Hob Broun - Odditorium

Christo nodded, picked up a traveling alarm clock. “How much you getting for these?”

Keds spat in a coffee can between his feet. “You want it?”

Christo shrugged and leaned across the counter. “Nah, I got nothing to get up for.”

“If you want something, you want something, but there’s no browsing in here.”

“So you’re Keds, huh?”

“So what?”

“So I heard about you. I talked to a guy.”

Keds shifted his wad to the other cheek. “There’s lots of places you can talk to a guy. This ain’t one of ’em.”

“The guy had nice things to say about you, Keds. He really built you up.”

“A guy says nice things about me. So I could pour that on cornflakes or something?”

Christo kicked impatiently at a mound of plastic canteens that was slowly collapsing around his ankles. “Look, let’s cut through the bullshit. This guy I talked to says you’re an honest fence, the squarest in town. You want to do some business or not?”

Keds took a half-step forward and shot a glistening brown gobbet onto the counter less than an inch from Christo’s elbow. “Take a walk, kid.” And he disappeared into the shadows of the back room.

“Okay, okay,” Christo said. “Billy Gaines, the smack head. He was the one who recommended you.” Silence. “Billy Gaines — come on, little guy with the hornrims, used to hang out with you at a tavern called Peck Miller’s.” Still nothing. “Said one night you busted a guy’s jaw on the edge of the bar when he tried to unplug the juke box on your quarter.”

Keds lumbered into view shaking his head. “You got no fuckin’ manners, you know that, kid? No fuckin’ manners at all. Now let’s see what you got.”

As it turned out, Keds was everything Billy Gaines had said. He didn’t haggle and gave fair value. Christo even sold him some tools he’d found in the trunk of the Fiat.

His next stop was a pizza shop two blocks south of Aviation Trades High School. There he had a small pie with mushrooms and extra cheese and, out by the dumpster in the parking lot, turned over the Valiums to a grape-eyed fat boy in exchange for sixty-three dollars cash and an underwater watch.

Two hours later, Christo was over the state line. By early evening he had checked into a motor lodge just off the highway. He took a long, steamy shower and stretched out. It felt good to be back on the road, back on the upstroke, but not that good. It had been a grueling day and hospital memories kept tumbling around in his head. He gave up and went for the caffeine. The “complimentary” coffee came out of its foil packet looking like river silt, so he left the empty glass pot on the hot plate until it cracked.

He napped in his clothes until midnight, then placed a call to a comrade in New York.

“Pierce? That you, Pierce …? Turn down the music, why don’t you. Yeah, it’s Christo.”

“Hey, jazzbo, where have you been?”

“Out of action. I got fucked up behind some bad checks, ended up doing six months in the bughouse.”

“Bad checks, huh? When are you going to get off the nickel-and-dime treadmill?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s in my genes. You got something better for me?”

“You know I just might. Jesus, almost a year I don’t hear from you. But it’s great you’re out in the breeze again. Listen, listen, what kind of line are you on?”

“Motel phone.”

“Going through a switchboard?”

“Yeah, but come on, Pierce.”

“Go find a pay phone and call me back.”

“I really don’t feel much like moving.”

“So call collect. I mean who just got out, you or me? … Oh yeah, bring a pencil and paper.”

So Christo laced up his sneakers, promoted writing materials from the night clerk and trudged up the road to an all-night grocery. He enjoyed a late supper — bar-b-q potato chips, two pralines and a bottle of orange soda — inside the phone booth, watching two girls in curlers walk back and forth under the streetlamp waiting for someone to bother them. He lit a postprandial cigarette and dialed.

“I’m back.”

“So you are. Think you might want to drive down to Florida and make a pickup for me? The usual percentage. But I can’t front you anything, have to be C.O.D.”

“I’m right there.”

“Fabulous, fabulous. Things have been a bit warm up here, but down in Miami it is really jagged. Street dudes walking into the Sponge Divers National Bank with suitcases full of money. People being blown away in French restaurants. Some of the wheels down there, so I hear, are having their homes electronically scanned for taps, once a week…. Anyway, we’re channeling through the west coast these days. Naples, Fort Meyers…. Get out your pencil and I’ll dictate a map.”

WHEN THE TOUR SWUNG down into Louisiana, Tildy decided it was time to take a few days off and visit her father in Ville Platte. It had been over a year since she’d seen Lucien and he was home from the hospital now. The doctors had thrown in the towel. Nothing could be done to moderate the progress of his disease. Six months at the very outside, they said, but they’d been wrong before. Still, the woman who was looking after him had written twice, hinting strongly that Tildy ought not put the trip off very much longer.

There was, as well, an even more immediate inducement for her to steal away: trouble on the job. Since the debacle in Coffeyville, the Cougarettes had dropped two more games, as many as they’d lost all last season. There had been a fight on the team bus and Wanda now wore a splint on her left hand. Heidi was guzzling her ulcer medicine between innings and threatening to go back to Virginia Beach and get married. That’s-Mary was juiced most of the time. Two games ago she had stood with arms folded in foul territory behind first base and watched three consecutive relay throws whiz by. Vinnie, who was fast becoming eligible for the sulker’s World Series, crouching off by himself with a stack of detective magazines, was sent in to replace her. On his first chance, he failed to get down on a short hop and was struck in the groin.

When Tildy went to Ben Salem to ask his permission to leave, he consented without argument.

“Sure. Take a whole week if you want. I only wish I was going with you.”

“You won’t mind fielding eight players for a few days?”

“What the hell difference would it make? Whole thing’s turning into a comedy act anyway.”

It took Tildy less than five minutes to pack her bag.

The night man at the car rental agency wore a wife-swapper mustache and high-heeled boots that zipped up the side. Spreading his hands on the counter, he confessed that he had left drafting school for this job because he liked the one-to-one contact.

“I’m a people person,” he said.

“And I think you’re overworked.”

He led Tildy by the elbow to a dark green Pinto and flung open both doors. “See what you think. I personally vacuumed out the interior. On my dinner break.”

Across the passenger seat and along the console were scaly brown spots which resembled dried blood. But Tildy wrote it off. Just my morbid state of mind, she concluded.

It was late by the time she started south, a profusion of semis on the road making up time. She picked up a hitchhiker a little after one A.M., a soldier heading for his brother-in-law’s place on a three-day pass. Thoroughly unnerved at catching a ride with a lone woman, his first ever, he hunched so far forward that his chin brushed the dashboard, mumbling thanks again and again. When Tildy handed him her smokes, asking him to light one for her, his suddenly unresponsive fingers kept tearing sulphur heads against the matchbook staple. His ears were prominent under a lawnmower service haircut and Tildy was positive she saw them turning pink in the gleam of passing headlights.