Doom Fox (25 page)

Sadness veils Joe's face as he sighs and pauses, then continues. 'Funny thing, I can't forget how I bawled at Pops' funeral until my guts ached ... been to lots of funerals of folks dead before their time. Know something? I can always put the finger on the killer. It's the bastard that bawls the most!'

Junior's bottom lip trembles as he looks into Joe's eyes and whispers, 'Papa, I'll make you proud. I will! I ain't copping out, but I ain't been myself since you left home ... needed your advice lotsa times ... called your boss, left messages a whole lotta times since you ... uh ... had that hassle with Ma and the preacher.'

In a long silence the brute faced twins stare into each other's eyes. Joe says softly, 'I'm sorry son. I thought you hated me, would be better off without me after what happened ...'

Junior says, 'Wanta tell me your side, Papa, about what happened that night?'

Joe remembers how in court he had, against his lawyer's advice, kept the secret of Reba's fellatio of Felix.

Joe almost whispers, 'What did Reeb say happened?' Junior's Adam's apple yo yo's in his throat. 'That she was sitting in Reverend Felix's car with a bad headache from working on the church books ... Mama says he was just massaging her head and shoulders to ease her pain. Then you come up on 'em ... blew your top thinking they was doing a horny number. Ma told the truth, didn't she Papa?'

He pats Junior's arm. 'Yeah son, she told the truth. Guess my eyes told me a lie. How is Reeb's jaw ... that was an accident. She got in the way.'

'Ma's jaw is healed up swell.'

'Junie, I'm sad and sorry as hell 'cause the whole thing happened ... does the preacher come 'round, call the house much? ... Reeb get out much?'

Junior shakes his head. 'Naw, Ma stays in, don't even go to church no more and the preacher don't call no more, don't come to the house or nothing.' Joe eyelocks him.

'You sure, Junie?'

'Yeah, I'm sure, 'cause I'm home all the time helping Ma clean and stuff 'cept when I'm in school.' Junior glances down on the seat. 'Guess I lost my bag of lunch hassling in the alley with that nigger.'

Joe puts his lunch pail on Junior's lap. He watches him wolf down the contents. Joe dips his head toward the students streaming back to their afternoon classes. Junior jumps from the truck to the pavement. He says, 'Papa, you make better lunches than Ma.'

Joe shapes a bitter smile. 'I'm a lot better in a lotta ways than Reeb. See you tomorrow, right here.'

Junior reaches in to slap palms before he slams the door. Joe watches him sprint down the street and into the school building. He lights a cigarette. He mulls the cruel injustice of how he lost his goddess, Reba.

He pounds his thigh in frustration, tells himself that Reba has no solid love or affection for Felix, that Reba is simply a dazzled victim of the preacher's evil magnetism. And Felix? I'd bet he's getting ready to cut Reeb loose 'cause she's maybe old stuff now in his book, he comforts himself. 'Hey! Cheer up!' he exclaims aloud. 'Reeb's a lead pipe cinch to quit him when she eyeballs the cheating scam on him.'

The thought of Felix out and himself back in with Reba swoons him for an instant as he fishes his expose ace-in-the-hole from his coveralls. He opens the dog eared manila envelope containing the private detective's pictures and reports.

He studies a picture of the preacher at a table in a Hollywood nightclub. The teenage daughter of an elder church deacon gazes into the preacher's eyes with slavish passion in a bar booth. Another: Ebonic Ruta, Reba's bitter rival, is pictured clinging starry eyed to Felix as they leave a Hollywood bistro. Another: The preacher sits sloe-eyed with a young black giant and a young white Apollo beneath the huge umbrella of a sidewalk cafe.

He heartens with hope that Reba will wake up, get the strength to cut Felix loose forever as she had her heartthrob, Melvin. He shoves the envelope back into his pocket. But hope drains away as he remembers Reba's years of total infatuation with Felix, the way she defended him the carnaged night he trapped them.

The crackling voice of old man Hoffmeister comes over the truck's shortwave. His heart jumps rhythm. An emergency call to a burst pipe two blocks from the Allen home. He torpedoes the truck away. He waves at acquaintances as he drives for a mile through the sun swept streets of Southwest Los Angeles, with its neat houses and manicured lawns.

He reaches Reba's block. He glances down it as he drives toward his job address two blocks further south. He sees Reba's new Thunderbird parked in the driveway of the pink stucco house. A moment later, the corner of his eye snares a gold machine in the alley behind the house. His palms drip sweat on the steering wheel as he jerks the truck to a stop. He reverses the truck with a howl of gears. He brakes the truck with a violent slam of foot. He sits in a palsy of rage as he slit-eyes the preacher's El Dorado parked down the alley behind the Allen house.

