Odditorium: A Novel (26 page)

Walking up the pier they argued over how to split the catch. Alvarado pointed out that it was his cooler. Cocoa Jerry pointed out that he’d supplied the ice and done all the gutting and cutting. Karl, who had boated only a few small ladyfish, kept his mouth shut.

“How about we roll dice?” Cocoa Jerry suggested. “Winner take all.”

Alvarado said he’d rather eat steak anyway and why didn’t they go on over to Bummy’s, see what they could peddle to the early morning jar heads.

Winter in Gibsonton meant party time. The carnies were on hiatus, filling dead time with noise and fast motion. There were card games, pancake suppers, dances at the Independent Showman’s Hall. And there was drinking, lots of it. The bars were always full of glowing folks exchanging lies and confessions, sighs and professions of love. Marriages broke and reformed in a matter of hours, lives were threatened and memories erased. Uncoverable wagers were made on the eye color of the next person to come through the door. And if all else failed, there was always shop talk, prospects for the upcoming season to be discussed and, inevitably, lamented. “When I came up there was two, three times as many shows goin’ as now. It’s the damn television that’s killin’ us.”

Bummy’s jukebox was sending out steel guitar breakfast music as Alvarado tugged the cooler inside and sat down on top of it, his head in his hands. Doc up in Tampa had told him he’d better slow down or one day his valves would blow out.

Karl arrived with a roll of aluminum foil (he’d left Cocoa Jerry heaving into the dumpster behind the market) and the two of them worked their way from stool to stool down the bar, hawking fillets.

“Not outta the water two hours,” Karl said, wrapping four pieces of snapper for Elsa Spitz, Queen of the Midgets. “Got all your vitamins.”

“I’m buying for my cats,” Elsa said, raking him with the same imperious sneer she gave the gawks from her little linoleum platform in the freak tent of Yester’s Family Circus.

“I been up all night, don’t go busting my chops now.” Alvarado was getting hassled over price a few feet down the line.

“It’s fuckin’ food is all, ain’t no investment. I’ll give you five bucks for that lot.”

“We didn’t catch these babies off the rocks, amigo. Kearny don’t take you out to the deep water for nothing, you know what I’m saying?”

“Ah … You dickhead.” But he came up with the seven fifty out of his change on the bar.

Bummy took foil packages, etched the proper initials on them with his thumbnail and shoved them in with the bottled beer. None of these rummys was going anyplace for a while yet.

George Beasle, who’d run for mayor back in the ’50s on a bars-never-close platform, announced that Mrs. Beasle made a superb fish chowder and he’d buy up whatever was left. The woman next to him pointed out that Mrs. Beasle had died of throat cancer well over a year ago.

“Thanks for squashing my deal, honey,” Alvarado barked.

“What are you, sick?”

“Shit, I would have thrown in my own cooler here for an extra ten bucks. Sound good, George?”

Beasle’s face spread out in a smile that was like time-lapse film of a blooming rose. “That’s right! She bought it, didn’t she? Well, damn, a round of drinks on that, Bummy.”

When Karl declared that all he wanted was a glass of plain soda with maybe a squeeze of lemon, there was widespread disbelief.

“Karl takin’ plain soda?”

“Karl Gables, the ferry man on the whiskey river?”

“Maybe it’s somebody just looks like him.”

“Nope, this is me,” he said. “But I done stared temptation down. I’m like that old horse you can lead to water, you know?”

“So what’s the story, Karl? Did you have a talk with Jesus or something?”

“Just the love of a good woman,” laying one hand over his heart. “A pearl of a girl.”

“Yes. Just this morning I purchased from your wife some bunion pads.” Elsa Spitz held up a stapled paper bag for all to see. “To me she looked run-down.”

A few blocks to the south, at the Medi Quik, Tildy examined herself in the antitheft mirror: wan and pulpy, skin like the white of an egg. What she needed was some prolonged exposure at the beach, a new haircut. Or maybe, maybe it’s an allergic reaction to all these beauty products, to the terminally sleek fashion faces of the merchandising displays, the bright package graphics.

