“We could have hot dogs on that corner where I said I’d shine your boyfriend’s shoes,” Billy suggested to Thalia.
“No, you won’t,” Nacogdoches said.
“That was the bet,” Billy countered, the ass-kicking smile back on his lips.
“You didn’t pull the trigger,” his rival argued.
“Why I wanna pull on a trigger when I know the gun is empty?”
“You could draw faster if you didn’t move your finger. Any fool could pull a gun out by its butt.”
Billy squinted as if he was on his beloved prairie trying to make out a shadow on the horizon. He shook his head ever so slightly and then shrugged, moving his shoulders no more than an inch.
“Thank you, Terrence,” Billy said, waving to my brother, who was standing next to the exit door. “We finished here.”
“You didn’t pull the trigger,” Nacogdoches said again.
“I won,” Billy replied.
Terrence herded us out the door and onto Sixty-Third.
Thalia, who was wearing black jeans and a calico blouse, walked up to Billy and shook his hand. He gave her a quizzical stare, but she lowered her head and turned away.
“I won!” Nacogdoches said, as he and his friends walked toward Central Park.
When we were walking to the train, Billy asked me to come with him while Sheila and the rest took a more direct route to the subway. He said that he wanted to talk about something as we strolled north on Broadway.
But before he had the chance someone said, “Stop right there.”
I was already nervous. Most of my life I had spent at my home, at church, or in school, where I had been an honor student every year, every semester. I wasn’t used to running the street with armed friends and watching duels.
Two uniformed policemen were getting out of their black and white cruiser. Billy had his six-shooter in a battered brown leather satchel, and the police had the right of stop-and-frisk.
Once again I had the urge to run, but I knew that wouldn’t end well.
One cop was pink colored and the other dark brown.
“What are you doing here so late at night, boys?” the black cop asked.
“Good evening, Officer O’Brien,” Billy said to the white policeman.
“Consigas?” he replied.
“You get that parade trot down yet?”
“This is the kid I was telling you about, Frank,” the white cop said to his partner. “He can do anything on a horse. Honest-to-God cowboy from Texas.”
“I was just playin’ basketball with my friend Felix here down at Lazarus House,” Billy said.
O’Brien asked Billy a few things about riding and then shook my friend’s hand.
“I thought the Cowboy Code said you shouldn’t lie,” I said when we were installed on the train.
“She gave me her phone number,” Billy replied.
“What?”
“That Thalia gave me her phone number on a little piece of paper when she shook my hand.”
“Damn.”
“What do you think I should do?”
I am, as I said, a good student and the kind of citizen that stays out of trouble. I prefer reading to TV and ideas in opposition to actions, sweat, or violence. I was always considered by my parents, teachers, and, later on, by my employers, a good person. My only serious fault, as my father was always happy to say, was that I often spoke without considering what it was that I said. This was most often a minor flaw, but in certain cases it could be a fatal one.
“You should call her and have lunch at that barbecue place with me and Sheila Grant. That way it’ll be friendly.”
Billy called Thalia the next day. He told her what I had said, and by now regretted, and she agreed to the date.
“She said,” Billy told me, “that Nacogdoches had obviously lost, and she felt that it was her obligation to go on a date with the winning cowboy.”
The lunch was set for Saturday.
“What you mean he’s goin’ out with that white girl?” Sheila said when I asked her to come along.
“It’s the bet,” I explained lamely. “He kind of has to go.”
“I bet he wouldn’t think so if she was black.”
“You know better than that, girl. Billy’s doing it because he won and she knows it.”
“Sounds stupid to me.”
“That mean you’re not comin’?”
We ordered hot links, brisket, fried chicken, and pork ribs, with cornbread, collard greens, fried pickles, and a whole platter full of french fries.
“So where all you southerners come from?” Sheila asked Thalia after we’d ordered.
“Only Nacky and one of the others, Braughm, are from the South. They’re both out of Nashville. We all go to this private school called Reese on Staten Island. Most of the kids there are rich and have what they call ‘social behavior problems.’”
“But all his friends dress like cowboys,” I said.
“They just wanna be like him,” Thalia said with a twist to her lips. I remember thinking that if she were Caribbean she would have sucked a tooth.
“So you’re rich?” Sheila asked Thalia, as if it was some kind of indictment.
“No. My mother teaches there, and she didn’t like the kind of friends I had in public school. I like your hair. I wish I could do something like that with mine.”
Sheila had thick corded braids that flowed down her back. She was a beautiful girl. She lost her angry attitude when Thalia complimented her.
“So Nacogdoches is like some kind of juvenile delinquent?” Billy asked.
“He got in trouble down south stealing. I think his parents just wanted to get rid of him. Anyway, he’s graduating this June. Says he’s going out to California.”
That’s when the food came. We spent the rest of the lunch talking and joking. Thalia was a painter who wanted to specialize in horses. That’s what drew her to Nacogdoches. He kept a horse at a stable in Connecticut and promised to bring her up there some day.
