The five steps to the chair and table left Soupspoon on his knees. He made it into the chair, trying to remember the chord he played behind that song. It wasn’t in his mind but he was sure that his fingers remembered.
Through the window he could see three pigeons on the clothesline that stretched across the street. Two together and one apart. He smiled at them and rapped his knuckles on the tabletop — one-two, one.
A ruckus erupted in the hall and the door flung open. Soupspoon expected to see Nate and Tony again, but it was the girl. Kiki came in breathing hard, pushing an ancient wooden wheelchair. It must have been fifty years old. All cherry wood except for the cracked wicker back and seat. The back was high and the wheels were surrounded by thick rubber strips. There was a big lever brake on it and big flat armrests like on a reclining chair.
“Mrs. Manetti loaned it to us.” She had a brilliant smile for him. “What do you want for breakfast, Soup?”
He smiled and hunched his shoulders for her.
He was amazed again. All the years he lived as a poor man among poor people and it always happened like this. You might know somebody for twenty years and never know their first name or what their feet looked like. But then one day something happens and somebody you never even thought of is there in your life closer than family. You know their smell and their temper.
That’s how it was with Robert Johnson.
You looked up one day and there he was singing and acting crazy. He told you about far-off places in the world and played music that was stranger yet. He made songs that were deep down in you — and then you looked up again and he was gone. He took something of yours that you didn’t even know you had; something your mother and your father never knew about. And taking it away he left you with something missing — and that something was better than anything else that ever you had.
Kiki fried canned spaghetti in leftover bacon fat and made sandwiches from it with dark toast. Soupspoon drank mint tea. He watched her down a shot of whiskey.
“What you lookin’ at?” The girl’s voice was hard. “You don’t know what I’ve been through. This is the only thing keeping me together right now.”
She stared into his eyes until Soupspoon lowered his gaze.
He’d been stared down by angry women before.
Hard lovin’ comes wit’ hard knuckles, his Uncle Fitzhew used to say.
Kiki lightened up after that. She didn’t mind helping Soupspoon with his toilet. She helped him on with his wedding suit and put him in the chair. Randy came soon after, and together they lowered him step by step to the bottom floor.
Soupspoon looked around at the gray-green walls of painted plaster and at the cracked granite floors. There was a sixty-watt lightbulb at each narrow landing. But even in the dim light he could make out the dirty corners.
Almost thirty years in that building and he’d never been above the first floor. The walls echoed from Kiki and Randy groaning. He had the feeling of being a child; carried about and wheeled around.
“You okay, Mr. Wise?” Randy asked.
Soupspoon nodded and smiled in the gawky boy’s face.
Arab my butt.
On the first floor they went past Soupspoon’s apartment door. It was open on the empty living room. The floor was bare and unswept; even the shades had been taken off the windows. Twenty-eight years it had been his home and now it wasn’t anything. He couldn’t remember how his things fit in there.
There was already graffiti across the wall slapped on with emerald-green paint:
Soupspoon didn’t know the language but he knew what it meant. It said that he could never live in his own house again.
Outside a dog was lifting his leg against the big yellow sofa. The cushions were gone, somebody’s bed now. The bed was still there, so filthy that Soupspoon hoped they’d pass by quickly so that no one would make fun of him. The rosewood dresser was half the way down the block, shattered.
Kiki put a blanket around him and they went to Avenue A and up by Tompkins Square Park.
Soupspoon watched his breath form into frost on the blanket.
They cut west when they got to Twelfth Street. Long barren walls and an occasional drug dealer was all there was.
“I told you that I tried calling you, didn’t I, Kiki?” Randy said at the beginning of the block.
“Uh-huh.”
“But then I remembered that you always unplug the phone, so I called your job too.”
“Yeah? What’d they say?”
“That you quit.”
“What?”
“Have you called them?”
“Not yet.”
“But why do you think they say you quit?”
“I don’t know,” Kiki answered. “I didn’t wanna call’em when I was flat on my butt in the hospital bed.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t.”
“But suppose they fired you?”
“What can I do about that? I didn’t call. I can’t go back and change that now.”
“But you should have called them. You should have.”
Kiki stopped suddenly. The big wooden chair lurched so that Soupspoon had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. She turned with the chair to face her sometime boyfriend.
“Get away from here, Randy,” Kiki said in a voice so hushed that Soupspoon could hardly hear.
“Aw com’on, honey.”
“Get your ass away from me.”
“I gave up my spot to help you today. I skipped classes for this.”
Soupspoon could hear the cold hatred in the girl’s breathing. Her ragged silence carried on the cold air.
“Damn!” Randy said after half a minute.
Soupspoon watched him walk back the way they had come.
Then Kiki yanked the chair around and they were moving again.
They went for blocks without her saying a word. Past the big yellow video store and the Korean market and florist. At Broadway was a large bookstore that specialized in “monster books” and toys.
They moved quickly down the street after that, Kiki bouncing the chair on its hard rubber wheels up and down the curbs. Soupspoon closed his eyes. A large spike was being driven into the bone, cracking it wide open. He wanted to yell, but his throat was closed. He wanted to run, but he could barely hold on to the chair...
“What?” Kiki shouted. “What?”
Soupspoon opened his eyes and saw that they had stopped moving. He had turned halfway around in the chair and grabbed Kiki by the arm. The hot spike ran down his right leg. She looked like demon with her eyes opened wide and her brows deeply furrowed. He could hear the bone-cracking gale of hate. “What?”
But when Kiki saw his face he knew that she saw his suffering. She stroked his forehead and turned him around and got down on her knees next to the chair. She fussed with the blankets, pulling them up around his neck again, and then she kissed him over his right eye.
From then on they rode slowly and Kiki went out of her way to find the special ramps they built for people in wheelchairs. They went across University and Fifth and Sixth. Finally they reached Seventh Avenue and turned left. Kiki wheeled Soupspoon up a wide ramp and through two wide glass doors that were held open by a black man dressed all in white.
The sudden heat made Soupspoon sleepy. His eyes felt scratchy and he started to nod. He had the feeling of motion, though, and he could hear voices. Kiki’s voice, petulant and on the way to getting loud. Another woman was talking too.
“I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait.”
Then something about a doctor. But it was the smell of rubbing alcohol that told him he was in a hospital. He was so tired that he fell asleep listening to them argue and bicker. The choppy voices worked their way down into Soupspoon’s sleepy mind, taking him back to earlier arguments.