Memphis Luck

by Gerald Duff

  “Unh uh,” Antwan said. “That ain’t the word, that ain’t what we waiting to hear you say. Don’t say fuck. Say something like molecule. Say economic trend, Do Run Run, say economic trend. Say honors program.”

  That’s when they really laughed, and he walked off down the steps, taking them three at a time, and by the time he was down to the street, all of them had turned to head into the building, Damon saying over and over, monkey shit, monkey shit, fool, fool, fool.

  ***

  When Randall Eugene stepped up on the porch, he could see her peeping at him from where she was looking out from a crack in her curtains, thinking she was hidden from anybody standing in front of the door. The sun hit her glasses, and he couldn’t see her eyes, and he was glad of that.

  Randall Eugene kept looking straight ahead, but he was still able to see the curtain to his left move just a hair, so he leaned forward and put his hand up to shade the glass part of the heavy wooden door. It was too dark to see anything inside, standing as he was in the bright sunlight, but the old lady couldn’t tell that.

  Seeing him do that would scare her, Randall Eugene thought, and it would keep her indoors with all her locks fastened. When he went back to school, getting there late and coming into the classroom where the officers of the Bones Family, Antwan and Damon and Ja’Nce, would be sitting against the back wall in a row, one-two-three, he’d be able to tell them the house he’d picked out had somebody in it, watching too close for him to go inside.

  “Motherfuck,” he’d say, “if I’m going to have some old bitch call the blue knockers on me for busting out a window. I want it to count for something when I be breaking in. I want to be able to take my time, do a little shopping for a thing to show you dogs, something worth something, to prove out where I been. Word up.”

  Yeah, Randall Eugene told himself trotting across Montgomery to the other side of the street, that’ll work, get them notified I mean business. I ain’t just moving my mouth up and down to keep the flies off my face. I be meaning to show I’m Bones material, and I mean to do it big.

  He’d just hit the curb with the sole of his shoe, when it happened and it caught him before he could get up all the way onto the sidewalk and out of the hold of the pattern in the cement of the street. How had it happened so fast that he couldn’t see it taking place? That was the fastest it had ever been, and that told Randall Eugene that the pattern had been deceiving him ever since it started up. It had always been able to move too fast for him to stop it, to hold and contain it, and put himself at a distance from it. When the pattern wanted to set up like cement in the sun, it could have done that, and the reason it hadn’t was that it wasn’t ready yet. It was waiting until he stopped being so afraid of the pattern and had come to believe he could live with it, and it would move then when it was ready.

  Here on Montgomery Street the pattern this morning had decided it was time, and it let him get almost all the way out of the street and up onto the sidewalk before it took him. But now it had, and he was in a pawn’s position, and the hand when it wanted to move him would do that. It would give him up for an advantage or not for one, maybe throwing him away just to fool the white king and make him think he was winning. The question is not where it will move me, Randall Eugene said to himself. I know that. The jar the curb gave me traveled up my leg and told me that. What I don’t know is when, and the pattern knows that, and it wants to think about that, along with the message it told the muscles and blood and bone of my leg.

  I know a thing and I know it is true, from the sole of my foot to the pit of my stomach to the top of my head, Randall Eugene whispered to himself, straining to listen to the one talking to him. The message lodged in a spot just behind a part of his skull directly above his eyes, and it brought with it the look they would have on their faces as he tried to explain why he still hadn’t done it, still hadn’t done the deed he had to do before they’d let him in, before he would be able to feel both parts of his brain come together and touch and be as one with each other as the white and yolk of an egg in the same shell.

  “Do Run Run,” Antwan would say, “go sit over yonder with the rest of the bitches and read some shit out of a book. Read it real loud and nice, say it like a white girl doing a book report.”

  Randall Eugene could see himself listening to them laugh at what Antwan said and waiting for the next one to say what he’d thought up, something even better than that, all of them ready to call him what he was.

