The Last Noel (11 page)

“
Do
you have a knife?”

He threw something into the back seat. “Yeah. Be my guest.”

Noni felt around on the seat. Surprised, she saw a red Swiss Army knife like the one that she'd given Kaye from “Santa,” back on the first Christmas they'd met. “Is this the one I gave
you all those years ago?”

“You want it back?”

“I'm sorry. I thought Parker was telling me you had like a
switchblade.
I was scared somebody was going to get hurt.”

Parker wheeled around on her. “I didn't mean Kaye. I meant
them.”

“A switchblade?” Kaye made his raspberry noise. “Who you think I am, James Dean at Hollywood High?”

“You two are weird,” Parker muttered. “Just let me out of here at this corner. Let me out! I'll walk the block. Y'all are too weird.”

After they dropped Parker off, Kaye asked Noni if she wanted to go to the hospital. “Why?” she asked.

“Did he rape you?”

“No! How could you say that?”

“How could I
say
it?”

She was profoundly, horrifyingly shocked. Roland had simply tried to “go too far” —as her girlfriends had told her, as her mother had told her, all boys would always try to do—by trying to undo her bra and touch her breasts. And she had stopped him—as her girlfriends, as her mother had told her all girls must always try to do in order to be respected and ultimately married to the boys they'd stopped from touching them.

Kaye and Noni didn't speak again until they were driving through the brick columns guarding Heaven's Hill. Then she said, “Parker has a gun.”

Actually it was the first Kaye had known of it, but he masked his surprised shock with a shrug. “Yeah, so what?”

“So what? He could get killed. You could get killed.”

“That's the least of my worries.” Kaye laughed, struck that she hadn't said, “He could kill someone, you could kill someone.” The white stone drive curved like a river to the house where dozens of lights were blazing, even at one in the morning. “Your folks are up.”

“They just leave the lights on.”

“Is Wade back?”

“Wade's over at his girlfriend's. Her folks went to St. Thomas.” Noni's careful curls were now wet and disarrayed. She'd buttoned her coat to her neck. “Kaye. You don't need to come in with me….I'm sorry—”

“Oh shut up. Here.” He handed her a small present elaborately wrapped in shiny red paper. “I won't be around Christmas. I'm going to Philly to see my mama. So Happy Birthday, et cetera.”

“Oh thank you. Let me get yours under the tree.”

“Good luck finding it.” He followed her to the big white front door that was never locked. She opened it quietly and slipped inside.

Kaye was waiting at the door when a small cry came from the hallway, like grief caught in her throat. “Oh….Oh.”

He hurried in to find Noni kneeling on the parquet floor in the midst of broken blue pieces of pottery. The Early Ming Dynasty Chinese jar that had always sat on the console lay on the floor smashed into fragments. Leaping up, Noni ran down the hall. Following her, Kaye noticed a path of small red smudges on the wide floorboards leading into the den.

There, on the far side of the handsome paneled space, Bud Tilden lay on his red leather couch, dressed in his perfect soft wool gray slacks and his cashmere sweater, but with bloody bare feet. A spilled glass was tilted in his hand. A record album lay on the floor,
Where Are You?
On its cover, Frank Sinatra hunched over, sadly smoking a cigarette, wearing a green V-neck sweater very much like the one Bud Tilden had on. Nearby, built-in shelves showed off trophies with basketball players on them; others held hundreds of vinyl records—classical Romantic music mostly, and pop vocalists. Other shelves held dozens of matched sets of “good books”—like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the poetry of Keats,
Ivanhoe
, and
Arrowsmith
, that Tilden read in the evenings.

A large trophy, a silver loving cup commemorating Tilden as player of the year, sat on the coffee table near him. It was filled with tennis balls, and other tennis balls lay on the floor around it. It looked as if Tilden had been throwing the balls from the couch into the trophy. A television was on without the sound, showing a test-pattern. The stereo turntable was on too, the needle rasping again and again at the end of the record. Kaye clicked the machine off.

“Daddy?”

Tilden groaned softly, rolled to his side, deep in drunken sleep.

