mrs. Scotty hurried toward the door.
    â€œI know you’ll make the right decision,” she said. “I just know it.”

    The thick tires of Mr. and Mrs. Scotty’s auto rolled past his bedroom window, and for one moment his room became dark, but then the light returned.
    Suppose Peggy Dixon called and said that Joe did not wish to go to the barbecue today, but that she and Oyekan might go anyway?
    Oyekan wanted to see Joe, of course, but he had such news today and lately, Joe appeared most often deep in thought, and, then, to draw him forth, Peggy Dixon would begin telling noisy tales; after Oyekan’s Honors’ presentation, it had been the story of a drunken cousin, drowned in an attempt to retrieve a bottle of whiskey from a flooded building called a “fallout shelter.”
    Ho, ho, ho, this made Joe and Peggy laugh and laugh.
    Oyekan was sorry, but he did not see the humor.
    That same night, at Peggy’s apartment, he and Peggy and Joe had watched an old television program in which a man received a wound and discovered himself to be a robot. As if they saw themselves in the robot man who did not know himself to be a robot, Peggy and Joe cried. They cried! They laughed! Sometimes Oyekan did not understand Peggy and Joe at all. Oyekan was no robot! His blood ran hot in him, thank you very much! Joe was a good friend, a good man, but if Oyekan were Joe, he would not act so silly before Peggy Dixon. He would not rush off to Micronesia, leaving her to be sought after by other males, no way!
    Maybe Joe did not like Peggy so well after all. In Joe’s place, Oyekan would write Peggy poems and take her interesting places—perhaps on a motorcycle like Lee Hillis’s, certainly not in a rusty Datsun F10 with gravel and squashed fast food containers in the back. He would show good posture and never fall down on the floor laughing during the Saturday Night Live television show, an act Oyekan witnessed after Joe and Peggy believed him gone, after the robot television show.
    He had been wrong to watch. His dear friends. They had not even wanted him to leave. All the way to the door, Peggy teased, “Won’t you stay on just a bit, Oyekan, now we’re having such fun?” Peggy Dixon’s eyes were flecked with green. She spoke with the accent of the American South, her voice soft and deep as pillows. Down the dark little hall she called to Joe, “Joseph, come on out here and instill a little guilt in this friend of yours, so he won’t go breaking up our party.” Peggy had held in her fingers the cloth of Oyekan’s jacket so that his hand might not fit through the sleeve. The two of them had stood there, together, watching for Joe to appear at the end of the hall, but Joe had never come and, eventually, Peggy let go of the sleeve. She looked beyond Oyekan, out the