I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  “Hey,” said Diana.

  “Fix me up a plate of that,” Ted said.

  “You can have mine,” I said.

  Ted sat beside me, and I pushed my plate in front of him. “Ted Turner,” I said, “this is the chief of police.”

  “How you doing?” Ted said, a mouth full of eggs and corn smut. “This ain’t terrible.” He pointed his fork at Diana. “But I wouldn’t order it a second time. No offense.”

  “None taken,” she said.

  “And this is Diana,” I said.

  “You ever notice how some people spell your name with two n’s and some with one? How do you spell it?”

  “One,” Diana said.

  “Now, see, that makes sense to me. Why would you need two of them doing the same duty? What is this shit called again?”

  “Corn smut,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt it. Tell me, Nu’ott, why am I here?”

  “Someone is trying to kill me,” I said.

  He looked at the plate in front of him.

  “Not with that.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  I wanted to suggest to him further that perhaps I had already been killed, but that would have sounded as crazy to him as it did to me. “I did something stupid. I needed fifty thousand dollars to help these religious women build a church, and I got it in cash, and now somebody wants to kill me for it.”

  Diana and the tractor-cap man were hearing about the money for the first time, and their mouths dropped open. The story I had just tried to tell in shorthand would have come across as nutty and surreal to anyone but Ted.

  “Did you get your money in twenties or hundreds?” Ted asked.

  “Hundreds.”

  “That’s where you went wrong. People go crazy for hundred-dollar bills. You can give a caddy seven twenties and he’ll forget you in a week, but give him a hundred, and he’ll remember you forever.” He nodded to the Chief. “And that’s why I don’t play golf.”

  “Who are you?” the Chief asked.

  “My name’s Ted Turner. What’s yours?”

  “Chief.”

  “Interesting.” He ate another bit of corn smut. “You know, Diana-with-one-n, this is isn’t half bad. It’s more like three-quarters bad.”

  “Glad you like it,” Diana said.

  Just then Horace burst into the trailer. “I got him, Chief! This time I got me the right one! No question about it!”

  “Got who?” the Chief asked.

  “The killer. Caught him snooping around the outside of the hardware store. He’s a nigger, so I arrested him.”

  “Well, let’s go see what the hell you’re talking about.” The Chief slid off his stool and walked out. Horace, Ted, and I followed.

  “What exactly is going on here?” Ted asked me as we sat in the backseat of the Chief’s car.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  At the police station, we filed in and heard laughter coming from the cells. The big-haired dispatcher said, “Been like that since you put him back there, Horace.”

  The Chief walked toward the back, and I followed. And there was Professor Everett, doing push-ups and counting loudly. “Sixty-three.” He paused at the top and laughed. “Sixty-four.”

  Billy, my former cellmate, was counting with him, laughing as well.

  “What the hell is going on here?!” the Chief shouted.

  “Push-ups,” Everett said.

  My first thought was that he could not possibly have done sixty-four push-ups. My second thought was an affirmation of my previous suspicion that Horace’s murder suspect was Everett.

  Everett sat on the floor, his back against the wall. “Okay, Billy Bob Jack, whatever-the-fuck your name is. Beat that.” He looked up at me and smiled. “I’ve been working out.”

  “I guess so.”

  “How are you, Mr. Poitier?” Everett asked.

  “You realize you’re in here for murder,” I said.

  “My friend Billy told me as much. Who did I kill?”

  “Me,” I said.

  He looked me up and down. “I didn’t do a very good job.”

  “Who is this guy?” the Chief asked me.

  “He’s one of my professors. I called and asked him to come down here.”

  The Chief moaned. “Horace, would you please let this man out of the cell? And don’t speak to me for the rest of the day.”

  “Yes, sir,” Horace said and unlocked the door.

  Everett stretched as he exited the cell. “Billy, it was good doing time with you. Look me up when you get out.” He looked at me. “Now, tell me, what the hell am I doing here?”

