When Atwater realized that there wasn’t going to be music he was ready to go. But he wanted to wait till it was dark enough that he wouldn’t be seen. That’s when he saw Maretha walk up to the moon-splattered door of the juke. He didn’t know who she was at that time but he could tell that she was different. To begin with, she was dressed in good brown cotton, good enough for church. And she walked with steady one-after-the-other steps, not like the regular customers ambling to and fro, seeing and being seen.
Atwater saw her at the front door and then he saw her in the bar through his flap. Shrimper was sitting among his friends, smiling and lifting his tin cup. As he brought the cup to his lips, Maretha was bringing her pistol to his head. She said something that Atwater couldn’t hear. Shrimper turned to look but the bullet caught him in the temple before he could face her. The floor around the man and his killer cleared of people. In between the screams and shouts five more shots sounded, each one like the hack of an ax into thick bark.
I told you you’d never leave. That’s what Maretha had said. Atwater heard about it later when the law came to take Maretha to jail.
Six months after that, Atwater changed his name. It was just after “Big Mouth” Willa Smith spied him peeking through the hole in the wall. She stopped singing and went right outside.
“Boy!” she shouted. “What you doin’ up there?”
“Listenin’, ma’am.”
“Come on down here.”
She took Atty inside and pulled him up to where she played guitar and bellowed.
“Atty!” Elma shouted. Theresa was grinning right behind her. Elma reached for him but Willa slapped her hand down.
“Hussy!” Willa hissed. “Git yo’ hand away. This here boy ain’t none’a your’n. He a music lover. He ’predate the art.”
The Milky Way wasn’t so frightening when he was with Willa. She wasn’t tall but she had big hands and the big mouth that she was named for. She was drunk most of the time and well armed with a .45-caliber repeater.
Willa loved it that little Atwater had been watching her through that hole and she was determined to make him into a musician.
He’d never played anything, so she gave him four big pewter spoons and showed him how to hold them between his fingers; how to hit them on his chest, stomach, and legs.
“Play somewhere between the way my head moves and my foot stomp. Play it like you love me,” she said. And he did.
He loved her and rattled his spoons behind the brick wall of her voice.
Ruby and Inez had given up trying to keep him at home.
“He’s a man now,” Inez told Ruby, disgusted. “A fool.”
Willa paid Atty ten cents for every dollar she made, and so he was rich. He spent every extra moment he had trying to learn the guitar, because Willa had once told him that “a woman’s heart strings is directly tied to the strings on a guitar.”
He was still playing spoons, though, on the night of the second killing. Willa was singing, making up a song, really, that might have been called “Ain’t Gonna Be No Cotton When I Die.” She was strumming on her big-bellied seven-string guitar and Soupspoon (that was his name by then) was clattering alongside. A commotion broke out in the bar. Soupspoon looked over and saw Vesey Turnot push Tree Frank. Tree fell backwards but helping hands kept him from falling and pushed him back into the fray. Vesey hit Tree’s jaw so hard that it sounded like a convict’s hammer on a ripe stone ready to crack. Soupspoon knew that that blow would lay Tree down.
But it didn’t.
Tree waded in swinging. Vesey did too. They looked less like men and more like little boys settling a dispute before running home for supper.
But these were men. Vesey was fast and accurate with his fists. He hit Tree where he wanted, and he hit him a lot. Tree was slow and lumbersome. For all the times he swung he hardly hit Vesey at all. But every time he connected, that part of Vesey’s body stopped working.
First Tree put a dent in Vesey’s side. Then he made the left arm fall down. When Tree finally laid his fist against Vesey’s head it looked to Soupspoon like a watermelon had been cracked open.
The blood came from Vesey’s face like a red snake jumping from a stone. The proud boxer put up his right hand to catch the blood and then he shouted, “Oh no! No!”
He grabbed for Tree’s right arm so that he wouldn’t get hit again.
Tree swung his arm around, tossing Vesey this way and that, but the bleeding boxer hung on.
“Please don’t kill me!” Vesey yelled. “Please! Please!”
Finally Tree threw Vesey to the floor. Tree would have left him there but poor Vesey had been demented by the sight of his own blood. He grabbed Tree around the legs, bleeding on his ankles and begging, “I’m sorry! Please don’t hit me again!”
Vesey showed more strength on his knees than he did with his fists. Tree couldn’t push him away no matter how hard he tried. He had Vesey’s blood all over his clothes and hands.
“Let me go, fool!” Tree shouted.
Willa had stopped singing.
“Pull that man offa there!” she shouted.
Tree backed up against the bar. He reached behind and grabbed a crock that was filled with pickled pigs’ feet. Tree hurled that thick crock down with all his strength, hitting Vesey on the top of his head.
The clay didn’t give.
Vesey stopped struggling and yelling. The whole jar of pig gelatin spilled down over his head. He slumped back against the bar and everybody else in the room went still.
Ulla Backley finally checked Vesey’s breathing and his heart.
“He’s dead.”
They laid Vesey out on the longest table at the Milky Way. He was flat on his back, no longer afraid, with blood and pork gelatin clotted across his handsome brown face.
Many people left the bar when they heard that Vesey was dead. Those that were left were the jury for Tree.
No one called the law like they had with Maretha. Maretha had murdered a man. Tree had just hit somebody who then wound up dead.
“Vesey started it,” Elma said. “He called Tree funny-lookin’ an’ said how his momma was probably a dog.”
“Yeah,” some slim sharecropper agreed. “An’ when Tree said to stop, Vesey picked a fight.”
Tree had his head in his hands. He never thought that he would kill a man and was brokenhearted at what might happen to his soul. That’s when Soupspoon decided to become a professional musician.
“When I heard that they was fightin’ ’cause’a name-callin’ I knew that I had to do it,” he told Cleophus the very next afternoon. “I knew my life weren’t worf a damn. Might as well do sumpin’ I want ’fore they get me.”
“Are you a fool, boy?” Cleophus asked. He had a great thatch of wild hair and wore plaid overalls. People treated him like he was a clown but Soupspoon knew that Cleophus was the smartest man in Cougar Bluff — after Bannon died.
“Yessir I am,” Soupspoon said. “An’ the on’y thing make me different is that I know it too. If I was out there pullin’ cotton you know I’d be every night at the Milky Way, all drunk an’ surly. An’ if I get drunk enough I’m liable as not to fight. An’ if I fight you know thatta be the end’a me.”
Cleophus scratched under his burly beard and considered the boy’s words.
What did he say? Soupspoon couldn’t remember. It had been too many years. Too many war stories and bad movies, and bottles of beer. Too many girlfriends who he lied to and who, in turn, lied to him.
Soupspoon was coming down the street. In front of him was a big vacant lot, with a few men lingering toward the back end. On the other side of the lot was a short, dead-end alley.