Doom Fox (27 page)

Lucy says 'That's great!' as he scoots off Melvin's lap to his knees between Melvin's legs, sleeked and firmed by years of ruthless diet and conditioning on the basketball court.

Their swap-out sucking of each other is interrupted five minutes later by the chuck wagon with its rubber tires rumbling off the elevator from the first floor hospital kitchen.

They cling together, deep kiss before they disengage to speed-dress in white shoes and snowy starched linen uniforms. Melvin stands behind Lucy, squeezing his bottom as he brush flogs his red shoulder length mane before a mirror in his bunk cubicle in a corner of Melvin's large one room kitchenette/cell.

Melvin strolls away to pour a glass of papaya juice from a six foot gold refrigerator stocked with health foods. Then he flops down in a leather easy chair to get the early morning news on T.V. Lucy comes to glance occasionally at the screen as he quickly makes the bed, tongue brushes Melvin's mouth before he sways from the love nest to hurry down the corridor to dispense morning medication to the thirty-odd inmates on the ward.

Melvin is startled by the jangle of the phone on a table at his elbow. He picks up to the sonorous voice of the prison switchboard operator who connects him with the hungover slur of his boss and benefactor, elderly Doctor Miliken, the prison's chief medical official. 'Good morning Mel. But since I'm deprived of it by you know what I won't be in until noon.'

Melvin laughs. 'Good morning. I can dig it doc. Relax, I've got the snake pit covered.'

'Thank you friend!' the doctor exclaims feebly before they hang up.

Melvin rises from the chair, goes to stare out a lace curtained steel barred window at serpentine lines of grey clad cons crawling across the yard towards their work buildings. Other sparse lines of sick call cons, accompanied by blue clad guards, file out of cellhouses toward the hospital.

He stiffens as he hears the uneven gait of Sweeney's rubber soled feet, the racist and treacherous night guard, slap the parquet floor in the corridor outside his room on his way to the elevator. Melvin watches him scuttle to the yard below, dragging his right leg, his right hip maimed by an iron pipe wielded by a Black Muslim before he and other members of a goon squad had beaten the con to death several years before.

He waves at elfish Krute, the elderly closet fag warden, dapper in taupe moleskin suit, as he cuts roguish blue eyes up at Melvin before he strides into the administration building with super masculine gusto.

Melvin smiles as he remembers how he won his prison power base through bribes and nude freakouts with the warden behind his locked office door when he was the warden's runner at the start of his bit up until his emergency transfer to the hospital several years before, to assist alcohol hobbled Miliken with a rising glut of inmate patients. He stares at Joe Allen entering the hospital behind a long line of cons.

Melvin sticks a glassine bag of grass and a sheaf of 'C' notes into his socks. He goes to the examination room across the corridor lines with sick call cons on benches.

He examines throats, rectums, legs, arms, teeth. He passes out cough syrup, pills, salves and psycho placebos until he reaches Joe, purposely last in line. He listens to a stethoscope pressed against Joe's naked chest under the gimlet eyes of a hack on a bench across the hall.

'How's Reba and the family, Big Joe?' Melvin says pleasantly, only to regret the inquiry an instant later when Joe's heartbeat bombs in his ear.

'Lissen, Melvin, don't never let Reba come outta your jib. Get to your business point, niggah!' Joe intones in a raspy whisper.

'All right, Joe, be cool and get in the buff for a complete examination to cover our rap' Melvin says softly with an amused smile and mischievous eyes.

Joe strips off nude with a wary scowl, goes to lie prone on the steel table. Melvin loops a blood pressure sleeve about his left arm.

'I have a secret to share with you Joe. I'm going out of here Monday coming on a special parole' Melvin says as he studies the gauge reading. 'My attorneys arranged it at a private session of the Adult Authority Board. I received the news by telephone yesterday.'

'Melvin, you gotta be dreaming unless you done copped a miracle past the head D.A. in L.A. that's been nixing your parole every time you went to bat, along with the kind folks of that white man you wasted' Joe says doubtfully.

Melvin grins. 'No dream Joe, no miracle either. Chuck Haggar's only survivors, his wife and sons, were killed several months ago in a car crash on Pacific Coast Highway. My D.A. nemesis retired a year ago to France. Long bread and lawyers with political muscle finished turning the release trick for me, Joe.'

Joe says, 'You a lucky niggah, Melvin ... now, 'bout that bread you cracked in your kite?'