He shakes uncontrollably as he soft shoes the truck down the alley to the rear bumper of the El Dorado. It is the preacher's! A neighbor's garage prevents view of the truck from the Allen house. He gets out to the alley floor, stares up at the upstairs master bedroom. The drapes are half drawn! Faint strains of a Bobby 'Blue' Bland ballad waft out on the sun lit air.

The sub-rosa voices of vodka and his cuckolded man prince rant a savage pitch - that bitch face is freaking off with my wife. In my bed! Fuck probation! Deal the snake justice! Stomp him in half, up the crotch like a wishbone. But the thunderous voice of reason checks his blind fury, persuades him to cunning.

Then, nonchalantly, he gets a luger from beneath the seat as he remembers that the preacher is a Karate black belt who carries a pistol. As he goes casually to the gate, he checks the luger, rams it into a coveralls pocket. He pats the private detective's evidence in his pocket, thinks perhaps he won't have to kill Felix to break up the romance. But no, he decides, the only certain way is to waste him in a way that will leave him free to resume his life with Reba.

His face is expressionless, his pulse calm now with deadly purpose. He hesitates at the gate, tells himself, this time I'll leave him naked and dead in my bed.

He removes his shoes and eases himself through the gate across the backyard toward the house. He is thankful that Zenobia is not alive to be disgraced to have birthed a killer. Sorrow and guilt reel him as he glances at the tulip bed repository of Elder Joe's ashes. He glances into a back house window. He sees Baptiste, Bible on his chest, mouth agape, sprawled drunkenly asleep on a battered sofa. He curls his lip as he stares at the trampish old man for a moment before he moves on.

He pauses at a trash bin, lifts and fondles a rusted tin trophy he won in his teens as an amateur heavyweight boxing champion. A pair of Blue Jays chatter recognition as he moves beneath their house in a weeping willow tree. A sentimental lump clogs his throat as he pauses to retrieve a battered doll from the dust. He gazes at it for a long moment. He remembers Sadie's ecstatic squeal two Christmases ago when she unwrapped it. He tenderly places the doll on the teeter-totter. He glances at the tiny slab of black marble above the grave of Susie, deceased for several years.

He retrieves from the dust his and Junior's favorite fishing poles. He leans the poles against the side of the house beneath a kitchen window. He turns, stares bleakly for a moment at the weather blistered carcass of Delphine's Ford gift. Then he checks to find all the kitchen windows locked. He goes to the side of the house and removes louvre panes of glass from a window. He climbs into the living room.

He pauses stock still in the familiar atmosphere. The house odors, the atom deep pain and sense of intangible treasures threatened by Felix jackhammer his temples, make him vibrate with the compulsion to execute his tormentor.

He moves past the gaudy clutter of Reba selected modern furniture and Zenobia's carved horsehair couch. The heady aroma of Reba's Creole Gumbo Filet wafts from the kitchen as he moves with the stealth of his Masai Warrior bloodline across the living room blue pile carpet toward the hallway that leads to the staircase.

He halts, startled by the feral faced stranger reflected in the mirror over the fireplace. Curiously, alternately now, he watches himself, feels himself the avenging subject of a documentary movie camera. He soundlessly opens a closet door at the foot of the stairs. Reba's dress-up gowns and furs coruscate like perfumed swatches of rainbow.

He stands and gazes up the spiral staircase. He struggles to turn back, to awaken from the nightmare. The sorcerous sun beams cathedral soft light through a stained glass staircase window on his tortured face, softens it, gives it the beatific aspect of an ugly saint. He cocks his pug-ugly head. His maroon eyes oscillate in the manner of a killer watchdog as he hears dulcet lyrics of Reba's voice.

He stiffens, thinks he hears a noise in the kitchen, strains his ears to confirm. Decides he hasn't. The erotic drum roll of the preacher's mellifluous baritone catapults him up the staircase carpet on the balls of his stockinged feet. Bombs of rage concuss his brain as he swelters in his straitjacket of hate, bleeds flaming sweat.

Baptiste, having awakened with hunger pangs and come to the front house kitchen, moves from the kitchen to the foot of the stairs. He blinks, not sure in his alcoholic haze that he has really seen a flash of monstrous stockinged feet on the stairway. He tiptoes up the stairs.

