A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  When he finally woke up, his squinting eyes blinked with confusion. Maybe it was because he realized what had happened or because he saw my tears, but he started crying too. He held his arms out toward me, but I backed away, afraid. In this moment how could either of us think touch was a good thing? I wiped my cheeks. “Why didn’t you breathe?” I said. “You’re not supposed to stop breathing. Why didn’t you say something?” He kept nodding, accepting the blame as he cried. “But you can’t tell,” I said. “Carlos, you can’t tell what happened. We’ll get in trouble. We both will. We’ll get a beating, so you can’t tell.”

  Carlos never did tell on me. He was convinced that I had saved us from a beating, and he may have even thought I had saved his life. In gratitude, he built a little religion and installed me as its godhead. This went beyond a younger sibling’s normal admiration for his elder. In a way, I had once again become “Ba-dee,” the alpha of his first and most private language. He was so single-minded in his devotion that, thereafter, when his father tickled him and asked, “De quien tú eres?” it was a shock that he didn’t respond by naming me.

  He seemed especially eager to show his love for me at school. We attended the parish school of our neighborhood’s main church. It was a three-story building made of red brick and trimmed with sandstone, next to the rectory. The sixth, seventh, and eighth grades used classrooms on the first floor, and the younger students were upstairs. Once we got to school, there was no reason for Carlos and me to see each other until it was time for dismissal, but he found ways. He knew the grades on the first floor switched classrooms between periods, so he started to sneak downstairs, bathroom pass in hand, in order to say hi to me in the hall. It was funny in the beginning, and, indirectly, I won a bit of attention from the girls. “Oh, your little brother is so cute,” they’d say, but in their minds his cuteness had nothing whatsoever to do with the big brother. The gap-toothed smiles and hugs and devotional dances he improvised made the girls no more likely to peel back their mysteries for me.

  I was a good student, and would go on to became salutatorian. Mr. Taylor, my favorite teacher, called me “exceptional” and said I was “blessed with talent.” He told me constantly that I had a bright future, that I was one of the lucky ones who would get out of the South Bronx and make something of myself. In spite of this, I had decided that the true purpose of eighth grade, my last year at the school, was to figure out girls. Most of them had begun to roll up the waists of their plaid skirts, and nothing any teacher said in class, even Mr. Taylor, could be as interesting as the legs of a fourteen-year-old girl. In Taylor’s math class, what my friends and I enumerated on any given day were the newly exposed inches of blooming thigh. We especially loved Ms. Nelson’s English class. She had us sit in a circular formation, so we were able to look directly across at Evelyn Martinez, who, as far as we were concerned, was already a woman. The girls weren’t always careful about crossing their legs, so sometimes we would catch a flash of underwear, or pretend that we had. Darius would convulse in his seat whenever he claimed to see something, as though the effect of such a glimpse were a blast of electric current. Sheldon couldn’t contain his laughter. Ms. Nelson caught on to the fact that we were up to no good, so she kept a closer eye on us. She must have shared her suspicions with the other teachers. They became more vigilant with us in their classes too. We came up with other ways to satisfy our curiosity, but without the safety of our classrooms, we had to deal with Carlos, my annoying shadow.

  The school’s cafeteria was in the basement. We figured out that it would be easy to get our blasts of electricity if we lingered at the back of the eighth-grade line after lunch while the girls proceeded to the first-floor landing. We got to enjoy these lightning storms for a few days before Carlos, with his shirttails untucked, ran over to us from his seat at the raucous third-grade table. He’d seen me peering up at the girls and giggling, tugging at my clip-on necktie, so he peered up into their skirts too. His initial look of bafflement gave way and he laughed as though he had heard the world’s funniest joke. It was an ugly and gratuitous laugh, and it made him look like a small, frightening clown with a painted-on mouth. I dragged him by the arm back into the cafeteria and told him he had to stay with his class.

  “Be good,” I said, too rattled to think of anything else.

  I don’t have children, and at this point I doubt I ever will. But I have a brother, and there are enough years and other distances between us for me to understand the vanity of saying those two words to anyone, especially a small child. To this day, I can clearly see the expression of near pity on his face.

