A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  “It’s terrible.”

  “Awful.”

  “A tragedy.”

  The sentiments went on, but Wolf could tell they were just making conversation. He was obsessed with the man, who had become his father’s favorite athlete. Wolf felt pangs of identification with Sterling, with his fearless way of talking and his uncontrollable urge for speed and risk. Earlier, at his father’s apartment, he had tried to convey this connection. The big man grunted in response and shook his head. “That man could’ve been the next Ali,” he said, and then took a sip of the beer he hadn’t offered to share. “You? You don’t understand a damn thing about him.”

  Wolf’s old friends continued with all their bullshit, confirming the unstated idea that drove all of his meetings at work: most people in this country were stupid. He distracted himself by staring at Maritza Lopez. Back in high school her silhouette had been the shape taken by the boys’ thoughts of sex. Pretty and curvaceous and, it appeared, ripening by the week, she had promised a future of endless pleasure. As recently as the last reunion, when Wolf was drunk enough, he could still envision Maritza as she had once been, pulsating with youth and vitality. But now she looked absurd in the frills of her purple dress. Squeezed into it, the odd lumps of her figure bulged like the scutes of a turtle’s shell. Though only thirty-seven, she had the unnerving face of a witch. More alarming to Wolf, and maybe what caused the rest of it, was the spiritual malaise he saw overtaking her. The effect over time resembled the gradual darkening of a lamp. He didn’t enjoy seeing her decline every five years, but he respected it. He understood it. It didn’t hide the fact of her ordinary human suffering. If Maritza were more honest about life, if she chose to flaunt her soul the same way she did her body all those years ago, she might have been his ally.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Wolf.” She raised her martini glass to cover the flirtatious smile forming on her thickly glossed mouth.

  “Old habits….,” he mumbled. But he wasn’t sure how he was looking at her, had no idea what his face was doing. He used to know how he looked at women, long ago, maybe back when they were only girls.

  What he felt sure of was the fact that he still loved being called Wolf. In Winter Garden, down in Florida, where he lived now, childless and unmarried, he was plain old Wilfred Jones. People there addressed him as Will, a solid name for a solid, prosperous man. He’d been popular as a boy because of his brashness, the unpredictable ways he performed being black and male, but that was before things changed between him and his father. His transformation became more pronounced when he went off to college, and then again when he moved to Florida. As he surrounded himself with increasing numbers of white people, people unlike those he’d grown up with in Mott Haven, his performance was by turns more timid and more exaggerated. He began to emphasize a more blatantly sexual approach to women, a consciously narrowed intelligence, and an inclination to keep any unpopular opinions to himself. He was conspicuous but never threatening, and for this he’d been rewarded. Wolf typically had been less cognizant of his acting than of being rewarded, and as the benefits became more substantial—more sex, more powerful connections, increasingly better jobs followed by the assurance of a fairly lucrative career—his practiced ignorance won out. Soon he was barely aware that he was acting at all. What he perceived instead was an irritation just beneath the skin, one he could claw at but never relieve.

  The old nickname helped. It was a large part of the pleasure of flying up to New York and going back to the South Bronx: watching the word form on the lips of people who seemed to really know him. Hearing it. It came from early teasing about the sharpness of his baby teeth and, later, from his wildness as a youth. To his great relief, it caught on and stuck as he progressed through the grades at St. Paul’s. His father had given him the nickname, but he no longer used it.

  Wolf still had an instinctive response to it, a raw physical reaction, his head perking up and the muscles tightening around his ears in recognition of his truest name. More than this, though, it reminded him of what it felt like to be not accomplished but perfected, filled to completion with energy and pride. Wolf knew that people joked and laughed about those who were said to have peaked too soon in life. He laughed too, though it pained him to do so. The pain articulated what otherwise stayed submerged, his knowledge that most of these people joking and laughing had yet to peak, and most of them never would. All they had were the undiminished measures of their longing. While they looked ahead and hoped for themselves in vain, he had already lived as the best incarnation of himself. He’d had that feeling and he would also have an abundance of time left on the earth to recall it. The reunions corroborated his memories; every five years, they helped him recall the feeling most clearly, in his body, and savor it as an irrefutable fact.

