Well, it’s an opportunity, really, a film, and the pay is
Oh for God’s sake, Baby, don’t pretend it’s the pay
But it matters to me, it does
A red stream like Peter Coolley’s bloody nose in math class wends its way along the cakey white banks of scum, around my fleshy knuckles.
Anyway, it’s just a meeting. Jerry
Jerry is a parasite
Turns thin when it mixes with the water on my wet wrist and runs in a sheet down my arm.
Jerry said the director asked for me, and I don’t always want to be saying no. Besides, now we’ll have Louise
My heart is racing, racing. My finger throbs, feels hot.
You don’t care what I think. Why are you asking me
I do, I’m
You’re a cunt
Sparks and spangly pictures crowd outside my vision, and the kitchen begins to disappear behind the black spilling around me.
“What’s happened to you, lickle one?”
It’s her. She’s bent over me, wearing a long brown overcoat and a delicate hat. The chain on her glasses swings above my face. Dilly is in the doorway and he’s dropped her bags. In an instant Louise has lifted me by an arm and is shoving my hand beneath the faucet.
“It’s OK. It’s arright,” she says, her voice soft as a bunny’s fur. She’s wiping the waxy clots from my fingers onto her own. “Lemme see. You’re OK. Jes’ a lickle glass. Jes’ a peeny-weeny piece. But yah hand’s so greasy.”
She looks back at Dilly, and then she looks me in the eye and smiles. Gold.
“What yah doing the dishes for? Dat’s not yah job.”
Dr. Goodman has hair like cauliflower. He holds a needle up to the light, so big he could use it to make clothes for a giant. The room is chilly and smells like my father’s favorite drink. I’m sitting on a table covered in paper that crinkles under my legs, and I’m frightened and my finger throbs. Louise holds my good hand in hers. Together they look like chocolate and butter. We left Dilly in the waiting room, twisting his cap.
“Don’t watch,” says Dr. Goodman.
I try to concentrate instead on the zigzags in Louise’s coat.
“Still now.”
I hold my breath. Louise has said it’s all right to cry, but I’ve decided I want to be brave, for her. The first stitch feels like burning water. Louise holds me tight. Zigzag, goes the cloth of her coat. Zigzag. Zigzag. Louise smiles at me. Zigzag. On and on, the burning water on my hand and zigzag. Zigzag.
“That should do it.”
Dr. Goodman is finished. I look at the fatty part of my pointing finger. It’s rusty brown from the medicine the nurse swabbed on, and across it run four black X’s, just like the stitching on the back of my blue jeans. It’s swollen and pulses with heat. The nurse has begun to gently roll gauze around my hand when the door springs open. All in a sweet-smelling rush, Mom appears, waved in I think by an unseen magic wand. Her butterscotch hair is falling from its twist.
“Oh, Snooks!” she cries. When I look at her, her eyes are drowning. They’re swimming with tears and a dark kind of trouble that wakes Cat and frightens me. I turn away from her, toward Louise.
Back at home, Mom rushes about, turning on all the lights till the house glows like a birthday cake. She shows Louise her room and then spreads a picnic on the living-room floor. Everywhere around us are paper parcels from Schwarz and Bonwits and the food shop in the basement of Bloomingdale’s. The kitchen is still a mess.
“It’s grand, just us girls. Right?” Mom says, pouring grape juice into a wineglass for me.
She pushes the plates of salmon and cheese toward Louise and, from time to time, glances toward the front door. The brimmy, drowning look in her eyes hasn’t quite gone away. I wonder where my Hank is. Addy’s father is wonderful, Louise, an absolute genius. You’ll like him, I’m sure. Louise drinks water and sits carefully, her legs tucked beneath her. When I’m away you may have to fill in for me a bit, but he cooks, mostly looks out for himself. Right, Addy? I lie on the floor and train my new binoculars on Louise’s face. She has a mole like a pencil eraser just above her lip.
When Louise goes to unpack, my mother takes me to bed. She tries to help me undress, but I pull away from her, not wanting to look into her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Snooks. I really am.” She sits on the edge of my bed. “You’re cross with me,” she says softly. “So is your father.”
