The Awkward Black Man

by Walter Mosley

So what if I gambled with Sherman sometimes or drank too much or bought things I couldn’t afford? My cousin, my brother, made me feel that life was important, that I was important. Without him I was nobody.

  “You look so much like him,” a woman said.

  It was Natasha Koskov, from Brighton Beach. She was a breathless Russian with a long neck and lips like Mona Tremont, the first girl I ever really kissed.

  “That’s what they say,” I replied, wondering where the words and light tone in my voice had come from.

  “He loved you,” she said, looking into my brown eyes with her black ones.

  “You wanna go get a drink?” I imagined Sherman asking.

  “Yes,” Natasha Koskov replied.

  We drank and kissed, went to her apartment, and made love. She called me Sherman, and after the first round I didn’t correct her.

  I was another man that night. Natasha wasn’t loving me but Sherman—Sherman, who could not be erased from this world or her heart or mine.

  Sometime after three in the morning I was walking from the subway toward Titi’s apartment building because I had no place else to go.

  I hadn’t lived with my parents for three years, and the thought that my father was not my father kept me from calling them. I wondered if he had known, if he and my mother had kept the truth from me. Maybe that was why my mother showed me so little affection.

  “Hey, you!” a man said from somewhere to my left.

  I turned and saw a rough-skinned, earth-toned man wearing a hoodie. He carried a small pistol in his right hand. I’d had a lot to drink, but I was sober. I was coming back from a night of lovemaking, but I was downcast, brooding.

  “Gimme yo’ got-damned wallet, main!”

  He could have demanded anything else: my shoes, my baby finger, every cent I ever made. But it was Sherman’s wallet in my back pocket. It was my brother’s legacy this man was asking for.

  I looked at him, and time slowed. Under a night-time lamppost his sludge-colored eyes were frightened, as mine should have been. I suppressed a smile, breathed in the darkness, and looked up suddenly as if seeing something surprising behind his back. It was just enough to cause him to falter and to give me time to reach out with both hands and tear the gun from his grip. He tried to grab it away, but I pulled back the hammer and steadied my right hand with my left. This was something Sherman had taught me with a pistol he kept in the top drawer of his bureau.

  “Now I want your got-damned money, man!” I said on that dark and empty street. There were tears in my eyes.

  The thief heard in my grief-stricken, strained voice that he was as close to dead as he was likely to be before that final breath. He reached into a pocket and came out with a wad of cash that he’d probably robbed from other brooding late-night strollers. He held the cash out to me.

  “Drop it on the concrete and haul yo’ ass outta here ’fore I shoot you dead.”

  It was the terrified look on the mugger’s face that made me decide to kill him. I was outraged that a man who made his living robbing others would not be brave enough to face the consequences of his crimes. His cowardice negated any claim to clemency.

  I was just about to shoot the mugger when a bright light flashed, a siren chirped, and a magnified voice called out, “Drop the weapon! This is the police!”

  In that moment I argued internally about the action I should take. One side of my mind said that the mugger should die, no matter what some bright light and bullhorn said.

  “No, cousin,” Sherman argued. “You got to live for Titi and for me too. You could have killed him, but now you got to drop the gun, get down on your knees, and put your hands behind your head.”

  As Sherman said these things, I did them.

  The mugger stayed on his feet, trembling.

  The policemen, two of them, hurried over—their guns drawn, their eyes searching for trickery and deceit.

  “Don’t say anything, cousin,” Sherman whispered. “Not a word.”

  They took us, me and the man that tried to rob me, to the precinct station. I was put in a small interrogation room and handcuffed to a metal hook anchored in the wall. A cop in a suit tried to question me, but I wouldn’t so much as look at him.

  A long time passed. During that period I thought about Sherman and the words he had spoken years before when talking about what he’d do if he were caught in some crime. I realized that he had been teaching me how to survive after he was gone.

