Hob Broun - Odditorium

Tildy wandered into the room fiddling at the untracked zipper of her suitcase, treating her husband’s load of talk like so much jellied silence.

“She tell you what I’m doin’ now?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“I got the donniker. I’m the donniker man.”

“Sorry,” Christo said. “That goes right past me.”

“Donniker is the public toilet on the midway, see. Some of these owners want to go all modern, tell me to call it a personal hygiene station, but you get the picture. Got soap, towels, cologne, combs and hair tonic. And the paper. Got to come to me for your paper. So there I am, head man in the shithouse workin’ for tips. How about it?”

“I’ve heard worse.”

“Yeah, it ain’t all bad. Nice and quiet in there and nobody I got to answer to. It’s got more of a routine to it, most days just like the last one and the one before. But I remember one time, this was last summer in New England somewhere, we had a real big crowd and there was a drug company had these young bimbos passin’ out free samples of this laxative thing. Problem was a lot of people took it for chocolate candy and gobbled it right up. You should have seen ’em all lined up with the sun beatin’ down, hopping around like rabbits. Oh, I was a rich man that day, mm-hmmm!”

Tildy was the only one not laughing. Her eyes converged at a point high on the spotted gray wall. “I thought I might hardboil some eggs for us to eat in the car.”

“What’s this? What’s this?” Giddy with all the talk of himself, Karl had apparently forgotten about the trip.

“She’s cleared for action,” Christo put in. “I think that’s what she’s getting at.”

“New York, is it? … What are you gonna do up there?”

“We might introduce Tildy around, maybe put a fresh face on her career. I mean, don’t feel scorned or anything like that. Strictly a business venture with me, at least so far.”

“What is it you do for work? I was aiming to get with you on that, then she came in about the eggs.” Karl, just now beginning to sense some type of bunco activity, was fumbling toward truculence.

“Well, it’s not so easy to put a name on what I do. I’m sort of a scout or an agent, free-lance. Maybe ‘catalyst’ describes it best. You take some energy from over here, put it together with some energy from over there and see if anything happens. Sometimes you get a healthy, profitable mix and sometimes you get third-degree burns. There’s no way of telling just how the deal will go down until it does.”

Karl appealed blinkingly to Tildy for translation, but she was verging elsewhere.

“Will you go wait in the car now? I need to talk to him alone.”

“Tempo, tempo. Don’t push the tempo.” Christo let his open hands waver down toward the floor, like a pantomime of “Autumn Leaves.” “Would you like to know what I think? I think the three of us ought to sit down to a nice candlelight dinner and really get to know each other.”

“Yeah, let’s do up some chicken and gravy.” Karl shot out of his chair, began pulling at Christo’s sleeve. “And while we’re at the store we can stock up on more beer…. Olé! Olé !” he shouted; and to himself: This guy’s okay, might be simpler if he just moved in.

Outgunned, Tildy sagged into the empty chair still puckered in the shape of Karl’s wide hams, still warm with his yeasty, drawling smell, and covered her face with both hands.

Balled-up napkins, intersecting rings left by wet glasses, littered bones, beads of creamy wax and fat. Splayed legs under the table and sounds in the dripping light: teeth sucking and belches and Karl grunting as he touched the place at the corner of his mouth where the bent tine of a fork had repeatedly jabbed him. There was sliced pineapple for dessert and then more beer.

Across the floor moonlight was a steel-colored box within which lay a single spattered shoe, its laces trickling off into the dark. Karl asked that the dishes be cleared away so he and Christo could match muscle in an arm-wrestling bout. They drained their glasses and stooped together, fingers wagging then settling into the gaps between bone, elbows wrapped in dish towels, waiting for Tildy to cue them. But she stood to one side rolling a pill of yellow wax between her palms, radiating indifference. Christo took the edge—“Now!”—and pushed fast and hard so that Karl had to rise out of his seat to avoid an immediate pin. He gained leverage until they were back at a rigid right angle, blue veins popping, eyelids clamped tight, the double fist in a tremor now as Karl leaned, condensed his force, and Christo bent at the wrist. The table shivered under them and Karl’s tongue emerged pushing tiny silver bubbles over his lower lip. And then it was over, Christo’s arm slapping down backward, rubbery and dead.

“But you gave up? I don’t get it.”

“I do that sometimes,” Christo said, wiping his face with the towel. “It hurt. And you would have won anyway.”

While Christo finished the dishes, Karl slept curled like a pet on the floor, hair spiky, a low buzzing of mucus inside his bristly nostrils, an oily sheen on his face, the hem of the blanket Tildy had laid over him wadded in his fists. He had collapsed in the midst of his fourteenth can of Gatortail Ale.

Rebuttoning his shirt, Christo backed away from the sink. “I thought it would be easiest this way. No messy farewell scene. We’ll slip out quietly and be gone when he wakes up.”

“It’s cold, but I suppose you’re right. I just wish …” Tildy aligned the soap dish beside the sudsy blue sponge, wrapped half a lemon in wax paper. “I just wish what I was doing made a little more sense.”

Insects clicked in the wet grass and the sky was punctured with stars as they made their way, hand in hand, to the car. Christo looked up at the bright bulb of the moon, pulled her against him and drummed on the trunk.

“Want to take a look inside? See what we’re carrying?”

“No, that’s something else I’d rather ignore.”

BASS BUSTERS!!

BUBBA’S WORM RANCH NEXT LEFT

NIGHT WAS A COLD black suction at the windows. Their destination was a ruined city. There was exhilaration in the raw, hot smell of gasoline and the whine of the Fiat’s six cylinders at maximum stress, in the glow of dashboard lights like prowling jungle eyes. A gospel station faded in and out, jammed by a news broadcast two clicks to the right: “ I’m gonna walk that milky white way some of these days…. ” Tildy let the unrolling wilderness contain her. So long as the wheels turned, misgivings were irrelevant.

They passed a pint of Bacardi back and forth, mixing Cuba Libres as best they could: swig of rum, a wedge of lime, a nip from the canned cola balanced on the dash, all swirled in the mouth like dental rinse, then swallowed. Their lips burned and their blood rumbled. Christo, raconteur, riffed on and on.

“There are a million ways to end up in the bughouse. Nobody’s exempt. The president of IBM might drop in if it seemed like a good idea for him to disappear temporarily. ‘Exhaustion,’ they call it. Yeah, it’s the closest thing you’ll ever see to a classless society in there. Everyone gets fucked just the same. They don’t care who you are. There was a kid I knew lost his larynx to cancer, had one of those vibrator gizmos he’d touch to his throat when he wanted to talk. One summer he started going around to radio stations and do, you know, anything, he’d sweep out the studio, it didn’t have to be the weather or the traffic report. But he really wanted to get into radio. Unusual, but who could possibly be threatened by it? He’s buzzing away at the station manager of one of those all-news operations, making his pitch, when the guy makes one phone call and, wham, that’s it. They stamp his papers and throw him in with the rest of the nuts. I collect stories like that. Old gent I met up with this last time. He wasn’t just the quiet type, he was the prototype. Lived in a small town all his life, never married, had nothing to do when he retired so he wandered the streets all day shaking hands with whoever. ‘Afternoon, good to see you.’ It got to be an obsession. He’d dash between cars to get to the other side of the street for a clasp. But some people didn’t like the way it looked or something, so they had county welfare put him away. Sound as a drum when he got there, but he’d done two years by the time I checked in and was afraid to tie his own shoelaces. Oh, they get you, one way or another … Shit, you can take my own case. Or one of them.”