'The two grand is your fee for guarding Lucy against head Nazi Stregner and his gang for sixty days. And especially against rape!' Melvin says as he probes Joe's scrotum with jabs of his manicured finger tips.

Then he jabs Joe's slab of meat. He seizes and squeezes his bullish testes. Joe cringes, drums fists against his chest. A roundball buff, Melvin shapes a bitchy smile. He titters at the thrilly imagery of Reba's pink rimmed hoop under the slam dunks of the hammer-headed stuffer.

Joe punches his hand away, growls, 'I'm gonna beat all the bitch outta you, niggah, if you touch my swipe again ... now lissen, we ain't got no deal if I gotta get transferred up here in all these germs to look out for that fairy.'

Melvin says, 'I'll arrange to have Lucy transferred to the gym and to your cellhouse tier Monday, no later than Tuesday. Deal!?'

Joe gets to his feet. As he starts to dress he says 'It's a deal for three grand, Melvin.'

'Three grand!' Melvin exclaims.

'Yeah that's what I cracked. I go to the Board myself in sixty days. I could make them streets by Christmas. I ain't gonna take the risk of icing a Nazi guarding that punk for less'n three grand. Deal!?' Joe says as he buttons his shirt.

Melvin extends his hand. 'It's a deal.'

They step out of eyeshot of the hall hack momentarily for Joe to conceal his payoff grass and cash in his socks.

As they walk toward the door Joe says 'Melvin, we ain't never been nothin' 'cept cat and dog with one another from way back ...' Joe pauses at the doorway: looks to Melvin's eyes as he rumbles in a near whisper '... but like I was 'bout to say, you wasted them people and then come up a winner and still alive after fifteen years in the white folk's cold blooded joint ... well, I uh ... wanta say, since you a brother and just a niggah like me even with them big bucks, I gotta congratulate you, Melvin, and wish you stone good luck out in them streets.'

Melvin's green agate orbs mist as they shake hands. , 'Joe, that was nice to hear ... from you. Thank you ...
'

He pauses, sets up to needle with a perverse twinkle of his eyes. 'Joe, in appreciation I want to do something for you out there.'

Joe shakes his head. 'Naw Melvin, thanks. I'm hittin' the bricks myself 'fore long.'

'Oh come on Joe, there has to be something ... perhaps, with your permission, I could take roses and cheer, and of course any message of yours, to Reba.' Melvin says just before he recoils from Joe's mock furious face.

Joe steps back, hurls a lights-out right hook that he pulls just short of Melvin's jaw. He grins. 'Melvin, I know you glad that hook was hip you was just jivin' 'bout Reeb.'

'Oh yeah!' Melvin exclaims as he saucers his eyes as his favorite comedian does when using the line.

They step out into the liver spotted face of the day, hack alerted off his corridor bench by Joe's right hook by-play.

'C'mon Big Joe, and get your sick call pass stamped' the hack says over his starved shoulders as he turns away for his desk near the elevator with his shiny blue serge uniform flapping on his emaciated frame.

As Joe splits off from Melvin to follow, a corner of his eye snares the harsh face of a white con peering into the corridor through a glass window on the ward door. The bulldog face nearly deposits recognition in Joe's memory bank before it ducks from view. Joe follows Melvin past a barrage of mops swung by convict swampers to the ward door across the corridor. As Melvin opens it, Joe sees the dwarfish young peeper leap into his bed at the middle of the ward, grab up a magazine and pretend to be utterly engrossed in its pages.

'Say, Melvin, who is that half-pint con with the magazine?' Joe asks, to halt Melvin.

'He's fish, fresh out of quarantine ... a transfer from Atascadero. He came in from the print shop yesterday or the day before with intestinal flu. Why?' Melvin says as he stares at the con.

'He vibes me bogus. I almost made his ugly mug a minute ago spying through the glass' Joe says as he rummages his memory.

Melvin laughs. 'Him a hit man! Shit, I can handle that skinny punk if he gets down wrong. Besides, he's been searched, even his rectum. But Lucy and I will watch him closely.'

'Even while you sleepin', Melvin?' Joe says as he turns to go down the corridor to the day hack's desk.

Melvin follows for several paces, stage whispers from the side of his mouth, 'No need to, Joe. The ward is locked at night and only I have the key. Doc Miliken's rule. Even Sweeney, the screw, has to wake me up in an emergency.' Joe nods, eyes straight ahead, locked on the watching hack, as he goes to get his pass time stamped for passage back to his boxing coach duties in the gym.

