Odditorium: A Novel (17 page)

“It’s all right. This thing can hold a cement mixer.”

At last they edged into light. Looie was waiting for them by an already open gate on the third level of this one-time hides and leathers warehouse, a short, thinset being in a velour tracksuit. He had beady black eyes and, except for a small, triangular beard dyed blue, not a hair on his head—this made his prominent nose even more so, like, you could open beer bottles on it. The original-cast album of
Bye
,
Bye Birdie
was playing and he lip-synced along.

“We’re going to park in this guy’s living room?”

Christo smiled. “I thought you’d like this part.”

But there was no living room as such. The dividers, panels of pebbled plexiglass on overhead tracks, had been drawn to one side; it was one clear-through space so large that details at its farthest depth—some kind of platform, old machinery—were hard to make out. The floor was sanded white, walls stripped back to the brick, tin floral-imprint ceiling, furniture of chrome and suede, warm earth tones, recessed lighting.

Glossy head tilted appraisingly, Looie helped her out of the car.

“Meet my partner, Tildy Soileau.”

“
Enchanté
.” His lips skimmed across her knuckles and he embraced Christo, kissing him on both cheeks. “Welcome back. Welcome back to the madhouse without walls.”

“You’re looking good, Chemikazi, got that glow of health and wealth. And I like the blue beard. It looks a lot better than the green.”

“It’s been a tough year, a lot of cruelty and fraud out there—you know—people whizzing around like insects, trying to stay clear of the big boot heel coming down. But I just float through it all and never get hit with the debris. I can’t explain it. It’s a matter of faith…. Now, can I get you anything? Ham salad? Fondue? White wine?”

“Later for that. I say we sample up.” Christo applied the trunk key, opened one of the garbage bags, tore off great fistfuls of the herb, gummy with resin, dropping them onto an unpleated road map. “Pierce tells me they had a very dry growing season down in Colombia and we have here some tops of the bush pickings. El Primo. He says even an old jade like you will be impressed.”

While Christo sat at a butcher-block table rubbing buds through a flour sifter, Looie took Tildy lightly by the arm and showed her around his “barracks.” He pointed out rosewood cabinets he’d installed himself, the hand-cranked dumbwaiter where he stored onions and potatoes, a row of pancakes—blueberry, buttermilk, whole wheat—tacked up intact as instant sculpture. He opened a locker of salvaged skins of bear and fox and stoat and made her feel the brittle age in them with her hand.

“Once when I still had hair I shared a lunch of berries with a young grizzly. Tremendous berries in Oregon. Justly famous.”

He’d saved the best for last, guiding her now to a window centered in one wall, tiers of green, flashing movement behind the glass. How lovely his touch is, she thought, I know his arm is there but it feels weightless.

“My vivarium,” Looie announced. “Not a terrarium or aquarium. It’s sort of a country club for reptiles, you know, like the place where the mobsters go. La Costa.”

The terraced enclosure was high and deep. Mossy outcroppings and sandy pools were surrounded by wooden sticks (for climbing) and broadleaf vegetation. There were perches and hollows, tunnels through the wet black earth, areas of shade and areas of warm yellow spotlight (the same lamps, Looie said, fast-food places use to keep the french fries warm). Heaped mealworms writhed in the feeding dishes and a ventilation unit hummed quietly.

“Some of these types in here are temperamental or frail. I try to keep it at an even eighty-two degrees. I’m afraid they do get institutionalized after a while, you know, roll onto their backs at the first break in routine.”

Tildy indicated two green lumps wedged behind a chunk of lava.

“Korean fire belly toads,” he whispered. “I’m going to isolate them soon for breeding. Extremely difficult to obtain in this country. I’ve been doing some consulting work for a flavors and essences company. They felt they needed help with their mocha and their number-two beef, so I went up to New Rochelle for a week, gave one a few more bass notes and softened the salts in the other. Simple. But it paid for my toads.”

With some prompting he got her to distinguish a speckled salamander with gold chip eyes from the dwarf begonias under which it was curled, and explained how an old girlfriend had smuggled it from Africa inside a steam iron.

“How did you get him out?”

“That’s nothing. Two friends of mine, brothers, attempted to smuggle marijuana from Yucatán in their scuba tanks. It took them all day to pack it in through half-inch air valve holes. But it only took Customs two hours to unpack.”

