Doom Fox (11 page)

He laments in a coarse whisper, 'I had a sweet back-up deal if there ever was one, set up for last night. Baby dear, it's best I don't tell you details. But last night I literally bet my life that deal would fall a royal flush. Hon, I lied to spare you worry.' He shudders, wrings his hands. 'That deal soured last night and broke my heart. Anybody except a Rambeau Creole would have cashed himself in. You've got to forgive me for lying. I did on the promise of that deal because I love you more than I ever did Phillipa or even myself.'

He extends his arms toward her, eyes piteous. She heaves a resigned sigh, shakes her head as she eye-sweeps the chaotic room. She drops down on the bed beside him, embraces his shoulders.

'Papa, I forgive you. We're not flat broke. I've got four hundred dollars saved from my sewing. We have to vacate immediately?'

He says, 'Yes, it's best we do ... hope is dead to save our house.' He pauses to say with visceral passion, 'If I didn't have you, I'd stand them off with my hunting rifle.' Then he sighs, says softly, 'I'm ashamed of the way I begged them on the phone today for one more extension.'

She whispers, 'Papa, I just can't believe this is happening ... after all the big money I've heard you brag about winning through the years.'

He smiles bitterly. 'I take the full sucker blame for letting Phillipa ruin us. Year in and year out, like an idiot, I let her blow thousands at the race track, on clothes from Beverly Hills shops that she didn't need. And when she left after that ... uh, shooting upstairs last year, she took my strong box containing an emergency five grand ... then to cap off bad breaks, I had that uh ... accident to my throat that knocked me out of the big buck sweepstakes. But I promise, dear lamb, to come back stronger. Soon!'

She says, 'Well, guess we'll have to check into a hotel until we find a small, clean furnished house to rent ... Say! We can rent the Allens' back house. It's clean, furnished and the rent is only sixty a month.'

He frowns at her suggestion. He is about to tell her about his plan to move them into Erica's flat when the doorbell chimes. Insistently!

'Damn! That must be one of the bad news bastards already.' Baptiste groans as he gets to his feet and leaves the bedroom followed by Reba.

They go to the door. Baptiste puts an eye to the peephole, is surprised to see Saul Sternberg, wearing a pajama top beneath his blue serge suit jacket. He opens the door, forgetting it's on chain. He reaches to unfasten it.

Reba sees Saul. She shoves Baptiste aside, glares at Saul through the chained aperture. 'What the hell do you want? God!'

Saul ashens, says, 'Reba, I must talk to you! Please!'

'No! I'm through talking to rotten Sternbergs.' She smashes an elbow into Baptiste's chest when he tries to pull her away.

'Reba, let me in. I want to discuss making an equitable arrangement for you and the baby' Saul pleads as he extends his hand through the door to touch her.

She recoils. 'Get lost!' as she slams the door on his hand.

Saul's muffled outcry of pain winces Baptiste behind her. Baptiste seizes her shoulders, spins her away from the door. She grapples savagely with him as he tries to go out the door. He breaks free to the porch, sees Saul angrily gun his Mercedes away. Baptiste steps back into the living room, glares at Reba turning from the open front window with smug triumph on her face.

'You dumb hellion! You just blew our chance to save the house!' Baptiste explodes.

'Goddamn the house, Baptiste! To hell with that muckety muck's welfare.'

Baptiste plops down on the couch. 'I hope you get some sense when you cool off: The Sternbergs owe you a cash settlement. All you have to do is file a paternity suit to get the payoff.'

'Forget it, Baptiste! I'm through with them. Understand!?'

Baptiste groans under his breath. 'How could I be the father of such a star natal sucker?'

She turns back to the windows when she hears a familiar truck sound. She sees Senior Joe key off the plumbing truck across the street and go into the Allen house.

'I'm going to rent the Allens' back house' she says as she moves toward the front door.

Baptiste leaps to his feet, intercepts her at the door. 'Baby, that won't be necessary. We're moving into Erica's place for awhile. Isn't she wonderful to take us in?'

She sets her jaw. 'Then I'm renting the Allen house for myself if you decide to shack up with Erica.' She pushes him aside and leaves the house as he clutches at her. Susie yaps at her heels.

He goes to the porch, rears his bantam frame erect, shouts to her back. 'Baptiste Rambeau will never humiliate himself with those peasant Allen niggers as his landlord!'

