A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  He shook the doors by their handles to no effect and then looked up at the gray bell tower. The sky still appeared green, an illusion probably: there was no trace of rain in the air. He cursed under his breath. Of course it would be like this. Of course, when his mind had already committed itself entirely to repeating the act they had engaged in.

  “Are you cold, baby?” Fat Rhonda said in a lazy voice.

  A slight breeze had picked up, rearranging the garbage on the street, but it wasn’t chilly. He sagged to the ground and sat there with his legs straight out in front of him, his shoulders heavy against the doors of the church. He wanted to fall backward into the lake of old feelings and be immersed in them. But whatever he genuinely wanted seemed barred from him, as emphatically closed off as his father’s disappointed face.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and after a moment he patted the ground next to him, inviting her to sit too. She lowered herself and adjusted her clothes. Wolf put his hand on her right knee. He began to slide it up to her thigh, and then underneath the skirt of her dress, but Fat Rhonda wouldn’t let him. She flung his hand away so it landed in his lap.

  Wolf looked at his hands, tightened them into fists, and released them. He’d always had powerful hands, which he had used to break and tear things, to take what he wanted and go where he wanted, to make other people feel small. He had intended to humiliate Fat Rhonda in the church all those years ago, to reduce her to just a tiny thing, a bit of dirty wax he could roll between his thumb and forefinger and then flick away.

  But Wolf had enjoyed being with her. It had been much more than sexual pleasure, much more than the risk of getting caught. Yes, he’d liked the sensation of gripping her in the light of the stained glass, but had been surprised by how much joy he took in the impression that there was always more of her—actively extending, thickening, deepening—more than he could ever possibly reach. He couldn’t have explained what he was doing, making such meaning of her body. He was too absorbed in the experience. It made him feel as though there were more of him too.

  In ways that Wolf wasn’t fully aware of, this feeling reminded him of slapboxing with his father, when things were still good between them. The last time they’d played in this way was earlier his senior year, after he had gotten in trouble at school again. He had cursed at Ms. Pritchett during a history lesson about slavery and told her she was teaching lies. A single parent, his father had gone to school and sat beside him in a meeting with Ms. Pritchett and the principal. As usual, he didn’t apologize for Wolf’s behavior, but he said what was necessary to make sure there would be no expulsion. Later that afternoon at home in their living room, he and his father laughed, as they often did after such meetings. “You keep giving them hell, boy,” the big man said. “Keep on giving these white people hell. The devil is a liar.” His father gave white people hell too, which was why he had trouble keeping jobs and often had conflicts with police. “You ain’t nobody’s brainwashed monkey,” his father said. “You’re my Wolf.” He’d had his arm over the boy’s shoulders and then, growling, pulled him into an embrace. They held each other for a moment. When his arms were around his father, Wolf liked that his fingers barely touched.

  They started to slapbox then, Wolf’s favorite thing in the world. After a few minutes of roughhousing on the couch, they began to grapple and eventually rolled onto the rug. The big man was stronger, but Wolf was quick and he drew energy from the odor of his father’s skin and sweat and warm, sour breath. Their limbs rubbed and slid as they fought for leverage and escaped each other’s attempts at a decisive grasp. Their grappling was going on longer than it ever had, and Wolf began to think it was possible that he would finally win. He made an unorthodox movement with his knee, stunning the big man, and then plunged his hand in an attempt to grab an unguarded wrist. He touched his father in a place he shouldn’t have, an accident. The big body flinched, and for a moment their eyes met before his father wedged his forearm between them and flung him off with more force than he had ever felt. Wolf landed hard on his tailbone but he stopped himself from crying out or shedding tears. Standing, his father watched his face for a while. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” Wolf asked. “What’s wrong?” His father didn’t reply to this. He took his time straightening his clothes and then said, “You go on and get cleaned up. I’m gonna get this dinner on the stove.”

