Cardinal Numbers: Stories

by Hob Broun

  They drove on with the windows open wide, and Lady Elaine with her head on his shoulder.

  “What I fell in love with the very first minute was how you could waltz.”

  “You were a feather in my arms,” said Dumas the gentleman, author of Torture & Catholicism, Dispersion of the Races, and Babyface Nelson, The Intimate Story, animal impressionist on barnyard novelty records by the Jelly Roll Morton band, impresario of indoor bicycle races in Newark, beef-eating contests in Houston, manager of beauty queens, importer of tropical birds.

  At the Endicott Lunch outside Roseburg, they took a booth midway between the entrance and the kitchen. Dumas ate his ham and white beans quickly, without looking up. Lady Elaine, slightly carsick, had tea. Two whores came in looking for men from the pulp mill. They wore tight dresses, open-toed shoes, and appeared to need sleep.

  “Ah, les nymphes du pavé” said Dumas warmly, and invited them to sit down.

  Lady Elaine felt her clothes, and what was underneath them, being closely appraised.

  “Business bad?” said Dumas.

  “These slobs.” The tall one smoothed her marcel. “They don’t know up from down.”

  “Maybe they got religion too much,” said the small one, wetting her finger and dipping it in the sugar bowl.

  Dumas bought them chicken dinners, a wedge of custard pie for his dessert, and an ammonia Coke for his lady.

  “To keep your spirits up,” he punned.

  The Tremaine was homey, neither the best nor the worst in town. The stationery, which Lady Elaine used for a letter to her sister in Banff, proclaimed, “A Hotel For All The People.” Moths stuttered inside the lampshade. A snowy sleigh-ride lithograph was puckered under glass and hung askew.

  Dumas, in pajamas, read aloud the Billboard carny gossip. He rolled into bed, smelling of pipe smoke. “My babies,” he said, kissing her talc-dusted breasts, then turned on his stomach and fell fast asleep.

  Lady Elaine kept awake an hour or more thinking how those girls could be murdered on the road and never even see their twenties. She’d traveled at that same age, from rodeo to rodeo with her father’s bullwhip act, couldn’t have been safer, more innocent. But those two had no protection, nothing to stop some great big lumberjack from tearing … The little one with glassy eyes defenseless most of all.

  COMING very late to breakfast, Lady Elaine found Dumas in the lobby giving one of his numberless histories to a traveler in plumbing supplies.

  “My father grew up the youngest of ten in an Ozark cabin with only hand-dipped candles for light. They slept two and three to a hammock. They ate turnips like fruit, and acorns and hickory nuts. Cod-liver oil was too dear, so Grandma dosed them all with bacon grease. They were stupid and dirty, but true as steel.”

  As he came to the part about Pop dying of pneumonia hours before his swearing-in at the state capitol, Lady Elaine made her interruption.

  “Herbert, let’s be on time for our appointment.” And she took his hand with a kind of motherly insistence.

  Wasn’t it a lovely summer? Fliers and film cans stowed in the big Packard trunk, they were on tour with South Sea Sensations, shot at Pismo Beach with a cast of Mexican apricot-pickers, bare-breasted women in tablecloth sarongs, the men in lipsticked war paint. Forty seconds of autopsy film, skillfully intercut, fulfilled the “BIZARRE & HORRIFYING RITES OF SACRIFICE.” They prospered.

  “Boobs and blood,” Dumas said. “You can’t beat it with a stick.”

  It was an ensemble operation, a labor of equal lovers from setup to payoff. In town offices, like Chief Scarper’s small brown one, Dumas set out the terms and Lady Elaine tuned the atmosphere: Men wary of a fast shuffle from the Husband might be reassured at dealing with a family business, and men ready to be greased, but uneasy with women, might take comfort in the Wife’s hard pug face and hoarse profanity.

  “We’ve had stag films before. And nekkid girls, live ones,” said Scarper. “But it weren’t advertised.”

  “We present this as educational.” Dumas swiped at a fly. “A documentary.”

  Scarper tapped his oily forehead. “You mean to put this on at the school or something? Kee-rist.”

