RL's Dream

Nine

Soupspoon left the apartment at four the next day. He knew where he was going but was in no hurry to get there. His hip hardly hurt him and he hadn’t had to take a pill all day.

“Good morning, Mr. Wise,” Mrs. Manetti said. She was coming up the stairs as he was coming down.

“Ms. Manetti. How are you today?”

“Oh, all right I guess,” she said, looking at his feet.

She was older than he; gray-haired with rounded blunt features and thick hands that had held many years of hard work. Arthritic legs forced her to put both feet on each stair before ascending to the next. She put down both of her plastic bags to greet Soupspoon and took in a deep breath.

“You need some help?”

“Maybe if you could take one bag.” She smiled as if it hurt to ask for help. “It’s all the way to the top.”

Soupspoon carried both bags back up the way he had come. They went past the fourth floor where he stayed with Kiki, toward the sixth where the old lady had lived for thirty-nine years with Alessio Manetti — and another twenty-three years alone. It was Alessio’s old wheelchair that Kiki had borrowed.

They took one stair at a time — in her fashion.

At the half flight to the fifth floor they stopped to rest.

“I’m sorry about what they did to you, Mr. Wise. I tried to talk to them, but you know these young people won’t listen. All they care about is beer and baseball, and whistling at the girls in those little dresses they wear.

“I called Mr. Grumbacher and told him that it was wrong. Wrong to put out somebody when he’s sick. God takes in the rent too, you know.”

There was no answer to what she said, but the subject was too painful for Soupspoon to go on with small talk.

“How are you now?” she asked.

“Just fine. Kiki took me to these doctors she knowed. They did a damn good job on my bones.”

Mrs. Manetti leaned forward peering through half-blind gray eyes that were a perfect match for her hair.

“You like her?”

“Kiki? Yeah. She took me in.” Soupspoon could feel the swelling over his left eye but he believed what he was saying.

“I don’t know. I guess,” the stocky little woman said. “But, well, you know... she has a bad mouth half the time, and you should see the kindsa men she brings in with her. Mrs. Green lives right upstairs and she hears them. Loud and fighting. I just think that you should be careful, Mr. Wise. You know, she’s all smiles when you see her, but not after a drink.”

“I don’t know. I guess.” Soupspoon picked up the bags and took normal steps to keep ahead, to keep from saying anything bad about Kiki. He wanted to protect her from the old women’s words. After all, what did those old ladies know about hard times, about drinking hard to forget? Of course Kiki got mad, but not for no reason. She had a good reason and a good heart. But Soupspoon didn’t want to make excuses. He wanted to carry those bags like a gentleman is supposed to do and then go on about his business.

Up to the sixth floor Soupspoon kept a few steps ahead. He could hear Mrs. Manetti straining and puffing behind. He turned once and said, “Slow down. I just got to move quick, but you could wait.”

She couldn’t wait, though. The ancient widow worked her feet and tugged on the railing until she could almost keep up with him. Her breath sounded like a greedy little dog slobbering over a bone.

“Which one is it?” Soupspoon called down to her.

“Number sixty-three,” she said, head down, pulling her way up the stairs.

She reached him at the door.

“She called me a witch. All I did was to ask if maybe Social Services could help more because that’s their job. I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t say that there was anything wrong with what she did,” Mrs. Manetti declared. “She doesn’t have any respect. You can’t trust a girl like that, Mr. Wise.”

The whole time she talked, Mrs. Manetti was rummaging around in her purse. Finally she came out with a copper key that had a red plastic handle. She pinched the key between two fingers and waited.

“You want me to carry the bags in an’ put ‘em on a table or somethin’?” he asked.

“No, thank you. You did enough already. I can manage.” She made no move to unlock the door.

Soupspoon watched her watching eyes. After a moment she blinked.

“You know, Ms. Manetti, nobody could help it.”

“What?”

“Kiki ain’t a bad girl...”

“I didn’t say...”

“Excuse me, ma’am, but just let me say these here few words. That’s all I ask.” Soupspoon put out his hands. She could have held them if she wanted to. “You see, Kiki kinda wild but that’s just who she is. She drink an’ she mean sometimes. But when she fount me downstairs she opened up her do’ an’ took me in. She couldn’t help it. It’s the way she learnt, just like manners. It’s like when you know somebody for a long time an’ you see’em ev’ry day you ask’em in for a cuppa coffee now and then, right?”

