A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  The music blasting in the club sounded like pure racket, but this wasn’t new. While he liked some of the rap other boys listened to when they were growing up, Curtis was always drawn to older music, songs from the sixties and seventies. All right, old man. Marvin had a great time teasing him about this. Look at the old head tryna get his groove! He’d mock Curtis by bending over and holding his lower back, two-stepping with an imaginary cane.

  Lena and her friends were already out there shaking their bodies, each with a drink in hand. Some new dances must have caught on from the music videos. As he watched, Curtis felt he was a man true to better times. He returned to the problem of Andre, how he’d manage to talk to the boy and what his first words would be. After a while, a tall man in a suit came up behind Lena and began to whisper in her ear. She laughed. Soon she had backed herself into him and they became fused in body and rhythm. She pursed her lips and slapped her thigh with her free hand as they danced. Although he and Lena were the same age, thirty-five, Curtis was upset to see her carrying on like this. Feeling sorry for the boy and, somehow, for Marvin, he wished he had just gone to the promenade. He ordered a second bourbon.

  Lena and the man in the suit talked for a while at a different side of the bar. He had bought her another drink, but the smile was gone from her eyes. She seemed much less engaged now that they weren’t dancing. The man must have noticed this too. He tried to pull her back onto the dance floor, but she refused. The man tried a few more times and then his mouth turned cruel. He appeared to curse at Lena before he walked away.

  She stood at the bar for a while, staring into her drink. Then she tossed it back, the entire pour, and drew a thin cigarette from her purse. She said something to one of the women she’d come in with and went past Curtis upstairs. It seemed for a moment that her gaze had fallen on him, but in places like this people’s eyes darted everywhere. He followed her. From the entrance, he saw her smoking out near the curb. Her coat was still checked inside and, with her purse pinned under her arm, she held herself, trembling against the cold. She dropped her cigarette and watched it smolder and die on the ground. She could have been some kind of bird staring down from a high perch, wings pinched against her blue body, refusing to fly.

  “Hey, playboy,” the bouncer said. “You leaving or what? It’s in or out, my man.”

  As Lena took out another cigarette and began the drama of lighting it, Curtis walked back into the club. He stayed on the ground floor this time, where the music seemed not quite as loud. Sipping from his third bourbon, he thought about how easy it had been to go from his first to his third, and beyond, on the night the girl was struck by his car. Dismissing this, he wondered instead about what Andre was doing, if he too was taking advantage of his freedom or compounding the little tragedies of the night by sitting timidly at home. A boy his age should be in the world, seeing as much as he could claim or aspire to. He should be terrified by the new sensation of a girl’s modest breasts in his hands, by the new sensation of her hands in his jeans, not by thoughts of his mother in a short dress playing at youth out here in the drunkenness of night. They were thirty-five, yes, but they were old. The boy was still young and he had his father’s face. Curtis had gotten close enough to see that. His face was the same, but his fate wouldn’t be.

  Curtis smelled the rank tobacco on her breath before he felt her cold hand on his shoulder.

  “You might as well come on,” Lena said.

  When he spun around on his barstool to look at her, she grabbed his drink and finished it in one swift motion. “Come on and dance with me,” she said.

  He allowed her to lead him to the dance floor, less crowded than the one downstairs. He bent his knees, searching for their bodies’ fit—it turned out he hadn’t forgotten this, how to accommodate the body of woman. They danced to old lovers’ rock. Her breasts were crushed against his ribs, his leg planted between hers. She held his shoulder and rode his hip. He touched a hand to her back and found skin there, exposed and sweaty. He could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair.