  He stepped off the sidewalk on Montgomery Street, taking himself away from the broken shards of clear glass and the cracked pieces of concrete, now part of the pattern which had been following him and waiting for him to know and allow he was part of it. Randall Eugene lifted both hands to his forehead to press the scene he’d imagined to come at Central High School back into his head along with the other ones already there, all the ones telling him he was a freak and a misfit and a white boy and a bitch and a final piece of the pattern waiting to step into the pawn position and be one with it. He looked up into the hot blast of sun hanging over Midtown Memphis, and he spoke out loud to it.

  “Fuck it,” Randall Eugene McNeill said. “I’m going back over to that lady’s house, and I’m going in, and I’m bringing something back out with me to show their punk asses what kind of a man they messing with.”

  And that he said out loud, and the other words he whispered to the evidence of the pattern on the wall in his room and in the concrete of the street and in all the tools and formulas and equations and translations in the world, and those words he said but could not hear and heard but could speak and understood but could not know.

  ***

  But when Randall Eugene got inside after the pattern had moved him there, the inner side of the door behind him, the air in the house smelling of where an old lady lived – paper flowers, some kind of chemical, maybe a floor cleaner, old toast, stale and burnt, a still dead odor of things shut up and sealed away in plastic wrap – nobody was home. Nothing told him to be quiet getting in, so he hadn’t tried to be, breaking the window set in the door with a brick from the ones lining a flower bed, hammering it hard and hearing the glass fall inside to the floor, snaking the wire of the coat hanger down, down to where it caught the deadbolt and flipped it up, a hard sharp sound in the middle of the morning.

  He went directly to the small dark colored table against the wall, watching his hands pick through the accumulation of things set there, placed by somebody in a shape to show them off. Pictures of men and women and children in funny clothes, everybody dressed up pretending to be young but showing they couldn’t be by the way their eyes looked staring into the camera lens, dead for years but trying not to be and fooling nobody. A framed letter, medals with ribbons fastened to them, a coin, a necklace, a pin carved with a white woman’s head. Paper weights made of colored glass with flower petals frozen in the center of them, blooming forever, but dead, dead, dead.

  From all this collection, Randall Eugene’s hand picked up one thing, a book bound in leather with two words made of curlicued letters on its cover, and his hand lifted the book to show it to his eyes to read, and the words said Precious Memories, and his eyes read that but his brain would not tell him what that meant, and he knew he had to understand it, and he believed if he looked a little harder and longer, the meaning would come to him and say its name.

  It hung there on the surface of his sight, almost connecting, but it never did, because she was in the room now, and Randall Eugene knew he would never be able to take its meaning now because she spoke, and her words got in the way of letting him know what Precious Memories meant.

  “Son,” she was saying, “son, don’t touch that, don’t take my book, you hadn’t got any use for that.”

  She held a butcher knife in her hand, and it should have been trembling because the woman was old and afraid, but it wasn’t. A shaft of sunlight from the window broken in the door touched the edge of the blade, and it hung there steady as a stone set in a ring, winking
with light, and Randall Eugene watched himself step toward her and take the knife out of her hand.

  What will it do now, he wondered, my hand with the knife in it, the wink of the sun gone now from the blade edge, and then it showed him, all the light in the room did, gathered into one beam, like it does when someone is on a stage ready to begin an act or sing or dance or play an instrument, and it showed him what he would do and it let him see him doing it.

  And then the old woman was lying on her sofa, but it wasn’t like she was asleep. No, she was falling halfway off the piece of furniture, but her fall was frozen in a way it couldn’t be, a way gravity wouldn’t allow. How could she do that, Randall Eugene said to himself, amazed by the act the old woman could perform, stop in mid-air halfway to the floor, holding, holding, holding everything in the room fixed and set and captured like one of the pictures on the table of the old people pretending to be young and alive and smiling, though they were dead.

  “Go on, now,” a man said in a deep voice. “You’ve done what you came to do, son. You’ve got what you wanted. It’s in your hand now. You have it to carry all by yourself.”

  Randall Eugene knew the voice, and he knew the man, and he had for as long as he could remember, and the man was standing in the entry way to another room.