My pajamas are in a heap on the floor and, feeling cold now, I get into them quickly. On the other side of the wall, I can hear bureau drawers opening and closing. Louise hums a pretty tune. I imagine her moving gently about, floating like a dancer. Mom is crying now, and the sound of it makes me feel sick. Keeping my back to her, I get into bed and snap out the light. I’m achy and tired and want to go away from the day.
“Everything is going to be fine, Addy. I promise,” she says in the darkness. “It’ll all be just fine.”
I listen to the sounds on the other side of the wall and find I cannot keep my eyes open. It is much later, I think, when my father returns home.
Jesus, this place is a fucking pigsty
Please keep your voice down, Hank. I got back late and
Look at this. Look at this!
It’s my fault. I said I’m sorry. The meeting went on
Thank Jerry for me, will you? Tell him I couldn’t be more pleased. Really.
Up rises furry spine. I wait for the scratch of his sandy tongue, for nails on the bedpost, for the long night ahead. But when my father’s voice recedes, I hear only the sound of Louise’s steady breathing, close by. Cat turns and takes his leave.
7
SEE THAT MOUNTAIN over there?” Philip said, pointing to a tiny island just off shore. Together, its two uneven hillocks resembled a sleeping woman, her back to us. “It’s called Morne des Serpents. It used to be a volcano. A long time ago a giant boa constrictor, four hundred feet, crawled from the sea and settled at the bottom of the hole.”
We were sitting at a table that had been plunked down in the sand outside a waterfront bar, waiting for word on the Cadillac. My head now cooled, I was just about to apologize for the trouble I’d caused and insist on paying for the damage when Philip began to describe our surroundings. He leaned in close to me, his expression grave.
“She stayed in there and, over the years, had thousands of babies. Twisting and turning on top of each other. Serpent stew.”
My flesh crawled. Philip brought his voice down to a whisper.
“If you’re foolish enough to go up there? Well, my aunt Marva knew a lady who did. If you go up there and look down on them, you die RIGHT ON THE SPOT!”
With the last words he slammed his palm down, making me jump, the uneven legs of the chair pitching me sideways. I hung on to the table to stop myself from falling over. Breaking up with laughter, Philip reached out and helped me right myself, then smacked me on the shoulder. I watched him as he kept laughing, his gangly legs poking up around the sides of the table, and thought he looked about twelve years old, which was around the same age he was acting. Philip, it seemed, had a unique way of making me feel stupid. He was beginning to get on my nerves.
“Don’t worry,” he said, grinning now. “He never bothers with white people.”
“That why you’re still alive?” I asked, unable to check my sarcasm.
Philip tucked his chin back in an attitude of mock indignity.
“Shit, no. I ain’t white. I’z a nee-gro!”
Between our table and the water, a man in dreadlocks and a threadbare UC Berkeley T-shirt squatted on the beach, scaling a pile of fish. He dropped his head, trying to hide his laughter. Until then, I hadn’t known he was listening to us.
I was flummoxed by Philip’s looks. The photos of the boys that Lou had had in her room were small and, as I remembered them, bent and faded. I couldn’t even say for sure, after twenty years, if they were color or black-and-white. Maybe I’d seen only what I’d expected to find.
So what of Lou’s husband, the father of these men? I recalled his name suddenly. Errol.
Errol.
Lou’s voice again, clear as the sound of seawater washing the shore just ahead of us. I closed my eyes for an instant and a figure, entirely in shadow, came to me. That’s all there was. In my mind, Errol had always been a dark man in darkness and nothing more. I knew the boys had a father but — now I wondered why — I had pretended he didn’t exist. For me, there were only women on St. Clair. Women and boys. Errol.
I turned my attention back to Philip, who was bugging his eyes out at me and grinning like Stepin Fetchit. I had dozens of questions, but I didn’t want to ask any of them. I resolved to keep quiet and ignore Philip’s patronizing. He didn’t seem to notice or care what I was thinking. Finished with his routine, he cuffed me lightly on the arm.
“You sure you don’t want a beer?”
I swirled the ice around in the pulpy bottom of my pineapple juice and shook my head.
