“Hey, mistah. Mistah.” It was an old man wearing a spotty green T-shirt under a black-and-white checkered jacket. His pants were tan and he had on a Mets sun visor cap. White stubble sprouted along his black jawline.
“Yeah?”
“You got a quarter?”
“Hell,” Soupspoon said. “I got fi’ty cent.”
The Mets fan staggered forward, raised his head, smiled.
“Guy name Rudy got a club back here somewheres?” Soupspoon asked.
“They ain’t gone let you in,” the man said. “They ain’t gone let you in. Might as well put yo’ money wit’ mines an’ we get us some Colt 45.”
Soupspoon took two quarters from his pocket. “Where Rudy’s?” he asked.
“Ovah yonder.” The drunk pointed with the hand that held his money. The coins fell but Soupspoon wasn’t distracted. It was a black door — the kind of door superstitious people used to ward off curses — down the dead-end street.
Inside the dark hot room smelt strongly of beer. There was a long black bar across the back and a few tables to one side. The room was populated by half a dozen black men who smoked, drank, and were talking serious in low tones. Everybody looked up to see Soupspoon as he walked up to the bar.
“I’d like a beer,” he told the barmaid.
“This a private club, mistah,” she answered.
“Rudy Peckell the owner?”
“I said that this was private,” she answered. “That means that I don’t tell you nuthin’ and you walk back out the way you came in.”
“Because,” Soupspoon said as if the woman hadn’t said a word, “Rudy’s a friend’a mines. Coupla years ago I run inta him an’ he told me I should come on by if I ever get the chance.”
The woman looked Soupspoon over. Her face was ready to be mad but he thought she looked sweet in spite of her disposition. She didn’t know whether to believe that he knew Rudy, but, he could see, she really didn’t care either.
She took a glass from under the bar and worked the spigot on it.
“Thatta be one seventy-five,” she said after serving him.
“What’s your name?”
“Sono.” The short woman took the two dollars from him and put them in her apron pocket. She made no move to give him any change.
Sono was short and well-proportioned. Her lips were pursed in a perpetual, if sour, kiss. Her skin was high yellow and there was a deep brown mole riding on the words in her throat. A big fly buzzed lazily above her head. Soupspoon couldn’t hear its drone above the hum of the refrigerator behind the bar.
Soupspoon thought he knew this woman. Not that he ever met her but that he’d known many a woman like her. A sweet girl who loved her daddy and her kids. A girl who never understood why people treated her the way they did. And even though she’d had it hard she was still looking; looking for that one man. A pretty black man who could talk her out of her clothes; who could work hard all day and playboy at night. A man who could bear up under the hot and heavy love that she’d been holding inside her chest since she was a baby — maybe since before she was born. A man who could learn that that love she had was all he would ever need in this life. A hard man who she could crack open like a sweet pecan. A man who could give up his sweetness to her.
“Rudy here yet?” Soupspoon asked.
“Do you see him?”
“He here yet?”
“Uh-uh, no. Rudy don’t never come in till later.”
“Well, when he get in tell’im I need t’talk. You got sandwiches here?”
“Naw. All we got is some potato chips an’ pretzels.”
“How much?”
“Pretzels free if you drinkin’.”
“Then gimme some’a them, ’cause I’ma be waitin’ right ovah at that table till Rudy gets here.”
Sono filled a round plastic bowl with thin pretzels and handed them to Soupspoon.
He was happy to be eating and drinking, seeing colors and breathing the rancid air.
The bar filled up as the evening came on. All kinds of black men came in. Some came in work clothes, overalls and boots. A few dressed in synthetic pastel-colored suits with big-brimmed hats and almost fluorescent shoes. There were old men with sad yellow eyes and threadbare trousers. One big guy, who Sono called Bongo, made his eyes big and told jokes full of curse words. Soupspoon would catch snatches of his foul humor, like “...ugly, ugly mothahfuckah had a tongue so big that could French-kiss ’er an’ be lickin’ her pussy at the same time...” — lots of laughing — “...you know ain’t no black woman gonna give up somethin’ like that!” Everybody broke up at that. Sono laughed so hard that she went down on both knees for a second there.
Rudy walked in at just about seven-thirty wearing a midnight-blue silk suit and a yellow shirt. His loose tie was the color of blood. He was followed by a large Hawaiian man. Soupspoon decided the man was Hawaiian because he wore a brightly colored shirt and even though he was fairly brown-skinned he had big eyes for an Asian and black hair that came straight down to his shoulder.
“Take the door, Cholo.” Rudy grinned, showing pure white teeth against mahogany skin. “Who gots the bones?”
“Right here, Rudy,” a man all in pink said. “I been keepin’ ’em next t’my nuts so they know who’s boss down there on the flo’.”
Cholo took his place at the door. Some of the men followed Rudy to the back of the bar. They all crouched down around him. He put his hand deep into his pocket and came out with a wad of money so thick that it would have made Soupspoon sweat if he were a younger man still dazzled by the luster of cash. Rudolph threw down a bill and said, “One hundred dollars! One hundred dollars on my first throw.” Then he threw the dice so hard that they sounded like the report of a .22.
“Five! That’s a lucky number for me. My little girl is five. I was five with my first woman. I got five thousand dollars in my pocket. Now lemme see some’a all you boys’s green.”
Rudolph looked up at Soupspoon then, and smiled. He showed his teeth and nodded, but he quickly looked back at the gamblers that surrounded him. Soupspoon knew that he’d have to wait. Rudy was the man now while Soupspoon was shrinking back to the size of a boy.
The men started shouting and throwing down bets.
Soupspoon sipped his beer and watched them from his table. It seemed like Rudolph was winning, but he couldn’t tell. He’d never been a gambler, never cared about taking chances like that.
“What you thinkin’ ’bout?” Sono was putting a fresh glass of beer on the table.
“Wonderin’ how could you stand it.”
“Stand what?”
“Bein’ cooped up in this smelly old room with all these here yappin’ hyena men.”
“Boxcars!” a tiny workman cried. “Damn!”
Somebody cackled. Money passed from hand to hand.
“I told Rudy ’bout you,” Sono said.
“What he say?”
“That if you still here when he get through that maybe you could talk.”
“I’ll be here.”
Son walked away from him slowly. She got about half the way to the bar, then she stopped and came back. She put her platter down and stood very close to the bluesman.
“Men are fools,” she said in a low voice. “They hide it pretty good, though, so mosta your women be even worse than fools ’cause they believe in them.
“But I don’t never trust a man,” Sono went on. “ ’Cause I come in an’ see’em here, where they don’t do no pretendin’. They might as well all line up an’ lay they ducks down on the table. That’s all they care about — who got the biggest dick an’ who get the most pussy. After four nights’a bein’ in this hellhole I got enough of men t’last me a year.”