Risk
by Inda Schaenen
When DeShante calls I always pick up. No matter what’s going on, or how I may be feeling, the sound of his voice is honey in my ear.
That morning, I was just getting out of the shower when he called on my cell wanting to know if I could meet him after work so he could ask me a very important question.
“I told you, baby, right after I leave the bank this afternoon I have to get down to Dillard’s. Today’s Thursday, you know that.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Well, then, it’ll have to be after you’re done. What time is that again?”
“Nine. But what is it you want to ask me? Go ahead and ask me now.”
“Aw, Latrice, you just going to have to wait ‘til later. Meet me at El Caballo at 9:15, okay? You have yourself one excellent day, sugar.”
“I will. I love you. Bye.”
I can tell you right off the bat, because I’m sure you’re wondering, that I knew that DeShante Abraham had no intention of asking me to marry him. We’d been over and over that ever since last winter when we had already been dating more than a year. Neither of us was ready. I saw no reason to hurry myself into marriage when we had all the time in the world ahead of us and things were fine as they were, at least as far as I was concerned. Also, I knew we were both too young. And another thing: I was working two jobs, he was working three. I could afford my own apartment, DeShante could not. He was sharing a place off Natural Bridge with Marie, who was his auntie, and Marie’s son, J.P. Marie and J.P. fought like crazy, and DeShante was the one who broke up their fights and made peace between them. Marie was pretty much a wreck, living on government checks and food stamps, trying to deal with her asthma and give up dope. One time a little earlier that summer, when I went over to pick up a change of clothes for DeShante, I found the front door open. Anybody could have walked right in, and that part of Arlington, I can assure you, is no paradise. Inside the house it was stuffy and sweltering. All the shades were drawn and the place reeked of Jergens and french fries and cigarette smoke. I saw greasy Big Mac wrappers crumpled on the floor and Dr. Pepper cans under the sofa. Marie’s inhaler was filthy with fuzz from the carpet and the TV was blaring some game show I had never seen before. I had to practically scrape Marie off the living room floor, where she was leaning against an old easy chair, smoking the last half of a menthol Kool and tipping ashes into an empty Big Gulp cup. I stubbed out her cigarette and steered her into bed so that J.P. wouldn’t find her lying there when he got home from work. I felt sorry for Marie—who wouldn’t?—but I also gave her a piece of my mind and told her that she was going to have to get her act together, that the way she let herself and the house go was creating all kinds of tension in the family, and that everyone was always terrified that the next call would be the hospital telling them that she’d been run over by a truck or coughed herself to death. I’m not sure she heard any of this, but she did nod along and say sorry.
DeShante’s cousin J.P. was working part-time for the construction company that was building the new stadium. He was also taking classes at Harris-Stowe. J.P. wanted to be a teacher. He had always been good with little kids. Fifteen years ago, when DeShante was seven and needed a place to live, J.P., who was only fourteen, made it so DeShante could move in with him and Marie. Back then she wasn’t doing so badly. J.P. became like a father to DeShante, keeping him out of trouble, coming down hard when he went with the wrong kids, and to this day DeShante never takes two steps in any direction without consulting with J.P. In fact, it was J.P. who paid for DeShante to go to trade school and got him his job at the stadium so that they were both working there. DeShante also works part-time in the kitchen at a nursing home out on Olive. He says the one thing he will never be able to look at again is butterscotch pudding.
Still, even though J.P. is patience itself with everybody in the whole world, his patience always seems to run out when it comes to his own mama. And that’s where DeShante helps him out. DeShante says it’s because Marie is so helpless and pathetic; somebody has to run interference. I nod along when he says this but privately I think that’s not exactly correct. I believe that DeShante feels deep down that Marie is his last and only link to his own mama, that if he lets Marie slide down too far into oblivion, he will have let down the spirit or fate or what have you that brought him into this world. But I would never say this out loud. DeShante would shake his head at a theory like that and grab my butt (he loves my butt) and say, “Girl, you spoutin’ crazy shrinkrap,’’ or something like that. So I only tell the other tellers who are my friends, Sherelle and Rhonda and even Matt, the white gay guy. They all agree with me.