“I got the good skin. Like my pappy,” he said, stretching himself and revealing his tanned, hairy stomach.
Philip, it was plain to see, had a beautiful body. I looked away and out at the little whitecaps in the harbor. Three pelicans swooped down, dropped their prehistoric beaks into the water, and took off again. Deeply uncomfortable, I felt compelled to talk.
“Is that why Derek’s so angry?”
“Oh, Derek woulda been pissed if he’d been born the Duke of Windsor.”
“So I shouldn’t take it personally.”
“Well, yeah, you probably should. But so what.”
I turned back to Philip, who was smiling warmly at me now. My curiosity was beginning to get the better of me.
“Has he always been like this?” I asked.
He gave my question some thought and shrugged.
“Yeah. No. Probably. I didn’t really grow up with him, so I can’t say for sure. But he wasn’t so mingy, tight like that, when we were real small. He’s suffered a lot of disappointment, my brother.”
“What do you mean you didn’t grow up with him?”
“I grew up with Errol in Eldertown, mostly. With my stepmother, Patrice, till she sent me to school in the States. I never spent much time with my real mumma till the last few years, after Patrice died and a lot of shit started to come down.”
“When did they divorce?” I asked, trying hard now to recall what I knew.
Philip began to laugh again. But this time he wasn’t mocking me. I’d struck a nerve.
“Oh, they weren’t married, Errol and Louise! Don’t you know what they say down here? ‘If you’re white, it’s all right; if you’re brown, stick around; but if you’re black, GET BACK!’ ”
“Wait, is your father white?” I asked, incredulous.
Sobering up, Philip leaned on the table and looked down at his arm and mine.
“Nah. Not white. He’s like me.” He ran his finger across my hand. The contrast was great. “He’s not real white, like you.”
Reflexively, I pulled away, and we both turned to look for the waiter. Just then, a man who had helped with the boat came into the bar and told us that the tow truck had arrived. Philip thanked him and proffered a crumpled dollar bill.
“Let’s go see what this Clifton has to say.”
I followed Philip back to the car, where we found a man in bare feet squatting down, inspecting the fender. Half of his ass was exposed above the top of his ripped denim shorts, and his chest was bare. Philip caught my eye and, trying to make me laugh, stuck out his tongue and waggled it obscenely. The tow truck, a rusty jalopy, was fitted with a winch made of recycled metal and old rope.
“Hey, boss,” Philip said, eyeing the hook suspiciously.
“Yah, boss,” replied the mechanic, standing up and stroking the scraggly hairs on his chin.
“What yah say?”
“Mmm. Yah needing a new headlight, leastways,” he said, showing as he spoke a broad hole where his four front teeth should have been. “And a fender. Gonna need some front end work too. Big job, boss.”
“Well, can you get it running again or can’t you?” asked Philip, anxiety creeping into his tone.
“Me try.”
“You call up by the Alfred house and let me know.”
Clifton gave a toothless smile.
“Got no phone, Bakra Man.”
Philip sighed, took a wad of cash from his back pocket, and peeled off a few bills. I pulled out my own wallet, but Philip waved me away.
“Do what you can, then,” he said to Clifton. “I’ll check you later.”
When we got down the street a ways, I asked Philip the meaning of what the mechanic had called him.
“Nothing,” he said, stiffening.
“Come on.”
“It’s what slaves used to call plantation owners. It means well-endowed white guy. A jerk, basically.”
It was my turn to laugh, discovering too late that Philip’s sense of humor failed when he himself was the subject. We returned to the scene of the accident and I helped him wrap the sail, securing it across the boat’s little open hull. Philip walked around to her stern. Running his hand over a row of dislodged, chewed-up nails, he looked bereft for the first time since we’d met.
“They met in a movie house,” Philip said quietly.
“In the summer, we used to go nearly every night,” I told him, remembering the evenings at my grandmother’s beach house.
“Guess he wasn’t seeing her too clearly, in the dark,” he said, his mouth turned up in a smirk. His mind was a long way from the sidewalk where we stood.
