“They’ll send them.” His voice was shallow. No resonance, no music. He was everything Kiki thought he was.
People shied away from the elevators when they saw what was going on. Kiki’s friends didn’t ask any questions. They stared from down the hall. But Kiki didn’t care. She was thinking about the man who held her elbow. She thought how she could shoot him the way Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald in front of all those people. The dark man would hunch forward, his mouth forming a tight little O. He’d go down to the floor, the light fading into pain as he went...
When they left Kiki in front of Number Two Broadway she was all right. She hadn’t shot anybody. Nobody was dead.
Whenever she came running in to Hattie with all her problems the big black woman would always ask, “Anybody dead?” That question always knocked the tears right out of Kiki’s eyes. She’d look up in wonder at the woman — who, to Kiki, was the perfect image of God — and shake her head, no.
“Well, if ain’t nobody’s dead we better get back to work.”
“They what?” Soupspoon asked her that night.
“They came up to my desk and escorted me to the door. Wouldn’t even let me get my stuff.”
“Why they wanna do sumpin’ like that?” Soupspoon was cleaning his guitar.
“They found out about the policy I faked for you.”
“No.”
“I don’t think they could prove it, daddy. I never signed a thing. I used a stamp that they keep locked up on my floor, but they can’t prove that I knew the combination. I didn’t have the priority on the computer and nobody can prove that I did. They just fired me, that’s all.”
“But what if they come here?” Soupspoon felt a sharp jab that went from his chest all the way down into his legs.
“What’s wrong?” Kiki got up and went to his side. She reached out and touched his head.
“Nuthin’. Nuthin’at all.”
Days later, at Sono’s apartment, Soupspoon would say into his Radio Shack tape recorder, “...that was the first time I ever figured it all out. There I was in shit up to my lip but they wasn’t nuthin’ I could do. That girl did everything she could t’help me. She saved my life. What could I say? I knew it was the cancer in my lung just like I knew it was the guitar on the table. Wasn’t a damn thing I could do. I kissed that girl right on the lips an’ told her that she was best thing happen t’me in years...”
“Take a walk with me, daddy,” Kiki said in a drunken little-girl voice. “Let’s walk off this food.”
“Kiki, girl, you not gonna find that boy. He scared away since he stuck you.” Really it was the pain he’d been feeling in his leg and chest that made him want to stay home. It wasn’t a bad pain. It was only late at night, when he was lying in bed, that it really bothered him. He told himself that it was just an old man’s muscle, that if he rested it would go away, but he knew better.
“Just this one more time, daddy. After this, if your singin’ don’t do it, we’ll have to move away anyway.” Kiki had put away a cupful of whiskey already. There were tears in her eyes. “And this is the right time’a day, and it’s Friday too... Just one more time and I’ll give it up.”
When Soupspoon handed Kiki her small purse he felt the weight of it. But if there was a pistol in there he didn’t want to know about it. It wasn’t anything to worry about anyway. That boy was nowhere to be found. He was lost; that’s why he was what he was — like Robert Johnson.
That’s what he had told Randy on the tape recorder.
“All bluesmen are lost. Bluesmen. Black-and-blues, that’s what they shoulda called it. Black men who only ever traveled at night, in the dark. Goin’ nowhere and findin’ hard fists and bone-breakin’ rock in their path.
“You could yell out pain in the blues. You could kill that woman that played you wrong. You could shout, ‘Oh no! Lawd!’ And even the white boss would smile.
“You could show a mean bone or cry from down deep in your heart with the whole world as your witness.
“You could demand freedom in the blues. But it wasn’t so much freedom a poor black man wanted but release. That’s a slave’s freedom; a sharecropper’s freedom. Release from his bonds and his bondage. Release from hard hunger and even harder fear. Release from the pain of work so hard that you’d say it was impossible for a man to do all that. Work so hard that it hurts even to think about it.
“And when we asked for release we knew that it meant freedom — but it meant death too. We was bound for nowhere. Bound for a heavy iron ball on the chain gang or just at work on the plantation. Bound to die — that’s what we was.
“Bound for freedom.”
“Bob?” young Atwater had asked Mr. Robert Johnson. “How come you don’t leave outta here an’ go up north? We could go up there an’ make a whole lotta money playin’. Real money. An’ no green-toof sheriff gonna dare an’ take it.”
“I been up there,” RL said. “I seen it — seen it all. Me an’ this other blues boy go on up there. Chicago, New York. But you know it ain’t real up north. Niggers don’t even know they names up there, baby. Naw. They crazy.”
“But we could make us a race record. Git that on the radio an’ you gots all kindsa money.”
Soupspoon remembered his friend’s sad smile. “They ain’t no gettin’ away from yo’ stank, Soup. Rabbit run, man, he run — maybe he even make it down into his hole. But you know that fox still out there grinnin’ somewhere. He grinnin’ right now.”
Soupspoon still remembered, remembered each word that RL had said. He worried over the lines like someone might do over a song that moved them but, still, the words just didn’t make sense.
“There he is,” Kiki hissed.
She started walking at a slant across Chrystie. The gang of boys was just moving past where she’d come up on the sidewalk. Soupspoon followed her as she stalked the pack of children.
“It’s the one in the black Spider-Man T-shirt,” Kiki whispered when Soupspoon came up beside her. He didn’t say anything. He just stayed beside her. This was a debt to her and he meant to pay it — a note come due.
There were about nine of them — little boys not one over ten. They were singing and laughing and trying to talk the talk of the street. Their hips and shoulders moved as they walked along because they couldn’t keep all that energy in. They were happy and scared and wild, and, Soupspoon knew, they weren’t thinking a thing about a crazy woman stalking them.
When they cut down a small alley, Kiki sped up to close the gap. She looked up over their heads and then back at Soupspoon. When she was satisfied that there was no one else around she took the pistol from her purse and ran right in the middle of the pack of boys.
“She got a gun!” a high voice screamed and boys were running everywhere. One of them fell but he never hit the ground because his arms and legs were moving so fast that he just touched the asphalt and somehow kept moving. Four of them sped past Soupspoon while the rest cleared out of the other end of the alley.
All of them got away except for the boy in the Spider-Man T-shirt. Kiki had him by the arm with her pistol jammed underneath his jaw.
They were both yelling but Soupspoon couldn’t make out a word. Then Kiki dragged the boy behind a big green Dumpster and threw him on the ground. He was trapped in the corner, facing the trembling woman and her gun.
“You know me, nigger boy?” she yelled. Soupspoon came up behind her and stopped.
“Do you know me?” She had torn his shirt so that all he had left was a black collar around his throat. His face was strained and contorted, shot through with creases like the wrinkles of an old man. He was trying to say no, that he didn’t know her, but there was no voice, just a high whine.