Odditorium: A Novel (27 page)

Still, no skull-and-bones on the label. Just a little taste then. A tablespoon dispersed in grapefruit juice, one dose of tonic for his nerves.

When Tildy returned home that evening she did not find her husband sprawled across the floor like a bag of laundry. She did not find him at all; just an empty glass on the kitchen table, a disarrangement of solvents and cleansers on the floor.

Nothing to be alarmed about. She heated a can of soup and filed her nails. Maybe he was lurking in a closet, waiting for her to pass so he could jump out and scare her breathless. Like a little boy sometimes. Then she heard the siren wail outside. She listened hard, wanting it to go on and on and fade in the far distance. But it stopped close by, as she somehow knew it would.

She ran out to the road and stopped. Voices yowling through the trees, a smell of smoke. Something dire going down at the Keyes place. Tildy broke into a sprint, knees pumping high, sneakers slapping hard on the pavement. Up ahead, an undulating orange glow. Down the bending driveway she could see the pump truck setting up, playing out hose. The Keyes outhouse, swaddled in flames, was tipping backward, igniting refuse and scrap lumber stacked around it. Cars flashed by her, volunteer firemen with their domelights spinning. Watching impassively from a bowed front porch, Mrs. Keyes sipped on a beer and shooed her children inside. Just as quickly one of them would pop back through the hole in the screen door and scramble with excitement back and forth along the railing. Water churned out the nozzle now, blowing a hole in the blazing outhouse wall. The firemen cheered themselves.

Then, from some deeper region of darkness, came a more familiar voice—Karl’s. “Black widows,” he screamed. “You can’t even burn ’em out.”

Tildy had to take an advance on her salary to cover the costs, a couple hundred to cool the Keyeses’ anger and persuade them not to press charges, and another seventy or eighty for building materials. Karl, on Tildy’s orders, had agreed to rebuild the privy himself.

“I can’t think of anyone more qualified,” she said, driving him home from jail on Saturday afternoon. “I mean that’s your business. Isn’t it, donniker man?”

“Okay, okay. Don’t jump salty on me. I know I deserve it but …” Karl looked down, digging into a seam of the upholstery with his fingers. “But it wasn’t really me did it. It was like me standing outside my body and watching.”

“Just a bad dream, huh?” Tildy tromped on the gas pedal and the Galaxie roared through the intersection streaming blue smoke.

But she couldn’t stay mad at him long. With the wind out of his sails he was bobbing and drifting like an innertube, her fumbling old sad sack again. He moped and whimpered and fawned, promising he’d never go near alcohol again. Oh yes, he should be whipped for treating her this way, putting shame and botheration on her when every week she brought the bacon home. Tildy listened quietly with her eyes half shut. It was almost comforting, this noise, like the lowing of cows.

They had cold cuts and macaroni salad for lunch, then a short nap, with Karl corkscrewing around the mattress but not daring to touch her. Finally, she took his hand and held it.

“Either keep still or get out of bed.”

From under a bulwark of pillows she heard his retreating steps and a thick, low voice as the radio snapped on, low and steady as wind, more soothing than music.

Tildy suction-cupped a sign to the inside of the door—
BACK AT
in fat white letters and a clock face underneath with movable tin hands. Nudging them forward to 11:15, generously allowing herself a full half hour, she turned the lock, went back to the stockroom and lit up a joint. The very last crumbs of the bag Looie had pressed on her as a memento of their passion. Dear sweet Looie, and she could barely remember the contours of his face. It was good dope, though. Two or three drags and there was that tightness across her chest, a twitching in her brain like an old motor coming to life. Tildy held the smoke in her lungs until she was dizzy, and then, letting go, could hear for a few seconds the tomtom rhythm of her pumping blood before it faded out like the end of a record. An easy mark for distraction now, reading along the wall of a box—
STORE AWAY FROM HEAT PACKED AT CENTRAL DIST. CTR. FAIRMEADOW, INDIANA—
wondering what Fairmeadow looked like, factory town with an endless strip of muffler shops and fried-chicken stands and not a meadow in sight.

The joint had gone out in her fingers, a blackened stem she stashed for later in the cellophane of her cigarette pack. Envelope glue was what her dry mouth tasted like; and it was suddenly spooky back there with the cartons and shredded paper, an interrogation room. She went and sat behind the register, sucking mints and scratching pictures on a ledger pad: palm trees, a sofa, free-floating breasts.

