RL's Dream

Twenty-Seven

It was late in the morning and Soupspoon was asleep on Sono’s couch. He could hear Hamela playing and Georgie’s scream. If he didn’t move, nothing hurt, and so he lay there, not awake, breathing fast like a kitten because he couldn’t seem to take a deep breath.

Then there was a loud noise and a man shouting, “You ain’t gonna shame me, you little whore!”

Soupspoon opened his eyes to see a huge man batter through the door. Chevette tried to run from the man but he caught her by the arm and slapped her one, two, three times.

Soupspoon jumped up off the couch but fell to the floor. “Leggo her!” he shouted.

Right then Gerry ran in from the bedroom, naked and holding a pair of pants over his crotch.

“Get out!” Sono cried, coming in fast behind Gerry. Gerry ran ahead, swinging his fist, but missed. The man caught Gerry by the wrist, releasing Chevette. Gerry had one more punch in him, though. He swung his left arm upward, pulling the man down with his weight, and connected with a shocking blow to Willy’s face.

“Fuckin’ shit!” Willy pulled Gerry up by the arm and gave the boy a savage uppercut to the gut.

Gerry vomited on Willy’s legs.

“Goddamn shit!” Willy pushed Gerry back two steps and hit the doddering naked boy twice in the head. Gerry didn’t seem bothered by the blows. He kept holding his stomach, white liquid dribbling out between his lips.

Soupspoon was trying to get up but his hip wouldn’t release. He looked for something to throw at Willy’s head but all he could reach was cushions.

Willy reared back to throw another blow but stopped suddenly and brought his hands to his head. “Oh!” he moaned and went down on both knees.

Gerry was down on his knees by then too, blood and vomit dripping from his face. They faced each other like exotic priests in the middle of a desperate ritual.

Sono came up then and started hitting Willy again with the heavy saucepan.

“Mothahfuckah! Mothahfuckah!” the wild girl screamed. When she hit Willy in the head he bellowed like bull at the slaughter. Soupspoon saw Hamela take little George and hug him to her bird chest. Her eyes were big but she wasn’t crying.

“Mothahfuckah!” Sono yelled again. Chevette was holding Gerry. Willy crawled from the room trying to ward off the saucepan.

Sono slammed the broken door behind him and turned to see her home.

Soupspoon saw what her mad eye saw. All the furniture turned over, the baby crying. Gerry was on his back with one hand trying to cover his little bell-shaped cock.

Chevette took Sono and the kids into the other room. Then she came back for Gerry. At last she helped her boyfriend back up on the couch.

“You okay, uncle?”

“My legs wouldn’t take me there.”

By afternoon they had the house back together. The story in the building was that Chevette’s aunt had kicked Willy out because that way she figured Chevette would come back. What she was really afraid of, Chevette said, was that her sister would find out and stop sending money to take care of her. Willy had come to get his revenge and to drag Chevette back so that Vella would take him back.

He got his wish. Vella wound up taking Willy to the emergency room for a broken jaw.

“His jaw was broke in three places,” Chevette said.

Gerry decided to take the whole family out to his mother’s home in Flatbush. “We got a lotta room out there,” he said. Both of his eyes were swollen and his stomach still hurt.

“What your momma gonna say ′bout me′n these kids?” Sono asked. Gerry was only twenty and hadn’t told his mother about his Manhattan girlfriend.

“What she gonna say?” he declared. “I pay for everything with my loans and my library job — and you need the help.”

Sono showed a smile that let you know what she was like when her load was lightened. She went right to work packing.

Soupspoon gave all of his salary and tip money to Chevette.

“You go on with’em,” he said. “Use that money to buy food.”

“Cain’t I come home wichyou, Uncle?”

“I gotta have my own place ‘fore you could do that. You go on an’ help Sono and them. I’ma stay here an’ try t’play at Rudy’s again.”

He took Gerry to the side while Sono and Chevette got the kids ready.

“Take these for me, Gerry,” Soupspoon said. He handed Gerry four cassette tapes that he’d been carrying around in his guitar case.

“What’s this?” Gerry asked.

“It’s everything I remember. It’s some songs and a lotta stories about the days when I’as comin’ up. I got a man’s address written down right here. He writes about the blues. You call’im an’ tell’im you wanna write down what I said. You tell’im you wanna write a history article about me.”

“Wow. Absolutely, Mr. Wise.”

It took Soupspoon half an hour to walk back to Kiki’s and another half an hour to make it up the stairs. When he got there he found Kiki and Billy together. They were making out on his couch.

“We wondered when you was gonna come, man,” Billy said.

Kiki came up to him with a worried look in her bloodshot eyes. “You okay, Soup?”

“Yeah, ‘course I am. It’s you that’s three shades’a pale.”

“You sure?”

“I’m fine, fine. Just a little tired is all.”

Billy plugged in the phone and called Rudy, who was happy to hear that Soupspoon wanted to play again.

“I need some sleep if I’m gonna play, though,” the old man said. He laid down on Kiki’s bed, no pillow at his head and his hands stretched out straight at his side. His fingers picked and jumped on the blankets and his eyeballs rolled behind the lids.