The gray-headed, gray-eyed old woman nodded, still pinching her copper key.

“We cain’t help who we is, ma’am.” Soupspoon looked at her a while longer — waiting.

Mrs. Manetti held up her key. “I have to be going now, Mr. Wise. I have to call my daughter in Miami.”

Soupspoon didn’t want coffee anyway. He wanted to be outside walking with no pain, and so he went. He walked down Avenue C to Pitt and then over, down toward Orchard. Before he got there he turned again, toward his destination.

He had music on his mind and on the streets around him. The blasting boom bass from the trunk speakers of a passing car. Phonographs out of apartment windows. The bouncing butt of a heavyset girl in short shorts listening to her earphones and licking a soft ice cream cone.

Music had been in his every day almost from the very beginning. He had pledged his life to music when he was still a boy in Mississippi.

“What you mean you gonna be a musician?” Cleophus Brown asked thirteen-year-old Atty Wise. “Have you lost your mind?”

“I’d’ruther to pick guitar strings than pick cotton, Cleo. Damn! I’d’ruther shov’lin’ coals in hell.”

For two years after his pneumonia, young Atty Wise had spent every music night right outside the Milky Way. He’d heard Jeff “Little Boy” Tynan, Willa Smith, and Job Landry with Rodeo Bob White. He never saw Cody again, but Elma and Theresa were there every night. He saw them dancing and drinking, flirting and fighting over men, for a year before either of them saw him again.

Nobody saw him because Atty would climb up the live oak out behind the Milky Way and peer in through a flap he tore in the tarpaper wall. He could sit out there all night and watch and listen without all that harsh talk and hard liquor, without the hot smells and hot tempers.

He’d seen two men killed in that first year. One was Shrimper Martins, a great big sharecropper who had left his girlfriend Maretha in Clarksville to go back home to his wife and seven kids in Cougar Bluff. Shrimper, Atwater had learned in the days after his murder, was the kind of religious man who sinned on Saturday and begged the Lord’s forgiveness on Sunday morning.

He was sitting at a card table with his friends making a big celebration out of his return. There was a lot of drinking and laughing. Atty didn’t like it because they made so much noise that Oja called off the music for that night. It was all toasting and roasting and talking loud because Shrimper was a popular man at the Milky Way and they were happy for his return.

When Atwater realized that there wasn’t going to be music he was ready to go. But he wanted to wait till it was dark enough that he wouldn’t be seen. That’s when he saw Maretha walk up to the moon-splattered door of the juke. He didn’t know who she was at that time but he could tell that she was different. To begin with, she was dressed in good brown cotton, good enough for church. And she walked with steady one-after-the-other steps, not like the regular customers ambling to and fro, seeing and being seen.

Atwater saw her at the front door and then he saw her in the bar through his flap. Shrimper was sitting among his friends, smiling and lifting his tin cup. As he brought the cup to his lips, Maretha was bringing her pistol to his head. She said something that Atwater couldn’t hear. Shrimper turned to look but the bullet caught him in the temple before he could face her. The floor around the man and his killer cleared of people. In between the screams and shouts five more shots sounded, each one like the hack of an ax into thick bark.

I told you you’d never leave. That’s what Maretha had said. Atwater heard about it later when the law came to take Maretha to jail.

Six months after that, Atwater changed his name. It was just after “Big Mouth” Willa Smith spied him peeking through the hole in the wall. She stopped singing and went right outside.

“Boy!” she shouted. “What you doin’ up there?”

“Listenin’, ma’am.”

“Come on down here.”

She took Atty inside and pulled him up to where she played guitar and bellowed.

“Atty!” Elma shouted. Theresa was grinning right behind her. Elma reached for him but Willa slapped her hand down.

“Hussy!” Willa hissed. “Git yo’ hand away. This here boy ain’t none’a your’n. He a music lover. He ’predate the art.”

The Milky Way wasn’t so frightening when he was with Willa. She wasn’t tall but she had big hands and the big mouth that she was named for. She was drunk most of the time and well armed with a .45-caliber repeater.

Willa loved it that little Atwater had been watching her through that hole and she was determined to make him into a musician.

