Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

At the same moment Colonel Jack Freeport was dripping the sweet honey of future wealth on Shelly Morgenstern, elsewhere in Las Vegas, Stag Preston was making merry.

Or to be more specific, Trudy.

Naked, Trudy Quillan was even more appealing than clothed. At sixteen her young, hard body was as voluptuously developed as that of a nineteen-year-old’s; her dark eyes wide, trusting, capable of being filled to moistness with passion newly-found and, most of all, love.

The object of her love, Stag Preston, was staring down at her naked form with horror, disbelief and anger. “You are what ?” he was saying, as the Colonel and Shelly planned his future.

“I’m gonna have a baby,” Trudy said again, not quite understanding how her lover man could fail to understand the meaning of the word pregnant .

It meant swelling all up with a little child and going to the hospital and then Stag and Trudy would be Momma and Poppa and even if she had never had a Momma and a Poppa, as far back as she could remember, at least her baby would have a Momma and a Poppa and wouldn’t that just be marvy!

“ Jee zus Chrah st!” Stag howled in pain, falling back suddenly into his Kentucky speech-patterns. “Oh, this is just swell !” He hit the side of his hand and turned away from her, leaving her ready young body waiting, empty.

Stag turned away and stared at the air-conditioner for some time. Trudy lay silently on the bed, watching him. She was confused; his attitude had altered so abruptly from anxiousness and energy as he was about to join her, that she could not understand him now.

Stag cursed foully, softly, effectively.

“Well, you can just forget about it,” he said, spinning on her. “Just forget it altogether!”

Trudy stared up without speaking. He didn’t mean…

“I got a—”

“Don’t say it—”

“—career to protect and I ain’t—”

“—please don’t say it, Stag—”

“—goin’ to louse it up marryin’ no damn—”

“—I LOVE YOU! Don’t you say that to me … I didn’t do it … you did it, now you better—”

“—well, just kiss off kid because this is it ! Now g’wan, you enjoyed it as much as me, so g’wan, get out of here, and don’t plan to give me no trouble, because I’ve got influence.”

Trudy leaped up and dressed with supple, quick movements. Somehow, the sight of her in full skirt, shirtwaist and flats did not equate with her announcement of imminent motherhood. She closed the door behind her softly, but firmly.

Twenty minutes later, the manager who owned ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of pure Trudy Quillan, an ex-fight manager named Horace Golightly, banged— without announcement—on the door to Freeport’s suite.

Horace Golightly was a misnomer. Horace could no more Golightly than the Budweiser Clydesdales at full tilt.

When Shelly opened the door, Golightly stomped through—a short man inclined toward velvet vests and Tyrolean hats—and brought up short before Freeport. The Colonel was still perched atop the bar stool, sipping at his Pimm’s Cup. His face was a battleground of uncertain emotions. He was undecided whether to be annoyed at Golightly’s appearance, pleased at least superficially by a business acquaintance’s attentions, or overflowing with joy because of private good news.

He fell back on the time-honored demeanor of the Southern gentry:

Open hostility.

“Sir, what are you doing?”

Golightly skimmed the Tyrolean hat with its alpenstock feather onto the marble-topped end table and took up a heroic stance before the Colonel. “I’m here to see justice done, Colonel, that’s what I’m doing here!” His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a sealed barrel, hollow, resounding, but entirely wooden.

Freeport set down the drink with a snap of the wrist. He slid off the stool and approached Golightly. The manager moved back a pace. “What exactly, sir, are you blathering about?”

“Justice, Colonel, that’s all. Just a little common, decent justice, the kind one man expects from a fellow man, the kind—”

“ Golightly !" Shelly said, cutting off the rotund manager’s ramblings, “get your mouth out of gear and just tell us what you’re gibbering about!”

“Stag Preston, Mr. Morgenstern. That is what I’m talking about.” Shelly looked up at the ceiling with exasperation. He mumbled something to himself that sounded vaguely like The man is deranged ! and rotated his hands in a go-on-and-make-your-point gesture. Golightly summarized quickly: “I’ve stood back and watched that boy of yours carry on pretty shockingly, and haven’t said anything, because it wasn’t my business, but when he gets one of my clients in trouble and refuses to marry her, then I figure it’s about time I sa—”

“Aaaah!” Shelly shrieked, clutching his head. “No! No, you’re putting me on, Golightly, you’re making a giggle, that’s it, that’s what it is, tell me that’s what it is!” He reached out and grasped Golightly by his lapels, dragging him forward. “Talk, you greasy little gozler … talk, and talk straight!”

“Trudy Quillan … Trudy … he’s got her, he’s got her in a family w-w-way … stop shaking me!”

Shelly released the lapels and slumped back against the wall, stunned. “You’re kidding.”

The Colonel, for the first time since Shelly had known him, seemed inwardly disheveled. “Mr. Golightly, this is not funny. If this is some sort of prank, sir … if you’re trying to get that girl a more formidable place on the tour … if you’re trying to hold us up for…”

Shelly cut him off, without a glance. “Golightly, this is on the level? You’re not kidding?”

The manager related the story as Trudy Quillan had told him, then launched into a fierce diatribe against young boys with too much activity in their sex glands, too much money, too big an estimate of themselves and too much success.

Shelly did not listen. His mind was whirling. After trying to keep Stag out of trouble, and deluding himself that he had done precisely that … this !

“Well, it’s a simple matter, Shelly,” the Colonel said. “If this is true, and—” he aimed a finger at Golightly, “we intend to have our physician assure us it is as you represent it, sir, then we merely make a settlement on this young girl, this— what’s her name, Shelly?”

“Trudy Quillan,” Shelly said in a small voice.

“Yes, Trudy Quillan. We make a settlement on her, let her have done what must be done, and we’re through with it. It’s a cursed business, of course, but nothing serious. Every hot-blooded young man gets at least one girl in trouble before he’s married. Ha ha.”

Shelly heard the hollow laugh and answered it with one of his own. “Yeah. Ha ha. But not every prominent, talented, apple-cheeked, red-blooded All-American boy, free white and over puberty knocks up a Black girl.

“Chew on that one awhile!”

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.