Hob Broun - Odditorium

Early one Sunday morning Molly Joan tumbled in with a caftaned, child-eyed girl whose knapsack had been stolen. She had pale hands and long red hair, and reeked of patchouli oil. Dizzy and emitting foul burps, Molly Joan disappeared upstairs, leaving Flora alone with her catch. The girl said her name was Nebula, that she was on her way to a ginseng farm in Idaho, and that she hadn’t eaten anything in two days. Flora gave her some fruit and cottage cheese. Then Molly Joan came down, put some Dixieland on the turntable and summoned them into the living room where, naked, scrubbed and powdered, she offered herself to both, a hungry castaway on an atoll of red satin pillows.

That evening, Flora slashed open her forearms with a broken lightbulb.

It was at this point, with a comely kind of logic, that athletics salvaged the relationship. Molly Joan had just been elected captain of her company softball team and, as a peace offering, took Flora (just returned from the emergency room) to the next practice session instead of leaving her home to sulk and imagine the worst. Flora’s natural gifts became obvious within minutes. Her conformation was ideal, with disproportionately long arms and legs for maximum leverage, and good depth through the shoulders. Her long, tapered fingers had no trouble gripping a ball twelve inches around. It was a pointless batting practice because no one could get much wood on the ball, but nobody seemed to mind. The team’s coach was ecstatic; this girl could really “bring it.” He kissed Flora’s pitching hand, ran to the nearest telephone and arranged a soft job with flexible hours for her so she’d be eligible to play in league games.

Flora won her first start on a six-hit shutout and went on to sharpen and refine her raw skills in daily practices with Molly Joan at a local playground. These external relationships of pitcher/catcher and protégé/mentor stabilized their life together; Flora no longer woke up crying in the middle of the night and, as she grew in confidence, recaptured and then surpassed the bliss of those first weeks. But it was Molly Joan who reaped the sweetest harvest. It was like a rebirth for her. Molly Joan who had been diving into brick walls for as long as she could remember, who had driven a cab, operated cranes, waited tables, cut asparagus, pumped gas, hawked rug shampooers door to door and cooked at the Skyway Grill of the Cincinnati airport, had at last found something she loved to do in teaching and guiding her Flora, this beautiful animal with whom she could happily spend the rest of her life.

Flora’s amazing pitching performances of that summer, including a string of thirty-five scoreless innings, nearly propelled the Dynaco Sparklers to a national championship. They fell short in extra innings of the second elimination round, but Flora got her picture in a national magazine.

That was how Pete Sparn got wind of her. Just the kind of promotion he’d been looking for. Dolly Varden spent a whole day tracking her down and when Sparn got on the phone he was all honey. He offered to fly Flora to Jacksonville to discuss the possibilities of lucrative barnstorming tours with a team he’d build around her.

“Definitely sounds interesting,” Flora said, “but I don’t go anywhere without my catcher.”

“Fine. Bring her along.”

But Sparn wasn’t too thrilled when they walked into his office. He visualized a company of sporting stunners, as lovely as they were lithe and swift, and had no desire to mar that overall chorus-line appearance with a chunky member who had a face like a cheese grater and was pushing forty hard. But Flora said there would be no agreement unless Molly Joan was a part of it. The longer they talked, the more obvious it became that this was nonnegotiable. He took the package or he took nothing. In the vocabulary of dealing, this was known as getting boxed.

Unable to curb himself, Sparn was already in the thick of a speech when his star and her lover waddled through the door in matching terry-cloth robes, redolent of sex.

“Go ahead, Mr. Sparn,” Flora said hoarsely. “We don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Yeah. We woulda been here sooner if we’d known there was gonna be chow. Was there any slaw came with this?”

Sparn had prepared two or three sarcastic fusillades, but he swallowed them all. Much as he wanted to publicly chastise those two, his instincts told him now was not the time. There was bad blood flowing, he could tell, and the last thing he wanted to do was spill some of it.

“Okay, we’ve been talking about spark, or the lack of it. We’ve been talking about showing emotion and pumping that old adrenaline. You know a man once said that winning wasn’t the most important thing, it was the only thing. But I wonder if that really covers it. Frankly, girls, we’ve got a winning team that’s going broke, you hear what I’m saying? It doesn’t matter a damn how many games you win if you don’t pull the crowds. Is that so hard to understand? Remember that you’re entertainers out there, performers. Those routine plays have got to be more than routine and every game has to be fresh. Now everybody knows that Pete Sparn is not a finger-pointer. I’m not going to single anyone out. But I’ll tell you this, when somebody gets a little lazy, a little complacent, well, these things can spread like a virus and infect the whole unit. It’s all a question of attitude. Digging down for that extra burst of effort when you’ve told yourself there’s nothing left. Because we all live and die together. I think of this team as a spiderweb, you know? Like many independent strands linked together in a strong, resilient, ummm … a strong, ummm, network that is, well …”

As Sparn floundered in the muck of this ill-chosen analogy, Tildy slithered between Wanda and That’s-Mary to the front of the bed. She had heard enough.

“Pete, you don’t know one single thing about what we do and that’s for damn sure. We’re right there with it day after day after day, and you buzz on out here from Jacksonville to tell us we don’t put out? That shit won’t float. We play tired and hurt and hungover, anywhere we can get a game. We play at youth camps, in cow pastures, on airplane runways. We play doubleheaders on sandlot fields full of stones and broken glass, and no lights when it starts to get dark so you can’t see the ball till it’s right up on you and meanwhile the catcher is trying to put his hand in your shorts. Then onto the bus and drive all night to the next date, try to put a few hours sleep together before we play again. A bunch of small-town hotshots who’ll never hear the end of it if they get beat by women, and they’re looking to tear our heads off. But, Pete, we play the game and we eat the dirt and that’s all there is to it. So you take a look right here and tell me whether or not we put out.”

Tildy lowered her jeans to reveal a large, ugly raspberry on the outside of her left thigh, souvenir of the slide into home.

“You can check this too while you’re at it.” That’s-Mary thrust forward her leg and pointed to a swollen, purplish ankle.

Heidi displayed her dislocated thumb. Roxie Vasquez showed her bruised calf. And Wanda Watts, just recovering from a pulled hamstring, showed Sparn her middle finger.

Mutinous! Abominable! Sparn would have liked nothing better than to blister each and every one of them with a razor strop, lay on some bruises of his own, instill a little respect the way he used to do with Vinnie, but it was way too late for that. The bad blood he’d wanted to contain was now ankle deep. He would have to back off and make another rush; from a different direction this time.

“Of course you work hard, I don’t question that. You have a lot to put up with, fair enough. Don’t let’s overreact.” He sighed heavily and circled to his right, in the general direction of the corner where Flora and M.J. loitered impassively. “You’ve misunderstood my point. Or maybe I failed to put it in quite the right words.”