“But now I think he was just sayin’ that to get in good with me,” the white girl added.
Billy said he’d take her to the police stables the next morning. He invited me and Sheila too.
“It’s not a date unless you two kiss,” Sheila said when we were out in front of the Iron Spur Barbecue House.
Thalia kissed Billy on the cheek, and Sheila snapped the picture with her cell-phone camera.
Billy left with Thalia, and Sheila gave me a few friendly kisses before I walked her home.
The next morning Thalia and Billy met us at the gate of the police stables. They were both wearing the same clothes from the day before.
I had the most trouble keeping up with my horse. I was just bouncing, bouncing—up and down, to the side, and almost to the ground once or twice. But we had a good time. The girls became friends, and Billy was glad that we were there together.
“You know, Felix,” he said to me, when we were returning the big animals to their stalls, “I realized yesterday that there are good people everywhere—not only in the place you come from.”
Like every other citizen of the world with a cell phone, Sheila was an amateur photographer. She took pictures of us on our horses, out in the park, and of me, Billy, and Thalia walking side by side. Thalia’s arm was linked with Billy’s.
Things returned to normal after that, more or less. I went back to my secretary post on the student council and helped Billy write a paper for his remedial English class. It was an essay about a book of cowboy poetry his grandfather had given him. Sheila and Thalia became Facebook friends. They shared pictures and started telling each other about their experiences in different boroughs and at different schools.
I asked Sheila to go out with me six times in the next two weeks, but she always had some reason to say no
.
Then one afternoon, Sheila was waiting outside my German class, clutching her beloved smartphone.
“Hey, Sheil,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Look at this,” she said, thrusting the phone into my hand.
On the screen was a photograph of Thalia. She had a black eye and a bloody lip, and she seemed to be in the middle of a scream or cry.
“Flip it,” Sheila said.
There were seven pictures of the white girl. It became obvious after the second shot that she was being beaten while someone took pictures. In two shots someone was pulling her hair and slapping her. In another photo she was hunched over, clutching her stomach with both hands as if someone had kicked her.
“Who sent you these?” I asked Sheila.
“It came from her phone. There was a text too.”
The text read, This is what happens to whores and race traitors.
As his tutor, I went to Billy’s house almost every afternoon. That day we were making the finishing touches on his poetry paper. Billy wrote on an old Royal typewriter.
“I don’t really care for computers,” he said. But I think he was just afraid of them.
The night before, he’d finished the fifth rewrite of the essay. He really did have deep insights into poetry and its uses by people living the actual lives that they turned into verse. We did a word-by-word examination of his spelling and grammar before I dared to broach the thing that was foremost in my mind.
“I need to show you something, Billy.”
“What’s that, Felix? You don’t think that the paper’s good enough?”
I located the forwarded files from Sheila’s phone and showed him the pictures. Billy flipped through them saying not a word. His eyes seemed to get smaller, but he wasn’t squinting. If he drew a breath, I couldn’t tell.
After some minutes and close perusal of the photos, Billy said, “Can you send this motherfucker a note?”
Playground above 150 on the Hudson. Midnight tonight. Come ready. Come heavy.
Billy strapped on the pistol in his bedroom. It was exactly as he had done at Lazarus House, but this time he tied the holster to his left leg.
“I thought you were right-handed?” I said.
“Two-handed,” Billy said, showing the first smile since he had seen the pictures. “But I’m a little better with my left.”
At 11:35 he donned an off-white trench coat, and we left the house.
“Where you goin’?” Billy’s mother called from the kitchen.
“Over to Felix’s,” said my friend. “He’s gonna help me type my paper into his computer so then I can send the file-thing to Miss Andrews.”
Outside we hailed a green cab and had the driver take us to the park.
Nacogdoches Early and his posse were waiting for us. Thalia was with them, but as soon as we appeared she ran to me. Her face was all swollen from the punishment she’d received.
“That’s right,” Nacogdoches said. “Go on over to them. That’s where you belong.”
A few moments later Sheila Grant, Tom Tellerman, and Teriq Strickland walked into the empty children’s playground. I had called Sheila, and she’d notified our other friends.
Nacogdoches was wearing a bright-colored Mexican poncho, which he flung off. Underneath he was wearing his brown holster and black gun. He was hatless, and his pale skin shone in the shadowy light.
Billy took off his trench coat and draped it around Thalia’s shoulders. Sheila was holding the scared white girl by then.
There was no need for words. Billy and Nacogdoches squared off with about ten paces between them.
“Thalia?” Billy called.
“Yeah?” she said.
“You strong enough to count to three, honey?”
Thalia walked to the river side of the present-day cowboys. The rest of us, white and black, moved out of the line of fire.
“One,” Thalia said, and I was reminded of the sense of fate I’d experienced at Lazarus House.
“Two,” she announced, and I wanted to scream.