He’d never played anything, so she gave him four big pewter spoons and showed him how to hold them between his fingers; how to hit them on his chest, stomach, and legs.

“Play somewhere between the way my head moves and my foot stomp. Play it like you love me,” she said. And he did.

He loved her and rattled his spoons behind the brick wall of her voice.

Ruby and Inez had given up trying to keep him at home.

“He’s a man now,” Inez told Ruby, disgusted. “A fool.”

Willa paid Atty ten cents for every dollar she made, and so he was rich. He spent every extra moment he had trying to learn the guitar, because Willa had once told him that “a woman’s heart strings is directly tied to the strings on a guitar.”

He was still playing spoons, though, on the night of the second killing. Willa was singing, making up a song, really, that might have been called “Ain’t Gonna Be No Cotton When I Die.” She was strumming on her big-bellied seven-string guitar and Soupspoon (that was his name by then) was clattering alongside. A commotion broke out in the bar. Soupspoon looked over and saw Vesey Turnot push Tree Frank. Tree fell backwards but helping hands kept him from falling and pushed him back into the fray. Vesey hit Tree’s jaw so hard that it sounded like a convict’s hammer on a ripe stone ready to crack. Soupspoon knew that that blow would lay Tree down.

But it didn’t.

Tree waded in swinging. Vesey did too. They looked less like men and more like little boys settling a dispute before running home for supper.

But these were men. Vesey was fast and accurate with his fists. He hit Tree where he wanted, and he hit him a lot. Tree was slow and lumbersome. For all the times he swung he hardly hit Vesey at all. But every time he connected, that part of Vesey’s body stopped working.

First Tree put a dent in Vesey’s side. Then he made the left arm fall down. When Tree finally laid his fist against Vesey’s head it looked to Soupspoon like a watermelon had been cracked open.

The blood came from Vesey’s face like a red snake jumping from a stone. The proud boxer put up his right hand to catch the blood and then he shouted, “Oh no! No!”

He grabbed for Tree’s right arm so that he wouldn’t get hit again.

Tree swung his arm around, tossing Vesey this way and that, but the bleeding boxer hung on.

“Please don’t kill me!” Vesey yelled. “Please! Please!”

Finally Tree threw Vesey to the floor. Tree would have left him there but poor Vesey had been demented by the sight of his own blood. He grabbed Tree around the legs, bleeding on his ankles and begging, “I’m sorry! Please don’t hit me again!”

Vesey showed more strength on his knees than he did with his fists. Tree couldn’t push him away no matter how hard he tried. He had Vesey’s blood all over his clothes and hands.

“Let me go, fool!” Tree shouted.

Willa had stopped singing.

“Pull that man offa there!” she shouted.

Tree backed up against the bar. He reached behind and grabbed a crock that was filled with pickled pigs’ feet. Tree hurled that thick crock down with all his strength, hitting Vesey on the top of his head.

The clay didn’t give.

Vesey stopped struggling and yelling. The whole jar of pig gelatin spilled down over his head. He slumped back against the bar and everybody else in the room went still.

Ulla Backley finally checked Vesey’s breathing and his heart.

“He’s dead.”

They laid Vesey out on the longest table at the Milky Way. He was flat on his back, no longer afraid, with blood and pork gelatin clotted across his handsome brown face.

Many people left the bar when they heard that Vesey was dead. Those that were left were the jury for Tree.

No one called the law like they had with Maretha. Maretha had murdered a man. Tree had just hit somebody who then wound up dead.

“Vesey started it,” Elma said. “He called Tree funny-lookin’ an’ said how his momma was probably a dog.”

“Yeah,” some slim sharecropper agreed. “An’ when Tree said to stop, Vesey picked a fight.”

Tree had his head in his hands. He never thought that he would kill a man and was brokenhearted at what might happen to his soul. That’s when Soupspoon decided to become a professional musician.

“When I heard that they was fightin’ ’cause’a name-callin’ I knew that I had to do it,” he told Cleophus the very next afternoon. “I knew my life weren’t worf a damn. Might as well do sumpin’ I want ’fore they get me.”

“Are you a fool, boy?” Cleophus asked. He had a great thatch of wild hair and wore plaid overalls. People treated him like he was a clown but Soupspoon knew that Cleophus was the smartest man in Cougar Bluff — after Bannon died.

