Doom Fox (18 page)

He moves her to her back. 'Baby, I can't wait no longer,' he groans as he drops himself between her thighs. She tenses, remembers her promise to Felix to preserve her post-twins cherry for their daredevil thing tomorrow in the woods. For a year she has used tactics to limit Joe's bumpkin raids on her treasure box. The better to lavish it on her now nearly six foot humping doll, Felix. And generous he is to a fault with money she launders and banks through the cover of her steady sewing revenue.

She had stubbornly decided not to let the bubbling fountain head of her sexuality wither and evaporate through lack of frequent replenishment. So, what the hell! Why not cuckold stone age Joe, she tells herself, since Joe, from the beginning, closed his mind to improvement of his sexual performance. He refused to read Doctor Van de Velde's popular book on marital love play and the genital kiss. She had bought it and diplomatically suggested they read it.

'I ain't gonna stick my head in no pussy like your nasty freak usta be nigger, Pretty Melvin did,' she remembers Joe had exploded after scanning the table of contents and then a hasty, beetle browed skim of the 'kiss' section.

Then, she had let inept Felix seduce her in the parsonage after the death of the elder Felix the year before. She remembers how she had opened herself to young Felix out of just plain desperation for someone she thought attractive to give her an orgasm. Felix had been an ultra avid trainee and in her opinion, has surpassed the once regarded peerless Pretty Melvin Sternberg as a lover.

As Joe haunches to pile drive his first bludgeon stroke into her, she grimaces and violently jars the crib with the bump of a spread-eagled leg. The twins, Belle and Sadie, squall her off the bangee hook. She leaps up, gathers them into her arms. She dips her head toward the domestic bedlam riding the hot humid air through the open bedroom windows.

'Sorry Joe, we have to raincheck it. I'll try to put them back to sleep on the other side of the house in your old room' she says as she leans to kiss his pursed lips.

She starts to turn away. She pauses, is panged by pity for Joe, so much nitty-gritty man, so faithful, but so flawed by his lackluster love making. She turns away and leaves the room, and Joe to commit benign adultery with Lady Five Fingers as he has since the birth of the twins.

As she goes down the hall with the twins clasped close to her bosom, she pains with the realization that she has, in five short years, drifted far left of her moral center. And she is fearful of the probability, she tells herself with a shiver, that Phillipa has genetically doomed her to follow in her wanton bitch pattern.

She goes to lie on the moon-dappled bed in Joe's old bedroom. Within the hour, she rocks Belle and Sadie to sleep in her arms. She closes her eyes, tries hard to drift into sleep. But she fails to turn off the spigot of apprehensive second thoughts about her promise to Felix to make love in the woods next day. She shudders as she visualizes their discovery by Joe or even by a church member. She carefully releases the twins from her arms, and eases from the bed.

She goes down the hallway to peek at snoring Joe before she cat-foots down the stairway to the living room telephone. She sits down on Zenobia's cherished horsehair sofa, feeling it prickle her bottom through her nightgown silk. She picks up the phone receiver. She hesitates dialing Felix in the parsonage to call off the risky rendezvous as she stares through a front window at the former Rambeau residence across the street.

Once the beautifully landscaped showplace of the block, it is now a rundown weed glutted halfway house for female ex-drug addicts and paroled convicts. She sees a curfew fracturing light-skinned Phillipa lookalike resident leave a cab, and remove her high heels before she goes down the concrete walk to key through the now scabrous front door into the house. She is jolted by painful deja vu as she remembers herself on the other side of the door. She sees herself on countless awful mornings as a child awakened when tipsy Phillipa the sex glutton was assaulted by enraged Baptiste when she tried to sneak through that front door.

As she finishes dialing Felix, she sees Baptiste and the now elderly terrier Susie walk with June, his comely married white sweetheart, to his Packard. It is parked in the newly constructed concrete driveway near the newly-built garage housing the Allen La Salle. The Delphine Ford jalopy gift sits in the back yard - Joe's rusting derelict bitter keepsake.

Baptiste backs the Packard out to the street and drives away to take the woman to her Inglewood home as he has done on weekends for several months.

'Hello. God bless you, friend,' Felix answers in his habitual way but in a surprisingly alert voice for two a.m. Reba thinks with a twinge of savage jealousy as she catches the faint sound of a throaty female voice in the background. She strains to hear an even more dulcet sound of violins.

