Dancers on the Shore

by William Melvin Kelley

  He looked over my head at my mother. “Since you’re not doing anything but heckling, why don’t you get us some food.”

  She stood, nodded slightly, went to the refrigerator, and pulled out potato salad and cold cuts on huge frosted platters.

  “Want to keep playing?” Mister Bixby had gathered the cards and was shuffling them loudly. His voice sounded like small-grained sandpaper on hard wood.

  My father nodded, as did the rest, and Mister Bixby began to deal.

  “Mis-deal!” My father leaned over me impatiently. I had expected him to say this, and I looked at Mister Bixby and wondered how silly he must be to forget the ritual of the game.

  “Man!” Uncle Hernando shook his head. “Let’s play and forget it this time. We ain’t on no river boat.”

  “Sure. Come on. Let’s play.” Mister Bixby continued to deal.

  My father said nothing, but I could feel his body becoming stiff behind me. He had always told me to follow the rules. I knew he must have been disappointed with his friends.

  Mister Bixby kept flipping cards onto the table. I counted four to each player. Then he turned over a card in the center. “This game, my friends, is ‘Spit in the Ocean.’ ”

  My father reached around me and gathered his cards, pulled them just to my eye level, and made a small fan of them. His hands in front of me seemed my own, his arms seemed attached to my shoulders. I could see the cards very plainly. He had two queens. The card on the table was a queen too and I turned slightly on his lap and pointed at it. “Look.”

  He put his hand over my mouth and bent to me. “Now be quiet. You want me to lose?”

  I was silent, thinking perhaps I had already made him lose, and looked around the table. Mister Bixby was grinning at me. I knew then I had made a mistake and that my father would lose. I wished I would never be able to talk again.

  I squirmed and looked over my father’s shoulder. My mother was by the sink spooning potato salad onto plates. She smiled at me warmly, as if to forgive me, as if she knew I meant no harm, and then turned back to her work.

  Now chips almost buried the card on the table. Aunt Petunia was no longer playing. And then Uncle Hernando spun his cards down and stared at them. “Too rich for my blood.”

  “All right, Bix, I’ll raise you.” My father’s voice rumbled and shook me.

  “You wants to drop out now, Carey?” Mister Bixby was talking to my father, but smiling at me—as if we were great friends! “Well then, I’ll just call you.” He tossed three chips onto the middle of the table. My father spread out his hand, as did Mister Bixby, whose cards all had the same kind of markings and were in order, an eight, a nine, a ten, and a jack. I watched him rake in all the chips and snort a laugh. Then he looked at me. “Thanks, little man.”

  I turned away.

  “Now I know why you didn’t want to redeal.” I could feel my father’s body stiffen again; a warm fear shot over me.

  Everybody stopped and looked at my father, and it seemed they were looking at me too. Their faces were alike, as humorless as if they were relatives at a funeral, and as accusing as my father’s must have been.

  “Come on, Carey,” nagged my Uncle Hernando good-naturedly.

  “That ain’t funny at all,” scolded Aunt Petunia, who had been collecting the cards.

  My father grew even more rigid and grabbed my shoulders so tightly they hurt. “I simply said it was a misdeal. We all lost. Figure it out.”

  I twisted to face him. “But it was my fault. I made you lose,” I blurted foolishly.

  For an instant I did not know if he had heard me, and then I was certain he had, for he pushed me off his lap and turned to my mother. “Put him to bed where be belongs!” His voice was louder than it had to be.

  He shoved me away from him and I stumbled backwards, always facing the table, and finally my mother was behind me, her hands light on my shoulders. “Shhhh, don’t cry. It wasn’t your fault.” It was then I realized I was tasting salt.

  I paid no attention to that, watched my father with his back to me, his neck red above his stiff collar. “It was a misdeal. We should have stopped.” But it was my fault, I yelled to myself, too afraid to utter it aloud.

  “Maaaan, you saying I cheated.” Mister Bixby seemed almost to be pleading. “That ain’t right.”

