The alpha moved forward. He was standing on Hal’s chest. But it was surprising for such a large animal how light-footed he was. Hal had his chin pressed tight on his chest to cover his throat, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He had failed, he thought. He had failed Kate, and that was the final truth. He knew that no matter how hard he tried to protect it, the wolf was about to tear out his throat. That’s how they killed. The wolf’s breath, smelling vaguely of fish, fogged his view in vapor. He could see a nose like a big ripe black fruit move closer to his face and a wide-open mouth running along a long muzzle, looking as though he were smiling. The smile got bigger. Hal could see long ivory fangs about to rip him. A paw as big as half his face landed roughly on his forehead and pushed his head back. The wolf was so strong that Hal could not even struggle. He let out one last scream while he still had a throat. But it was too late. No sound came out.
Then he heard a shout.
It was Kate. “Jesus Christ, did you just hit me?”
Hal turned his head and opened his eyes. Kate was lying next to him in the bed. Henry was lying on his chest, on his back, hoping Hal would rub his belly.
“Why’d you hit me?”
It took him a second to find his voice.
“I’m sorry. I don’t sleep well with those damn wolves howling.”
“I don’t even hear it.”
“They’re there, though. Trust me on that.” He rubbed Henry’s belly and Henry purred.
NEW YORK NITPICKERS
At last, I have a future. I could see no future in Diego Martin, or anywhere else on the beautiful hopeless island of Trinidad. But now I am in America, where people are smart-smart and rich-rich. And I am in New York, where people are alchemists who can make money out of any little thing. I don’t want to be, as they say, a nitpicker, but there is one problem and I have to admit that it is starting to bother me.
This town is infested and the people all have bugs in their hair.
They have some bugs, tiny little hair louses that you can hardly see. But they have a lot of eggs, nits, and if they don’t get rid of them they turn into lice. I see some children who are crawling with them. From there they crawl onto their parents. Then onto everyone else. But not onto me, because I stopped them. I shaved my head. A black woman with a shaved head can be fashionable, especially with big gold hoop earrings. It is better if you have one of those fine egg-shaped heads. I have more of a melon head, but that doesn’t matter; I am one of the few women in New York who is sure to be absolutely louse-free.
It’s one of those things you are not supposed to talk about. I know it is the land of the free and all that, but there are a lot of things you are not supposed to mention even though everyone knows it. It’s like white people can’t dance. We know this but don’t say it. So another one is that black people have prettier heads than white people. A black man with a shaved head is far more beautiful than one of those big pale eggs. And a white woman with a shaved head is too horrible to ever speak of. But black people look good without their hair and they would be wise to shave it off.
I should explain or people will think I’m crazy. This goes on, this business of the invasion of New York City by lice, but not that many people know about it. They walk around infested and with bug-ridden children and they don’t even know. The two things no New Yorker will ever admit: falling for a scam and having bugs in their hair. Falling for a scam is worse, so sometimes even when they have the bugs they won’t come to me because they are afraid it’s a scam. That is if they even realize they have bugs. They walk around scratching their itchy heads, trying on hats, sitting back on furniture and leaving their bugs to crawl on someone else. How can anyone try on hats? Why do the stores allow it? Everyone walks around like the problem isn’t there. They don’t admit it because no one wants to be thought of as a carrier, a contagious person.
And they think that being covered with lice is a poor-people thing. And being poor in New York is never acceptable. But in my experience they are all rich and infested. In fact, I am beginning to think that lice prefer rich people. I know they like clean hair. People shampoo with special potions that cost dizzying amounts of money, a good example of how New Yorkers can get rich on anything, and they wash and wash until their fine hair shines—and it’s still full of lice eggs. They have just made their hair more attractive to lice.
The truth is that lice, just like a lot of folk, are more drawn to rich white people than poor black ones. It’s just a fact. That is the kind of hair lice like. Rich white people feel bad for poor black kids and spend money so they can spend time in the summer in special camps. But they send their own kids to nice, nice camps for ballet and music and fancy sports like fencing and tennis and lacrosse, and then when they come back the parents send them to me because their hair is alive with lice. The poor black kids who went to the special poor-black-people camp? They come back and their hair is fine.
Back in Diego Martin, we had all kinds of bugs. They crawled up the bushes, along the ground, into your house, and sometimes a child, especially those more out in the bush, got lice in their hair. Not too much. Not like in New York. We always heard that the Indian people in the south were infested with them. But it wasn’t too bad in Diego Martin. If someone got them, they went to my cousin Enid. She was the lice expert. There were always women with strange kinds of obeah who knew how to deal with one problem or another. There was Sharon Williams, who people always went to with love problems. My cousin Enid was the one you went to when you itched. Then Enid moved to New York. I can see why some white people might think it is a scam.
Enid kept writing me to come join her in New York. She had a job. Everybody in New York had jobs and made good money, she said. At the time all I had was selling mangoes near the Savannah in Port of Spain, which was an Indian job and had no dignity and, worse, made no money.