  She was clearly drunk and he, with the bourbon at work in his blood, had the impression that he was anonymous to her. He wished he could vanish on the spot and leave her to her phantom, but something he couldn’t name begged him to stay. It didn’t seem sexual—his body had yet to respond in that way to hers—so, he told himself, it had to be his obligation to the boy. But it felt like something more bewildering than an obligation. The yearning didn’t belong to him, and it didn’t belong to her either. It was beyond either of them, he felt, so it claimed them both. It was as though a bright, delicate object they couldn’t see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress stretched taut by his thigh, the spark of it hot where he carried her on his hip, moving her in the rhythm of his stationary stride, and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light. The exhilaration of her breathing and her slim clutching thighs and her hand pulling on his shoulder were the forces she exerted on him, and he carried her with his hip and his knees bent and his back dimly aching, but all that mattered was the fragile wire pressed between them, lit by something they could neither face nor abandon.

  This feeling of being stuck persisted and Curtis was horrified by it. When the long set of lovers’ rock ended and released them, he averted his eyes from the sapphire dress going loose again between Lena’s thighs. He knew of nothing else to do but go back to the bar and order another drink, and when she followed him there he ordered one for her as well. It was what anyone in the role of her phantom would do. Her drink was cooled by a sculpted sphere of ice that had the look of perfection and permanence, a little moon displayed in glass. When Lena drank she did so deeply, and the moon slid, and it wet the tip of her nose. Curtis’s drink had no ice. When he took it up he tilted it so the liquor fell just short of his lips and he could inhale its heat before drinking.

  What did she see when she looked at him? Added weight had rounded his face and a beard darkened it. His hair had receded above the temples so that a blunt arrow pointed down at his nose. What would Marvin look like now if he were alive?

  Curtis avoided Lena’s eyes, hoping the rest of their time together would pass like this—in silence. He tried to lose himself in the music that was playing but it wouldn’t permit him access; its borders were dense, its patterns impossible to predict.

  “I know who you are,” Lena said. “You.”

  Curtis was overcome with a feeling that by entering this place he had once known, he had also elected for so much more. He sat, helpless. Everything around him—the music, the carnal laughter, the spinning stellar lights—all of it was a frenzy. He’d forgotten this basic truth, that freedom was a wilderness.

  There was no place for them to go. He explained that he was living with his mother for a little while, listened as Lena said that her son was at home. Then she surprised Curtis by suggesting they get a room. Just for a couple of hours, she said. She was lonely. It wasn’t all that late yet. The nightclub itself would be open until four, and her son knew not to expect her home until after that. He’d already be asleep anyway, and she’d still wake up before he did. “All that boy’s worried about is having his breakfast ready in the morning,” she said. She told him she made pancakes and bacon on Sundays.

  Curtis hadn’t expected the drinks to be so expensive, so only six dollars remained in his pocket. His dignity would have been one reason to tell Lena no. Andre was another, but he was a reason to say yes too. Getting mixed up in her night wasn’t a good way to get closer to the boy, but it might be the only way.

  “I spent all the money I had on me,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Lena said. “I got it.”

  Their motel was called the Galaxy Inn. A strange scent hung in the air of their room, which was nearly as small as his cell had been. A coat of silver paint had recently been applied to the walls, but there was something else, an organ
ic pungency. Little effort had been made to mask the presence of former occupants. Useless dials studded the walls, mysterious blinking lights. Curtis felt trapped in some television show from the sixties, a science fiction program he had watched in syndication as a child.

  Lena lay with her back to him, abruptly calm, abruptly still. Curtis couldn’t even hear the sound of her breathing. He’d been surprised by her wildness, which exceeded his. The rough sheet covered her to the waist, displaying her long neck and the slick coins of her spine. Curtis felt the urge to yank the spine out of her, to scatter those coins all over the bed and catch a true glimpse of her inner workings under the room’s dimmed bulbs of winey light.

  Lena sat up. “I should go soon. See about my son.”

  Up close, even in this light, Curtis could see how dry her skin was, the blemishes on her forehead and cheeks. “Tell me about him,” he said.

  “Now?”

  “That boy’s asleep. You got time.”

  She studied his face. “What’s in that head of yours?”

  Curtis shrugged and made himself hold her hand. “Come on, tell me a little something.”

