A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  Carlos ended the game, shook the man’s hand, and hugged him. He began to walk out of the roda, but the famous mestre stepped in. One woman yelled, “Opa!” and several people exclaimed in delight. Sulay was on the bateria, playing the atabaque drum, laughing now. When the two men crouched facing each other at the berimbaus, she led the next song:

  Valha-me Deus, Senhor São Bento

  Buraco velho tem cobra dentro

  Valha-me Deus, Senhor São Bento

  Quando vê cobra assanhada

  Valha-me Deus, Senhor São Bento

  A cobra assanhada morde

  Valha-me Deus, Senhor São Bento

  They shook hands and began to play. It was my brother’s turn to be overmatched. The mestre, a true snake, had probably been playing capoeira longer than Carlos had been alive, and now he was the one who knew where the other would go. His footwork was incredible, and his feints were so layered that it was hard to know when a real attack might come. He began a kick now, and Carlos tried to sweep his base leg, but this kick was also a feint and my brother was the one swept to the floor. The mestre strutted around in the roda and everyone laughed, my brother too. They shook hands again and the game continued. In this second phase, after the fall, my brother became more alert and seemed more comfortable. He used his flexibility more and danced as he had in the last game. He and the mestre had several beautiful and intricate exchanges, and while the mestre still controlled the game and pressed him, Carlos played well. After a few more minutes, they shook hands and embraced, ending one of the best games I’d ever seen. The mestre stood with his arm around my brother in the roda, as if showing him off, and people began to applaud for them. I applauded too. My brother noticed me then and, tentatively, I raised my hand to him. He pointed me out to the mestre, but before anything else could happen I slipped out the door.

  “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” This sentence, frequently quoted by writers, is attributed to Hemingway. I still teach his work sometimes, though I’ve grown somewhat cold to it. Perhaps, for writers, what he says is true. It certainly seems true for me. With my brother, however, it’s a different story. Watching him that night, I knew that he would one day become a mestre, a master of the small roda as well as, in some ways, the large. As I lay in bed later, in my otherwise empty cabin, listening to the distant sound of the berimbaus humming in the air, I wondered about mastery. What it took to achieve it. The drive to attain it, to constantly correct oneself, the ceaseless drive to be complete. It struck me as such a hard life. Masters of an art are magnetic figures, yes, and we are drawn to them, fascinated by them and their hard-won talents. With rare exceptions, though, they must be lonely too. So few of us know what they know, or have their capacities. So few of us feel truly worthy of them. Our astonishment also keeps us at bay.

  The next morning, near the end of the conference, I walked into the noise of the big cabin for breakfast. Carlos was already there, sitting with the men Sulay had called his brothers. I got my food and sat alone at the end of a half-empty table. The heat and sweat of last night’s roda were still present in the room. Carlos came over and sat at my table, next to me. I ate, and for a while we sat in silence and stared at the same empty space.

  “You ran away last night,” he said with a grin. “Mestre was looking for you.”

  “I don’t think I can deal with that,” I said. “But you looked good—you looked great.”

  We were quiet again, lost in the chatter of the room. Then, somewhat disingenuously, I said, “What happened to us?”

  He sort of chuckled. “I don’t know what happened to us, big brother, but I sure as hell know what happened to me.”

  I nodded, thinking of the terrible things I knew about and might have prevented. I also wondered at the things, known and unknown, that in some way I might have caused.

  “Actually,” he said, and he looked at me then, “there are things that I know have happened to both of us.” He wrung his hands roughly and stared at them. “I’m ready to talk about it if you are, and if you’re ready to hear it.”

  “Yeah, we should do that,” I replied, too quickly.

  After a moment, he stood and said, “Hey, I want you to be at the closing roda tonight.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean in it,” he said, “not just watching from the damn door. Can you deal with that?”

  “Think so. Just keep that old snake away from me.”

  “Can’t make any promises, buddy.”