Joe glides down the hallway. He stops and presses his ear against the door of the master bedroom. He hears the sound of the shower rain beneath their carnival of joyful grope. He draws the luger as he inches the door open.

Baptiste reaches the second floor landing and peeps down the hallway. Instantly sobered, he sags against the wall aghast as he sees Joe enter and shut the bedroom door behind him. Baptiste turns and creeps down the stairs. He flees the house to his back house telephone. He excitedly makes a 'man with a gun!' call to the police.

Joe stands inside the bedroom door for a long moment watching their nude yellow bodies soaping and groping each other through the frosted glass of the shower door. He must defang the preacher, he thinks. He moves to search the preacher's clothes hanging on a chair beside the turned back canopied bed, lush and sexy with fresh pink silk sheets. He snuffles his nose against the silk. She's perfumed and talced the bed! He carefully searches between the mattresses, floor and the entire bed area for a gun.

He rips the telephone cord loose at the baseboard box before he conceals himself behind velvet wine colored drapes across a walk-in closet. He peers at them through a slit as they emerge from the shower. While toweling each other off, he sees them sucking and licking each other. He raises the luger and draws a bead between the preacher's sultry eyes. But no, he might hit Reba, the mystical snake's innocent victim, he tells himself. Besides, he must stick to his plan. He lowers the gun.

He thinks, with painful envy, of his own misshapen and uncircumcised organ as he sees Reba heft and kiss the preacher's sleek circumcised dick head. The preacher scoops Reba up into his arms, tongues her ear as he carries her to the bed. She squeals when he hurls her onto it. Felix dives onto the bed, licks his way from her toe tips to her chest. Joe draws a bead on the back of the preacher's breast suckling head. His maverick finger caresses the trigger. Prematurely.

Joe watches the preacher work his fingers gently and deeply into Reba. He extracts his glossy fingers, sucks them ravenously. Reba giggles, sucks his tongue with such force that he whimpers. She goes down to deep throat him for a long moment before she falls back on the bed supine. He tongue flicks a trail across Reba's belly down toward her heaving crotch.

She pushes his head off trail and moans, 'I want you inside me ... all of you. Now!'

He haunches over her with a rigid weapon. Reba moans impatience as she holds her knees against her bosom, thighs atremble to receive him. Joe strains his ears to hear the preacher cooing into Reba's ear. He thinks it sounds like the sissy drivel of that poet, Gibran, that Reba goes ape for.

Joe stares at the preacher stroking into Reba. He dances a silent hot cha cha of rage on the closet floor. For an instant, like Elder Joe before him, he lusts for the Epicurean orgasm. Murder. Through the lens of hurt and madness, he sees them in red soft focus, in slow motion grunt and groan action.

Reba shouts, 'Fuck me! Fuck me, pretty daddy!'

He remembers the preacher's chop on the chin that nearly decked him outside the parsonage. He tells himself to wait for Reba to bleed the snake of his lightning Karate venom. Then he'll be easy to stomp into a bloody mush, he thinks. I'll cinch kill him slowed down. I'll let him bung me up enough to prove at the coroner's quiz that I beat a naked black belt in my wife's bedroom. This time Reeb will help the bear, me, he thinks, after I lay the private eye documents on her. He smiles at the perfection of his plan.

Joe struggles against the impulse to blow them both away when they bellow ecstasy as they climax. Together. They lie locked together, panting. In a lance of sun their golden bodies are sparkled by crystal gems of sweat. Reba's auburn glory gleams like a cache of Aztec copper.

Joe starts to step out of the closet, doesn't. He stares mesmerized as Reba's wizard of woo performs his post coitus wrap-up.

Felix's lips feather-stroke Reba's lacy eyelashes. He croons baby talk, 'DaDa's star eyes?'

'Yes darling! Oh yes!' Reba exclaims.

His teeth gently nip her tip tilted nose. 'DaDa's magnificent doll nose?'

'Yes!' she gasps.

He sucks her cupid bow lips. 'DaDa's confection mouth?'

'Oooeee! Yeah!'

He swoops to suck and teeth rake her nipples, rose tipped. He tongue flogs her mound of Venus. 'You're so fucking marvelous, such a gorgeous cunt you have!'

'It's yours, daddy good dick!' she whispers rapturously.

He moans, 'I love you!' Then prophetically, 'I'd die for you! Oooh!' he exclaims, 'You sweet bitch Madonna.' Then he tongues the backs of her satiny knees.

Joe winces in the closet to see Reba's face deform with passion. She whines as Felix cannibalizes her feet with lips and teeth.