Only the Strong

by Jabari Asim

  Earlier that day, Goode had stood at the bedside of his barely breathing wife. Barely breathing, barely there. Through the speakers at the corners of the room, Johnny Mathis demanded to be flown to the moon, a pitiless reminder of how utterly earthbound Goode was.

  He was drying out, shrinking, finding new folds in his skin everyday. One day he’d be curled up in a hospital bed too, wearing a diaper and tubes up his nose. He used to think he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Now he just wanted to die in his sleep. Why did he feel so much older than he was?

  Barely breathing, barely there.

  The beep and whir of the machines.

  Was she dreaming under there? When she twitched or shuddered, Goode had the idea that she was dreaming of falling, a long, breathless plunge through endless stories. But she never approached the ground. Never woke up sweating, thirsty for air, relieved.

  Beep. Whir.

  A pillow over her face could end the ache for both of them. He had been a man with muscular, even monstrous appetites. With his gambling, his death-defying criminal escapades, his many mistresses, and his myriad cruelties, he had crushed the life out of her long ago. According to his thinking, the pillow would be less a killing device than an instrument of freedom, a cushion for her to land on after years of descent.

  Behind the glass, a baby stirred. The nurse appeared and bent over the cradle. She lifted the infant out and disappeared. Soon she was at his side, holding the blanketed bundle before him.

  “How about for a little while?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The nurse placed the baby in his hands. He was a beautiful boy, brown and bright-eyed.

  “You’ve held a baby before?”

  “I have.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  Children usually made him jumpy. He avoided them, especially boys. For years, every time he saw one, the boy turned into his Julius, dented and lifeless, still as a stone in the huge hands of Guts Tolliver.

  Looking down at the baby, Goode smiled through his nervousness. “You’re a big baby boy, aren’t you?” he cooed. “A big boy. Yes you are.”

  To press the pillow down. To nudge her toward the peace that she likely longed for in some miniscule, still-flickering fragment of consciousness. To press the pillow down. Let her go. Set himself free.

  In the space between the pillow and the ravaged countenance, amid the beep and whir of the vigilant machines, while Johnny Mathis crooned “Chances Are,” insight arrived: this sleeping woman, once his whole world, posed no barrier between him and the elusive, rejuvenating calm that hovered just out of reach. He knew that losing her wouldn’t help him find it. Her death would offer him no deliverance.

  He wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t.

  Tossing the pillow aside, he fell to his knees and wept, a silent, choking agony that left him windless and drained. Finally, he stood and brushed off his pinstriped trousers.

  Maybe he had a heart after all.

  The baby began to writhe in his arms, his little face wrinkling in anguish. The first few cries had squeaked from his lips when the nurse reappeared.

  “You’d better take him,” he said. “I think I scared him.”

  “Nonsense. He likes you. Just sing to him.”

  Goode shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “What would I sing?”

  “Whatever comes to mind. You’ll figure it out.” She smiled and left him.

  Goode took a deep breath. His mind traveled back to Liberty, to the memory of his mother’s sweet voice. He was shooting marbles, a small circle drawn in their neatly swept dirt yard. His mother hung laundry a few feet away, pulling clothespins from her apron in pairs and holding them between her lips. The clothespins dangled as she sang. But they never fell.

  “Hush,” he sang. The baby’s movements slowed as his little body relaxed. Eyes wide open, he looked up at Goode. “Hush,” Goode sang again. “Somebody’s calling my name. Hush, hush. Somebody’s calling my name. Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord what shall I do?”

  A CONFESSION FROM CHARLOTTE might very well have changed her tentative rapprochement with Artinces into something richer and more mutually assuring. They might have huddled at the kitchen table over cups of tea while Charlotte explained her wanderings, the great grief behind her peripatetic moods. Artinces might have shared something about her own past beyond platitudes and up-from-poverty clichés. She might have told the girl that she, too, had wrestled with the consequences of love. Charlotte might have told Artinces that she would never again give away her heart, because when you love somebody, something always happens. Artinces might have held Charlotte when the girl finally broke down. There, Artinces might have said, softly, like a lullaby, it’s all right. At least somebody in this house knows how to cry.

