Spider Kiss (18 page)
The façades had been ripped away.
This was the true face of the creatures that prowled Jungle York.
Shelly elbowed past the Colonel, stooped to one knee and lifted Stag's shoulders. The boy was semiconscious, barely able to draw breath. "Colonel, help me get him on the sofa, he may have a concussion."
Freeport came to them and bent from the knees, jacking the singer into his arms with a fluid movement. Without help he carried Stag to the big sofa and dumped him there. Then he went into the bathroom and Shelly could hear water running in the sink.
It had been an eventful, a revealing, five minutes.
In the bedroom, Shelly could hear the Colonel moving around, a drawer opening, then closing. A few minutes later Freeport emerged from the bedroom. He had changed his shirt, and it had taken time that Shelly had not realized was passing. A cigarette Shelly could not remember having lit was half-smoked between his lips. He felt confused and weary.
The Colonel pulled a chair up alongside the sofa and sat down, staring intently, searchingly at Stag Preston. The pale blue eyes swiveled up to Shelly. "Get some water from the bathroom, Shelly. I want him fully awake."
With half the glass of water
on
the boy, and the other half
in
him, Stag came around sufficiently to register fear at the Colonel's face so close to his own.
He looks the way he looked that night in the Dixie Hotel in Louisville
, Shelly mused, watching.
Tight, scared, ready to eat the whole damned world before it can eat him.
Stag was Luther Sellers once more.
And Colonel Jack Freeport was himself again. The voice was controlled, the great mane of white hair had been recombed, the gloves had assiduously been pulled back on and the cuffs shot. Freeport leaned forward.
"If I knew what to say, precisely, to avoid what we have just come through, boy, I'd say it. But I don't know what to say." He waited.
Stag did not reply; he merely stared with malevolence. Freeport pursed his heavy lips and clasped his hands on his knees. "That girl's manager came to see us. You knew that was why I sent for you, didn't you? Answer me, boy, or I'll have to slap you around again."
Stag sneered and an unpleasant half-smile came to the corner of his mouth. "I knew. So what? That's your problem; that's why you got thirty percent of my contract — to take care of me."
"Listen, Stag —" Shelly interrupted.
Freeport stopped him with a vague hand movement. "No, this is the time the boy and I have our talk, get matters right between us."
"Stop callin' me 'boy!' You know my name."
The bright pyrite sheen of arrogance was coming back over Stag Preston's face. He had been too long exposed to the deadly radiations of success, and it only took a booster to bring him back to his previous level of unbearableness.
"You listen to me now,
boy
. You listen to me very carefully, because I'm not going to mince words. Your flagrant transgressions were difficult enough to bear, as they came one after another. We've managed to pull you free each time, at considerable expense to ourselves, but this time you've endangered the entire operation. That girl you got pregnant —"
"She ain't a broad, for Chrissakes, she's a
nigger
!" Stag started up, and caught the Colonel's palm across his jaw. He fell back, the fear showing through for an instant; then it was washed, laved, drowned over with hatred.
Freeport's voice was still soft, commanding. "That is just it, you unfortunate simpleton. She is a Nigrah, a member of a lower race, a person with black skin, and for that reason you could destroy us inside twenty-four hours. Not only yourself — for that would be little loss —but the entire structure of my holdings which, unfortunately, I have come to build around you. We are on the verge of a very important motion picture deal, involving your dubious services, and this would put a stamp of end to it instantly.
"Do I make myself clear?"
At the mention of movie contracts, Stag had tuned in more carefully. His ears almost went up in attention. He stared at Freeport, then swung his glance to Shelly for confirmation.
He got none. Shelly sat frozen in silence behind a lapis lazuli gaze. Freeport's words about Trudy Quillan had been painful to him. He remembered all the little times he had side-stepped prejudice himself … all the words in school yards, all the jobs he had not gotten, all the restricted cabana clubs in Florida … and he was, oddly, hurt. Inside himself, he had never categorized Freeport that way, despite the man's heritage, despite his obvious feelings about certain groups. Freeport had been above it, because he was a businessman too sharp to allow mere prejudice to stand in his way, because he was a member of the hip set that Shelly identified with, who might not like an individual, but who would never condemn a group
in toto
.
