Monkey Island

by Paula Fox

  He came back to the chair, saying, “When I was young, you could make up a life … a little work here or there … keep yourself decent … even save a few dollars. If Robinson Crusoe was washed up on the shores of that island nowadays, he’d find a used car lot there, and before he could get a job sweeping the asphalt, he’d be asked for his papers, his degrees, and his work background.”

  Clay sat down on the ground in front of Calvin. It was just as the old man had finished trimming the hair on his neck that Clay looked up and saw a patrol car, a flatbed truck, and a police emergency van draw up to the park entrance.

  Gerald, wearing a sweater with a turtleneck that nearly covered his chin, was handing out the last cheese sandwich to a young woman with a head of wild, frizzy hair dyed purple. An enormous shawl covered her except for the pale hand that reached for the sandwich. Calvin’s hand holding the scissors fell lightly on Clay’s shoulder. Ten policemen and several men in work clothes walked determinedly toward the van. Gerald ran out from behind the counter to the rear and spread his arms wide. “No! Please!” he shouted.

  “What’s going to happen?” Clay asked urgently.

  “Hush!” commanded Calvin.

  Mrs. Crary, with a speed Clay would not have thought her capable of, gathered up her bundles and scuttled out into the street, followed by the young woman in the shawl, still chewing on her sandwich.

  Ignoring Gerald, all the men lined up around the van, bent, and lifted it. Clay could hear them grunting with effort as they carried it out to the street, right past Gerald, where it was loaded onto the flatbed.

  Gerald remained standing in the bare place where the van had stood on its rims. A policeman came up to him and handed him some papers and walked away.

  The work crew and the police got into their vehicles. There was a clanging of gears, a revving of motors. Then they were gone. Gerald, looking dazed, made his way over to Calvin and Clay.

  For a long moment, he and Calvin stared at each other.

  “Why?” he uttered at last.

  “The park is public property,” replied Calvin.

  Gerald shook his head. “Why?” he repeated more softly. “Why aren’t they ashamed? Why did they look like stones? Why isn’t everyone ashamed?”

  “They don’t want to study shame,” Calvin said almost gently.

  “Is this boy your grandson?” Gerald asked.

  “Yes,” said Calvin at once.

  “I’m coming back tomorrow. I’ll carry the food with me. They can’t stop me handing coffee and sandwiches out of a taxi, can they?”

  “Not as long as you pay for it,” said Calvin.

  Gerald hunched his shoulders and walked away from them out to the street.

  “I said that—about your being my grandson—because Gerald would feel he had to do something about you. And I’m coming around to the view that Buddy and I ought to do it. The cold is coming, the real cold. There’s a point you don’t know about, a point where you won’t want to go to school anymore, won’t want any of the things you miss now. You will have learned the street and you won’t want to give it up.”

  “I can’t yet,” Clay said, nearly crying. “She might still come back.”

  “A few more days, then,” Calvin said sternly. “But you’re not spending Christmas in this place. Nobody ever heard of it here.”

  That day, when Clay returned to the hotel, there were more policemen, four of them carrying an elderly black man out of the lobby to the street. He was clutching an old down jacket to his chest like a shield.

  “Now, Morgan,” said one of the policemen in a placating tone of voice. “You know you’ve been feeling bad, setting fire to your bed like that. We are here just to help you—”

  “My name is Mr. Johnson, Morgan Johnson,” the black man shouted as he tried to twist away from restraining arms.

  “Mr. Johnson,” said another policeman. “We have to take you to the hospital.”

  “Call it the bin, you damned toy men!” Mr. Johnson cried as tears ran down his face.

  Clay, pressing himself against the wall near the door that led to the stairs, saw them lift the old man into an ambulance that waited behind patrol cars, its lights flashing and circling. He went through the fire door and up the stairs. A thin girl, her head down, wearing a man’s suit jacket over a dirty white skirt, passed him. “You gotta match? I gotta cigarette,” she muttered.

  In the corridor, he stood for a moment by the exit door from the stairs. There was no plastic bag outside Mrs. Larkin’s door. He could see it was ajar. She always locked the door. He tiptoed to it and listened. Nothing. He pushed it open. The room was empty except for the small stove.

  They had gone. Where?

  He walked into the room and looked at the place where the bed had been, where he had seen Jacob fall sideways and Mrs. Larkin had set him upright and patted his hair. There was a loud thump on the wall that separated him from his old room. A baby cried. A woman’s voice called out, “I’m getting it ready—now simmer down, you kids!”

  He leaned against the wall. People had moved in. His mother hadn’t come back. He stayed there in the empty room for a long time. At last, he took his red crayon from his pocket and wrote STOP on the wall above the corner of the little stove. But nothing stopped as he felt the whole earth growing larger and larger with himself standing in the middle of it, motionless. He dropped the crayon on the floor.

  Clay wandered the streets in the afternoon, no longer fearing he would attract the notice of a policeman. He’d seen an army of them that day. They hadn’t given him a glance. How could he have ever imagined they were after him? Nobody was after him.

  The days were so short. Night began early. A wind was blowing the cold air right to his bones. His corduroy jacket was dirty and ragged now. He put the collar up, but it didn’t do much good. His head itched from the lice Calvin had explained to him people got from living outside, like the sores on his feet and ankles and wrists. “The lice need a home too,” Calvin had said in his sarcastic voice. And he had smiled sourly. “Little fellows looking for their place in the sun.”

  Clay imagined that instead of returning to the park, he would walk to where the city ended. There would be country, and fields, a farm where someone would take him in and give him warm chocolate milk and a bath. That was what Calvin called “making a movie in your head.”

  He was a truant. His mother was a runaway, and his father had disappeared. His own face would show up on a milk carton.

  When he got back to the park, Buddy was there beside the crate talking to Calvin. Usually, Buddy smiled a welcome when he saw Clay, but not this time. He only stared at him as if he didn’t know him.

  “It was only a matter of time,” Calvin was saying, “until they took Gerald’s van away. He knew it too. But he couldn’t stand thinking about it.”

  “He was just trying to do good,” Buddy said.

  “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 beatin
g 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, hal
f-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!”