Airtight Willie & Me (18 page)

The first was an account and shot of how beautiful rebel stripper Brandy Hoffstader had excoriated, cursed, and spat in the socialite face of Otto, her father, on a Galveston cabaret stage when he had interrupted her performance with righteous indignation. The audience was seen applauding riotously.

Another clipping: The headlined account of the barbiturate suicide of Constance Hoffstader, civic leader and social queen. Her suicide note condemned her husband, Otto, as her murderer via his long-term bestial treatment of her and Brandy and his numerous illicit affairs with other women.

Jay unfolded a full page of lurid story, with pictures, on Tiffany Hoffstader, Brandy's twin sister. She, the possessor of impeccable reputation and social status, had descended into the pit of madness when jilted by her socialite inamorata. She waited, in her bridal gown, in the crowded church for the groom who had married someone else hours before. Family members reported that she had disappeared.

Jay searched the cabinet and found no cash. He restored the
contents and locked the cabinet. Then he searched every inch of the room, except the closet lair of Grandma's pets. He drew the drapes. “My only hope for escape dough is her purse,” he told himself. He left the room and pulled the door shut and locked.

As he went down the hall, he nearly tinkled on himself when Fay said, “Boo!” as she grabbed his arm and pulled him into the deserted kitchen.

He frowned. “Stop the pranks, Fay! Huh?”

She tiptoed and kissed the corner of his glum mouth. “You score?” she whispered.

“Not a red cent in that funk box. I'll take a shot at her purse first chance,” he said wearily.

“Everyone is out in the mess hall. Let's slip upstairs and make love,” she said breathlessly.

He shook his head. “No good, not cool with the monster probably on the turn. Besides, I'm hungry,” he said as he went to the small private gas stove in a corner.

He took his plate of gravied pork chops, rice, and biscuits from the oven. She sat with him in the breakfast nook and watched him wolf the plate clean.

She said, “I gotta pin you down, sweetmeat. When we gonna do it?”

He grinned. “Tonight, late,” he said as he rose and walked toward the doorway.

She followed, tugged at his sleeve. “When, late?”

He shrugged. “Midnight. Bang my ceiling to get the all-clear. Look, Ice Cream Cone, I feel bad vibes about the old creep. I think she knows you're not my sister. So let's be careful. You know, like let's don't be Siamese twins in the yard like we've been, OK?” he asked with a solemn face.

Her eyes twinkled mischief. “Okay. I'll give Marcus some action for our cover. Now, kiss me.”

He took her into his arms and bit her lip for the Marcus crack.
Their tongues combated furiously for a long moment before he split for the corral.

Grandma, coruscating in her puce and peace tent of a silk dress, sat regally, triple-chinned, head high on a barstool in a Galveston cesspool. Bittersweet nostalgia panged Grandma as she remembered her reign as queen of the bump and grinders. She darted a glance behind her at the darkened stage of the former strip palace and Mecca for the cult of the artful tease.

She turned back and beamed a beatific smile down the bar at her claque of time-hacked subjects wallowing in the time warp of the good old days of fresh faces and wild, impossible dreams of breaking the gaffed casino of life. The good old days of wizard torsos when Bluebonnet Brandy was the supreme hard-on enticer with the mostest.

A bedraggled loser toasted, “Here's to Brandy, the sexiest fluff that ever peeled off and humped a runway.”

The motley mob hoisted their shot glasses and flung the fifth round she'd sprung for down their cast-iron gullets.

She went to the juke box and dropped in quarters pursued by a derelict roue in quest of a sugar mama. He managed to lick her ear and whisper his raging passion to eat her twat before a rabid bouncer galloped him through the door by the seat of his well-ventilated pants.

She jiggled her lumpy hips to upbeat music in the manner of an erotic hippo as she gazed ecstatically at her reflected face in the mirrored interior of the box. In the sorcerous flattery of the rainbow glow of neon, abetted by time warp, she saw herself as the enchantress of old. My Gawd, old gal, you're still beautiful, she told herself. I guess my new love is why.

She turned away to go back to her stool when the scintillating vision of her teenage rival, Fay, enveloped her mind in depression and rage. I won't lose him to that chippie. I'll bury her! she vowed venomously.

