RL's Dream

Twelve

Neither one of them spoke for a while after he finished his story. Kiki sat back holding a cigarette, just letting it burn. Soupspoon leaned forward on his elbows. He looked like a man does after completing a long and difficult job.

“They ain’t nuthin’ Robert Johnson did worth rememberin’ except the way he played guitar and how he made livin’ just that much more easy t’bear. You got botha them things now, here today. They got his records t’listen to an’ me t’bear witness.” Soupspoon slapped the table and showed his teeth.

“I gotta get to work early, Soup,” Kiki said from her bed. She had a glass of whiskey in one hand and a burnt-out butt in the other. Soupspoon saw by the way her head lolled to one side that Kiki was drunk again.

She winked at him.

Kiki put the cigarette in her whiskey hand and got to her feet with some effort. She grabbed onto the head post of the bed to keep upright. Then she spilled the whole glass of whiskey out on the bed. It looked like she did it on purpose but Soupspoon knew that she was just drunk. He jumped up and grabbed a towel from the sink. While he toweled the liquor from the bed he said, “If I had ever done that my a’ntees woulda hung me up by my ears... my wife woulda kilt me.”

“What wife?”

Kiki wore a light green dress with clusters of tiny red apples printed all over. She went up close behind Soupspoon and leaned against him. It was a drunk woman’s weight he felt against his back.

“What wife, Soup?”

He could feel the hot breath, smell its liquor.

“You better get to bed if you wanna make work tomorrow, Kiki.”

“Come to bed with me, daddy.” Pale arms snaked around his chest. Kiki’s fingers pressed at his breastbone.

“How’s your hip?” she asked.

“It hurts some.”

Kiki put her mouth to his ear and breathed for a while before saying, “I could ride you so good you wouldn’t even feel it, baby.”

Soupspoon went still like the levee lizards of his dreams. He let his hands hang down and whispered, “You got to get to bed, honey.”

“Come with me.” Her arms tightened. With controlled strength she began to pull him toward the bed. She kissed his ear and said, “I liked your story.”

“You did, huh?”

Soupspoon stumbled and they were at the foot of the big bed. It loomed out in front of him and the weight of his savior began to bear him down.

“I never knew all that stuff about you, honey.”

As they lowered to the bed, Kiki’s thigh rose over his leg. He remembered a feeling almost lost in the pain of cancer.

“I could play you a song,” he said as the slippery tongue tickled the hairs in his ear.

“You could?” Her hand ran the distance between his knee and his navel.

Soupspoon almost forgot what he’d been saying.

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“What kinda song?”

“A love song. A song I heard when I’as just a boy down in Cougar Bluff, Mississippi.”

Soupspoon sat up and looked down on Kiki. She was a plain woman but her red hair was beautiful. She hiked her dress up to her crotch and looked deep into his eyes. He felt his heart skip once and made it to his feet before she could reach out for him. He went behind the couch and brought out his red guitar.

“I want you to fuck me,” Kiki said so loud that Soupspoon was sure that Mrs. Green upstairs could hear.

He sat on the bed next to Kiki and started tuning his guitar. His fingers felt stiff and clumsy but the sound was still in his mind. The strings whined a little from long years without play but they came half the way back to life for him. Kiki became silent while Soupspoon cocked his ear to make sure that his chords were just right.

He picked the words, note by note, as he sang, hearing an old man in his voice — a man he’d never heard sing the blues before.

Inez insisted on painting the porch pink. Sweet peas she had planted crawled up string, half the way to the roof. He remembered the little rays of sun making hotspots on his arms and Fitzhew singing “The Half-Blind Woman Blues” while Inez and Ruby leaned next to each other behind the slanted screen of sweet pea blossoms.

He remembered his ex-wife, Mavis Spivey, and how she was miserable and drunk when they met in a Texas juke. He married her and loved her. He still missed her after thirty-two years and two months.

On the day they were married, Mavis made pig tails and blackeyed peas. All the blues men and women from miles around came to Reverend Crow’s backyard and played music until late in the night. After the wedding Mavis came to bed crying. He begged her to tell him what was wrong until the sun was bright through the lace curtains her cousin had given them. He finally got so frustrated that he left and went down to a friend’s house for two days. When he came back, Mavis had stopped crying. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her suitcase packed and her traveling clothes on.

“Where you goin’, Mavis?” Soupspoon asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere where I can start up new.”

“Can I come?”

When he asked that question she started crying again. She fell to the floor and moaned. She was saying something but Atwater had to get down on his knees to hear her weak words.

“I cain’t give you no chirren, daddy,” she sobbed. “I had bleedin’ after Cort and the doctor cut me up on the inside. He cut me an’ now I cain’t have no more kids.”

Soupspoon said that he didn’t need any kids as long as she could stay with him.

“I wouldn’t want no kids that wasn’t ours, Mavy,” he whispered to her. “So I guess I got to take you like you is.”

Kiki was sound asleep. Soupspoon moved her hand away from her crotch and pulled her dress down.

He looked at that pale face, pondering a life filled with hardpressed women and shadowy, disappearing men. Ruby and Inez, who had little love or respect for most men but who loved him just the same. Mavis Spivey, barren and childless since her one baby son, Cort, died in a flash flood. Mavis, who married him without joy or dreams. And then this redheaded white girl, drunk and jagged, who thought slaps were kisses and whiskey was milk.

Bannon, RL, Fitzhew, and a thousand other blues boys crushed down into the mud without making a sound. Dead, buried, and forgotten all on the same day. Trampling each other like a stampeding crowd making for the door. Men who sought out love in women’s tears.

He sat on the bed next to Kiki and touched her cheek. She smiled in her sleep. Soupspoon knew that it was a pleasure she’d never remember. The small touch of love and the smile to go with it that she couldn’t know when she was awake.

He thought again about Mavis. How her face hardened year after year. The love of life drained right out of her; her smile went with it. He wondered, looking at Kiki’s ignorant bliss, if Mavis even smiled in her sleep.