“If I live that long.”
Billy and Soupspoon went together down to the club. Billy was full of blustery con man chatter, the kind of talk men use to fool themselves.
Soupspoon limped and ached, hot and ragged embers embedded in his body. He needed to clear his throat but waited until he was on his stool at Rudy’s to do it.
He didn’t play dance tunes or love songs that night. He played “A Long Time Down the Line, “Satan Gave Me Back My Soul,” “One Last Bullet,” and “Shine Whiskey Mind.”
Nobody danced, but they did laugh. Soupspoon didn’t even get up to go to the toilet. He was working like a sharecropper; every step he took put him another step behind. But he was playing the music right for one time in his life. He ordered straight whiskey and told Sono to keep it topped off.
“My ribs,” he hollered, “is the jailhouse. The blues is my heart.”
Kiki came late with Randy. She was drunk to begin with. As the night wore on she turned mean. If a man looked at her she’d call him out for his disrespect. And if Randy tried to stop her she’d turn on him with vicious anger. But it wasn’t until she grabbed a jolly girl named Tiffany by the hair for laughing that Rudolph said she had to go.
Billy and Randy grabbed Kiki from either side and dragged her from the nameless bar.
“I’ll come back to get you,” Randy whispered to Soupspoon.
“I’ll be waitin’,” the guitar man replied.
“Motherfuckin’ cocksuckin’ bastards!” she yelled.
“Hey!” the cab driver, a small-framed mustachioed man, said. “Keep the cursing down.”
“Just drive, man,” Billy said.
“Does she wanna go with you?” the cab driver asked.
“Motherfucker.” Kiki pronounced the words perfectly.
“She drunk, man. All we wanna do is take her home.”
“I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass! I’ll bite off your goddamned dick!”
The three of them sat on the curb in front of the Beldin Arms. Kiki started crying when she realized that the men weren’t going to let her go.
“Please,” she sobbed. “Please let me go.”
A car full of three burly white youths stopped at one point.
“What the fuck you guys doin’ to her?” the front passenger said.
“What fuckin’ difference it make to you, paddy-boy?” Kiki yelled back.
“I’m sorry, Randy,” Kiki said as they went up the stairs. Billy was with them.
When they reached Kiki’s floor, Randy asked, “You got your keys, Kiki?”
He remembered that days later in the hospital room. The last words he said to Kiki: “You got your keys, Kiki?” And then a sound something like wind but really the shuffle of rubber soles on the granite flooring. A big man with oily hair. Kiki’s last words to him — “Oh no!” — sounding completely sober, and then the knife.
He did right to rush the big white man with the knife in his hand. Randy pushed Kiki back. The knife didn’t feel like anything going in but then there was pain in a place that Randy wanted to tear out of his body. “Nigger!” the white man muttered. Their bodies came together except where the knife was. Their lips touched, men’s kiss. And the knife came out and went in again.
“In and out,” the ambulance driver had said. “He’s lucky JD didn’t twist it.”
JD. John Doe at Mercy. The bright red lights and the lifejacket that they inflated around him. Remembering Kiki’s scream and weakness in his knees that he tried to fight. He saw the big man catch Kiki by the throat and lift her. He saw the knife come up and then Billy from behind the red hair. But all Billy got for his trouble was an elbow in the throat. He went down gagging and coughing. Then a bright star blossomed from Kiki’s handbag. Randy remembered going down sideways and the white man saying “Huh?” before dropping Kiki and running down the stairs.
Kiki didn’t think at all. She saw the knife and went straight for her gun. He grabbed her just as her hand closed on the butt. Then he slowed down for a moment to hit Billy — that was his downfall. Without taking the pistol out of the purse Kiki shot Fez in the neck.
He put his hand somewhere below his left ear and turned to run. He pushed Billy down over Randy and took the stairs five at a time.
It was the running that made Kiki act. She followed after fez, shooting. The first shot caught him in the leg. It didn’t stop him from running, though. The next shot missed. Kiki stopped at the third floor and shot over the banister, hitting Fez in the arm.
Maybe Fez thought it was a four-shooter. He made his stand on the second floor. He held the knife high above his head and lurched forward on his wounded leg.
“If a wild animal charge you,” Hester Grule, the crazy cousin in Hollywood, had always said, “don’t lose your head. Take time and hit’em in the big part’a their body. Aim! Don’t shoot wild, ’cause then he get ya. Wild animal want blood.” And the wildest animal, Kiki knew, was man.
She went down on one knee again and shot Fez right in the center of his blue shirt. She went up high for the last shot and made a spot slightly darker than the white man’s skin just above his left eye. Fez fell on top of Kiki. The knife skittered on the stairs.
Kiki rolled the dead man over and went through his pockets as fast as she could. There was a stack of new bills, probably from a cash machine, and a wallet. Kiki took everything and jumped up over the body and down the remaining stairs. Most of the blood was on her purple jacket, so she dropped that into a city trash can on the corner. But then she remembered Randy and Billy in a heap at the top of the stairs. From a pay phone she called 911 but from the sounds of sirens everywhere she knew that they were already on their way.
She couldn’t remember if there had been anybody in the hallway or on the street when she’d come out with the pistol showing through her ruined handbag.
She dropped the pistol and empty purse down a sewage drain and made for the subway.
She took a subway to the Port Authority and an early bus to Hoboken.
The morning paper said that Randall Chesterton was in stable condition and that, after being held overnight, William Hurdy had been released as a suspect.
That was the last she ever heard about either of them. And, though she still thinks about Soupspoon from time to time, she never found out about him after that last night either.
She fled to Atlanta and then to Chattanooga. She lived for three years in New Orleans with a gambler named Arcady. She stole his pistol one night and boarded a Greyhound to Hogston, Arkansas.
She came to the house in the early morning. There was dew on the magnolias and the bees were still asleep.
Charla Wilson, a straw-headed old white woman who was a stranger to Kiki, answered the door. Kiki took her hand out of her purse and asked about her parents.
“Waters? Child,” she said sadly. “They been gone for six years now. First him of cancer in the liver and then her one month later — weak heart, they said. I’m so sorry.”
There wasn’t a will. Waters Photographic Inc. had twenty-seven stores that the family lawyer had run while waiting for Kiki’s return. Everything was hers. The house that Charla Wilson rented, a Jaguar car, and a chest full of silver coins impressed with the image of her father’s profile.
Everybody remembered her family. Complete strangers told her stories about her childhood that she had no memory of.
She went to Hattie’s house and found her old nursemaid still there. She didn’t even look much older, but Kiki knew that she had to be over seventy.
“Hector?” Hattie said. “He died twelve years ago last March. Heart just stopped one day while he was restin’ under that ole avocado tree’a his.”