He imagined what being dead would be like. The cool tickle of stale coffin air and darkness so deep that even the sun couldn’t reach it. All around the murmur of the dead. Young people and old remembering their lives just the way they happened.

“I stoled Mr. Onceit’s chickens an’ lawd was he mad! Man like to busta gut over three scrawny chickens. You know life mean more than some scrawny chickens.”

“Will you marry me, Elsie B.?”

“Nigger! Strip down an’ prove it that you ain’t got my nickel!”

Then a scatter of baby talk and the sound of worms. Colors don’t mean a damn thing if you’re dead. No blue, no red. You remember what people were; not what they looked like exactly but if they were big then you remember big and if they were loving and sexy you remember holding them, rolling with them.

Evil brings about hot spots and prickles.

But it’s all just a dream. Day in and day out all the things that ever happened, just like they happened. Never the littlest change. Because when you die everything is sealed. It’s like you’re asleep and can’t wake up. Because if you could wake up you would change it. Not go down that road or maybe call up Ruby and Inez and tell them how much you loved them. If you could wake up.

“...wake him up. We gotta get down there soon.”

“But he looks sick.” Kiki’s talking. “Look how he’s moving.”

“He looks sick.”

But not dead. Not yet.

Robert Johnson with his evil eye looking around the crowd for a woman. His fingers so tight that they could make music without strings. Music in his shoulders and down in his feet. Words that rhyme with the ache in your bones and music so right that it’s more like rain than notes; more like a woman’s call than need. Not that pretty even stuff that they box in radios and stereos. Not even something that you can catch in a beat. It’s the earth moving and babies looking from side to side.

“Soupspoon?”

The people all broke out talking after Bobby Grand died. He wanted to hear them because death and music are the same things. Hot baby with his heart thumping starts it all out. Hollering rhythm.

“Soupspoon? Are you awake, honey?”

“Look at how he’s jerkin’ around.”

The walking and running and praying for rain. And all it does is wash away your feet in the mud.

“They all gone soon enough. You didn’t have to worry.”

“What, honey?” Kiki asks.

“Blues is the fish and the fisherman is what plays’em.”

“What, man?” Billy asks.

“I got a rowboat fulla blues.” Soupspoon opened his eyes then. He saw his friends and thought that they were the most beautiful sight in the world. His heart was running fast.

“If the blues was fish and I was on the blue sea. I’d have a rowboat fulla blues wish they could swim away from me.”

“You gonna sing that tonight?” Billy asked. He gave Soupspoon his hand and helped him upright.

“If I live that long.”

Billy and Soupspoon went together down to the club. Billy was full of blustery con man chatter, the kind of talk men use to fool themselves.

Soupspoon limped and ached, hot and ragged embers embedded in his body. He needed to clear his throat but waited until he was on his stool at Rudy’s to do it.

He didn’t play dance tunes or love songs that night. He played “A Long Time Down the Line, “Satan Gave Me Back My Soul,” “One Last Bullet,” and “Shine Whiskey Mind.”

Nobody danced, but they did laugh. Soupspoon didn’t even get up to go to the toilet. He was working like a sharecropper; every step he took put him another step behind. But he was playing the music right for one time in his life. He ordered straight whiskey and told Sono to keep it topped off.

“My ribs,” he hollered, “is the jailhouse. The blues is my heart.”

Kiki came late with Randy. She was drunk to begin with. As the night wore on she turned mean. If a man looked at her she’d call him out for his disrespect. And if Randy tried to stop her she’d turn on him with vicious anger. But it wasn’t until she grabbed a jolly girl named Tiffany by the hair for laughing that Rudolph said she had to go.

Billy and Randy grabbed Kiki from either side and dragged her from the nameless bar.

“I’ll come back to get you,” Randy whispered to Soupspoon.

“I’ll be waitin’,” the guitar man replied.

“Motherfuckin’ cocksuckin’ bastards!” she yelled.

“Hey!” the cab driver, a small-framed mustachioed man, said. “Keep the cursing down.”

“Just drive, man,” Billy said.

“Does she wanna go with you?” the cab driver asked.

“Motherfucker.” Kiki pronounced the words perfectly.

“She drunk, man. All we wanna do is take her home.”

“I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass! I’ll bite off your goddamned dick!”

The three of them sat on the curb in front of the Beldin Arms. Kiki started crying when she realized that the men weren’t going to let her go.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please let me go.”

A car full of three burly white youths stopped at one point.

“What the fuck you guys doin’ to her?” the front passenger said.

“What fuckin’ difference it make to you, paddy-boy?” Kiki yelled back.

“I’m sorry, Randy,” Kiki said as they went up the stairs. Billy was with them.

When they reached Kiki’s floor, Randy asked, “You got your keys, Kiki?”

He remembered that days later in the hospital room. The last words he said to Kiki: “You got your keys, Kiki?” And then a sound something like wind but really the shuffle of rubber soles on the granite flooring. A big man with oily hair. Kiki’s last words to him — “Oh no!” — sounding completely sober, and then the knife.

