Airtight Willie & Me (19 page)

Grandma leaned and snatched the pictures. One of them slipped down in the covers at Tiffany's hip. Grandma took the cue to stab in the knife.

“Future?” she laughed. “He's aching to get married when he's older. Why that li'l jock is got the hots for me so bad I've got to dose his food with saltpeter.” She paused to twist the knife. “He may look like Cecil, kiddo, but I'll give you ten to five he won't leave his sweet patootie crying at the church.”

Tiffany stricken eyes gazed about the monotonous off-white walls and ceiling. Her lips trembled as she burst into tears.

“Stop the waterworks, dearie pie,” Grandma said sweetly as she moved to embrace Tiffany.

Tiffany scuttled away. “Please! Don't touch me! You hate me!”

Grandma stood and laughed. “Hate you, dearie? Why say a hurting thing like that? You're never going to get out of here feeling and thinking crazy like that.”

Tiffany scooted up to a sitting position, tear-flooded eyes ablaze. “We know I'm not crazy, don't we? You don't want me out of here, but you're in for a surprise soon.”

Grandma screwed her face into an anguished mask. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief from her sleeve and sniffled, “You're so cruel and ungrateful after all I've done to get your release.” She blubbered as she turned and left the room. A flower vase shattered against the door as she shut it.

She went down the corridor to the elevator; she smiled to see several attendants rush, with a straitjacket, toward the pandemonium of shrieking and crashing of window glass sounds from Tiffany's room.

Twilight's lavender blindfold had covered the sun's stark eye when Grandma parked in downtown Galveston. She walked through a crowd of Saturday shoppers and early on-the-towners into a posh jewelry store.

A clerk descended on her at the threshold. She selected a fiery cluster of diamonds on a gypsy mounting packaged in a gold satin box and paid with a fifteen hundred dollar personal check. Then she went to a drugstore several shops down the street to see a pharmacist friend where she purchased a bottle of chloroform.

As she pulled the Lincoln away for home in total euphoria she merrily hummed an old stripper's show tune.

In the deepening twilight, Jay lay groaning on his belly naked.

Fay gently massaged liniment into his bruised body. “Damn!
Your back and ass, besides the bruises, look like you've been whipped. The welts!”

He growled, “You saw how I tumbled and slid when that maniac bronc threw me. Those are scratches, not whip welts. Now, get the hell out of here before the witch brooms home.”

Fay kissed his neck and stood. “Well, I guess the bronc kicked my loving date in the head for tonight,” she sighed as she went to the door.

He winced as he leapt spastically out of the bed to prove his indestructible macho. He said stoutly as he embraced her waist, “By midnight, I'll be back in the almost pink. So, knock the ceiling at midnight, okay?”

She kissed him. “Okay. But even if you're not up to par, I can always ride the peg.”

They laughed and sucked tongues. Then Fay went down the hallway toward the attic dorm stairs. Jay shut the door and hobbled to the window. He lit a cigarette and watched Hitler, the bronc, rearing and kicking in the corral. “I'll break your black ass down like a ten buck shotgun soon as I heal,” he told himself.

He had limped back to bed when Grandma opened his door. She stood in the doorway sniffing. Then she walked in and sat on the side of the bed.

“I hate liniment! You hurt?” she said, wiggling her nose.

“Yeah, bad as I can with no broken bones,” he moaned to block any of her amorous notions.

“Who was sweet enough to rub you down, dearie?” she asked as she lit a cigarette.

“Me, who else?” he answered too hastily and desperately.

“Your sister, kiddo. That's who,” she said with slitted eyes that yo-yoed his Adam's apple.

“Naw, she's under the weather herself, I think.”

Grandma kissed his cheek and stood. She yawned. “I'm bushed and sleepy myself. You've got a peach of a gift, li'l darlin', I bought you. Maybe it tops the watch.”

He said, “Nothing except a Caddie convertible could top the watch. What you got for me, Brandy?”

She said, “I'll bring it with me tomorrow when I get my sugar refill.” Then she opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and closed the door. Minutes later, he heard a rap on the door. Shit! Main Street pad! he thought.

“Come in,” he said.

Big Ralph, decked out in a grey houndstooth suit and snowy ten-gallon hat, peacocked into the room with his moon face hedgerowed with concern.

