RL's Dream

Sixteen

The next day Soupspoon dialed a number from his address book, but it had been disconnected. Then he called information. His old friend Popeye Peter Laneau, who played mouth harp and who was Leadbelly’s uptown barber, was unlisted. His cousin Mattine was in the book but she was stone deaf. Mattine’s grandniece told Soupspoon that Mattine hadn’t heard from Uncle Popeye in twenty-four years.

He found a listing for Alfred Metsgar, a bass player who backed up Howlin’ Wolf and Quickdraw Marrs in Chicago. Alfred lived on 147th Street off Broadway. Soupspoon decided to go straight to there. Even if Metsgar was deaf he might be able to talk.

He packed his tape recorder and two bananas in an old tan briefcase that he’d found under Kiki’s couch. It would be the only testament of Quickdraw Marrs’s demise in the Black Sparrow Bar in East St. Louis forty-six years before.

The door to apartment 3L was slender, it reminded Soupspoon of a coffin’s lid. There was a straw mat on the floor that read GOD’S WELCOME. No fanfare for the musician, just a plain pine door stained maple and sealed. There were two deep dents in the door made by something hard and jagged and a large green smudge almost dead center. Graffiti, Soupspoon thought, that somebody tried to wipe out.

Before he’d gotten up the courage to knock he was startled by the door coming open. An ancient woman, small as a girl, stood there leaning on a new aluminum walker. She wore black slacks, a puffy white sweater embroidered with beaded white flowers, and a lopsided gray wig. She had on black-lensed sunglasses with white frames in the shape of swans whose wings arched out beyond the width of her small head.

“You the ice man?” she asked clearly. Her lips were beautiful. Full and large. They wrapped around the words as if she were eating an overripe pear.

“No, ma’am, my name is...”

“You got a cigar, mister?” she asked. “’Cause I hurt my hip and I sure could use some release.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Ain’t you Bobby?” The old woman had begun to struggle with her walker. She reminded Soupspoon of somebody who couldn’t do one more push-up. Her head sagged down between her shoulders and tremors went through her arms. But that didn’t stop her. She cocked her head sideways and looked up.

He caught the dry, slightly sweet scent of old age. He was looking at the cockeyed face with the beautiful lips, ready to say no again, when a deep voice boomed out, “What you doin’ here, man?”

Behind the little woman was a long dark hallway. From the gloom a large man appeared. Three hundred pounds of hard fat in short-sleeved orange overalls. His face was brown like a tree trunk with a wiry mustache that ran down his chin and throat disappearing into the collar of his T-shirt.

“Come on, Miss Winder. You shouldn’t be out at this door.”

As soon as she heard the big man’s voice the woman started making her way back into the house. Soupspoon saw the rhythm of it. She waited for the big man to be watching a basketball game or maybe to get on the phone, and then she’d sneak out to the door looking for ice cubes, cigars, and a man named Bobby.

“What you want?” The big man held the door ready to slam it shut.

“Alfred Metsgar.”

“What you want him for?” His neck was as wide as his head. The mustache ran down the lines of a normal-sized neck. It was an optical illusion to make him seem normal.

“We used to be friends, I mean... we was musicians together a long time ago. I just thought I’d come on by an’ shout at’im.”

The name MIKE was stitched over the man’s left breast. Mike was breathing hard — as if maybe he was getting ready to fight.

“Is Alfred here?”

Mike’s eyes were dark and unhealthy. His scowl was mean and Soupspoon was sure that he was going to be sent away.

Mike surprised him when he said, “It’s the door down on your right,” and backed away allowing Soupspoon to enter. After Soupspoon had gone halfway down the hall, Mike yelled out, “Mozelle!” A door came open and a woman stuck her head out. She was tall and skinny, somewhere in her late forties with a salt-and-pepper Bride of Frankenstein hairdo.

She didn’t say much. “Down yonder,” to say that Alfred was just down the hall. “Naw,” when asked if she was his daughter. When Soupspoon asked if he could talk to the old man she said, “If you wan’.”

Alfred Metsgar’s room was no more than a cell. It even had bars on the unshaded window. This window looked into another room where, in a single bed, Soupspoon could see the back of somebody’s head that poked out from under a mound of covers.

Alfred was too busy looking into that bedroom to notice his old friend. The shrunken old man was sitting in a wooden chair, hemmed in by squared armrests. He was leaning forward and peering toward the bars. The bed beyond him was neatly made. A bright-orange-and-yellow quilt covered the lower half.

Alfred wore a threadbare T-shirt and had an army blanket over his legs. The pitted wood floor was swept and there was no dust on the short two-drawered dresser that stood beside the window.

“Sh!” Metsgar said, even though Soupspoon hadn’t uttered a word. “She still sleep.”

