Mama Black Widow (26 page)

The phone jangled me out of my reverie. It was Dorcas, and she called to make sure I was home safely and hadn't forgotten that Saturday night coming was ours together. And hadn't I told her I was twenty years old? After I hung up, I wondered if Mama had told Dorcas that I was only seventeen.

I thought our Saturday night would never come. But it did, and I went to the Southside early to visit Soldier before my date with Dorcas.

He still lived in the same rooming house where Papa had died. Soldier was jolly and looked much thinner, but well.

I was surprised when he told me he had been out of Veteran's Hospital less than a week where he had gone with severe stomach problems. He told me that Lockjaw Hudson and Cuckoo Red had been killed the week before in an auto accident while vacationing in Mexico.

Dorcas picked me up at the El station on Forty-seventh Street. I gave her a bunch of “glads” I picked up from a sidewalk vendor. It thrilled and excited Dorcas, like I had given her a fistful of diamonds.

We saw a stage show at the Regal Theatre, and then we went to the lakefront and parked. We sat there talking softly and watching magical stars flaming and floating in the blue blackness of Lake Michigan.

Then she started kissing me. She got hot as hell. She moaned and thrashed her thighs. She squeezed my hand. She suddenly pulled my hand between her thighs and pressed it against her cunt.

Panic and shock jerked me rigid! She wasn't wearing panties! She had creamed herself wet and slimy, and my middle finger was in “it.”

I roughly snatched my hand away. The pulsation of her “thing” and “its” heavy bush of hair had had the instant effect on me that a furry animal with a wildly beating heart and wet mouth was going to bite off my finger.

Naturally in the next instant I knew this was not true. But it was too late. I had reacted negatively and violently to her body.

A headshrinker told me in later years another reason that I almost jumped out of my skin like a bumptious ass was that my finicky mind hadn't put together the delicate combination of loss of fear of failure, and of my pedestal reverence for her, and, of course, any sensual message from the brain to erect.

Dorcas looked hurt and befuddled as she drove silently away from the lakefront. I suggested food. She looked dazedly at me and nodded her head.

We went to a Chinese restaurant on Sixty-third Street. She only picked at her food. She looked out the window at the parade of giggly young couples going into a transient hotel across the street.

She said, “Sweetheart, where are we going when we leave here?”

I said too quickly, “To the El station at Cottage Grove. Mama has a touch of flu. Baby, why did you ask?”

She sighed and looked right into my eyes for a helluva long sweaty moment.

Then she said, “Darling, I am going to ask a terribly personal question. I hope in my confusion that I will not be impertinent.”

She paused and tenderly cradled my hands in hers. She caressed the knuckles with her lips, and then held my hands against her cheek. My heart mauled my chest when she beamed the trillion-watt soul power of her eyes into mine.

She almost whispered, “Pretty fella, why did you recoil from that part of me which is the why and how of love and life and should surely be your most natural destination?”

I gently escaped my hands to my lap so she couldn't feel the tremors and the sudden wetness in the palms. I was beginning to feel slightly hostile because she was shooting me through hot grease.

I was surprised to hear my voice lie so clearly and smoothly, “Baby, I didn't recoil from ‘it.' I admire your class, and you carry yourself like a lady. You dress like one with gloves and all. I was shocked and acted like a bumpkin when I found out that you had no panties on, and you put my hand on ‘it' so suddenly.”

Her eyes were getting cold, and I was desperate to think of something she'd buy.

I said, “OH! I think I know why I snatched my hand away.”

She didn't say anything. She nodded.

“Baby, dear, maybe in my subconscious I was afraid to play with it or anything because I knew I couldn't stop until I had gone all the way right there in the car where a cop might show at any minute. What do you think, baby?”

She sat there staring at me and crawling her thumbs rapidly across her red lacquered fingernails.

Finally she said, “Otis, I think you ought to tell me the truth.”

I held my breath. Did she suspect that in a way I was a cunt myself?

I said, “Dorcas, if there is something I haven't told you about out there at the lake, it's hidden from me. Let's be sweet and forget about it.”

