Dancers on the Shore

by William Melvin Kelley

  Pablo was still thirsty and ordered again.

  The bartender came and stood in front of him. He was a big man, with a face as red as watermelon. “Say, buddy, can’t you take a hint?”

  Pablo smiled. “What hint?”

  The bartender was getting pretty mad. “Why you think I’m breaking them glasses?”

  “I thought you like to break glasses. You must got a high bill on glasses.”

  The bartender got an axhandle from under the bar. “Get out of here, Cuban!”

  So now Pablo knew the bartender didn’t want him in the bar. “Now, let me get this straight. If I ask you for drink, and you give me drink, you would break that glass too?”

  “That’s right. But you better not order again.”

  Pablo sighed. He was sad. “Well, then we will pretend I got drunk in this bar.” And the next thing anybody knew Pablo was behind the bar, breaking all the glasses he could reach.

  “And we will pretend that I look at myself in your mirror.” He picked up a bottle and cracked the big mirror they had.

  By now there was a regular riot going on with all the men in the bar trying to catch and hold him, and Pablo running around, breaking chairs and tables. Finally just before they caught and tied him up, he tipped over their piano. “We will pretend I played a Cuban song on this piano!”

  They called the police and held him until the wagon came. And the next time I saw him was in court the next morning, where the judge kept looking at Pablo like he really didn’t believe that a man who seemed so kind and gentle could do such things. But it was plain Pablo had wrecked the Irishman’s bar. The judge sentenced him to thirty days in the city jail, and fifty dollars damages, which Pablo couldn’t pay. So the judge gave him thirty extra days.

  I didn’t see Pablo for the next two months. When he came home, he was changed. He wasn’t smiling at all, and you remember that he used to smile all the time. As soon as he came in the house he told me he was going out again. I knew where and I got mad. “Do you want to spend another two months in jail? Is that what you want?”

  He didn’t understand me. “Why you ask me that?”

  “Why! You’re going over there to that white man’s bar and get into a fight and go on back to jail. Did you like it that much? Did jail change you so much?”

  “Jennie, don’t you see? I try not to change.” He picked up five boxes of cigars he’d made before he went to jail and put them into a brown paper bag, and tucked the bag under his arm.

  I watched him go out the door and then started to cry. I loved him, you see, and didn’t want him back in jail. And I cried because I didn’t understand him now and was afraid of that.

  When the Irishmen saw him coming into their bar, they were stunned. Their mouths dropped open and they all got very quiet. Pablo didn’t pay them any mind, just walked up to the bar and put his foot on the brass rail.

  The bartender picked up his axhandle. “What you want here, Cuban? Ain’t you had enough?”

  “No.” Pablo didn’t smile. He took the brown paper bag and put it gently on the counter. Cigars, he said, are delicate and shouldn’t be tossed around.

  The bartender looked at the bag. “What you got there?”

  “Maybe you find out.” He touched the box with his fingers. “I like a drink.”

  The bartender stared at him for a second and then at the paper bag for a long time. He started to sweat. “All right.” He set the drink down in front of Pablo.

  For a minute, Pablo just looked at it. Then he lifted it to his lips and drank it down and pushed it across the bar to the bartender.

  The bartender picked it up and studied it. Finally, he looked at Pablo again. “What the hell! I had to close up for a week after you was here the first time.” He took the glass to the sink, washed it with soap and water, and put it with the other clean glasses. Then he looked at Pablo again. “Satisfied?”

  “Not yet.” Pablo grabbed the paper bag and started to open it.

  “Watch out, fellows!” The bartender yelled in his ear. When Pablo looked up, all the men in the bar were lying on their stomachs covering their heads. The bartender was behind the bar on his knees, his hands over his ears.

  Pablo took a cigar box out of the bag, opened it, pulled himself up and across the bar, and reached the box down to the bartender. “Hey, you want fine, handmade Havana cigar?” He was smiling.

  * * *

  —

  “ARE YOU GOING BACK down to that corner?” My grandmother took my hand.

