The Midnight Cool Read online

  But Billy had escaped. He had started trading with the other miners, penknives, cans of beans, bread, not for any gain, just to amuse himself, just to break up the darkness of the underground days. But pretty soon he was doing almost as good business as the company store, and the company caught wind of it and fired him, and when he left without paying his bill they sent two men after him. To shake them off his tail he spent three days hiding out in the green hills of Pennsylvania, snaring rabbits, drinking from creeks, sleeping under his coat. The woods were bountiful as Eden. The second night out there he realized he did not care if the Neversink men caught up with him and shot him dead. What he had found in those woods was worth dying for.

  And for a year he has been free. Or nearly. He goes wherever he pleases, trading with whoever he happens to meet, camping at night in hay fields. He is tethered to only one thing in the world and that is the island. Home. All the money he makes, mostly five or ten dollars here and there for boot, he dutifully sends back to his mother, widowed now six years.

  With love from your son, who has struck it rich in America, his accompanying letter invariably reads. Where there is gold and silver in the ditches, and nothing to do but gather it.

  But things changed two weeks ago, in Abingdon, Virginia, where he stopped for a spell to wait out some bad weather. While there he wrote a letter to a man back up at the Neversink, asking him to send the rest of his belongings. Included in the small package he received in return was a ten-month-old letter from the island with the news that his mother was dead.

  It brought the place back to him, in a rush, so real he could feel the sting of salt air. Fourteen years old he was when he left it. The summer after the Winter of Darkness. That winter for ten ghastly weeks storms had kept the men off the sea and cut them off entirely from the mainland, until food dwindled to nothing, until food ran out. His baby sister was one of the first to die. A little bright-eyed girl, not yet two. There was no consecrated ground on the island and so they buried her by the dolmen on top of East Hill, and by the time the weather had settled a dozen more were laid out beside her, shallow in the rocky soil. There was talk of abandoning the place, of the entire island picking up and going to the mainland, where the young people had begun to go, anyway, in recent years. His four older sisters were all married to men in Skibbereen. Without them and without the baby his father’s house was sorrowfully quiet, all winter rocked by the howling wolflike wind.

  If I live, Billy would say to the wind at night, half-mad with hunger. If I live through this I am going to America.

  And he did live, and he did go, six months later, after making his passage money bit by bit, selling rabbit skins at the market in Skib.

  When he told his parents of his plan his father had only sucked in a breath and pulled his chin to his chest. His mother’s chair creaked when she rose from it and went to the window, and it pained him to know she was looking towards the makeshift grave on East Hill and at a vision of herself alone and old beside an empty hearth. At that moment he nearly told her he would abandon the whole idea. Then, from above, came a squawk. One of the hens which roosted in the thatch of the roof laid an egg, and it fell through, clean through the hole that needed fixing, fell straight down between them and burst on the floor. They all stared at the oozing golden yolk for a minute before they all three began to laugh and his mother embraced him and still laughing told him it was a sign, that he was bound to meet with great fortune in America. In no time at all he was gone, never to return.

  Readying his string of horses in Abingdon that morning, the suit packed away in his saddlebag, he can hear for the first time in a decade her laughter when that chicken egg dropped, and he has to stop and lean against the horse’s neck for a long time, weak with grief, both for the loss and for all the days he has spent in ignorance of the fact that the world no longer contains her.

  But he feels something else, behind all this. A weight lifting.

  He heads south, aiming for Tennessee. The roads are still a mess and it is slow going. A few nights later he is camped in the hills above Bristol when a ring shows up around the moon. More rain coming.

  He breaks camp at dawn, but the rain has already started. The road gets bad fast as the swollen creeks overflow and water rushes downhill by any path it can find. The horses slog along, their ears at half-mast. Mud sucking their hooves. He is thinking again of his mother. She had not cried when they buried her baby girl. Only crossed herself and said, The good Lord wills it so. But she had wept when he left for America, down at the harbor, waving with the rest of the island.