But Freeport
was
a bigot. A silent, perpetual bigot, as deadly as any other, though not as offensively obvious as — for instance — the Kemps had been that day in the bicycle shop. But he cared not a damn that Trudy Quillan was in pain. All he cared about was that her skin was black. It suddenly made a difference to Shelly.
The rot was even here, where he thought he was above it. The bigger they get doesn't necessarily mean the less blighted they become. Stag looked at Trudy as a piece of tail, that was disgusting enough; he saw her as some sort of breed animal. But Freeport actually hated the girl because of race. She was more than an inconvenience — a white girl pregnant would have been that to him — she was an object of open hatred.
Stag found no confirmation in Shelly's face.
It was as though Shelly had been tuned out.
"So this time, boy, we're going to let you get out of the scrape yourself. I have no idea how much this Nigrah's manager will take, but whatever it is, the money will come from you, for a change. Not us." Freeport got up, pushed the chair back and walked to the door.
"I'm going to talk to the girl and Golightly. Keep him here, Shelly. I shall be back shortly." He opened the door, paused for another look of absolute contempt at his talented Stag Preston, then walked out, pulling the door firmly closed behind him.
Shelly and Stag sat in silence.
The boy began rubbing his face, still crimson from the Colonel's attentions. Blood had dried in a thin, arterial line down his chin. He tried to sit up on the sofa. Shelly shoved him back.
The boy glared at Shelly for a moment, then began chuckling. "C'mon, Shel-baby, don't put me on the way The Man did. I was just rompin' a little."
Shelly hunched forward slightly. He put his face as close to Stag's as the Colonel had. "You want to know something, Stag?"
"What?"
"You stink, kid. You stink on ice!"
Stag Preston leaped up. The words had been delivered by a mongoose about to strike its cobra. Such hatred. Such open loathing. Such realization of who and what Stag Preston really was. Not what he
thought
he was, but what he was really made of.
The singer stalked to the other side of the room, hands thrust deep into his pockets. He spun on Shelly and whatever innocence might have acted there was now gone.
"Who the hell you think you are? Who the hell you think you're talkin' to, guy? Maybe you don't remember, but I'm the guy that's been makin' your pile for you, so you could ball that Carlene, so you could wear three-hundred-buck suits … so don't get all smartass with me!"
Shelly stared. Blankly.
"If you think I'm such an s.o.b. why you been pushin' me? What's made you hang around here so long for? I'll tell you why … because it's loot, and you like a lot of that stuff,
that's
why, you hypocritical bastard."
"You mispronounced hypocritical," Shelly murmured.
"Go do it to yourself, you leech! You been suckin' thirty percent of my skin the longest while, and now you got the gall to come up and lean on me because I done took down a little dark meat. I guess you've poked the same place … what makes me such a criminal?"
Shelly stood up and approached the boy. It was obvious Stag could take him, even half coordinated as he was from the Colonel's beating. "I'll tell you why, you little hard-on. Because she isn't a girl to you, she's some kind of black plaything and it's all right if she has a
litter
of pickaninnies, because the Great God Stag Preston needed a place to dump his load, and whatthehell, she's only a jungle bunny, anyhow. That's why you stink, you little bastard!
"All that guff you fed me about your old man and the dope and your mother and the orphanages … I figured any slob who went through that deserved a lot of breaks, but brother, you've used up all your turns. You can turn in your soul now, fella. You smell bad." He turned to walk away and felt the hand on his shoulder only an instant before he was spun, and the fist drove into his stomach.
It was the only blow.
Shelly doubled, all air exhaling, and tumbled over onto the carpet, on his side. Stag stared down at him, then brought back one Italian loafer and kicked him solidly in the groin.
Pain groped for Shelly, found him, and for a moment he was certain he would faint. Above him he heard Stag mouthing words. "You high-talkin' sonofabitch!" Stag snarled, "I'd tell you
any
damn thing to keep you on my side. That was crap just like
you're
crap.
