Airtight Willie & Me (6 page)

There on the wall, a faded blue felt banner. On the dresser top, a gleaming trophy I won for the hundred-yard dash. There, against the wall, a rickety Flexible Flyer sled. An eight by ten blowup of me at five seated on the lap of a padded department store Santa Claus.

Holy Christ! . . . What a rack of torture she must have been on. Blaming herself for my terminal street poisoning. Suffering that I wasn't that upright, silver-tongued mouthpiece she'd dreamed me to be.

I got really blue and sad that fate had dealt us a black card from the bottom. I was torn down with that, and Sue, to make it worse. I went to Mama's bedroom. You know, to comfort her, to tell her I loved her, like Sue had begged me to do. Mama was on her knees praying for Sue before a homemade altar. What the hell could I do but get down on my knees beside her and pretend to pray?

At midnight, that first day, I unpacked Sue's bags. I sat on the side of the brass four-poster and opened her album of pictures. Ah! There she was, barefoot in a rough cotton dress, squinting in the sun as she lovingly held a puppy against her cheek. A shot of her father, riding a mule, a black-as-midnight tiny guy. His face was seamed and ruined by stoop slavery in the cotton fields beneath the inferno sun.

Her octoroon mother, the Baton Rouge strumpet, appeared surprisingly beautiful and innocent in a white dress. The closet monster was posed with Sue's porcelain-skinned sister before the backdrop of the scabrous death barn watching a polka-dotted sow suckling piglets. Ah! Sue and her daughter, with Sue's string bean Cajun husband, standing proudly in front of the gumbo greasy spoon they owned before the gorilla came Sue's way and turned her out.

I closed the album and went to bed. I hadn't closed my eyes all night when Mama called me for breakfast at eight. Two days later, the first paper from Illinois arrived. Sue had made news all right. Horrendous news! I uncontrollably jiggled the paper as I read the account of her end. The fiend she had played for was an escaped nut from an asylum for the criminally insane. He had taken her to an abandoned farmhouse. He had crucified her and tortured her to death with his teeth and a hunting knife.

Two teenagers, hunting rabbits out of season and drawn to the presence of the fiend's stolen pickup truck, had peeked through a window and saw her nailed to a wall. When the rollers showed, the fiend was in a drunken stupor on the floor beneath her corpse.

Mama and I flew to claim the orphan's body. I can't forget that sunny afternoon I walked into the morgue to identify her—that is,
what was left of her. The attendant pulled her out of the cooler bin. He jerked away a bloody and filth-pocked rubber sheet like she was dog meat. I gazed down at her and retched.

That inhuman cocksucker had hacked and scraped off her crow breast mane of shining hair that had leapt from her temples in spectacular, voluptuous waves. Her skull was crisscrossed and gouged with knife slashes. Her doll face was unrecognizable, except for the stable pony eyes staring blankly into mine. The cupid bow mouth had been lumped hideous from punches. Her teeth were bared in a macabre grin. Her body was measled with cigarette burns. Her honey-dipped breasts were ragged stumps. The satin belly was disemboweled from her breast bone to pubic hair. Her fingers were missing, and the butt of a cigarette protruded from her vulva. I staggered away, vomiting all the way to the sidewalk.

We buried Sue that week from Mama's church. We got the location of Sue's infant daughter's foster home from Sue's address book. Mama shipped Sue's stuff to Carla.

In the limo, on the way from the cemetery, I told Mama about Sue's plans and dreams to square up and open a restaurant to make a decent home for Carla, her daughter. Mama broke down and wailed like a crumb crusher. Small wonder. Mama had lost her dream too, a billion tears ago.

Thirty years later, whenever I see a pygmy fox with indigo, velour skin and pony eyes, or see a shimmering mane of crow breast hair, or hear a smoky voice, I get a lump in my throat remembering Black Sue.

I
tossed restlessly in the emperor-size bed in the Big Windy. The moon-drenched branches of a wind-mauled tree outside the bedroom window cavorted spectral shadows about the suite. Raucous March gales screeched off Lake Michigan. I felt a bleak loneliness, a nameless apprehension. I chain-smoked as a blond console in the living room issued Ellas's new hit wail about the loss of her “Little Yellow Basket.”

I was startled from my counting of the gold satin ruffles on the bed's canopy by the jangle of the telephone on the nightstand. I froze and stared at the phone for a long moment. Three
A.M.
! Was it Phyl, my one and only mud-kicker calling from the slams? Had some mugger on Sixty-third Street slugged and robbed her? Had some trick maimed her?

