Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  “Please tell him I’ve called.”

  Without saying goodbye she rings off, and I’m left with the knotted, lonely loop of my morning. The phone slips out of my hand to its cradle, rattling emptiness.

  Janet’s charging me extra for Caroline’s board, even though Caroline has slept here only one night of the four she’s been in town. Days, I don’t see her nor hear tell of her. Only the one night I’ve seen her, curled up on the couch just like the first night we found her. Same dress, even, kept just as clean. Something in her face has filled out in four days, and with her hair French-braided back and the Fuller 14 on her cheeks, she looks just like a doll.

  Next week, we leave for South Carolina. We’ve paid fifty dollars for promotional cards and posters in Greenville, Anderson, and Abbeville, but that’s only three cities, and beyond them we don’t know how long we’ll stay. Eventually, Sam Reevin says, we’ll hit Georgia, Alabama, Florida. We have no way of knowing what we’re in for, no idea what new and outrageous indignities await us in the Deep South. Reevin’s told us to stay in the Colored part of town, but even there, Jim Crow has found us. We could be killed for kissing in front of the White-owned soda shop, Sanders has warned us, for White people are offended by the notion of Negro love. We can’t even think of flagging down a White taxi passing through, no matter how torrential the rains. We’ve found Jim Crow’s rebellious stepchild, too: the Negro woman who works at the Colored window of Egan’s Fish & Chips regularly gives away food when she takes a notion. I’d meant to ask Caroline if she’ll travel with us to South Carolina, maybe sell her cosmetics on the road, but I haven’t even seen her to ask her where she’s been.

  Janet has gone in late again to the restaurant, leaving hungry fishermen stranded without breakfast. Monday, a lady tenant came to complain that Janet hadn’t pruned the bushes. Tuesday, a man came by the house to pay her because she hadn’t gone to collect his rent. That same day, she mopped the restaurant without gloves at closing, and came home smelling of Lestoil. Wednesday, a White man came to the house to look at her piano.

  “Fifty dollars,” he said.

  “Fifty? That’s just about what Daddy paid for it! And that was back in 1927!” The man rocked confidently on his heels, and she looked down at the floor. “Take the damn thing,” she said, in a bear’s voice. “Come get it this afternoon if you like.”

  With the piano gone, her house is a jail. She leaves meals on the kitchen table, but doesn’t call us in to eat. She’s stopped sectioning August’s grapefruit in the morning, and she strips our beds to nothing and leaves the fresh linens hanging on the line for me to collect. The day the piano left us, she telephoned a store in Hatteras and bought a television. Had it delivered that evening, before a neighborhood thrall to its spectacle. Now, she watches Gunsmoke in the parlor while we sit in our room and listen through the door. She gets up and takes a skein of knitting back to the sofa for I Love Lucy, and we leave the door open two cautious inches to watch her watching. She finishes twenty loops of a blue winter scarf and throws it back under the sofa, puts her feet up on the table to rub her tired heels. At the end of the show, when Ricardo kisses Lucy on the cheek, she gives a little cry, and slowly, we turn the knob to close the door.

  Everywhere in America, people are gathering for television parties in front of new consoles full to their thirteen inches with shining celebrities, but to 547 North Walnut, Hatteras, North Carolina, no one is invited. Instead, for entertainment, the street watches the crane swing the lead wrecking ball into the old Slone’s grocery. It takes an entire day’s shift to destroy half a wall; most times, when the ball hits, it doesn’t even break brick. Janet watches her television alone and falls asleep long after the wrecking ball does, her mouth open, the static roaring.

  Finally, August escapes to shoot dice with Sanders—something he’d promised, when he first came here with his city-shined shoes and Harlemite notions, never to do—but without invitations of my own, I’m shut in here on Walnut Street without even a piano to play. Alone with Janet, I listen through the walls and peep through the crack in my door and read her as one would digest an issue of True Confessions: as a jeremiad, a caution, and a counsel. I could study her life backwards in frames. Learn how never to end up alone, by doing the exact opposite of what she has. In the company of the television, she begins to eat heavier meals: biscuits with milk gravy at nine o’clock, two chunks of rhubarb cobbler at ten. She’s a dying star, expanding.

