Airtight Willie & Me (17 page)

She rubbed her cheek against his hard belly and crooned, “You're so goddamn adorable, dearie. I'm gonna adopt you with papers, and flat-out marry you the second you're old enough. You're mine! Now, lie and rest long as you want; don't polish the car or anything. You only got to help me with my corset when I go out later today. That won't be until around noon.”

She quivered with murderous eyes as she stared at a strand of Fay's platinum hair snared in his crotch bush. Her fingers curled into long, nailed claws to rake his face. Instead, she stood, slipped on her wrapper, and waddled from the room, her face hideous with anger.

He lay in a fire-bed of pain, with tearstained face, his thighs gluey with semen. He slugged the pillow and silently screamed he'd kill her. Through the dope haze, he relived the crunch of fate's trap with zoom-shot fidelity:

He saw himself grimy, belly growling with hunger several days off a freight train. He'd been lying on a pallet of rags in the twilighted basement of a condemned house near the Galveston waterfront used by a mob of homeless street urchins like himself between panhandling missions and thieving forays for food and garbage wine. He was rising from his odious bed, salivating at the thought of another grab-and-run score from the cart of one of the street food vendors when the basement entrance was suddenly shadowed.

A half-dozen tattered basement denizens shoved Fay into the basement at knifepoint. Her eyes were phosphorescent blue globes of terror in the purple murk. Her teeth chattered, lips batted mute protest as they pushed her to the basement floor on her back and ripped off her panties. The older husky leader stripped off his pants and dropped between her palsied thighs with a stiff dingus and his
knife at her throat. The others undid their flys and lined up in the humping order of their ages and/or brawn.

Jay stared, paralyzed with shock, as the leader stroked brutally into his victim, whose piteous sobbing vibrated the basement. He was galvanized to take violent action when the rapist slugged Fay's face with his fist. He fumbled in his bed of rags for his weapon of fat steel pipe, gripped it, and lunged to the attack.

The line hollered warning as he smashed the pipe against the top of the leader's head. He rolled off limply and vacant-eyed. The others snarled and crowded in, muttering profane threats, with organs waggling, as he pulled Fay to her feet. He and Fay backed into a corner as the mob moved in.

He slashed the pipe through the air at their heads and screamed, “I'll break your fucking heads! Get back, motherfuckers! We're coming out!”

They retreated a few feet blocking the exit. He clutched Fay's hand as he moved toward them brandishing the pipe. His teeth bared like fangs in his feral face, contorted like a wolverine's protecting its cub. The mob scattered away before his doomsday countenance. He and Fay escaped down an alley to a jalopy cadaver in a slum street a dozen blocks away.

He saw anew the blistered shell that became his and Fay's love-nest home for the two weeks they roved, stole, and begged in the streets of Galveston's waterfront district. To protect her against further assault, they posed as sister and brother, and they were inseparable except for hygienic and biological moments in service station washrooms.

He remembered that last, half-starved, early evening in the crowded streets when they had sneaked up behind a tamale vendor as he gave change to a customer. They scooped handfuls of tamales off a steam grid on his cart into paper sacks and fled toward an alley mouth. They ran, pursued by the elderly Mexican vendor, smack into a police cruiser easing from the alley. They were arrested at gunpoint and taken to the juvenile lockup.

Jay remembered how many of his jailhouse acquaintances received indeterminate sentences for petty theft from the hanging judge presiding, even sentences up to twenty-one years.

Vividly he recalled how Grandma had come the day before his scheduled court appearance. He remembered how she had selected him and several other boys like heads of cattle from the juvenile tank, to save them from the state reformatory she'd told them. He had refused Grandma's generosity unless his half sister, Fay, was rescued as well. Politically clouted Grandma was cunning all right, he thought. She had rescued them for free labor on her ranch and in her fields as house servants and lackeys behind the twenty-foot barbed wire-topped fence of her foster home-stockade.

Now, easing into slumber, he told himself, “I'll be smooth, cool, and case our escape from Monsterville.”

Dream shrouded, Jay crept up behind Grandma, securing the bluebonnet blossoms in her hair at the top of the steep second-floor landing. He was panting and wild-eyed as he cat-footed close enough to see sproutings of white hair at the roots of the strawberry red mass. He raised the flat of his foot, drew his knee back to his chest, and sighted on the porcine small of her back. He heard his knee crack as he launched his foot like a missile into her back.