  “You know,” I added, “I learned a few things in Harlem that might surprise you.”

  He laughed deeply and gripped my shoulder. “See you there,” he said, and went back to sit with his brothers.

  That evening, everyone wore white. The circle was beautiful, a bright and solid ring. The famous mestre held the gunga, the largest berimbau, and presided over the roda the entire time. He led all of the songs too. One of the reasons for his fame was his singing voice, and I’m tempted to say that it was the most impressive thing about him. There was something of the ocean in it, or below it, a quality like sonar, like the wailing of the many drowned and gone. His voice was a vessel too, driving into you the way a prow slices through water.

  Carlos sat next to me in the perimeter of the roda. He closed his eyes for a while, also enthralled by the mestre’s voice. He leaned over and said, “It just transports you, doesn’t it? Takes you all the way there.”

  Soon he was next up to play, but instead of going with whoever was opposite him, as one typically did, he took my hand and led me into the roda. He gestured for everyone around us to move in, and they contracted the circle, leaving much less space in which we could move. I saw how Carlos wanted us to play, low to the ground, our bodies close. This intimate, and dangerous, style of play was known as “the inside game.”

  My heart pounded at we knelt at the largest berimbau, at the feet of the mestre. He rested his voice for the first time that evening, and Carlos began to sing:

  Camarada, o que ele é meu camarada?

  The chorus responded as one, “É meu irmão,” elongating the second word to fit the phrase into the rhythm of the song. Carlos continued to lead it. He too had a beautiful singing voice—coarsened over time—and the weight and texture of it pressed against me. The surrounding chorus encased us in a pillar of sound, sealing us into the space of the tightened circle. After Carlos’s next call, “Meu irmão do coração, camarada,” I joined in with the response, and the song continued:

  É meu irmão

  Na roda da capoeira, camarada

  É meu irmão

  Irmãozao de coração, camarada

  É meu irmão

  He passed the song to the mestre, who led it now and drove the words so that they cut deeply into me. I understood them. Carlos and I bowed our heads and reached for each other’s hands. We leaned into the roda to begin.

  A Family

  Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see any movie with his mother on a Friday night. Her expression went from pleading to irate. The boy said nothing more. With his head taking on weight, hung as though his neck couldn’t hold it, he followed her inside.

  It was a chilly evening in November, and rain threatened the sky. Curtis blew warm breath into his cupped hands. Obedience, he thought; he could talk to the boy about that. He’d been making a list of topics they could discuss. The question of obedience felt right for a boy of fifteen, when the man he would become was beginning to erupt out of him, like a flourish of horns. Though sometimes it was important to disobey. Curtis had known this since he was younger than the boy was now. Twelve years in prison hadn’t changed that, and so Curtis was here, doing exactly what his mother had asked him that morning not to do anymore. He’d been seen watching Andre and Lena, and his mother’s friends were gossiping about what they saw. Maybe Curtis still h
ad a grudge against Lena, they said, or maybe he simply couldn’t let go of the past. But he didn’t care what his mother or her friends said. A man decided his own way, and there came a time when a boy growing into his manhood had to as well. Unless your balls haven’t dropped yet. Curtis could say that to the boy, teasing him the way he and the boy’s father, Marvin Caldwell, used to tease each other when they were young. Marvin dreamed most vividly of everything he would do for his mother one day, but even he knew to disobey her.

  Curtis took a last look at the names of the movies and tried to guess which one Andre might have wanted to see, and which one Lena would have chosen instead. He counted his money. He’d spent only twelve of the forty dollars his mother had left for him, so he decided to get a bite to eat while he waited for the movie to end. At the Downtown Bar and Grill, an old favorite, he ordered a hamburger and a soda. Refills were no longer free, so Curtis kept asking for glasses of water. From where he sat he could still see the brilliance of the marquee.