  I looked into her face and then at the picture of her husband. He was still studying something just above my head. “I guess so.” I did not really want to do it.

  “You may not even have to use that.” She pointed at the broom handle. “But you should know you can.”

  I knew this was true and climbed off the bed and picked up the white hat and the broom handle. “Okay.”

  “I’ll be waiting on the porch for you.” She smiled, got up, and, sighing, went out to the kitchen.

  For a while, I listened to pots knocking and being filled with water. Then I stood in her room and practiced what I would say to Valentine’s Gang: “If you guys don’t let me go by, I’ll have to hit you with this.” There was a quake in my voice the first time I said it out loud, but, if I had to, I thought I would actually be able to say it and then use the stick. I went down the hall, onto the porch, and looked down toward the corner.

  It was empty. The mothers of the members of Valentine’s Gang had summoned them home to supper.

  The Poker Party

  AS I REMEMBER THEM, late summer Saturdays were always hot, dry, and colored a deep green. I know now some Saturdays must have been gray; rain must have made water princesses dance in gutter puddles, as my grandmother assured me they did, each time a drop plunked down. But I will never really believe it rained on Saturdays, for I can remember only the sun playing with bits of broken glass in the vacant lot next to my house and myself running all day up and down the block like a heathen.

  I never watched the sun when it was overhead dragging the day after it. I saw it twice each day: in the morning outside the kitchen window, up the hill and behind the elevated subway, so close to the pillars they seemed crisp and flimsy like burnt match sticks, and later when it had hopped to the other side of the sky, and, as big as a saucer and the color of orange sherbet, it slid behind the stiff old monuments in Woodlawn Cemetery. I should have watched it glide overhead, for surely that was the way Indians told time and I was an Indian most Saturdays. But then I was not concerned with time, for time was the ticking of watches and clocks, and had nothing to do with the length of a day.

  When the sun was gone, and car windshields reflected the sky and became pale blue, it would be dinnertime. I would run to my house, prance up the porch steps, press the black button below the small window of thick glass through which I could see my father’s name—Thomas Carey—and soon, would come the buzz, somehow sweet, of my mother’s answer on the second floor.

  My mother always came to meet me. She knew it was I, for no one else pushed the bell so hard—grownups were usually not so urgent, would thumb once lightly, stand and wait, tumbling hats in their hands. I would climb the stairs and even before I had gained half of them she would appear at the landing. She would wait, and as I hopped level with her, would touch my cheek or run her hand over my forehead, and if she found sweat, would march me to the bathroom and swab my face with a clean smelling washcloth.

  Some Saturday nights, the Poker Party was at my house. I would not be awake (bedtime was much earlier than the beginning of the party), but I would know it was at my house, because my mother would boil and cut potatoes for salad, and buy olives, and my father would come home those nights with five new decks of cards in cellophane as smooth as ice. I did not like the Poker Parties. They lasted very late, almost until I woke on Sunday mo
rning and my father would sleep all day and would not take me to the park like other fathers.

  My father was a tall, very thin Negro man. The bald skin on his head seemed also thin for it was stretched until it shone brightly. He wore a white shirt to wherever he went in the daytime, and it was clean when he came home at night, except for the collar where oil from his neck gathered dust. His nose was round with tiny pock marks in it; his eyes were red, shallow and sad. He had once been even darker than I (I had seen pictures of him in a floppy bow tie and baggy knickerbockers), the color of chocolate drink, but working indoors had diluted his skin until it was the same shade as my own, perhaps even as light as my mother’s. She was small and very Cuban, being half that race, and her hair was black, straight, and soft as smoke. Her nose was sharp, her lips thin, her eyes deep-set and brown. At dinner she sat on my left, my father on my right.

  “Is everything ready?” he asked after he had swallowed.

  “Yes.” She did not look up.

  “I told the fellows to come at ten—after he was asleep.” He was speaking of me. “Will you have everything ready by then?” He seemed very excited and anxious.

