Spider Kiss

Eleven

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 Nigrah…”

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 Nigrah…”

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 Nigrah…

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.

The façades had been ripped away.

This was the true face of the creatures that prowled Jungle York.

Shelly elbowed past the Colonel, stooped to one knee and lifted Stag’s shoulders. The boy was semiconscious, barely able to draw breath. “Colonel, help me get him on the sofa, he may have a concussion.”

Freeport came to them and bent from the knees, jacking the singer into his arms with a fluid movement. Without help he carried Stag to the big sofa and dumped him there. Then he went into the bathroom and Shelly could hear water running in the sink.

It had been an eventful, a revealing, five minutes.

In the bedroom, Shelly could hear the Colonel moving around, a drawer opening, then closing. A few minutes later Freeport emerged from the bedroom. He had changed his shirt, and it had taken time that Shelly had not realized was passing. A cigarette Shelly could not remember having lit was half-smoked between his lips. He felt confused and weary.

The Colonel pulled a chair up alongside the sofa and sat down, staring intently, searchingly at Stag Preston. The pale blue eyes swiveled up to Shelly. “Get some water from the bathroom, Shelly. I want him fully awake.”

With half the glass of water on the boy, and the other half in him, Stag came around sufficiently to register fear at the Colonel’s face so close to his own. He looks the way he looked that night in the Dixie Hotel in Louisville, Shelly mused, watching. Tight, scared, ready to eat the whole damned world before it can eat him.

Stag was Luther Sellers once more.

And Colonel Jack Freeport was himself again. The voice was controlled, the great mane of white hair had been recombed, the gloves had assiduously been pulled back on and the cuffs shot. Freeport leaned forward.

“If I knew what to say, precisely, to avoid what we have just come through, boy, I’d say it. But I don’t know what to say.” He waited.

Stag did not reply; he merely stared with malevolence. Freeport pursed his heavy lips and clasped his hands on his knees. “That girl’s manager came to see us. You knew that was why I sent for you, didn’t you? Answer me, boy, or I’ll have to slap you around again.”

Stag sneered and an unpleasant half-smile came to the corner of his mouth. “I knew. So what? That’s your problem; that’s why you got thirty percent of my contract—to take care of me.”

“Listen, Stag—” Shelly interrupted.

Freeport stopped him with a vague hand movement. “No, this is the time the boy and I have our talk, get matters right between us.”

“Stop callin’ me ‘boy!’ You know my name.”

The bright pyrite sheen of arrogance was coming back over Stag Preston’s face. He had been too long exposed to the deadly radiations of success, and it only took a booster to bring him back to his previous level of unbearableness.

“You listen to me now, boy. You listen to me very carefully, because I’m not going to mince words. Your flagrant transgressions were difficult enough to bear, as they came one after another. We’ve managed to pull you free each time, at considerable expense to ourselves, but this time you’ve endangered the entire operation. That girl you got pregnant— ”

“She ain’t a broad, for Chrissakes, she’s a nigger!” Stag started up, and caught the Colonel’s palm across his jaw. He fell back, the fear showing through for an instant; then it was washed, laved, drowned over with hatred.

Freeport’s voice was still soft, commanding. “That is just it, you unfortunate simpleton. She is a Nigrah, a member of a lower race, a person with black skin, and for that reason you could destroy us inside twenty-four hours. Not only yourself— for that would be little loss—but the entire structure of my holdings which, unfortunately, I have come to build around you. We are on the verge of a very important motion picture deal, involving your dubious services, and this would put a stamp of end to it instantly.

“Do I make myself clear?”

At the mention of movie contracts, Stag had tuned in more carefully. His ears almost went up in attention. He stared at Freeport, then swung his glance to Shelly for confirmation.

He got none. Shelly sat frozen in silence behind a lapis lazuli gaze. Freeport’s words about Trudy Quillan had been painful to him. He remembered all the little times he had side-stepped prejudice himself … all the words in school yards, all the jobs he had not gotten, all the restricted cabana clubs in Florida … and he was, oddly, hurt. Inside himself, he had never categorized Freeport that way, despite the man’s heritage, despite his obvious feelings about certain groups. Freeport had been above it, because he was a businessman too sharp to allow mere prejudice to stand in his way, because he was a member of the hip set that Shelly identified with, who might not like an individual, but who would never condemn a group in toto.

But Freeport was a bigot. A silent, perpetual bigot, as deadly as any other, though not as offensively obvious as—for instance—the Kemps had been that day in the bicycle shop. But he cared not a damn that Trudy Quillan was in pain. All he cared about was that her skin was black. It suddenly made a difference to Shelly.

The rot was even here, where he thought he was above it. The bigger they get doesn’t necessarily mean the less blighted they become. Stag looked at Trudy as a piece of tail, that was disgusting enough; he saw her as some sort of breed animal. But Freeport actually hated the girl because of race. She was more than an inconvenience—a white girl pregnant would have been that to him—she was an object of open hatred.

Stag found no confirmation in Shelly’s face.

It was as though Shelly had been tuned out.

“So this time, boy, we’re going to let you get out of the scrape yourself. I have no idea how much this Nigrah’s manager will take, but whatever it is, the money will come from you, for a change. Not us.” Freeport got up, pushed the chair back and walked to the door.

