Odditorium: A Novel (33 page)

He rushed to the shelf where he kept his back issues hearing wind in his ears, feeling like a mystery force had him by the nostrils and was pulling him on. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for: “Jazzman’s Fortune.” There was a muddy picture of Chick Webb; small all right, nothing but a nappy little head visible above his drum kit.

“… Harlem rumor mill was alive with stories of a fortune in cash and jewels secreted somewhere in Webb’s sumptuous town-house.”

With a pair of scissors Karl snipped out both articles, reread them while he brewed a pot of coffee. He sharpened his pencil, found paper to write on and sat down with a hot cup and the sense of profuse anticipation that comes only to the chosen, to begin research.

He drew a line down the center of the page, opposed facts and guesses at facts on either side. This is how it looked:

So what? In frustration Karl snapped the pencil in half. But he was no less convinced that he’d been sent a message, that there was a reason these two stories had fused in his mind. He was messing around at the dry surface of things, that was the problem. These men were like elves who came in the night to take his hand and lead him to a pot of gold. Elves were mischievous; they liked to tease. They didn’t just give their secrets away, but made you jump through hoops and solve riddles. He’d need a fresh approach. He’d need to attack at a deeper level. If he opened himself up, stayed quiet and passive, something might come to him.

Karl decided to sleep on it. Literally. Sandwiching the snipped-out pages around his lucky silver dollar, he sealed them in an envelope which he put under his pillow.

“Come on, elves,” he whispered, “come on into my sleep…. And bring your drums along.”

He thumbed his eyes shut and counted to a hundred. And as he’d done as a kid, when from the dim refuge of his narrow bunk he’d whirled around the Indy track like a fireball and drunk champagne from smooth white breasts in Victory Lane, Karl dreamed what he wanted to….

Old gray house. Moonlight on waxy leaves. Giggling in the hedges and small, dark animal shapes coming at him in the dark, Chick and Lester on all fours. They roll on the ground like they’re scratching fleas, poke at him with silver drumsticks. Chick is like an old eggplant, wrinkled and bulbous and black. Lester has colorless eyes and tiny hands. He stomp-dances while Chick limps. They say, “Don’t be afraid of the peewees,” and pull him inside the house where floors are slanted and stairs end in midair. They beat a rolling rumble on the baseboard with their sticks. Chick stands on his head; his hump is a searchlight shining into a corner where walls meet at an impossible angle. Lester pulls him back outside through a window, makes trilling bird noises. Chick is tapping out a waltz on his own head and they sing:

Ask us where is this there

We say not up our sleeves

We say down in the leaves

The sticks leave their hands like bullets, making phosphorescent trails in the air. Giggling again, the peewees somersault away into the black …

Good cash flow today, an upsurge in the seasonal trade. Kids had been coming in all afternoon to buy water pistols and baseball cards and bubblegum shaped like little running shoes. This kind of brisk selling was a natural mood-elevator for Ray Holstein.

“I know kids,” he said around a mouthful of peanut brittle. “Been in their vicinity near all my life. You expect they’ll get wild when the end of the school year comes in sight. But this, this … You know how much we could do with a minimal lunch counter setup? Those little termites would be in here every day chewing up hot dogs and soda and cupcakes. Dollar here, fifty cents there, ice cream, maybe even some little microwave pizzas. We could double the gross, I’m telling you. I know these kids. You can study them like the weather.”

Tildy came away from the window where she’d been evaluating her reflection with several brown-to-purple shades of lip gloss that had just come in. “Instead of telling me, Ray, you should just do it.”

“Would that I could, Soileau, would that I could. But I’m just the caretaker here and got no right to make any modifications. Follow the plan, that’s all the home office people want from me.”

“And you never get tired of that.”

“Whatever you think, I’m no damn robot, Soileau. I got ideas of my own. Why the hell not? I got a college degree and I read the papers. Just driving along in my car or loading the dishwasher and I’ll get an idea about something. Maybe I’ve been working up to it all along, but it’ll just come into my mind, you know?”

“So you’ve been having ideas.” The way Tildy rocked her head, fingered her throat, made it seem like she was talking about a medical condition. “What
is
on your mind, Ray?”

