A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  A pathetic cloud of chalky smoke, made of powdered sugar, fell from the tip of Omari’s cigarette. He’d found something he liked, a small but representative peculiarity. After testing his scissors on the air, he slowly snipped out a headline, making a show of it.

  “September’s the weirdest month,” he said. The cigarette bobbed up and down under the beak as he spoke.

  “September just started, dummy.”

  “I can already tell.” He rose and stretched. At eleven he was nearly as tall as I was, and broad like Pop, his body an unchiseled slab. The ear tufts of his mask were sharp enough to scratch you. He squeezed between the fan and our bunk bed and went to the window. Though the kitchen was on the other side of the apartment, we could hear sink water speeding through the pipes.

  We lived on the second floor of our building, not even high enough to see the top of the tree outside. Leaves from a bough pressed against the window. In a month the view would be pretty, the panes tessellated in autumn shades, but it wasn’t so nice now. When I was younger, right when Pop stopped coming around, I had nightmares about that tree breaking through the glass and reaching inside to grab me with its branches.

  “I invited somebody over today,” Omari sang. He gestured toward the window frame. Apparently his newest imaginary friend was there. “Her name’s Angela.”

  “Who cares?” I said.

  Omari turned his face toward me, twisting his neck as far as it would go. He unwrapped the paper from the cigarette and bent the hard gum until it broke. Reaching under the beak, which curved from the bridge of his nose, he slipped the pieces into his mouth. The black-and-amber eyes of his mask were large and round. But the freaky thing was Omari’s eyes within those eyes. They stared directly at me now, two pennies sunk in a bucket.

  Where we lived, it didn’t matter what a room was called. Ma would wash her hair in the kitchen, careful when she was done rinsing not to hit her head on the bottom of the cabinet. Sometimes she’d take phone calls in the bathroom or go in there to listen to the radio. When she was sick of me fighting with Omari, she’d take her dinner plate into her bedroom and go out to eat in peace on the fire escape.

  Now she was in the kitchen washing dishes. She used scalding hot water and never wore rubber gloves. Her hands were tough, long and deeply lined. She was tough, with wiry, muscular arms. But this afternoon, as she cleaned, she also concealed the woman I knew by making herself look soft. Pink plastic rollers filled her hair. The smell of dabbed-on Florida Water rose from her skin. Mike, her new boyfriend, was coming over.

  Our dish rack rested on top of the refrigerator—there was no other place for it—and she handed me clean plates to stack there as I made my case. She leaned against the wall, seemingly exhausted, her long slip spotted with spray from the faucet.

  “Money’s tight,” she said. “You know that, Ty. I told you to get a job this summer, but you hardheaded. A lazy boy does things twice.”

  She shoved a fistful of wet utensils at my chest, but I just looked at them. I wanted to get my haircut at the place Pop used to go. I was seventeen and had never been to a barbershop, homegrown afros and cornrows all my life. Maybe I wouldn’t know what to say once I got there. Maybe I’d ask for the wrong thing or laugh at the wrong time, surrounded by all those clever men, grooming each other’s masculinity. Still, even if I embarrassed myself, I felt ready. I was almost a grown-up, not a boy. Plus tomorrow was the West Indian Day Parade. This was the first time she was letting me go by myself.

  “If you not gonna help,” she said, “get out the way and quit breathing all over me.”

  Now we both stared at the forks and knives clutched in her hand.

  “Ma, I need to look good.”

  She shut off the water, jammed the utensils in the rack, and sidestepped by me. “Been doing this boy’s hair all his life,” she muttered. “I’ll just cut it my damn self.” She started banging around in the closet where we kept photo albums, boxes of discount toilet paper, and Pop’s old winter coats. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the living room with my shoulders draped in a towel. Here was the woman I knew—a force of nature—and I was totally helpless against her.

