The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  “Always, Mr. T.”

  In the old rebuilt Thunderbird, Kaye and Noni were bringing Parker along with them to Glade Lake, the affluent neighborhood where Bunny's parents, the Breckenridges, lived, and where (home for the holidays) she was having her party. Parker hadn’t been invited, but Noni (who had called ahead to ask if he might come) told him that Bunny had wanted to invite him, just hadn’t been sure if he’d be in Moors for Christmas.

  Parker laughed. “If Allah's into white chicks in heaven, He's sure gonna make you one of them. ’Cause, Lady Disco, you are lying like a rug on a rich man's floor.”

  “No, it's true!” Noni turned around in the cracked red-leather bucket seat to protest.

  “Oh sure,” said Kaye in her father's voice of soft skepticism.

  When the three arrived at the huge modern glass and redwood house, the party was a loud crush of people, mostly, like them, in their twenties. The Breckenridge parents had abandoned their home and fled to relatives in Raleigh. Many of Bunny's guests were old high school classmates who hadn’t seen much of each other in the last five years and had in common little but that shared past. The boys who’d had long hair in high school mostly had short hair now; the ones who’d had short hair then mostly had long hair now. Fewer of them smoked.

  In large part the group was welcoming to Parker, although most awkwardly avoided questions about what he’d been up to since the old Moors High days.

  Parker, who had a shaved head and a Kung Fu moustache, told Bunny he remembered her in the junior talent show, playing the guitar and singing. “You were whapping on the side of that gittar, doing this big voice Odetta/Georgia chain gang shit. ‘Huh. Huh. Huh! Oh Rosie oh Lawd gal, the Man done killed my convict pal. Huh. Huh. Huh!’”

  Bunny laughed. “Was I awful?”

  “Oh Lawd, gal.” He ate the Brie-filled mushroom she handed him. “But I gotta say, you had guts, those crackers guffawing at you.” Parker told Bunny he had converted to Islam in prison and was getting ready to change his name to Kareem Aked.

  Bunny, who had wild frizzy long mousy-brown hair and wore loose black caftans to hide her weight told Parker she was working on her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, and that she was keeping the name “Bunny” although it made her sound like someone who worked in a Playboy Club, because every time she heard it, it was a battle cry to war against the patriarchy.

  Parker said, “Kick ass, Sister!” but declined her offered glass of chardonnay. He was a teetotaler now.

  Bunny's older sister Mindy (the one who so long ago had asked Noni's brother Gordon to help escort the first black students into Gordon Junior High) was here from Atlanta with her husband; they manufactured something called “software” for computers and were doing quite well. She told Noni that sometimes she dreamt about Gordon.

  From speakers embedded in the ceiling, music pulsed loudly: Elton John, the Pointer Sisters, Blondie, Carly Simon. Noni fast-danced with Parker, and slow-danced with a pleasant young lawyer named Lucas Miller, who confessed that he’d had a crush on her in high school. He wondered if she’d care to go out with him now. Noni thanked him, but said she was still married, although separated from her husband. He apologized for asking.

  There was paté and a roast goose with ribbons on its legs and there were white pizzas. One of the pizzas had spinach on it and Kaye left the two other medical students he’d been talking with beside the huge raised fireplace in order to bring Noni a piece, making Doctor Jack's old joke about how she needed to eat spinach to build up her iron.

  Noni was dutifully finishing the pizza slice when the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” began. Kaye looked at her, then held out his arms. “I bet I haven’t danced in a year or more.”

  Noni smiled, stepped into his arms. “It’ll come back. You can do anything, remember?”

  They danced so well together that people stopped to watch. They danced with the old rapport that they had had, practicing in Amma's kitchen when they were thirteen. Their bodies remembered more than they did.

  But there was a difference now and they both felt it; those bodies had changed, felt less familiar, and the two of them were strangely more conscious of each other's hands, arms, hip bones, the small of her back, the length of his leg. They looked at each other, then they looked away, the intimacy in their eyes suddenly too strong for easy dancing.

  Noni thought back to one of their practices in the kitchen at Clayhome, how Kaye had choreographed them in his bossing way. What had that song been? He’d mapped out every step. “All right. On ‘time goes by so slowly,’ we open out like this. Got it? Outside arm out. We lead with the outside foot. Walk, walk, walk, walk. Time goes by so slowly / And time can do so much.’ Walk, walk. That's right. Good. Now, we spin on Are you still mine?’ Spin spin, Are you still,’ now I’ll dip you, ‘mine?’ Are you still mine?’ Got it? Great, that's great. Boy, we’re good.”