Holstein started fiddling with things on the counter, lining them up, pressing down with the palm of his hand. “Sure, make a joke out of it. Everybody’s a skeptic today. Leave town for a few days and your wife assumes you were banging some chick. Tell a kid about work, improving himself, being part of a team, and he laughs in your face.” Crushing the cardboard pop-up display over a tray of disposable lighters. “Everybody’s got a sneer on and they wonder why things don’t work. Maybe if there was a little more faith in people we could finally get out from under all this shit we live with.”

“Ray, you shouldn’t do this to yourself.”

He was heading straight for the milk of magnesia.

She drove home with the windows open and a bottle of beer in her lap. The air was soft, wrapped around her like the finest mosquito netting. She took the long road that skirted the Alafia River, passed quietly humming power lines marching through sand and scrub pine, and it all looked good to her.

Karl had thrown away the pillows in his sleep, kicked off the sheet. One forearm was curled under him while the other twitched spasmodically. He groaned once and opened his eyes halfway.

“Miss me?” Tildy said, changing into pants.

“What … What time is it?”

“Anytime.” She danced toward him, twirling invisible tassels.

He sat up and probed furiously behind the bed; a crackle of paper and he slumped back cradling an envelope. “Yes, baby, we almost there. We gonna be so rich you won’t recognize us.”

Saturday dawned cloudy and cool. By seven thirty Karl had packed his tools—crowbar, pickaxe, three sizes of shovel—into the car, tested the metal detector’s batteries, unplugged its six-inch loop and replaced it with a twelve-incher, going for maximum depth penetration over pinpoint accuracy. He was loaded for bear.

Cautiously, just after eight, he went in to wake Tildy. She had reacted with surprising annoyance to his plan, but this hadn’t flustered him. He’d read the pertinent texts aloud to her, patiently explained the connections he’d succeeded in making between them, the subsequent implications of his dream.

“What is this about?”

“You don’t see how I asked for a sign and it came?”

“This doesn’t make a damn bit of sense,” she’d said fiercely.

“Don’t have to make sense,” he replied. “It ain’t a map, it’s an inspiration.”

Forcing down a piece of raisin toast, Tildy was more despondent than before, and tangled in questions. Had Karl become truly demented, past all hope? Did he belong in a hospital? Was humoring him this way really the kindest choice? And why, when he’d said to her, “You don’t even
want
to believe in me,” had this accusation been so painful?

By nine they were parked at the head of Gardenville Road, shivering in silence marred only by the idling motor. Karl sat slumped against the dashboard, fists pressed into his eye sockets, communing with who knew what. His lips were moving. A last prayer? Tildy wished she had it in her to say one too.

“Okay, sugar, let’s move out.”

He was so jaunty it made her want to cry.

“Take it nice and slow. I’ll know it when I see it.”

Like an eager dog Karl thrust head and shoulders out the window, investigating the air with an elevated nose. Mist formed on the windshield. They passed a mobile home park, a chicken farm, the ruins of a church or one-room school.

“Hold it. Yeah, back her on up.”

A wedge of sloping roof visible through the trees, a dormer window with three of four panes broken out, a pair of weedy ruts angling out of sight.

“We’re gettin’ real warm. Can you feel it?”

There were signs of recent activity: fresh tire tracks, saplings bent and broken. Karl scrambled out of the car and searched the brush for further spoor. He found a crushed box, the kind used for takeout sandwiches. The mustard splotch on it was still fresh, hadn’t yet completely hardened. A few feet away, pressed into soft earth and disfigured by bootprints, was a paper sign that said:
CRIME SCENE AREA DO NOT ENTER.
He held it up for Tildy to read. He shimmied and kicked, a dance to celebrate his vindication.

“Maybe we should come back when it’s dark,” she said, wondering if they were being watched.

“Fuck no.” He was yanking her out the door, pawing her up and down. “I been waitin’ thirty-four years for my big moment. I always knowed a man couldn’t live the life of Karl Gables without some damn compensation comin’ to him. Now here I am after thirty-four years and I ain’t about to wait even another five minutes to finally get my end of the seesaw offa the ground.”

