He shook his head as he watched her pull her opulent machine away into the blizzard pit of twilight. The brute machine growled through the darkening city’s flashbulb neon to the highway for the Big Windy. Satin flipped on the radio to her and Malique “Pony” Jones’s torch ballad, Lou Rawl’s “You’ll Never Find.” Orgasmic waves rocked her with the expectation of Pony’s bed. She snorted a blow of pure cocaine. Her hand-fashioned boot stomped the golden bomb toward Pony, the bandit scourge of black Chicago’s dope dealers.
Ninety miles away in fallen dark, Malique “Pony” Jones parked his tan Mercury Marquis in a side street on Chicago’s Southside. He slid his black-clad Whippet frame to the street. His huge grey eyes were slits of cold-blooded purpose as he cradled, under his arm, a sawed-off shotgun in a shopping bag. A floppy black hat was jammed down on his long skull and black silky hair. Thrilly jolts of ecstasy electrified his junkie loins.
His fancy-prancy equine stride took him a half block down the ghetto street into the dingy foyer of a tenement building. Stevie Wonder’s voice and music issued faintly. Pony’s gloved hands slipped a Halloween fright mask across his too-pretty face. He moved silently up the foyer stairs. He faded into hall shadows facing the front ground apartment of his prey.
For tensioned eons it seemed to him he compulsively glanced at the radium face of his wristwatch as he fidgeted impatiently waiting to snap the trap. He heard Ink Spot, Bill Kenny’s romantic falsetto voice, singing, “If I Didn’t Care” waft from an old 78 record on the second floor. His mother’s all-time favorite he remembered.
His delicate mouth fashioned a psychotic smile as he remembered how his father hated the record, despised it because, he sneered, “It’s so gutless and faggy I’ll puke. Shut it off or I’ll stomp the record player to pieces.”
The muscle-bound cocksucker hated me too, Pony thought, as he remembered how his father caved in his ribs during sadistic roughhouse play when he was a willowy kid of ten to toughen him and “grow some muscles on that sissy body,” his father had vowed. He remembered how joyous he was behind his forced camouflage of token tears to see, at last, his father’s monster muscles raped and slain in the coffin by the steel mill, by his father’s sucker Paul Bunyan bit in blackface for the white boss’s pats on his nappy head for his slave labor.
Pony fondly patted his blue steel money minter. He thought, I wish the dead and stinking bastard could see me make more money in minutes than he could hump up in a year. I wish he could see how much more lavishly I support Mama, could see how clever and bad and tough I am, could see me, for years, take off small fortunes without taking a single fall.
He heard the whoosh, felt the icy blast of the foyer door opening. He stiffened as an elderly Western Union messenger entered the foyer with the telegram he’d sent to his mark. He inched forth as the messenger drummed his knuckles against the door. His plunder lust, his buried passion for death, erected him as he caressed the shotgun crutch for his invalid ego, for the crushed image of his manhood.
Rapture barraged him to see his gargantuan shadow stalk the wall. He felt like an implacable Colossus of conquest, more ferocious than Genghis Khan. He smiled as he crowned himself Pony, the Rex of Heist! He cat-footed closer to the door of the treasure house. He remembered a late, late TV football movie line: “One for the Gipper.” He paraphrased a limerick to himself with perverse glee: One more for Satin and me and Mama makes three.
Behind the door in the living room, ebonic fatso Frank “Jelly Drop” Watson went rigid in his chair at the knock of an unscheduled caller. His mouth and nose were covered with a surgical mask to prevent inhalation of the white pile of doom dust on a card table he was packaging for his large retail trade.
He waddled to the door, peered through the dot of a peephole. “Whatta you want?” he said.
“Telegram for Mister Watson,” the messenger answered.
“Shove it under the door, Pops,” Jelly Drop bellowed.
“Can’t; need your signature,” the messenger said firmly.
“Oh shit!” Jelly Drop exclaimed as he ripped off the mask and cracked the door on the chain. He took the signature board and scribbled his name.
Pony exploded from the shadows, seized the messenger as he raised the sole of a heavy boot, kicked and crashed the chain from its moorings. Jelly Drop tumbled to his back on the carpet. Pony shoved the messenger atop him and stormed into the room. He leaned and leveled the shotgun down on Jelly Drop’s head.
