The Boy in the Black Suit

by Jason Reynolds

  Mr. Ray stood at the counter and took a sip, a slurp. He seemed to be studying me, reading me. Then out of nowhere he just blurted, “You know, I meant what I said earlier.”

  “I know.”

  Mr. Ray nodded and took another sip of his coffee. It seemed like there was something else he wanted to tell me. I was hoping it wasn’t another apology. Didn’t need another one of those, especially since I didn’t blame him for nothing. But I appreciated it. After a few more awkward sips and swallows he finally said, “Come with me.”

  He led me through the kitchen, back into the living room, to a door on the far side of the room. He dug into his pocket and pulled out the small key he took from the ashtray in his car. He slipped it into the doorknob and jiggled it around just like he did the front door. He looked back at me, smiled, and shrugged.

  The door opened. Darkness.

  “No one has seen what I’m about to show you. Not even my brothers,” he said, running his hand along the wall, trying to find the light switch.

  “What is it?” I asked, holding the mug up to my mouth and blowing on the hot coffee.

  Mr. Ray slipped the key back into his pocket.

  “How come kids today gotta know everything? Nothing can be a mystery or an adventure anymore. Takes the excitement out of life.”

  I slurped the coffee. It burned my tongue.

  “I’m just asking,” I said.

  Mr. Ray sighed and mumbled as if he wasn’t talking to me, even though he was. “Guess it’s better than being a sheep and just going wherever people tell you. Lord knows we don’t need no more of them.” Then he spoke louder. “You know what a vault is?”

  “Like the kind they got in banks?” My voice went from high-school Matt to middle-school Matt.

  “Yeah.”

  “You got a vault down there? Like, full of money?” Now it was at elementary-school Matt.

  Mr. Ray almost spat coffee everywhere.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “But my basement is like my vault.” He turned and started heading down the steps. “I can’t really explain it, son. Just come on.”

  The wooden stairs felt flimsy under my feet. There was no railing, and I wondered how Mr. Ray would be able to keep coming down here, to this secret lair, when he was older, especially since he was already limping. As we got closer to the bottom of the steps, the light, though still dim, got a little brighter, and I could see that the room, this dungeon—the vault—was overloaded with photos taped to the walls like posters in a teenage girl’s bedroom. Photos of ball players, newspaper stories, old and dry, some even framed. Smaller pictures, some Polaroids of a woman, her skin dark and smooth, her teeth bright white. She smiled big in all of them, so natural, like she was actually happy to have her picture taken.

  There was a table in the middle of the floor, under a lightbulb that hung from a wire. Mr. Ray pulled an extra chair up as I stared at all the oldness. I looked closely at one news article about a high-school ball player who scored eighty-five points in a game.

  “You know what that is?” Mr. Ray said, sitting down on one of the fold-up chairs.

  I leaned forward, read, then gaped. “Is this about you?” I turned to look at him, then turned back at the brownish gray paper stuck to the wall.

  “Do it say my name?” Mr. Ray joked. “If so, then I guess it’s about me.”

  “This says you scored eighty-five points?” I’m not a big sports dude but I know enough to know eighty-five points is a lot of damn points. “I didn’t know you played high-school ball.”

  Mr. Ray nodded.

  “And college,” he said, pointing to some other cut-outs on the wall. “Syracuse.”

  I moved down the wall to see some of the college clippings.

  RAY AT THE BUZZER FOR THE WIN!

  RAY OF LIGHT, WHY WILLIAM RAY RULES THE COURT

  RAY ALL THE WAY! SYRACUSE SOPHOMORE’S GOT WHAT IT TAKES

  “This is amazing. I mean, you were amazing!” I said, boosted. He’d been so good !

  Mr. Ray rubbed his head. “Yeah.” He smirked, then pointed. “Read that one over there.”

  In the corner there was another clipping, this one from the New York Times. It was pinned to the wall by itself. Nothing around it. Front page of the sports section. It read in big black bold letters:

  WILLIAM RAY, BROKEN KNEE; SHINING STAR’S SEASON OVER

  “What they shoulda wrote was ‘Career Over,’” Mr. Ray said. “Y’know, I was slated to go top ten in the draft.” He leaned back in his chair. “But the knee never healed. They never do.”

