Odditorium: A Novel (2 page)

Yeah, it was that kind of thing. The way people liked to shit on you out there. Even people that knew you, like R.C. Owens right down at the crossroads store. Anytime Karl walked in there, R.C. would come out from behind the counter and follow his every step like he was some spic fruit tramp between harvests; and he’d explained that thing last April a dozen times. How he’d carried those wieners outside because he remembered that he’d left his wallet on top of the Coke machine. But there was no human charity out there. Folks needed their victims.

Karl leaned shakily against the bedroom door, the bottle nestled against his cheek. He yearned miserably for his wife. She could soothe him with her voice, comfort him with a sandwich. So young and lovely, how had he kept her this long? He browsed through hangers in the closet, stroking her clothes, craving the slightest trace of her that might still reside in the fabric. His head swaddled in bunched skirts, jackets and blouses, he haltingly recalled their last time in bed. Crackles of heat lightning on the radio, handcream spilled on the sheets. Difficulty staying firm. Oh well. He wobbled to the floor, sat cross-legged and contemplated Tildy’s shoes neatly aligned on the closet floor, each insole dappled with the gray outline of heel and toes like paw prints in sand. It was hell, missing her this way, looking for her in a batch of empty shoes.

He took an enormous hit of brandy as a kind of blunting agent. Real nice, he’d stopped tasting it now. Ought to have just about a full tank by this time—there was an audible sloshing in his belly when he moved—but it didn’t seem to be putting him any closer to the hollow stupor he’d been longing to enter for days. And it was into the cooking sherry after this. He was going to need a miracle at this rate, some of that water-into-wine action. Karl tipped back, curled himself at the foot of the bed in the hope that, given a few minutes, he might pass out.

The floor was hard; his left ear throbbed. There were dust balls and odd pillow feathers right next to his eyes when he opened them. Wouldn’t mind if the whole house looked like it did under the bed, dark and untouched. Secret. A man could pass out in style in a house like that. Gradually, he extended one arm into the shadows and touched something hairy, more substantial than dust. He closed his hand around … It had bulk, there was fur. A dead animal. He would have squawked, probably injured himself with a sudden recoil, but his ganglia were so numbed, his reflexes so torpid, that he pulled weakly and the object skittered into light. It was one of Tildy’s slippers. He lifted it out and, cringing at himself even as he did so, kissed the spiky floss of blue orlon. Grit adhered to his lips sticky with blackberry brandy. More shoes, for Chrissakes. Into the slipper’s interior, stiff with wifely sweat, went his hand.

“I love you, Karl,” he squeaked, pinching the sole of the slipper into a kind of puppet mouth.

Inside something skidded under his fingertips. Square, crisp, with sharp corners.

“You got to ask to get,” he said in the puppet voice.

He looked at the ceiling, drew out his hand, dropped his eyes again. A fifty-dollar bill folded eight ways. Didn’t General Grant look fine, even with a crease right through his eyes!

Sweet, sweet Tildy. There when he needed her even when she wasn’t there. She’d been paying the cost to be the boss right from the start; hired Arlo the Aqua Boy to be best man at their wedding. And hadn’t the preacher swallowed hard when Arlo handed up the ring in webbed hands.

Karl chugged the brandy dregs and came to his feet shadowboxing, a new man. Flush. He knew just what he was going to do, too. Get hold of that turnip squeezer, R.C. Owens, and order up.

He dialed, waited. “Yo, R.C, this is your day and mine to shine.”

“Who in hell is this?”

“Karl Gables, good buddy.”

“What you want, thief?”

“No way to talk, R.C. No way at all. I wanna mend fences with you, throw a little business your way. Got some friends coming in for the weekend, gonna need some stuff. Lessee … two pounds of olive loaf. Uh-huh. Couple of white breads.”

“Listen up. I done told your wife a while back you two ain’t got no more line a credit with me.”

“This is a straight cash deal here. Greenest greenbacks you’ll ever see. Now we got the olive loaf and the bread, yeah, maybe a couple cans of tuna. Need a dozen eggs, and you pack ’em careful, you prick. Then gimme two jugs of that hearty Burgundy … you writin’ this down?”

“Sure, Gables. In blood.”

“Real smart, R.C. Just for that I’ll take one case of that Gatortail Ale ’stead of two. Now you get that stuff all together ’cause I’m sendin’ my boy for it right quick.”

