We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  “What did I do to deserve such a siddity son?” Mama turned her nose up. “You need to come around here more and stop acting like you weren’t raised right. It’s not healthy to spend all your time up in that white tower.”

  My field of vision went dark. Someone had placed their hands over my eyes.

  “What’s up, Frank Sinatra?” Only one person ever called me that. It was a reference to my fedora, which lay upside down next to me.

  “What you selling today, money?” I asked in light Ebonics. Supercargo released me, mussed my hair, which I hated, and stepped into view. He had taken my fedora and put it on. Supercargo was my cousin. He had lived with me, Mama, and Sir for years. We’d been close as kids—I taught him how to tie his shoes—but I’d kept my distance from him after he dropped out of high school and got himself locked up in City Prison. He said it was all a setup. That white people had more use for him as a felon not in direct competition with their sons and daughters. Supercargo was a little nutty. Choose your company wisely, I always told Nigel.

  “I see you still conking your fro, brotherman.” My fedora sat atop his wild dreadlocks like a bird on a hippo’s back.

  “I see you’re still annoying as ever.” I turned to Mama. “I told you about harboring all these agitators in the restaurant. The City will be after you.”

  Mama raised her pinky. “Shut up, boy,” she said, and laughed.

  “What’s up, girlfriend?” Supercargo kissed Penny’s cheek.

  Nigel came around the counter and tried to hug him, but Supercargo held his hand out to give Nigel a pound. “I’m too ripe for a hug,” Supercargo said. Nigel hugged him anyway.

  Supercargo said the riot squad moved the barricades back one hundred more feet from the hospital. Now they were confined to a small patch of grass near a drainage canal.

  Mama asked him about the two bundles he dropped by the door. Balled-up banners in one.

  “And those tablecloths you asked me to pick up from the Kendrick’s cleaners,” Supercargo said. Mama thanked him. “There were a couple of guys in robes and hoods.”

  “That’s rich,” Penny said. “They must think it’s 1968.”

  Mama placed a hand on her collarbone. “Did they cause trouble like before?”

  “Nah. We run them off.”

  “Now, that’s how you handle an issue,” Mama said. “Why don’t you handle your problem like him?” Sometimes I could swear Mama liked my cousin better than me. He wasn’t even my real cousin, just a crumb-stealing stray whom I loved like a brother.

  “What problem?” Supercargo asked. I explained. “So, basically, your job want you to be more black so they can look like they care about black people.”

  “In a nutshell,” Penny said.

  “Sounds like he’s doing what he gotta,” Supercargo said.

  Penny and Mama looked surprised.

  Nigel tapped Supercargo’s arm. “I’m going to be main guy in the school musical.”

  “Main guy?” I asked. “Musical. What foolishness are we speaking of now?”

  “Not quite the lead yet.” Penny pulled Nigel to her body and curled an arm around him. “He still has to win the role.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That.” My jealousy mounted. There was something about Nigel’s ability to create words that my presence warped. Around me he sometimes seemed like Charlie Chaplin or Fancy Fox, able to act but not speak for himself. But in my absence, Nigel apparently reached Proustian heights of discourse, detailing the colors and smells of his life with startling clarity. He had known about his audition for the School Without Walls’ production of The Musical Life of Cletus Prufrock Morris, the blind black organist and, later, blind black vice president, for days before I overheard Penny and him talking about it. Supercargo walks in and Nigel tells all in under sixty seconds. I took my fedora back. I didn’t want it sullied.

  “You know how to play the keys?” Supercargo asked.

  “A little.” Nigel hung his head slightly.

  “That’s nonsense. Nigel is a veritable virtuoso.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Nigel said.

  “The new teacher at school, Mr. Riley, has been showing me. He’s really good.”

  “Riley?” I asked.

  “He said he used to work with you,” Nigel said. So that was where Riley wound up after the firm dumped him on Elevation Night.

  “Mr. Riley said if I stuck with it, I could get really good.” We had brought in a tutor and paid him handsomely for weeks before Nigel admitted he didn’t like the man. Following those sessions, Nigel could play “Yankee Doodle” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” but little else. He couldn’t be a natural at everything, apparently.

