Airtight Willie & Me (10 page)

Old Sims came to her with a solemn look and purple lips pursed. “Hi, my dear. Let me kiss the prettiest waitress I ever had . . . my sympathy for the passing of Mother Lewis.”

She said, “I appreciate that, and I'm always thrilled to see my darling Mister Sims,” as she warmly kissed his mouth.

He said, “How about your Daiquiri on the house?”

She smiled and shook her head. She thought, I better stroke him with tactical chitchat before I crack for the extension.

She glanced at the darkened kitchen cubicle at the rear of the room as she said, “How is Mama Sims? Seems kind of odd not to see her back there turning out the best soul food in town.”

His droopy, hound face was serious as he mused, “She's poorly . . . she missed you, the customers missed you . . . came in here by the droves asking about you. Most of 'em stopped coming, went to jam the Apex down the street instead when that slick Red Nigger stole you. Lost Timmie too . . . died last week.”

She said softly, “I'm so sorry to hear that. Poor sweet boy. What happened to him?”

“He whiskeyed himself to death,” he said harshly. “Started soon's you left town three years ago. Woulda broke a murderer's heart to see Timmie, the Sheik, shabby and falling down drunk. I woulda swore,
and him too, you two was gonna marry and settle down after you had his baby. Guess you did what you wanted to do.”

She bit her lip. “Please believe me. Mister Sims, Mimi was an accident. I . . . uh . . . never misled Timmie. He was fun. I liked him. He begged. But I always told him I just couldn't marry him.” She heaved a sigh. “I'm really, truly sorry Timmie didn't get over me.”

A customer at the end of the bar knocked his beer mug against the bar. The old man patted her wrist and shuffled away. She removed a gem-encrusted cigarette case from her white mink bag and flicked flame to a lavender papered cigarette. A panting Lothario, in a baggy, checked suit, sprang from a booth with a flaming lighter. Too late.

The old man returned and cupped her hands in his bony paws. He leaned close and said, “You get my broker's letter?”

She nodded and pouted. “I almost cried, Mister Sims. You just have to extend my option to buy the hotel. I may need until next week to get the money. I want to prove something in this town for Mimi . . . for Mama.”

He shook his gray head emphatically. “Wish I could, but I can't. My broker's got me the best offer I've had. Me and my old girl have lined up our plans to go 'round the world and enjoy ourselves. Our time is short. I gave you sixty, then thirty days to buy. Too bad you don't have the credit for the financing. You'll find something else you want when you're ready.” He shrugged. “The buyer is paying cash like the letter said, when your option is up in two weeks. It's out of my hands now. I've been fair, been your friend since you left your mama's home in your teens.”

She stood and said fiercely, “Mister Sims, I'm going to buy this hotel. I'll be back with the cash before my option expires.” She turned for the door.

He said, “Wait, Etta!”

She turned back to the bar.

He whispered, “Lemme tell you a secret. I hustled moonshine,
busted out craps, been shot, stabbed, and poisoned, even prison before I squared up in this hotel thirty years ago. Listen to someone that loves you. You gotta be honest and straight to be happy. Don't put your young beautiful self in jail or the grave for this hotel that ain't worth a hair of your head, or your baby daughter's, to get. Hook a fine young man and get married.”

She shaped a smug smile. “I have, and I am. And I'm going to own this hotel, Mister Sims, and live happily ever after.” She turned and exited into the jaws of the ravening weather. Snowflakes spangled her indigo mane like crystal stars.

He shook his head as he watched her pull her opulent machine away into the blizzard pit of twilight. The brute machine growled through the darkening city's flashbulb neon to the highway for the Big Windy. Satin flipped on the radio to her and Malique “Pony” Jones's torch ballad, Lou Rawl's “You'll Never Find.” Orgasmic waves rocked her with the expectation of Pony's bed. She snorted a blow of pure cocaine. Her hand-fashioned boot stomped the golden bomb toward Pony, the bandit scourge of black Chicago's dope dealers.

Ninety miles away in fallen dark, Malique “Pony” Jones parked his tan Mercury Marquis in a side street on Chicago's Southside. He slid his black-clad Whippet frame to the street. His huge grey eyes were slits of cold-blooded purpose as he cradled, under his arm, a sawed-off shotgun in a shopping bag. A floppy black hat was jammed down on his long skull and black silky hair. Thrilly jolts of ecstasy electrified his junkie loins.

