An’ then I died, Soupspoon said to himself. There was nobody there to hear him. And even if there was — so what?
That was the blues.
He was eleven years old the first time he heard the blues. The year was 1932. It was on a Saturday and Atwater had been hanging around at a barn party. He got to stay late because Inez forgot to send him home.
It was Phil Wortham playing on a homemade four-string guitar with Tiny Hill working a squeeze-box. It wasn’t like anything that Atwater had ever heard. The music made him want to move, and the words, the words were like the talk people talked every day, but he listened closer and he heard things that he never heard before.
Your heart breaking or your well running dry. Things like cake batter at the bottom of the bowl and the mist clinging to the road on summer mornings.
The music made Atwater want to dance, so he knew that it had to be good.
A good friend of the boy’s — an older man named Bannon — had been killed only a week earlier. Atwater hadn’t shed a tear.
People died in the Delta; they died all the time. Atwater hadn’t cried, but a dark feeling came over him. He didn’t know what it was until he heard Phil and Tiny play at the barn party. He didn’t know that he had the blues.
That music had changed him. From then on at night, after Ruby and Inez had gone to bed, he’d go out the window and make it down to the Milky Way.
The Milky Way was a beat-up old chicken barn that had been coated with tar and dotted with yellow splotches of paint that were supposed to be stars. It was a lopsided ugly building in the daylight. But at night, when you came through Captaw Creek and around the old elm, it looked like something magic; like, Atwater thought, a hill house of God.
He was too young to go into a juke joint, but he made up his mind to try on his birthday.
And so on a summer’s evening, when the sun was still out, Atwater told Ruby that he and Petey Simms were going to set nets for crayfish down at the creek. But really they meant to take the quarter that Fitzhew had given Atwater for his birthday and get two glasses of whiskey from Oja, the midget owner of the Milky Way.
Petey made it as far as the old elm — where he stopped and gawked as Atwater walked on ahead.
“Wha’ wrong wichyou, Petey Simms?” Atwater asked when he turned to see that he was alone.
Petey just shook his head. He was a long-necked heavy-eyed youngster who everybody but Atwater called Turtle.
Atwater followed Petey’s gaze to two women who were standing out in front of the juke. They were big women wearing loose dresses that flowed in the breezes, flaring up now and then to expose their legs. They had very big legs. Petey was looking at those women (especially, Atwater knew, at those legs) and shaking his head.
Atwater was scared too but he thought that they’d be safe as long as they stuck together.
“Come on,” he said. “They ain’t gonna bite you.”
He said it loudly to shame his friend, but he didn’t expect the women to hear.
“Hey you,” one of them shouted.
Petey took off like a scared hare. Shoop! He was gone.
“Hey, boy!” the voice called out again. “You!”
One of them was coining toward him. She had a kind of rolling motion in her thighs as she walked. She waved for him to come to her while her friend stayed back near the juke, shading her eyes to see.
“Me?”
“Come here!” the woman shouted — none too kindly. She was tall and heavy-chested with hair that was combed straight back from her head.
“Come here!”
Atwater’s bare feet obeyed, but he didn’t want to walk down there.
“Hurry up, boy! I ain’t got all night!” The big woman was smiling, one meaty fist on her hip.
“Yes, ma’am?” Atwater said when he stood before the woman.
“Elma,” she said. Her smile revealed that one of her upper front teeth was gone. Another one had been broken in half. “Elma Ponce is my name. What’s yours?”
“A-A-Atty...”
“A-A-Atty,” Elma mocked the poor boy. “What you doin’ out here, A-A-Atty? Yo’ momma know you here?”
“Elma, what you messin’ wit’ this baby for?” The other woman had come up to them.
They seemed like women then, but now, on Kiki’s couch, Soupspoon remembered them as teenagers — maybe eighteen. But they were women to Atty Wise. They wore the same cut of loose dress. Elma’s dress was blue while her friend’s was a washed-out orange.
“Jus’ playin’ wit’im, Theresa.” Elma took Atwater by the arm. “What you doin’ here, Atty?” The sweetness in her voice was not lost on him.
“My birfday,” he whispered.
“What? Talk up.”
“My birfday today.”
Elma showed her snaggle teeth again. “Yo’ birfday? An’ you come down to Milky Way to get a kiss?”
“N-no...” Atwater said. He could feel himself shaking but couldn’t stop.
“You scarin’ the poor boy, Elma,” Theresa laughed. “Let him be.”
“I come to get a drink on my birfday day,” Atwater said. He said it fast to keep Elma from getting mad. He didn’t want to see her mad. “I come t’get a drink wit’ my birfday quatah.”
“You got a quatah?” Theresa asked. She was black-skinned and good-looking the way a handsome man looks good.
“Uh-huh. Yes, ma’am.”
Elma, still holding the boy by his arm, pulled Atwater toward the door of the Milky Way. “Come on,” was all she said.
The dark blue front door had a big drippy yellow circle painted in the middle. That circle was supposed to be the moon.
Elma pushed the door open, dragging Atty in behind her. Theresa followed up the rear, holding on to his pants.
Elma went up to the bar and shouted, “Oja! Bring a pint bottle ovah here!” She pointed across the dark room to a row of makeshift booths hammered together against the far wall.
“The hell I will,” small fat Oja replied. He climbed up on his stool to face her. “Where you gonna come up wit’ money for a pint an’ not ten minutes ago you couldn’t even buy no beer?”
Theresa pinched Atty’s butt and giggled in his ear.
He was thankful for her closeness, because the Milky Way on the inside scared him to death. The floor was black and sticky, covered with crushed peanut shells. It smelt of sweat and sour beer. The ceiling was uneven and low; at some points a full-grown man wouldn’t have been able to stand up straight.
And it was hot.
“I cain’t pay for it,” Elma hooted. “But my boyfriend here could.”
Elma yanked Atty’s arm, pulling him away from Theresa and up next to her.
“Well? Pay the man, Atty,” she said. “You want yo’ birfday toast, don’t ya?”
Atwater took the quarter from the pocket of his cutoff trousers and handed it to Elma.
“Not to me. Give it to the barman an’ tell’im what you want. That’s what you do when you a man.”
Oja had a mashed-in black face with a long cigar stuck out between his battered lips. He was too small to work in the cotton fields, so he had to go into business for himself.
“Well?” the bartender asked.
Atty pressed his quarter into the pudgy little hand.
“Yo’ a’ntees know you down here, boy?” Oja asked once the coin was in his pocket.
“Yes sir.”
“You sure?” Oja had this thing he did with his eyes. He’d open one very wide and close the other until it was just a glistening slit.
“Put that eye back in yo’ head, nigger,” Elma warned. “He done told you that they know an’ he done give you his money too. So pull down that pint. The deep brown stuff too.”