  Dumas was patient. With his finger he guided the Chief’s attention to the seventh and eighth lines of the flier:

  NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH OR FAINT! MATURE ADULTS ONLY—PLEASE

  “And what you got’s gonna square up with this come-on?” Dumas made a steeple of his hands. “Quoting from Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, ‘The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there.’ Of course, upon investigation, this proved to be no more than a porpoise in heavy costume. Do you see my point?”

  “I do not.”

  “My husband can be so abstruse at times.” Lady Elaine smiled indulgently. “What he means is that people will see what they want to see. You just have to give them a chance.”

  “Five bucks a ducat, you say?”

  “Anything less, they feel they won’t have had their money’s worth,” answered the Husband. “And you get a buck off the top of each one.”

  Scarper raked his nails across the pilled green desk blotter. “Odd Fellows hall might be free. Lemme make a call.”

  NOON had burned away morning damp. They made their way back to the Tremaine through lunchtime foot traffic, issuing fliers just now detailed, in bright red ink, by the Chief’s personal secretary, with time and location.

  “I don’t like to see you spoil those beautiful eyes with squinting,” Dumas said, guiding Lady Elaine into a pawnshop, where she could pick out a pair of dark glasses while he talked up the owner.

  “Shalom. So how’s by you?”

  “These are a perfect match for my combs.”

  They left with blue lenses in tortoiseshell frames and a flier in Siegel’s window.

  Two blocks from the hotel, lolling on the stairs of a triple-decker wooden apartment house, there was that little whore. Lady Elaine, stern, gave over the revolver from her purse, first wiping it clean, and said, “Anyone tries to get rough, you shoot his dick off.”

  The girl buzzed her lips and spun the chamber.

  SRO at $5 per. Seasonal aromas: drugstore whiskey, anxious flesh on varnished folding chairs. Noisemakers: brogans scuffing the pine floor, crackling newspapers fanned, coughs and snorts releasing tension of the attention Dumas commanded with—

  “… Are we repelled by their savagery? Charmed by their simplicity? What can we really know of these strange tribesmen and their isolated land of scoria and marl?”

  —such spieling as Lady Elaine put into her negative division of fancy jokes. But she knew this was his instrument, and that to play fresh inventions each time meant more to him than money. She threaded the film through the projector, trued it in the gate.

  “… filling this hall in such numbers to be startled, astounded, astonished, seeking not the satisfaction of curiosity but stimulation for the heart and mind. And so, my friends, now shall you have it.”

  She lowered the phonograph arm and the Boswell Sisters sang “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” Gestures dappled the screen.

  BEFORE the astonishing film, it had been two-cent stamps sold through a classified ad: “Color portrait engraving of George Washington. Send your $2 now! P.O.B. 3G, Ansonia Station, N.Y.”; before that Love Lockets peddled on amusement piers from Norfolk to Myrtle Beach to Mobile; before that a turf advisory service that once too often gaffed a dentist with connections. Dumas served not quite half of an eighteen-month sentence at Sing Sing. His cellmate, Monk Dershowitz, the Club Royale killer, knew interesting card tricks.

  And some while before that, on the veranda of a Sarasota hotel overlooking the Gulf, Dumas and Lady Elaine had met for the first time. They were at separate tables with coffee and rolls and striated butter curls on ice. They wore white: his plus-fours and pullover, her silk blouse and aeronaut’s jodhpurs.

  At that time, to everyone but the natives, Florida
was novel, exotic, a tropical backdrop even the dullest might play against, granting equally to Buick dealer and tycoon grounds for sport and a climate for folly. Banjo bands and coon dancers roamed Sarasota; the Asola Theater had been rebuilt out of constituent parts sent from Venice.

  “May I join you?”

  “I don’t mind.” She smiled while hiding her teeth.

  Dumas looked past the hawk nose and into her deep-green eyes.

  She was first to turn away. “You must be dressed for golf,” she said. “It couldn’t be a lovelier day.”

  “No, no. Billiards is my game.”

  She thought: He’s not so much older than me. In his forties, or perhaps a bit more.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve always been at my best indoors.”

