The next morning he awoke in Alyce Griggs’s barn, just about a quarter mile from his house. A white hen was clucking and dancing around his feet.
“What you doin’ in here, boy?”
When Atwater lifted his eyes to see the woman he felt sharp pain throughout his head and jaw.
“Sorry, Miss Griggs,” he said to the elderly white woman. “I got drunk at Milky Way an’ I landed here in yo’ barn.”
“That’s the devil in you, Atty,” the scrawny white woman warned. “You know that, don’t ya?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and meant it.
“Go on now. I hope Inez hides you good.”
He never did get a beating for that night. When Atwater came through the door he was staggering from fever. The chill and the whiskey had made him sick. For three weeks Ruby and Inez took turns sitting over him, covering his forehead with damp towels and feeding him foul home remedies one after the other.
His lungs filled up and his dreams walked around the house with a life of their own. He choked and coughed and finally accepted that he was going to die. He made his goodbyes to Ruby and Inez so bravely that even stone-faced Inez cried.
When Atwater got out of bed again he knew that he was a man.
“Daddy?” Kiki was sitting up in the bed.
“You okay?” Soupspoon asked.
Fully naked, she got up from the bed and came over to the couch. She sat spread-legged before him and held out her hands for him to hold.
It wasn’t sex on her part. It was a frightened girl, no older than Atty at the Milky Way, holding out her hands to be saved.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’m scared,” she said all at once. “I’m scared of... of...”
“What?”
Kiki told him about her dreams of a stone boy stalking her with his knife.
“It’s okay, honey,” Soupspoon said when she was through. “He ain’t gonna get in here.”
“That’s not all,” she said, avoiding his eyes.
“What else is it?”
“I can’t tell you yet. I... I have to wait.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to catch her eye without ogling her orange-brown crotch. “I’ll be here when you ready.”
“What’s wrong?” Kiki asked. “Why you look away from me?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that you’re a nice girl. You should cover up in front of a old man like me.”
“You shy?” She smirked while trying to get him to meet her gaze.
“Naw, I ain’t shy. I seen it all. But I like you an’ I feel like I don’t wanna get the wrong idea.”
Kiki’s face went smooth when he said that. Her eyes became perfect circles with tears beaded up on the lashes. She leaned forward as if she meant to hug Soupspoon but then she got up and went to the bed and rummaged around on the floor. She came up with a ratty brown robe and wrapped herself in it.
She held out her arms as she came back to the couch.
“Can I hug you, Mr. Wise?”
“Sure.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” she whispered into the embrace.
Soupspoon was thinking about little Atty wandering through the wilderness over stones white as skulls.
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.