So anyway, that Thursday we hung up and I went about my business. My hair was pulled tight off my face, done up in a knot of microbraids. I was wearing my gold earrings, the skinny hoops that come halfway down to my shoulders, a burgundy tank top, a fitted black skirt, and high heels. Liking clothes is one reason I was hanging on to the job at Dillard’s even though the managers at the bank wanted to pay me to do an MBA. Believe me, I was using every penny of my Dillard’s discount. My thought was, what kind of professional development could I pursue if I didn’t have the right outfit to pursue it in?
At four, I left the bank and drove over to the mall. The Dillard’s ladies department was pretty dead. July isn’t much of a shopping month, so I spent most of my time refolding T-shirts and putting clothes back on hangers and doing the inventory paperwork that had to be done before the fall things started arriving in August. It was a hot night and just getting dark when I came out at five past nine and drove over to El Caballo on Manchester.
DeShante was waiting for me at a table under a string of colored light bulbs. He had a big smile on his face and got up to kiss me and pull out my chair. DeShante kept his hair shaved close to his head and had his sideburns shaped exactly the way I like them, not too long and not too short. His skin is medium brown like mine. One time he joked that we matched like bookends. “Ten to one my great-great-great-granddaddy was chained right next to your great-great-great-grandmama and they got it on during the Middle Passage, sugar” he once said for a laugh. I told him that some people might not find a comment like that too witty, and that he better not be saying things like that in public. I think that hurt his feelings a little, but I also knew I couldn’t let him get himself in trouble over something stupid.
He had ordered himself a margarita, so I asked the waitress for one, too. “With extra salt on the rim, please,” I said. The music in the background was loud and steady. I spread out the huge red cloth napkin over my skirt.
“So, what is this all about, DeShante?”
DeShante had this expression on his face—surprised and amazed and happy. He looked to me like a little kid, all hopeful and expectant. I couldn’t help but smile back at him. He kept on looking at me while I dipped one tortilla chip after another in that good salsa they make. My drink came and I took a long sip. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry.
“So listen, Latrice. This is big.”
“How big?”
“Big big.”
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“Listen, you know how we been working on those luxury boxes down at the stadium, right? Dry walling, what have you. Well, yesterday late afternoon, just as we getting ready to quit for the day, me and J.P. be putting up our tools and washing down the site when a couple white dudes come in along with a brother, a slick brother all dressed to the nines. He wearing a suit and crisp shirt and cologne and they be talking to him telling him about the corporate plans and seating packages they arranging. And this brother, he nodding and smiling as if he approved of what they saying. And then the white dudes sort of notice J.P. because he in charge of this whole area, you know what I’m saying? And they introduce J.P. to the brother, whose name is Andrew Adams Jackson. They praise the work that J.P. be getting done on time and under budget and the quality of the work he doing, that gets their attention to me, so J.P. goes on and introduces me to this Jackson brother who shakes my hand.”
Out of breath, DeShante took the last sip of his margarita. Our waitress came over and we ordered: chicken enchiladas for me, chimichangas for DeShante, guacamole first to share. We both always ordered the same thing every time at El Caballo.
“So go on,” I said when our waitress left.
“Well, I’ll do you a favor, Treecy, and make this long story short. The brother dude, this Jackson, he ask me do I have any aspirations beyond working in construction. And I say I do, that I be working two jobs just to keep up and save a little but that it was my intention to get my GED and eventually go to college so as to set myself up in my own business. Jackson, he wearing a very fine suit of clothes, a dark silky thing with a hanky in the front pocket and tassels on his shoes. He standing there in a cloud of cologne so strong it filled the whole space up.”
“Too much cologne is a sign of insecurity and vanity,” I said.
“What?”
”Cologne. People who wear too much cologne or perfume are afraid of their own animal nature and also want everybody to notice them right away.”
“Where you read that?”
“In Style, I think.”
