Walter Mosley
RL’s Dream
For Leroy Mosley (1916–1993)
RL wasn’t no real man. A real man gits born, does what li’l he can, and then he dies. That’s it! You could remember a real man and say how he lived an’ how he died. But RL fooled you. He played the guitar when he shouldn’t’a been able to, an’ nobody knows how he died. Maybe it was the pneumonia, maybe a jealous man. Satan coulda come an’ made him bark like a dog ’fore takin’ him home.
But us po’ fools lookin’ fo’ his story is lost ’fore we begin. ’Cause Robert Johnson wasn’t never born an’ couldn’t die. He was Delta blue from the bottom of his soul. He was the blues; he is today. Ain’t no start to his misery. An’ death could not never ease his kinda pain.
Soupspoon Wise
Back Road to the Blues (1986)
Transcribed by Gerald Pickford
Zero
Pain moved up the old man’s hipbone like a plow breaking through hard sod. So much pain he could barely think. He shit himself on the long walk from the shelter toward home and fell in the street more than once. No one moved to help him — passersby steered a wide path to get away from the smell. Soupspoon Wise staggered up Bowery toward the East Village imagining being home again, away from the dormitory of disheveled men. Those gibbering and farting men calling out to people who weren’t there.
Three blocks from the apartment he felt a crack come into the bone. A blood-black splinter that went so deep he cried out, “Oh, no!” His diaphragm trembled and the choked sobs came out in a broken whine. He went down on his left knee while trying to keep the right leg straight. He could have died on that frozen street, counting out the time between sighs — fingers drumming on his chest.
Music thrummed in his body; the rattles of death in the tortured song of his breathing. Soon he was moving his head to this rhythm; even the crackling pain in his hip pulsed in time. He got back to his feet and hobbled to the new music, reeling and rocking on a river of unsteady feet. Maybe he’d die before he got there. But he’d die singing and making music out of life the way real men did it a long time ago.
In the hot apartment the pipes still clanged and hissed steam even though it was spring. Soupspoon fell into the bed — soiling it. Even the feather mattress hurt him. Pain pulsed in his ears and leg until he longed to turn it off. His body shook with every heartbeat. He counted the beats until he forgot the pain and then, when the ache came back, he counted again. Soupspoon got to know his body weight so well that he could make minute shifts to keep the pain at bay. But he couldn’t make it to the toilet and he couldn’t sleep. Instead he conjured up a young man with short nappy hair and one dead eye. The young man didn’t care about Soupspoon’s plight but he didn’t mind stopping awhile to visit. He wore homemade overalls and no shirt, and smirked like a fox with a belly full of chickens.
In the afternoon the old man crawled from the fouled mattress. In the kitchen he clung to the sink and sucked water from the tarnished spigot the way he’d done at the well when he was a boy in Cougar Bluff, Mississippi. Then he pulled a five-pound sack of flour from the cabinet, letting it fall heavily to the drainboard. While eating the raw powder he considered going into the hall and lying on the cold concrete out there until someone took pity and killed him — or saved him.
Leaning over the kitchen sink, using his arms to keep his weight, he felt less pain. He let the water run until it had the cold bite of a deep well in winter, holding his hands under the flow until they were numb.
There were rat turds on the sink.
“Po’ rat gotta eat too. They’s more than enough flour for the both of us.”
When the doorknob jiggled he didn’t notice. Even when the door came open he wasn’t surprised. He turned, though, to see who it was. That’s when he realized that his arms had gone numb and he fell hard to the kitchen floor.
One
“Tanya!” a heavyset colored girl yelled as she jumped into the subway car. “You bettah git yo’ butt ovah here!”
She landed awkwardly, almost dropping her schoolbooks. Kiki eyed the fake rabbit fur and the lime-green hose that came up to the girl’s tight brown miniskirt.
An electronic bell chimed and the doors began to close.
Somewhere outside two girls screamed, “LaToya!”
Kiki felt her stomach tighten and then the jagged stitch of pain down her left side. LaToya pushed her shoulders forward and her butt back against the door. The door stuttered on its rails and then slid open again. A sneer of grim satisfaction passed across LaToya’s pear face.
Two more black girls came running in. One screaming, one laughing and bumping from behind. In the reflection of the window across the aisle Kiki saw the elderly white lady seated next to her take a shopping bag from the floor and hug it to her bony, blue-bloused chest.
At the far end of the car a small brown man, dressed all in charcoal colors, looked up.
“Release the door in back. Another train is right behind us,” a woman’s voice commanded from the loudspeaker. The bell sounded again and the doors slammed shut. The hum of the engine died and the train started off, first with a jerk and then into the smooth glide of steel on steel. Kiki’s bruised stomach lurched along with the train.
The girls sat in a bunch across the aisle. They were all large. The two latecomers wore jeans and sat on either side of the girl with the big green legs. The one on Kiki’s left had on a bulky brown sweater from which her stomach and breasts bulged sensually. Her hair was combed and tied back the way Kiki remembered Hattie’s hair back home. The other girl’s hair was a mess; all ironed and half braided. Her jacket was a boy’s football coat; yellow and green with frayed cotton cuffs.
Nigger-bitches.
The voice seemed to whisper right at the back of Kiki’s neck.
Nigger-bitches ain’t worth a damn.
It was Katherine Loll, Kiki’s redheaded aunt from Hogston. She was skinny and sour-faced and hated coloreds for taking the food right out of her mouth.“...and them nigger-bitches the worst ones. Filthy, rotten, and low,” Katherine would say. That was when she could still talk, before the cancer took out her voice. The two years before she died, Aunt Katherine breathed out of a puckered hole in her throat.
Kiki hated Katherine. She hated the white trash attitudes. The names they used for Negroes and Jews; the jealousies and poverty. She hated how frizzy-haired Katherine smelled of beer and lard. But still the words went through her like electricity. A shudder of hatred for these girls.
“Dog,” the unkempt one said, her mouth hanging open. All three were gaping at the smutty paperback book open flat in a notebook on the center girl’s lap. The cheap paper was almost brown and the letters were so large it might have been an elementary school reader.
In the window Kiki saw the man in charcoal clothes get up and walk to within a few seats of the girls. He sat down delicately and stretched his neck, not to see what smut they were reading but to watch them reading it. His eyes devoured their young lips and breasts. His nostrils flared as if he were inhaling the breath of them.
Kiki wanted to get up and tell him to get away. But the thought of moving made her lay the palm of her hand against the soft flesh below her ribs — feeling for the dampness of blood.
When the brakes screeched the girls listed to the side; their eyes all remained glued to the page as the station filled the windows behind them. The girl in the sweater was grinning; the other two were wide-eyed in awe.