A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  “Let a real man take care of this,” he said. “Things have changed around here, but there’s still trouble to be found out in these streets.”

  He left with Sadie, and Sharod cleaned the mess behind the bar. Ellis stayed quiet in his seat. He could still smell Sadie’s scorched hair, as strong as it had been when she was there.

  He wasn’t much of a talker. He preferred to pass his time at the bar sipping blended Irish whiskey and sketching whichever people or objects caught his eye. Like most of the other solitary regulars, Ellis dressed elegantly. Tonight his yellow necktie made a pleasing streak of heat against the faded blue field of his shirt. In those days he often wore a flashy tie, and he’d recently become aware of his tendency to run the full length of it through his hand, as if to remind himself, or others, of his vitality. One of the youngest of those who frequented Clifton’s—he’d turned forty last December—he was among the few who stayed cleanly shaven and didn’t wear a hat. There was a time when he’d worn a fedora, mostly because his receding hairline and premature patches of gray, contradicting the boyish appearance of his face, used to embarrass him. Now he understood that none of the clothing worn by regulars at Clifton’s was meant to hide anything. They tended to be honest about themselves and the things that ailed them, and he tried to be honest too.

  Among the other folks there was an attractive old woman, Yolanda, said by some to be Julius’s lover. The unintelligible looks that passed between the two of them convinced Ellis the rumor had to be true. Old Mr. Edmonds used to sit across the bar, but he no longer came by. He said that things just weren’t the same at Clifton’s anymore. Ellis had acquired the habit of flashy neckties from him, and wore them now in his honor. When the man’s attention wasn’t fixed on the silent television mounted above the array of liquor bottles, Ellis used to have an impression of being scrutinized by him. Of course it had been ridiculous to believe that Mr. Edmonds, or anyone else, would give him that much attention. Impossible, Ellis told himself now, just a flaring up of his old self-consciousness, or a touch of ego as he sought a tiny measure of comfort with the dullness of his life. He missed Mr. Edmonds.

  Dyson, another regular, was a skinny, arthritic man who enjoyed drinks flavored with licorice. The bar stocked Fernet just for him, because it was said to soothe the stomach, the place in the body where many neighborhood people believed insanity resided. Dyson had nonsensical, somewhat violent outbursts, a peculiarity that had started around the time Clifton’s stopped being a bar only for the folks. Some nights, he ranted and tore his voice, but whenever the tables were empty, when the bar looked and felt the way it used to, he didn’t utter a word. He began cursing under his breath now, however, a kind of low spastic muttering. Though it was a slow Monday night, two newcomers, a white couple, had stepped into Clifton’s. They tried to make small talk with Julius, who had returned to the door. As usual with newcomers, he was rude as he checked their IDs.

  Ellis watched as the couple ordered food and beer at the bar and then huddled together on one side of a table. When the food was ready, the woman ate her fried fish with her hands, breaking off small pieces with her long fingers and dipping them into the blot of ketchup on her plate. She encouraged the man to do the same, flirting with him, Ellis thought, and after some resistance, even a little annoyance, he began to eat with his hands too. They appeared to be enjoying the music, in a familiar way. They didn’t yell, as some newcomers did, for the volume on the jukebox to be turned up. They didn’t dance foolishly. The two enjoyed the music and mood of Clifton’s Place just as they were, and the woman even mouthed the words to a blues. A rectangle of space several feet long separated the tables from the bar, but to Ellis it seemed as though he could extend his arm, place his whiskey glass on the red plastic cover of their table, and join his voice to the woman’s in singing “Mean Old World.”

  He began to sketch the couple, on the same page he’d used to draw Sadie’s smoke. The pencil moved easily and felt good in his hand. It wasn’t long before the drawing took on the couple’s likeness. The woman’s fingers holding a piece of fish and her sad singing undefeated mouth. The man’s admiring gaze. Though it was just a sketch, something felt alive in it, an affinity between the subject and the lines on the page that Ellis rarely saw in his work. He stood and approached the couple’s table, grasping the sketch in both hands. They looked up at him, eyes puzzled and amused as he stood there, not saying a word.