“Well, I don’t know, he don’t seem so insecure. Jackson, in this cloud of cologne, he nods and looks me up and down. He looks into my eyes like some kind of laser beam, so that I feel, I don’t know, studied or something. What he looking to see I have no idea. I can see the white dudes watching him closely, trying to figure out what he up to, talking to me and all. And J.P. watching, too, with a kind of proud smile on his face, but also kind of suspicious, like he thinking what the hell, man, what you be messing with my bro here for. Well, Jackson asks for my phone number and asks can he give me a call and when would be a good time. So I say later that day would be good, but before five, which is when I have to go over to to Graceful Edge in order to do my dinner shift.”
The guacamole came and I started eating.
“So Jackson he calls me and, get this, sugar, he says he has a proposal for me. Evidently, he runs some kind of investment thing, a money management kind of deal, one of those companies that get people to give them money so they can turn that money into more money. Which is why he’s being courted to buy into a piece of the stadium, I guess. Anyway, he says he has a knack for seeing into the potential of people and companies, that he has patented a method of growing money like it was a flower that can grow better under some conditions than others. I don’t believe I understand this dude at all, he seem a little crazy to me, if you want to know the truth. Over and over again he say, ‘It’s all good, brother. It’s all good.’ I had half a mind to tell him that from where I sit, it’s not quite all good, that I have an aunt who can hardly see straight half the time on account of habits that are better left unsaid.
“Jackson say he had took one look at me and known, just known, that I belonged with him in business. He ask me do I want him to pay for my schooling while he trains me to come with him and work. He say he feels I will prove to have a knack for this line of work, and that I can teach him things about the way people like me think. He say there be too much of a distance between the black folk who got money and the black folk who don’t, and that the first brothers who figured out how to bridge this distance would clean up.”
When DeShante finally paused, I thought about what he was saying. Naturally, I thought it sounded suspicious. I knew from experience that there are no shortcuts in this life. You had to pay your dues. I know I did. And I did because my own family taught me to. Mama would not have stood for me not making the grades I made, for not doing everything I could to make something of myself. Which is why Mama just about had fits at the mere thought of DeShante and his folks. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him. She could see the goodness and sweetness in him just like I could. It was that people like DeShante were so easily waylaid by the thought of a shortcut.
What DeShante was describing just didn’t sound right. DeShante is cute and charming, and I know his soul is clean like a sheet. But what kind of businessman made impulsive offers like this? It sounded too pie-in-the-sky. But I could tell that a piece of DeShante was already sold.
The waitress came over holding our two plates, one in each hand, a rag protecting her palms and fingers from the heat. “Don’t touch these, they’re hot,” she said, lowering the heaped and steaming platters.
“Jackson say there’s this idea called headspace,” DeShante said, ignoring the food’s arrival. He put his long forefingers alongside his temple. “Headspace is where most all the buying and selling in the world takes place even before a single dollar trades hands. A person has to become master of the headspace. And at the same time, Jackson say it all about the numbers, looking at what they done in the past and trusting them not to lie about the future. That’s it from A to Z, he say. Knowing the headspace. Trusting the numbers and not the people. You young, he say to me. You got energy, he say. He say a black kid that gets to be my age without being in jail is like a white guy becoming a CEO. He say his instincts is never wrong when it come to judging character. And then last of all he tell me to go to work like I always do and then call him back on Monday with an answer. He say he already have partners, who he will set me up with right away if I say yes.
“So my question to you, Treecy, which I have been thinking about ever since yesterday afternoon and all day today, is do I listen to this brother, or do I go about my own business?”
Only then did DeShante pick up his fork and dig all the way into his chimichangas. His eyes looked so worried and I could tell he hadn’t slept much the night before. He took a long sip of his beer, and a dab of white foam remained on his upper lip. He licked it off with his tongue and smiled again.
I said, “Have you talked about this with Marie and J.P.?”
DeShante’s face darkened the way it does when he doesn’t feel good about something. One of the things I love best about him is the way a person can read his face like a book. There isn’t any kind of feeling he can have that doesn’t show up on his face.
I said, “What did they say?”