The moment he cradled the phone, Karl found he was overwhelmingly tired, as though he had dispersed his energy through the mouthpiece and along the wires. His knees were quivery, his vision slightly fractured, but he couldn’t let himself go just yet. Things to be done still. Had to get Ondray Keyes down here and work out some kind of deal.

The Keyeses were Karl’s closest neighbors. There were a lot of them up there; Karl wasn’t exactly sure what the total count was. Amos Keyes worked at a sawmill somewhere inland, but it was an off-and-on thing. Members of the family were constantly off here or there, running down a few days work. Ondray, the second youngest, was sometimes willing to come down the road and do a few things for Karl—run errands for him on his bicycle mostly. He had a basket in front and two saddlebags in back. He’d load up on goodies at the crossroads store, ferry them back, and usually end up keeping Karl’s change. Ondray was only in the fourth grade, but sharp, a demon with figures. He looked up at the sky when he talked and never smiled. Hard-ass little kid. And his pricing procedures were too.

Once Ondray had delivered two quarts of beer, hot, nearly explosive from a long trip in the saddlebags, in exchange for a pocket knife with bottle-opener attachment. Frantic for someone to talk to, Karl invited him to stick around. Ondray didn’t say a word, just hefted the knife in his small hand and stared at his bike lying on its side in the grass.

“Aw, c’mon, don’t be a wallflower,” Karl said. Then, in a ruinous stab at joviality. “I really like you, kid. You’re the cutest little Sambo I ever saw.”

Ondray’s markup had taken a truly brutal increase from that moment on. The kid knew what he was doing. He had the only game in town.

There was no telephone up at the Keyes place so in order to call Ondray, Karl had to go out on the front lawn and blow through a conch shell. That was supposed to be the signal. Sometimes Ondray rolled right by, sometimes he came the next day, and sometimes he didn’t come at all.

Karl had to rummage through several kitchen drawers before he located the shell, a hefty specimen with the words
SOUVENIR OF CABBAGE KEY
painted on the outside. He hurried into the front yard with it and sunlight hit him like a bucket of hot soup. He tried shading his eyes, but found both hands were needed to hold the shell steady. His flaccid lips had trouble forming the proper embouchure and the first sounds were like the belches of a housecat. He filled his lungs and tried again. The effort brought considerable pressure to bear on both his head and chest; he felt dizzy and remembered a story he’d once heard about a trumpet player who collapsed and died on the bandstand after a solo. The thought of blacking out in the yard, possibly lying vulnerable there for hours, filled him with such terror that he put his every last reserve behind the next blow and came out with a round bass note that made his ears ring.

With the shell under his arm he ran for the house and away from the light. Sometimes the boy came, sometimes he didn’t. Karl would just have to see. He closed his eyes and drained the cooking sherry. Then, sitting on his haunches in a corner of the bedroom, tearing off bits of fingernail and chewing them up, he lay in wait.

Karl Gables was not a habitual underdog looking downriver to the breakup of his life years later. That had already happened.

D
ENSE BLUE-GRAY CLOUDS
floated over the Sergeant Bill Cavaretta Memorial Field. The air crackled with ozone. Brick smokestacks of a knitting mill loomed over the bleachers along the third-base line and behind corrugated tin fencing in the outfield (279 feet to straightaway center). Burdock and pokeweed grew between the ties of an abandoned rail spur. All quiet as the two teams switched positions at the half inning—no claps or cheers, just the low rumble of approaching thunder. Total paid attendance for the Battle of the Sexes Softball Match was 61, not enough to cover expenses.

The lead-off hitter was Clothilde Soileau, a slight but compact woman with tightly curled brown hair and the kind of pale, hearts-and-flowers face that caused temples to vibrate back in 1925. In white lettering on the back of her green uniform shirt over the numeral 1, it said simply,
TILDY.
She raked the dirt around the batter’s box with her spikes, took a few practice cuts, then stepped in, crowding the plate and choking up on the aluminum bat, holding it at a 90-degree angle just behind her right ear. She laid off a hummer at the knees for ball one. Tildy winked at the pitcher, an unemployed roofer with end-stage acne, and laid down a perfect drag bunt that dribbled to a stop in the long grass to the right of the mound. She was standing on first base before the ball had been touched.

