“I heard Linda say, ‘Get’im, and the dog that was half wolf was on Lyle and Lyle was screamin’ and runnin’ from the house.”
Soupspoon sat back a minute. Kiki took that moment to take the cassette out and flip it over to get whatever else there was for him to say. Soupspoon looked over at Kiki. She looked him in the eye in a way she never had before.
“Is that all, Mr. Wise?” she asked after finishing with the recorder. Soupspoon looked at her a long moment before saying more.
“RL an’ me lit out that night. We hitched a ride on a hay truck that went all the way to Leland. RL wanted to stay with Linda but we finally got him to go. He swore that he’d get back to her one day.
“Years later I heard that Lyle had lost a hand to Lupe, which ruined him for sharecroppin’. He went down to New Orleans to live with his a’ntee. But he was broken after that tragedy and took to drinkin’. Two years later they brought him home to be buried.
“I traveled with RL for a while after that, but one night, just outside’a Panther Burn, there was this fire. Me an’ Bob was playin’ hard an’ things got so wild that the juke joint caught on fire. The whole place burnt to the ground. I ate too much smoke and had to rest for a while. I guess I coulda caught up to RL later but I just couldn’t.
“I didn’t hear ’bout him again until I hear one of his songs on a phonograph record that a rich colored undertaker had in Florence, Alabama.
“A few weeks after that I heard that Robert Johnson was dead.
“They said Satan come got him in a little place outside Greenwood, Mississippi. Satan or a jealous man.”
Soupspoon sighed and left three blank minutes on the tape. When he finally spoke again his voice was deeper and hoarse like a man who had just recently awakened from a full night’s sleep.
“You know I played a whole lotta music in these fifty years since he died. I made a lotta people happy and a lotta people dance. I could play anything on my guitar. Sometimes I’d look out in the crowd an’ see women with tears in their eyes. But the music they was hearin’ was just a weak shadow, just like some echo of somethin’ that happened a long time ago. They was feelin’ somethin’, but not what Robert Johnson made us feel in Arcola. They cain’t get that naked. And they wouldn’t want to even if they could, ’cause you know Robert Johnson’s blues would rip the skin right off yo’ back. Robert Johnson’s blues get down to a nerve most people don’t even have no more.
“I never played the blues, not really. I run after it all these years. I scratched at its coattails and copied some notes. But the real blues is covered by mud and blood in the Mississippi Delta. The real blues is down that terrible passway where RL traveled, sufferin’ an’ singin’ till he was dead. I followed him up to the gateway, but Satan scared me silly and left me back to cry.”
Twelve
Neither one of them spoke for a while after he finished his story. Kiki sat back holding a cigarette, just letting it burn. Soupspoon leaned forward on his elbows. He looked like a man does after completing a long and difficult job.
“They ain’t nuthin’ Robert Johnson did worth rememberin’ except the way he played guitar and how he made livin’ just that much more easy t’bear. You got botha them things now, here today. They got his records t’listen to an’ me t’bear witness.” Soupspoon slapped the table and showed his teeth.
“I gotta get to work early, Soup,” Kiki said from her bed. She had a glass of whiskey in one hand and a burnt-out butt in the other. Soupspoon saw by the way her head lolled to one side that Kiki was drunk again.
She winked at him.
Kiki put the cigarette in her whiskey hand and got to her feet with some effort. She grabbed onto the head post of the bed to keep upright. Then she spilled the whole glass of whiskey out on the bed. It looked like she did it on purpose but Soupspoon knew that she was just drunk. He jumped up and grabbed a towel from the sink. While he toweled the liquor from the bed he said, “If I had ever done that my a’ntees woulda hung me up by my ears... my wife woulda kilt me.”
“What wife?”
Kiki wore a light green dress with clusters of tiny red apples printed all over. She went up close behind Soupspoon and leaned against him. It was a drunk woman’s weight he felt against his back.
“What wife, Soup?”
He could feel the hot breath, smell its liquor.
“You better get to bed if you wanna make work tomorrow, Kiki.”
“Come to bed with me, daddy.” Pale arms snaked around his chest. Kiki’s fingers pressed at his breastbone.
“How’s your hip?” she asked.
“It hurts some.”
Kiki put her mouth to his ear and breathed for a while before saying, “I could ride you so good you wouldn’t even feel it, baby.”
Soupspoon went still like the levee lizards of his dreams. He let his hands hang down and whispered, “You got to get to bed, honey.”
“Come with me.” Her arms tightened. With controlled strength she began to pull him toward the bed. She kissed his ear and said, “I liked your story.”
“You did, huh?”
Soupspoon stumbled and they were at the foot of the big bed. It loomed out in front of him and the weight of his savior began to bear him down.
“I never knew all that stuff about you, honey.”
As they lowered to the bed, Kiki’s thigh rose over his leg. He remembered a feeling almost lost in the pain of cancer.
“I could play you a song,” he said as the slippery tongue tickled the hairs in his ear.
“You could?” Her hand ran the distance between his knee and his navel.
Soupspoon almost forgot what he’d been saying.
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“What kinda song?”
“A love song. A song I heard when I’as just a boy down in Cougar Bluff, Mississippi.”
Soupspoon sat up and looked down on Kiki. She was a plain woman but her red hair was beautiful. She hiked her dress up to her crotch and looked deep into his eyes. He felt his heart skip once and made it to his feet before she could reach out for him. He went behind the couch and brought out his red guitar.
“I want you to fuck me,” Kiki said so loud that Soupspoon was sure that Mrs. Green upstairs could hear.
He sat on the bed next to Kiki and started tuning his guitar. His fingers felt stiff and clumsy but the sound was still in his mind. The strings whined a little from long years without play but they came half the way back to life for him. Kiki became silent while Soupspoon cocked his ear to make sure that his chords were just right.
He picked the words, note by note, as he sang, hearing an old man in his voice — a man he’d never heard sing the blues before.
Inez insisted on painting the porch pink. Sweet peas she had planted crawled up string, half the way to the roof. He remembered the little rays of sun making hotspots on his arms and Fitzhew singing “The Half-Blind Woman Blues” while Inez and Ruby leaned next to each other behind the slanted screen of sweet pea blossoms.