  Mathilde, a tall, precariously thin girl on our street, has one roller skate, perhaps found in the garbage at the edge of someone’s yard, or received as part of a once-new pair for Christmas, or taken from an unthoughtful bundle her mother’s White people sent home with her. The girl launches herself with her shoed foot and glides down the street on the one quartet of rusty wheels, so gracefully that we who are watching don’t even wonder after its mate. She skates down the sidewalk in front of the grocery’s undoing, the wrecking ball beating a counterpoint to her moves.

  By the time Auchidie calls again, I’ve watched Mathilde lose her footing and stumble four times. “Don’t think you’ll keep my son from me,” Auchidie says, when I tell her he’s out fishing again. “Don’t you dare.” And I don’t blame her for not believing me, since it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. But he’s out shooting dice, which is nothing I can say.

  “He loves you dearly,” I tell her instead. “Why would I want him not to?”

  “The way girls like you are,” she says, and hangs up on me again.

  The rest of the day I spend on Janet’s front porch, rocking in her favorite chair in my good sweater, waiting for August to walk up her sidewalk, letting the slight chill slide up my wrists, testing the air for my best friend’s hair pomade, reading and rereading the same three lines of Tell My Horse while the plover calls to its mate and the Atlantic washes up the broken rock of distant continents. The sheer power of the wrecking ball as it pounds into the ceiling of Slone’s distracts me, and the skating Mathilde lures me in with the tum-thaa of her exertions, and the crazy old tomato seller with her caged lovebird makes me watch as she cleans her ear with her fingernail. I wait for August or Caroline until the sun is low and orange, but it’s Janet who comes home early, rouged like a Raggedy Ann doll, her hair out of its bun and curled so that the bottom hangs in a hunk on her shoulders. Not an auburn-haired China doll dressed in purple; not Caroline. I’m tamped down by sadness until seven, when August finally returns, just in time to bathe before our show in Swanquarter. “Do you still love me?” I ask him, once he’s dressed.

  “What a question.” He picks out his conk and pats it back down, and it’s redundant, I suppose, to tell him he must answer yes or no. I close the toilet lid for a seat.

  “Why does your mother hate me?”

  “She doesn’t,” he says, turning sharply sideways to look at himself in the mirror.

  “You know she does.”

  He loses some of the wire in his shoulders. Guilty. I sit on the toilet lid and quietly watch him preen. He brushes the lint off his jacket and knots his tie. “Let’s go, then,” he says, and flips off the bathroom light.

  Out in the parlor, a four-piece White band stands in the frame of Janet’s television, boys with slicked-back hair crooning like a gospel choir, the teenaged audience stretching behind them, from one top corner of the television to the other. “Good evening,” Janet says, without looking at us.

  “Night,” says August, and we clink out the door together, too embarrassed by her misery to even get our coats from the closet. She’s more emptying than anything a human soul should have to endure. In the street, August looks to either side of himself, taking in 180 degrees of night. It’s North Carolina warm, 70 degrees on an April evening, so warm neither of us even need our jackets anyway, and August’s profile breaks the clouds gone silver over a full moon. In the distance we hear laughing from neighboring porches, a guitar coming from somewhere on the beach. August scratches his ear as if divining, knowing the Colored taxi
doesn’t run at night.

  We end up hitching a ride from a White man with Tennessee plates. August loads his bass onto the truck bed and hoists himself up before pulling me in, and I hitch my dress up and squat on my stockinged knees so as not to pick up too much of the bed’s dirt. An ax lying in the truck with us, and a dull-toothed saw. We ride through the Negro part of town, then past the warehouse further out, then to the open air of the beach, and I get sorry for bringing up his mother, or his loving me. When we jump off the dock, August offers the driver a quarter, but the man waves it away. “Thank you, sir,” August says instead, clipping the sir the way any obedient Southern Negro would. One month we’ve spent down here. Kennedy invading Cuba, Eichmann on trial in Israel, but in North Carolina, Blackness outdefines everything else.

  The ferry line grows and shortens and branches and finally, the boat growls into the inlet and the boatman rolls down the ramp. The people in automobiles drive to the center, leaving a right and a left alley for pedestrians. The gears of the boat shift into play and I stare at August, who’s staring at the ocean. You can see it in people’s eyes sometimes, a sadness, like they know they’re going to die, and it will probably hurt, and no one will be able to stop it. I see that sadness in August’s eyes just now, and I say, “I’ll always be here for you,” but the spray of the wake overpowers my voice so I have to yell it—”I’ll always be here for you.”