“Marie, she say go for it,” he said. “She say—you know how sometimes she gets all religious on you—she say, ‘the Lord has dropped an angel in your lap, DeShante. This man was sent to you for a reason and you owe it to yourself to follow him. This could be your one true way up and out of here.’”
DeShante stabbed a bite and chewed for a while. I just drank and ate and waited. But I could already sense what J.P. had said.
“J.P. told me to walk away from it. To tell you the truth, Treecy, J.P. got ugly, as ugly as I ever seen him get. He say these kinds of dudes come through and think they can make a buck off a poor stupid nigger just like white folks do. I swear, Treecy, J.P. used some harsh language, words I never heard him use before. J.P. say that Jackson must feel like he can use me for something or he wouldn’t be approaching me with all this talk of opportunity. J.P. say rich black folk never bat an eye at poor niggers unless there’s some money to be made off them or they’s a tax deduction somehow. He say just take care of yourself and keep on doing what you doing and stay outta trouble.”
DeShante and I stopped eating and looked at each other a long time. I could tell there was something more he wanted to report. He took a sip of beer and looked down into his glass as if he couldn’t look me in the eye.
“After that, J.P. turned on Marie.”
“What did he say, DeShante?”
“He say, ‘Marie, you shut the fuck up with your bullshit about angels falling in laps and one true paths outta here. You know nothing about what DeShante has got to contend with. Or me, for that matter. You stay in this apartment and smoke and look out the window all day and watch the bullshit down there on the street and think the good fairy is going to make a special 9-1-1 rescue visit. Well, I’m telling you DeShante knows better than that. He knows he has to work and work and pay his bills and make himself a solid skilled citizen and then he can talk about business plans.’ And then Marie, she cover her face up and she start to cry, which makes J.P. even madder because then as I see it his anger be mixed with guilt like he picking on a defenseless victim. And that is what I cannot tolerate, Latrice. I just cannot tolerate that. You know I can’t.”
“So what did you do?”
“I said, ‘Lay off for now, J.P. I mean it. Lay off. She can’t help it and she just wants the best for both of us.’”
“And what did J.P. say?”
“He said, ‘DeShante, you are a fool.’”
Then we felt sort of shy and quiet in El Caballo. The tone of the place suddenly seemed all wrong. I didn’t feel like hearing the loud music and I didn’t feel like seeing all those colored bulbs and eating any more of my enchiladas. I had watched DeShante go from all excited, to angry, to confused. Now the man was entirely turned around like he had just stumbled off a merry-go-round and didn’t know which way was which. I guess given everything in her life, I could understand why Marie would encourage DeShante to take a chance on this piece of happenstance. Marie’s head was always half in the clouds even when she wasn’t high, and she really did love DeShante in her own way. I could also understand J.P.’s worry and doubt, because honestly, I sort of agreed with him. Here he had put all this energy and love into his cousin and he was afraid it would all get blown away on a some guy’s whim.
“Then what, DeShante?”
“Marie, she say J.P. didn’t really never care for her the way I did, that he might be her son but he never cared for her or for her future the way I did, that I acted more like a son to her than he did. And then she start to really break down and cry real loud. And then I was afraid J.P. might get rough with her and I prepared myself to step in like I always do. But a few minutes went by and J.P., he had been palming that faded bald tennis ball he keeps around just to squeeze to make his hands stronger. After squeezing his tennis ball a while and staring at me, who was glaring at him, J.P. sort of look like something transformed him. He completely changed his whole attitude, like in a couple of minutes some new influence had washed over him and made everything different.
“J.P. smiled and said, ‘Mama, you can say what you want about who you want, you ain’t never goin’ to be DeShante’s mama. And DeShante’s not your son and that’s a fact. You’re stuck with me. But that doesn’t mean nothing when we both are here for you.’ And then J.P. come over and he punch me in the arm and told me to go call this Jackson dude and say yes to him. But all of it was so confusing to me, sugar, my family being messed up as it is, that last night I realized that I need your help to decide what to do. What do I do? How do I know if this Jackson guy is for real?”
“Let’s get out of here, DeShante,” I said. “Come back to my place and we’ll look him up.”
