A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  When we got to the plaza there was already a crowd spilling from the steps of the Central Library. Each individual was faceless one moment, familiar the next. The faces I thought I knew, from school or our neighborhood, flitted from body to body or disappeared outright. There was a man who could have been Mike, and even a woman, not far from him, who could have been Ma. Almost anyone, it seemed, could have been there. A crush of voices rose with anticipation. Then came the soft rollicking peal of steel drums, faint strains in the distance. The people, odd and ragtag, wore their shabbiest clothes and held musical instruments that looked homemade, nothing like my memories of the crowd on Eastern Parkway. They were waiting for something. Or maybe this was all there was to it.

  But then came the sound of a horn, several horns. On the street, raised pitchforks prodded and tickled the air. A cluster of people wielded them, yelling joyfully. They were blue—blue people. Faces and bodies streaked with the color. They hopped around behind a van, and as it began to move along the avenue, pulling a creaky metal skeleton of a trailer, full of fidgety musicians, they moved with it.

  Following the loose organization of people ambling down Flatbush Avenue, we walked on the outside edge of the street alongside Prospect Park, but most threw themselves into the middle of things. They proceeded in a kind of squat dancing, a slow gallop, a low roving strut matched to the risen rhythms of steel drums and cowbells and the flourishes of horns. Groups rolled and surged within the mass, people wearing T-shirts in the same bright color, or gyrating women in mere strips of cloth, or men with bells around their waists and rhinestones patterned on their slacks, faces raised, questioning and answering in song. Or the arrangement might have been according to the flags waved high or worn as capes or printed on cloths tied onto the head and worn over the nose and mouth in the style of desperados. Many of the flags I recognized. Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica and Barbados and Haiti, and Puerto Rico and Cuba and the Dominican Republic too, but there were many I didn’t know. It was the full array of them that I loved.

  In and out of various cones of illumination from streetlights and from lamps fixed to police generators, we moved and watched. There was a frayed quality to the procession. Many people had masks on, just as cheap-looking as Omari’s. A wolf man wound his way around the slowest people. A fat Pocahontas stumbled ahead in a ratty fringed dress. A woman in a shower cap lifted one leg and then the other, displaying the flecks of glitter on her inner thighs. Plastic helmets made pyramids of people’s heads. Someone on stilts, wearing a yellow coat and a top hat, three times the height of a normal man, hopped on one false leg before he longstepped his way ahead.

  Our forward movement stopped all of a sudden and people danced and strutted in place. Women of every size, in the shortest shorts I’d ever seen, gyrated their hips alone or with other women or with men. We joined a circle of spectators that opened for a woman in a dirty blond wig. She had a large belly and sagging breasts that bounced as she humped the air. The circle broke for a shirtless muscular man pulling a chain with a second man on all fours at the end of it. They looked like twins, but the man on the ground had painted his face to look like a hound. He went right up to the big-bellied woman and put his nose in her crotch. She turned around and bent over and he stuck his hound’s nose up there too. “It’s okay,” I said, as Pop would have. “It’s okay. You can look.”

  As we pushed on down the avenue, more figures with pitchforks, devils oiled slickly black, rushed at us and began to fling paint or grease or powder or dye. They targeted us, the ones who lingered on the edge and observed, stirring and scattering us, splashing the liquids from crusted detergent bottles and roughly smearing the oil from their own skin. I held on to Cuffy’s hat as if the devils were a wind, and as they whipped us blue and white and orange and black, and as breathing felt like drowning in color, they seemed to be saying, There are no observers here. As if to confirm this, an old woman, maybe the same Haitian we had seen earlier (could it be?), but now dressed like a French maid, started screaming, “Dance or go home!” She shouted it again, “Dance or go home,” and then said it once more with grave seriousness as she looked me in the eye.