  August recoils from this, physically, rolling his eyes and moving his left leg one step down the deck. He stands this way, a leg-length apart, for the whole ferry ride, staying apart from me even when I try to go close on my tiptoes and whisper it in his ear again, even when I take his hand and slip it under the back of my sweater. It’s a cold, limp fish, his hand, a hand that won’t hear me and cannot feel me, a hand that has felt my need and found it unbecoming. I let him go, kiss him on the cheek, take his chin in my hand and turn our lips together, but his don’t move. “Please,” I say, “don’t be mean.” The ferryman throws his rope to the man on dock, and August pats me on the back once, twice, three times, as if I were his daughter or sister or puppy.

  At the Pavilion in Swanquarter, the girl in the ticket booth has a thin, nervous efficiency about her, long bangs pressed out over intelligent hazel eyes, and when a man in the crowd, upon seeing August’s bass, asks us to let him in with us for free, she shakes her head no.

  He’s a tad stout, with a nice enough jacket and a bowler hat, and something in his eagerness reminds me of my father, dressed like a doctor for Lyric night. “We know him,” I lie. “From way back.”

  “Whatever,” she says, waving him in. “It’s y’all’s bread.”

  August shakes his head at me, and the man hurries in the door without so much as a nod of thanks.

  Through the open doors we can see that the Pavilion, inside, is full to capacity already, women in small circles bumping into one another’s backs when they laugh, men trying to flock against a wall already lined end to end with bodies, kids out for relief on the warmest day of the spring so far. We can see through the front doors that it’s the biggest crowd we’ve had on these little islands, and Sam Reevin must have premonited as much, because he’s here, in person, sitting on a chair under the Spanish moss that grows along the Pavilion’s front porch. He grins at us, tips his hat. Something in his eyes, the way they don’t hold a gaze, makes me want to ask August where we’ll find our own trombonist. “Full house already,” he says, “seems like the word’s spreading fast. She can’t let anybody else in until somebody in there leaves. You’d better get in there and set it off.”

  We’re hot into our groove fifteen minutes into the first set. To the Pavilion have come Negroes from as far away as Kitty Hawk and Pamlico, and the hardwood floor is so crowded that an easy time is impossible: only the best dancers and the prettiest women will get respect enough for a wide berth on the dance floor. August solos and I calculate the trajectory of his notes, so that I match them every time he finishes a measure. He lets me do it twice, and then, the third time I try, he plays an accidental. He presses hard into the neck of his bass and plucks loud, dissonant notes. I try to play Monk to his Mingus then, but it doesn’t sound quite right, so I let him be.

  Little tall Mathilde, who can’t be more than thirteen, is swaying with herself against the curtained wall. She’s drinking all the liquored-up punch from the table near the stage, and smiling at Mark and clapping the downbeat and having herself a time. Even with the bodies crushed into each other she’s an easy spot because of her height and the loud pink lipstick that’s too old for her, and in a pretense of adulthood she moves stiffly, as though someone has fused her spine. At some point I miss, she’s asked to dance or maybe even asks a man herself, because when Julius takes his long drum break, I look up again and find her dancing with a bald man whose gold tooth winks under the Pavilion’s strobe lights. She keeps an arm’s length between them, and when he tries to whirl her around she doesn’t understand what he’s trying to communicate, and they both end up hurt, rubbing their wrists and laughing. I look to August and wink, but he hasn’t seen her, doesn’t wink back. It takes him a minute to smile at me.

  Even so, even with that beat of silence, he did smile. He didn’t even know why, but he smiled, and when I think about that, I feel righter than I have for a long time. I’m just about to start believing in being saved again when the first screams come from the other end of the Pavilion. The half of the floor closest to us empties in a motion fluid as an ink bottle’s as people begin running for the front entrance. I hear a series of gunshots like firecrackers going off, and people crush toward the front doors; they scream. A woman not five feet tall, in a black minidress and heels, gets tripped up in legs. She’s under everyone’s feet but no one cares, and her screams are the loudest, until she screams no more. A woman close to the door—maybe she has asthma or just weakness or maybe bad luck—is on the floor, coughing, and a man kicks her out of his way so he can get closer to the door. From somewhere, finally, someone brings the lights up on the empty dance floor.