  Maybe, just maybe, some invisible force would steady Ma’s hand, but who was I kidding? I had probably just stumbled again into that stagnant puddle of mud: belief. It was silly to think good things could possibly happen, but I had no choice. I described the style I wanted, picturing it as I spoke: a skin fade like Pop’s, with the taper smooth and balanced, perfectly even all the way around. A timeless look.

  Ma wasn’t even listening. She fumbled with the box, which had a white person cheesing on the front, proud of his bowl cut. “You sure you don’t want one of those high-tops?” She hovered a hand several inches above her head. “Looks easy enough to do.”

  I began to fidget in the chair and made one more attempt. “All the guys from school go to the barbershop,” I told her. “Trip’s been going since before he could walk.”

  “Like I give a damn about some fool calls himself Trip,” Ma said. “Trip. Trip ain’t in this family. Trip ain’t got to make the sacrifices we do.”

  “Sacrifices …”

  “That’s right. For your brother, and for you too.”

  “Don’t you mean Mike?”

  The heat rose quickly on my ear after she hit me, my cheek stinging from her still-moist hand. Though she yelled plenty at me, almost never at Omari, Ma rarely hit. Before she could scold me or hit me again, the intercom buzzed.

  Ma made her voice all sweet to call Omari and tell him to buzz Mike up. Then she started on my hair. Soon Mike walked in with a bottle of bright pink wine and his dopey grin. Ma got dopey in response and apologized for her appearance.

  “Always look good to me, babe,” Mike said.

  He kissed her on the cheek and plopped down on the couch, the coffee table sandwiched tightly between us. Omari sat too, exactly where Pop used to relax with a beer and watch TV.

  “You keep nicking me,” I said. Ma was being rough with the clippers.

  “Well, stop talking. Your whole head moves when you talk.”

  “I’m not the retard here.”

  “What I tell you about saying retard?”

  Mike grinned extra big as he took in the show. “Ruth,” he said, “you truly a woman of many talents.”

  Ma nicked me again when she laughed, and the clippers barked at every botched contact with my scalp. When she stood apart to take in her progress, they hummed in her hand.

  Mike said, “Boy look like he could be on TV—right, Birdman?”

  Omari’s eyes shifted within the owl’s; he was smiling. Though shy around Mike, he didn’t seem to mind him. This pissed me off, even though he was too young to remember when there had been a real man around.

  When Mike offered to add some finishing touches, I hopped up and hair rained from my shoulders. I rushed to the mirror by the front door. I couldn’t believe what I saw. On top, a tall crumbling brick of hair. Edged by a jagged line, a sharp wandering border. There was no fade, no taper at all. My mouth got tight, ready to curse loud and long, but Ma gave me a look that stopped me in my tracks. She said she wanted me to take Omari out for a while.

  “For what?” I said. “Because of him?”

  Mike spread his arms, a gesture that meant Don’t you dare talk to your mother that way at the same time that it said Hey kid, just leave me the hell out of it.

  “You got a problem with that, Ty?” Ma said.

  “I’m not the one bringing in problems.”

  “Do you pay the rent here? You pay any of the bills? I’m a grown woman, and I work my ass off. I’ll be damned if I can’t have a friend over.”

  Omari sang, “Everybody needs to have a friend,” but I told him to shut up.

  “I need to take another shower,” Ma said wearily. “By the time I’m done, I want you boys out enjoying the day.”

  “Can we at least get some money?” I asked.

  Ma went to the window an
d switched on the hulking air conditioner we rarely used. “Be back in time to set the dinner table. Six o’clock sharp. You’ll be all right till then.”

  When she shut herself in the bathroom, Mike flipped something at me. A quarter.

  “Case you think about coming back early,” he said, eyeing his bottle of wine, “go on and give us a call first.”

  It was a hot breezeless day, the air gauzy and wet. Though the sun was high in the sky, a lone and distant object, its energy came from everywhere at once. I wandered around the neighborhood tugging down the bill of my Knicks cap. Omari trailed behind. Families walked from afternoon church service, sweating in their dress clothes. Fathers unbuttoned dark jackets from their paunches and slid down the knots of ties. One man, with a bushy soul patch under his lip, shouted for his little girl to stop running as she neared a corner.

