RL's Dream

Fourteen

Mavis had been Soupspoon’s last chance at any kind of normal life. He didn’t mind that they couldn’t have children. He didn’t care that she cried, sometimes for days. He was happy to get away from the heartache and despair of the deep south. Up north he played in nightclubs and at barbecues. The upper states were loaded with Negroes who wanted a taste of down home — and he was better with his guitar every night.

There was some time away from home, there had to be. By bus usually, but also by train and even a car now and then. Never in his whole life had Soupspoon been airborne. There were times that he was away from home for two months and more. But he was always glad to come back to Mavis. She always had something good on the stove in their uptown cold-water New York flat. Pig tails and black-eyed peas was a favorite; collard greens and cornbread on a plate of their own on the side.

Mavis loved her daddy’s foreskin. “Come on to bed, baby,” she’d say in the early days when the sadness only came now and then. “Let’s go shuck that corn.”

He saved up his money and all his love on the road. Didn’t play with the B-girls, didn’t play with himself either. He held Mavis in his arms until it was quiet, even in Harlem. When he was through his mind was as dark as the night sky and that was all right with him.

But then a chill came into his mind one night and Soupspoon woke up to an empty bed.

Mavis was in the kitchen. All the lights were on and she was smoking Pall Malls and drinking beer. Her elbows were up against her side and her legs were tight together She was perfectly still but tears ran freely from her eyes.

“Woman was the saddest thing I ever seed,” he once said. “She didn’t even get no release from cryin’.”

One time he came home from the road and there wasn’t anything cooking on the stove. Everything in the house had been painted white. The walls, the floor, the wood chairs, and even the little dolls Mavis had saved from when she was a child. There wasn’t a bottle of liquor left in the cabinet.

“It’s just a style,” she said. “Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with it.”

She couldn’t go to bed without a light on, couldn’t even take a nap in the dark.

He wanted to say something but the light made him quiet.

Mavis would throw a fit if he dirtied something or left a stain. She put everything of his into a closet to keep the house clean — even sealed the sofa and stuffed chair with plastic because he might sit on them.

He knew he should have said something. But even when she shamed him — by saying that the only reason he even wanted her was to put his thing down where RL’s thing had been — he didn’t fight. That night he tried to sleep on the couch but it was too sweaty so he curled up in a sheet on the floor. They never slept together again, and finally he moved out. He’d heard a year later that she’d gone back down to Texas to keep Cort’s grave covered with fresh flowers.

He couldn’t even hold on to his woman. He never missed her after all the crazy things she did and all the terrible things she said — he was lonely and didn’t want a friend.

His music was empty too. Just an old bastard style. Singing the same words every night to people who didn’t care, who didn’t even know what it meant to dust your broom. He felt like an old dog that rolls in a carcass out in the woods. Maybe a long time ago his ancestors did that to throw prey off the scent, but now he’d just come home and smell up the house.

He put his guitar down and became the day janitor at the Calumet Building. At night he’d roll out a sleeping bag so he could call the cops if anybody tried to break in. They let him go after thirty years. He didn’t even have Social Security.

Kiki’s drunken snore filled the room.

“I’m gonna lay me down in a bed fulla blues,” he sang softly to himself.

“No, daddy,” Kiki answered from her sleep.

Soupspoon laid down on the couch and fell right into a dream about the Delta.

After the fire at Terry’s juke joint young Soupspoon went to heal at Darnell Calter’s house, which was on an unnamed tributary of the Potato River. Rich white people had fancy homes along the Potato at that time.

In the dream Soupspoon had gotten better and was with Darnell under the deck of Judge Whitestone’s cabin. Darnell used to like to go there because it was cool under the shade and you could let a line down in the water and no one would know. Mrs. Whitestone had passion fruit vines growing down the side of the house, so the underpart wasn’t even visible from the rare passing boat. Darnell and Soupspoon had crawled down to the water’s edge under the house and had their poles stuck in the mud so they could see if a catfish or carp was pulling on the line.

“You a fool to follah RL, Atwater,” Darnell said. “He ain’t no good. An’ he got the kinda bad luck fall on people ’round him.”

“Uh-uh,” Soupspoon replied. He was laying on his back letting the dappled light through the vines fall on his face. “That man play some music I got to know.”

“You almost got kilt already, boy. What got to happen t’wake you up?”

There was the lazy swish of an alligator diving in the river and the flitting of hummingbird wings and cicadas crying. Soupspoon knew he was dreaming. He kept his eyes closed like a guitar man who’s hit a good note and just wants to feel it in the dark.

“Man gotta settle down, Atwater,” Darnell continued. “All RL want is that pussy and that whiskey.”

“That’s all you want, Darnell.” Soupspoon sat up to look at his friend. “Only you too scared to go out there an’ get it. You hate it, down snatchin’ cotton and haulin’ it. You hate how hard it is but you ain’t got nuthin’ else to do. I’m tired’a every day just doin’ my business an’ fallin’ into my bed. I could just as well be you an’ it wouldn’t make no difference at all.”

“But you follah RL an’ you be dead in a year. Somebody shoot you or stick you with a pick.”

“We all gonna die,” Soupspoon said.

And the images of a lifetime flashed into his mind. Kirkem Bowers pushed to the ground by stupid Willy T. and stabbed until his head nearly came off. Mother Babbet thrown from the window by JoJo, her boyfriend at the time. Her neck was broken and a scream frozen on her face; it looked like she was holding her head back in a laugh that needed more room than a live person had. After the flood of ’26 they gathered the bodies and stacked them in the Curry plantation barn. White on one side and colored on the other; forty-seven dead souls stretched out and piled high. Soupspoon thought that that barn was more God’s house than any church. He imagined again in his dream barefoot God walking among the dead and judging their sins.