  But first they had to get home.

  At the park, Artinces sat behind the wheel in disbelief as her car’s engine repeatedly failed to turn over. She was tempted to slap her head in frustration. It had been a childhood tendency until the day her father caught her wrist in mid-air. She was six, her hair in pigtails with ribbons on the end. “Nope,” he cautioned, “your brain’s in there. Be kind to it.”

  So instead of slapping her head she hissed, slowly and loudly like a deflating tire. After a long day of working the booth and waiting in vain for the three women to reappear, she was close to exhausted. She searched in her purse, dipping her fingers blindly until they emerged with a business card. She gathered coins from a zippered pouch and walked across the street to the parking lot of A&U Barbecue, where a pay phone stood under a security light. She pushed a dime in the slot and dialed the number on the card.

  “Hello,” she said. “Mr. Reid? Wendell Reid? This is Dr. Artinces Noel. I’m fine, thank you. I’m wondering if you might be available to give me a ride?”

  When Goode had his country retreat, before the Continental plunged into the lake and ended his flirtation with feudal pursuits, his men sometimes played baseball in a neighboring field. He’d join in occasionally, his suit jacket left behind in the farmhouse, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, suspenders straining against the bulk of his chest. His men knew better than to pitch him high and tight or risk beaning him with a curve. They knew to lob something soft toward the plate and wait for him to wallop it past the deepest man, to greet his home run with requisite cheers and the gravest respect. To shout encouragement as he took his gentlemanly jaunt around the bases, Josh Gibson in custom boots, stogie clenched between those powerful teeth.

  White men loved baseball, he’d tell his men after the country breeze cooled their sweat and they cracked open beers under a canopy of maples and oaks. With its fenced-in frontiers and diamonds carved out of cornfields, baseball was the American Dream played out under the lights. You could start out in the batter’s box with hope and a stick, steal your way across the heartland in search of a big score, and end up a winner by the time you got home.

  But white men would soon hate it, he continued.

  They’d soon hate it because, in places, like Kansas City and Indianapolis and Oakland and Birmingham, black men had grabbed hold of the national pastime with their black hands and dragged their jazzy flair from Jim Crow sandlots to Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. They circled under pop flies with deceptive ease and turned double plays like wizards of the air. Jackie Robinson was only the beginning; it was a new game now. Soon, only the ball would be white. They’d hate it because they made the game and we’re remaking it. They made the country from black sweat, Indian blood, and grand theft. If we can remake their game, we can damn sure remake the country.

  Three beers in and Goode would be ballistic, proclaiming his expertise on the art of making and remaking. “Just look at me,” he’d declare. “I’m one self-made motherfucker.” Hadn’t he come from Liberty with little more than the lint in his pocket and a talent for inflicting pain?

  His men, stre
tched out in the grass and tipsy themselves, eyed one other nervously, lest Goode’s temper take a fearful turn. If he kept it aimed at white folks, they were safe. If he aimed it inward, they were safe. Sometimes he went down to the lake and raged at his own reflection.

  They call baseball the national pastime, he ranted, and they love it sure enough. But the real national pastime is crushing niggers. So crush or be crushed, goddamn.

  He might be from Mississippi but his mama didn’t raise no fools, he’d say. He knew the rules, he’d say, and if he ever struck out he’d go down swinging.

  Back then, everything was an argument to be proved, a score to be settled. But now he was standing in the well-baby center at Abram H., holding a baby in his arms. The infant’s fresh innocence was a shock to his system, a balm to his soul, and all he wanted to do was forgive. Forgive his wife for never forgiving him. Forgive Artinces for refusing to save him. (For whom had he ever saved? Not a single soul.) Forgive himself for asking her.