  The weather was similar when I’d gone to the West Indian Day Parade with Pop. This was before he went away, when I was seven and Omari was a baby. I heard Pop come in early Labor Day morning and get ambushed. Ma was yelling because he had stayed out all night. They argued like crazy and woke Omari, then Pop came into my room, bleary-eyed, and told me to get ready. When we left, Ma was still screaming and Omari was crying in her arms.

  The parade was heat and laughter, flags and floats, music so loud I felt it was shaking me more and more awake. I had my first taste of jerked pork there. I even got to pick the exact pieces I wanted from the vendor’s smoking grill. After we ate, Pop lifted me to see over the crowd on Eastern Parkway. The women dancing in the procession were nearly naked, but plumed, with sprays of brilliant multicolored feathers. When I shifted my eyes away from their bodies, Pop laughed and told me it was okay to look.

  Mike’s quarter felt warm and dirty in my shorts pocket. I was tempted to pitch it into a gutter. Omari muttered as he lagged behind me, walking with one foot on the sidewalk and the other in the street. I was melting in my cap, and here he was with that mask. He’d been wearing it since Mike began coming around. All of a sudden Ma had started acting girlish, humiliating herself. She even smiled in a ridiculous way, like she did in her pictures from high school. You could see all her teeth and, held like a tiny bud between them, the bright red tip of her tongue. She crossed and uncrossed her legs with extreme awareness of herself, awareness that Mike enjoyed looking at her, delighted that he did, as if she were some other woman and not our mother.

  The first time she sent us away from the apartment, in June, Mike wasn’t gone at the time she had told us to come back. They were in her room. We could hear the muffled sounds of an old corny love song, plus other sounds. I knew what they were doing. I rushed Omari into our room and slammed the door, not that it did much good. We could still hear them. I went on a rampage. I yanked the sheets from our beds, knocked toys from Omari’s shelves, tore his drawings and posters from the walls, and even ripped up some of his headlines. When I came out of it, he was curled up in a corner, rubbing the sides of his face. He stared at me like he didn’t know who I was. After Mike finally left, sneaking out like a thief, Ma seemed embarrassed. She apologized, but only for dinner being late. She made us something extra nice but it didn’t matter. Before the end of that night he was already hiding his face in the mask.

  Omari still lagged behind me. “But even the moon wants to get away from the earth …,” he was saying. On the street, crawling along beside us, a jeep blasted music so loudly its metal frame shook: “Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide. Gonna find you and make you want me …”

  Once the jeep passed by, I called to Omari: “Hey dummy! Aren’t you hot with that thing on?”

  He laughed in reply, strange and birdlike, a deliberately false squawk.

  The park I liked wasn’t far, just past Myrtle Avenue. On the way, we passed some rowdy corner boys and, in front of a Chinese takeout joint, a man in a mesh marina sitting on a milk crate. As we went by, he glared at us. He took the dead cigarette from his lips and then, real slow, mouthed, “Fuck you.” He shut his eyes and angled his head back. His laughter was nearly silent too, all breath. As though we weren’t even worthy of his voice.

  After Ma kicked him out of the apartment, Pop used to come see me at our local library. In the reading room, he would lick his flaking lips and airily chuckle at things that weren’t funny. He slouched in his chair, distracted by everything happening around us, books being shelved, words whispered, children shushed. The final time I saw him, before he got into that bad business, he paged through my stack of fantasy novels. The disapproval on his face said, You shouldn’t read shit like this, but he didn’t say the words, or couldn’t manage to.

  We were near the little park now. I was careful not to step on dog shit or pats of old gum or the dark stains of mulberries dropped months ago by trees. Omari hopped around behind me, holding out his hand as though Angela, in distress, were grasping it. It was fun for him to imagine that the world teemed with obstacles.

  Out of nowhere, someone slapped me on the back of the neck. Then my cap was snatched off.