  I didn’t answer his question, instead I introduced him to Ted. “Percival Everett, Ted Turner. Ted, this is my professor.”

  “Was,” Everett said. He looked at my face. “You look a lot older.”

  “He’s right,” Ted said.

  Everett shook Ted’s hand. “Ted.”

  “Prof.”

  “Well, ain’t this just sweet and friendly,” the Chief said. “This is a damn jail. Everybody out of here.”

  Everett reached through the bars and shook hands with Billy. “Take care of yourself, you pathetic peckerwood motherfucker.”

  “You, too, you darkie sumbitch.”

  Everett smiled at me. “It’s a special thing when you do time with a fellow.” He led the way back into the main room of the station. “So, tell me how I killed you, and why it didn’t stick,” he said.

  I ignored Everett’s question and told him what I’d told Ted, that someone wanted to kill me. I then told him why.

  “That was stupid,” he said. “That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.” He looked over at Ted. “I hate colorization.” He then turned to the Chief. “I’m not speaking metaphorically.”

  “I have mixed feelings about it myself,” Ted said. “Don’t you just hate when you’re watching a movie, and you can’t remember if it’s the first version or a remake. You know, like Heaven Can Wait.”

  “No, I kind of like that feeling.” Everett turned and looked me up and down. “What’s with the monkey suit?”

  Ted looked at his thumb. “What do you call it when you get that painful bit of nail on the side of your cuticle and you can’t help but push up and make it hurt more and you never have a clipper with you?”

  “I never knew what that was exactly. Is that what I’m supposed to call a hangnail?” Everett asked.

  “I guess that’s what you call it,” Ted said.

  “You’re right, though. It is really annoying,” Everett said. “I always get them right before I’m about to have sex for some reason.”

  “Would you two shut up?” I said.

  The Chief and Horace looked on as if they had been invaded by Russian-speaking madmen. The big-haired dispatcher dozed in her chair. The rain had started up outside again, and the wind howled.

  “I say we go get your money and put it in the bank,” Ted said.

  “I agree,” Everett said. “That doesn’t mean it’s the right or smartest thing to do, but I agree with it.”

  It was the thing to do. And as long as I kept the Chief with me, I figured I was relatively safe. Even though the rain was falling more heavily than ever, I felt an urgency about getting the money. I looked out the window and at the black sky.

  “Listen, I want everybody out of this goddamn station right now,” the Chief barked.

  The dispatcher sat up and said, “Weather Service just announced a tornado watch for all of Bullock County.”

  Horace whistled. “It does look bad out there.”

  “What’s the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning?” Ted asked. “I mean, which one is worse?”

  “I think a warning means somebody’s seen one,” Everett said.

  “But how can you watch something that’s not there?” Ted asked.

  Everett scratched his head.

  Ted looked at Everett’s face. “Percival Everett. Didn’t you write
a book called Erasure?”

  Everett nodded.

  “I didn’t like it,” Ted said.

  “Nor I,” Everett said. “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”

  “Well, actually, I loved the novel in the novel. I thought that story was real gripping. You know, true to life.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  It grew darker outside. The wind screamed. The dispatcher calmly crawled under her desk. The front door blew open, hit the wall, and then slammed shut. Horace was shaking.

  “Wow,” Everett said. “I’ve always wanted to see a tornado, if in fact this is one. Could be just a bad storm.”

  “I read that tornado is a messed-up form of some Spanish word, tronada or something like that.”

  Everett scratched his head. “Could be from the Latin tonare, to thunder. Anyway, I like the word twister better.”

  “Maybe you two should step outside there and get a close-up look,” the Chief said.

  “Maybe I will,” Everett said. He smiled at the Chief. “Tell me, constable, just what is a Smuteye?”

  “It’s a dish,” I said.

  “I tried it,” Ted said. “Tastes like shit.”

  Everett looked at the Chief and around the station. “I can well imagine.”

  The whole building rattled.

  “Well, we can’t go out in this mess,” the Chief said. “The best we can do is hunker down in here. And the best place for that is back in the cells.” He leaned over the dispatcher’s desk. “You’re gonna have to come on back, Lucy.”

