Soupspoon had to take three pain pills before the pain finally subsided.
“How’m I gonna pay for these here doctors you got me goin’ to, girl?”
“With those insurance papers you signed.”
“I ain’t got no in-surance. Shit. I be lucky to get some Medicaid.”
“But it’s like I said, I made an application at the place where I work. That’s better than being on the county, hon. All kindsa stuff the government won’t pay for.”
“But how could I get in-surance just like that?”
“You just do,” Kiki answered. “Why don’t you lie down and try to rest now? We could talk about it later.”
Soupspoon knew there was something wrong with the documents that she had him sign, but he was tired. Something was wrong with every breath that he drew. That’s why he was thinking about the blues again. That’s why he was lying there on that angry girl’s sofa. He couldn’t change it. So he let Kiki spread the blanket over him and closed his eyes. The medicine had turned the pain in his leg from fire to cold stone. If he turned just right on the couch he barely felt the nugget of hurt.
He didn’t fall asleep but he closed his eyes and listened to Kiki move around the apartment. Later on he heard a knock at the door and then whispers.
“Shh! He’s asleep,” Kiki said.
“How long’s he gonna be here?” It was the skinny boy, Randy.
The bedsprings sighed.
“I don’t know. Until he’s better. The doctor said that he might be real sick.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to take care of him.”
“So if you were so sick that you couldn’t wipe your own butt I should just let you lie out in the street?”
“But you know me, Kiki.”
“But suppose I wasn’t there?”
It was quiet for a while after that. Soupspoon drifted, wondering about what the police could do to him now that he was so sick. He heard the wet crackle of kissing and then, “Uh-uh, no, honey. You got to go, Randy.”
“Come on, Kiki, I won’t do anything. I’ll just hold you.”
“I’m sick too, honey. Just wait awhile, till we both get better.”
Soupspoon heard the door open and close. Then the silence of the room seemed to hover above him. His neck felt the tickle of skin so close that it almost touched and then a moist kiss on his cheek.
Six
Inez used to kiss him at night when she thought he was asleep. She’d come to his corner of the big room after he’d been in bed for a while. First she’d strike a match on a piece of sandpaper that was tacked up on the wall. Then she’d puff on the pipe in little gasps until Atwater could smell the sweet smoke of her cured tobacco.
Inez came very close but he kept his eyes shut, not even making a peep, because li’l boys s’posed t’be ‘sleep when it gets dark outside — an’ thas all they is to it. But he wasn’t asleep. He was wide awake in his cot, fooling Inez; and that made him want to laugh and dance. But he couldn’t make a sound while she was still there.
Inez hovered over him. He could feel it like you could feel the harvest moon when it was over the frail sharecroppers’ huts in the Delta. And like that moon she brought sweet smells and slight breezes that tickled his skin the way Kiki did over sixty years later up on the fourth floor.
The child had ants in his hands and feet. He wanted to laugh out loud and caper to let Inez know that he was fooling her. He couldn’t keep it in, but if he moved, Inez would get mad. Inez got mad when children couldn’t control themselves. She wasn’t like Ruby. Ruby was rounder and darker and she smiled almost all the time. Inez was sweet-smelling but Ruby smelled like bread.
Ruby didn’t get mad even when Atwater kicked over the bucket of cleaned and peeled turnips, or when he threw that rock and broke Ruby’s grandmother’s colored window (which Ruby’s mother had given her from the deathbed). Ruby never got mad, She’d just let her eyes get real big and say, “Atwater! How did we let that happen?” and then they’d get together and work hard to clean up the mess before Inez could find out.
But it was Inez who came out to check on Atwater at night after the alcohol lanterns were turned down. It was always Inez. And Atwater was always scared that he wouldn’t be able to control himself and would make a peep and then Inez would be mad and he’d have bad dreams.
But, just when he knew he had to let go, Inez would take a deep draw on her pipe and blow a sweet wave of smoke over him. The ants became long dewy blades of cool grass between his fingers and toes. The moon gave way to blue sky and Atwater was rising and falling like one of the great box kites that Fitzhew made for the windy days of fall.
Atwater Wise came out of the sky and hit the ground running. Faster than the dive-bombing bumblebees and with nobody to tell him when to come in. There was chest-high yellow grass to run through and a hundred different odors of earth. There was the blood from his ankle, once, from a sharp rock hidden in the moss of Millwater Pond. There were the hilly nests of fire ants that would swarm over grasshoppers and tired dragonflies.
Cold water was good. Blood, scabbing over and sluggish, was good. Even the fire-orange specks on the shiny green eye of the dragonfly were good.
The wind through the stiff yellow grass wheezed like an old woman. Hidden in there were all kinds of birds that were named for their colors and sizes and personalities. They sang and warbled and croaked.
Crows came from the devil but they couldn’t catch him. They called his name in crow words but the little boy just laughed.
His dreams were full of colors and smells and music. There, under the blanket of Inez’s sweet smoke, he ran and played while she sat back — too old to have fun anymore.
And then the kiss. Warm and moist. It was only when she thought that he was asleep that Inez kissed Atwater. The loud groan of a timber and the snick of the door told the boy that Inez had gone back to the big bed with Ruby. He could open his eyes, but now he was too tired to move.
The young boy fell asleep but the old man came awake. Tears saved up from over half a century came for the death of that poor dragonfly. The red bird, the gray fat warbler — lost. Soupspoon had tears over the great herons and the train that ran right through town carrying the big bales of cotton down to the Mississippi River.
He remembered the one-eyed cat that came to the window to look into the house; looking for Inez’s praying mantis like Death searching for that one soul who slipped away behind some trees and was overlooked, half forgotten.
Soupspoon remembered days and days down by the river with his little boyfriends — fishing, rafting, swimming among the catfish and carp.
He remembered the cotton fields and all the men and women lumbering off to work from the plantation barracks. Hollers and calls came from the fields even before the sun was up. But it was silence he heard at the end of the day.
I’m way past tired to almost dead, Job Hockfoot would say. But by midnight on Saturday he was dancing full out.
A Negro didn’t own too much back then, but he had the ears to hear music and the hands and mouth to make it. Washboards, washtubs, and homemade guitars. Mouth harps from the dime store and songs from deep down in the well...
“No, daddy,” Kiki cried. Her voice was small and helpless.
Soupspoon wondered if it was her nightmare that woke him.
He sat up to look. The blankets were all kicked off her bed. Her naked behind was thrust up in the air because she was hunched over the pillow and some sheet.
“No.”
A white woman; skinny butt stuck out at me like a ripe peach on a low branch. There was nobody left to tell. Nobody left to understand how strange it was, how scary it was. Nobody to laugh and ask, “An’ then what you did?”