His fancy-prancy equine stride took him a half block down the ghetto street into the dingy foyer of a tenement building. Stevie Wonder's voice and music issued faintly. Pony's gloved hands slipped a Halloween fright mask across his too-pretty face. He moved silently up the foyer stairs. He faded into hall shadows facing the front ground apartment of his prey.

For tensioned eons it seemed to him he compulsively glanced at the radium face of his wristwatch as he fidgeted impatiently waiting
to snap the trap. He heard Ink Spot, Bill Kenny's romantic falsetto voice, singing, “If I Didn't Care” waft from an old 78 record on the second floor. His mother's all-time favorite he remembered.

His delicate mouth fashioned a psychotic smile as he remembered how his father hated the record, despised it because, he sneered, “It's so gutless and faggy I'll puke. Shut it off or I'll stomp the record player to pieces.”

The muscle-bound cocksucker hated me too, Pony thought, as he remembered how his father caved in his ribs during sadistic roughhouse play when he was a willowy kid of ten to toughen him and “grow some muscles on that sissy body,” his father had vowed. He remembered how joyous he was behind his forced camouflage of token tears to see, at last, his father's monster muscles raped and slain in the coffin by the steel mill, by his father's sucker Paul Bunyan bit in blackface for the white boss's pats on his nappy head for his slave labor.

Pony fondly patted his blue steel money minter. He thought, I wish the dead and stinking bastard could see me make more money in minutes than he could hump up in a year. I wish he could see how much more lavishly I support Mama, could see how clever and bad and tough I am, could see me, for years, take off small fortunes without taking a single fall.

He heard the whoosh, felt the icy blast of the foyer door opening. He stiffened as an elderly Western Union messenger entered the foyer with the telegram he'd sent to his mark. He inched forth as the messenger drummed his knuckles against the door. His plunder lust, his buried passion for death, erected him as he caressed the shotgun crutch for his invalid ego, for the crushed image of his manhood.

Rapture barraged him to see his gargantuan shadow stalk the wall. He felt like an implacable Colossus of conquest, more ferocious than Genghis Khan. He smiled as he crowned himself Pony, the Rex of Heist! He cat-footed closer to the door of the treasure house. He remembered a late, late TV football movie line: “One for the
Gipper.” He paraphrased a limerick to himself with perverse glee: One more for Satin and me and Mama makes three.

Behind the door in the living room, ebonic fatso Frank “Jelly Drop” Watson went rigid in his chair at the knock of an unscheduled caller. His mouth and nose were covered with a surgical mask to prevent inhalation of the white pile of doom dust on a card table he was packaging for his large retail trade.

He waddled to the door, peered through the dot of a peephole. “Whatta you want?” he said.

“Telegram for Mister Watson,” the messenger answered.

“Shove it under the door, Pops,” Jelly Drop bellowed.

“Can't; need your signature,” the messenger said firmly.

“Oh shit!” Jelly Drop exclaimed as he ripped off the mask and cracked the door on the chain. He took the signature board and scribbled his name.

Pony exploded from the shadows, seized the messenger as he raised the sole of a heavy boot, kicked and crashed the chain from its moorings. Jelly Drop tumbled to his back on the carpet. Pony shoved the messenger atop him and stormed into the room. He leaned and leveled the shotgun down on Jelly Drop's head.

He commanded, “Both of you get up and sit on that couch with your hands on your head.”

They trembled to their feet. The messenger scrambled to the couch. He clasped his hands on the top of his head. His false teeth chattered. Pony patted Jelly Drop's pajamas and robe before he goosed him toward the sofa with the snub barrel of the shotgun.

Jelly Drop stumbled to the couch. He collapsed on it. His hands shook on his bald head. He glared as Pony scooped up his precious merchandise into the plastic cover on the card table and shoved it into the shopping bag.

Pony's eyes were serpent bright with menace as he snarled, “Fat ass, if you blink your eyes I'll blow your head into your lap.”

Pony watched the pair in a dresser mirror as he rummaged for
Jelly Drop's cash stash. He found it beneath shirts in a drawer where his junkie finger man had said it was. He backed out the shattered door into the hallway, shotgun aimed at the couch. He sprinted for the foyer door.