I live in a garden apartment off Delmar and 170. It’s a safe place, a complex of two-story brick buildings filled with single young people who are all mostly white collar types—teachers, computer fix-it guys, and bank tellers like me. There are lots of Indian folks, too.I mean Indians from India, young women who come and go with their long, straight black hair pulled back.
Outside my front door, while I was trying to separate my apartment key, DeShante came up and hugged me from behind and kissed the back of my neck. I could feel his knees press into the back of my thighs and start to kind of buckle me backwards into him, which meant you know what. I opened the door, flicked on the overhead light, and put my purse on the entry table. DeShante made for the couch.
“Let’s sit a minute, Latrice.”
I took off my shoes and felt completely exhausted from my day. If I had sat down with DeShante right then, I don’t think I could have gotten up until the next morning, and things might have turned out very different for him and me both.
So I went over to the computer and woke it up. DeShante got up from the couch, turned on the stereo, and put on the Abstract Tribe Unique CD he’d brought over the Sunday before. Then he came over and pulled up a chair to sit beside me.
“You want something to drink?” I asked.
“No thanks, baby.” He put his arm around my shoulders.
I googled this guy Jackson. Unbelievably, it turned out that DeShante’s “It’s all good” Jackson from the stadium was the real deal. He was the Jackson from a group called Jackson, Klein & Allen, an investment firm that had gotten write-ups in about a thousand magazines and newspapers over the last five years. Business Week. Ebony. St. Louis Business Journal. The Post-Dispatch. They were all listed one under the other in blue letters.
“Click on one of them, Latrice.” DeShante said. “Click on the one from Business World.”
Side by side, we started reading while DeShante tapped the steady beat of “Mass Men Baby” on my thigh. I got to the bottom of the page and started to scroll up.
“Hang on, sugar. I ain’t there yet. Remember who you dealing with here.”
“Sorry, baby.” Waiting for DeShante to catch up, I tuned in to the music which normally I didn’t pay much attention to, the rhythm of the eloquence strong as an elephant.
“Okay, I’m there.”
I scrolled down. Here’s how Jackson and his partners worked: every year they picked only two companies. Just two. They researched for months until they found exactly the right two to invest in in order to guarantee an annual return of fifty percent on a person’s investment. One year it might be Apple Computer and Caterpillar Trucks. Another year Disney and BP Oil. But whatever it was, the system worked. And a fifty percent return is not normal, that much I knew from what I did for a living. Nobody secured that kind of return. I clicked on a few more articles. After a half-hour I had seen what I needed to see. Jackson, Klein & Allen made serious money.
“Well, the man’s real, all right,” I said. “But I still do not see what exactly he wants from you, DeShante. I think you need to ask him very specifically why he chose you of all people. Find that out, and then we can talk about whether or not it’s the right thing to do.”
When DeShante left my place around midnight, he was walking on air.
One week later, DeShante called me up when I was putting on my makeup. He said that we were invited to dinner that night with Jackson and his wife, and Klein and his wife. It happened that fast. DeShante told me to get dressed nice, and that we were meeting at the Kleins’ house for drinks and then going out to Tony’s.
“Tony’s,” I said.
“That’s right,” DeShante said.
“Tonight?”
“That’s what I said.”
The thing that embarrasses me is that right away I thought about clothes.
“I guess I can wear my little black dress with the green fringy shawl. No, that’s not right. I’ll have to think about this. But what are you going to wear, DeShante? Do you even have a jacket? Do you have a tie? They won’t let you in wearing trousers, no matter how nice they are. Those brown linen ones you got with me last spring are fine, I guess, but you need a jacket. You don’t want to have to use one from the cloakroom.”
“Relax, sugar,” he said. “J.P. got something I can borrow.”
“What about Dillard’s?”
“You’ll just have to call in. Latrice, you need to calm yourself down. I had that conversation with Jackson you told me to have. Listen up. He told me he wanted to train me to train my own mind how to pick stocks and how to know when to make the trades. He told me he didn’t want no one who had finance ideas hard as rock in his head from the start. No backassed MBA, is what he said. So I told him I don’t see nothing wrong with giving this a try as long as I can do my GED somehow, and he say no problem to that. I also told him about you and me, and how you was the best thing I had going, you and J.P. I told him what you did and where you worked, and how you had plans. I guess he figures to get to know me he has to get to know you. This could be it, Latrice, so I’m asking you please to call in your manager and tell her that you will not be in tonight.”
