RL's Dream

Nineteen

On Tuesday Kiki went to work, pistol stashed in her shoulder purse. Her friends didn’t talk to her. Sheldon Myers said hardly a word. At noon, while she was outside eating a hot dog for lunch, she ran into Motie and Clive Tooms. They were smoking a joint near the statue across the street from the office building.

Motie told her that somebody had forged a million-dollar insurance policy. That building security had come to Fez’s desk, thrown all of his stuff into a box, and escorted him from the building. He was fired but there might also be criminal charges. They stopped the numbers game and the bar.

“I hope they deep-fry the motherfucker,” Motie said. Kiki didn’t say anything. She could tell that Motie hadn’t connected the files he routed for her with Fez’s problems. She didn’t even take a hit off the joint when Clive, a tall and redheaded black youth, offered.

“I gotta get back,” she said.

That night she dreamed about the stone boy again. This time he caught her. He cut off her arm with his black blade.

On Wednesday Soupspoon borrowed fifteen dollars from Randy down at the “bookstore” on St. Mark’s. He went to a music store on Forty-sixth Street and got strings for his guitar. The subway stairs were hard on his hip. He could feel the pain, but he had a trick that kept the feeling at bay. He “walked around” the pain. He took one step with his right leg, then he’d look quickly to the right, or left, and take a fast step with his painful side. That way the ache was contained, almost forgotten. Soupspoon made it a point to look at something special when he took his walk-around step; like a pretty girl or an interesting face. Often he watched babies at play or the domestic and wild animals of the city. Soupspoon loved the wildlife of the big city. Frisky dogs, hungry squirrels, and feral rats. Some of the bigger cockroaches reminded him of old men dressed in their stiff tuxedos. Sometimes he’d point his gaze up high, because in New York there was always something to see up on the sides of buildings and rooftops. There were gargoyles and statues, trees that sprouted right out of the concrete it seemed, brooding men and women looking back down at him.

That day he saw a hawk just as it swooped down from a ledge and snagged a pigeon by the throat. The hawk arched high with its prey, leaving a few tattered feathers to float down toward the street. Soupspoon turned to see if there was somebody else who saw that poor dove’s angel of death — but he was alone.

Kiki was sitting at her desk on Thursday morning. She glanced down at her nails. They were ragged and rough. For a moment she thought of doing them but decided against it.

A small bald man in a light green suit was coming down the hall. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. Behind him were three large men in good dark suits. The men ran from slender to fat but they all looked powerful, as if their work was in a rock quarry instead of an office.

“Miss Waters?” the green-suited man asked when they got to her desk.

Kiki felt for her pistol in the bag at her side.

“Miss Waters?”

“What?”

“My name is Mr. Cause,” he said.

Kiki found the name funny.

“Do you know me?”

“I don’t think I’d forget that name.”

“I’m vice president in charge of personnel, Miss Waters. Your position here has been terminated.”

“What?”

Out of the side of her eye she could see Sheldon peeking around his door.

“You will leave the building now, escorted by myself and these men...”

Kiki saw a red cloud around Mr. Cause. She felt her finger on the trigger inside the handbag. There was a loud bumblebee in place of the words the little man was saying. She felt an intense, definitely sexual pleasure down her body. A cool sweat went across her face — even into her mouth. When she smiled, Mr. Cause got a quizzical look on his face. One of the men, a dark-skinned white man, moved to help Kiki out of her seat.

“Thank you.” She allowed the man to help her up by her gun arm. A potent attraction for this man went through her. His face was lean and his tapered ears were back against his head like a wary hound’s ears. His eyes were truly black. He had no smell at all that Kiki could sense.

The little man was still talking. He said that she could only take her purse and her jacket. Everything else that was hers would be sent home. His high-pitched voice hurt her ears. She waved around the side of her head as if waving away the bees that hovered about the magnolia tree of her childhood.

She was wobbly on her feet toward the elevator doors. The olive-skinned man’s long finger lit the button sensor. She leaned against his hard chest. “My things?”

“They’ll send them.” His voice was shallow. No resonance, no music. He was everything Kiki thought he was.

People shied away from the elevators when they saw what was going on. Kiki’s friends didn’t ask any questions. They stared from down the hall. But Kiki didn’t care. She was thinking about the man who held her elbow. She thought how she could shoot him the way Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald in front of all those people. The dark man would hunch forward, his mouth forming a tight little O. He’d go down to the floor, the light fading into pain as he went...

When they left Kiki in front of Number Two Broadway she was all right. She hadn’t shot anybody. Nobody was dead.

