by Iceberg Slim
Frog picked up the phone in the den on the second ring. He listened to Jelly Drop’s excited report. Frog said, “Take that Marquis’s registration card off the steering post. Don’t try to memorize his address! Don’t try to tail him. You might wake him up. Call me to give me his address as soon as you get the card. Don’t mention this to anybody!” Frog hung up. He went to dress for the street.
Jelly Drop went to Pony’s unlocked car and shakily got the registration card. He went back to the drugstore phone to dial Frog and read off Pony’s address. Frog loaded his revolver, locked his bedroom door, and went to his Buick in the garage. He drove down the driveway to the boulevard. Frog was too excited to detect Silas Hilson pull out behind him, tail him to Pony’s block. Frog parked near the corner a half block from Pony’s house.
Silas parked a half block away in the next block. Pony’s Marquis and Satin’s El Dorado were parked in front of the Jones’s house. Silas eased out to the street. He walked to a public phone in the middle of the block where he was parked and called Mel.
Inside the house, Pony and Satin giggled in a haze of dust as they slit the heavy gauge plastic-wrapped kilos of “H” with razor blades and flushed the powder down the toilet. After the last of it was flushed, they lay nude on the bed and sipped champagne. Their eyes were hooded with the narcosis of the inhalation of the “H” dust. They kissed and fell asleep with their lips and bodies locked together.
Two hours later, Frog left his Buick. Gun in fist he went to the rear of the Jones’s house. A killer Doberman snarled and lunged from the shadows. He blew a hole in its head in midair with his silenced gun. He dropped his gun into his overcoat pocket. He made a hole in a basement window over the latch. He dropped into the basement. Silas, with MI6 rifle, hid in the shrubbery in the front of the house. Mel and Jeff went to the rear of the house and waited in the shadows, with guns drawn.
Frog ascended stairs to the locked door to the kitchen. He opened a pocketknife, struck a match. He shimmied the spring lock open with the knife blade. He drew his revolver. He stepped into the dark kitchen and went through it into the dimly lit hall. He stopped at the sound of Lula’s snoring at the end of the hall. He moved to Pony’s open bedroom door. He stepped inside and stared down at the intoxicated lovers locked together, with the valise of cash gaped open beside them. He held the gun an inch from Pony’s temple and pulled the trigger. Pony jerked spastically. Pony’s movement and the air-from-a-punctured-tire sound of the gun awakened Satin. She stared gigantic eyes up at Frog over his gun in her face.
Frog grinned and whispered, “High and mighty ho! I couldn’t fuck you one way, so I’ll fuck you the sweetest way there is.” He pulled the trigger and stared at the sudden hole between her glazed open eyes.
Frog turned to search the room for the dope. He noticed the pile of plastic in the bathroom wastebasket. He stooped and saw the inside of the toilet rimmed with “H,” the floor dusty with it. He fastened the valise, put it under his arm, and went to the side of Lula’s bed. She stirred and stared sightlessly up at him.
“Malique, is that you?” she asked in a sleepy voice.
Frog’s finger was tight on the trigger. He waved the gun before her eyes. Then he turned and went to the barred front door. He frowned at the heavily fortified door, turned, and went to the back door. He unbolted it, opened it, and peered into the shadow-haunted backyard. He stepped into the night.
The sound of Mel’s and Jeff’s barraging silenced pistols were like a dozen tires popping as the bullets cavorted and slammed Frog against the side of the house. He fell lifelessly to the frozen earth.
Malicious winds off Lake Michigan scattered and sailed the spill of bills from the unlatched valise.
GRANDMA RANDY
I
In 1938, Jay Henderson sat suspect in a klieg of Texas sun, a disheveled rodeo cowboy Apollo. Big green money lay like bouquets of wilted blossoms in front of him and at center table. He felt threatened in the breathy silence beneath a gimlet battery of bloodshot eyes. His insides queased in the rancid odors of nicotine, the emotion stink of his opponent. He felt suffocated by the sour whiskey gusts from the four busted-out hard-faces leaning in with sullen flabbergast to detect a cheat angle, or even a rational explanation of how their perennial sucker had wiped them out.
Atom-deep fatigue stained Jay’s eye sockets like blue shadow makeup. But his violet eyes shone with frantic vivacity behind sunglasses as they scanned the brute face of his surviving opponent: Sol “Wildman” Starkey, rodeo star and high stakes stud poker player—and peerless hard loser.
