Airtight Willie & Me (15 page)

Suddenly, she snapped her fingers, frowned in the throes of fake recall. “Now, let me see . . . you're . . . uh . . . No, don't help me. Ah! I've got it! You're that skid row pukey bum that conned me out of a buck the other day. Sure, you're the one . . . you stink the same . . . said you hadn't dirtied a plate in days. So, what the fuck you doing here in my face?” She paused to push the nitty-gritty sound out. “I didn't invite your broke ass to the party.”

He hurled the bulged-with-loot bandana into her face.

She tore it loose, caressed her long, tapered fingers through the treasure, moaning carnal hype. “Ooeeee! Oh shit! Sweet Da Da, whoooo wheeeee! You do it to your baby so good.” She catapulted herself toward him.

He stiff-armed her back and stood. “Don't touch me, Ila! Get on a robe and bounce your parasite pals.” He jiggled his head spastically. “I can't trust myself to do it.”

Cat eyes saucered and luminous, she said quietly in her whispery knife-at-his heart way, “Your old ass I will. You reneging on our latest understanding? Remember? I do what I want with whoever I want to do it with. Are you creaming again to crap on your li'l free spirit? Huh?”

He said, “No, Ila, you got the best hand. Now.” He went to the closet, extracted a carbine, and rammed in a cylinder of shells. “All right, I'll be fair and ask them one time to go away. Then, I'll blow them away,” he said tremulously as he moved toward the door.

She sprang from the bed and seized him around the waist and
spun him. “Hey! You flipping out?” she exclaimed as she blocked the doorway.

He smiled sweetly. “Then, Ila, please, will you make them go away?”

She nodded frantically as she led him to the bed. He dropped the rifle to the carpet and sat down heavily on the bed. She stooped and tugged off his boots, pressed him back on the bed, and lifted his legs onto the bed. She kissed his forehead, walked to the closet, and slipped on a gauzy wrapper. She left the room and shut the door.

Dizzy with fatigue, he lit a cigarette, decided he'd have to take a short nap to energize himself a bit before undressing for a shower. He closed his eyes—then opened them wide in apprehension about his threat to blow away Ila's friends. I really wasn't serious, never out of control. Yes, I was bluffing. I was tired and angry and just bluffing, he told himself desperately. But then, he told himself, it was better after all that Ila bounced them to save me the risk of wasting the bastards.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the details of an article on fatigue he'd read. He felt certain it could be a killer long term. His mother, Sarah, was an example victim, he thought.

His mind untethered, staggered catacombs of pain. He saw a vision of her, as vivid as the Arkansas stars in summer, lying on her deathbed in their lopsided coal miner's shack. In a storm of tears, he begged her not to leave him and his pa. He knew how much she loved them both. His seven-year-old mind just couldn't comprehend why she could be so eager, so cruel to die and desert them.

Her gasps and the doomsday thump-a-bump of her tired heart terrified him as he lay in her arms waiting for the company doctor and his pa.

“Ma, don't leave me and Pa. Ain't long I'm gonna be big and workin' the coal with Pa. Then we gonna buy you a ritzy house . . . 'lectric lights! . . . a great big slew of snazzy furniture. Ain't that somethin', Ma? And that ain't all. A john—inside! Honest, Ma! And
a new magic 'lectric washtub to do all the washin' you got 'cept the throwin' in. That's what Pa and me gonna do, Ma. So please, Ma, don't leave me and Pa. We love you, Ma.”

He raised his head from her bosom to see her promise not to leave. He burst into tears. She looked sixty. How could she be just thirty-two?

She smiled, closed her eyes, and sobbed, “Pa's sweet on scum, that Binnie on Red Light Hill. I ain't sorry to leave your pa. He ain't got no feelings left for me nohow since her. Forgive me for leaving you, but I'm too tired and ugly to try to stay. Anyway, I got an invite to peace and rest.”

Suddenly she bolted upright, seamed face ashine, dull blue eyes fired by the glory vision of the beckoning Master Keeper of the sweetest, longest dream there is.

She clapped her hands in joy and shouted, “Hallelujah!” then lay back and died.

He wept, thrashed, and pounded the spiny pine floor in convulsions of pain until his fists were bloodied and torn by splinters. Pa never got back with the doctor, never even got to him. Whiskey and Binnie had ambushed him on the way.