  And then I was grabbed by it, pulled into it, twisted up in the songs and yells and laughter, and in the flatbed trailer ahead the drums glinted, and I was squatted low and driven to dancing. When the current stalled again a woman twice my size backed her tremendous ass into me and began to grind and bounce me with it. I laughed and groaned and fought to stay on my feet and tried to hold on to her waist as I had seen others do but my hands slid on her glazed flesh. When the mass spasmed and advanced again the big woman gave me a hard bump, a final toss of herself, and I fell and was jabbed by elbows and knees, but then people reached and caught me by the arm and neck and lifted me and urged me on. I laughed and danced under the sky’s slowly paling light, squatting and rubbing and strutting past the impassive eyes of watching policemen until my thighs started to burn. Then I thought I saw Trip’s jeering face bob past. My father’s cap. It looked as though he was wearing it. I shoved my way past several people as I pursued him, keeping the orange and blue colors on his head in view, reaching with my toes to maintain contact with the ground. I struggled out of the barrier made by one trailer’s music and plunged into the faster tempo of another’s. Despite my best efforts, though, I couldn’t reach him. Trip, if it was Trip, got farther away, became obscured in the crowd, and was gone.

  At that point, I noticed my naked head. Another hat gone, my head exposed again for everyone to see. But I realized I didn’t care. I didn’t care that my haircut was bad, or that my feet hurt and thighs burned and empty stomach growled. My stature wasn’t important. I didn’t feel small. I felt the weariness in my eyes but I liked it, and I imagined I must have looked just like Pop when he was here years ago. Of course a man like him, who loved his body and loved to dance, had stayed out that night, and was willing to be screamed at by Ma, not just on the morning of that day but the many days that followed until the screaming and fighting drove him away. He was never the same after that, but even where he lay now, in some hard little room at Otisville, he must have held on to that night and to the feeling, now coursing through me, of being shamelessly alive. Who wouldn’t give everything for that?

  There was a sudden surge within the crowd that held me now, and then came a strange shout, a high sprung note. I spun around and people brushed past me with their cowbells and horns. I didn’t see my brother. I ran up a little ways, in case he had gone on ahead. A sign said we were close to Empire Boulevard, which meant only that I didn’t know where I was. I turned and went back, moving against and alongside the procession now, calling Omari’s name. There was another shout, and I knew for sure this time it was his. In the crowd a rowdy group of masked men were whirling and shoving and yelling, throwing themselves around. Within this group, in the quarterlight, I spotted Omari’s mask, the stunned circular eyes of the owl. He was being jostled about, was struggling to keep his footing, and he shouted again as he was swept in a direction he couldn’t see.

  I pushed my way back into the crowd toward him. I felt ready to fight these men if need be, but when I reached them they absorbed me like a churning pool of water. Hugged by their bodies, I saw their masks up close and the human features within them, the hysterical eyes and cackling mouths, and the distress of Omari’s shouts was lost in the ecstasy of theirs. They were enjoying themselves. They didn’t mean to be scaring him but they were; they didn’t mean to be hurting him but they might have been. I grabbed the back of one man’s neck and pulled myself closer to my brother, but then a hand reached up and yanked me down hard by my shoulder and I lost all sight of him. When I regained my balance, at first I didn’t see him but then, moments later, I did. He had been spat out of the large wave of men to the edges of the crowd. He got to his feet and began to run. By the time I wrestled my way out and ran after him, he was already far ahead.

  We were going back the way we had come. The procession gradually
thinned, became a few stragglers, and then was gone. With a hand held out to the side, Omari gimped along, like there was something wrong with one of his legs, but he still moved fast. I called after him and he glanced back. He looked again and kept looking when I called a second time, as if to verify, as if he couldn’t believe it was me chasing after him and saying his name. A moment later, he brought his hands up to his head and pulled off his mask. Then he held his free hand out again. He picked up speed now, like this was a game he wanted to keep going.

  I ran after him in the predawn half-light with an ache in my stomach that was something other than hunger. The air was heating up. Pigeons were beginning to fly. The rough, thick shadows of trees began to emerge on either side of us.

  Omari veered left. He looked back again, his features opening at the sight of me. He dropped his mask on the ground and then clambered over a section of sagging fence into Prospect Park.

  When I got to the fence, I stopped to catch my breath and rested my hands on my knees. The sun had risen, and in the full light of day I looked down at the vacant eyes of the owl mask. It was smeared with powder and paint. My sneakers and socks and calves were also filthy, my shorts and shirt too. My entire body had been marked.

