Odditorium: A Novel (13 page)

“You’re pretty colorful yourself.”

And then with a single horrendous crack the storm was upon them. Raindrops the size of hominy rumbled on the roof of the car and ran in overlapping sheets down the windows. The chill came right through the seams of the car. Tildy’s teeth chattered and she slid down until her eyes were level with the door handle. They were breathing fog, felt the cold charge of ozone stiffening muscles along spine and calf. Rising off the floor came the heavy odor of a Turkish bath: steam and sweat and scurf and fungal crusts that fed off one another. Abruptly then, something was sucked from the furious core of the storm and it eased, shifted. They were strafed with tiny nuggets of hail now.

“I think you should have turned left back there,” Tildy said.

Two-lane blacktop had turned to one-lane gravel. They swayed in the ruts and Christo had to swing sharply right to avoid the limbs of a freshly fallen tree. Soupy mud thrummed in the wheelwells. Christo stopped short and cut the ignition.

“What’s the deal?”

He turned to her and wiped his eyes. Tildy stared ahead, shoulders square, arms folded under pointy breasts perfect as two chrome bumper guards.

“This doesn’t go anywhere. I think you’d better turn around.”

Rain fell softly now and through a meager canopy of trees the sky showed veins of yellow breaking through.

“I sort of like it here. Tranquil.”

“Let’s go.”

Christo watched her hand dip into a pocket of her baggy slacks, reappear holding a pale, slender object which she tapped against the window glass. It was a straight razor.

“What’s that for?”

“Protection.” She depressed the thumb lever and the blade, spotted with iridescent tarnish, emerged from its mother-of-pearl housing.

“You don’t need it from me, Tildy. Relax. Whatever you might be thinking right at the moment, I’m a real get-along guy. Dogs love me.”

“You’re a thief and a liar, and that’s only what you’ve admitted to. How do I know you’re not some maniac who’d like to tie me up and carve his initials in my thigh?”

“You don’t, not conclusively. But that’s part of my charm.”

“This ride was your idea, don’t forget, not mine.”

“I’d call that coy, but if you put that thing away, I’ll agree.”

Tildy shoved the razor back in her pocket. “This doesn’t mean I trust you.”

He swung the door open, put one leg outside. “We’re both too jumpy for close quarters. Let’s walk.”

Separated by a wide corridor of air, they tramped through the drizzle without speaking. The road dipped and turned past a gravel mound, an overgrown rubbish site: tires, jerry cans, rubber pipes, a tilting stove.

“We could make a fire if you want,” he said, turning up the collar of her jacket for her, feeling for the first time the sleek texture of her skin as his knuckles grazed her neck.

“With what?”

“I don’t know. Money. I read once about some people up in Minnesota who got caught in a blizzard. They burned twenty-dollar bills to keep from getting frostbite.”

“Just keep walking,” Tildy said, more vehemently than she meant to.

Their shoes squelched with every step. Tildy began purposely to slog through the deepest water she could find, kicking it in all directions. She stopped in a puddle that was shin-deep and brought her foot down hard, splashing Christo’s legs. He nodded his head, smiling, and she did it again.

“Okay.” He bent, filled cupped hands and emptied them on her chest.

She winced and leaned over, pulling the sodden T-shirt away from her skin. Christo, taking advantage of her poor balance, gave a slight shove and she toppled backward into the slop.

“Thank you,” she said. She removed a sneaker, filled it with water and gradually, so as not to spill a drop, swaggered over and poured it on his head; while he was still blinking, she dropped a cold oyster of mud down the front of his pants.

Christo checked them into the Windjammer Motel as Mr. and Mrs. Leif Lucky of Detroit. The room overlooked the parking lot of a discount hardware store. The carpeting was mildewed, the bathtub drain clogged with hair. They showered separately, got under the covers, got nowhere.

“A lot of trouble you took to not get it up,” Tildy said, lighting her only dry cigarette.

They stared at cracks in the ceiling, shared the hollow silences and prickly, irregular flushes that accompany sexual nonfeasance. Down below someone was beating his dog.

Christo reached for the cigarette, puffed. “At least we’re dry.”

“I know I am,” Tildy said, delicately probing herself with an index finger.