  I walked back over to the table and set my coffee down.

  “Oh man, you must’ve been pissed! I mean, so close, and then something fluke happens and ruins everything. All that money.” I shook my head.

  Mr. Ray laughed. “All that money. And yeah, son, I was pretty damn pissed. Martin Gandrey’s big ass fell on me and ruined my ball career.” He took his hands down from his head and tapped on the table like he was playing the piano. “But I was okay, after a while, because I had her.”

  He was looking over my shoulder at the wall. The other pictures. The ones of the pretty dark-skinned lady, cheesing for the camera.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ella,” Mr. Ray said, his eyes still focusing on her pictures. “Ella Dansfield. Man. I used to get lost in that smile.”

  I turned to look at the pictures again. She did have an amazing smile. Seemed like all her teeth were showing, but not in a weird way.

  “Yeah. Ella.” He sighed.

  “Was that your girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend? Ha! Son, a man my age don’t keep pictures of his teenage girlfriend up on his walls. What that look like?”

  I didn’t really think about it that way, but I guess that would be strange.

  “Ella was my wife. I met her in college, and we were engaged before I even graduated. Before I broke my knee. And after I broke it, I started learning the funeral business under my old man and was able to provide a good life for us. I missed basketball, but as long as I had her, I was fine.”

  “I didn’t even know you had a wife. Never seen her.”

  “That’s ’cause she’s gone, and I ain’t got the heart to wear the ring no more.”

  “She left?” I frowned.

  “No. See, we had this thing. Once a week we would have date night at one of the restaurants around here. Because I was always working so hard at the funeral home, she usually just met me at work, and then we’d go on to get something to eat. One day, December seventeenth, 1975, a bitter cold night after a day of rain, she left the house to come meet me. I guess there was black ice or something on the stoop. She slipped, hit her head, and was gone before anyone could even get to her. Twenty-nine years old.”

  I checked his eyes. No water. But I was feeling crazy inside, like I was going to cry at any moment. I could tell he still felt the burn, but it didn’t make him as emotional anymore. I wondered how long it took him to get to that point, and how long it was gonna take me.

  “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Oh man, please. It’s been over thirty years. I was a goddamn mess then, which is when I started this room, this shrine of all the fucked-up things that happened to me. I used to sleep down here, on that couch, around all my sadness. But I always kept upstairs all clean and new because I didn’t want nobody to know about this—to even suspect it—my pain room. My vault. Not even my brothers,” he explained. “But now . . . you know.”

  I did my best to maintain composure and just take it all in. Here was this man, a man I always saw as the dude who beat cancer twice, the old guy across the street who ran the neighborhood. But I didn’t know he used to be a ball player and a husband, and lost both his wife and career for absolutely no reason. A man who used to sleep in his basement surrounded by images o
f who he used to be, his life suddenly changed forever. I looked at him sitting there across from me, and suddenly imagined him crying his way through his twenties, and probably most of his thirties. I can’t even believe he’s still here, alive. And not nuts. And cancer too? Clearly, Mr. Ray was a man made of steel, and I had had no idea.

  “But why are you showing me?” I wasn’t sure if I should ask that, but I really wanted to know. Of all the people to show this, he chose me. What for?

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been waiting to show someone who would . . . get it,” Mr. Ray said. “And, well . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence. He just took the last few gulps of his coffee, a little trickling down his chin, black like oil. He wiped it with the back of his hand and stared into the cup like it was a crystal ball.

  I didn’t say anything. I just kind of watched him take a few more moments down memory lane, back when he could make the game-winning three-pointer, then kiss his girl after he came from the locker room. Days long gone.

  “You play chess?” Mr. Ray suddenly snapped out of it and set his mug down. Seemed like such a random question. Chess? Right now? In this dungeon?

