Jelly Roll Morton hissed out a quick melody from the record player. In the bright whiteness of the wall Mavis caught the flash of Soupspoon’s smile as he looked up sideways from his guitar on-stage. When he was playing was the only time that he was ever happy. And she was only happy in the presence of memories and bright white light.
The intercom cried again.
“I heard ya, Rudy! Go on home now! Call me tomorrah, in the daytime. I’ll put in the phone at three.”
Mavis took her finger from the intercom and went back to the sofa. She wrapped herself in a thin white sheet and reclined, thinking about Egyptian queens laying up in their coffins, wrapped in fine white silks — their hands over their breasts.
She didn’t think about Soupspoon; about him dying out there in all that smelly darkness. But he was out there. She thought about orange peel, about squeezing the skin of the fruit close to her nose, about the bitter sting. She thought about the crisp odor of new leather shoes and, with that, the stale grainy smell of her first lover’s penis.
She thought about flowers.
Mavis folded her feet up under her body and covered her head with the sheet. She closed her eyes and imagined the whiteness of the room. The last Jelly Roll record fell from the stalk-stack. Before the song was over Mavis was far away watching a boychild play with his new spinning top. He wanted to know how flies landed upside down. When she reached out to stroke his head he looked at her with big vacant eyes. The boy was her young son but he was more than that. He was every little boy who had to grow into rough, and finally broken, men. He was happy because he was ignorant.
She started to say something but the boy laughed and ran away.
“Catch me,” he cried.
He ran, impossibly fast, across a field of wildflowers. The sun began to fade. And when he was out of sight, night descended and Mavis was asleep.
Fourteen
Mavis had been Soupspoon’s last chance at any kind of normal life. He didn’t mind that they couldn’t have children. He didn’t care that she cried, sometimes for days. He was happy to get away from the heartache and despair of the deep south. Up north he played in nightclubs and at barbecues. The upper states were loaded with Negroes who wanted a taste of down home — and he was better with his guitar every night.
There was some time away from home, there had to be. By bus usually, but also by train and even a car now and then. Never in his whole life had Soupspoon been airborne. There were times that he was away from home for two months and more. But he was always glad to come back to Mavis. She always had something good on the stove in their uptown cold-water New York flat. Pig tails and black-eyed peas was a favorite; collard greens and cornbread on a plate of their own on the side.
Mavis loved her daddy’s foreskin. “Come on to bed, baby,” she’d say in the early days when the sadness only came now and then. “Let’s go shuck that corn.”
He saved up his money and all his love on the road. Didn’t play with the B-girls, didn’t play with himself either. He held Mavis in his arms until it was quiet, even in Harlem. When he was through his mind was as dark as the night sky and that was all right with him.
But then a chill came into his mind one night and Soupspoon woke up to an empty bed.
Mavis was in the kitchen. All the lights were on and she was smoking Pall Malls and drinking beer. Her elbows were up against her side and her legs were tight together She was perfectly still but tears ran freely from her eyes.
“Woman was the saddest thing I ever seed,” he once said. “She didn’t even get no release from cryin’.”
One time he came home from the road and there wasn’t anything cooking on the stove. Everything in the house had been painted white. The walls, the floor, the wood chairs, and even the little dolls Mavis had saved from when she was a child. There wasn’t a bottle of liquor left in the cabinet.
“It’s just a style,” she said. “Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with it.”
She couldn’t go to bed without a light on, couldn’t even take a nap in the dark.
He wanted to say something but the light made him quiet.
Mavis would throw a fit if he dirtied something or left a stain. She put everything of his into a closet to keep the house clean — even sealed the sofa and stuffed chair with plastic because he might sit on them.
He knew he should have said something. But even when she shamed him — by saying that the only reason he even wanted her was to put his thing down where RL’s thing had been — he didn’t fight. That night he tried to sleep on the couch but it was too sweaty so he curled up in a sheet on the floor. They never slept together again, and finally he moved out. He’d heard a year later that she’d gone back down to Texas to keep Cort’s grave covered with fresh flowers.
He couldn’t even hold on to his woman. He never missed her after all the crazy things she did and all the terrible things she said — he was lonely and didn’t want a friend.
His music was empty too. Just an old bastard style. Singing the same words every night to people who didn’t care, who didn’t even know what it meant to dust your broom. He felt like an old dog that rolls in a carcass out in the woods. Maybe a long time ago his ancestors did that to throw prey off the scent, but now he’d just come home and smell up the house.
He put his guitar down and became the day janitor at the Calumet Building. At night he’d roll out a sleeping bag so he could call the cops if anybody tried to break in. They let him go after thirty years. He didn’t even have Social Security.
Kiki’s drunken snore filled the room.
“I’m gonna lay me down in a bed fulla blues,” he sang softly to himself.
“No, daddy,” Kiki answered from her sleep.
Soupspoon laid down on the couch and fell right into a dream about the Delta.
After the fire at Terry’s juke joint young Soupspoon went to heal at Darnell Calter’s house, which was on an unnamed tributary of the Potato River. Rich white people had fancy homes along the Potato at that time.
In the dream Soupspoon had gotten better and was with Darnell under the deck of Judge Whitestone’s cabin. Darnell used to like to go there because it was cool under the shade and you could let a line down in the water and no one would know. Mrs. Whitestone had passion fruit vines growing down the side of the house, so the underpart wasn’t even visible from the rare passing boat. Darnell and Soupspoon had crawled down to the water’s edge under the house and had their poles stuck in the mud so they could see if a catfish or carp was pulling on the line.
“You a fool to follah RL, Atwater,” Darnell said. “He ain’t no good. An’ he got the kinda bad luck fall on people ’round him.”
“Uh-uh,” Soupspoon replied. He was laying on his back letting the dappled light through the vines fall on his face. “That man play some music I got to know.”
“You almost got kilt already, boy. What got to happen t’wake you up?”
There was the lazy swish of an alligator diving in the river and the flitting of hummingbird wings and cicadas crying. Soupspoon knew he was dreaming. He kept his eyes closed like a guitar man who’s hit a good note and just wants to feel it in the dark.
“Man gotta settle down, Atwater,” Darnell continued. “All RL want is that pussy and that whiskey.”
“That’s all you want, Darnell.” Soupspoon sat up to look at his friend. “Only you too scared to go out there an’ get it. You hate it, down snatchin’ cotton and haulin’ it. You hate how hard it is but you ain’t got nuthin’ else to do. I’m tired’a every day just doin’ my business an’ fallin’ into my bed. I could just as well be you an’ it wouldn’t make no difference at all.”