  My mother looked at him squarely, then glanced quickly at me. “I told you I had everything ready.” We finished eating in silence, even me, although I liked to talk a great deal.

  When dinner was over, I squatted on a small stool beside the radio. It was far bigger than I, bigger even than it had to be. It was mostly speaker in an ornate cabinet as large as a refrigerator. I listened until night pressed gently against the windows. Then it was time for me to go to bed. I crawled between sheets which had been warm that morning, but were now cold and unfamiliar. My mother sat with me and helped me say the prayers I could hardly understand, the words being too long, and the black outline of my father watched us from the doorway. They both kissed me and I nestled down with my head under the covers. I pretended I was in the cockpit of a plane carrying bombs to Burma, fighting the Japanese, who, being nearly the same color as I, seemed, no matter how I tried, as much my friends as my enemies. And there, flying somewhere over Burma, I raced my plane straight to its destination, to unload my bombs, but never reached that destination for sleep always rushed toward me faster than I, dawdling at my games, sped to my target, and swept me into a tailspin where my games ended and my dreams began.

  * * *

  —

  I BLINKED AND WAS AWAKE. The soft street lamp printed dark shadows on the walls of my room. I lay in bed, sleep stinging the corners of my eyes, and then came the low grumblings of joking men.

  I had not heard the men come, had not heard them press the bell—much the same as I would have, without searching for the button, knowing where it was as well as I—had not heard them climb the stairs in shining heavy shoes, or the loud friendly greetings, or my father say, as I am sure he had, “Quiet, the boy’s asleep,” or the men tiptoe past my door to the back of the house and the kitchen. But now I was awake, the darkness soft and as close around me as my one soft blanket. I was afraid; each shape was a man in a long coat coming with a silver knife to slice my neck.

  Faintly above the rumble of their talk, I heard the sound of the chips my father never let me touch (they were plaster and easily broken) thudding on the kitchen table. I climbed from between my sheets and opened the door.

  The long narrow hall was dark, the walls straight on either side of me, moving up into a blackness so thick I was not certain there was a ceiling to stop them. I shuffled toward the kitchen, the hard wood floor warm beneath my bare feet. Ahead was the doorway, a tall rectangle of smoky yellow light. I could hear the men’s words now but did not know what they meant. As I crept closer I smelled something burning, not as if my mother had left food on the stove too long, not the rich smoke of fish or bacon, but more like the musty and ancient odor of dust in a cellar.

  I stood in the doorway and watched them play a long while before they noticed me. My eyes smarted from the smoke, but still I recognized everyone at the table; I knew them all. My father sat with his back to me, his shoulders slightly hunched. Even from behind I knew that his eyes would be narrow, that he was annoyed. On his left was my mother’s brother, whose last name was Cortés, and was therefore named Hernando after the conquistador. He was half Cuban like my mother, but not as dark as most Cubans. His face was kind and handsome; his hair was black and shiny. And then came Mister Bixby, small, as bald as my father, his remaining hair plastered to his scalp. A cigar blacker even than himself poked out between yellow teeth and parted pink lips. Heavy steel spectacles weighed on his nose and bent his ears forward. Next was my Aunt Petunia, Uncle Hernando’s wife, who was West Indian and did not believe in combing her hair or in false teeth. I did not like her very much because when she came to our house in the daytime, she always said, “Why don’t you run along, child.”

  My mother sat next to her, clutching her cards almost desperately to her chest, looking very sleepy and as though she was not enjoying herself. Between her and my father was the table which I used on rainy days to cut pictures from magazines, filled now with liquor bottles.

  Tossing her cards on the table, my mother looked up and saw me, and turned to my father. “We have a visitor.” He had just slid two chips onto the table. He half turned, holding his cards close to him just below his chin, and looked at me, as did everybody else.

  They all seemed surprised, even fugitive, as if they had been caught at something they were not supposed to be doing. My mother threw open her arms. “Come here.” I ran to her and she hoisted me into her lap, my back to her chest. “I’ll put him to bed, Carey.” My mother, and everyone else, called my father by his surname.