  Ellis smiled and gave them the sketch. “A little something for the lovebirds,” he said.

  The man’s eyes changed before the woman’s mouth did. His face tightened as he held the sketch. He glared at the woman and crushed the page into a tight ball. Rising, he pointed at Ellis and then shoved his shoulder. “You’re a fucking perv,” he said. “Sick son of a bitch.” The man shoved him again, threw the crumpled paper so that it bounced off his chest. He seized the woman’s hand and pulled her out of her seat. As he dragged her out, past Julius, and out the door, the woman looked back at Ellis, all the features of her face reduced to tiny points. Julius stood as if ready for a brawl, but by the time he got all the way up they had already gone.

  For her, Ellis decided, the trouble of the night was just beginning. It had been clear as day that the man was no good.

  But then Sharod picked up the crumpled page and flattened it out on the bar. As Ellis looked at it, the page revealed what he had actually drawn—the shading of her open mouth, how it seemed to suck lewdly on the fish in her fingers. The figure of the woman took up most of the page. Ellis hadn’t taken the time to render the edges and folds of the dress against her skin, so she appeared to be naked. The man, rendered in fainter lines, was hardly there at all.

  Sharod barked out a laugh. “A man likes what he likes on a woman,” he said, and Julius joined in with some light teasing. Sharod ripped away the part with the ghostly man, made two dots on the woman’s chest with Ellis’s pencil. Still laughing, he walked around to the other side of the bar and taped up what was left of the wrinkled page there, displaying it like a cheap pinup.

  “Take it down,” Ellis begged, but Sharod refused.

  “It’s about time you drew something worth a damn,” he said. “I think I’ll just keep it there.”

  When Ellis’s further attempts failed he grabbed his supplies and left as fast as he could, twice humiliated. He told himself he’d never return.

  He thought it would be easy to stay away. With his regular hours at the art store and the discount he got there, he figured it would be no problem at all. He’d have more money to spend on supplies and more time to work on his drawings, but it was difficult for Ellis. He kept thinking, though he tried not to, of how destroyed he’d been when his parents, a beautiful couple, died within months of each other a few years ago, leaving him alone to wonder at his own weakness, to wonder how it was possible that other people routinely endured such losses. He looked at drawings he’d made of each of them in their sickbeds. The loneliness of his apartment choked him. He ached every time he was unable to introduce himself to a nice-looking woman at the store or on the bus. In a little over a week he was back at Clifton’s, in his usual seat. He expected the smell of Sadie’s burned hair to be there, but it was gone. His torn, wrinkled drawing still hung behind the bar.

  That night a woman approached from a loud group of newcomers at the tables. Ellis watched as she leaned over one of the empty barstools. He could see she was very young, still a girl in some ways. She was short, likely paler in the winter months, and had an eager grin that climbed all over the features of her broad face. She had the pleasing density of an athlete, maybe a runner or a gymnast, and to Ellis she looked pretty in her form-fitting jeans. Sharod looked down at her and twisted his mouth into a hard little smile that said, State your business. She ordered three Mexican lagers.

  “Nine dollars,” Sharod said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Nine dollars.”

  Not satisfied with the good prices, and ignoring the sound of Sh
arod slamming the bottles down, the white girl tried to make small talk. “Hey, are you Clifton?” she asked.

  Sharod, used to this question by now, gave her a once-over and wiped his always-watering eyes with a knuckle. “Naw,” he said. “What’s your name? Molly? Katie? Or they still call you Miss Anne?”

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” the girl said. “Didn’t mean anything by it.” She seemed sincere. Her smile was reined in now, measured, without a hint of the condescension Ellis had seen in other new patrons. She introduced herself as Allegra, but Sharod didn’t respond.

  Allegra left fifteen dollars on the bar and grabbed the three sweating bottles of beer by their long necks. She returned to her friends at the tables, sitting with her back at an angle to Ellis. The faces of the other white girls, just as youthful and free of blemish, glowed red and green and yellow in the blinking Christmas lights. Their voices could be heard over the low strains of “Yesterday,” as sung live by Donny Hathaway back in 1971. Allegra marveled again at how cheap the drinks were, and another said, “Told you so.” When they lifted the beer bottles, rings of moisture shimmered on the red plastic table cover. Ellis watched Allegra and her friends and the shadows their bodies made.

