“Pace,” Randy answered, then he looked his question at Kiki.
“Hare’s a friend’a Soup’s, Randy. We’re gonna go get somethin’ and sit in the park.”
They went to Bernie’s, which sat opposite Tompkins Square Park. She got cupcakes and a bulbous can of Japanese beer. Soupspoon and Hare split a pressed turkey sandwich and they each had coffee with lots of sugar poured in.
Soupspoon didn’t eat his sandwich half — he was still thinking about home.
The sun was strong and there was no shade on their bench. All around them were the people of the park. Young white men and women in tennis shoes that matched their exercise suits and shabby folks like Hare. There was a game of basketball going on between middle-aged men, some of them balding, who sported headbands and fading tattoos. The Sunday paper was everywhere being read. Children played on skateboards and with balls. Kiki drank her beer and studied the boy children. Randy and Hare were silent.
Soupspoon watched the sparrows and starlings at first, then the flies darting from place to place. From a tree nearby he spied tiny albino worms descending on invisible webs. On the ground ants made their ways haltingly, stopping now and then to rub antennae and move on.
“Everybody’s doin’ their business. The world don’t stop for you or nobody else,” Soupspoon said at last as he watched two hard-eyed starlings chase a sparrow away from a crumb.
“What’s that, Mr. Wise?” Randy asked.
“Spider hatches spinnin’ her web. That’s what she do. Ain’t no stoppin’ her, ’cept if you gonna kill her, stomp out her life and wipe away all the beauty she was and don’t leave a thing.”
Soupspoon was remembering the broken men and women of his dreams; the cowering of everyday life like a spider crouching when she senses a shadow. The shadows came every day in the Delta. So many shadows where it hardly seemed that a colored man ever got the chance to stand upright. Men and women wore shadows like cloaks and shawls; like the hundred-pound sacks of cotton they carried on their backs. Sacks bigger than they were. Like God’s big white toe about to crush out what little misery they had to let them know that they were alive.
The only time they got a chance to stand tall was when the shadows turned into night. And even then they didn’t stand — they jumped. Jumped and twirled to the music. The weight of a normal man under cover of darkness — darkness where no shadows could find you — was freedom for them. And freedom had a name. It was called the blues.
Hello blues, hello Satan.
Robert Johnson evoked the devil with a clear call. You might have been scared that morning — scared that your woman was gone; scared that your baby was dead; scared that the bottle was empty or that poison was scattered on your floor. But when RL tuned up you weren’t scared anymore, because that man told you, “Yes, it’s all true, so you better lap up the gravy while you can still lick.”
Soupspoon sat up straighter with these thoughts. He found himself looking across the park — straight into the eyes of Robert Johnson.
He was sitting at a small round table leaning over to kiss a pretty brown girl. She let him kiss her on the side of her big red lips, pouting almost angrily. Somebody who didn’t know black women might have thought that she resented the kiss but Soupspoon could see her pleasure.
The young man sat back (but how could he be so young?) and took a drink from his brown bag. He looked right into Soupspoon’s eye.
It was him. He cracked an evil smile, the smile that broke all the girls’ hearts, and raised his bag. His girlfriend looked over jealously. She didn’t even see Soupspoon. She was looking for some other girl. When she didn’t see the one RL was flirting with she gave him a full kiss on the mouth to mark her territory.
“You want a job, Mr. Wise?” Randy’s voice was severe and thoughtful.
“Yeah. Yeah, I sure do.”
“What could he do?” Kiki asked.
“Can you still play your guitar?”
“Yeah. I mean, not like I used to. Not like at the Savoy or Billy’s Room. But I can do a blues chord. Better’n these rock’n roll boys can do.”
“You see, I’m gonna do this T-shirt sale on Carmine Street at a street fair two weeks from Saturday. They do it every spring.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a like bazaar. You rent booths outside and if it doesn’t rain then a lotta people come and buy what’s bein’ sold. They got food and jewelry and clothes.’
“Yeah yeah, I got ya. I seen that happenin’. But you know, I never really went inside’a one. Too much of a crowd.”
“You’d be right inside the T-shirt booth with me. And you could just play. I bet lotsa people would come over and then if I had the right shirts I’d make some money. What do you think?”
“I don’t know...”
“Come on,” Kiki said. She even smiled. “Let’s do it. It’d be fun.”
“I don’t know, Kiki. But maybe. Maybe we could.”
Kiki smiled again. This time at Randy. She reached out and took his hand.
Soupspoon glanced over toward RL. He was gone. An empty park bench was all he saw.
“What’s wrong, Soup?” Kiki asked.
“You seen that man over there?”
“What man?”
But Kiki wasn’t looking at the bench. She was looking at Randy, rubbing his hand.
Soupspoon and Hare walked back toward the Beldin Arms without her and Randy. On the way they picked up a jug of red wine.
“You cain’t sleep here, Hare,” Soupspoon told his friend. They were nearing the bottom of the bottle. Hare had drunk most of it but Soupspoon had had enough that his fingers tingled and music played over and over through his mind.
“That’s okay, Soup,’ Hare said. “I got me a girlfriend.”
“Shit!”
Hare couldn’t repress his grin. “Sure do. SallySue. Live right down under this side’a the Williamsburg Bridge. They got a li’l trestle house down under there from a long time ago. Sally took it.”
“She got free house under the bridge? Shoot. Boy, you better put down that bottle, you know the wine done got to your head.”
“No lie, man,” Hare said, sounding almost like a black man talking. “She’s big an’ she got a twenty-two pistol — nobody mess with her. Nobody.”
“And she’s your girl? Big old smelly boy like you?”
All Hare did was to shake his head and grin.
Soupspoon felt an urge deep down somewhere. He wanted a big woman with a trestle house under the Williamsburg Bridge; carrying a sleek pistol and calling him home.
Hare got up and waved. “See ya on Carmine.”
“Huh?”
“When you do that street fair. I’ll be there with SallySue.” Hare went to the door. He waved again and then went out.
“SallySue,” Soupspoon intoned. He got that feeling again and felt relieved that Kiki probably wouldn’t be coming home that night.
Sixteen
The next day Soupspoon dialed a number from his address book, but it had been disconnected. Then he called information. His old friend Popeye Peter Laneau, who played mouth harp and who was Leadbelly’s uptown barber, was unlisted. His cousin Mattine was in the book but she was stone deaf. Mattine’s grandniece told Soupspoon that Mattine hadn’t heard from Uncle Popeye in twenty-four years.
He found a listing for Alfred Metsgar, a bass player who backed up Howlin’ Wolf and Quickdraw Marrs in Chicago. Alfred lived on 147th Street off Broadway. Soupspoon decided to go straight to there. Even if Metsgar was deaf he might be able to talk.
He packed his tape recorder and two bananas in an old tan briefcase that he’d found under Kiki’s couch. It would be the only testament of Quickdraw Marrs’s demise in the Black Sparrow Bar in East St. Louis forty-six years before.