Someone banging on the door. Only five after but they wouldn’t go away. Tildy stumbled coming off the stool and banged her hip on the edge of the counter. A skinny woman peered through the glass, deep acne scars, lavender eye shadow and pencil marks on upper and lower lids like sun rays in a child’s drawing, stringy blond hair that hung down past her shoulder blades. Tildy stood blinking, rubbing her hip.

“Come on, come on. I really need some stuff.”

My time is your time. Shrugging, Tildy pulled the door open, kicked a rubber wedge under it to let the breeze in. A little late. The woman sniffed ostentatiously, winked.

“I’ll find what I need. You go on back to whatever you were doing.”

She had chains around her neck, bracelets crowded on both wrists and every time she moved it was like somebody shaking a jar of nails. Tildy hung there beside her, rising and falling on the balls of her feet and staring like an imbecile. The woman backed away, tugging at the sleeves of her black cowboy shirt.

“I’d take five if I was you, honey. Your eyes look like silver dollars.”

Nobody asked you, but okay. Tildy climbed onto the stool and tried to look busy pushing papers around. Flitting among the shelves the woman studied bottles and spray cans intently, lips moving as she read the labels; and then her eyes would roll to one side and catch Tildy doing it too. They were watching each other, appraising. Tildy wanted to start a conversation, but felt timid and blocked. What the hell was going on? All the shivery tension of a blind date.

“I’m looking for a conditioner.”

“What?”

“It’s just so lifeless.” Raking fingers down her scalp. “I should have it cut off…. But if it’s all right, lemme ask what you use on your hair.”

“Nothing.”

“Well, nothing really works for you. It’s got a kind of innocent look, like, I don’t know, some silent-movie star.”

Not very surreptitiously, the woman ripped open a bag of malted milk balls and ate a few. She browsed at the magazine rack and tried on several pairs of rubber sandals. Squatting on the floor and talking to herself, she experimented with different hues of nail polish, didn’t bother to screw the caps back on the bottles. Tildy didn’t bother to camouflage her amazement, either. She envied this one’s gall.

Finally, in one concerted sweep, the woman filled her arms with products and swaggered over to dump them on the counter: tampons, foot powder, wart remover, orange sticks, baby oil, a toy airplane, and three of the magazines that Holstein, left to himself, would never have stocked in the first place.

“You ever check out these pussy books you got? They make the girls too pretty if you ask me. It’s better with all the hair, dirt under the nails and maybe a pimple here and there.”

“So maybe they should leave the faces blank altogether.” Tildy was ringing up her items very slowly, peeling the price tags off.

“But it’s got to be real, see?”

“Yeah, I used to be a stripper about a hundred years ago. Worked three straight nights at this place with a terrible case of hives. They loved me. On the fourth night they wanted to paint them on.”

“No shit, you really did that? How was it?”

“Lousy. But I liked the hours.”

The woman dug into her greasy jeans, spilled a hash of bills and coins on the counter. “Hope I got enough.”

Tildy took a crumpled five. “Tell you what. Pay me for what’s already on the machine and we’ll call it even.”

Shown in a wide smile, the woman’s teeth were small and gray. “I can have the rest for nothing? You sure?”

“Doesn’t matter to me. I’m not working for commissions.”

“Well,
muchas gracias
. You’re damn good down-with-it people, you know that … uh, Tildy,” reading the plastic name tag, then hooking a thumb at herself. “DaVita. Big D, small a, big V. My mom wanted something unusual, the old cow, and I guess she got it. Yeah, down with it. So what time you get off here, Tildy? I’d like to buy you a drink.”

“Around six. But I …”

“Cool, cool. Can you meet me then at the Paddle Wheel? It’s down Route 17, just past Sears. I’ll wait for you in the parking lot and we can go in together.”

“Why not.”

But when Tildy found her perched on the hood of someone’s jeep around by the rear entrance, DaVita had already been inside. There was a table waiting for them.

“I know the bartender,” DaVita said.

She seemed to know everyone at the Paddle Wheel. As they were sitting down, an older woman in an orange caftan rushed over and threw a drunken sloppy kiss on DaVita’s chin.

“This little girl is just so full of life,” she yipped at Tildy. “I just love her right to death. So full of life. Wisht I could be your age again.”

