The giant said, “Broncs got radar and murder stuffed between their ears. Hitler got wise you was leery and tight in the saddle. You gotta stay tough but loose. You gotta flow and glow positive through the earthquakin’. Got it?”
Jay nodded.
Big Ralph gave him a feathery fist in the shoulder. “I’m goin’ to town to destroy some whiskey. Want anything?”
Jay said, “Thanks, Big Un, but I got everything to keep me from going nuts for now.”
They laughed. Big Ralph left the room.
A half hour before midnight, restless Fay lay bright eyed in the darkened quiet of the dorm. She watched summer breezes lash a chinaberry tree outside an open, screened window near her bed. Its branches cavorted spectral shadows on the moon-tinted walls.
Her chum, Millie from Dallas, in the bed beside hers, writhed. She pleaded piteously in her sleep. “Ah, mister! Please don’t shoot! Let me go!” as she relived a kidnapping by a pervert-killer interrupted by police cars before he could dismember her as he had several other girls.
Fay shivered, felt a familiar spasm behind her belly button. The feeling shifted her mind to her middle-aged novelist stepfather and the fearful awful night several weeks after the childbirth deaths of her mother and premature sister. She remembered she’d been asleep around midnight in her bedroom in the palatial home of her stepfather in the Whitefish Bay section of Milwaukee. Her mother had married him two years before.
The stepfather, Frank, slid his naked body into bed with her, fondled her half awake. For several seconds she thought she was having a nightmare as she watched and felt him sucking her breast. He reeked of alcohol.
She screamed, “Goddammit, Frank, you gone nuts!” as she punched his head away and tried to escape from the bed.
He seized her and squeezed her close, showered her face with spittled drunken kisses as he passionately sobbed, “Your beauty has destroyed my will to live if I can’t be your lover. I’ve failed my sacred vow to do without you, Angel Witch. Torturer Goddess, saboteur of my sleep and sanity, have mercy! You must understand! With Felicia gone from us, way out there beyond the heavens, we’re like infant sparrows together, deserted in the snow. I’m bewitched! No price is too high to pay to have you. Disgrace? A pittance! Prison? A bagatelle!”
She raked his face, arms, and back bloody with her fingernails. Anesthetized by desire, he forced her thighs open, hunched his muscular two hundred and fifty pounds, and entered her. He punched her jaw. She dropped into a dark abyss. She revived and feebly continued to maim him with slashing fingernails and gouging teeth as he pumped away to climax.
He cursed and rolled off the bed to his feet. He went down the hall to the bathroom. She followed to peek through the keyhole. He was treating his wounds with iodine. Fay went back to her room, slipped into jeans, and snatched up her piggy bank before she fled the house.
She took the Greyhound to Galveston to look up her mother’s cousin. She discovered that the cousin had moved to Alaska. Fay remembered with a shudder her penniless frightful week before Jay rescued her from gang-rape in the basement of the condemned house in Galveston.
Now, she tingled as she noticed one minute to midnight on the wall clock. She glanced at Phoebe, the dorm mother, fast asleep across the way. She eased out of bed, picked up a shoe, and went several feet to the furnace vent in the wall. She gently tapped the shoe heel against the floor. Shortly, she heard Jay tap his ceiling. Then his familiar kissy oral sex sound issued and spasmed her crotch.
“I’m going to come!” she stage-whispered down the vent.
Within the minute, she entered his room and slipped out of her gown. They moved the dresser against the door.
Grandma, in red wrapper, stepped with a feral face from the shadows at the bend of the hallway. She moved soundlessly down the hallway carpet past the tryst room in stocking feet to a guest room near the foot of the darkened attic dorm stairway.
She put the bottle of chloroform and a rag on the carpet near the door. Then she got a chair and sat down. Her face was suffused with rage in the flare of her lighter as she shakily lit a cigarette and peered at Jay’s door through the cracked guest room door.
The young lovers settled for a near wipeout sixty-nine before a brief ride on Jay’s peg. Panting, they lay smoking a cigarette between them. In the cathedral quiet, her child’s face was poignantly innocent in a soft blue spot of moonlight.
“Candy Dong, know what kinda home I wish for when we get rich?”
He said, “Gimme a rundown, Ice Cream Cone.”