  The rain began before Andre and Lena came out of the theater. They took a walk anyway, and Curtis followed. Lena opened an umbrella that was large enough for two, but as they strolled along the promenade Andre kept drifting away from her, exposing himself to the cold drizzle. Lena stopped at a bench and used a piece of newspaper to wipe it dry. Andre maintained a distance from her when they sat. Curtis stalled for a few moments, and then settled near the middle of the next bench. A large trash can partially blocked his view of them, but he could hear their conversation.

  “Your daddy liked to come out here,” Lena said.

  “You told me that before,” Andre replied. Curtis had been following them for weeks, but had rarely been this close. He’d never heard them talk about Marvin.

  “Well, it’s nice, isn’t it? Look at that view.”

  Andre stood and gestured wildly at the rain. “Hello? I can’t see nothing.”

  Curtis had been out on the promenade several times since he’d been released from prison. There was plenty to see, he thought. A great unseen hand depressed the keys of the city and sounded notes held constant in the many windows, a thousand little squares of humming light. These seemed to float independently, since the tall buildings themselves, their outlines obscured, were indistinguishable from the black enamel seal of the sky. The night grew more thickly clouded by storm, but in the shifting bands of reflected light from the bridge and the city Curtis could see the surface of the river alive and puckered like so many restless mouths. Given all the nights he’d spent here since getting out, it felt like a triumph that he no longer thought of feeding himself to the water.

  “Why we out here, Ma?” Andre asked, sitting again. “It’s wet. I’m cold.”

  “It’s not so bad under the umbrella.”

  “Can we go?”

  “I just thought you’d like to stay out awhile longer. Might as well enjoy it now. I need you to be at home tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “You know how the girls go out to Temptations after work,” Lena said. “Well, this time they finally invited me.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday, Ma.”

  “I know what day it is. And I need you to be at home. For my peace of mind.”

  “While you out shaking your ass at the club.”

  “What’d you say, boy?”

  “Nothing,” Andre said. “I’m cold.” He stood again and started walking back the way they’d come.

  Lena chased after him, sounding pathetic as she called his name.

  Curtis didn’t follow them. After a while, he got up and strolled along the promenade in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only other person he saw was a man with an unsettling face. The man’s bouts of muttering formed clouds that flowered like visible emblems of his secret language before being pulled apart by the wind. But it was the way this man’s hands jumped within his dirty coat as he shuffled along that marked him as dangerous and insane. Curtis had been both of these things, in those months after Marvin died in the fire. Those months before Curtis went to prison. It was danger lurking in the man’s left pocket, he suspected, and insanity leaping around in the right. He liked the feeling of their passing him by.

  Curtis huffed the name of his long-departed friend—My dead friend, he told himself soberly—so he could see the wind take it. He imagined that it too, along with the words steaming from the man’s mouth, drifted off and seeded the East River. The river was badly polluted, but he liked it anyway. It flowed in either direction, reaching both ways until it licked the sea. As the man prattled on, now some distance away, Curtis again said Marvin’s name, which rose from his lips and hovered there for a moment, clean as an unstrung bone.

  He might have also said the name of the dead woman, the one he had struck with his car, the one who intruded on his dreams. But his life was for other things now, he’d been desperately telling himself, beautiful and wondrous things.

  The rain began turning to sleet, the sound of it an exhalation steadily hushing the world. Curtis indulged his sense of feeling contained but not trapped. Under the capacious dome of sky he was free, but bounded, so his newly freed limbs wouldn’t fly apart. As much as he wanted to stay there on the promenade—often he stayed until the spell of night began to break—the sleet was penetrating his slicker and the thin coat he wore underneath. His hands and feet were already numb. Curtis shivered. It wouldn’t make any damn sense to get out of the clink just to turn around and catch his death of cold. He walked quickly to keep the chill from settling into his muscle and marrow.

