Hob Broun - Odditorium

“Hold it.”

Looie shut off the saw and drew back.

“What the hell?” Pierce, sensing the alarm.

Christo padded his hand with his shirttail. They watched as he worked under the crack and pried up.

Air. And down at the bottom, a few make-weight bags of cement.

Christo saw spots. Like stepping on the teeth of a rake, taking the handle full on the nose.

“I stood right there.”

Looie walked in a circle, massaging his sweating head. “Imported cement,” he said. And again, “Imported cement.”

“I did.” Speech made Christo gag, as though he had alphabet blocks in the throat. “I stood right there and helped load.”

Pierce took three long steps and drove a left hook into the wall.

Looie lay back on the floor. “I’ve walked into one of Aesop’s fables,” he sighed. All Christo could do to keep the vertigo at bay was continue to stare down the hole.

The elevator began to descend. As Pierce disappeared from view, they heard him say he’d be back. Right now he was going to find an emergency room and have a cast put on his hand.

DAYS LENGTHENING LIKE RYE grass, bold new movements along the river, mating calls from out of the trees. Yeah, it was spring all right, and the shows were starting up again, siphoning folks out of Gib-town for another season. Time to shake off the long, idle winter. Jam auctioneers were limbering up with tongue twisters, human oddities working out new poses in front of the mirror.

Karl sat dejected by the telephone. He’d been calling around all morning, pleading with anyone he could reach to help him latch on somewhere. He wasn’t an analyzer, a student of self, but Karl understood his own cycles and rhythms. He had to get out on the road again, just had to. But Bert Banion, who ran a fried clam concession for Worldwide, had just told him it was hopeless.

“Nobody wants to touch you after that riot you started last year,” said Bert, ever blunt. “The manager of L & M has put the word out on you. Gables is poison. So forget about it, you’ll have to find chump work this year.”

So he’d be a worthless outcast, a prisoner of the summer, and probably get crazy with boredom or resentment by July. Tildy would finally give up on him, and he’d be a marked man on the street reduced to picking over trash, and kids would throw rocks at him and dogs would pee on him as he slept at night on pieces of cardboard.

Sweet Jesus.

He pulled the newspaper over and went through the classifieds: dental receptionist. Mortgage officer. Typesetter. Karl tapped the side of his nose with a pencil. Were you really expecting there’d be an ad for bathroom attendant?

He turned pages slowly, looking for crime stories, found one headlined WIFE GETS THE FREEZE.

A spokeswoman for the County Sheriff’s Department announced today that a charge of murder would be brought against Lester Clines of Miami, described as a “three-foot four-inch midget” who had recently been working as a drummer at a Coconut Grove strip club.

While living in Miami for the past four years, Clines continued to pay rent on a bungalow on Gardenville Road in Gibsonton up until December of last year. When his checks stopped coming, the landlord initiated eviction proceedings, which resulted in the charge being filed against the 56-year-old Clines, who is alleged to have clubbed his wife to death and then stuffed her into a 2½-cubic-foot freezer sometime in 1976.

Sheriff’s deputies were removing furniture from the Gardenville Road house last week, the spokeswoman announced, when they discovered the freezer.

“It had a slight odor to it. We were hoping it was spoiled meat but it turned out to be a body,” she added.

Sources close to the Coroner’s Office report that it took three days for the body to thaw sufficiently to permit a positive identification.

Karl had trouble picturing the body as a solid block cast in the shape of a freezer compartment, frost in the eyelashes, arms and legs all contorted to fit in the small space. Mrs. Clines must have been a petite woman. Maybe even an all-out miniature like her husband.

He turned more pages, browsing through an item on a pharmacist’s attempt to cross the Pacific in a rowboat, a recipe for stuffed cabbage. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Lester Clines, the little drummer boy. It was really a comedy story if you looked at it hard — this midget laying down a bump-and-grind rhythm, while miles away his wife slept forever with her head on an ice tray.

It happened then, the slight turn of the wheel, the click. Karl remembered an article from one of his treasure magazines about a tiny coon bandleader with a hump on his back, a drummer, too, who’d stashed away a fortune. Drumming midgets, secret hiding places. It was a sign for sure, unmistakable as a thunderbolt.

He rushed to the shelf where he kept his back issues hearing wind in his ears, feeling like a mystery force had him by the nostrils and was pulling him on. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for: “Jazzman’s Fortune.” There was a muddy picture of Chick Webb; small all right, nothing but a nappy little head visible above his drum kit.

“… Harlem rumor mill was alive with stories of a fortune in cash and jewels secreted somewhere in Webb’s sumptuous town-house.”

With a pair of scissors Karl snipped out both articles, reread them while he brewed a pot of coffee. He sharpened his pencil, found paper to write on and sat down with a hot cup and the sense of profuse anticipation that comes only to the chosen, to begin research.

He drew a line down the center of the page, opposed facts and guesses at facts on either side. This is how it looked:

LESTER CLINES

CHICK WEBB

Drummer in band

Ditto

Midget

Small with deformity

Murdered wife

Unmarried (?)

Miami

New York (Born down South?)

Rental property

Owned own home, real estate investor

Secretive

Ditto

Possible coon (?)

Definite coon

So what? In frustration Karl snapped the pencil in half. But he was no less convinced that he’d been sent a message, that there was a reason these two stories had fused in his mind. He was messing around at the dry surface of things, that was the problem. These men were like elves who came in the night to take his hand and lead him to a pot of gold. Elves were mischievous; they liked to tease. They didn’t just give their secrets away, but made you jump through hoops and solve riddles. He’d need a fresh approach. He’d need to attack at a deeper level. If he opened himself up, stayed quiet and passive, something might come to him.

Karl decided to sleep on it. Literally. Sandwiching the snipped-out pages around his lucky silver dollar, he sealed them in an envelope which he put under his pillow.

“Come on, elves,” he whispered, “come on into my sleep…. And bring your drums along.”

He thumbed his eyes shut and counted to a hundred. And as he’d done as a kid, when from the dim refuge of his narrow bunk he’d whirled around the Indy track like a fireball and drunk champagne from smooth white breasts in Victory Lane, Karl dreamed what he wanted to….

Old gray house. Moonlight on waxy leaves. Giggling in the hedges and small, dark animal shapes coming at him in the dark, Chick and Lester on all fours. They roll on the ground like they’re scratching fleas, poke at him with silver drumsticks. Chick is like an old eggplant, wrinkled and bulbous and black. Lester has colorless eyes and tiny hands. He stomp-dances while Chick limps. They say, “Don’t be afraid of the peewees,” and pull him inside the house where floors are slanted and stairs end in midair. They beat a rolling rumble on the baseboard with their sticks. Chick stands on his head; his hump is a searchlight shining into a corner where walls meet at an impossible angle. Lester pulls him back outside through a window, makes trilling bird noises. Chick is tapping out a waltz on his own head and they sing: