Doom Fox (26 page)

She moans, 'Felix, you gotta fuck your baby again.'

The preacher moves to haunch over Reba with his reinflated weapon ready to encore. Poor Reba, how could she stand off that freakish devil, Joe thinks.

Joe springs from the closet with a hoarse cry. 'No you don't! You bitch faced sonuvabitch, unass my wife!'

They stare at him in total shock as he moves to the bed and points the luger at them. The preacher rolls away toward the rim of the bed as if to take to his feet.

Joe savagely whispers, 'Go on, cocksucker, move another inch so I can blow you away.'

The preacher collapses on his back, eyes wild, chest heaving. Reba scoots up to a sitting position on the bed. Her lips work soundlessly as her voice fails. A distant chorus of police sirens keens feebly in the silence.

Joe seats himself on the chair four feet from the preacher. He extracts the manila envelope and throws it into Reba's lap. She stares at it with a puzzled frown.

The preacher says softly, 'Look Brother Allen, these things happen. It isn't really the sordid thing it appears to be. We love each other. We plan to be married after Reba's divorce from you is ...'

Joe leans with a ferocious scowl and levels the luger at the preacher's head. The preacher gulps.

Joe growls, 'Shut up, you conning faggot! You ain't got no more chance or time to marry nobody. I'm gonna kill you! Reeb, dig that scam about this snake.'

Reba picks up the envelope and pulls out the contents. The preacher glances at it apprehensively and mumbles, 'Joe Allen, you can't kill me and not go to the gas chamber. The D.A. and the Mayor are personal friends of mine. And I still happen to be Bishop of the Southwest Conference of Ministers. Put that gun down and I'll prove how much man I am.'

Reba's face drains color as she studies the photographs. Joe sees the preacher's muscles tense. He leans and slugs the barrel of the pistol against his kneecap, says 'Relax sissy. You'll get a shot to prove how bad you are.'

Reba glares venomously at the preacher as she shoves the pictures under his eyes. Joe frowns mild concern at the now strong wail of sirens.

Reba's outrage quivers her as the preacher takes the pictures. Just a flicker of guilt touches his face before he tosses them aside. He says blandly, 'Oh Reba darling, can't you see he has obviously framed me with a double?'

The preacher tries to lay a placating hand on her thigh. She claws furrows of blood on his hand. The preacher stares at the wound with mouth agape.

She shrieks as she punches and claws at his head, his chest, his crotch. 'It's you Felix! You lowlife cheating bastard! I'll kill you myself!'

Joe leans back with a wide grin as he watches the preacher cringe and cover up from her attack. He pleads, 'Bunny love, please! Please give me a chance to explain.'

A couple of the pictures fall to the carpet in the fray. For an instant, Joe's eyes leave the preacher as he bends to retrieve them. In that instant, the preacher snatches an automatic from the tie-back ruffles of the bed's canopy.

Joe hears Reba scream. He glances up into the yawning hole of the gun pointed at the center of his forehead. He hears the deafening boom, sees the orange blossoms of fire as he flips his head down and away a mini-second in time. He feels the pain of a thousand toothaches as the volley of white hot bullets rips through his cheek and gums.

He leaps towards the bed, grabs the preacher's gun hand, falls between the preacher's spread-eagled legs, smothers the preacher's flailing body like a ponderous lover copulating. His jaw agony, the odor of their love juices gag him, rev up his rage to maniacal peak. He shoves the snout of the luger up the preacher's rectum. He squeezes the trigger. Felix trembles and surrenders life with a soft sigh.

Joe struggles off the bed to his feet, clutching the luger. He stares, awed at the steady splash of scarlet on his blood soaked coveralls. He cocks his head, listens to an alarming rising racket on the stairway. Curious, he stumbles toward the door. He opens it, sees a mob of cops double timing toward him. He shapes a grotesque crimsoned grin, holds out the gun like a naughty child surrendering contraband.

He burbles through a blood glutted mouth, 'Officers, I'm Big Joe Allen ... caught my wife and Felix the preacher screwing ... he shot me! ... had to kill him!'

The police halt. 'Drop that gun!' the leader cop shouts. Joe stares into the cop's face. Long term hatred glues the gun to Joe's hand as he waggles it in the face of the leader cop as he struggles to drop it. The cop fires several rapid pistol rounds into Joe's lower torso. Joe reels, feels, as oblivion looms, that killer bees have stung him, poisoned him woozy and weak. Joe crashes to his knees, crawls back into the bedroom screaming, 'Reeb! Reeb! Tell these crazy rollers what happened! Tell 'em, Reeb!'