  When the door came open again, my cousin Theodora entered. She was the last person I expected to see, hastily clad in blue jeans and a long turquoise T-shirt. Her hair was wrapped up in a nylon stocking, and there were bags under her eyes.

  She stared at me with a confused look on her face. Then, slowly, the answer to the riddle of who I was and who they thought I was, came to her.

  She squatted down in front of me, her face not two inches away from mine.

  “Stew?” she whispered.

  I couldn’t speak.

  “Why you had Sherman’s wallet on you?” my cousin asked.

  “Titi,” I uttered softly.

  Theodora understood.

  “Listen, Stew,” she murmured. “They found me as the contact in Sherman’s wallet. They think you’re him. Tell me what happened, and I’ll try and get you outta here.”

  “Man tried to mug me, and I grabbed away his gun.”

  Theodora was well known at the precinct. They looked up the mugger’s records and Sherman’s to find that my mugger, Chris Hatter, had been arrested for violent crimes many times. That, and the fact that his fingerprints and the ones on the bullets matched, got me released.

  Titi let me come live with her.

  Sleeping in Sherman’s bed, waking up each day and putting on his clothes, made me feel . . . different, more and more so each day. I began reading his library of college books and the thirteen volumes of the detailed journal he’d kept since the age of ten. And, slowly, I made a plan for my future.

  I applied to college, saying in my essay that I wanted another bachelor’s degree, one in English literature because I wanted to teach.

  * * *

  Six months later I was in Greenwich Village at one of eight NYU registration tables. The table I stood in line for was specified for people with last names that started with letter A, B, or C.

  I stood there thinking about the police captain who harangued me for not telling the arresting officers that I was the victim of the mugger I had disarmed.

  “. . . and we might have let him go,” the captain said. “By keeping quiet you could have put a dangerous criminal back on the street . . .”

  And now I was at the front of the line at registration.

  “Name?” a blond girl with a wide face and rimless glasses asked.

  Instead of responding I gave her the driver’s license from my wallet.

  She took the card and read it, looked up, and said, “Sherman Cardwell-Brownley?”

  I sighed, smiled, and nodded. She smiled back and started going through a box of large envelopes sitting next to her. The young woman—her name tag read “Shauna”—found the name and handed me my schedule for the fall semester. I had been given a dorm room, a roommate named Lucian Meyers, and a laminated card with the photo of a face on it that looked a lot like mine.

  Otis

  Crash Martin, christened Percival by his parents, left school in a hurry when he thought the truth had come out. The Martin family lived in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, in a three-bedroom apartment, with rent control grandfathered in through his father’s father, both named Reginald, upon the elder’s death in 1999. While Reginald Jr. had been born in that apartment, Mathilda Poplar-Martin, Crash’s mother, hailed from Portland, Maine, and still owned her family cabin on Monhegan Island, population seventy-three.

  “There are twenty-seven art
ists, forty-five fishermen, and me,” she’d say of her island home away from home, “when I’m there.”

  Crash had an older sister named Albertha, a fraternal twin brother called Brother, and a cousin named Bob. Bob’s parents had died in an automobile accident on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Claudia, Bob’s mother, had been talking to Mathilda on her cell phone while Bob’s father, John, drove the family from Santa Barbara down to LA. Mathilda didn’t care much for her brother’s wife or for him, for that matter, but she felt that it was providence that she was talking to them when they died and so told Reginald Jr. that Bob had to come live with their family.

  Of the six residents living in the fourth-floor apartment on Gay Street, only seventeen-year-old Albertha had her own bedroom­—­for obvious reasons. The unlikely twins were both fifteen, and Bob was eleven, though he insisted that he was twelve. The three boys slept restively at night in their bedroom, which was also the smallest proper room in the apartment. Crash and Brother had mattresses set upon box springs in opposite corners, while Bob slept on a shelf Reginald Jr. had installed to make room for a study desk that only Crash used.