Whenever she came running in to Hattie with all her problems the big black woman would always ask, “Anybody dead?” That question always knocked the tears right out of Kiki’s eyes. She’d look up in wonder at the woman — who, to Kiki, was the perfect image of God — and shake her head, no.

“Well, if ain’t nobody’s dead we better get back to work.”

“They what?” Soupspoon asked her that night.

“They came up to my desk and escorted me to the door. Wouldn’t even let me get my stuff.”

“Why they wanna do sumpin’ like that?” Soupspoon was cleaning his guitar.

“They found out about the policy I faked for you.”

“No.”

“I don’t think they could prove it, daddy. I never signed a thing. I used a stamp that they keep locked up on my floor, but they can’t prove that I knew the combination. I didn’t have the priority on the computer and nobody can prove that I did. They just fired me, that’s all.”

“But what if they come here?” Soupspoon felt a sharp jab that went from his chest all the way down into his legs.

“What’s wrong?” Kiki got up and went to his side. She reached out and touched his head.

“Nuthin’. Nuthin’at all.”

Days later, at Sono’s apartment, Soupspoon would say into his Radio Shack tape recorder, “...that was the first time I ever figured it all out. There I was in shit up to my lip but they wasn’t nuthin’ I could do. That girl did everything she could t’help me. She saved my life. What could I say? I knew it was the cancer in my lung just like I knew it was the guitar on the table. Wasn’t a damn thing I could do. I kissed that girl right on the lips an’ told her that she was best thing happen t’me in years...”

“Take a walk with me, daddy,” Kiki said in a drunken little-girl voice. “Let’s walk off this food.”

“Kiki, girl, you not gonna find that boy. He scared away since he stuck you.” Really it was the pain he’d been feeling in his leg and chest that made him want to stay home. It wasn’t a bad pain. It was only late at night, when he was lying in bed, that it really bothered him. He told himself that it was just an old man’s muscle, that if he rested it would go away, but he knew better.

“Just this one more time, daddy. After this, if your singin’ don’t do it, we’ll have to move away anyway.” Kiki had put away a cupful of whiskey already. There were tears in her eyes. “And this is the right time’a day, and it’s Friday too... Just one more time and I’ll give it up.”

When Soupspoon handed Kiki her small purse he felt the weight of it. But if there was a pistol in there he didn’t want to know about it. It wasn’t anything to worry about anyway. That boy was nowhere to be found. He was lost; that’s why he was what he was — like Robert Johnson.

That’s what he had told Randy on the tape recorder.

“All bluesmen are lost. Bluesmen. Black-and-blues, that’s what they shoulda called it. Black men who only ever traveled at night, in the dark. Goin’ nowhere and findin’ hard fists and bone-breakin’ rock in their path.

“You could yell out pain in the blues. You could kill that woman that played you wrong. You could shout, ‘Oh no! Lawd!’ And even the white boss would smile.

“You could show a mean bone or cry from down deep in your heart with the whole world as your witness.

“You could demand freedom in the blues. But it wasn’t so much freedom a poor black man wanted but release. That’s a slave’s freedom; a sharecropper’s freedom. Release from his bonds and his bondage. Release from hard hunger and even harder fear. Release from the pain of work so hard that you’d say it was impossible for a man to do all that. Work so hard that it hurts even to think about it.

“And when we asked for release we knew that it meant freedom — but it meant death too. We was bound for nowhere. Bound for a heavy iron ball on the chain gang or just at work on the plantation. Bound to die — that’s what we was.

“Bound for freedom.”

“Bob?” young Atwater had asked Mr. Robert Johnson. “How come you don’t leave outta here an’ go up north? We could go up there an’ make a whole lotta money playin’. Real money. An’ no green-toof sheriff gonna dare an’ take it.”

“I been up there,” RL said. “I seen it — seen it all. Me an’ this other blues boy go on up there. Chicago, New York. But you know it ain’t real up north. Niggers don’t even know they names up there, baby. Naw. They crazy.”

“But we could make us a race record. Git that on the radio an’ you gots all kindsa money.”

Soupspoon remembered his friend’s sad smile. “They ain’t no gettin’ away from yo’ stank, Soup. Rabbit run, man, he run — maybe he even make it down into his hole. But you know that fox still out there grinnin’ somewhere. He grinnin’ right now.”

Soupspoon still remembered, remembered each word that RL had said. He worried over the lines like someone might do over a song that moved them but, still, the words just didn’t make sense.

“There he is,” Kiki hissed.

She started walking at a slant across Chrystie. The gang of boys was just moving past where she’d come up on the sidewalk. Soupspoon followed her as she stalked the pack of children.

“It’s the one in the black Spider-Man T-shirt,” Kiki whispered when Soupspoon came up beside her. He didn’t say anything. He just stayed beside her. This was a debt to her and he meant to pay it — a note come due.

