Mama Black Widow (28 page)

The needles of the prickly water gave me a warm glow, and
I felt an encouraging, flickering pull in my balls when Dorcas soaped my crotch.

I lay in bed beside her switch-sucking and brutally gnawing the erected black cherries, and rapidly stiff fingering into the melon red slash in her fat, jet bush. She was writhing sensuously, and her guttural groaning was laced with a sharp whining high note of joyful pain.

I raised my eyes and looked up at her contorted face.

I thought,
She's savagely beautiful, like an African warrior in his death throes. And a tiger is going to conquer her—ME!

And with that solitary, magical thought, I felt myself erecting gloriously—HARD!

I uttered an ecstatic sob as I moved to mount her. I was going to spear into and master her crimson cunt and discover my eternal manhood in its pungent fire.

I was raising myself on an elbow and swinging a leg across to top her when she squeezed my spear and suddenly rolled over on me—pressing her palms down on my chest and pinning my shoulders to the bed like a vanquished wrestler.

She mounted me in a squatting position over my crotch and guided my quickly fading shaft into her. We stared into each other's eyes as she frantically tried to stuff the shriveled limpness inside her.

She said helplessly, “Did I do something wrong?”

I was drained of imagination, hope and reason. I was a pathetic dwarf trapped beneath a clumsy colossus with my manhood imprisoned forever in the unreachable depths of her unconquerable bloodred cunt.

Humiliation was strangling me, and rage was poisoning me.

I said harshly, “Stop pulling on my thing. It won't get hard any more. I feel terrible.”

She flinched and said, “Don't get panicky and nasty. And please don't feel terrible. I'll make it hard again.”

I said, “I had a wonderful hard-on, and you killed it. I'll never forgive you for that.”

She laughed nervously and said mockingly, “Sweetheart, don't be that square. Your little ‘pee-pee' will get hard at least once more before you die.”

I blurted out, “Not for you it won't. You're rough and clumsy like a man. I don't have any feeling for you. You're burly. Maybe it would have been proper to carry me across the threshold when you got the idea.”

She squeezed her face between her palms and shuddered from the raw shock of my stupidity. She stared at me with big stricken eyes. She moved her lips, but she didn't speak. She kept looking at me and cocking her head from one side to the other like an inquisitive puppy trying to solve the riddle of a strange object.

I said, “You're mashing the shit out of me.”

She rolled off me and stood at the side of the bed looking down at me piteously.

She shook her head and almost whispered, “Otis, you were only seventeen like your mother told me. Poor little fella. You need to grow up. I thought I loved you, but I am through with you forever. I was foolish to call you after that experience at the lake. You're not well. Get help, Otis. You're in trouble.”

She turned and gathered up her clothes and went to the bathroom.

I lay there hearing the mild roar of the shower. I felt a pang of remorse for my rage. I remembered how lovingly she had bathed me.

She came out of the bathroom fully dressed and with a serene face. She went straight to the door without so much as a glance in my direction. She opened the door. She paused and looked back at me.

She said in a soft voice, “Otis, do you have carfare to get home?”

I snapped, “Don't worry about me. I'll get home.”

She stood there idly twisting the doorknob, scrutinizing me with misty intense eyes like she was going on a long lonesome journey and was engraving my image on her brain to cherish along the way.

The love in her eyes pierced my soul and made me ashamed of my cruelty. I lowered my eyes so she couldn't see my misery.
There was utter silence. I heard her draw a deep breath and exhale. I looked up.

She smiled wryly and said softly, “Bye now, Doll Fella. And the very best of luck always.”

I mumbled, “Good-bye, Dorcas. The same for you.”

The door shut, and she was gone.

I lay there numbly, staring stupidly at the ceiling. Then it hit me. My precious, irreplaceable Dorcas was gone. I leaped from the bed, raced to the window and jerked it up. I stuck my head out and looked down on Sixtieth Street. The red Mercury was already pulling away toward South Parkway.

I shouted, “Dorcas! Dorcas, come back!”

But the raucous wind muffled the sound of my voice, and the red Mercury disappeared.

