Hob Broun - Cardinal Numbers - Stories

Savannah

drop biscuits

Opa-Locka

moros y cristianos

I like to draw parallels. Daphne calls this “laying track.” I reply that converging rails teach perspective to small children. Perhaps, Daphne says, this is why as adults their definitions blur. Stella, our daughter, is six and takes no side.

“I’m sooo exhausted,” she says, collapsing theatrically at our feet.

But of course, right there, by posing she makes a parallel, an alter ego.

Daphne says, “Mimicry is not analogy.”

Yes, we are being insufferable. Lunch resumes with humorless laughter; the salad dressing features basil from our window box, the coffee is brewed very dark.

“Stella! Will you come out from under the table?”

“Just as a for instance,” I begin. My wife chews grimly. Are these the glinting eyes I fell in love with? “Just as a for instance, isn’t it amazing that at one time in Ireland they bled their cows to mix with milk just as the Masai do in Kenya today?”

“No.”

When Daphne has the last word, it is usually of one syllable.

park-wayn. a broad roadway bordered by trees and shrubs. (soften curves, plantings to guard from dazzle and wind, harmonize design)

free-wayn. a multi-lane divided highway with fully controlled access.

(eliminate curves, invite glare, engineer velocity)

One idea was, What would Frankie see? How would he react? Would Frankie on the road be restless or deliberate? With a ballpoint I wrote L-O-V-E on the knuckles of my left hand and H-A-T-E on the right, but it wasn’t the answer. Eye-level compositions were not the answer. Should I try not to focus at all?

Increasingly, my sensible Datsun was an embarrassment, a timid signature. Frankie would drive some kind of muscle car with tachometer, Frenched headlights, a hood scoop. I pictured an expanse of tailfin in thirty coats of hand-rubbed candy-apple red. I thought of the acute angle as an abstraction of speed, thrust, dynamism. What is it to understand a language and still not be able to speak it?

ALBERT FRANCONA

AKA “FRANKIE”

White Male

Age: 29

Height: 5’ 10”

Weight: 160

Color of Eyes: Black

Color of Hair: Black

SUBJECT IS WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH SERIES OF AGGRAVATED SEXUAL ASSAULTS IN NEW ENGLAND AND MID-ATLANTIC STATES. KNOWN TO FREQUENT PHOTO STUDIOS, GREASE PITS, BOWL-A-RAMAS. SCORNS FIREARMS, BUT SHOULD BE CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

It takes vigilance not to succumb to the numbers — f-stops, motel rates, highway designations, diner checks, exposure times — and one is not always up to it. The odometer turning to 50,000 becomes an anticipated Event. The glove compartment fills up with receipts, a wealth of documentation. Billboards and license plates turn unpreventably into algebra. A certain fecklessness sets in. And then a certain tension, which can be relieved only by sight of time and temperature specified in filament bulb mosaic on the rotating sign in front of a smalltown bank.

Awareness deluges when not modulated, when not finely tuned. It can become a kind of panic.

Expenditure: $62.31

1738 miles @ 26 mpg

67 gals, gas @ avg. price 93 cents

Stella, legally, should be starting school, but my wife and I are loath to part with her. Is this a lack of faith in institutions, or something more selfish? Either way, it probably is natural for members of the overeducated class. Daphne’s mother cannot say often enough that her daughter is “too clever by half.” In my own case, form follows function until exhausted but never catches up. A rerun in every direction, I mean. Stella announces: “Chocolate is fabulous.” Daphne has on Verdi or Bizet, and Stella shudders, yells, “I hate this music!” She has something to say with these words; they are not merely thrown up like tinsel onto a tree. We cherish in her such certainties, such firm insistence, and are loath to see them replaced by anxiety, ambivalence, embarrassment, retreat — what, in short, seem to be the necessary perversions.

ROADWAY VERNACULAR

(A Preliminary Syllabus)

Baines, Melissa, Urban Motif Congestion , Argon Press, West Covina, 1979.

De Marco, H. D., Rest and Respite: From Caravanseri to Truckstop , printed privately, 1968.

McMahon, T. K., Looking at the World Through a Windshield, HomeRun Books, San Francisco, 1981.

Niemann, Dieter, Phänomenologie des Autobahns, Kultur Zeitung, Bern, 1977.

Platt, David Alan, Neon Democracy, Dreyfuss-Peterkin, Boston, 1983.

Traven, Bob, First with the Best: A History of U.S. 1, Tire & Rubber Institute, Akron, 1965.

“Don’t get too wrapped up,” said nearly everyone who knew about my project. “Drive safely.”

I carried in the trunk of my car a first-aid kit, jumper cables, flares, a heavy-duty flashlight, kept my thermos filled with coffee, was careful to husband my energies and stay alert. Still, as it turned out, the dice weren’t sufficiently loaded.

I remember a distinct but unnameable shift of light, hard impact, raining glass, and then a kind of torpid, nauseous remove that was almost like snobbery. “Oh, just relax,” I might have said. Or, “Call the roller of big cigars.” I remember a texture of white clamshell, surf hissing around my ears. And O’Hara, unmarked and unfazed, the prick, his Dodge half-ton barely scraped, O’Hara making a cozy offer, his arm around me, snuff-stained teeth and rapid blinking.

In the taxi, I came more to myself, lenses spread out around me on the seat. Blue sea and blue sky seemed to roll as one. Just the note, I thought, to fill and then combine the chord. Go on. Make friends with it.

I sold the car and flew home.

DAY OF ACCIDENT

May 18, 1986

TIME OF DAY

10:15 a.m.

WEATHER

Clear

LIGHT CONDITION

Daylight

ROAD SURFACE

Dry

OCCURRED ON

(Name St., Rd. or Rte. #) U.S. 1

AT INTERSECTION WITH

(Name St., Rd. or Rte. #) Dade Co. 905

CITY NAME

(Or Nearest City) Key Largo

I look over the four contact sheets while they are still wet, am pleased right off to see a balance of formal and informal, a mixture of broad long-shot and close-in detail. I pour out another glass of Old Overholt, straight rye whiskey bottled in Cincinnati, and, along with my big-band tapes, a habitual darkroom accouterment. True, I like certain things to be just so, but who cares any more about workmanship? These are bits, blips, snippets, and not as careful as they look. Starting anywhere. Taking the last sheet, reading the rightmost negative strip, which on its upper edge says KODAK SAFETY FILM 5063, and on its lower edge names exposures 16 through 21.

— paired gas pumps, rectangular digital display units topped with identical PAY FIRST signboards

— old man forcing smile in motel breezeway, NAPA cap, bill stained

— industrial exhaust stacks, low angle

— church steeple paralleled by traffic light stanchion

— self-portrait behind the wheel (camera held at arm’s length), visible fatigue, characteristic alternation of aimless and frantic

— family group at Tastee Freez picnic table, night (flash fill)

Mom, dad, two girls, one boy. “We’re a service family.” Contemplative dad sipping thick shake. “MacDill AFB, Tampa. Antiaircraft. It’s all computers now.” Taking their latest transfer in stride, fatalists. “Work’s always there, so you follow it.” I had to envy resignation chosen and not settled for. Watched them roll slowly away in a camper lashed with luggage and bikes.

This is “Prelude to a Kiss.” Benny Carter’s 1942 band, very mellow reeds. And these still are only scraps, chips, slivers. That they can be fixed in a coherent sum is the kind of stance we live on, like entropy or antimatter: pretty fictions that don’t explain, furtive agreements of pretense, a wink and a ducking away.