Doom Fox (17 page)

'He's bad off, Lil Joe ... maybe if you could find it in your heart to forgive him. I know he cares about you and your family because when his head is clicking on all cylinders he quizzes me about you and Reba and his grandkid. You know, pay him a visit to let him know you care about him, at least a little. Will ya please, Lil Joe? Now?'

Joe's face softens as he glances at Reba motionlessly staring at him. 'Poor Pops! Mama loves him in her grave ... she'd want me to go ... think I will since it's Christmas time and 'cause Pops was once my main man before he ...'

Reba shouts 'Hooray!' as she leaves the sink to splatter Joe's face with kisses.

'Be cool, Reeb. You win again. But I can't go until you get back from church.' Bitterness clouds his face for an instant.

''Cause I got to baby sit to keep your precious kid, Felix, from having conniptions and calling here to check up on my wife like he did last Sunday when you didn't show at church. So I can't try to make up with Pops until you get back from church. Right!?'

Reba laughs, 'Wrong, Daddy Joe! Take the baby with you to visit his grandpop. Right?'

'Right, 'cause ain't no way you gonna stay away from that little bullshit shyster and his choir two Sundays in a row' Joe says petulantly as he transfers the dozing baby to Panther's lap and rises to dress for the street in a fresh salvo of Reba's reward-control kisses.

Within the hour Cox and Young Joe, with the baby, ascend the creaky stairway to the apartment. They hear a weird keening sound as Panther keys into the living room, whispers 'Sounds like he's hunting coons and killing that redneck down in Georgia again. He thinks he can set up coon studs with that sound of a bitch coon ripe to lay out her poontang.' Panther heaves a sigh. 'Hurts my heart when he's flipped out on the dark side.'

The coon call suddenly stops.

Panther whispers, 'Joe's spell of crazy is probably over. But only for a little while.'

As they move toward the bedroom door, Young Joe falters, stares at a tan plaid shirt draped across the back of a sofa. He feels a surge of renewed hatred for Elder Joe as he remembers that Zenobia gave Elder Joe the shirt for Christmas almost a year ago. Her last one. Young Joe tells himself that he won't try to reconcile with his stepfather, that he'll turn and go back home. But the pathetic portrait of Elder Joe roots him at the threshold when Panther unlocks the bedroom door, swings it open, steps into the shade drawn murk of the room.

They stare at pajamaed Elder Joe, who stares eyes luminous with terror at Young Joe. He cringes in a corner. He darts a hand between the mattresses for his pistol confiscated by Panther. Then he snatches up his shotgun barrel thick, heavy headed cane.

'Lemme alone, Lil Joe! I'll kill you! I ain't gonna let you hurt me. You better heed, Lil Joe, and lemme alone. I'd kill God before I'd let him harm me. Lemme alone, Lil Joe!' Elder Joe whips his mock rifle to his shoulder, squints down its shaft aimed at Young Joe's heart.

'Oh shit, pally! Get yourself together. Your boy has brought your grandson for you to meet. Lil Joe ain't gonna harm you' Panther says as he moves to take the cane, helping Elder Joe to sit on the side of the bed.

Elder Joe warily watches as Young Joe approaches the bed with the baby. Young Joe smiles as he extends his hand for a long aching moment before Elder Joe limply handshakes. Young Joe sits down on the bedside, places the baby on Elder Joe's lap. He lifts a flap of blanket, gazes at the tiny face. The baby stirs, gurgles as he opens his enormous dark eyes that stare into Elder Joe's eyes glittery with tears as he hugs the baby to his chest.

Panther eases from the room.

'You wonderful little sonuvagun!' he exclaims. 'Your grandpa is sure glad to meet you. But shame on you for making me cry.' He looks at Joe Junior. 'And thank you Son, for coming and bringing him.'

'Pops, we gotta dump the past ... so ... uh ... well ... Oh shoot! I want you to be my main man again. Okee dokee with you?' He warmly puts an arm around the old man's slumped shoulders, shaking with emotion.

Elder Joe's eyes study every plane of the earnest, brutish face before he whispers, 'Okee dokee Son, if you really done forgave me. If you sincere and want old Pops around you again.'

Young Joe leans in eyeball to eyeball, whispers raggedly, 'I'm on the dead level, Pops ... want you to come for Christmas dinner with your family, even move back under the roof that you and Mama slaved to get and keep. You coming, Pops?'

He leans his head against Young Joe's shoulder, blubbers, 'You won't have to pick me up Son, and Panther don't have to bring me. I'm gonna throw away my stick and do the Fox Trot all the way to that Christmas dinner.'

