said, ‘She’s my girl. We’re on the way to break the news to him. Then we’re splitting. I’m gonna check out the afternoon plane schedules.’
Phil chuckled, ‘Bring me my piece, nigger. Did the ’ho give you claiming dough to cop a Forty One Hog that runs like a scalded dog?’
I said, ‘Look, Phil, I need your piece to brace that Nigger. Who’s selling the Hog? And what’s the bite?’
He said, ‘It’s my old Hog, and the bite is a measly grand to you, Pally. C’mon and cop it so you can ease in and cop the ’ho’s clothes and hit the road.’
I said, ‘Phil, you drunk? You think that nigger will let us ease in his crib like that? If he’s not there, he’ll be staked out for sure.’
He said, ‘He ain’t in town. I dropped the word in the street that you and the ’ho had split to Akron. I tailed him to the highway myself . . . get here, nigger, and take care of your business!’
I hung up woozy with relief.
Phil’s Forty One Fleetwood I bought was a black beauty. At a distance, it was almost as clean as his new Forty Six. We made a fast raid and copped Sue’s clothes. Late that night a rain storm struck at the edge of a town in Illinois. I was dozing on the seat beside her.
Suddenly she said, ‘Daddy, look!’
She pointed at a skeletal white man with a slicker draped across his gaunt shoulders, cape style. There was something eerie about him. He was standing motionless. His stark white face glowed in the storm. He looked like a statue of Count Dracula.
As she cruised the Caddie past him, she said excitedly, ‘That paddy gives me wild stinging vibes. You take the wheel when I pull over. I’m going back and shake him down. Daddy, he’s sweet and loaded. I feel it!’
She pulled to the curb two blocks away. She started to open the car door.
I said, ‘Sugarface, pass him up . . . don’t play for him. I got a helluva bad feeling nudging me about him.’
She sprang out of the car and slammed the door. I slid across the seat fast to open the door to physically stop her. I mean, that joker really turned me off. She turned twelve feet away. In an explosion of lightning, her dollface was radiant with stealing lust. She blew me a kiss and waggled ‘bye bye’ with her fingers. You know, like a little kid who is just going to the grocer on the corner.
I’ll never forget how I felt as I watched her tiny figure disappear, forever, in the storm. In the distance, I saw what looked like the tail lights of a pickup truck flash on like bloody orbs and disappear into the raging blackness.
For thirty-six hours, I didn’t shave, eat, or bathe. I searched everywhere. I called into the local police station.
I disguised my voice. You know, laced it with a Slavic accent, pitched down to a gutteral register to make it sound indigenous to the area. I reported that I had seen a nigger girl kidnapped into a pickup truck. I gave the description of the ghoul in the slicker. I hung up when asked my name. I went to the local newspaper office and bought a subscription to their rag. I gave Mama’s address in Milwaukee.
I was in a blind fugue of shock all the way home. I had no recollection of the trip. My room, and its mementos of my junior high school days were intact. I looked about it and guessed that Mama had preserved it as a kind of shrine to cushion her loneliness and guilt for her hots for that ’ho faced sonuvabitch long ago.
There on the wall, a faded blue felt banner. On the dresser top, a gleaming trophy I won for the hundred yard dash. There against the wall, a rickety Flexible Flyer sled. An eight by ten blow-up of me at five seated on the lap of a padded department store Santa Claus.
Holy Christ! . . . what a rack of torture she must have been on. Blaming herself for my terminal street poisoning. Suffering that I wasn’t that upright, silver tongued mouthpiece she’d dreamed me to be.
I got really blue and sad that fate had dealt us a black card from the bottom. I was torn down with that, and Sue to make it worse. I went to Mama’s bedroom. You know, to comfort her, to tell her I loved her, like Sue had begged me to do. Mama was on her knees praying for Sue before a homemade altar. What the hell could I do but get down on my knees beside her and pretend to pray?
At midnight, that first day, I unpacked Sue’s bags. I sat on the side of the brass four poster and opened her album of pictures. Ah!, there she was, barefoot in a rough cotton dress, squinting in the sun as she lovingly held a puppy against her cheek. A shot of her father, riding a mule, a black as midnight tiny guy. His face was seamed and ruined by stoop slavery in the cotton fields beneath the inferno sun.
Her octoroon mother, the Baton Rouge strumpet, appeared surprisingly beautiful and innocent in a white dress. The closet monster was posed with Sue’s porcelain skinned sister before the backdrop of the scabrous death barn watching a polka dot sow suckling piglets. Ah! Sue and her daughter, with Sue’s string bean Cajun husband, standing proudly in front of the gumbo greasy spoon they owned before the gorilla came Sue’s way and turned her out.
I closed the album and went to bed. I hadn’t closed my eyes all night when Mama called me for breakfast at eight. Two days later, the first paper from Illinois arrived. Sue had made news all right. Horrendous news! I uncontrollably jiggled the paper as I read the account of her end. The fiend she had played for was an escaped nut from an asylum for the criminally insane. He had taken her to an abandoned farm house. He had crucified her and tortured her to death with his teeth and a hunting knife.
Two teenagers, hunting rabbits out of season, and drawn to the presence of the fiend’s stolen pickup truck, had peeked through a window and saw her nailed to a wall. When the rollers showed, the fiend was in a drunken stupor on the floor beneath her corpse.
Mama and I flew to claim the orphan’s body. I can’t forget that sunny afternoon I walked into the morgue to identify her, that is what was left of her. The attendant pulled her out of the cooler bin. He jerked away a blood and filth pocked rubber sheet like she was dog meat. I gazed down at her and retched.
That inhuman cocksucker had hacked and scraped off her crow breast mane of shining hair that had leapt from her temples in spectacular, voluptuous waves. Her skull was criss-crossed and gouged with knife slashes. Her dollface was unrecognizable, except for the stable pony eyes staring blankly into mine. The cupid bow mouth had been lumped hideous from punches. Her teeth were bared in a macabre grin. Her body was measled with cigarette burns. Her honey dipped breasts were ragged stumps. The satin belly was disemboweled from her breast bone to pubic hair. Her fingers were missing and the butt of a cigarette protruded from her vulva. I staggered away, vomiting all the way to the sidewalk.
We buried Sue, that week, from Mama’s church. We got the location of Sue’s infant daughter’s foster home from Sue’s address book. Mama shipped Sue’s stuff to Carla.
In the limo, on the way from the cemetery, I told Mama about Sue’s plans and dreams to square up and open a restaurant to make a decent home for Carla, her daughter. Mama broke down and wailed like a crumbcrusher. Small wonder. Mama had lost her dream too, a billion tears ago.
Thirty years later, whenever I see a pygmy fox with indigo, velour skin and pony eyes, or see a shimmering mane of crow breast hair, or hear a smoky voice, I get a lump in my throat remembering Black Sue.
I tossed restlessly in the emperor-size bed in the Big Windy. The moon drenched