  When Lena grabbed her cigarettes, Curtis complained, but she ignored him and lit one anyway. She began to speak about her son, hesitantly at first, but her initial vague description of him eventually turned into a long complaint about her challenges with him, how easily she seemed to make him upset. He was a good child, she said, but their relationship was worsening and it was difficult to manage things on her own. “It’s not just that he’s a teenager,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

  “He’s probably just girl-crazy,” he said.

  “Uh-uh, I don’t think so,” she said, and went on, speaking with more kindness about him now.

  Then Curtis insisted on giving his view of things. The question of obedience was still on his mind, but nothing he said was profound. Lena listened to everything he said anyway, and she seemed contemplative when he fell silent again.

  “You know,” she told him, “if it was my boy you were interested in, there were easier ways than sniffing after my behind. You could’ve just walked up to him on the street and told him who you were.”

  Curtis straightened against the headboard. To him that sounded like the most difficult thing in the world. “I was just looking out for Marvin’s people, that’s all.” He felt embarrassed, a little angry. “I know it’s not the usual way,” he added.

  Lena shook her head. “Look at you,” she said. “I know you been gone, but you not invisible. People talk. I got eyes.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Long enough to think plenty on whether to do anything about it.”

  Curtis gestured at the blinking walls of the room, a tired old version of the future. He gestured down at the bed. “This what you decided to do about it?”

  “Well, you were there, sniffing as usual,” Lena said. “I had my notions, and you just happened to be the one. I knew you were safe. And I figured you’d go along with it.”

  He yanked off the sheet and exposed the full nakedness of his body. He sprang from the bed and glared down at her.

  “I’m all done with that,” she told him, “so you can put it away now.”

  “I’m not somebody you know,” Curtis said. “I never was.”

  She rubbed the edge of the sheet between her fingers. “Look, I’m gonna go. You can stay the rest of the night if you want, if you don’t wanna sleep at your mama’s house.” She rose from the bed and watched him for a few moments, frowning. “You don’t know me either,” she said, and began to dress.

  Curtis left not long after Lena did. No need to stay and stare at a dead end. Night was starting to drain from the edges of the sky, but he didn’t go directly to his mother’s house. Walking restored him when he was upset, helped him regain his focus, even before he went to prison, and now he savored it much more, despite the times he was harassed by cops. As adolescents he and Marvin would often stay out late, sometimes until dawn, romping all over Brooklyn. Marvin preferred walking or taking the bus to the half-blind underground careening of the subway. He liked taking different routes, favoring the slightest deviations or even dangerous blocks or neighborhoods over what he would have called “the same old, same old.” But he did enjoy the promenade.

  When the two boys went there together and gazed out at the protruding jaw of the city, they spoke most openly of their desires. Marvin spoke as if the days and years to come were nothing but a cycle of restoration. “I’m gonna get my mother a house,” he’d always say. This was his favorite thing. Not only would he pay off her considerable debts, he would do this too. The house he imagined buying for her was like a place he’d already been in, stepping past furniture bought from her catalogs and out to the little vegetable garden she’d keep. Looking up with her past the white slats to the blue roof where the birds would be rebuilding their nest. “She wouldn’t want the birds there,” he said once. “But I do. They do all the things I like.”

  Marvin spoke of girls as if he weren’t a virgin, as if he knew a thing about the frightening business of female nudity and of sex, which Curtis understood was animal and floral: the odd nosing around, the smells and the sap, the near-violence of fingernails and coarse hair, the peeling back of language to a hard core, like the spiked stones of peaches the boys used to throw at stray dogs.

  Then, for reasons Curtis never understood, Marvin got stuck on the idea of Lena Johnson. He talked about her constantly, and soon the boys’ wanderings through the borough began to circle her old neighborhood, not far from where Curtis was walking now. There was the basketball court—still there, Curtis knew—where Marvin kept insisting they go, despite the busted rims.