  He usually flew into the city early so he could spend time with his father, but no matter what, whether he’d gotten another raise or promotion, the big man was never happy to see him. As a remedy for these inevitable disappointments, he would go stand across the street from St. Paul’s at dismissal time. Waiting there, watching, he would find duplicates of Maritza and Chucho and Duncan and other people in their class, but never another Wolf. He felt relieved. He was Wolf, the only one. Wolf was who he truly was.

  Maritza, Lizzie, and the guys began to touch on the expansion of the Sahara, their tone making the topic dull and distant, as though nothing were actually wrong. These were his friends, supposedly. They referred to one another this way, and he was as close to them as he was to anyone in Winter Garden, which meant he was hardly close to them at all. While coming to the reunions gave him a taste of conviviality, none of his old classmates were people whose lives he was interested in, people he trusted. Wolf didn’t have anyone like that.

  He turned his back on them and immersed himself in the din of the party. He two-stepped with the music until the laziness of his movements made him feel old. He appraised the bodies of the women who danced and shook the hands of men as they walked by, greeting them as he would have twenty years ago so they could greet him in kind. But soon he was just standing there, alone in the crowd, swinging his head from the bartender’s table to the cake. He pulled a balloon down by its string and batted it with all of his strength. The balloon rebounded about a foot away from him and then floated with perverse slowness back to the ceiling. As he searched for someone else to talk to, he was stunned to see Fat Rhonda struggling her way through the narrow, festooned door.

  She wore a white belt over a tight dress that accented her broad curves. Twirling a couple of times as if to show off her outfit, she was like a pale green apple rolling in the sun. She smoothed her hair, done in a bob and streaked with copper, and glanced impassively around.

  She had never shown up at any of the reunions before. Wolf could tell from everybody’s faces, the way their mouths warped into ovals of hilarity and disbelief, that no one had ever expected her to come today. They didn’t hate Fat Rhonda. It was just that their collective withdrawal from her had made a kind of community back in high school. The same was true now. The sixty or so people gathered in the oblong room reorganized their bodies and nudged each other into place, seeking out the old laws of gravity. Wolf felt a kind of shifting within himself too. He stared in her direction, while everyone shuffled away and opened a path for her, trying to anticipate her movements as she swaggered over to the bartender. His initial impression had been right: Fat Rhonda was even fatter now. He thought back to the day he had walked behind her in the church, when they were alone together between the pews.

  That day, twenty years ago, had not begun well for Rhonda. She hadn’t slept, had been up worrying about her mother, about meeting with the principal, about the massive question of her own life, worrying and tossing in bed. The fabric of her nightshirt felt stiff, prickly on her skin, and with a sick feeling she had watched the sun lighten the sky. She stared outside at 325, which was identical to 315, her own building, where she lived with her mother on the ninth floo
r. The windows of 325 emerged across the basketball court like hundreds of eyeballs opening at dawn to pry. They were so numerous in the solid wall of brick that Rhonda had the sensation of being menaced by their collective gaze. She pulled the sheet over her head.

