Airtight Willie & Me (20 page)

In the attic dorm, Jay stared down at Fay's empty bed. He crept through the silent dorm of sleeping girls and down the stairway. He went to his room and snatched up the baseball bat. Then he put on high boots and long-fringed cowboy gloves to his mid-arm. He went to the basement door, peeped, and listened before he tiptoed down the stairs. He saw the grinding machine out of position immediately. He went to the hole and stared down into it for a long moment.

Grandma watched him through the latticed doors of the toilet. Her eyes leaked tears as she watched her beloved pet disappear into the sub-chamber to seal his doom. She scrambled up the basement stairs to her bedroom. She unlocked the closet door.

Cobras, Homer and Abigail, slithered to her with affectionate low-key hisses. Grandma scooped them into her arms and started back to the basement.

Jay screamed grief as he crushed Fay's corpse against him at the table. “Please, Fay, baby! Come back! I can't live without you!”

He released her tenderly back on the table. His face was draconic as he went to a high stack of paper cartons and slugged them away with the bat hoping Grandma was crouched behind them. He ripped off the canvas covering the row of caskets. He recoiled at the sight of the embalmed corpses of five young boys lying nude as if asleep in the satin-lined boxes.

He spun at the sound of weeping to see Grandma standing at the stone steps with the cobras slung across her shoulders like a stole. A pitchfork gleamed wickedly in her hand. He stared mesmerized, speechless.

Grandma shook her head sadly as tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Why, oh, why did you have to go poking your doll nose into Brandy's business? I flat-out adore you, li'l darlin'. I bought you a diamond ring, a cluster of stones bigger than your heartbreaking eyes. Next month I was gonna order a white Caddie convertible with all the extras . . . was gonna let Big Ralph make you a rodeo star with the spiffiest gear and duds on the circuit. It's gonna break my loving heart to fix you for keeping forever.”

She smooched the cobras and set them on the cement. “Sic him, lovelies!” she commanded.

Jay gripped the bat and crouched in a combat stance, tear-flooded eyes brilliant in the red murk.

The grey, black-marked assassins emitted a chilling high-octave-penetrating hissing sound as they elevated the fronts of their sinuous bodies. The movable flab of their neck skins puffed out hideously. Their eyes flamed like bronze-hued coals of fire. Two front glistening fangs and three smaller upper fangs behind gleamed in the hellish heads as they moved across the cement to strike.

Jay took a mighty bat shot at their awful heads moving toward him in tandem, but missed. They cunningly separated to attack his flanks. Jay backed into a cul-de-sac of stacked cattle feed grain bags. He stumbled on a canister of rat bait to fall flat on his back. The cobras halted for a long moment.

Grandma lumbered up behind her motionless hit pets brandishing her pitchfork as she squawked, “Sic him, lovelies!”

They lunged in to fang droplets of venom down his boots before he was able to scramble to the top of a grain bag stack. Homer and Abigail fixed phosphorescent bronze orbs on him as they reared their hooded heads toward him. Jay kicked off several of the bags that pinned the cobras' lower bodies against the cement floor.

Grandma cursed and popped sweat as she struggled to get her monumental flab through the narrow aperture of the cul-de-sac of tightly stacked bags of feed.

Jay leapt down and quickly jellied the heads of the trapped cobras
with his bat. Grandma bellowed grief as she barred Jay's escape from the cul-de-sac with savage jabs of the pitchfork.

He moved toward her, swinging the bat violently and screaming, “Please don't make me kill you, Grandma! I'm gonna let the cops punish you. Get out of my way, Grandma!”

She sneered and squeezed her bulk through the narrow lane of feed bags. She jabbed the pitchfork at Jay's throat. He ducked a split second in time. There was a terrible crunch sound when he slammed the bat against the side of Grandma's head. Her shattered skull gouted blood. She wobbled like a gigantic top before she collapsed dead on the cement floor.

Jay shook uncontrollably as he stared down at the slain voluptuary. The bat slipped from his palsied hand. The thud of it against the cement startled him. Panic seized him, galvanized him to leap over the corpse and streak from the mansion.

Sobbing, he ascended a brambled rise to railroad tracks. He lay in adjacent underbrush for seeming ages until the engine headlamps to a freight train, bound for Houston, labored up the incline toward him. He galloped from cover and swung aboard an empty boxcar where he lay panting and staring down at Grandma's mansion of horrors vividly eerie in the glow of frosty blue starlight.

