Devil's Night (35 page)

“Two,” I said. “I'm divorced now.”

“You take care of those kids, Bill,” he said in the tone he once used to tell me to do my homework. “You take care of them, be a father. That's the most important thing.”

“Come on, Charles,” I said. “I don't need you to tell me that.”

He grinned, the old Charles. “I'm still older than you, and badder than you,” he said. “I can still tell you what to do, and I can still beat your bootie to make you do it, too. I don't care how many gray rabbi-ass beards you got.”

Charles and I sat for a couple of hours on the picnic bench, drinking bourbon out of tall glasses and talking about old times. A lot of the kids we had gone to school with were dead; others were in trouble with drugs or in jail. He shook his head at their folly, and at his own good fortune. We both knew that he could have been them.

“I wouldn't be twenty years old again for anything,” he said. “I was so confused all the time, it was pitiful. I didn't have nobody to turn to for help, you know? I needed a father. I only saw mine twice,
once when I was seven years old, and again just before he died. I always envied you for having a father,” he said.

“How did you know how to be a father?” I asked.

“Instinct,” he said. “I knew what I wanted and what I needed, and that's what I've tried to be for my children. When you don't have a model, you just got to make things up as you go along.”

One of Charles's sons came back to visit us. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that gave him a mild, scholarly look and a black-and-orange high school jacket. “Say hello to Mr. Chafets, son,” Charles said. “He's an old, old friend.”

“Hello, Mr. Chafets,” the boy said, shaking hands self-consciously. “I know who you are. You live in Israel. Dad has an article about you from one of the newspapers. He keeps it upstairs in his bedroom. He said that someday you'd come to visit.” He turned to Charles. “Dad, what's for dinner?”

“I'll fix you something when I get home, son,” he said. “First, I got to pick up your brother from football practice.”

The sun was going down when we got back from picking up Charles's son. The two of us sat in the backyard, drinking the last of the bourbon. “Charles,” I asked, “did you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you weren't black?”

“Sure I wonder,” he said. “You wonder about all kinds of things. It's a disadvantage, no doubt about that. There's still a hell of a lot of discrimination in the world. My children got opportunities I never dreamed about, but opportunities don't mean nothing if you can't take advantage of them. And everybody, black or white, needs some help to do that.”

Charles gazed at the large vacant lot just beyond his chain link fence. “Someday I'm going to buy that property,” he said, “and the first thing I'm going to do is have a family reunion. I dream of that, right back there.”

He gestured with his eyes to a large black metal smoker next to the garage. “I'll be over here cooking bar-be-cue—and you know I
can cook some bar-be-cue—and my children and grandchildren will be gathered all around. They'll even come up here from Georgia. Then at night, everybody will be sleeping in the house, and we'll all be together. Won't that be a motherfucker, though; won't that be a stone motherfucker?”

“You've done fine, haven't you, Charles?” I said. I was feeling the bourbon, and the long, happy day we had spent together.

“Yes I have, Bill,” he said, looking in the direction of his cozy house, where his kids were doing their homework. “It took me some time, and it hasn't been easy, but yeah, got-dammit, thank God, I've made it over.”