He found his pa through a tear in a shade at Binnie's shack on Red Light Hill. Pa was whimpering and groveling naked, kissing and licking the feet, anus, and sex nest of Binnie, the giantess, in patent leather boots cursing and whipping him savagely with a cat-o-nines to howling climax.

He crashed their party through the shack door. Wailing, he hawked and spat on Binnie. She punched and kicked him as his pa feebly tried to restrain her. She beat and whipped them both into submission. Then wept, apologized, as she smothered them against her bosom.

Jay remembered how Binnie, the rouge-smeared schemer, got the house with the toilet hole inside from his Ma's life insurance policy payoff shortly after her cremation; how after Binnie had rinsed
her dishwater blond hair to platinum and sausaged her Mae West dimensions inside peep-show dresses, she was the envy of all the two-buck pieces of meat with holes on Red Light Hill.

He thought, with a freakish ping in the scrotum, of the nine years Binnie had her sexual way with Pa and himself, exploited them like slaves. He shaped an ugly smile recalling the morning his pa cancelled his hatred when he shot out Binnie's lights.

On the screen behind his closed eyes he saw himself about to rise for his shift in the coal pits. He heard the guttural whisper of the Maserati when it coasted to a stop outside his window. He heard the tipsy bray of Binnie's voice. He went to the window, saw Casper, the elderly and notorious bisexual Lothario that had picked her up in the evening, groping Binnie in the funeral glow of dawn.

He heard his pa suffering a black lung paroxysm of coughing from his bedroom above. Then he listened to the sounds of Pa struggling from the bed that he hadn't been out of in several months, heard him stumbling across the floor to the window, to the closet, down the stairs. He cracked his door, saw gowned Pa, Magnum rifle in hand, his rotten lungs wheezing as he opened the front door.

He froze in exhilaration to see Pa brace his wasted frame against a doorjamb, aim, and put his sharpshooter eyes to the rifle sights. A minisecond before the percussive roaring, the lapping of orange tongues of flame, the couple's phosphorescent eyes locked on the rifleman. Then a gout of crimson leapt from Binnie's forehead. Casper ducked out of sight. He felt tidal waves of joy rock him to see Binnie dead. He walked toward Pa, who collapsed and wept piteously.

As he reached Pa and stooped to lift him, a muffled blast punched his eardrums. Blood and brain gore splattered him. He winced to see the end of the rifle barrel rammed into Pa's throat. He dropped to his knees and clasped his shattered dead ringer image close to his chest.

“I don't hate you no more, Pa,” he sobbed. “I ain't never thought about leaving you sick. I took care of you, Pa, 'cause Ma loved you. But I ain't never gonna forgive you, Pa. Not for Ma!” he screamed through bared teeth.

He remembered how, stripped penniless by Pa's sickness and Binnie's passion for the ponies and craps, he traded the dilapidated house off to the mortician for Pa's decent burial. He thought of how he rode the rails, begged, and stole for months until lost and dazed, he circled back through a dozen states to Galveston, Texas.

Now, in his bed, he heard the rustle of taffeta interrupt his bitter reverie. The musk of a dead woman, a murdered woman startled him. He slowly opened his eyes, plastered his hands across his eyes, trembled as he stared through his fingers at the nightmarish apparition smiling wickedly at him from a chair near the door. Grandma Randy! “I must be dreaming!” he exclaimed to himself.

“You're not dreaming, kiddo,” he heard the obese crone say in her unmistakable whiskey contralto.

He shuddered, knew he was dreaming. He razored red-hot rills across the back of his hand with his fingernails to discover he was awake.

She stroked gem-littered fingers across the bluebonnet blossom pinned in her red hair and primly pulled the hem of blue taffeta down across her lumpy knees as she grinned salaciously.

I'm awake. But she can't be alive, unmarked over there. She's dead. I killed her in self-defense, he argued with himself as he stared hypnotized as she took a cigarette from a jeweled case, flicked flame to the cigarette tip, inhaled. He watched her exhale, smelled the poltergeist of smoke as it floated through the air. He popped sweat. The murderess had come back from the grave as she'd warned him.

“Yes, I'm back to punish you, dearie. You fool! I told you you couldn't kill Satan's pet. Remember?”

I'll kill her again, I'll blow her away, he thought, before she kills me.