Soupspoon looked over at the head and then back to Alfred.

“She like to sleep late, late.” He kept his voice low — a proud parent letting a spoiled child get her rest.

“Alfred?” Soupspoon said, partly to get the old bass player to recognize him and partly because he wondered if this actually was his old friend.

His skin seemed to have become liquid. It had seeped slowly downward until it molded almost perfectly over the bones of his face; the effect was to make him look like a brown skull. Below the eyes the flesh had bunched into downward-rolling waves. The deep ocher skin at the top of his head was so thin it seemed that a hard breath would separate skin from bone.

“Yeah?” Alfred jawed.

“The musician, right?”

He turned away and whispered, “She still sleep.”

The room stank of urine, like the men’s shelter had. Because of the smell, Soupspoon didn’t want to sit on the bed. But there was no place else to sit. His leg was hurting him some — from the long walk, he told himself — but he decided to stay on his feet for a while more.

Soupspoon was about to ask his question when Alfred put his hand out and pointed Soupspoon to come somewhere, or to go.

“Over there! Over there! Right chere!” Metsgar waved his hand around meaninglessly. Soupspoon wanted to obey his urgent commands but he didn’t know what to do.

“Go ovah an’ sit on the dresser. Then you could peek around the side.”

Soupspoon sat on the short stack of drawers and opened Kiki’s briefcase across his lap. He took the cassette player and pressed the record and play buttons.

“Alfred?” he whispered.

“Shhhhh! Look!”

Soupspoon followed the the direction of the lizard-skin finger pointing over the sill and into the room across the way. There again he saw the head lying in repose. He saw now that it was a woman’s head.

Soupspoon felt like a child again waiting by the side of his mother’s bed — waiting for her to rise.

He’d wake up with the sun through homemade cardboard shades. Then he’d be roused by the racket of his father’s ax chopping wood for the stove. In the season when his father had plantation work, Soupspoon would wait in the bed with his big brother Holden until he heard heavy bootsteps marching away from the house. He’d take his blocks down from the loft and go up next to his mother’s bed and play very quietly, watching her round brown face.

That was greatest feeling of love in Soupspoon’s whole life: guarding over his mother while morning birds played and his brother snored up in the loft. His stomach gurgled but he loved to see his mother sleep and would wait all day rather than see her get up and go off to the cotton mills.

When she finally opened her eyes she would smile so nice and say, “Mornin’, baby. You et?” He’d shake his head and then she’d kiss him for being so good and letting her sleep. More than sixty years later Soupspoon still felt a pang against his heart when he thought of her rising up from the straw-filled bed.

“See? Look,” Alfred Metsgar said.

The woman in the bed had turned over and was now sitting up. She was naked as far as she could be seen. Plump and the color of a dusky orange, she was young. Soupspoon moved closer to the wall so as not to be seen looking. But he soon realized that he had no reason to hide. The young woman never once looked into Alfred’s room. She got up from the bed with her naked back to the window and pulled on a loose pair of underpants. Alfred leered as she walked from one corner of the room to the other — picking things up and putting them down again.

The show went on for two or three minutes. She finally went right up to the window and stood on her tiptoes to reach the shade. It took her a few moments to grab the string and pull it down. When Soupspoon saw her face she was smiling, and then she was gone.

“That stuff sure is sweet,” Alfred Metsgar said. “I’d die wit’out my dancin’ girl. I’d die.”

Soupspoon got it on the tape recorder.

“You remember me, Alfred?”

The old man was still looking at the shade. He turned toward Soupspoon and squinted. After a long time he shook his head, no.

“Atwater Wise. They used to call me Soupspoon. I played twelve-string with Hollis McGee and Triphammer Jones.”

Alfred smiled and nodded but his eyes didn’t know Soupspoon.

“You remember, Alfred. We did a whole circuit around California in ’57. You know.”

Alfred looked back toward the window but the show was over.

“Don’t you remember, man? You the one told me about Quickdraw Marrs. You know — how he got killed at the Black Sparrow in East St. Louis?”

Alfred turned toward Soupspoon. “Who told you ’bout that? Who told you?”

“You did, Alfred.”

“Who you said you was again?”

“Soupspoon. Soupspoon Wise. Guitar player. We played at the Sour Bowl in Pasadena — with Holly Gomez.”

“Holly,” Alfred said with a smile. “Cook some damn good red beans and rice.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Soupspoon said hopefully. “You remember Holly?”

“That gal could cook.”

“An’ you remember Quickdraw Marrs?”

“Who you said?” The curtain came down over Alfred’s eyes again.

“Quickdraw Marrs. You told me back in ’57, ’58, that you was playin’ with Quickdraw when he died back in East St. Louis, back in ’36.”

