Hob Broun - Cardinal Numbers - Stories

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve always been at my best indoors.”

There was something like bergamot in her perfume. Dumas offered a cigarette. They lied readily to each other for several minutes.

“Would it be rude to order champagne at this hour?”

“I don’t mind,” she’d said.

“MARRY me.” Dumas cut the salt air with the stiff white brim of his hat.

South of Coos Bay, still half a day from the California line, they’d stopped for razor clams and a game of miniature golf. Lady Elaine had just stroked the ball under a lighthouse — its wire form showing through cracks in light blue cement — round a banked turn, off a pipe rail at two sharp angles, and into the cup.

“You’re such a ham,” she said.

Lady Elaine wore her dark glasses. The bulb enclosed in the lighthouse blinked invisibly in direct sun.

“Have I ever once teased you with this in twelve years?”

“No, never. And don’t spoil the record now.”

“Now is late.”

His shy sobriety frightened her.

“Shall I drive?”

“I mean in the game. Late in the game.”

“Come on, you need a drink.”

Dumas touched her face. “I mean it’s something we should do before we get too tired. Before we get to where it won’t matter.” She looked out at the unreasonable tumbling of the sea. “Let’s make for Nevada and you can think about it on the way.”

“I already am. I’m remembering what it took to get free of my last husband.”

Dumas reseated his hat. “Nobody but me will ask you, and I won’t again.”

“I don’t mind.”

Lady Elaine thought of the little whore. Down a road black with rain, unconsciously clicking the headlights from dim to bright to dim and back again, she felt her heart change.

LIGHT-HEADED FROM SILENCE, BRICK stopped in Canyon City to have the car monogrammed. A Sioux in watch cap and coveralls appraised him as a surgeon might. Gesturing, they arrived at a figure. The Sioux had piano player’s hands.

Raptors floated on thermals that rose from the parking lot. Brick, who deplored pathos, began to count in his head. Observe geology. Check tire pressure. Take photos: distancing factor. He bought pemmican and crackers from a vending machine that beeped twelve bars of Gershwin, G. Cautiously approaching the municipal beach, he saw it was deserted, and crouched in the shade of styrene palm leaves to eat.

Monotony of the waves.

Gull talk.

What continued to bother him was that analog wiring, one thing always leading to another: intricate rake trails in the sand furnishing the notes for a Japanese temple courtyard. He missed the clarity of no connections, of ignorance. And he continued to suspect that someone else had control, that he was being moved from panel to panel like a man in a comic strip.

How long and how far? How many stolen hotel towels?

Brick could not remember preparing for this trip, let alone on what day and in what city it had begun. He did remember waking up behind the wheel, having slept only for a second, then swerving past the reflective eyes of a large mammal, and over median grass. How much luck had that used up?

The white Gothic B’s to right and left of the hood scoop were, Brick realized only now, wrong side round to his view. He checked the expressions of oncoming drivers, for whom it was right side up, but these were unreadable.

Well, he could adjust.

That was the idea of travel, anyway.

On the far outskirts of Ciudad Radiofonica, he pulled over for a girl with a sign charcoaled, “Pilgrimage to Family Crypt.”

“How far you going?”

“Le Havre.”

Close up, it was easy to see that the pigtails and pinafore were an affectation, that she was quite a bit older than she was trying to seem.

“Brick Bradford,” he said, opening his hand. “Chemist, explorer, tight end.”

“The name is Boots.”

“And you’re on a pilgrimage.”

“Oh, that’s just a gimmick,” she said irritably. “I won this tour in an essay contest sponsored by the Optimists Club. I wrote ‘Emergency Styling: A Sonata in Verbs.’ But I discover some empty promises, like yesterday, this allegedly prepaid hotel, my room key won’t go through the wax they’ve jammed in the lock, and I have to skip. Real hospitality. Am I talking too much?”

Hedgerows had given way to olive groves and low, drylaid stone walls. Cattle egrets flew up out of a ditch. A boy led a gray donkey laden with firewood. The donkey’s expression said: I am not here.

They stopped at a trattoria with outdoor tables and ordered clam salad. Bright plastic soft drink crates were stacked against the fence. Across the road, on the one remaining wall of a house destroyed by fire, posters for a ninja film had been pasted upside down.

Brick wiped his plate clean with bread. “Do you believe in coincidence?” he said.

“I never ask myself.”

“How about destiny? Do you believe in destiny? That we’re really not in charge?”

“I ignore that.”

She spoke too slowly, too carefully, for these responses not to have been learned in advance.

“Is it true that sharks never sleep?” he said in the next panel, by way of experiment.

“Too obvious.” She pushed out her lower lip.

“What color are my eyes?” he said, covering them with his hands.

“Too romantic,” she said, taking her musette bag and slithering through the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway.

By the time Brick understood that she would not come back out, had ditched him via the back door, crickets were sounding, wild thyme aroma had vanished behind tour bus exhaust, and blue Xmas bulbs glowed along the roofline. His incoherent revenge was to run out on the check.

In the center of the right front seat, as if deliberately placed, and so demanding to be read, was a sheet of bond paper folded into an airplane:

Rex—

We never talk any more, really talk. You’re so busy with your “graphs and charts.” And whoever answers your phone there is not passing my messages along. Or possibly you are only pretending to be ignorant of them? It is humiliating for me to appear at canoe class alone. It is so painful for me now to remember our first summer at the cottage, you nursing my sunburn so tenderly. Last week at breakfast when I showed you my plane ticket, you laughed and laughed. Maybe you are laughing as you read this, I don’t know. But if you miss me and are sorry, it is not too late. Write c/o Hotel Empire, El Kharga.

Optimistically,

B.

Once again, B.B. was subject to the caroms of association. Having snapped at the end of the second sentence that this was the letter to her husband that had never been sent, he thought of the extinct passenger pigeon, the Transatlantic Cable, and Riverdale High valentine cards after that, Lulu with her haughty, rhodium-plated poodle pin. All without any proof that he was remembering his own experiences, and not someone else’s.

Heat lightning over the plains. Phone-talk radio. He couldn’t keep his eye off the mileage counter, reassured by any movement of the numbers.

“Go ahead, Emporia, Kansas,” said the phone-talk host.

White moths continued to collide with the windshield, spattering their essential liquors.

“I have a question for Major Hoople,” said the voice from Emporia.

He placed another nicotine lozenge under his tongue.

The Dew Drop Inn concierge refused his check and mimicked his bad pronunciation. The kitchen was closed, she told him, and then called the bellhop to help ridicule his clothes.

“But this is what I always wear,” Brick protested, flouncing his white linen suit, smoothing the lavender band of his boater.