Then, at ten thirty, she breathlessly called Tut to report that she was calling from a hardware store where freaked-out Maggie had sent her to purchase a strongbox, shovel, and heavy-gauge plastic.
Immediately after the call, Tut turned to Skeeter seated beside him on the living-room sofa. “This is it, Skeeter! Cannon-ass it down to that hardware store down the block and cop a shovel!”
Ten minutes later, Tut and Skeeter, blue-jeaned and booted, sat in the hotel parking lot in Tut’s gold Rolls. Fifteen minutes later they watched Cassandra carrying a bulky package and a shovel with its scoop wrapped in brown paper, and stooped Lela, clutching a briefcase, enter her scarlet Mercedes. Chauffeur Skeeter tailed the Mercedes when Cassandra drove from the parking lot into sparse traffic.
Later, inside the Mercedes as Cassandra drove into the mountainous Big Bear area, Lela broke a long silence. “This used to be our favorite vacation spot when Marc was alive. It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Cass?”
“Very, Lela. Well, we are almost there where we . . .” Cassandra said as she glanced at the reflection of the Rolls in the rearview mirror, a half mile behind as she turned the Mercedes off the deserted highway to ascend a very steep mountain toward its heavily forested pinnacle.
“Yes, Cass, and now that we are only minutes away from doing it, I’m not thrilled a bit. In fact, in a way, I wish that fate had never put us in this position. I almost wish we didn’t have to do it!” Then she heaved a heavy sigh and said bitterly, “But then, I remember my baby in that casket . . . and I know for her and the safety of other young women that monster must die!”
Minutes later inside the Rolls, several hundred yards from the mountaintop, Skeeter said, “They’ve stopped up there!”
Tut answered, “Yeah, to bury that bread. I was wrong about the old broad being leery of that young bitch.”
Skeeter said, “The old lady must really have her nose wide open for Cassandra to take her along to deep-six a load of bread like that . . . unless the old broad is senile.”
Before Skeeter could say it, Tut said, “Drive the ride into cover. We’ll have to hike it from here to eyeball the spot where they bury that bread.”
Skeeter slowed the car as it approached a crooked sign that read Picnic Area. He pulled the Rolls, as Tut instructed, off the road onto a narrow dirt road. Driving through a thick stand of trees to a mossy clearing containing several oaken tables for picnickers, Skeeter U-turned the Rolls to face the main road visible a hundred yards away. They got out and moved through heavy brush toward the summit of the mountain, halting and staring at the gaping mouth of a cave fifty yards away.
A half hour later they peered through heavy brush at Lela and Cassandra leaving the cave empty-handed except for the shovel. A cabin sat a hundred yards above the cave.
That must be the cabin where the old broad honeymooned, Tut told himself. They watched as Cassandra pulled the Mercedes away down the road toward the flatlands.
“Let’s go!” Tut exclaimed as he turned and led Skeeter back toward the Rolls.
As they reached the picnic clearing, Lela and Cassandra, armed with the shovel, stepped from the cover of thick brush at the clearing perimeter, several yards behind Tut. He whirled and recoiled in shock from Lela’s mint image of Toni stripped of gray wig and heavy bifocals, leveling an automatic at his chest. At the same instant, Skeeter pulled a length of iron pipe from his boot.
“Yes, you dirty cocksucker, I’m Toni’s mama!” Lela intoned with a hideous face as Tut turned to flee.
Skeeter smashed the pipe against the side of his head, and as Tut stumbled past Cassandra toward the brush, she chopped a long, deep gash into his throat with a violent swing of the shovel. Tut collapsed on his knees. As Lela went to stand over him she fired several rapid shots into the back of his head and Tut fell dead on his back.
The trio dragged him to the Rolls, put his corpse on the front seat. Then they got in with Skeeter behind the wheel, and he drove to park the Rolls and set the emergency brake near the inclined edge of a thousand foot cliff near the parked Mercedes. After they got out, Skeeter retrieved a five-gallon can of gasoline from the trunk of the Mercedes, saturating Tut’s body and the Rolls’s interior with the gasoline. He leaned in, released the emergency brake, and scampered away from the car.