  Carlos and Sulay wanted to assist with the final preparations for the conference—setting up the registration table, getting the instruments ready, bringing crates of food and bottles of water to the kitchen. It was determined that Rosa and I would just get in the way, and the people who would run childcare for the conference hadn’t arrived yet. Sulay had insisted her daughter would warm up to me, but it appeared this might never be the case. All my attempts to get Rosa to play with me by the campfire circle failed. Despite my efforts, she whined and whined for her parents until I gave up and brought her back to the big cabin. She was such a shrill annoyance to everyone there that one of the mestres, a dreadlocked Brazilian with a high, scratchy voice, got fed up. He rested his hands high on his narrow waist and, in broken English, told all four of us to just go away for a while. Two hours remained before the opening ceremony.

  A creek ran not far from the camp, and we decided to take our swimsuits and wade in it. The hike was brief and easy. Midafternoon sunlight shot through the leaves of the forest canopy and spilled like tossed clutches of coins along the ground. Flutelike cries, ee-oh-lay, rang through the air. Rosa eyed me warily over Sulay’s shoulder as Carlos and I followed them on the trail. To our left came sounds of rustling in the briers.

  “I hope there aren’t any snakes here,” I said.

  Carlos snorted. “The snakes he needs to worry about are back at the camp. Hope big brother’s been training hard.”

  I had taken classes a little more frequently in the three weeks leading up to the conference, but I’d found they taxed my mind more than my body. Capoeira angola remained a puzzle to me, no matter what, and when I played the game, I tended to think my way through it. A jogo can be played slowly, especially in the opening minutes, but not always. I preferred the slow game, found it beautiful and chess-like. The sweet agony of controlled and unhurried movement appealed to me. When I played in a game that started to speed up, I got flustered. I couldn’t think quickly enough. Snakes of any kind would be an issue.

  Quantico Creek was a narrow sheet wrinkling in the breeze. Reflections of the trees danced in its shimmer. Farther along, the water quickened and frothed white over rocks; near us it fed into a still pool. Sulay treated this visit to the stream pool as though she were at her favorite beach in Leme. As soon as we reached the south bank, she set Rosa down and was out of her clothes in a snap. Sulay stretched her long arms upward, then back, and made some futile adjustments to the scanty bottom of her suit. In a moment, Rosa was also in her bathing suit, back in her mother’s arms, and the two made their way into the water. Carlos stripped down to a pair of tiny swim trunks, which Sulay must have chosen for him. Even though mine were much longer and looser, I removed only my shirt and shoes. I sat in my jeans at a reasonable distance from Carlos, both of us perched on a circular formation of warm, smooth rock, our feet pointing toward its center.

  “Porra!” Sulay yelled. She proceeded more gingerly into the pool, taking lighter steps on the gravels. The water came to her hips now, and Rosa’s toes skimming across its surface made splashes and spray. Carlos and I watched without speaking. A band of sunlight traced a white line along Sulay’s cheek and shone on her head of gathered curls, reddening them, blanching the loose, trembling strands and the wisps at her nape. She waved to us and convinced Rosa to do the same. Carlos, on my right, watched me now, with a strained look on his fac
e.

  “So what’s happening with that girl in Northeast?” he asked. It had taken him a lot of effort to ask.

  “She has a sad face,” I said.

  “I think she’s pretty. At least she was the one day you let me get a look at her.”

  “I just can’t stand her sad-ass face anymore.”

  “And here I thought you were gonna dedicate your damn novel to her.”

  “It’s not even like that.”

  “But she loves you,” he teased, “doesn’t she?”

  I ran my thumbnail along a groove in the rock. “Women fall in love too easily.”

  His laughter, a loud shot, silenced the nearby songbirds and sent them darting from the branches and leaf litter. They filled the sky with yellow flight. “I don’t think the easy part is what bothers you,” he said.