I picked up with vast relief to friend Gold Streak's frog-in-a-log voice. “How ya doing, Slim?” he shouted above a background of honky-tonk pandemonium.

“Great, Streak,” I said. “You must be balling at Small's Paradise, or maybe at the Cotton Club?”

He laughed. “Your ass, buddy. I'm back in Chi! Stole the finest three-way silk bitch in the Apple. I'm celebrating my birthday at Wimpy's, then Tracy's for a taste. C'mon!”

I said, “I'm waiting for Phyl. Want me to pick you up in your wheels later?”

He said, “No, Jim, I got the cabby with me that drove me from the Apple.” He hung up.

I went to the bathroom to freshen up for my lady due to check in. I was just a nineteen-year-old pimp novice. I wasn't scoring a big buck from the streets with one flat-backer. I wasn't really the suite's tenant. I had agreed to hawk-eye (from my modest pad down the hall) and occupy the suite during prime burglar time. Streak had a fear that some scuffler would shim his pad and cop his five dozen pairs of stomps, hundred vines, and assorted personal treasures. Streak had been on business in the Apple for a week. Dope business.

I brushed my teeth and felt pangs of worry and fear for Streak. The nasal sludge in his voice was the tip-off that he had strung himself out on his merchandise. Worse for Streak was the street scam that he was long past due in payment for supplies of dream shit from you know who.

I went to a bedroom window and idly glanced down a street. I saw a group of white couples and a pair of sharply dressed Mutt and Jeff Italian dudes alight from cars in front of the hotel. Apparently they were catching the Nat “King” Cole Trio's last show in the hotel cabaret.

I went to the blue-mirrored bar and mixed a Cuba Libra, overweighted with rum. I heard Sparky, a pimp friend with a noisy mob, go into his suite across the hall. Then I put Savannah Churchill's “Time Out For Tears” on the turntable. I heard a gentle knock on the door. I thought it had to be Phyl. I felt irritation that she had lost the key I had entrusted her with.

With casual reflex, I unlatched the door. It swung open. The stack of records clattered to the carpet. I stared slack-jawed at the Mutt and Jeff Italians I had glimpsed on the street muscling into the suite. Jeff pushed the door shut. They stood like sphinxes, royal blue overcoated, dap and deadly, inky eyes hooded staring at me. I couldn't ask them what they wanted. My terror and the stench of the oppressive cologne made me nauseous, mute.

My vocal chords were paralyzed. My lips banged together soundlessly as I obeyed the imperative command of porcine Mutt's head dip at the sofa. I collapsed onto the sofa with gluey palms. Mutt shoved his blue fedora back off his face and sat on the coffee table facing me. My ticker boomed counterpoint to Savannah's tearjerker.

Jeff stage-whispered something in Sicilian. Mutt grunted and belched a stinking gust of garlic and pasta. Jeff materialized an automatic piece from a shoulder holster as he cat crept into the bedroom. Jeff came back into the living room scowling. He sat down on the coffee table beside Mutt. They glared at me.

I found my voice to say inanely, “What's the trouble?”

Mutt said, “Who are you, kid?”

I said, “Bobby Lancaster.”

Jeff leaned and tapped my forehead with the snout of his piece. He said, “Now, Bobby, we got urgent business with Otis . . . very important! Where is he?”

I bit my lip thinking fast. They exchanged a few rapid words in Sicilian as I procrastinated. I caught a bit of it for I had grown up next door to Sicilian pals in Rockford, Illinois. Their rap had sounded like, “squeeze the skinny asshole.” Jeff stomped his heel down on my bare instep. My eyes leaked water. I almost tinkled in my pajamas with the jolt of pain.

I was about to blurt out the info when the truth hit me. They had to waste me since Streak was a walking dead man already. They couldn't leave me alive. They couldn't risk my possible identification after they hit Streak! I closed my eyes and thought about Mama. I remembered how she had wept and pleaded with me to stay in school, to avoid ruin and early death in the underworld. I thought about unforgettable, dazzling Opal, my childhood sweetheart. Now it was all over. I was finished at nineteen.

Savannah's song was winding up. I heard Phyl's key in the lock. I groaned. She was finished too. I opened my eyes. Jeff raced to the side of the door with pistol ready. Phyl opened the door. My friend
Sparky, the pimp, and his dozen-odd mob of hustler pals were spilling out of his suite. Mutt released his grip on my hair. Sparky embraced Phyl's waist from behind and nuzzled her ear.

Sparky glanced at me on the sofa and hollered as he waltzed Phyl into the room, “Young Blood, my man!”

