All I Did Was Shoot My Man

31

I opened my eyes, understanding that I had been in a kind of existential slumber, an intellectual doze. Rather than being in a true state of restful unconsciousness, I could only be described as a philosophical recluse. My spirit had challenged the pretexts and justifications, allowing the truth of my flawed existence to come to the surface.

I felt completely rested and free.

People wanted to kill me. They had valid reasons even if they were not aware of what those reasons were. I wanted to survive because I couldn’t make up for my sins if these shadowy men achieved their purpose.

On the street, walking south, I considered Zella. She was a textbook case of a woman who suffered a severe case of bad luck. From the man she chose to be her lover to the woman she thought of as a friend, she had chosen badly. Having a loaded gun where she could grab it was a bad idea, but the worst thing about Zella’s life was completely out of her control — me. I was bad luck, pure undiluted calamity; for Katrina, Aura, Zella Grisham, and one hundred and seven other poor souls who had been blindsided by my machinations. I was Typhoid Mary’s meaner older brother, the ire of Moses on the unsuspecting peasants of the Nile Valley. I planted false evidence, sicced the dogs on unsuspecting citizens simply because I didn’t like them and was being paid to trap someone, anyone, that would fit the bill. I was a minor, mischievous deity loosed upon naïve humanity for the entertainment of the gods.

Back in the hippie days we would have been seen as Karmic siblings, Zella and I, working out the misdeeds of previous lives. But in 2011 the metaphysical world, as well as the physical universe, was comprised almost completely by corporate plans, prayers, and plagues.

I was so distracted by these useless esoteric reflections that I came up on the White Horse Tavern unawares. It was after one and there were quite a few people at the tables and bar — regulars, tourists, and the odd drop-in.

At a table in the corner, in the front room by the window, a group of nine people were being addressed by a young man wearing black jeans, a dark green sports jacket, and a T-shirt that read GINSBERG FOR RAJAH.

Not only the tableful of tourists with their pints and bitters were listening to the lecture but people all over the bar were enthralled. The bartender, a red-faced man, was smiling at the effect.

The young man continued, and I found myself taken by his ideas and obvious passion.

Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned to see Sweet Lemon Charles. At the bus station his skin looked olive under the fluorescent lights but in the window, bathed in natural, if murky, sunlight, he was more a wallet brown.

“She’s sumpin’ else, huh?” he said.

With a twitch of his head he indicated a small white girl with short brown hair, standing behind the lecturer. She was slight, but still with a figure under the maroon dress. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty but she had a look that would make a man pass up a dozen comelier girls just to see her smile.

“That’s Morgan?” I asked.

“Yep. My girl.”

“She could be your daughter, man.”

“Every young girl needs a daddy until she has kids of her own.”

“That’s pretty good, Lemon. You read it somewhere?”

“Auntie Goodwoman,” he said, shaking his head.

“Shhh!” a woman seated at the bar near us hissed. She wasn’t part of the paying group, but still... “Let’s go outside, LT,” Lemon suggested.

On Hudson in the afternoon there was lots of foot traffic. People walked dogs and toted laptop computers in dull-colored rectangular valises. There was every race, gender, subgender, and age, hoofing it around us.

Lemon lit up a cigarette and I stood close to share the secondhand smoke.

“So this is your new gig?” I asked. It was an obvious question but safer than the ones lurking at the back of my mind.

“Oh yeah,” the lifetime thief opined. “I live, breathe, and fuck poetry twenty-four hours a day. Morgan had me go out to Wyoming to this writers’ retreat with her. They gave us a cabin out on the prairie. You know one night I saw a coyote not six feet from our front door. A coyote and me!”

“You got any scams?” I asked. I had to.

“They go through my mind,” he said with unusual candor. “You know how people get all trustin’ when they’re excited. They want you to help them lose their money, or at least that’s how it seem.

“One night this woman and her husband wanted me to score for them. They would’a paid two hundred dollars for what I could get for fifty. But instead I went back to Morgan’s place and wrote a prose poem of what my auntie would say after I had did what would’a been so easy for me to do.

“Now that’s what I do every time I’m tempted — by anything. I plan that to be my first book. I call it Sour Lemons, Sweet Nevermind.”

The grifter was beginning to get to me and that’s always a problem. The best con men believe their stories up until the moment they let you down. They’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, they’re telling you the truth, and then, all of a sudden, they see a different light, take the money and run, before either one of you knows what happened.

“What you call me for, Lemon?” I asked.

The question snapped him out of his reverie of poetry and sex, bad thoughts and the alternative of words never spoken by a woman that died before he went wrong.

“I asked around all over the place, LT,” he said. “It was easy enough ’cause I had a name. I was at a readin’ last night and there was this woman there that Morgan knows, Tourquois Wynn. Tourquois used to be a adjunct creative writing professor at Hunter College. When she was there, five years ago, she had this older black man student named William Williams. He was in her fiction class.”

The chill that flowed into where fever had lain for so many days almost made me shiver. I considered various inappropriate responses: 1) I thought about hitting Lemon with a roundhouse right, knocking him unconscious; 2) I might have taken off, running up the street, back to where there were no answers to unanswerable questions; and, 3) I entertained putting my fingers in my ears and chanting, “Nah, na, na, na naaa, na, na, na, naaaa, na na, na, na na, na.”

“This Tourquois still at Hunter?” I pronounced the name as he did — Tur-kwa.

“No. She got a tenure-track job at NYU after her first book of poetry won the Sanders Prize. She told me that Williams said that he named himself after a writer because before, when he was a politico, he said that the movement ground him down until he was just a mirror. He said that when a man becomes simply a reflection that writing is the only honest thing he can do.”

That simple explanation meant that the man in the fiction class was my father, Clarence Tolstoy William Williams McGill. There was no doubt in my mind. I had to clasp my hands to keep them from shaking.

“Did she know how to get in touch with him?”

“Said she hadn’t talked to him since that class five years ago. I believed her. But me and Morgan said that the three of us should meet up for a early dinner at the Nook Petit down on Seventh at seven. You could come with. Maybe you got a question she can answer.”

“Why you doin’ this, Lemon?” I asked. It was a reflex question, like right cross after a left hook to the body.

“Favor.”

“I thought you were leavin’ my world behind.”

“That’s right. I stay out of the life. But everybody says that you don’t mess wit’ gangsters no more, LT. And even if you did, a guy like me might need a friend someday.”

“Someday is fine, but how much do you want right now?”

“Nuthin’, man. All I ask is that you remember that I gave you this.”