The door to apartment 3L was slender, it reminded Soupspoon of a coffin’s lid. There was a straw mat on the floor that read GOD’S WELCOME. No fanfare for the musician, just a plain pine door stained maple and sealed. There were two deep dents in the door made by something hard and jagged and a large green smudge almost dead center. Graffiti, Soupspoon thought, that somebody tried to wipe out.
Before he’d gotten up the courage to knock he was startled by the door coming open. An ancient woman, small as a girl, stood there leaning on a new aluminum walker. She wore black slacks, a puffy white sweater embroidered with beaded white flowers, and a lopsided gray wig. She had on black-lensed sunglasses with white frames in the shape of swans whose wings arched out beyond the width of her small head.
“You the ice man?” she asked clearly. Her lips were beautiful. Full and large. They wrapped around the words as if she were eating an overripe pear.
“No, ma’am, my name is...”
“You got a cigar, mister?” she asked. “’Cause I hurt my hip and I sure could use some release.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ain’t you Bobby?” The old woman had begun to struggle with her walker. She reminded Soupspoon of somebody who couldn’t do one more push-up. Her head sagged down between her shoulders and tremors went through her arms. But that didn’t stop her. She cocked her head sideways and looked up.
He caught the dry, slightly sweet scent of old age. He was looking at the cockeyed face with the beautiful lips, ready to say no again, when a deep voice boomed out, “What you doin’ here, man?”
Behind the little woman was a long dark hallway. From the gloom a large man appeared. Three hundred pounds of hard fat in short-sleeved orange overalls. His face was brown like a tree trunk with a wiry mustache that ran down his chin and throat disappearing into the collar of his T-shirt.
“Come on, Miss Winder. You shouldn’t be out at this door.”
As soon as she heard the big man’s voice the woman started making her way back into the house. Soupspoon saw the rhythm of it. She waited for the big man to be watching a basketball game or maybe to get on the phone, and then she’d sneak out to the door looking for ice cubes, cigars, and a man named Bobby.
“What you want?” The big man held the door ready to slam it shut.
“Alfred Metsgar.”
“What you want him for?” His neck was as wide as his head. The mustache ran down the lines of a normal-sized neck. It was an optical illusion to make him seem normal.
“We used to be friends, I mean... we was musicians together a long time ago. I just thought I’d come on by an’ shout at’im.”
The name MIKE was stitched over the man’s left breast. Mike was breathing hard — as if maybe he was getting ready to fight.
“Is Alfred here?”
Mike’s eyes were dark and unhealthy. His scowl was mean and Soupspoon was sure that he was going to be sent away.
Mike surprised him when he said, “It’s the door down on your right,” and backed away allowing Soupspoon to enter. After Soupspoon had gone halfway down the hall, Mike yelled out, “Mozelle!” A door came open and a woman stuck her head out. She was tall and skinny, somewhere in her late forties with a salt-and-pepper Bride of Frankenstein hairdo.
She didn’t say much. “Down yonder,” to say that Alfred was just down the hall. “Naw,” when asked if she was his daughter. When Soupspoon asked if he could talk to the old man she said, “If you wan’.”
Alfred Metsgar’s room was no more than a cell. It even had bars on the unshaded window. This window looked into another room where, in a single bed, Soupspoon could see the back of somebody’s head that poked out from under a mound of covers.
Alfred was too busy looking into that bedroom to notice his old friend. The shrunken old man was sitting in a wooden chair, hemmed in by squared armrests. He was leaning forward and peering toward the bars. The bed beyond him was neatly made. A bright-orange-and-yellow quilt covered the lower half.
Alfred wore a threadbare T-shirt and had an army blanket over his legs. The pitted wood floor was swept and there was no dust on the short two-drawered dresser that stood beside the window.
“Sh!” Metsgar said, even though Soupspoon hadn’t uttered a word. “She still sleep.”
Soupspoon looked over at the head and then back to Alfred.
“She like to sleep late, late.” He kept his voice low — a proud parent letting a spoiled child get her rest.
“Alfred?” Soupspoon said, partly to get the old bass player to recognize him and partly because he wondered if this actually was his old friend.
His skin seemed to have become liquid. It had seeped slowly downward until it molded almost perfectly over the bones of his face; the effect was to make him look like a brown skull. Below the eyes the flesh had bunched into downward-rolling waves. The deep ocher skin at the top of his head was so thin it seemed that a hard breath would separate skin from bone.
“Yeah?” Alfred jawed.
“The musician, right?”
He turned away and whispered, “She still sleep.”
The room stank of urine, like the men’s shelter had. Because of the smell, Soupspoon didn’t want to sit on the bed. But there was no place else to sit. His leg was hurting him some — from the long walk, he told himself — but he decided to stay on his feet for a while more.
Soupspoon was about to ask his question when Alfred put his hand out and pointed Soupspoon to come somewhere, or to go.
“Over there! Over there! Right chere!” Metsgar waved his hand around meaninglessly. Soupspoon wanted to obey his urgent commands but he didn’t know what to do.
“Go ovah an’ sit on the dresser. Then you could peek around the side.”
Soupspoon sat on the short stack of drawers and opened Kiki’s briefcase across his lap. He took the cassette player and pressed the record and play buttons.
“Alfred?” he whispered.
“Shhhhh! Look!”
Soupspoon followed the the direction of the lizard-skin finger pointing over the sill and into the room across the way. There again he saw the head lying in repose. He saw now that it was a woman’s head.
Soupspoon felt like a child again waiting by the side of his mother’s bed — waiting for her to rise.
He’d wake up with the sun through homemade cardboard shades. Then he’d be roused by the racket of his father’s ax chopping wood for the stove. In the season when his father had plantation work, Soupspoon would wait in the bed with his big brother Holden until he heard heavy bootsteps marching away from the house. He’d take his blocks down from the loft and go up next to his mother’s bed and play very quietly, watching her round brown face.
That was greatest feeling of love in Soupspoon’s whole life: guarding over his mother while morning birds played and his brother snored up in the loft. His stomach gurgled but he loved to see his mother sleep and would wait all day rather than see her get up and go off to the cotton mills.
When she finally opened her eyes she would smile so nice and say, “Mornin’, baby. You et?” He’d shake his head and then she’d kiss him for being so good and letting her sleep. More than sixty years later Soupspoon still felt a pang against his heart when he thought of her rising up from the straw-filled bed.
“See? Look,” Alfred Metsgar said.
The woman in the bed had turned over and was now sitting up. She was naked as far as she could be seen. Plump and the color of a dusky orange, she was young. Soupspoon moved closer to the wall so as not to be seen looking. But he soon realized that he had no reason to hide. The young woman never once looked into Alfred’s room. She got up from the bed with her naked back to the window and pulled on a loose pair of underpants. Alfred leered as she walked from one corner of the room to the other — picking things up and putting them down again.