He wept wildly for his dead sweetie, Fay, for the embalmed corpses of the boys. The star glow ignited a razzle of icy fire on the diamond dial of the wristwatch Grandma had given him. He gazed at the gaudy bauble and wept anew for Grandma until his entrails dry-locked. For after all, she had, he realized, gifted him with the spiffiest wristwatch there ever was.

A
mbushed by grief, San Francisco barmaid Lela Leseur left her post to weep behind the door of a washroom cubicle for several minutes. Composed, she walked to the mirror to renovate her makeup and to drop Murine into her reddened grey eyes. She returned to serve the midnight mob with a congealed, pained smile on her elfish Creole face.

The nicotine and perfume-choked air vibrated with profane jive and shuck of street people scoring the red-lit haze with a light show of jewelry and psychedelic clothes. Lela's pinch bottle curves inflated black satin leotards. She mesmerized a gallery of covetous eyes as she moved sensuously behind the long bar with two male bartenders.

At closing time, the five-eight, 38-22-36 wipeout fox counted nearly a half “C” note in tips. After bar cleanup duties, she stepped out into the late August chill of the deserted street. Her wind-flogged, shoulder-length mane coruscated beneath a street lamp like indigo neon. She scarved her hair and belted her red suede coat and appeared ten years younger than her thirty-four years. She stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, engorging her lungs, unloading tension with foggy air before she whipped her red-booted, centerfold-shapely gams toward her scarlet Mercedes parked down the street from the bar.

A simian-faced drug dealer monikered Tar Baby, aglow in pink leather, lunged from the black maw of an alley mouth to block her way.

She halted. “Tar Baby, you just did an uncool graveyard thing. What do you want?” she said icily as she darted her hand into her coat pocket to grip a .32 automatic.

His tiny dark eyes sparkled ravenously as he held out a thick bundle of “C” notes bound by a diamond- and ruby-studded money clip.

“The same thing I been wantin', sugar cunt, since I hit town last month. You! And to prove I ain't jivin', peel off a chunk of this bread and cop the greatest head on the planet,” he crooned breathlessly.

“No sale. Get out of my way,” she said in a cold, deadly voice. She remembered the pair of white would-be rapists she had ventilated into an intensive care ward six months before at this very alley after the bar closed. She hoped she would not be forced to repeat the bloody scenario as she said harshly, “Tar Baby, don't force me to harm you. Get out of my face!”

The giant threw back his glittery processed head and laughed. “I ain't gonna do that. I just decided I'm gonna kidnap ya fine ass and put ya in my bed this mornin'. Bitch, I'm claimin' ya for my woman!” he declared as he oozed toward her.

She snaked out the automatic and leveled it at his belly. “I'll burn you, Tar Baby!” she warned.

He studied her with hooded eyes for a moment before he took another step toward her. She stepped back, fired two rapid shots that chipped concrete at his feet, then she took aim at his head.

“Easy now, bad mama. You done won this round,” he gasped with a horrific grin as he threw up his hands and backed into the alley toward his pink bubble top Eldorado in the alley.

“Nigger, next time you try to gorilla me, I won't miss!” she shouted as she pursued to the alley mouth.

She watched him squeal the Caddie away before she went to her car. As she drove through the sleazed Fillmore District, pangs of sorrow and guilt compelled fresh tears. “I should have checked on Toni in L.A. I should have tried harder to persuade her not to leave home,” she told herself. “I helped to destroy her!”

She drove into a funeral home parking lot, deserted except for a hearse, and sat gazing at the fog-shrouded building, smoking a cigarette, preparing herself for the misery and pain awaiting. She noticed a driver in his cab parked at the curb. I guess Cass decided to take an earlier flight from L.A., she thought.

She left the car and climbed the stone steps of the mortuary. Her knees quivered as she opened the front door and stepped into the cathedral's quiet foyer. She exchanged nods with a drowsy old man behind a desk as she went down a blue-lit hallway to a shadow-haunted viewing room. There she paused on the threshold and watched for a moment the sleek, white leather-suited Cassandra Jones, model-singer-actress and family friend. Dionne Warwick look-alike, Cassandra sobbed as she stood beside Toni's blossom-banked casket, vivid in a spot of rose light. Lela went to Cassandra's side and kissed her cheek. They embraced as they gazed down at the shriveled ruin of Toni's corpse. The once-lush café au lait face had been blackened and sucked cadaverous by vampire heroin.