Hands on hips, the pitcher talked to his shoes. “The cunt bunts. Real cute.” He bounced his next pitch in the dirt and Tildy took off as it skipped all the way to the backstop. The catcher went after it on bow legs as the first raindrops fell, wheeled and sidearmed a wild throw that ricocheted off Tildy’s back into short right. She lowered her head and pumped her slender legs, rounding second. Two outfielders reached the ball simultaneously, bumped and elbowed for possession until one of them scooped it back in underhand. Rain came hard and heavy, as from a showerhead with a five-mile diameter; Tildy cut the third base bag and kept on. The catcher waited for her now, a heavy hippo straddling the plate with his mask in one hand, the ball in the other.

She was a dead-sure out and people started running for their cars. Fifteen feet away, Tildy went into her slide, right leg flung above her, flexed at the knee; then her foot sliced out and up, kicking the ball loose, and she sprawled through the wicket of those massive hippo legs.

Lying face down, Tildy smelled fresh, moist earth. She heard the hissing of the rain, but no awestruck ovation from the stands, not even the umpire’s safe call. Then she turned onto her knees and saw him through the haze, sprinting for the street along with the rest of her teammates. Tildy leaped up and followed, realizing they’d want to scramble onto that bus and make like a blue streak for the motel before any of the suckers thought to ask for their money back.

From the cork-lined Situation Room of his corporate headquarters in Jacksonville, Peter F.-X. Sparn—past president of the Florida Vending Machine Association, Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the Muscular Dystrophy Bass Tournament at Crescent Lake—oversaw a bustling amusements empire with the help of his loyal staff: Miss Dolly Varden, personal assistant to Mr. Sparn since 1947; and bonehead son, Vinnie, adopted in 1953 after Mrs. Sparn had her third spontaneous abortion.

Sparn’s Seminole Star Corporation supplied topless dancers to saloons and army bases up and down the Eastern seaboard; leased juke boxes, pinball machines and video games; and jobbed the finest in candy and confections to movie theaters throughout Nassau and St. John’s counties. But the flagship of the operation, the real nonpareil, was Flora Pepper and Her Cougarettes, an all-girl fast-pitch softball team traveling fifteen states and taking on all comers. The mounted sailfish behind his desk didn’t make him a sportsman; owning a ball team did. After thirty-eight years of hardheaded entrepreneurship, what had he got? An all-electric home with asphalt drive and in-ground pool. A limousine that sailed down the road like a cloud. A beautifully appointed cabin cruiser drawing ten feet of water. A solid-gold walking stick and a diamond ring insured for over five thousand dollars. But he never wore the ring, kept it in a safety deposit box at the bank. And there you had it. Without sport, without fun, his life was so much gilt-edged paper sitting pointlessly in some darkened vault.

“If fun can be a business,” Pete was fond of saying, “then business can be fun.”

He’d been around long enough to know that financial success wasn’t everything. There were plenty of business wizards around, but damn few sportsmen. Real old-time classy sportsmen, he meant, not the bored board chairmen noodling around on the golf course or flying off on those nitwit hunting trips where drugged animals were herded up to the patio. Sparn’s team was much more than a hobby to him, more than a toy to keep him entertained between deals; it was the thing that set him apart and gave him prestige. And so what if his accountants (Pennspar & Kezdekian, of Neptune Street) were unimpressed? What did he care that they said revenues accruing therefrom were inadequate in view of current overall tax judgements? He was a goddamn sportsman.

Every morning, before lifting the smoked Lucite hood of his executive telephone to inaugurate the business day, Sparn read Dolly’s impeccably typewritten boxscores, cumulative batting and fielding averages, as well as the expenses and attendance figures. He pored lovingly over these stats, reveling in the pristine, almost mystical flow of the numbers that Vinnie, the Cougarettes’ manager, had phoned into Dolly the previous night.

“Another extra base hit for Heidi,” Sparn might say. “Let’s move her up in the order.” Or, “That’s three errors this week for Rosie Alonzo. Get her to an optometrist and have her eyes checked.”

Dolly Varden made note of these comments, of every grunt and lifted eyebrow, and relayed them to Vinnie at their next phone contact. She did not mind these extra tasks. She did not mind putting in ten- and twelve-hour days, then taking work home to her one-room apartment. Time did not pass for Dolly Varden. She lived in the haunted, unalterable vacuum of a dream. She was a 53-year-old virgin, silently, hopelessly, agonizingly in love with her boss.