  So we did. Horace unlocked the cell doors and we all joined Billy sitting on bunks and against the walls.

  Everett stared at the disgusting, seatless toilet. “I grew to hate that during my incarceration,” he said.

  The roof shook, and we all looked up. Dust fell from the ceiling into our eyes. The wind roared like an engine.

  “It’s a bad one,” Horace said.

  “Thanks for the news,” the Chief said.

  I pictured the satchel of money swirling up into the funnel cloud, opening and scattering the bills across six counties and into Georgia. I felt nothing for the money; it was only fifty thousand, a drop in my so-called bucket. However, I felt I needed it in order to make a show of depositing it into the bank—a move designed to protect myself from the would-be robbers. And I wanted the sisters to have it, though I was unsure why that was important to me, if in fact it was and not some mere and strange act of perversion on my part.

  Ted was marveling at the storm and saying wow over and over. “I read that twisters in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise, I think, opposite from the ones in the southern hemisphere. Hey, you ever try on trousers and they’re too short in the rise and for some reason you buy them anyway?”

  “That happens to me a lot,” Everett said. “I don’t know why. Mr. Poitier was one of my favorite students. That is until he cowardly dropped out of school. I think it’s because no girls would sleep with him.”

  The roof made a loud cracking noise, and we let out a collective gasp, but the structure stayed together. The dispatcher prayed loudly. Billy comforted her, called her “Mama.”

  Horace said, “Think we’re going to die, Chief?”

  “We’d never be so lucky,” the Chief said. “If I could only get that fucking lucky.”

  Then the wind stopped. Rain leaked in through the damaged roof, but the blowing stopped. All was silent. “I guess that’s it,” the Chief said, disgust in his voice. He walked away back into the station room.

  I followed him. “Chief, I think we ought to go get that money now the weather has broken.”

  “Oh, you do,” he said. “That’s just like one of you selfish muckety-mucks from the city. I’ve got to go out there and check on the folks. I might have to rescue some poor peckerwoods from the tops of trees or some such. And all you can think about is your money.”

  “Actually, it’s the sisters’ money,” I said.

  “You and your friends go and find your damn money. I got pressing business to attend to.”

  “But I’m afraid I’ll be in danger,” I said, slowly.

  He looked blankly at me, then said, “Horace, drive around and see what’s what while I help this boy find his money. And do it right now and don’t go visiting that Sarah Purdy that you think I don’t know you visit every day.”

  “Yes, sir, Chief.”

  The road outside was strewn with fallen limbs and whatever garbage there was in the town of Smuteye, but it didn’t appear that any of the buildings had been ripped from their foundations. Ted and Everett sat in the back of the car while I sat in the front and reminded the Chief how to get to the sisters’ place. We turned off the road and bounced over a few limbs. Then I saw her. Actually, I first saw the white head of Thornton Scrunchy, then I saw Sister Irenaeus. I told the Chief to stop, and we got out. Sister Irenaeus and the man were shoving bills back into what I recognized as my satchel. When they saw us, they ran through the woods toward a pickup parked at the side of the road. Sister Irenaeus looked back when she reached the passenger-side door. She looked wild eyed, nothing like the woman I had met before. She turned, got into the cab, and slammed the door. Thornton Scrunchy punched the accelerator and sprayed the bushes behind him with mud and gravel. The truck sped away into the wet, windy, dismal gray of Bullock County.

  I walked over to what had been the money’s hiding spot. Bills were still all over the place—in the crooks of tree branches, in puddles, on the muddy ground. They hadn’t gotten nearly all of them. Everett started collecting the money he could reach and stuffed it in his pockets.

  “We have to catch him,” I said, realizing suddenly just what was happening. “He’s the one who killed me.”

  The Chief, Ted, and Everett studied me, quizzically.

  “We have to stop him,” I said, again. My heart was pounding. “He killed that man because he thought he was me. Someone is dead because of me. Because of my stupidity.”