She closed her eyes. “A pink house, definitely a shocking pink house on a hill. I mean a high one. A flower garden, a pink swimming pool shaped like your dong. A zillion kids your spitting image and servants by the battalions.”
They laughed, clung together, kissed as if they had no tomorrows together before she slipped on her gown. They moved the dresser. She kissed him once more and left the room.
Goddamn, that broad has got me hooked, he thought, as he flung himself into bed and inhaled the odor of their love stew.
With pink ribbon in hair gleaming like a cache of Inca platinum, she skipped down the hall humming like the ecstatic child she was. She reached the dorm stairway and took a step when Grandma lunged from the guest room and seized her throat from behind. Fay made choking sounds as her blue eyes bulged out in pain and terror.
Grandma dragged her by the throat, kicking and squirming, into the guest room and dropped her three hundred pounds onto her frail prey to anchor her to the carpet, with a heavy knee on her throat to strangle outcry. She quickly saturated the rag with chloroform and pressed it against Fay’s face until she went limp.
Grandma grabbed a foot and peeped down the hallway before she stepped out. Fay’s dislodged pink hair ribbon lay on the door threshold. She dragged her victim down the hall past Jay’s room. Fay’s body against the carpet made only a whispery rustle like a snake’s belly snagging on autumn leaves. Fay’s head bounced quietly on the carpeted stairway to the ground floor, but sickeningly on the pine steps leading to the basement furnace room.
A sweet tooth had sent Jay to the private oven for Grandma’s peach cobbler an eyelash second after Grandma had reached back to shut the basement door behind her. He was spooning cobbler into a dish when he heard the bumping sounds of Fay’s head. He put the dish down and walked several feet down the hall to the basement door. He put his ear against it and heard sounds.
He stooped and peered through a hairline crack in the doorjamb. He saw only Grandma’s back near the grinding machine and the usual clutter of dulled field hoes and rakes waiting to be sharpened. He sniffed at vapors of what he thought was chloroform. “Could Grandma be into an el cheapo high like that?” he asked himself.
He shrugged and went back to the cobbler. Sharpening of tools was his job. But what the hell, he thought. I’m her fucking house pet, so let the horny dingbat do my gig. He sat down and devoured three portions of cobbler and a quart of milk.
He stepped out of the kitchen and walked toward the stairway for the second floor. He retraced and put an eye to the hairline crack. He couldn’t see her now. He put his ear to the door. No sounds.
He opened the door carefully and went down into the basement. She’s not here, he thought, but where is she? I had to see her pass the kitchen unless Satan’s pet has gone invisible.
He went to her open bedroom door. He went to his bedroom, stared into it. He opened the bathroom door. He walked to the guest room, flipped the light switch near the door. Empty. The stench of chloroform wrinkled his nose. He spotted the pink ribbon, stooped, and picked it up. “I’ll kill her if she’s hurt Fay,” he told himself, as his chest inflated with tension.
He went to his bedroom and rapped the softball bat against his ceiling several times. No response. He decided to scout the dorm. But nausea churned his stomach, made him weak. Ill, his legs trembled as he went to sit on the side of the bed.
In a sub-cellar beneath the furnace room lit by a naked red bulb,
Grandma had set up the embalming process on Fay. She was lying nude and ghastly white on a long table. A whirring machine sucked her bloodless through a tube inserted into an artery at the base of her crotch. A row of cheap caskets lay covered by a canvas cloth in a corner of the cave-like room.
Grandma leaned and pressed Fay’s eyelids up with her fingertips. The eyes were blank, dead orbs. She grinned as she went to a short flight of stone stairs, ascended, and pressed a button on the sheet steel hatch on the sub-basement’s ceiling.
A two-horsepower electric motor swung away hatch and ponderous grinding machine welded to it above. Grandma went through the aperture to the furnace room. She left the hole agape to go through the swinging doors of the basement john.
In the attic dorm, Jay stared down at Fay’s empty bed. He crept through the silent dorm of sleeping girls and down the stairway. He went to his room and snatched up the baseball bat. Then he put on high boots and long-fringed cowboy gloves to his mid-arm. He went to the basement door, peeped, and listened before he tiptoed down the stairs. He saw the grinding machine out of position immediately. He went to the hole and stared down into it for a long moment.