  She is free now, he thinks, God rest her soul.

  The rain falls in white sheets. And in it he understands what he is feeling, the weight lifting. He too is free. Responsible for nothing and no one but himself. Coming down off the mountain he overtakes a fellow in a buckboard who is whipping a balky mule.

  This keeps up the road won’t be passable, he calls after Billy.

  Passable? Billy shouts, his heart buoyant with joy. Mister, it won’t even be jackassable!

  The sky begins to clear by the time the smokestacks of Bristol come into view. Billy finds a dry place to tie up on the edge of town, an overhang of rock hidden in rhododendrons, takes care of the wet horses as best he can, and ponders his next move. Trying to get any farther on these kinds of roads is foolish, but he’s got no money for a boardinghouse and is in no shape for town, wet as a drowned rat with mud halfway up his pants legs.

  Then he remembers the suit. When he pulls it out of the saddlebag, he finds that by some miracle it has stayed dry. He washes and shaves in a swollen creek, combs back his hair. Strips off his wet clothes and puts it on. Settles the horses one more time. Heads down into town.

  And so this is how Billy Monday, with no money in his pockets but looking like a millionaire, comes into Bristol on that wet afternoon. Bristol. He has heard plenty about it, the town that straddles Tennessee and Virginia so tidily that the state line runs right down the center of Main Street. The town with two of everything: two police stations, two post offices, two libraries, two schools, and sixty-four saloons. The town where a man can break the law on one side of the street and evade the sheriff simply by crossing to the other.

  He keeps the good shoes tucked under his arm until he gets to Main Street and then, stashing his muddy shoes behind an ash bin, puts them on. Bristol jangles and bustles, Main Street opening back up after a rain. On either side of the street, shopkeepers are jabbing their awnings with broom handles to knock off the rainwater. A grocer is drying off a great green pyramid of watermelons. The windows are stacked with boxes, cans, factory bread, factory clothes, buttons, spools of thread, gloves from Knoxville, leather goods from Chicago, bananas from God knows where. Billy falls in with a group of men who have gathered to read a job board. King Coke and Fuel is hiring, as well as the N&W Railway. There are dozens of men jostling for the same sorry positions that would all break their back and spirit. A dollar a day. Two dollars a day. Five dollars a week. To spend in the shops on leather goods from Chicago, gloves from Knoxville, furniture from North Carolina, furniture polish in a jar to keep all that furniture nice and new-looking.

  I am free, Billy is thinking happily. I am free free free free.

  He laughs out loud. He knows now what a dead man knows. The distance between the pit and the snare can be measured with time clocks and paychecks. There is only one way out. And that is down. Down below even the bottom rail, to slip out free on the other side.

  Somebody turns and looks him over, and then steps aside to let him up to the front of the crowd. He thinks nothing of it until he walks away and a couple of urchins ask him for change. Then an important-looking fellow strolling past gives him a knowing nod.

  Suddenly it hits him. The suit!

  He stops and looks at his reflection in a shop window.

  Well look at that. He squares his shoulders. If he didn’t know better, he would think he was somebody. Why, in this suit he could go anywhere.
And when the man inside the shop comes out and, smiling broadly, wants to know if he can help him, Billy asks him where the best place in town is. The fellow points him up the street. To the Nichols House Hotel.

  The Monkey Trick

  Bristol

  It is too easy. All he’s got to do is keep his mouth shut. Nobody in the Nichols House parlor gives him a second glance. In fact, the fellow sitting next to him, a speculator from Cincinnati, Ohio, chewing a fat cigar, thinks he is a local. He even asks if Billy is a King. Billy bites his lip to keep from laughing, and the man mistakes this for a nod. He nearly tears out his pocket digging for his card and hands it across the brass spittoon between them.