Philip and I walked a circular route back through town and he gave me a bit of St. Clair history, a thumbnail sketch of its passage through Dutch, French, and English hands. He impressed me with the breadth of his knowledge. When I told him so, he shrugged.
“I was prelaw in college. Thought I’d come home and shake my fist, become president of St. Clair!”
“So what happened?”
Philip laughed.
“President of St. Clair? Please. I mean, who gives a shit? Anyway, I had other things to do. Family business to run. I’ll leave the show-boating to my papa.”
Errol, his son told me, was once an entertainer. He’d also been a politician, a taxi driver, a doorman at the Hotel Caribe, and a restaurateur whose famous charm had made him a minor Windward celebrity. All that was gone now, replaced by age and grief. Errol had probably earned his unhappiness, Philip conceded, though he really wasn’t a bad man. He had just, over a lifetime, let a lot of people down. Not the least being, of course, the woman he loved the most.
In 1964, when Errol Hodge met Louise Alfred, he was already a couple of years into a gig that seemed to suit him perfectly. Three nights a week, he headlined at Foxy’s Palace, thrilling to the attention and making enough money to spend the remainder of his time in other, more idle pursuits. “Back then, Foxy’s was the number one,” said Philip, with a touch of pride. A swank watering hole, it was the kind of place where tourists and locals mamboed and cha-chaed under the stars, and big-name performers regularly stopped in on their way back from Havana. With a limited vocal range and a couple of enormous feet suited to only the simplest of steps, Errol wasn’t exactly Harry Belafonte. But no matter. His light skin and devastating smile had a mesmerizing effect on the ladies. And Foxy, who discovered the young man wasting his looks as a shoe shine, paid him an enviable wage to headline when the big bands weren’t in town.
On his nights off, Errol invariably went to the movies. Down at the Eldertown Cinema, the only movie house on St. Clair, first-run American pictures played on a wide screen just weeks after their stateside debut. “Everybody got together there,” said Philip. “Catch the picture and then just hang around outside, liming, chatting each other up, till it was time to go home.” Errol loved the movies, but he loved people more. As popular offstage as on, he was at the center of any group and the very last one to depart when Bobsled began turning out the lights. “Li
ke I said,” Philip reported with an ironic chuckle, “he was an entertainer.” Errol was thirty years old, with no inclination to change, till the evening when an argument with Bobsled Terry turned his life upside down.
Friday night was always a double bill. Not, as Bobsled would grouse, to be confused with a two-for-one. “If yah staying, yah paying,” he’d warn each and every customer as he ripped their stubs. Unfortunately, the man had a couple of enforcement problems. “Bobsled was cheap and he was nearly blind,” recounted Philip. “They say he had a old piece of cane, for getting around. And he would throw up the lights between shows, then go down each aisle, knocking it back and forth, sweeping the place for cheaters. Then everybody’d go hiding in the bathroom or crawling up this ladder he had and hanging all in the beams of the place. Everyone cheated Bobsled.”
Except Errol. Errol liked Bobsled. Their fathers had been friends, and the men had known one another since grade school. For years, Errol maintained that on the night in question a jealous boyfriend must have given Bobsled some bad information. When Bobsled shined his flashlight on Errol halfway through Viva Las Vegas, he stared into the spotlight in disbelief. Bobsled tapped his knee with the cane and told him to pay up. Errol swore he already had. Their argument became a shouting match and, with the rest of the house hissing its complaint, Errol flew up the aisle after Bobsled. He was well inside the tiny office behind the projector, still cursing Bobsled a wicked mile, before he saw the young woman bent over the accounting books. She wore a simple gray blouse buttoned high, and at her left elbow was a Bible. When she looked up at him with her enormous eyes, he felt as strange and new as if he’d just been born.
“‘That girl saw me, for true.’ That’s what Papa always said. Like he thought no one had ever actually seen him before. Like everyone was blind but her.”
Despite his way with women, Errol’s powers failed him when he met Louise. Miraculously, she wasn’t interested in him. Not in the least. This, however, didn’t deter Errol; it emboldened him. “They both of them stubborn as mules.” Errol had never really been in love before, and the effort required to catch Louise’s eye served only to convince him this was It.
All the Finest Girls Page 5