Lela groaned. “How, why has this happened to my baby? She was so pretty, so talented. Oh, I wish I could've found out who destroyed her and dumped her in that alley when I claimed her body! I would have blown his brains out!”

Cassandra said softly, “Lela, I knew who was responsible when you were in L.A.”

“What!” Lela exclaimed.

Cassandra nodded her head, averting her eyes. “Yes, I knew. He pads in the penthouse in my hotel. I didn't tell you because I know you. I knew you'd kill him and get into trouble. So, I tipped off the cops instead. Horace Jenkins aka King Tut was busted early this morning with enough dope to bury him in the joint until he's an old man. I brought the L.A. Times to show you the story. Forgive me, Lela?”

Lela dropped her arm from Cassandra's waist and stared meanly into Cassandra's eyes. “I'll forgive you that. You called to tell me Toni was in the morgue, but why didn't you call me to tip me she
was a pimp's slave and a junkie? Why, Cassandra? Why!?” Lela whispered savagely. “I could have brought her home and saved her.”

Cassandra averted her eyes, lips atremble. Then she raised her stricken eyes, radiant with pain in her satiny tan face as she stage-whispered shakily, “Lela, I wanted to let you know about her when Tut opened her nose and turned her out . . . but Toni begged me not to. She was so miserable! So pitiful! Swore she could kick Tut and dope if I gave her a chance. She wanted to come back home to you clean. She told me that the night she OD'd. The night Tut dumped her in that alley. Lela, please try to understand why I didn't call you about Toni while she was alive.” Cassandra broke into wild sobbing.

Lela said, “Forgive me, baby. I understand. Let's go home to stay forever, if you wish.”

Cassandra blotted tears with a tissue and exclaimed, “Fantastic! I don't have to go back to L.A. until week after next to open a gig.”

Lela kissed her cheek. “That's great, darling! I need you, and I've got a slew of outfits that will fit you.” Lela put her arm around her waist and led her to the street.

Cassandra paid the waiting cabby, and got her overnight case before they drove away in the Mercedes. They exchanged sad, knowing glances as they passed a blistered, fire-gutted storefront with an askew smoke-blackened sign on its facade. LESEUR'S CLEANERS AND DYERS. Lela's hands shook on the steering wheel to remember how Lily, her mother, and Marcus, her husband, had been shot dead by arsonist bandits two years before at closing time. She heaved an anguished sigh as she recalled how her stalwart father, Benny, had become a pathetic alcoholic after the tragedy.

Moments later, Lela parked in front of the beige stucco house, in the heart of the ghetto, where she began her life. They strolled down the walk toward the front door. A fetal-ball wino slumbered on a sun-bleached wicker chaise that gleamed starkly in the blue wash of full moon. The chaise was ringed by a glitter-litter of empty short-dog bottles.

Lela went to his side. “Freddie, wake up!” she said as she gently shook him and slapped his spittled cheek.

He grunted and slumbered on.

She pulled his greasy topcoat up over his withered shoulders and looked down at the snoring derelict for a long moment, remembering how he and other close cronies of her father, their dreams deferred and clobbered, had once squabbled drunkenly on the wicker lounge over checkers, baseball, and politics.

She was tinged with pain as she remembered the summer day, the year before, when she found her father, a suicide, sprawled on the wicker lounge. “Damn! Will the Leseur jinx never end?” she asked herself with a shudder as she turned away to join Cassandra on the walk.

Lela glanced back at the grizzled septuagenarian. “I fixed the old angel a cozy place in the attic, but I guess he's a pneumonia buff.”

They laughed feebly, then keyed in and entered the living room of the old house. Lela eye-swept her mother's dust-mantled vintage furniture she sentimentally had refused to replace, and the carpet cluttered with her teenage son's record player and albums. A faded poster of her idol, Huey Newton, on a thronelike chair, graced the wall over the fireplace.

“Excuse this joint, Cass,” she said as she removed her coat and took Cassandra's.

Lela's face hardened as she sniffed the reefer-reeked air.

“Excuse me, Cass!” she said as she dropped the coats on a sofa, then stomped toward Marcus Junior's bedroom at the rear of the house.