  My father breathed deeply. “I did not say you cheated. I just said we should have stopped after the misdeal.”

  Uncle Hernando leaned over and touched my father’s arm. “Why don’t you just forget it, Carey?” Before he had finished my father pulled away.

  “You may be rich enough to forget about nine dollars.” His voice cracked and rose higher than normal. “But I can’t.”

  “You want your money back?” chided Mister Bixby.

  “No!” my father shouted. “I’m no poor sport. I just said it was a misdeal.”

  “Well then, don’t yell.”

  “This is my house and I’ll yell if I want to.”

  “Okay, but you know God damn well I didn’t cheat.”

  “I don’t know anything of the kind. And watch your language in front of the boy.”

  Both men stood slowly, as if by the same unheard signal, and glared at each other across the table. Uncle Hernando stood too. “Come on, you guys. Sit down and forget it.”

  “You stay out of this,” snapped my father; my aunt too began very slowly to get up, her empty mouth open.

  “You’ve seen enough.” My mother’s hands tightened on my shoulders and navigated me in a circle so we both headed down the hall to my room. “Now don’t you act like a child too. Don’t you cry.” But I was not thinking of tears, was not crying now because I felt I had made my father lose the game or the nine dollars, but because for the first time in my life I was afraid of grownups. I had never seen them argue, perhaps I had heard my father’s voice raised to my mother, or hers to him, their voices seeping through my door at night, but I had never seen it, or the anger in their eyes, or their bodies bent and stiff like dogs fighting and snarling in the street. And even as my mother lifted me into bed, and I felt the sheets cold against my feet, and her hands through the mattress tucking me tightly, I heard my father arguing with Mister Bixby.

  She sat with me until I stopped crying. Then she kissed me and went out, closing the door behind her.

  I listened intently as the guests gathered their coats from my parents’ bed, then filed down the hall, one by one, without speaking; heard my mother undress, cross the tile in the bathroom, and the water travel explosively through the walls, and in the bedroom again, my mother climb into bed. After that the house was silent and dark, except for the light in the kitchen which crept up the hall and under my door. I knew then my father was still sitting, alone now, at the kitchen table.

  Not Exactly Lena Horne

  “BY GOD, STANTON, there just went Oregon!” Wilfred called back into the house, then scanned the new sheet, and finding the Oregon box, made a check mark. “Oregon! Imagine that. Fifteen minutes I been out here and seven Connecticuts, three New Jerseys, and one Oregon. What that fellow doing way over here?”

  Stanton lumbered onto the porch. He was the younger (by two years) of the two old Negroes, both retired twenty years. He was also the fatter, taller, sturdier, and darker. Wilfred, tallying out-of-state license plates, was short, fragile, the color of clean sand. They had worked on the railroad together, and when time came to retire, being widowers, together they bought a frame house on a highway on Long Island.

  “What, Wilfred?”

  “Got me an Oregon. Wonder what he’s doing out this way?”

  “God damn! That what you called me out here for?”

  “Thought you might want to know.” Wilfred was not even sheepish. Stanton had been complaining this way for years. “Oregon’s a good piece away.”

  “All thi
s time and I still can’t see why you do this. What you making them lists for? You don’t do nothing but transfer them into them notebooks. Don’t even show them to nobody. You ain’t even getting paid for it.”

  “How many times I got to tell you I likes to do it. And there’s the stories. Now old Oregon, he’s just killed him eight cops breaking out of the Oregon State Prison. He’s going to Montauk to meet a plane what’ll fly him to Rio, where he’s got a señorita waiting for him. Could be, Stanton.”

  “Could be, but it ain’t.” Stanton retreated into the house, slamming the screen door.

  A car was approaching, sucking in the white line like spaghetti. Wilfred squinted; he knew he would have no more than five seconds to make out the plate. It was a New York and did not count.

  Stanton came back onto the porch and sat in the other chair. “Nothing, huh?”

