Hob Broun - Odditorium

He scissored two fingers, took the cigarette she lit for him, his features glazed orange with the first long drags.

“But let me give you the background first. I was running with this Indian girl in Denver a few years ago. Oglala Sioux. Sixteen years old, and like I always say, you’re only as young as the woman you’re sleeping with. Silver had long black hair, green eyes, the sweetest disposition. God, was she lovable. We had a real tight game going, went something like this: I’d rent a late-model car for one week, slap fresh plates on it, make out a phony registration form. Silver would put an ad in the paper offering the car at an insanely low price. A mark would be there in no time and he’d find Silver all upset and crying because the landlord was going to put her out on the street unless she got her rent up that day. The mark’s getting a steal anyway, a couple minutes with those big, wet eyes and he’s happy to help out by paying cash. That night, before he’s had a chance to re-register it, I go over to his house with my duplicate keys, drive the bastard away and we start all over again. Not real sophisticated, but we had it tight, doing three or four sales in a good week. We were building up a stake, planning to spend a year in Mexico in a house overlooking the beach. But then I came home one afternoon and it was all gone, Silver, the money. Gone. All she left me was a can opener and the furniture we’d picked off the street. And you know where I’d been all day? Out looking for one perfect thing to give her on her birthday that would make her just light up. It was bitter, all right. I had a soft spot for her, understand? So anyway, I’m sleeping in the park on frozen ground, living on cupcakes and trying to figure my next move. My body can’t take that program for long; next thing I know, I’m puking all over my shoes in front of the Brown Palace Hotel, cruiser pulls up and I get popped for vagrancy. On top of all my other grief, this was the fatal dose. I wigged out at the stationhouse, screaming my head off. ‘I got important friends’ll make you regret this.’ They didn’t need my aggravation, right? So they packed me off to the state bin and, bingo, case closed. It’s the perfect indeterminate sentence.”

Tildy touched the rim of his nearest ear. “What was it you bought her for her birthday?”

“Parrot feathers. A ten-pound bag of parrot feathers. Now, do you mind if I make my point? … Okay. Clear Creek Hospital, a real warehouse. They had a little of everything in there, like Noah’s Ark, and no time to play around. They started breaking you down right from the git-go. Inside of five minutes they’d stripped me down, put me in this flimsy cotton item split up the back, thrown me in a dark lockup. I can’t remember how long it was before I got any food. I was reeling, see, and not yet wised up, I wasn’t hip to the provocateur element, this on-arrival jolt they hit you with. Shout in your face one minute, pat your head the next, ask you trick questions and call you a liar when you don’t give the right answer. There’s a lot of browbeating, real humiliating crap. I’m good and whiplashed after a few days of it and they got me doing a little free labor, scrubbing the linoleum floor with a brush. And all of a sudden I could see what they were making me into. But I couldn’t see far enough because what I did then was right on schedule. I lost it, completely lost it. Suds all over the place and I’m ripping up sheets, just raving. And that’s when they’ve got you, see? It’s all over and those house odds were just too strong: ‘Now you see how dangerous and uncontrollable you are. In fact, you may be even sicker than we thought. We will have to drug you and put you in restraints before you hurt someone.’ It can be months before they throttle back on the medication and give you a standing eight count.”

Tildy shivered, nibbled on lime rind. “I see what you mean,” she said. “You’ve got to watch out for that provocateur element.”

Was it possible? Yes. It was possible to say she was having a good time.

OBEY LIMITS

YOUR SPEED MONITORED BY AIRCRAFT

In search of fuel, Christo switched to a secondary road. The gauge had been pinned on E for several miles.

“Rechette will have put out the word on these cards. They should have made the hot sheet by now.” One by one Christo removed the celluloid wafers from his wallet and scaled them out the window. “You got to know when to ditch these things. I found that out. But we may latch on to some free gas yet.”

Without lights, Christo nosed up an asphalt drive, parked by the adjoining garage and cut the motor. He waited a few minutes, alert for any sound or gleam of light from inside, then stepped out and tried the garage door; it was locked. He went over all four sides of the building, feeling with his hands, hunting for signs of alarm wiring in the thin radiance of a cigarette lighter. Satisfied he ran no risk of setting off bells, he took a set of picks from his jacket, sprang the simple pin lock on his first try and eased the door up carefully on its tracks.

A pair of Cadillac hearses were parked inside, two state-of-the-art beauties fresh from Detroit that model year with hand-rubbed gray finishes, understated chrome trimmings and, in the rear, gauzy white curtains behind smoked glass.

“Delicious. Maybe we should just swap,” Christo said. “These babies can do a hundred and ten and you don’t even know you’re moving.”

Tildy yawned. “I don’t think you want to blow your cover that badly.”

“I guess not. But how about that leg room?”

From the webbing under the driver’s seat Christo plucked out a coiled length of transparent rubber tubing. He spun the gas caps off the Fiat and the closer hearse. Inserting one end of the tubing down into the hearse’s gas tank, he took a few deep breaths, moistened his lips and commenced sucking on the other end, pulling away to exhale, bending his knees each time to lower the tubing’s elevation. Gas traveled gradually up the line, reaching his mouth when the tubing was on an even latitude. He spat furiously and guided the flow into the Fiat’s tank.

“Now we let gravity do the work.” Spitting again, swabbing at his lips with his shirt-tail. “This was the first game I ever ran. Couldn’t have been more than nine, scooting around the neighborhood with milk bottles and four feet of garden hose and all I was after then was enough money to buy mud flaps and a side mirror for my bike. Twenty-two years I been at it and still getting gas in my mouth. Now there’s a story with a moral.”

“What is it?”

“Beats the shit outta me. Any rum left? This taste really stays with you.”

HIGH ACCIDENT AREA

Bolted under the dashboard was a 32-channel CB radio assembled at a runaway shop on the Philippine island of Mindanao. Christo explained that the original owner had installed it. Rechette, he said, was fond of cruising the suburbs listening for distress calls: multi-car fatals or simple fender benders, propane leaks, lost children, angina crises. Rechette was a qualified CPR instructor, a collector of drug abuse bulletins, an amateur mechanic who kept his trunk packed with flares, blankets, first-aid supplies including ampules of Thorazine and of epinephrine (for the treatment of anaphylactic shock), boxes of tools and spare parts, fifty feet of yellow nylon rope, and, of course, a Polaroid camera. “Everyone just take it easy,” he would say. “I’m a licensed physician,” and he would move gawkers and sobbing relatives aside with the slightest pressure of his vital hands — the cool professional, the humble altruist. And he was hypnotized by glazed eyes, by faces paled with fear and marbled with blood.

“What a ghoul; he showed me some of those pictures and got excited all over again,” Christo said as they squealed around a curve, headlights slicing through the trees. “Told me once in so many words that this was a great way to meet people.” He seized the handmike, dangled it upside down on its spiraled cord. “Some marketing hero came up with this idea. Expand the machine population, that’s always a plus, right? You got your CB dictionaries and your CB clubs with insignia to sew on your CB windbreakers. You got a whole army of yokels talking at each other in the dark like some damn circle jerk.”