Christo pressed the disadvantage. “See. I’m no kink, like you said before in the car. No madman from out of the cellar. I didn’t scratch you or crank your arms or pound on you like a piece of veal. There’s nothing I can’t seem to be, but this is your place, right? Abnormal is normal. Can you tell the difference now?”

Tildy rose on the right angle of one lean elbow and drew out from beneath her pillow the razor, balanced it on her palm like a small stick whittled clean. “Just in case. I stashed it while you were in the shower.”

“A wrong move or two and I could have been nutless, huh? Jesus.” Christo cupped his groin. “Jesus. You’re a tough little item, you know that? Ought to wear a bell around your neck.”

“It’s all right. I wouldn’t have cut anywhere below the shoulders.”

“You’ll just have to excuse me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in bed with a woman.”

She pulled the sheet over her head. This is it, she thought. Here the stale revelations come, the me-matter in all its weary detail from the first jumbled episode of Mom scrubbing his back to that perfect sexless sweetie who wounded his heart…. She did not want to know about his past. She did not even want him to have one.

“Listen, it wasn’t up to me. They don’t give you a whole lot of options in a mental hospital. Dating therapy is one thing they haven’t tried yet.”

Tildy jumped up, toes digging into the woven loops of the carpet, shouting through a sudden flurry of little stinging tears, “Why do you do it? Why do you tell me these things? Don’t you know when it’s time to shut up?” She fled into the bathroom.

“Come on out.” Christo chattered his nails on the door, thin composition board he could have put his fist right through. “You should feel good. You probably know more about me than a lot of my friends.” He heard water running full force in the sink. “Hey, this is a thoroughly cornball scene, me talking through the door and … Look. I move around a lot. I do things that are against the law and sometimes when I get jammed up, I have to take a few months in the bin. But there’s nothing out of whack in my head. I don’t commune with furniture. I don’t go around on the freak with rubber bands in my mouth and the end of my necktie hanging out my fly … I’m just a small-time outlaw. Where’s the harm in that?”

Jerking the door open, Tildy locked eyes with him briefly, then brushed past. Her wild brown curls spilled down her back like a gallon of dead bees. “I think I would like to go home now,” she said, stepping into her pants.

“Bullshit.” In annoyance Christo took a swipe at her fresh wake, perfumed with pink motel soap. “I interest you and you interest me, why kid around? I’ve been square with you more or less from the jump, so let’s make it even. Home obviously is the last place you want to be. Don’t you know I sniffed out your action before I was in that hash house two minutes? You got all the signs, sweetie, and believe me, I’ve been on the run long enough to recognize somebody else with the same disease. You need to bust the hell out and I think you ought to do it. I think you ought to come to New York with me.”

Tildy’s head came poking out the neckhole of her T-shirt, brows arching then flattening out, two dark valves above her glinting eyes. “That may be true.”

“You know it.”

“But don’t try those slimy intimidation tactics with me. I’m no plastic dolly and I won’t stand still for it. I never have. You don’t know how many bozos I’ve had try and intimidate me into things. All my fucking life. Pushing at me, poking at me … ‘I know what you want, sister, I got what you need.’”

“Man, but you could boil water with those eyes,” Christo said admiringly. He had been dressing while she talked, now buttoned the cuffs of one of Rechette’s blue cambric tab-collar shirts, pulled on ribbed black socks of see-through nylon. “I wasn’t trying to push you, just keep you honest. We had kind of a saying, too, back there at Milford State: ‘Don’t mess with a psychotic, you can’t win.’”

“You really want me to come to New York?”

“Absolutely. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

“With that load of marijuana you’ve got in the trunk?”

“Well now, well.” Christo fell back on the bed laughing, a slow, low-frequency laugh that had always served him well.

“I have a very sensitive nose.”

“I’ll say. And I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you I’ve got a little quarter-horse farm up north and it’s sweet clover hay you were smelling.”

“Lovely. I’m supposed to sign on for a trip to New York with you and a load of dope? Uh-uh. Jump back, Jack. If I can smell it, so can any traffic cop.”

“True. Get pulled over, you better talk fast fast fast. That’s where the sport comes in for me.”

“Well, I don’t need any more sport. I’m retired.”