There were about nine of them — little boys not one over ten. They were singing and laughing and trying to talk the talk of the street. Their hips and shoulders moved as they walked along because they couldn’t keep all that energy in. They were happy and scared and wild, and, Soupspoon knew, they weren’t thinking a thing about a crazy woman stalking them.

When they cut down a small alley, Kiki sped up to close the gap. She looked up over their heads and then back at Soupspoon. When she was satisfied that there was no one else around she took the pistol from her purse and ran right in the middle of the pack of boys.

“She got a gun!” a high voice screamed and boys were running everywhere. One of them fell but he never hit the ground because his arms and legs were moving so fast that he just touched the asphalt and somehow kept moving. Four of them sped past Soupspoon while the rest cleared out of the other end of the alley.

All of them got away except for the boy in the Spider-Man T-shirt. Kiki had him by the arm with her pistol jammed underneath his jaw.

They were both yelling but Soupspoon couldn’t make out a word. Then Kiki dragged the boy behind a big green Dumpster and threw him on the ground. He was trapped in the corner, facing the trembling woman and her gun.

“You know me, nigger boy?” she yelled. Soupspoon came up behind her and stopped.

“Do you know me?” She had torn his shirt so that all he had left was a black collar around his throat. His face was strained and contorted, shot through with creases like the wrinkles of an old man. He was trying to say no, that he didn’t know her, but there was no voice, just a high whine.

Kiki pushed him down on his back and stepped over him so that she had a foot on either side of his chest.

He was a brown boy but his sweaty skin glinted orange with blood from his hard-pounding heart.

Kiki grabbed him by his short dreadlocks and pulled his head up to meet her pistol again.

That’s when he cried like a little boy, like what he was.

“Shut up!” Kiki screamed. “You don’t remember putting that knife in me?”

The boy put up his hand to plead but Kiki slammed it down with the barrel of her gun.

Soupspoon saw a short piece of lumber lying nearby. He stooped to pick up the heavy stick.

“You don’t remember?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The boy cradled the broken fingers. His breath sang from down below his throat.

Soupspoon came up close behind Kiki.

“I know you’re sorry,” she said. “And you gonna be even sorrier, ’cause I’m gonna shoot you. I’m gonna shoot you in your legs” — she touched his knee and he pulled back—” and then in your eyes.”

The boy covered his face and sank even further into the ground.

“But first I’m gonna get you down where you got me.” Kiki brought the muzzle down toward the boy’s genitals. Soupspoon moved quickly then. He thrust the board between Kiki and the boy.

“Here! Beat’im wit’ this,” he said.

“What?” When Kiki looked up he could see the tears and the pain in her eyes.

“Beat’im wit’ this here board. He don’t deserve no shootin’, Kiki. So gimme that gun an’ beat’im for what he done.”

Kiki didn’t move at first. She licked her thin lips with a pale tongue. A quizzical look came over her face. Soupspoon still offered the thick board.

She let the pistol swing down to her side.

Immediately the boy was up and gone. He was running down the alley, holding his broken fingers and moving fast.

Kiki turned to watch him, and Soupspoon took the gun from her hand. He put on the safety and pocketed the piece.

Kiki fell to her knees and hugged him around the waist. Anyone looking from down the alley would have sworn that Kiki was performing some sexual act. But nobody looked. Kiki hugged Soupspoon and cried into his crotch. She cried for a long time and would have gone on but Soupspoon helped her to her feet. Then they walked home, arms wrapped around each other for support, Soupspoon holding on for his aching leg and Kiki staying near for love.

That night Kiki couldn’t stop crying. She blubbered and snorted and drank a whole bottle of sour mash. She started talking and couldn’t stop that either. At first she said terrible things about her mother and her mother’s sister who had come to live with them when she was dying of cancer. She hated them. Hated the way they dressed and smelled. She hated how they went to the toilet and chewed their food. For over an hour she said things about them. Until finally Soupspoon asked her about her father, and if she liked him.

He was sorry about that question.

He didn’t want to know all the things that went on in that childhood basement. The things that went on while one woman held her hands over her ears and the other one died.

Water hoses, hard fists, and the smell of sweat over cologne that still made her want to vomit — that’s what Kiki remembered about her father.

Soupspoon held her, his mind devoid of anything — even music. He held her and hoped that the tears would wash away the filth caked in her mind.

But the more she cried the sadder she became. She cried and moaned and walked all around the room. Finally Soupspoon took her to bed. He had to lie with her because she couldn’t lie down alone.

He remembered the smell of whiskey and sweat, and the touch of dry hot skin that was past passion.