  This was when Wolf started getting into much more trouble, and not just for talking back to teachers who were unfair or taught lies. He broke so many school rules, he almost didn’t graduate. His father had to come in for meetings more frequently, but they no longer laughed together at home about them afterward. When Wolf tried to slapbox or grapple with his father again, the big man told him he wasn’t a kid anymore. Smiling warmly, he said, “You’re too old to play those games.”

  “We were meant to be here,” Wolf said to Fat Rhonda now. “It has to be here.”

  “What does?”

  He hadn’t told anyone what they did the first time, but if they did it again, tonight, he would tell everyone. Maybe even his father. “I can feel it,” he said. “You and me, we’re connected. We’re supposed to get inside.”

  She didn’t say anything. She turned her head to watch a man ride slowly past on his bicycle, a phantom slipping idly by.

  He and his father could get drunk on beer together and laugh about it. “We can try to get in through the school.”

  She shook her head.

  “We can break one of the damn windows,” he told her. And he could tell his father about that too.

  “It’s just not interesting,” she said.

  “There’s gotta be another way to get back in. Don’t you remember a way?”

  “Lots of things,” she said, “I try not to remember.”

  The man beside her slumped farther down against the door of the church. Rhonda listened to him, but not really. She had changed her mind. He seemed too sad. Nothing would happen between them tonight.

  “I didn’t even say anything,” he said. “Not a word. I was going to, but I didn’t tell a soul.”

  She listened with half an ear, even less, as he talked about a day years past that had meant something to him. She had long ago decided it wasn’t worth it to pay much attention. The world was too awful. What you loved—family, friends, notions of yourself—you would lose. And what caused you pain would hurt all the more if you gave it any space in your mind. Her mother had lived much longer than the doctors said she would, years longer, but each day that went past the sentence they had given was only a further withholding of mercy. Whenever Rhonda thought of her mother, she scolded herself. Her goal, though she knew better than to chase it with too much passion, was to forget as much as she could.

  “But you did,” the man beside her said. “You told.”

  She looked up at the sky. It was terrifying to hear about things she might have done. Terrifying, though she felt resigned to being coldly observed, to think she was still, always, under judgment. When her mother finally died, ten years ago yesterday, Rhonda began to wander, like people did in the ancient stories she’d once committed to memory. She went south through several cities—Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charlotte, Atlanta—and then west, taking jobs and men as she could find them, in the same thoughtfully uncommitted way. She had the idea that she roamed where nothing could see her—an illusion probably, but one that made her feel free.

  “You told,” the man repeated. She wondered how and why he’d gotten stuck on such an insignificant thing.

  Something had made her come back to this place, where she’d been born and raised and had suffered, something more than just the simple fact that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. Whatever it was felt out of her control, as though some bird-instinct, the pull of mineral bits in her skull, had guided her here and told her this was the time to return. The mystery of this caused some familiar stirrings of conviction in her now, which she usually knew better than to pursue. Authority was beyond myst
ery, she believed, so there was no reason to dwell on either one. There was no reason to hold on to anything: to hope, to love, to faith. But why had she come back? She couldn’t help wondering about it now. It may have been this: you never knew if something had lost its power over you if all you did was keep running away.

  It had been a fine test to go back to Patterson Houses, to go back into building 315, ride the elevator up, and stand outside the door of her old home. A test, yes, to go to her old school, to see the notices about the reunion and not feel a thing. It had also been a test to go into that barroom with its gaudy decorations. She hadn’t expected to see so many people there—still alive, not yet subdued—people who still cared about their yesterdays. But she felt relieved to find that none of their faces held a scrap of significance for her. Not one. The priest’s deathly face, his inarticulate call for prayer—these didn’t mean anything to her at all.

  “You wanted it that way,” the man beside her said.

  This was the last year of the school’s existence. Maybe I’ll come back here again, Rhonda told herself. Maybe I’ll come back on the morning they open these church doors for the school’s final graduates.

