Hob Broun - Odditorium

The inning ended without further damage, the other team took the field, and their first baseman tossed a few warm-up grounders. He was olive-skinned, tall, with pectorals swelling under a T-shirt that had his name felt-markered across the back: Silvio. A high throw kicked off the heel of his glove and, instinctively, Tildy trotted after it.

“Bring it here, Mommy.” He had stunning black eyes.

Tildy looked at the slightly misshapen ball, squeezed it, weighed it, rolled it around her palm. They were all watching her, smirking. She let it drop, bouncing it twice off her toes like a soccer ball, scooped it between her legs, caught it with her other hand and flipped it over her back. She took it on the one bounce and in the same motion launched a throw that trailed smoke as it rose from her shoe tops and whistled toward Silvio’s head. Ducking down and away at the last second, he threw up his glove and the impact of the arriving ball spun him halfway around. He whirled on her, features tense and sharp, but realized in another moment that to lose his temper in front of the others, and at the provocation of this scrawny little bruja , would also be to lose face.

“What position you play, Butch?”

“Shortstop.”

“Okay, Butch. You show us what you can do. Chombo! You go in the outfield.”

Silvio borrowed a mitt that was slightly too big for her hand and she felt suddenly haggard, ungainly as she took her position, rubbed dirt on her hands. She had not won his respect, only his curiosity…. Check the freak, boys. This ought to be good.

Her first chance was a slow roller that trickled past the mound. She charged, barehanded it and leaped high on the throw, scissoring her legs. The man was out by eight feet. He stood for a moment, hands on hips, and then spat.

“Get down with it, Butch.”

“In his face.”

The chatter felt good to her, a warming incantation. She caught a soft pop-up, backpedaling, to end the inning and scooted off the field with her head down to conceal the grin that forced itself on her. She flopped down under a tree and Silvio came and sat next to her, rubbing his back against the knobby trunk.

“You blow some minds out there, Butch.” He shook his head. “Where you learn to play ball, in the joint?”

“No, I just fell into it.”

“What else you do, Butch?”

The hand he had placed on her leg conversationally was still there. Did she imagine a slow, deliberate increase in its pressure? Then he shifted so that the outer curve of his hip melded with hers and there was no mistaking the heat that flowed between them. She felt an odd serenity with this stranger touching her, a soft abatement of her protective reflexes. They gazed into space, said nothing, while his fingers splayed and met, splayed and met, taking small pinching folds in the fabric of her pants.

“You’re up now,” he whispered. “Go hit a homerun for me.”

But with men on first and second, Tildy struck out on three pitches, her mind totally preoccupied with imaginings of what Silvio looked like without clothes. She came away from the plate blushing.

The game ended two innings later on a disputed play at the plate. Silvio ushered her away from the contracting circle of screams and threats, saying he knew a real nice spot where they could go have some beers. This was not an invitation, but an accomplished fact. He was going to take her without even asking what she wanted. It was the kind of arrogance that would normally have inflamed her, but she went along, her silent presence beside him all the consent he required. And when, as they walked, he slung an arm around her waist, she responded instantly (knowing him to be an operator, a man without underwear who carried shiny white knife scars with pride) by crossing her arm over his damp back and smiling into those black, still eyes. She amazed herself.

Orphan Annie’s was an airless, close-fitting bar that smelled of roach poison. It might have been the noise, the press of the crowd, the urgent, wheedling faces lunging at one another, but for whatever reason the new setting pierced the vacuum in which she had been afloat. That echoing, dreamlike serenity was gone and a sour unease took its place. Drinks with a bastard and in another fifteen minutes, back to his place.

Picking at the label of her beer bottle, Tildy wondered how she had ever gotten herself into such a box. Was it boredom? Feckless curiosity? Anger at Christo for leaving her alone? It didn’t amount to a damn. For if there was one truth to which she held fast it was that reasons were the province of the doomed; that only results mattered.

And so a few minutes later when Silvio danced off to the men’s room, she bolted for the door and ran. Full out. For blocks and blocks.

Down and dirty. Pierce dealt the final hole cards with care, sliding each one across the table with his finger, detouring around the green mountain in the center. Christo checked his pair of kings and Steve the Record Producer blew a few blasé smoke rings. He had four spades to the ace showing.

“I’ll go two thousand,” ironing the bills with the back of his hand, laying them delicately on the crest of the mountain.

It was two big ones to Randy Restaurants, a heavy loser all afternoon who’d been annoying everyone with such irrelevancies as the stale tale of screenwriter Ellie Sebring dropping dead at his sushi bar. He stalled, picking his eyebrows, massaging his overbite, and finally dropped.

“Yeah, what suspense,” said Dennis the Lawyer, throwing in yet another busted straight. “I can’t catch pneumonia here.”

Playing with the jogtrot conservatism of a loan officer from the Corn Belt, Pierce had been drifting back and forth across the breakeven mark all day long. Now, true to form, he dropped without even looking at his seventh card.

That brought it around to Eddie the Agent, a big, silk-suited noisemaker from the William Morris office who’d bought in only an hour or so ago and immediately lost four big pots in a row. He was showing paired eights and a couple of junk cards.

“So Steve is hot to trot with his spades, eh? And ace high, too. Fuck, is this déjà vu or what?”

“You really ought to put out some more face towels, Ernie.” Maury from Wall Street was just now returning from a pit stop in Freed’s black tiled bathroom. “The one I used was all wet…. Say, this looks like our biggest pot so far.”

“Shut up, Maury.”

“Yeah. If you’re out of the hand, stay out. What’re you up to, Eddie?”

“This is so exciting I just have to call.”

“Then I have to raise,” Christo said, counting three thousand into the pot.

Steve the Record Producer exhaled very slowly. “And two more. That’s three grand to you, Eddie.”

“Well, that’s damn exciting, but … But I don’t think I can stick around for the showdown.”

“You and me,” Christo said. “Let’s see it.”

Slamming the edge of the table, Steve the Record Producer threw open his hand in disgust. He had three red cards down and a second ace. Christo turned kings over nines and drew in the pot on the blade of his arm.

“Outstanding read,” breathed Maury from Wall Street. “Hell of an outstanding read.”

“Fucking ridiculous is what it is.” Steve the Record Producer was going a little pink about the ears. “There’s no possible way you can raise into me and then call me out with two cocksucking pair.”

“It was easy once he folded the winning hand. Trip eights, wasn’t it?”

Eddie the Agent shrugged helplessly.

“I must thank both of you.” Christo looked for a moment into the bursting silver bubbles of his club soda. “You did exactly what I wanted you to.”

“And your buddy was dealing, too. What did you do with the rest of the spades, Milbank, swallow ’em?”