Hob Broun - Cardinal Numbers - Stories

Back in Dakota one year when he was visiting for Christmas, the wind had come down off the Canadian plains to swirl snow and dirt into what they called a “snirt” storm. It clattered against the house. Mom said, “Hardly recognize you in those clothes.” Pop said, warily lifting his present, “Is it something to eat?” Pop had been three years at the Colorado School of Mines. As a cook. It was still snirting the next day and the day after that. “That dog can’t but hardly see,” Pop said. Perry Como sang about mistletoe and Mom sniffled. Speed went to the cellar. He put his hands in the bin of seed potatoes. Things can live in the dark, he thought, and didn’t feel any better.

Speed gets out his fourteen gum cards, still shiny. Twelve full seasons, plus the one in front when they sent him down to Asheville for seasoning, and the one in back when they said you’re not in our plans for this year. But we could let you be a batting coach in the Bean Dip League. He remembers the Fargo girl who sent pictures of herself on a horse, or in her band uniform. “Carry me up there and hit the big one.” And the one night he puts her in his pocket Fuentes throws a no-hitter. Sandi, with a heart over the i . He thinks about pictures as a residue of time. “Adams led the club last year in RBIs.”

Back in tenth grade in Dakota, geometry had calmed him down. Nothing he knew was so pure as those angles and arcs. Not even the hiss of a fastball inside the four points of a diamond. He made figures with compass and ruler and colored them in. Numbers might be a trick, but he could understand the laws of shape.

It’s almost dark outside, so Speed turns some radios on. The sound is tight, a pressure leak, but Speed hears his questions the same. And what they want is the clacking logic of one domino tipping the next one as it falls and the next and the next and the next. But all he can remember is what the things were, not why or where they went. From the couch to the John to the bed is the only geometry left. The lines don’t really meet, okay.

Noticing the buzzer, he can tell its been going some time behind his radios. Getting up, he feels light, light as paper, when the door sucks open on a man with silver eyes, skin with a rubbery shine, and where the ears ought to be, holes in a circle like the mouthpart of a telephone.

He says, “Bless my stars.”

Speed says come on in, but the shape of the doorframe seems to make him nervous. He tries to smile and it’s like something he had to learn in a hurry.

Nodding to the radios: “You’re a listener.”

Speed shrugs a little. Those eyes are really terrible.

“So you’re ready to go, then?”

Speed doesn’t say, “I don’t care if I never come back.” He sings it.

“Really very nice there.” The man gestures vaguely, impatiently. “All the lines meet. It’s very forgiving.”

Speed really wants him to come in now, but the man says he needs to run a couple or errands first.

“My vehicle’s parked on the roof. Wait here.”

Okay. In the kitchen Speed empties a can of Hormel chili into a pan. Hearing the traffic report is nice. He breaks two eggs into the pot, stirs. It doesn’t require a look to know there are bits of shell in there. But so why take them out?

SKY DISAPPEARED FROM BAY City at this time of year and the lighthouse never went out. Foam crackled like burnt candy at the edges of the beach. Nightfall came as a relief. She sighed. She leaned into the casement and felt her own pulse. There was muzzle steam from dogs fighting in the yard. There were newspaper bits spinning in the wind. She turned back to the room and a white beam squared across her eyes like M-G-M key lighting.

SHE’D spent December on an alcoholic case, a cartoonist who lived at the Forest Park Inn, a relentless man. He seemed able to breathe up gin from out of the air. On Christmas Day they ate chicken pot pies. He made her portrait on a napkin, told jokes, sang Gershwin. He said, “This is the A material, buttercup.” He raged, wept, and went to sleep at last.

She called the rich uncle, said, “I’m only a nurse. I can’t stop him from killing himself.”

Now she was on a palsy case, a lady author who lived on the top floor of the Tarleton Arms with Turkish carpets and a Siamese cat. Attempting a new book, the old lady could dictate only one chapter.

One day it would begin: This was the morning it was meant to happen, and I lay there trembling with nervous anticipation, with excitement I should have been saving for the climax, lay there as darkness faded slowly from the window and the sounds of a sullen city came up …

And the next time: Rusty woke up knowing he was going to kill her, as surely as the morning insects hummed in their grassy retreats, as birds sang each to each, palm fronds trembled in a nervous breeze …

And then: The first shaft of sunlight to pierce the mullioned windows found Dr. McCoy still at work, poised with excitement over the cluttered oaken table …

And it would go on and on without ever reaching a period.

She still felt pride, walking out in her navy-blue cape, red enamel Medic Cadet pin shining over the clasped collar. Her steps echoed off the row-house fronts. Mist curled over slag piled by the tracks. Then came the warmth of her own address, ribbed brown rubber matting on the stairs, that smell of radiator paint. And the single privacy of her room. She took off the hard starched cap, white lacquered shoes. She fixed a hot bath with lilac salts and alum. Her training explained that you could never really be clean, free of invisible organisms. She did not mind this. The white iron bed was drawn under the steep roof slant, by the low dormer window. Her open pores felt the weave of candy-stripe sheets. Her sleep was sweet as a fever.

ALL kinds of heat records were set that July. There were, every afternoon, ice-cream-and-lemonade parties for the house staff at Goriot Memorial. From balcony windows at one end of the activity room she looked out over the lawn, wilting now in the interval between morning and evening sprinkler time, at pansies and geraniums burned in their beds. She dabbed pink cupcake icing from the corners of her mouth.

“If you like this view, I know a better one.”

The new surgeon had come up behind her. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with clear, inviting eyes and an insistent jaw. She clutched the railing, sick at the odor of his brilliantine.

“When I can steal a moment in the evening, I go to the rotunda, up in the dome. That was the operating theater a hundred years ago, and it saw some great medical advances. I stand there in silence, watching the moonlight, and I feel I’m in touch with a beautiful essence.” He smiled. “You might like to join me some evening.”

She gestured illegibly, groaned, pushed past him.

The new surgeon sucked at his cold pipe. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he said.

She went into the empty chapel and knelt to pray. Saint Dymphna looked on from a deep sconce. The martyrdom of Saint Ignatius glowed red and blue in the cusped arch window. She asked mercy for those lingering victims of the bus depot fire. She asked for clarity in her heart.

She went down in the elevator, past X-ray rooms, the pathology lab, under a geometry of asbestos-covered pipe, through the cool connecting tunnel, up gray linoleum steps to her room in the back of the dorm. Next to a buzzing fan, Mona was soaking her feet in a basin of ice water. Mona worked night shift; she was still in her pajamas.

“Hi, sleepyhead. Doing all right?”

“I’m trying to think, like an Eskimo.”

Mona was tiny and dark, with brown eyes under black bangs. Her people farmed a hundred fifty acres of barley and russet potatoes in Bluefield, Minnesota.