  “You just need to practice more, baby,” Penny said.

  Supercargo gestured for Nigel to follow him into the community center, and I received a jig of haptic feedback from my amygdala. My cousin was mostly a good guy. Maybe the countless times he had been stopped by the police and occasionally been taken into custody and sometimes even charged and now and again incarcerated—for vagrancy or carrying a joint—weren’t his fault. But fault wasn’t the question.

  I couldn’t help but feel that every time he left my sight, the next thing I would hear about him was that he was profiled, chased, arrested, shot, killed, or any combination of the above. Still, I put a lot of the trouble on his appearance. He often dressed well, if a bit too garishly, during his leisure. But his various work uniforms, frumpy and bland, put him in the same visual class as the brothers begging for change at the soup kitchen. And his hair, his magnificent, unstructured, unprofessional hair—the huge locks branched off in five or six directions, a photo negative of the final fireworks of New Year’s Eve—made him a target. I had been trying to convince him to cut the growth or at least tame it for years.

  A slightly out-of-tune piano interlude to an R&B song emanated from the other room. The syncopated interlude played a couple of times before stopping midnote. It restarted shakily, like a fawn using its legs for the first time.

  “Is that Nigel?” Penny’s face lit up.

  “Sounds like it,” Mama said. Penny went to see. I was going to follow, but Mama said that she bet I had forgotten how to prep an order. I bet her she was wrong. As I mixed wet and dry ingredients into a steel bowl, I realized Mama was watching my every move, studying my face.

  “It’s just the kind of opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I slaved for this.”

  “Don’t con me,” Mama said. “I won’t take it. You still trying to bring that boy in for that procedure. I know you.”

  It’s impossible to outmaneuver the person who taught you how to walk, talk, and lie. “We don’t have to talk about this now.”

  “But we do. You losing yourself. Your heart. Your roots. Like another man I know.” She grabbed her own forearm and wrenched her fingers around it as if trying to take herself apart.

  I looked away and grabbed the pepper Nigel left behind. “I’m not about to wind up in prison.”

  “They transferred him to City Prison, you know,” Mama said. Sir had been at Buckles Correctional for the length of his term. The idea of him being in the City—barely a mile away—startled me. I struggled to suppress my surprise. “I’m going to visit him during open hours next week.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Don’t sass me.” Mama raised her pinky. “I know you ain’t well. It’ll break me if you let whatever is chewing on you hurt that boy.”

  “We’re fine, Mama. I promise.”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “But we really are.”

  “The mix.” She grabbed my hand. Without noticing it, I had emptied the pepper mill. The mix was pitch black.

  10

  Despite Mama’s misgivings, I knew I had to stay proactive, so I went to my friend Jo Jo’s place out in Sunny Vale. Sunny Vale
was once a gated community, but the fence boards had rotted out before the most recent recession and were never replaced. Now nothing separated its nearly identical rows of fussy American Craftsman–style homes from the service road Nigel and I waited on. We were in the Bug. We were caught in a long line of cars turning into the subdivision. My knee quivered.

  Nigel watched my knee. He wore my fedora, which, although pushed back from his face, sloped down to cover his ears. As he leaned forward, with his palms pressed against the dash, I had that hiccup-in-time feeling, as though I were the passenger and Nigel were driving.

  “Can you see what the holdup is?” I asked. Nigel slid back the fabric sunroof, gleefully climbed onto the seat, and peeked out. This was all strictly verboten in Penny’s presence, of course. But my dove wasn’t around, and I needed a distraction, because to answer Nigel’s unasked question: Dad was not okay. Dad was not in the same ballpark as okay. Dad was on a cruise missile headed in the opposite direction of okay at hypersonic speeds. My throat was a knot of twigs. Eyes sat on rusty ball bearings. Left heel swarming with bees. I had another more pressing reason for going to Sunny Vale. Imagine my surprise when I found my pill holder, a Daffy Duck Pez dispenser, empty.

