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huskily, 'Cazzie, I've enjoyed you very much this evening ... perhaps too much ... call me.'
    She flees the car and dashes up her walk, a scarlet sprite luminous in the starlight. He watches her tipsily fumble her key in the lock and blow a kiss before she enters the front door of the house. He drives happily away for his Malibu home.
     
    Joe Allen Senior quietly keys into the Allen living room, glances at snoring Zenobia seated on the horsehair sofa, feet still immersed in the bucket of Epsom Salts water. He removes his shoes, tucks them beneath an arm, goes up the stairway to Joe Junior's vacant bedroom.
    He steps across the hall into his bedroom. The walls and dresser top are covered with rare posters and photographs of his idol, Jack Johnson. He gazes reverently for a moment at a mirror polished brass bound Bible that sits enshrined on a gold satin pillow on the dresser top. Beside it sits a bust portrait of his beloved, spit image, lynched, preacher father. He undresses, liniments his aching knees before he puts on his favorite lounge ensemble of lavender pajamas, robe and bedroom slippers. He returns to a living room chair near a front window to look out for Joe Junior.
    He shifts his eyes to Zenobia, cruelly spotlighted in a kleig of street lamp. He compares her jowly face with Marguerite's taut facial planes, Marguerite's pearly dazzle of teeth with Zenobia's snuff-browned teeth rotted and jagged in her agape mouth oozing snuff spittle at its corners.
    He scans, compares the cables of varicose veins on Zenobia's tree trunk limbs with the smooth sleek legs and thighs of Marguerite, Zenobia's pendulous breast globs with the girlish jut of Marguerite's confection peaks. He stares, compares Zenobia's ballooned belly deformed by soul food suet with the sexy concavity of Marguerite's fashion model waist.
    He sighs, shakes his head. How could it happen? Where did Zenobia's cute face and pulse lashing figure go, the years, his own youth? He shudders and is panged by pity for himself, for her. He goes across the carpet, pauses to stare at her shambled face. He feels only sterile affection for his faithful, cantankerous, broken old doll as he goes past her to the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee.
    In the feeble glow of the kitchen night light he gazes at his lean six-three frame magnified into a gigantic ceiling high shadow on the wall above the gas stove. He thinks that only in Marguerite's presence does he feel himself so heroically magnified. His ancient Zulu Maiden, Dutch Slaver roots are revealed dramatically in the blue flare of flame beneath the coffee pot that flickers his square cast, sensual lipped Afro visage. Red highlights glint his near silky hair.
    He stares at the gas flame, remembers long ago festive flame: Succulent odors from a sharecropper's barbecue in celebration of the end of World War One waft into a boxcar. He sees himself leap off a freight train into heavy brush outside Macon, Georgia. He sees himself, a half-starved bedraggled murder fugitive from the chain gang, sneak into a sharecropper cabin on a knoll overlooking a frenetic scene.
    Sweat shiny celebrants, in Sunday best overalls and calico, dance and sing to the music of tambourines and banjos around browning carcasses of pigs spitted above crackling flames that grenade sparks into the clamorous night air. A sea of the plantation's cotton in blossom sparkles like ermine beneath a ceiling of crystal stars.
    He thinks of how he exchanged his striped convict pants for field grimy overalls found beneath the bed in the cabin.
    He remembers his wild anxiety crouching in the shadows waiting for the cabin occupants, rehearsing what he'd say to win support and compassion. At midnight, he presses himself deeper into the cabin murk. He remembers his high grade erection watching the approach of an outrageously voluptuous and beautiful barefoot girl of thirteen agleam like seal skin in the moonlight, moving up a forested path to the cabin.
    She lights a