The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  Well, Amma thought, probably he will. I’m not worrying about Kaye. She folded the finished apron and took another one from her stack. Her grandson wouldn’t be waiting on life to come smack him from behind, and even when life inevitably did, it wasn’t going to knock him over like it had his poor mama. Kaye always bounced back. He reminded her of that plastic punching bag he used to love that would pop back up at you. Bounced back and talked back and wouldn’t stop talking, that was Kaye. ’Course, he could always get you laughing sooner or later. Yolanda said that's why he’d been made night dispatcher at Austin's taxi company, young as he was. He made the drivers laugh with his voices and jokes. Plus he could always get the cars to the customer, like he had all of Moors County on a map inside his head. She wasn’t going to worry about Kaye.

  Amma heard heavy shoes come running down the stairs, young male laughter, then she felt a kiss and the brush of a moustache on the side of her neck.

  “Stay cool, Grandma.” Kaye stood there at the opened refrigerator with his skinny school friend Parker Jones, both of them in solid black, head to toe, with big black circles of hair on their heads. Kaye pulled off the legs from the Cornish game hens left over from the supper Amma had made for Heaven's Hill. He gave two to Parker, ate two others himself.

  “You turn off those lights upstairs?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, go turn off those tree lights, too. Tat's not looking at that tree, he's looking at that fool television.”

  Kaye's dog Philly ran into the kitchen to see what the noise was about and followed Kaye back into the living room.

  Amma slapped Parker's fingers off a cake. “Leave that alone. Parker, you weren’t upstairs messing with Tat's leg box again?”

  For years Kaye's friend had had an insatiable fascination with the bones from Tatlock's amputated leg, and had loved to look at them. Parker had even borrowed the bones once to terrorize his sister into believing that he’d dug up a murdered man in their crawl space.

  “We got better things to do than play with old bones,” Parker told her. “Times are changing, Grandma.”

  “That so?”

  “Yep, the black man's time has come.”

  “Um hum.”

  Kaye returned and spun the radio dial to the Motown station where the Drifters were singing “White Christmas.” He shook out one of his grandmother's aprons, held it so the sunflower spread across his chest. “Outta sight. I’m telling you, slap these sunflowers on wild-color T-shirts, you can sell ’em, make some bread.”

  “You can sell ’em,” agreed Parker. “Every jive turkey in town be wearing a big yellow flower.”

  “Flower power to the people, Grandma. Later.” Kaye tossed the apron back on her table and pulled Parker with him across the room.

  “Kaye! You come back in here and put on a coat. It's cold out there. Kaye!”

  The door slammed as she turned up the radio. Tat yelled, “I can’t hear my program in here,” and turned up the television. A TV voice was singing, “Here comes Google with the goo goo googly eyes” about that horrible chocolate and vanilla peanut butter that Tat would eat right out of the jar with a spoon.

  Amma turned off her music and went back to work. She pinned a sunflower onto an apron bib, smoothed the cloth under the foot pedal of her sewing machine, and looked out the window at Heaven's Hill where all the lights were still on.

  At Moors High School gym the spinning planets were deflating and the sparkle lights were blinking out in the fiberglass snow of the Stardust Court. Hands held tightly between them, Noni and Roland were slow-dancing to the last dance, John Lennon's “Imagine” without the words. Inside her head Noni was singing the words about imagine all the people living life in peace, while the outside of her head was pressed into the silky lapel of Roland's tuxedo. She could feel his warm breath in her hair as he whispered, “You’re the most beautiful girl here. I’m a lucky guy.”

  This conjunction, or disjunction, between imagining world peace and feeling Roland's breath was symptomatic of how Noni had felt through the entire Christmas dance—Stardust on Mars, it was called—as if she were looking at the gathering through peculiar binoculars that caused her to see completely different scenes through each of the lens, one far away, one very close. Far away, the dance looked like the tacky Snowland at the mall, a row of cheap plastic Christmas trees in front of which children got their pictures taken with Santa, with the odd addition here in the gym of a solar system of painted balls hanging from the ceiling representing the planets (in the wrong order). Far away, girls without their dance partners looked miserably perky laughing together in corners, while the boys who were supposed to be dancing with them ran outside to drink or do drugs; teachers didn’t notice, or pretended not to. Far away, Noni could imagine Kaye's look of exaggerated comic horror at the poor dancers, or the talentless band, which played everything from David Bowie to the Allman Brothers in the same thumping style. Far away, she could imagine the speech on archaic sex roles delivered by her best friend Bunny Breckenridge, who had gone tonight to see The Garden of the Finzi-Continis with “The Outsies,” the group of self-described hippies and nerds with whom she and Noni had picketed the Moors draft board to protest the Vietnam War.