She went on like she hadn't heard me. “I know my body is too long and top heavy. I might even be too black. My nose is too wide and flat, and my mouth is too wide, and my lips are too thick.

“Now you be sweet and agree with me. Tell the truth and admit you never thought I was even attractive, much less beautiful. Say it!

“I am no fool. I know when a woman that a man thinks is beautiful opens and offers herself as I did to you, he takes her on the spot or the goddamn dog foams at the mouth until he can get her to a bed, any bed. Let's get the hell out of here. I've got a headache.”

She drove me to the El station in silence. I got out and stood beside the car on the driver's side.

She looked up at me and said softly, “I'm sorry I lost my temper. You know this is the second time we have seen each other. I wonder if the second meeting that a man and woman have isn't really more crucial and important than the first and the last, and I wonder how often is it that the second is the last?”

She shot the Mercury away. I stood and watched it disappear down Sixty-third Street. Then I went up on the lonely El platform.

I felt like bawling when I looked down on the street. I saw lucky guys with their girls coming out of the joints hugging and kissing and going to a bed somewhere.

I
was disconsolate and preoccupied for a week with the fear that I had lost Dorcas. In Mama's presence, of course, I smiled and pretended that all was running smoothly with Dorcas. I didn't want her to have the satisfaction in knowing her dire prediction might be coming true.

Several times I started to call Dorcas at the funeral home where she and her father lived in an apartment on the second floor.

But because she had told me that she hadn't yet told her father about me because of his fondness for Ralph, her soldier suitor, I didn't risk calling and having her father answer the phone. And she told me her father had once practiced law, and I wasn't exactly aching to be quizzed by a pro about Dorcas and me.

By Saturday afternoon tension had pumped my chest tight with aching pressure, and freak Sally was prodding me to go in the street and get high.

Then like always when I got looped on gin, I'd go to Marion's pad on Lake Street and doll up like a sexy bitch and find some guy to break off with.

Marion was a red-haired, green-eyed white queen about twenty-five
whom I had first seen in the cafe on Madison Street where Carol had worked.

Marion dressed exclusively in drag and fabulous wigs and only her close friends knew that he wasn't a woman. He held a highly responsible position at Spiegel's mail-order house and wrote salable risqué stories and articles for magazines.

He preferred to be called Lucy, and he called me Tilly. I didn't object when I was guzzling gin and wiggling my round ass in drag borrowed from Lucy.

I had decided to get out of the flat just for a bit of fresh air (a casual capitulation to Sally) when the phone rang. Life was instantly beautiful again. It was Dorcas! She had missed me and wanted to see me. Should she pick me up? No, I told her. I'll be at the Forty-seventh Street El station at eight
P.M.

I left home right away so I could have time to visit with Soldier. He was in the community kitchen of his rooming house drinking whiskey with a pretty, high yellow woman in her early thirties. I was happy to see him clowning and cracking jokes like the jolly Soldier of old.

I went walking on Forty-seventh Street toward Cottage Grove Avenue killing time until eight
P.M.

At Evans Avenue, I think, I heard a wild chorus of ribald laugher and saw a small group of black men and women on the sidewalk ahead. They had their backs to me and apparently were enjoying immensely the funny antics of a drunk or perhaps, I thought, old man Casey, a colorful black trainer of chickens who performed hilariously comical routines with his feathered protégées on Southside streets.

I reached the excitement and peered through an opening in the spectators. It wasn't funny. It was a death struggle.

A short, muscular young guy wearing a soldier's dress khakis was sitting astride the belly of a middle-aged, dark brown-skinned man dressed in the uniform of the Chicago Police Department.

A glistening red rill on his close-cropped skull leaked blood down the side of the young guy's maniacal face. His powerful hands gripped the ends of the cop's necktie and steadily tightened the noose until the cop's protruding eyeballs oscillated madly and his purple tongue lapped his chin.

A man in the crowd shouted, “Croak him, buddy! Send that dirty motherfucker to the cemetery!”

I plucked at the sleeve of an old guy on a cane in front of me and said excitedly, “Mister! He's going to kill him! Why don't they stop him?”

