Monkey Island (7 page)

“He can afford it,” Calvin said curtly.

“They don't care if we all die out here,” Buddy said. All at once, he seemed to see Clay, and he touched his shoulder. Clay stepped closer to him.

“Now, Buddy, you know we don't die in this country. We just become celestial hamburgers.”

Buddy snorted with laughter. “May I be covered with piccalilli,” he said.

Clay spoke. “Somebody's moved into our room. They must know my mother's not coming back.”

The two men looked at him. They didn't seem surprised.

“I brought you something,” Buddy said. “Got it from the Loving Heart Recycled Clothes Center.”

He reached into the crate and pulled out a dark blue wool sweater.

“I know it's too big, but it'll keep you warm for a time,” he said.

Clay put it on. The sleeves covered his hands. Buddy stooped and rolled up each one to Clay's wrists. Then he did what Clay wanted him to do. He put his arms around him and held him. Clay's face was against Buddy's neck, against the warm brown flesh, feeling the steady beating of Buddy's pulse as though it was his own heartbeat.

6   Monkey Island

Calvin wore a blue watch cap pulled down over his ears and a faded pink-and-white cotton blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “Wear every bit of your clothing in case you have to skedaddle,” he had advised Clay.

He was sitting in front of the crate, the inside of which was now lined with rolled newspapers. Although it was Friday, the noise of traffic was muted. A thin layer of snow, the first of the winter, covered the park, the benches and iron railing, and the streets. The twigs of trees were sheathed in ice.

Buddy was groaning softly, rubbing the backs of his ankles. Clay knew that his chilblains were hurting him. Buddy had on a pair of cotton work gloves he'd picked up somewhere. “Picked up somewhere” was how he described most of his finds.

The cold was intense. It had been three mornings since Gerald had last appeared with a big thermos of coffee, wrapped sandwiches, and doughnuts, stepping out of a taxi and calling for someone to come and help him carry the food into the park.

He was probably in court, Calvin said, defending his dastardly deed of bringing breakfast to people, and trying to get his van back.

Clay couldn't stop shivering. The coughing that had begun the day after he made his last trip to the hotel was dry and deep and made his ribs ache. He would have liked to crawl into the back of the crate and pile everything in it over himself. They'd had soda and pretzels for breakfast, which Buddy had bought with the last of Clay's money, the rest of which Clay had spent in Abdul's during the days he had kept watch on the hotel. His stomach felt queasy.

“It's time for a conference,” Calvin said, a vapor cloud around his beard.

“What we need is a fire,” Buddy said. “I was down by the old warehouses on the riverfront yesterday, and I saw these guys burning wood in big metal barrels. Oh, that fire looked good! If we could get a pail, you know what I mean, Calvin? I could find some coal somewhere—”

“You won't find coal. It's not used anymore—”

“All right, then. Wood and a big stone or two. We could heat the stones and put them under that stuff in the crate and be warm at least part of the night.”

“Yesterday evening, I was walking down White Street,” Calvin said, “and I got tired and sat down in front of one of those dusty-looking fabric stores they have there. First thing you know, two cops came up and said they were taking me to a shelter. I was too old—they called me a ‘geezer'—to be out in this weather. I went limp and they hauled and pulled and I went limper. They let go for a second, and I got away. I should say—I scuttled. You can usually surprise people.”

“You were saying,” Buddy said, “about a conference.” Buddy frequently reminded Calvin of what he'd set out to talk about.

“The conference is about you, Clay,” Calvin said. “Wherever your mother is, she's not going back to the hotel.”

Maybe the baby had been born, Clay was thinking. It would be Lucy or Daniel. Those were the two names he'd chosen when he'd first known about the baby.

“Clay! Listen to me!”

Ma might be thinking of him this second. He felt himself shrinking to a pinpoint, to a word:
Clay
. That was what happened when he thought of her thinking of him.