She airily waved a pudgy hand. “I'm not going to kill you, kiddo, not personally, that is. My lovelies will for that horrid thing you did to me and them with your baseball bat. Remember? Homer and Abigail are here in this house waiting to chastise you. Happy, happy, kiddo,” she said as she dredged up her bulk from the chair. She threw her head back and laughed.

He darted a glance at the carpet to locate the carbine. He leaned and scooped it up. He swung it toward her to fire. She had vanished. He leapt from the bed, scrambled to fling open the door. Ila faced him. He grabbed her, darted a fearful glance back into the bedroom.

“You see a fatso old broad?” he shouted.

Ila shook her head.

“Well, don't go in the bedroom! Stay in open spaces until I search the house!” he warned.

“What the hell is happening, Ding-a-ling?” Ila asked as he seized her wrist and pulled her down the hallway to the kitchen.

“Shut up, bitch! We got guests. King cobras!” he screeched.

He snatched a flashlight from the refrigerator top. With carbine in arm, he and Ila searched every shadowed nook and cranny of the house. They went to the basement, stood at the threshold, staring at the piles of junk furniture and odds and ends that the former owner had abandoned.

He shook his head. “It's too dangerous to search this mess. We've got to get out of this house until I think of a way to find and kill those snakes,” he said as he shut the basement door.

He led Ila to the bedroom to stuff his poker winnings into a leather shaving kit. After that, they went to the living room, flopped down on the sofa. His face was tortured as he mopped sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

She studied him, remembered that a boy in the orphanage was
frightened by things nobody else ever saw before he was taken away. She chewed her bottom lip as she tried to remember the medical term she'd heard that applied to the derangement.

Ila finger-stroked his temple as she said gently, “I love you, and I'm worried about you, Jay, baby. I just don't understand how that old woman that you saw could sneak in the house and out, and I never saw her. It's impossible!”

He cut hostile eyes at her. “She was here!”

“But what if she wasn't? What if it's really your . . . uh . . . nerves?” Ila said.

He batted her hand from his temple. “I'm not crazy, girl!” he snorted.

At that instant she recalled the mental derangement term. Paranoid schizophrenia! Fear narrowed her eyes as she moved away a bit.

She said, “So we've got a problem, snakes in the basement. Do we sit here and wait for them to die of old age?”

He shaped a cunning smile of triumph. “We'll check into a hotel until I can get the exterminators to put a tent over the house and gas it Monday. What kills roaches and rats will sure as hell snuff cobras,” he said as he picked up the phone to call a cab.

They sat in silence waiting for the cab.

Finally she said, “The old lady? Where did you know her?”

He jerked his head to stare at her. “In Galveston. Now, Ila, dummy up about her.”

They heard the honk of the cab. They left the house and went down the walk to get in.

“She won't be able to sneak into the house after I steel bar all the windows and doors,” he whispered into Ila's ear as he patted her thigh.

“Jay, the old broad you thi—you saw. Who is she?” Ila pressed.

He glared at her. “Forget her! I mean it!” he said sternly.

His mind whirled madly as the cab pulled away into the peaceful and salubrious Houston twilight. At midnight, in a downtown hotel
bed, wide awake, Jay clutched sleeping Ila in his arms. He remembered how the seedlings of his madness had been planted a decade before in Grandma Randy's mansion of horrors.

Jay saw himself at seventeen. He vividly recalled how he had palpitated in Grandma's horror mansion at his teenage sweetie's coded knocking on his bedroom ceiling from the attic above. He rapped a softball bat against his ceiling in reply. Then he went to a furnace vent in the wall, listened for movement in Grandma's first-floor bedroom below.

“Hi, Ice Cream Cone, it's clear!” he stage-whispered into the vent. Then he made a kissy sound of cunnilingus.

“Ooeee!” a honeyed voice squealed through the attic vent.

Joyfully he flung himself back into his bed. Thumbtacked shots of rodeo superstars riding and roping studded the walls. He gazed at them, certain he'd join their ranks one day.

Shortly, Fay, a dazzling platinum-haired girl, eased into his room and flung herself onto the bed into his arms. The teenage waifs caressed and kissed ravenously, clung together in the county-accredited foster home for the first time since their arrest ten days before. His house-pet cowboy suit, pearl grey and crisp, sprawled on a chair aglow like a decapitated ghost in a laser of Texas dawn.