  Randall Eugene had not seen that room before, how had it gotten there, he had looked that direction before, hadn’t he, when he came into the place where he found himself now?

  He was dressed like he always was, the man in the entry way – a dark suit, a shirt so white you wanted to look away from it to save your eyesight, a tie with broad muted stripes – and he was solid and bulky across the face and forehead, and his cheeks and chin shone from being freshly shaved, the thin mustache two precise lines above his lips, large and prominent and parted to speak.

  “Dr. King,” Randall Eugene McNeill said. “I have always wanted to meet you, but I thought I never would be able to.”

  The man nodded once, but his eyes did not move from where they were fixed on Randall Eugene’s eyes, and then he lifted one hand and held it out as though to take the leather book from Randall Eugene.

  “My name is Randall Eugene McNeill,” he said, speaking as if he was introducing someone whose name he had heard only once and had to concentrate to remember. “Dr. King, I’m Randall Eugene, that’s me.”

  “No,” the man in the entry way to the other room said, “you’re not him, young man. Your name is Do Run Run.”

  And then the blood, just a thin line, began to come from the knot of the man’s striped tie, the place where the bullet had struck Dr. King on that balcony in Memphis, the one at the Lorraine Motel, and Randall Eugene watched it grow like a flower blossom, a red carnation like the ones in the corsages the girls wore to the Central High prom, and it was stronger and wider and deeper, and the blood was a stream now, not a flower at all, and it moved in steady spurts.

  All the light in the room began to gather into one point, which twisted and glowed so brightly that Randall Eugene had to close his eyes or be blind, but he could still see it through his lids, moving past his face now, and he followed it as it floated up and out a window set high in the wall, and Randall Eugene knew he must follow, and he did, and he watched himself take two strong steps and leap from the floor, the leather book held before him as he went through the glass and frame of the window, following the ball of light outside, and now it was gone, and the sky was as black as midnight, as dark as Dr. King’s suit and the blood against it.

  The light was gone forever, and Randall Eugene had known that, he knew that was true, as true as the leather book he now had to carry in his hands into the pattern worked into the street that ran through all the world.

  EIGHT

  J.W. and Tyrone

  J.W. Ragsdale sat in the Owl Bar on Central at a table well away from the crowd of police officers, detectives, and the odd dispatcher and clerk clamoring at Cliff Perry for more drink. He was nursing his first beer – a Buckhorn or Stag or some other brew occupying the low end of the price spectrum. J.W. hadn’t looked at it close enough to tell when Cliff put it before him, but he knew that Cliff knew his preference well enough to make the correct selection and he knew that Judy had not showed up to work that shift, leaving Cliff to fight alone the weekly battle in the Owl after one a.m. against the powerful thirsts of Midtown Memphis peacekeepers, law enforcers, and support staff.

  Judy was supposed to be there, Cliff had told J.W., but goddamn it she wasn’t and hadn’t even called in to let him know she wasn’t.

  “Maybe she couldn’t, Cliff,” J.W. said. “You know, sick, or disabled to work for some good reason.”

  “Sick, my ass,” Cliff had said, pointing toward the solitary beer on the table in front of J.W, “She’s lying up drunk with that Mexican, Herrara or Hernandez or whatever his name is. You better let me get you a couple more of them bottles while I’m at it, J.W., ‘cause once that damn pack of head-knockers gets here, I sure ain’t going to be running around in front of the bar serving tables.”

  “Just the one, Cliff,” J.W. said, “will do me. I’m technically on duty. But I got to say I’m disappointed to hear you talk the way you been doing, Cliff.”

  “Better get that extra one now,” Cliff said again. “What’re you talking about, the way I been talking? What the shit does that mean?”

  “Calling Judy’s gentleman friend a Mexican, for one thing,” J.W. said, curling one hand around his beer bottle and lifting the other one in a stop sign gesture to discourage Cliff Perry from fetching another one. “The gentleman is Hispanic ethnically, and you can’t presume to know what flavor of Hispanic he may happen to be.”

