After all, she thought, gazing out the window as the tree-lined streets of Green Valley flashed by, once I get some time by myself to pull myself together, there’s always the possibility ofparole. A cloud of dust from a back loader drifted across the road. Madison Feldon smiled.
Crip
by Preston L. Allen
Nellis
They called him Crip, and you could find him at night seated on his throne outside the Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club.
He wore a mustard-colored suit and a ruffled party shirt. His round-eyed shades were mustard-tinted, and his narrow-brimmed hat was mustard too. He carried a gold-tipped cane. But he was a nobody, just a big, ugly coal-black man with a twisted face and a brain that divided the world into absolutes. Black and white. Right and wrong. Loyal and disloyal. What he like and what he don’t like.
He was not exactly a bouncer, but he was. He was not exactly a valet/bodyguard, but he was. He was not exactly associated with the Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club, but he was. What he was, was a man with a face so ugly that the Gold Man himself found him useful and kept him around for special assignments.
Usually he just sat outside the entrance with his hat and his cane in his lap, keeping watch over things. Making sure the college boys didn’t start any trouble when you turned them away for being underage. Making sure the flyboys from Nellis Air Force Base weren’t too drunk already before they went in. Making sure nobody tried too hard to put the moves on Candy Apple, the pretty little thing who checked IDs and collected cover at the door. Yeah, there was a security guard out there, little Josh Ho the Hawaiian, all decked out in his black-on-black uniform — but everybody knew the real power was the Mustard Man. Crip never said much. He never had to. He just had to stand up and walk over to you. He loomed well over six-foot-five — and he had to be pushing three hundred pounds. The twisted, scarred face. The unsettling mustard tints. If he told you, “Get to steppin’,” then you did, no matter how drunk you were pretending to be.
He had a work ethic that was admirable. He never called in sick. He never caught a cold. He never took a night off. The only time you didn’t see him on his throne was when he went to take a leak or refill his drink. Bourbon on the rocks, with not too many rocks. When he wasn’t in that chair it signaled trouble for somebody, big trouble, because the Gold Man had summoned his Mustard Man upstairs.
So that night he left his throne and went upstairs, where Snake told him, “Gold Man wants you to babysit.”
Crip nodded and went into the nursery. Crip was surprised to find an actual child sitting there, because it was not really a nursery. It was where they held you and sometimes worked you over to make an example of you. He took his seat next to the child. She didn’t look like trouble, so he relaxed and rested his cane and hat in his lap, and waited for the Gold Man’s door to open.
Through the walls, he heard the Gold Man say, “Her? Don’t worry about her. She’s okay. For now. It’s you that you should worry about.”
And the nursery door swung open. A beet-red face, the child’s father, peeped in. Got a good look at his precious little one sitting next to the big mustard suit. That black skin. That twisted face. Then the door closed. Through the walls, Crip could hear Snake’s cruel laughter. Then he heard the Gold Man laying down the terms. The other voice, the sobbing voice, that was the girl’s father.
The little girl said, “How’d you get so black? I’ve never seen anybody so black.”
“Huh?”
He looked down at her. Usually he tried not to look at them, unless they seemed like trouble. He looked down at her, and she was staring up at him as though she expected an answer. Well, little blond-haired, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked child, one day I took a paint brush and dipped it in a big can of black and slapped some more on my face because I didn’t think I had enough problems already. Instead of answering, he scowled at her, trying to scare her, but she kept staring at him until he turned away.
Through the walls came, “Scumbag. Degenerate. You piece of shit. I want my money. I want my money or I will do bad things to you. Very bad things.”
The little girl said, “I like the color of your suit, though.
It’s pretty. Where’d you get it from?”
Hand tailored. A gift from the Gold Man. Got three more just like it at home. One of them’s double breasted. One of them’s got tails. One of them’s got a matching vest. Got an image to uphold. I am Crip, the Mustard Man. He felt something on his knee. The little girl’s hand. He glanced at her. Her smile was gone. Tears were rolling out of her eyes, down her cheeks into the lacy collar of her nightgown. The kid was probably in bed dreaming about sugar plum fairies when Snake and Radney and Goggles went to collect her and her old man. The kid was leaking tears, but she was quiet about it — just a sniffle here and there. A brave little girl she was for eight or seven.
The Gold Man’s voice: “If I don’t get my money, I’m gonna lose my temper. I haven’t lost my temper yet but I will.”
“The payment plan,” the father sobbed. “I’ll stay on the payment plan this time, I swear it.”
“You’ll stay on the payment plan, you’d better. Five hundred every five days.”
“Ohmygod. God. God.”
“Five hundred every five days, and you don’t owe me seven grand anymore. Now you owe me ten.”
“Ohmygod. God. My daughter.”
“I’m done talking to you now. Snake, Radney, show this bum the door.”
“My little girl—”
“Show it to him hard.”
The little girl had her hand in his lap and tears in her eyes and he took her hands in both of his and said to her, “I painted it on.”
She sniffled, “Painted what?”
“I painted on an extra coat of black.”
She smiled. “You can’t paint yourself. You’re lying. People are born with skin.”
“And I grew the suit from pumpkin seeds.”
She was smiling, sniffing back sobs. “No way. That’s silly. You can’t grow suits from pumpkin seeds. You buy suits in a department store.”
He winked at her with his twisted face. He made his bug eye jump in the socket to spook her. The little girl wasn’t afraid of it at all. She was holding his hand when Goggles came through the door and called him over, whispered to him: “Gold Man says to pack her up.”
“What do I know about kids? I never done a kid before.”
“Pack her up is what he said.”
“What do they eat? What do they drink? Kid’ll end up dead living with me. Do they drink bourbon? All I got is bourbon.”
“With a father like what she’s got, this one’ll probably end up dead anyway. He’s into us for a lot of dough. He’s in over his head.”
Crip looked over at the little girl in the cotton nightgown and she looked back at him, rubbing the redness out of her nose with her little hands. He said to Goggles, “Well, I’ll figure it out. It can’t be that hard. We was all kids once, right?”
All night he thought about the kid. At 5 in the morning, things had slowed down enough for him to get off the throne and head on home. He went upstairs to collect her. She had fallen asleep in the chair. Her hands and feet were bound, and she had duct tape over her mouth. There was no need for that, but the Gold Man was trying to send a message. This is not kid’s play. People could get hurt. The stripper who had been assigned to watch her was snoring in the other chair.