This is going to break his heart, Tildy thought, swaying through the ruts with Karl running in front of her, an awkwardly suspended figure in the frame of the windshield. She cut the engine and waited, listened almost hopefully for the crashing footfalls of the stakeout team sweeping down to intercept them before they got any closer. But there was only a faint sandpapering of wind, the overlapping chirps of two birds contesting territory.

“Come on. I need you to help carry things.”

She took a pick and shovel and a canvas sack they normally used for dirty laundry (“the swag bag,” Karl called it now), and followed helplessly along.

The color and texture of driftwood, the house looked like the setting for a Halloween cartoon. The front door dangled on a single hinge; a few scattered wads of newspaper stood out against the spongy darkness, nothing more. Karl ripped up one of the buckled porch slats and dropped to his haunches, studying the heavy skies. He dug around with the stick at the edges of the foundation, crumbled a chunk of earth in his hand, sifted it.

“They told me, ‘down in the leaves.’ No point messin’ in there.” He threw the stick into the black mouth of the doorway. “Somewhere under us,” and he put his ear to the ground.

Tildy shivered and buttoned up her sweater. This would be a vigil. She had turned away; Karl’s arms curled around her from behind, his nose cold on the back of her neck.

“Don’t be mad with me, baby. You’ll see.”

He clapped on the earphones, fiddled briefly with the tuning and volume controls, and began a preliminary sweep with his metal detector. Ten feet from the porch, beeps came loud and fast. He made a few circles of the area, homing in on where the signal was loudest, then took up the smaller shovel and began digging. Minutes later, he pulled out the bottom part of a kerosene lamp; an earthworm hung from its rust-chewed edge.

“At least you know the machine’s working right,” Tildy said helpfully.

But two hours later her supply of comforting words was running low. There were holes in front of the house, in back of the house, along the sides. Karl had worked painstakingly at first, scooping out round, smooth-edged cavities and mounding dirt neatly to one side, but the last ragged few looked like shell craters with dirt flung in all directions. The booty so far included a screwdriver, two spoons, a paint can and a faucet. The chill had settled in for the day, but Karl was perspiring heavily and had peeled down to his undershirt.

“In the leaves,” he muttered.

She could not bring herself to look at him.

He stood with one foot resting on the edge of the porch, leaning over with his chest supported on the bent knee. “The man that won’t be beaten can’t be beaten.” He was gasping for air. “And I won’t. No, I won’t.”

Karl sprang onto the porch, took one step toward that yawning door and his foot crashed through rotten wood. Foundering, he landed on his side, twisted, and splinter-teeth gouged his ankle. Tildy rushed to him, but he diverted her with a ferocious snarl, and turning very slowly lifted the foot free. Red blood seeped through a torn white sock, and lodged by its stem under crisscrossed shoelaces, a thin round of dead brown—a leaf.

Karl pitched his head back and yodeled with joy. “See that? I’m right on top of it.”

“What? What?”

“There’s a leaf on my shoe.” Reaching for it with quivering fingers, “Lord, I’m gonna kiss this leaf.”

And so he did, with the hungry gratitude of a man saved from drowning. Then he reached into the hole his foot had made and tossed up a great profusion of leaves that sailed and propellered down the air to land all around him like banknotes at the climax of a crime film.

“Down in the leaves, boys, I hear you now. We red-hot, boys. We got the goods.”

Tildy was frightened by the passion in his voice.

“Get the crowbar. Bring them things over here and we’ll rip this porch right up till we find what’s underneath.”

Raving. Delirious. He was like a man who’d been chasing a mirage across the desert for too long. She wanted to blanket him with her body, cover his parched mouth and burning eyes and lure him into sleep. But it was much too late for that. So she worked alongside him, trying not to think of anything but the cadence of her pickaxe swings. Steady as a metronome. Wood breaking apart, flying. Ground opening up to light it hadn’t seen in years …
Clang
. Pick point hitting something that was also metal. A shorter stroke, another clang. She reached down and felt smooth cold sides meeting in a rounded edge, little knobs up and down. She flopped on her stomach and peered down. It was a steamer trunk.