Hob Broun - Odditorium

He was going to beat all over the door, but Tildy answered right away.

“Morning.”

“Is it?”

“Okay if I come in?”

“Sorry.”

He brought up his arms and she dodged away from him. “You mad with me?”

“Not particularly.”

“You can’t be mad with this.” He emptied his pockets one after another, greasy, misshapen doughnuts of money piling up on the bed.

“You’ve been wobbling around all night with that on you?”

“Yeah, I could just kiss myself.”

“And how soon will the cops be here?”

“No, baby, I made those cards fly tonight and it’s mine. Coulda made ’em swim if I wanted.” He reached for her again, fell forward, steadied himself on the bed. “What is … What is this about?”

There under all the green paper, tidily lined up with the stripes on the coverlet, were Tildy’s clothes all folded and ready for packing.

“I’m through,” she said, turning her back and looking for a cigarette. “I’m off.”

“Hold it there. We’ll have to talk about this.”

“I’d really rather not go into it.”

“Too cold.” Christo sat roughly on the floor. “It’s panic and I’m not even sure I like you.”

She bent and clasped her cold hands behind his neck. “Has nothing to do with you, so don’t feel bad.”

“But I was thinking we could be …” His head was so heavy and slow; he pressed hard on the bone between his eyes. “Partners.”

“You’re better off.” He caught her wrist when she tried to get up. “But you’re too drunk, Jimmy. I’m not going to try and follow your eyes and pound words into you. It’s like writing in sand.”

“I’m down, I’m all the way down. So talk to me. You can call me Jimmy, but just talk to me, tell me the story.”

She flopped down in surrender with that cigarette still unlit. “Not a very interesting story, a girl stuck in neutral … I came up here with you to get away, right? But nothing happened. I had three tosses for my quarter and didn’t score. That’s when you walk away. You go home and take care of your husband and wait on tables like any other ordinary broad.”

“But that’s all wrong. You don’t belong with that chump. And you don’t want to play hauling pitchers of beer and getting your ass pinched by guys in canvas hats.”

“Forget about Karl. You don’t know what that is.”

“But you’re wasting it all, we both know it. It’s easy to say: ‘This is not how I pictured it. Not at all.’ Sure, easy. Everyone knows how to give up, but is that really what you want? To just fade into the wallpaper?”

“Very nice, Jimmy. But I’ve heard all the stories, I’ve been hearing them since I was sixteen. And time just keeps roaring by. A lot of years people have been hitting on me. The circuit should have made me tough enough to get what I wanted on the ‘outside,’ seems like it just wore me out instead. When I close my eyes all I see are, are these, what — landscapes from some distant, unreal past. I feel this dull, maybe I should be dull. So I guess you’re right, I guess I do want to fade into the wallpaper.”

Christo was stumped. He asked for a drink of water. Tildy filled a glass in the bathroom. When she gave it to him, words stuck in his throat like wool waste in a clogged oil line.

Now she lit the cigarette. “But didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say I’d show you just how much of a bitch I could be?”

On her way to the airport Tildy had the cabbie stop at a farfetched downtown address. She told him to wait. What the hell, Christo was paying. Looie was waiting for her as she came off the elevator cage unbuttoning her blouse.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, moving for the rear of the loft. “Roll me a joint.”

DIM AND MUFFLED MUSIC of the seasons. The moon half asleep in its phases. But even in the tropic zone there is winter, a collective downturn: Citizens put on weight, slept longer, reacted with unconscious gloom to the early arrival of darkness. Even lifetime residents who had never salted a driveway dreamed of toddies by a crackling fire and sleigh bells in the snow. Up and down the Sunshine State, people ringing in the New Year with banana daquiris.

But there was a hollowness that nagged here, a sense of borrowed mythology, like the canned apple juice and paper oak leaves of a New Mexico Thanksgiving.

Karl Gables wobbled down the gangway of the Miss Jenny Lee III holding one end of a cooler packed with fillets: Yellowtail, mutton snapper. Oscar Alvarado, retired tattoo artist, held the other end, and following close behind came Cocoa Jerry with a blood and fish scale-spattered baseball cap turned sideways on his head. Cocoa Jerry was drinking “shark repellent,” half vodka and half instant coffee. They’d been on an all-night charter party and everyone, including the captain, was pretty well plotzed. Everyone except Karl, who’d confined himself to ginger ale, saltines and, when no one was looking, a few chunks of bait.

Walking up the pier they argued over how to split the catch. Alvarado pointed out that it was his cooler. Cocoa Jerry pointed out that he’d supplied the ice and done all the gutting and cutting. Karl, who had boated only a few small ladyfish, kept his mouth shut.

“How about we roll dice?” Cocoa Jerry suggested. “Winner take all.”

Alvarado said he’d rather eat steak anyway and why didn’t they go on over to Bummy’s, see what they could peddle to the early morning jar heads.

Winter in Gibsonton meant party time. The carnies were on hiatus, filling dead time with noise and fast motion. There were card games, pancake suppers, dances at the Independent Showman’s Hall. And there was drinking, lots of it. The bars were always full of glowing folks exchanging lies and confessions, sighs and professions of love. Marriages broke and reformed in a matter of hours, lives were threatened and memories erased. Uncoverable wagers were made on the eye color of the next person to come through the door. And if all else failed, there was always shop talk, prospects for the upcoming season to be discussed and, inevitably, lamented. “When I came up there was two, three times as many shows goin’ as now. It’s the damn television that’s killin’ us.”

Bummy’s jukebox was sending out steel guitar breakfast music as Alvarado tugged the cooler inside and sat down on top of it, his head in his hands. Doc up in Tampa had told him he’d better slow down or one day his valves would blow out.

Karl arrived with a roll of aluminum foil (he’d left Cocoa Jerry heaving into the dumpster behind the market) and the two of them worked their way from stool to stool down the bar, hawking fillets.

“Not outta the water two hours,” Karl said, wrapping four pieces of snapper for Elsa Spitz, Queen of the Midgets. “Got all your vitamins.”

“I’m buying for my cats,” Elsa said, raking him with the same imperious sneer she gave the gawks from her little linoleum platform in the freak tent of Yester’s Family Circus.

“I been up all night, don’t go busting my chops now.” Alvarado was getting hassled over price a few feet down the line.

“It’s fuckin’ food is all, ain’t no investment. I’ll give you five bucks for that lot.”

“We didn’t catch these babies off the rocks, amigo. Kearny don’t take you out to the deep water for nothing, you know what I’m saying?”

“Ah … You dickhead.” But he came up with the seven fifty out of his change on the bar.