Hob Broun - Odditorium

Tildy feels weak, needs to lie down. The queasiness is still with her from the morning. Like an oven inside the hut. Why didn’t one of us think to cut a little window? She fashions a pillow out of the empty sacks (Karl brings them home from the Syrian’s stuffed inside his pants) and drops her lids, realizing only seconds later that she has to pee. Botheration; she reaches behind her for a pan. It is customary in the settlement to deposit human waste directly into the river and allow the natural conveyor to carry it off. This is a problem for the more modest among them, Zarzuela’s wife for example, who waits for the cover of darkness to empty her child’s sand bucket girdled with red stars. And Christo relays the story of a safe-cracker full of aguardiente who went down by the river to ease his pressure, passed out and drowned in six inches of water. Improved technology is called for, a modernizing hand. That spot under broad-leafed trees at the downriver edge of the settlement, Karl could build a three-holer there, with a door you could latch. Think what this (probably all they can offer), could do for their standing in the community, for the goodwill of their artificial family. Family …

A thumping hose of blood circles Tildy’s head. Family. A word she should have kept out of her mind. A conjuring word that makes bad dreams appear. A triad marriage blossoms in the wilderness where organisms feed constantly off one another and the rules and regulations of the past no longer apply. X plus Y describes the old world; X plus Y plus Z the new. Parasite on parasite on parasite. An overloaded structure like this runs itself. It generates excess energy that has to go somewhere.

Tildy has missed her last two periods. For a time she hoped it was the sudden transfer to a new environment that had upset her previously consistent cycle; a change in diet, exotic bacteria in the water. But she can’t maintain doubt anymore. A little creature is stirring down there, pattering on the walls of its padded cell.

“I’m pregnant,” she says experimentally, with the coy, sparkling-eyed delivery of distant suburban comedies.

She lifts her shirt, trails dry fingers across her abdomen. A vibratory warmth there, but it does not seem in any way distended. Still, she can keep her secret only so much longer. The problem is whom to tell, and how. She doesn’t know which is the father. She has no intuition, no real preference. Mr. Y or Mr. Z? Karl with his genes of inertia and defeat? Christo with his genes of instability and deceit? It’s a choice she’d rather not make.

Tildy flexes her knees, stretches, eases through the jagged doorway into air as heavy and predictable as the shadows. How quiet it is. Not a breath of wind. Two crested birds chase and plunge across low branches without a sound. The steamy, muffling atmosphere insists on quiet, disguises what is going on so feverishly here and in the distance. When she holds herself and sings part of a tune she cannot place it’s like a curse thrown against the elastic disdain of the quiet. Hector passes without looking, a turtle shell dangling at the end of string wrapped around his hand. Her feet are white and sticky against the ground layered under her — crumbled minerals, ashes, powdered thorns and bones and bark. She curls and squeezes her toes in case anything is trying to crawl between them. The patchy black dog who has a dozen owners goes along dragging a back leg. Nearby, Lita is on her knees spreading a salve of fish oil and yam over the sores while her boy covers his eyes. Behind her there are other people moving, working. Of course, disintegration is quiet. And it is anywhere she might choose to look, sealed like a baby inside the concave blue muscle of the sky. She has a thirst like sand and her throat feels barbed all the way down. Arms extended, she walks as if on a rail down to the river. Something plops away, leaves a covering of bubbles and no more. It is hard not to think that the river runs in a circle, that the water passing returns and is always the same. She flattens her body over rocks and lowers her face into the water. She drinks until it aches, then pushes up with her hands and the droplets that fall from her chin send out rings from the center of her reflection. Into the multiplying rings comes a pointed green leaf. Its veins are thick and pearly, its serrations sharp. It is drifting. Drifting and drifting toward an unseen brink.

Hob Broun was the son of Heywood Hale Broun and the grandson of Heywood Broun, the newspaper columnist. After publishing his first novel, Odditorium , Broun underwent a spinal surgery that saved his life but left him permanently paralyzed from the neck down. By blowing through a tube connected to a specially outfitted keyboard, Broun was able to complete his second novel, Inner Tube , and write the short stories of Cardinal Numbers . He was at work on a third novel when he died at age thirty-seven in 1987.