  The study desk was Crash’s province, because Brother was dyslexic, which Crash understood as not liking to read, and Bob had ADD, meaning that he could not concentrate on any one thing for very long. But even though Crash had the desk to himself, he didn’t use it often, because his brother and cousin made loud noises at odd moments that would shock and distract him.

  So Crash used his sister’s desk, even when she was in the room, because Albertha didn’t seem to mind his presence, and the noises she made were both consistent and benign. Albertha talked on the phone to her friends most waking hours.

  “ . . . and then Billy said that Principal Rivers knew that Mr. Eagles had been arrested for bein’ drunk, and he said that Principal Rivers didn’t get him fired because Eagles knew that Rivers had had sex with Mrs. Longerman’s wife, Betty, before Betty realized that she was a lesbian . . .”

  Albertha had long riffs of interpersonal explanations that went on and on and on. For Crash it was kind of like white noise playing in the background. While he wrote and read, Albertha explained the only things that were important to her and maybe her friends—what A did or didn’t do with B, either against C or behind C’s back.

  The only thing that confused Crash was why his sister never stopped to listen to her friends, most of whom were girls. He decided that her friends were, like him, doing their schoolwork and found it soothing to hear his sister’s soft chatter while delving calculus or unveiling the disturbing mysteries of biology.

  Schoolwork came easily to Crash. His brother, Brother, cousin Bob, and Albertha all went to public schools, but Crash had a scholarship to Horatio Preparatory School, grades six to twelve. There were only 218 students at Horatio, and the education, everyone said, was one of the best in the nation.

  What made Crash such a good student was that he could solve math problems by closing his eyes and allowing the equation to enter a place in his mind where it somehow solved itself, and also that he could read and retain a thousand pages in an evening’s time. The years he attended public school, the teachers and counselors saw his odd quirks in learning to be symptoms of a mental disorder. When Mr. Martindale ordered Crash to write out the calculation to solve a long division problem, the youngster butted him in the nose out of sheer frustration.

  “He’s definitely suffering from a mild case of autism,” the school’s psychologist-counselor, Hannah Freest, told Mathilda Poplar-Martin at a special emergency meeting to discuss Percival’s violent assault.

  “But my son is happy,” Mathilda said. “He’s not suffering at all.”

  “He struck Mr. Martindale.”

  “A math teacher,” the mother pointed out, “who does not accept that my son can do math problems in his head.”

  “Skirting processes,” Hannah Freest argued, “which are part and parcel of the standardized education required by the state.”

  The phrase standardized education struck Mathilda. She realized in an unexpected instant that school for Percival was a factory, where he was a defective product soon to be discarded for more manageable material.

  “Leave my son where he is for the rest of the semester,” she said, “and I will have him in a private institution by January.”

  Horatio Prep tested Percival, called Crash for the rest of the semester by adoring fellow students. The private school accepted him, agreeing to waive tuition. That solved the problem of the young man’s education for four blissful years. But by the time he reached the tenth grade, Percival had become bored with what the teachers had to show him.

  Math and language gave him no problem. He understood the facts his teachers presented but was never, to his satisfaction, shown what lay behind the curtain of this so-called knowledge. Why did things happen? And what was responsible for why things were the way they were? On top of his own ennui, Crash could see that his classmates were often frustrated by the processes of acquiring knowledge and were rarely given what he thought of as truth. So he began to help his friends by giving them answers to the rote questions that a formal education asked over and over, like some monstrous dictator-parrot.

  He taught his friends how to cheat on tests in ways that no one would suspect. He wrote papers and installed viral programs on their class computers, programs that would seek out the answers they needed.

  One night he was lying in bed, only half-asleep, amid the clamor of Bob’s nightmare cries over the deaths of his parents and Brother’s rustling susurrations arising from the throes of yet another wet dream. At times like these Crash could drift, examining his mind without complete awareness. A thought would come into his mostly sleeping consciousness; birds’ wings or World War II Russian tanks, blood pulsing through vessels or words that rhyme. This was a state of complete ease, unencumbered by the limitations of time. Much later in life he would claim, “I do my best thinking when I’m asleep.”