  That Labor Day morning when Pop came home to Ma’s anger, his eyes were bloodshot and he stank a little of sweat, but his clothes, I remembered, they weren’t dirty at all. What did this mean? What could it mean? I didn’t know exactly, but he must have been somewhere else. Pop was no observer, so he must have been someplace else. There must have been another reason. Ma’s voice from that morning, years ago, came to me. Where were you? she kept shouting. Where were you? When I saw him again, if I did, I would make him tell me. But what if this wasn’t even the right question to ask?

  I went over the fence and into the park. It didn’t take very long to find my brother. He was in the middle of a small clearing. He had his arms extended in front of him and was spinning around and around in the hazy morning light, another game. I caught glimpses of his face as he spun. It had been so long since I’d seen his face. It was a shock to see it, with his eyes again among its features. His cheeks and forehead were blotched, but he looked happy, struck dumb with joy. From the trees, where a faint wind fingered my scalp, I reached toward him and waved but he didn’t notice. He laughed without making a sound, still spinning, arms out, hands folded as though grasping onto something. It was Angela, I realized; his hands were holding hers. He kept spinning with her, around and around, faster and faster. I waited before approaching them. I wanted to see if she would let him go.

  I Happy Am

  When Freddy became a robot, a special map appeared in his mind. It alerted him to obstacles and told him the fastest way from here to there. One morning, instead of waiting for the elevator, he flew down the dozen flights of stairs, careful to leap over a big puddle of urine on the landing of the fourth floor. Outside, he ducked through the hole in the busted playground’s fence. In the alley behind the liquor store, a homeless woman with a shopping cart shuffled into his path. He closed his eyes and clenched his metal fists as he crashed into her. The woman’s stink exploded like a bomb, but it couldn’t harm him. As he sped past, she yelled a lot of bad words, an enemy wailing in defeat. St. Rita’s Day Camp was only a few blocks away, but by the time he arrived it was already past nine o’clock.

  The other kids in his group had boarded the van. Sister Pamela stood in front of the day camp, her back pressed against the gate of the squat building. Her habit, made of plain white cotton trimmed in blue stripes, fit perfectly around her pale sweating face. She narrowed her eyes at Freddy and bared her brownish teeth. She’d been making this face at him throughout the summer, whenever he was late, but as usual it wasn’t his fault. His mother had forgotten to sign her name. It had taken a long time to wake her up so she could do it.

  “Where’s your permission slip?” Sister Pamela said.

  For a moment he didn’t know. He couldn’t answer her.

  She glanced down. “Just give it to me.”

  It was right there in his hand, folded in half and crumpled, see-through in one spot from the moisture of his palm. She pinched the slip by a dry corner, tugged at it until his fingers understood and stiffly opened. Previously Freddy had been a wizard, an angel, and a knight. Lately, whenever he felt nervous, it seemed best to imagine he was a robot. He liked the ones he watched on TV best.

  Sister Pamela held the permission slip away from her and examined it for a long time. Earlier, at the apartment, Freddy’s mother had gripped the pen in her trembling fist like a toddler with a crayon. She’d gazed up at him from the couch with her one awakened eye, disappointed again, it seemed, that he wasn’t the person she dreamed about, whose name she murmured in her sleep. Her signature was worse than the one he’d begged her to make on the camp registration form months earlier, little more than a thick wandering line dragged off the edge of the page. The tip of the pen punctured the couch’s plastic covering, near the other holes and burn marks from cigarettes. His mother asked him then to call her job, to say she wasn’t feeling well and would be late again. But he hated her boss’s grouchy voice asking all those questions, and there was no time to waste, so he didn’t call. In such lonely moments Freddy wished he had a sibling, a younger brother he could conspire with or boss around, forcing on him every unpleasant task. He felt now as if Sister Pamela could see everything from earlier that morning, including his thoughts and feelings, right there on the permission slip.

  “Well?” she said finally. “Get in the van.”

