Doom Fox (3 page)

The bathroom phone rings as Delphine is stripping for a shower. She picks up and croons, 'Delphine's house of ecstasy. What is your desire and name, darling?'

A guttural, accented voice says 'Otto vants to come over tomorrow.'

She frowns, 'Who?'

The trick says, 'Otto! I love your vunderful pee-pee and spanking my ass red. Remember?'

She says sternly, 'Motherfucker, where in the fuck you been hiding? You bring that fat little ass over here to be punished at noon. You hear?'

He makes lappy sounds and gurgles, 'Gorgeous mean lady, I heard you!' before he hangs up.

She showers, applies thick make-up to her inner thighs to camouflage a scabrous network of needle tracks. She colognes herself, brush flogs her six inch forest of pubic silk into butterfly wings that hover above her liver-lipped snare. She puts a stack of Duke Ellington records on a record player turntable. 'Satin Doll' oozes dulcetly as she pulls back a black silk spread on the red-sheeted, satin-canopied bed. She clicks off all light except for a hidden purple glow behind the bed. She goes nude to the doorway.

Joe peeps at his watch for the dozenth time, stares at it, decides to defer the blast off of his aching nine-week cherry, and decides not to further fracture Zenobia's curfew. He stands. Delphine's splendor magnetizes his eyes. His twenty-year-old hooligan heart pummels his ribcage.

Her feline grey eyes are phosphorescent, compelling as the crotch butterfly wings that shadow her notorious, pulse stomping thighs.

Trancelike, he zombies across the carpet void to take her outstretched hand, follows her into the purple maw of her trick trap.

2

A ghetto mile away, ebonic Zenobia Allen, seething matriarch, sits in her living room on a black horsehair sofa glaring through a front window at the deserted street. Joe Senior's employer's white panel truck with Hoffmeister Plumbing stenciled on its sides, is parked in front of the Allen's neat, pink stucco house. A sign, Rear Furnished House FOR RENT, is in a front window.

The ravages of stoop slavery in broiling cotton fields and L.A. day work ache and twinge her joints and muscles. She flinches as she soaks and moves her sore feet, deformed by bunions, corns and calluses, in a steamy bucket of Epsom Salts water. She wears a silted white uniform worn since seven a.m. A lance of street lamp glows her bunned white hair in the unlit half darkness.

The religious hymn, 'It's True 'Cause Jesus Told Me So' choruses joyously from an antique console radio. An antique grandfather clock disgorges a grimy plaster bird that stridently cuckoos midnight before it ducks back into its hidden nest.

She reaches to the carpet to place a heavy leather belt in her much too ample lap. She plans to chastise Young Joe with a lick or two for breach of her curfew rule.

She frowns as she thinks of Joe Senior. She is certain he is cheating on her. She wonders what her rival is like. Some low life chippie half that old fool's age, she says aloud. I am feeding him with a long handled spoon, she tells herself. But in time she, with the Lord's help, will trap and punish him. She smiles grimly.

Her ruined doll face hardens as she remembers the imperious white woman who mercilessly berated her, calling her 'imbecile girl' when she slopped sauce from a serving dish onto the damask tablecloth. She turns on a floor lamp and picks up her Bible to read for cleansing of herself. She needs a defense against a return spew of the bitter bile of humiliation, rage, hatred and mayhem that had, in early evening, leapt in her throat. Her hands had palsied uncontrollably with the compulsion to pulp the patrician face of her tormentor with a massive pewter candelabra.

'Thank you Sweet Jesus for chasing Lucifer and saving your sinful chile,' she exclaims aloud.

She reads several verses before she puts the Bible aside.

She sighs to remember how wonderful it was to be her own boss as she stares at a blown-up photograph on the fireplace mantle. It is an exterior shot of the bannered and bunted gala opening of the 'Down Home Cafe' ten years before on upper Central Avenue, now three years defunct. It had been a casualty of a soft-hearted credit policy and Senior Joe's raids on the cash register for long shot nags that always ran out the money.

The Allen house front windows reflect the posh house of Reba's father, Baptiste Rambeau, across the street. A battery of hidden spotlights shower pastel-light on its red brick two stories set back on a landscaped expanse of manicured jade lawn ringed lushly by a profusion of tulips, lilac trees and scarlet roses.

At a brightly-illuminated den card table, slight porcelain hued, French-Negro Baptiste, attired in gold silk pajamas, sits painstakingly marking a deck of cards. A widow's peak of indigo mop gives his near pretty face a softly Satanic cast. His widely spaced green eyes are ferret bright as he pen-etches the cards with invisible ink that only he will see with special glasses. Susie, his Toy Manchester, watches him from the carpet with bubble eyes radiant with love.

