Doom Fox (4 page)

Waves of class inferiority and paranoid jealousy rock Joe Senior as he wonders if Marguerite has a secret interest in the Judge since she exclaimed his name first before he emerged from his car.

She pecks his cheek. 'Darling, I'm going to surprise them and join them for the Alabam's last show' she says excitedly as she scrambles across him to the carpet.

He puppy-eyes her as she dances a transient rigadoon of joy before she prances her Jane Russellish curves into the bathroom. He hears her click the lock on Panther Cox's adjoining door. Then he hears the pianissimo thunder of the shower. His idolatry of her, the terror of losing her aches his gullet. The thought of the suckling artistry of her mouth quivers his organ as he inhales the pungent spice of her plum tinted sex nest clinging to his thick mustache.

Jealousy racks him when she returns to carefully apply fresh make-up at the dressing mirror. She's prettying up for the Judge, he tells himself. I'm just her ghetto jock she'll dump when she finds a muckety-muck like the Judge to punch the right buttons in bed. Their eyes meet in the mirror. She smiles lovingly. He smiles grotesquely.

She speed-dresses herself in her crimson chiffon dress and matching sling pumps. She appraises herself in the mirror, says, 'This dress nearly perfectly matches your lovely new convertible. Don't you think, Hon?'

He mumbles, 'Close baby, close.'

She hides her long auburn glory beneath a floppy brimmed black leghorn hat. She slips dark glasses over her sable eyes to complete the disguise leaving that she'd employed when they'd checked in down in the crowded lobby.

She comes to the bed, leans to kiss his forehead, says 'Promise me you'll go straight home after you drop off your friend and his lady ... I don't want some prowling floozie stealing a smidget of my sugar. Promise?'

He says, with an inanely serious face that overrides flippancy, 'I promise. But c'mon baby, you know I wouldn't give up your sugar to Lena Horne with a tommy gun.'

She laughs. 'I know that precious. And believe me, Clark Gable himself couldn't get into my pants with a blank cashier's check and Spanish Fly, forever lover mine.'

Unwittingly, her remark inflicts a fresh wound of paranoid jealousy and inferiority for he is convinced she's fantasized opening her black thighs to the castrating white king of Hollywood. They lightly kiss to preserve her make up before she leaves the room. He lies catatonically on the bed staring down at the roistering people on the street.

He is flayed by his central problem: How to divorce Zenobia and marry his socialite goddess, Marguerite. He thinks solution will be nearly impossible. Impossible not for his lies of new affluence, Marguerite he believes, will forgive him those. But impossible because Zenobia knows his twenty year secret and can condemn him, return him to a Georgia chain gang for life by dropping a nickel in the phone to the police.

Finally he hears Panther Cox and his girl giggling in the shower. Arthritic pain wobbles his knees as he leaves the bed and goes across the room to the clothes closet. A glance in the dresser mirror at his tortured face stoops him with despair and the full weight of his sixty years.

Several blocks away, Delphine's nightstand phone jangles Joe Junior from his drunken slumber. He stares at it groggily, glances at naked Delphine stirring feebly in deep intoxication. On the fourth ring, he knocks a dead soldier fifth of gin from the nightstand as he picks up.

He mumbles, 'Hello.'

He hears the rasp of the caller's breathing before he hangs up. Joe looks at two a.m. on the face of his watch.

He reaches to call Zenobia, decides he'd better try to slip in and cool her out at breakfast. He showers, feels the rash of Delphine's suck and bite bruises deliciously atingle. He remembers the sweet ferocity of her teeth gnashing, torso whiplashing, fake multiple orgasms under the womb stroking of his weapon. He feels himself, sees himself for the first time, the consummate lover, a sepia Apollo as he towels himself before an enchanted door mirror: Duped by Delphine's lather of flattery and spurious ecstasy, choreographed down to her every rapturous howl.

As he dresses, he gazes at her face, childlike in repose, impulsively tells himself he's in love. He studies the phone dial to memorize her number. He leans across the bed to kiss her lips, is swooned, for an instant, by the raw perfume of their love stew. He gazes at her as he backs from the bedroom. He leaves the apartment, makes sure the door is locked behind him.

He whistles as he goes down the hallway, sees a young guy in shabby sports clothes shred a note, then bang a fist against a door at the end of the hallway before he goes down the stairway. Joe glances at a metal plug sticking from the lock of the punched door. Joe passes the young guy sitting forlornly on the stoop as he leaves the building.

