On the top shelf of the closet, under a stack of three straw hats, was the box Hattie had given Kiki after she came running out to Hattie’s house, crying and bleeding from her ass. A tall thin man as black and shiny as tar was sitting in the front room of her two-room shack. He came into the bedroom after a little while and said, “You cain’t leave that chile here.”
“What I’m s’posed to do, Hector? You want me t’put her out there in the dirt? You more worried about some goddamn white man than you scared’a God?”
“God knows the trouble I got. He ain’t gonna blame me for this here.”
“If you scared then go on,” Hattie said. “An’ git yo’ butt outta here anyway. This girl don’t need to be ’round no men.”
Hector went out but Kiki could hear him from time to time in the other room. She had a fever again like when she had flu. She could always come to Hattie. Hattie listened to every word she ever said.
“Tell me a story,” Kiki begged.
“Shut up, child.”
But Kiki remembered that all she had to do was keep on asking and finally the story would come.
Once there came a loud knock on the door. Hector came in, picked Kiki up from the bed, and took her out of the window and into the woods. He held her rough and tight the way her father did when he wanted to do it. When she tried to scream he held her mouth. She fought against him but he was too strong.
Her nose was stuffy from crying and the skinny man’s hand was clamped tight over her mouth. Kiki went silent as she concentrated on sucking in the slender stream of air through her almost fully clogged nostril.
She got fuzzy-headed.
The light from Hattie’s house looked to her like big colored snowflakes and the loud voice of her father was just a jumble of mad words. “Mr. Waters! Mr. Waters!” was all she could make out from what Hattie said.
When the shouting came out back, Hector pulled further off into the wood. He whispered in her ear, “Sh!” Then he released his hold on her mouth.
She had never, before or since, tasted anything so rich and pure as the air in that deadly wood. Her lungs tingled with the beginnings of pneumonia as her father blundered around lost, unable to find her.
“Kiki! Kiki, you come on out here!” he shouted. “You cain’t run from me, girl! Come out here!”
She was only fourteen but she understood that he had come alone. Alone because he was ashamed and didn’t want his friends to see the blood at the back of her skirt.
But tomorrow, she knew, he’d have his white friends come down. She didn’t care much about that, though. Not while she was sitting on Hector like some old comfortable chair; hard but made to hold her.
She passed out and didn’t come to again until she was in a hunter’s cabin with Hector, deep in the Arkansas woods. The dark man sat next to her cot. The sun shone through a paneless window illuminating the old newsprint used to paper the walls. Hector was washing her bare legs with alcohol, using an old rag and a battered tin pan. He slathered the rag up over her belly and chest. When he let the liquid run cold over her throat she wanted to touch him, to let him know how good it felt, but she was still too weak.
He turned her over and went from between her toes and the soles of her feet all the way up to the nape of her neck. The alcohol burned where it seeped to her rectum but by then she knew that Hector didn’t mean to hurt her. He was trying to save her life.
Hector bathed Kiki at least six times that first day, and he not saying a word. He fed her soup and water, and watched her sleep. He was always touching her, feeling for fever, and whenever he found heat he bathed her in cold.
Kiki suspected that Hector had never been so intimate with a white girl and that he probably enjoyed rubbing her all over. But she didn’t mind his eyes and hands. She didn’t mind him being there when she roused. He could do anything he wanted, because he was Hattie’s friend and his hands were cold and he smelled like the deep Arkansas wood.
The next day Hattie came and clucked and watched over her. Hattie made Kiki drink much more soup than Hector had. She took her outside to pee. She told the half-asleep girl that her father was looking for her and that Hattie had to be careful. She’d only come out twice a week.
Kiki didn’t care, though. She liked being alone with silent Hector.
After three weeks Kiki was strong enough to eat bread. The fever had broken and the pneumonia was almost clear. Hattie had a hundred dollars put away and offered it to take Kiki on a bus to California where her cousin would take her in. Hattie also gave Kiki Hector’s pistol. It was a .32-caliber six-shooter that Hector’s old boss had given to him after a good year.
Hattie taught Kiki how to oil her gun and how to keep it clean. She told her to buy bullets every three years. Kiki went to target practice on her own. She wasn’t a dead shot but she wasn’t afraid to shoot either. She could hit a man at ten paces, that’s all she’d ever need.
On the day she was to leave, Kiki went outside Hector’s shack while Hattie was still packing her bags. Hector was seeing to the litter he’d made to drag the bags down to the road where the Greyhound passed.
Kiki stared at Hector but he kept working as if she wasn’t there.
Finally she asked him, “Would you come with me, Hector?” She hadn’t planned to say it, didn’t even know what she meant. “I mean, come with me to California.”
“What?” That got his attention.
“We could sleep in a big brass bed and eat oranges and work for the movies. You could be a gardener and I’d do makeup work for the stars.” She was surprised at herself — that she had it all worked out.
Hector moved to turn away, but Kiki grabbed him and dug her fingernails into his forearm. Blood came from the deep scratches.
He looked at her again and shuddered. She knew, or thought she knew, at that moment he was almost ready to go. But he was too strong. He pulled her hands away and was lost to her. And that loss was the worst thing, up until this night in New York, that she ever experienced.
Kiki took the gun out and cleaned it sitting next to Soupspoon’s guitar. Then she went back into the closet and found a shoulder purse that she’d be able to carry with her around work.
She brought the purse with her to bed and slept better than she had since she was just a child, sleeping in a big black woman’s arms.
Eighteen
The day after Kiki came home early, Soupspoon called Rudy. “I’ma play at a street fair on Saturday, Rudy. Down on Carmine Street just offa Bleecker. You could come on down an’ hear me t’see what you might get.”
“Okay, Uncle Atwater. How you feelin’?”
“Like I was dead an’ then I died again.”
Rudy laughed at Soupspoon’s blues. “I told A’ntee Mavy ’bout what’s goin’ on wit’ you. She said she’d like to talk if you wanted.”
He found himself pressing her buzzer at about noon. She didn’t live far from the Beldin Arms. Fourteenth Street and Avenue A.
All those years and we was just walking distance, Soupspoon thought. Might as well been a million miles.
“Who is it?”
“Me, Mavy. Atwater.”
There followed a long silence. In a corner of the vestibule a water beetle was dying on his back, waving his hairy brown legs at the light. Soupspoon raised his foot but then put it back down.
Who knows what he thinkin’.
“Rudy said that you got cancer,” Mavis said at last.
“That’s what the doctors say, babe. That’s what they say.”
“Elevator’s straight back when you walk in. Eight G,” the talk box barked. Then there was a loud buzzing and Soupspoon pushed his way in.