What he felt now was no teenaged crush but a big man’s love and lust, a powerful pull that told him he would not enjoy his life fully if she were not close to him, if he could not talk to her, if he could not always be in the orbit of her face. So he had resolved that if he wanted her, he would have to know what she knew, walk where she had walked, and figure out the things that had given shape to her. Alexandra Park was one of those things.
He’d never met Jackie’s father, but there was a tall man, just as tall as he, coming toward him who was unmistakably him. Oku felt nervous but realized that Jackie’s father didn’t know him, so he could easily pass him by. The man had a limp to his walk, probably not a limp from any injury but from some sense of style. His head leaned to one side the way black men in sixties movies leaned their heads. A comfortable thought passed through Oku. The brother was old school. It was that lean of the head that told him this was Jackie’s father. Jackie had the same slant, the same way of sizing you up at the same time as making you know that she was dangerous. Jackie resembled her mother more than her father, but his height and that threatening lean of his head Jackie had taken from him. He limped toward Oku, and assessing him as no threat, he walked by. Oku called to him: “Mr. Bernard.”
Jackie’s father stopped. “I know you, man?” he asked. Oku felt as if his answer had better be correct. In that “I know you, man?” was a challenge for respect. Oku recognized it. It was couched in another generation, but the machismo was recognizable. It was a question about dominance, and territory, it said, Don’t be trifling, and what the fuck do you want?
“No, sir,” Oku said with the required deference. “I’m a friend of Jackie’s, and I saw you and I just knew you had to be her father.”
“Oh yeah, that’s my girl, how you know her?”
He hadn’t said the right thing. The interrogation would get deeper now, the stakes were higher. “We went to high school together, sir.” He dropped the second “sir” in to reassure Jackie’s father of his total respect.
“She ain’t around today. Haven’t seen her in a week or so, you know. She down at that store …” Jackie’s father trailed off as if he’d found something disturbing in what he’d said.
“Oh, I was just passing by. You tell her I said hi, eh?” Jackie’s father looked at him quizzically. “Oku’s my name, sir.” Oku reached his hand out, and Jackie’s father took it.
“All right, young brother, all right. See you on the tip.” He limped on, going toward Queen Street.
Oku watched him go, then regretted not asking him to go for a beer or something. Maybe he’d lost an opportunity, but he didn’t want Jackie feeling he was prying, he didn’t want to repeat that incident years ago when her mother’s attention got him the cold shoulder. So he watched Jackie’s father go. There was the old player in her father; the hand clasping his had been cool yet brotherly. The face was slightly twisted in the way that older black men’s faces invariably were. Something wry seemed to be constantly slipping across their lips; some knowing tale, as if to say, “Yes, I know that bullshit. Took me a life to figure it out and I still ain’t got it. Beat that.” One day his own face would register that truth, but he hoped not.
As Jackie’s father disappeared west along Queen, Oku felt wistful for him. He felt the concentration of the man, the insecurities that had to be gathered up, the opportunities that were imagined but never came, the vanity that his body allowed him, all gathered in that limp like some bird feigning weakness to protect what was valuable. He looked around at the perilous stuff of Alexandra Park.
What must have scared Jackie was Vanauley Way. The scarred brown buildings. The dry hot walkway in the summer, the dry cold walkway in the winter. Her coats with the polyester stuffing coming out, the nylon tearing so easily. Why couldn’t they have planted a good tree anywhere here, why couldn’t they have laid out beds of plants and flowers, a forsythia bush or two, a grove of hostas, some forget-me-nots, some phlox, smoke trees now and then, mint bushes and rosemary, why had it been so hard for the city to come up with a bit of beauty?
The narrow winding walkway, virtually empty in the daytime, scarred-looking, teemed with a ghostly, sometimes scary life at night. With one thought they could have made it beautiful, but perhaps they didn’t think that poor people deserved beauty. Lavender, for instance, could grow anywhere. No reason at all that the walkways, which were not built for cars, could not have been made into an oasis of flowers, grasses, bushes, with perhaps a cobbled walk. But at least lavender. Then at night it wouldn’t be that shadowy, that dim. And in the daytime people would have come out to front yards and puttered around, had a coffee, said “hello” and “how you doing?” to children, and “careful there, careful now.” In the nighttime the gloom would have been lit by people sitting in their gardens with lanterns, a little laughter would have passed in the air—not the kind of laughter that was derision and self-mockery or smirking at someone else’s folly or misfortune but real laughter from the small joy of life. There would have been wine and music, and not the kind of wine that you drank eventually to numb the inconsequential-to-anyone-else disaster of your life, and not the music that makes you remember a perfectly lovely time at the Paramount bitterly, but the music that makes you remember