  “Well, well,” Sharod said. “Back on the scene, huh? Glad to see it. Can’t have these ofays running us out of our own goddamn establishments.”

  “I guess not,” Ellis said with a glance over at the taped-up drawing.

  “I guess not. I guess not,” Sharod teased. “Backbone, motherfucker. I told you we can’t have none of that soft-ass, bearing-gifts-for-massa, wannabe native informant bullshit. I see you eyeballing that white girl, but don’t get it twisted. The gentry don’t give a fuck about you.”

  Ellis made a few stray pencil marks on a page and listened to Julius cough behind him. Most of what Sharod had said was unnecessary, even cruel in its simplicity, but men were often rough in their affections.

  Ellis peeked over at Allegra again. He’d never paid much attention to white girls before, but yes, she was pretty. One of her rounded hips jutted off the edge of the chair she sat in. She looked corn-fed to him, maybe raised in the Midwest, maybe even the South. He may have heard some accent in her voice earlier, but he wasn’t sure.

  The bar began to fill with more newcomers. At first just groups of two or three showed up, but then a raucous group of about fifteen people arrived all at once, filling the entire space. At the other end of the bar, Dyson’s muttering became more audible. As he raised his voice, some of the people in the crowd laughed and gave him funny looks. One man, tall with a baseball cap backward on his head, nodded at Dyson as if they were having a conversation. He had an expression of mock seriousness on his face.

  Other than the unavoidable interactions with Julius and Sharod, most of the newcomers remained oblivious to the folks, even to Dyson’s intermittent shouts. Sharod was at his surly best, especially as he picked up the dollars left as tips. His kindness wouldn’t be bought. He denied their requests for food, even for the baskets of potato chips and pretzels he usually set out, and he delighted in telling them the jukebox would never be any louder than it was. Many of the newcomers danced anyway, yelling out words even to songs they didn’t know.

  Dyson fell silent, though he kept moving his lips, and the man in the baseball cap lifted his beer in comic salute. Ellis saw why Dyson had stopped his rant. Amid the confusion of shouting and singing, and the spasms of dance and drink, Julius cleared out space near the open door with wide swings of his arm. His other arm was raised above his head, where he held a familiar, still-graceful hand. Sadie was back.

  “And where is your ID, young lady?” Julius joked.

  “Get out of my face,” she said in a brassy voice. She snatched her hand away and looked around, somewhat disconcerted by the crowd. “We need some toys for all these babies.”

  “Miss Sadie,” Julius said after a fit of coughing, “who brought you over?”

  “Brought myself over, young man. Me.”

  Elegantly curved brown lines crossed her jade green dress, which extended just past her knees. Her arms moved freely in the loose, longish sleeves, silver bracelets sliding along her wrists. A varicolored necklace of wooden beads rested around the wrinkles of her neck, and her hair was stylishly cut, shorter, Ellis saw, than it had been last time. He couldn’t discern the section that had been burned away. She grinned as she turned her head jerkily around, and bounced her purse against her hip. But something was wrong: Sadie limped as she walked, as though one of her legs had gone lame.

  Ellis jumped from his seat. “Miss Sadie, do you wanna sit here?”

  “Plenty of places to sit,” she said, barely registering his presence. “But I ain’t come here to sit. Anyway, I got all these babies to feed.” She called for Sharod and began to make her way through the crowd toward the kitchen area, tottering like a damaged windup toy. On the back of her dress, just above the hem, a large black spot seemed to grow, as if an invisible hand pressed it with the tip of a leaking pen. Of course the spot couldn’t be growing, Ellis told himself, but he knew as well as the other folks that something tragic had touched Miss Sadie, that the first prick of a spreading contagion had been made a good while ago.