“Drummer boy?”

“Guitar,” Soupspoon said.

“Uh. Um. Oh yeah. Yeah. That was somebody else.” Alfred held up his hands and smiled. Then he looked out of the window again. “Shade’s down,” he whispered.

“Don’t you remember?” Soupspoon asked.

Alfred shifted in his chair and a wave of urine odor rose in the room.

“No sir,” Alfred said. “You want some coffee, mister? You could make that lazy girl go’n get us some coffee.”

“You told me at the Sour Bowl that you saw the man shot Quickdraw. You told me that you knew who did it. You told me that you was there.”

“Maybe I was,” Alfred said clearly. “I coulda been. But you know I ain’t never killed nobody. An’ if I don’t get me some coffee in the day then I gets headaches. But that girl won’t let me have it. She say that it ain’t good for me, but that’s some shit. I’m the one say what’s good for me an’ what ain’t. Thas only right, ain’t it, mistah?”

“You don’t remember anything, Alfred? Nuthin’ but Holly?”

“Will you talk to her for me?”

“Talk to who?”

“Mozelle. She wanna take all’a my money. She plottin’ ’gainst me wit’ Mike.” Alfred nodded his head to back up his claim.

“She all right, Alfred,” Soupspoon said. “She sure enough keep this room clean.”

“She wanna p’ison me.”

“No.”

“But that’s okay.” Metsgar bounced in his hard chair. “I gots her number. I ain’t dead yet.”

“How did Quickdraw die?”

“Who are you, man?” Alfred asked, angry. “What you be comin’ in here for — messin’ wit’ me?”

“I’m yo’ old friend, Alfie. Soupspoon. We used t’play together. I wanted t’tell the story about that night if I could get you to remember. I wanted t’tell some stories ’bout the blues ’fore they all gone. You. Me...”

“You could read?” Alfred asked.

“’Li’l bit.”

“I wanted t’go to school. But a black man couldn’t be nuthin’ where I come up. All you could do was to clean up after the white man, an’ you know you had better brang your own broom.

“They didn’t have nuthin’ for ya. So... if somebody did somethin’, an’ maybe it wasn’t right, what could you expect? We ain’t had nuthin’. An’ if somebody wound up dead it wasn’t nuthin’ lost. He knowed that he had it comin’ an’ he were grateful not to be burdened with the when an’ wherefore.”

Alfred Metsgar sat back in his chair exhausted by all those words. Every breath stopped at the end of the exhale that might have been his last.

Soupspoon was tired too.

“So you don’t remember nuthin’. Right, Alfie?” Soupspoon asked.

“I played the music but I didn’t kill nobody. You cain’t pin that one on me.”

“I’m not sayin’ that you did it, Alfred.”

“People die all the time, man. All the time. You cain’t s’pect me t’keep up wit’ all’a that.”

“Alfie, I know you didn’t do it. All I wanna know is the name’a the man that did. I want to say about us and what we did. I don’t want them to forget. But I ain’t blamin’ you.”

“But I did do it,” Alfred said.

“What?”

“It was me — my fault.”

“You shot Quickdraw Marrs?”

“I played the music.”

“But did you shoot’im?”

Alfred Metsgar raised his yellow and brown and green skull face to regard his younger friend. “What difference it make if it were me or that other man pult the trigger? What difference if Quickdraw turned the bullet on his own heart?”

Soupspoon turned off his tape recorder and locked it away. When he stood, Alfred looked up at him with fear or maybe awe that people could still stand on their own.

Soupspoon held out a hand which Alfred took into both of his. Alfred was grinning. He didn’t shake so much as he felt the hand, moving it back and forth.

That embrace lasted for three minutes.

In the hall Mozelle stopped Soupspoon.

“What he say about me?”

“He said that you wanted his money.”

“That old fool don’t have no money. All he get is a check from the Social Security. We spend that on keepin’ him alive. You from them?”

“Who?”

“Social Security.”

“No. I’m just a old friend. I wanted to talk about the old days.”

“Alfred don’t remember nuthin’. He just sit in there. He wouldn’t even go to the bathroom without me helpin’ him.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” Soupspoon wanted to get out from there. The whole apartment smelled of urine.

“Do me a favor, will ya?” he asked Mozelle.

“What’s that?”

“Touch him ev’ry once in a while.”

“Say what?”

“Put your hand on his forehead like you feelin’ for fever. Then tell’im that he’s cool as a cucumber. That’s all he need now. Believe me, I know.”

Pig Ears Mackie, Big Time Joe Harker, Blues Belle, Nessie Montgomery. They were all dead or disappeared. Soupspoon went through his address book and all of his memories. Few were to be found. Of those few, none had anything to say worth turning on his recorder for.