The Last Noel (23 page)

Giving up the conversation, he sweetly smiled. “Oh sure. Thanks for the stew. I love that stew.”

“I know you do.”

Half an hour later, Amma returned to the den from sitting beside Michelle's bed. She found the stew bowl on the kitchen table empty and Bud Tilden gone.

He was nowhere in the house, but she heard the stereo playing loudly, an orchestra.

Rachmaninoff's
Piano Concerto No. 2
boomed out from the speaker Tilden had moved to face through a window onto the porch so that he could listen to it while outside.

By the lights on the front porch and by the Christmas lights hung on the shrubs and bushes bordering the circular drive around the lawn of Heaven's Hill, Amma could see Bud Tilden out there in the icy slush, throwing a basketball into an old ratty hoop on a backboard that he had set up in a corner of the yard a long time ago.

Amma remembered watching him out there, way back twenty years or more, when he'd been running around under that hoop with little Gordon sitting high up on his shoulders so the boy could drop the ball through the rim. She remembered long summer twilights with the two of them playing
with that basketball. Gordon shrieking with pleasure and Bud Tilden shouting, “Another one! You're so good!” A long time ago.

She watched Tilden now through the living room window. Over and over the tall slender man leapt in air, arced the ball over his head, threw it, raced to catch it under the net, spun, and threw it again. Usually—and this surprised Amma—it dropped right through the rim and into the net.

Amma walked out onto the porch. She saw Tilden's big silver basketball trophy sitting on the top step with a bottle of champagne in it, packed in snow. She called to him over the sweet sad music to come on inside, that it was too cold and icy to be out in the yard throwing a ball around at night in just his pants and that thin V-neck sweater.

Jogging through the slush to the foot of the porch, he asked her please if she couldn't stay with Michelle just a few more minutes. Just let him do a dozen baskets in a row if he could, let him do thirty-five, please. He smiled as he lit a cigarette, then picked up the trophy and showed her the champagne bottle. “If I make it, here's my victory cup. We'll celebrate, you and I, Mrs. Fairley, okay? Thirty-five in a row. Thirty-five married years, thirty-five baskets.”

Amma went back inside and returned with Tilden's fleece jacket. “I'll stay a little while more. Tat's sleeping and I've got stuff I need to get done here. But you put this on.”

He ground out the cigarette, took the jacket, slipped into it. “That twenty-fifth anniversary party was some disaster, right? Remember that? Poor Judy. She hung in there as long as she could, don't you think?”

Amma zipped up the jacket as if he were a child, the way she used to do for Kaye. “For better, for worse, the Book says. You got to decide what that means to you. I didn't leave my husband Bill King 'til I left him in the ground at the cemetery. And I'll leave Tat Fairley the same way. Or he'll leave me.
Whatever God decides. 'Til death do us part. That's what it means to me. And that's what I plan.”

He smiled at her, tucked the silver cup under his arm. “Oh Amma, sometimes death just gets to be too long to wait.”

She watched him from the porch for a while. It had stopped snowing, and he didn't seem to have had all that much to drink tonight. He looked as if he might be enjoying himself, and heaven knows, the man could use a little happiness. Not a bad man, not mean, not cheap, not hard. Not hard enough maybe. Too soft anyhow to keep Judy from feeling like she had to be so hard herself. He must have been good with that basketball in his day, thought Amma, as she walked back to the kitchen to clean up the meal she had talked him into eating. As she dried dishes in the kitchen she thought of as hers, she sang:

 

When that first trumpet sounds, I'll get up and walk
         around.

Ain't no grave can hold my body down.

 

Out on the lawn, Bud Tilden stopped for a moment, looked up at the great endless night where the sky now sparkled with infinite millions of disinterested stars. He thought something he had never believed before, about his connection to this universal dome above him: he thought not how small he was in relation to it but that he was a part of it, that he was a piece, even if broken, of a lovely and eternal wholeness. He felt in harmony, like the music he was listening to. He saw Noni playing the piano, her face so beautiful, so filled with the beauty she heard.