Erica, the white, petite blonde manager of the corner drug store, sits in panties across the table smoking a cigarette and gazing infatuated eyes at Baptiste, her short-term lover. Her eyes shift to lock on a puckered scar gleaming lividly on the side of his neck.

She remembers with a shiver the carnaged scene she'd witnessed in San Francisco six months before. A razor-wielding poker loser inflicted the wound when he heard the telltale whistle of a tap-out 'second' flawfully dealt by Baptiste because his dealing thumb had spasmed. The thumb spasm was due to a tendon grazing bullet wound inflicted a year before in the master bedroom of the Rambeau house.

Erica watches him complete his handiwork on the last of a dozen decks. He carefully reseals it in its original cellophane wrapping.

As he packs the decks in their cardboard container he says, 'Well Erica love, there they are, hopefully gaffed above detection. I should sting those rocky-assed poker hustling chumps for the eight grand I need so I can save this house ... by the way darling, it wouldn't surprise me if our marks arrived before ten. Your store must be open when I send one of them to buy decks for the play, across your counter.'

She says, 'Da Dee, I'll open the store at nine.' She rises and goes to sit in his lap.

Susie whimpers jealously. Erica measles his face with vermilion lipstick. He gnaws gently on her raspberry nipples as the heel of his hand grinds against her crotch.

Her blue eyes wall as she gasps, 'Oh Da Dee! Let's go to bed.'

He shakes his head resolutely, 'After I've rehearsed dealing.' He pecks her cheek and eases her off his lap to her feet.

Susie leaps to his lap. Erica pouts her mouth as she goes back to her seat. She props a large mirror on the tabletop before him. He shuffles a used deck, false cuts it, palms cards with magician finesse for several minutes. Then he deals 'seconds' soundlessly, pulls cards from the bottom and middle of the deck with such skill that even he cannot detect himself in the mirror. His gimpy dealing thumb had not so much as twinged.

High hopes of self-confidence seize him for an instant before doubt and depression snare him. He stares at the circles of discoloration on his fingers denuded of his hocked diamond rings to raise a bankroll for the crucial play in the morning with his fat but sharply wary prey. He remembers again the threat of bank foreclosure on his house for months of delinquent mortgage payments.

He rises and leads Erica and Susie through the posh house to the second floor master bedroom. Fear drums his temples as they undress and lie embracing on the emperor bed. What if the pressure under play with heavyweights causes another failure in my dealing thumb, he asks himself as he strokes the razor scar on his throat. He stares, with a bitter grimace, into an open walk-in closet across the room. Susie stares glumly at the couple from the carpet.

He relives the climactic shock of Reba's party for her high school graduating class: He had needed Phillipa, his beloved wife, to assist him with the mob of teenage revelers. She was not on the first floor. Perhaps she was upstairs, he had thought. He was at the top of the spiral staircase when he heard a muffled catty yowling from the direction of the master bedroom.

He entered it, heard Phillipa's voice ecstatically crying out from behind the closet door. 'Fuck me! Fuck me! Goddamn! Oooeeee! I'm coming!'

He had crept to the lighted closet door, put an eye to the keyhole. Phillipa, hostess gown hiked over her naked buttocks, was on her knees in a corner of the closet. A brawny terminal teen jock, his trousers and shorts looping his ankles, was pumping into Phillipa dog fashion. Initially paralyzed by painful shock for a long moment, rage galvanized him to arm himself with a pistol from a nightstand.

He had flung open the door and fired on them, missing them in his wild excitement. The jock had sprung on him to disarm him. In the struggle, the pistol discharged, grazing a tendon in his dealing thumb. Disarmed, he fled the bedroom from a volley of shots, to a hospital. When he got back with the police, Phillipa and the jock had vanished.

It had been easy to divorce her on desertion grounds. He remembers the recent rumors that the curvaceous and predacious Phillipa had bewitched an elderly owner of a string of mortuaries in his native New Orleans and moved into his mansion with her young jock passed off as her orphaned nephew. Baptiste heaves a sigh of loss as he rolls between the eager thighs of Erica. Sensitive Susie retreats from the familiar porn to the closet.

Joe Junior, while driving Delphine home past the Club Alabam, had unknowingly passed his stepfather, ensconced with a black L.A. socialite-divorcee. They occupy a second floor room of the Dunbar Hotel. The hotel is mere yards from the Alabam, the hotel is the west coast mecca for black sportsmen and celebrities from across the nation.