  “Mathilde,” I say, but August shakes his head. I think of the girl’s mother, tall and thin and tight-lipped like Mathilde herself, and I wonder whether she even knows her daughter is here. August grabs his bass by its neck and pulls me, with his other hand, along the length of the wall toward the rear of the building. Dust from the wall makes a screen on my arm and I lose August, snatch for his hand, find it again. “Damn,” he whispers, and he squeezes my hand until it hurts. We slide backstage this way, and come to a door with a window, the moon shining through it to make a four-paned projection on the opposite wall. The door’s marked DELIVERIES ONLY but some force of goodness has left it unlocked, and we exit into the vacuum of cool air and it’s as though I’m breathing for the first time, but then suddenly a dog is upon us, a big slobbering German shepherd whose ears are as high as my waist, and as quickly as anything August has pushed me out in front of him.

  The dog sizes me up and doesn’t even bark before he runs away, but August keeps his palm on my back anyway, pushing me, making me his human shield. “Wow,” is all I can say, when he finally realizes and withdraws his arm. We both laugh uncomfortably, but something has changed between us. “You’re not in love with me,” I tell him.

  “In love is when your heart beats faster every time you see somebody. In love is once in a lifetime, maybe not even that. Do you feel that way, Audrey? Do you?”

  The full moon illuminates the detail of the cars in the parking lot, washed and polished just for the night. Two or three, maybe, that won’t be driven home. I want to run back into the gunshots, drown myself in the ocean, do anything but stand and hear August say this. I could respond to his question, but he wouldn’t like my answer. “What about Mathilde?” I ask him.

  “What about her?”

  “We can go back in and see.”

  “I’m keeping my Black ass right here in this parking lot.”

  After all the dust of the backstage area, tears feel good
. I close my eyes and walk away as he calls my name. When I get to the front door, I see Reevin walking the parking lot with a money box under his arm, smoking a cigarette. The Colored ambulance has arrived, but already among those watching under the corrugated tin roof there hangs a sense of futility. People have stopped shooting and screaming, and a group of men are leaned in the door. The one doctor in the back of the ambulance sets his mouth into a straight line: he’s here to collect the dead rather than save the living. Two of the leaning-in men pull a body out the door, and then the paralyzed, asthmatic woman, having been mistaken for dead, screams out as they throw her onto a gurney. A man shudders in an agony of injured nerves as he’s put on another gurney and rushed into the ambulance with her, but from the looks of him—the white matter of his brain showing, one eye gone missing—simply dying would have been a blessing.

  “Audrey!” someone yells. “Hey, girl! We were looking all over for your show!” It’s Caroline, Caroline in that same purple and pink dress, sitting on the hood of a silver Studebaker. Closer to the car, I see that there’s a man sitting behind the steering wheel, engrossed in his cigarette. She hops off the hood, runs over, and hugs me. “I knew all this time I should have come to see you. Your life is a gas, it really is. This here’s Jimmy,” she says, taking me over to the window, where I give the man a small wave.

  He stares at me. “You the pianist?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  He nods.

  She takes me away from the car so that we’re standing in Jimmy’s headlight, and she whispers, “I know that bitch is charging you ’cause she told me she would. I don’t know why she don’t like you, but take this.” She hands me a twenty-dollar bill. “You go on to South Carolina. I’m staying here.”

  “Here? In Swanquarter?”

  “Durham. Jimmy’s taking me to Durham. He’s a banker there. They got Colored banks, girl!”

  A hearse arrives and is filled with four bodies; the undertaker leans out of the car and vomits into the gravel. An older woman in a pink nightgown and house slippers shrieks when a young man in a blue suit is taken out of the building. “Warren! Warren!” she wails, running to where he’s been unceremoniously thrown to the gravel. “Warren, my Warren, you sleep tight, and Mama’s gonna make you some Cream of Wheat come morning.” My world has stopped, but Caroline’s is still moving. She’s talking, talking about the brand-new pair of shoes Jimmy bought her, and the hamburger she breaded up and fried for him, the little mechanical rabbit at the dog track he took her to, the Colored resort where they’re staying and the maid who comes and sweeps their patio every morning. My world has stopped, but she doesn’t feel it. Her orange isn’t my orange. No one’s is.