He ran faster, leapt higher. Again and again the ball dropped through the hoop.

Kaye's red Thunderbird was parked in front of the ivy-covered stucco house where Dr. Fisher lived; Kaye was waiting for Noni who was inside giving a Christmas gift to the elderly minister. Snow on the lawn was thin, and there were icy patches on the walkway and the sidewalk.

Suddenly he was startled by a bright light in his eyes and a loud rapping on his car window. It was a Moors policeman. The officer shined his flashlight into the front and back seats of the Thunderbird. Kaye rolled down the window but didn't speak.

The policeman, young (Kaye's age), white, stone-faced, said, “What're you doing here?” Not, thought Kaye angrily, “Can I help you, sir?” Not even, “Sorry to bother you, sir, but what are you doing here?” Not even, “Sir, what're you doing here?”

“Waiting for a friend,” Kaye replied. He could have said more but didn't.

“Can I please see your license and registration?”

“I'd need to know why you want to.” Kaye saw another policeman suddenly run out from the side of a nearby house, slipping on ice as he headed up the sidewalk toward them, looking into the dark yards with his flashlight. “I'm legally parked. My plates are in order. What's your probable cause, officer?”

Now the policeman opened Kaye's door. “Step out of the car please.”

In part Kaye was thinking of Amma's rule, “Save it for when it's worth it.” In part he was watching the other cop ring the doorbell of the house next to Reverend Fisher's, and in part he was wondering where Parker had gone when he'd left Bunny's party. Meanwhile he slid from the Thunderbird, and without looking at the young policeman handed him his opened wallet. In the wallet, facing the driver's license, was a photo card identifying John Montgomery King as a doctor at
University Hospital. Kaye was interested in whether the cop would notice the ID and, if so, whether it would change things.

It changed things immediately. The policeman returned the wallet. “We've had a report of a suspicious person in the neighborhood, sir, and a possible attempted break-in.”

The other officer had now disappeared inside the house next door.

Kaye asked, “How would someone define ‘a possible attempted break-in'? Would that be a black person slowing down in a white neighborhood?”

Doctor or not, his tone was too much for the young officer whose face returned to stone. “I need to see your registration.”

As Kaye reached for the glove compartment, he saw a sight that surprised him and probably, he thought, surprised the policeman even more. Out of the gray stucco ivy-covered Georgian house walked three people: old Dr. Fisher in his clerical collar and a baggy cardigan sweater, Noni in her beautiful gray cashmere coat, and, with Noni's arm through his, Parker Kareem Aked Jones.

Noni waved at Kaye, calling to him as he stepped around the car toward her. “Oh, Kaye, here we are. We're so sorry to keep you waiting, aren't we, Reverend Fisher? Parker and I just lost track of time.” Tightening her arm, Noni pulled Parker closer to her. “Didn't we, Parker?”

“Just lost track of time,” repeated Parker. “Talkin' 'bout church and stuff like that.”

Dr. Fisher reached Kaye, touched his shoulder. “Everything all right?” He turned to the young policeman, touched him as well. “What's the problem here, Officer? Dr. King have car trouble?”

“Report of a suspicious person in the neighborhood.” The cop stepped back as Noni moved next to the passenger door where she stopped expectantly. She waited a moment, then
gave the cop a cool expectant look and he jumped forward to open the door for her.

“Good gracious,” said Dr. Fisher, “on Christmas? What kind of ‘suspicious'? Oh, excuse me.” The old man leaned into the front seat, kissed Noni's cheek. Then he opened the back door, gestured for Parker to get in. “Noni, good-bye, thanks so much, you and Parker, for my present. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Kaye.” The old minister led the policeman along the sidewalk away from the red Thunderbird. “So, Officer, who saw this suspicious person?”