“He's hurt himself,” Noni whispered. She ran to a small sink that was set in a bar in a corner, noticing as she wet a cloth there that the bottle of bourbon beside the sink was empty. Tilden winced and twitched as Kaye carefully washed away the blood from his bare feet. The long pale feet reminded him of Noni's brother Gordon, of how Gordon had made a stand in college by not wearing shoes but had gone to Vietnam wearing stiff shiny boots.

Pulling out a tiny sliver of the broken jar, Kaye cleaned the sole of Tilden's foot. “He's okay. He'll be fine. Where's your mom?”

Noni gestured above to the ceiling. “Upstairs. But she won't wake up.” Noni didn't want to say that her mother took sleeping pills. “She's a heavy sleeper.”

“I guess your dad was wandering around in the hall, knocked that blue bowl off.” Kaye didn't want to say that her father had obviously been drunk and had now passed out.

“Mom loved that jar. Her grandfather brought it home from China. I hope she didn't hear it break, I hope she didn't.” Tears fell from Noni as she leaned over her father. One of the tears struck Tilden in the face and he brushed at it with his hand. She smoothed the tear away from his cheek. Then, taking a plaid throw from an armchair, she floated it over him,
softly tucked it in around his legs, kissed his forehead, and turned out the lamp in the den. “Everything's breaking,” she said quietly in the dark.

The phone rang, terrifyingly loud, on the table right beside the couch. Tilden didn't stir. Noni quickly picked it up before it could ring again. It was Roland Hurd, wanting to know if she was all right.

“Yes, Kaye got me home,” she said stiffly. “I'm fine.” Kaye saw her take a large gold sports ring from her coat pocket, look at it, then return it. “No, I still have it,” she said. Kaye left the room as Noni kept talking into the phone, “No, you can't come over….”

When she returned to the hallway, she found Kaye kneeling on the parquet floor, collecting the broken pieces of the jar into its jagged base. Still in her long buttoned coat, she knelt beside him to help.

Kaye looked at her. “He apologize?”

“Yes. He apologized.”

“Good.”

“He'd had a little too much to drink.”

“Um hum. ‘A little.'” Kaye shook his head. “What does he do to his date after he's had a ‘lot'?”

“Can we forget about Roland?”

“That sure would be my advice. Find me some good glue.”

They walked through the house back to the large kitchen. From the living room, the hundreds of lights on the huge tree blinked on and off in complicated sequences. Kaye wondered if the Tildens just plugged in the lights and left them on day and night from December 5 to January 5. They never seemed to be turned off.

The long pale green-painted pine table and pale green chairs and the enormous sink and enormous refrigerator were all familiar to Kaye. While his grandmother cooked or cleaned, he had often waited in here, studying the new appliances and gadgets that Judy Tilden was always buying.

When Noni came back from the bathroom, she'd fixed her prom dress and her hair. She sat down at the table and watched Kaye start to sort the pieces of the jar. There must have been twenty or thirty broken shards.

“Aren't you going to help me?” he asked.

“It's stupid. You think my mother's not going to notice?”

“So what, it'll be fixed. Come on, we can fix this. We can fix this as good as new.”

She rolled her eyes. “It's an antique, Kaye! It's early Ming Dynasty!”

He grinned at her. “We can fix this as good as old.”

Noni couldn't stop herself from smiling.

He looked up from his neat pile of sorted chips. “Why do you always cover your mouth like that? You've got a pretty smile.”

The compliment astonished her. Embarrassed, she began examining the broken pieces. She found one that fit to the base and handed it to him. When she found the adjoining piece, he glued them together.

“Nice smile, but look, kid, you're anemic,” he added, mimicking the way Dr. Jack had once always been telling her that. “You need to eat more spinach, get some iron in your blood. I know some black people, they want to be whiter. But you are
too
white. You need to get a little more colored blood in you.”

“I probably have plenty.”

“You probably do.”

“Maybe as much as you do.”