  But close-up, Roland Hurd, who would never picket anything, was leaning down to kiss Noni sweetly on the face and then on the lips. “My dad's so right,” he whispered. “You’re the best of the best.” Close up, other senior boys were cutting in on Roland to dance with her. Senior girls ran over to ask her where she’d bought her dress. Roland did, well, not real dance steps like the ones Kaye and she had choreographed together, but Roland moved his body in ways that felt very pleasant. He had no doubts when he danced, which made it easy to give in to him.

  Indeed, Roland Hurd appeared to have no doubts about anything in the world, including facts that Noni was fairly certain he’d gotten wrong and opinions she knew she would have argued against if Bunny, for example, had expressed them, or if she’d heard them from Kaye. In fact, she was far more sympathetic to Kaye's views than Roland's—even if Kaye drove her crazy by the assertive way he insisted on knowing things. Roland, on the other hand, had an unsettling manner of making outrageous claims so coolly and blandly that they sounded like incontestable clichés.

  Roland's lack of investment in what he said was very different from Kaye's and Bunny's ardent quarrels with the world, and somehow Noni couldn’t bring herself to fight with Roland the way she fought with her friends. Somehow she didn’t want to. Roland took away her will to fight, the way her mother did, but without the tension and the anger. As if weight had lifted from her, she felt herself floating toward him, like a leaf blown against the side of a building, until she was pressed against his chest, warm and close, and with no desire to argue.

  But, at the same time, through the other lens of the binoculars, far way, she could see another Noni, the Noni she’d been before Roland, and that Noni was shrinking into someone small and quiet as a mouse. It was all very strange.

  The dance ended. Noni was saying good-bye to some friends when Roland sauntered back into the crowded lobby of the gym and draped her long coat around her shoulders. Then to her shock he suddenly moved his hand under the coat and cupped her breast in his palm. He squeezed, not hard enough to hurt, but not at all in a way she liked. He smiled until, frowning, she pulled away.

  “What's the matter?” he asked, staggering slightly against her. His blue eyes, she noticed, now had little red lines in them. Throughout the night, Roland had “stepped outside” with the other boys, although only when another boy had cut in to dance with her. And now as he whispered, “Noni, wear my varsity ring,” pressing his lips into her neck, harder and less pleasantly than when they’d been dancing inside, his words were slurred and she could smell the whiskey strongly.

  But it was a familiar smell to Noni, even loved.

  Kaye and Parker hadn’t had much luck with their evening, although it had started well. Still a few days short
of sixteen, Kaye had borrowed his Uncle Austin's taxi by assuring him that it was legal for him to drive with a learner's permit as long as a licensed driver (Parker) was in the car. They’d driven into Hillston. Because state troopers were always pulling over young blacks, Kaye had put Parker in the back seat as if he were a customer; he figured that cops wouldn’t bother a taxi, because they’d assume there must be a white person in the back seat.

  But at the new mall, when they strolled through a department store where Kaye was looking for a present to give his grandmother, an old lantern-jawed guard began following them up and down the aisles. Finally, as Kaye was searching for an open cash register to pay for the purple down-filled coat in his hand, the man had growled at them, “Put it back and move along, boys,”

  Curses rose quickly to Kaye's lips, as strong as bile, but he stopped them before they escaped. Two years ago, he hadn’t always managed such control. And as a result, he’d once been physically shoved out of a store by a security guard. He’d once been forced by the Gordon Junior High football coach to stand on a chair in the middle of the boys’ locker room for an hour as a punishment for “back talk.”

