RL's Dream

Seven

“The tests show that the tumors in your pelvis and lung are cancerous,” Dr. MacDuff said.

Soupspoon felt bad for the poor woman. Here she had three little ones and a husband to take care of and he was causing her sorrow that a young mother should never feel. Babies could taste it in their mothers’ milk; hear it in the way they talked.

“That’s okay, honey,” he said. He reached out to take her hand. At first the young doctor tried to pull back but then she relented.

“Don’t worry ’bout’a old man like me, darlin’. I done had almost seventy years in this world. I seen more than mosta your presidents an’ kings. You gotta worry ‘bout them chirren you got.”

Dr. MacDuff tried to say something but choked, her white cheeks turning pink.

“I...” she stammered.

Soupspoon thought that maybe if he could have cried she would have felt better.

“Here you are being nice to me and I’m the one who should be consoling you,” she said. “Will Tanya be here soon?”

“Yeah, she’s comin’. But you better let me talk to her ’bout this. You know Kiki got her a short ole fuse.”

“Kiki?”

“That’s, uh, that’s my nickname for’er. Kiki.”

Soupspoon sat on a long sheet of paper that the doctor had laid on the examining bed. All he wore was a pair of unbuttoned pants. Dr. MacDuff was seated on a chair that made her lower than him. Her long black hair hung down to her waist and her upturned eyes were almost black.

“I’ve recommended radiation treatment for you, Mr. Wise. It’s at the Cooney Institute uptown in Washington Heights. It’s expensive but I believe that it’s the best for you.”

“Yeah, but you know I ain’t got two nickels an’ Kiki don’t make that much neither.”

“The insurance will cover it.”

“I don’t see why you even wanna bother. Ain’t nuthin’ they could do about cancer.”

The young woman stood up and threw her hair back. She took a seat next to Soupspoon on the waxy paper and opened a dark folder that had ghostly X-ray photographs of his bones. Soupspoon had seen these pictures before but only when Dr. MacDuff was showing them to the technicians or some other doctor on her floor.

“You see, the pain in your hip is coming from here.” She pointed to a dark area above what he figured was his leg bone. “It’s a tumor growing in the bone. Have the painkillers been working?”

“Well, least I can sleep through the night and walk some.”

“This other scan is your lung. There’s just the smallest little tumor there. We’re not worried about that yet because it’s so small and you aren’t showing any symptoms there.”

Soupspoon was looking at her elbow, which rested on his arm as she pointed. A woman doctor. A white woman doctor treating him with her arm touching his.

“The radiation treatment has a high success factor. Seventy percent in cases like this one. I’m optimistic about it,” she said. “But you’re going to have to be careful. I’m giving you a prescription, because you have high blood pressure already and some of these procedures might make that a little worse.”

“What’s blood pressure got ta do with it?”

“Lots of things. It could bring about heart attacks, stroke.”

“Nuthin’ wrong wit’ my heart.” Soupspoon thumped his chest like a one-handed Tarzan. “You gotta have a good heart to be where I been.”

Kiki filled out the forms and took the train with him to the clinic for the first five days. She watched as they tattooed the little black points where the radiation was to be aimed. She waited on the other side of a lead shield as he lay flat on a table in the big green room while a giant robot arm shot atomic beams into his fragile bones.

They sat together with Dr. Fey, who had a large bandito mustache and shy brown eyes. He was cheerful and asked all kinds of useless questions about what baseball teams did Soupspoon like and how long had the couple been married.

Dr. Fey was suspicious when he heard that Soupspoon and Tanya were married. But when he saw the devotion the young woman gave her man he was reassured. The couple wore matching wedding rings that Kiki bought in the street and then got sized by a student in jewelry at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

On those five mornings Kiki had told Sheldon that she was going through physical therapy for the cuts in her side. She did go to the hospital twice. They had to check the stitches and examine the fluids she was leaking.

“They cut up the muscles down there and I gotta get my legs fit or else I’ll be a cripple when I get old.” She could have told him anything. Sheldon just nodded and said okay. He was better than a lover; he was afraid of her.

The pills Soupspoon took — Percocet, three at a time, six times a day; three times the dosage the pharmacist said to take — made him tired and listless. He’d sleep the day through, after going for his “zapping,” and then wake up at night thinking, half dreaming, about the lost days of his life.

After the first week he took the long train ride to the clinic by himself. The women there were all nice to him. Only women worked for Dr. Fey.