“Yessir I am,” Soupspoon said. “An’ the on’y thing make me different is that I know it too. If I was out there pullin’ cotton you know I’d be every night at the Milky Way, all drunk an’ surly. An’ if I get drunk enough I’m liable as not to fight. An’ if I fight you know thatta be the end’a me.”

Cleophus scratched under his burly beard and considered the boy’s words.

What did he say? Soupspoon couldn’t remember. It had been too many years. Too many war stories and bad movies, and bottles of beer. Too many girlfriends who he lied to and who, in turn, lied to him.

Soupspoon was coming down the street. In front of him was a big vacant lot, with a few men lingering toward the back end. On the other side of the lot was a short, dead-end alley.

“Hey, mistah. Mistah.” It was an old man wearing a spotty green T-shirt under a black-and-white checkered jacket. His pants were tan and he had on a Mets sun visor cap. White stubble sprouted along his black jawline.

“Yeah?”

“You got a quarter?”

“Hell,” Soupspoon said. “I got fi’ty cent.”

The Mets fan staggered forward, raised his head, smiled.

“Guy name Rudy got a club back here somewheres?” Soupspoon asked.

“They ain’t gone let you in,” the man said. “They ain’t gone let you in. Might as well put yo’ money wit’ mines an’ we get us some Colt 45.”

Soupspoon took two quarters from his pocket. “Where Rudy’s?” he asked.

“Ovah yonder.” The drunk pointed with the hand that held his money. The coins fell but Soupspoon wasn’t distracted. It was a black door — the kind of door superstitious people used to ward off curses — down the dead-end street.

Inside the dark hot room smelt strongly of beer. There was a long black bar across the back and a few tables to one side. The room was populated by half a dozen black men who smoked, drank, and were talking serious in low tones. Everybody looked up to see Soupspoon as he walked up to the bar.

“I’d like a beer,” he told the barmaid.

“This a private club, mistah,” she answered.

“Rudy Peckell the owner?”

“I said that this was private,” she answered. “That means that I don’t tell you nuthin’ and you walk back out the way you came in.”

“Because,” Soupspoon said as if the woman hadn’t said a word, “Rudy’s a friend’a mines. Coupla years ago I run inta him an’ he told me I should come on by if I ever get the chance.”

The woman looked Soupspoon over. Her face was ready to be mad but he thought she looked sweet in spite of her disposition. She didn’t know whether to believe that he knew Rudy, but, he could see, she really didn’t care either.

She took a glass from under the bar and worked the spigot on it.

“Thatta be one seventy-five,” she said after serving him.

“What’s your name?”

“Sono.” The short woman took the two dollars from him and put them in her apron pocket. She made no move to give him any change.

Sono was short and well-proportioned. Her lips were pursed in a perpetual, if sour, kiss. Her skin was high yellow and there was a deep brown mole riding on the words in her throat. A big fly buzzed lazily above her head. Soupspoon couldn’t hear its drone above the hum of the refrigerator behind the bar.

Soupspoon thought he knew this woman. Not that he ever met her but that he’d known many a woman like her. A sweet girl who loved her daddy and her kids. A girl who never understood why people treated her the way they did. And even though she’d had it hard she was still looking; looking for that one man. A pretty black man who could talk her out of her clothes; who could work hard all day and playboy at night. A man who could bear up under the hot and heavy love that she’d been holding inside her chest since she was a baby — maybe since before she was born. A man who could learn that that love she had was all he would ever need in this life. A hard man who she could crack open like a sweet pecan. A man who could give up his sweetness to her.

“Rudy here yet?” Soupspoon asked.

“Do you see him?”

“He here yet?”

“Uh-uh, no. Rudy don’t never come in till later.”

“Well, when he get in tell’im I need t’talk. You got sandwiches here?”

“Naw. All we got is some potato chips an’ pretzels.”

“How much?”

“Pretzels free if you drinkin’.”

“Then gimme some’a them, ’cause I’ma be waitin’ right ovah at that table till Rudy gets here.”

Sono filled a round plastic bowl with thin pretzels and handed them to Soupspoon.

He was happy to be eating and drinking, seeing colors and breathing the rancid air.