  There was something like bergamot in her perfume. Dumas offered a cigarette. They lied readily to each other for several minutes.

  “Would it be rude to order champagne at this hour?”

  “I don’t mind,” she’d said.

  “MARRY me.” Dumas cut the salt air with the stiff white brim of his hat.

  South of Coos Bay, still half a day from the California line, they’d stopped for razor clams and a game of miniature golf. Lady Elaine had just stroked the ball under a lighthouse—its wire form showing through cracks in light blue cement—round a banked turn, off a pipe rail at two sharp angles, and into the cup.

  “You’re such a ham,” she said.

  Lady Elaine wore her dark glasses. The bulb enclosed in the lighthouse blinked invisibly in direct sun.

  “Have I ever once teased you with this in twelve years?”

  “No, never. And don’t spoil the record now.”

  “Now is late.”

  His shy sobriety frightened her.

  “Shall I drive?”

  “I mean in the game. Late in the game.”

  “Come on, you need a drink.”

  Dumas touched her face. “I mean it’s something we should do before we get too tired. Before we get to where it won’t matter.” She looked out at the unreasonable tumbling of the sea. “Let’s make for Nevada and you can think about it on the way.”

  “I already am. I’m remembering what it took to get free of my last husband.”

  Dumas reseated his hat. “Nobody but me will ask you, and I won’t again.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Lady Elaine thought of the little whore. Down a road black with rain, unconsciously clicking the headlights from dim to bright to dim and back again, she felt her heart change.

  DEVELOPMENT

  LIGHT-HEADED FROM SILENCE, BRICK stopped in Canyon City to have the car monogrammed. A Sioux in watch cap and coveralls appraised him as a surgeon might. Gesturing, they arrived at a figure. The Sioux had piano player’s hands.

  Raptors floated on thermals that rose from the parking lot. Brick, who deplored pathos, began to count in his head. Observe geology. Check tire pressure. Take photos: distancing factor. He bought pemmican and crackers from a vending machine that beeped twelve bars of Gershwin, G. Cautiously approaching the municipal beach, he saw it was deserted, and crouched in the shade of styrene palm leaves to eat.

  Monotony of the waves.

  Gull talk.

  What continued to bother him was that analog wiring, one thing always leading to another: intricate rake trails in the sand furnishing the notes for a Japanese temple courtyard. He missed the clarity of no connections, of ignorance. And he continued to suspect that someone else had control, that he was being moved from panel to panel like a man in a comic strip.

  How long and how far? How many stolen hotel towels?

  Brick could not remember preparing for this trip, let alone on what day and in what city it had begun. He did remember waking up behind the wheel, having slept only for a second, then swerving past the reflective eyes of a large mammal, and over median grass. How much luck had that used up?

  The white Gothic B’s to right and left of the hood scoop were, Brick realized only now, wrong side round to his view. He checked the expressions of oncoming drivers, for whom it was right side up, but these were unreadable.

  Well, he could adjust.

  That was the idea of travel, anyway.

  On the far outskirts of Ciudad Radiofonica, he pulled over for a girl with a sign charcoaled, “Pilgrimage to Family Crypt.”

  “How far you going?”

  “Le Havre.”

  Close up, it was easy to see that the pigtails and pinafore were an affectation, that she was quite a bit older than she was trying to seem.

  “Brick Bradford,” he said, opening his hand. “Chemist, explorer, tight end.”

  “The name is Boots.”

  “And you’re on a pilgrimage.”

  “Oh, that’s just a gimmick,” she said irritably. “I won this tour in an essay contest sponsored by the Optimists Club. I wrote ‘Emergency Styling: A Sonata in Verbs.’ But I discover some empty promises, like yesterday, this allegedly prepaid hotel, my room key won’t go through the wax they’ve jammed in the lock, and I have to skip. Real hospitality. Am I talking too much?”

  Hedgerows had given way to olive groves and low, drylaid stone walls. Cattle egrets flew up out of a ditch. A boy led a gray donkey laden with firewood. The donkey’s expression said: I am not here.

  They stopped at a trattoria with outdoor tables and ordered clam salad. Bright plastic soft drink crates were stacked against the fence. Across the road, on the one remaining wall of a house destroyed by fire, posters for a ninja film had been pasted upside down.