Soupspoon brought them sweet rolls and hot coffee with skim milk and Sweet ’n Low just the way they liked it. Then he’d sit in the maze of cushioned chairs and bask in the slatted sunlight that came through the blinds. He’d doze in the chair thinking about the lazy rock lizards down along Water Moccasin Pond. They’d crawl up on the slate shore in the noonday sun. He’d imagine himself a lazy sunning lizard who didn’t have the time or the mind to worry about cancer or the rent. All he had to do was to eat flies, and there were enough flies to last a thousand years.

A distant chime sounded whenever the pale violet door to the waiting room opened. Skeletal old men and balding children would come through. They all had the same look; as if they were concentrating on a question in their heads. Some deep religious problem or maybe long division. Old women came in wearing out-of-style clothes. Some of them wore pastel trousers and T-shirts with no jewelry. Many who still had some hair had given up their combs completely. They sat and stared out ahead trying to figure out that problem. They sat and waited for the nurses to call.

There were three nurses. Yvonne, a big brown girl from Tennessee originally, who had nine children and a husband who was no good but pretty. Wendy, who was blond and full of smiles even though she wore braces and had bad skin. And Bristol, a straight-backed English woman who made everything happen and managed to be nice even when she was pushing some poor old frightened dying woman in or out of the door.

Soupspoon liked Bristol. He was idly considering her big breasts and the little jade earrings that dangled beside her square jaw when the chimes sounded.

Two young men entered. They were as different as day and night. One brunet and the other blond. They were both tall, but Harry was sober and serious where Bob had a grin on him just like he must have had when he was three. Harry didn’t like to talk. If you said hello to Harry he’d nod and look down at your hands. But Bob laughed as if you were some long-lost cousin and asked you how your life had been.

Bob was six foot one and weighed just over 120 pounds. His blond hair was in wisps now, and there were open sores on his face that oozed pus and blood. Bob couldn’t walk without Harry holding his arm. They usually got in late.

After Soup met Bob, he’d save him a seat next to the nurses’ station if he could.

Soupspoon felt sorry for everybody who had cancer and had to be shot through with atomic radiation. But he liked Bob, because he was one of the only patients who still had some humor.

“How you doin’, Bob?” Soupspoon always asked.

Bob would look back as if he were thinking hard and then he’d smile and say, “If it was any worse I’d be better off than I am now,” or some such blues humor.

While they waited, Bob and Soupspoon talked about things. They gauged each other’s pains and treatments. Bob talked about his soap operas and events in the news. Harry kept out of the way and left the two to their gabbing. Every now and then he’d ask if Bob was comfortable or if he needed some water.

“You got a girlfriend, Bob?” Soupspoon asked on the day after they met. He thought that maybe he had one but she left when he got cancer and now he had to rely on his friend.

“Harry’s my wife,” Bob answered in a sly tone. He was looking Soupspoon in the eye when he said it, a smile tucked under the three or four hairs of a mustache that he had left.

“Oh.” Soupspoon nodded. “You a homo, huh?”

“We say ‘gay’ these days,” Bob said.

“Yeah, I know. But you know, sometimes a word just sticks in your mind and nuthin’ else seems right. To this very day when I talk about my own people I got a inclination t’say ‘colored.’ I know I’m s’posed t’say ‘Negro’ or ‘black’ or ‘Afro-American,’ but I say ‘colored,’ ‘cause that’s what we said when I was a boy and it fits in my mouth right.”

Bob laughed in a mild hacking way that he had, and they became friends. Soupspoon found out what AIDS meant. How so many people had it and didn’t even know. He found out that Harry had been tested and that he had it.

“I’m sorry to hear that, man,” Soupspoon said to Harry one day. The hale young man nodded and smiled. Then Soupspoon understood why he stayed so somber, because when he smiled he also cried.

“We all sure do got the blues, don’t we, Bobby?”

“At least we can sing together,” he said. “At least for a while.”

By the third week Soupspoon’s pain was almost gone. He only had to take two Percocets a day.

Bobby was dead.

Harry sent a long letter, which Kiki read to Soupspoon. It said that Soupspoon had helped Bobby laugh those last two weeks. “...the only things he looked forward to were seeing you in the morning and watching As the World Turns in the afternoon,” the letter said. It also gave the time and address of the service. It was in the Village, not far from Kiki’s.

Soupspoon stood at the back of the chapel. Over four hundred people had crowded in to pay their last respects. The family took up the front row. Mother and father, his sister and her kids. They were all broken up. They cried for Bobby Grand. But what got to Soupspoon was the men who had come to pay their respects — they cried too; cried with that deep sort of bereft sorrow that people have when a great leader passes. That ragged kind of sorrow you feel when your best friend dies. A brave kind of man who you, in your ignorance, never believed could die.