“Of course I’ll call in, but why Tony’s of all places? He must know you won’t be comfortable there.”
That was a mistake, me saying that, and I knew it right away and felt bad. I heard DeShante snort on the phone and then he was quick with me.
“I guess I’ll just have to make myself comfortable, then,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at 6:30.” I knew he was mad when he didn’t call me sugar.
All morning I counted out twenties. I issued deposit slips. I cracked open solid brown rolls of quarters and watched them splash into my tray. I smiled at customers at my window and talked about what a beautiful day it was and how lucky we were that the heat finally broke and made it more like California than St. Louis. But in between customers I couldn’t stop talking or thinking about what might happen that night. Sherelle and Rhonda shook their heads and looked like doomsday had come. Matt was optimistic, but his peppy encouragement only made me feel worse.
At lunch I had no big appetite so I just went over to the Starbucks. I took my iced mocha to an iron table and watched the people who had time to hang out on the street. A gray-haired older mother went by in a pair of frumpy navy blue sweats and running shoes. She was pushing a tricycle stroller and had a big to-go cup of coffee in one hand. Her kid was gumming a bagel.
It’s strange. When summer is in full swing in St. Louis, nothing feels too serious. People go through the motions of work. Mailmen walk around in their shorts carrying their satchels. Construction workers blast at holes all over town. And I know stuff gets done. But there’s this feeling in the air, as though everybody agrees that the work they are doing now is not like the work they do when the weather is cooler. Five o’clock comes and you go to the movies. Or you go meet friends and go dancing. Or you get together with your family on Sunday afternoon and drink a beer while sitting on your boyfriend’s lap. Your big-chested uncle cooks ribs and laughs from behind a screen of blue smoke and the little cousins run amok in the yard and you think, I do not want this day to ever end.
I realized then that I wasn’t worried about DeShante dealing with the lah-de-dah of Tony’s, exactly. I was worried about the family that would show through DeShante’s talk. I was afraid that the way he talked would betray the folks who had taken care of him for better and for worse. And I was also afraid of the way I was already thinking (I couldn’t help myself) that if this shortcut of DeShante’s got him set up for real, I could maybe, maybe, be going out with a man on the road to the place on easy street where everybody wants to be.
When I opened the door on DeShante at six-thirty, I was all dressed up in my pleated lemon-yellow skirt, the one I always wore with a white camisole. I had high-heeled espadrilles on, that season’s wedgy version that criss-cross and lace up your ankle.
“Hey, baby,” I said.
“Well, hey.”
We had a big long kiss and he grabbed my butt in his hands and lifted me up.
“So I guess I pass muster,” he said.
“Oh, DeShante, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was no good on the phone earlier. Let me just get my bag and do my lips. Take my keys out of the bowl and we’ll go in my car.”
The Kleins lived in the Central West End, in one of those three-story mansions on Portland Place. It was the kind of neighborhood that if we were dressed differently and had driven up in DeShante’s truck with Mos Def rapping out the window, people would have assumed we were there to paint the garage or haul off broken cribs or steal copper downspouts. We parked along the curb in front of the house. An automatic sprinkler with nozzles poking up through the front lawn was already spraying the grass. From little black heads the water spiralled out and the system made a rhythmic sound– k’tch…k’tch…k’tch…k’tch—as it flung water across the sharp green grass blades. DeShante and I timed our dash up the front walk so as not to get splashed.
The Klein’s front door was big and heavy and had a brass knocker in the middle. We didn’t use the knocker; we pressed a small white button and heard the ding-dong inside. The white guy who opened the door was just about bald.
“Here he is, The Man” the guy said, obviously meaning DeShante. “Phil Klein. A pleasure to meet you.”