As the death car rolled toward the abyss, Lela fired into the gas tank. The Rolls exploded in a ball of fire as it tumbled off the cliff. Then the trio hurried to the Mercedes, and Lela sprinted it away down the mountain toward the flatlands.
At that instant, bathrobed Marcus flipped breakfast pancakes in the Leseur kitchen, then sat down at the breakfast nook table to wolf down the flapjacks. Finished, he was about to rise when he froze, seeing Pat in a pink bikini moving through the unusually hot and humid sun-dazzled air toward the open kitchen door.
“Hey, baby, I just copped some dynamite smoke!” she said as she entered the kitchen. She slid her pulse-hammering curves against him at the table, extracting a fat joint from the satiny lair of her wipe-out breasts.
“Pat, you ain’t got no business here,” he said raggedly as she tongued his ear and darted her hand beneath his robe to finger-stroke his obese womb sweeper quickening to the perpendicular despite his sincere promise to Lela to cut Pat loose.
“I ain’t gonna stay, baby. I just wanted to share this bad shit with you,” she crooned as she lit the bomber with a lighter from her awesome valley of rut.
She drew deeply, with slumberous eyes, before she placed the angel dust brain-bomber between his lips. Then he drew on it deeply, and they passed the joint between them until it roached.
“Whew!” he blew as he stripped off his robe.
“Ain’t it some bad shit, baby? It’s spiked with angel dust,” she slurred as she dropped her head to his naked lap, massaging her cheek against his crotch thicket.
“Don’t know . . . This shit has got me on fire!” he gasped as he savagely jerked her head up by her hair to stare malevolently into her eyes.
“Baby, please don’t look at me like that!” she bleated as she tore at his hand to free her hair.
He saw her face transpose hideously. Then he stood and lifted her by her hair to her feet as she shrieked in pain and raked bloody rills down his face with her fingernails. He hoisted her over his head and hurled her against the wall where she lay stunned in a sitting position, moaning.
He galloped nude from the kitchen through the house and out the front door into the quiet street, gabbling like a Holy Roller possessed by the Holy Ghost and the Divine Fire. He bowled over an elderly black man who had known him since birth when the man tried to block his way on the sidewalk in front of the Leseur house. Marcus raced to the crowded street of a business district a block away where he stopped to seize a parking meter. He bent it backward and forward to loosen it at its base before he wrenched it from its foundation.
Pedestrians screamed and scattered in his wake like sheep before a panther as he shattered shop windows with the parking meter for two blocks before a police car blocked his way at an intersection. He clubbed the cruiser windshield to smithereens before the pair of cops leaped to the street and leveled pistols on him.
“Put your hands over your head!” one of them commanded as they leveled their guns on him from behind the cruiser.
Marcus charged them with a snarl, and they emptied their guns into his head and chest. Lela’s “I’ll cash in my chips if anything happened to him . . .” child fell riddled, encrimsoned into the street. Dead.
A preview of
MAMA BLACK WIDOW
1
MAMA YOU MOTHER . . . !
She lay beside me in the late March night, naked and crying bitterly into her pillow. The bellow of a giant truck barreling down State Street in Chicago’s far Southside almost drowned out her voice as she sobbed, “What’s wrong with me, Otis? Why is it so hard for you to make love to me? Am I too fat? Do you love someone else? Yes, I guess that’s it. And that’s why you haven’t married me. This is
1968. We’ve been sleeping together for a whole year. I wasn’t brought up like that. Let’s get married. Please make me Mrs. Tilson. I hope you’re not stalling because I married twice before.”
I just lay there squeezing the limp flesh between my sweaty thighs and feeling desperate helplessness and panic.
I danced my fingertips down her spine and whispered tenderly into her ear, “Dorcas, there’s no one else. I think I’ve loved you since we were very young. I just have to stop drinking so much. Maybe we’ll get married soon. Now, let’s try it again.”
She turned over slowly and lay on her back in a blue patch of moonlight. Her enormous black eyes were luminous in the strong ebony face. Desperately I set my imagination free and gazed at her tits, jerking like monstrous male organs in climax.