  “A little. I mean, I can play, but I’m not like a master or nothing like that,” I fumbled. Truth is, I just wasn’t very good. But I knew some guys who were super good. Like three-move-checkmate good. Funny enough, Chris was one of them. It was a way he kind of got through a lot of things. Smacking heads in chess. And in the hood, if you can play chess, you get some respect.

  “Good, ’cause I don’t wanna play,” he said, relieved. Like I was going to ask him to play. “It’s an overrated game that people, especially New Yorkers, think is the friggin’ holy grail of games. Like you can learn all there is to know about life by playing chess. A bunch of bull.” He shook his head.

  People did make it seem like chess was a game about life and that you have to always think out your next three moves and the moves of your opponent in order to win . . . at life. I always thought it was wild to see dudes you knew were hustlers playing chess for hours. Junkies come cop dope from them right in the middle of the game. Crazy. But Chris used to always tell me that drug dealers played to keep their minds sharp. To always know their next move and the move after that. I guess most of them weren’t too good at chess, because they still got caught.

  “What about I-DEE-clare War?” Mr. Ray leaned forward and rested his arms on the old table. He looked me dead in the eye.

  “What about it?” I leaned back a little.

  “You play?”

  “When I was, like, six.” I laughed.

  Mr. Ray didn’t laugh. At all. Not even a smile.

  “Let’s play,” he said, sliding his chair back from the table and reaching for a deck of cards on the shelf behind him. “This is a real game.”

  Mr. Ray slid the cards out of their soggy box and attempted to shuffle them, but the cards were so old they kept sticking together. So he just laid them all on the table and mixed them up like a child would do before playing Go Fish.

  “This is really the holy grail of games,” he said, dealing the cards one by one. “The game of life.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.” He lifted his eyes from the cards and gave me a five-second stare down. “See, in chess, you plan everything. You strategize and all that. And even though we like to believe life goes that way, let me tell you, son, it don’t.” He waved his hands around as if to say, Look at this room. This is proof that life don’t always go as planned. But I didn’t need to look at his walls to know that. All I had to do was look at my father. Or sit in my empty house at night. I was definitely with Mr. Ray on this one.

  “But this game here, I-DEE-clare War, is how life really goes down.” Finally done dealing, he picked up his stack and held it in his hand, face down. Then, he flipped the first card.

  “I flip a card, then you flip a card,” he explained, and waited for me to turn my first card. A six. His was a ten. “Sometimes I win”—he raked the cards off to the side, close to him—“and sometimes I lose.” He flipped another card. An eight. This time I turned a queen and beat him.

  “And sometimes,” he continued while flipping another one, “I can lose and lose and lose and I don’t know why. But there’s nothing I can do but just keep flipping the cards. Eventually, I’ll win again. As long as you got cards to keep turning, you’re fine. Now, that’s life,” he said, pushing another hand I won over to me.

  Chapter 7

  AGAINST THE RULES

  AFTER ME AND MR. RAY’S dungeon adventure, things kind of smoothed out for a while. Well, maybe not smoothed out, but at least there were no more surprises. And that was a good thing. Me feeling crazy about my mom dying was still there, bugging me the most at night when I was in bed, and Tupac probably wasn’t helping, but even the pain was just becoming a part of me. The dreams of my mother sitting with me at her own funeral kept coming every night on schedule, and y’know, I started to look forward to them. It was like our time together for a few hours that felt only like a few minutes, making me happy to see her, but leaving me disappointed to wake up to an empty house in the morning. But at least I was sleeping through the night. And at least, when I woke up, I knew why my father wasn’t home, and it wasn’t because he was dead too.

  Mr. Ray, who became like a big brother to me—well, maybe more like an uncle—was worried about me staying in the house by myself. But I assured him that I was fine. I mean, it’s not like I was a kid. Not to mention, I was at school for the first part of every day, and with him for most of the rest of the day, so I was actually only alone in the house at night. And all I would do is look through my mom’s old cookbooks—not that I was cooking anything—and try my best to go to sleep.

  Mr. Ray took me to see my father every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before school. While I went in to see my broken-up pop, Mr. Ray usually stayed out in the lobby and talked to the receptionist who’d helped us the first night. Looked like Mr. Ray hadn’t lost all his cool yet, and that lady was getting a healthy dose three times a week.