  One spring day they saw her there. She came from across the street and began to stroll the sidewalk along the length of the court, lifting her hand to take languid pulls from a cigarette. Marvin raced over with an odd look on his face, his hands in loose fists. He was carrying little rocks baked and blanched by the sun, as though he wanted to roll them at her like gifts through the openings in the chain-link fence. Curtis followed, smelling the opportunity for mischief. The boys caught up and then kept pace with Lena on their side, daylight flickering in their faces, blinking madly through the diamonds of the fence. The flashing light did not transfigure Lena’s appearance. She was still just a skinny girl with pointy elbows and spooky eyes, whose shirts and sweaters were always linted-up, whose flat ass made a pair of jeans droop and frown.

  When Marvin greeted her, she blew out the smoke that had been held in her lungs. She was inhaling from a joint, they realized, not one of her usual cigarettes. Kids made fun of her at school for having stale breath. Curtis laughed at these jokes. Marvin used to laugh too.

  “My mama told me not to talk to strange boys,” Lena said, without looking at either boy.

  “What? It’s me, Marvin Caldwell. From school.”

  “I know who you are. Don’t mean you not strange.”

  “But you talking to me anyway.”

  “Do you always do what your mama says?”

  And that was it. She kept going without another word and left Marvin standing with his long fingers clawed into the fence, exactly where Curtis stood now. Marvin somehow turned what she’d said into a genuine mystery, one he considered, on that day and afterward, by wondering aloud about her life. Had anyone ever seen her mother at the school? Did they get along or did they argue all the time? Did they look alike? He let Curtis know how deeply he imagined her. As Lena gradually became a part of Marvin’s life, he talked less often to Curtis about her. And when they became a couple, he hardly talked to Curtis at all.

  It took a long time, but Curtis finally got him to go on a walk, like they used to, one Sunday afternoon in Prospect Park. When they got near Drummer’s Grove, alive with sound, he confronted him. “We supposed to be boys,” Curtis said.

  “Then be happy for me,” Marvin replied.

  “I can’t even remember the last t
ime we hung out.”

  The shaking of gourds decorated the sound of the drums. Marvin said, “Man, you know how it is when people first get loved up.”

  “You don’t even talk to me no more.”

  Marvin laughed. “It’s not like that. You’re my boy. Trust. We’ll be good.”

  “So it’s just a phase?”

  “Nope, it’s real. Be happy I’m happy.”

  “What about me?” Curtis said. The drumming got more layered and complex. A strange instrument that looked like a bow and arrow made high twanging noises.

  “Okay, I see,” Marvin said. “You want it to be about you.”

  Curtis frowned. “I just can’t believe you let a bitch get between us.”

  Marvin stopped walking. He narrowed his eyes in the direction of the music. The head of a dancing man jerked up and down. Sounds from a wind instrument wove between those of the drums. “Don’t ever come out your mouth like that,” he said. “I’m serious, you hear me?”

  Curtis laughed wryly. “But that’s what you did though.”

  Marvin closed his hands into fists and then opened them. Curtis watched them close and open, close and open. Marvin got in his face. Their noses almost touched. Curtis tried not to blink.

  “I’m out, man,” Marvin said finally, and gripped him in a firm lengthy hug.

  Curtis let his arms hang limp at his sides, hands loose. As time passed, until the fire and the death, he mostly kept his arms and hands that way, until he used them again to drink.

  When Curtis came in, his mother was asleep in the easy chair again, the glow from the television in the living room bluing her form. He didn’t switch off the old sitcom and he didn’t wake her. Instead he listened to her dogged breathing. On the small table beside her were peanut shells on a paper towel and a cup with the dregs of tea. When Curtis stayed out until seven or eight in the morning, his mother would be awake when he got in, looking tired as she sipped strong coffee and stretched her sore back at the kitchen table. Otherwise she’d be where she was now, floating on the merest shallows of sleep. When he told her not to wait up for him, she said this was nothing; she’d been waiting for him to come home for twelve years.