Doom Fox (10 page)

He grimaces, shivers at the prospect of a gig changing tires at the Greyhound garage his father promised to arrange. He finger-strokes a satiny palm, visualizes it encrusted with calluses, winces. Tears of self-pity sparkle his lacy lashed amethyst eyes. He shapes a sad rosy lipped smile as he gazes at Reba's supine naked splendor.

At seven a.m. he makes erotic canine sounds as he grinds his face against her pubic thicket. She awakens, reflexively slams her thighs together to trap his head for an instant. He giggles ecstatically as he scoots up to wiggle his tongue tip in her navel. She cries out, flees to the bathroom.

After breakfast in bed they go to the pool. They swim and frolic until nine a.m. Wetly glistening in the warm sun, they lie embraced on a poolside canvas chaise under the eyes of the elder Sternbergs lying in bed above the pool.

Reba looks into his eyes, says 'What are you thinking sugar?' as she finger-combs through his water lanked hair.

His eyes flee to the vault of dazzling blue sky. 'Sweet meat, you wouldn't be happy, respect me, couldn't love me if say I became a funky tire changer for six bits a week to support us and whatsit's name?'

She laughs, 'The heck you say! I'd love you and be happy and respect you if you were just a boot black on the busiest corner downtown ... why, I'd be your assistant darling. I'd carry our shine box stenciled Melvin and Reba Sternberg. I'd gig and inhale the foot funk when you got pooped. I'd lug whatsit's name strapped on my back papoose style. So forget the tire wrestling. Popping a public rag is more groovy. And becoming a doctor ain't bad, I want to hip you.'

He frowns. 'Stop clowning. I'm serious Re,' he says as he wins the struggle to look into her eyes.

'Okay, you called me Re. You never do unless you're angry or worried. So, now I'm hip you're serious. C'mon, what's got you frazzled, sweetheart?'

She laughs nervously. 'Baby maker, you haven't also put one of my zillion rivals in the family way while we were on the outs, have you?'

'Stop it!' he exclaims as he disengages to sit on the side of the chaise with a solemn face.

'Hey baby, then tell Mommy why you've suddenly become a gloom buff?' she says as she sits up beside him, shakily flicks lighter flame to two cigarettes, lays one between his lips.

'Re, I really love you and need you' he half-whispers as he furiously puffs his cigarette with a tortured face.

She says, 'Damn baby, after a thousand years tell me something I don't know. But please darling, don't call me Re any more in my delicate condition.'

She exhales, snuffs out her cigarette in a seashell ashtray. She embraces his waist, is alarmed to feel an almost imperceptible trembling of his torso. He burrows his head into her bosom, heaves an anguished sigh as she finger-strokes his temple. She says, 'I can't stand a helluva lot more of this. What's wrong?'

'It's the end of the world and I don't know what to do.'

'You mind breaking that down?'

'We can't get married!'

She jerks away to evict his head, locks his head between her palms as she stares into his eyes. 'Fathead, we have to get married. Whatsit's name. Remember!?'

He averts his eyes. 'We can't!'

'Why?'

He spills it out. 'Dad's knocked out the money props, last night. He told me marriage now and pre-med, no go. He'll give us only a small house we'd have to run on the lousy salary from the tire gig. We can't live like that. We just couldn't make it without Dad's support.'

She says, 'Cry for yourself Sonny Boy. I don't need your father's welfare to enjoy life, to make it with you. I've got a sewing skill, and I'm not lazy. We can make it if you've got the guts to try. Well!?'

He rises to his feet, paces the flagstone edge of the pool under her slitted eyes for a long moment. And also under the anxious eyes of the elder Sternbergs peering through their bedroom curtains at the tableau.

He pauses before her, manages to say stoutly, 'I've got the guts not to shove you and the baby through the poverty wringer ... Dad plans to give you a big check, even take you in, give you and our baby the finest care. I love you! Please under ...'

She leaps to her feet, lips curled in contempt, 'Your ass, Jelly Fish! You can't con me. You can't love anyone except selfish lazy number one. YOU! I'd blow my brains out before I'd take a red penny from your father. Tell him that! I'll take care of MY baby and myself!'

She slips off his ring, hurls it against his forehead, stomps away toward the guest house. He follows her inside. He sits on the side of the bed, watches her get her clothes from the closet. She goes into the bathroom, slams the door shut. Shortly, she emerges dressed in the diaphanous pink dress she wore at Joe Allen's main event fiasco. She moves in stockinged feet past Melvin, seated on the bed. She bends to pick up her shoes on the carpet at the head of the bed.

