A Cry of Angels (11 page)

Em and I looked at each other. The thought of setting foot across the threshold of the Waugh place threw a chill on the whole proposition. "Shoot the dogs," voted Em.

"No," I said, "I'll help you."

"You can't lift nothing."

"I know what I'm doing." I was already walking toward the house.

"Come back here!" yelled Em.

Miss Lilly caught the drift, and turned to follow me.

"Come back here, I said!" I kept walking. Once I glanced back; he was still at the fence, mumbling, shaking the wire, fretting and cursing to himself. But by the time we reached the yard he was trudging along up the hill, looking warily about.

Miss Lilly opened the door to an upstairs bedroom and it was obvious why she wanted it evacuated. There was an enormous tree limb hanging through a hole in the wall. The rain had peeled the wallpaper and left a large brown stain on the floor, from which she had rolled back an oval hooked rug.

The furniture was of the old solid oak, elaborately scrolled variety that has no redeeming qualities except that it's "in the family," and been in the family, and therefore can't be got rid of, and travels from generation to generation, with the taste of some unschooled and ignorant pioneer girl tormenting every subsequent bride until it meets one with the guts to throw it out. Or smart enough to sell it to the fools who pull U-Hauls and hang out at auctions. Miss Lilly hated it, I could tell by the way she looked at it, but there she was, locked in the tradition, starting it on its way.

"Looks like you could of emptied the drawers," groaned Em, heaving a bureau away from the wall.

"They are empty," she said.

"Oh, God."

"Pick up now, don't you scar the floor!"

"Pick up, hell, I ain't gettin' no rupture rasslin' this junk!"

We maneuvered it through the door and Em got under it trying to lift the rusted rollers over the steps of the stairs. Miss Lilly hovered about fussing and fretting as though we were moving an invalid aunt. When it was dragged across the field and into the new house Em was ready to strike a bargain. "Give him one dog for the bureau, and do what you want with the others."

"Nothing doing, Em," I said.

And Miss Lilly was quick to take my side. "All or none."

Next we wrestled down a dresser with flapping wing mirrors and an overstuffed chair so large Em was moved to comment on the inordinate obesity of the Waugh line. Then he cut his hand knocking the bed apart. "Now look! Just look at that!" He stepped out and let the high headboard crash to the floor and examined his bleeding palm by the window. "Right across the lifeline," he said woefully. "I knew I should'a never set foot in this place."

Miss Lilly lifted her dress and tore a strip of cloth from somewhere underneath. But Em backed away in horror. "Get away from here! Wrop it in that thing hit'd rot off at the elbow!"

"Get blood poisoning, then, see if I care. Just don't you get blood on my furniture."

When the room was emptied she took a key from her pocket and locked it as casually as if she were leaving for the day. She moved to the other rooms, the kitchen, choosing what else she wanted dragged to the new house. When the last items were moved we were both eager to get out in the open air. I drew a drink from the well but Em shook his head. He kept his cut hand closed in a protective fist. Miss Lilly came and stood on the back steps. She said nothing.

"Well, we'll go now," I said. "Where are the puppies?"

Still she said nothing. She stood with her head tilted to allow the sun to her face.

"Ma'am, the puppies . . ." Then the realization hit me.

I looked back at her, still standing with her face to the sun. "Em, there ain't any puppies. There never was any puppies!"

"What?" Em rubbed his bleeding hand on his pants. "Where's the dogs, old woman? Look, we ain't got time to . . ."

A spidery hand leaped to her apron pocket and suddenly the pistol was leveled at his nose. The blue eyes blazed from the funnel of her bonnet.

I struggled to keep my voice steady.

"Let's go home, Em. It don't matter. Come on, it's gettin' late."

Em was outraged. "What do you mean? She said she would give you the dogs! We moved the goddamned furniture so she wouldn't kill the dogs!"

"Never mind about the dogs. Let's go."

"You mean that crazy old woman . . ." She was eyeing him curiously, as though he were some animal that had suddenly started speaking. "She ain't crazy. She's just puttin' on. She knew what she was doin'."

