“You’re a good girl,” Soupspoon declared.
Chevette smiled. She moved three inches closer, put her hands together as in prayer, and clamped them tightly between her knees.
“I like you, uncle,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. She reached out and ran her small finger around his thumb. Then she brought her hand back between her knees.
“Shoo’,” Soupspoon snorted. “I’m old enough t’be yo’ daddy or, what was that you said, huh, yeah, uncle.”
“You ain’t old.” Chevette brought her shoulders forward and looked slantwise at Soupspoon. “Old is in your head. Old is when you cain’t laugh no more.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody need t’tell me what I could see, uncle.” She touched his thumb again. His hand jumped, and she smiled. “When Hamela an’ me be playin’ it’s not like I’m old and she’s a baby. We like each other an’ we like to laugh. There’s all these young men walkin’ around cussin’ an’ talkin’ mean. They say all kindsa nasty things when you be walkin’ down the street. An’ even if they talkin’ nice it’s just ’cause they want sumpin’.”
Chevette put her hand next to his, comparing their sizes.
“They don’t never laugh an’ sing, buy a girl her dinner and her taxi ride just ’cause it’s nice. They don’t just be nice to be nice.”
“Somebody should be nice to you.” Soupspoon’s heart took shape in his mind. The blood was singing ahead of the beat.
“You see?” she said. “Between you an’ me an’ Hamela we all the same age.”
“You could have anything you want, girl.” Soupspoon didn’t think about putting his hand on Chevette’s thigh. It was just that he was sitting there next to her and she was turned toward him with her leg up on the couch. “It ain’t like the old days when a black man or a black woman had to look at the ground when a white walked by,” he said. “If you got dreams today you could have’em. Ain’t nobody could stop you from that.”
“I want it too, uncle. You know I want me some money and nice clothes. And I wanna good man who looks good too. You know, like a real black man. Like coal but fine too. An’ you know I love Hamela and little George but I don’t want no babies, not right now I don’t. You see, I wanna get some money on my own with a good job and then I want a man who could work too. And mosta the time we be up here workin’ in the days an’ goin’ out to some clubs on the weekend. An’ then we have us a house down in New Orleans, up near the lake. They got some nice houses up on the river up there. And we could go down there ’round Christmastime up until Mardi Gras. And then my momma an’ them could stay there the rest’a the time so we don’t have ta waste the rent when we up here...”
“But what would you do?”
“Huh?”
“What kinda job would you get?”
Chevette sucked her tooth and licked the last bit of orange lip-stick from her lips. “Oh,” she sang and leaned forward to hold Soupspoon’s hand to her leg. “I don’t know. I could be a nurse, because I really like to help people. Or I could be a computer operator. You know Sono got a girlfriend works for the city in computers. She’s only trainin’ but they pay good for that and they pay for your doctors too. But really I’d like to make clothes. Or maybe I could go to FIT and work my way through bein’ a model and then when I get too old for that I could design things. You know, kinda like get the experience first and then go out on my own. They got a lotta pretty black models now, just like you said. You don’t have to be white no more.”
“You sure pretty enough to do it,” Soupspoon said. He moved his finger along with hers. The pain in his hip, just under being sharp, moved somewhere in his chest. It was cancer or sex, he didn’t care which. He felt the beginnings of an erection with surprise.
“I better be gettin’ outta here. I mean gettin’ home,” he said.
Chevette didn’t let go of the fingers on her leg. “What do you dream about, uncle?”
Soupspoon tried to remember the last time he actually heard his heart beating.
“I don’t know. I’m too old to be dreamin’ ’bout what’s gonna happen. When I dream it’s about what was.”
Chevette moved a little closer. She picked up his hand and held it in his lap.
“Um,” he said.
“What do you dream about the past?”
“I don’t know really. It’s like everything I did seems to be happenin’ all the time. Like things that was over start up again.”
“Like what do you mean? Like old friends?”
“I knowed a man name of Robert Johnson,” he said, and he felt that he’d said that same thing over and over, day and night, for his whole life. He said it to the crowds of people in smoky clubs all around the blues circuit in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, and a hundred other places that all looked the same. He said it in the morning when he watched himself in the mirror; and on the toilet when he grunted and strained and needed something in his mind to hold on to. He said it to himself when walking down some familiar street in a strange town. He’d said it to Mavis Spivey when she was talking about the loss of her only son.
“What, uncle?” Chevette said. Her face was closer to his now. The back of her hand rested on his half-hard thing. He put his hand to the back of her neck.
“I wanna cry,” he said.
“How come?”
“You got a nice face, Chevette. Big ole eyes and kissy lips...”
Chevette leaned forward to kiss him lightly. He felt the pressure of her hand and sat there for the longest single moment he ever felt in his long life. He didn’t even want to breathe because breathing distracted him from this beautiful girl.
“Tell ’bout your friend,” she whispered.
“Just a lazy nigger is all. Lazy nigger could play music that was brand new.”
“Did you like him?”
“I loved him, Chevette. And when he died it broke my heart to know that he was gone. ’Cause you know livin’ weren’t the thing when I was young man comin’ up. Livin’ was bein’ a slave. An’ all you could really do was lose yo’self in whiskey, women, and the blues. An’ when you got tired’a that it was time to die. An’ the onliest man I ever met who could face that truth and still be a man was Robert Johnson.”
“He was brave, your friend?”
“It wasn’t that so much but he never let himself know that he was scared. He had somethin’ t’hold on to.”
“What was that?” She turned her hand around to hold on to him. When his eyes got big she grinned.
“I don’t know.”
“How long ago did he die?”
“Fifty years this year.”
“Fifty? Damn, that’s how old my grandmother is.”
Their hands began moving together. A girl of eighteen and a man who could have sired her grandmother. They kissed and she wasn’t sad. He moved his soft leathery hands on her young skin and she trembled for him.
“You a virgin, girl?”
Chevette shook her head to say that she was not. She didn’t like to stick her tongue in his mouth but she took his thing out of his pants and stroked it.
“Go over and get that bottle’a wine,” he said.
She did as she was told but first she took off the torn shirt top and cutoff jeans. Then she poured out a glass of wine and blew out all of the candles except for one. She brought the wine and the candle back to him.
She dipped her right hand into the glass and then let the liquor dribble from her fingers into Soupspoon’s open mouth. With her left hand she guided his only half-solid cock up and down until she finally got it in.
Between the tastes of wine from her hand Soupspoon told the girl how pretty she was and how wonderful she was. He told her that she was young and beautiful and generous and he meant every word that he said.