So I followed Enid to New York and I quickly saw that it was a dirty place and a buggy place. Diego Martin had insects, but it wasn’t buggy like New York. I mean, the people weren’t buggy. I truly hate bugs. I’ll show you what I mean. There is a plant, a green vine that crawls up on everything in Diego Martin. It will cover your house if you don’t chop it back. They call it passion fruit, but a real Trini boast, the plant doesn’t produce any passion fruit, only an occasional flower at the end of a vine of big green shiny leaves.
When I left for New York I took a four-inch stalk of the vine from our house, a little piece of Diego Martin. I had to hide it from the American official at the airport, buried it in my underwear and women things, where he would be embarrassed to look too carefully. When I got an apartment in Harlem, in the heart of history, I bought a big pot and some dirt and put the stick in a glass of water for two weeks until it got white root tentacles and then planted it in the dirt and I started getting a green vine that grew and grew just like in Diego Martin.
But it wasn’t Diego Martin, it was New York, where everybody profits from everything. In this case it was cockroaches, ugly blackish-brownish fiends, that couldn’t pass up the shiny sticky sap from the new leaves. I hate bugs. I chopped down the vine and threw it out and that was the end of my piece of home.
Enid was making good money working for the Jews. The company was called Licefreee, and yes, she was back in her old trade. In New York they called it a nitpicker, and her big idea was for me to be a nitpicker, too. It was too late to go back, and so Enid trained me. The money was good. The other Trinis were making nothing looking after children, but Enid and I were making it by the cartload picking bugs out of their hair. You used this special shampoo and then you combed every strand with a fine metal comb and you could get sometimes six hundred nits and more than a hundred full-blown lice out of a single head. These New Yorkers were crawling with them. It was disgusting.
This all took place in a big room. New Yorkers do not waste space, so this room was unusual in how much empty space it had. The walls were white and the
re were eight white chairs like the kind in a beauty salon but with lots of space between them. There was also a chair that looked like a fire engine and another that looked like an airplane. These were to make it fun for small children, but so far I haven’t seen any children who think this is fun. A head takes two or three hours.
The only thing on the white walls was a little proverb in a glassed frame above each chair. My chair got “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.”
So far, nothing in my New York life was taking my breath away. What I missed most about Trinidad was light. This is a dark town. My apartment building was only a few feet away from the next one, so alley gray was the only daylight that came through the two windows in my two rooms with sills that were peeling like something left out in the rain. The narrow streets of Midtown where I worked were surrounded by tall buildings like a dark trail in a rainforest. Occasionally I found a broad avenue that got sunlight or one of those perfectly aligned east-west streets at the moment of sunset, as red in the mango sky as the end of a Diego Martin day. But most of the time the large room where I picked nits was actually the brightest, cleanest spot I had. You had to have light to find the eggs.
* * *
I was spraying myself with peppermint because the brochures we gave to families said that peppermint kept lice away. The Jewish owner, a nice-looking woman with a full body named Leslie, laughed at all my questions about catching the lice. “They can’t fly, you know,” she would say with her pleasant dark-eyed smile. “The day lice start flying I’m quitting,” she said, and she and Enid and the Jamaican women all laughed. I kept spraying peppermint just the same.
Then I started noticing certain precautions. Jews are smart-smart. They had some obeah thing on the doorway to keep bugs away, but that wasn’t the important thing. As I examined Leslie more closely I realized that she wasn’t wearing her real hair. It was a wig. Not only that, but when her husband came by he was always wearing a hat and he never took it off. This New York is as hot and wet as Diego Martin in the summer. It felt like you could squeeze your hand and come up with water. Made people loose and wilted with as little clothes as possible. It was a sexy season. It made my bald head shine and it made me feel sexy. But this Jewish husband kept on his black hat and his long black coat and stayed covered while his wife wore a wig. The Jews were not going to get infested.
One night I was in Diego Martin under a hot yellow sun and everyone was sweating and shining except Leslie, as dry as could be under her big hair wig. In that dream, as often happens in dreams, I did something I had been wanting to do. I snatched Leslie’s wig right off her head. Underneath it you could hardly see her real hair through the piles of nits. Lice were crawling all over it, some of them falling off onto her shoulders.
I woke up kicking my legs in the bed as though I were running lying down. The big Trini sun was only a lightbulb I had left on. My smooth melon head was wet as a fruit in the morning field.
I liked my melon. I must have looked all right like this even without a good egg shape, because men asked me out all the time. Only, if I told them what I did they didn’t ask me again, so I learned to keep quiet about my work. I didn’t blame them. Would you go out to dinner with someone who had spent the day picking bugs out of people’s hair? Picking bugs out of white people’s hair is not a decent job for a self-respecting black woman. So I never told anyone. Enid would tell everyone and her boyfriends lasted about three minutes after she told them. I never said a thing. If I were forced I’d say that I was “a hairstylist.”
Still, the money was good-good. Their babies grew up and didn’t need nannies, restaurants closed, and stores were replacing cashiers with machines, but if you saw what I’ve seen you’d know that the lice business is never going to die out in this town.