Pitifully, inanely, I lay my head on the sill and to the blank horror of the lonely street blubbered, “Dorcas, Baby, forgive me. How could you expect a little cotton-picking nigger from Mississippi to learn right away how to treat a classy lady who wears gloves even in the summer time? You're perfect, tender, beautiful, and I love you. I love you. Come back. I need you, Dorcas. Come back and save me.”

I
n a haze of grief, I dressed and left the hotel. I walked several miles through the chill late-August night before taking a streetcar home.

Two days later I had Lucy call the funeral home for Dorcas. An employee told Lucy that Dorcas was out of town indefinitely. I figured that she had gone to one of the coasts to get away from me and to wait for Ralph to be mustered out of the service.

I missed Dorcas as much as I had Carol. My days were spent jumping hopefully to answer the door and telephone. But it was never a telegram or a call from Dorcas. My sleep was riddled with nightmares.

Mama saw that I was distraught and drinking quite heavily, and she knew it was because of Dorcas. I never told her the real reason Dorcas ended our affair. I lied and said Dorcas's father had broken us up.

I had struggled successfully against going wild and picking up some guy to use me like a woman. I guess I had that strength because all hope wasn't dead that Dorcas would get in touch with me and give me another chance.

I was reading a black paper in early October when I saw what I
had dreaded. It was the inevitable photograph. Ralph Duncan was guiding Dorcas's hand as she cut into the wedding cake. The accompanying story said they were to honeymoon in the Bahamas, after which the groom was to take an executive position in a new branch of the elder Duncan's insurance firm in the East.

Fifteen minutes later I was walking out of the flat. I had one purpose: get a gut full of gin, fast.

I drank in a skid row bar on Madison Street where the price and the quality of the poison was rock bottom. I had drunk the sharp edges off Dorcas's marriage and had lit a cigar when I noticed the clock on the wall read seven
P.M.

I called Lucy and told her I was coming over to get glamorous. At nine
P.M.
I walked in and sat at the bar of Tony Carlo's Music Box, on the Southside at Sixty-third Street and South Parkway Boulevard.

I checked my makeup in the compact mirror. My small sexy mouth was moist and red with lipstick, and my tip-tilted nose and slightly almond-shaped hazel eyes gave my satiny yellow face a pixielike cuteness.

I was resplendent in a fitted sky blue Lillie Anne woolen suit trimmed lavishly in white fox, a blue velvet purse and shoes and sheer indigo-shaded hose. A white pillbox hat sparkled atop the silky shoulder-length auburn wig. And, of course, I wore chic, short white gloves on my delicate hands.

An expensively dressed middle-aged guy left his stool at the end of the bar and came quickly to stand beside me. He sported fiery diamonds and flashed an obese bankroll when he peeled off a fifty to pay the bartender for my Tom Collins and his double Scotch. I fumbled in my purse.

I smiled demurely and said, “Thank you.”

He stuffed his bale of money into his inside coat pocket and poked out his skinny chest.

He said thickly, “Miss Pretty, I ain't done nothing for you yet. You heard of me? I'm Cadillac Thompson. Who are you?”

I said, “Tilli Jones.”

He dumped the double shot past the gaudy dazzle of his gold teeth.

He nodded toward his change from the fifty on the bar and put his hand on my knee and said, “Pick it up. It's yours.”

I shook my head. “Why? For what?” I asked.

He said, “I don't blow no time courting and jiving and bullshitting even a beautiful young bitch like you. Pick it up, girl, and go get in that black Cadillac up the street. I'm gonna' take you to the Southway Hotel. I know a tender young bitch like you ain't never had her cunt and her asshole sucked at the same time. Don't worry, I'm gonna' sweeten that chump change with a C note, and this!”

He popped open his cavernous mouth and lashed out the longest, widest, reddest tongue I'd ever seen—except on a cow.

I was about to tell him I was married and couldn't play, when the elderly yellow-skinned bartender, while frantically wiping the bar in front of us, said from the corner of his mouth, “Goddamnit, Cadillac, raise. You gonna' get this young lady slaughtered. Charlotte is in the joint watching you freaking off!”

Cadillac jumped like he had been shot and scurried away to the john in the rear of the joint. The bartender started to say something to me, but some guy banging his glass against the log pulled him away.

