“I could die anytime now, girl. I need to say somethin’ an’ send it to Mr. Early before that happens.”
“Why not just call him?”
“I don’t wanna call’im, goddammit! I wanna tell it an’ play it right here. I wanna tell it my own way wit’out all kindsa questions an’ shit. I just wan’ it, wan’ it the way I wan’ it.”
“Okay, daddy,” Kiki said. “I’ll get it for you on payday. Next Friday, I swear.”
Nine
Soupspoon left the apartment at four the next day. He knew where he was going but was in no hurry to get there. His hip hardly hurt him and he hadn’t had to take a pill all day.
“Good morning, Mr. Wise,” Mrs. Manetti said. She was coming up the stairs as he was coming down.
“Ms. Manetti. How are you today?”
“Oh, all right I guess,” she said, looking at his feet.
She was older than he; gray-haired with rounded blunt features and thick hands that had held many years of hard work. Arthritic legs forced her to put both feet on each stair before ascending to the next. She put down both of her plastic bags to greet Soupspoon and took in a deep breath.
“You need some help?”
“Maybe if you could take one bag.” She smiled as if it hurt to ask for help. “It’s all the way to the top.”
Soupspoon carried both bags back up the way he had come. They went past the fourth floor where he stayed with Kiki, toward the sixth where the old lady had lived for thirty-nine years with Alessio Manetti — and another twenty-three years alone. It was Alessio’s old wheelchair that Kiki had borrowed.
They took one stair at a time — in her fashion.
At the half flight to the fifth floor they stopped to rest.
“I’m sorry about what they did to you, Mr. Wise. I tried to talk to them, but you know these young people won’t listen. All they care about is beer and baseball, and whistling at the girls in those little dresses they wear.
“I called Mr. Grumbacher and told him that it was wrong. Wrong to put out somebody when he’s sick. God takes in the rent too, you know.”
There was no answer to what she said, but the subject was too painful for Soupspoon to go on with small talk.
“How are you now?” she asked.
“Just fine. Kiki took me to these doctors she knowed. They did a damn good job on my bones.”
Mrs. Manetti leaned forward peering through half-blind gray eyes that were a perfect match for her hair.
“You like her?”
“Kiki? Yeah. She took me in.” Soupspoon could feel the swelling over his left eye but he believed what he was saying.
“I don’t know. I guess,” the stocky little woman said. “But, well, you know... she has a bad mouth half the time, and you should see the kindsa men she brings in with her. Mrs. Green lives right upstairs and she hears them. Loud and fighting. I just think that you should be careful, Mr. Wise. You know, she’s all smiles when you see her, but not after a drink.”
“I don’t know. I guess.” Soupspoon picked up the bags and took normal steps to keep ahead, to keep from saying anything bad about Kiki. He wanted to protect her from the old women’s words. After all, what did those old ladies know about hard times, about drinking hard to forget? Of course Kiki got mad, but not for no reason. She had a good reason and a good heart. But Soupspoon didn’t want to make excuses. He wanted to carry those bags like a gentleman is supposed to do and then go on about his business.
Up to the sixth floor Soupspoon kept a few steps ahead. He could hear Mrs. Manetti straining and puffing behind. He turned once and said, “Slow down. I just got to move quick, but you could wait.”
She couldn’t wait, though. The ancient widow worked her feet and tugged on the railing until she could almost keep up with him. Her breath sounded like a greedy little dog slobbering over a bone.
“Which one is it?” Soupspoon called down to her.
“Number sixty-three,” she said, head down, pulling her way up the stairs.
She reached him at the door.
“She called me a witch. All I did was to ask if maybe Social Services could help more because that’s their job. I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t say that there was anything wrong with what she did,” Mrs. Manetti declared. “She doesn’t have any respect. You can’t trust a girl like that, Mr. Wise.”
The whole time she talked, Mrs. Manetti was rummaging around in her purse. Finally she came out with a copper key that had a red plastic handle. She pinched the key between two fingers and waited.
“You want me to carry the bags in an’ put ‘em on a table or somethin’?” he asked.
“No, thank you. You did enough already. I can manage.” She made no move to unlock the door.
Soupspoon watched her watching eyes. After a moment she blinked.
“You know, Ms. Manetti, nobody could help it.”
“What?”
“Kiki ain’t a bad girl...”
“I didn’t say...”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but just let me say these here few words. That’s all I ask.” Soupspoon put out his hands. She could have held them if she wanted to. “You see, Kiki kinda wild but that’s just who she is. She drink an’ she mean sometimes. But when she fount me downstairs she opened up her do’ an’ took me in. She couldn’t help it. It’s the way she learnt, just like manners. It’s like when you know somebody for a long time an’ you see’em ev’ry day you ask’em in for a cuppa coffee now and then, right?”
The gray-headed, gray-eyed old woman nodded, still pinching her copper key.
“We cain’t help who we is, ma’am.” Soupspoon looked at her a while longer — waiting.
Mrs. Manetti held up her key. “I have to be going now, Mr. Wise. I have to call my daughter in Miami.”
Soupspoon didn’t want coffee anyway. He wanted to be outside walking with no pain, and so he went. He walked down Avenue C to Pitt and then over, down toward Orchard. Before he got there he turned again, toward his destination.
He had music on his mind and on the streets around him. The blasting boom bass from the trunk speakers of a passing car. Phonographs out of apartment windows. The bouncing butt of a heavyset girl in short shorts listening to her earphones and licking a soft ice cream cone.
Music had been in his every day almost from the very beginning. He had pledged his life to music when he was still a boy in Mississippi.
“What you mean you gonna be a musician?” Cleophus Brown asked thirteen-year-old Atty Wise. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I’d’ruther to pick guitar strings than pick cotton, Cleo. Damn! I’d’ruther shov’lin’ coals in hell.”
For two years after his pneumonia, young Atty Wise had spent every music night right outside the Milky Way. He’d heard Jeff “Little Boy” Tynan, Willa Smith, and Job Landry with Rodeo Bob White. He never saw Cody again, but Elma and Theresa were there every night. He saw them dancing and drinking, flirting and fighting over men, for a year before either of them saw him again.
Nobody saw him because Atty would climb up the live oak out behind the Milky Way and peer in through a flap he tore in the tarpaper wall. He could sit out there all night and watch and listen without all that harsh talk and hard liquor, without the hot smells and hot tempers.
He’d seen two men killed in that first year. One was Shrimper Martins, a great big sharecropper who had left his girlfriend Maretha in Clarksville to go back home to his wife and seven kids in Cougar Bluff. Shrimper, Atwater had learned in the days after his murder, was the kind of religious man who sinned on Saturday and begged the Lord’s forgiveness on Sunday morning.
He was sitting at a card table with his friends making a big celebration out of his return. There was a lot of drinking and laughing. Atty didn’t like it because they made so much noise that Oja called off the music for that night. It was all toasting and roasting and talking loud because Shrimper was a popular man at the Milky Way and they were happy for his return.