“I’m going to talk to the girl and Golightly. Keep him here, Shelly. I shall be back shortly.” He opened the door, paused for another look of absolute contempt at his talented Stag Preston, then walked out, pulling the door firmly closed behind him.

Shelly and Stag sat in silence.

The boy began rubbing his face, still crimson from the Colonel’s attentions. Blood had dried in a thin, arterial line down his chin. He tried to sit up on the sofa. Shelly shoved him back.

The boy glared at Shelly for a moment, then began chuckling. “C’mon, Shel-baby, don’t put me on the way The Man did. I was just rompin’ a little.”

Shelly hunched forward slightly. He put his face as close to Stag’s as the Colonel had. “You want to know something, Stag?”

“What?”

“You stink, kid. You stink on ice!”

Stag Preston leaped up. The words had been delivered by a mongoose about to strike its cobra. Such hatred. Such open loathing. Such realization of who and what Stag Preston really was. Not what he thought he was, but what he was really made of.

The singer stalked to the other side of the room, hands thrust deep into his pockets. He spun on Shelly and whatever innocence might have acted there was now gone.

“Who the hell you think you are? Who the hell you think you’re talkin’ to, guy? Maybe you don’t remember, but I’m the guy that’s been makin’ your pile for you, so you could ball that Carlene, so you could wear three-hundred-buck suits … so don’t get all smartass with me!”

Shelly stared. Blankly.

“If you think I’m such an s.o.b. why you been pushin’ me? What’s made you hang around here so long for? I’ll tell you why … because it’s loot, and you like a lot of that stuff, that’s why, you hypocritical bastard.”

“You mispronounced hypocritical,” Shelly murmured.

“Go do it to yourself, you leech! You been suckin’ thirty percent of my skin the longest while, and now you got the gall to come up and lean on me because I done took down a little dark meat. I guess you’ve poked the same place … what makes me such a criminal?”

Shelly stood up and approached the boy. It was obvious Stag could take him, even half coordinated as he was from the Colonel’s beating. “I’ll tell you why, you little hard-on. Because she isn’t a girl to you, she’s some kind of black plaything and it’s all right if she has a litter of pickaninnies, because the Great God Stag Preston needed a place to dump his load, and whatthehell, she’s only a jungle bunny, anyhow. That’s why you stink, you little bastard!

“All that guff you fed me about your old man and the dope and your mother and the orphanages … I figured any slob who went through that deserved a lot of breaks, but brother, you’ve used up all your turns. You can turn in your soul now, fella. You smell bad.” He turned to walk away and felt the hand on his shoulder only an instant before he was spun, and the fist drove into his stomach.

It was the only blow.

Shelly doubled, all air exhaling, and tumbled over onto the carpet, on his side. Stag stared down at him, then brought back one Italian loafer and kicked him solidly in the groin.

Pain groped for Shelly, found him, and for a moment he was certain he would faint. Above him he heard Stag mouthing words. “You high-talkin’ sonofabitch!” Stag snarled, “I’d tell you any damn thing to keep you on my side. That was crap just like you’re crap.

“My old man was like any other old man, and my old lady was too dumb to stop me from robbin’ her purse when I needed the dough to get away. I’d do anydamnthing to get away from them self-made, pious assholes, and you’d better know I’ll do the same to stay where I am. You just ain’t sharp enough, Shel-baby, to know when someone’s snowin’ the ass off you.”

The pain receded. There were greater pains. Shelly felt, all at once, like crying.

“And now that I’m big time, sucker, you can shove it. And if you don’t like it, you can sell your thirty percent and get the fuck away from me.”

Shelly stared up at the boy. He saw very clearly the face of the boy, not as he had deluded himself into thinking it looked, but as it really was. The face of the … the … creature he had helped create. He was stung and bled dry by his naiveté in actually believing what he had wanted to believe—that there were any sparks of decency in the boy. All at once he knew how Einstein must have felt, or Victor Frankenstein, or the obscure Chinese who had first invented gunpowder. He knew what it was to feel responsible for turning loose something hideous.

Check out? Forget the boy? Let him shift for himself? That was no longer possible. He was responsible. He had molded Stag out of inert matter, and now it was his job to stay handy, to mitigate the evil Stag could turn loose on others.

(And somewhere in him, the Sheldon Morgenstern who had himself prowled and eaten in Jungle York reminded him:

Your investment is at stake.

Carlene will leave you.

You’ve grown accustomed to the good life.

What will you do on your own … you aren’t a hot shot kid any more.

You aren’t your brother’s keeper.

But it was a voice from someone else, someone dying, who had occupied this Sheldon Morgenstern’s body with him. A voice from a life before Stag Preston had knocked him down and made him see the truth, unglossed with greed. He heard that voice.)

But he just lay there, watching the boy’s retreating back. Stag stopped at the door and turned. Everyone was making exit speeches these days.

“Take care of yourself, Shelly. See you later. I got a date with one of these Sands chorus girls. Get back to ya later, sweetheart.”

Then he was gone, and Shelly lay there enjoying his pain and his penance.