He leans, smooches her buttocks, says 'There, I've kissed your ass to say I love you. Let's talk and work out something.'

She snaps erect, steps into her pumps. She whip turns, eyes radiant with hostility, 'Hah! Big deal! You've sucked and kissed asses in motels all over town. We've said it all. We're through!'

She turns, goes quickly for the door. He lunges after her, seizes her around the waist at the dresser beside the door.

'I can't let you quit. I'm your forever man!' he declares loudly as he roughly whirls her, tries to force his tongue into her mouth.

She bites his bottom lip, hard. He bangs his palm against the side of her head. She snatches up a brass stiletto letter opener from the dresser top.

He backs up a step, hoarsely whispers, 'Creole witch, you're gonna fuck your man goodbye' as he oozes toward her.

He retreats to the middle of the room as she jabs the blade at his crotch.

'Man!? Pussy Freak!' she hisses with chest aheave. She pauses to catch her breath. With acidic sarcasm she lies, 'By the way, great lover, since I took you back for the babys sake, your midget weenie hasn't moved me once. And every time you've given me head, I've nearly puked with boredom.'

Wounded, he grits his teeth, glares at her. 'You lying cunt!'

'Sissy bastard, it's true!' she says.

He rocks with knotted fists, 'I'm going to beat your ass and rape you for lying' he snarls as he lunges.

She fires the letter opener. The point grazes a scarlet rill at his temple, cracks the headboard mirror behind him. Shaken, he stumbles back onto the bed.

She backs toward the door, screeches, 'You ever try to touch me or get in my face, I'll kill you!'

She leaves the house, bangs the door shut behind her. Forty minutes later she leaves a cab at the mouth of the alley running past the Rambeau backyard. She walks up the alley, goes through the gate. She crosses the yard to the back door. She starts to turn the doorknob, hesitates. She decides she must be utterly alone in her crisis.

She retraces to a corner of the yard. For the first time in years, she stoops to enter the door of the weather mauled candy striped playhouse of her early girlhood. Tears threaten as she eye sweeps the dusty toys, the quartet of dolls in silk dresses, now time sleazed, seated at a miniature table with dull waxen smiles before a tiny scaled daisy appliqued tea service. Misery embattled, she falls to her knees on the mildewed beige carpet beside the table. She smiles oddly as she takes flight through the regressive gates of nostalgia's comforting time warp.

In a child's quaver she says to the diminutive ghostly ladies at tea, 'Pretties, I'm so glad to see you again. I've been away on a trip. Can you please forgive me for staying away so long?' She leans, crawls about the table, kisses their cool tarnished foreheads in turn, murmurs, I will always adore you.'

A beam of late morning sun fires through a sooted window pane, illuminates the face of a tiny doll swathed in calico lying in a crib with long lashed eyes shuttered. Reba crawls to crib side. She takes a cracked thermometer from a toy doctor's bag beside the crib.

She inserts it into the doll's mouth for a moment before she withdraws it, mock studies it, exclaims cheerily, 'Whoopee! Peggy Precious, your fever's gone!'

She crawls to a half-dozen naked dolls topsy turvy on an eye level shelf, staring blank eyes into space. She tenderly arranges them neatly seated side by side. She takes a square of black silk from a rainbow dyed straw Easter basket. She drapes it across them to cover their nude torsos.

From the basket, a music box, in the image of Mickey Mouse, issues, for a moment, the tinny lyrics of 'On The Good Ship Lollipop.'

She gazes at a huge doll dressed in yellowed white satin seated in a rocking chair across the room. She crawls to the rocking chair, stares into the filmy china blue eyes of the doll. She fingers the satin dress hem. She remembers Phillipa spanking her bottom raw in angry outrage when she discovered her expensive dress cut up to costume Tawny, the huge doll's name.

Reba stiffens, recoils as she stares at speckles of brown dried blood on the bodice of the doll's dress. The blood of her father, she remembers. One early a.m. it was Phillipa that had shed his blood. Phillipa had stabbed a nail file into his wrist, splattering her bed and doll when they brawled in the hall and into her bedroom, about her mother coming home drunk with her clothes disarrayed.