I felt an electric spark quicken my limpness. Frantically I closed my eyes and gnawed and sucked at the heaving humps. Her outcries of joyful pain pumped rigid readiness into me.
She pinched it. She moaned and held herself open.
She screamed, “Please! Please, fuck me before it falls again.”
I lunged into her and seized her thighs to hold them back. But as I touched her fat softness I felt myself collapsing inside her.
I was terrified. So I thought about Mike and the crazy excitement I had felt long ago when I pressed my face against his hard hairy belly. Then in the magic of imagination, instead of Dorcas it was the beautiful heartbreaker Mike that I smashed into.
Later, I lay and watched Dorcas sleeping. Except for added weight and faint stress lines etched into the satin skin, she looked the same as she had on that enchanted spring day when I first met her twenty years before.
What a chump I had been then to dream that the daughter of a big shot mortician could really be mine.
Mama had warned me then, “Sweet Pea, a slum fellow like you don’t have a chance with a girl like that. Her father will see to it. If anyone despises poor niggers more than white folks, it’s high class niggers like him.”
Mama had been right. He had helped to marry her off and broken my heart. The prejudiced bastard was dead now.
By sheer chance I had run into Dorcas a week after his death. She was a trained mortician, but she was lonely and needed help.
I knew right away that there was still lots of warm sweet voltage between us. Two days later I moved from Mama and the tenement flat where I had spent most of my life.
I hadn’t dated a guy since I moved into the funeral home with her. I put off marrying her because I knew that freakish creature I called Sally was still alive inside me. I was afraid of Sally. I couldn’t marry Dorcas until I was certain that the bitch Sally was dead.
I thought about the freshly embalmed corpse of Deacon Davis lying in the mortuary morgue downstairs. I would have to groom and dress it by mid-morning for viewing in the slumber room. I tried until dawn to sleep. But it was no use. I couldn’t get the corpse of Deacon Davis off my mind. I decided to prepare the Deacon and get him off my mind.
I eased out of bed and slipped on a robe and slippers. I took a ring of keys from the dresser top and went down the front stairway to the street. I went down the sidewalk through the chilly dawn to the front door of the mortuary.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the dim reception room. I walked across the deep pile gold carpet into the office. I switched on a light and sat down at the old mahogany desk. I took a fresh fifth of gin from a drawer and sipped it half empty.
The shrill blast of the desk phone startled me. I picked up and said, “Reed’s Funeral Home.”
Mama’s high pitched, rapid voice chattered over the wire, “Sweet Pea, it’s been over a week since you visited or called me. You know I have a bad heart and I’m all alone. Don’t let that woman make you neglect your Mama. Think about it and let your conscience be your judge.”
Before I could reply, she hung up. I started to call her back, but decided against it. I took two more belts of gin and went through the darkened chapel on my way to the morgue at the rear of the building.
The heavy odor of spoiling flowers and the harsh chemical stench of preserved death burst from the slumber room. I walked into its shadowy blueness and paused beside a cheap chalky casket with a bouquet of stale blossoms laying on the foot of it. There was a poignant message scrawled on a smudgy card: “Happy journey, Papa, to the arms of sweet Jesus. See you soon. Lettie, your loving, lonesome wife.”
I stared down at the tired dead face, creased hideous by the lifetime terror and torture of its blackness. I remembered the puckered emblems of hate on the corpse’s back.
I turned away from the pitiful corpse wrapped in the shabby suit. I walked unsteadily down the long murky hallway to the morgue. I opened the raspy door. There he was, a skeletal black blob on the porcelain table that gleamed whitely in the half darkness.
I walked across the room and the scraping of my feet against the concrete floor was like shrieking in the tomb quiet. I flipped on the high intensity lamp over the table. I slipped on rubber gloves and stood hypnotized, sweeping my eyes up and down the white haired wasted corpse.
I shook with rage as scenes and sounds of the awful past shattered and filled the bright stillness. I was nine years old when the corpse everybody respectfully called Deacon Davis lived on the third floor of the Westside tenement where Mama still lives.
I remembered that first time in his apartment. His hand was hot between my legs, caressing the throbbing tip of my stiff little organ.