He commanded, “Both of you get up and sit on that couch with your hands on your head.”
They trembled to their feet. The messenger scrambled to the couch. He clasped his hands on the top of his head. His false teeth chattered. Pony patted Jelly Drop’s pajamas and robe before he goosed him toward the sofa with the snub barrel of the shotgun.
Jelly Drop stumbled to the couch. He collapsed on it. His hands shook on his bald head. He glared as Pony scooped up his precious merchandise into the plastic cover on the card table and shoved it into the shopping bag.
Pony’s eyes were serpent bright with menace as he snarled, “Fat ass, if you blink your eyes I’ll blow your head into your lap.”
Pony watched the pair in a dresser mirror as he rummaged for Jelly Drop’s cash stash. He found it beneath shirts in a drawer where his junkie finger man had said it was. He backed out the shattered door into the hallway, shotgun aimed at the couch. He sprinted for the foyer door.
Jelly Drop lunged from the couch to the card table. He ripped a taped pistol from its underside. He hastened to his front window and opened it. He emptied his pistol at Pony’s figure streaking down the sidewalk. The messenger fled the scene on rubbery legs. Jelly Drop smiled meager satisfaction to see Pony stumble a bit and grab at his shoulder before he disappeared into the night.
Jelly Drop’s jaws were inflated with his moniker candy as he put through a coded call to his wholesaler, Razzle Red, to arrange credit purchase of a replacement batch of doom dust and to report that the phantom bandit, with Red’s twenty grand price on his head, had scored again.
Satin fell into depression, felt despicably corrupt and worthless as she cruised the El Dorado down a business street on Chicago’s black Southside—the street where Razzle Red turned her out on, where, for a year, she humped and frenched off myriad multiethnic johns. But she opened up Red’s nose as none of his whores ever had, she told herself. She grinned lasciviously. My pussy hooked his nose tougher than the crystal blow he pigs up, she thought.
For an upper, she remembered how she got in the wind to whip her master plan on Red that recovered the piles of bread she’d humped into his pockets. She remembered how she made him find her, crawl, beg her back on her terms. “No more trick-flipping, Red; set me up in a boutique or get out of my face,” she’d told him.
“I’m really something else, a helluva lady,” she reassured herself. Then a downer snared her: “I’ve been delivering Red’s dope, risking my ass for a month. Gotta cut Red and his dope loose. Soon!”
She coasted the machine into the gleaming reflection in the window of her barred boutique flashing SATIN’S in blazing turquoise neon on its gold-flecked black marble facade. She parked and went to the window to feast her eyes on the darkened elegant interior of her independence. She was appalled at how old and decadent the tear-marred makeup made her face appear in the white-lighted mirror of a jewelry display.
She thought of Pony as she used tissues and lotion from her bag to scrub her face clean. She applied fresh lipstick—Eros Scarlet. She got into the car and floated in it on steamy clouds of passion through the night toward Pony’s loving.
At Sixty-third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, she slowed the car beside an alley mouth crowded with gawkers. An ambulance squealed behind her. The crowd scrambled to the sidewalk as the ambulance turned into the alley. Satin got a flash view of a nude female child lying lifelessly in the filthy snow. In minutes, the ambulance pulled to the street and moved casually away without siren.
Shocked, Satin
left her car and asked an elderly spectator, “What happened to that little girl?”
The oldster shook his gray head. “Pore chile, no more’n twelve. A dope fiend! A overdose kilt her. Guess her chums or the heartless bastid that sold her the dope dumped her like a poison dog.”
Satin said, “I . . . uh . . . didn’t realize kids that young shot up . . . died.”
The oldster grunted, “Shoot, just last week they found a lad younger than that girl dead and stiff in a vacant house in my block . . . been so many of ’em they don’t even make the papers no more.”
She saw a vision of the wee girl’s corpse with its only clothing a pert polka-dot ribbon in its hair, the blued discoloration of its pathetic underdeveloped breasts and bald pubic mound. She shuddered with the thought that perhaps the dope that killed the child was Red’s dope, dope that she had delivered!
Satin went back to her car. As she drove away, her head vibrated with concern. “That child was just a few years older than Mimi! My God! Just a few years older than my baby!”
