Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Why we out here, Ma?” Andre asked. “It’s wet. I’m cold.”

“It’s not so bad under the umbrella.”

“Can we go?”

“I just thought you’d like to stay out a while longer. Might as well enjoy it now. I need you to be at home tomorrow.”

“For what?”

“You know how the girls from work go out to Temptations after our shift,” Lena said. “Well, this time they finally invited me.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, Ma.”

“I know what day it is. And I need you to be at home. For my peace of mind.”

“While you out shaking your ass at the club.”

“What’d you say, boy?”

“Nothing,” Andre said. “I’m cold.” He stood and started walking back the way they’d come.

Lena chased after him, sounding pathetic as she called his name.

Curtis didn’t follow. After a while, he got up and strolled along the promenade in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only other person he saw was a man with an unsettling face. The man’s bouts of muttering formed clouds that flowered like visible emblems of his secret language before being pulled apart by the wind. But it was the way this man’s hands jumped within his dirty coat as he shuffled along that marked him as dangerous and insane. Curtis had been both of these things, in those months after Marvin died in the fire. Those months before Curtis went to prison. It was danger lurking in the man’s left pocket, he suspected, and insanity leaping around in the right. He liked the feeling of their passing him by.

Curtis huffed the name of his long departed friend— my dead friend, he told himself soberly—so he could see the wind take it, imagining that it too, along with the words steaming from the man’s mouth, drifted off and seeded the East River. The river was badly polluted, but he liked it anyway. It flowed in either direction, reaching both ways until it licked the sea. As the man prattled on, now some distance away, Curtis again said Marvin’s name, which rose from his lips and hovered there for a moment, clean as an unstrung bone.

He might have also said the name of the dead woman, the one he had struck with his car, the one who intruded on his dreams. But his life was for other things now, he’d been desperately telling himself, beautiful and wondrous things.

The rain began turning to sleet, the sound of it an exhalation steadily hushing the world. Curtis indulged his sense of feeling contained but not trapped. Under the capacious dome of sky he was free, but bounded, so his newly freed limbs wouldn’t fly apart. As much as he wanted to stay there on the promenade—often he stayed until the spell of night began to break—the sleet was penetrating his slicker and the thin coat he wore underneath. His hands and feet were already numb. Curtis shivered. It wouldn’t make any damn sense to get out of the clink just to turn around and catch his death of cold. He walked quickly to keep the chill from settling into his muscle and marrow.

The next night, Curtis walked along Atlantic Avenue, not far from the movie theater and the Downtown Bar and Grill. It was eleven o’clock and he was enjoying the bustle and breadth of the thoroughfare. He was still amazed at how much had changed: the number of fancy restaurants and wine stores now. Then again, many of the old bars remained. And the new nightclubs were just the old nightclubs with different names.

An empty bus made its way past, the driver lit against its dark frame like an insect stuck in amber. On the corner stood a white woman trying in vain to hail a medallion cab, and Curtis stood beside her, as though waiting to cross the street. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, wearing only a trim jacket and a scarf over her short dress. Her uncovered head twitched, shaking her cropped hair from her lips; her legs were thin but shapely, the color of rich cream. She was what Marvin used to call a “slim goody.” Curtis imagined how soft the inside of her thighs would be. He imagined her open mouth.

It had been a long time since he’d had sex with anyone but himself, with his own clutching hand. In those first years in prison, he kept an old black-and-white picture of the actress Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. Following those first years of her smiling in the swimming pool came explicit pictures of women opening their shiny, hairless bodies to the camera. When he first got out of prison he bought a couple of magazines with centerfolds, but then he discovered how easily videos could be found on his mother’s computer. He still liked that picture of the actress in the pool most of all.

The white woman’s phone began ringing, and she greeted the caller, apparently her mother, the simple words strained by her tone of heavy familiarity. The second Curtis heard her speak, a feeling of exhaustion overcame him; she reminded him, for some reason, of the woman he had struck with his car. But if that woman had been white, Curtis knew, he would still be in prison, with many more years there ahead of him. To get away from the voice now whining into the phone, he jogged across the street.

In front of Temptations, three men were lined up behind a black velvet rope. The bouncer wore dark glasses and appeared to have no intention of letting the three in. Curtis took his place in line as the first man began to complain.

“Come on now, chief. We been waiting out here for a minute.”

“Damn near a half hour,” another said. “Say it straight.”

“And the hawk is out, big man. Come on.”

The bouncer said nothing. Another man got in line behind Curtis as a livery taxi pulled up. Three women got out and were followed by Lena Johnson, an afterthought. The bouncer wasted no time letting them in.

Waiting with the other men in line gave Curtis plenty of time to reconsider going in, even after Lena’s arrival. In fact, he tried to change his mind, calling up reasons he should—images of the promenade, of the white woman on the corner—but it was Lena’s nyloned legs emerging from the taxi that were lit up on the stage of his mind. Moving slowly in a sapphire dress, she trailed the other women. The shock of seeing her dolled up was slight, but after she vanished through the door, every scene that proceeded on the stage of his mind featured the nylons and the sapphire dress and ended in foolishness. He kept thinking about Andre imagining these scenes unfold or trying to decipher his mother’s face tomorrow during the broadcasts of Sunday afternoon football. The boy needed to be spared his mother’s small tragedies.

About fifteen minutes later, the bouncer announced to the men that it would be a ten-dollar cover to get in, speaking as if they had only just arrived. He examined Curtis’s clothes doubtfully before admitting him. Curtis wore jeans, but they weren’t that dirty; the real problem was that he had on work boots instead of what Marvin would have called “slippery earls.” This outfit wouldn’t have gotten him into the places they used to frequent, back in the days when they used fake IDs.

“Good luck, playboy,” the bouncer said. He stepped aside to let Curtis through the curtains. “Your broke ass gonna need it.”

The nightclub had two floors. Curtis didn’t spot Lena on the ground level, so he went down to the basement. He took a seat at the bar that gave him a good view of the room and recognized certain features: the low ceiling with its copper tiles, the four pillars that marked the boundary of the dance floor. He and Marvin had been here before, when there was only a basement level. The place used to be called Nelson’s.

Curtis had extra money from an odd job helping his mother’s neighbor move some boxes, plus what was left of yesterday’s forty dollars. It was easier than he thought it would be to order a bourbon. The words didn’t get stuck; the bartender didn’t stare. The taste of the drink closed his eyes and warmed him from his throat to his navel.