  The colored man at the piano is playing a number Billy recognizes. ‘The Sunshine of Paradise Alley.’ He is blind, his unseeing eyes fixed on a spot between the wall and the ceiling, and his big hands move sleepily up and down the keyboard. His cap lies on top of the piano, turned up for tips. At the foot of his stool sits a threadbare carpetbag.

  The Cincinnati man goes on about taxes and the price of raw land, the fine quality of Bristol’s water, the agreeable climate, the railroads, but Billy keeps his eye on the piano player’s bag. When he sat down, he could have sworn he saw it move. But now it looks like just a run-of-the-mill carpetbag. The truth is, he is restless and bored. The men in the parlor remind him of seals crowded on a rock: fat and torpid, snapping at one another, blowing hot air. There’s a sad desperation to the fellow from Cincinnati. Better fed and better heeled, but isn’t he clawing out of the same pit and into the same snare as the workingmen huddled at the job board?

  Where I’m from every pie’s already got too many fingers in it, he is saying. That’s what brings me here. I happen to know, on good reliable sources, that Bristol is about to boom. In fifteen years this town will be big as Knoxville. In forty, Chicago.

  He settles back into his chair and stabs the air with his cigar.

  And I’ll be able to say I was on the leading edge.

  His eyes wander over Billy’s shoulder.

  Well if that isn’t the ugliest little colored boy I ever seen.

  Billy turns. Out of the carpetbag has climbed a monkey. A moonfaced creature dressed in a brocade vest and top hat. It scampers onto the piano to retrieve the player’s cap and begins to work the room for tips, holding its tail over its back to display its ass like an insult. When it approaches, the Cincinnati man pushes it away with his foot in disgust. Billy, pitying it, digs in his pocket and finds a nickel. When he reaches down to drop it in the hat, the monkey snatches it out of his hand with thin leathery fingers.

  Outside, a train slowing for the station blows its whistle. It passes so close to the back wall of the hotel that the floor shakes and the rose-colored glass globes of the parlor lamps rattle. The Cincinnati man is talking about a tract of land along Beaver Creek, hundreds of acres, limitless possibility for development. Billy watches another man across the room push the monkey away with his foot, without breaking his conversation. So far his nickel is the only one in the creature’s cap.

  He looks at the man at the piano, his blind eyes raised to the ceiling, now on to ‘The Picture That Is Turned Toward the Wall.’ Poor old fellow, he thinks. Probably spent his last dollar on that monkey. Creature probably doesn’t even earn its keep.

  A chambermaid has come in, darting along the wall, quick as a mouse. When she begins to draw the drapes of the big windows, Billy gives her the once-over, dismisses her. Just a sour-looking girl, with downcast eyes and hunched shoulders, dark hair pulled back severely from her scowling face.

  The piano player begins to play ‘Beautiful Dreamer,’ flourishing every note. Without breaking the melody he reaches up to pat the monkey, which has scampered to the top of the piano to sit on its haunches and eat a crust of bread, glaring at the crowd.

  The Cincinnati man sings along, his lips working around his cigar.

  Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me

  Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee

  Billy hardly hears him. He is watching the monkey. Some sort of spell has come over the animal. It has dropped its bread and is watching the chambermaid with rapt concentration. Finished with the drapes, she is now turning up the gas lamps along the back wall. As if in a trance, the monkey climbs down off the piano and begins moving towards her. Billy looks around the room. A handful of men have noticed the creature’s odd behavior and have turned to watch.

  Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day . . .

  The Cincinnati man is one of the last to notice. He abruptly quits singing, looks at Billy and raises his eyebrows.

  Would you look at that little sonofabitch, he says. If I didn’t know better I would say it was lovestruck.

  The whole room is watching. All eyes are on the creature. In fact, the girl and the piano player seem to be the only two unaware of the fact that the monkey is stalking her, drawing closer and closer.

  It is six feet from her now. Five. Four. Three.