  Brick wiped his plate clean with bread. “Do you believe in coincidence?” he said.

  “I never ask myself.”

  “How about destiny? Do you believe in destiny? That we’re really not in charge?”

  “I ignore that.”

  She spoke too slowly, too carefully, for these responses not to have been learned in advance.

  “Is it true that sharks never sleep?” he said in the next panel, by way of experiment.

  “Too obvious.” She pushed out her lower lip.

  “What color are my eyes?” he said, covering them with his hands.

  “Too romantic,” she said, taking her musette bag and slithering through the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway.

  By the time Brick understood that she would not come back out, had ditched him via the back door, crickets were sounding, wild thyme aroma had vanished behind tour bus exhaust, and blue Xmas bulbs glowed along the roofline. His incoherent revenge was to run out on the check.

  In the center of the right front seat, as if deliberately placed, and so demanding to be read, was a sheet of bond paper folded into an airplane:

  Rex—

  We never talk any more, really talk. You’re so busy with your “graphs and charts.” And whoever answers your phone there is not passing my messages along. Or possibly you are only pretending to be ignorant of them? It is humiliating for me to appear at canoe class alone. It is so painful for me now to remember our first summer at the cottage, you nursing my sunburn so tenderly. Last week at breakfast when I showed you my plane ticket, you laughed and laughed. Maybe you are laughing as you read this, I don’t know. But if you miss me and are sorry, it is not too late. Write c/o Hotel Empire, El Kharga.

  Optimistically,

  B.

  Once again, B.B. was subject to the caroms of association. Having snapped at the end of the second sentence that this was the letter to her husband that had never been sent, he thought of the extinct passenger pigeon, the Transatlantic Cable, and Riverdale High valentine cards after that, Lulu with her haughty, rhodium-plated poodle pin. All without any proof that he was remembering his own experiences, and not someone else’s.

  Heat lightning over the plains. Phone-talk radio. He couldn’t keep his eye off the mileage counter, reassured by any movement of the numbers.

  “Go ahead, Emporia, Kansas,” said the phone-talk host.

  White moths continued
to collide with the windshield, spattering their essential liquors.

  “I have a question for Major Hoople,” said the voice from Emporia.

  He placed another nicotine lozenge under his tongue.

  The Dew Drop Inn concierge refused his check and mimicked his bad pronunciation. The kitchen was closed, she told him, and then called the bellhop to help ridicule his clothes.

  “But this is what I always wear,” Brick protested, flouncing his white linen suit, smoothing the lavender band of his boater.

  The bellhop’s little finger, which had lost its top joint, first touched the side of his nose, then traced his eyebrows.

  “Clochard,” he said. “Walking backwards around the world.”

  Brick had no choice. He dined under the sodium lamps of a roadside park that memorialized the Colorist Uprising of 1968. The cold forests around him were thick with fir and spruce. Raccoon dogs called to one another. He ate a bologna-and-sweet-relish sandwich. He tried to make a nest on the slippery back seat of the car, and everything came apart. Sleep came hard; it was like the finish line of a forced march. He shivered and twitched with a dream that went something like this:

  Moving through a suite of apartments in a rose-pink building at the corner of Wilshire and Western. Eating jellied consommé at a glass table, taking Russian cigarettes from a Chinese box. Chrome accents. White bisque bas-relief Pegasus over the fireplace. Parrot climbing drapes. Santa Anita results on radio KNBC interrupted for bulletin flash. “Rex missing! Posse formed! Search dunes!”

  Brick’s descent from the mountains was one long afternoon of switchbacks. A light rain fell. The pastures were empty. Gasoline was unavailable in village after village, but wine was everywhere. Fog lay in the valley. Pennants dangled over the roadblock and militiamen in silver shirts searched every car for booty from last night’s tomb rifling. They pried up mirrors and slashed water bags.

  Now Brick recognized all plot elements as lab work, a run of testing obstacles, captive panels clocked and rasping with the stylus over an unspooling graph paper band. Fine, then. Over we go.