Young Joe stands, hand helps the old man to his feet with the baby. The old man breaks into weeping when Joe lifts the baby into his arms, leans and kisses Elder Joe's cheek.

As they step into the living room Panther says, 'Say, Lil Joe, Melvin's cousin is cracking for a rematch.'

Young Joe barks, 'Mama retired me from the ring. But tell that pussy any alley in town he picks will do to bust his ass wide open 'stead of his jaw. And Panther, maybe you better bring Pops with you Christmas Day so's the cops won't bust him Fox Trotting.'

They laugh.

Elder Joe tip-toes, whispers into Young Joe's ear, 'Son, if something happens to me, just let 'em burn me and scatter my ashes in my tulip bed in the backyard at home.'

'Come offa that crap Pops. You got boo-koo years to go before you cash in,' Young Joe whispers.

'Promise, Son?' the old man persists.

'Yeah, I promise, Pops,' Young Joe says as he locks an arm across the old man's shoulders.

Panther, with tears in his eyes, follows, embraces them both at the front door before Young Joe leaves for the La Salle parked behind Panther's long chippie enticer convertible.

Early Christmas Eve night Panther Cox scrutinizes his dapper six-two reflection in his bedroom door mirror. He smiles satisfaction, bares a cache of gold nugget teeth gleaming in his cave dweller, coal dust black face. His vanilla suit is lumped across the shoulders by daily conditioned muscles that long ago powered the punches that swept him into contention for the heavyweight boxing crown of thorned orchids for his brain clot coronation bid in the roped pit with the Manassa Maniac who kayoed his dreams of fistic glory.

He cocks a tan banded pork pie lid on his glittery boulder head, mossed straight and black by a fresh process and dye job. He blazes his fingers with a half dozen fake diamond rings from his jewelry box. He steps into the living room, pauses to study Elder Joe seated on the sofa tapping his foot to radio music as he plays solitaire on the coffee table.

Joe raises his eyes to give Panther a level look. 'Stop eyeballing me Old Buddy and make your run. My head is cool and mellow, as Lil Joe would say.'

Panther smiles. 'Ain't got no doubts about that, pally. I'll be back in a coupla hours. Want anything from the streets?' he asks as he moves to the front door.

With a cool grin and tragic eyes Elder Joe says unlightly, 'Yeah, lug Marguerite Spingarn back with you if you bump into her.'

They manage to laugh bleakly as Panther leaves the apartment. He remembers, on his way to the street, how he met Elder Joe ten years before. He was a penniless and hungry hobo off a freight train from Alabama. Joe had fed him in the Down Home Cafe because of his resemblance to Jack Johnson, his idol, when he wandered in. He remembers the mountainous stacks of dishes he volunteered, the next day, to wash in the furnace heat of the cafe's kitchen for meals, a modest salary and shelter in the Allen back house before he won the small fortune at craps to set up his fresh fish market a year later.

He steps into the incendiary sunlight torching red sky rockets off his new Buick. It reminds him of the red painted shoeshine box he hustled the streets of Birmingham with when he was an escapee from the last of many foster homes at fourteen.

Twenty minutes later, fishing the streets for sex-pot strikes, he brakes the Buick sharply at a street car stop to reel in a flirtatious mulatto barracuda, hooked by the lure of his prepossessing red trawler and the big buck sparkle bait of his paste gems.

Later at the apartment Joe awakens from a nap as night's black broom sweeps away the last lavender debris of twilight. He takes a glass of milk to the coffee table to resume his game of solitaire. He pops anxiety sweat as his eyes seem to zoom in on and away from the cards he turns in the manner of a berserk movie camera.

He closes his eyes, groans as he sees the queen of spades transpose into the angry visage of Zenobia, whose paper lips move to threaten, 'Ah'm gonna send ya to git yo leg julry back on the chain gang, Mister Midnight Creeper.'

He flings the deck of cards to the carpet. He goes to the window, jerks it open to the whine of freeway traffic at the bottom of the tree and brush covered incline below. He stares at headlights flitting through the brush curtain like coon hunters' flashlights as he inhales deeply of the rush of crisp air. He whimpers, wrings his hands in panic to see the scene zoom in and out, then transpose into the Georgia locale of his revenge slaying long ago. He recoils, struggles against incorporation into the phantasmagoria of his madness but it absorbs him, drops its black murderous hood over the portals of his mind.

