The Future Has a Past (27 page)
He looks around the stools at the bar, forgets the hat again and says, “Gimme a drink, man!”
As Joe fixes the drink, Cool’s body jumps as if he’d been shot, I guess it was the reality hittin him. He grasped the bar with his arms stretched out, and leanin on the bar, he sobs . . . deep rackin sobs as he slowly crumbles to his knees on the floor. Between sobs he says, “I . . . don’t want . . . to be . . . no . . . loner. I don’t . . . want . . . to . . . be . . . no loser!”
During all this time Tan has got up from her stool and looks for Cool’s hat. She finds it crumbled up beneath the table. She walks back to the bar and picks up her glass and takes a drink, all while she is lookin at Cool in the strangest way; a cross between a grin and a smirk. Then she leans down to help Cool up. He lets her help him. She puts his lucky hat on his head as she tells him, “Come on, honey, you need some company . . . Come on with Tan-Tan.” She does not say it like “everything will be alright.” Just with a smirk.
As they slowly walk toward the door to go out of the bar, Tan looks back over her shoulder to Joe and smiles.
As they go through the door, Cool’s lucky hat falls off again and rocks back and forth on the floor for a time. Joe comes from behind the bar, again, and goes to pick up the hat. He looks at it a moment, then opens the door, leans out and hollers to Cool.
“Hey! Man! You left your new lucky hat!!”
I untied my apron, came out that kitchen, hugged my nephew “good-bye” and went home and sat in my own red swing and thought about all that. Yes mam!
J. California Cooper
The Future Has a Past
J. California Cooper is the author of five collections of short stories, including
Homemade Love
, winner of the 1989 American Book Award, and the novels
The Wake of the Wind
,
Family
, and
In Search of
Satisfaction
. She lives in northern California.
Also by J. California Cooper
A Piece of Mine
Homemade Love
Some Soul to Keep
Family
The Matter Is Life
In Search of Satisfaction
Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime
The Wake of the Wind
Copyright
©
2000 by J. California Cooper
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
These stories are a work of fiction. Any references to real events, businesses,
organizations, and locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of
reality and authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Cooper, J. California.
The future has a past: stories / J. California Cooper.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Contents: A shooting star—A filet of soul—The eagle flies—The lost and the found.
1. Afro-American women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O5874 F8 2000
813’.54—dc21 00-034602
eISBN: 978-0-307-42864-6
v3.0