Lisa Harding poisoned by her own sister over a man who wouldn’t marry either one. Sly Fox Nathan Mull shot in the head for cheating at cards. He ran six blocks to Ruby and Inez’s house. They laid him out on the porch and sat with him as he had one hand on his hard cock and the other over his heart. “Boy!” he shouted at Soupspoon more than once. “Never gamble with a nigger. Nigger can’t take the joke.”

As a boy Soupspoon had followed the men; Rayford Benoit, Toy Bennet, and Alfred Fixx. It was after a gang of white men had robbed and murdered JT Ott. Rayford heard from his mother that June Bell had seen Grig Plothdell coming from where they found JT. The men drank at Soupspoon’s house until they were drunk and then they went out past the old bridge near Grig’s farm. They waited and Soupspoon waited behind them. Old man Grig never came, but Justin did. Justin was Grig’s nephew, a pale boy who had a girl somewhere nearby. When he got to the bridge the men surrounded him. He cried out loud but was slapped down by Toy’s cudgel. The men kept around Justin and every time he tried to run out of the circle one or the other would hit him with a stick. Poor Justin begged to be free and then he’d make a break and get struck back to the center. The men never said a word. Justin went down on his knee and there came a flash of silver. Soupspoon heard a scream that ended in a gurgle, then something like a spray. When he opened his eyes again Justin was just a lonesome heap on the rill’s edge. He was just a pile of bones.

Then he heard a knocking. He imagined the sound of a hammer banging on a slender pine coffin, then he saw that Darnell had taken out his pipe and was knocking out the ashes by banging it against the timbers that held up Judge Whitestone’s porch.

Soupspoon was suddenly afraid that the judge would hear, that he’d come running down underneath his house and arrest them. He wanted to tell Darnell to stop but he couldn’t catch his breath to say it. Darnell just kept on banging. It was loud enough to wake the dead.

While Soupspoon was counting dead bodies in his sleep, Kiki called out, “No, daddy.”

Her dream was southern too.

She went down in the basement with her father, Keith, to his new photo lab. He’d started a photo development darkroom in the old house and did people’s photographs right in town instead of them having to send off and wait weeks for their pictures. When that went well he went into other little towns around Mississippi and Arkansas. He liked to go into a town where there was already a developer and put him out of business. That way he knew that he already had people who needed the service and he could lord it over anyone else who tried to stand up to him.

He was a smallish man with blue-black hair, not a trace of gray, and small hands. He was clean-shaven and his round face looked like it was waxed. He never washed much and he sweated a lot, so any room he was in reeked of him.

Down in the basement Keith Waters separated and saved the silver from the film developing process and made it into one-ounce coins that were imprinted with the rough-rendered profile of his tight face. Every once in a while he’d tell Kiki to come on downstairs and look at his treasure.

If she said no he’d slap her and then ask her again — sweet as corn syrup.

When she got there he’d ask her to get something from the high shelf. She’d get up the ladder and he’d come to steady her, talking about his silver and the men he’d destroyed for her future. First he’d put his hand on her behind and then he’d slip his hard little fingers between her thighs. She couldn’t fight him off because he’d get mean. All she could do was stay still and bring him what he needed as fast as she could. Sometimes her just being scared was good enough for him.

But not then, not in that dream.

“Daddy, stop it.”

“What’s that you said?”

“I said stop it. You got your wife right upstairs.”

He was even stronger in the dream. He held her over his head and threw her down on the chemical table, breaking glass and throwing everything everywhere. When she looked up he was taking off his belt. She turned to run but only managed to fall off the table. She fell on her knee. It hurt but the pain was nothing.

“Come here, Kiki Waters.”

“No, daddy. Let me be.”

“Come here, girl. You cain’t talk to me like that and not get it.”

“Daddy, no!” she yelled. Somebody somewhere had to hear that.

Keith sat down on his old wooden chair. Kiki remembered that chair from when she was a little girl. She hated that chair. It had always been there, it had even followed them to the new big house.

“Please, daddy.”

He didn’t say anything else, just waited there with the strap in his hand. Kiki had to go lie across his lap and pull up her dress. She knew not to pull down the panties, that was for him to do.

The strap lashed against her backside twelve times. She screamed and he smelled stronger with each blow. The pain was real in Kiki’s dreams.

She felt his fingers and hand. He was hoarse from heavy breathing and made her say everything he wanted to hear. If he rasped, “Does it hurt?” she had to answer, “Yes, daddy,” making sure to hold back any tears or rage.

When it was over she went up the basement stairs while he washed off his hand in the sink. Her mother stood at the door holding a tight ball of handkerchief. Kiki tried to let her skirts hang down to cover the red welts on her legs. She could hear her father’s heavy footfalls across the cellar floor.

Kiki couldn’t hold in the shout. “YOU WHORE!!!” So loud that her mother was buffeted backwards against the plasterboard.

“YOU GODDAMNED, GODDAMNED WHORE!!!” Kiki ran her hand up the crack of her ass and came out with fingers covered in blood and shit.

Then there was the sound of her father’s feet coming from somewhere. She knew the feet were headed for the gun case. She wanted to get there first but she’d forgotten where it was. The steps moved faster and louder. Kiki was afraid. She wanted to wash her hands. Her father’s footfalls sounded like gunshots.