  On this particular night, Crash suddenly realized that some student would betray him to the administration one day. This revelation forced him to recognize that in the eyes of the school he had been not helping but cheating. This meant that sooner or later he would be expelled from the one place where people believed in him.

  Crash might have dismissed this dark epiphany as a bad dream if it were not for the note Alissya Progress brought to his first-period life-drawing class.

  The model that day was Felix Neederman, a freshman from CCNY, who posed wearing nothing but briefs. He was reclining on a large wooden crate, propped up on one elbow, with what Crash’s father would have called a shit-eating grin on his lips. Felix was pale-skinned and muscular, blue-eyed, with dirty-blond hair.

  Crash sat on the high wooden stool at his easel with a stick of charred willow wood in his hand. He gazed at the burnt twig, which was quite a bit darker than his taupe-brown skin. The brown newsprint drawing pad hanging from the easel was closer to Crash’s hue.

  His father, Reginald Jr., was a deep brown color. Brother was a slightly darker brown than Crash, and Bob was that odd olive hue most people called white. Mother Mathilda had pale skin that she slathered with tan makeup every morning before facing the world. The only reason Crash knew his mother’s true color was that they both liked to swim in the ocean, and her makeup, as she said, “could not survive the brine.”

  Thinking about skin and color, Crash had yet to make a mark on the pristine sheet of newsprint. While he pondered the colors ranging from charcoal to pale he noticed Alissya walking by. He arranged the easel so that he could see the paper and Felix Neederman at the same time. He knew from previous classes that this binocular experience would end up with him tracing what he saw in the air upon the sheet of paper.

  “Mr. Martin,” Ernst Schillio said.

  “Yes,” Crash murmured, seemingly addressing his burnt willow stick.

  �
��Miss Warren wants to see you.”

  Looking up, the tenth grader saw his teacher and Alissya staring back at him. He knew in an instant what was happening.

  Crash placed the twig on the tray beneath the hanging pad of newsprint, hopped off the battered oak stool, and walked toward the exit. He was aware of the eyes of his fellow students watching as he made his way toward the classroom door. At public school the other kids would ooh at a student being called to the office. But at Horatio they only watched.

  Percival was certain that his dream state the night before had predicted what was happening. Someone had turned him in, and now the principal was going to expel him for cheating.

  By the time Crash made it to and through the doorway to the hall, his decision had been made. If he turned right, the principal’s office was two doors away. Going left three doorways would bring him to Antoine Short’s office. Antoine was what they called at Horatio the Student Advocate. If asked, Antoine would be required to go with Crash to the principal’s office to protect him as much as possible from disciplinary actions demanded by school rules.

  But Crash wasn’t interested in the left or the right. Straight ahead were the double front doors of the school that opened onto Horatio Street and escape.

  Bob, Albertha, and Brother were all at or on their way to school by the time Crash left Horatio. Reginald Jr. had been at work at Tourmaline Distributions since before the kids were awake, and Mathilda would be gone by ten to visit her ex-boyfriend Matthew Sinn in the hospice where he was dying from lung cancer.

  Upstairs, in his parents’ bedroom, on the high shelf in the big closet, Crash found his backpack among the others that Reginald Jr. and the boys used when they camped in the wilderness of Monhegan Island on summer vacations in late August.

  Crash took jars of crunchy peanut butter and grape jelly along with a hard-crusted loaf of sourdough bread from the kitchen cabinet, a heavy afghan sweater from Brother’s bottom drawer, and his father’s Swiss Army knife. He dressed in canvas pants, a long-sleeved, heavy blue-and-white-checkered cotton shirt, and a light windbreaker. Clad in his makeshift camping wear and carrying the pack on his back, Crash set out for the E train. He took the subway to the Q37 bus, from which he transferred to the Q55. At noon, give or take a few minutes, he arrived at Forest Park in Queens and followed a rarely used path to Pine Grove, a place where his father took the boys camping now and then.