Mama Black Widow (27 page)

I said, “I doubt it. Dorcas may disappoint you. She confides in me. I don't think he's that important to her any more.”

He sucked his front teeth hard and said, “Goddamnit! Don't you talk to me that way. What would a jitterbug know about my personal life?

“Ralph and his family are important to me, and what is important to me is important to my daughter. His father's insurance firm handled four million dollars in new policies last year. What the hell did your old man turn over last year?”

I said, “Nothing; he's dead.”

He said, “Before what did he do?”

I started to lie and say that Papa had been an engineer or a doctor, but I thought,
Dorcas is real, and she's in my corner. I'm not going to do a dance for this phony pot of shit.
I got out of his car and stood on the sidewalk.

I said boldly, “We chopped and picked cotton in Mississippi, and he shoveled snow and did porter work up North. Why?”

He cut an eye up the sidewalk toward his funeral home. I looked and saw Dorcas coming down the sidewalk toward us.

He turned and smiled toothsomely in her direction, and then from the side of his mouth he hissed venomously, “Stay away from my daughter. I don't want her associating with low-life cotton-picking niggers from Mississippi.”

I remembered what Mama had said about him. And I realized that he wanted Dorcas to think all was well between us. I saw the opportunity to blast his ass off with impunity. But just in case he blew his cool, I moved out of range so he couldn't punch me in the mouth or something.

Then I smiled sweetly at Dorcas twenty feet away and stage whispered, “Kiss my cotton-picking ass, Snake. You phony nigger motherfucker, I'm going to marry her.”

I was still smiling when Dorcas reached us. The nigger aristocrat had turned gray and sucked his front teeth desperately. Dorcas was heavenly in a fresh diaphanous pink dress with pink satin pumps. I couldn't resist visualizing myself in a similar costume.

Dorcas beamed up into his tense face and said, “Cecil, don't look so annoyed. You should know I didn't simply walk out and leave things. Lee came back from the coroner's office and took me off the hook. I see you two have met.”

I said, “Yes, Dorcas, and he's a great guy.”

Cecil constructed a grotesque smile and mumbled something that sounded like . . . “nice young fellow.”

He extended a sinewy hand, and in the distracting presence of Dorcas I thoughtlessly held out my hand. His paw seized it in a lightning quick pincer and crushed tears to my eyes.

In the glow of the street lamp I saw the muscles in his heavy wrist cording. He was saying nice things about me and grinning at Dorcas behind me as he went on torturing me.

My left hand was buried in my trouser pocket frantically trying to open the needlepoint blade of an inch-long miniature knife. Cecil was putting so much pressure on my hand I was getting faint.

Finally the midget blade opened. I brought it out in my palm. Cecil said hello to an elderly lady who passed us and stopped to chat with Dorcas. I aimed the little razor-sharp stiletto at a fat, pulsing artery in the fleshy web between his thumb and index finger and viciously plunged it in.

He stiffened and freed my aching hand. He held his wounded hand stiffly at his side and stole a surreptitious glance at the dark dots speckling the sidewalk.

He looked down at me with insensate hatred and rammed his stabbed hand into his trouser pocket. He abruptly stepped past us and almost bowled over the elderly lady hobbling down the sidewalk in his frantic wake as he pumped his long legs urgently toward the funeral home.

Dorcas turned and watched him with a puzzled look on her face and shook her head. We got in the car and pulled away. Cecil's nerve-mangling handshake had lasted only a few seconds. But my hand was hurting and throbbing like he had tortured me for hours.

She frowned and said, “Cecil acted so peculiarly. Surprisingly, he seemed to approve of you. So it wasn't that. I don't understand him tonight.”

I said, “Baby, he probably remembered something that had to be done right away. A big shot guy like him is bound to have sudden emergencies in his life. I wouldn't worry about it, darling.”

She gave me a searching look, but she didn't say anything. We
went to the Music Box on Sixty-third Street and had several bottles of beer. Then we went for a ride all the way to the Thirties.