The excitement of murder lust is magical therapy that bolts his arthritic legs to the front door, cane unaided, without a scintilla of pain. He lurches through the door before he remembers he'll need his shotgun for his mission. He hurries back to the sofa to snatch up his cane. He goes to climb over a fence in the backyard. He flops, panting, into the mini jungle. He crouches as he stares through the forest with his shotgun cradled at ready.

A motorcycle cop zips into traffic from a car parked on the shoulder of the road below. He scrambles down the incline toward the ticketed motorist, walking back to enter his car. The motorist freezes in surprise at the sight of the bathrobed apparition materialized on the shoulder of the road ten yards away. Joe stops, stares into the captive blue eyes of the motorist terror glowed in the headlight glare of his car.

Joe puts the cane to his shoulder, squints down its oaken barrel as he aims it at the head of his target. His trigger finger scratches the cane fruitlessly to blast out the blue eyes as the motorist leaps behind the wheel of his car. Joe reaches it, splinters the windshield with a violent roundhouse swing of the cane before the motorist bombs his car away into brake grinding traffic. Joe pursues the fleeing car into the wind tunnel traffic that whips his bathrobe to his naked waist baring his mocha tan, twisted limbs and organ erected by his aphrodisiacal frenzy of murder.

By ironic coincidence, it is a black La Salle that smashes him airborne. His scream pierces the traffic roar when he crashes to the pavement to be disemboweled beneath the multiple wheels of a tractor trailer truck. A nest of his entrails writhe and glisten hideously on the pavement like Medusa serpents. He sprawls motionless in the freeway cacophony of rear end collisions and screeching panic braking of cars.

Through a gout of claret, he burbles, 'Marite!' Then death shutters the bedroom eyes that shucked young Zenobia out of her potato sack drawers down in Georgia long ago.

10

Young Joe was severely guilt shaken by his belief that, in revenge for Zenobia's death, he had nudged his stepfather into the grave. He had narrowly escaped a nervous breakdown. But time, five years of it, has diminished the angst of his neurotic guilt. That is except when he finds himself within eye shot of Elder Joe's backyard tulip bed sprinkled with his ashes and pauses to flay himself.

It is a fat mooned midnight in the year 1953 when Joe is awakened by the racket of a neighbor's squabble with his wife. A moment later he hears five-year-old Joe Junior flush the toilet, then patter past in the hallway on his way back to his bed in Elder Joe's old bedroom. Joe lies free of the imp of his guilt in the paradise of his mind created by the vision of his Creole Goddess, Reba, beside him in Zenobia's master bedroom. He gazes at her and the derby hatted knight of his man-prince rears a blue black awesome shadow across the moonlit valley of her sleek gold dusted thighs still sheening the illusion of girlish attraction.

He poises a callused palm above her nipple on the lam through the lace bars of her nightgown. He glances into a double crib at bedside, gazes at miniatures of Reba, twin girls, two months old. He tussles with the paranoid notion that his ugliness is so potent that at least some tiny bit of it should show on the twins if he is really their blood daddy. He twiddles his thumbs as he remembers their mutual colic has drastically cut into Reba's sleep for several nights. And too, he remembers, Reba still complains of too much soreness for intercourse since the twins' birth. He left jabs his monster for creating the frustrating emergency.

Behind the sham of closed eyelids, Reba quakes and mentally crosses fingers that she won't be summoned to perform the most onerous of her marital duties. She flinches when his Brillo Pad palm scrapes across her nipple. One of his sandpaper caresses before he mounts me to batter ram me, she tells herself bitterly.

She listens to Joe's coarse pooch panting and remembers Gibran's heady lyrics of love that Felix, her teenage wizard of woo, would be breathing at this juncture. And she remembers, with heart pit excitement how then Felix's vicuna soft hands and tongue would caress her and thrill her to her jade painted toenails. She snarls when one of Joe's meat hooks gouges a hunk of her buttock.

But she is grateful that Joe the baby sitter, with his aversion to a Felix related event, has threatened to boycott the picnic for a beer bash and catfish fry at Panther Cox's. Since Joe is the only sitter she will trust, her two month cherry will languish at home, unplucked by Felix in the picnic jungles. They had giggled like demented felons at the doomsday risk, with the vision of sleuth Joe handcuffed by Junior and twins while they pull off their caper in the woods.

She turns toward him on her side, seething, green orbs lash curtained. When Joe's mouth descends to slobber kiss her face, she holds her breath in the gust of decomposed supper liver and onions on his breath. She remembers the baby sweet breath of Felix.