Hob Broun - Cardinal Numbers - Stories

“Business bad?” said Dumas.

“These slobs.” The tall one smoothed her marcel. “They don’t know up from down.”

“Maybe they got religion too much,” said the small one, wetting her finger and dipping it in the sugar bowl.

Dumas bought them chicken dinners, a wedge of custard pie for his dessert, and an ammonia Coke for his lady.

“To keep your spirits up,” he punned.

The Tremaine was homey, neither the best nor the worst in town. The stationery, which Lady Elaine used for a letter to her sister in Banff, proclaimed, “A Hotel For All The People.” Moths stuttered inside the lampshade. A snowy sleigh-ride lithograph was puckered under glass and hung askew.

Dumas, in pajamas, read aloud the Billboard carny gossip. He rolled into bed, smelling of pipe smoke. “My babies,” he said, kissing her talc-dusted breasts, then turned on his stomach and fell fast asleep.

Lady Elaine kept awake an hour or more thinking how those girls could be murdered on the road and never even see their twenties. She’d traveled at that same age, from rodeo to rodeo with her father’s bullwhip act, couldn’t have been safer, more innocent. But those two had no protection, nothing to stop some great big lumberjack from tearing … The little one with glassy eyes defenseless most of all.

COMING very late to breakfast, Lady Elaine found Dumas in the lobby giving one of his numberless histories to a traveler in plumbing supplies.

“My father grew up the youngest of ten in an Ozark cabin with only hand-dipped candles for light. They slept two and three to a hammock. They ate turnips like fruit, and acorns and hickory nuts. Cod-liver oil was too dear, so Grandma dosed them all with bacon grease. They were stupid and dirty, but true as steel.”

As he came to the part about Pop dying of pneumonia hours before his swearing-in at the state capitol, Lady Elaine made her interruption.

“Herbert, let’s be on time for our appointment.” And she took his hand with a kind of motherly insistence.

Wasn’t it a lovely summer? Fliers and film cans stowed in the big Packard trunk, they were on tour with South Sea Sensations, shot at Pismo Beach with a cast of Mexican apricot-pickers, bare-breasted women in tablecloth sarongs, the men in lipsticked war paint. Forty seconds of autopsy film, skillfully intercut, fulfilled the “BIZARRE & HORRIFYING RITES OF SACRIFICE.” They prospered.

“Boobs and blood,” Dumas said. “You can’t beat it with a stick.”

It was an ensemble operation, a labor of equal lovers from setup to payoff. In town offices, like Chief Scarper’s small brown one, Dumas set out the terms and Lady Elaine tuned the atmosphere: Men wary of a fast shuffle from the Husband might be reassured at dealing with a family business, and men ready to be greased, but uneasy with women, might take comfort in the Wife’s hard pug face and hoarse profanity.

“We’ve had stag films before. And nekkid girls, live ones,” said Scarper. “But it weren’t advertised.”

“We present this as educational.” Dumas swiped at a fly. “A documentary.”

Scarper tapped his oily forehead. “You mean to put this on at the school or something? Kee-rist.”

Dumas was patient. With his finger he guided the Chief’s attention to the seventh and eighth lines of the flier:

NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH OR FAINT! MATURE ADULTS ONLY — PLEASE

“And what you got’s gonna square up with this come-on?” Dumas made a steeple of his hands. “Quoting from Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, ‘The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there.’ Of course, upon investigation, this proved to be no more than a porpoise in heavy costume. Do you see my point?”

“I do not.”

“My husband can be so abstruse at times.” Lady Elaine smiled indulgently. “What he means is that people will see what they want to see. You just have to give them a chance.”

“Five bucks a ducat, you say?”

“Anything less, they feel they won’t have had their money’s worth,” answered the Husband. “And you get a buck off the top of each one.”

Scarper raked his nails across the pilled green desk blotter. “Odd Fellows hall might be free. Lemme make a call.”

NOON had burned away morning damp. They made their way back to the Tremaine through lunchtime foot traffic, issuing fliers just now detailed, in bright red ink, by the Chief’s personal secretary, with time and location.

“I don’t like to see you spoil those beautiful eyes with squinting,” Dumas said, guiding Lady Elaine into a pawnshop, where she could pick out a pair of dark glasses while he talked up the owner.

“Shalom. So how’s by you?”

“These are a perfect match for my combs.”

They left with blue lenses in tortoiseshell frames and a flier in Siegel’s window.

Two blocks from the hotel, lolling on the stairs of a triple-decker wooden apartment house, there was that little whore. Lady Elaine, stern, gave over the revolver from her purse, first wiping it clean, and said, “Anyone tries to get rough, you shoot his dick off.”

The girl buzzed her lips and spun the chamber.

SRO at $5 per. Seasonal aromas: drugstore whiskey, anxious flesh on varnished folding chairs. Noisemakers: brogans scuffing the pine floor, crackling newspapers fanned, coughs and snorts releasing tension of the attention Dumas commanded with—

“… Are we repelled by their savagery? Charmed by their simplicity? What can we really know of these strange tribesmen and their isolated land of scoria and marl?”

— such spieling as Lady Elaine put into her negative division of fancy jokes. But she knew this was his instrument, and that to play fresh inventions each time meant more to him than money. She threaded the film through the projector, trued it in the gate.

“… filling this hall in such numbers to be startled, astounded, astonished, seeking not the satisfaction of curiosity but stimulation for the heart and mind. And so, my friends, now shall you have it.”

She lowered the phonograph arm and the Boswell Sisters sang “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” Gestures dappled the screen.

BEFORE the astonishing film, it had been two-cent stamps sold through a classified ad: “Color portrait engraving of George Washington. Send your $2 now! P.O.B. 3G, Ansonia Station, N.Y.”; before that Love Lockets peddled on amusement piers from Norfolk to Myrtle Beach to Mobile; before that a turf advisory service that once too often gaffed a dentist with connections. Dumas served not quite half of an eighteen-month sentence at Sing Sing. His cellmate, Monk Dershowitz, the Club Royale killer, knew interesting card tricks.

And some while before that, on the veranda of a Sarasota hotel overlooking the Gulf, Dumas and Lady Elaine had met for the first time. They were at separate tables with coffee and rolls and striated butter curls on ice. They wore white: his plus-fours and pullover, her silk blouse and aeronaut’s jodhpurs.

At that time, to everyone but the natives, Florida was novel, exotic, a tropical backdrop even the dullest might play against, granting equally to Buick dealer and tycoon grounds for sport and a climate for folly. Banjo bands and coon dancers roamed Sarasota; the Asola Theater had been rebuilt out of constituent parts sent from Venice.

“May I join you?”

“I don’t mind.” She smiled while hiding her teeth.

Dumas looked past the hawk nose and into her deep-green eyes.

She was first to turn away. “You must be dressed for golf,” she said. “It couldn’t be a lovelier day.”

“No, no. Billiards is my game.”

She thought: He’s not so much older than me. In his forties, or perhaps a bit more.