He turned his seamed face toward me and said, “Son, that nigger gittin' kilt is Beeman. He busted black folks' heads and shot for nuthin' but heads and guts for years.

“He slipped up behind that soldier and busted his head for talking to a woman he's sweet on. Ain't nobody gonna stop Beeman from gittin' kilt, jes' like that Indian Joe up on Fifty-first Street.

“I don't feel nuthin' for Beeman, and other dirty treacherous niggers with badges killin' and cripplin' they own kind for the white man.”

I had to turn away because Beeman was unconscious on the sidewalk, and the GI was stomping Beeman's face into a mushy scarlet mask. And the joyful squeals of the women and the vulgar applause in the men's laughter rode eerily on the balmy May air as I fled the carnage.

I reached the El station twenty minutes late for my date with Dorcas. I saw the Mercury parked a few yards away. I went and found it unlocked. I got in and waited.

In less than five minutes I saw Dorcas leave the drugstore on the corner at Prairie Avenue and Forty-seventh Street.

I saw her lurch when she stepped off the curb. She stopped and looked down at the back of her foot or leg. I got out and went to her. She wasn't hurt, but she had broken off the high heel of her shoe.

She limped on one tiptoe to the car. She decided to go home and change her shoes. I volunteered to have coffee or something on Forty-seventh Street until she got back. She insisted that I go along.

She parked on State Street almost a half block from the funeral home. Shortly after, a tall, brown-skinned guy in a blue business suit came down the sidewalk with a short black guy from the direction of the funeral home behind me.

They stopped beside the car parked in front of the Mercury. They had an animated chat, and then they shook hands. The short guy got in the car and pulled away.

The tall guy started up the sidewalk toward me. I had switched my attention to an unlucky guy across the street fixing a flat tire whose jack buckled, dropping the rear of his car with a resounding whoomph.

So I was startled to hear a loud, officious voice blast my ear from the sidewalk side, “Well, who are you?”

I turned and looked full into the arrogant face of the tall guy bending over glaring at me through the open window frame.

I said snappishly, “Why?”

He sucked his front teeth noisily.

He swept his sleepy maroon eyes up and down State Street and said ponderously, “Because I am the . . . legally . . . registered owner of the vehicle in which you sit.”

Suddenly I knew who the pompous bastard was and why his eyes had swept State Street. He was Dorcas's ex-mouthpiece father, and he was cop happy. And he was getting thrills shooting me through hot grease.

I said, “My name is Otis, and I'm waiting for Dorcas, Mr. Reed.”

He snickered and said, “I would prefer your last name for the purpose of the moment. You do have one?”

He was rattling me. As a result, inadvertently, I kissed his black, lousy, middle-class ass.

I replied too quickly and too respectfully, “Yes, sir! It's Tilson, Mr. Reed.”

He screwed his face into puzzled agony and said archly, “We are not acquainted with any Tilsons. Where did you meet Miss Reed?”

I said with a mocking, sadiddy, middle crust nigger accent, “I met Dorcas . . . I saw Dorcas for the first time in the dining area of an apothecary on Garfield Boulevard.”

He sputtered, “You mean . . . are you implying she let you pick her up? And how do you justify your insolent persistence in referring to Miss Reed by her first name?”

I said nastily, “I'm telling you that I let Dorcas pick me up. I guess Dorcas introduced herself by her first name because she is not a phony and she was grateful.

“A pugilist waxed carnal insisted that Dorcas let him do an indecent act. I kicked him between the legs and took flight. Dorcas picked me up in this car, and we got acquainted. She's the sweetest and most beautiful girl I ever met.”

His eyes narrowed, and he looked cunning. I turned my head and looked out the rear window to see if Dorcas might be coming down the sidewalk to pull me out of the hot grease.

He said, “Miss Reed has to mind things until I get back. We have time to understand each other. Do you know about Ralph Duncan and his family?”

I was getting angry.

I said, “Dorcas told me about them.”

He snickered again and said, “He's going to be my son-in-law soon.”