Before she was able to utter the last number, Nacogdoches reached for his pistol. He pulled out the gun and fired. But before that, with snake-like fluidity, Billy drew and shot. Nacogdoches’s bullet went wild, landing, I believe, somewhere out on the Hudson. The young white man was dead before he hit the concrete. I remember that he fell on a chalk-drawn hopscotch design.
There was another shot, and I looked to see Braughm, the other white southerner, aiming a pistol at Billy—who was now down on one knee. Billy shot one time, hitting his assailant in the upper thigh. Two others of Nacogdoches’s posse had guns, but Billy shot both of them before they could fire—one in the shins and the other in the shoulder.
After that we all ran.
At a coffee shop on 125th Street, Billy was once again wearing his trench coat, and he was drinking from a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Sheila and Thalia were there with us.
“You think he’s dead?” Billy asked me.
“You hit him in the head,” I said.
Billy nodded and grimaced.
“It ain’t no fun when somebody dies,” he said.
After a few minutes of silence I noticed a red spot at the right shoulder of his off-white coat.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I think I need to get out of town,” he said.
“I’ll go with you,” Thalia offered.
“That’d be nice,” Billy said kindly, “but with all them bruises we’d be stopped before the train made it out from Penn Station.”
Sheila’s aunt and uncle were out of town, and so we cleaned and dressed Billy’s wound there. The bullet had come in through the front and gone out the back of Billy’s shoulder.
“Lucky that Braughm had steel-jacketed slugs,” Billy said. “A soft bullet woulda tore me up.”
I went with my friend to Penn Station and waited with him for a train headed to Atlanta. I was worried that there was some kind of internal bleeding, but Billy said that he felt good and strong.
“I never wanted to live up here anyway,” he said.
“What do you want me to tell your mom?”
“I’ll write her, don’t you worry about that. If she calls, tell her I left your place sometime after two and you don’t know where I went.”
He boarded the 5:11 morning train, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
The police found Nacogdoches Early and followed the bloody trail back to his friends. All they knew was that there was some black kid named Billy who killed Nacogdoches in a gunfight. They got to my brother, but he said that he’d made the deal with some kid named Billy and he never knew where he’d come from.
Thalia told about the beating, but she’d tossed her phone, and the cops were never able to follow the electronic trail.
The three major newspapers loved the romance of a shootout on the Hudson.
In the weeks that followed there were seventeen Western-style gunfights all over the city. Black, white, and brown would-be gunslingers had duels. No one was killed, but the mayor and chief of police ratcheted up the stop-and-frisk program until even rich people started to complain.
Six months later it had all died down. Billy’s mother left Harlem, and I graduated a year ahead of time. I was in my fourth year at Harvard, majoring in English literature with an emphasis on Yeats, when I received an unopened letter forwarded to me by my sister, Latrice.
Dear Felix,
Over the past four years I have meant to write to you but I was always on the move and even when I started to write the words didn’t add up to much. I am very sorry for what I did when you knew me back then. There was no excuse for what Nacogdoches Early did to Thalia but that didn’t give me the right to take his life. Maybe if it had been a fair fight, maybe if I didn’t know I could beat him, it
would have been all right. But I knew I was the better gunman and so what I did was murder.
I have spent my time since then in the country from Montana to Northern California riding horses and taking work as I find it. I see my mother from time to time. She moved back to Texas because Henry Ryder died and she didn’t have to be afraid of him anymore.
You were a good friend, Felix, and I appreciate you sticking by me even though you could have got in trouble too.
Maybe you should burn this letter after you read it. Whatever you do I’ll be writing again. Maybe one day we’ll even see each other in Times Square or maybe on the Hudson.
Your friend, Billy
I haven’t burned Billy’s confession—not yet. I keep meaning to.
Over the years I have received eleven letters from the Harlem Cowboy. In the last few he’s written some very nice poetry about nature and manhood. His words mean a lot to me. His convictions about right and wrong give me the strength not to see myself as a victim.
I got my PhD from Harvard and now teach American literature at the University of Texas in Houston. In Billy’s most recent letter, he said that a girlfriend googled me online and found out that I was there. In that letter he wrote,
. . . Don’t be too surprised if I drop by your classroom one day, professor. In a long life you only got a few friends, that’s a fact . . .
Breath
Iremember waking up, trying to catch my breath. If someone had asked my name or address, or even what room I was sleeping in, I wouldn’t have been able to say. All I had on my mind was that elusive inhalation, that solitary lungful of air that had to be somewhere; it had to be or I was going to die.
The apartment was empty—stripped down to the dust-swirled wood floors. The air conditioner was on, and I wasted precious seconds looking around for my pants. I found the phone, but it was dead. Somebody was crying somewhere nearby, but I couldn’t call to them. As I went through the door to the hallway, it came to me that the sobbing was actually the whine of my lungs trying to throw off the congestion.
The Awkward Black Man Page 18