'May He bless you and save your butt if I've interrupted chippie business' she says edgily as she loses sound of the voice.

Alone in the parsonage on his bed, Felix smiles mischievously after he silences his radio, stage whispers, 'Shut up Joyce, it's you know who.' Then he says to Reba with a chuckle in his voice, 'Babykins, be cool. I was just listening to sweet radio music and thinking about you and tomorrow.'

Reba says, 'I think I'll sneak over to check you out.'

He turns his radio volume up very softly, then down and up again. 'Sssh!' he hisses, then laughs, titillated by her jealousy of the apparent presence of a rival whose sexy voice happens to be that of a popular D.J. who is delivering a lengthy and sultry commercial for a line of cosmetics whose use is guaranteed to grovel the object of one's affection.

Reba says, 'You bastard, aren't you cute?' as she suspects his hoax and turns on a table radio beside her.

She quickly spins the dial until she hears the violin accompanied D.J. voice.

'Darling, I don't think we should take that chance in the woods tomorrow' she says.

'What!? You chickened out, huh?' he snorts. 'I told you there's nothing to worry about.'

'It's too risky. We've got too much to lose if he catches us. He'd kill you! And almost as bad would be if a church member or some child spotted us. I think we'd better forget it and meet later, in the evening in the parsonage.'

Felix's voice shakes with exasperation. 'Trust me, baby. There is absolutely no chance we can be seen or caught together if you will just follow our plan. All right?'

She sighs, 'I'm not sure ... we'll see tomorrow. Good night. Talk to you.'

They hang up. Reba takes a portable T.V. upstairs. She watches half of an old 1935 movie 'RiffRaff' starring Tracy and Harlow on the tiny screen before she drifts into sleep beside the twins.

Next early afternoon Joe sits near the center of the gala Love Picnic on a bench ideally located for Reba - Felix watching. He sits in the moil of fifteen hundred men, women and children enjoying the rental ferris wheel, loop-the-loop and the flared nostriled pygmy steeds on a merry-go-round. Its calliope lilts 'Stairway to the Stars' into the sun-splashed clamorous air.

Portly church matrons, in sauce and soot tarnished white linen dresses, baste and turn slabs of barbecued ribs salivating mass mouths with charcoaled gusts of smoked ambrosia. Other church men and women operate the penny pitch and spin the wheel of fortune booth with plaster Kewpie Dolls as prizes. Other church member women and their husbands sit on the grass and on benches. They apprehensively hawk-eye sons and nubile daughters running and squealing in contact and chase games with east of Avalon Boulevard teenage ghettoites accompanied by their parents. They are guests invited by Felix to promote love and understanding between many snobbish middle-class members of his congregation and their poverty-trapped black brethren.

Joe, on his bench, with Joe Junior beside him and the twins in a double stroller before him are harassed by church people of all ages who pause to kiss, fondle or tweak the cheeks of the bawling twins. Before he flees, Joe glances at Reba, in black linen shorts, umpiring a softball game between church teenage girls and a team of ghetto rough and tough Central Avenue area girls. He rises from the bench, locates Felix, the martial arts buff, demonstrating elementary moves of the craft to a group of church youths in a far corner of the grassy grounds near a thick forest.

Joe, with Junior in tow, wheels the stroller to the La Salle parked on a roadway on a slight rise overlooking the picnic revelry. He swings open the curbside doors of the car for ventilation from the ninetyish temperature before he and Junior seat themselves on the front seat. Joe hums a lullabye and gives the twins bottles to put them to sleep on the back seat.

Joe's mouth drops open in flabbergast when he eye-sweeps to relocate Felix, who has vanished. He sees Felix's group of youths meander back toward the central hub of the picnic. And Reba, Joe discovers, has vanished as umpire of the softball game, replaced by a substitute. Galvanized by suspicion, Joe leaps from the car with Junior in hand and goes fifty yards before he realizes he can't leave the twins unattended. And he decides he won't wake them and drag them back into the crowd.

He returns to his post in the car. He sits and strains his eyes to cull the crowd several hundred yards away for sight of Reba and Felix.

Minutes later, Mother Sarah, the twins' ancient god mother, parks her flivver down the road from the La Salle. The white haired old woman leaves her car and comes to the La Salle. 'How are my babies?' she says as she peers at them.