The black chasm sprouts jaws and devours him.

16

Convict Joe Allen half awakens. He bolts upright at the climax of a frequent nightmare. He trembles on his sweat drenched upper bunk in a cell on a lifer's tier in State Prison. His teeth bare in a black leopard snarl as he recoils from a guard's fire bomb flashlight exploding through the bars into his eyes.

'Reeb! Tell these crazy rollers what happened!' he shrieks.

The elderly hack's white harlequin face, framed by his metallic braided uniform cap, glows eerily in the macabre light of his flashlight. Still not fully awake, Joe has the delusion that a psychotic cop is brandishing a flame thrower.

'Hey there, Big Joe! Wake up!' the hack commands.

'You're giving the cell house the weemies with that hollering in your sleep.'

The hack lowers the flashlight. Joe rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms. He shivers as he mumbles, 'I'm awake now Mister Balansky ... had a bitch of a nightmare.'

The hack says, 'Sounded like the same kind you been having for years.'

Joe sighs, 'Yeah, the lousy preacher kind.'

The hack stoops to peer at Joe's snoring cellmate on the bottom bunk. He clucks and shakes his head. 'All that racket you made but Old Percy snoozes on like he's in the Fairmont's Presidential Suite.'

The hack moves away down the tier on his rounds of the darkened cellhouse. Joe lights a cigarette. The firefly tip is tremulous in the shadow haunted gloom of the cell. He feels the roil of diarrhea. He swings off the bunk to the stone floor with astonishing grace. The crushed bridge of his flared nose and broad face are measled with cop inflicted scars.

He has a cobweb of fine wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead. He also has a white stubble on his now jowly face. But he has kept his fortress of muscles taut. His two-fifty weight is at free world level. This through rigorous exercise and training as the prison's heavyweight boxing champ. He is also strawboss to the civilian supervisor of the prison's sports program.

He pulls down his scratchy cotton shorts and seats himself on the icy throne of the john. His shaved bullet head shines dully in the anemic light. He watches a hump backed rat on the tier pause, rear on hind legs, fix bright malevolent eyes on him. Then the rubber soled thud of the hack's feet on the tier above and his monstrous shadow on the cellhouse wall spook the rodent convict away.

A sleeping triple murderer of poker flimflammers revisits his orgy of blood with ear rending screeches of rage. Epidemic farting, monologues of profanity, roaring of flushing toilets, and bellowed expectorating resonate the cellhouse as the kitchen cons arise early to set up breakfast.

Joe watches infant gray fingers of dawn ease through the ancient grime of cellhouse windows. Joe stares hypnotically at the sleeping face of his beloved cellmate, his kindred soul of betrayal, misery and murder. The spade nosed, cruel lipped face, even in leathery repose, has a savage cast. The face is a living logo of its long years of caged pain, the madness of its scorched blackness, while a lost slave child beneath the blow torch sun in cotton wildernesses. The thick wooly hair fires light in a laser of dawn like a platinum halo sanctifying a visage of Lucifer.

The old man's hands flutter on his chest like panicked bats. His eyes suddenly open and stare into Joe's. They are enormous, shockingly soft ginger cookie eyes buried in his awful face.

He shapes a ragged grin. 'Gimme a puff of that pizen, son.'

Joe passes the cigarette to him.

Percy wiggles his nose. 'Ain't ya nevuh gonna flush that hole!?'

Joe pushes the button.

Percy struggles up to sit on the side of the bunk. 'I'm gonna dreen pee down my leg if ya don't hurry, Joe.'

Joe says, 'In a minute, Pops. I got the galloping shits.'

Percy scowls. 'Ya musta been spankin' the preachuh again 'bout Reba's pussy.'

Joe nods. 'Yeah, sneaked in on me 'round four this morning. For ten years, that bastard is been fucking with me. I gotta find a way to cut him loose!'

Joe cleans himself, punches the button and draws frigid water into the washbasin and sponges off. He gets a pack of cigarettes off his bunk and tosses it on Percy's as he sits on the side of it.

Percy goes to empty his bladder into the john. As he does, he says, 'Joe, for seven years in this cell I been ya stand-up friend. I ain't nevuh jived ya, even if it hurt ya and made ya salty ...'

Joe laughs. 'Sure, that's what held me together. Kept me from going back to the nuthouse or icing a screw. Pops, I've told you a zillion times how much I 'preciated it, after I cooled off.'

Percy punches the john button. 'Well, I gotta bone to pick with ya, son, 'fore breakfast.'