Klein stuck out his hand to DeShante, who mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I think it might have been his name. Klein squeezed DeShante’s upper arm. “Welcome. And this beauty—”
“Latrice Sanders,” I said.
“Of course.” He shook my hand, too, and I noticed his green eyes and yellowish, even teeth. “Please come in, both of you. What can I get you? Beer? Red wine? Sangria? My lovely bride just made up an excruciatingly delicious batch.”
A big round pedestal table stood right in the middle of the front hall. In the middle of the table was a tall glazed vase full of thick-stemmed flowers with solid purple heads like globes. We followed Klein around the table and down a few steps into the living room that was probably four times the size of my whole apartment. The ceiling was high and light flooded in from a wall of glass doors along the back of the house. Klein gestured at a couch and a chair. DeShante and I looked at each other, smiled stupidly, and plopped ourselves down, but not before Klein scooted to the door to let in Andrew Jackson and his wife.
“My man!” Klein said at the door.
“Yo bro,” Jackson said. “Here we go.”
“Bernice, a knockout as always,” Klein said.
Jackson and his wife came down into the living room. DeShante got up to shake their hands and I almost died when he said “Nice to meet you, too, ma’am,” to Jackson’s wife, just like he was a fourth grader. Bernice Jackson had on a nice dress, a simple white lisle that I could tell by the cut cost a fortune. It looked great against her skin, which was dark like the sharps and flats of piano keys. When she sat down she locked eyes with me for just a flash.
Klein stood at a rolling cart and poured us all tall glasses of sangria.
Pretty soon, everyone except Klein’s wife was stuck deep in furniture that swallowed you up like a bowl of fluff. Then the woman who must have been Klein’s wife came in and grinned. We were all holding icy glasses and not touching the fat olives and white cheese on the table in front us.
“I’m Daphne. So glad you could join us this evening.”
This woman was dressed like a person in a Saks ad. The toes of her black open-heeled shoes were so pointy they could have stabbed a rat. Her skirt had sparkling beads and sequins around the hem. The colors of her halter top swirled in a retro Peter Maxx pattern I knew from the knock-offs we sold at Dillard’s. She wore huge chandelier earrings of cut crystal that caught the light every time she turned her head. Daphne Klein poured herself a glass of sangria.
“So, so, so,” Klein said, lifting his glass when he saw his wife perch on the edge of the piano bench. “Where to begin? Giving thanks to fate? To the new stadium for throwing you two into the same space and time? To Einstein, for inventing space-time in the first place?”
“It’s all good,” Jackson said, and I couldn’t help it, I laughed out loud. DeShante laughed out loud too, but it was alright.
“Listen,” Jackson said. “In all seriousness, and with all due respect to your Einstein, my friend Philip, this ain’t no space-time hocus-pocus. This is the first day of the revolution. You just lucky enough to be along for the ride.”
I felt Klein and his wife and Bernice Jackson watching us, watching me and DeShante listen to Jackson taunt his partner. This jabbering was nothing new to them, I could tell. Jackson seemed to have the upper hand, but Klein never stopped smiling.
“You won’t never hear me argue with that, Mr. ‘Double A’ Jackson,” Klein said. “I got no problem with carrying the flag and beating the drum, so to speak. That’s what I do best, anyway. You just go right ahead and lead the way.”
“And you, DeShante?” Jackson said. “What do you make of this turn of events?”
“I’m not sure what all I make of this, sir,” DeShante said, rubbing his thumb up and down his glass and staring at the red fluid. “It do seem strange to me, I’ll say that. But I think I understand where you coming from.”
Klein said, “Not to change the subject, but will someone please tell me why Feliz Almatazon, with the heat he’s got, is painting the corners like the finesse pitcher he is not?”
DeShante’s face looked confused and I knew what he was thinking: what the hell kind of crazy white and black dudes were Klein and Jackson? Was DeShante supposed to answer this question? What would they think of him if he did? What would they think of him if he did not? I could see all of these questions churning through DeShante’s mind even as he sat there. Faced with what he believed to be a trick question, DeShante, like the self-protecting boys in grade school, rode it out in silence; he decided to let someone else seize glory for the right answer or suffer shame for the wrong one.
