The Boy in the Black Suit Read online

  Dad cracked a joke about her being a queen. “Damn right!” she replied, and Mr. Ray was right there to cosign.

  “The queen of your house, this block, Bed-Stuy—hell, Daisy, you the queen of all of Brooklyn!” Mr. Ray joked. “And guess what? Your throne will be right here waiting for you when you come home.”

  She never came home, but we appreciated Mr. Ray’s positivity. He was always that way—a good guy. And even though I trusted him, did I really want to work at the funeral home with him? I mean, it wasn’t him I was worried about. It was just the whole death thing, and the fact that I would have to be around sad people all the time. Losing my mom was already damn near too much for me to deal with, so being around a bunch of strangers dealing with the same crap just seemed like hell.

  But the way Mr. Ray was talking, hell paid pretty good. And even though I didn’t buy the whole “You wont be able to eat here” crap, I didn’t want to risk it. But still, I didn’t know if I could really do it. A funeral home?

  “Thanks Mr. Ray,” I said, tapping the ink pen on the application. “But I don’t think I can do that. It’s just . . . I just . . .” I struggled to explain why, but I could tell by the way he looked at me that I didn’t really have to.

  “No need to explain, son,” he said, putting his hand up. “Trust me, I get it.”

  I looked down at the application, embarrassed. Even though Mr. Ray said he understood where I was coming from, I still felt a little stupid turning down his offer when the only other option was to work in a grimy chicken spot. But on the other hand, it just didn’t seem like a good idea to take a job somewhere where I’d have to relive my mom’s funeral everyday. Like being paid to replay the worst day of my life over and over again.

  Mr. Ray put his hand on my shoulder. “Just let me know if you change your mind.” I didn’t look up. I just nodded and started filling out the address line, signing myself up for fry-duty. But it was either that or die-duty. Lose-lose.

  As soon as Mr. Ray turned around to walk back toward the counter, the door swung open and a young girl came rushing in, her hand pressed tight to her mouth, her cheeks bulging from her face. And before she could get to the bathroom—hell, before she could even get all the way inside—she spewed red, lumpy slime all over the already sticky floor. It looked like that old-lady pudding. What’s it called? Tapioca? Yeah. It was like tapioca. But red. And if there’s one thing I just can’t deal with, it’s puke. Two things, really—tapioca and puke. I just can’t. Everything about throw-up is gross. The way it looks, the way it smells, the way it sounds. All of it. Straight-up nasty. So when this girl came in chucking her lunch, I sprung from my chair and damn near jumped on Mr. Ray. I literally almost knocked him over.

  “What the—” Mr. Ray whipped around after hearing the belching and hacking sound of spit-up, along with my chair sliding back from the under the table and my footsteps running up on him. “Clara!” he shouted. “Clara! You got a situation out here!”

  I stood next to Mr. Ray, but faced the opposite way. I looked straight ahead at Renee and the other customers who were also grossed out, while Mr. Ray focused on the sick kid, who I could hear heaving.

  Renee stretched her neck to see what was happening, and once she saw the mess, she just tightened her lips and shook her head. Like this was normal. “Clara, we need a clean-up,” she said in a bored voice.

  “Clara!” Mr. Ray barked again.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!” Clara yelped. She came through a door on the side of the kitchen, rolling a yellow mop bucket. A guy followed behind her with what looked like a bag of sand and one of those big orange cones.

  “Jesus,” Clara said, passing me. I locked my eyes on the chicken. I couldn’t stand to see the puke, because if I had seen it, they’d have had to clean up two tapiocas. “Put that stuff down and go get her some water,” Clara said to the guy with the sand.

  The dude ran back toward the kitchen and in a flash came back with a cup of water.

  “Sit down,” Clara said to the girl.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” the girl cried over and over again, and I could tell she was lifting the cup to her mouth because her voice changed. “I’m so sorry. I just . . . couldn’t make it to the bathroom.” She sounded embarrassed, and to be honest, I was pretty embarrassed too. I mean, I was already feeling a way when I turned down the job Mr. Ray offered me, but now I was visibly scared of upchuck and I just knew the girl at the register was looking at me act like a pussy. So, yeah—pretty embarrassed.

