A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  A little time remained before sunrise. Curtis would often read in such circumstances; he’d become an avid reader of Walter Mosley’s novels in prison. But he liked the feeling of being near his mother now—he liked her when she was asleep—so he sat with a tall glass of water and forced his gaze onto the television screen. The off-hour commercials for ridiculous products held his attention better than the show itself, though the canned laughter was a kind of murmured grace. Despite his efforts, his body slumped against an arm of the couch and he fell asleep.

  Curtis often slept during the day, so his dreams were full of light. At least, this was how he made sense of what happened. Each dream brought him to a city of houses and water and clear sparkling glass. Every inhabitant wore white, against which their brown skin was beautiful. People smiled and held the hands of their lovers, their children, and their friends. The strange thing about these light-filled dreams was that Marvin never appeared, not a piece of him in the fragments Curtis could gather upon waking. He told himself that the grandness of the dreams—the pristine landscapes and spacious houses, the variety and richness of color—was a symbol of Marvin’s presence, or that the diffuse light, the kind you see in old paintings, was the gold of his friend’s fantasies. But he knew his claims were suspect. He felt stung by Marvin’s disregard for his dream life.

  It was not yet morning now, however, so his dream had a different character. Aside from the darkness of waking life seeping into it, there was the dim, gray shadow of the woman he’d hit with his car all those years ago. The woman sprang into the dream the same way she’d sprung out onto the street; she was faceless, voiceless, and pale, gesturing woodenly at the edge of his vision. As she had been in the last few moments of her life, she was barely a smudge, nothing more than a faint mote in the air before suddenly looming. That night she seemed to fall upon the car like a burden dropped from the sky, and in the dream she acted the same way, flying at him, shocking him out of sleep. He jerked awake, shaken and afraid, with a metallic taste on his tongue. The taste offended Curtis, reminding him of the pit his mouth had become after Marvin’s death, in those months of heavy drinking.

  In the kitchen Curtis’s mother spread butter and cherry preserves on slices of toast. “Glad it’s Sunday,” she said. Her job at the hospital gave her Mondays and Tuesdays off, so she was on the cusp of her weekend. She pushed his breakfast plate across the table and got up to place more bread in the toaster and fork scrambled eggs from the pan on the stove. She was already dressed for work. A saltshaker pinned down two folded twenty-dollar bills, the amount she’d leave for him a few times a week to eat lunch and get around as he searched for jobs. While waiting for the toast to pop up, his mother hummed old gospel songs, something she’d never done when Curtis was growing up. She must have learned them as a little girl back in North Carolina. Now, as she drew closer to her life’s other edge, the songs must have come back to her again.

  When she sat back down with her plate, she watched Curtis, nearly done with his eggs, toast, and sausage patties, before touching her own food.

  “Want some more?” she said.

  Curtis nodded and grunted yes.

  His mother gave him one of her hot triangles of toast and began to scrape some of the eggs from her plate onto his. “Go on and eat it, Curtis,” she said. “Shoot, I’m getting fat anyway. I need to start back with my exercises.”

  Remembering his private vow, that his life was now for wondrous things, he accepted what ended up being almost all of his mother’s breakfast so he could see her lips closed and smiling and her eyebrows settle back down to a sensible height, so there would be the satisfaction of silence. It was true that she was getting round in the midsection, but he knew she would never return to her exercises. She’d never started in the first place.

  Curtis felt her watching him eat the second portion of food. She’d be late for work if she didn’t leave right away. She was sixty and he wasn’t surprised by how old she was starting to appear. The visits she’d made upstate to the prison each month revealed the rhythms of her decline, and in the intervals he guessed accurately where and when age would touch her next. Her brown skin was somehow darkening. She had a soft pouch under her chin. At the cheeks and around the eyes the skull was beginning to show itself behind her face. She was nothing to write home about anymore, but a man her age probably wouldn’t complain. When she and Curtis’s father decided their relationship just wasn’t going to work, she was still a young woman, and quite pretty. She made only half-hearted attempts at romance though, as if she believed you got just one real try at it in life.

  She used those energies to dote on Curtis and fuss over him the way it seemed Lena fussed over Andre. As soon as Curtis set his fork down on his plate, his mother snatched them up, along with her own, then went to the sink and began washing them.

  “I was telling Shirley what we talked about on Friday,” she said. “She thought you were gonna give me lip, but I said, ‘Oh no, my boy gets it.’ Look, I know you loved Marvin. He was like kin to you. But following his people around ain’t what’s right for you. I know you know it. Can’t look back. It’s like the Bible says: Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Make level the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor to the left—”

  “Ma, don’t you gotta go?” Curtis said.

  She waved him off with a gloved hand, flashing yellow, flicking suds and drops of water across the kitchen. “My baby is home,” she said. “Ain’t no thing to put some soap and water to a couple dishes.”

  That’s right, he thought. Your baby. Can’t get a job, can’t get my own place, can’t open a goddamn bank account. You wouldn’t even care if I pissed the bed.