She spots a pair of her mother's old high heels that she remembers tottering in when she played grown-up. She tries to slip her foot into one of the shoes. She is amazed to discover her triple A foot too snug now for Phillipa's triple E size.

She rolls a rusted tricycle squeakily across the floor. She remembers the scary blood from a forehead cut when she fell on the sidewalk riding it with her feet on the handlebars, showboating for a gallery of chums. Old sorrow twinges her as she excavates, from the toy box, the rhinestone collar of her beloved Mitzi, the Yorkie, her first puppy, long ago murdered by a Doberman.

Tears flood her eyes as she fondles a pair of sneakers from the box. She was seven, she remembers, when she wore them. She had fled in terror into the midnight from a terrible profane fight between her parents. A sweet faced elderly man in a big black car befriended her, promised to take her home and stop her parents from killing each other.

Instead, the man drove her to frightening darkness behind a factory. She remembers his suffocating hand over her mouth to stop her screaming. He had ripped off her clothes when the blinding headlamps of a police cruiser interrupted him. She trembles to remember how she sobbed and clung to one of the cops all the way home to Baptiste and Phillipa, who played out Academy Award performances as happy, loving husband and wife for the cops.

She picks up a tiny dapper man-about-town doll, in frayed tuxedo, from the toy box. She turns it, frowning as she stares at its too delicate face profile. Almost identical to Melvin's she thinks. She wrings off the doll's head, collapses in a storm of weeping.

In Reba's bedroom, green satin pajamaed Baptiste and Erica are packing Reba's clothing and personal effects.

Erica says, 'Da Dee, I still feel uncomfortable about not letting Reba pack her own things. After all, she's a woman. And then too there's the question as to whether or not your assumption is valid that she will accept moving into my place, even temporarily.'

Baptiste says, 'This is an emergency. Look, you know the finance company will come at any moment today to repossess the furniture. The marshal is due to evict us today, no later than tomorrow.' He hitches his shoulders disconsolately. 'She has to accept your apartment. Like me, she has no place else to go until her marriage.'

Erica frowns. 'But Da Dee, just like a man, you're overlooking the dynamics of female territoriality. She'll probably have a natural reluctance to move from the spacious privacy of her own home into a cramped two bedroom apartment where I'm lady of the house. Surely you can't expect her to choke up at the chance to place herself in the position to daily witness her father sleeping with his mistress. She's possessive of you, you know.' She sighs, 'But we'll see, Da Dee, we'll see.'

They go to Baptiste's bedroom to pack his things. Reba leaves the playhouse somewhat composed. Baptiste spots her through his bedroom window. He hurries from the room to go downstairs to cushion the shock of her packed belongings. He races down the stairs. The fifth of whiskey he's guzzled since the heist stumbles him. Flat on his back, he stupidly stares up at Reba. She helps him pull himself to his feet. He shapes a crooked grin of embarrassment, dips his head toward the stairs.

He murmurs, 'There's a step with a split in the carpet ... I uh ...' Realizing the bad news he must break, he checks himself before he says, 'I have to fix it.' He follows her toward her bedroom door, says 'Mouse, what's wrong? Your eyes look like you've been crying.'

She says over her shoulder, 'I cut Melvin loose. And don't call me Mouse.'

'Don't tell me the marriage is off,' he gasps.

'You heard me!' she says harshly as she steps inside her bedroom.

She halts, reels at the threshold with a shocked face. She stares at the mini mountain of her luggage and possessions in cardboard boxes stacked on the stripped bed and strewn about the room. She whirls to face Baptiste in the hallway.

'Baptiste, what the hell does this mean!?'

'Now, now dear, I'll explain. Don't get upset,' he says gently as he pats her shoulder.

She jerks away, legs akimbo, green eyes afire. 'We've lost the house! Haven't we?'

He averts his eyes, mumbles, 'That's the heartbreak gritty of it, my dear. But nothing can stop stepper pals like us, baby.' He reaches to embrace her.

She jerks back with a hostile face. 'Stepper, you told me two weeks ago that you had won the money to save the house and furniture from those four men who came here to play cards. Is that right!?'

He collapses on the bedside, bent forward, palms pressed against his face. 'I lied, baby ... guess my touch played hooky ... they beat me, busted me out.' He peers pathetic eyes at her through the bars of his fingers.

'Stepper pal, why did you lie, fool me that everything was all right?' she pursues with a hateful face and merciless scorn in her voice.