Grandma watched him through the latticed doors of the toilet. Her eyes leaked tears as she watched her beloved pet disappear into the sub-chamber to seal his doom. She scrambled up the basement stairs to her bedroom. She unlocked the closet door.
Cobras, Homer and Abigail, slithered to her with affectionate low-key hisses. Grandma scooped them into her arms and started back to the basement.
Jay screamed grief as he crushed Fay’s corpse against him at the table. “Please, Fay, baby! Come back! I can’t live without you!”
He released her tenderly back on the table. His face was draconic as he went to a high stack of paper cartons and slugged them away with the bat hoping Grandma was crouched behind them. He ripped off the canvas covering the row of caskets. He recoiled at the sight of the embalmed corpses of five young boys lying nude as if asleep in the satin-lined boxes.
He spun at the sound of weeping to see Grandma standing at the stone steps with the cobras slung across her shoulders like a stole. A pitchfork gleamed wickedly in her hand. He stared mesmerized, speechless.
Grandma shook her head sadly as tears rolled down her cheeks. “Why, oh, why did you have to go poking your doll nose into Brandy’s business? I flat-out adore you, li’l darlin’. I bought you a diamond ring, a cluster of stones bigger than your heartbreaking eyes. Next month I was gonna order a white Caddie convertible with all the extras . . . was gonna let Big Ralph make you a rodeo star with the spiffiest gear and duds on the circuit. It’s gonna break my loving heart to fix you for keeping forever.”
She smooched the cobras and set them on the cement. “Sic him, lovelies!” she commanded.
Jay gripped the bat and crouched in a combat stance, tear-flooded eyes brilliant in the red murk.
The grey, black-marked assassins emitted a chilling high-octave-penetrating hissing sound as they elevated the fronts of their sinuous bodies. The movable flab of their neck skins puffed out hideously. Their eyes flamed like bronze-hued coals of fire. Two front glistening fangs and three smaller upper fangs behind gleamed in the hellish heads as they moved across the cement to strike.
Jay took a mighty bat shot at their awful heads moving toward him in tandem, but missed. They cunningly separated to attack his flanks. Jay backed into a cul-de-sac of stacked cattle feed grain bags. He stumbled on a canister of rat bait to fall flat on his back. The cobras halted for a long moment.
Grandma lumbered up behind her motionless hit pets brandishing her pitchfork as she squawked, “Sic him, lovelies!”
They lunged in to fang droplets of venom down his boots before he was able to scramble to the top of a grain bag stack. Homer and Abigail fixed phosphorescent bronze orbs on him as they reared their hooded heads toward him. Jay kicked off several of the bags that pinned the cobras’ lower bodies against the cement floor.
Grandma cursed and popped sweat as she struggled to get her monumental flab through the narrow aperture of the cul-de-sac of tightly stacked bags of feed.
Jay leapt down and quickly jellied the heads of the trapped cobras with his bat. Grandma bellowed grief as she barred Jay’s escape from the cul-de-sac with savage jabs of the pitchfork.
He moved toward her, swinging the bat violently and screaming, “Please don’t make me kill you, Grandma! I’m gonna let the cops punish you. Get out of my way, Grandma!”
She sneered and squeezed her bulk through the narrow lane of feed bags. She jabbed the pitchfork at Jay’s throat. He ducked a split second in time. There was a terrible crunch sound when he slammed the bat against the side of Grandma’s head. Her shattered skull gouted blood. She wobbled like a gigantic top before she collapsed dead on the cement floor.
Jay shook uncontrollably as he stared down at the slain voluptuary. The bat slipped from his palsied hand. The thud of it against the cement startled him. Panic seized him, galvanized him to leap over the corpse and streak from the mansion.
Sobbing, he ascended a brambled rise to railroad tracks. He lay in adjacent underbrush for seeming ages until the engine headlamps to a freight train, bound for Houston, labored up the incline toward him. He galloped from cover and swung aboard an empty boxcar where he lay panting and staring down at Grandma’s mansion of horrors vividly eerie in the glow of frosty blue starlight.
He wept wildly for his dead sweetie, Fay, for the embalmed corpses of the boys. The star glow ignited a razzle of icy fire on the diamond dial of the wristwatch Grandma had given him. He gazed at the gaudy bauble and wept anew for Grandma until his entrails dry-locked. For after all, she had, he realized, gifted him with the spiffiest wristwatch there ever was.