Whispering Slim ducks down in his puce and gold Cadillac parked across the street as Joe goes down the sidewalk toward Central Avenue for a dab. Slim leaves his car, strides across the street, passes Delphine's Continental, to the sidewalk in front of Delphine's building. He stares at the manager sign in a lighted front window. He goes past the young guy on the stoop into the vestibule, retraces back to the stoop.

'Hey Lil Bro, how you doing?' Slim inquires warmly as he leans into the troubled face of the youngster.

'Ain't doing no good ... my landprop plugged my slammer ... ain't even got the geeters for a crib in a flophouse' he murmurs disconsolately.

Slim scoops a handful of silver coins from his trouser pocket, clinks them together in his palm as he asks, 'You know the apartment number of the fox that owns that white Continental?'

'Yeah, two fifteen at the end of the hall' the loser spills as Slim dumps the coins into his shirt pocket.

Slim goes to Delphine's door, shims open the spring lock with the blade of his pocket knife. He locks the door and cat-foots across the living room and stares at Delphine's supine form. His blind left eye rolls unfocused in his head. The eye was damaged when he was dumped in a trash bin when he was a week old by his junkie mother.

He fans out his five grand bankroll in 'C' notes and fifties on the nightstand beside a half-ounce of high grade heroin, cellophane packaged. He picks up her switchblade from the nightstand and tosses it away beneath the bed. He searches the drawers of the nightstand, her purse, the bed and beneath the mattresses for her hide-out weapons. He slides his skeletal frame into bed, and jiggles fingers in her rectum and semen frothed vulva to awaken her to his presence.

Stone harlot to the pelvic bone, she reflexively humps his fingers in her sleep for a long moment before her eyelids flutter. He removes his fingers, wipes them on her lips. He inserts a 'C' note, tightly rolled lengthwise, deeply into her vaginal tunnel. Her eyes open, stare balefully into his face, then pop wide in shocked furious alarm. She emits a venomous wildcat attack hissing sound. His spindly legs scissor-lock her thighs as he seizes her wrists before her clawing talons can shred his face.

'Let me go! You'll have to waste me to freebie fuck me like a chippie. I'll kill you! Let me go, sonuvabitch!' she shrieks as she struggles mightily.

His lupine lips curl contemptuously as he whispers, 'Bad outlaw bitch, Slim ain't yenning to highjack none of your stinkin' 'ho cave. I'm buying a ticket to your ears 'ho. Now gander my ticket and listen.' He dips his head toward the 'C' note peeping from between her thrashing thighs.

She stares at it, ceases struggle. She darts a greedy glance at his bankroll fanned out on the nightstand. He flings her arms free and unscissors her thighs.

'Motherfucker! Don't ever play this angle on me again' she pants as she retrieves the 'C' note, unrolls the bill to examine it. She impounds it inside her fist. 'How did you find me, get in here?' she asks.

'A little bird snitched and your door was open ...' he replies.

She says, 'Let's get this transaction straight, Slim. You're turning a pure conversation trick. Right?'

'Yeah, cold blooded 'ho mama, that's right' he says as he turns to pluck the dope packet from the nightstand. He unfolds it. A loaded syringe gleams atop the powder. He dips a thumbnail into the contents and snorts a mini pile of dust up his nostrils.

'Pure smack of brown for this pimping stud of clay scored from down old Mexico way' he chants with slumberous eyes rolling ecstatically toward the top of his long head.

She taps her wristwatch. 'You're blowing your half hour, Slim' she says with a quaver as she stares hooded electric eyes at the packet of dope on his chest.

He props himself up, gazes into her eyes as he spiels his game in a sugary whisper: 'Star, you ain't been outta my skull since the Mellow Fellow Bar. Remember that night in Chi when Jelly Drop copped you and I made you high? I told Jelly I got to buy! For that pimp's dream, the limit is the sky. He said, "Nigger, I ain't selling. That gold mine young freak is worth no telling." I vowed that night I'd kick the Windy's baddest asses, swim through a ocean of mildewed shit gasses to make you mine. Miss Fine! I gotta stable of ten. Four African thieving queens, pocket magicians. Three blond silks, boosting and grifting technicians. Three sissies, pretty and prissy, stone mudkickers from Dixie Missi.

'Now Sugar Baby, 'cause I love ya, your spot ain't in between but at the top, the motherfucking queen! And that ain't all. I got enough bankroll, if you fall, to raise you for murder one with a telephone call. Get hip and flip for that!'

She coyly averts her eyes, to stroke his hoodlum ego, murmurs, 'It's you I think I'll choose. But, like I told you in the bar, Whispering, I'll think about it, let you know.'