  We hurried back to the car. The Chief slammed his foot on the gas as we hit the highway again. The weather began to turn bad once more. We were driving into another storm. Sheets of rain washed along the road and then over us. The rain fell so hard that the wipers did little to help our vision through the windshield. The rain stopped, all of a sudden.

  In front of us was the overturned and mangled blue Ford pickup of Thornton Scrunchy. Engine parts littered the road. As did Sister Irenaeus and Scrunchy and Scrunchy’s hair. The utility pole into which it had crashed was broken and lay on the ground beside it; the wires were sizzling and popping on the wet road.

  Ted whistled as we stood there staring from a safe distance. “Hell of a thing,” he said.

  “Do you think they’re dead?” Everett asked.

  “Dead enough,” the Chief said. He was at the open door of his car and on his radio. “Lucy, call Donald and have him come over to Two Forks Road and the highway with his wagon. And call the county and tell we need a cleanup, some power lines down.”

  “What if they’re alive?” I asked. The electrical line bounced and danced across the asphalt.

  Ted turned to Everett. “Does rock beat paper or does paper beat rock?”

  “Paper beats rock, but I have no idea why,” Everett said. “A rock should go right through paper, don’t you think? I mean, I love paper as much as, or more than, the next guy. My guess is that it’s the function of some kind of privileged intradialogical and embedded enunciator.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ted asked.

  “Paper beats rock. What beats paper?”

  “Scissors.”

  “Ah, yeah.”

  “Your friends are nuts,” the Chief said to me.

  I had to agree. And so I did. I didn’t know why I’d asked them to come. But somehow things had worked out for me. The same could not be said for Sister Irenaeus. Neither could it be said for the unfortunate young man in the freezer who may or may not have been m
e.

  The sun burst through the dingy steel gray sky and made everything bright. For whatever reason the power line appeared to discharge and then after a few last pops lay there quietly, unmoving. The Chief and I stepped forward toward the bodies. Except for the twisted metal and carnage on the road, the sun had made it a beautiful day. It was pretty clear once we were close that both Sister Irenaeus and Scrunchy were quite dead. All four eyes were wide open and staring into what I believed the sisters would have called the afterlife—into what my mother would have called nothing.

  The Chief pointed to the satchel. It had been tossed clear of the truck and was lying in the tall brown grass at the side of the highway. “There it is. Take it. It’s your money.”

  “It’s not evidence?” I said.

  He gave me a get-real look.

  I picked up the bag. “I’ll give this to the sisters.” I walked back over to Everett and Ted.

  Everett handed me the money he’d collected in the woods. “What do I need with money? I’ll just gamble it away.”

  “You have a gambling problem?” I asked.

  “Not yet.” He looked at my face. “What now?”

  “Why don’t you just fly to Los Angeles?” Ted said.

  CHAPTER 7

  I flew to LAX. Podgy told me he’d arranged a car for me. For a while at least I would live the way my money allowed. I called it a kind of vacation after Alabama. At the bottom of the escalator at baggage claim I saw several black-suited drivers holding signs with names. There was one with a placard that read Sidney Poitier. I stood in front of him.

  He said with a British accent, “Are you not Sidney Poitier?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “I’m Gilbert. Do you have any luggage, Mr. Poitier?”

  “This is it, Gilbert,” I said.

  He took my small bag from me, and I followed him out and across the lanes of traffic to the dusty parking garage.

  I sat in the back of the black sedan as he paid the Somali attendant and might have flirted with her, I couldn’t tell. I looked out at Los Angeles as he curved around onto Sepulveda. He took me on a slow drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Stale glitz and money conspired to make me feel comfortable. Everyone there knew me—the men outside the door, the men inside the door. Mr. Poitier this and Mr. Poitier that, welcome back, long time no see. The driver left me at the desk, told me that he would be back to collect me at fifteen past seven. I did not tip him, and this seemed to make him happy. I turned to face the desk clerk.