  “You wanted everybody to know,” the man said. An odd suggestion of cheer had risen in his voice, but it didn’t match the expression on his face. He looked up at the sky again and remarked on it, as if he had never seen it this way before.

  In some ways, men like him were familiar to her. Many of them existed, well-dressed, successful men who were nonetheless unhappy and often alone. She thought he would be just another one of these men, someone she could spend a pleasurable night with and never think about again. But this man, he had the heaviness of desperation. She couldn’t help but notice the particular burden he carried. She glanced at the man and thought, Maybe what tonight means is I shouldn’t come back at all.

  “Tell me why. Answer me, please.” He was still looking up. “Don’t treat me like some nobody. I’m here. Why did you tell them?”

  His voice had changed. Now, as he alone furthered the conversation, he sounded angry, disgusted. A tone she recognized in the voices of men vibrated from his throat. Along with the tone, his body was growing tense.

  “What we did was between us,” the man said. He looked down and smashed a fist into the palm of his other hand, a lonesome gesture. “It was our thing. Why the hell did you tell them?”

  When Rhonda didn’t reply, he cursed at her and said she was a bitch. She wondered why she didn’t feel threatened. She waited, examining the texture of the ensuing silence. What he’d said, she decided, was only juvenile name-calling, a helpless tantrum.

  The man sitting next to her had been a boy she once knew. If she tried she could remember that boy, but she didn’t, she wouldn’t. She refused to. When it became clear that she wouldn’t answer him or respond to his insult, he looked at the sky again and resumed his talking, repeating himself endlessly, repeating his frustrated pleas. She stared across the street, at the line of parked cars, and then raised her face to the breeze. The air tasted like rain, far away but approaching. She raised her head higher, and higher still, until its angle was the same as his. He kept going on about his memories, laying them out like an arrangement of stones. His words piled on themselves in a strange rhythm. They formed walls that he could take shelter in. So be it, she thought. So be it. She opened herself, just for a while, to the man who had been a boy she refused to remember, listening as he went on and on about some distant day, a weightless speck of time. Then, thinking of where to go next, she reached through a gap that had yet to be closed off by the past. For a few moments, she interlocked her fingers with his.

  Clifton’s Place

  The sign outside the bar had appeared only recently. It announced the bar’s name and hours of operation, clear indications that this was not just another townhouse basement. Still, despite the listed business hours, no one got in before the sun went down, even in summer, even if you stood right outside the locked gate, peered in, and waved. The ones who stood waving by the sign—twilit, ignored—were the newest of the new, the people whose need for signs and schedules and business cards and happy hours was most acute.

  Only when night fell did the gate to this other world open. An old man in his eighties, Julius, checked IDs from his chair by the door. Julius saw himself as he had been decades earlier, a tough and wiry young man, still every bit a bouncer. Once they got past him, the newest of the new sat where everyone unaccustomed to the place sat, at the tables lining the paneled wall across from the bar. Rarely did newcomers of any kind come alone; mostly they arrived in pairs or in larger groups. They commented on the Christmas lights strung wildly across the low ceiling and nodded to the music playing faintly from the old, hulking jukebox. These people amused themselves by pointing at the outdated appliances massed in the corner near the kitchen: an enormous microwave oven, a rusted hot plate, a few coils detached from an electric stove, a clock whose remaining hand twitched at the number 9, things many of them couldn’t even name. Until they learned better, they sat as if they would be waited on, as if they would be handed menus. At Clifton’s Place there were no menus.

