“Someone get me a priest

To put my mind to bed

This ringing in my head

Is this a cure or is this a disease…”

-Show Me How To Live, Audio Slave

At some immediate length, he stood before the door to Betty’s house, the house he had won on a bet at the cost of a well-broken nose, the house that was the only safe place in their world for her to lay her old, soft bones. The concrete slab he had poured from a hand mix all on his own, accounting for the only work of construction he had ever achieved more complex than mounting a heavy bag, received the bullet point of the cane, but without a sound, as if the cane itself knew that Betty should not be disturbed by cruel exterior sounds, but only by the welcoming click of the door latch to their room, which had its own key. Betty lay locked behind two doors and a double-barred window.

The hat was hung on the knob, the cane leaned against it, Tom not wishing to bring strange things into his wife’s “nesty space” as she called it, in the dark of night, unannounced. Betty was a “good girl,” as he liked to say, much entitled to her feminine quirks and notions of serenity, particularly in light of the half-century of marriage to Tom “Bet House” Jones she had endured—for waking up to him every morning was not on the list of any woman’s fairytale desires.

He could see fine now, after this night out and about, without turning on a light. So he made no excuse to wake his darling Betty. Rather he slipped off his hard, easy living shoes with the silver heels and toe and walked noiselessly into her room. Standing in the doorway he could see her hugging his boxing gloves, the pair that had won them the house, sleeping squint-eyed and alien-looking as the C-PAP machine helped her tired parts breathe. She was still a doll to him, wrinkled and hunched as she was, barely able to straighten up any more.

He slid into bed behind her and enjoyed the warmth of her pajama-coated body, heaving slightly under his bathrobe. She nuzzled into his hips with hers and he flushed with a life he had not felt in years.

Once again armed with a tool long lost to him, Tom slid from bed and slunk back through the doorway to their modest bathroom—though pinkly frilled and appointed with flowering ceramic art.

Tom opened the bathroom door and turned on the light as he shut it, turned before the sink as he turned on the faucet, wasting not a second, wetting his hands, pulling the water to his waiting face as it lifted in the mirror and, and, and—he was 32 years old, or looked it, had to be 32 or younger, because his nose was still unbroken! And, most disturbingly, behind his left shoulder, stood the old pimp from the Bus to Asquith, or rather, it was him in gaily colored, shadowy, smirking outline.

“You motherfucker!” snarled Tom.

“Actually,” responded the pimp, “I prefer virgins, even demand them as a price oft time. Old Betty is neither, so I’m willing to make due through you—never having been a white man before.”

“Who the hell are you?” growled Tom. Keeping an eye lock through the mirror, making sure that creep didn’t get past him back to Betty.

“The address will do, in broad terms. Suffice it to say that—being a card-playing man—I am the Ace of Spades. You wouldn’t argue on that count, would you, Mister Jones?”

Tom nodded, not trusting this pimp for a second.

“In that case, I am both a card and a card player. Mister Jones, don’t blame the Black Ace when the Deckholder dealt him. Speaking of which, I owe you thanks. You have broken the curse—or its sad legacy has been severed using you as the agent—that has kept me forever wedded to the basest form of agency. As troubling as it is to know that you’ve got a black shadow, Mister Jones, how would you feel, if after eons immersed in shadow, any time the Deckholder saw fit to deal you into a hand, you issued forth in the most displeasing form—an ace albeit, but always a spade! I have walked the world ever the distrustful spade, occasionally the crude club, in the worst of times the juggling joker, but this night—thanks to a confluence of events—I’m the Deuce of Hearts.”

Tom looked at the suave little man of colored shadow comprehendingly, for there was far more than this expressive link between them.

The little man in the mirror then said, most resonantly, “Thank you, Mister Jones. For the moment it appears you are sitting in for the Deckholder. It’s your call. Do we go comfort Mrs. Jones?” asked he, with a fiendish wink, “or shall we make right what’s gone wrong?—and believe me, if you find yourself in an unaccustomed role, then you may well imagine my consternation.”

Tom looked deeply into the immensity of those small eyes, sunken so decorously in that elfin face and sought clarity in words, though it’s sense was already uplifting within, “I see her with you, or I never see her again?”

The masterfully expressive face smirked in such a way as to answer in the affirmative, more amorously than was diplomatic.

Tom’s answer came unbidden, from the bowels of his soul and the echoing halls of dust that were his youth, “Nigger, get the Hell out of my house.”

Tom looked into the eyes of the beaten, middle-aged man in the mirror, no peacock pimp shadow over his shoulder, aging quickly. He hobbled off through the living room, the light left on behind, to stop before the still-locked door to Betty’s room, gave a nod of respect and a blown kiss, and limped out the front door of her house.

As he stood crookedly, on the concrete slab he had formed with his own hands, he looked into the cotton-thick fog, down his narrow walkway, which cut like a tunnel through the fallen cloudbank, at the cane of silvery steel and black wood, which stood of its own free and terrible accord, by the curb, wearing a derby hat at a cocky angle, a hat that seemed to tip respectfully as the old man stepped down off the three-inch high porch and limped along the foggy way.

The remainder of Skulker Jones will appear in print and kindle in the last week of October, 2016.