Doom Fox (19 page)

Reba whistles. 'Whew! I've got a headache just hearing that riddle.'

'Mother said her father swore to fast until he solved it.' Felix continues. 'Finally his mind snapped and he wound up in a Bellevue padded cell and my old man wound up with all of his clients and my mother as his love slave.'

Reba says, 'I'd bet the solution to that riddle is mathematical. Did you ever lay it on any of those eggheads at U.C.L.A. before you graduated last year?'

He chuckles, 'Sure, several theorized actuarial mumbo jumbo and compound interest years as the solution. But maybe the real solution could be as mysterious as the slow aging time warp of an outer space traveler.'

Reba says, 'Could be. But what do I know ... how did your father wind up in L.A., the founder of The Universal Holiness Church?'

'He came out here when I was five after he finished a two year sentence in Attica for practicing medicine without a license. A powerful Harlem politician discovered after the death of his sister that she had been my father's patient. She died from a brain tumor he had treated as simple migraine with powdered bat hearts and black healing candles. My mother's appendix burst and she died our second year in L.A. He had treated her for a week for indigestion with herb tea.

'Oh, how he abused us! He beat me with a razor strap and forced me to memorize the Bible. I'm not even convinced God exists. I'm just an actor reciting lines in the pulpit. He forced me to preach at five ... the novelty drew a mob of members to his church when it was just a storefront on San Pedro. I hated him! I despise him in his grave. If there's a hell, he's ...'

They jerk rigid, stare at Joe entering the clearing. They watch him walk to within yards of the waterfall, stop, swivel his shaved bullet head to locate the teenagers' outcries of copulation in the tall grass.

Joe goes to the thrashing bed of grass, peers down at the couple, mumbles ' 'Scuse me' before he turns and goes deeper into the woods.

The teenagers rise and hurriedly leave the clearing. Felix leaves the cave followed a moment later by Reba. She jogs to the perimeter of the picnic area. She is about to leave the woods when she encounters several pre-teeners chasing and snaring butterflies. She gets an idea to allay Joe's suspicions.

'Kids, I saw lots of the prettiest butterflies I've ever seen deeper in the woods. Come on, I'll show you!' she exclaims as she leads them back into the woods.

She leads them to Joe frantically searching thick under brush. He whirls at the sound of their voices with a stupefied expression on his face. Reba saucers her eyes to feign amazement to see him.

She moves to his side, whispers harshly, 'Joe Allen, what the hell are you doing out here? Where are our children?'

He shifts his clodhopper feet as he exhales tension relief to discover her apparently innocent. He averts his sheepish eyes to mumble, 'Aw Reeb, I was just taking a light hike ... the kids are with Mother Sarah ... they're all right.'

Reba hisses, 'She's old and ailing. Joe Allen, will you please get your big black ass back to the kids? Now!'

He nods his head. As Reba turns and moves away with the pre-teeners she says loudly, 'All right, kids, let's go get those pretty butterflies among those sunflowers over there.'

From the corner of an eye she sees Joe hurry back toward the picnic grounds, and vows to herself never again to be persuaded to take such a foolish risk with Felix.

11

Reba kept her vow to herself not to hype up her affair with Felix with brink of doom thrills through high risk shenanigans. The lovers have become so cautiously sub rosa that Joe's suspicion of them is in almost total remission.

Joe feels contentment, a euphoric rush of happiness as he holds Reba in his arms on the front seat of the La Salle at a drive-in theater. They watch the gas chamber end of the new hit 1958 crime movie,
I Want to Live
starring Susan Hayward in the real life role of Barbara Graham.

Ten-year-old Joe Junior, fast asleep on the rear seat, holds his five-year-old sleeping twin sisters, Belle and Sadie, in his arms. The couple show only a slight stomp of time. Joe's shaved bullet head has a two day sprout of prematurely gray stubble. But his flat brutish face is unlined. And his steely muscles still writhe sinuously beneath his panther black skin. And, except for slightly thickened thighs and middle, Reba is still head swiveling pretty.

Joe kisses her earlobe, whispers, 'Ain't we happy Reeb?'

She says softly, 'Yes Joe honey, very happy ... my sewing customers are growing and you're the highest paid field employee old Hoffmeister has at two hundred bucks a week. And best of all, you're home nights and not on that night watchman gig.'

