Spider Kiss (17 page)
The object of her love, Stag Preston, was staring down at her naked form with horror, disbelief and anger. "You are
what
?" he was saying, as the Colonel and Shelly planned his future.
"I'm gonna have a baby," Trudy said again, not quite understanding how her lover man could fail to understand the meaning of the word
pregnant
.
It meant swelling all up with a little child and going to the hospital and then Stag and Trudy would be Momma and Poppa and even if she had never had a Momma and a Poppa, as far back as she could remember, at least her baby would have a Momma and a Poppa and wouldn't that just be marvy!
"
Jee
zus
Chrah
st!" Stag howled in pain, falling back suddenly into his Kentucky speech-patterns. "Oh, this is just
swell
!" He hit the side of his hand and turned away from her, leaving her ready young body waiting, empty.
Stag turned away and stared at the air-conditioner for some time. Trudy lay silently on the bed, watching him. She was confused; his attitude had altered so abruptly from anxiousness and energy as he was about to join her, that she could not understand him now.
Stag cursed foully, softly, effectively.
"Well, you can just forget about it," he said, spinning on her. "Just forget it altogether!"
Trudy stared up without speaking. He didn't mean …
"I got a —"
"Don't say it —"
"— career to protect and I ain't —"
"— please don't say it, Stag —"
"— goin' to louse it up marryin' no damn —"
"— I LOVE YOU! Don't you say that to me … I didn't do it …
you
did it, now you better —"
"— well, just kiss off kid because this is
it
! Now g'wan, you enjoyed it as much as me, so g'wan, get out of here, and don't plan to give me no trouble, because I've got influence."
Trudy leaped up and dressed with supple, quick movements. Somehow, the sight of her in full skirt, shirtwaist and flats did not equate with her announcement of imminent motherhood. She closed the door behind her softly, but firmly.
Twenty minutes later, the manager who owned ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of pure Trudy Quillan, an ex-fight manager named Horace Golightly, banged — without announcement —on the door to Freeport's suite.
Horace Golightly was a misnomer. Horace could no more Golightly than the Budweiser Clydesdales at full tilt.
When Shelly opened the door, Golightly stomped through — a short man inclined toward velvet vests and Tyrolean hats — and brought up short before Freeport. The Colonel was still perched atop the bar stool, sipping at his Pimm's Cup. His face was a battleground of uncertain emotions. He was undecided whether to be annoyed at Golightly's appearance, pleased at least superficially by a business acquaintance's attentions, or overflowing with joy because of private good news.
He fell back on the time-honored demeanor of the Southern gentry:
Open hostility.
"Sir, what are you doing?"
Golightly skimmed the Tyrolean hat with its alpenstock feather onto the marble-topped end table and took up a heroic stance before the Colonel. "I'm here to see justice done, Colonel,
that's
what I'm doing here!" His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a sealed barrel, hollow, resounding, but entirely wooden.
Freeport set down the drink with a snap of the wrist. He slid off the stool and approached Golightly. The manager moved back a pace. "What exactly, sir, are you blathering about?"
"Justice, Colonel, that's all. Just a little common, decent justice, the kind one man expects from a fellow man, the kind —"
"
Golightly!"
Shelly said, cutting off the rotund manager's ramblings, "get your mouth out of gear and just tell us what you're gibbering about!"
"Stag Preston, Mr. Morgenstern.
That
is what I'm talking about." Shelly looked up at the ceiling with exasperation. He mumbled something to himself that sounded vaguely like
The man is deranged!
and rotated his hands in a go-on-and-make-your-point gesture. Golightly summarized quickly: "I've stood back and watched that boy of yours carry on pretty shockingly, and haven't said anything, because it wasn't my business, but when he gets one of my clients in trouble and refuses to marry her, then I figure it's about time I sa —"
"Aaaah!" Shelly shrieked, clutching his head. "No! No, you're putting me on, Golightly, you're making a giggle, that's it, that's what it is, tell me that's what it is!" He reached out and grasped Golightly by his lapels, dragging him forward. "Talk, you greasy little gozler … talk, and talk straight!"
"Trudy Quillan … Trudy … he's got her, he's got her in a family w-w-way … stop shaking me!"