  My desperate state was my own doing. I should have planned ahead. I should have restocked days ago. I should not have brought Nigel. But with Penny at work, I couldn’t explain a midday disappearance, leaving Nigel at home.

  “What’s the deal?” I asked Nigel.

  “It looks like some kid dropped a ball,” he said.

  I stood up through the sunroof, crushing Nigel to one side of the gap. A ball was wedged under the bumper of a dump truck.

  “This calls for evasive maneuvers, petty officer.” Thus continuing a role-play we engaged in less and less frequently as the world adulterated Nigel. The narrative was ridiculously complex by that point, but the basics were easy enough to understand. We were in a submarine when we received a garbled command to attack the mainland of that tragic kingdom, our homeland. Meanwhile a distress call came in: innocents trapped on a sinking ocean liner. Nigel: We should probably save those kids. The captain: Hell no. Me: Oh well. Exposing the captain, Captain Swartzman, as a double agent, Nigel confined the cretin to quarters. We usually succeeded in our rescue mission. But in recent times we tended to arrive belatedly due to a confluence of quick-moving icebergs and demonically possessed winds, which hampered operations and, by extension, saved lives.

  Nigel saluted. “Aye-aye, XO.” He wiggled back down into the car.

  I followed suit. “Safety first,” I said. “Prepare to surface.”

  “Preparing to surface, XO.” Nigel clipped on his seatbelt.

  “Blow the ballast.” While I depressed the clutch, Nigel threw the stick shift into drive. “Brace yourself,” I said. And we swerved around the kerfuffle. Horns honked. Voices called out angrily. I cut through a backyard, glimpsing an elderly woman on a radioactive green Slip ’n Slide.

  Entering the neighborhood proper, I clipped a yard jockey, putting him out of his eternal misery. After I killed the engine in Jo Jo’s circular driveway, the Bug’s rear engine pinged in well-earned exhaustion. Nigel was pressed against his seat.

  “Did we save them?” I asked.

  “Some,” he said.

  Inside, Jo Jo greeted us wearing jodhpurs, riding boots, and a black beret. He was dressed like someone’s idea of a film director from the silent era. He even wore a floppy black mustache that didn’t match his sandy brown hair or pale skin at all. Same old Jo Jo. My college roommate had a penchant for the oddball, the whimsical, the obscure. I fit all the categories, which I suppose is why we hit it off from the day we met in freshman orientation. Our tastes were generally different—I liked classical pop, he enjoyed contemporary avant-garde; I favored dandyish clothes, he liked whatever didn’t stink too bad that day; I tended to date white girls, he never went out with anyone lighter than a paper bag (until he met Casey)—but our energy signatures were the same. We rarely had to explain ourselves to each other. Like we’d been separated during a mix-up in the maternity ward.

  In our undergrad days, when it looked as though we might get a black woman president, it seemed as if the country were turning away from the old troubles of systemic racial oppression. Jo Jo used to say that one day we would walk into a room and people would see us as the twins we were, despite the fact that he was white and I wasn’t. I bought into the hopes, too. But those hopes died fast. It sometimes felt like we were the only people in the world who experienced the whiplash and loss of those years, because no one else talked about that era. Not that Jo Jo and I did.

  “There’s my handsome brother,” Jo Jo said.

  “What’s with the Cecil B. DeMille?” I asked.

  “Dress for the job you want, killer.” Sometimes Jo Jo worked in the local film industry as the guy who stood a mile away from the action to ward off the public. He had wanted to make movies—used to make funny-as-shit shorts starring me and our classmates—before he became a pharmacist and, later, a discredited pharmacist. He got a headless teddy bear each month from the mother of the child he’d inadvertently poisoned.

  “Where’s Randy, Jerry, Reynaud, and Milford?” Nigel asked.

  “You didn’t tell him?” Jo Jo asked.

  I hadn’t brought Nigel to Jo Jo Baker’s in a long time. His wife and kids had moved out the previous year. Casey and the boys were replaced by a rotating cast of scruffy subculturalists who loved the irony of Jo Jo’s suburban compound: a local experience so authentic that it was more or less exactly like where they came from, only with endless Plums and other exotic nipple twisters like ziziphus berries.

