Doom Fox (14 page)

The cabbie's horn prods again as he looks at his wrist watch, says gravely 'Naw Big Mama, I'm sorry, but I'm late. I can't stay. This study is fleeing in the wind to chomp the tall sweet clover. Bye baby, bye.'

She whimpers piteously, leaps from the bed when he picks up his duffle bag and steamer trunk. He moves past her, cosmic-eyed.

'I'm gonna put a curse on you!' she shrills. 'You a dirty nigger to split on me cold-blooded like this, Reginald!' She pursues, claws at him to the front door, Aunt Jemima face maniacal.

He swings the duffle bag hard against her chest. She falls backward to the carpet. He steps into the sunshine, bangs the door shut. He whistles himself to the cab, loads his gear and himself into the rear seat. As it pulls away, from the only friend and home he has anywhere, he stares at Mable weeping her heart out, standing nude, in the open doorway.

Reginald arrives first at Phillipa's hotel. Young Joe's jalopy has been slowed by a traffic jam. Reginald drops his bags at a window couch. He goes to the desk to be informed that his dream inamorata is absent from her 'C' note a day suite. He goes to sit on the couch. Head aswivel, he alternately hawk-eyes the bustling street and rear lobby entrances for Phillipa's arrival.

Joe pulls into the hotel's rear parking lot. Phillipa gets out. Reginald spots her, fresh as dew washed daisies in yellow silk, as she comes through a rear door toward him. He catapults from the couch. But his gazelle smooth streak across the lobby stonewalls against the gouted foot of a portly gent who calls him 'crazy nigger' in strident Swedish.

He lies in a sweatbox of embarrassment under the stares of passers-by and the neoned eyes of his voluptuous bonanza. His sky fallen in, he closes his eyes and chickens out fetal for a mini-instant before he sensuously acrobats to his feet, guided by the velvety crutch of her hand.

Cold blooded amusement skates her icy eyes as she volleys him with giggle bullets. But he forces himself impervious. Phillipa injects his lips with one of her cobra kisses that breaks him down sloppy like a sawbuck shotgun. His 'Howdy Doody' mouth slobbers to threaten her 'Ingenue of Camelot' make-up scam.

'I missed you too, gorgeous' she whispers as she ducks her fragile mask away and steers him back to the window sofa.

They sit and gaze at each other a spell before she says, 'I've got bad news.'

His voice shakes, 'Bad news? ... uh, about us?'

She lifts his hand, smooches the back of it, 'Don't look so distressed, Soldier Man. It's just that we can't fly to New Orleans together today.'

'What!? Why?' he exclaims.

'My mother called me from New Orleans last night to alert me that my crazy ex-husband will be staked out all day at the airport to beg me back.' She straightens a stocking seam on a Grable quality gam as she continues. 'Lover, it seems to me you'll simply have to take a later flight, perhaps in several days to give me time to clear the damn fool out of our way. Don't you agree?'

He frowns, drops his head. 'Yeah, sure, but I've got a problem.'

She finger lifts his chin. 'Your problems are my problems, honey lamb. What's worrying you?'

He heaves a heavy sigh, 'I'm,uh... almost flat broke, with just a few bucks for food ... lost my mustered out money gambling on the troop ship coming Stateside. I don't even have a place to stay.'

She laughs gaily, 'Cheer up, poopsie. You don't have a problem.' She rises. 'You can stay in my suite until I wire you money for a plane fare in a day or so.'

He follows her, with his bags, to pick up her key, then to an elevator. She watches him freak out when they enter the ultra posh suite.

'What a terrific pad!' he loudmouths.

She goes to the bathroom to get her make-up to pack into her small suitcase. She suddenly strips nude, falls supine to the airy carpet. Her mega notched, fat lipped, whiskered glutton winks at him. He shucks out of his clothes, sports a quality erection which she promptly rips off with bitchy yaps of joy. Then she mounts his face, humps it savagely, smears it, with bared teeth.

Leaving the suite, she embraces him and fantasizes her slashing teeth hemorrhaging his lips and tongue. He yelps in pain, recoils free.

As she steps into the corridor with her bag she reassures him. 'I adore you! I'll be in pure misery until I meet your flight in New Orleans.'

He hippy dips, 'Everything boss cool with the landprop?'

She says, 'Will be, for the time we'll need after I stop at the desk.'

She turns away. Quim maimed and drained, he teeters on rubbery legs, gazing at her witching him again with the ball-bearing wiggle of her honey dews through sheer yellow silk. She disappears into an elevator. She goes to a pay phone near the lobby's rear exits.