  “If that’s all that’s bothering you, I ain’t worried then.”

  “You should be. Show a little sensitivity, Cliff. Shit, you’re talking like a racist redneck asshole, and it appalls me.”

  “Appalls?”

  “Appalls,” J.W. said. “Yessir, and calling my comrades in arms by that demeaning term, head-knockers, Lord, Cliff, what I am suppose to think? That kind of coded speech marginalizes a whole category of service providers.”

  “Oh, hell, I get it. You been at a departmental workshop, ain’t you? Had some kind of a consultant talk at y’all. That’s where you hearing this stuff.”

  “I have,” J.W. said. “Run by a lady PhD from St. Louis, and a little session of soul-searching would do you some good, too, Cliff.”

  “Here they come,” Cliff said, turning toward the door just slammed back against the wall by a cadre of mustachioed uniformed cops baying for whiskey. “You and that beer are on your own now.”

  “Fuck you, Cliff,” J.W. had called after the departing bartender, “and your low and mean use of hate speech.”

  But that was fifteen minutes ago, and the beer level in his bottle was at a hair short of two fingers, Cliff was too busy to look up, and J.W. Ragsdale would be damned in hell with his back broke before he’d walk over to the bar and fight his way through the mob of cops to ask for a refill.

  And where was Tyrone Walker, late again but with a foolproof excuse like every married man always has at his immediate disposal. Something with the wife, something with the kids, something with the goddamned house.

  A man on his own, J.W. considered, looking at the last swallow of beer in the bottle, has not got a single thing between him and the obligation to get to work on time. Be late once, and they’re convinced you’re either laid up drunk or getting over that condition. Be single, and be suspect. Be divorced, and be a dickhead. Be double-divorced, and be damned to an early hell.

  “Hey, Sergeant Ragsdale,” somebody said. “Looky what I got for you. Cliff sent you over a beer.”

  “God bless the boy. I can use that,” J.W. said, knocking back the last warm swallow in the bottle before him and taking the cold one from Jim Drake, who was leaning over the table at a perilous angle.

  “Mind if I sit down?” Drake said. “Or are you thinking some deep thoughts about how to
fight crime in the big city? Figuring up ways to effect a turn-around, like Pencil Neck Cogrun’s always saying.”

  “Yeah, sit down, Jim,” J.W. said. “And don’t get me started to thinking about Cogrun. I’m trying to enjoy a quiet drink here before Tyrone shows up, rearing to go.”

  “You better think about him, J.W.,” Jim Drake said. “Once Pencil Neck gets finished up at the night law school, he’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. That’s what he’s always telling everybody. He figures to move up in the organization. Push the envelope. Go to Republican fundraisers. Get that nose polished up.”

  As he talked, Jim Drake was leaning in toward J.W. across the table, his voice raised to be heard over the din at the bar of shouts, curses, laughs, and grab-assing from the crowd of police personnel hammering down shots, hits, and drafts. Up close and personal as Jim Drake was having to be with J.W. in order to be understood, J.W. was able to see clearly flecks of yellow paint in Drake’s thinning pompadour.

  “What you been painting today, Jim?” J.W. said, patting at his own hair to give Drake hint and direction as he spoke.

  “Nothing, that’s from yesterday. An old boy’s garage out in Southhaven. I ain’t bothered to wash my hair with paint thinner yet this week. Just only hand soap.”

  “I wouldn’t if I was you,” J.W. said. “That yellow hairdo gives you kind of a punk look. You could go undercover with some of these youthful offender bunches, and you’d blend right in. Get you a cover story in the Commercial Appeal. I can just see the headlines. Hell, you might even get you some pussy out of it.”

  “Aw, there was a time when I used to worry about getting paint on me, back when I was running women all over Shelby County, but I don’t give a shit no more, J.W.”

  “Well, whatever gives a man an edge I don’t begrudge him.”

  Jim Drake turned to look at the bar where a particularly loud outcry from one of the female officers had just risen above the general baying of Thursday night late in the Owl.