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.
IV
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?”
Grandma leaned and snatched the pictures. One of them slipped down in the covers at Tiffany’s hip. Grandma took the cue to stab in the knife.
“Future?” she laughed. “He’s aching to get married when he’s older. Why that li’l jock is got the hots for me so bad I’ve got to dose his food with saltpeter.” She paused to twist the knife. “He may look like Cecil, kiddo, but I’ll give you ten to five he won’t leave his sweet patootie crying at the church.”
Tiffany stricken eyes gazed about the monotonous off-white walls and ceiling. Her lips trembled as she burst into tears.
“Stop the waterworks, dearie pie,” Grandma said sweetly as she moved to embrace Tiffany.
Tiffany scuttled away. “Please! Don’t touch me! You hate me!”
Grandma stood and laughed. “Hate you, dearie? Why say a hurting thing like that? You’re never going to get out of here feeling and thinking crazy like that.”
Tiffany scooted up to a sitting position, tear-flooded eyes ablaze. “We know I’m not crazy, don’t we? You don’t want me out of here, but you’re in for a surprise soon.”
Grandma screwed her face into an anguished mask. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief from her sleeve and sniffled, “You’re so cruel and ungrateful after all I’ve done to get your release.” She blubbered as she turned and left the room. A flower vase shattered against the door as she shut it.
She went down the corridor to the elevator; she smiled to see several attendants rush, with a straitjacket, toward the pandemonium of shrieking and crashing of window glass sounds from Tiffany’s room.
Twilight’s lavender blindfold had covered the sun’s stark eye when Grandma parked in downtown Galveston. She walked through a crowd of Saturday shoppers and early on-the-towners into a posh jewelry store.
A clerk descended on her at the threshold. She selected a fiery cluster of diamonds on a gypsy mounting packaged in a gold satin box and paid with a fifteen hundred dollar personal check. Then she went to a drugstore several shops down the street to see a pharmacist friend where she purchased a bottle of chloroform.
As she pulled the Lincoln away for home in total euphoria she merrily hummed an old stripper’s show tune.
V
In the deepening twilight, Jay lay groaning on his belly naked.
Fay gently massaged liniment into his bruised body. “Damn! Your back and ass, besides the bruises, look like you’ve been whipped. The welts!”
He growled, “You saw how I tumbled and slid when that maniac bronc threw me. Those are scratches, not whip welts. Now, get the hell out of here before the witch brooms home.”
Fay kissed his neck and stood. “Well, I guess the bronc kicked my loving date in the head for tonight,” she sighed as she went to the door.
He winced as he leapt spastically out of the bed to prove his indestructible macho. He said stoutly as he embraced her waist, “By midnight, I’ll be back in the almost pink. So, knock the ceiling at midnight, okay?”
She kissed him. “Okay. But even if you’re not up to par, I can always ride the peg.”
They laughed and sucked tongues. Then Fay went down the hallway toward the attic dorm stairs. Jay shut the door and hobbled to the window. He lit a cigarette and watched Hitler, the bronc, rearing and kicking in the corral. “I’ll break your black
ass down like a ten buck shotgun soon as I heal,” he told himself.
He had limped back to bed when Grandma opened his door. She stood in the doorway sniffing. Then she walked in and sat on the side of the bed.
“I hate liniment! You hurt?” she said, wiggling her nose.
“Yeah, bad as I can with no broken bones,” he moaned to block any of her amorous notions.
“Who was sweet enough to rub you down, dearie?” she asked as she lit a cigarette.
“Me, who else?” he answered too hastily and desperately.
“Your sister, kiddo. That’s who,” she said with slitted eyes that yo-yoed his Adam’s apple.
“Naw, she’s under the weather herself, I think.”
Grandma kissed his cheek and stood. She yawned. “I’m bushed and sleepy myself. You’ve got a peach of a gift, li’l darlin’, I bought you. Maybe it tops the watch.”
He said, “Nothing except a Caddie convertible could top the watch. What you got for me, Brandy?”
She said, “I’ll bring it with me tomorrow when I get my sugar refill.” Then she opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and closed the door. Minutes later, he heard a rap on the door. Shit! Main Street pad! he thought.
“Come in,” he said.
Big Ralph, decked out in a grey houndstooth suit and snowy ten-gallon hat, peacocked into the room with his moon face hedgerowed with concern.
“How ya doin’, Baby Slim?” he said as he walked to the side of the bed.
Jay faked a smile. “Shoot, I was just thinking about saddling up black-ass Hitler for another go-round before it got real dark.”
They laughed.
“You got the heart and the touch to be a sonuvabitching performer one day. Your steer wrestling and roping is the best I’ve seen a novice do. You wanta take a slice of advice from this old-timer?” Big Ralph said seriously.
“Sure, Big Un, you’re my professor.”