Starkey grunted and hunched his buffalo shoulders. He pushed his tap-out pile of green into the pot. He rapped his knuckles against the table. “C’mon now, Cutie Face, call that two thou raise or pass,” Starkey drawled. “Call! ’Cause I ain’t got no disrespect for that ten high club flush you maybe got.”
He took a hit from a whiskey bottle, then lit a trademark cigar to signal his win of the first substantial pot in almost fifty hours. The gallery leaned in closer on their chairs.
Jay stared at Starkey’s apparent jack high diamond flush hand on the tabletop. He shifted his eyes to zero in on the center of Starkey’s freckled forehead. In his crucial bet situation he heard, as he had for two days, whirring high voltage electrical sounds inside his skull. Then like from an echo chamber, the infallible read-out tip-off voice of his budding super-sensitized schizophrenia boomed: “Starkey’s bluffing!”
Starkey ribbed, “C’mon, boy, don’t just sit there eyeballing me like a possum in a tree. Play poker!”
Jay smiled as he scooped up his winning hand and shuffled it into the deck. He knew that Starkey considered himself undressed without a pistol. And worse, he remembered Starkey’s penchant to use his pistol to reverse a tap-out. Yes, he told himself, unarmed as he was, it would be hazardous to his health and winnings to tap-out Starkey along with the others.
Starkey grinned extravagantly as he flipped over the black spade jack in the hole that paired the diamond jack. He pulled the pot in. He hee-hawed and winked at the gallery. “Don’t you know, friends, it feels good, real good, to sock a stiff one on him?”
The gallery chuckled.
Starkey scowled as he watched Jay scoop up his bundle of green and stand. “Look here, boy, it ain’t sporting to quit now. We gonna play a few more hands to give me some kinda justice,” Starkey said as his hand fiddled at the butt of his pistol in his waistband.
One of the gallery piped up, “Yeah, give the man a shot to get even.”
Jay shook his head as he peeled off two hundred in walking money for the four losers. He scooted fifty-buck portions to them on the tabletop. Then he stripped his yellow bandana from his throat and tied his winnings into it. His knees quivered as he walked toward Starkey’s front door.
Starkey followed him and shoved his palm against the door as he opened it. “Boy, you clipped me for ten grand and the others for at least another five. I’m gonna call you in a coupla days for another go-round. You coming, ain’t you?”
Jay shrugged, “Sure, why not? Nobody living can beat me playing poker. Not any more!”
Starkey removed his hand from the door. Jay stepped into the Sunday sunshine. He stood on the porch, a blinking, booted portrait of woe slumped in his wrinkled pastel-blue cowboy suit. Wisps of lank golden hair scaggled the edges of his tan ten-gallon hat as he went down the walk and got into his spanking-new 1938 white Caddie parked at the curb. He cruised away through the bustling Houston streets to the northside and Ila, his teenage inamorata.
As he parked on the tree-shaded street, an electrical fire issued smoke from beneath the hood and deadened the engine. He leapt from the car and put out the flames with a fire extinguisher from the trunk. He cursed as he slammed down the hood.
He heard a Glen Miller band recording blasting from his pink stucco bungalow accompanied by the bedlam of a Saturday night party still in riotous progress. He moved up the walkway determined to evict the familiar mob of freaked o
ut sluts and studs.
“I’m only twenty-seven, and I feel like my own grandpa,” he lamented. “You’re an idiot, a star sucker to hold on to Ila,” he told himself. “She’s poison, a tramp. Throw her out!” But, he remembered a pathetic vision of himself humiliated, groveling when he was forced to find her, apologize, and beg her back. Once he begged, literally, on his knees as she marinated him with her sewer-mouth abuse. “I hate her, but I can’t do without her,” he told himself bitterly as he rammed his key in the lock and twisted himself into the shambled living room.
Remnants of his filet steaks lay on cigarette-butted plates stacked on the beer can-littered coffee table. High heels, panties, jeans, and condoms were strewn on the carpet. Dead soldiers of scotch and bourbon glittered from the wastebasket. A half-dozen nude teenaged couples, pretzeled on the couch, chairs, and floor, chattered and laughed raucously. They raised eyebrows, and then ignored him as he moved past them through a smog of hash smoke toward his bedroom.