He says, 'Ain't that the truth? Sure is mellow that old wolf ain't lolly-gagging 'round our door and we got healthy kids.' He squeezes Reba so hard she gasps. 'Oh Reeb, I love ya! Happy is sweet!' he exclaims so loudly that the kids jar instantly awake.

Reba climbs over the seat to take the twins in her arms. Junior climbs over into the front seat to Reba's place beside Joe. They watch the executioner's cyanide pellets drop into the bucket of acid. Fatal vapors swirl about Hayward, strapped into the death chair.

Joe replaces the car speaker on its stand, keys the La Salle engine to life, drives hurriedly toward an exit to avoid the end-of-movie glut of cars.

But lonely physician, Pretty Melvin Sternberg, in the family Beverly Hills mansion is neither happy nor still pretty as he shoots a shot of Dilaudid, a morphine derivative, into a main arm vein. He withdraws the empty syringe, places it on a new nightstand, as he reclines his obese bulk against the bed pillows. His face is jowly, blotched and seamed. His once enormous sparkling gray eyes now seem piggish in his once handsome face that had sex vibed legions of chippies. That magnet face has vanished, is uglied by fat and debauchery.

He scowls furiously as he looks about the bedroom he had to completely refurnish a month ago as he had been forced to do to nearly every other room in the mansion. He glances at his wristwatch, only seven p.m. He decides it's too early to leave for another of his ritualistic Saturday night searches of the black ghetto vice jungles for Roxie Jackson, a beautiful teenage whore he'd become slavishly infatuated with and retired, he thought, when he moved her into the mansion to share his bed.

In recent years, he remembers, he has given fat fees to a wide assortment of street girls for hire from Hollywood to Watts. But only pain freak Roxie proved to be the perfect superstar foil for his bondage and S and M games requisite to gratify his cruel and rapacious sexual appetite. So he feels excruciating Roxie withdrawal misery as he stares at her huge nude image commissioned in oil on the bedroom wall.

He is unaware that it was the now king of black L.A. pimps, Whispering Slim, her secret boss, that had used a crew of Central Avenue losers and a pair of rental moving vans to strip the mansion of heirloom furniture, tapestries, paintings, Oriental carpets and gold tableware left to Melvin by the elder Sternbergs who had died six months apart several years before.

Roxie had been cleverly programmed to dupe Melvin's lone house servant, Tessie, an elderly black jack-of-all household labor, away from the house. Tessie had accompanied Roxie on a supposedly heavy shopping trip in midday to allow the cleanout thieves' dream access to the Sternberg treasure. Roxie had ditched the old woman in the Beverly Hills shopping center after the burglary was completed.

Melvin had persuaded Tessie to keep Roxie's presence in the mansion and her part in the robbery a secret from the police and insurance snoops. He had reasoned that his white, affluent patients would desert him en masse were the sordid details of his involvement with Roxie revealed by her apprehension by police.

Dilaudid freaked out, he flirts with the mad idea when he finds her to kidnap her and hold her prisoner in the wine cellar under key and steel bar for his pleasure and her extended punishment.

At eight p.m., he gets out of bed to dress himself in a casual black slax suit for the ghetto search. He forgets his wallet on the dresser top. He rams a snubnose thirty-eight under his belt before he goes to the guest house site of his breakup with Reba years before. He tiptoes in and lifts the key to sleeping Tessie's nondescript black nineteen-fifty Dodge off the dresser top as he has for a month of weekends.

At the moment that Melvin drives Tessie's Dodge away from the mansion through the balmy August night, vice king Whispering Slim brushes his mop of processed hair before a Sternberg dresser mirror. He strokes his glossed head, tells himself 'Player, your mop is so slick and perfect a fly would bust his ass lighting on it.'

He glances at stable pet Roxie Jackson lying on the heisted Sternberg emperor bed. His white stucco six bedroom Hoover Street headquarters is luxuriously furnished with the other stolen loot. The house was built as a residence for a major oil company's executive years before when the now black neighborhood was exclusively upper-middle class white.

The other five girls of Slim's Southeast L.A. stable pause in the master bedroom doorway, street jungle sexy in outrageously short, tight and noisy dresses. Their fierce dark faces in the scarlet wash of hallway light auras them war painted Mau Mau maidens, murder stained. 'Happy birthday, Daddy Slim' they chorus.

The other six, the white half of Slim's stable, live, hump and shoplift in the shops and hotels of the Hollywood and downtown fast tracks.