She felt embarrassing tears on the brink, so she dug in her purse for tab money. Then she went to the bar and tossed a pair of hundred dollar bills before the bartender. She managed to smile as she moved through a saccharine gauntlet of kisses, best wishes, and embraces on her way to her car at the curb.

She unlocked it and got in, then sat and stared at the bouquet of bluebonnets she'd cut to place on her mother's grave: The thirtieth anniversary of her suicide. She bombed the car away in a storm of tears and darted a glance at her face in the rearview mirror. The time-warped magic was gone, and she was ugly Grandma again with bloodshot eyes. She bellowed self-pity and grief as she stomped the purring horses to a hundred-miles-per-hour pace.

A state trooper's cruiser siren growled behind her. She slowed the Lincoln to a legal forty. The trooper flashed his dome lights. She set her jaw and didn't pull over. The trooper drew abreast, peered sternly at her for an instant, then grinned apologetically through his open window. She ran her window down.

“Howdy-do, Grandma. Didn't recognize you in your new machine. Be careful! See ya, ma'am.”

She nodded tipsily as he pulled away, then drove at ninety several miles to a wooded cemetery. A silver-thatched curmudgeon left a kiosk to swing open a wide metal gate. Grandma drove through a grove of chinaberry and pecan trees to an imposing black marble mausoleum with Constance Hoffstader, date of birth, and death chiseled in giant Gothic letters into its entry arch. She parked and entered its utter silence and placed the bouquet of bluebonnets on the silver casket.

Tears welled as she stared at the gleaming box and shook her head. “Oh, Mama! I'm so lonely, so sorry I didn't realize how much you meant to me. Forgive me, darlin'! Your baby loves you, Mommy!”

She broke down in wild weeping and stumbled out to the roadway. Her tear-wet face congealed to vindictive hardness as she walked fifty yards up the road to stop before a tall headstone gutted with weeds: Otto Hoffstader and date of birth and death were chiseled into the
gray granite. The wind sighed mournfully through the overhanging branches of a chinaberry tree. Her face was a twisted, bitterly hateful mask as she stared at the sunken sod of the grave.

She sank to her knees atop it, lowered her face, and whispered ferociously, “I hated you living. I hate you dead and stinking. You rotten bastard! You heah!?”

She struggled to her feet, walked away a dozen paces, turned back, and screamed piercingly, “I hate you! I hate you!”

Birds in the chinaberry tree panicked and flapped away. She went to the car and drove to the public road. Ten minutes later, she drove into the parking area of a high-walled private sanitarium where she parked and made up her face.

She went into the red stone building past harried white-garbed attendants in a moil of middle-aged and elderly patients walking and wheel-chairing themselves through the sterile corridors and walked toward the administrative office. A receptionist showed her into the superintendent's stained-cedar paneled office.

A naked-pated ox of a man with a cherub's face rose from behind his cluttered desk. He beamed an IOU-fifty-grand smile. “How have you been, Brandy?” he chortled as he nervously hunched his shoulders inside his raucous Glen plaid suit and extended a brawny paw.

She placed her hand in his for an instant. “Not bad for an old bitch, Wesley,” she said as she sat in a large chair before the desk.

“You look lulu lovely, my dear,” he said as he lowered himself into his high-backed leather chair and eased a racing form into a drawer.

“Snow the chippies, old buddy,” she said harshly.

She took a cigarette from her platinum case. Before she could flick flame to it, he leaned and lit it with a desk lighter. She blew a gust of smoke into his face as he reclined.

From her purse, she removed a letter and waved it. “Wesley, I'm so pissed with you I could bust your bald, irresponsible noggin wide open,” she said in a deadly whisper as she flung the letter into his lap. “Read it!” she ordered as he picked it up and stared at it slack-jawed.

His face was creased with dismay when he finished reading it and passed it back to her.

“It was addressed to the governor. This is dynamite! She revealed her true identity and pleaded for a sanity hearing. How on earth did you intercept it?” he choked out.

“That's my business. I helped that trick become governor. I can take a shit on the state house carpet if I want. But that isn't the point.” She leaned forward and gritted her teeth. “Your carelessness permitted my sister to smuggle out that letter. To the world she's dead. Wesley, she's got to stay that way. Understand? I want your staff, from dishwashers to physicians, interrogated and shaken up until they find the nosy sonuvabitch that mailed that letter for her!” She stood.