Six and a half hours until quitting time. She moved down the aisle with her clipboard, taking inventory…. Q-Tips, cotton balls, eyewash, mouthwash, lip gloss, dental floss. She felt disapproving eyes on her. Ray Holstein, store manager, whose duodenal ulcer had forced his retirement as Oceola High basketball coach, was checking through the previous day’s receipts and hoping to find a mistake.

“Cindy. Cindy, can you hear me?” He could never get her name right. “You’ll have to step it up. I need that inventory by twelve thirty. I’m having lunch with the district supervisor.”

Hallelujah. Lunch with the D.S. would be the highlight of Holstein’s week. Not that he lacked suitable fear of a company superior, but the D.S. was someone with whom he could feel affinity, rapport. (Rapport—wasn’t that what team sports were all about?) They shared interests, could gab all afternoon about target shooting, marketing, home video equipment. They had the same tastes in sportswear. Holstein was desperately hungry for this kind of thing. He hated Gibtown and the people who lived there. He felt isolated, a lone sentinel of decent reality among stooges, chiselers, fast-talkers, the mentally and physically deformed. Every single one of them breaking some kind of rule: moral, behavioral, genetic. Holstein was a true believer in rules. He had once bounced his top play-making guard right off the team for wearing unmatched socks to a game.

Tildy rattled her pen on permalloy shelf supports to get his attention. “Did you reorder those party supplies? The paper hats and all that?”

Hand going to the knot in his tie. “What about it?”

“We’ve still got everything from last month.”

“It wasn’t my idea, got a memo on it from the central office. They must be stuck with a whole warehouse.” Looking away, into the green digital readout of the cash register. “So what are you worrying about it for, Cindy? All you have to do is fill in the boxes on your inventory forms. Somebody else will take care of decision-making.”

“Sorry, Mr. H. I guess I got carried away.”

Eight hours a day with this weasel couldn’t be too good for her either. All for three ten an hour and whatever lipsticks and candy bars she could sneak out in her shoulder bag. A jalapeño milkshake to toast the perforation of your stomach, bossman. Go digest yourself.

Tildy’s fifth job in as many months and by no means the worst. The first gig after she got back from New York had lasted less than a week. She got into a rhubarb with some regular patrons (“What is it makin’ your nipples so hard, sweetie?”) and bopped one of them with a beer mug. After that she cleaned motel rooms. A month and a half with the flannel rags and the Ajax and the plastic bags—and an occasional startling discovery: a turd in the middle of the bed, an abandoned chihuahua tied to the sink with a shoe lace. There was even a kind of eloquence in empty liquor bottles grouped just so on an ash-strewn table. Tildy became increasingly sensitized to the things revealed in people’s trash and soiled leavings. Her appetite for such material kept on growing. Scenarios of sleaze began to dominate her every waking moment and finally enough was enough. Curiosity was one thing and fascination quite another. After that her friends at the Alhambra Diner took her on for the dinner shift, but Karl complained about being left alone at night.

Manically sober Karl. He was so much more alive off the juice, and on the muscle these days, wanting more and more from her. There was greater energy between them now than at any time since their first year, beating the bushes with a bus-and-truck show, never flying off to Bermuda like they planned, and not caring. There was clear improvement in the mechanics of romance. Karl’s newborn energy flared brightest in the bedroom and their sex was better than ever. She had even come several times. He was playful, like a little boy sometimes, and would curl around her in the dark, stroking her to sleep. But still she was restless: Is this
my
compulsion, or something to do with hormones? Assuming there’s a difference.

Karl felt strong and solid, like a newly installed king. He placed his empty coffee cup on the tank behind him, shifted forward on the cool toilet seat and listened to the gurgling of his intestines. The king makes music! All morning long the pressure had been building in the lower regions of his belly and now there was release.

Refreshed in recent weeks by the new domestic harmony (he was a husband again, with all those privileges), by good feelings seltzering through his bloodstream, Karl had become preoccupied with the smallest details of physical action. He went about the most mundane tasks attentively, watching his soapy fingers circle the rim of a dish, measuring the exact extension of his muscles as he reached for some object, relishing the way in which the smooth pistol-grip handle of the metal detector Tildy had given him for Christmas fit in his palm, the easy action of thumbwheel controls.

Now he felt the contours of a smoldering cigarette, rolling it against his fingertips, applying that certain degree of lip pressure that would draw smoke through the cellulose filter. Things could be so easy if you only let them.