My heart leaped when she drove down Thirty-first Street and passed the corner at Indiana Avenue. I remembered that night Railhead and Junior spotted Sally and stalked her and forced her to show us Bessie's butchered corpse.

Near South Parkway we passed a storefront Holiness Church. A portly black woman was going inside. We got a brief glimpse of frantic pandemonium and heard the raw rhythm of ecstatic feet and tambourines.

Dorcas pulled to the curb and said, “Let's go in for a few minutes.”

We went into the oven heat and sat on metal chairs in rear. The long room was packed with swaying, sweating, shouting enemies of Satan.

A dozen black women grimacing in orgiastic bliss danced voluptuously in the funky aisle. They cast torrid eyes up at a gigantic picture of a lustful, blue-eyed, golden-haired Christ hung high on the wall behind the shrewd-faced woman minister standing calmly in her battered pulpit and gazing blandly down on the licentious presence of the Holy Ghost and The Fire.

As we walked to the car I thought
, I wonder how many fanatically religious black women like those back there close their eyes in sex with their black husbands and sweethearts and imagine that their adored, dazzling, white Christ has made an especial divine visitation so their Jim-Crowed black cunts can host his pristine, pink prick.

While driving up South Parkway Boulevard, Dorcas said, “I suggested that we go in that church. Frankly, I went out of curiosity and perhaps callously to be entertained.

“I am not especially religious. I'm afraid that I didn't give your feelings a thought when I dragged you in there like we were going to a circus. You might have deep feelings about religion. I hope you weren't offended.”

I laughed and said, “I believed in all that jazz, and it was
important to me when I was a little kid down on the plantation and my Papa preached from-the-heart gospel.

“Papa was like a saint all his life. I can't think of one hateful thing he ever did. But, baby, devout Papa didn't have God in his corner. Before Papa crawled away to die, my heart would break listening to him praying for a job—just for a chance to feed and shelter his family so he could hold onto his manhood and self-respect.

“Then I saw that corrupt pastor of Mama's church living in the lap of luxury. I could never understand why God failed Papa, who loved him, and rewarded the crook.

“Then I realized that sweet, good people like my sister Carol were punished too. When I went to grammar school, I used to pass a house where an old, old man sat on the front porch in nice weather.

“Many times I saw an old woman fussing around him to make him comfortable. One day I heard older kids say that the old man had killed the old woman who was his daughter and the only friend he had in the world. Then he killed himself.

“He had done a terrible thing like that without any reason except that he was past a hundred years old and had become senile and lost his judgment.

“I remember how I first started wondering if God was like the old man. Maybe he had just grown so old he didn't realize he was doing horrible things to good people who loved him. Maybe God had had his awful lucid moment and was overcome with guilt at the infinite carnage and heartbreak he had wrought even among innocent children, like the old man who destroyed himself. Dorcas, I decided that whatever the case, I'd better not get too involved with him.”

Dorcas looked at me oddly, and then changed to a pleasantly light topic.

Dorcas and I saw each other at least once a week and often twice a week during the summer of 1945. We hadn't sexed, but we were close and devoted to each other.

Many times when we met I sensed that Dorcas was burning for
sex with me, but somehow, I managed to avoid sexing her without coming to crisis.

I had to know that the psychological moment was perfect for me before I attempted to make love to her because I couldn't afford to fail.

It was good for both of us that we used up a lot of potentially erotic energy swimming in Lake Michigan and playing tennis in Washington Park.

Dorcas's father apparently never mentioned to her that our first and only meeting had had slightly savage aspects. To avoid another meeting with him, I explained to Dorcas that despite the fact that Cecil and I had rather good thoughts about each other, I wanted to stay away from the funeral home. I knew how fond he was of Ralph Cecil, and I didn't want to make things awkward for Cecil.

In the last part of August, Dorcas picked me up at the El station, and she was wearing the sexy pink dress and satin shoes she had worn months before and that I loved to see her in.

We went to the Play House on South Parkway Boulevard and drank draught beer and danced to jukebox music.

We were catching our breath in a booth when Dorcas looked serious and said, “Ralph called from overseas the day before yesterday. He is going to be mustered out of service next month.