“We're going to have to take you to some authority”—here Calvin paused and repeated “authority” with cold dislike—“people who'll find a home for you … a home with heat and regular meals and a pillow to lay your head on at night. You know that, Clay. You're dreadfully thin, you're cold all the time, you've been coughing like a chain-smoker. We can't help it that the life here is so hard. But we can help you get out of it.”

Clay felt a sound starting in the pit of his stomach and getting bigger and bigger until it flew out of his mouth.

“No!” he cried.

“Christmas is coming,” Buddy said quickly. “You could be somewhere where it'll really be Christmas.”

“This doghouse is coming apart. It won't last another week,” Calvin went on severely. “Listen to me. We live in days, not weeks and months. Each day can be a year. We think … at the end of a day … how we made it. Again. Only because we found an old coat, only because some people don't bother to turn in their cans and bottles, only because somebody gives me change, somebody who doesn't care if I make a few dollars that way because such a somebody knows what a terrible life it is. Other people say, You
like
the pavement—you must be making hundreds of dollars a week! Maybe some of us do, but we have to lick the sidewalks for it. Clay! I see how hard you're trying not to hear me! On Monday, Buddy is going to take you to an agency that looks out for children. You think you know all about agencies. You don't! Not everyone is like that Miss You-can't-fool-me you told us about. There are people who worry about children like you, whose hearts burn up each day of their lives and fly away at night like an ash, so they have to find a new heart every morning just to bear it all. How do you know Buddy won't find someone like that? You hear me, Clay?”

“Why can't you both take care of me?” Clay pleaded. “I could even go to school.”

“Yes, and I could go with you on Father's Day,” Calvin said. “I can see it now. Me, sitting at the back of the classroom with all the daddies. I look crazy and I am crazy. But—” The old man suddenly gasped as though he'd run out of breath entirely. Buddy clasped his shoulders.

“Monday, Clay,” Calvin whispered. He crawled inside the crate, drawing all the tatters and rags about himself until nothing showed but a few white hairs gleaming in the shadows like silver threads.

For the first time, that day, Clay went with Buddy to his “job.”

He held garbage bags open while Buddy picked through them. They walked into alleys alongside apartment houses and went through piles of rubbish. Atop walls, Clay saw huge coils of razor-edged wire that looked as if it could kill you if you stared at it long enough. He kept his eyes on the gutters, where Buddy said he sometimes found change. In all the hustling crowds whose feet were stirring the snow into slush, hardly anyone glanced at them, a young white boy and a young black man, as they went through the city looking for discarded or lost things.

After a few hours, they went to a supermarket, where Buddy redeemed the cans they had found for $3.05. They had to stand in line for nearly half an hour, along with other people who carried bags of cans. But Clay was glad for the time indoors. His feet had grown so numb he couldn't feel them.

Beneath the stoop of an old house with bricked-up windows, Buddy spotted a dented, rusty pail.

“Look at that,” he said. “That's what luck is. We got a stove, Clay.”

Buddy put the other things they'd found in the pail, a light bulb still in its paper case—“We might find a lamp,” he said—a crochet needle, its question-mark head nearly worn away, a small leather bag with a broken strap, a paper bag filled with old socks, a small framed picture of a large dog sitting on a lawn, and some half-eaten sandwiches and pastries.

“We'll buy hot dogs and potato salad at that deli across the street,” Buddy said. “We can cook the dogs over the fire. Keep your eye out for wood.”

By the time they'd returned to the park, they had gathered enough scraps of wood from construction sites to make a fire in the pail. They cooked their franks on twigs Buddy broke off from a tree. Calvin brought out three spoons from what he called his kitchen bag, and they each had a small scoop of potato salad.

While they were eating, a woman with an enormous turban around her head made of stockings ambled over to them, holding out an entire apple pie.

“Warm, my hands at your fire. Give you pie,” she said in a gravelly voice. Clay saw that most of her teeth were missing when she suddenly smiled at him.

She squatted down and held her hands out above the pail.

Buddy cut pieces of the pie with the crochet needle. “Everything comes in handy,” he whispered to Clay.

At the first taste of the apples in the sweet, half-frozen syrup, Clay felt sick. But he didn't care. He gulped down his piece. For once, his stomach was filled.