  The next night, Curtis walked along Atlantic Avenue, not far from the movie theater and the Downtown Bar and Grill. It was eleven o’clock and he enjoyed the bustle and breadth of the thoroughfare. He was still amazed at how much had changed: the number of fancy restaurants and wine stores now. Then again, many of the old bars remained. And the new nightclubs were just the old nightclubs with different names.

  An empty bus made its way past, the driver lit against its dark frame like an insect stuck in amber. On the corner stood a white woman trying in vain to hail a medallion cab, and Curtis stood beside her, as though waiting to cross the street. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, with only a scarf and a trim jacket over her short dress. Her uncovered head twitched, shaking her cropped hair from her lips; her legs were thin but shapely, the color of rich cream. She was what Marvin used to call “a slim goody.” Curtis imagined how soft the inside of her thighs would be. He imagined her open mouth.

  It had been a long time since he’d had sex with anyone but himself, his own clutching hand. In those first years in prison, he kept an old black-and-white picture of the actress Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. Following those years of her smiling in the swimming pool came explicit pictures of women opening their shiny, hairless bodies to the camera. When he got out of prison he bought a couple of magazines with centerfolds, but then he discovered how easily videos could be found on his mother’s computer. He still liked that picture of the actress in the pool most of all.

  The white woman’s phone began ringing, and she greeted the caller, apparently her mother, the simple words strained by her tone of heavy familiarity. The second Curtis heard her speak, a feeling of exhaustion overcame him; she reminded him, for some reason, of the woman he had struck with his car. But if that woman had been white, Curtis knew, he would still be in prison, with many more years there ahead of him. To get away from the voice now whining into the phone, he jogged across the street.

  In front of Temptations, three men were lined up behind a black velvet rope. The bouncer wore dark glasses and appeared to have no intention of letting the three in. Curtis took his place in line as the first man began to complain.

  “Come on now, chief. We been waiting out here for a minute.”

  “Damn near a half hour,” another said. “Say it straight.”

  “And the hawk is out, big man. Come on.”

  The bouncer said nothing. Another man got in line behind Curtis as a livery taxi pull
ed up. Three women got out and were followed by Lena Johnson, an afterthought. The bouncer wasted no time letting them in.

  Waiting in line with the other men gave Curtis plenty of time to reconsider going in. In fact, he tried to change his mind, calling up reasons he should leave—images of the promenade, of the white woman on the corner—but it was Lena’s nyloned legs emerging from the taxi that were lit up on the stage of his mind. Moving slowly in a sapphire dress, she trailed the other women. The shock of seeing her dolled up was slight, but after she vanished through the door, every scene that proceeded on the stage of his mind featured the nylons and the sapphire dress and ended in foolishness. He kept thinking about Andre imagining these scenes unfolding or trying to decipher his mother’s face tomorrow during the broadcasts of Sunday afternoon football. The boy needed to be spared his mother’s small tragedies.

  About fifteen minutes later, the bouncer announced to the men that it would be a ten-dollar cover to get in, speaking as if they had only just arrived. He examined Curtis’s clothes doubtfully before admitting him. Curtis wore jeans, but they weren’t that dirty; the real problem was that he had on work boots instead of what Marvin would have called “slippery earls.” This outfit wouldn’t have gotten him into the places they used to frequent, back in the days when they used fake IDs.

  “Good luck, playboy,” the bouncer said. He stepped aside to let Curtis through the curtains. “Your broke ass gonna need it.”

  The nightclub had two floors. Curtis didn’t spot Lena on the ground level, so he went down to the basement. He took a seat at the bar that gave him a good view of the room and recognized certain features: the low ceiling with its copper tiles, the four pillars that marked the boundary of the dance floor. He and Marvin had been here before, back when there was only a basement level. The place used to be called Nelson’s.

  Curtis had extra money from an odd job helping his mother’s neighbor move some boxes, plus what was left of yesterday’s forty dollars. It was easier than he thought it would be to order a bourbon. The words didn’t get stuck; the bartender didn’t stare. The taste of the drink closed his eyes and warmed him from his throat to his navel.