His voice was hoarse with excitement, “Kiss mine and lick it, you dear little boy, like I did to yours. Mine is a magic wand to make any wish come true when you make it cry tears of joy.”
I put the long crooked thing in my mouth until I spat its slimy tears. I cheated the wand and made two wishes: That poor Papa found a steady job. And that Mama wouldn’t be so bossy and cruel to Papa anymore.
To my complaints of wishes unfulfilled, the Deacon would grin and say, “I know what’s wrong. My wand must cry deep in your hunger, my dear boy.”
For more than a year, until he moved away, the Deacon shoved his wand deeply into me. The Deacon sure ruined me. He really did.
I leaned over the corpse and roughly jabbed my thumbs into the sunken eye sockets. I pushed back the withered eyelids and stared into the brown orbs filmy and vacant.
I whispered, “Dear Deacon Davis, you can’t know how thrilled I am to see you again. I just don’t want you to go to your grave unpunished. You bastard child-raping freak. I’m going to shave you and dress your nappy hair. Then I’m going to punish you for ruining me. But no one will know except you and me, dear Deacon Davis.”
I groomed the corpse and got a razor-sharp scalpel. I lifted his wrinkled shaft and held it erect at its tip between a thumb and index finger. I stood there with the glittering blade in my hand.
I glanced at the Deacon’s face. The blank sable eyes were staring at me. I felt suddenly queasy and faint. The scalpel clattered to the table top. I jerked my hand away from the shaft and pressed the eyelids down. I just couldn’t do a vicious thing like that even to a filthy freak like Deacon Davis.
I was putting underwear on the corpse when it groaned as trapped air escaped its chest. I went to the office in a hurry for a stiff drink of gin. I came back to the morgue and split the burial suit coat and shirt down the back and dressed the body.
I wheeled the white satin-lined casket to the side of the table. I attached pulleys over the table to the corpse and lowered it into the casket. I wheeled it into the slumber room for viewing by mourners who believed the Deacon was holy.
Funeral services for Deacon Davis were held two days later. The anguished wails of his surviving brother and sister moved me not at all.
I drove the hearse to the cemetery. Two elegant black limousines driven by chauffeurs Dorcas hired at a ten dollar fee followed behind me. At least thirty private cars behind them crawled through the dazzling sunshine to the grave. The Deacon was well thought of all right. But then I’m sure that the m
ourners didn’t know about his dirty passion for little boys.
A nice funeral like that was much more than the Deacon deserved. But I was really glad I hadn’t used that scalpel on the Deacon. I’ve always, at least in one respect tried to be like my idol, Martin Luther King, Jr. To not hate anybody.
To tell the truth, I’ve never really hated a living human soul except cops. There may be cops who are human, but I’ve never known any.
The day after the Deacon’s funeral I called Mama more than a dozen times. I didn’t get an answer and the line was never busy. I was awfully worried, so that evening around seven I killed the fifth of gin and drove my old Plymouth to the Westside.
I drove past raucous clusters of ragged kids frolicking on the sidewalks and stoops in the twilight-down Homan Avenue past 1321, the six flat slum building that my idol and his group had taken over in February, 1966. The plan had been (in violation of the law) to collect the rents and spend the money to make the building fit for human occupancy.
I parked at the curb at the end of the block. A gorgeous black brute striding down the sidewalk toward me mesmerized me. The bulgy thigh muscles undulated against his tight white trousers. I forgot all my resolutions to keep Sally shackled and scrambled to the sidewalk and stood fumbling with my key ring.
His raw body odor spiced with the scent of shaving lotion floated deliriously on the warm air. I inhaled hungrily. I was flaming. I really was. He came abreast of me and I saw the imprint of his huge dick. I was dizzy with a hot roaring in my head. I almost fainted with excitement. I really did.
I had an insane urge to stroke his thing. Instead I caressed my eyes over his crotch and then waltzed them to the depths of his dreamy brown eyes, searching for a flicker of sweet kinship for “the” secret message. I saw only a cold quizzical indifference as he passed me. The beautiful bastard was straight!
Almost instantly I felt like shouting with joy and relief that he was, and that the bitch, Sally, had been denied. I went down the cracked walk toward the grimy familiar front of the six unit building that Mama now owned.