  His mother snapped off her rubber gloves and glanced up at the clock. She blinked slowly, keeping her eyes closed a beat or two longer than necessary, and opened them as she took in a great draft of breath. Curtis steadied himself for what was coming. This had the look of one of her speeches, the ones that began, Baby, you know the Lord has forgiven you. Now you just need to forgive yourself … Curtis wasn’t sure God had forgiven him. He wasn’t sure God agreed that the accident couldn’t have been avoided. He wasn’t even sure about God. If God was true and had forgiven him, then why did He keep sending the woman into his dreams at night? Curtis had to do it the other way. If he forgave himself first, maybe then God would follow.

  He steadied his breathing, thinking of beautiful things and filling his head with their music: The words of the man on the promenade, grabbed by the wind. “The Payback.” Freedom on his tongue like the taste of curry chicken and macaroni pie from Culpepper’s. “Someday We’ll All Be Free.” A pretty woman opening her legs and arms for him. Devil in a Blue Dress. “Ruby.” Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. “A Felicidade.” Marvin, his friend. Andre, who looked so much like his father. “They Reminisce over You.” “Little Ghetto Boy.”

  Curtis followed Lena into a bank one afternoon that week. He tried to make the encounter seem like a coincidence, but could tell she knew better. They talked uncomfortably for a few minutes, both averting their gazes. Then he apologized for the other night and told her he wanted to see her. After some hesitation, which seemed to him like ceremony, Lena gave him her phone number.

  Whenever they got a room together on weekdays, Lena would tell Andre she was working an extra shift, but they usually got rooms on Saturday afternoons. Curtis brought her home once, while his mother was at work, but only after he made her promise not to smoke there. After they arrived, Lena told him it was fine, but he felt humiliated being with her on such a small bed, in a room filled with his childish things. He was morose after they slept together. Even the scent of their sex couldn’t distract him from the pervasive smell of his mother. When Lena tried to comfort him, he asked her to tell him about the night Marvin died.

  She flinched. “Y’all were like brothers,” she said. “You know all about it.”

  �
��I wasn’t there.”

  “I wasn’t there either,” she said. “You had to know that much.”

  “But tell me about the last time you saw him.”

  Lena chewed the insides of her cheeks before she spoke. “I was waitressing back then too,” she said. “The late-night shift at a diner over by Coney Island. I like waitressing. You get to know folks and they get a kick out of you remembering them and they tip you good—well, as best they can.”

  “What about Marvin?”

  “Like I said, I was working the third shift, and that started at midnight during the week. Marvin had already lost his construction job. Then he lost his side gig too. You know how hard things were for him.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, he couldn’t handle it. Poor thing was always beat from pounding that pavement all day, every day, but he liked to stay up and watch me get ready for work. Tried to keep himself awake with a book of all things. Can you imagine? He was one to think reading in bed would keep a tired man awake.”

  “What was he reading that night?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “How about Easy Rawlins and Mouse? Did he like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the fire?”

  She looked at him for a long time and then studied her hands. Her voice, when it came, was flat now: “You must’ve heard how it happened, Curtis. It was just like that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I told him not to smoke in the bed, especially when I wasn’t around. But the man was tired, always, and with every job telling him no, he was a bundle of nerves. I kept telling him to ask for help, but he had to do things all by himself. Too proud. He wanted life to be different for us, and for his mama. All that debt …” She shook her head. “He thought we deserved to be in a better place.”

  “I heard his spirits were low.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You’d know better than me.” Curtis tried to say this with some tenderness, but she flinched again. For the first time she seemed beautiful to him, like a woman grieving calmly in a painting. He pressed on: “Do you think he … ?”

  “What?”

  Curtis looked at her.

  “Took his own life? Is that what you mean?”

  He nodded. He knew he was being cruel, but couldn’t help himself. He wanted to hurt her.

  “What—in his right mind he just lit a match and let it fall on the damn pillows? You asking me if he meant to destroy his own self? Why would you say such a thing? Why would you even think it?”

  Curtis sometimes imagined that his friend would understand what it was like to feel that blue, but he knew Marvin had loved life too much to take his own. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” The faded Knicks poster on the far wall hung askew. “I guess he wouldn’t have done that with Andre on the way. He knew about the baby, right?”

  Lena seemed baffled. “Whatever did or didn’t happen, it wasn’t because of what was growing inside of me.”

  Curtis nodded, but meant nothing by the gesture. “Tell me the last thing he said to you.”

  “I don’t know, Curtis,” she said. “As far as we were concerned, it was just another day.”

  “Last time we saw each other, he gave me a hug.”

  Lena lay with her back pressed to him, her knees drawn up and touching the wall. “That’s no surprise. I never heard him say a bad word about you, not once.” She inhaled loudly. “What in the world happened between you two?”

  Curtis didn’t reply. After that Sunday afternoon by Drummer’s Cove, Marvin eventually reached out to reconcile, but Curtis ignored him. He met any attempt to talk or spend time together with silence. When they finally talked on the phone, Marvin begged to borrow some money.

  “I lost both my jobs, man,” he said, “and nobody’s trying to hire a brother. Can’t catch a damn break right now.”