“It was heartbreaking the way he poured himself out to me, and like our parents, he is certain we will marry when he comes home. I am not the least bit certain about that. But I couldn't hurt him. I didn't try to dissuade him from his thinking. Perhaps I should have. I just don't know. I am so confused. He loves me . . . It wouldn't be a bad life with him at all. Let's forget it for now and drink lots more beer and dance the soles off our shoes.”

I danced and laughed and drank mechanically. Dorcas went to the restroom and left me alone in the booth.

I thought,
Gorgeous Ralph is coming home with all those sleek muscles and a marriage license in one hand and an honest to Pete stiff dick in the other hand.

She's carnal, and I'm the screwed up bastard that touched her cunt and flirted with a straitjacket. But she's forgiven me because she's acting fuckish tonight. And she's never been sexier. She's got a hot, juicy one all right.

Goddamnit! I'm getting hard! It's bigger and longer than I remember. I am hard! I got quite a tool. I got that feeling! I'll make her holler. Tonight I'm going to turn tiger and kill the freak, Sally. I have to hurry and get Dorcas in a bed while I'm hard and feeling powerful like this.

Dorcas came back to the booth and held out her arms to dance.

I got up and said, “Baby, I feel carnal. Let's get in the wind.”

Her face lit up, and she went quickly toward the door. We went out South Parkway Boulevard to the Park Vernon Hotel at Sixtieth Street and Vernon Avenue. It overlooked the section of Washington Park where we had parked for hours that first day we met.

I felt wonderful. But I took no chances. I kept my right hand busy in my pocket stroking my tool to keep its readiness.

Dorcas's eyes shone brightly and looked larger and prettier than ever as we went to our third-floor room. We reached our room. I unlocked the door and moved slightly aside so Dorcas could go in first.

But she hesitated at the threshold, smiling slyly down at me, for one hellish, destructive fragment of a pounding, torturous instant!

I felt my power draining from me and my precious, my magnificent hard-on, collapsing against my trembling fingertips. She tossed her head and her hips and went into the room. I stood in the hall staring at her back and feeling hatred for her shaking me for what I was positive she had been thinking at that awful moment of hesitation.

My head was roaring with thought. She started to ask me to carry her across that threshold in a playful way, perhaps like Ralph, the muscle buff, had done the trillion times he has fucked her.

I looked so goddamn puny and inadequate standing here, she didn't have the heart to ask the impossible of me. Then the perverse bitch gave me that shitty smile when she toyed with the idea that maybe she should carry
me
across the threshold.

I'm her little private freak show. Contempt is where her kicks are at. She's getting revenge for that night at the lake.

Dorcas went hurriedly into the bathroom without noticing that I hadn't followed her into the room . . . I went in and sat on a chair near the window. She came out in panties and bra and walked to the closet and hung the diaphanous pink dress on a hanger. She came to me and turned her back.

She said, “Undo my bra, Love.”

I did. She slipped off the pink bra and panties and put them on the dresser top. She posed before me in all her voluptuous blue black splendor.

Her thick bush had the luxuriant sheen of crow feathers, and a heart-shaped hairy carpet led to the rim of her belly button.

I turned my eyes downward from the imperious invitation of her jutting velvet tits with nipples deliciously deformed to the size and color of black cherries.

She dropped to her knees in front of me, and I shut my eyes against the vision of the strong, shapely curves in the long, powerful thighs. The sheer physical majesty and epic sexuality of her was terrorizing away my self-confidence and blowing all the fuses in my crotch.

She kissed my closed eyelids tenderly and slipped off my loafers.

She crooned, “Doll, fella, let's shower and do something naughty.”

I opened my eyes and gazed at her stupidly. Beer, frustration, the impact of her nude dimensions, ambivalence and her sweetly adroit handling of me had me in a kind of giddy trance.

I remembered I was supposed to be angry with her. I knew it was something terrible she had done to me because I felt like bursting into tears as my mind tensed in its struggle to remember her crime. I made a solemn vow to remember as I followed her into the shower.