RL's Dream

Fifteen

Somebody was hammering down below. Kiki jumped out of bed and Soupspoon lurched up from his couch. Kiki was breathing hard. Soupspoon had lost his breath. They stared at each other with no words on their lips or in their heads. After a while, quaking in her bed, Kiki got up and came over to her friend. She put her arms around him and buried her face in the crook of his neck.

Her tears felt thick on his skin, oily. He looked at his skinny arms wrapped over hers. Then they both shivered like cold dogs huddling up to get warm.

“No,” Kiki whispered.

Soupspoon didn’t answer, he just held on tighter and closed his eyes. His slow breath coming only once for three of her gasps.

The hammering continued.

It wasn’t a carpenter driving nails but some kind of vicious pounding that was designed to tear down and rend. It was a wall, Soupspoon thought, that wasn’t ready to come down yet.

Kiki dragged herself to the table, where there was a half-drunk cup of day-old coffee. She downed the dregs and grimaced.

Soupspoon watched the sunlight from the window climb up on the pale skin of her thigh. She didn’t look sexy — except where the sun struck her leg.

That same sun shone under Judge Whitestone’s house.

Kiki took a dirty juice glass out of the sink and filled it with beer from the Frigidaire. She drank it down and poured another. Then she came back to the couch and the same sexless embrace.

The hammering got louder.

Kiki held on to Soupspoon, but his hands were laid down on either side of her. He tapped his fingers in an off-beat; played against the ripping hammer.

“Somebody should complain,” Kiki said. Maybe it was half an hour later. The beer had gone flat from the heat of her hand. “Let’s take a walk, daddy.”

“Walk where?”

“I don’t know. Around.”

“Why you always goin’ down around Chrystie Street, girl? What’s down there for you?”

Kiki pulled away from him while trying to stand at the same time. Instead she fell off the couch.

“Then I’ll go my own damn self!” she yelled from Soupspoon’s feet.

“Noooo, no. I’ll go wichya.” He pushed himself up from the couch. “Just lemme get my pants on.”

“You don’t have to come. I can go myself.”

Now the sun was on her knee.

“You don’t have to be mad at me, girl. I said I’d walk wichya. I will.”

Kiki’s nostrils flared and her breath came hard. Soupspoon was wondering if she was going to try and hit him again, but then the hammering stopped.

“Okay,” she said, suddenly quiet herself. “Okay. Let’s get ready to go then.”

They went down through Little Italy on Baxter to Canal. The whole time Kiki was looking, especially when she saw little boys wandering or playing. Little black boys running ragged; no different, really, Soupspoon thought, from him when he was down on the work farms and plantations of the Delta.

They went up and down Mott and Mulberry, Bowery and Elizabeth. There wasn’t much traffic, because it was early in the morning and Sunday. Only a few pedestrians were out.

Kiki stopped at Hester and Chrystie and peered at the sidewalk as if it held some kind of secret.

“This is where they did it,” she said.

“Where they stabbed you?”

“Right here.”

Soupspoon looked down the bare streets. It was safe now but he knew how an empty, nowhere place could become an awful mean place.

Anywhere a man can walk, the blues is on his tail.

“Mr. Wise?” It was a man’s voice.

A gray man was standing there before them. Not old and not young. His shirt had a hint of green from when it was new and his pants were once blue. Both had aged, under the sun and in the rain, from many months of hard living. His hair, blond at birth, had whitened too from the elements and neglect. His skin was almost colorless but dark from bright sun and processed red wine. White men would have a hard time claiming this man.

“Who’re you?” Kiki asked. As she spoke she stepped between the stranger and her friend.

“Hare?” Soupspoon said. “Hare, is that you?”

The big man grinned.

He had been in the shelter when Soupspoon got there. He was stupid but nice. Whenever Soupspoon couldn’t get out of bed, Hare was there to help him. It was Hare who helped him down to the exit when he ran from the shelter.

The director had come to examine Soupspoon when he told them that he could barely get out of bed. They said that they’d have to take him to some hospital. Soupspoon knew what that meant — they’d take him into some ward of dying men and leave him to die all alone, not even a friend like Hare to smile and say good morning. He knew that if they piled him into that ambulance he’d be a dead man.

While they went to the director’s office to discuss how to move him, Soupspoon asked Hare to help him escape.

The big gray man had said, “Sure. Let’s go.”

“You hear about Norman Braddock?” Hare asked. It was as if he had run into a neighbor from down the hall and had stopped for a chat. “You know — Brandy?” Soupspoon didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want even to think about the shelter.