The bar filled up as the evening came on. All kinds of black men came in. Some came in work clothes, overalls and boots. A few dressed in synthetic pastel-colored suits with big-brimmed hats and almost fluorescent shoes. There were old men with sad yellow eyes and threadbare trousers. One big guy, who Sono called Bongo, made his eyes big and told jokes full of curse words. Soupspoon would catch snatches of his foul humor, like “...ugly, ugly mothahfuckah had a tongue so big that could French-kiss ’er an’ be lickin’ her pussy at the same time...” — lots of laughing — “...you know ain’t no black woman gonna give up somethin’ like that!” Everybody broke up at that. Sono laughed so hard that she went down on both knees for a second there.

Rudy walked in at just about seven-thirty wearing a midnight-blue silk suit and a yellow shirt. His loose tie was the color of blood. He was followed by a large Hawaiian man. Soupspoon decided the man was Hawaiian because he wore a brightly colored shirt and even though he was fairly brown-skinned he had big eyes for an Asian and black hair that came straight down to his shoulder.

“Take the door, Cholo.” Rudy grinned, showing pure white teeth against mahogany skin. “Who gots the bones?”

“Right here, Rudy,” a man all in pink said. “I been keepin’ ’em next t’my nuts so they know who’s boss down there on the flo’.”

Cholo took his place at the door. Some of the men followed Rudy to the back of the bar. They all crouched down around him. He put his hand deep into his pocket and came out with a wad of money so thick that it would have made Soupspoon sweat if he were a younger man still dazzled by the luster of cash. Rudolph threw down a bill and said, “One hundred dollars! One hundred dollars on my first throw.” Then he threw the dice so hard that they sounded like the report of a .22.

“Five! That’s a lucky number for me. My little girl is five. I was five with my first woman. I got five thousand dollars in my pocket. Now lemme see some’a all you boys’s green.”

Rudolph looked up at Soupspoon then, and smiled. He showed his teeth and nodded, but he quickly looked back at the gamblers that surrounded him. Soupspoon knew that he’d have to wait. Rudy was the man now while Soupspoon was shrinking back to the size of a boy.

The men started shouting and throwing down bets.

Soupspoon sipped his beer and watched them from his table. It seemed like Rudolph was winning, but he couldn’t tell. He’d never been a gambler, never cared about taking chances like that.

“What you thinkin’ ’bout?” Sono was putting a fresh glass of beer on the table.

“Wonderin’ how could you stand it.”

“Stand what?”

“Bein’ cooped up in this smelly old room with all these here yappin’ hyena men.”

“Boxcars!” a tiny workman cried. “Damn!”

Somebody cackled. Money passed from hand to hand.

“I told Rudy ’bout you,” Sono said.

“What he say?”

“That if you still here when he get through that maybe you could talk.”

“I’ll be here.”

Son walked away from him slowly. She got about half the way to the bar, then she stopped and came back. She put her platter down and stood very close to the bluesman.

“Men are fools,” she said in a low voice. “They hide it pretty good, though, so mosta your women be even worse than fools ’cause they believe in them.

“But I don’t never trust a man,” Sono went on. “ ’Cause I come in an’ see’em here, where they don’t do no pretendin’. They might as well all line up an’ lay they ducks down on the table. That’s all they care about — who got the biggest dick an’ who get the most pussy. After four nights’a bein’ in this hellhole I got enough of men t’last me a year.”

“Is that all men?”

Sono sneered at Soupspoon. She wasn’t going to let him think that he was special.

“Yeah,” she said. “All y’all.”

“How ’bout yo’ man Rudolph?”

“That’s different.”

“Different how?”

“Rudolph is a businessman. Ev’rything he do is business. All that big talk is t’get them men drinkin’ an’ th’owin’ they money away. He always the house in a crap game. He always makin’ money.”

“So at least Rudolph ain’t no fool, huh?”

“That don’t mean he ain’t gonna make a fool outta me, or some other poor girl.”

“Sono!” one of the gamblers shouted.

She took her platter and went back to work.

Now and then during the night a knock might come, and Cholo would look through the peephole and then open up. Mostly gamblers came to Rudy’s; he was the Atlantic City of the Lower East Side.

At about two, Soupspoon was ready to go. He was wondering about a last glass of beer when a knock came on the door. Cholo peeped and then whistled so loud that it hurt.

The dice stopped rolling and all of the men were up on their feet strolling aimlessly away from the game.

