Memphis(62)

“Half kin. My brother and your sister no more…”

August felt something that she had to steady herself to compute: Bird’s hand was sliding up the front slit of her kimono. She waited a bit too long to move back from it, and she knew it.

“Don’t mean we can’t be friendly,” Bird continued. He winked and withdrew his hand, leaving room for August to let it be a tease, nothing more—if she wanted.

August swiveled the barber’s chair around so that Bird faced the mirror. She stood behind him and turned the clippers on. She felt his eyes on her in the mirror. She pretended to be busy with the clippers.

“Remember the last time I was here? The wedding? You killed in that yellow.”

“Who’d y’all kill?” August, ever the expert conversationalist, knew how to steer him toward safer ground. She could tell there was something he wanted, needed, to get off his chest, and though she wasn’t sure if she cared to hear what he had to say or, more important, if he deserved to be witnessed by her, it felt less like a choice and more like the inertia of ritual. If he hadn’t been in her chair, it might have been different. But he was. And she, too, was in position, attendant.

Bird relaxed in the barber chair and he confessed all.

“It was 1976,” he said, regarding himself in the mirror while August got to work, “and not yet spring. I remember the look of the dirty brown snow smeared on the dead grass along the curbs. Chicago’s South Side stretched around us, like a patchwork of intersections. Brick row houses lining both sides of King Drive. The barbershop wasn’t anywhere near as nice as yours—just a one-story lean-to directly underneath the Line station that shook every time a train passed overhead, every three minutes.

“At the time we killed that nigga, Jax and me was only twenty-one years old. He was going through this phase where he wore a mustache that desperately wanted to be thicker. My black leather bomber jacket was lined with thick shearling, but I was still freezing. Had forgotten my gloves. Jax was wearing a wool caramel coat he’d just gotten for Christmas—I’d forgotten about that coat. Went with his whole mustache look.

“It would wind up being the second time me and Jax would steal that day. Earlier, we were rummaging through shelves at the local library, Jax had slid a faded and beaten, spine-long-gone, second edition of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the long front pocket of his coat. He’d checked it out enough times, told me he figured he pretty much owned it by then, anyway.

“Holmes was waiting for us outside—he was this guy Jax had been running with for a time. He had this real sharp goatee that made him look like an exact replica of Malcolm X. We all stood outside the barbershop for a minute, shivering, cupping our hands and breathing into them for warmth. Holmes nodded to Jax. ‘You ready?’

“?‘We really doing this?’ Jax asked.

“Holmes nodded. ‘Let’s roll,’ he said and opened the swinging door to the barbershop.

“Right there in his barber’s chair, with a shotgun laid across his lap, was a massive bear of a man. That was Red.

“Red had two enormous front teeth with a gap between them the Hoover Dam couldn’t fill, and two prostitutes he pimped out, and five children he saw on Christmas, sometimes Easter, and a bright red shirt he always, always wore, and a ruby the size of a chicken heart on a chunky pinky finger. He was as big as a barn. You can see why the name ‘Red’ stuck.

“?‘What in the entire fuck are you doing with that?’ Holmes said, nodding his head at the rifle.

“?‘For y’all, nigga,’ Red said back. ‘I made an appointment with you, Negro. You. I don’t know these other dusty niggas’—and he makes this sweeping motion with his right hand—‘from Cain.’

“Jax spoke up: ‘I look like a cop to you?’

“?‘Nigga, was I speaking to you? I swear to God I wasn’t.’

“?‘God would be right, as He tends to be. You weren’t. But I’m speaking to you now, aren’t I, you fat motherfuckin—’

“That’s when I stepped into the center of the room and threw open my leather jacket. Red was stupid, but the nigga wasn’t blind. Any man could’ve seen the black gleam of my nine-millimeter.

“Holmes spoke: ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen. In the city of Chicago tonight…no, in cities across this country, can we not concede that there are a significant number of Black men killing other Black men? Let us not add to that number recklessly.’

“Holmes had a way of speaking like some old Confederate general. Elegant. Slow. He took a seat in an identical, but smaller, barber’s chair across the room. Crossed his long legs, pulled a pack of Kools from his right pocket, a lighter in his left. He held the lighter like a baby mouse in his hands, cupped around the shaft of the cigarette, and lit it. He looked like a daddy longlegs in that chair. Waiting. Smoking. Patient. Then the floor began to shake with the arrival and departure of another L train.

“?‘Here’s how I figure’—Holmes took another drag off his cigarette, blew the smoke above him in a halo—‘You can take my money right here.’ He tapped his breast pocket. ‘And we can continue our mutually beneficial agent-procurer relationship, or I can release them’—he pointed his finger at me and Jax—‘this storm of men, upon your Black ass and your Black establishment. Trust me when I tell you it would be wise to choose the former.’