In the dank T-shirt that chafed and made her nipples hurt, in stiff pants that rasped against her knees like sailcloth, Tildy moved shakily to the window and tipped her forehead to the glass. A light breeze stirred rain-laundered palm fronds and oily black puddles in the parking lot below. She let go of the pretense that she had any choice. What was the point? It was like the fading trail of a comet that had already passed. Her resistance was based on nothing; a fetish, the mindless twitching of a nerve. Somewhere back there a security violation had taken place, a border had been crossed, and now some dark and possibly terminal scheme had gathered her up. Quivering, rolling, heading straight into the wind and gaining speed. Bon Voyage! … And a vision of her immediate future flew by, milky and indistinct, like an animated cartoon projected onto the surface of one of those puddles. New York: a definite spot, at least, on the map.

“Right then. We’ll stop by my house and I’ll throw some things together.”

“No hurry. We’ll have lunch and a couple of drinks first and you can tell me about your husband.”

“Forget I ever mentioned him.”

“If you like. But let’s have lunch first anyway.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll change my mind?”

Christo just whistled through his teeth.

Parking in the shade, Tildy tossed the car keys in the ashtray.

“Wait here for me. I’ll be right out.”

“Have you decided what to say to him?”

“Not really.”

“Just don’t tell the truth. It’s poor form.”

It was stuffy inside the house, choked, even with the windows open. The furniture seemed shabby, unfamiliar; she felt, moving quickly and uneasily across the hard floor, that with a slight adjustment in the tuning of this signal she could be in the home of a friend she had not seen in years, who had called out of the blue to invite her over.

Karl stood with his back against the far wall eating peanut butter out of the jar.

“Where have you been all day? Car trouble?”

“No, everything’s fine.” She leaned against him, running her hand back and forth across his shoulders. “I ran into someone, we got to talking. You know.”

“I went outside this afternoon,” he boasted. “Walked up to Keyeses’ and back, saw a blacksnake sunnin’ himself in the road.”

She shook her head, declining the gob of peanut butter he offered on the end of his finger. “I can’t stay.”

“What about dinner? Thought we might go out someplace. Had a cravin’ for fried chicken and some cream gravy since I got out of bed. Dunno why.”

Tildy saw that she would have to jolt him, and wasn’t quite up to it. Despite his self-destructive history, the stubborn drag of his missteps and disabilities—or perhaps because of them—she was very loyal to her husband.

She pushed it out all at once. “I need some free time, Karl. This friend I ran into today, we’re going up to New York for a while to look into some things. I left some money with R.C. down at the store so you don’t have to worry about groceries and stuff. We’ll keep in touch by phone and if …”

He flung his arms around her, still holding the jar of peanut butter which she felt hard against the small of her back as he squeezed. “You’re leavin’ me, ain’t you.”

“Don’t dramatize. It’s just a trip, no more.” She broke away from his cramping, disconsolate hold. “It’s no different than if I were back on tour, like Sparn had booked a few dates in the Northeast. You see?”

“No. You goin’ off with someone else, that’s no job. And I need you here.”

“I won’t be long.”

“If you’d only stay, I’ll straighten up and fly right. Promise.”

She fixed her mouth on his and slicked her tongue over his lips, tasting something thin and bitter. “I have to go get organized now. He’s waiting for me outside.”

“You didn’t say it was no man.”

“I didn’t need to.”

“Don’t do it, baby. Not now. S’like leavin’ me out in the desert to burn up with no canteen … I’m set to fall in pieces, I can feel it comin’ on. You got a responsibility for that.”

But she was gone. From where he stood he could see her moving about the bedroom, reaching, leaning. She is slipping in and out. Slippery. Like a bar of soap, he thought. The harder you squeeze, the greater the odds it will fly away from you.

“Didn’t always treat me this way,” he said, but quietly so she wouldn’t hear. “You used to stick by me in the old days.”

Leaning inside the closet, the wrinkled white bedsheet that curtained it pushed over one shoulder and falling down her back like a bridal train, Tildy worked through the tangle of hangers one by one. Nothing much appealed. What were they wearing these days in the Big City?

“I wasn’t planning to get bogged down in this,” she murmured.

Taking her diaphragm from its bed of cornstarch, Tildy held it up to the light to check for tears or pinholes. Fine white powder fell on the sleeves of her jacket. Noises from the front room. Two distinct voices, not just Karl talking back to the teevee set. She hurried out, found them sitting opposite one another drinking beer.