Cholo pulled open the door and a white man in a wrinkled tan suit came in. As he walked in the door he pushed Cholo aside.

“How you doin’, man?” someone said at Soupspoon’s side.

It was the man dressed in pink. He had a dark, scarred-up face and was chewing on a wooden match. He extended a hand to shake.

“Name’s Billy Slick.” His breath was sour.

“Soupspoon’s what they call me.”

“Hello, Officer Todd,” Rudolph was saying. He had his arms extended like a halfhearted Christ and a smile plastered across his face.

“ ’Gainst the law t’lock the doors if you’re open for business,” said the jowly-faced cop.

“A man just left here ten minutes ago an’ said he was comin’ back to settle a debt with Cholo there. We locked the door to keep trouble away.”

“You should have called the police if you were threatened,” the cop said.

“Don’t look at’em,” Billy told Soupspoon. “Pretend you talkin’ t’me an’ let Rudy do his thing.”

Rudy was talking. “I didn’t want to cause the man no problem. He coulda just been talkin’ outta his head.”

“What was this man’s name?” The policeman took a note pad from his pocket.

“Why don’t we go back to my office an’ talk in private, officer.” Rudolph gestured the way and the two went through a door behind the bar.

“Time for the greasin’,” Billy Slick said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Have I seen you here before, man?”

“Naw. But I know Rudy. Ain’t seen’im in a while, though.”

“Where you been?”

“Sick. Sick and tired.”

“That’s too bad,” Billy Slick said, not caring a damn. “But you better now, right?”

“When Rudy close?”

“That depends.” The big man’s eyes lit up when Rudy’s name was mentioned. “If he got a woman waitin’ he break about two, two-thirty — a woman waitin’ or a bad streak.”

Soupspoon nodded and looked Billy up and down. He was maybe forty with big muscles under those pink clothes.

“What you want wit’ Rudy?” Billy asked.

The older bluesman felt the smile come to his face. He heard the men laughing and shuffling and even that lazy fly buzzing around, looking for the barmaid’s scent.

“You hear it?” Soupspoon asked at last.

“Hear what? I don’t hear nuthin’.”

“That’s what I wanna talk to Rudy about.”

“You crazy?” Billy asked.

“Uh-huh. I’m a musician, least I used to be. Maybe I could be again.”

“You wanna play here?” When he smiled, Billy showed two missing teeth and a broken one. It reminded Soupspoon of someone but he couldn’t quite remember who.

The air around them was sour from Billy’s breath, but Soupspoon didn’t mind. He liked the atmosphere.

“You come on back whenever you want, hear?” Rudolph was saying to Officer Todd. Todd was gruff and moved quickly toward the door. He made eye contact with any man who would look at him — but most men were looking down.

On his way out the door Todd said to Cholo, “Keep this door open from now on.”

The Hawaiian grunted and nodded but when Todd walked out he slammed the door shut and threw the bolt home.

Billy Slick was on his feet the moment the door was closed.

“I’m lookin’ fo’ seven!” he shouted. “I’m on a mission for home!”

By three the game was over. The only people left in the club were Rudy’s employees. Rudolph spent a few minutes talking to Billy Slick and Sono at the bar, then he strolled over to Soupspoon’s table.

“Soup,” Rudy said.

Soupspoon held out his hand but he didn’t stand. “Rudy.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s a nice place you got here,” Soupspoon answered. “Why’ont you sit down an’ drink wit’ me?”

“I got places t’be.” Rudy pointed at his heavy gold wristwatch — it read three-fifteen.

“You ain’t got five minutes t’drink wit’ a old friend?”

The gambler looked uncomfortable for a moment. Soupspoon addressed himself to the boy he had known, not the man standing in front of him.

“Sono!” Rudy called.

“Yeah?”

“Bring ovah some Wild Turkey and a coupla glasses.”

Rudy sat with a hand on each knee.

Sono rushed over with the liquor. She poured each squat tumbler one quarter full.

“I need a job, Rudy,” Soupspoon said.

“A job?”

Soupspoon nodded and touched the rim of his glass.

“Hey, I’m sorry, man, but I don’t have nuthin’ for ya here. It’s just me an’ Cholo an’ Sono here. Sometimes Billy do a odd job, but you too old for anything he do.”

“I could play the blues.”

“This ain’t no music club. You know that, Soup. Shit, I’ont even have a jukebox.”

