Hob Broun - Odditorium

Glossy head tilted appraisingly, Looie helped her out of the car.

“Meet my partner, Tildy Soileau.”

“ Enchanté .” His lips skimmed across her knuckles and he embraced Christo, kissing him on both cheeks. “Welcome back. Welcome back to the madhouse without walls.”

“You’re looking good, Chemikazi, got that glow of health and wealth. And I like the blue beard. It looks a lot better than the green.”

“It’s been a tough year, a lot of cruelty and fraud out there — you know — people whizzing around like insects, trying to stay clear of the big boot heel coming down. But I just float through it all and never get hit with the debris. I can’t explain it. It’s a matter of faith…. Now, can I get you anything? Ham salad? Fondue? White wine?”

“Later for that. I say we sample up.” Christo applied the trunk key, opened one of the garbage bags, tore off great fistfuls of the herb, gummy with resin, dropping them onto an unpleated road map. “Pierce tells me they had a very dry growing season down in Colombia and we have here some tops of the bush pickings. El Primo. He says even an old jade like you will be impressed.”

While Christo sat at a butcher-block table rubbing buds through a flour sifter, Looie took Tildy lightly by the arm and showed her around his “barracks.” He pointed out rosewood cabinets he’d installed himself, the hand-cranked dumbwaiter where he stored onions and potatoes, a row of pancakes — blueberry, buttermilk, whole wheat — tacked up intact as instant sculpture. He opened a locker of salvaged skins of bear and fox and stoat and made her feel the brittle age in them with her hand.

“Once when I still had hair I shared a lunch of berries with a young grizzly. Tremendous berries in Oregon. Justly famous.”

He’d saved the best for last, guiding her now to a window centered in one wall, tiers of green, flashing movement behind the glass. How lovely his touch is, she thought, I know his arm is there but it feels weightless.

“My vivarium,” Looie announced. “Not a terrarium or aquarium. It’s sort of a country club for reptiles, you know, like the place where the mobsters go. La Costa.”

The terraced enclosure was high and deep. Mossy outcroppings and sandy pools were surrounded by wooden sticks (for climbing) and broadleaf vegetation. There were perches and hollows, tunnels through the wet black earth, areas of shade and areas of warm yellow spotlight (the same lamps, Looie said, fast-food places use to keep the french fries warm). Heaped mealworms writhed in the feeding dishes and a ventilation unit hummed quietly.

“Some of these types in here are temperamental or frail. I try to keep it at an even eighty-two degrees. I’m afraid they do get institutionalized after a while, you know, roll onto their backs at the first break in routine.”

Tildy indicated two green lumps wedged behind a chunk of lava.

“Korean fire belly toads,” he whispered. “I’m going to isolate them soon for breeding. Extremely difficult to obtain in this country. I’ve been doing some consulting work for a flavors and essences company. They felt they needed help with their mocha and their number-two beef, so I went up to New Rochelle for a week, gave one a few more bass notes and softened the salts in the other. Simple. But it paid for my toads.”

With some prompting he got her to distinguish a speckled salamander with gold chip eyes from the dwarf begonias under which it was curled, and explained how an old girlfriend had smuggled it from Africa inside a steam iron.

“How did you get him out?”

“That’s nothing. Two friends of mine, brothers, attempted to smuggle marijuana from Yucatán in their scuba tanks. It took them all day to pack it in through half-inch air valve holes. But it only took Customs two hours to unpack.”

“ Caramba !” Christo displayed a wicked cheroot of Rubio de la Costa, Colombia’s highest octane strain, tightly and quite symmetrically rolled in a sheet of onionskin paper. “Let’s go, boys and girls.”

He lit up with an entire book of matches, paper flaring as he inhaled, face barely visible behind clouds of smoke.

“Nice flavor, very nice. Like incense in a Catholic church.”

The paper was burning too quickly, ash and seed embers dropping to the floor.

“That’s like a taco. You have to do it over something.” Looie brought a cookie sheet.

Collecting smoke in cupped hands, he washed his face with it. “Excellent bouquet. Pungent but not too sharp. Almost camphorous.” He made the delicate pass with Christo, took small puffs, exhaling rapidly through his nose, then one large one which he swirled, shifted back and forth between pouched cheeks like a wine taster. “Good resin content, no doubt about that. A little harsh on the throat.” Lifting a teapot from the table, he sucked cold oolong from the spout. “Any metabolic signs so far?”

“Slight chill in the palms, increased pulse rate … and this — this sort of walls-of-stone effect in my sinuses.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Looie refilled his lungs.

Then Christo held his face over a smoking hunk that landed on the cookie sheet and sucked through his nose till his eyes watered. They both watched the column of lacy blue smoke undulate toward the ceiling, examining it for omens, nodding learnedly like a couple of Delphic kibitzers.

“Looks like Pierce has done it again,” Christo said. Tildy stared into the grain of the table and wobbled her feet; he prodded her. “What about you? Why don’t you join me in our test kitchen to sample a new product absolutely free.”

“Okay. But I should tell you, strong grass gives me a headache.”

She handled the thing, smoking like a flare now, as if it were a cigarette; though her eyes bugged out, she managed not to cough. Christo made encouraging whatta-ya-waitin’-for gestures, and pinched her on the cheek.

“Just fuck off, Jimmy,” she choked. Looie shook his head, recalling something once said about not messing with a psychotic. She took a few modest hits, passed. “Don’t get pushy, that’s all. It provokes me.”

“You don’t want to come along, don’t.” Christo shifted, his speech twangy, stressed. “There are some changes really need to be made in Colombia. They’re still locked into that coffee economy, and monoculture just destroys the soil. Clear the forest for coffee trees that suck the nutrients out of the ground, before long you have to clear more forest and start again. Now nationalized marijuana plantations would offer a much more favorable foreign exchange situation without the inefficient use of land. It’s labor-intensive, you can have staggered planting and harvest times….”

Through gritty casement windows flanking the elevator cage, the sky bled by slow degrees to a duller shade of gray. The only sound in the room now a repetitive hissing: phono needle circling the end-groove of a Bing Crosby album. The humongous joint had been followed by a second, lying crumpled now and half finished on the cookie sheet, generating an atmosphere wrapped heavily with aimlessness. Like waiting for fruit to drop off the tree. In want of hostly energies, Looie snoozed open-eyed amid the fumes of an Indonesian clove cigarette. Christo, trying to do figures in his head, kept losing the handle in the process of rounding them off, but returned doggedly to the starting point. One kilo equals 35.2 ounces. The silence was so commanding, so tightly sealed, that when finally Tildy spoke, the words were like machine-gun fire.

“I think,” she said thickly from the depths of a canvas sling chair, “I think those aspirin you gave me are outnumbered.”

“I can give you something stronger,” Looie said, nearly toppling out of his chair as he reached to test her cheek for fever.