She calls the desk, says, 'This is Mrs Tomlinson, registered in suite six-ten. Please don't disturb Mister Tomlinson with messages or phone calls before he checks out at two p.m. today.'

She is suddenly assaulted by an imp of madness. She pauses, reflected at the door glass. She twists her face into a cretin sneering monster, then an idiot slut, with scotch purpled tongue lolled out like a gangrened penis. After a tensioned tussle, she rousts the gibbering imp and moves into the parking lot. She instantly becomes an animated portrait of laid-back elan, perhaps inspired by the card-carrying sanity buffs moiling about her.

Cruel to say the least, but Reg is easily one of your most creative hangings since you strung up adorably hung Miguel, she tells herself. You couldn't let a mere busboy illegal alien hook your heart so you fingered him to the immigration cops. You beautiful, perfect, genius person you. She goes across the lot to Young Joe moving the jalopy through dazzling sunlight toward her.

She gets in. As he pulls away for the airport she says, 'A priceless day like today makes life worth living, doesn't it, darling?'

He says, 'I maybe can say "yes" today. But no way yesterday. I'm getting hip to take the bitter with the sweet.' She leans her head back on the seat cushions, closes her eyes, muses, 'Good thinking Joe ... we have to use our memories of the candy and orchid days of our lives as cushions for the catastrophes.'

'Ca ... what?' he says.

'People caused disasters, Joe, as for instance the bride or groom is no show for that road show of elderly shoes and rice' she says bleakly as she thinks of Reba's split off from Melvin dilemma.

'Yeah, I dig you now' he says softly as he remembers Delphine's rip-off with a hot poker stab of psychic pain.

He flogs the crippled jalopy into autopsy hazardous traffic with typical Young Joe Allen derring-do and, with soul based, brute machismo.

8

Under the deepening cover of September twilight, a month to the day since hapless Reginald's hotel lynching, Zenobia sits parked in her La Salle. Her falcon bright eyes are welded to the Hoffmeister plumbing firm building a half block away. She waits to tail her eel-elusive Midnight Creeper. Driving skills honed and Holy Ghost vibrated, she flirts with the conviction that she will bag the Midnight Creeper this tail out.

A church member's trio of pre-teen daughters pause and stoop beside the La Salle's sidewalk side open window to startle her with a stoutly chorused 'Hi Miss Zenobia!' before they boogie away.

She stares at the departing trio and the rather tackily dressed step-sister Maude. Zenobia's ruined doll face is thoughtful and softened in the fallout of lavender light. She watches ebonic Maude, in cheap black dress, become nearly invisible at the corner between the high yellow natural sisters, butterfly vivid in starched dresses. Zenobia remembers the church gossip about the sinful and cruel way the widowed mother of the daughter trio favors her blood offspring over Maude, the family chore slave.

Zenobia's mind takes flight to painfully grope the past. She remembers when she, at Maude's age, was the despicable, anxiety-wracked, wet-the-bed, family lackey. She remembers the sweaty summer nights she lay on her wash board rough rag pallet. She'd lie there bruised on the pine floor in the one room cabin. She'd dream herself into her sisters' feather mattressed brass bed, gleaming like gold in the rush of moonlight through the open door.

She remembers shedding a billion tears, lying there wishing she wasn't so heart grindingly blue-black so her stepmother would touch her, hug her, love her as she did her silky-haired mulatto daughters. She had wished them all dead and stinking a thousand times. Even her lovable but jelly spined tar-black father when he cajoled, pitifully begged her half-white stepmother, Ora, for sex behind the leaky privacy of a gunny sack curtain.

Rejected and hopeless, she often death-wished that the Big Dipper would scoop her up through the star shot gates of Paradise. She remembers when trouble and hurt burdened her unbearably, she would sneak from the share cropper cabin to a clump of forest to rendezvous with a hallucinated only friend. Childishly, she had secretly named him Mister Firefly Face for the warm light that always suffused his unearthly kind face when he came to hold her, rock her, kiss her to tranquil slumber beside a musical brook.

Her stepmother, next morning, always razor strapped her bottom raw for that before her daily, fatiguing chores. Her father's feeble protests were always blown away by the blast of her stepmother's ex-moonshine joint B-girl spew of profanity.

