Hob Broun - Odditorium

Ondray shrugged, replaced his wad.

“Okay, but you might hear my words comin’ out a juke box sometime. They’re lookin’ for new blood, you know. New ideas.”

“You gonna eat this banana?”

Ignoring him, Karl peered out the window. “Guess it’s a nice day out there,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Maybe you and me could do some huntin’ on a day like this.”

“We finished that up already and Earvin done went home to eat. He like that fish head soup.”

“No, see what I had in mind … Lizard huntin’. Remember a couple years ago how we went lizard huntin’ right out back here in the slough. Caught some big ones, too, and my wife tied pieces of thread on ’em so you could walk ’em up and back like on a leash. Remember? We got awful muddy, both of us. And you were just a little scrap back then, looked like a piece of devil’s-food cake with the frosting all mussed. But we sure had a time of it. Nice kinda day to do it again. We could go right now if you want.”

Ondray’s mouth was filled with banana so he answered by angling his head and wandering toward the door. Nothing much else to do that he could think of.

Karl walked in front. He wore his painter’s cap and carried a shoe box and a couple of glass jars. Ondray scuffed along after him, eating a jelly sandwich. As they reached the trees, Karl cautioned him about making noise. A hunter, he said, had to move as softly as a breeze. They walked several minutes through thick woods with clouds of gnats hanging over their heads. A bread crust slipped from Ondray’s fingers and tiny brown ants instantly swarmed on it. He bent down to watch them.

Karl, who’d gone ahead, came thrashing back through stalks and saplings. “Come on, we got to stay together out here,” he said urgently. “You can’t tell what might be lurkin’ around.”

“Sure, man.”

The trees thinned out and the ground became uneven, exposed roots and grassy little hummocks. A smell of warm rot reached them.

“Couldn’t get me out here by night at the wrong end of a gun,” Karl said. “That’s when the swamp cats come out and big bears’d tear your head clean off with one swipe.”

“Ain’t no bears,” Ondray said impatiently.

Up ahead, light hit the stagnant water like a fist.

“There’s snakes though. They good to eat.”

Karl moved back out of the sun. Sweat was dripping down his neck and water had begun to seep through his sneakers. The coffee was pressing at the neck of his bladder but he didn’t want to let it out. He had this crazy thought that if he took his cock out, some creature would jump up and take a bite out of it. Crazy. But every time he’d reach for that zipper, he’d imagine what they’d feel like, those little wet teeth, and it was so real his stomach would drop. Hey. Settle down now.

He was duckwalking by the edge of a puddle flecked with scum when he saw one and froze. A black salamander with yellow spots. It was basking with eyes closed and forefeet just touching the water. Karl balanced, set his weight back on his heels, moved his open hand very slowly until it was directly over the target, and then he swooped. Mud and water in his fist and, yes, a little something cold and wriggling, a dark head emerging from between his fingers. He felt behind him for the jar, fascinated by the struggling movements, the shiny jaws widening. He thought he heard a tiny squeak and then there was a new sensation, something warm. He loosened his grip, looked. In his excitement he had squeezed so hard that the salamander’s belly had ruptured and its purplish viscera were all over his palm.

Karl flung the body away, churned his hand in the water, wiped it on the grass. And then he stopped. Ondray was gone and he was completely alone in the cruel emptiness and heat of the slough. Here it came again, that panic of broad daylight that he knew well enough to recognize at its first shifty approach. The trees closed off his route of escape and the sun descended on him from above.

He wanted to call for Ondray but his throat would open only for the thinnest stream of air. No sound came out. His head felt like a sponge full of wet plaster. If he’d had the strength he might have dug a safe hole in the earth. But all Karl could do was curl up in the mud and pray his lungs and heart would keep working.

“Man, you funny. You come out here to sleep.”

“God almighty but I told you. Don’t you ever walk off and leave me that way. I told you we had to stay together.”

“Yeah, okay. But be cool, jes be cool.” Ondray backed up, alarmed by the wild-eyed mudman who wavered toward him. “I found some good stuff back in them reeds.”

He held up his collecting jar; it was filled with clear jelly speckled black.

“What the hell?”

“Frog eggs.”

“You little bastard.”

“Good stuff. These don’t die on the way, I be farmin’ frogs.”

Karl recovered with an ice pack and some afternoon teevee. His favorite show came on at three, I Married Joan (“What a girl, what a whirl, what a life!”) with Joan Davis and Jim Backus as Brad.

Joan Davis was no stunner. She had a big nose, almost no chin and a rubbery face that could have been a man’s. But there was something about her that brought the heat to Karl’s balls. He would picture her sprawled across a bed, skirt up around her waist. Conical tits, legs and arms so thin, so helpless. He imagined himself pushing them here and there like a doll’s, grasping that helmet of glossy blond hair and pulling her face close to his. He lay back on the sofa and masturbated, thinking of Joan Davis, of Tildy, of a little girl who let him pee into her hands in third grade; and at the end, as usual, he thought of Jerry Apache’s wife in the emergency room, her dirty sandals and red toenails, her face distorted with grief, tears and mucus running, her knees buckling as she slid down the white tiled wall and fell in a heap on the floor.

He ejected his semen onto a torn magazine. Just as quickly he began to recede. That moment’s appeasement faded into the slack afternoon; his nerves twitched, frantic for something more, and went numb. A droplet fell from his deflated penis, cold and gray on the edge of his thigh.

He reached behind him for distraction, pulling old issues of Rockhound, Prospector’s World , and True Treasure Tales from the tumbling pile in the corner. He knew parts of them by heart, favorite passages he would reread at times of dejection like verses from the Bible. Ah yes, here was the one about the man who discovered a 28-carat diamond while pitching horseshoes with his nephew. There was inspiration in these yellowed pages. All things were possible. One revelatory moment, a fast dig in the right piece of ground, was all it took to turn your life around. Rebirth. Rebirth as a man of means.

Opening a three-year-old copy of True Treasure Tales , Karl looked at the pictures and read the advertisements. Then he found an article in the back which, after hurrying through the first few paragraphs, he could not remember having ever seen before. It was written by someone called J. Frank Robey (Former NYPD Consultant). The title was “Jazzman’s Fortune.”

… The diminutive, hunchbacked Webb overcame his handicaps and went on to become one of the premier jazz drummers of his era. Connoisseurs of Negro music still speak in tones of awe about the great bands he led in the 20’s and 30’s at the Savoy Ballroom in New York’s Harlem. Many famous musicians graduated from Webb’s band and made names for themselves elsewhere. Included among these would be Ella Fitzgerald, the great vocalist who’s still making records today and who, as a shy orphan from Baltimore, debuted with Webb’s band in the early 30’s.

Unlike many jazzmen of the time who squandered their money on cars, clothes, liquor, and fast women, Chick Webb was a shrewd businessman who made sound investments and managed them carefully. So it was that shortly after his death, the Harlem rumor mill was alive with stories of a fortune in cash and jewels secreted somewhere in Webb’s sumptuous townhouse. Mounted police were called in on several occasions to control wild mobs trying to break into the property. Over the next few years amateur treasure hunters, as well as some out-and-out criminals, tore the place apart, but nothing of significance was ever found.