“
Caramba
!” Christo displayed a wicked cheroot of Rubio de la Costa, Colombia’s highest octane strain, tightly and quite symmetrically rolled in a sheet of onionskin paper. “Let’s go, boys and girls.”

He lit up with an entire book of matches, paper flaring as he inhaled, face barely visible behind clouds of smoke.

“Nice flavor, very nice. Like incense in a Catholic church.”

The paper was burning too quickly, ash and seed embers dropping to the floor.

“That’s like a taco. You have to do it over something.” Looie brought a cookie sheet.

Collecting smoke in cupped hands, he washed his face with it. “Excellent bouquet. Pungent but not too sharp. Almost camphorous.” He made the delicate pass with Christo, took small puffs, exhaling rapidly through his nose, then one large one which he swirled, shifted back and forth between pouched cheeks like a wine taster. “Good resin content, no doubt about that. A little harsh on the throat.” Lifting a teapot from the table, he sucked cold oolong from the spout. “Any metabolic signs so far?”

“Slight chill in the palms, increased pulse rate … and this—this sort of walls-of-stone effect in my sinuses.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Looie refilled his lungs.

Then Christo held his face over a smoking hunk that landed on the cookie sheet and sucked through his nose till his eyes watered. They both watched the column of lacy blue smoke undulate toward the ceiling, examining it for omens, nodding learnedly like a couple of Delphic kibitzers.

“Looks like Pierce has done it again,” Christo said. Tildy stared into the grain of the table and wobbled her feet; he prodded her. “What about you? Why don’t you join me in our test kitchen to sample a new product absolutely free.”

“Okay. But I should tell you, strong grass gives me a headache.”

She handled the thing, smoking like a flare now, as if it were a cigarette; though her eyes bugged out, she managed not to cough. Christo made encouraging whatta-ya-waitin’-for gestures, and pinched her on the cheek.

“Just fuck off, Jimmy,” she choked. Looie shook his head, recalling something once said about not messing with a psychotic. She took a few modest hits, passed. “Don’t get pushy, that’s all. It provokes me.”

“You don’t want to come along, don’t.” Christo shifted, his speech twangy, stressed. “There are some changes really need to be made in Colombia. They’re still locked into that coffee economy, and monoculture just destroys the soil. Clear the forest for coffee trees that suck the nutrients out of the ground, before long you have to clear more forest and start again. Now nationalized marijuana plantations would offer a much more favorable foreign exchange situation without the inefficient use of land. It’s labor-intensive, you can have staggered planting and harvest times….”

Through gritty casement windows flanking the elevator cage, the sky bled by slow degrees to a duller shade of gray. The only sound in the room now a repetitive hissing: phono needle circling the end-groove of a Bing Crosby album. The humongous joint had been followed by a second, lying crumpled now and half finished on the cookie sheet, generating an atmosphere wrapped heavily with aimlessness. Like waiting for fruit to drop off the tree. In want of hostly energies, Looie snoozed open-eyed amid the fumes of an Indonesian clove cigarette. Christo, trying to do figures in his head, kept losing the handle in the process of rounding them off, but returned doggedly to the starting point. One kilo equals 35.2 ounces. The silence was so commanding, so tightly sealed, that when finally Tildy spoke, the words were like machine-gun fire.

“I think,” she said thickly from the depths of a canvas sling chair, “I think those aspirin you gave me are outnumbered.”

“I can give you something stronger,” Looie said, nearly toppling out of his chair as he reached to test her cheek for fever.

Beginning at the tips of his fingers, a protective urge shot through him. This brittle and uncertain girl thrust suddenly into a wild frontier—for her alone he would draw the wagons into a circle, heat bath water over a buffalo chip fire, pamper her with silk bloomers all the way from Junction City. One so dainty as you, ma’am, out here on the plains …

“The three-thousand-dollar kilo,” Christo said, discarding his calculations and taking a stab at it. “I think we’ve reached that plateau. Ought to check in with the boss. Where’s your phone?”

Looie pointed into the shadows. “All the way back on your right, next to the sewing machines.”

Tildy, for her part, had been sizing Looie up for some time, admiring his sleek contours and the elegance in the movements of his mouth. She imagined now a certain telegraphy between them—perhaps it was nothing more than weed hyperbole—a swift, uncoded message of flesh need. One for the homefolks, Karl in particular. “What’d y’all do up in New York?” Fucked a guy with a blue beard.