Shelly released the lapels and slumped back against the wall, stunned. "You're kidding."
The Colonel, for the first time since Shelly had known him, seemed inwardly disheveled. "Mr. Golightly, this is not funny. If this is some sort of prank, sir … if you're trying to get that girl a more formidable place on the tour … if you're trying to hold us up for …"
Shelly cut him off, without a glance. "Golightly, this is on the level? You're not kidding?"
The manager related the story as Trudy Quillan had told him, then launched into a fierce diatribe against young boys with too much activity in their sex glands, too much money, too big an estimate of themselves and too much success. Shelly did not listen. His mind was whirling. After trying to keep Stag out of trouble, and deluding himself that he had done precisely that …
this!
"Well, it's a simple matter, Shelly," the Colonel said. "If this is true, and —" he aimed a finger at Golightly, "we intend to have our physician assure us it is as you represent it, sir, then we merely make a settlement on this young girl, this — what's her name, Shelly?"
"Trudy Quillan," Shelly said in a small voice.
"Yes, Trudy Quillan. We make a settlement on her, let her have done what must be done, and we're through with it. It's a cursed business, of course, but nothing serious. Every hot-blooded young man gets at least one girl in trouble before he's married. Ha ha."
Shelly heard the hollow laugh and answered it with one of his own. "Yeah. Ha ha. But not every prominent, talented, apple-cheeked, red-blooded All-American boy, free white and over puberty knocks up a Black girl.
"Chew on
that
one awhile!"
Clichés begin to stink after they've lain around for a few years, and there is no more redolent cliché in the listings than, "He turned white with shock."
Yet that was precisely what happened when Shelly pointedly informed his employer that the girl Stag Preston had knocked up, Trudy Quillan, was in point of fact, a lovely young subscriber to the Negro persuasion. Freeport
did
turn white. He turned ashen. He went dead sheet white. His complexion matched his great shock of snowy hair. Some one pulled a plug out of his rump and drained the blood from his face. In short, damn the clichés and full speed ahead, he turned white with shock.
Shelly watched as his own personal God fell apart. It was something to see; a definite facial and metaphysical
altering
of Freeport's appearance. More than merely his substance: his reality. The Colonel took a faltering step backward, found the bar stool with his searching fingers and plumped onto the edge of the seat. The Pimm's Cup might have helped, but it was unnoticed by Freeport's elbow. The room had abruptly gone darker, to Shelly, with Freeport's blue eyes that peculiar almost-albino white that seemed lifeless.
"A
Nig
rah …"
As though someone had just told him all fifty-dollar bills were counterfeit. As though he had opened his wallet to examine the sheaf of fifty-dollar bills therein and had found not Ulysses S. Grant staring up at him, but a winking jester, an epileptic leper, motley, insipid, rotting, leering. Then he would turn and say, "Counterfeit …" the way he had said, "A
Nig
rah …"
Golightly looked to Shelly for an explanation. "Didn't he … ?" Shelly shook his head.
"Uh-uh. He didn't know." They both watched the Colonel. It was an unpleasant but fascinating thing to watch — a man's face shriveling and changing and changing again. Emotions played like heat lightning across Freeport's countenance, finally settling into a semblance of normalcy.
Normal to anyone but Shelly, who had worked under Freeport long enough to recognize the restrained fury the man was trying to conceal. Freeport was a man who felt he could get more by speaking softly, by operating gently, until that final instant when the hound catches the hare and snaps its neck with one twist and bite. Now he was like that. Calm to the eye of Golightly, seething to the more practiced eye of Shelly.
"I want the boy up here," the Colonel said gently.
Shelly moved to the house phone, waited, spoke into it softly. Before he was finished, Freeport was speaking to Golightly. The manager seemed disinclined to argue, and as Shelly hung the receiver he heard Freeport saying, "just go to your room and wait for my call. Keep that girl with you. If she speaks to
anyone
, sir, I'll hold you directly responsible."
Golightly mumbled something slight but appropriate, retrieved his Tyrolean hat, and made a hasty exit. Then the Colonel turned to Shelly. The face dissolved from its posture of composure and the fire that licked at Freeport's brain sent visible shoots of red into his cheeks. "This time, Shelly, that rotten boy has gone too far." Then he cursed.