  There was an open seat next to Santos, because the other kids avoided him. They said he had bad breath, that the little rattail on his otherwise shorn head made him look dirty, but Freddy didn’t agree. He liked the fuzzy nub of braided hair and even wanted one himself. And he thought Santos’s breath smelled good. It was richly sweet like the bruised peaches his mother sometimes got for free at C-Town, from the old man who said he was in love with her. Those peaches were so overripe they were almost liquid, syrupy in their skins.

  Freddy was nine. He couldn’t make sense of the way opinions suddenly changed about some kids. The opinions about Santos hadn’t shifted—not yet at least—so there was no danger of losing his friend to other boys.

  Santos began imitating Sister Pamela, making the same face he used when mocking Chinese people. Freddy laughed.

  “What an old bitch,” Santos said. He whispered because they were sitting near the front.

  Freddy laughed again. “You can’t talk that way about her.”

  “She’s just a wrinkled-up raisin wrapped in a sheet.”

  He was being a friend when he made fun of her, but Freddy wanted to change the subject anyway. He didn’t like it when Santos said such things. Before she got sick, Aunt Ava had been thinking about becoming a nun.

  When the van pulled into the street, the twelve kids, all boys, clapped and cheered. Sister Pamela sat beside the driver, looking back when it got too loud or when one of the boys said a bad word.

  “What do you think the pool will be like?” Freddy said. “And the house. And what will they make on the grill?”

  “The food’s always great,” Santos said. “Burgers, hot dogs, whatever you want. There’s even steak. You can get seconds, no problem. Thirds too.”

  His know-it-all tone annoyed Freddy, but he smiled anyway. He’d been looking forward to the trip, imagining it for many weeks. This was his first summer with the camp, his friend’s third. The sisters of the Missionary of Charity ran St. Rita’s, and a few times every summer they’d take a van out to the suburbs, in New Jersey or Connecticut or Westchester, where some friendly white people would welcome the city kids into their house. It must have been their way to feel closer to God, or at least to Mother Teresa. She had started the Missionary. Last summer she had come to visit the Bronx. Even Freddy’s mother had gone to see her. It had been important for her to spot Mother Teresa with her own eyes, as if that would improve things for her
younger sister, Ava.

  “The house is great too,” Santos said. “Really freaking big.”

  “How big?” Freddy said, though he had asked this question before.

  Santos grinned. “Wait till you see. I know.”

  “Liar.”

  “Your mom.”

  Freddy sucked his teeth. “How could you know?”

  “I do know. I heard Sister Spamela say we’re going to Scarsdale. I’ve been there before,” Santos said. “Twice,” he added, holding two fingers up in Freddy’s face. “If it’s Scarsdale, it’s the Johnsons’ house. We always go there.”

  Freddy had pictured the Johnsons’ house before, and now he imagined it in more detail. As the van made its way out of the city, he saw the house’s open garage like the ones on TV. Inside, two cars were parked side by side, their hoods shiny in the sun. The lines of bushes leading him to the front door were shaped like animals: a squat baby elephant, two fat pigeons, and a panda lying on its back. The house was white, it was true, with blue shutters and roofing, but different kinds of white existed, and this one was special, like a patch of new snow. In the kitchen, half the size of Freddy’s whole apartment, the refrigerator was silver, not brown; it stood tall and wide, and didn’t make a sound. It was dizzying to go down to the basement, where the floors and walls were like gold, and back up to the first and then the second floor, where he peeked into the bedrooms, before going back down again to change into his bathing suit. The path out from the back door, made of weird pale stone, felt warm on the soles of his feet. To his right, the garden had almost every color he’d ever seen and the flowers nodded and shook from the movements of fat bugs. He and the other kids fit easily into the pool—it could have fit almost twice as many of them—and there was no need to worry or watch out when anyone jumped into the deep end or flew down the slide into the cool, clear water. At lunchtime, they all sat under an outdoor shelter, like a little house itself, and its roof and the trees protected them from the sun and from summer rain. They breathed in the smoke of meats grilled over charcoal. Then they ate tender slices of steak and laughed, and their laughter was even louder and more relaxed than the sounds they were making on the van as it sped away from the city. And through it all, Mrs. Johnson floated around them like a spirit, a gentler sort than he knew in his world, her hair gold like the walls of the basement, her face softened by a smile.