  The girl is up on her toes, straining to reach one of the light fixtures. The black skirt of her dress sways. The monkey is now only a step behind her. The last notes of the song fade. In the silence, the monkey sits back on its haunches, turns, and gives the room a conspiring look. Then it snatches up the hem of her dress and sticks its head inside.

  The girl screams. And what a scream. They could probably hear it back in Abingdon. She snatches up her skirts, beats out the monkey as if beating out a flame, and flees. The beads of the portiere clack wildly behind her.

  The room rocks with laughter nearly as hard as it shook with the passing train. Feet pound the floor. Somebody calls after her.

  Hey, honey, come back, he only wants a little kiss!

  The player looks up, pretends to grope around for the monkey, shrugs, turns to the room, and pulls a grin. Brings his hands back down to the keyboard.

  Shave and a haircut, two bits!

  The Cincinnati man is laughing so hard it sends him into a coughing fit. The monkey scampers onto the piano for the hat and goes back around for tips. This time, no one kicks him away. The coins rain in. And the fellow at the piano is grinning like his face is going to split in two.

  Billy shakes his head. What a brilliant trick. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. It’s the best hustle he’s seen in all his travels.

  In the morning, after sleeping under the overhang with the horses, he realizes he left his hat at the hotel. He puts the suit back on and heads back into town along the railroad tracks. Better traveling than the roads, which are a churned mess. Ruts so deep, the Cincinnati man said yesterday, that you can hear voices coming up from below.

  Where to? Billy thinks, hearing the whistle of a distant train. His evening at the Nichols House has only made him more grateful that he has nothing to his name. He’s freer even than the birds wheeling above the tracks, which after all have to hustle back to the nest at the end of the day. But for him—no limits. Where to? What next?

  When he gets to the Nichols House, he sees that someone has left a back door propped open. When he slips in, it brings him to the foot of a dark, narrow stairwell. The clatter of pans and smells of the kitchen rise up from below. From above, the sound of creaking stairs.

  He looks up. A small girl with a basketful of linens on her hip is coming down backwards. She goes carefully, one hand sliding along the banister, placing each foot square in the center of each tread.

  Irish, he thinks, admiring the slow swing of her backside. All Irish girls in America go down staircases backwards, accustomed as they are to ladders back at home.

  She looks over her shoulder and catches his eye, then lets out a yelp. He jumps. The basket falls from her hip, spilling its contents. She unleashes a string of curses as satisfying as any Billy has ever heard in any barroom. He laughs, amazed that such filth can come from such a wisp of a girl.

  She spins around, clutching her hand to her mouth. Even with half her face covered he can see that she is beautiful. Her eyes are green and sharp
. They move over him slowly, taking in more, it somehow feels, than just the suit and the shoes.

  Lowering her hand, she grins. It’s a big, disarming smile, revealing a gap between the two front teeth.

  Barked my knuckles, she says. Then she runs her tongue over her lip, looking him over again. You were in the parlor last night, weren’t you?

  I was. An important business meeting. This town’s going to be big as Chicago someday, you know— He hesitates, suddenly confused. But how do you know? You weren’t there. I would have noticed a girl so pretty as you.

  Ah! she says. But I was there, sure enough.

  He shakes his head. She is standing three steps above him, looking down. Remembering the basket, he bends down to right it and begins to pick up the linens.

  There was only one girl I saw, he says, straightening. And she was nothing to look at. Just a homely little mouse.

  She smiles bigger at this and winks. Then she drops her gaze, rounds her shoulders, bites the insides of her cheeks. She is transformed into the sour little chambermaid who was chased by the monkey.

  Billy sucks in his breath.

  Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. How did you do that?

  She throws back her head and laughs a big glittering laugh. When she does, the ugly girl disappears, as if the sun has suddenly burst forth from behind dark clouds.

  He stands there dumbfounded, clutching his armload of dirty rags. She is still three stairs above him, looking down.

  You— he says.

  That’s right, she says proudly. Me. I play that old monkey trick three nights a week and twice on Saturdays. Me and old Joe, we split the take.