“Fuckin’ shit!” Willy pulled Gerry up by the arm and gave the boy a savage uppercut to the gut.
Gerry vomited on Willy’s legs.
“Goddamn shit!” Willy pushed Gerry back two steps and hit the doddering naked boy twice in the head. Gerry didn’t seem bothered by the blows. He kept holding his stomach, white liquid dribbling out between his lips.
Soupspoon was trying to get up but his hip wouldn’t release. He looked for something to throw at Willy’s head but all he could reach was cushions.
Willy reared back to throw another blow but stopped suddenly and brought his hands to his head. “Oh!” he moaned and went down on both knees.
Gerry was down on his knees by then too, blood and vomit dripping from his face. They faced each other like exotic priests in the middle of a desperate ritual.
Sono came up then and started hitting Willy again with the heavy saucepan.
“Mothahfuckah! Mothahfuckah!” the wild girl screamed. When she hit Willy in the head he bellowed like bull at the slaughter. Soupspoon saw Hamela take little George and hug him to her bird chest. Her eyes were big but she wasn’t crying.
“Mothahfuckah!” Sono yelled again. Chevette was holding Gerry. Willy crawled from the room trying to ward off the saucepan.
Sono slammed the broken door behind him and turned to see her home.
Soupspoon saw what her mad eye saw. All the furniture turned over, the baby crying. Gerry was on his back with one hand trying to cover his little bell-shaped cock.
Chevette took Sono and the kids into the other room. Then she came back for Gerry. At last she helped her boyfriend back up on the couch.
“You okay, uncle?”
“My legs wouldn’t take me there.”
By afternoon they had the house back together. The story in the building was that Chevette’s aunt had kicked Willy out because that way she figured Chevette would come back. What she was really afraid of, Chevette said, was that her sister would find out and stop sending money to take care of her. Willy had come to get his revenge and to drag Chevette back so that Vella would take him back.
He got his wish. Vella wound up taking Willy to the emergency room for a broken jaw.
“His jaw was broke in three places,” Chevette said.
Gerry decided to take the whole family out to his mother’s home in Flatbush. “We got a lotta room out there,” he said. Both of his eyes were swollen and his stomach still hurt.
“What your momma gonna say ′bout me′n these kids?” Sono asked. Gerry was only twenty and hadn’t told his mother about his Manhattan girlfriend.
“What she gonna say?” he declared. “I pay for everything with my loans and my library job — and you need the help.”
Sono showed a smile that let you know what she was like when her load was lightened. She went right to work packing.
Soupspoon gave all of his salary and tip money to Chevette.
“You go on with’em,” he said. “Use that money to buy food.”
“Cain’t I come home wichyou, Uncle?”
“I gotta have my own place ‘fore you could do that. You go on an’ help Sono and them. I’ma stay here an’ try t’play at Rudy’s again.”
He took Gerry to the side while Sono and Chevette got the kids ready.
“Take these for me, Gerry,” Soupspoon said. He handed Gerry four cassette tapes that he’d been carrying around in his guitar case.
“What’s this?” Gerry asked.
“It’s everything I remember. It’s some songs and a lotta stories about the days when I’as comin’ up. I got a man’s address written down right here. He writes about the blues. You call’im an’ tell’im you wanna write down what I said. You tell’im you wanna write a history article about me.”
“Wow. Absolutely, Mr. Wise.”
It took Soupspoon half an hour to walk back to Kiki’s and another half an hour to make it up the stairs. When he got there he found Kiki and Billy together. They were making out on his couch.
“We wondered when you was gonna come, man,” Billy said.
Kiki came up to him with a worried look in her bloodshot eyes. “You okay, Soup?”
“Yeah, ‘course I am. It’s you that’s three shades’a pale.”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine, fine. Just a little tired is all.”
Billy plugged in the phone and called Rudy, who was happy to hear that Soupspoon wanted to play again.
“I need some sleep if I’m gonna play, though,” the old man said. He laid down on Kiki’s bed, no pillow at his head and his hands stretched out straight at his side. His fingers picked and jumped on the blankets and his eyeballs rolled behind the lids.
He imagined what being dead would be like. The cool tickle of stale coffin air and darkness so deep that even the sun couldn’t reach it. All around the murmur of the dead. Young people and old remembering their lives just the way they happened.
“I stoled Mr. Onceit’s chickens an’ lawd was he mad! Man like to busta gut over three scrawny chickens. You know life mean more than some scrawny chickens.”
“Will you marry me, Elsie B.?”
“Nigger! Strip down an’ prove it that you ain’t got my nickel!”
Then a scatter of baby talk and the sound of worms. Colors don’t mean a damn thing if you’re dead. No blue, no red. You remember what people were; not what they looked like exactly but if they were big then you remember big and if they were loving and sexy you remember holding them, rolling with them.
Evil brings about hot spots and prickles.
But it’s all just a dream. Day in and day out all the things that ever happened, just like they happened. Never the littlest change. Because when you die everything is sealed. It’s like you’re asleep and can’t wake up. Because if you could wake up you would change it. Not go down that road or maybe call up Ruby and Inez and tell them how much you loved them. If you could wake up.
“...wake him up. We gotta get down there soon.”
“But he looks sick.” Kiki’s talking. “Look how he’s moving.”
“He looks sick.”
But not dead. Not yet.
Robert Johnson with his evil eye looking around the crowd for a woman. His fingers so tight that they could make music without strings. Music in his shoulders and down in his feet. Words that rhyme with the ache in your bones and music so right that it’s more like rain than notes; more like a woman’s call than need. Not that pretty even stuff that they box in radios and stereos. Not even something that you can catch in a beat. It’s the earth moving and babies looking from side to side.
“Soupspoon?”
The people all broke out talking after Bobby Grand died. He wanted to hear them because death and music are the same things. Hot baby with his heart thumping starts it all out. Hollering rhythm.
“Soupspoon? Are you awake, honey?”
“Look at how he’s jerkin’ around.”
The walking and running and praying for rain. And all it does is wash away your feet in the mud.
“They all gone soon enough. You didn’t have to worry.”
“What, honey?” Kiki asks.
“Blues is the fish and the fisherman is what plays’em.”
“What, man?” Billy asks.
“I got a rowboat fulla blues.” Soupspoon opened his eyes then. He saw his friends and thought that they were the most beautiful sight in the world. His heart was running fast.
“If the blues was fish and I was on the blue sea. I’d have a rowboat fulla blues wish they could swim away from me.”
“You gonna sing that tonight?” Billy asked. He gave Soupspoon his hand and helped him upright.