Joe Senior lies in bed with his buxom secret sweetheart as he smokes the first cigarette after a passionate love bout. He feels marvelous, so young and virile as he always does when in the company of the refined, regal and sensitive Marguerite Spingarn. Could be my arthritis is in my head, he thinks. I gotta cut Zenobia loose, soon. Guess it's the old girl's frozen pussy and her Holy Ghost and the fire that are jinxing me.

Marguerite coos, 'How do you feel, honey dear?'

He glances through a window at the full bright moon, says, 'Like I could leap up there and slice off a hunk of moon cheese to make you a double-stacked on toast sandwich with french fried onions like you used to order in the Down Home Cafe.'

They laugh. She nibbles his earlobe and whispers, 'I love you Joe Allen ... and your marvelous love making.'

He says, 'I love you too, angel. You made my life like a beautiful technicolored movie the second I saw you walk in the Down Home Cafe.'

She sighs. 'Ironic isn't it that if Jay hadn't brought me to the cafe ... "let's go slumming for country goodies" he said ... I'd probably never have met you, perhaps would still be married to him.' She finger-combs her shoulder length mane of luxuriant auburn hair. Gemstones on her tapered fingers wink light like pastel fireflies. Her finely boned velvet chocolate face is serious as she asks, 'How's Joe doing?'

'Fine, just fine, except for a setback in the ring tonight' he answers.

'How is Zenobia wearing her new retirement?' she says.

His throat constricts with remorse that he had told her the lie. 'Just great. Her doctor said her blood pressure problem is getting better all the time.'

She caresses his face with fingertips. 'You deserve a billion kisses Joe ... that makes me so happy ... I don't feel quite so guilty now about us. It's all so wonderful that you are now a partner in the Hoffmeister Plumbing business and Zenobia is regaining her health. Oh Joe, I'll be so thrilled, so happy when she's well enough so you can tell her about us and get a divorce.' She peppers his face with kisses.

A leaden ball of tension inflates his chest as he struggles to make himself blurt out, 'It's all lies! Lies so you won't quit me. I still ain't nothing but an old loser nigger flunkying for Hoffmeister and digging in filth for seventy-five a week.'

But instead he mumbles, 'Yeah, it is wonderful that things have finally turned around for me, for us.' He avoids her eyes and slides from the bed to flee to the bathroom with the roil of sudden diarrhea.

He sits on the stool pressing his palms against his pounding temples. Finally he rises, flushes the toilet. He steps into the shower. As usual he cleanses himself only from the shoulders down to preserve and savor Marguerite's scent about his head. He is toweling off when Panther Cox, his bosom crony, sticks his head through the door of the adjoining room with his battered black pug face radiant with erotic conquest.

'Say buddy, you leaving?' he asks.

Joe nods.

'Gimme another half hour with my fox and I'll take you home.'

'Okay Panther, take your time.'

Joe steps into the bedroom. Marguerite is pillow propped in bed, languidly smoking a cigarette, watching the street below. She gives his strained face a concerned look as he gets into bed. He props himself within her encircling arm, cheek to cheek beside her.

'Hon, are you ill?' she asks.

'Just an upset stomach and a lightweight headache ... had rough paperwork in the office today' he lies again as they look through the open window down at the street ahum with cars and jay-walking Nigger Christmas celebrants.

Her fingertips stroke his temple as she says, 'Hon, I've had a lovely time with you. Let's go home. Panther and his lady can take a cab when they are ready to leave.'

Now he thinks he doesn't want to leave, wishes he hadn't complained but decides to terminate the evening to avoid further painful discussion and back-up lies about Zenobia and the dismal state of his affairs.

'All right sugar, after we finish your cigarette' he says softly.

She puts her cigarette to his mouth for a draw. Then she stiffens against him as she points excitedly at the street.

'Oh, there's Judge Evans with Rob and Helena!' she exclaims.

He sees, for the first time, her spitting image lawyer son emerging, across the street, from a sparkling new black Forty-Seven Fleetwood Cadillac accompanied by his reddish tan Kewpie Doll wife, Helena. Her father, a platinum-haired giant with a mahogany-hued fierce Buffalo Nickel Indian face and noble bearing, emerges from beneath the wheel to lock the car. The men's flawlessly tailored ice cream silk suits sheen richly as they escort Helena, shimmery in orange taffeta, across the avenue.