  The first two weeks of Dad being in the hospital were the roughest, mostly because his mouth was wired shut, and there was a skinny tube shoved down his throat, which I learned was how they were feeding him since he couldn’t chew. You ever seen liquid food pumped through a tube, straight down a man’s throat into his belly? Not cool.

  They also were giving him less pain medication, so at least he was able to keep his eyes open long enough to know I was there. I remember the third morning I showed up, it was the first time he was all there and not doped up on medicine—he looked at me and squeezed his eyes into little slits as if he was trying to make sure it was really me, standing there. I was dressed in my funeral suit. All black. I could tell he was confused.

  “No, you ain’t dead yet,” I said. “This ain’t your funeral.”

  He grunted and I could see his stomach bouncing a little under the white sheet from him wanting to laugh but trying not to because of his broken ribs. He couldn’t smile, but I could tell by the look in his eyes he was happy to see me. And probably happier that I wasn’t the grim reaper.

  By the third week they had transferred him to the rehabilitation center next door, which was good. Even though recovery was going to take some time, it was better than sitting in that hospital. Nobody likes hospitals. He probably would’ve been in rehab sooner if it wasn’t for all the other injuries. They finally pulled that hose out of his throat so he was able to talk again. So glad I wasn’t there to see that. Gross. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.

  “Man, it was terrible,” he said, his voice hoarse and muffled. “I mean, I really thought it was gonna choke me to death before they got it out.” He used the back of his tongue to scratch the inside of his throat, ribbitting like a frog.

  Whenever I would go see him, he spent most of the time asking me questions. It felt l
ike he missed a lot of my life, even though it had only been about three weeks since he’d been out getting wasted every night with Cork. The first thing he wanted to know was what was up with the suit.

  “It’s for work. Remember I told you I’m working for Mr. Ray? Ray’s Funeral Home?”

  My father bugged his eyes out. “I don’t remember you telling me that.” Of course he didn’t. The morning I told him he was too busy pretending he wasn’t hungover. He looked skeptical. “Well, how is it? I mean, you gotta touch dead people?”

  I thought of doing to him what I did to Chris when he asked that question, but my father might’ve flinched and thrown all his broken bones out of whack even more.

  “Naw, man. I just help out with the stuff like flowers, and ushering, making sure the cars are clean”—yes, Mr. Ray had me washing the hearses—“and stuff like that. Sometimes I have to be a pallbearer, too.”

  My father tried to shift around in bed, squinting his eyes closed in pain at the effort. His legs, still in their big white casts, looked like two albino elephant legs. When he finally got comfortable, he asked, “Well, do you like it?”

  “It’s cool.”

  “Is it paying?”

  “Yeah.”

  My dad nodded. “Well then, you like it.”

  Yeah. I liked it. Man, I loved it. And I would’ve still done it even if Mr. Ray didn’t pay me the thirty bucks. But I couldn’t tell my dad that. I couldn’t tell him that school was boring and pretty much a big blur every day, where I daydreamed about dead people and their brokenhearted family members most of the morning, and was still managing to pass with nothing lower than a B. No way would he have understood that. No one would’ve.

  Working at the funeral home was the best thing I had going for me. It was my golden ticket, almost like a VIP pass to any funeral I wanted to go to. Each one was different. Different people, different places. But the one thing that was always the same was how the closest person to whoever the funeral was for reacted. Day after day, week after week, funeral after funeral, I searched for that person—almost always sitting in the front—and watched them deal. Saw them rock back and forth, the sound of their hearts breaking, weeping, sobbing, all in the pitch of pain. Desperately begging for help in a room full of uncomfortable people who want to be helpful, but just don’t know how. Because they can’t help. Nothing helps. I knew that. Every time I saw them, the closest ones, bent over in tears, it felt like a warm rain came down inside me. Even though I knew that I couldn’t help them and they couldn’t help me, just knowing that we were all struggling with this thing . . . that helped.