'Hey Daddy Slim, we creamin' to hit them streets. We gonna starve them other nigger pimps' 'hos shitless tonight' his strawboss rubenesque warrior bitch enthuses with shapely black net stockinged gams aggressively akimbo.

'G'wan Sharlene, take them 'hos and git in the motherfucking Hog' Slim commands as he admires his mauve and shocking pink decked out image in a mirror. He sees his squad of john flippers disappear behind him down the hallway on their way to his new puce and ivory Caddie.

He gazes at Roxie. His diamond glutted hands pretend to adjust his custom silk tie. It depicts the hand painted copulation between a kneeling alabaster sexpot and a gargantuan black German Shepherd. He watches Roxie, with lime chiffon gown hiked to her porcelain hued belly, perform her dazzle-daddy, leg pumping, bicycling, quim flashing exercise. A mane of tousled platinum hair frames her Kim Novak lookalike face, infant innocent in the soft blue ambience of nightstand lamp. Gossamer gowned and violet eyed, she is haunting, as ethereal in the blue mist as an escapee nymph from Botticelli's Allegory of Spring.

Roxie Jackson, teenage queen of black ghetto hookers, the polymorphous perverse favorite bitch of an interracial swarm of street tricks.

My pussy money tree, Slim thinks as he turns from the dresser mirror to prance to bedside, to say goodbye until dawn.

'Daddy, please lemme hit the streets, like tonight, before I flip out. Please! Huh?' she huskily pleads with a cheek pressed against his fly in protest to her thirty day house quarantine since the Sternberg wipe-out caper.

She gazes up into his face. He lags his response to bang the pain junkie with suspense jollies as he stares into her face. He remembers how he had stalked her for four years, since she was fourteen. He trapped her the year before when she turned eighteen. He remembers how he first moved into the Jackson's lives by buying a river of cheap grape for her mulatto wino father before he passed the year before. He had hipped her alcoholic white mother how to get welfare checks under multiple names and addresses. The fur choked, Caddie blessed mother waxed horny gratitude. He'd then whammed his costly meat, freebie into the buxom mother periodically, he recalls, to cover his four year obsession to make Roxie his whore. He shapes a cunning little smile as he remembers how he fingered the mother to welfare investigators to get her a jail sentence so he could turn out Roxie on the fast track.

'Talk that get down shit to your daddy, sweet freak bitch star' he whispers as he slashes a fingernail across her nipple.

He leans as she shivers to grind her bottom lip between his teeth.

'Girl, ain't no way I'm gonna put you down in them streets to get your head busted or chopped off by one of that sucker croaker's scalpels. Be cool and concentrate on that three, maybe four, kilos of Joy Boy skag we gonna score for in the Apple. Lissen to me, bitch, and be patient.'

She pouts her rosebud mouth, 'Sharlene told me my star trick was on the scene last night with his dick in his hand looking for me. You know, Daddy, Chuck, the peckerwood, that ex-marine hero that always spends a "C" note. Sharlene is gonna give him my phone number if he shows tonight. Can I turn him, daddy? Please! I'm so fucking bored! I feel like crapping on the carpets to get some action.'

He studies her upturned face before he whispers from his ruined voice box, 'Yeah, you can turn him at the Circle. Bitch, the king don't allow no tricks turned in his castle. Maybe later, when the Pit closes, I'll call you and you can cab to my birthday party. That is, Miss Frisky, if you make that trick bring you back home fast, with no detour into no cabarets.'

'I promise, Daddy,' she says as she kneels on the bed, unzips his fly with her snowy teeth. She mouths in to tow out his cable veined womb sweeper. Her epic chest humps with excitement as she reaches to a nightstand top to hand him a snaky whip and handcuffs. He locks her hands together behind her and whistles the whip across her back.

She moans ecstatically, 'Ooooh! Wheeee!'

He violently whip-welts her buttocks and back while she fellates them to mutual climax. She collapses supine, gaspy, her kiddie face wet with sweat. He unlocks her hands, goes to the adjoining bathroom for a moment, steps out. He gives himself a final check out in the dresser mirror, and blows her a kiss as he leaves the bedroom.

Shortly before one a.m., in suburban white Lynwood, Chuck Haggar, Medal of Honor winner in World War Two, civic leader and father of pre-teen boys, lies wide awake beside his sleeping wife. He is feverish, erected by raging Roxie itch. He stares at his beloved but inhibited wife, feels a twinge of resentment for her no suck, missionary position, sexual concrete that forces him to find Roxie, the sexual circus.