  Jo Jo, the poor bastard, seemed to think Casey would step out of the kitchen at any moment and declare that all was forgiven.

  A woman stumbled from the kitchen on one platform heel. Her hair was piled into a crooked beehive, and she wore little more than an unsashed kimono that revealed one light brown breast. Mild, hard-to-pin-down accent when she spoke.

  “Tozz fiik, Jo Jo. You could have warned me that you had a kid in here, no?” The woman cinched the kimono together with a looped metal belt.

  Jo Jo introduced her as Polaire from Egypt. A friend. He told her who I was.

  “I’ve heard much about you, Jo Jo’s friend. You have such a fantastic complexion. Like the chocolate they melt onto strawberries.”

  “Um. Thanks?” I said, my cheeks warmed.

  “Oh no. Did I embarrass you?” she asked.

  “Honestly? A bit.”

  “Good,” she said.

  Nigel and I stepped into the kitchen and opened Jo Jo’s fridge. I saw an empty egg carton, some Camembert, and a cornucopia of beers, but there was a container of freshly squeezed lemonade. Nigel removed the container.

  “Whoa, kemo sabe.” Jo Jo took the container from Nigel and turned to me. Jo Jo took off his mustache. “Not for the little one. Not unless you want him seeing orange stars and green clovers. Would you?” He nodded at Polaire, who grabbed Nigel’s hand.

  “Want to see something spectacular?” She gestured toward the staircase. I gave Nigel the okay signal. “Come, my little chimpanzee,” she said, and led him out of the kitchen.

  “Is she safe?” I asked.

  “Her? Safest person in this flying circus. Daughter of a sultan or something, but don’t bring it up. Speaks like a dozen languages. Brilliant photojournalist, too, although she’s too busy trying to get back to that war zone. Those animals shot her. She barely made it out.”

  I asked him how he was doing lately. He said his life sucked, but at least he kept busy. “You didn’t come here to check on me, brother.” He placed hands on both sides of my neck, squinted, and sniffed. He snapped his fingers. “A little out of focus.”

  “It’s not just the Plums. Work trouble.” I told him about the diversity campaign. I sipped juice fro
m another cup and immediately spat the liquid out. “Castor oil?”

  Jo Jo handed me a napkin from his sleeve. “Probably.”

  “So I need a director to make a commercial. Someone with style. I’ll need some stills, too.”

  “I can help you with that.”

  With Octavia’s budget and leeway, I could build any team I needed to get the job done. Jo Jo was flaky, but he knew his shit. He’d gone to school to become a pharmacist, after his parents’ wishes, but he blew that off and eventually found success as an independent video producer. He started out doing weddings, then training films for midsize companies. Now his artistic video installations were the talk of the City and quite lucrative. It turned out my pal was a creative genius after all.

  And while a normal person couldn’t pay him enough to do commercial work, he could help me make an Afrocentric Seasons ad campaign to impress Octavia and PHH. Octavia would be one step closer to her big deal. When she closed the deal, I’d get my cut, and Nigel would be healed.

  I grabbed Jo Jo’s shoulder. “I’m thinking something light and quick. Lots of smiling black faces. Upbeat music—”

  “Like one of those Caribbean tourism commercials,” Jo Jo said.

  “Precisely—”

  “But with local flavor.”

  “Correct.”

  “We’ll need some good locations,” Jo Jo said. “Location is everything.”

  “I know just the place.”

  The doorbell rang. I opened the door and a man in fatigues stood there, a shotgun slung from his hip. I raised my hands. He shoved me into the wall, choking my windpipe with his forearm.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Jo Jo said. “Easy, officer. The good brother is with me.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.” The officer released me. I grabbed my throat.

  “Why’d you do that, man?” Jo Jo said. I gasped and coughed.

  “I did it for his safety.”

  “My safety?” I asked. “How is that possible?”

  “I had to make sure you weren’t a danger to me or yourself,” the officer said. His neck was bigger than his head. “I’m not used to seeing black guys around here. You can’t be too careful these days. There was a robbery—”