  Neighborhood people who had been coming there for years—regulars, or “the folks,” as they called themselves—knew that no one named Clifton had ever been formally associated with the bar. They knew that the owner, Sadie, had fallen for a man named Clifton back when she still turned heads on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Their love affair didn’t last. They fought for weeks until Sadie, known for her reckless tongue, told him she never wanted to see him again. So he left her and then, they said, he left the city too. But Sadie came to realize she had made a mistake, and the name she gave the bar when she opened it was her way of letting Clifton know he could come back to her. The folks knew that Sadie’s friends chided her and said he would never return, that she would feel like a fool owning Clifton’s Place after her feelings for him had gone cold. Her friends had predicted the humiliation of the days when she would have to fill out the forms to change the name. “Good thing for you there’s no sign to replace,” Julius had said. Forty years later, however, there was a sign and the bar was still called Clifton’s. Sadie appeared there any night she felt up to it, wearing heels and one of her many colorful dresses. But she didn’t feel up to it as much as she used to.

  Ellis was one of the folks. One summer evening, at his usual place near the door, on the stool where the bar counter curved and met the wall, Ellis tapped his fingertip against the sharp point of his pencil and held the eraser in his mouth, the ferrule giving easily between his teeth. As he often did in those days, he wondered about Sadie. It seemed true, as folks said more and more often, that her mind was no longer right.

  Her nephew Sharod, who had become the bartender, heaved himself into motion and settled his bulk on the slabs of his forearms, directly in front of Ellis, covering his stack of drawing paper. “You stay sucking on that thing like it’s your favorite titty,” Sharod said.

  The pencil had been taken fresh from the box before Ellis left his tiny apartment, turned in the sharpener until the graphite peeked out just the way he liked. The eraser, out of his mouth now and as yet unused, gleamed in the bar’s irregular lights, the solid pink nub slick with his spit.

  “Don’t look all confused,” Sharod said. “A man likes what he likes on a woman. Even though what’s best about those things is that she got two of ’em.” He held out his hands, cupped to suggest breasts. Ellis noticed how often men used their hands to suggest the bodies of women. “Just last week,” Sharod continued, “I got yelled at ’cause my crazy ass don’t know how to spread the love. Then her crazy ass up and decide she got jealous parts and kicked me to the curb. How you gonna be jealous of your own self?”

  Ellis wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer this question.

  “And how’s a man gonna play favorites with what a woman got?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellis said, but he could imagine it. He heard what
men said to women out on the streets. He sometimes felt he should say something to the women too, something nice to correct what the men said, but he never did.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Sharod said. “All of a woman is too much woman to love.”

  Ellis blinked at him. “There’s gotta be hope for us, right?”

  “Ah, you useless piece of shit,” Sharod said, standing upright now. He stared hard at Ellis for a moment before allowing a big smile. But the smile wasn’t comforting at all. Sharod’s mood, particularly bad tonight, sat like a weight on his face, deforming the curve of his lips.

  When Sadie came into the bar, she brought the smell of burned hair with her. Julius ignored it and said, “May I see your ID, young lady?” As usual she laughed at their joke and said, “Thank you, young man.” When Sharod asked about the burned smell, she said she’d just had a little accident with the curling iron, but it looked much worse than that. Ellis saw that a section of it was gone nearly to the scalp.

  Sadie went behind the bar. As she began to make her usual, a Golden Cadillac, the tall bottle of Galliano slipped out of her hand and shattered. Sharod raised his voice at her. He had grown impatient with her mistakes and confusions. As he yelled, Ellis’s hand began idly drawing the shape of smoke. Without moving or speaking, Sadie stared straight ahead with eyes as wet and broken as the glass at her feet. Ellis set down his pencil and hurried to her. He brought her around to sit next to him on a stool.

  Sadie gazed at Ellis’s drawing. “Well, isn’t that pretty,” she said. “Is that for me?”

  Ellis hid the drawing underneath the rest of his pages, afraid she’d come to think the drawing was an insult to her. When their eyes met, she smiled and then said, in a low voice, almost flirtatiously, “Well, baby, it’s late. Maybe we should get on home now.” He stood, ready to help her on her way, but then Julius butted in. He gripped Ellis’s shoulder and used surprising strength to sit him back down.