“Easy,” he said, and snapped his fingers.

He took a last drag, flipped the cigarette between his legs into the bowl. The orange coal grazed his scrotum, the pain signal reaching his brain at the same moment the butt hit the water with a hiss. Despite the sudden sharpness of the pain, he did not even wince.

Years ago. A dewy, languid morning, early summer. Sitting in his grandma’s two-hole privy with birds squeaking outside, digging with his toes at the earth floor; and that summer peace ripped open by a mean, searing pain behind his little hairless balls. He exploded through the door, ran screaming for the house holding his pants up with both hands, then stopped dead, knees knocking, at the sight of a yellowed curtain flapping in an upstairs window. He knew how Grandma would fuss, wanting to examine the disgraceful hurt, to handle him and touch and poke. So, terrified and ashamed, he bolted into the woods and pressed cool moss to the burning spot, threw his arms around a tree and sobbed. The bark was rough and cold, but it was something to hug.

There he lay for a small boy’s eternity, quivering and filmed with sweat while a new pain engulfed him, an agony in his stomach that pulsed like a drum. Only the grown-ups could save him now. Would he die twitching in the dirt like a fish? For there was no doubt that he must die from a wound received in the midst of such a filthy act, from a punishment some evil toilet god had directed at the most wicked part of his body.

But he made it, stumbled crimson-faced into Grandma’s bony arms, and the first thing he did, with saliva running from his mouth and tears from his eyes, was apologize.

“I’m sorry, Grandma. I hurt myself making kaka. I’m sorry.”

She threw him in the back of the DeSoto and they flew down the hill, across the causeway to the army hospital. At first they thought it was acute appendicitis and were prepping him for surgery when a nurse noticed the lesion on his perineum. She said it looked like an insect bite. The doctors muttered and fiddled around in their white coat pockets. Black widow spiders were not unknown in this part of the country. The females often spun their webs beneath outhouses and their bite introduced a deadly nerve poison into the system.

By the time they hit him up with a jumbo dose of antivenin, Karl was teetering right on the edge. For some hours there was very real doubt as to whether he would recover. When two days later he did, he refused to go home. They tied him up in a sheet and carried him out to the DeSoto. For months Grandma had to lock him in his room to keep him from running away.

The moral of the story was that you were never safe. Each tiny fraction of a second held the possibility of pain and death; and something was always lurking. Always.

All aquiver, sphincter wound tight as a tow-truck winch, Karl got to his feet. He put his head in the sink and let the cold water run and run. Then he turned fast, so as not to see himself in the mirror, and got the hell out of that bathroom. Air, he needed fresh air. He’d take a little stroll by the mailbox, see what was waiting for him there.

That same sample box of fabric softener was hanging from the post in a plastic bag. Been there near two weeks now, had a look of bad luck about it. Karl tore it loose and flung it into the thicket across the road; then he pulled back the mailbox door and peeked inside. Pine needles, gray bits of old wasp nest and, yep, something pale way in the back. But don’t be no fool and stick your hand in. Karl flicked the letter out with a stick.

You were never safe. Never ever. He recognized the sharply angled handwriting, the way his name was written in red. His hands were shaking so badly he had to open the envelope with his teeth. This is what the letter said:

A big hello from Motor City. Sorry you missed your Christmas card this year, but I was busy recuperating from major surgery and just couldn’t find the time. I know how you enjoy news of Little Jerry and me. The streets are covered with ice now and the car won’t run, but we’re pushing on ahead and who needed a set of ovaries anyway? I’m running my own massage studio, living in an apartment upstairs with a view of the switching yards. Little Jerry is with me and a constant inspiration these days. Did you know he wants to be a race driver just like his Dad! Isn’t that sweet?

Many happy returns,

Shelly

There wasn’t a single thing to drink in the house … Except for this dusty bottle of grain alcohol under the kitchen sink. Was that the stuff that made you deaf or blind or something? Just the smell of it made his eyes water. How bad could it be? He remembered a gobbling geek named Suggs who used to drink shoe polish strained through a felt hat; but then, after biting the heads off mice every time he could muster a good crowd, probably anything would do.