Hob Broun - Odditorium

Leroy, squinting over the rim of his Bloody Mary said, “How about it for sports? Do you do tennis? Horseback riding?” Leroy was tall and pop-eyed, his hair cut in early Beatles fashion, sort of a Merseybeat Ichabod Crane. His arm went around DaVita and squeezed. “Now DaVita, she loves to go four or five miles on a stallion, right?”

“Don’t let these boys startle you,” DaVita cautioned. “That’s just what they’re after.”

“Not at all, not at all.” Bob sadly puffed his lips at the extent to which they’d been misconstrued. “I mean would we be making the money we make and looking how we do if we weren’t a couple of straight arrows?”

“I’d like another,” Tildy said.

DaVita emptied her glass. “Me too,” she said with her mouth full of ice cubes.

“Okay, this is my round,” Leroy volunteered. “Let’s get the party going.”

While he was off seeing to refills Bob stuttered his chair to a strategic angle and dropped his hand in Tildy’s lap. She tossed it back. With the sudden downshift of a telethon emcee going from toilet joke to fund appeal, Bob came on all chumpy and sincere.

“Hey, I’m really sorry. Don’t get ticked off, okay? I’m not always this crude but sometimes I get so nervous, you know, nervous around women that I act like a dumb high school kid.”

“No whispering, Bobby.” DaVita waggled a finger at him. “This is a party. You gotta be loud.”

Tildy smiled at her, but it was hard to tell if she and DaVita were allies or not.

Then Leroy was back and it was time for a toast to Mother’s beaten biscuits, dancing by moonlight, and, for all present, the peace and contentment of a sow on her belly in a bog. They all touched glasses and drank. Leroy, who seemed deeply moved by his own words, had to be cajoled into sitting back down. DaVita tickled under his chin and told him he had poetry in his soul.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bob said. “He got that off a record jacket.”

“Bullshit.” Leroy sent a fine spray of tomato juice across the table.

“Lighten up now, both of you. This is a party.” DaVita made them all touch glasses again.

Trying to ignore everything but what was in her glass, Tildy was struck by the sudden inspiration that separately or together DaVita had already fucked these clowns about a dozen times. This better not be a setup, she thought.

Bob, meanwhile, had returned with a vengeance to his original tack. Tildy jumped when he pinched her thigh, drinks sloshed all over the table and now it was Bob’s turn to buy a round. Leroy went off to empty his bladder, leaving the girls alone to discuss developments.

“What’s cooking here?” Tildy wanted to know.

“Bob’s pestering you? So you’ll sit next to Leroy when they get back. He’s much easier to handle.”

“Then you know these two from before?”

“Oh hell, yes. We’re like long-term buddies, drank ourselves unconscious in here many a time. Couple of sad guys, really. Snakebit. Mrs. Leroy, she lost her arm last summer. Driving down the road with her arm out the window, truck went by with a two-by-four sticking out and tore it right off at the shoulder.” DaVita mimed the impact, the expression of horror and revulsion, seeing your arm all mashed on the highway like somebody’s dead cat. “And Bobby’s so cranked up most of the time it’s pathetic, like a disaster just waiting to happen. But they’re totally harmless, believe me.”

Tildy needed subtitles, something to translate all this bar palaver into words of one syllable. “You and I were going to have a quick beer,” she said lamely. Was she being encouraged to come across with a charity fuck for one of these “sad guys”?

DaVita reached for Tildy’s hand with sisterly reassurance and her grip was soft, insinuating. “Oooh, your fingers are like icicles. You need to relax a little. I don’t think that job of yours is worth it if it makes you so uptight.”

“You’ve got advice for everyone, don’t you?”

“Know what I do? I’ve got these special breathing exercises. There’s a rhythm you have to master, but after that it’s easy. You get those lungs working smooth and steady and soon all your bullshit problems just float away. I’ll show you sometime.”

Bob arrived with a tray of highballs and an angry waitress at his heels. She windmilled her arms and screamed that he had no right taking her customers away like she wasn’t fit to carry drinks ten feet across a room, and he’d better give the tray back before she had him bounced the hell out. Bob was serving all the while with deep, smirking bows, throwing little scalloped napkins down to catch the frost-drip from the glasses. When he was through he flipped the tray at her like a pie plate and tried clumsily to jam a five-dollar bill into her modest cleavage. The girl took the money, but she was crying.

Tildy slid back as Bob melted into his chair. “What was that for? Do you get a jolt out of wiping your feet on people?” She was hot and cool at the same time.

“So don’t get all in a sweat over nothing. She got a nice fat tip out of it.” To DaVita, with a snide, shimmying delivery, “This is the stripper you told us about? So what’s with the goody-goody bit?”

Tildy turned flame-thrower eyes on DaVita and saw in her face sheepishness but no apology. “You’ve got it all wrong. There’s been a misunderstanding. I was a stripper, true, but in my uncle’s antique shop in New Orleans, the French Quarter. I stripped the paint off furniture.”

DaVita’s bracelets jangled in the bubble of uneasy silence. The evening, the party, had quietly slipped its bonds and was beyond capture, free to roam as it liked. Leroy loomed up with the orange caftan lady on his arm and offered to take the whole crew out for bar-b-que at some nigger spot back in the woods. There were no takers. Bob slurped from every available glass and looked ready to hit someone. Asking plaintively why, with the world so overpopulated, folks had to go on being lonely, the caftan lady wept inconsolably. DaVita chewed her split ends and asked if anyone would like to buy her a pack of cigarettes. There were no takers.

Even Leroy could pick up these vibes. “Hey, what happened, guys? Did I miss the boat or something?”

“Totally,” Tildy said.

“Well, fuck you, people.” And Leroy led his sobbing comrade away to a quiet venue near the restrooms where they could get to know each other better.

“Just the three of us now,” Bob said. “Ain’t that cozy.” He changed moods like paper hats.

Tildy slowly twisted to face him, lips flirtatiously slack, dampened by a sliding tongue. “As cozy as you want to make it.” Fingers darting inside his rayon shirt to tug at coiled chest hairs.

Bob flinched. “Don’t burn your fingers, baby.”

“You’d really like to get into my pants, wouldn’t you?”

“I surely would. Whatta you think?”

“I think one asshole in these pants is enough.”

She stood, tipping the ashtray onto Bob’s blossoming erection and, without so much as a glance in DaVita’s direction, headed for the exit.

It was a beautiful night. A beautiful night for a secret thought or a hanging. She heard DaVita’s jewelry sounds behind her.

“You’re mad, you’re mad.” DaVita moved as though there were a hot griddle under her feet. “I should never have mentioned to those tired rejects about your being a stripper. I know that.”

“Why are you following me?”

“I feel bad.”

“Yeah, don’t we all.” With a flat hand Tildy swept water beads off the car and onto DaVita’s chest.

“Hey, come on. So you got naked on stage. So what.”

“So,” pointing inside, “so you don’t tempt a hungry man with a steak.”