Satin pulled her machine to the curb in front of the Jones’s neat beige stucco house in the Woodlawn District of the mid-Southside, got out, saw the flutter of living room drapes, then tread a squishy carpet of snow to the front door that opened. She rushed into Pony’s arms. They kissed and clung.
“Pony, I’m so glad I didn’t take you. It was so sad,” she whispered.
Pony squeezed her close. “I was feeling for you, baby.”
He shut the door. Arm-in-arm they went down a hallway toward his bedroom. They paused at Pony’s mother’s open bedroom door. They looked lovingly at the porcelain-hued, pink-gowned, delicately featured, once-beauteous belle, propped up in her canopied bed, her long fingers furiously knitting a colorful sweater for Pony. Her silky silver tresses lashed her shoulders as she cocked her head, birdlike, in that alerted way of the blind. Her unfocused hazel eyes glowed.
“Muh, dear, Etta’s here,” Pony said as they moved to her bed.
“Hi, Mama Lula,” Satin said as she kissed and embraced the old woman.
She sighed. “Bless your darling heart, Etta, you’re here. Now Malique can stop walking the house like a ghost with a toothache.”
They all laughed as Pony led Satin from the room into his bedroom. They stood in the blue-lit lair deep tonguing and swaying in each other’s arms with Lou Rawl’s muted “You’ll Never Find” creaming from the record player. They disengaged to remove her coat and boots. She sank down on the side of bed and thought she saw an odd bulge beneath the blue silk shoulder ridge of his robe as he went to the closet. Her eyes widened when he turned, with a shining face, from the closet holding a submachine gun. He tossed it on the bed beside her. She recoiled, stared at it.
He laughed. “Can’t bite! Meet my bad backup buddy when I take off Razzle Red.” He snapped his fingers and returned to the closet, brought back Jelly Drop’s dope and money wrapped in the square of oilcloth. He dumped it into her lap, bowed grandiloquently before her.
His enormous grey eyes twinkled. “Taxes, my Queen, for our beer town dream. I collected it from Lord Jelly Drop in the province of Dopeville at Forty-seventh and Calumet Avenue.”
He sat on the bed beside her and unloosened the oilcloth. The mound of “H” gleamed whitely as he plucked off its top the fat stack of greenery. He riffled it before her eyes as he exclaimed, “Five grand! . . . for two minutes of fun. And that smack I’ll drop on my man in Gary for another two grand.”
She stared down at the heroin, saw the OD’d child junkie again, and thought of Mimi. Then she heaved a heavy sigh.
He put his palm against her forehead. “Beautiful, you all right? That’s a nice dust score!” He nibbled at her ear, her lips.
She turned her head away and slowly rolled up the oilcloth. She kissed him, looked into his eyes. “Pony, the bread is mellow, but the smack goes down the crapper.” Then she stood clutching the oilcloth and walked resolutely toward the bathroom on the other side of the room.
He hollered, “Hey!” as he leapt in pursuit. He grabbed her waist and spun her to face him. His voice was harsh as he gripped her shoulders. “Have you flipped out? I stuck my head up the devil’s asshole for that smack. Now come to yourself, doll. Shit!”
She stared implacably into his outraged eyes. “You know I love you, Pony, don’t you?”
He nodded.
She bit her lip. “Well, Pony, guess you’ve got a big decision to make . . . me or this package of poison. We don’t want, can’t afford, the Karma dues for this shit. Darling, I hope you choose me.”
He was slack-jawed, utterly flabbergasted, trapped in the indecipherable quicksand of her female temperament. He shivered his head. “You serious, baby?”
She whispered, “I’m serious, Pony.”
He released her and shrugged. “I choose you, Witch. I can’t make love to that smack.”
She tiptoed and sucked his lips as her tender hand invaded his pajama fly to caress his weapon. Then she turned and said over her shoulder, “But you gotta do me, you gorgeous knight with the ice cream cone dick. I’ll run through the shower.”
He shook his head ruefully as he watched her dump the “H” from the oilcloth into the john and flush it away. After that, she stepped into the shower. He stripped himself nude. His sleek muscles rippled beneath his tawny skin like those of a jungle cat. He stretched his steel wire frame on the bed and snorted a blow of coke, and lit up a stick of gangster. He closed his eyes and drifted into fantasy about Satin and a new caper with his tongue he’d lay on her.