“You know,” Jackson said to his partner, “if that man would just rear up and fire, that would be it. It’s Duncan who’s not setting that pitcher free, and you can only blame LaRussa for that. Or blame Henderson. But don’t sit there and blame Almatazon. When those assholes finally take the bit out of his mouth he’s going to blow people’s minds.”
Klein shrugged. He leaned forward and put a fat green olive in his mouth. He chewed on it for a while, then put his hand to his mouth and spat out the pit. He leaned forward and lay the pit on a small silver dish.
“Maybe so,” he said.
Daphne took a sip of her sangria and looked at DeShante.
“I feel like I’ve seen you before,” she said to him. “Do you live near here, in the West End or anywhere?”
“Um, no ma’am, I don’t.”
Then DeShante’s phone rang and we were both startled from the depths of the couch. Now everyone looked at him. DeShante shifted his weight and pulled his phone out of the front pocket of his brown linen pants. He looked at the number. I could see he was trying to decide whether to take the call or not. There was always the chance that this was the bad one, the one we all dreaded. Marie in the E.R. Marie in a house fire. He gazed at the tiny screen for a couple of seconds while his ringtone played on, and then his long thumb pressed the button that made the tone go silent.
“I live in North City,” he said, looking up into Daphne Klein’s eyes. “Up near Arlington and Natural Bridge.”
People who don’t live in St. Louis don’t understand what it means for a person to state his address just like that. It means you lay your whole entire self on the line. Where you live means everything. Maybe that’s true in other places, but here it’s a sign of strength to admit to living in North City when you’re sunk in a couch on Portland Place. I could have thrown myself into DeShante’s lap and hugged him right then and there.
“I am familiar with that vi-cin-it-y,” Jackson said, and Bernice actually chuckled.
“Mr. Jackson,” DeShante said. “I said before that I think I understand where you coming from, but really, the truth is that I do not. I understand what you will be training me to do, but what you mean by a revolution?”
“Son, I was hoping you’d ask me that,” Jackson said. “You know what’s at the heart of revolution, I mean the word ‘revolution?’ Revolving. Turning. Turning things over and upside down. I want you, DeShante. I want you to help me turn our world over and upside down. I can teach you about buying and selling stock. That’s easy. And I can teach you about how capital, large amounts of capital that is, flows from St. Louis to Hong Kong, from Harlem to Singapore. What I want to see for once is capital flowing against the current. By the time I am through with you, my brother, you will be able to read this world from both sides, from the have side and the have-not side. And because you are the kind of man who calls it straight, you will be the engine that drives this company’s capital upstream. That is precisely what I aim to do, and you can go ahead and tell that to your folks.”
Klein had stopped smiling. These guys may have been cryptic, but they were serious.
When our glasses were empty, we all went out to Tony’s and clinked glasses to the words Jackson and Klein threw out.
“To painting the corners!” Klein said.
“To rearing back and firing!” said Jackson. “Finesse ain’t nothing without power.”
On Labor Day, right before DeShante started work for Jackson and Klein, the two of us brought Marie and J.P. over to my parents’ house for an end-of-summer cookout. Marie chainsmoked a pack of cigarettes, but otherwise behaved herself, and J.P. spent the day bragging about his cousin, who was on his way to the top, according to him. I sat and watched DeShante play a long game of checkers with one of my uncles. DeShante had quit his job at the nursing home and would be putting on a suit and tie and reporting to an office for the first time in his life.
Watching him play, I have to admit I felt a little sad, not knowing how things were going to change for us. You read all the time in People about folks who just cannot deal with overnight success and wind up suffering tragic fates. But I also think Labor Day is always a little sad, whatever the new season has in store. The end of summer hits hard—grasshoppers everywhere have to turn back into ants—which is why I found myself praying DeShante’s risk would pay off. Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t want to leap over the long slog that lies between hope and destiny?
DeShante used one of his kings to triple-jump my uncle right off the board. My uncle laughed, play-slapped him on the side of the head, and called it beginner’s luck. DeShante’s face shined penny bright.