It made Soupspoon think of Jolly Horner.

Jolly had a big black face bulging with shiny cheeks. He had powerful smiling teeth that could bite through iron nails. His big hands and legs were so strong that he could lift a barrel full of water and carry it a quarter mile.

When Jolly Horner clapped those big hands behind Soupspoon’s guitar it sounded like artillery; cannonfire and the blues.

The floor gave way right under Jolly’s feet. Seth Wyles made a bet with his uncle that Jolly could carry a two-hundred-pound spotted pig up the ladder to the top of Seth’s barn. Jolly could do it, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to play the fool for white men. But Seth made him do it anyway. He told Jolly that if wanted to keep his job then he had better tote that Pig.

It wasn’t much of a challenge except that the pig was scared and the boards of the barn weren’t strong enough. Jolly made it to the top, but then the floor gave way and he came down, pig and all. They fell through to the plow mare’s stall. The mare reared back and crushed Jolly’s big face.

It was a hard life back then.

People died all the time. Young people died from hard blows, disease, and from taking their own lives. If you cried for every one of them you would have died from grief. Let their mother cry, their children; everybody else just picked up and went on. There was no holiday that you got to mourn.

But there was a holiday the day after Jolly Horner died. No one went to the plantation fields on that day. No one went to the farms or into the rich white people’s homes to work.

Jolly wasn’t meant to die, and Negroes from all over the county came out to say it. The night before, men went to Wyles’s barn. They slaughtered his spotted pig and crushed his mare’s skull.

And nobody ever found those killers, because when the white men came down into darktown the next day they found a funeral vigil with over a thousand people lining the road.

Jolly had friends everywhere. People loved him because of his strength and his loud, big-toothed laugh. You could hear Jolly laugh day or night because he didn’t get tired.

A thousand men and women came out to tell Jolly ’bye. But they also came out to tell God something, that’s what Soupspoon thought. The black population of the whole county came out to say that they would bear witness to the innocent death of a good man. A right man.

Soupspoon found himself crying at the back of the church, but he wasn’t sure who it was that he cried for.

He got home by three and put water on for tea. He took two extra pills, because his hip bothered him that day. There wasn’t a thing he could do to help that poor dead boy but at least he could do something about the pain.

When Kiki got home Soupspoon was sprawled out on the bed snoring. His shoes were in the middle of the floor and the dry sharp smell of burnt tin was in the air.

“What in the hell is this!” she shouted, flinging the hot pan against the wall over his head. Soupspoon rose out of his drugged sleep and peered at the wild woman.

She snatched his shoes up from the floor.

“You think this is some kind of pigsty?” She stomped across the room and hurled the shoes right through the windowpane. “This ain’t no goddamn cat box!”

“I’m sorry, honey,” Soup said softly. He tapped his toe on the floor as if, in his music mind, he were trying to slow down the beat, to bring them into harmony.

“You’re sorry?”

Kiki moved with fast clipping steps from the shattered window to the bed.

“You’re fuckin’ sorry all right!” she shouted. The next thing Kiki felt was a sharp pain that ran from her fist up her right arm. Soupspoon grunted and fell sideways from the impact of the blow.

“Sorry?” tore from Kiki’s lips. She swung with her left fist, hooking Soupspoon in the eye.

“Shit!” he yelled, putting his hands up around his face.

“Goddamn, goddamn...” Kiki kept hollering. With each syllable she punched or slapped until there was no more breath for either and she fell down on top of Soupspoon, putting her arms around him in a tight embrace.

Later Kiki went out to buy ground sirloin, canned collard greens, and lemon pie. She made ice packs for Soupspoon’s swollen eye and asked every few minutes, “You all right, Atwater? You okay, honey?”

He met those questions with shrugs and grunts until she’d been brought to tears five times. Finally he said, “Don’t worry ’bout it, honey. You a good girl. You done good by me. It’s just all’a this havin’ somebody stay wit’ you in such a small place is too much. I’ma get myself together after this last few days’a treatment and move on.”

“You don’t have to go, Soup.”

“Me stayin’ here an’ livin’ off you ain’t right, Kiki. An’ I need my own place.”

“But how can you pay for it? You don’t have money.”

“I can work. I might be past sixty-five, but somebody needs a sweeper or counterman. ’Cause if you can’t work then you dead already.”

“You can stay with me as long as you want,” Kiki said.