Joe shrugs. Then, as is their habitual custom after washing up, they dress early and quickly in joint grey and make their bunks. They sit on Percy's bottom bunk in the gloom and smoke while waiting for the imminent explosion of wake-up lights. Percy's face is wry and sad as he gazes into the contaminated light of a new zombie day filtering into the steel cage.

Joe takes a note from his shirt pocket, delivered the afternoon before by a hospital runner. By the glow of dim cellhouse lights he reads its shaky too neat almost feminine handwriting for the dozenth time: 'Joe, please make sick call in the morning. I have to rap with you. I'll lay a lid of Mexican smoke on you just to show. It's a life or death matter. If you can get past how you feel about me, you can score for two grand in cash. Doc Mel.'

Joe rises from the bunk, paces the cell, frowning in deep thought under Percy's glare of disgust.

Percy says, 'Let's pick that bone. Tell Old Percy why ya gittin' a hard on for that faggot's two grand.'

'I'm broke as Lazarus, with no B.R. for the free world when I hit it. I gotta think 'bout two grand!' Joe says stoutly as he shreds the note and flushes it down the toilet.

'Aw shit! Ya done flipped and gotta yen for a pine box parole 'stead of walkin' through the front gate' Percy taunts as he rises to confront Joe as he turns from the john.

'Betcha the Arin Nashun is done put a contract out on that snitchin' nigguh. They gonna hit ya bad ass too if ya butt in ... 'member they got the joint brass and mosta the hacks backin' 'em 'ginst nigguhs and spics. Do I gotta run down how them Arin peckuhwoods is got even some of the screws leery of gittin' hit on and 'sides that ...'

Joe knocks Percy's hand off his arm. 'Lay off, old man, 'cause the reasons you cracked for me not going to rap with Melvin is the reasons I gotta go. You think the paddy that delivered Melvin's kite ain't tipped off them Aryan cocksuckers? I ain't scared of a motherfucker in here, or a slew of 'em if they assholes is pointed to the ground ... Now, lemme rent your shank for a taste of that grass, Reefer Freak!'

Percy shrugs. 'Ya got it, bad ass,' he shorts as he starts to slip out a six inch shiv fashioned from a file and honed to razor sharpness from the hollow of a makeshift leather scabbard sewn onto the underside of his heavy leather belt behind his spine.

'I ain't got no cool blade stash. Gimme your belt and take mine' Joe says as he pulls his off to exchange for Percy's armed belt.

Suddenly the strident clang of the wake-up bell, accompanied by a blast of lights, shocks the cellhouse to full bedlam life. Shortly, the bars above the cells slide away and the cons step out onto the tiers and file from the cellhouse for breakfast in one of the mess halls.

Nude Doc Melvin, wolf mother queen of the joint, relaxes in his cozy hospital quarters. He smokes the days first reefer, reclines on a candy striped satin sofa after a breakfast of strawberries and waffles. He exhales a chest load of acrid smoke, kisses the parted lips of his naked roommate-orderly, Lucy, a Lilliputian flame mopped near double for the slender and zany comedienne. Except that his curves are more 'wow,' his violet eyes more sultry, haunting his rose petal face from lacy lashed shadows.

Melvin gnaws Lucy's nipple as he gives him a draw on the pot stick. Lucy whines, loops a girlish arm about the long yellow neck of his lover. Lucy grinds his top trophy buns against Melvin's hirsute lap as their extended tongues duel furiously for a long bit.

'I'm gonna miss the piss out of you, Daddy Doc' lisps the former Hollywood 'Chicken' convicted burglar.

'Not for long, Honey Meat. Trust Daddy's long bread and boss connections. You'll be hitting the bricks right after your parole hearing sixty days away.' Melvin pauses to suck on the pot stick that sparkles his hazel eyes in his gaunt face.

'Then baby, it's me and you in our Beverly Hills castle living happily ever after.'

Lucy chews his bottom lip, runs fingers through Melvin's silky mop of white hair in the heavy silence.

Fear flickers Lucy's face. 'Sounds fabulous. But sixty days is gonna be a bitch kitty long time with my old ma ... uh, ex-old man and his Nazis out to ice me.'

'Lucy, I won't let them! The baddest con in the joint is coming to see me this morning to arrange for your protection' Melvin croons into Lucy's delicate ear.

'Kong!?' Lucy exclaims.

Melvin nods. 'But never let him hear you call him that' he warns.

Lucy pouts her fragile mouth. 'I'm still scared! Right now there could be one of them with the swampers or who knows, planning to hit us. I ...'

Melvin bear hugs him. 'You'll be transferred only two days after tomorrow, Monday, to the gym right under Joe's wing after we make our deal this morning. How about that, baby?'