  Upstream, a mysterious shape moved with the current. The creature—or was it a shadow?—slid near Sulay, who was squatting to dip herself and Rosa up to the shoulders. She came up laughing with the girl. Her clavicles were bare in her strapless suit and they made fine shallows that each held a little teaspoon of water.

  I pointed downstream. “Think the lake is that way,” I said.

  My brother’s eyes bored into me. “Nope. This way’s the Potomac. Lake’s the other way.” For a while, we were quiet again as mother and daughter communicated in Portuguese and gibberish. Then he said, “So how about it? What happening with what’s-her-name—Millie, right? Big brother’s not getting any younger.”

  “What kind of name is Mildred anyway?” I said. “Mildred. Who the hell would give a newborn baby a name like that? Just out of the womb and already someone’s ugly grandmother.”

  “That girl is not ugly. She seems nice, and sensible, like she knows what’s what. You were hauling your ass down to DC every few weeks to see her. You definitely weren’t coming to see me.”

  “Nobody knew where you were.”

  “Nobody cared,” he said.

  “Come on. Mom tracked you down.”

  “Oh, we’re doing this? Okay. You’re right, Mom cared,” he said, his voice a little louder now. “But you know how she is, light as a feather. Sometimes things get to where you need care to come down hard. Sometimes shit gets so bad, hard is all you feel.”

  I didn’t respond and he allowed our silence to linger. The sun was over the lake now, pulling bits of green and amber to the surface of the water.

  “Hey,” he said abruptly, “remember that time we got into trouble at St. Francis? I know you do. Man”—he laughed—“that’s one of my most vivid memories, but I didn’t understand a thing about it until later. Girls, sex … But I didn’t really understand it until a lot later.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Well, how angry you were. How angry we both were. Remember?”

  “Guess I blocked it out,” I said.

  “What? No way, Eric. How could you forget that?” A bittersweet smile played on his face. “This is gonna sound crazy, but I think that’s the closest I ever felt to you. You initiated me, buddy.”

  The sky, in that moment, resembled an open, waiting mouth.

  “You remember. You have to,” my brother said, his voice full of excitement. “Come on, help me out with the details. Who was the one—?”

  “Why you gotta talk about old shit?” I said. We watched each other for a moment.

  “Don’t yell at me, man,” he said.

  “I’m not yelling. I’m just saying. We’re here, right? I’m here with you now, right? I don’t want to talk about Millie or St. Francis or the Bronx. None of it. Let’s just enjoy this.”

  He shook his head and stood. His body had become muscular, I noticed, his skin glowing with health. He waved at Sulay and Rosa, who were returning now. Sulay again took careful steps, dragging the length of her body out of the water, which pulled the bottom of her suit down slightly along her hips. Her belly was marked by Rosa’s birth, and at this moment a strange expression marked her face.

  “Eric,” Carlos said. He glared down at me. “You see that woman there—my wife, my daughter’s mother? Yeah, I know you do. You might not be able to tell though, ’cause she’s got that nice smile and looks the way she does in that suit. Got those pretty eyes and that hair, the accent, a name that makes your mouth feel good saying it. But don’t get it twisted. That woman’s as solid as that rock your ass is sitting on. She knocks me upside my head the way I need her to, know what I mean? She loves me hard, but she loves me.”

  He seemed like he wanted to say more, or maybe he was waiting for me to reply. I didn’t say a word. He squinted up into the sun and shook his head again, then walked until his feet were in the water, his arms held open for his family.

  How would my brother tell the story I’m about to tell? What words would he use? Why was he so excited that afternoon by the creek? What he said wasn’t true, or was it? But how could that have been the time he felt closest to me?

  The end of my last year at St. Francis approached, and for my friends and me, the sap, as they say, began to rise. All of us had troubles of some kind at home, or claimed to, so we stayed out after school as much as we could. We’d go to the corner store after our last class and get boxes of Ferrara Pan candy. We’d walk around eating it and talking about what next year would be like. Darius, Sheldon, and I were all going to different high schools.