  Wilfred shook his head.

  “You even got me doing it now!” Stanton twisted in the chair. “Twenty years of peeping at license plates! God damn!”

  “You ought-a start collecting things.”

  “Why?”

  “You can make up stories.” He reconsidered his suggestion. “Maybe you better just collect things. You ain’t really got no imagination.”

  “I ain’t? How you sound, man, when all you can think to do is sit on a porch making checks on a piece of paper?”

  “Well, it better than grumping around about your rheumatism.”

  “All right, I got rheumatism. I ain’t ashamed of it. I didn’t ask for it, but it my burden.”

  “And my burden is you.”

  “Well, you ain’t exactly Lena Horne yourself!”

  A car had been rolling toward them at a good pace, and zipped by before Wilfred noticed it. He strained to his feet, scurried, round-shouldered, to the edge of the porch and leaned after it. “New York.” He turned back to Stanton. “Lucky for you it New York. If it been Alaska and I missed it on account of your noise there might-a been trouble here.”

  This interested Stanton. “That so? What kind of trouble? Even in my extreme pain I could beat tar out-a you.”

  “That so? I remembers times on the railroad when you got whipped by little children with balloons on strings. Whip me? Ha!”

  “Ain’t no ha to it.”

  “That so?” He heard tires from the other direction. “By God, Delaware!” He checked it off. “First Delaware in seven weeks. A musician in a jazz band on his way to visit his mother, who’s senile and staying in a rest home. He’s only playing in New York for a week. He ain’t seen her for three years.”

  “Senile. You is the only senile person you know. One of these days I’m taking them lists and books out back and burn the whole lot of them. Kerosene! Gasoline!”

  “That so? Burn them, you say? Well, you’ll sure rot in hell then and you’ll be traveling a whole lot sooner than you figure, God damn.” A New York went through. “Kind-a slow today except for the Delaware and Oregon.” He reflected. “Remember that day, summer 1948, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and Kansas come by? Man, what a day that was. A regular day to remember!”

  “Your mind’s breaking down. That was 1947 and wasn’t no Idaho in them. That was Illinois. You got potato on the brain. Mash potato!” Stanton started to chuckle. “Idaho!”

  “Illinois? That ain’t nothing. Lots of rich folks from Chicago come out to New York. And you making a big deal out Illinois. That were Idaho, as sure as I’m sitting here.”

  “Your old dry husk of a body is sitting there, but your mind lying in the grave because that weren’t no Idaho.” He paused. “God damn, here I is arguing with an old coot about license plates. God damn!” He got up and went inside again. Shortly, he returned with a glass of iced tea. The two men awoke each morning at eight and made two quarts.

  Wilfred looked up from his list. “Why didn’t you bring me some?”

  “Bring you some? If you wasn’t wasting your time, you could get some yourself. And that’s another thing: I ain’t no waiter. I stopped waiting on fools when I retired from the railroad.”

  “You won’t stop waiting on fools until you dies and don’t have to feed your-self no more.” He did not miss this one—New Jersey—and checked it off.

  “Talking about dying, when you does, first thing I’ll do is burn them books and lists.”

  “That’d be mighty stupid—just natural to you. You never once thought the Highway Commission might want them to see how many cars traveled this road.”

  “The Highway Commission wouldn’t want them books even if they could make out your scrawl, which they can’t, because I can’t, even after forty years of knowing you.”

  “Well, my penmanship is bad from lack of education. Yours is bad because your old hands shake so.”

  “Well, I can’t help it. Rheumatism’s my burden.”

  “And you is my burden.”

  “You ain’t exactly Lena Horne yourself.”

  There was a long silence. Wilfred continued to scan the fronts and backs of the passing cars and record the acceptable ones.

  Stanton sipped his iced tea with shaking hands. Last night had not been a peaceful one for him. Alone in one of the house’s two bedrooms, pain had attacked his joints. In the morning, he had awakened more cross than usual.