Within the hour Reba, with the help of both Joes, transfers kitchen utensils, curtains, drapes and the haunting contents of the playhouse to the Allen back house. She sits on a sofa relaxing with Young Joe at an Allen living room window watching Baptiste and Erica move the last of his things in the Packard which Erica had saved by cashing in an insurance policy.

An hour later, Reba sadly watches the finance company movers load the house furniture into a mammoth van and drive away. Within minutes she sees the marshal padlock the house. She breaks into wild weeping. Young Joe takes her into his arms and gently rocks her. He gazes at her fawn face, feels a thrilly quickening. But his absolute belief that she will go back to Melvin, as she has countless times, chills any urge to dream her his. He thinks of Delphine to further insulate himself against Reba.

Shortly she says, 'Big Bro, I'm cool now. Think I'll go and start setting up my new pad.'

He releases her. She kisses his cheek and leaves the room.

That early evening, Zenobia finishes scouring early dinner utensils in a Beverly Hills kitchen. Fatigued and eager to leave early, she goes to peep into the dining room. She sees her employer, a shrewish matron, still chewing filet. Zenobia slits her eyes in loathing for the woman who weeks before had cruelly berated her, before dinner guests, for sloshing sauce from a serving dish onto the tablecloth.

Zenobia is about to turn back to the kitchen when she sees the slave driver clutch her throat, make choking sounds as she whitens. Zenobia stares impassively into her tormentor's terrified eyes, ignores her frantic hand beckoning. The woman tumbles to the carpet.

Conscience at bay, Zenobia leans against the door frame, is electrified by a perverse surge of power for a long poisonous moment watching the woman writhe feebly. Zenobia actually turns away, takes a step toward the kitchen before she turns back. She hurries to the blued woman. She lifts the scrawny form, falls into a chair with the woman stomach down in her lap, her head hanging over the edge of her thigh. Zenobia pounds her fist against the stricken woman's back as she dredges a middle finger deep into the woman's throat.

The woman coughs as Zenobia digs out a small hunk of filet. The woman gulps for air, turns on Zenobia's lap. She sits up, presses her head against Zenobia's bosom as she locks her arms about her neck.

The woman sobs gratitude, 'Oh! You saved my life! You're so wonderful, Zenobia. Thank you darling! Thank you!'

Zenobia helps her to bed. A half-hour later she leaves, rewarded with a fifty dollar bill. She pulls her La Salle away from its ghetto parking space on Slater's used car lot.

She exclaims aloud. 'Thank you, Sweet Jesus, for chasing Lucifer before I let that mean white woman die. Thank you, Jesus!'

She thinks of elder Joe, the Midnight Creeper, and vows not to lose him the next time she tails him.

7

Ten days after Reba's eviction and her unprecedented series of phone calls, Phillipa is on a midnight flight from New Orleans to pay a surprise visit to Reba in her new home. She has seen Reba once since leaving Baptiste. And then clandestinely in a downtown hotel to avoid Baptiste's certain rage.

She finishes her sixth coffee heavily laced with scotch. Affluent enough to afford first class, she has always preferred to travel coach with the hoi polloi. She feels she relates more comfortably to them than to fat boring business types. Then too, she's discovered to her perverse joy on several memorable occasions that the probability for raw erotic adventure is greater among coach have-nots. The haves in first class are prone to fresher, younger stewardesses.

Seated at the nearly deserted rear of the plane, she stares down at the pallid neon of a medium-sized city. She thinks it resembles Shreveport, Louisiana as she remembers it from the top floors of office buildings that she helped her janitorial French-Cajun parents service from the age of ten, until she was fourteen when her parents were killed in a car crash. Then Rajah, a polyglot ethnic and notorious movie star attractive badger game hustler stole her and turned her out in Baton Rouge on his specialty.

Her reverie is interrupted by the reflection in her window glass of the cutest young soldier she thinks she's ever laid eyes on, staring hotly at her from an aisle seat just across the way. In the cathedral soft light of the airliner, she appears half her forty years. Cop, dogcatcher, even Western Union, and especially soldier uniforms, worn of course by comely studs, have always revved her ravenous loins.

She shifts and points her bottom toward the young lecher. Her short tight dress hikes up to her porcelain-hued girlishly voluptuous thighs. Her nude slavemaster behind sheens, defines, through the gauzy white silk like perfectly matched oversized honeydew melons.