“Really needs a man, that one,” DaVita reported as the woman shouldered her way back to the bar. “Hasn’t been off work more than forty-five minutes and already she’s sloshed out of her old head. So what do you do for fun, Tildy?”

“Could I get a glass of rum with no ice?”

“Sure. Let me catch my breath a minute. Whoo, but this shit can become a way of life, like Donnie says I should just go on and move in here, all the time I spend. Him and the two kids there in a house-trailer, so if I don’t get out regularly—you know—I got to flip out from all that time boxed up. You married?”

“Seven days a week.”

“Mmm-hmmm. It can get that way. Men seem to move a whole lot slower, that’s what I’ve noticed. They’re like lizards or something around the house. Where’s the fun? Like, Donnie just came off the work farm. Some bank guy came to take the car back and Donnie punched him around. So he pulls three months on the farm and what does he want to do his first day out? Drink beer and fuck me while he watches television. That’s the most fun he can think up in three whole months. Moves too slow for me, that’s all.”

Tildy nodded; she knew about the slowness. “He doesn’t try and keep you home?”

“No point in that. Besides, Donnie weighs close to three hundred pounds. How many times is a guy like that going to get lucky? Once, and I’m it…. But what about you? What do you get into on the weekends?”

“Not a lot. Drive to Tampa and eat out.”

“I know you’re bluffing, a fox like you. Think about it some more and I’ll be back with drinks.”

Not much to think about—that was the problem. Tildy was embarrassed at her own dullness. Playing catch with Karl on a typical off-work day, hitting a few fungos just to watch the ball sail; sometimes going off on a treasure expedition, but unable to share Karl’s rudimentary excitement at digging up a high school ring near a roadside picnic table or a few black Mercury dimes at a demolition site. If she weren’t so perverted, could make the quick, animating choice instead of turning from it, she’d still be in New York and shacked up with Looie. No one to blame, sweets, but yourself.

DaVita showed up with two drinks, two men, and an unsettling gleam in her eye. They all four shoved in around a table for two and it was instant kneesies.

“Tildy, I’d like for you to meet Leroy and Bob. Leroy runs the security for Sears and Bob manages … What is it, Bob, sporting goods?”

“Affirmative. That’s my area, rods and balls.” Beefy Bob chortled through his mustache and his elbow pressed into Tildy’s left breast.

Leroy, squinting over the rim of his Bloody Mary said, “How about it for sports? Do you do tennis? Horseback riding?” Leroy was tall and pop-eyed, his hair cut in early Beatles fashion, sort of a Merseybeat Ichabod Crane. His arm went around DaVita and squeezed. “Now DaVita, she loves to go four or five miles on a stallion, right?”

“Don’t let these boys startle you,” DaVita cautioned. “That’s just what they’re after.”

“Not at all, not at all.” Bob sadly puffed his lips at the extent to which they’d been misconstrued. “I mean would we be making the money we make and looking how we do if we weren’t a couple of straight arrows?”

“I’d like another,” Tildy said.

DaVita emptied her glass. “Me too,” she said with her mouth full of ice cubes.

“Okay, this is my round,” Leroy volunteered. “Let’s get the party going.”

While he was off seeing to refills Bob stuttered his chair to a strategic angle and dropped his hand in Tildy’s lap. She tossed it back. With the sudden downshift of a telethon emcee going from toilet joke to fund appeal, Bob came on all chumpy and sincere.

“Hey, I’m really sorry. Don’t get ticked off, okay? I’m not always this crude but sometimes I get so nervous, you know, nervous around women that I act like a dumb high school kid.”

“No whispering, Bobby.” DaVita waggled a finger at him. “This is a party. You gotta be loud.”

Tildy smiled at her, but it was hard to tell if she and DaVita were allies or not.

Then Leroy was back and it was time for a toast to Mother’s beaten biscuits, dancing by moonlight, and, for all present, the peace and contentment of a sow on her belly in a bog. They all touched glasses and drank. Leroy, who seemed deeply moved by his own words, had to be cajoled into sitting back down. DaVita tickled under his chin and told him he had poetry in his soul.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bob said. “He got that off a record jacket.”

“Bullshit.” Leroy sent a fine spray of tomato juice across the table.

“Lighten up now, both of you. This is a party.” DaVita made them all touch glasses again.

Trying to ignore everything but what was in her glass, Tildy was struck by the sudden inspiration that separately or together DaVita had already fucked these clowns about a dozen times. This better not be a setup, she thought.