  “Massachusetts! You see that? Massachusetts. First one in a week. A secret service agent, the President’s second cousin on his mama’s side, going to check reports of a Russian submarine at Bay Shore.” He spoke scanning his list.

  “Will you shut up?”

  Wilfred was startled. Never before had he heard the note of real anger that now cloaked his friend’s words. “Just telling you what—”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear.” Just then, his hands burned, and he grimaced.

  Wilfred took it for a smile. “Well, then not the President’s second cousin. His—”

  “Shut up.” Stanton slammed his glass to the porch floor. It popped. The ice slid down the slight grade and water reflected the sunlight.

  “What you doing? Everything in this house is half mine. Half that glass is mine.”

  Stanton lunged to his feet. “Then half of them God-damned books is mine. And I’m burning my half.” He started to the door.

  At first, Wilfred thought Stanton must be joking. But as he stomped by, shaking the porch, Wilfred saw his face, serious and angry. Stanton jerked open the screen door and barged through.

  Wilfred was right behind him, puffing by the time he reached his bedroom. The books, more than a hundred black and white speckled school notebooks, were piled neatly on a table beside the window. When Wilfred reached the room, Stanton was already menacing the table, was scooping up an armful of notebooks. He turned around. Wilfred blocked his way. “Put them down, man. Stop playing.” He could not believe this was happening.

  “I ain’t playing, you loon. I’m burning my half.”

  “Half of them ain’t yours. You never once put a check mark to paper. Them’s all mine.”

  They stood face to face now, Wilfred looking up into Stanton’s dark gaze. He felt small.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Wilfred. Get out my way.”

  “Come on, Stanton, put them books back.” He was whining now. He reached out for Stanton’s arm, caught it. His fingers ached when Stanton pulled the arm away.

  “I told you to get out my way. I’m burning these God-damned books. I’m sick of listening to you croak about them.”

  “Put them books down before I—” Wilfred started, but Stanton’s big hand caught him in the chest and he fell like a baby, hard, in a sitting position. His spine stung, but he knew he was not really hurt. He looked up now and found Stanton glaring down at him. Scrambling to all fours, he reached out and grabbed Stanton’s knees. “Come on, man. Please. Don’t burn my books.”

  “I’m sick
of hearing about them.”

  Wilfred gripped the other man’s knees tighter. They were more fleshy than his own. “All right, I won’t never talk about them again. I won’t mention them. I’ll keep my list in quiet.”

  “That’s a promise?”

  “A promise, man. I promise.”

  “Take your God-damned books then.” He released them and they dropped with a crack. Wilfred let go Stanton’s knees, and the other man stepped over him and trudged to the porch.

  On hands and knees, Wilfred collected his notebooks, making certain they were in correct order, the latest on the top. He crawled back into the room, and using the bedpost, pulled himself to his feet and set the notebooks on the table. He lingered in the room for fifteen minutes, then took a deep breath and returned to the porch.

  Stanton was reading a newspaper. “Listen, Wilfred, I’m sorry I pushed you down.” He leaned forward over his stomach. “I didn’t mean to do that. You should-a got out my way, man. Ain’t hurt, is you?”

  “No.”

  “I meant what I said. I don’t want to hear about them license plates ever again. I’ll burn them books sure if I do. Remember now.”

  “I’ll remember!” Wilfred remembered too, with fear and shame, the hardness of the floor beneath his knees when he had begged for his notebooks.

  “But that don’t mean we can’t talk about everything else under the sun. You understand that, don’t you, Wilfred?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shake on it, so I’ll know we still friends.” Stanton extended his hand and smiled timidly. Wilfred realized the other man was honestly sorry for having knocked him down, and that he wanted to remain friends. He shook Stanton’s hand.

  An old Connecticut chugged by and Wilfred, sneaking a glance at Stanton, checked it off in silence. He thought to himself that it was a millionaire, who drove the old car to escape reporters.