That early evening, after lock-up and the count, Joe and Percy throw a grass party. Each alternately posts himself at the cell bars, with a sliver of mirror, to monitor the tier. This to alert the smoker to guard rounds while he repeatedly flushes the john to suck away the smoke as he exhales it into the open top of a newspaper cone covering the john hole.

Spent, after a gut tickling roundelay of free world vignettes and dirty jokes, they luxuriate on their bunks in the rose glowed transport of the high grade pot when the cellhouse lights extinguish at ten. Joe, on his top bunk, feels a rhythmic vibration from Percy's bunk.

'How you feelin' Pops?' Joe whispers.

'Like a lucky lollipop gittin' sucked off by a Chinese doll in Red Joyce's 'ho house 'til ya snatched me back offa them streets ... now please nigguh, dummy up!'

Joe chuckles, closes his eyes to an instant vision of Reba's magnified sex snare as faithful Lady Five Fingers strokes into action.

Just before dawn, Sweeney, the hospital night hack and racist ally of the prison's Nazi mob, smiles as an amber light flashes from ward bed nineteen on a board beside his desk. He gets to his feet, dragging his crippled right leg. He goes to carefully open Melvin's kitchenette door. Sweeney eases across the room. He goes around a hand painted silk screen, stares at the sleeping couple embraced on the bed.

Melvin's face is serene. He is unaware that mere hours before several thousand of Chuck Haggar's outraged V.F.W. buddies, tipped off to Melvin's imminent release, had forced an emergency meeting of the parole board to rescind Melvin's parole, 'for future consideration' against the livid opposition of Melvin's brace of big buck fixers.

Too bad about that fucking nigger loving kid, Sweeney thinks, as he stares at Lucy's face on Melvin's chest. But further remorse is routed an instant later as he reminds himself that he has been prepaid five bills and the good will of the feared Nazi cons to play his role in the hit scenario.

After an eye-sweep of counter tops he takes the ward key from the pocket of Melvin's trousers on the foot of the bed. His giant frame quivers with excitement as he scuttles from the kitchenette to the ward door. He recoils, startled by the fiery blue eyes of the grinning assassin staring ghoulishly at him through the darkened door glass. Sweeney averts his eyes as he keys open the spring lock, turns quickly away from the apparition to replace the key in Melvin's trouser pocket. Then he goes to the john at the end of the corridor.

The hit con stuffs a wad of toilet tissue against the lock to jam it. He slips off his gown before he steps out into the corridor. A razor sharp dagger, pre-stashed by a Nazi electrician in the ward two days before, gleams wickedly in his rubber gloved fish as he darts down the corridor to Melvin's door.

He steps inside, shuts the door. He pads his bare feet to bedside. He locks eyes, for an instant, with young Saul and Mai Ling Sternberg smiling warmly at him from a wedding picture on a bedside nightstand. Pre-dawn light filters through the peach window curtains. It softens the planes of Melvin's hard con face, magically lifts it to the dazzling comeliness that lubricated slews of black ghetto foxes long ago.

The hitter leans in close to the bed. He shakes in a psycho frenzy of excitement and hatred as he stabs the dagger to the hilt into Lucy's ear. Lucy shivers. He hammers the blade handle horizontally with the heel of his hand as Lucy convulses, gouts brain blood, dies on Melvin's chest.

Melvin stirs as the killer jerks the dagger from Lucy’s butchered brain. Melvin's big hazel eyes flash open. He throws up a defensive palm too late to parry the violent plunge of the dagger into an eye socket. Melvin dies with a mighty sigh that spews the killer with blood.

He slashes his victims' throats from earlobe to earlobe, mincemeats Melvin's crotch before he dashes away past the ward door to the swamper's mop and broom closet door. He enters it, wipes the blade on a hanging mop head. He throws the blade and bloody rubber gloves behind bottles of cleaning agents on a shelf. He hastily scrubs his blood splattered body and hair at a sink with cleaning rags and strong detergent before he steps out into the corridor. He gives Sweeney, emerging from the john, the A.O.K. sign with a looped index finger before he enters the ward and removes the wad of paper that lets the door lock behind him.

He slips into his gown. As he goes to his bed, he vainly eye-sweeps the beds for a wakeful con in the bleak light of breaking dawn. He climbs into his bunk, lights a cigarette. Assassin rapture trembles him as he relives, gloats over, the awful artistry of the murders. He grins, certain that he will not be among the suspect thirty-odd swampers, typists and other hospital workers dormed in the building after the corpses are discovered by Sweeney just before he goes off shift.