But he couldn’t help himself.

“Brandy?” Soupspoon had tried to put everything about the shelter out of his mind. About how they locked them in at night; how they told them when to get up and when the lights went out. One man, a big toothy warden of a social worker, even told him that the pain in his leg wasn’t so bad. “I got a toothache,” he said. “But you don’t see me complaining.”

If you had a nickel it was gone. If you had to crap you needed permission first and had to have someone, probably a woman, go unlock the toilet for you. Cancer grew like milkweed in the men’s shelter and Soupspoon didn’t want any of it.

But Brandy was different. Big-eyed, Buddha-looking, sienna-colored Brandy. Big old stomach he grew so he could rest his hands there. Brandy sat at the end of his cot most of the time. Every morning he took the disposable razor, the tiny bar of hotel soap, and the toothbrush wrapped in plastic paper to do his toilet down at the sink. Then, when he was all clean, he’d put on his glasses and sit at the end of his bed reading scraps of newspapers he took from the trash. He didn’t bother anybody. Nobody stole anything from Brandy, because he didn’t have anything to steal. His broken-down brogans were too big for anybody else. He did his laundry naked in the basement twice a week.

Soupspoon never talked to the Brandy-man. But he respected him. Brandy was a clean man, happy reading and comfortable in his fate. He’d given up everything but being a man.

“How’d he die?” Soupspoon asked. “He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t even that old.”

“Stabbed.”

“Stabbed? Stabbed for what?”

“His glasses,” Hare said simply, accepting the fact as reason in itself. “Somebody tried to steal his glasses.”

“Steal the fillin’s right outta your mouth in the mortuary when you dead,” Soupspoon said, remembering Bannon and his hatred. He had the taste of mealy apples on his tongue.

“Um, hey, Mr. Wise?” Hare shuffled from side to side in a show of humility. “You got a coupla bucks? I could sure use two dollars. It’s for food.” He added this last for Kiki, who had been looking away most of the time, but who turned to look at him when he asked for the handout.

Soupspoon touched his pocket. Kiki had given him a little cash to carry around. He hated to take from a woman, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to give to this big dumb white man because he had helped when nobody else seemed to care. But he didn’t want Kiki to get mad either. He didn’t want her to go off because he was giving her money away to some bum in the street.

But before he could speak, Kiki asked the gray man, “You hungry?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“We could get some food at Bernie’s Delicatessen and sit in the park across the street.”

They walked back up to the East Village, stopping at Randall’s one-room apartment on Avenue C. Kiki went in and came out with the gangly boy to meet Soupspoon and Hare.

“I thought you be out on St. Mark’s on a nice day like this, Randy,” Soupspoon said.

“I try and do my math work on Sundays, Mr. Wise. It’s quiet almost all morning on Sundays and I can really get into the work.”

“What school?” Hare asked. He tried to stand up straight and look Randy in the eye but he kept squinting, nodding, and looking down.

“Pace,” Randy answered, then he looked his question at Kiki.

“Hare’s a friend’a Soup’s, Randy. We’re gonna go get somethin’ and sit in the park.”

They went to Bernie’s, which sat opposite Tompkins Square Park. She got cupcakes and a bulbous can of Japanese beer. Soupspoon and Hare split a pressed turkey sandwich and they each had coffee with lots of sugar poured in.

Soupspoon didn’t eat his sandwich half — he was still thinking about home.

The sun was strong and there was no shade on their bench. All around them were the people of the park. Young white men and women in tennis shoes that matched their exercise suits and shabby folks like Hare. There was a game of basketball going on between middle-aged men, some of them balding, who sported headbands and fading tattoos. The Sunday paper was everywhere being read. Children played on skateboards and with balls. Kiki drank her beer and studied the boy children. Randy and Hare were silent.

Soupspoon watched the sparrows and starlings at first, then the flies darting from place to place. From a tree nearby he spied tiny albino worms descending on invisible webs. On the ground ants made their ways haltingly, stopping now and then to rub antennae and move on.

“Everybody’s doin’ their business. The world don’t stop for you or nobody else,” Soupspoon said at last as he watched two hard-eyed starlings chase a sparrow away from a crumb.

“What’s that, Mr. Wise?” Randy asked.

“Spider hatches spinnin’ her web. That’s what she do. Ain’t no stoppin’ her, ’cept if you gonna kill her, stomp out her life and wipe away all the beauty she was and don’t leave a thing.”