He clapped his palms over his ears to blot out her screaming as she bounced and tumbled down the stairs, making terrible pulpy sounds. He stared at her motionless, twisted bulk at the bottom of the stairs. Shards of blood-speckled bone thrust starkly from her askew neck as she gazed up at him accusingly for seeming eons.

Then she pulled herself to her feet and daintily pressed all, except one, of the shards back into place. She snatched that one free. Slowly, she popped her head and crooked neck straight with the heel
of her hand. He stood transfixed as she ascended to him brandishing the shard like a dagger.

She said, “Naughty, naughty. Turn your palms up for punishment, li'l darlin'.”

He watched her very gently spank his upturned palms with the bloody shard in the manner of a grade school teacher with a ruler.

He cried out again and again, “I didn't really want to kill you, Grandma!”

She smiled as she continued the spanking and recited softly like a poem, “You can't kill Brandy 'cause you're not that handy. You can't put me away. Never. I'll come back to punish you forever and ever.”

He screamed, “I swear, Grandma, it was an accident! I stumbled against you!”

Her face became fearsome with rage as she inserted the shard into her neck. Then she seized and violently shook his shoulders. “Don't lie to Brandy! I can read your mind!” Her long nose touched his.

He thrashed on the shadowy precipice between sleep and reality.

“Wake up, dearie!”

Reality pummeled his eyes open. He rolled away in a lather of sweat, in terror to see Grandma shaking him with a half-hooked corset clinging to her clumps of fat, looming above him.

She smiled knowingly. “I heard you raving murder, dearie. You're stupid to waste yourself dreaming to kill me. You can't!” She leaned her mouth close to his ear. “Kiddo, Brandy is Satan's pet!” she whispered sibilantly as if she had emerged with him from the nightmare.

He slid to the carpet, eyes averted from the soul-deep probing of her green orbs chilling his entrails. After ten sweaty minutes, he pressed and hooked her into the heavy-ribbed corset. She rewarded him for the monumental accomplishment with a kiss on his nose.

He'd wondered about the scars. Now, he stared mesmerized by the fang wounds on her lower arms gleaming lividly in the sunlight.

She pinched his cheek and laughed. “I have adorable pets, li'l darlin', that, unfortunately, are flat-out ornery at times.” She grinned
ruefully as she stroked an arm. “But, I've long since become immune to their . . . uh . . . naughtiness. Bless their rapscallion hearts.”

His voice trembled. “Pets!? Why do you want slimy sn—?”

She tapped his lips with an index finger. “Hush! My pets are not your affair, you heah, dearie?” she said sharply.

She retrieved a Polaroid camera off the nightstand and stared at him thoughtfully for a long moment. “Li'l darlin', get into your spiffy pastel blue suit.”

He went to the closet and got it from the rack holding a half-dozen other noisy western suits she'd bought.

He said, “I need a shower.”

She waved her arm imperiously. “Oh, forget that. I'm pressed for time. Now, put it on and let's get some shots.”

He put on the suit with grey boots, then brushed his long golden locks at the dresser mirror. He tied a grey silk scarf around his neck. Her hand jiggled his crotch to free his organ from between his thighs for imprint beneath the fabric of his tight pants.

“I'm flat-out going to have myself a ball flashing his gorgeous pictures on that bitch Saint Tiffany,” she told herself with perverse glee.

She arranged his limbs and head for a series of sexy macho poses. For twenty minutes she stooped and lumbered about him until she had a stack of shots from many angles.

“In our private oven you'll find pork chops and gravy, with biscuits I fixed for you,” she said as she sat on the side of the bed shuffling and examining the pictures.

He went across the hall and ran through the shower. She was standing in the bathroom doorway when he emerged, beaded and glistening. She watched him wince as he gingerly toweled himself dry. She sighed, kissed the welts on his back, and turned away down the hallway for the stairs.

He got on the throne and gazed at his watch. It twinkled noon. He cocked his head and admired the bauble with bright eyes and twisted his wrist to hype up the sparkle of the dial stones.