I pulled him close, trying to keep my voice down. "Em, if there wasn't any dogs to shoot, why'd she bring a gun down to the fence in the first place?"

Em stopped blustering. I could see the logic taking hold. He looked at me, and back at Miss Lilly. If she wasn't going to shoot dogs, there was the very real possibility that she had fully intended to shoot us, and when she found we weren't prowlers, decided to trick us into the work.

The anger drained out of Em's face. We started backing away. At the edge of the field we broke and didn't stop running until we were across the fence and into the safety of the woods. When we looked back she was gone. The old house looked undisturbed and calm.

But the more I thought about it, the madder I got. "No, she set the whole thing up, made pure fools out of us."

Em's mood, on the other hand, seemed to reverse." Aw, let it ride," he said. "She only done it 'cause she hadn't no money. Pulled it off, too, she did."

"Now look who's taking up for her," I said.

"Craziness was all she had to bargain with. She's proud, and folks like that would rather cheat and steal than beg."

"She didn't have to beg. She could of asked it as a favor."

"That's the same as beggin' if you got no way of payin' it back. 'Sides, you can't take no pride in somebody doin' you a favor. But now, you trick somebody, outsmart 'em, well, that ain't nothin' but good business. You can take pride in that." He sauntered along shaking his head, chuckling, whipping at milkweeds with a stick.

With a full afternoon before us and nothing to do, we decided to stop off at Mr. Teague's for a frozen Pepsi and pass a little time with Tio. Through some malfunction, Mr. Teague's drink box had one corner that froze drinks solid. I have never encountered another one with that characteristic, though I still look for it in every box I open. He could have charged double, even triple for those drinks, and got it. I have known boys to sit on his curb for hours waiting for their drinks to freeze.

Alvah Teague's gray brick wedge of a grocery store had sat on that knoll in the Ape Yard longer than anyone could remember. It had been there, and run by Mr. Teague's grandfather, when it was hardly more than a trading post in the hollow north of what was to become the town. Captain Mcintosh's mule-mounted cotton farmers supplied themselves at the store before they forded the Little Iron and shot up half a regiment of Union regulars at the battle of Social Rose. When Alvah Teague inherited it, people were still riding half a day by wagon to shop there. That was before Roe Mill changed hands, and the infamous quarry was dug, and everyone who could moved out.

Now supermarkets were climbing the foothills—there was a new one opening in Galaxy Plaza that afternoon—and Teague's place was dying. The half-moon lettering,
Teague & Son
, had peeled to mere tracings on the window. The floor sloped dangerously under the meat cases, and the pine bench along the outside wall, worn slick and grainy by generations of weather and overalls, was empty of Saturday loafers.

As we neared the store Em suddenly stopped and pointed to a tennis shoe swinging from under the front awning. Putting his finger to his lips, he crept to the corner of the store, then pounced forward and yelled,
"Hyaaah
!," simultaneously giving the canvas awning a violent shake.

There was a startled cry, and a skinny black boy dropped down from the awning, swinging by his knees from the crossbrace. Hanging upside down, he shook a wrench in the Indian's face. "You ain't no funnier'n you ever was, Jojohn. Now, put me back up. I'm just about done."

"Ain't you gon' say you glad to see me?"

"I'm 'on hit you where you live with this crescent wrench, you don't put me back up."

Em sighed and lifted him back on his perch and helped himself to peanuts from the parching machine. "What you makin' now?" he asked.

"Automatic awning raiser. Raises and lowers the awning without cranking."

"That mus' be a help," Em said.

"Ain't no other store got one."

Tio Grant was my age, though slightly smaller and considerably bonier, with a felt hat with square holes in the crown permanently affixed to his head. He wore the hat with everything—or with nothing, as when we went inner-tubing on the river. It was his trademark, he said.