In all the years Sheldon Morgenstern had worked for Freeport, he had never heard the man swear. It was a mark of character, something you could hang your identification on: Colonel Jack Freeport never used foul language. He had taken on awkward speaking habits to avoid swearing, referring to something as "cursed" or "rotten" before he would offer up even a mild damn. Now, he cursed.
Foully. In a torrent that Shelly never thought possible from anyone playing the role of aristocracy as heavily as Freeport played it.
And when Freeport was silent, Shelly knew twinkling words would not mend this rift. Stag had stepped over the line. The Colonel had been piqued by Stag's amour, was even more annoyed by his carelessness. But with a
Nig
rah …
It was more than shocking; it was a personal affront.
The knocker clanged twice and Shelly stepped around the Colonel to answer the door.
Stag bowled through, a wide, slap-happy grin on his face; the charm that turned millions of women on was now coruscating around him like a halo.
"Hey! The Man and my favorite personal bodyguard, Sheld —"
His bubbling friendliness was cut short as the Colonel took a short two-step and met the oncoming singer with his fist. He drew back and punched Stag Preston full in the mouth. The boy's rapid advance and the force of the older man's blow combined to spin Stag sidewise, blood pouring from his torn lip. He stumbled, caught himself on a pedestal table, tripped over it and crashed to the floor, whimpering in pain.
Shelly stood transfixed as Freeport moved with the grace of the trained boxer, dipping, grasping Stag by his jacket front and bodily jerking him erect. He stood paralyzed the way any bystander must stand paralyzed in the face of sudden, unexpected violence. Violence on the tv screen never takes anyone by surprise, because that is the home of sudden movement, senseless violence … but life is filled with side-steppings, avoidances of conflict, and the abrupt clash of two people shocks, stiffens, frightens.
The Colonel held Stag away from him — now Shelly knew the Colonel's muscled back and shoulders were not merely for the young chippies — one-handed, the other hand a pendulum, flat and hard and back and forth that cracked against the boy's face with systematic, agonizing open-handed blows. He was not pulling his punches. He was not using his fist to break bone and shatter cartilage, so his property would be unable to perform … he was not that insane with fury, but he was racking the boy.
Stag's eyes began to glaze as the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth blows tick-tocked against his skin. His head slipped to the side, escape! The Colonel grasped him by the hair, dragging his face close. Then he spat in Stag's face!
"
Little scud!
" he cursed him, teeth clenched, lips drawn back till the skin about his mouth went pale. He shook Stag furiously; but the boy was half-conscious. Terror and pain had combined to drain away all the arrogance and shine from Stag Preston.
The Colonel, impelled by his anger, released Stag's hair and drew back for another full-fist smash, driven past the hounds of sense by the very fury of his actions. Then Shelly moved. Abruptly galvanized, he ran across the room, wrapping his arm about the Colonel's.
Freeport bellowed like a beast, trying to wrench loose, with his other hand shaking Stag till the boy's eyes closed and he went limp. Shelly dragged back on the Colonel, adroitly twisting his wrist, pulling it up behind the bigger man's back.
No one spoke, and the jagged rasp of breath in and out of Freeport was a steam engine gone berserk. Finally Shelly applied so much leverage that the pain filtered through to Freeport and the big man began to cast off fury. It was very much like the final percolating of a coffee pot, with rapid exhalations and madness in the eyes, then tapering with longer periods of breath-catching silence, then a final upsurge of insanity, and all at once the Colonel was restored.
"Let me go, Shelly. Please let go of my arm; you're hurting my arm." Shelly gently disengaged himself.
The Colonel shook out Stag as though he were a drip-dry shirt, and cast him away. Stag bumbled once and collapsed in a heap on the carpet. Shelly still could not reconcile what he had seen with the portraits of these people built up in the past. Freeport — the quiet, deadly gentleman more adept at screwing the opposition than at clouting them; Stag — almost six feet of young hotblood, well-built, full of arrogance and self-importance.
Now here they were: Freeport a madman, as easily able to break a man in half as he was to destroy him financially. Stag a taffy-limbed, spastic bundle of dirty clothes unable to stand or speak or see straight.