  Because he still had business to take care of, Goode’s upstart compassion was not expansive enough to include those who had foolishly dared to cross him. Of late, only one misbegotten individual had been so reckless: Sharps.

  That thing about keeping your enemies closer? Damn straight.

  Thinking about Sharps brought to mind another of Goode’s countryside homilies, delivered to his disciples as they sucked down their beers: a skunk can spend all day in a garden, rolling around in the roses, eating them, shitting them, but when the sun goes down his black ass is still gonna stink.

  That perfumed chump had been fouling his air for long enough.

  Pretending to be stupid had been torture. But he had to bumble along as if clueless until he discovered what the hell Sharps was after. The idiot overestimated himself when he tried to follow his boss one Wednesday. Goode, on his way to meet Artinces at the Riverbend, shook him long enough to place a call to Grimes. The detective caught up with Sharps at the edge of the bridge.

  “I work for Goode,” Sharps said when Grimes pulled him over.

  “Don’t know him,” Grimes quickly replied.

  Sharps lowered his sunglasses and looked directly at him. “It’s me, Sharps.”

  He got silence in return. “I work for Goode. Ananias Goode.”

  “I’m going to tell you again that I don’t know him.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Don’t think and drive. It’s a dangerous mix.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Your brake light’s out.”

  “No way. I just had this car tightened up from stem to stern.”

  Grimes turned and walked to his unmarked cruiser. He came back with a baton, which he swung at Sharps’s taillight, shattering it. He returned to Sharps’s window. “I got a good look at it,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s out.”

  He wrote Sharps up and sent him on his way. By then Goode and Artinces were long gone.

  Goode had planned to send Guts after Sharps, knowing how much the big man detested him. But then he saw the strangest thing. He’d pulled up at an intersection beside Fairgrounds Park and spotted Guts on the playground, pushing his girlfriend in a swing. Guts looked ecstatic, transformed. His happiness removed years and pounds from him, making him look as young and uncorrupted as the strapping youth Goode had noticed outside the train station so many years before. He liked seeing that young man again. Seeing that joy. So he called Grimes instead.

  When Grimes got the call he was doing what he always doing while off duty: sitting on the couch in his front room, staring at the painting on the wall. His wife, Virginia Grace, was upstairs cleaning the bathroom, it sounded like. He could hear her humming as she worked; some defiantly cheerful church song, something that reminded him of when you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. Her humming was soft and reliable. It didn’t ride above the other sounds, the gently controlled splashing and the brisk-brisk of a scrub brush, so much as it accompanied them, melody marching to harmony’s dependable beat.

  When Grimes was not on call, when he was not rolling eagle-eyed through North Gateway and scooping low-life, double-dealing vermin from its deep black streets, he sat on the couch. He looked at the portrait of Cheryl, his only child. It had been three years since leukemia swooped in and swept her up. Seven weeks from diagnosis until that terrible ceremony, the preacher mumbling bullshit (bullshit!) about ashes and dust and God’s will, Virginia Grace leaning heavily against him under a black umbrella while the rain poured.

  On the job, some colleagues—and some criminals too, if pressed—would describe Grimes as spooky. The more charitable among them might call him intense. For the grieving, unbelieving couple, their dear Cheryl still lived and breathed. Not Cheryl was. Cheryl is. Every day the Grimes set a place at the table for their daughter. They continued to cook the meals she favored. They included her in any conversation suitable for 12-year-old ears. They laughed at tender suggestions from concerned relatives, who murmured that Cheryl was not there with them but in some better place, free of pain and suffering. And Virginia Grace cleaned, forever on the lookout for germs, evil bacteria that could assault their little girl, subject her again to the demonic fury of disease. They were united in this sustained illusion, Detective and Mrs. Grimes. It bound them as tightly and warmly as the love nurtured across nearly two decades of wedded bliss.