  “You can’t go until the hand’s played out. And besides, he’s up and probably hungry and might as well stay and watch. What say, son, you want to watch?”

  I nodded, Yes. I had seen older boys playing cards in the corner of the schoolyard, had heard the ringing of their money on the pavement, but now, as I looked at the table covered with green felt softer even than my blanket, I was certain of two things: the chips were more valuable than money, and that I wanted to stay.

  My mother did not dispute my father although I am sure she did not want me up. She wrapped her arms around me tightly and asked if I was cold. I shook my head, not knowing whether I was cold or not, too interested in watching the chips that were being thrown by my father, Mister Bixby, and by my uncle, who had more chips stacked in front of him than did anyone else.

  My father clicked his tongue and spread out his cards. Mister Bixby, smiling so broadly his cigar jounced ashes down the front of his white shirt, scooped the chips from the middle of the table with one dark hand as my mother might have gathered red beans into her apron.

  “Say hello to everyone,” my mother ordered quietly. Everyone smiled at me, and Aunt Petunia moved her lips and said something which I did not hear, for I was still watching Mister Bixby smile as he arranged his chips so high in front of him it seemed he might disappear behind them.

  “How the child doing, Pablina?” my aunt fairly shouted. She would have known had she not always shooed me along when she visited.

  “He’s been doing fine. Haven’t you?” My mother tickled my stomach so I was forced to giggle a reply.

  My father, who had hardly any chips, was irritated as if I had done something bad, and without looking at me, asked, “Who’s dealing this hand?”

  “Me.” Uncle Hernando took the cards into his hands.

  “I’m out. I might as well let Carey lose for both of us.” My mother squeezed me and kissed my ear warmly. The others laughed except my father; Mister Bixby laughed the loudest.

  My father waited for them to stop. “That is not very funny, Pablina.”

  Uncle Hernando winked at me and shuffled the cards, then began to throw them in front of everyone except my mother.

  “Misdeal.” My father clenched
his fists. “You didn’t cut them.”

  They all looked at my father acidly and threw the cards back to Uncle Hernando, who took them up and burred them again, then planted them in front of my father as forcefully as he might have squashed a scampering bug. My father cut them; the deck looked the same to me. Uncle Hernando dealt them, some face down, others face up, and I saw the red and black figures, the numbers, and the beautiful pictures. I watched him closely, watched the cards sliding and popping from his fingers as if they were being made within his fingers themselves. He seemed to love the cards even more than the pile of chips in front of him (he never counted the chips), and enjoyed even more than the cards the gasps and sighs each card forced from the players.

  Once the cards had been dealt no one spoke. All I heard was the men blowing smoke heavily from beneath their business shirts, Aunt Petunia whistling through the gaps in her teeth, and the thud of the chips on the blanketed table. My father’s face was motionless, as if he had been photographed when bored.

  Uncle Hernando began to snap the cards once more and spin them across the table. Soon he and Mister Bixby turned theirs over and sat back in their chairs. Only Aunt Petunia and my father were playing. I hoped very much he would win, and stared at him, seeing small jewels of sweat slowly appearing on his forehead and running over his brows until he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped them away.

  “You ready to stop, Carey? I know I got you beat.” My aunt spoke with such certainty I thought she must be telling the truth, and fully expected my father to admit defeat, but instead, a slight smile crossed his face.

  “I’ll just call you, madam.” He tossed two more chips onto the table.

  One by one, tantalizingly, she flipped over her cards: a red three, two jacks, and two queens, one red, one black.

  My father grinned broadly and turned his cards over so we could see his three tens, a two and a five. The men around the table gasped, then chuckled, drawing smoke deep into their lungs. My father laughed triumphantly, scraped in his chips, spread his arms wide and bent slightly toward me. I took the two steps between us and hopped into his lap. “You brought me luck, offspring.” The way he said it made me believe I really had.