He grunts as he picks up the loaded syringe. He flicks on the nightstand lamp, eases the syringe needle into a wrist vein. She stares at the red flood of his blood into the syringe. He pumps it empty into his vein, withdraws it and lays it on the pile of powder.

'Goddamn! This is some sweet shit' he moans with closed eyes.

She kisses his nipple nearest the packet. Her nose quivers as she hovers it above the powder. He seizes her hair and jerks her head away as she swoops her nose into the dope.

'Ask me for my dope, cold-blooded 'ho mama' he whispers savagely as he wraps up the package and starts to slide from the bed.

'May I have a pinch of your smack?' she asks sweetly with radiant eyes.

He starts to cook up a shot in a bottle cap with water from a glass on the nightstand.

'I don't want to start banging again, Whispering ... just lay a pinch on me for my nose.'

He shakes his head as he draws the syringe full from the bottle cap. 'Turn over girl, if you want it.'

She flops on her belly. He hits a vein in her buttock, drains in the contents of the syringe.

She moans into her pillow. 'You rotten bastard! ... it's soooo gooood.'

He snatches his 'C' note from her unwary hand. She screams, 'Give me back that trick money!'

He grins, 'Bitch, we ain't turned no trick. We done had a smack party.'

He slides from the bed, dresses, stuffs his bankroll and dope into his pockets.

She rolls to the edge of the bed with dope glazed eyes, mumbles thickly, 'Leave me a light taste of that shit.'

Stony faced he says, 'Uh uh 'ho mama ... connect with me in the Blue Pit if you wanta score or be my woman. You dig?'

She nods stuporously as he turns and splits the bedroom.

3

Divorcee Marguerite Spingarn and her Club Alabam companions leave after the last show to have seafood at a Pico Boulevard restaurant. Afterwards, Judge Evans, recent widower, drives them through thickets of extinguishing neon into the quietly lighted environs of Marguerite's impressive white stone house on tree embossed Normandie Avenue in a still predominantly white upper-middle-class neighborhood. Her real estate brokerage sign glows its pale blue neon in a front window. The fragrance of honeysuckle, ringing the house, pervades the night air.

Marguerite's all day visitors, Rob Spingarn and his cutie pie wife Helena, sleepily kiss Marguerite and the Judge goodnight. They go, arm in arm, to their new blue Chrysler sedan parked in Marguerite's driveway behind her new fuchsia Caddie convertible. Marguerite and the Judge watch the ruby orbs of the Chrysler taillights disappear. Santa Ana winds lute a mournful dirge through a trio of weeping willow trees sighing counterpoint on Marguerite's spacious lawn.

'Happy kids aren't they, Maggie?' the Judge says softly.

'Yes ... Jay and I were happy like that ... in the beginning ... hope their happiness train never derails' she says as she flicks flame to a cigarette, exhaling a grey poltergeist of smoke through an open window.

His amorous soft brown eyes gaze adoringly at her dusky, sloe-eyed loveliness as he takes her hand, kisses her fingertips. 'Maggie, you, we could be happy again. I've been hellishly lonely since Ora passed last year ... I ... uh have had, for many years, bountiful affection and admiration for you as you must know. I've been in an airy fugue all evening in your company. My dear, I adore you! I must see you again and again. May I? Maggie, we are like canaries in the snow.'

Her elfish face is serious as she studies his face with tender eyes for a moment, kissing his cheek. He reaches to embrace her.

She moves away, whispers huskily, 'Cazzie, I've enjoyed you very much this evening ... perhaps too much ... call me.'

She flees the car and dashes up her walk, a scarlet sprite luminous in the starlight. He watches her tipsily fumble her key in the lock and blow a kiss before she enters the front door of the house. He drives happily away for his Malibu home.

Joe Allen Senior quietly keys into the Allen living room, glances at snoring Zenobia seated on the horsehair sofa, feet still immersed in the bucket of Epsom Salts water. He removes his shoes, tucks them beneath an arm, goes up the stairway to Joe Junior's vacant bedroom.

He steps across the hall into his bedroom. The walls and dresser top are covered with rare posters and photographs of his idol, Jack Johnson. He gazes reverently for a moment at a mirror polished brass bound Bible that sits enshrined on a gold satin pillow on the dresser top. Beside it sits a bust portrait of his beloved, spit image, lynched, preacher father. He undresses, liniments his aching knees before he puts on his favorite lounge ensemble of lavender pajamas, robe and bedroom slippers. He returns to a living room chair near a front window to look out for Joe Junior.