  “It’s so unfair,” she said to herself, as though voicing it rather than thinking it would function as a genuine appeal, with the force of prayer. She wasn’t Catholic, but for three years she’d been praying in St. Paul’s Church. Father Grancher had told her she could pray there. He told her why prayer was important, what it meant when you said Amen. She would go to her favorite spot, always the same spot, at the end of the pew beneath the red and white stained glass image of Christ. There she would lower herself onto the kneeler so she rested below the Good Shepherd’s heavy-lidded gaze. She whispered the Apostles’ Creed and then her favorite, the Act of Faith. At first her prayers had been about her body, that she could be thin and light-skinned. She wanted the other students to stop teasing or ignoring her. She wanted boys like Wilfred Jones to pay attention to her. But last year her mother’s speech had begun to change; her words slurred and oozed from her lips. She spent more and more time in the bathroom, at times her vision fogged, and her steps got less steady as she walked. She was like a drunk, someone whose troubles rose as a stink from her flesh. Rhonda started saying prayers about her mother, but initially they were requests to God and His Son that the woman stop being so embarrassing. Maybe these had worked against the later appeals, the ones for her mother’s health. Maybe all of her earlier prayers had been judged and she was being punished now for her selfishness.

  “It’s just not fair,” Rhonda said, more loudly now. Her voice, the ferocity and volume of it, startled her, so she crossed herself and muttered the Act of Faith against it: Oh my God, I firmly believe that you are one God in three divine Persons … I believe that your divine Son became man and died for our sins … I believe these and all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because you have revealed them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Amen.

  She got up and walked quietly toward the shower, but her mother called from her bed.

  Rhonda came into the room but stayed close to the door. Wrapped around her mother’s hand was the leather bracelet that had been worn by Rhonda’s father. She rubbed it habitually between her fingers, softening its tough braid. He had been a good man, but why would her mother further infect herself with this memento of the dead?

  “You gonna have to feed me,” her mother said. “You gonna have to clean my teeth. You gonna have to bathe me.” It was a continuation of what she had been saying yesterday as they sat with their dinner plates, as if no time had passed at all. Here were more additions to the responsibilities Rhonda would have, now that her dreams—of going away to school and starting a new life, her actual life—were deferred, if not entirely over. The litany continued: “When I fall, you gonna have to pick me up. When I can’t talk no more, you gonna have to be my mouth.”

  Her mother spoke slowly, fighting to get some of the words out. She lay on several pillows, her head elevated almost forty-five degrees, as the doctor had instructed. Though it was only May, not yet summer, a small fan blew air through its dust-rimmed grille into her slackened face.

  “Now that I got my trophy,” she said, “I need you to help me.”

  Her mother wasn’t ignorant—she knew good and well that the word describing her condition was atrophy—but her sense of humor had always been grim.

  “Ma, I need to go. I’m gonna be late.”

  “I’ma need to know I can count on you, Rhonda.”

  “I already said so, yesterday.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’m sorry,” her mother said. “But I need to know those words were meant.”

  Rhonda retreated a step. “You always saying how you gave me this life,” she said, “so you might as well take it back.”

  Though Fat Rhonda had packed on more weight, her body was firmer, no longer the nebulous mass it had been before. Wolf hadn’t seen her since senior year. In those days she wore the uniform St. Paul’s required of its girls, including a pleated plaid skirt. Near the end of senior year, after things had started to shift with his father, Wolf started calling her skirt a circus tent because it was so large. He’d joke about spotlights trained on the expanse of her rear end, acrobats tumbling, clowns doing pratfalls, foul-smelling elephants marching in line. There would be snacks in there too, he told his friends, peanuts and popcorn kernels trapped in the dimples of her thighs. Wolf no longer limited himself to talking back to teachers. He began to break more school rules and had started doing everything he could think of with girls. To further his reputation, he began to tell anyone who would listen that he was going to stick his head under Fat Rhonda’s tent and have a look around. He ended up doing much more.

  “I can’t believe it,” Maritza said. “I can’t believe she’s here.” There was a blend of disgust and glee in her voice. “And that outfit!”

  Wolf narrowed his eyes and tried to see Maritza’s soul. No one else knew, but he wanted to believe in the soul.

  “What? I mean it. She looks like shit.”

  “You look like shit,” Wolf said. “We all look like shit.”

  Maritza and Lizzie acted offended, but Chucho and Duncan took it in stride. Lizzie’s mouth kept trembling, in search of a response.