“Now that's not happening.” Grinning, Kaye took a small mirror off the wall and brought it over, held it in front of her, pressed his head against hers so they could see both of their faces in the narrow glass: her pale cheeks, blonde hair, his cinnamon skin, black Afro, his gold-flecked eyes ironically asking her gray-blue eyes to laugh with him. But then as they kept looking at each other in the mirror, they became suddenly
aware of their closeness. The laughter left his eyes and her cheeks flushed. They looked away and then they moved apart.

“We need to fix this bowl,” Kaye gruffly announced, returning the mirror to the wall.

An hour later, with the meticulous precision that she'd noticed in him from the beginning, he had put most of the Chinese jar back together. While they worked they drank Cokes and ate brownies. Mostly they didn't talk. But suddenly out of nowhere he said, “That asshole Coach Ross, he's always telling me how I need to get ‘a passion' for football. I said to him, ‘You think a black man's got to dance in the end zone, is that what you think? How 'bout if I got a passion to be a rocket scientist?'”

“Do you?”

Kaye didn't answer. Instead he attached another piece to the jar. “And I don't want you turning into a zombie.”

“What in the world is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, tell me something
you
want. You want to marry Roland Turd?”

“Don't call him that.”

“Sorry. So, what do you want?”

It was disturbing that the image invading Noni's mind was of Roland kissing her sweetly on the dance floor, early in the dance, before he'd “stepped outside” too often. Then bizarrely Roland was turning into Kaye and Kaye was kissing her. But of course she couldn't say any of that out loud. So she said, “For one thing I want people I care about not to drink so much.” She hoped Kaye would think she meant her father. And she did mean him. But she also meant Roland.

Kaye made his raspberry noise. “Not what you want for somebody else. For
you.”

“That's what I want.”

“Nope.” He shook his head at her.

“You can't just tell me, ‘No.'” But Kaye kept waiting, gesturing “Come on,” with his hand, and, finally, exasperated, she
blurted out. “I want to go someplace where they can teach me to play the piano better.”

“You play the piano fine. You just play scared.”

“Oh, you think you know everything.”

“I do,” he grinned.

“At least I play the piano. At least I love it. You just use everything you do as something to put on your college applications. Football. Violin. Science Fair winner. Paper editor. He does it all. You're just collecting medals.”

“Damn straight I am. I need all the medals I can get, need the Medal of Honor, for me to get anywhere in the old U.S. of A.”

She watched him maneuver the piece he'd just glued into place. “I know I play scared. Don't you ever get scared?”

Slowly he pulled at the glue stuck to his fingers. The silence stretched until she was sure he was going to ignore her question (as he often did). But then he said, “You grow up in the streets, in Philly? You don't let it show. You blink, and you're lucky, you're lying on the sidewalk and you hear the sirens come. You're unlucky, you're lying on the sidewalk and you're wearing a toe tag.” He made this comment with his usual braggadocio, as if boasting about a violent cityscape she could never know.

“When were you the most scared?” she asked. “I was the most scared when they told my mom Gordon was dead.”

Now he spoke in a different voice, softly rubbing at the old black Timex watch that he'd had since childhood, whose square face had once looked so large on his wrist. “My mama. When she didn't make sense, that scared me,” he said quietly. “The first time when they tied down her hands and stuck needles in her and rolled her out to the ambulance and wouldn't let me come too, that scared me bad. I was seven. I got on a bus but I couldn't find the hospital so I kept on riding because I didn't know what to ask for. Then the driver started in about calling over a cop so I ran off. Except I got lost in downtown Philly, and I got so tired
and cold I just went to sleep on a grate next to this stinky old man.” Kaye glued the edge of the blue broken piece and then pressed it into the top of the jar. “That old man gave me part of his blanket. Could have been a rapist, killer, anything. But he was just a nice old man. You need luck, too. Or angels.”

“You believe in angels?”

“When I was little, my mama used to tell me I had angels fighting for me, not sweet little nice angels, but warrior angels with great big swords. She showed me pictures of them and told me they were always on watch up there, looking out for me. Anybody messed with me and these angels would whack off their heads. You remember those crosses she used to put out in the yard here?”

“Her ‘beau ideas'?”

He smiled. “That's right.”