Kiki smiled like a child. “Okay. But maybe you should have the bed.”
“No no no no no,” was all he said to that idea.
Kiki made sure to give the old man his antibiotics after the meal. She washed him again and helped him go to the bathroom.
Kiki lay in her bed a long time before sleep came. That night, like every night, she would almost fall off to sleep, she would be on the edge, and then the image of a man’s pale lips arose, and the smell of the dank basement under the new house. For just an instant she was a teenaged girl again — trying to hold down her skirts, trying to stay off her stomach.
She’d start awake again. A dozen times it happened.
Some nights she didn’t get to sleep at all; the nights she didn’t drink. Kiki’s father was in her mind every night of her life, except in the hospital when she was on their drugs.
She thought about him every night and hated him every morning.
It took five shots of JD before she drifted off that night.
And when she finally got there it wasn’t worth the trip.
During the night she had nightmares about a small boy who was carved from black stone and who carried a black iron knife. While the boy stalked her, Kiki could hear Soupspoon moving and murmuring in his sleep. It was almost as if he moaned in sympathy with her own fears as the stone boy kept coming; kept coming with no emotion in his sharp-angled onyx face, the knife held out in front of him like a black flame. He weighed ten thousand pounds and moved slowly, but Kiki was so scared that she could hardly move. She’d fall down and have trouble getting back to her feet. He’d advance a step and she’d fall again. And every time she fell it seemed that Soupspoon groaned or spoke aloud, “Oh, God!”
Late in the night she heard a heavy thud and sat up straight, afraid that the boy had taken his first deadly step inside her room. She crawled to the edge of the bed, cramped at her side from the stiff stitched wound. She looked at the door and saw that it was closed tight. She waited for another knock, but none came. Nothing came but the hot feeling of the wound and the stale aftertaste of Jack Daniel’s on the back hump of her tongue. Sleep crept back into her eyes and she looked away from the door to the empty couch.
Empty, she thought, and felt loneliness, dark sleep with no purpose except darkness. Empty. Empty?
And then Soupspoon was back in her mind. Soupspoon with his voice like snake’s breath and fat, black, sagging cock. His skinny thighs. His sour breath filled the room with the smell that Katherine Loll gave off before she died in their house. The good house on Knox Street that was built from cedar and pine and reinforced with brick brought all the way from Georgia. The house with two magnolia trees in the front yard. Their smell sweet and tangy like citrus but not quite. And all the sleepy bees buzzing so dull that she could sleep out there not even worrying about them. The sweet magnolia scent wiping out completely the smell of poultices and Katherine’s breath.
Inside the dream of the girl-child dreaming, her father hollered about how much it cost to keep Katherine alive and Momma, in her high-necked gray cotton dress, shushed him and begged him to be quiet.
“But how the hell do you expect me to pay for it? She’s just gonna die and then how do you expect me to get my money back?”
Somewhere Katherine was wheezing. Daddy never meant to kick her out, he only wanted to make her feel she wasn’t wanted. He only wanted to see Momma begging and to hear the old hag wheeze upstairs. That harsh ragged breath you had after you’d run so long that you could just fall down dead like the first man to run a marathon.
Kiki could still hear Katherine breathing after the dream had passed. She was still asleep, or almost so, but the breathing continued. Harsh and painful with a small hurting wheeze behind it. But it wasn’t Katherine.
Kiki opened her eyes again. The couch was empty. The weak streetlight through the imitation lace curtains fell across it, making it look like a dimly lit stage where the action was about to happen.
Not knowing why, Kiki got up and went to the couch.
The old man lying on the floor didn’t surprise her. She wasn’t quite sure who he was at first. Those dark glistening eyes and still darker skin. The ragged breath and that smell.
“Fell,” he whispered.
“You have to go?”
She helped him into the toilet, helped fish his thing out of the folds of his boxer shorts, held him steady from behind while he stood at the cracked commode. They stood for minutes, Soupspoon doddering and holding his penis. He stared straight down into the lined brown bowl and waited until the sluggish sprinkle began. She could see the spurts of droplets beyond his slim legs. When he was done she felt his body move as he shook himself.
“Take two of these and your hip will stop paining you. And then we’ll get you to a doctor tomorrow.”
“But how we gonna pay?”
“Don’t worry, I know how to handle it.”
She gave him water to swallow the pills with and helped him back to the couch.
They both slept after that.
In the morning she dragged the chair downstairs and then took the steps, one stair at a time, with Soupspoon. The Percocets dulled the pain and the antibiotics turned his whisper breath into a surprisingly musical tenor. She went with him to University Hospital and left him with a Bahamian nurse and the note from Dr. Mussar.
“I’ll bring the card this afternoon,” Kiki told the long-lashed woman through a glass wall.
“We need proof of insurance before we can admit a patient, Mrs. Wise,” the nurse said simply. She made no move to buzz the door, to let them into the office.
“I can have it this afternoon.” Kiki spoke earnestly, looking directly into the woman’s large almond eyes. “He was up all night in pain. All I thought about was getting him in here. Dr. Mussar said it was okay. I mean, I do work, you know.”
The nurse’s finger hovered above the brass button on the desk. The long red fingernail had a tiny star of gold etched into it.
“Well...”
“I’ll be here by five forty-five.”
Marshall & Pryde Health, Accident, and Whole Life Insurance had the twenty-third to twenty-ninth floors of Number Two Broadway. The entrance to the building was crowned with a large mosaic depicting red Indians and yellow Spanish soldiers meeting on a gold-tiled beach before a blazing crimson-and-ocher sun.
The bank of elevators for those floors was cordoned off by a thick velvet rope stretched across the entranceway. A red-faced guard stood leaning against a podium and staring off into space. Somewhere a small radio played an old-time big-band tune.
“You have to sign in, miss,” he said when Kiki came up. “It’s after nine.”
He said the same thing to her every morning. Brian Coulane, vice president in charge of staff operations, had instituted the policy over two years before. If employees felt that they were being monitored, they would come in to work on time. All latecomers had to sign in. Sarah Fields, Coulane’s secretary, had told Kiki and the other girls on floor twenty-seven that she got the sheets at the end of the week.
“Do you make a report?” Brenda Jones had asked.
“No, honey, I just throw ’em away. I got enough mess in that office that I don’t need no more trouble.”
Everybody had laughed, but no one came in late after that. Nobody but Kiki.
The only time Kiki ever came in on time was when she had a crush on Sheldon Meyers, her boss. She’d come in early so he could drop by her desk and talk for a while before the day’s work began, He had a little potbelly and his hairline was receding, but his smile was kind and he never said anything rotten behind people’s backs.