  Around them as they danced at the Breckenridge house, the party went on. There was talk of whether Noni had left Roland or vice versa, and why. Whether their former class president was gay and if he was not, why was he still living with his college roommate? Whether their former head cheerleader was pregnant.

  Kaye and Noni slow-danced while around them there was talk of Three Mile Island, new Swedish stoves, Apocalypse Now, pocket calculators, the Sugar Bowl, the Pritikin diet, the new discount mall, whether sexual fidelity was unnatural to the human species, and what the meaning of happiness might conceivably be.

  Kaye and Noni fast-danced again while there was talk of whether Parker (or rather Kareem Aked) was guilty of what he’d gone to prison for, and if so what exactly had it been? Whether Kaye—who certainly had turned out a more handsome man than they had thought to conjecture—was involved with anyone, and if so, who.

  There was talk about whether Bunny had slept with Kaye, with Noni, or with Parker; if with Parker, it might explain why he had come to this party, even if guilty of whatever crime had sent him to the state prison, if in fact prison was where he had been.

  In fact, Parker wasn’t at this party anymore, at least Noni and Kaye couldn’t find him when they stopped dancing, although they searched through the house. They needed to leave so Noni could drop off a Christmas gift for Reverend Fisher who lived in the next block. She worried that perhaps she and Kaye, dancing, had paid too little attention to Parker, and that, feeling uncomfortable, he had left Bunny's without telling anyone, although he was miles from his own neighborhood and without a car.

  But after another search through the house, and with Kaye's assurances that Parker could take care of himself, she finally agreed to go. The truth was, she wanted to get back to Heaven's Hill to check on Michelle and her father. She feared, not that her father would overdrink when in charge of the child, but that Michelle would talk him into letting her stay up way past her bedtime, just as Noni herself long ago had talked him into it.

  Michelle was actually sound asleep in Noni's four-poster bed. Amma Fairley had come over to Heaven's Hill and found the child sleeping on the red leather couch beside Bud Tilden; A Christmas Carol was showing on the television. Amma had brought Tilden a bowl of her Brunswick stew, which she knew he loved. In the past, she could always get him to eat her stew when nothing else would tempt his appetite.

  Turning off the set as Ebenezer Scrooge leapt happily through the streets of London with Tiny Tim on his shoulder, Tilden lit a cigarette and gestured for her to sit down with him.

  “Amma,” he said, “I’ve got a serious question for you.” He wondered if Amma wouldn’t agree that we don’t need ghosts, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, to show us visions of our ruined pasts and our unhappy present and our doomed futures.

  She told him she wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “I mean, don’t we have those visions with us all the time anyhow? All the time. And you know what, our knowing what we’ve done, what we’ve left undone—it doesn’t help one bit, Amma, it doesn’t change us at all. There's a boo
k,” he pointed at the shelves where rows of music boxes had now replaced his collection of Great Books. “A Greek philosopher said, To know the good is to do the good.’ But, Amma, who was he kidding?”

  Amma carried Tilden's untouched cocktail from the coffee table and poured it down the drain of the wet bar sink. “Well, Mr. Tilden—”

  “How many years have we known each other? Thirty?” He took her hand. “Thirty? Do I call you Mrs. Fairley?”

  Amma patted his hand, removed hers. “If you knew what the right thing to do was, why wouldn’t you do it?”

  He laughed, put out his cigarette. “Oh, Amma. You’d do the right thing. That I do know. Noni’d do the right thing. But that's all I know on earth and all I need to know. You think Noni and Kaye’ll ever get together?”

  She stiffened, stood to leave. “I don’t know if they will or not.”

  “But you think they shouldn’t? Hang on, don’t go. Hell, they’re probably seventh cousins anyhow. What do you bet? You know damn well, Amma, your family and Judy's family have been all mixed up together for the past two hundred years.”

  Amma did know this, knew that in the long oral history of the Clays there were tales of nocturnal visits by Gordon men to Clayhome women. She had been told that her greatgrandfather was actually, secretively, a Gordon, and that was why her eyes were amber and her skin cinnamon. But Amma said none of this, and didn’t want to. All she said in the doorway was, “Mr. Tilden, you carry this child up to bed for me and then you come on down to the kitchen and eat some of my stew. You’re not looking too good.”

  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 r
eport 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?”