Hob Broun - Odditorium

“You think I was pimping you? Well, honey, that just ain’t fair. It wasn’t that way at all. Those guys are drinkers, not doers, I’m here to tell you. I thought we’d have a little fun with ’em, tease ’em along, get a few free belts, but that’s it. Shit, I’m hurt you could think anything else.”

“Who invited them over? Not me.”

DaVita tugged at her wilting hair in frustration. “How could I know it’s going to turn into an ugly scene.”

DaVita was eager to please. Tildy softened a bit, regaining a sense of — was it proportion? “You shouldn’t have waited until now to tell me the score.”

“You’re right, of course you’re right. A little bit late, that’s chronic with me. So I still owe you, don’t I?”

“Never mind.”

“But I want to make it up to you.” DaVita was pleading; she looked pale and wasted in the rain. “We’ll go out Saturday and I’ll show you my secret beach. No one ever goes there so we’ll have it all to ourselves. Some days it’s good for body surfing and you can pick up nice shells if you want, they’re all over. I make necklaces and sell them.” Touching her throat, “I don’t have one on to show you but …”

Tildy opened the car door and threw in her bag. “Let’s just call it a draw and forget it.”

“No. I really like you, Tildy. I mean, I don’t even know who you are, but it’s one of those gut things.” DaVita shivered. Her vehemence was mysterious but compelling. “It would be good for me right now to have a girlfriend.”

“Agreed.” Tildy slid behind the wheel, turned the key. “A little sun, a little sand. I’ll meet you in front of the store at around eleven.”

“Cool, cool. And I’ll bring my kids along, I want you to meet them. They’re real sweet. I wouldn’t lie and say I’m happy to have ’em around all the time, but they’re my kids and I love ’em. Okay? So you drive careful now and don’t worry about me. I can hitch my way home, done it hundreds of times.”

Tildy activated the wipers, waved quickly, backed out.

“Don’t worry about me,” DaVita murmured into the headlights. “I’ll just put out my thumb and get soaked.”

The children were shy and pretty with hair of seaweed black. Robbie was five, Gina was three, and they held tightly to one another’s hands, moved cautiously onto the back seat with their dripping popsicles.

“Don’t you go making a mess back there,” DaVita said gently.

“Yes ma’am.” Robbie’s lips were tinted wild cherry. Kneeling, one hand braced on his sister’s head, he pushed in the chrome knobs to lock both doors.

DaVita pushed a ragged straw bag between them. “You have to both be watching this for me ’cause our sandwiches and everything are in here. That’ll be your job, okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

But Robbie pushed the bag into one corner, Gina clambered over the transmission hump, and they sat close, clasping sticky hands.

Tildy was not in the best frame of mind for a weekend drive. It was hot and growing hotter and DaVita unbuttoned her shirt; a lacy scar curved out from under her bikini top. She snooped restlessly through debris in the glove compartment.

“Can’t you go any faster? We’re liable to miss the prime tanning period.”

“It’s an old car.”

But Tildy put a hair’s extra pressure on the accelerator. A delivery van zoomed past, honking. She checked the odometer, then the rearview mirror; 12.7 miles and still not a word out of those kids.

They reached the coast and turned south past fruit stands and reptile museums and pastel stucco bunkers offering live crabs by the bag. Tildy rolled her window down to catch some of that salt breeze, but all she could smell was diesel smoke. Jammed up behind a laboring trailer truck, they passed slowly by a tongue-shaped inlet where men were wading waist-deep and scooping great weed balls into olive-drab buckets on shore. A guard sat nearby on a camp chair, shotgun across his knees. His bald head was red and peeling.

“Water hyacinth,” DaVita explained. “It fucks up boat propellers so they rip it out, chop it up, spray it with molasses and use it for cattle feed.”

“I’m impressed. Where’d you pick all that up?”

“Those are boys from the farm. Little bit ago you coulda seen Donnie out there pulling twice as much as anyone else.”

Robbie broke his vow of silence: “My dad’s so big he could pull a train.”

DaVita howled with laughter, reached over to squeeze a little baby fat leg. “But he couldn’t be the caboose, could he?”

“No ma’am.”

Past a line of palms, through a couple of S curves, and DaVita said, “Take a right, your next available right.”

They rumbled down a sandy trail descending gently toward water that was dirty green with shreds of white over the surface where the wind kicked it up. With a long sweep of sky behind it, the silvery beach was right out of an airline magazine. The only problem was the barbed wire they would have to climb to reach it; and the big red NO TRESSPASSING signs every ten feet. To the left, where the shore swelled out round and fat like the toe of a sadist’s boot, was a power generating station. If anything was coming out of the monstrous stacks it was colorless.

“Park right here and you’ll be invisible from the road.”

“‘Violators subject to fine and imprisonment’?”

“It’s all right. I’ve been here lots of times and it’s always deserted. We won’t have to bother about suits.”

DaVita padded the top strands of wire with folded towels, boosted Tildy up, then lifted the children over to her. With a vault and a spin she cleared the wire herself, landing gracefully with arms spread as in the finish of a tap routine. They picked a spot below small dunes tufted with sawgrass and laid a blanket down. Robbie took the plastic pail, Gina the matching shovel, and they wandered off along the hot sand.

“They’re independent,” DaVita said. “I like that. You been married a few years, how come you don’t have any kids?”

“It never came up really, we were both away so much. Now? Who needs one more thing to fail at. I don’t have so much confidence in myself as a mother.”

“That didn’t stop me. Fuck it, I know I don’t do all the things I should, but they’re tough and they’ll get by — or not — regardless of what I do.”

DaVita peeled off her clothes, then her bikini, and stood hipshot, humming softly, challenging Tildy to look.

“You think I got a good body?”

The scar was a tilted capital C under one tiny breast and her sloping crotch was shaved. She pinched her thighs, slapped at them, thrust herself forward with palms on her ass.

“Too much bone, you know. You can count every rib I’ve got.”

Staring at this scrawny, breakable woman, Tildy did not know what she felt, but it was sitting heavily in the pit of her stomach.

“For a man my tits are too small but I like them just the way they are, and like I tell Donnie, anything over a mouthful is wasted. I think you maybe got a little more up here. Come on, let’s see. Let’s see who’s bigger.”

Tildy looked down at the chipped pink polish on DaVita’s toenails, then over at the surf sliding in, frothing, bouncing up in little wedge-shaped waves. Whatever the spirit was, wherever it was leading, she’d get with it. Was this what DaVita meant by toughness? With stunning speed, she got naked.

“Zowie.” DaVita whistled through her teeth. “You got gorgeous lines. Yeah, everything tapers just right. But when you get right down to it I’d say we were about even. My breasts are firmer, see, the way you hang just makes them look bigger. I bottle-fed my kids from day one ’cause I didn’t want that droop.”