Ruby and Inez sit out on the front porch arguing about politics and recipes and what so-and-so said at the store last Thursday.
His parents and brother were already dead. Influenza tore through their small shack, leaving a five-year-old boy just barely alive. He staggered away from that death too, like he had from the shelter. And he was saved then also. Because if Ruby and Inez hadn’t taken him in he would have starved or gone insane from loneliness.
Ruby wore a blue cotton dress that had rough yellow flowers printed on it; Inez wore pants like a man and she smoked a corncob pipe. Inez kept a praying mantis around the house to eat pesky bugs. The big green walking stick could often be seen riding on Inez’s shoulder or striding down her arm. When he was a boy little Atwater thought that walking sticks were the souls of saints that protected them all from harm.
Ruby and Inez were his only family, but he wasn’t blood to them. They weren’t blood to each other. But just good friends that lived together and that took care of him because they needed a child to order around.
Soupspoon felt a sharp jolt in his hip that opened his eyes. He saw a little blond boy, less than two, sitting on the floor with a red-and-blue ball between his legs. He was looking at that ball like God gazing at the world. Soupspoon imagined rivers and trees sprouting under that scrutiny. A whole world of buffalo and dinosaurs, flowers as big as your head and cold water deep and clean.
Asleep again, with lion claws digging into his hip. The darkness of half-sleep became bright sun shining through the plate glass. The baby yowled and Soupspoon roused to look at him again. A pinched-faced white woman was holding him in her lap. Next to her sat a dark man, probably Latin. His left arm was wrapped in a shirt deeply stained with blood. He was nodding off too. The baby struggled to get free. He was looking at that ball like it was his last chance. And Soupspoon wanted to get it for him. He wanted to get up out of his chair and go get that ball. He wanted to cry like that baby.
“Mr. Wise?”
A young man, younger even than the cops from yesterday. He was dressed in doctor white, not orderly white. He was short and smiling. Behind him Kiki looked worried.
“Can you talk, Mr. Wise? Can you make words?”
Soupspoon shook his head, hunched his shoulders, and smiled.
“Well, your friend here here says that you’ve had a pretty tough time of it.” The doctor turned to Kiki and said, “Why don’t you bring him along?”
They went through double swinging doors into a hall where nurses and doctors went from patient to patient, between aisles of sick people loitering in their beds. It was a long hall filled with flat tables that were separated by raspy plastic curtains. At the far end of the hall was a wide door that burst open suddenly. Four men carrying two stretchers rushed in, followed by more men. When they rushed past Soupspoon, he saw the bloodied face of one of the patients. He could tell by the angle of the eye and the loose lips that the man was already dead. He tried to see the other one, but they moved too fast for him.
“A-M-P thirty-one,” a paramedic barked out. Then they were gone. With his voice the way it was, Soupspoon couldn’t even whisper a prayer.
“You should always say a prayer when you see a dead body,” Uncle Fitzhew used to say. “You know they souls be all confused when they die. Yo’ li’l words might set’em straight fo’heaven.”
Soupspoon always respected the tall gravedigger “uncle.” He was no more blood than Inez or Ruby, but he came by once in a while to drink wine and play dominoes for nickels. He had the biggest thing in Cougar Bluff, everybody knew it. White men used to ask him would he take a dollar to show it off, but he wouldn’t, “not for no white man.”
“Open wide, Mr. Wise,” the doctor said. He poked a popsicle stick down his throat and felt his neck. Then he pulled Soupspoon’s eye wide and shone a light into it. He took something and shoved it in his ear while looking at a red-lit panel. Numbers jumped around until they stopped at 102.5.
The doctor and Kiki helped him off with his jacket and shirt, shoes and socks. The doctor listened to his chest and felt his skin. He looked at his fingers and toes and at the sores along his ankles. Then he sat in a metal chair at Soupspoon’s side.
“My name is Mussar, Mr. Wise. Alan Mussar. I’m a resident here.” The young doctor smiled with his mouth, but his eyes looked sad. Soupspoon wondered how a man could work in a place where they dragged in dead people every day.
“Are you a relative?”
“A friend of, of his daughter’s, doctor. We just found him at the shelter yesterday. They hadn’t talked in a long time and she didn’t know what he’d come to. She had to go to work and I brought him over. Is he real sick?”
“Well, there’s infection in his throat and he’s got a fever. His glands are okay. But we need X-rays for the hip.” The doctor stopped a moment and looked closely at Kiki.
“Does his daughter have health insurance?”
“Sure she does. She works for the city, they have full family coverage.”
“Do you have her card?”
“No, but I could go get it. I mean, by tomorrow I could.”
The doctor took a prescription pad from the shelf behind him and jotted something down, and then he took another piece of paper and wrote a short note, which he signed along with his phone number.
“Take this,” he said, handing her both pieces of paper. “And fill it at a pharmacy. Bring your friend to the University Hospital. Make sure you have his insurance cards. They won’t admit him in this hospital unless you can prove that he can pay.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Kiki drawled. “She’ll get him there tomorrow morning.”
“He’s got a bad infection in his throat,” the doctor said. “Warm liquids, salt gargle, and this prescription four times a day. And,” he said, taking a handful of small aluminum packets from a drawer, “give him these for any pain he might feel.”
“Yes, doctor,” Kiki said, taking the dozen or so packages.
Soupspoon wondered why the doctor didn’t talk to him. He was the sick man.
Outside Kiki was singing. It was late afternoon and warmer than the morning or the day before. They stopped at a deli and got chocolate chip cookies and apple juice. Kiki kept saying, “We did it. We did it, Soupspoon Wise.”
Five
That night, when Soupspoon took his blanket and stretched out on the couch, Kiki came over and sat down next to him.
“You don’t have to sleep over here, daddy. There’s still room in the bed for you.”
“No,” he said. His voice was weak but still strong enough that she didn’t have to put her ear in his mouth to hear it. “It ain’t right.”
“I don’t mind. And I don’t know if that couch isn’t too hard for your hips.”
“A man ought to be able to sleep by hisself, girl.”
“You scared of me, Soupspoon?”
“It ain’t like that, Kiki. I really ’preciate it, what you done and all. But I hurt an’ I need t’sleep alone.”
“Please,” she said, sounding as if she meant it. “Please come to bed with me.”
“Why?”
“I... I don’t know. I’m just lonely, I guess.”
“I’m not your boyfriend. I’m twice your age, more. An’ I’m sick. You don’t even know me.”
Kiki jerked her hands back and forth and picked at a loose thread in the seam of her jeans. Soupspoon could see the fear in those hands.
“My hip hurts, honey,” he whispered. “I got to sleep by myself. But if you get scared you can come on over an’ visit. Okay? I’ll be right here if you get scared.”