  Wolf wasn’t sorry. He felt he could make a presentation about them right now, similar to the ones he gave for clients at work. If he had his laser pointer, the one he used to dissect and dumb down every ad in progress, he would drag its red light from one of his high school friends to another, specifying each of their acquired flaws: the paunch, the stale fried hair, and so on. But unlike what happened at the office, where things came easy for him, where he could simulate mastery, here he wouldn’t be able to show them what he really meant. If he had a laser pointer big enough, a light wide enough, he would step toward it with his eyes fully open, until he was lost entirely in the beam.

  To cut the tension, Duncan spoke up and changed the subject. “Yo, Wolf,” he said. “Remember when you did Fat Rhonda on the stairwell?”

  “Get it right, man,” Chucho said. “He did her in the damn church. Everybody knows that.”

  As Duncan held up his drink in reply, Wolf looked over at Fat Rhonda again. She stood on the other side of the room, near the cake. She had a pink cocktail in each hand and swayed to the music as she drank. People either ignored her or took sidelong glances as they talked about her. Back to the old routine.

  Chucho had it right, and for Wolf, hearing this truth said out loud was like hearing his preferred name. He felt reignited. Having sex in the church, with Fat Rhonda of all girls, had served as the final augmentation of a fire soon to be extinguished. While her already poor reputation suffered as a result, his rose to its peak. The boy who would do anything had done just that, but Wolf hadn’t ever said a word about it. He had planned to tell everyone, but afterward he’d changed his mind. He couldn’t communicate what he had actually experienced and he couldn’t tolerate lying about it. Fat Rhonda had been the one to spread the story.

  “You know what you should do?” Duncan said. He choked on his own laughter. “You know what you should do?”

  “Oh, I dare you,” Chucho said, grinning. “I double-dog dare you.”

  Wolf drank deeply from his beer. He understood what they meant. It didn’t even need to be said. Without realizing it, they had found the seed of the idea sprouting right there inside of him.

  “Why else would she be here?” Dunk said. “It’s like fated, man.”

  The two women smirked and shook their heads in disapproval.

  “It can be just like it was,” Chucho said. “You can do it the way it happened back then.”

  After showering and dressing that morning, years ago, Rhonda had prepared breakfast and lunch for her mother, simple tasks compared to what was coming: making sure she had enough salt and fiber in her diet, man
aging medications and appointments, keeping the rooms cool. Getting up in the middle of the night to check her breathing and the stuttering of her heart. Learning her language as it eroded and struggled to leave her throat. Becoming not only her mouth, but her eyes too. And for what? The doctor said her mother would be dead and gone in four years, five or six at most. Anger and despair clashed inside of Rhonda. She kept telling herself this wasn’t the proper reaction, but it didn’t matter. She felt it was her own life that was truly over. She’d done everything she was supposed to. She got excellent grades and no longer fought with the kids who teased her as she had in middle school. She’d been admitted to colleges upstate and in Maryland and Georgia. She’d gotten on her knees in church day after day, but the Good Shepherd looked down at her with something like scorn, deaf to her mumbled prayers.

  No, she couldn’t think this way. She was just being tested. Today she would have to explain to the principal why her family had fallen months behind on tuition payments, why they hadn’t paid her graduation fees. She would need the firmness of her faith this morning, faith unbroken and, if anything, tempered by her troubles.

  On the walk to St. Paul’s, she passed, as always, the squat building that contained the management office. The white sign out front read WELCOME TO PATTERSON HOUSES, A WONDERFUL COMMUNITY, and below that, in smaller green letters, NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY. An image of the high-rises appeared among the words, an eerie green silhouette that reminded her of the way things looked through military binoculars in the movies. Rhonda hated this sign, the way it mocked the community with a lie. She felt it mocking her. She especially hated the word authority. When kneeling at the church, she tried to believe in what Father Grancher called “the highest authority.” She tried to rid her deepest imaginings of the green silhouette that stood behind them, throwing down its shadow.