Hob Broun - Odditorium

If only there were some shade to sit in. She hadn’t been walking long, only two cars had passed her by, but with each step the top of her sneaker rasped against the mauled foot. Crouched down, fumbling with the laces, she heard squealing tires behind her, turned to see gleaming chrome grillework and a bulge of blue hood.

“Oh my God, you’re alive.” DaVita’s voice. “You’re alive.” She tumbled out of the car, ran around and crushed Tildy in her arms. “You’re alive and I thought you were dead.”

“So you figured to leave me for the crabs to pick over and took off in my car.”

“Try and understand.”

“Understand! Fuck you.”

DaVita reached in, brought out the car keys, and as Tildy went to snap them up, caught her behind the neck and drove her rubbery mouth against the thin red line of Tildy’s lips. One manic, grappling kiss and she retreated, pulling hair in front of her face.

“There’s no way to explain it. I just freaked out, that’s all. You were out there so long and we lost sight of you. Up and down the beach, up and down, staring out till my eyes blurred. I didn’t know whether to stay or whether to go somewhere and call the police or the Coast Guard. I didn’t know what to do, so I just freaked.”

“Get in the car.”

Tildy slammed the door, rammed in the key and the engine knocked and roared. She felt a tug on her hair; it was Robbie, his gray eyes wide and clear. Next to him on the back seat, Gina was wrapped in a towel and fast asleep with thumb in mouth.

“Mommy said you couldn’t hear us underwater.”

Just then a thought dropped into Tildy’s mind, plop, like a honeydew melon tossed out of a third story window. “You don’t know how to swim, do you?”

“Not a lick.” DaVita nodded. “I know a lot of other things, like how to change a set of sparkplugs or how to make jambalaya or how to keep a man from shooting off too quick or how to stay up all night without watching teevee or listening to the radio, but I don’t know a damn thing to do around water.”

“You should have mentioned that before, DaVita. You really should have mentioned that before.”

The return trip passed in stunning silence.

Pulling up at the entrance to DaVita’s trailer park, Tildy left the motor running.

“Why don’t you come on in and I’ll make us something to eat. You like pig feet?”

“Just go.”

DaVita leaned against the open door looking scrawny and beat and pawed at her scarred face; a ruined child who’d been missing the point all her life, soon to trap herself inside a brand-new shape, the imperviously smashed oval of inertia without end.

“Will I see you again?”

Tildy smiled in spite of herself, pulled the door shut and drove.

Karl was in the backyard bouncing a tennis ball off the wall of the house.

“What happened to your foot?”

“Banged it up on a rock,” Tildy said.

He showed her the gauze on the back of his hand. “Sliced it open on a saw up at Keyeses’. Guess it’s been that kind of day all around. But I got the side pieces up, ought to be finished by Monday.”

He underhanded the fuzzless gray ball to her but she didn’t reach; it skittered into the weeds.

“You ain’t up for a catch, huh?”

“I’m exhausted, Karl, and sick to my stomach.”

“Too much sun probably.”

“Much too much.”

“Come on, darlin’, I’ll squeeze a dozen oranges for you.”

Tildy lay in bed with a cool cloth over her eyes and soft pillows under her head. In her stomach all that salt water she’d swallowed could not escape the influence of the tides. Up and back it rolled, up and back, up and back.

“Here. You don’t have to sit up.” Karl guided a straw between her lips. “I left a little of the pulp in. Just the way you like it.”

“Fine. Put it there and I’ll have it later.”

“You goin’ right off to sleep?”

“Sleeping or just lying still. I don’t know.”

Karl touched her naked instep with a cautious finger and she jumped. “Hush now, little sweetness. I’m only thinkin’ you ought to have a bath, give this foot a little soakin’. It’ll soften up the nail so she comes off nice and easy.”

“I don’t want to get up.”

“Don’t you worry.”

Karl filled the tub, undressed her, carried her in and lowered her into the water. Hot, safe water that welcomed her. He bent down very gradually and brushed her lips with his. A dry, fleeting, sober kiss, but the sweetest she’d ever had. She purred softly while he soaped her.

“Lord, it’s so good to be home,” she said.

And meant it.

LANDING IN TANGIER AT six in the morning, stiff-necked and bleary with trepidation, Christo was hard-pressed to accept the reality of African soil beneath him and the game now beginning in earnest.

Twelve hours ago, in a Midtown delicatessen lined with celebrity photographs, Pierce had given him a single piece of parting advice: “Be alert.” No problem. Nestled at the bottom of his cigarette pack were two little methamphetamine footballs; a green rabbit’s foot sat in his pocket. He’d be alert all right, at critical mass. He chainsmoked by the baggage carousel and his eyes moved like automatic cameras in a bank, checking every face.

The customs inspection was perfunctory — a heft of his bag, a fast dig around the sides, a squiggle of chalk on top. His phony passport was glanced over, duly stamped by a civil servant with a prosthetic hand. A real work of art, the passport, handcrafted by a woman who had married briefly into the Milbank family, who ran a design studio turning out corporate logos at ten thousand dollars a pop. The new identity was Arno Bester, Professor of Biochemistry, and in a tweed one-button with elbow patches, baggy slacks and bow tie, Christo was trying to look the part.

In the small café by the observation deck he ordered a pot of coffee and turned to the smuggler’s basic activity: waiting. The coffee was strong and thick and made his stomach pucker along with his mouth. Or was that anxiety twisting in him like a parasitic worm?

He took out the Polaroid of his local contact. In front of a wattle-and-daub hut, a brawny, heavy-boned individual with blond whiskers posed, wearing a cable-knit sweater and a bicycle racer’s cap with the bill turned up. He stood at attention, an expressionless mug-book figurine under a sky whose marine hue probably had more to do with developer chemicals than any quality of North African light. Tomas Ulrich was the name. He was a Swedish expatriate who’d had a long and (to insiders) renowned career as an arms dealer: AK-47s to the Turkish Cypriots, grenade launchers to the Pretoria-backed faction in Angola, plastique to the IRA, and on and on. But he was retired now, ran an auto body shop in the heart of the city.

“Tommy’s an absolute no-bullshit pro. A heavyweight,” Pierce had promised. “If there’s any trouble it won’t come from him.”

But Christo didn’t much care for the idea that his envoy and broker, the hinge on which the deal would swing, was a weapons man. Gunrunning, it was agreed even among the hardened, was an unusually demented business. It attracted men interested in more than money, taught them that anyone, even a partner, was ripe for the picking.

Already Christo needed help. He did not want to leave the consoling anonymity of the airport. They’d taught him about synthetic spirit on the inside, where time was measured by the clattering of pills in the bottom of tiny paper cups. He shook out one of the footballs and medicated himself. There now. The moment after swallowing, he felt more hopeful about the task ahead; like starting down the road with a full tank of gas.