  “Pick your battles,” his grandmother Amma had told him after that incident. “Some things just not worth what they cost. Fight to win, Kaye, not to fight.”

  He heard her voice now as he restrained Parker with an arm, then with an elaborate shrug of his shoulders, tossed the down coat onto a table of sweaters. “Just cost your boss a sale,” was all he said to the guard.

  The man repeated, “Move along,” as if it were the only phrase they’d taught him.

  Afterwards, the new Chinese restaurant on University Street where Kaye wanted to try something called “Szechwan” didn’t have any tables and apparently didn’t plan to have any for the rest of the evening. So the two young men strolled among the college shops and hippie sidewalk venders. Kaye bought a silver chain and had his present for Noni wrapped in Christmas paper for fifty cents. Then they bought hamburgers and sneaked them in when they went to see The Godfather, which Parker found hilarious.

  After the movie, Kaye and Parker drove to the Underground Railroad, a college dive in an old Pullman car near the train station. It stank of beer and urine but had a young racially mixed crowd and live folk singers—mostly white local dropouts, who sang, Kaye said, with weedy voices and loud guitars about social and personal horrors they’d never experienced. Parker said, fine; he didn’t want to hear folks singing about horrors they had experienced. All he wanted to hear about was good times and fast women.

  Kaye had never been carded at the Underground because of his size and his moustache and the fact that the bartender thought he was a cab driver. But this time the bartender asked Parker for his ID, and as Parker wasn’t carrying his driver's license, they’d been thrown out. Worse, their expulsion had been observed not only by three attractive black girls in a booth, who’d agreed to let Kaye and Parker join them there, but by Wade Tilden, who’d taken to hanging out in funky places like the Underground where the drug dealers could be found. Wade's hair was now almost as big as Kaye's, a fluffy red Afro, and he wore a tight gray leisure suit that resembled a space suit and accentuated his skinniness. Kaye told Parker that Wade looked like he was on his way to the moon. When Kaye had first spotted him over by the bar, he was buying a dime bag of hash from one of the bearded folk singers.

  It was embarrassing that just as Kaye, with a grin, was dramatically pantomiming at Wade the smoking of a joint, Parker should get them bounced so that Kaye had to endure not only the three girls’ mocking waves but also Wade's smirk as he mouthed “bye-bye” when they left the bar.

  “Parker, would you carry your fucking driver's license with you?” Kaye stormed across the parking lot.

  “No, thank yoooou.” Parker was actually eighteen although he attempted to stop anyone in authority from finding out his age. His teachers at Moors High School (where he was still a sophomore) thought he was stupid and kept him back, which was fine with him, and part of his plan for “flying under the radar screen” of the Moors draft board. “I’m not about to be the last nigger Huey’ed out of that jungle stuffing his guts back in his stomach.”

  “No,” said Kaye. “You’re gonna be the last nigger sitting in the ’leventh grade right beside your own grandchildren.”

  “That’ll be just fine with me.”

  Parker wanted to check out the Christmas Dance at Moors High, to which a few of his friends, being seniors, had taken dates. Begrudgingly, Kaye drove back to Moors in a cold misty rain and detoured over to the high school. As they slowed going past the parking lot, Parker rolled down his window to see better. “Man, that Stars on Mars dance is already let out.” He pointed at dozens of prom-goers heading for their cars. “Look over there. Somebody puking on his Corvette. Ten-four, good buddy!” He leaned out the window. At the Corvette, the boy's date was holding onto him, trying to turn him away from his car hood.

  “Hey, Kaye, there's that girl lives ’cross your yard from you.”

  “What girl?”

  Then Kaye saw Noni as she was struggling to get out of a blue GTO. Someone inside the car was holding her back by her long coat. With a yank, she broke loose, staggered, stepped away, clutching at her dress. Then the other person jumped out of the car as well, grabbing her again. Kaye recognized the tall man in the tuxedo as the senior halfback, Roland Hurd.

  Slamming hard on the brakes, spinning the old black taxi around, narrowly missing a car speeding out of the parking lot, Kaye sped over the sidewalk onto the asphalt and squealed to a stop beside the GTO. Startled, the girl at the Corvette, still holding onto the boy who’d been sick, suddenly let him go and he bounced off the hood of his car and fell onto the pavement.