Jelly Drop lunged from the couch to the card table. He ripped a taped pistol from its underside. He hastened to his front window and opened it. He emptied his pistol at Pony's figure streaking down the sidewalk. The messenger fled the scene on rubbery legs. Jelly Drop smiled meager satisfaction to see Pony stumble a bit and grab at his shoulder before he disappeared into the night.

Jelly Drop's jaws were inflated with his moniker candy as he put through a coded call to his wholesaler, Razzle Red, to arrange credit purchase of a replacement batch of doom dust and to report that the phantom bandit, with Red's twenty grand price on his head, had scored again.

Satin fell into depression, felt despicably corrupt and worthless as she cruised the El Dorado down a business street on Chicago's black Southside—the street where Razzle Red turned her out on, where, for a year, she humped and frenched off myriad multiethnic johns. But she opened up Red's nose as none of his whores ever had, she told herself. She grinned lasciviously. My pussy hooked his nose tougher than the crystal blow he pigs up, she thought.

For an upper, she remembered how she got in the wind to whip her master plan on Red that recovered the piles of bread she'd humped into his pockets. She remembered how she made him find her, crawl, beg her back on her terms. “No more trick-flipping, Red; set me up in a boutique or get out of my face,” she'd told him.

“I'm really something else, a helluva lady,” she reassured herself. Then a downer snared her: “I've been delivering Red's dope, risking my ass for a month. Gotta cut Red and his dope loose. Soon!”

She coasted the machine into the gleaming reflection in the window of her barred boutique flashing SATIN'S in blazing turquoise neon on its gold-flecked black marble facade. She parked and went
to the window to feast her eyes on the darkened elegant interior of her independence. She was appalled at how old and decadent the tear-marred makeup made her face appear in the white-lighted mirror of a jewelry display.

She thought of Pony as she used tissues and lotion from her bag to scrub her face clean. She applied fresh lipstick—Eros Scarlet. She got into the car and floated in it on steamy clouds of passion through the night toward Pony's loving.

At Sixty-third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, she slowed the car beside an alley mouth crowded with gawkers. An ambulance squealed behind her. The crowd scrambled to the sidewalk as the ambulance turned into the alley. Satin got a flash view of a nude female child lying lifelessly in the filthy snow. In minutes, the ambulance pulled to the street and moved casually away without siren.

Shocked, Satin left her car and asked an elderly spectator, “What happened to that little girl?”

The oldster shook his gray head. “Pore chile, no more'n twelve. A dope fiend! A overdose kilt her. Guess her chums or the heartless bastid that sold her the dope dumped her like a poison dog.”

Satin said, “I . . . uh . . . didn't realize kids that young shot up . . . died.”

The oldster grunted, “Shoot, just last week they found a lad younger than that girl dead and stiff in a vacant house in my block . . . been so many of 'em they don't even make the papers no more.”

She saw a vision of the wee girl's corpse with its only clothing a pert polka-dot ribbon in its hair, the blued discoloration of its pathetic underdeveloped breasts and bald pubic mound. She shuddered with the thought that perhaps the dope that killed the child was Red's dope, dope that she had delivered!

Satin went back to her car. As she drove away, her head vibrated with concern. “That child was just a few years older than Mimi! My God! Just a few years older than my baby!”

Satin pulled her machine to the curb in front of the Jones's neat
beige stucco house in the Woodlawn District of the mid-Southside, got out, saw the flutter of living room drapes, then tread a squishy carpet of snow to the front door that opened. She rushed into Pony's arms. They kissed and clung.

“Pony, I'm so glad I didn't take you. It was so sad,” she whispered.

Pony squeezed her close. “I was feeling for you, baby.”

He shut the door. Arm-in-arm they went down a hallway toward his bedroom. They paused at Pony's mother's open bedroom door. They looked lovingly at the porcelain-hued, pink-gowned, delicately featured, once-beauteous belle, propped up in her canopied bed, her long fingers furiously knitting a colorful sweater for Pony. Her silky silver tresses lashed her shoulders as she cocked her head, birdlike, in that alerted way of the blind. Her unfocused hazel eyes glowed.

“Muh, dear, Etta's here,” Pony said as they moved to her bed.