"My old man was like any other old man, and my old lady was too dumb to stop me from robbin' her purse when I needed the dough to get away. I'd do anydamnthing to get away from them self-made, pious assholes, and you'd better know I'll do the same to stay where I am. You just ain't sharp enough, Shel-baby, to know when someone's snowin' the ass off you."
The pain receded. There were greater pains. Shelly felt, all at once, like crying.
"And now that I'm big time, sucker, you can shove it. And if you don't like it, you can sell your thirty percent and get the fuck away from me."
Shelly stared up at the boy. He saw very clearly the face of the boy, not as he had deluded himself into thinking it looked, but as it really was. The face of the … the …
creature
he had helped create. He was stung and bled dry by his naiveté in actually believing what he had wanted to believe — that there were any sparks of decency in the boy. All at once he knew how Einstein must have felt, or Victor Frankenstein, or the obscure Chinese who had first invented gunpowder. He knew what it was to feel responsible for turning loose something hideous.
Check out? Forget the boy? Let him shift for himself? That was no longer possible. He was responsible. He had molded Stag out of inert matter, and now it was his job to stay handy, to mitigate the evil Stag could turn loose on others.
(And somewhere in him, the Sheldon Morgenstern who had himself prowled and eaten in Jungle York reminded him:
Your investment is at stake.
Carlene will leave you.
You've grown accustomed to the good life.
What will you do on your own … you aren't a hot shot kid any more.
You aren't your brother's keeper.
But it was a voice from someone else, someone dying, who had occupied this Sheldon Morgenstern's body with him. A voice from a life before Stag Preston had knocked him down and made him see the truth, unglossed with greed. He heard that voice.)
But he just lay there, watching the boy's retreating back. Stag stopped at the door and turned. Everyone was making exit speeches these days.
"Take care of yourself, Shelly. See you later. I got a date with one of these Sands chorus girls. Get back to ya later, sweetheart."
Then he was gone, and Shelly lay there enjoying his pain and his penance.
Trudy Quillan had not been as young and simple as she had looked. Or perhaps it was simply that contact with Stag had hardened her. She would not accept Freeport's first two offers of settlement in Stag's name. She jacked them ten thousand dollars higher, gave ten percent to Golightly (who gladly signed the release Freeport's lawyers drew up), and went off to Pennsylvania by jet to find the Good Doctor there who would scrape and cleanse her.
Shelly did his work as he was expected to do it, and no mention of the affair was even breathed to the Hedda/Louella/Sheilah set. The matter faded, from everyone's mind but Shelly's who had noticed something:
Stag had had difficulty raising the money to pay Trudy Quillan and Golightly. His spending had been catching up with him, and while it was nothing that serious, a few more peccadilloes and Stag might be working for a small salary from his stockholders.
After the Sands engagement they made short work of San Diego, San Francisco and waded through a hard four days in Los Angeles, aware constantly that they were being watched by the Eyes of Movie Town. Freeport grew pensive, distant, cautious. Stag grew more arrogant, skittish, as he was discovered by the night-flying wastrels of the area, and smug toward Shelly, who did his work, kept his own counsel, and took to drinking Mexican hot chocolate in espresso houses along the Strip.
The status remained quo.
Waiting.
When the time finally came for talks with Universal, Freeport went into them — Shelly saw it — the way Roosevelt went to Yalta. Banks of lawyers, accountants, statisticians, recorders and secretaries followed the Colonel, Stag (who insisted on being present), and Shelly into the offices of Milt Rackmil, head of Universal. It took three days, and in that time thirty-five butcher's pads of scratch paper were consumed, fifty-nine pencils were worn to nubs, eight hundred and nine cigarettes, cigars, pipes and hookahs were smoked, one tape recorder blew a fuse, three gallons of coffee and other assorted beverages passed down throats, innumerable suspicious glances were cast, and not one curse word was used.
When the smoke cleared, everyone was happy. Both sides thought they had pulled a
grand coup
on the other. What neither side realized was that there had been
three
sides in the affair. Theirs, ours, and
Stag's.