I sat trembling on the stool as I tried to spot homicidal Charlotte in the mirror behind the bar. I saw a tall, muscular woman with a tense black face striding angrily from the front of the joint straight toward me.

She stopped and stood behind me. I watched in the mirror as she sneeringly looked me over. Then she moved to the bar beside me and started picking up Cadillac's change from the fifty-dollar bill.

She said in a venomous voice without looking at me, “You motherfucking shit-colored bitch. You know who I am?”

I said, “No, lady . . . I don't.”

I spun my legs to get off the stool on the other side. My back
was turned to her. A sudden pressure in my side cut off my breath. I looked down over my shoulder. Charlotte was pressing an ice pick against my side.

I looked into her wild eyes and said pleadingly, “I haven't done anything. Please . . . Don't do it!”

She laughed and pushed harder. I saw the bartender coming toward us.

She shoved her face close to mine and gritted, “You been fucking my man a long time, haven't you, whore?”

I gasped, “Lady, I'm a stranger. I never saw him before tonight.”

She said, “You lying, half-white bitch. I think I'll waste you on GP.”

I was at the point of blurting out that I was in drag and could prove I was the possessor of a penis when the bartender leaned across the bar and shouted, “Jesus Christ, Charlotte, are you out of your mind? This young lady is nothing to Cadillac. He cut into her and went into his routine. Look at her. Why the hell would she want Cadillac? Besides, she just got in town and she's a friend of mine. Now lay off.”

She frowned and looked rapidly from him to me. She slipped the ice pick up her coat sleeve, threw her head back and laughed loudly and long.

She wiped tears from her eyes with her sleeve and said, “Honey, I was just jiving. I wasn't going to do you no harm. You sure looked comical, girl. Mr. Henderson, give her a drink on me.”

I said quickly, “No, thank you, Mrs. Cadillac . . . I mean . . . Thompson.”

I went to the ladies' john. I came out and as I passed the men's john, I saw Cadillac peeping out through the narrowly cracked door.

He stage whispered, “She still out there?”

I ignored him and stopped at the bar when I noticed Charlotte had gone. I gave Mister Henderson a five-dollar bill and a big warm kiss. He insisted that I have a drink on him. I gulped down a double gin and went to the street.

I started down the sidewalk toward the corner. I stopped and cut across the street. Charlotte had a rapidly growing audience watching her perform against a black Cadillac. She had flattened all four tires, and apparently had sprung the lock on the Cadillac's gaping trunk lid.

She had taken off her topcoat and smashed out every one of the Caddie's windows and started to demolish the form and shape of the battered car with Herculean swings of a heavy bumper jack.

Wary of her spotting me and switching targets, I skulked through the El platform shadows to the safety of a jitney cab going north on South Parkway Boulevard. I got off at Fifth-fifth Street and went into the Hurricane Lounge.

I sat at the bar drinking Tom Collins and thrilling to my toes at the way young guys kept pestering me and whispering lewd somethings in my ear.

But none of them really appealed to me enough so I could reveal my secret and risk instant and loud-mouthed exposure in the bar. And on the other hand, a young guy could be dangerous when put in a sexual cross like taking a pretty girl to a room and discovering he had been tricked by a stud.

Coming back from the ladies' restroom, I passed a booth and thought the back of a brown-skinned guy's head was familiar. But I was too looped to remember to look at his face when I sat at the bar.

I was making eyes at a handsome black guy in his thirties down the bar when somebody bit the side of my neck. I turned angrily like a lady to tongue-lash the culprit. I smiled instead.

It was cute brown-skin Ray whose party I had gone to the day I met Dorcas. And he wasn't slobbery drunk like then, just high.

The bartender brought my change from a ten-dollar bill. I opened my purse and pushed the bills into a coin purse bulging with close to a hundred dollars in tens and twenties. I noticed that Ray's eyes lingered inside my purse, but I was high and glad to see him, so I promptly forgot about it.

He looked me up and down and said breathlessly, “Damn! I
didn't know you went all out like this. You look like a sure enough pretty bitch. Shit, you look like an ice-cream cone to me. You dig?

“I've been dreaming about that dime-sized round eye since I first dug your fabulous yellow butt in the shower at school. You hip to it? Now take this key to the blue convertible Chevy out front and wait for me.”