She remembers the midnight the carping voice was stilled forever, and those of the others in the cabin. She was awakened brook-side by the banshee screams of her tyrant stepsisters. She raced to the flame shrouded cabin, watched their terror-hideous, hated yellow faces through a curtain of door flame. Cotton slave neighbors arrived too late at the cindered scene. She had guessed correctly that it was her father's usually carelessly tamped out pre-sleep pipe that had started the fire.

She remembers the cratered face of her father's cousin bellying against her, clutching her horny eyed and scary in the glow of flame. 'Baby girl, I ain't gonna let them mean peckerwoods stick you in no prison orphanage' he whispered, rattling her skinny frame with terror. 'I'm gonna be ya pappy 'cause I hear Cousin Frank begging me to be, jus' as clear.'

She hurts to remember her shrieks of blackout pain when he drunkenly butchered her maidenhead with shaft long slams of his wrist thick meat slab. She felt he had split her into two bloody halves. She remembers that she tried to drink herself dead when, years later, he deserted her, pregnant with Young Joe, for a new infant concubine.

Now, she sees Elder Joe comes out of the plumbing building. She watches him get into the truck, drive away, decked out dapper in blue suit with matching Homburg rakishly cocked on his square head. She eases the La Salle away in pursuit.

She follows him to a Hollywood bar adjacent to a fancy motel. She watches him park the truck a hundred-odd yards from the La Salle on the street near the front of the bar. She drives to the other side of the street to spy into the psychedelic murk of the place. She sees the Creeper sip several drinks on a stool at the bar near the open door as he darts anxious glances toward the sidewalk.

She stiffens, white hot jealous, as she sees Joe grin, lean back and stare at the stately Marguerite Spingarn getting out of her fuschia Caddie. She is Vogue gorgeous in a powder blue, blue fox trimmed suit and matching baby doll shoes. Emotion sweat drenches Zenobia as she watches them kiss and cling in the manner of the long term lovers they are.

She remembers how Joe's creamy tan handsomeness and bawdy jocker / baby boy personality had shucked her out of her potato sack drawers. She remembers it was sweet right away in that cricket serenaded bush bedroom. He had pushed her love button as he rode her on palms and toe tips with only a blue sash of moonlight to cushion their pelvic smashes.

Now, she sits paralyzed with hurt as she watches Joe leave her ritzy rival at the bar to go to stand behind a pair of customers at the next door motel office window and wait to rent a room. She thinks of the scythe in the La Salle's trunk that she earlier picked up razor honed from the sharpener to chop down a patch of backyard weeds. For an insane instant, before her Sweet Jesus routs Lucifer, she visualizes Marguerite's decapitated head on the bar room floor to shock Joe when he returns.

She sits and cries like a scalded baby for a long time after she sees them go into room 210. In a red haze of revenge lust she stumbles to a nearby sidewalk pay phone cubicle. She dials the operator, blubbers she wants the police to arrest a murder fugitive. But when the operator connects her to the voice of a desk sergeant, she hangs up. She stares across the street at the neon ripple of the motel's telephone number on its shocking pink facade. She dials. The motel switchboard operator connects the call.

Inside, the lovers disengage from their favorite sex-snack position. They stare stupidly at each other for a long bit before Marguerite picks up and says, 'Hello.'

Joe sees her ashen, puts his ear to the back of the receiver, hears Zenobia's flat voice say, 'Put Joe Allen on this phone, ya filthy Lucifer's pet!'

'That isn't possible, lady. There's no Joe Allen here' Marguerite manages to say cooly before she hangs up. 'Oh God!' she exclaims as the lovers scramble to peer through a slit in the room's drapes at an empty public phone booth near the entrance to the parking lot.

They are speed dressing when the phone jangles them rigid. They stare at the phone for three blasts before Joe again glues his ear to the back of the receiver when Marguerite tremulously picks up to Zenobia's voice. 'Ya lyin' strumpet! Tell my convic' husban' he better fly outta there 'cause I'm gonna drop a nickel to the poleece so's they can ship his 'scaped butt back to the Georgia chain gang for killin' that white man.'

Marguerite drops the receiver to the nightstand top with a clatter as she collapses with a color drained face onto the side of the bed. She rocks as her fingers work like vipers massaging her temple pits. He drops himself down beside her. She recoils when he tries to loop an arm around her shoulders.

Her bleak maroon eyes stare into his eyes that flee to an intense interest in the taffy carpet when she whispers, 'Tell me it isn't so, Joe' with the pathos perhaps of the legendary moppet baseball fan who long ago begged that Black Sox player to deny his thrown game guilt.