She lowers her Sophia Loren lookalike face to a pillow. Her witchy green eyes gleam as she gazes surreptitiously at the young wolf reflected that she suddenly decides to make her prey. She is suspicious, piqued that he apparently plots to tryst with Lady Five Fingers when she sees him remove his cap and place it on his lap. She is certain when he thrusts a hand beneath the cap. His bedroom eyes devour her, glow phosphorescently in his teasing-tan face.

Excitement mauls her as she sits up, gets a cigarette from her purse, obviously rummages through it for a light. From a corner of an eye she sees him fumble to secure his fly before he scrambles across the aisle to lean his lighter flame to her cigarette tip.

'Thank you. That's so sweet of you, soldier man' she croons in her heady contralto.

'Your voice is as pretty as you are' he says.

She coyly averts her eyes, remembers that an infatuated Bourbon Street musician lover once described her voice as starlit prelude to opus sixty-nine.

'We're lonely. Mind if I sit down and keep you company?' the dreamboat says in a rich vibrato baritone that gives her the sensation that it rocks the seat cushion beneath her bottom.

'Why no, of course not' she says as she moves her purse from the aisle seat. 'I'm terribly patriotic' she continues inanely, wishes she could reclaim the remark as he sits down beside her.

He says, 'Thanks. I'm Reginald Lewis, mustered out of the occupation army in Europe. I'm on my way home to L.A. from a Baton Rouge visit with an injured battlefield buddy.'

She lies, 'I'm Cleo Johnson, happy divorcee from New Orleans on my way to an overnight stay in L.A.'

His fierce tawny eyes and sandy coarse mopped leonine head aura him jungle cat, palpitate her to a sizzling frenzy. She enjoys a tipsy interior giggle, thinks, this is great! ... the farm boy has his ewe to abuse and this gorgeous lion has me.

They empty the fifth of scotch from her purse and chat minutiae for the better part of an hour. She schemes where, as quickly as possible, she can get her raging brush fire extinguished. To prime him, she opens her thighs to his explorer finger.

She glances at the lone coach stewardess agiggle as she leans in, distracted at the side of a towheaded young soldier seated near the front. Phillipa glances at her prey's rigid monster aquiver against the khaki. She asks herself, should I simply mount dreamboat's lap and impale myself on his jumbo stake? Too risky and restrictive she decides. She smiles slyly as she abruptly locks her thigh gates, feels the seismic tremble of frustration in his finger ejected.

She rises. As she leg bangs past him to the aisle, she veils her eyes seductively, whispers, 'Lover, I'm going to the little girls' room. I feel so deliciously patriotic.'

He leaps up to follow. He enters behind her when she lets herself into the chamber. Panting, and thrilling her giddy with masterworks of tenderly obscene erotic profanity, he mightily humps her dog fashion. She bends, with palms on the john seat. She raises her head to stare into a mirror at his humping reflection, then into his cruel eyes, slumberous and mesmeric behind half-drawn lash curtains.

She exclaims, 'Oh yeah! Ride me tough and talk that nasty sweet shit to me, Reg ... Rex!'

Her pony tailed, wiry red mane swishes madly as she spastically jerks her head and makes high pitched equine whinnying sounds of rut until their mutual carnal explosion.

Before the plane touches down in Los Angeles, they encore the performance. Satiated, at least for the moment, and scotch maimed, Phillipa checks into a downtown hotel for the night.

Next morning, at the magenta blush of early August sunrise, lethargic Delphine spikes a medicinal speedball of H and C. She rises effervescently from bed. She leisurely packs her belongings for the split to the Big Apple, several days before she planned.

Her double rip-off timetable had been changed the midnight before. She plucked scuttlebutt off the street grapevine that Whispering Slim had taken a midnight flight South to the funeral of a pal pimp.

She remembers how she seized the chance to crowbar through the back door of Slim's dope stash house. Searching for the dope, she tore the inside of the house asunder. She even crowbarred up a dozen suspiciously loose floorboards. Nothing! Exhausted, she sat on the john stool to tinkle. She had risen, flushed the john when an odd sound of metal scraping against metal caught her attention. She flushed the toilet again as she leaned an ear toward it. She removed its water tank cover, lifted and opened a large coffee can afloat in the water. She had split with the plastic wrapped kilo of smack from the coffee can.