Conscious of her watchful eyes, Looie fanned out crackers on a cheeseboard, sliced up a wedge of Emmentaler shot through with cumin seeds, popped open a bottle of sparkling rosé.

“Pierce wasn’t home, but I left a message on his machine.” Christo appeared as Looie dealt out the glasses, filled one and swirled wine in his cottony mouth. “Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it. With a little teamwork we can have this shit bricked up in no time flat.”

“What’s the hurry?” Looie, to be sure, had other things on his mind.

“Fine. You two go ahead and sit there, chew the fat and get drunk. I’ll do the work. Don’t worry about it.” He walked sideways toward the Fiat, hands on hips, as though expecting one of them to jump him from behind. “Don’t worry about it at all.”

Noisily, he dragged bulging bags across the floor to the kilo press, an apparatus made of planks, pipe, a spring or two, and an automobile jack. The herb would be weighed out on a delicatessen scale, jammed in the mold and formed into bricks to be wrapped in lightly waxed yolk-yellow paper and sealed with gummed labels of Looie’s own design: La Cometa Azul      Imported under License to Phillip II of Spain.

Next to the kilo press was a letterpress with which Looie turned out a monthly poetry magazine containing his own punning and shaggy dog works, and those of a varying roster of friends. The May issue’s table of contents listed contributions by Mercedes Triumph, Looie’s ex-singing teacher; by Feral Hix, a Zen cab driver with a heavy jones for flower imagery; and by a spade kid named John Alonzo (Looie had only seen him once, darting around the corner in white canvas high-tops) whose Koranic pensées scrawled on spiral notebook paper would appear every so often, inside of a magazine or catalogue jammed in the mail slot. It had been years since Looie’d known money worries, and in fact he oversaw, without professional guidance, a small but diversified securities portfolio. But on Sundays, by the fountain across from the Plaza Hotel, Looie peddled his homemade editions at fifty cents per copy, a gesture to the indigent boho past he’d never had.

He flirted rather clumsily now with Tildy as they picked over the cheese remnants. Each had detected the other’s lust and their little corner of the room became a vivarium of its own, crowded with hot pinpoint lights and liquid radii flowing between them, while Christo toted his bales, fine-tuned the scale.

Looie told a story: dabbing a professor’s tuxedo with an extraordinarily potent moth lure so that when he arrived for the Alumni Banquet, his lapels were a quivering, powdery gray.

Tildy told a story: secretly, while her father slept, listening to Cajun boogie music on the radio—Clint Boudreau and his Zydeco Nightriders.

And when at last Christo looked up from his toils, some thistly remark at the end of his tongue, their chairs were empty. Cracker crumbs, whorls of cheese rind, were on the table, bubbling dregs in two wine glasses—an amateur’s tawdry still life, but the message was there. Out of darkness at the back of the room came rustlings, thuds on the wooden platform bed.

Tildy knelt on the mattress, crossed arms pulling the shirt over her head. Confused, flushed by the boldness of it all, Looie watched her and felt, oh my, pressing against him a sleek warm thigh that awaited his kiss. He saw in profile her sharp peewee breasts and something flipflopped inside him like the snap and release of taut elastic…. How very young she is, a small bird in the snow.

“It’s like an ostrich egg,” she whispered tentatively. “Could I do something?”

“Anything.”

“Could I, well, sort of run my tongue all over your skull?”

Christo used the fire stairs. He grabbed an evening paper and headed uptown. It was good to be back on the subway again.

Pierce Milbank’s Claremont Avenue duplex (which had once belonged to the great blind historian, Duncan Gateshead, when he was a visiting lecturer at Columbia) had three fireplaces, two kitchens and a Jacuzzi. In the front hallway, softly lit by a chandelier, he had hung a framed photograph of himself taken several Easters ago at his late grandmother’s home in Connecticut. In a vested tweed suit, the jacket draped over his shoulders à la Sinatra, he stood in front of a cluster of white birches, the last snows of spring withdrawing to sullen patches on the lawn. The only thing missing was a brace of freshly bagged grouse splayed at his feet.

Sure, it was all there, buried somewhere in the faint, granular background of the black and white print. The legendary Boston period, running black opium out of a quiche shop on Mass. Ave., then up to the majors, the fast track: drug casseroles, high-stakes badminton, the tumbling act in his sports car, charcoaling a steak in a men’s room sink at the New York Stock Exchange. Levels upon levels of carefully plotted can-you-top-this outrageousness.