He halted slit-eyed in the hallway and knotted his fists at the appearance of a strange, brawny, teenage jock prancing from his bedroom toward him with a con grin on his foxy face.
“Whew! Man, I’m glad you showed. I’m Freddie. You must be Jay, Ila’s old man. I been helping your old lady with the party and stuff. You know, I been making like a bouncer keeping everybody from tearing your joint down and bad asses from crashing in.” Lipstick smeared Freddie as he stuck out his palm.
As Jay limply slapped his palm, he noticed the lipstick indictment on his face was Passionate Scarlet. Ila’s. The jock’s fly gaped open, smudged red. This bastard’s fly is flying her flag too, he thought. She had to French him to brand him there.
“I can’t find words to thank you, Freddie, for everything,” he said with a hideous smile.
Freddie gave him a fist in the arm. He gave Freddie a return shot, hard, as he went past him. Jay continued down the hall to the bedroom door. He pushed it half open.
Transfixed like a voyeur stranger, he peered through the door crack at Ila nude. She was squatting in the center of the gold-quilted bed flogging her five-inch cone of jet pubic bush with a silver brush. His weapon tingled as he gazed at her incredibly fat-lipped snare, its shocking pink gate aflash. Her hair, Betty Grable-styled, framed her pixie face like an indigo halo. “Why does she have to be so luscious and so lowlife?” he groaned mutely.
Bite and suck bruises lividly pocked her pulse-sprinting curves from epic chest to sculpted inner thighs. She has to be the most irresistible orphan that was ever born, and the most corrupt, he thought. Somehow I have to find the balls to let her go before she compels me to do something I don’t ever want to do again, he told himself as he punched his door wide open with his fist.
Her grey eyes, beclouded with dope, zoomed in wide on him, rosebud lips slung loose in alarm for the instant before she recovered her sloe-eyed cool. He moved to sit on the side of the bed. She recoiled in mock disdain. He studied her with an expression of treacherous bemusement on his stubbled face as he waited for the witty overlay of her offensive defense of her tramphood.
Suddenly, she snapped her fingers, frowned in the throes of fake recall. “Now, let me see . . . you’re . . . uh . . . No, don’t help me. Ah! I’ve got it! You’re that skid row pukey bum that conned me out of a buck the other day. Sure, you’re the one . . . you stink the same . . . said you hadn’t dirtied a plate in days. So, what the fuck you doing here in my face?” She paused to push the nitty-gritty sound out. “I didn’t invite your broke ass to the party.”
He hurled the bulged-with-loot bandana into her face.
She tore it loose, caressed her long, tapered fingers through the treasure, moaning carnal hype. “Ooeeee! Oh shit! Sweet Da Da, whoooo wheeeee! You do it to your baby so good.” She catapulted herself toward him.
He stiff-armed her back and stood. “Don’t touch me, Ila! Get on a robe and bounce your parasite pals.” He jiggled his head spastically. “I can’t trust myself to do it.”
Cat eyes saucered and luminous, she said quietly in her whispery knife-at-his heart way, “Your old ass I will. You reneging on our latest understanding? Remember? I do what I want with whoever I want to do it with. Are you creaming again to crap on your li’l free spirit? Huh?”
He said, “No, Ila, you got the best hand. Now.” He went to the closet, extracted a carbine, and rammed in a cylinder of shells. “All right, I’ll be fair and ask them one time to go away. Then, I’ll blow them away,” he said tremulously as he moved toward the door.
She sprang from the bed and seized him around the waist and spun him. “Hey! You flipping out?” she exclaimed as she blocked the doorway.
He smiled sweetly. “Then, Ila, please, will you make them go away?”
She nodded frantically as she led him to the bed. He dropped the rifle to the carpet and sat down heavily on the bed. She stooped and tugged off his boots, pressed him back on the bed, and lifted his legs onto the bed. She kissed his forehead, walked to the closet, and slipped on a gauzy wrapper. She left the room and shut the door.
Dizzy with fatigue, he lit a cigarette, decided he’d have to take a short nap to energize himself a bit before undressing for a shower. He closed his eyes—then opened them wide in apprehension about his threat to blow away Ila’s friends. I really wasn’t serious, never out of control. Yes, I was bluffing. I was tired and angry and just bluffing, he told himself desperately. But then, he told himself, it was better after all that Ila bounced them to save me the risk of wasting the bastards.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the details of an article on fatigue he’d read. He felt certain it could be a killer long term. His mother, Sarah, was an example victim, he thought.