  The smell of hot cooking oil began to fill the air of Clifton’s Place as Sadie prepared the food that Sharod had denied the crowd. In the atmosphere of her cooking, Dyson even stopped moving his lips. Sharod looked chastened as he leaned on his elbows and glared at the stiffly moving bodies between the bar and the tables. Four white men converged on Allegra and her friends, standing over their table. Whether the girls wanted them to or not—and Allegra seemed openly annoyed—the men lingered for a long time. Ellis wondered if Allegra was accustomed to handling herself here in the city. One of the men made his way to the bar to order several shots of vodka. Ellis, tucked in his corner, glanced up from time to time. He sketched abstractedly, the page a chaos of thick lines and dark calligraphic forms.

  Someone bumped him, a white man standing behind him in the crowd, causing Ellis’s hand to make a dark errant line across his page. The man turned with an indignant expression on his face. “Sorry,” Ellis said. He started to erase the mark, but then studied the page and the other sketches he’d made tonight. They’d gotten worse, more formless, and somehow more forlorn.

  The men at Allegra’s table seemed to have made some progress. They all tossed back more shots and joined the large cluster of dancers. It was difficult to maintain sight of Allegra in the crowd, but Ellis could tell from glimpses of her face that she wasn’t enjoying herself, moving her body in a perfunctory way.

  Before long, Sadie was dancing through the crowd with her fried delights, chicken wings and fillets of whiting. She invited the newcomers to pick them right from the tray, flicking her tongue across her lips all the while. She swayed as she went along, her head plunging to the left with every other step.

  “Look at her go!” someone shouted.

  “She’s gonna break a hip.”

  “Tell her to bring that fish over this way.”

  “Look at her shoes,” someone else said.

  Ellis could see now that she was wearing mismatched heels. Behind the bar, Sharod turned to him and said, “This is fucking bullshit.”

  “The poor woman just isn’t well.”

  “She’s making a fool of herself. And us.”

  “Her shoes. It’s awful,” Ellis said and then immediately regretted it, feeling as though he’d betrayed Sadie in some small way. “I should take her home.”

  Sharod looked up from his clenched fists. “All she’ll do is come back. She just keeps bringing her ass back. It would kill her not to. This here’s the only damn thing she’s got.”

  It can’t be true, Ellis thought. He felt it just couldn’t be that the thread sustaining a person’s life could be that fine, that terribly frayed. But then he thought about the way his own life had been the past ten days. He looked at his drawing taped up behind the bar. Even humiliation couldn’t ke
ep him away for long.

  “Hey, leave that alone!” Sharod yelled. But it was too late—the music began to blast out of the jukebox and the white man who had been tinkering with it raised his arms and nodded vigorously at his friends. The newcomers began jumping up and down and they told Sadie to jump too. Ellis couldn’t tell what she was doing. She was lost in the motion of the crowd. Dyson yelled, louder than he ever had, so his voice wasn’t drowned out by the music. Near the kitchen a length of Christmas lighting, yanked loose by someone’s swinging arms, dangled from the ceiling.

  Sharod made his way from behind the bar and pushed toward her. Ellis stood and excused himself as he maneuvered around a few dancers. He passed Julius, whose head was in his hands, opened the door, and walked out. He intended to keep going, maybe all the way home, but outside, in the vast warm night, he found Allegra, her trembling hand holding a lit cigarette.

  She looked at him. “You smoke?”

  He told her no, feeling like he was answering more than one question.

  “You obviously drink.” She nudged her head toward the closed door behind them. “Bar,” she added uselessly. “God, I don’t even know why I come to these places. I’m so tired of them.”

  “But you’re too young to talk that way,” Ellis said.

  “What do you know?” she said. “A girl gets tired in no time at all.”

  “Well,” Ellis said, “your friends looked like they were having fun.”

  “You think?” The sarcasm made her seem very young, though up close she looked more like a woman than he’d first thought. Her odd complexion gave her the impression of being weathered, like a rock beaten smooth by hard rain. He could hear now that her accent wasn’t Southern.

  “Where are they—your friends?”

  She took a deep pull on her cigarette and her next words came in little clouds. “Couldn’t tell you. Gone. On their backs probably, legs open to the world.”