Calvin refused pie.

The woman stared at him suspiciously.

“You think I pinched this?” she cried. “It fell off a bakery wagon. That's what happened. What do they know about what falls off their damned wagons! Tell me that!”

“My digestive system is not up to it,” Calvin said mildly. “Calm down. It's none of my business where you got the pie. The boy is glad, and so is Buddy.”

“Don't often get a treat,” Buddy said.

But the woman looked at them indignantly and grabbed up the rest of the pie and walked away.

“I believe that is a person who thinks nothing is happening unless she is talking,” Calvin said.

“She's crazy,” Buddy said.

“Just what I said,” Calvin snapped as he crawled into the crate.

The wood in the pail had burned down to ashes. Now the cold clung to Clay like a coat of chilled water. As always, he had a moment of dread before he slid into the crate, a sense that he was about to be trapped inside a box from which he might not be able to escape. He looked over at Buddy, who was standing beneath the nearby tree knocking ashes out of the pail. Only an occasional car sped past the park, its roof briefly reflecting the glitter of the streetlight.

Suddenly, Buddy dropped the pail on the ground. It clanged once. He stood motionless, his head up, listening.

Clay began to hear a sound like people singing different songs at the same time. It changed into a tuneless roaring. Down the street on the opposite side of the park came what looked like a small crowd. As they passed into the light, he saw fourteen or fifteen young men and, walking by themselves a few yards behind, three girls, their arms linked, the tangle of their hair above their chalky faces like small brush fires. All of their mouths were open like people in pictures of Christmas carolers.

They were not singing carols. They were shouting, “Monkey Island! Monkey Island! Where the monkeys live!”

Calvin stuck his head out of the crate. Clay saw the turbaned woman run out of the other side of the park. Two men, barely visible beneath rags and newspapers, rose from the ground like otters and swam away into the dark.

What gleamed so dully? Clay blinked, opened his eyes wide, and stared. The men held lengths of chain and baseball bats. “Monkey Island!” they howled.

“We got to get out of here,” Buddy said urgently, but he didn't move.

Calvin was crouching by the crate. “The stump people … out for a night's sport,” he muttered.

The three girls danced in a circle in the middle of the street, their screechy laughter as piercing as shards of glass. The men had begun to hit the railing with their chains and bats. Now their chant had changed, but the words were as familiar to Clay as his own name, written on walls or shouted and grunted and hissed everywhere he had ever been in the city.

They caught sight of Buddy. “Nigger!” they cried out in one great shout, and they hit the railing with greater force while they swayed from side to side like huge red worms in a tin can.

Clay felt Calvin and Buddy grip his arms. They ran, Calvin stumbling and groaning, toward the farthest exit from the park. Down the street they went, turned, turned again, running for what seemed hours, until suddenly Buddy halted.

Calvin was panting like a thirsty dog. Clay could hardly stand upright. All he heard now above the hum of distant cars was the click of the traffic light beneath which the three of them huddled. The buildings around them were dark.

“All right now,” Buddy said, his words barely audible.

“Never be all right …” Calvin mumbled.

Shadows moved in an entrance to one of the buildings, people trying to find better ways to sleep on stone, Clay thought. There must be no place in the city where there wouldn't be those shadows, restless, stirring in dark places. He had learned to see them.

Buddy walked on, and Clay hurried to catch up with him. He was shivering so his teeth were clicking like the traffic light. Where were they going to go now?

“Buddy?”

Buddy stopped and turned. “Where's Calvin?” he asked.

A truck rumbled down the street toward them. “Calvin!” Buddy called. He listened for a moment.

“Come on,” he said roughly to Clay, and pulled him onto the sidewalk. The truck went by. Clay was dizzy. The truck appeared to be riding on its two left wheels. He sank against a wall. The street was empty except for Buddy standing a few feet away from him, turning in a circle as he continued to call the old man's name. He fell silent a moment, looked up at the sky, then glanced at Clay.

“We got to find a place to get out of the cold,” he said.