His mind untethered, staggered catacombs of pain. He saw a vision of her, as vivid as the Arkansas stars in summer, lying on her deathbed in their lopsided coal miner’s shack. In a storm of tears, he begged her not to leave him and his pa. He knew how much she loved them both. His seven-year-old mind just couldn’t comprehend why she could be so eager, so cruel to die and desert them.
Her gasps and the doomsday thump-a-bump of her tired heart terrified him as he lay in her arms waiting for the company doctor and his pa.
“Ma, don’t leave me and Pa. Ain’t long I’m gonna be big and workin’ the coal with Pa. Then we gonna buy you a ritzy house . . . ’lectric lights! . . . a great big slew of snazzy furniture. Ain’t that somethin’, Ma? And that ain’t all. A john—inside! Honest, Ma! And a new magic ’lectric washtub to do all the washin’ you got ’cept the throwin’ in. That’s what Pa and me gonna do, Ma. So please, Ma, don’t leave me and Pa. We love you, Ma.”
He raised his head from her bosom to see her promise not to leave. He burst into tears. She looked sixty. How could she be just thirty-two?
She smiled, closed her eyes, and sobbed, “Pa’s sweet on scum, that Binnie on Red Light Hill. I ain’t sorry to leave your pa. He ain’t got no feelings left for me nohow since her. Forgive me for leaving you, but I’m too tired and ugly to try to stay. Anyway, I got an invite to peace and rest.”
Suddenly she bolted upright, seamed face ashine, dull blue eyes fired by the glory vision of the beckoning Master Keeper of the sweetest, longest dream there is.
She clapped her hands in joy and shouted, “Hallelujah!” then lay back and died.
He wept, thrashed, and pounded the spiny pine floor in convulsions of pain until his fists were bloodied and torn by splinters. Pa never got back with the doctor, never even got to him. Whiskey and Binnie had ambushed him on the way.
He found his pa through a tear in a shade at Binnie’s shack on Red Light Hill. Pa was whimpering and groveling naked, kissing and licking the feet, anus, and sex nest of Binnie, the giantess, in patent leather boots cursing and whipping him savagely with a cat-o-nines to howling climax.
He crashed their party through the shack door. Wailing, he hawked and spat on Binnie. She punched and kicked him as his pa feebly tried to restrain her. She beat and
whipped them both into submission. Then wept, apologized, as she smothered them against her bosom.
Jay remembered how Binnie, the rouge-smeared schemer, got the house with the toilet hole inside from his Ma’s life insurance policy payoff shortly after her cremation; how after Binnie had rinsed her dishwater blond hair to platinum and sausaged her Mae West dimensions inside peep-show dresses, she was the envy of all the two-buck pieces of meat with holes on Red Light Hill.
He thought, with a freakish ping in the scrotum, of the nine years Binnie had her sexual way with Pa and himself, exploited them like slaves. He shaped an ugly smile recalling the morning his pa cancelled his hatred when he shot out Binnie’s lights.
On the screen behind his closed eyes he saw himself about to rise for his shift in the coal pits. He heard the guttural whisper of the Maserati when it coasted to a stop outside his window. He heard the tipsy bray of Binnie’s voice. He went to the window, saw Casper, the elderly and notorious bisexual Lothario that had picked her up in the evening, groping Binnie in the funeral glow of dawn.
He heard his pa suffering a black lung paroxysm of coughing from his bedroom above. Then he listened to the sounds of Pa struggling from the bed that he hadn’t been out of in several months, heard him stumbling across the floor to the window, to the closet, down the stairs. He cracked his door, saw gowned Pa, Magnum rifle in hand, his rotten lungs wheezing as he opened the front door.
He froze in exhilaration to see Pa brace his wasted frame against a doorjamb, aim, and put his sharpshooter eyes to the rifle sights. A minisecond before the percussive roaring, the lapping of orange tongues of flame, the couple’s phosphorescent eyes locked on the rifleman. Then a gout of crimson leapt from Binnie’s forehead. Casper ducked out of sight. He felt tidal waves of joy rock him to see Binnie dead. He walked toward Pa, who collapsed and wept piteously.