'Oh fine, Mother Sarah. They and Junior need you for awhile. I need to stretch my legs some. Will you look out for them?'

The old woman says, 'Sure will, Son' as Joe moves out to let her take his front seat post. He kisses the old woman's forehead before he turns and goes quickly toward the crowd.

Reba moves deeply into the forest toward the roar of a waterfall as per Felix's instruction. She reaches it, stares at the white capped cascade of water.

She suspects typical Felix pranking when she hears his muffled voice echo, 'Oh please! Somebody help me!'

She moves to stare in puzzlement into the churning pool of water at the bottom of the falls, the seeming locus of his voice. Suddenly he steps into view from behind the falls on a ledge of rock. He laughs as he beckons her to him. She ascends a mossy incline to his side. They cling and kiss before he leads her into the cool murk of a cave behind the falls. He pulls her down on a pallet of moss and old brown leaves with a rolled-in hollow that pings her with jealousy.

She says, 'How cozy this is ... you dirty dog!'

He laughs shakily, 'Not guilty. My old man was the dirty dog that I trailed here with that sexy old Sister Matthews last summer just before he died.'

Reba is stunned speechless for a moment. 'Oh horse feathers! I just can't believe that about your father. Why, he carried himself like a saint.'

Felix shakes his head. 'I peeped on them petting in the parsonage a dozen times after my father made her church business manager. And, as you know, her husband is a senior deacon of the church who was also my father's best friend.'

Reba says, 'C'mon now, you don't have to tar brush your dad in his grave to cover up for yourself. What you did before we started our thing doesn't matter to me. So, don't jive me, sugar pie.'

He heaves a heavy sigh. 'No, it's true about Sister Matthews. Believe me, he was evil for as long as I can remember.' Reba's caressing fingers invade his fly and for the first time fail to inflate his flaccid organ.

'Darling, I believe you about this cave and your father' she says tenderly.

He says, 'Maybe our meeting here wasn't such a groovy idea after all ... this cave has me hung up on memories of that tyrant bastard. I'm thinking of how he let my mother die. Ah! She was the saint!'

She holds his head against her bosom. 'Oh baby sweets! You never told me bad things. I thought you were very happy growing up. Since you're hurting, it doesn't matter that we don't make love here. Let's go ...' she whispers into his silky ringlets of curls.

'We can't now!' he exclaims as they stare through the curtain of waterfall at a pair of teenage lovers who enter the clearing and almost immediately bed down in tall grass. They fuck violently and keen the air with their erotic outcries as startled birds flash like feathered neon through the jade panorama of forest.

Felix nests his face on Reba's bosom as he bitterly muses, 'Now I'm sure I love and trust you enough to tell you the truth about my rotten old man as my mother told me so many times. He was Harlem faith healer-atheist, a con man hypnotist. He swindled the superstitious poor and sick with John The Conqueror Roots, love potions and magic oils he sold from a store that he claimed could cure all diseases, including cancer, enslave sweethearts and ward off evil spells of enemies.'

Reba's face is shocked. 'He was a warlock!?'

Felix says, 'Baby, now you get it. He also got his following and fame removing spiders, snakes and scorpions from beneath the skins of curse victims that crawled only in their minds.'

'And your mother' Reba says softly, 'was she one of your father's customers when he met her?'

'No. She was only a fifteen-year-old school girl when she caught my father's eye. She was the only child of Black Solomon, my father's chief enemy and rival for the Harlem witchcraft trade. Black Solomon was an ego maniac. He challenged my father to a public riddle bee in a large Harlem auditorium that was filled with their followers.

'My mother said that after three hours they were tied, neither stumped by each others' mind stretching riddles. Then, my mother told me, my father pointed at her seated in the front row and asked Black Solomon, "Your lovely daughter is fifteen years old. You had your sixtieth birthday celebration last week. You've bragged publicly that she was born when you were forty-seven years old. On her first birthday you were forty-eight times older than she was. Tell me, Black Solomon, why is it that now you are only four times her age? And why is it that forty years from now should she reach fifty-five and you a hundred, you will not even be twice her age?" Mother said her father's black face turned gray as he pondered the question for a half-hour in the silence before he left the hall, crushed and preoccupied with the riddle.'