  Our madness for girls intensified, but we couldn’t talk freely about them because Carlos was always there with us. It was easier for us on warm, clear days. We’d stomp over to the playground by PS 49 and send him off to the monkey bars or the slide. One afternoon, however, Carlos wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept making unreasonable requests. Finally, when I promised to go with him on the seesaw later, he let us be.

  My friends and I discussed the girls at school whose panties we had seen that day, or wanted to see again. This went on for a while until I announced I was tired of just looking. It wasn’t good enough anymore. I wanted more. I told them about an incident that had happened the other day.

  At school there was always a big show at dismissal time. Since the oldest students had class on the first floor, we were the first ones to gather at the entrance to the school, where the principal stood grinning at us. The younger kids pressed in behind us or crowded into the stairwell. The principal would wait until it got quiet and then she’d say, “Good afternoon, St. Francis!” We’d reply, “Good afternoon, Sister,” and then she and the vice-principal would open the doors. It wasn’t unusual for us to jockey for position to be the very first ones out. I explained to my friends that as I worked my way through the crowd, the back of my hand accidently, or so I said, had rubbed along the back of Kayla Valentine’s skirt. At first they called me a liar, but I insisted that I had touched her. Showing the hand I did it with seemed to convince them. When Sheldon asked what it felt like, I smirked at him. “Soft,” I said. “Like heaven.”

  They both wanted to do what I had done, and I wanted to do it again too. So for over three weeks it became our everyday routine before the school doors opened to worm our way through the crowd and touch girls with the backs of our hands. All we could talk about was the thrill of dragging our knuckles along those skirts. When we gathered on the benches in the PS 49 playground after school, each of us bragged about which girls we had gotten, especially the prettiest ones, the ones who ignored us. Sometimes we planned targets for the next day. Carlos was always with us, observing everything, but it no longer mattered to me. I wanted to get even bolder.

  “I’m gonna palm one,” I said. “Get me a handful.”

  In response, my friends told me I was crazy, and that I was going to get caught. “Chill,” Sheldon added. “Your brother.”

  But I didn’t care. I’d grown lax about shielding Carlos from our “grown-up” talk. Glancing at him, I said, “He’s so pressed to be around me, I’ma let him. He’s gonna hear what he’s gonna hear. See what he’s gonna see. You won’t say nothing—right, peanut?”

  I h
ad decided Beth would be next. Beth was a grown woman, one of the kindergarten assistants, whose daughter was a second grader in the school. She wore the tightest pants we had ever seen, and her body reminded us of the exaggerated drawings of heroines in comic books. To us, she far exceeded the skinny white girls on the covers of magazines. She was at the apex of our adolescent desires. We dreamed of her, claimed her in our fantasies. At my urging, Sheldon and Darius promised they’d go through with it too. Tomorrow was a Friday, and I insisted it had to happen then. I didn’t want to go into the weekend without having done it. My desire felt violent, like a fury.

  After dismissal the next day, the three of us, followed by Carlos, raced down the front stairs and hung out by the school gates. Beth came down the stairs, swaying her broad hips as usual. She stood on the sidewalk talking to some of the kindergarteners and looking around, probably for her daughter. The crowd was a little sparse but I still went right away, before I lost my nerve. As I approached, I commanded my hand not to shake. I slid my palm against the seat of her jeans and, as I did, a fuzzy sensation glided along the entire length of my own body. After several more steps, I turned around with a big grin, but then my face fell. Beth gripped Carlos by the arm, almost shaking him, and she pointed at me and yelled. Darius and Sheldon were nowhere to be seen.

  Carlos and I were brought to the principal’s office. Mr. Taylor and the vice-principal sat across from us, black men facing black boys. Mr. Taylor never lost his cool, but when I looked up at him from underneath my brows, he seemed to be trembling. He told me I was a good kid, exceptional, one of the best he had ever taught, and so he was deeply disappointed in me. Didn’t I know I had a responsibility to be an example to my brother? Helplessly, he said he knew my body was going through changes and my hormones were raging. When he asked if I understood why what I did was wrong, I nodded. The vice-principal knelt in front of Carlos and sternly reminded him that you never ever touch anyone’s private parts. My brother started to cry.