The wild mob followed Sparky and Phyl into the suite. Jeff dropped his piece tight against his hip. He jerked his head at Mutt as he stepped into the hallway. Everybody froze and stood staring at my mussed up condition.

Mutt snarled, “Clear the way!” He moved from behind the couch waggling the automatic. The crowd parted to make an aisle to the door.

Sparky said, “What the fuck is going on, Slim?”

I said, “Everything's cool now.”

Mutt went past the muttering, menacing mob into the hallway. I went to the window and watched Mutt and Jeff drive away. I knew their unfinished business wouldn't take them far from the hotel.

While Phyl was helping me clean myself up in the bathroom, Sparky came to the doorway. He said, “Baby bro, you better cut Streak loose.”

I said, “Streak and the mob split to an after-hours spot down the street.”

Phyl and I split to our pad. I called Tracy's joint several times and got the busy. I put in an emergency call. No dice; the line was out of order. I paced the floor and glanced out the window every few seconds. Streak was a cinch to be ambushed if I didn't risk my life and go to Tracy's and pull his coat. But I was leery!

Then I got it! I'd send Phyl in a cab. I went to the bathroom doorway and watched tiny Phyl cold creaming off the ho makeup from her baby face. I couldn't send her. Her face looked like a trusting child's in the mirror.

She smiled at me. “Daddy, you feel like making love?”

I kissed her hard and said, “For real, baby! Soon's I get back.”

It was a man's mission. I dressed in dark clothes, rammed my pistol into my belt, and told Phyl not to leave the pad and split. I went to the roof and tried to spot the Mutt and Jeff Buick staked out. I went down the fire escape to the alley. I started down the black pit alley toward Sixty-third Street for a cab. Two blocks away! Platoons of rats scampered and squealed across my path.

Deep into the nightmarish tunnel I saw the black shape of a car oozing toward me with lights out. I snatched out my pistol. It slipped from my sweaty hand and bounced on the alley floor. I dropped to my belly behind a trash bin and retrieved it. My shaking hand pointed it at the windshield of the car moving toward me. The car stopped ten yards away. It was a Cadillac!

I got to my feet. As I passed the startled white dude under the wheel, I saw a Sixty-third Street ho laying head on him. I was dizzy with relief when I stepped into Sixty-third's carnival of neon and whistled myself into a cab.

On the long trip to Tracy's on the Westside, I remembered how I'd met Streak. Junior high was out for summer vacation. Opal Grady, my first sex mate sweetheart, and I were having a picnic lunch in the park one July afternoon. We noticed an older young guy in tattered, dirt-streaked clothes. He'd amble out of the bushes to get a drink of water from a nearby fountain every few minutes. Each time, he'd sneak a ravenous glance at our layout of food. Opal suggested that we share with him. I followed him to his pad in the bushes. I had a helluva time convincing him to accept the invitation to join us.

He introduced himself to us as Otis Banks. Guess we were the first to meet him formally when Otis the orphan had swung off that freight train from Dixie three days before. He had oodles of warm, comedic charm. He hooked Opal and me right away. I remembered there was an extra room at home. He shot Mama down within an hour after she met him. Mama copped him a gig as mop technician at city hall. I loved him like the brother I never had.

But he was restless, had been street poisoned down in Memphis. A year later, he split to the fast track and left a sentimental note for Mama and me. Through his rare visits and rumors, I kept in touch with his street career. He had hooked his heart to become a pimp. His black patent leather skin stretched across the Cro-Magnon features was a slight handicap. The major handicap of his tender dick, compounded by his secret pedestal reverence for foxes early on, had chilled his long shoe dream.

He peddled low-grade eights and sixteenths of smack and cocaine, instead of dick, out of crappers in junkie dives for several years. Then he copped the big bag. He bleached a gold streak down the center of his processed hair to cop his moniker and to match his gold hog. And now, I thought, as my cab pulled to the curb at Tracy's, Streak's golden street bubble had popped.

Tracy's doorman peeped at me through the spy hole and opened the steel door. I walked into the acrid smoke haze and wall-to-wall night people. The Seeburg jukebox was firing neon and Hamp's “Flying Home.” I spotted Streak at the crowded bar. As usual, he was a loudmouthed, animated symphony, decked out in puce and gold threads. The Carole Lombard look-alike blond fox he'd stolen in New York was beside him, draped out in threads that matched his own. Next to the fox teetered the fat, black New York cabby. I muscled through jitterbugging fanatics in the aisle toward Streak.