Rudy was big and hale now that he was a man. He was sure of himself and people respected him. But Soupspoon remembered the skinny little boy in cutoffs and no shirt. He and his wife, Mavis, used to pick Rudy up at his mother’s house and take him home for fried chicken dinner. They played tic-tac-toe and dominoes with him in the front room.

The first time he ever saw Rudy he was no more than six. Soupspoon and Mavis were out walking when they saw this little boy, all snot-nosed and ragged, breaking bottles in the street.

Mavis went right up to him and jerked him by his arm.

“Pick up that damn glass, boy! You think people want holes in they tires just ’cause you bored?”

From the look on his face, Soupspoon figured that that was the first time anybody had ever tried to make Rudy do right.

It probably was. His mother wasn’t much use. She had seven kids — and a boyfriend for each one. When Mavis made Rudy take her to his sixth-floor apartment, up in Harlem, they found two babies eating peanut butter out of a jar on the floor while Mrs. Peckell was with one of her men in the back room.

“Maybe we better leave, Mavy,” Soupspoon had suggested. He didn’t want to come to blows with some man that he didn’t even know.

“You could leave if you want to, Soupspoon Wise,” Mavis had said. “But I will not sit by and leave these children to live like this.”

“Oh yeah! Yeah, baby!” Mrs. Peckell yelled from behind the closed door.

Rudy stuck his finger in his ear, embarrassed by the lack of manners his mother displayed.

Mavis let Rudy take his little brothers out in the hall. Then she banged on the closed door.

The yelling stopped and Soupspoon could make out the sounds of clothes rustling, springs singing, and shoes sliding on the floor.

“What?” a woman’s voice called out.

“Come on out here!” Mavis commanded. It was the first time Soupspoon heard her voice like that. It was the first notion he had that they wouldn’t be together forever.

The woman who came out was a mess. Her Cleopatra wig was crooked on her head, her eyes were two colors, and the sheet wrapped around her big body was covered with stains — some of them still wet with bloody patches in them.

The man, who came out second, was small. He wore gray pants and a shirt with no sleeves.

“What?” the messy woman asked again.

“I come about your kids.” Mavis was no taller than Mrs. Peckell but she managed to look down on her just the same.

“What about my kids?” Mrs. Peckell glanced at the floor where the two infant boys had been eating.

“I better be goin’, Jessie,” her little boyfriend said.

“Richard, sit’own!”

He almost did it. Even though he was nowhere near a chair he let his butt slump back as if he meant to fall down on the floor and await her next command. But instead of falling down he took a long step forward like a Russian Cossack dancer — then he took another.

“Richard!”

But he was gone out of the door. He took Mrs. Peckell’s brass along with him. All of a sudden she seemed slack and flabby — aware of how messy she and her house were.

“What about my kids?” she asked Mavis again.

“I fount Rudy in the street breakin’ glass.”

“Is he hurt?” Jessie Peckell asked.

“He’s fine. But now I come up here an’ find yo’ other babies eatin’ wit’ they hands on the flo’ while you layin’ up wit’ that sorry li’l coward...”

“That’s Juanita’s fault,” the sad mother said. “I told her to feed them an’ take ’em to the park. I’ma beat Juanita’s ass when she come home.”

“Are they your kids?” Mavis’s voice shook.

Jessie shook too, like a kid herself, caught smoking behind the house.

“Are they?” Mavis lifted her fist, causing Jessie to flinch.

“Are they?” Mavis asked again. “Are they yours? Because if they your babies — an’ you don’t watch’em ev’ry minute — then they gonna be dead an’ not nuthin’ you say to nobody else gonna bring ’em back. When you look at his chair an’ ain’t nobody there, ain’t no flowers gonna, ain’t no sea breeze gonna help...”

Mavis walked right up to Rudy’s mother with her fist still raised. Jessie fell backwards, not because she was afraid, Soupspoon thought, but because of the hurt that Mavis showed her.

“I’m dyin’, Rudy,” Soupspoon said. “Got cancer in my bones an’ I’m almost homeless. I did some radiation an’ now I’m gettin’ ready t’go on keemo. An’ all I want is to play the blues.”

“A’ntee know that?” Rudy called Mavis his a’ntee.

“Mavis in New York?”