Kaye started his motor and drove away as Parker blew out a great long sigh, then a cascade of curses, then lay down laughing in the back seat. “Disco Queen, you too much. And that little old priest ought to be on TV.”

“Parker, shut up! What's going on?”

Together Noni and Parker explained. Noni had been in the old minister's backyard, hanging up on a hawthorn tree the new bird feeder she'd given him for Christmas. Suddenly she'd spotted Parker running as hard as he could out of the yard next door. She'd jumped in front of him and grabbed him; when he'd said the police were chasing him, she'd hurried him inside Dr. Fisher's house.

Watching out the living room window, they'd seen the officer interrogating Kaye, and seen the other officer knocking on the neighbor's door. They had decided to walk out of the house together as if Noni and Parker had been paying a social call on their pastor.

Kaye wanted to know why the police were chasing Parker in the first place. Why was Parker running through strangers' yards at night? Why had he left the Breckenridge party without telling them?

Parker said, “I felt like a rabbi at a redneck pig picking. But I didn't want to bust up your fun the way y'all were dancing like you were trying out for American Bandstand. So I was
gonna walk to where I could get on some bus line and go home, but I got lost and I didn't wanna ring, know what I mean?, bells in Lake Glade, so the more I walked the lost-er I got and then, Jesus fuck, I see this cop shining his flashlight round those yards like he's gonna find gold with it. And I say, Kareem kiss your free ass good-bye, 'cause my parole officer is a fucker. Then I swear it was like there's Noni like Allah dropped her out of the sky…”

As Parker went on with his story, Kaye was thinking that he didn't believe it. The saga of looking for a bus, of being lost and too wary to ask for help, was too much like the Philadelphia incident from Kaye's childhood, a story he had often told his friend. But maybe Parker wasn't lying; maybe he wasn't casing houses to rob them. Maybe it was true that he was looking for a bus, or maybe he was just wandering around, glancing in the windows of safe, comfortable, unfamiliar lives, intriguingly unlike his own.

Parker was still congratulating Noni on how she'd cowed the policeman by the way she'd looked at him as she'd waited for him to open her car door. “That's class. You can't learn that. You gotta be born thinking you're higher up.”

“I don't think I'm higher up!'

“Sure you do.” Kaye pulled in through the brick columns of Heaven's Hill. “Parker's not saying you think you're better, just higher up.”

“Well, I don't know what you mean.”

“That's why I love you, Duchess.” Parker hugged her from the back seat. “Let's us three go to the Indigo!”

Disappointed that Noni and Kaye said they didn't want to go dancing with him, Parker finally hopped out at Clayhome to pick up his sister's car.

“Go home, Parker,” Kaye told him.

“How 'bout you, Lady Disco? Change your mind. You and me and night fever.”

“Thanks, but I've got to check on my niece. Merry Christmas.”

“Y'all are drags,” lamented Parker. “Come on, Doctor Feelgood, least meet me later.”

“I'll think about it.”

Parker waved goodnight as he climbed into his sister's old Pinto. Kaye and Noni stood together waving as he drove away.

“Thanks,” Kaye told her. “Even if he wasn't trying a break-in, they'd have probably nailed him.”

“You don't have to thank me. Parker's my friend.”

Kaye stared at her. It was true, and odd that he'd never thought it. Parker was her friend.

He walked Noni across the long icy lawn toward the big house.

Only when he stumbled over the silver trophy and the champagne bottle rolled out of it did he see the human shape lying, arms and legs at odd angles, in the snow near the basketball hoop.

He ran toward the body so fast that he'd already had time to discover that Bud Tilden was ice cold and blue in the face before Noni was near enough to see her father.

Kaye jumped up and ran back to her before she could come closer. “Call 911! Go call 911! Now!”

Her voice was terrible. “Is it Daddy?” She tried to twist around Kaye, but he blocked her, turning her toward the house, shaking her.