It wasn’t a carpenter driving nails but some kind of vicious pounding that was designed to tear down and rend. It was a wall, Soupspoon thought, that wasn’t ready to come down yet.
Kiki dragged herself to the table, where there was a half-drunk cup of day-old coffee. She downed the dregs and grimaced.
Soupspoon watched the sunlight from the window climb up on the pale skin of her thigh. She didn’t look sexy — except where the sun struck her leg.
That same sun shone under Judge Whitestone’s house.
Kiki took a dirty juice glass out of the sink and filled it with beer from the Frigidaire. She drank it down and poured another. Then she came back to the couch and the same sexless embrace.
The hammering got louder.
Kiki held on to Soupspoon, but his hands were laid down on either side of her. He tapped his fingers in an off-beat; played against the ripping hammer.
“Somebody should complain,” Kiki said. Maybe it was half an hour later. The beer had gone flat from the heat of her hand. “Let’s take a walk, daddy.”
“Walk where?”
“I don’t know. Around.”
“Why you always goin’ down around Chrystie Street, girl? What’s down there for you?”
Kiki pulled away from him while trying to stand at the same time. Instead she fell off the couch.
“Then I’ll go my own damn self!” she yelled from Soupspoon’s feet.
“Noooo, no. I’ll go wichya.” He pushed himself up from the couch. “Just lemme get my pants on.”
“You don’t have to come. I can go myself.”
Now the sun was on her knee.
“You don’t have to be mad at me, girl. I said I’d walk wichya. I will.”
Kiki’s nostrils flared and her breath came hard. Soupspoon was wondering if she was going to try and hit him again, but then the hammering stopped.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly quiet herself. “Okay. Let’s get ready to go then.”
They went down through Little Italy on Baxter to Canal. The whole time Kiki was looking, especially when she saw little boys wandering or playing. Little black boys running ragged; no different, really, Soupspoon thought, from him when he was down on the work farms and plantations of the Delta.
They went up and down Mott and Mulberry, Bowery and Elizabeth. There wasn’t much traffic, because it was early in the morning and Sunday. Only a few pedestrians were out.
Kiki stopped at Hester and Chrystie and peered at the sidewalk as if it held some kind of secret.
“This is where they did it,” she said.
“Where they stabbed you?”
“Right here.”
Soupspoon looked down the bare streets. It was safe now but he knew how an empty, nowhere place could become an awful mean place.
Anywhere a man can walk, the blues is on his tail.
“Mr. Wise?” It was a man’s voice.
A gray man was standing there before them. Not old and not young. His shirt had a hint of green from when it was new and his pants were once blue. Both had aged, under the sun and in the rain, from many months of hard living. His hair, blond at birth, had whitened too from the elements and neglect. His skin was almost colorless but dark from bright sun and processed red wine. White men would have a hard time claiming this man.
“Who’re you?” Kiki asked. As she spoke she stepped between the stranger and her friend.
“Hare?” Soupspoon said. “Hare, is that you?”
The big man grinned.
He had been in the shelter when Soupspoon got there. He was stupid but nice. Whenever Soupspoon couldn’t get out of bed, Hare was there to help him. It was Hare who helped him down to the exit when he ran from the shelter.
The director had come to examine Soupspoon when he told them that he could barely get out of bed. They said that they’d have to take him to some hospital. Soupspoon knew what that meant — they’d take him into some ward of dying men and leave him to die all alone, not even a friend like Hare to smile and say good morning. He knew that if they piled him into that ambulance he’d be a dead man.
While they went to the director’s office to discuss how to move him, Soupspoon asked Hare to help him escape.
The big gray man had said, “Sure. Let’s go.”
“You hear about Norman Braddock?” Hare asked. It was as if he had run into a neighbor from down the hall and had stopped for a chat. “You know — Brandy?” Soupspoon didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want even to think about the shelter.
But he couldn’t help himself.
“Brandy?” Soupspoon had tried to put everything about the shelter out of his mind. About how they locked them in at night; how they told them when to get up and when the lights went out. One man, a big toothy warden of a social worker, even told him that the pain in his leg wasn’t so bad. “I got a toothache,” he said. “But you don’t see me complaining.”
If you had a nickel it was gone. If you had to crap you needed permission first and had to have someone, probably a woman, go unlock the toilet for you. Cancer grew like milkweed in the men’s shelter and Soupspoon didn’t want any of it.
But Brandy was different. Big-eyed, Buddha-looking, sienna-colored Brandy. Big old stomach he grew so he could rest his hands there. Brandy sat at the end of his cot most of the time. Every morning he took the disposable razor, the tiny bar of hotel soap, and the toothbrush wrapped in plastic paper to do his toilet down at the sink. Then, when he was all clean, he’d put on his glasses and sit at the end of his bed reading scraps of newspapers he took from the trash. He didn’t bother anybody. Nobody stole anything from Brandy, because he didn’t have anything to steal. His broken-down brogans were too big for anybody else. He did his laundry naked in the basement twice a week.
Soupspoon never talked to the Brandy-man. But he respected him. Brandy was a clean man, happy reading and comfortable in his fate. He’d given up everything but being a man.
“How’d he die?” Soupspoon asked. “He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t even that old.”
“Stabbed.”
“Stabbed? Stabbed for what?”
“His glasses,” Hare said simply, accepting the fact as reason in itself. “Somebody tried to steal his glasses.”
“Steal the fillin’s right outta your mouth in the mortuary when you dead,” Soupspoon said, remembering Bannon and his hatred. He had the taste of mealy apples on his tongue.
“Um, hey, Mr. Wise?” Hare shuffled from side to side in a show of humility. “You got a coupla bucks? I could sure use two dollars. It’s for food.” He added this last for Kiki, who had been looking away most of the time, but who turned to look at him when he asked for the handout.
Soupspoon touched his pocket. Kiki had given him a little cash to carry around. He hated to take from a woman, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted to give to this big dumb white man because he had helped when nobody else seemed to care. But he didn’t want Kiki to get mad either. He didn’t want her to go off because he was giving her money away to some bum in the street.
But before he could speak, Kiki asked the gray man, “You hungry?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“We could get some food at Bernie’s Delicatessen and sit in the park across the street.”
They walked back up to the East Village, stopping at Randall’s one-room apartment on Avenue C. Kiki went in and came out with the gangly boy to meet Soupspoon and Hare.
“I thought you be out on St. Mark’s on a nice day like this, Randy,” Soupspoon said.
“I try and do my math work on Sundays, Mr. Wise. It’s quiet almost all morning on Sundays and I can really get into the work.”
“What school?” Hare asked. He tried to stand up straight and look Randy in the eye but he kept squinting, nodding, and looking down.