Hob Broun - Odditorium

Beginning at the tips of his fingers, a protective urge shot through him. This brittle and uncertain girl thrust suddenly into a wild frontier — for her alone he would draw the wagons into a circle, heat bath water over a buffalo chip fire, pamper her with silk bloomers all the way from Junction City. One so dainty as you, ma’am, out here on the plains …

“The three-thousand-dollar kilo,” Christo said, discarding his calculations and taking a stab at it. “I think we’ve reached that plateau. Ought to check in with the boss. Where’s your phone?”

Looie pointed into the shadows. “All the way back on your right, next to the sewing machines.”

Tildy, for her part, had been sizing Looie up for some time, admiring his sleek contours and the elegance in the movements of his mouth. She imagined now a certain telegraphy between them — perhaps it was nothing more than weed hyperbole — a swift, uncoded message of flesh need. One for the homefolks, Karl in particular. “What’d y’all do up in New York?” Fucked a guy with a blue beard.

Conscious of her watchful eyes, Looie fanned out crackers on a cheeseboard, sliced up a wedge of Emmentaler shot through with cumin seeds, popped open a bottle of sparkling rosé.

“Pierce wasn’t home, but I left a message on his machine.” Christo appeared as Looie dealt out the glasses, filled one and swirled wine in his cottony mouth. “Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it. With a little teamwork we can have this shit bricked up in no time flat.”

“What’s the hurry?” Looie, to be sure, had other things on his mind.

“Fine. You two go ahead and sit there, chew the fat and get drunk. I’ll do the work. Don’t worry about it.” He walked sideways toward the Fiat, hands on hips, as though expecting one of them to jump him from behind. “Don’t worry about it at all.”

Noisily, he dragged bulging bags across the floor to the kilo press, an apparatus made of planks, pipe, a spring or two, and an automobile jack. The herb would be weighed out on a delicatessen scale, jammed in the mold and formed into bricks to be wrapped in lightly waxed yolk-yellow paper and sealed with gummed labels of Looie’s own design: La Cometa Azul Imported under License to Phillip II of Spain.

Next to the kilo press was a letterpress with which Looie turned out a monthly poetry magazine containing his own punning and shaggy dog works, and those of a varying roster of friends. The May issue’s table of contents listed contributions by Mercedes Triumph, Looie’s ex-singing teacher; by Feral Hix, a Zen cab driver with a heavy jones for flower imagery; and by a spade kid named John Alonzo (Looie had only seen him once, darting around the corner in white canvas high-tops) whose Koranic pensées scrawled on spiral notebook paper would appear every so often, inside of a magazine or catalogue jammed in the mail slot. It had been years since Looie’d known money worries, and in fact he oversaw, without professional guidance, a small but diversified securities portfolio. But on Sundays, by the fountain across from the Plaza Hotel, Looie peddled his homemade editions at fifty cents per copy, a gesture to the indigent boho past he’d never had.

He flirted rather clumsily now with Tildy as they picked over the cheese remnants. Each had detected the other’s lust and their little corner of the room became a vivarium of its own, crowded with hot pinpoint lights and liquid radii flowing between them, while Christo toted his bales, fine-tuned the scale.

Looie told a story: dabbing a professor’s tuxedo with an extraordinarily potent moth lure so that when he arrived for the Alumni Banquet, his lapels were a quivering, powdery gray.

Tildy told a story: secretly, while her father slept, listening to Cajun boogie music on the radio — Clint Boudreau and his Zydeco Nightriders.

And when at last Christo looked up from his toils, some thistly remark at the end of his tongue, their chairs were empty. Cracker crumbs, whorls of cheese rind, were on the table, bubbling dregs in two wine glasses — an amateur’s tawdry still life, but the message was there. Out of darkness at the back of the room came rustlings, thuds on the wooden platform bed.

Tildy knelt on the mattress, crossed arms pulling the shirt over her head. Confused, flushed by the boldness of it all, Looie watched her and felt, oh my, pressing against him a sleek warm thigh that awaited his kiss. He saw in profile her sharp peewee breasts and something flipflopped inside him like the snap and release of taut elastic…. How very young she is, a small bird in the snow.

“It’s like an ostrich egg,” she whispered tentatively. “Could I do something?”

“Anything.”

“Could I, well, sort of run my tongue all over your skull?”

Christo used the fire stairs. He grabbed an evening paper and headed uptown. It was good to be back on the subway again.

Pierce Milbank’s Claremont Avenue duplex (which had once belonged to the great blind historian, Duncan Gateshead, when he was a visiting lecturer at Columbia) had three fireplaces, two kitchens and a Jacuzzi. In the front hallway, softly lit by a chandelier, he had hung a framed photograph of himself taken several Easters ago at his late grandmother’s home in Connecticut. In a vested tweed suit, the jacket draped over his shoulders à la Sinatra, he stood in front of a cluster of white birches, the last snows of spring withdrawing to sullen patches on the lawn. The only thing missing was a brace of freshly bagged grouse splayed at his feet.

Sure, it was all there, buried somewhere in the faint, granular background of the black and white print. The legendary Boston period, running black opium out of a quiche shop on Mass. Ave., then up to the majors, the fast track: drug casseroles, high-stakes badminton, the tumbling act in his sports car, charcoaling a steak in a men’s room sink at the New York Stock Exchange. Levels upon levels of carefully plotted can-you-top-this outrageousness.

Christo lifted the picture off its hook and carried it into the living room where the light was better.

“Like it?” Pierce entered clutching a black gym bag. “My publicity still. Can’t you just see it on the cover of the Times Book Review ?” He pulled the bag’s zipper back and showed Christo what was inside.

“Don’t you believe in banks?”

“This is just mad money.” Pierce counted out thirty one-hundred-dollar bills. “You’re the last one in on this shipment. I ought to fine you a couple hundred for lateness, but I won’t. Seeing as how you’ve been out of action up till now.”

“Thanks, white man.”

“Where’s the car? Still down at Chemikazi’s?”

“Yeah. Ought to be safe there, don’t you think?”

“No good. Tomorrow you’ll drive it up to Fox Street in the Bronx and leave it there. It’ll be stripped or torched within twenty-four hours.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That’s the spirit.” Pierce zipped the bag shut and tugged slyly at his blond mustache. It was easy to visualize him behind a carved desk at his family’s shipping company, barking memos into a dictaphone. “So where’s your friend from Florida? You could’ve brought her along, that’s no breach of security.”

“She seemed to be having a good time so I left her down with Looie.”

“He’s such a gentleman.” A click of the tongue. “You’re not pressed for time, so why not stick around? I thought I might shake up a few gimlets. Gin or vodka?”

They carried their drinks upstairs to the “conference room,” a cork-lined sanctum filled with books and dominated by a long mahogany table surrounded with leather swivel chairs. Heavy glass ashtrays were distributed around the table and a water pitcher and tumblers sat on a tray in the middle. Black velvet curtains eclipsed the windows.