THE RECKONING
Ambushed by grief, San Francisco barmaid Lela Leseur left her post to weep behind the door of a washroom cubicle for several minutes. Composed, she walked to the mirror to renovate her makeup and to drop Murine into her reddened grey eyes. She returned to serve the midnight mob with a congealed, pained smile on her elfish Creole face.
The nicotine and perfume-choked air vibrated with profane jive and shuck of street people scoring the red-lit haze with a light show of jewelry and psychedelic clothes. Lela’s pinch bottle curves inflated black satin leotards. She mesmerized a gallery of covetous eyes as she moved sensuously behind the long bar with two male bartenders.
At closing time, the five-eight, 38-22-36 wipeout fox counted nearly a half “C” note in tips. After bar cleanup duties, she stepped out into the late August chill of the deserted street. Her wind-flogged, shoulder-length mane coruscated beneath a street lamp like indigo neon. She scarved her hair and belted her red suede coat and appeared ten years younger than her thirty-four years. She stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, engorging her lungs, unloading tension with foggy air before she whipped her red-booted, centerfold-shapely gams toward her scarlet Mercedes parked down the street from the bar.
A simian-faced drug dealer monikered Tar Baby, aglow in pink leather, lunged from the black maw of an alley mouth to block her way.
She halted. “Tar Baby, you just did an uncool graveyard thing. What do you want?” she said icily as she darted her hand into her coat pocket to grip a .32 automatic.
His tiny dark eyes sparkled ravenously as he held out a thick bundle of “C” notes bound by a diamond- and ruby-studded money clip.
“The same thing I been wantin’, sugar cunt, since I hit town last month. You! And to prove I ain’t jivin’, peel off a chunk of this bread and cop the greatest head on the planet,” he crooned breathlessly.
“No sale. Get out of my way,” she said in a cold, deadly voice. She remembered the pair of white would-be rapists she had ventilated into an intensive care ward six months before at this very alley after the bar closed. She hoped she would not be forced to repeat the bloody scenario as she said harshly, “Tar Baby, don’t force me to harm you. Get out of my face!”
The giant t
hrew back his glittery processed head and laughed. “I ain’t gonna do that. I just decided I’m gonna kidnap ya fine ass and put ya in my bed this mornin’. Bitch, I’m claimin’ ya for my woman!” he declared as he oozed toward her.
She snaked out the automatic and leveled it at his belly. “I’ll burn you, Tar Baby!” she warned.
He studied her with hooded eyes for a moment before he took another step toward her. She stepped back, fired two rapid shots that chipped concrete at his feet, then she took aim at his head.
“Easy now, bad mama. You done won this round,” he gasped with a horrific grin as he threw up his hands and backed into the alley toward his pink bubble top Eldorado in the alley.
“Nigger, next time you try to gorilla me, I won’t miss!” she shouted as she pursued to the alley mouth.
She watched him squeal the Caddie away before she went to her car. As she drove through the sleazed Fillmore District, pangs of sorrow and guilt compelled fresh tears. “I should have checked on Toni in L.A. I should have tried harder to persuade her not to leave home,” she told herself. “I helped to destroy her!”
She drove into a funeral home parking lot, deserted except for a hearse, and sat gazing at the fog-shrouded building, smoking a cigarette, preparing herself for the misery and pain awaiting. She noticed a driver in his cab parked at the curb. I guess Cass decided to take an earlier flight from L.A., she thought.
She left the car and climbed the stone steps of the mortuary. Her knees quivered as she opened the front door and stepped into the cathedral’s quiet foyer. She exchanged nods with a drowsy old man behind a desk as she went down a blue-lit hallway to a shadow-haunted viewing room. There she paused on the threshold and watched for a moment the sleek, white leather-suited Cassandra Jones, model-singer-actress and family friend. Dionne Warwick look-alike, Cassandra sobbed as she stood beside Toni’s blossom-banked casket, vivid in a spot of rose light. Lela went to Cassandra’s side and kissed her cheek. They embraced as they gazed down at the shriveled ruin of Toni’s corpse. The once-lush café au lait face had been blackened and sucked cadaverous by vampire heroin.