“How ya doin', Baby Slim?” he said as he walked to the side of the bed.

Jay faked a smile. “Shoot, I was just thinking about saddling up black-ass Hitler for another go-round before it got real dark.”

They laughed.

“You got the heart and the touch to be a sonuvabitching performer one day. Your steer wrestling and roping is the best I've seen a novice do. You wanta take a slice of advice from this old-timer?” Big Ralph said seriously.

“Sure, Big Un, you're my professor.”

The giant said, “Broncs got radar and murder stuffed between their ears. Hitler got wise you was leery and tight in the saddle. You gotta stay tough but loose. You gotta flow and glow positive through the earthquakin'. Got it?”

Jay nodded.

Big Ralph gave him a feathery fist in the shoulder. “I'm goin' to town to destroy some whiskey. Want anything?”

Jay said, “Thanks, Big Un, but I got everything to keep me from going nuts for now.”

They laughed. Big Ralph left the room.

A half hour before midnight, restless Fay lay bright eyed in the darkened quiet of the dorm. She watched summer breezes lash a chinaberry tree outside an open, screened window near her bed. Its branches cavorted spectral shadows on the moon-tinted walls.

Her chum, Millie from Dallas, in the bed beside hers, writhed. She pleaded piteously in her sleep. “Ah, mister! Please don't shoot! Let me go!” as she relived a kidnapping by a pervert-killer interrupted by police cars before he could dismember her as he had several other girls.

Fay shivered, felt a familiar spasm behind her belly button. The feeling shifted her mind to her middle-aged novelist stepfather and the fearful awful night several weeks after the childbirth deaths of her mother and premature sister. She remembered she'd been asleep around midnight in her bedroom in the palatial home of her stepfather in the Whitefish Bay section of Milwaukee. Her mother had married him two years before.

The stepfather, Frank, slid his naked body into bed with her, fondled her half awake. For several seconds she thought she was having a nightmare as she watched and felt him sucking her breast. He reeked of alcohol.

She screamed, “Goddammit, Frank, you gone nuts!” as she punched his head away and tried to escape from the bed.

He seized her and squeezed her close, showered her face with spittled drunken kisses as he passionately sobbed, “Your beauty has destroyed my will to live if I can't be your lover. I've failed my sacred vow to do without you, Angel Witch. Torturer Goddess, saboteur of my sleep and sanity, have mercy! You must understand! With Felicia gone from us, way out there beyond the heavens, we're like infant sparrows together, deserted in the snow. I'm bewitched! No price is too high to pay to have you. Disgrace? A pittance! Prison? A bagatelle!”

She raked his face, arms, and back bloody with her fingernails. Anesthetized by desire, he forced her thighs open, hunched his muscular two hundred and fifty pounds, and entered her. He punched her jaw. She dropped into a dark abyss. She revived and feebly continued to maim him with slashing fingernails and gouging teeth as he pumped away to climax.

He cursed and rolled off the bed to his feet. He went down the hall to the bathroom. She followed to peek through the keyhole. He was treating his wounds with iodine. Fay went back to her room, slipped into jeans, and snatched up her piggy bank before she fled the house.

She took the Greyhound to Galveston to look up her mother's cousin. She discovered that the cousin had moved to Alaska. Fay remembered with a shudder her penniless frightful week before Jay rescued her from gang-rape in the basement of the condemned house in Galveston.

Now, she tingled as she noticed one minute to midnight on the wall clock. She glanced at Phoebe, the dorm mother, fast asleep across the way. She eased out of bed, picked up a shoe, and went several feet to the furnace vent in the wall. She gently tapped the shoe heel against the floor. Shortly, she heard Jay tap his ceiling. Then his familiar kissy oral sex sound issued and spasmed her crotch.

“I'm going to come!” she stage-whispered down the vent.

Within the minute, she entered his room and slipped out of her gown. They moved the dresser against the door.

Grandma, in red wrapper, stepped with a feral face from the shadows at the bend of the hallway. She moved soundlessly down the hallway carpet past the tryst room in stocking feet to a guest room near the foot of the darkened attic dorm stairway.

She put the bottle of chloroform and a rag on the carpet near the door. Then she got a chair and sat down. Her face was suffused with rage in the flare of her lighter as she shakily lit a cigarette and peered at Jay's door through the cracked guest room door.

