I was there from the beginning to the end, serving sweet wine with butter and salami sandwiches on hard rolls. My mother, Mint, when she first saw me there, sneered in a way that I didn’t understand—at the time. Many others who knew how close I was to Sherman said how sorry they were and how much alike we looked.
I stayed to clean up after the wake. Titi watched me from the kitchen door.
“Sherman loved you,” she said.
Her tone was sweet, but still I took it as an accusation. I castigated myself for failing to be there to fight side by side with him.
“He was my best friend,” I uttered, trying not to cry, again.
“More than that.”
“I know we’re blood, but I always thought of him as something more, I guess.”
“He was,” Nefertiti said. “Your father and his are the same.”
“My father, Skill?”
“No. My husband, Blood.”
I stopped drying plates and turned to look at Titi. She’s a dark-skinned woman with bright eyes and graying dreads. I could see that she had always loved her husband and son in me. That connection was the source of her kisses and kind words. It was why she protected me when Sherman and I spent the night with those fancy girls.
She took a light-brown snakeskin wallet from the pocket in her apron and handed it to me.
“It was Sherman’s,” she said. “I couldn’t even look inside. They killed my boy. This world killed him. He was too beautiful, too beautiful.”
“I can’t, I can’t take this, Titi.”
“Please,” she implored. “I’ll sleep easier if I know he’s with you.”
The next day was the funeral. Six hundred people and more showed up.
Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy, and Ballard the Perv were there. They told me how sorry they were and dredged up the old stories about Sherman’s adventures at school. I liked my friends, but they seemed very far away. Or maybe it was me; ever since I’d heard that Sherman had died I’d felt that there was a wall between me and everyone else. Everyone except Nefertiti.
I sat through the ceremony thinking that Sherman was my brother, my brother.
My mother’s husband—my uncle Skill—and I took opposite sides at the front of the casket.
The reception after the interment was held in the house that our grandfather Theodore Brownley had built. I hung around the corners, talking to people as little as possible. People talking and laughing and remembering things about Sherman just made me angry. Didn’t they realize that someone who was so much more had been taken? Didn’t they understand what Sherman was in this world?
That morning I’d broken up with my girlfriend of two years, Leora Dumas, because she said that Sherman had been a bad influence on me.
“He was crooked,” Leora said. “And you couldn’t see that he was holding you back.”
I was living with Leora because I didn’t make enough delivering papers to afford my own place. She wanted to get married, but I really didn’t have any interest in that. I guess Sherman dying meant that I had to move on, no matter what Leora said.
So what if I gambled with Sherman sometimes or drank too much or bought things I couldn’t afford? My cousin, my brother, made me feel that life was important, that I was important. Without him I was nobody.
“You look so much like him,” a woman said.
It was Natasha Koskov, from Brighton Beach. She was a breathless Russian with a long neck and lips like Mona Tremont, the first girl I ever really kissed.
“That’s what they say,” I replied, wondering where the words and light tone in my voice had come from.
“He loved you,” she said, looking into my brown eyes with her black ones.
“You wanna go get a drink?” I imagined Sherman asking.
“Yes,” Natasha Koskov replied.
We drank and kissed, went to her apartment, and made love. She called me Sherman, and after the first round I didn’t correct her.
I was another man that night. Natasha wasn’t loving me but Sherman—Sherman, who could not be erased from this world or her heart or mine.
Sometime after three in the morning I was walking from the subway toward Titi’s apartment building because I had no place else to go.
I hadn’t lived with my parents for three years, and the thought that my father was not my father kept me from calling them. I wondered if he had known, if he and my mother had kept the truth from me. Maybe that was why my mother showed me so little affection.
“Hey, you!” a man said from somewhere to my left.
I turned and saw a rough-skinned, earth-toned man wearing a hoodie. He carried a small pistol in his right hand. I’d had a lot to drink, but I was sober. I was coming back from a night of lovemaking, but I was downcast, brooding.
“Gimme yo’ got-damned wallet, main!”
He could have demanded anything else: my shoes, my baby finger, every cent I ever made. But it was Sherman’s wallet in my back pocket. It was my brother’s legacy this man was asking for.
I looked at him, and time slowed. Under a night-time lamppost his sludge-colored eyes were frightened, as mine should have been. I suppressed a smile, breathed in the darkness, and looked up suddenly as if seeing something surprising behind his back. It was just enough to cause him to falter and to give me time to reach out with both hands and tear the gun from his grip. He tried to grab it away, but I pulled back the hammer and steadied my right hand with my left. This was something Sherman had taught me with a pistol he kept in the top drawer of his bureau.
“Now I want your got-damned money, man!” I said on that dark and empty street. There were tears in my eyes.
The thief heard in my grief-stricken, strained voice that he was as close to dead as he was likely to be before that final breath. He reached into a pocket and came out with a wad of cash that he’d probably robbed from other brooding late-night strollers. He held the cash out to me.
“Drop it on the concrete and haul yo’ ass outta here ’fore I shoot you dead.”
It was the terrified look on the mugger’s face that made me decide to kill him. I was outraged that a man who made his living robbing others would not be brave enough to face the consequences of his crimes. His cowardice negated any claim to clemency.
I was just about to shoot the mugger when a bright light flashed, a siren chirped, and a magnified voice called out, “Drop the weapon! This is the police!”
In that moment I argued internally about the action I should take. One side of my mind said that the mugger should die, no matter what some bright light and bullhorn said.