“So you gonna call ’im?” Clarance Mayhew asked me.
“No.”
“Why not?” asked Ricky, who was no bigger than one of Clarance’s fat legs.
“I don’t have an apartment down there, man. I mean there’s junk been down there since my mother’s mother’s mother was a child.”
“You could clean it out,” Clarance said. His face was chubby and pear shaped. Underneath his chin was a crop of curly hair about an inch thick. Hair wouldn’t grow on his cheeks. That’s why the tan-colored man always looked about ten years under his actual age. “I mean you ain’t got no job so you ain’t got no money. You could clean up down there and make yourself somethin’ to pay that damn mortgage you took out.”
“You want a drink?” I replied.
“Hey.” That was Ricky’s way of saying yes. He was darker than his cousin but not nearly my color. When my uncle Brent used to see us coming, he’d say, “If it ain’t the three shit-colored patches on a tatty brown quilt.”
I pulled a bottle of Seagram’s from beside the wood chest where we played cards. I took a drink from the bottle and then passed it to Ricky. We never used glasses unless Leonard Butts or Timmy Lee came over to play with us. Clarance, Ricky, and I had drunk from the same bottle since we were babies in the crib.
We were playing blackjack for pennies and I was up $1.25. That meant I had $15.76 left to my name. One more bottle of whiskey and I’d be flat out of money.
“Lemme see some cards,” Clarance hissed off the back end of a deep draught of whiskey.
He threw down his three—a heart queen, a deuce, and a trey. Ricky slapped his cards facedown and took the bottle back. I showed two spades, a ten, and an ace.
“Shit,” said Clarance. “You got all the luck tonight.”
I raked in thirty-seven pennies, thinking about luck and waiting for the bottle.
My aunt Peaches would lend me the money to cover the monthly mortgage payment to the bank. I’d borrowed on the house and Peaches wouldn’t let the property slip out of family hands. But if I had to go to her, she’d give me all kinds of grief about how I should get a job and how disappointed my father would have been to see me falling apart like I was.
I took another draught from the bottle. It felt nice. Good whiskey smoothes out after the third sip. Clears the fuzz from behind your eyeballs and relaxes the spine. I’ve always liked to drink. So did Clarance and Ricky, who we sometimes called Cat.
“Wilson Ryder needs a man to help on those new houses he’s putting up,” Ricky said.
“Yeah?” I took another drink and realized that I was hoarding the liquor, so I passed it on to Clarance.
“Yeah,” Ricky said. “He’ll be down there tomorrow. You should go ask ’im.”
“Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe so.”
“Maybe?” Clarance was shuffling the cards over and over again, the way he always did when he was getting high. “Maybe? Man, what you thinkin’? Like you some kinda prince don’t have to work? They will take this house from you, Charles. You gonna end up like old man Bradford—sleepin’ in somebody’s garage, eatin’ day-old bread, and drinkin’ brand X.”
“Clara, baby,” I said, doing my impersonation of a halfhearted lounge lizard. “What’s all this tough love, darlin’?”
Clarance had height to carry all that weight. He stood straight up and grabbed for me, but I pushed my chair back and scrambled out of his reach.
“Goddammit, asshole!” he shouted. “I told you not to call me that!”
“But, baby,” I pleaded with my hands clasped as if in prayer. “Clara, you tellin’ me I ain’t worthy.”
I knew calling his name in the feminine for the second time would end the card game. We used to tease Clarance in grade school by calling him Clarabell and then just Clara. He stood there shaking, looking as mean as he could manage.
I laughed. And for a moment there was a chance that we would fight. Not much of a chance, because Clarance knew he couldn’t take me. But we were both just high enough to act like fools.
Ricky put the bottle down and picked up his sweater. When he stood, that was the signal for Clarance to turn around and leave. Ricky shook his head at me and followed his cousin out the front door.
They’d left their piles of change on the table where we played.
Clarance and I had had these fights for more than twenty-five years. I could still get to him. I regretted it every time. But all Clarance had to do was be himself and he made me mad. He’d always done better than I had. He held a good job as the daytime dispatcher for a colored cab company. He was married, but he still had more girlfriends than I did. He read the newspaper every day and was always referring to events in the world to prove a point when we were discussing politics or current affairs. Even though I had made it through three years of college, Clarance always seemed to know more.
For a while there I had a subscription to the New York Times just so I could compete. But I never actually read the paper. Sometimes I’d try to do the crossword puzzle, but that just made me feel stupid. Finally, after losing my job at the bank, I let the subscription go.
I did some things better than Clarance. I was good at sports. But he wouldn’t compete with me there. He said I was better than him but I couldn’t get a scholarship or anything. And he was right. Like my uncle Brent was always happy to say, “He could win the race, but he cain’t beat the clock.”
So I tortured Clarance now and then, angry at him for proving my inadequacies.
There were certain benefits to an early evening. The first thing was that there was more than half the fifth of whisky left over. I loved to drink. Loved it. But I didn’t abuse alcohol. I never drank before the sun went down and never drove while under the influence. Every once in a while I’d make Ricky and Clarance sleep over when they got too tipsy on a Thursday night.
You’d think I’d want to spend the evening with my friends. As it was I spent almost every night alone, listening to the radio or reading science fiction. I never got into the TV habit. I’d watch the news now and then, but that was mainly to keep up with Clarance. Most nights I spent alone, except when I had a girlfriend. But the last girlfriend I had was Laura Wright. That had ended some months before.
It was mostly just me in the big house. The rooms were large, with big bay windows everywhere. When I was alone I’d wander around in my underwear, talking to myself or reading about outer space. Those were the best moments I had. With the evening spread out in front of me, maybe with some music playing and a few shots of bourbon, I had all the time I needed to think.
I couldn’t think when I was around people. In company I was always talking, always telling a joke or laughing at one. My uncle Brent used to say that my mouth was my biggest problem. “Boy,” he’d say while sitting in the reclining chair in the den, “if you could just learn to be quiet for a minute, you might hear something worthwhile.”
My mother said that I was supposed to love Uncle Brent, but he was hard on children. Brent came to live with us after he had what my mother called a case of nerves. There wasn’t much wrong with him that I could see, but after his attack he came to live in our house. He kept the garden in the spring and summer and sat in the old chair in what used to be my father’s library. But my father was dead by then and Uncle Brent called the library his den.
Brent loved to tell me what was wrong with me. I talked too much, I didn’t study enough, I didn’t respect authority, and I was way too dark for the genteel colored community of Forest Cove. That was down in South Carolina, where Brent was born. Brent himself was a deep-brown color, with thick lips that were always turned down as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. The only hint he gave of being sick was that it took him a long time to get out of his chair.
So when my mother was out and he’d let loose with one of his insults, I’d say, “Fuck you, old man,” and walk slowly away while he struggled to get up and after me. Once outside I’d tear through the backyard and into the family graveyard. From there I’d make it into the ancient stand of sixty-two oaks that my great-great-grandfather Willam P. Dodd planted.
That night in my house, wandering completely naked through the half-dark rooms, I thought about how much fun it was to torture my mean old uncle. When I’d escaped into the dark-green shadows of those gnarly old trees, I’d get the giggles from excitement. Sometimes Brent would stand out on the back porch and yell for me, but he didn’t dare to wander off from the house.
He never told my mother about my curses though. I think it was because he was ashamed at not being able to control a child.
The night after the day I met Mr. Anniston Bennet was the first time I’d ever missed Uncle Brent. It had been more than a decade, and I just then marked his passing.