When I went out with a man, I couldn’t help looking through his hair. I would study it while he was talking, which they didn’t mind because there is nothing a man likes better than a woman who stares at him like the miracle had just appeared while he is talking. But sometimes I would sift through their hair while they were making love to me and one time I found a nit. It was sickening. I didn’t want these New York men and their thick hair. They would say sweet things to me and I would look back and see only lice.
But then there was Howard.
Howard was tall, a nice tamarind-husk brown, a smile that stayed in his eyes. He had a condition he was born with. He had not one hair follicle. Not on his body, his head, his brow, his eyes—I mean, nowhere—just smooth and brown. You’d have to feel sorry for the lice that landed on Howard.
Back in Diego Martin there was a famous calypsonian who got rich from all his records and built a special house and brought in tan couches of Italian leather. Those couches were so smooth, felt so nice, that when I was a little girl I used to go over there just to sit on one of them. Howard reminded me of those supple, smooth Italian leather couches. I loved to rub his smooth, tan head and run my fingers across his brow where his eyebrows should have been and touch the tan, smooth muscles of his chest.
Meeting Howard was one of those breathtaking moments by which life is measured. This one I was not going to lose, so of course I absolutely was not telling him what kind of work I did.
“What do you do?” he asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Do you have a job?”
“What do you do?”
“You first.”
“I’m a hairstylist.”
“Really? Where’s your place?”
“It’s around. What about you?”
Howard smiled. So it became a game. Who was going to confess first. I didn’t think Howard was hiding anything. He was just trying to force me. I almost slipped one afternoon.
We were walking by a hat shop. It was a fancy hat shop for fancy rich heads. Men’s and women’s hats. Felt, velvet, straw, sisal, feathers, ribbons, and veils. Hats that stood up. Hats that flopped down. Everything. All the fancy rich came into the shop to try on the fancy rich tops. And you know what fancy rich people have on their heads. And that just spread it from one person to another. “Disgusting,” I growled.
“What is?”
“The way everyone tries on hats, not knowing what was in the hair of the last person.”
“What would be in their hair?”
Howard was staring at me the way you might look at someone telling you about an experience with three-legged green people from another planet. I knew I was getting into deep trouble. It was like the pitch lake back in Trinidad. This is a lake of natural asphalt. They say some New York streets are paved with it. It is deeper than the height of thirty men. It is asphalt, so you can walk on it, but on a hot day you start to sink. Once you start sinking they say the harder you try to save yourself the faster you sink. I was on a pitch lake now and struggling hard and sinking fast.
“No, there’s nothing in the hair. It’s just I love hair so. Nothing I love more, and the hats . . .”
I am not sure what I was trying for, but looking at hairless Howard, I knew I had made a big mistake. But then he smiled and started laughing. He thought the mistake was funny. There was something a little strange about Howard.
I was growing cautious about this man with no hair who wouldn’t talk about himself. One day on my way to work I thought I saw Howard off to the left. Was he following me? I took the 1 train to Times Square, the 7 train to Queens, a taxi to Brooklyn, and as I was grabbing the F train back to Manhattan I saw a shiny tan globe in the distance—Howard’s beautiful head. He was following me. What bothered me worse, he was really good at it. Was he some kind of spy? CIA or something? But why would the CIA be interested in me?
That was when I realized it. The only reason Howard would be spying on me was if he worked for the immigration people. Was Howard going to get me thrown out of the country? It was hard for me to believe,
but there it was. Or was I wrong? Maybe he wasn’t following me. I caught him only that one time and it was only a quick look at the top of his head. In all of the millions of people in New York, there could be another head like that. But I am a professional about heads.
The smart thing would have been to stay away from Howard. But I couldn’t. If your life is to be measured in the moments that take your breath away, how can you afford to walk away from one?
So there was now something tragic, ill-fated, about our relationship and it showed. Not in him. He was the same, same smile, same laugh. But in me. I think I even enjoyed the tragedy of it. Finally he asked me what was wrong.
“Why won’t you tell me where you work, Howard?”
“All right,” he said resolutely. “I will. Then you have to tell me what you do.”
I agreed, though I was not certain that I would really tell him the truth. I guess it depended on what he did.
He took us on the Lexington line to the Upper East Side and we walked down Madison Avenue with windows full of jewels and furs and dresses for movie stars—mostly showing people what they could never have. You never saw anyone walk into these stores. Were they just there to tease?
Howard stopped in front of a store. It was that hat shop. And it was full of customers—well-dressed women trying on one hat after another, just spreading their lice. And there was a sign, a small sign that I hadn’t seen before—“Howard’s Haberdashery.” It was just printed along the awning where you wouldn’t think to look. All the really hip shops and restaurants now hid their name so it was hard to find. When you can’t find the name, hide your wallet. It’s going to be one of those stores that you walk in and they look at you like you killed a relative or something. They only want a kind of people that have too much money to think about. I know those people. They came into my shop every day with bugs in their hair.
City Beasts Page 14