“Uh-huh,” the boy inside the man answered.

“Well, I ain’t talked to Mavis in years. An’ I don’t want you t’tell’er nuthin’ neither. All I want from you is yea or nay.”

“I don’t even know what you want.”

“I wanna play music. I wanna play it here. All I need is a chair.”

Rudy twisted his face like a little boy again. Soupspoon remembered the first time that Mavis took him home: his face was all twisted then too. He didn’t want to stay for the night away from home. He didn’t want to until he tasted the roast pork and potatoes with gravy; he didn’t want to until he had buckwheat pancakes and bacon for breakfast and then a pony ride in Central Park.

“People don’t come in here to hear music, Soup. They come here to gamble; gamble an’ drink.”

“I’ont care what they want. They gonna get me,” Soupspoon said. “You know you owe me, Rudy. You owe me sumpin’.”

“I cain’t pay ya.”

“That’s okay. I take donations.”

Rudy downed his scotch. He sat back in his chair and then he sat forward, bringing his elbows to his knees. Then he sat up again and covered his lips with his hand.

Soupspoon smiled to see the fidgety boy grown into a man.

“Keemo be over in three weeks. If that don’t kill me I might got six months, maybe more. I figger I be strong enough t’come in in about a month or five weeks. We try it on, an’ if it don’t fit... well then, I’ll leave.”

Billy Slick and Sono were listening to the conversation from the bar behind Rudy.

“Do it, Rudy,” Sono said.

“Yeah,” chimed in Billy Slick. “Do it.”

“You gonna take responsibility for it, Billy?” Rudy asked in a threatening tone.

“Sure I will. I’ll set’im up an’ break’im down too. Shit! I used to do that at the Palladium till they fired my ass.”

Rudy nodded. Sono grinned at her new friend.

“Okay,” Rudy said. “Listen, I tell you what, you call me when you ready in four or five weeks an’ we see. All right?”

She slapped him hard across the face as he was tiptoeing in.

“Where the hell have you been?” Kiki stood only half a foot from Soupspoon — her breath was ninety proof. She cocked her fist and reared back. Soupspoon knew that if she hit him again he’d be on the floor, so he pushed out with both hands as hard as he could against her chest. He swung out to slap her but only clipped the top of her head as she was already falling.

When she hit the floor, Soupspoon took a step backward intending to get outside, but he bumped into the door and it swung shut. He couldn’t open it because he didn’t dare to turn his back on Kiki when she was wild.

But he didn’t have to worry. Kiki rolled herself up into a ball and sobbed.

“Don’t touch me!” she shrieked when he crouched down beside her. His hip throbbed along with his left cheek but the real pain was a hollow aching that came from the very center of his heart.

“I ain’t gonna touch ya. I’m just gonna sit here next to ya. That’s all. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

While Kiki cried, Soupspoon pressed his fingers against the left side of his chest. The pain was like a hard pea lodged in his clenching heart. It was the memory of love and the onset of death all at once. It set off a wild glee in him.

“You didn’t have to hurt me,” Kiki said, her face still buried between her knees.

“I was just scared, honey. I’as afraid that you might start hittin’ me an’ then not be able t’stop.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she said and then gulped. “I was just worried because it was so late and you didn’t call or leave a note or anything. You were just gone and I was scared that you wouldn’t ever come back.”

Soupspoon put his hand on her heaving side. She brought her arm down and clamped the hand to her.

“Where’m I gonna go, baby? I’as just tryin’ t’get ready for what I’ma do after this keemo shit.”

“What do you mean?” Kiki asked as she sat up. She wiped the tears from her eyes and brushed back her hair in the same motion.

“Doctor says I’l be real sick for a while. She says that keemo is poison for the cancer. But I figure that if they got me takin’ poison then I gots to be real sick already. Sick almost to dyin’ — an’ maybe even dyin’.”

“Don’t say that, daddy...”

“Don’t cut me off now, girl. You know since you brought me up here I been thinkin’ — I started playin’ the blues ’cause I had a feelin’ that I would die young an’ all I wanted before that happened was to play. An’ now that I’m dyin’ for real I wanna do it again. I wanna make sumpin’ an’ leave sumpin’ behind.”

“I’m sorry,” Kiki said.

“Yeah, baby. Me too.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.

“I know you didn’t, baby. I know it.”