  “Next in line!” Renee called. Turns out she wasn’t paying me no mind. She wasn’t tripping about anything. For her this was just another day at the job. I didn’t know how anyone could still have an appetite, especially since the whole place smelled like old, wet socks now, but people went on ordering.

  Mr. Ray faced the front of the restaurant and put his arm around me. “All good, Matthew,” he said. “Go ahead and finish up your application. Hell, they should hire you just for having to endure that!” He chuckled to himself and moved toward the register.

  “Wait. Mr. Ray.” I reached out and grabbed his arm. He turned back toward me. “Will I . . . uh . . . will I have to touch dead people?” Honest question.

  He crossed his arms. “Do you want to?”

  “No.”

  “Then, no.”

  I weighed my options. Funerals suck. The possibility of not being able to eat my favorite fast food, dealing with random crazies who come in and talk trash, and mopping up throw-up really, really sucks.

  “Okay,” I said to Mr. Ray.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mr. Ray smiled. “Okay,” he said with a nod. “C’mon, you can start right now.”

  I followed him up to the register. I set Clara’s pen on the counter while Mr. Ray reached in his suit jacket and pulled out a few cancer pamphlets and left them in front of Renee’s register, like they were some kind of tip or something.

  “Give these to your grandma,” he said while we gathered up all the buckets of chicken.

  “You got it,” Renee said nicely as we headed toward the door. I held my breath as me and Mr. Ray tiptoed over the pile of sand that covered whatever was left of the vomit, leaving the application with only my name and half of my address on the table.

  “So, who’s funeral is it up there?” I asked Mr. Ray as we laid the chicken out on platters. The repast (I actually didn’t know that’s what they’re called, but it’s the dinner after the funeral—the repast) was happening in the basement of the funeral home, and the actual service was going on upstairs. The only reason I knew that some funerals happen in the funeral home is because we used to always see people standing outside of Ray’s dressed in all black, hugging, just like they do at funerals that happen at churches. The good thing about Ray’s Funeral Home is, at least the AC worked.

  “You know Rhonda Jameson?” Mr. Ray asked.

  He placed a breast next to a leg.

  “Ms. Jameson died?”

  “No. Ms. Jameson is fine. Her father passed last week.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, at least she had him for a long time.”

  “Yeah.” Still, he shook his head. “But it never gets any easier.”

  Mr. Ray put these big, really nice bowls on the table and was scooping out spoonfuls of canned greens. I have to admit, the food area looked pretty good. He had tablecloths down and fake flowers on the tables (I hate real flowers, but I’ll get to that), and had me set up the cushioned fold-up chairs instead of the regular, hard-butt ones.

  After all the food was out and all the tables were set, there really wasn’t much else to do, but I still didn’t want to go home yet. At the same time I also hoped Mr. Ray didn’t start digging into how I was feeling and all that. I mean, I know people mean well when they ask those kinds of questions, but at the end of the day, they are stupid questions
. How am I feeling? Well, let me think. My mother’s funeral was a couple days ago, so I damn sure ain’t happy.

  Lucky for me, Mr. Ray didn’t ask anything like that. He actually didn’t say nothing about my mother at all. Instead he started talking about what he was like when he was my age.

  “Man,” Mr. Ray said with a sigh, “you better than I was. You responsible, y’know?” He leaned against the wall and crossed his ankles.

  “I guess,” I said, unsure of where this conversation was going.

  “I mean, I wasn’t thinking about no job or nothing like that. I was thinking about one thing only—skirts.”

  “You were thinking about wearing skirts?” I asked, shocked.

  “No, man! I didn’t mean”—his raspy voice sounded even more scratchy when he got excited—“I mean girls, man. Skirts. We were thinking about girls. Like your buddy, Chris.”

  Mr. Ray seemed disappointed that I didn’t pick up on his old-school slang.

  “Oh.” I smirked. Chris definitely thought about girls. “Well, I think about them too. A lot. I just also think about other stuff, I guess.” I didn’t really see the big deal in that. Girls are great. But so is graduating from high school and leaving it behind. Forever. Seemed pretty basic to me.

