RL's Dream

Twenty-Eight

At two a.m. Soupspoon finished his last set. Neither Billy nor I Randy had come back so Rudy gave Soup the hundred dollars for that night’s work.

“You’re worth every goddamned dime,” the big gambler said as he shook Atwater’s hand. “You maybe could come twice a week.”

“Yeah. I’d like that.” Soupspoon’s head felt light and hot. He was worried about Kiki and there was a swarm of fire ants crawling in his chest.

There was a full moon out and lots of people in their cars. The ache in his chest went up into his shoulder and down into his back.

He made it three blocks before he had to stop. He grabbed onto the side of a building. Suddenly the pain was gone. There was a feeling of warmth all around his head and the sound of all the guitar music he’d played that night. The notes were too long and ill-fitted. It wasn’t the neat little tunes he played so well. It was dark and deep music — like the ocean. It was so beautiful but it wasn’t his.

He was sprawled out on his back in the early morning before the police came. They put him in a ward full of men in hospital beds. He was thirsty but he couldn’t talk.

Nurses came and doctors too. But nobody Soupspoon recognized found him in his deathbed. They put needles in his arm and smiled at or ignored him. He was mute again. The infection back in his throat from hours on cold stone.

“Heart attack,” some woman’s voice said. Through the dark Soupspoon imagined that she was talking about him. Two wards down, Randy lay with stab wounds to his stomach. At Fourteenth Street and Avenue A, Mavis Spivey was changing a 100-watt bulb.

Heart attack. Something white people died of when he was a boy. Negroes died from gunshot and knife wounds, pneumonia and fever. Negroes died from broken hearts and alcohol but not from no weak heart. Negroes had strong hearts and stronger backs. They carried the whole world on their shoulders and when they sighed it came out blues.

In the late night, in the dark room where red and blue lights winked and old men smelled and died. In the late night Soupspoon saw a dark shadow of a man cross the room and pull a chair up beside him.

“Randy?”

But when the young man lit his cigarette Soupspoon could see RL’s evil, handsome face in the flame. Even after he blew out the match his face stayed alight. He smiled but his cold eyes told Atwater that he was finally going to die.

RL didn’t say anything, but that didn’t surprise Soupspoon. He knew that ghosts couldn’t talk like men anymore. All they do is to haunt you with what they once looked like.

The tobacco smelled good. Really good. He felt a chill pass through his body and thought, Chilly death pass through me like a rill through the woods, like maybe I’ma wake up and all this I been goin’ through is just a dream. The kinda dream that somebody like RL would have. A evil long-lastin’ dream about all the bad things could happen here.

“Is that what you tellin’ me?” Soupspoon asked. He didn’t believe that he could think up such thing. Life was all he knew. RL was the one knew what came after. He could see it with his dead eye. The eye looking at Soupspoon right then.

Then pain sang through the old man’s bones. It was loud and pure. Soupspoon felt himself open wide. He could see everything, even in the dark. He could hear the soft humming of hospital machines and the hushed conversation of the two nurses in the hall, he could hear the roaches scuttling under his bed and the earth settling underground. His hands opened wide and his toes splayed out. He shit and pissed in a hard stream. He opened his mouth wide and stuck out his tongue. The bright pain turned into a light that burned through everything. He could see things but he didn’t understand what they were. He didn’t care though. The pain was gone and all he had left was the light. He raised up from the bed a few inches and then suddenly fell back. The light flicked on and off. I’m dead, went through Soupspoon’s mind. The light went down and down. He marked the darkness, an old fisherman now well past sunset at the edge of the sea.

When the room was black he remembered who he was in a spiraling echo that played itself out.