  Tall and brown-skinned, Grimes was one of two black detectives in the entire city. While his policing skills were beyond dispute, most observers credited his promotion to his mysterious relationship with Ananias Goode. The men had never been seen together, but informed observers swore that Grimes was Goode’s inside man. With the support of a cooperative (and well-compensated) precinct captain, he showed up at opportune times to grease the wheels of law enforcement on Goode’s behalf. He did indeed receive “bonus pay” for his extracurricular work, but evidence of it would be hard to find. He was squirreling it away for when he was done protecting and serving. He planned to supplement his pension with enough capital to live in other climes, far from annoying relatives who had limited ideas about life and death.

  Weeks after receiving the assignment from Goode, while the reformed gangster held babies in Abram H., Grimes sat on his couch like usual. Hands on knees, he admired Cheryl’s portrait. Reuben Jones of the Black Swan Sign Shop had created the painting from a handful of photographs, the only ones they had.

  Something else, that Reuben Jones. One hell of an artist he is.

  As he got up to work the night shift, Grimes was thinking he needed another portrait of Cheryl. Maybe several. Maybe one for each room in the house.

  Sugar. Flour. Bananas. Damn.

  Pearl Jordan, soon to be Pearl Tolliver, discovered she was out of vanilla wafers. Strutting into the front room where Guts slept, she nudged him with her foot. Guts opened his eyes and found a foot between his thighs, the big toe flexed suggestively on his crotch. It was perfect, the foot. Slender, brown, exquisitely arched. Nails perfectly polished. He had never noticed women’s feet before Pearl. In fact, he hadn’t noticed hers until she proved as talented with her toes as she was with her fingers.

  She lifted her foot and stroked the front of his pants, all along his inseam.

  “I love you from head to toe” had once been just an expression to Guts. He knew better now.

  “Hmm?” he said.

  “I need you to go to the store.”

  He had dozed off while listening to the ballgame on the radio. Rip Crenshaw, closing in on his club’s home-run record, had flied out in his only turn at bat. Earlier, Guts had stopped through Afro Day and spoken with the slugger while he was on a break from autographing glossy photos of himself.

  “Uh-huh,” Crenshaw said when Guts walked up to him in the presenters’ hospitality tent.

  “Uh-huh what?”

  Crenshaw laughed. “You know exactly what uh-huh I’m talking about.” He leaned close and whispered in Guts’s ear. “You’ve been getting some.”

&
nbsp; “That’s what you think?”

  “That’s what I know. You’ve got your swagger back.”

  Guts shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, but I do. That’s why you took my advice with that Pearl. Be careful, though. Heed the voice of experience. Too much of that good loving can sap your strength.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be hurting you any.”

  Crenshaw shook his head. “I’ve sworn off women, remember? That’s the lesson I’m supposed to get from losing my ring.”

  “It’s not lost forever,” Guts said. “It’s just temporarily misplaced.”

  “No sweat, brother. If it’s out there, I know you’ll get your hands on it.”

  “I haven’t given up.”

  “It looks good on you, by the way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Being domesticated. That’s what your boy Nifty called it, right? You told me about it that night at the racetrack. He made it sound like you’d come down with a disease. Looks to me like you’re in the pink. In the pink every day, I suspect. Did you catch that? Man, I’m one nasty All-Star.”

  Now Guts shook his head. “You are nasty. We talked a lot that night. I’m surprised you remembered.”

  Crenshaw tapped his temple. “Steel trap,” he said. “You think I’m all reflex and bone structure, right? Let me tell you something. In my head I keep a book on every pitcher I face. Whether he likes to go inside or outside, high or low. Which pitch he’ll go to in a jam. I just tell folks it’s all in the wrists because I don’t want to give away my secrets.”

  “Forgive me for underestimating you.”

  “Right on. I got to get back to the autograph booth. Can you believe I got a game tonight?”

  “You can handle it.”

  Crenshaw grinned. “’Preciate the vote of confidence. Say, we get in the World Series, you’ll be in the box seat right along the foul line.” They shook hands.