  “And that’s why you’re different. Man, me and my brother Robbie done wrecked many a car, taking our eyes off the road to check out some lady’s hind-parts.”

  Hind-parts? I snickered and Mr. Ray started laughing too. He probably thought I was laughing at him and his brother, but what it really was, was the word hind-parts. Such an old-people word.

  The whole time we talked I could hear the people upstairs moving around. I couldn’t make out voices, but every footstep came through. I wondered what the people at Mr. Jameson’s funeral were doing. If they were laughing or crying, or both. If someone was whispering stupid comments to the person next to them about how good Mr. Jameson looked dead. If Ms. Jameson was exploding. Like I did.

  “Mr. Ray, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” I could tell he thought I was going to ask him something about girls by the way he crossed his legs the other way.

  But I didn’t.

  “Can I go up there?”

  “Where?” he asked, confused.

  I pointed up. “Up there? To the funeral. Just for a second.”

  “Why?” He cocked his head slightly to the side.

  I just shrugged. I couldn’t tell him why because I’m not sure I really knew why at the time. I just all of a sudden wanted to. I needed to.

  Mr. Ray looked at me for a few seconds, hard. Then he sucked his teeth. “Come here, Matthew,” he said, taking off his suit jacket. “If you gonna go up there, be respectful.” He held the coat open so I could slip my arms in. “And sit in the back.”

  THE FUNERAL OF CLARK “SPEED-O” JAMESON

  Upstairs, the funeral home was pretty much the same as downstairs, except much darker and no tables. Just rows of padded fold-ups and a wooden podium in the front. The lights were dimmed, which was very different from the bright lights in the church at my mother’s funeral. The darkness definitely made it seem more serious. Plus it hid you better in case you exploded.

  Robbie Ray, Mr. Ray’s younger brother, was the MC for the funeral, kind of like how the preacher is when you have one at a church. But Robbie Ray wasn’t no preacher. As a matter of fact, he was pretty much still the same man who was crashing cars looking at “hind-parts” when he was younger, except now he was older. But he still looked young. Way younger than Mr. Ray. And he was always dressed like he was looking for a date. Tight suits with his shirt always unbuttoned down to the middle of his chest like we live on some island or something. He always wore gold watches, gold chains, had a gold slug in the front of his mouth, and wore a gold nugget ring on his pinky. My mother used to always clown him, saying he was stuck somewhere between 1970 and outer space.

  “And now we’re going to have a few words from some of Mr. Jameson’s friends,” Robbie said, his voice deep like a late-night radio show host’s. Sometimes I thought he was making it that way on purpose, just to go with his whole style. But I could never tell for sure.

  He moved his finger over the program to make sure he called the right name. “Mr. McCray?”

  I slipped into a seat in the back like Mr. Ray told me. I felt a little silly, not because I was at a random funeral, but because my arms looked like tentacles in Mr. Ray’s huge suit jacket. It fit me okay in the shoulders because Mr. Ray was skinny, but the sleeves were way too long. I kept pulling them up to my wrist, and tried to keep my fingers spread out so they wouldn’t slide back down.

  Next to me was an old lady dressed in a purple skirt and a black and purple polka-dot shirt. Who said you had to wear all black to a funeral, I thought as I looked down at my blue jeans and green and brown Nikes. I glanced over at her and nodded. She gave me an awkward look. At first I thought maybe she knew I didn’t belong there. But then she kept wiggling her nose like she was going to sneeze, so I figured it was all the cologne coming from Mr. Ray’s suit coat. I don’t know what it is about old men and cologne. My mother used to say that when men get old they think anything that smells bad can kill germs better than soap and hot water, so they either bathe in liquor or cologne. I wanted to lean over to that old lady and tell her that I was sorry for the stench and that I hoped it didn’t cause her more grief than she was already feeling. But I didn’t. I just made whatever face I thought looked like it was saying I was sorry, and nodded my head to her.

  “Afternoon, afternoon,” a mumble came over the speakers. “I’m A. J. McCrary. Not McCray. McCrary.” The old, bent-over man peered at Robbie Ray for messing up his name.