He stood and said, “I'll discover and fire whoever it is. I promise.”

She moved to the door. “You've got a week.” She studied his face. “You're not sucker enough to feel sorry for her are you, Wesley?”

He waved his palms through the air. “Not a twit of that. Like Justice, I've been blind for your cause, my dear, for twenty years,” he said with a subtle edge of sarcasm, as he thought, I'll release her the day you kick the bucket, you fiend. “My loyalty has always been with you, dear heart,” he crooned.

She opened the door. “Don't pancake on me, Wesley. As of last week I acquired sixty percent of Merchant Bank stock and the board chair. Your mortgage payments are a year delinquent, plus you owe me fifty grand. I'll foreclose on this white elephant booby hatch and convert it into a brothel and put you in charge of douche bags and washing dirty towels to work out my fifty grand,” she said as she shut the door and went past the receptionist into the corridor.

She moved leisurely to Tiffany's second-floor private room savoring the turning of fate's cards that afforded her such sweet revenge. She fondled and knifed herself with memories of Tiffany luxuriating in the sun of her father's favor and affection while she festered and hated in exile. She remembered her father's ceaseless reprimands, rejection, and cruelty.

“Why can't you be a refined little lady like Tiffany instead of a stupid destructive brat?” he'd said that early morning after she'd awakened him and shown him her seven-year-old genius and love.

She had taken his hand and led him, in his yellow silk pajamas (she remembered), to his custom-made lizard golfing bag and clubs laid out neatly on the garden grass to dry in the embryo sun. He'd gasped and purpled as he stared at miniature likenesses of herself she'd painted on the bag and club shafts in bright vermillion with neat aqua Palmer method inscriptions: BRANDY LOVES DADDY. He'd seized her and beaten her bottom raw with a club shaft, then locked her into a black pit garage until noon.

When her chronically ailing mother returned the next day from the hospital, Brandy tearfully reported the beating and imprisonment. She remembered her mother was ambulanced back to the hospital that same day after a furiously profane shouting bout with her father.

In her early teens her father criticized her makeup, dates, and personality. “You're going to be a low-life gutter tramp! Use Tiffany as a role model. Save yourself!” he'd screamed until she was convinced, at eighteen, that he was indeed a prophet after his attacks drove her from home to street poisoning.

Her suicidal mother had grown too disturbed to protect her. But, at least she'd had the exquisite satisfaction of spitting on his corpse twelve years later in the mortuary viewing room one midnight.

Now, she eased open the room door of her father's paragon. Saint Tiffany, the magnificent and pure, she thought as she stepped into the sunny room. She smiled and looked into the green eyes of her snowcapped, gowned genetic mint replica lying in bed holding a book. The agony and stress of confinement had accomplished the same ruin and obesity that wanton freedom had inflicted on Grandma.

“Tiff, you look great!” Grandma exclaimed.

“Thank you, Brandy. It's good to see you,” she said with a cultivated soft voice.

They pecked cheeks and embraced. Grandma sat on the side of the bed. Tiffany slid the book beneath the covers.

Grandma said, “Do you mind, kiddo?” as she scooped Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer from concealment. Her eyes widened in ersatz shock. “My Gawd, dearie! Why, I just flat-out can't imagine a lady like you reading this notorious and immoral novel.”

Tiffany blushed and averted her eyes. “A neighbor . . . a friend gave it to me . . . insisted that I read it,” she stammered.

Grandma spanked Tiffany's hip. “A man friend, kiddo?”

Tiffany nodded.

Grandma leered. “He's hauling your hot ashes, maybe?”

Tiffany shook her head vigorously. “He's married. Just my friend. How is your love life out there in the big bright world?”

Grandma said, “I'm glad you asked,” as she took the Polaroid shots of Jay from her purse and flung them onto Tiffany's abdomen.

Tiffany picked them up and looked at the first one. She threw her hand over her heart and gasped, “This young man looks incredibly like Cecil!”

Grandma said, “Only that li'l humper's ass is pretty enough to make Cecil a Sunday face. That's my new sweetie!”

Tiffany's hands shook as she examined the pictures. “He's just a child,” she murmured. “There can't be a future with him. Can there be?”