He did right to rush the big white man with the knife in his hand. Randy pushed Kiki back. The knife didn’t feel like anything going in but then there was pain in a place that Randy wanted to tear out of his body. “Nigger!” the white man muttered. Their bodies came together except where the knife was. Their lips touched, men’s kiss. And the knife came out and went in again.

“In and out,” the ambulance driver had said. “He’s lucky JD didn’t twist it.”

JD. John Doe at Mercy. The bright red lights and the lifejacket that they inflated around him. Remembering Kiki’s scream and weakness in his knees that he tried to fight. He saw the big man catch Kiki by the throat and lift her. He saw the knife come up and then Billy from behind the red hair. But all Billy got for his trouble was an elbow in the throat. He went down gagging and coughing. Then a bright star blossomed from Kiki’s handbag. Randy remembered going down sideways and the white man saying “Huh?” before dropping Kiki and running down the stairs.

Kiki didn’t think at all. She saw the knife and went straight for her gun. He grabbed her just as her hand closed on the butt. Then he slowed down for a moment to hit Billy — that was his downfall. Without taking the pistol out of the purse Kiki shot Fez in the neck.

He put his hand somewhere below his left ear and turned to run. He pushed Billy down over Randy and took the stairs five at a time.

It was the running that made Kiki act. She followed after fez, shooting. The first shot caught him in the leg. It didn’t stop him from running, though. The next shot missed. Kiki stopped at the third floor and shot over the banister, hitting Fez in the arm.

Maybe Fez thought it was a four-shooter. He made his stand on the second floor. He held the knife high above his head and lurched forward on his wounded leg.

“If a wild animal charge you,” Hester Grule, the crazy cousin in Hollywood, had always said, “don’t lose your head. Take time and hit’em in the big part’a their body. Aim! Don’t shoot wild, ’cause then he get ya. Wild animal want blood.” And the wildest animal, Kiki knew, was man.

She went down on one knee again and shot Fez right in the center of his blue shirt. She went up high for the last shot and made a spot slightly darker than the white man’s skin just above his left eye. Fez fell on top of Kiki. The knife skittered on the stairs.

Kiki rolled the dead man over and went through his pockets as fast as she could. There was a stack of new bills, probably from a cash machine, and a wallet. Kiki took everything and jumped up over the body and down the remaining stairs. Most of the blood was on her purple jacket, so she dropped that into a city trash can on the corner. But then she remembered Randy and Billy in a heap at the top of the stairs. From a pay phone she called 911 but from the sounds of sirens everywhere she knew that they were already on their way.

She couldn’t remember if there had been anybody in the hallway or on the street when she’d come out with the pistol showing through her ruined handbag.

She dropped the pistol and empty purse down a sewage drain and made for the subway.

She took a subway to the Port Authority and an early bus to Hoboken.

The morning paper said that Randall Chesterton was in stable condition and that, after being held overnight, William Hurdy had been released as a suspect.

That was the last she ever heard about either of them. And, though she still thinks about Soupspoon from time to time, she never found out about him after that last night either.

She fled to Atlanta and then to Chattanooga. She lived for three years in New Orleans with a gambler named Arcady. She stole his pistol one night and boarded a Greyhound to Hogston, Arkansas.

She came to the house in the early morning. There was dew on the magnolias and the bees were still asleep.

Charla Wilson, a straw-headed old white woman who was a stranger to Kiki, answered the door. Kiki took her hand out of her purse and asked about her parents.

“Waters? Child,” she said sadly. “They been gone for six years now. First him of cancer in the liver and then her one month later — weak heart, they said. I’m so sorry.”

There wasn’t a will. Waters Photographic Inc. had twenty-seven stores that the family lawyer had run while waiting for Kiki’s return. Everything was hers. The house that Charla Wilson rented, a Jaguar car, and a chest full of silver coins impressed with the image of her father’s profile.

Everybody remembered her family. Complete strangers told her stories about her childhood that she had no memory of.

She went to Hattie’s house and found her old nursemaid still there. She didn’t even look much older, but Kiki knew that she had to be over seventy.

“Hector?” Hattie said. “He died twelve years ago last March. Heart just stopped one day while he was restin’ under that ole avocado tree’a his.”

It nearly broke Kiki’s heart when the old woman refused to come live in the big house with her.

“I like my own rooms, child,” she said. “But you could come on out an’ visit whenever you want.”

She ran into Brewster Collins in town the first Saturday she was back. He had put on a big belly and worked for an oil delivery company that was based in Little Rock. They went out that night. Before sunup Kiki was asking him to bite her thigh.

They were married two weeks later.

Kiki Collins bought her husband the woodmill he’d always wanted, had four kids, and moved into an even bigger house surrounded by magnolia trees. She kept bees out behind the garage and gave up liquor.

Her only vice was speeding on the interstate in the afternoons. When the policemen took her license and went back to call it in there was a wild glee alive in her. Every time they checked her name she wondered if the warrant had made its way down south.