The young lovers settled for a near wipeout sixty-nine before a brief ride on Jay's peg. Panting, they lay smoking a cigarette between them. In the cathedral quiet, her child's face was poignantly innocent in a soft blue spot of moonlight.

“Candy Dong, know what kinda home I wish for when we get rich?”

He said, “Gimme a rundown, Ice Cream Cone.”

She closed her eyes. “A pink house, definitely a shocking pink house on a hill. I mean a high one. A flower garden, a pink swimming pool shaped like your dong. A zillion kids your spitting image and servants by the battalions.”

They laughed, clung together, kissed as if they had no tomorrows together before she slipped on her gown. They moved the dresser. She kissed him once more and left the room.

Goddamn, that broad has got me hooked, he thought, as he flung himself into bed and inhaled the odor of their love stew.

With pink ribbon in hair gleaming like a cache of Inca platinum, she skipped down the hall humming like the ecstatic child she was. She reached the dorm stairway and took a step when Grandma lunged from the guest room and seized her throat from behind. Fay made choking sounds as her blue eyes bulged out in pain and terror.

Grandma dragged her by the throat, kicking and squirming, into the guest room and dropped her three hundred pounds onto her frail prey to anchor her to the carpet, with a heavy knee on her throat to strangle outcry. She quickly saturated the rag with chloroform and pressed it against Fay's face until she went limp.

Grandma grabbed a foot and peeped down the hallway before she stepped out. Fay's dislodged pink hair ribbon lay on the door threshold. She dragged her victim down the hall past Jay's room. Fay's body against the carpet made only a whispery rustle like a snake's belly snagging on autumn leaves. Fay's head bounced quietly on the carpeted stairway to the ground floor, but sickeningly on the pine steps leading to the basement furnace room.

A sweet tooth had sent Jay to the private oven for Grandma's peach cobbler an eyelash second after Grandma had reached back to shut the basement door behind her. He was spooning cobbler into a dish when he heard the bumping sounds of Fay's head. He put the dish down and walked several feet down the hall to the basement door. He put his ear against it and heard sounds.

He stooped and peered through a hairline crack in the doorjamb. He saw only Grandma's back near the grinding machine and the usual clutter of dulled field hoes and rakes waiting to be sharpened. He sniffed at vapors of what he thought was chloroform. “Could Grandma be into an el cheapo high like that?” he asked himself.

He shrugged and went back to the cobbler. Sharpening of tools was his job. But what the hell, he thought. I'm her fucking house pet, so let the horny dingbat do my gig. He sat down and devoured three portions of cobbler and a quart of milk.

He stepped out of the kitchen and walked toward the stairway for the second floor. He retraced and put an eye to the hairline crack. He couldn't see her now. He put his ear to the door. No sounds.

He opened the door carefully and went down into the basement. She's not here, he thought, but where is she? I had to see her pass the kitchen unless Satan's pet has gone invisible.

He went to her open bedroom door. He went to his bedroom, stared into it. He opened the bathroom door. He walked to the guest room, flipped the light switch near the door. Empty. The stench of chloroform wrinkled his nose. He spotted the pink ribbon, stooped, and picked it up. “I'll kill her if she's hurt Fay,” he told himself, as his chest inflated with tension.

He went to his bedroom and rapped the softball bat against his ceiling several times. No response. He decided to scout the dorm. But nausea churned his stomach, made him weak. Ill, his legs trembled as he went to sit on the side of the bed.

In a sub-cellar beneath the furnace room lit by a naked red bulb, Grandma had set up the embalming process on Fay. She was lying nude and ghastly white on a long table. A whirring machine sucked her bloodless through a tube inserted into an artery at the base of her crotch. A row of cheap caskets lay covered by a canvas cloth in a corner of the cave-like room.

Grandma leaned and pressed Fay's eyelids up with her fingertips. The eyes were blank, dead orbs. She grinned as she went to a short
flight of stone stairs, ascended, and pressed a button on the sheet steel hatch on the sub-basement's ceiling.

A two-horsepower electric motor swung away hatch and ponderous grinding machine welded to it above. Grandma went through the aperture to the furnace room. She left the hole agape to go through the swinging doors of the basement john.