She slid in beside him, took the joint, and sucked on it. He held his gold snorting spoon beneath her nostrils for a heady blow. She caressed his face, his throat with fingertips. He flinched. She sat upright as she touched the bandage on his right shoulder ridge. She flipped on a nightstand light and asked, “How did that happen?”
He grinned. “Jelly Drop stung me lightly. Now don’t get uptight; it’s just a crease.”
She gravely studied his wounded shoulder, imagined the bullet fatally hitting inches left through his throat, perhaps left and inches higher through the back of his head. She collapsed into his arms. The kiss of death kid, that’s me, she told herself. She heard blind Lula flush the toilet in the hall and ground herself close to Pony. She decided she couldn’t let Pony go against Red, his killer partner, Frog, and the trio of deadly New York dope dealers. The hotel dream is called off because of love, she thought. Lula and me can’t make it without Pony.
Childishly she visualized Mister Sims’s hotel flapping mammoth wings over the horizon like the winged greenbacks and sacks of loot in newspaper comic strips and cartoons. She whispered against his chest, “Pony, the big score is cancelled. I can’t let you take the risk. We’ll have to forget our Milwaukee dream.”
He pushed her away, frowned as he stared into her face incredulously. “Satin, what the fuck is happening with you?”
She said, “I love you,” as she swung her legs off the bed to sit on the side of it. She got cigarettes and the broker’s letter from her purse on the floor. She lit two cigarettes, stuck one in Pony’s mouth, and gave him the letter. She drew deeply on her cigarette.
As he read the letter, she said, “We’ll have to be patient. We’ll find another spot in Milwaukee to make the scum jibs swallow their poison. You won’t come back against five streetwise niggers, even with a machine gun.”
Pony flung the letter into her lap. He leapt from the bed, stalked the carpet before her as he furiously puffed the cigarette. Then he savagely ground it out in a nightstand ashtray. He knelt between her legs and vised her face between his palms.
Their eyes were locked as he brutally intoned, “You doubt me. You don’t love me. You don’t believe I’m clever enough or tough enough to take those niggers off. You maybe think Red is more man than me because he’s got a bunch of bulgy muscles.”
He seized her shoulders and shook her violently. “Say it! Run it down, baby! Say it! Say you think I’ll freeze like a
pussy and let those gorillas blow me away. Now you got a choice. Get me the dup twister to the joint where the deal goes down. We’ve waited three months for Red to make a deal this big. It was your idea. You got me high on it. We’ve got to take it off. You can’t junk it, baby! I don’t want you for my woman, Etta, if you don’t love me enough to have confidence in me.”
She understood his twisted macho reasoning as she studied his face, realized he meant it. Trapped, she burst into tears. Triumphant, he covered her face, her breasts, and thighs with kisses. Conquered, she set the alarm clock on the nightstand. She sank back on the bed. She moaned as he mounted her and stroked into her with amazing grace and equine power for an hour. He banged her womb-gate until their last mutual orgasm. Delicious fatigue dropped them into slumber. He slept between her thighs with his vanquished monster jailed inside her lubricious cave.
The jangle of the clock’s alarm awakened them at dawn. They kissed and hugged. She sponged off and dressed as he watched her from the bed. She sat on the side of the bed and ran her fingers through his hair.
She said, “I’ll get the meet motel key duplicated. I’ll get it to you tomorrow.” She lit a cigarette. She continued softly, “I think it looks great for this week. Red always rents his meet room a week before. He’s checked in, as always, with luggage like a traveling salesman. So I should, within the next three days, know when Red and Frog get the call from the New York dealers, unless they call to reset the meet. It can happen. If it does, our dream is down the drain by default. Stay close and keep your phone open the rest of the week. Pony, I’m so excited. I’m going to be a wreck, darling, until it’s over. I hope it comes off this week and nothing happens to you.”
He said, “Nothing can. I’ve never made a Karma debt. I’ve never put the heist on or hurt an honest man.”
They kissed. She stood and gazed at him for a long moment. He followed her to the front door.