As he dressed in his gold-ivory, white deep-pile carpeted room, his empty belly growled, but he decided to stay upstairs until she left. He heard the roar of the field truck and the cry of its brakes. He went to the window overlooking the dorm. He felt bandboxical, showered, cologned, and dap in a fresh beige suit. Grizzled, carrot-topped Big Ralph heaved himself from the truck and unlocked the tailgate.

Jay watched the sun-scorched rabble of teenagers leap from the truck, whooping joy for the Saturday half-day respite from the stoop agony chopping of the cotton plants free of weeds. Pungent zephyrs of sweat and manure stung his nostrils through the open window. Their grit-measled faces and the mute explosions of dust grenades from their coveralls, as they stampeded for the bathhouse behind the dorm, panged him with pity. He drew a sigh and wished them all house pets like himself. Without Grandma, he amended.

He heard a distinctive snort of bellicosity above the “moo” bedlam of market steers milling in the cattle pens beyond the dorm. He glimpsed in the corral the buck-stomp violence of Hitler, the mad bronc Big Ralph was prepping to break. He gazed at the free world crawl of insect cars on the highway, the sun-glinted barbed wire fence beyond the ocean of peek-a-boo cotton blossoms soon to explode from emerald buds.

The sound of Grandma's Lincoln gunning at the front of the mansion caused him to tense. He crossed the hall to the bathroom window. She was moving the pearl machine past profusions of bluebonnet blossoms down the driveway toward the steel gate in the barbed wire fence, a hundred-odd yards distant. He saw the gate, activated by an electronic control inside the car, slide open on its tracks, then bang-lock behind her as she tooled the new car onto the roadway. He returned to his room to protect himself against snakebite. He put on gloves and picked up a softball bat.

He hastened down the circuitous hallway to the stairway and descended quietly to the ground-floor hallway. He started down the
hallway back toward Grandma's bedroom beneath his at the rear of the house. He paused to peep at the blue-jeaned crew of girls, on cigarette break, in the spacious kitchen. They were dewy faced from vapors of odorous steam spewing from gigantic pots of lunch stew aboil on the range. He exchanged smiles with Fay.

As elderly Phoebe turned from checking loaves of bread in the oven, he moved away to Grandma's spring-locked bedroom door. Careful not to scratch the doorjamb, he shimmied the latch back with his pocketknife. He thought of Grandma's fang wounds. His knees shook as he eased the door open and stood at the threshold to accustom his eyes to the heavily draped murk.

A trio of Grandma's sculpted plaster images of fiends and murderers lurked in a cluster on a platform behind the black velvet headboard of an emperor-sized bed. He stepped into the room and locked the door. Mister Hyde, Landru, and Count Dracula, neatly attired in period costumes, glowed hideously in a soft ray of hidden blue light.

Jay stared at the apparitions as he moved across the room to the windows and opened the black velvet drapes halfway. He stood in the blast of sunlight, exhaled tension. He swept his eyes about the clutter of antique furniture, multisized statuary, cardboard boxes bulged with old clothes, yellowed magazines and newspapers. Half-nude pictures of young Brandy infested the room.

He gingerly probed the bat beneath the bed to flush out Grandma's pets. He went to the locked closet. He saw straw fragments on the carpet. He rattled the doorknob and heard a rustling sound when he put his ear against the door.

He started his escape-cash search in the crammed drawers of a massive mahogany dresser. He burrowed fruitlessly through musty piles of mildewed finery for fifteen minutes before he found a dozen keys on a ring. He sat on a prickly horsehair chair twirling the key ring as he caught his breath.

Jay looked about the room for possible stashes and spied the legs
of a squat piece of furniture shrouded by an indigo opera cape, mottled with dust. He went and uncovered a filigreed cabinet. He tried several keys in its lock before the doors swung open. The interior, stacked tight with books, legal papers, and photo albums, belched a foul gust of aged air.

He stared at, then reached toward, a thin book on the Science of Embalming. Instead, he pulled out a heavy, tattered book, riffled through half the pages for a greenback cache before he halted and stared at a drawing of a disemboweled woman on a stone altar surrounded by a ghoulish mob with maniacal faces. He looked at the book's cover: Immortality Through the Power of Satanism. He completed his search of the book.

He replaced it and opened a gold-leafed photo album. A sheaf of yellowed newspaper clippings magnetized his attention. He read several.