  “Kaye, where you going?”

  Kaye ignored Parker as he hurried toward Noni. He saw that her hair was disheveled and that she was holding her coat tightly closed. He saw that Roland was squeezing her tightly by the upper arm, that he was swaying, and that his words slurred as he kept repeating. “Jesus, what's the matter with you, Noni? What did I do?”

  “Please just leave me alone please.”

  “Leave you alone? What the hell you crying about?” Roland saw Kaye approaching from the black cab. “Jesus, you called a taxi? When the hell did you call a taxi? I don’t believe this.”

  “Noni?” Kaye stepped beside her. “You need a ride?”

  Roland moved between them. “She doesn’t need a cab! This is my date. How do you even know her name? How does this cab driver know your name?”

  “Noni? You need a ride?”

  Struggling not to cry, she nodded.

  Other students had heard Roland's raised voice and had drifted over to see what was happening. Kaye recognized two seniors, one of them a fat defensive tackle, as teammates of Hurd's. The two football players shoved to the front of the group. The fat one had a nasal way of talking that squinted his nose up to his eyes. “What's the deal, man?”

  Kaye said, “Well, the deal is, the Marlboro man here is loaded. So I’m taking her home.”

  Roland Hurd shook his head at his two friends in amazement. “This is mind-blowing. Where’d this cab come from?”

  The other senior said, “Hey, Rol, we know this guy. He's not a cab driver. What's your name? JV running back. Rol, we know this guy.”

  “My name's Kaye King. I’m a friend of Noni's.”

  Behind them Parker got out of the taxi and stood beside the opened back door.

  “Excuse me, please, I’m sorry,” Noni said. It was hard to know if she was talking to Kaye or to Roland or to the dozen students now milling around them in the parking lot in the soft rain.

  “Noni, honey, come on!” Roland reached for her but she twisted away from him. Then abruptly she ran to the black taxi and jumped inside the back. Parker shut the door behind her, calling over to Kaye. “Move it, man!”

  Roland's two teammates crowded on either side of Kaye, then they turned to Roland for a lead on wh
at to do. But the tall, handsome senior was staring at the cab into which Noni had disappeared. Then he turned back to Kaye. He and Kaye just stood in the soft rain, looking at each other for a while. Finally the fat tackle with the nasal voice hit Hurd on the shoulder with his huge fist. “Roland, hang on, you gonna let this nig—, oh sorry, this black person drive off with your date?”

  Kaye did a perfect imitation of the tackle's scrunched nose and twangy voice as he pointed at him and the other senior. “Where are y'all's dates? Oh hang on, maybe some black person already drove off with them. Or oh hang on, I got it, y’all are dating each other! Far out!” So uncanny was the mimicry that a few students snickered before they could stop themselves.

  Seated in the driver's seat of the taxi with the window down, Parker mumbled, “Shit, don’t pull a knife. Shit, don’t pull a knife.”

  Noni saw with horror that Parker had taken a pistol out of his jacket and was resting it on the open window. “I’m going to get a teacher,” she said.

  Parker reached over and pushed her back into the seat, told her to sit still. He turned on the car radio. The news came on saying that the trial of the Watergate Seven would start in January. Incongruously, Noni found herself thinking that Kaye would be happy to hear it.

  Suddenly, the fat tackle lunged at Kaye and just as suddenly Roland threw his arm in front of his teammate to block him. Roland was so drunk that the sudden movement threw him off balance too; he lurched forward and fell down onto the wet asphalt. Quickly, his two friends pulled him back to his feet.

  Kaye hadn’t budged. He nodded at Roland. “That's right. You want her to get home to her folks safe and that's what I’m going to do.”

  Roland stared at Kaye, motionless for a moment, then he nodded at him. “Okay.” He turned to the two seniors. “He knows her. His family works for hers.”

  “What's her problem?” asked the tall senior.

  Roland shrugged. “Okay,” he mumbled at Kaye. “Just take her home.”

  “That was the plan, man.” Kaye turned and walked to the taxi.