  “Anyway, y’all know how Clark got the name Speed-O?” A. J. McCrary leaned on the podium and spoke into the mic. His face looked like leather, and his eyes were big and glassy. He only had white hair on the sides of his head, almost like he was wearing ear muffs made of pure cotton.

  “Y’all wanna know?” he asked again, his voice pitchy and weird like all the teeth in his mouth were loose.

  Some people in the crowd grunted, a few others shouted, “Tell it!”

  “Oh, I’m a tell it,” he said, adjusting the microphone.

  “One time, a long time ago when we was kids, there used to be this old doughnut shop over on DeKalb all the cops used to hang at. So we outside of there, and Clark starts talking to me about the pig this and the pig that, and that he been reading black newspapers and checkin’ what Malcolm X been saying up in Harlem. This was the sixties, so you know how it was. ’Fros, people changing their names and all that.”

  The older people in the crowd nodded their heads in agreement. I glanced over at the lady next to me and imagined her with an afro. Yikes.

  “So Clark kicking all this revolution stuff, and I told him, ‘Man you ain’t ’bout nothin’. You just yappin’ your trap. But you ain’t gonna do a”—the old man caught himself about to cuss—“a daggone thing.”

  People started giggling.

  “He said, ‘Oh, yeah? Watch this.’ Next thing I know this fool come running out the doughnut shop with one doughnut in his hand and one in his mouth, and a young white cop running behind him hollerin’ ’bout his doughnut gettin’ stolen. Can you imagine that? A cop yellin’ out, ‘Thief, thief !’”

  Everybody started laughing at this crazy story. Even me.

  “I didn’t see him for a few days after that,” Mr. McCrary continued, “but when I did, he told me he never got caught! And to prove it, he told me he had the other doughnut in his house for me. He said Brother Malcolm talked about whatever you do for yo’self, you do for your brother. So the other doughnut was mine. I couldn’t believe it—one, because that’s crazy; two, because he risked his life over some doughnuts; and three, because he actually outran the police! You know how fast you gotta be to get away f
rom the cops . . . on foot? Pretty damn”—he caught himself again—“daggone fast! So I started calling him Speed-O, and it stuck.”

  He laughed and began coughing harshly into the mic, digging into his back pocket for a handkerchief to spit in. Robbie Ray reached out for him to help him to his seat, though Mr. McCrary didn’t look like he was quite ready to sit down. But realizing that his time was up, he looked back into the crowd and pressed his lips to the mic as if he was kissing it.

  “We’ll miss him, and many blessings to his family. Thank you,” he added quickly, his voice now way too loud, popping through the speakers.

  Everybody shook their heads, confirming that Mr. Jameson was that kind of guy.

  Robbie Ray came bopping back up to the mic to introduce the next speaker. I kept feeling something sticking me in my chest, so I reached my hand into the jacket to see what kept poking me. Of course, not thinking, I pulled out what had to be at least ten cancer pamphlets. For a moment I forgot whose jacket I had on. The lady next to me shot her eyes over at me. I just made the weird robot face I make when I’m taking pictures—big eyes, tight lips—and tried to stuff the pamphlets back in the pocket as quickly as possible. Especially since I didn’t know what Mr. Jameson died of. Might’ve been cancer. That would’ve been awkward.

  “Mr. Wallace,” Robbie said next in his weird, fake sexy voice.

  A giant rose from the second row. Seriously, the biggest man I’ve ever seen in real life. His head was the size of a basketball, and his back was like a king-size mattress. Except made of bricks.

  “Good afternoon,” the giant said.

  I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This humongous monster of a man had the voice of a six-year-old. High, squeaky. Like, cute. I could hear that weird sound when you try to hold in a laugh, but a little bit leaks out—like a mouth fart—happening all over the church. People were trying not to crack up, but his voice made it so hard.

  “Um, my name is Mouse,” he said, leaning down to get to the microphone. His hands, the size of oven mittens, were gripping the sides of the wooden podium. He could’ve ripped it apart like nothing if he wanted to.