Soupspoon was remembering the broken men and women of his dreams; the cowering of everyday life like a spider crouching when she senses a shadow. The shadows came every day in the Delta. So many shadows where it hardly seemed that a colored man ever got the chance to stand upright. Men and women wore shadows like cloaks and shawls; like the hundred-pound sacks of cotton they carried on their backs. Sacks bigger than they were. Like God’s big white toe about to crush out what little misery they had to let them know that they were alive.

The only time they got a chance to stand tall was when the shadows turned into night. And even then they didn’t stand — they jumped. Jumped and twirled to the music. The weight of a normal man under cover of darkness — darkness where no shadows could find you — was freedom for them. And freedom had a name. It was called the blues.

Hello blues, hello Satan.

Robert Johnson evoked the devil with a clear call. You might have been scared that morning — scared that your woman was gone; scared that your baby was dead; scared that the bottle was empty or that poison was scattered on your floor. But when RL tuned up you weren’t scared anymore, because that man told you, “Yes, it’s all true, so you better lap up the gravy while you can still lick.”

Soupspoon sat up straighter with these thoughts. He found himself looking across the park — straight into the eyes of Robert Johnson.

He was sitting at a small round table leaning over to kiss a pretty brown girl. She let him kiss her on the side of her big red lips, pouting almost angrily. Somebody who didn’t know black women might have thought that she resented the kiss but Soupspoon could see her pleasure.

The young man sat back (but how could he be so young?) and took a drink from his brown bag. He looked right into Soupspoon’s eye.

It was him. He cracked an evil smile, the smile that broke all the girls’ hearts, and raised his bag. His girlfriend looked over jealously. She didn’t even see Soupspoon. She was looking for some other girl. When she didn’t see the one RL was flirting with she gave him a full kiss on the mouth to mark her territory.

“You want a job, Mr. Wise?” Randy’s voice was severe and thoughtful.

“Yeah. Yeah, I sure do.”

“What could he do?” Kiki asked.

“Can you still play your guitar?”

“Yeah. I mean, not like I used to. Not like at the Savoy or Billy’s Room. But I can do a blues chord. Better’n these rock’n roll boys can do.”

“You see, I’m gonna do this T-shirt sale on Carmine Street at a street fair two weeks from Saturday. They do it every spring.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a like bazaar. You rent booths outside and if it doesn’t rain then a lotta people come and buy what’s bein’ sold. They got food and jewelry and clothes.’

“Yeah yeah, I got ya. I seen that happenin’. But you know, I never really went inside’a one. Too much of a crowd.”

“You’d be right inside the T-shirt booth with me. And you could just play. I bet lotsa people would come over and then if I had the right shirts I’d make some money. What do you think?”

“I don’t know...”

“Come on,” Kiki said. She even smiled. “Let’s do it. It’d be fun.”

“I don’t know, Kiki. But maybe. Maybe we could.”

Kiki smiled again. This time at Randy. She reached out and took his hand.

Soupspoon glanced over toward RL. He was gone. An empty park bench was all he saw.

“What’s wrong, Soup?” Kiki asked.

“You seen that man over there?”

“What man?”

But Kiki wasn’t looking at the bench. She was looking at Randy, rubbing his hand.

Soupspoon and Hare walked back toward the Beldin Arms without her and Randy. On the way they picked up a jug of red wine.

“You cain’t sleep here, Hare,” Soupspoon told his friend. They were nearing the bottom of the bottle. Hare had drunk most of it but Soupspoon had had enough that his fingers tingled and music played over and over through his mind.

“That’s okay, Soup,’ Hare said. “I got me a girlfriend.”

“Shit!”

Hare couldn’t repress his grin. “Sure do. SallySue. Live right down under this side’a the Williamsburg Bridge. They got a li’l trestle house down under there from a long time ago. Sally took it.”

“She got free house under the bridge? Shoot. Boy, you better put down that bottle, you know the wine done got to your head.”

“No lie, man,” Hare said, sounding almost like a black man talking. “She’s big an’ she got a twenty-two pistol — nobody mess with her. Nobody.”

“And she’s your girl? Big old smelly boy like you?”

All Hare did was to shake his head and grin.

Soupspoon felt an urge deep down somewhere. He wanted a big woman with a trestle house under the Williamsburg Bridge; carrying a sleek pistol and calling him home.

Hare got up and waved. “See ya on Carmine.”

“Huh?”

“When you do that street fair. I’ll be there with SallySue.” Hare went to the door. He waved again and then went out.

“SallySue,” Soupspoon intoned. He got that feeling again and felt relieved that Kiki probably wouldn’t be coming home that night.