  Curtis cleared his throat but otherwise stayed quiet.

  “And you know how it is with my mom … I’m having a real hard time, man.”

  Before he hung up, Curtis said, “Well maybe that bitch you got can help you out.”

  He didn’t tell Lena any of this now, and it was obvious that she didn’t know. He listened as she breathed, the steady in and out, the deepening. He closed his eyes. In a while he was startled awake by his recurring dream, and then startled again by a cold hand on his shoulder. Curtis saw it had taken a great effort for Lena to reach out to him, even though they had no space between them on his bed. Her reddened eyes, taut mouth, and fingers roughly scratching at the points of her elbows meant she knew she could never be loved by him—he had told her as much when they talked before falling asleep. Maybe she already knew she couldn’t love him either. He held her though, in the little bed, and then she held him too. As they lay there, he decided he would never bring her to his mother’s house again.

  Curtis and Lena stopped getting rooms and he moved in to her apartment. This took a while though—almost six months. They both danced around the question in such a way that both of them could claim the other had come up with the idea. When Curtis told his mother it was happening, she cried, almost as much as she had when he was sentenced to prison. He invited her to visit them, but she said she would need some time.

  Before the move, Lena would invite Curtis over only for meals: dinners or late Sunday breakfasts, when he got to see the boy. On Sundays, the pancakes were dense. Lena piled the bacon in the pan, so it always came out soggy. It was greasy and almost sweet on the tongue. As it slid down his throat, Curtis held his hand to his mouth and gave Andre a funny look, but the boy seemed to like the food. He didn’t seem pleased with much else.

  Lena had told Andre the simple truth, that Curtis was his father’s good friend. “He’s like your uncle,” she’d said, but the boy rolled his eyes. When he called Curtis “uncle” after the move, he said it with a hint of derision. The two of them got along well enough though. Curtis pretended Lena had never called him the boy’s uncle, but Andre went on calling him that anyway, still with a mocking tone. He liked to say it in the mornings when Curtis emerged from Lena’s bedroom, or right before he went in at night. “Morning, Unc,” he’d say, or “Have a good night, Uncle Curtis.”

  In bed, Lena would rub her cold feet along Curtis’s shins to signal her desire for sex. He had never liked the way her tongue tasted, but the first few times they’d slept together, he had been surprised by how much pleasure her skinny body gave him. He wasn’t gentle with her, and the things she whispered to him made it clear she didn’t want him to be. But now he hated the little sounds she made, the words she said, loud enough that the boy would be able to hear. Sometimes, not quite meaning to, Curtis covered her mouth.

  When summer arrived, Curtis took Andre to the basketball court in Lena’s old neighborhood and watched him hang listlessly from the rims. They took long walks together, though Andre complained. “Why don’t we just take the train?” he asked. They had macaroni pie at Culpepper’s, but the boy said Lena’s was better. Curtis told him about his time in prison. Andre seemed uninterested until Curtis began to exaggerate, and then the boy asked if being locked up was the way they showed it in some movie Curtis had never even heard of. His reply was yes, exactly like that.

  One of Andre’s favorite things to do, because it made him laugh so hard, was ridicule his mother. It bothered Curtis afterward but he joined in anyway and complained about her bad habits. He made fun of his own mother too. When the weather was nice, he laughed with Andre on the promenade, tears wetting his eyelashes. Curtis often fell silent and made a show of watching the young women walk by.

  “What makes mothers the way they are?” Andre asked one day. It was the first time he had posed such a question to Curtis, that of a boy seeking the wisdom of a man.

  “They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous,” Curtis said. “Ain’t no mystery to it.”

  But Andre was quiet, and it was hard to tell if h
e was listening. Curtis fixed his gaze on a jogger in tight red shorts, and leaned forward to keep her in sight as long as he could. He pointed so that Andre would look too. Then the joke from the old song leaped into his mind. “Goddamn,” he said. “Do fries go with that shake?”

  Andre turned to look out at the harbor, his eyes a bit dulled. His taut lips shifted from side to side, as restless as the river.

  Curtis kept up the banter about the jogger. “You like that, huh?”

  “If you say so,” Andre replied with a shrug.

  “Well, she looks like a college girl to me anyway, young buck,” Curtis said with a laugh. “Might be out of your league.”

  “Man, I’ma be so glad when I go off to college.”

  Curtis nodded and listened as Andre continued to talk about his future, his life of success, of accumulation and bachelorhood. “There’s one thing you gotta do though,” he told the boy. “A house. When you make it big like that, you gotta get your mother a house.”

  Andre seemed taken aback, and was quiet for a long time as he considered the idea. “Ain’t you gonna to do that?” he said. “I mean, I’ll come visit and everything. But you’re the one with her, right? You make it happen. She’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

  Curtis didn’t say so, but he supposed she would.

  “Hey,” he said, “you never ask me anything about your daddy.”

  Andre shrugged again.

  “I got a lot of good stories. Don’t you want to hear them? You should get to know who he was.”

  “What for? He’s still gonna be dead.”

  “Your father was a good man,” Curtis said. “And—”