Sewanee Review

One of my questions about “Bartow Station,” from Jamel Brinkley’s second collection, Witness, is what makes the story seem so bottomlessly deep, since really it’s quite simple, quite contained in its materials. Narrated by an unnamed, youngish man, it takes place over a few months, a single summer, with a couple of important excursions into the past. It’s comprised of three interwoven strands: the narrator’s new job as a delivery man for UPS; his strained, would-be relationship with a youngish woman, Zoelle; and the defining relationship of his life, his bond with his cousin, Troy, who died some years before the summer the story recounts. One of Brinkley’s great subjects, in both of his books, is the way men—brothers, friends, fathers, and sons—relate to one another, the way certain models of masculinity give form to and so, maybe necessarily, deform expressions of love, both love between men, and love between men and women. One [End Page 18] way of thinking about “Bartow Station”—and this is true of other of Brinkley’s stories, like “A Family” and “Clifton’s Place” from A Lucky Man, “The Let-Out” and “Comfort” in Witness—is as a narrative of a present relationship cut across, impeded, in “Bartow Station” finally made impossible, by a relationship from the past.

We don’t learn all that much about the story’s unnamed narrator, though after twenty pages we’ll feel we know him deeply; one of the marvels of Brinkley’s work is how economical he can be with backstory, how our knowledge of his characters—who are often folded in on themselves, curled around some hidden grief—comes from inhabiting the experience of their lives, not from the delivery of facts. The story opens on the narrator’s first day as a delivery man for UPS; he’s sitting on a bench in the locker room getting razzed by Jimmy, a more experienced driver who will train him. The narrator’s shoes are all wrong—Oxfords that will destroy his feet—and so are his socks (white, not regulation black or brown); he’s sure to get reamed out by the bosses. More important, his attitude is all wrong; a “unicorn,” Jimmy says, “hired off the street,” he takes for granted a job that others covet. “This is just a gig, man,” the narrator says. “I’m not here to collect a pension.” We’ll learn that he has dropped out of college, twice; there’s the slightest hint, late in the story, that maybe he thinks of himself as an artist, or would like to. (“I had no ambitions then of being an artist,” he will say of his younger self; my sense of his current ambitions hangs on that then.) In any event, something has knocked him off course, into a job he feels is beneath him.

It’s a great job for a protagonist, though, since it keeps him in motion, bringing him into contact with an endless stream of others, any of whom might spark a story. The narrator finds himself frequently making deliveries to a flower shop, something he comes to enjoy; in the early mornings, the mirrored interior makes him feel [End Page 19] like he’s stepping into a meadow. He flirts with one of the women who works there, at first casually, courteously—and then “my courtesy starts getting away from me, growing bit by bit into something else, something I don’t know how to control.” It’s largely this woman—her name (she will prod him into asking it) is Zoelle—who pushes things along, coaxing the narrator into playfulness, giving him a flower and telling him it’s a ticket. “All that flirting . . . and you actually have no idea what to do,” she teases. The narrator’s response is to feel, literally, bewildered, “swept up, engulfed,” utterly estranged from himself. “So deeply lost in the meadow,” he thinks, recalling his earlier impression of the shop, “you surrender all sense of not only where you are but also, briefly, who.” Brinkley’s work is...