Tio had lived with Mr. Teague since his mother died, when he was five years old. She used to do the little hunchbacked grocer's washing and ironing and what other little housekeeping was required in the three rooms over the store, and Mr. Teague gave him an apple or a cracker and let him play in the store while his mother worked upstairs. On slow days he began letting her drop the boy off while she went to work elsewhere, and soon Tio became a familiar sight around the store, scurrying to fetch things from the shelves and scattering sweeping compound before Mr. Teague's broom. Sometimes Mr. Teague let him wear a pinned-up apron with a stub of pencil stuck in the pocket. After the Grant woman died of pneumonia, it came as no real surprise to anyone when Mr. Teague marched down to the neighbor who had taken the boy in, and fetched him and his belongings back to the store. Tio had been there ever since, despite the fact that Mr. Teague threatened to throw him out about every other day.

Tio and I had started hanging around together shortly after Em came to the Ape Yard, and I suppose, next to Em, we were each other's closest friends. Everybody in the Ape Yard liked Tio, but living with Mr. Teague had made Tio a little too white for the other boys. Mr. Teague dressed him better than most of the black boys at old Pelham Grace School on the river, demanded better grades from him, and brought him up sharp in private if he forgot the difference between politeness and hang-dog cringing when dealing with people uptown. I knew what it was like. My being from the Ape Yard was plenty enough to keep my classmates in Quarrytown at a distance from me. I suppose it was that peculiar position we shared of not really belonging to either community that made Tio and me hit it off so well.

The only real fistfight we ever had was over the question of race.

It started when I discovered in geography class that my height was exactly that of the average African pygmy, and the teacher had me stand up and demonstrate it to the class. It was one of the few times I was ever taken notice of in class, and I was pretty excited. So that Sunday when Tio showed up, I was carrying Em's frog gig, dressed in a bath towel with my body coated with mud, all set to play pygmy.

Tio balked at the idea.

"Man, you can't be no pygmy. Pygmies are black, everybody knows that."

"What difference does that make? I'm the right size for it."

"Never work. Now, I can be the pygmy, but you'll have to be sump'n else."

"What are you talking about? I'm the only one the right size for it. The
exact
size for it, whereas,
by the book
, you are at least two inches too short! It's just as bad to be the wrong size as the wrong color."

Tio was unmoved. "I'll grow into the right size; you ain't never going to be the right color."

Neither of us would budge. I thought Tio was being uncommonly stubborn, even for him. We had both been Japanese samurai without any problem. But, of course, that had been
his
idea.

Finally he hit on what was to him the perfect solution: "Tell you what," he said, "I'll be the pygmy—you can be a midget."

"What!"

"What's wrong with that?"

"What's wrong with it! A pygmy gets to hunt with a spear and be wild. Whoever heard of a wild midget!"

But Tio had that look on his face that always gave me a knot in the stomach, the look that said that, as usual, he had found a hole in my argument and was just about to hang it around my neck.

"Earl, you know as well as I do that stunted black folks are called pygmies. Stunted white folks are called midgets. Now, if my folks choose to hunt dangerous animals and live wild and free, and yours end up in the circus-makin' folks
laugh
—that ain't no fault of mine."

I think it was at that point that I proceeded to show him how wild my folks could be.

The awning raiser was only the latest of Tio's time—or money—saving projects. He was constantly inventing devices or devising methods to improve operations at the store. He had salvaged a paddle-fan, with one paddle missing, from the back of the barber shop, installed it in the ceiling and got it working again. Unevenly, but working. He argued with the wholesaler's driver about the most efficient way to stock the storeroom. He initiated countless new methods for checking the inventory, several of which did save time, but none of which were simple enough for Mr. Teague to understand. He was good, and Mr. Teague depended on him more and more. He could butcher a side of beef, he knew the price of every article in the store, and with Mr. Teague's arthritis getting worse, Tio was doing practically all of the bookkeeping. For the most part, Mr. Teague gave his inventive mind free rein, and sometimes had cause to regret it. When the city installed the new parking meters around the square uptown, Tio was soon caught protecting Mr. Teague's Model-A truck with a homemade jimmy key. The judge let them both off with a warning. "Got a mind like a damned hummingbird," Mr. Teague would say, "flits and spurts around, you never know
where
it's going to light!"

Tio dropped to the ground and carefully ordered his toolbox, then stood back admiring the odd structure of angle braces and garage door springs mounted under the awning. "Now, ain't that beautiful?" he said.

"Takes my breath away," said Em.