  “Shit, somebody jump you? They fucked your head up real good.”

  It was Trip. Though younger than I was, only a rising sophomore, he stood over six feet tall. He held the cap high so I couldn’t reach it. Eventually, after he’d had enough fun, he gave it back. “Why you so pressed about that raggedy-ass lid anyway?” he said.

  I shrugged and put the cap on tilted to the right, the way Trip wore his. He said he was heading home to get out of the heat. As he talked, Omari made circles around him, doing a little war dance. “No, like this. Do it like this,” he was saying. Trip smacked him on the back of his neck too, and I laughed. He made a grab for the mask, but Omari slipped out of reach.

  “Yo,” I said, “you going to the parade tomorrow?”

  Trip sucked his teeth. “Damn the parade. J’ouvert’s what’s up.” “J’ouvert?”

  “That’s where all the shit happens.”

  I’d heard of it before, but didn’t really know what it was. “When is it?”

  He stroked his jaw and looked around, as though there might be someone way more interesting to talk to. “Tonight. Way past your bedtime, kid. When the freaks come out.”

  “Where?”

  “You don’t know a damn thing, do you?”

  “I know some stuff about it.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “I do. My pops used to go.” The words leaped from my mouth, but I didn’t regret saying them at all. I liked that they were out in the world. They sounded true.

  Trip laughed. He craned his neck from side to side, squinting past me. “Maybe your pops will take you then.”

  “Come on, man.”

  “If he ever gets around to it.”

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  Suddenly Trip’s fist was in my face and I flinched, but it stopped short. He plucked the brim of my cap so that it came off again. Before I could, he grabbed it from the ground.

  “Trip, stop playing.”

  He fended me off easily and then stuffed the cap down the front of his baggy basketball shorts. “You want it so bad? Take it, fag. Go ahead, it’s right there.”

  I stared at it bulging from his crotch. The cap had belonged to my father. He used to wear it whenever we listened to Knicks games on the radio. I kept staring at it until Trip shoved my chest and sent me stumbling backward onto my butt. He stood over me, face contorted. “So fucking gay.” Then, my cap still in his shorts, he walked off cowboy-style. From some distance away he shouted, “See you, bitch. You, your retarded brother, and your busted-ass fade!”

  I sat right where I was on the ground, wishing for somewhere to hide. Every eye in the city seemed to be turning in my direction. Omari stood in front of me, stroking the air. “It’s okay,” he kept saying. “It’s okay.” I finally realized he was talking to Angela, not to me. I scrambled to my feet, hands crushed into fists and blindly flailing, my mouth stretched wide by everything I yelled at him. By the time I ran out of words it
was Omari on the ground, as if he were the one Trip had shoved there. He was as small as he had been that day earlier in the summer, curled up in that corner of our room.

  The laughter of the men comforted me a little. It rose from the park like a thrown net of sound and I wanted to be caught in it. Before setting foot inside though, I stopped and felt my sun-pricked scalp. This stupid haircut. I pulled off my T-shirt and began to fold and tie it around my head. Soon I had made it into what felt like a turban. Omari stared at me.

  “What are you looking at, fag?” I said, and then walked away in case he was stupid enough to answer.

  The park was a narrow triangle of grass that stretched along Willoughby Avenue. The men, most in their fifties or sixties, would arrange themselves in a small group on benches surrounding chess tables made of concrete. They ate packaged oatmeal cookies or wax-coated cups of coco helado, and drank from cans of beer kept hidden in little brown paper bags between their thighs. Sometimes they actually played chess, but usually they just talked a world of shit about how everything was getting terrible.

  From other adults I resisted this kind of talk, but these men were so adept at it, as verbally skilled as the boys who freestyled over by Marcy. I loved the slang they peppered into their speech, archaic and strange and wonderful to my ear. And there was an underlying gentleness they had with one another. They reminded me a little of Pop. I sometimes imagined that I would find him one day, sitting here among them.