Composite illustration by Brian Groppe
Aretha belted out “Chain of Fools” from the neon and rosewood Seeburg Select-O-Matic jukebox. I was hunched over the pool table across from C-Boy in Pauline’s Grill, on a side street by the Fairgrounds. C-Boy, lean and lanky, tilting forward on his upright cue, watched me shank the eight ball off the side rail and spiral it from the pocket.
Goat Meat looked back down at the pinball machine he was playing, took a swallow from his bottle of strawberry Nehi soda, then flashed a pitiful look at me. He knew I wasn’t playing my top game, with $2 riding on a win. C-Boy saw advantage.
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“Curtis, that shot you could make backwards and blindfolded,” he crowed. It was all Goat Meat needed to hear. “C-Boy, don’t you know Minnesota Fats himself got nothing on this man!”
Goat Meat thought he could be the next Sam Cooke. He had a fine tenor voice, smooth dance steps, and pretty-boy good looks. While he was trying out with singing groups, he kept his RCA transistor radio tuned to WDIA, crooning with soul ballads.
It was late afternoon in the café. We were trying to figure out who could help us get jobs at the International Harvester plant. That would give us the shot we needed. Not even thinking about the troubles that were stirring in town.
“Don’t y’all listen? I already told you, my cousin Leander said he could get us on soon as he talked to the man,” Goat Meat assured. I wasn’t convinced. His cousin had been saying that for a month, and still no word had come for us to go to the plant.
“All we got to do is study up on farm machines and how to work on an assembly line so we ready when the time comes,” Goat Meat advised. “We talking maybe $1.50 an hour — you could get a nice ride with that and find that girl you used to like. I can get some new threads to wear to auditions.”
I wouldn’t have known C-Boy and Goat Meat if not for a brutal cold winter night when my salvage yard Plymouth Fury conked out at the corner of Beale and Fourth. Nobody was on the roads. Like guardian angels, they rolled up out of nowhere.
“Gee whiz!” C-Boy hollered. “It’s cold as a witch’s teat in Denmark out here.” Goat Meat shivered, aiming a flashlight under the hood in the freezing dark. Wind swirled light snow on the roadside. C-Boy knew cars. He could pull an engine from a car in the morning to the last bolt and have it all back together better than before by sundown. He jiggled the solenoid on the Fury, and I was back on the road.
Racking the balls for another game, I remembered it was late fall before I saw those guys again after that night. It was at a LeMoyne College basketball game. C-Boy’s grandmother lived across the street from the college in LeMoyne Gardens housing projects. Miss Odessa was known for pinto beans, cornbread, and fried chicken that made taste buds tap dance. C-Boy said when she smothered red potatoes and onions in a black cast-iron skillet. the aroma woke up nostrils in French Fort, three miles away on the river.
There was a basketball court near the projects, down Walker Avenue, across from the back side of Elmwood Cemetery. That’s where we were one vein-popping hot summer afternoon.
I remembered it because that was where love first hit me in the form of slender, hazel-eyed Jackie Hunt, who had a soft lilt to her voice that melted my heart like butter.
A while later, I started helping my Uncle Junior lay bricks for houses being built out past the state college. Me, C-Boy, and Goat Meat didn’t think much about the troubles going on in town. That was grown folks’ business.
Until the evening Uncle Junior, looking worried, told me we’d better keep to our neighborhoods until there was a cooling off, after some of the marching was over because he didn’t know which way things were headed. Nobody knew. The same way nobody knew what was in store for people earning a good living making farm equipment in Frayser.
A booming voice snapped me to attention like a surprise summer thunder burst. “Curtis, where’s your mind, man? Here comes Leander. I told you he’d come through for us!”
A Memphis public-relations professional, ANTHONY HICKS earned degrees from Arkansas State University and the University of Delaware. He has taught journalism at the University of Memphis and Southeast Missouri State University and worked as a reporter for the Tri-State Defender, The Commercial Appeal, and the Arkansas Gazette. He is the author of a poetry collection, Voices in the Light, and in his spare time reads and writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays, but “the joy of his life,” he says, are his three children.
SHORT AND SWEET (or not-so-sweet), the Very Short Story Contest welcomes entries of up to 750 words, maximum. Writers are encouraged to incorporate the city into their work. Winning stories will be published in Memphis and archived on memphismagazine.com. Whereas the fiction contest was in the past a once-a-year event, the Very Short Story Contest will publish a winning entry in each month’s issue. The Very Short Story Contest is presented by Novel, Memphis’ newest independent bookstore, where each winning author will be honored with a $200 gift certificate.
