by Hob Broun
“Don’t dramatize. It’s just a trip, no more.” She broke away from his cramping, disconsolate hold. “It’s no different than if I were back on tour, like Sparn had booked a few dates in the Northeast. You see?”
“No. You goin’ off with someone else, that’s no job. And I need you here.”
“I won’t be long.”
“If you’d only stay, I’ll straighten up and fly right. Promise.”
She fixed her mouth on his and slicked her tongue over his lips, tasting something thin and bitter. “I have to go get organized now. He’s waiting for me outside.”
“You didn’t say it was no man.”
“I didn’t need to.”
“Don’t do it, baby. Not now. S’like leavin’ me out in the desert to burn up with no canteen … I’m set to fall in pieces, I can feel it comin’ on. You got a responsibility for that.”
But she was gone. From where he stood he could see her moving about the bedroom, reaching, leaning. She is slipping in and out. Slippery. Like a bar of soap, he thought. The harder you squeeze, the greater the odds it will fly away from you.
“Didn’t always treat me this way,” he said, but quietly so she wouldn’t hear. “You used to stick by me in the old days.”
Leaning inside the closet, the wrinkled white bedsheet that curtained it pushed over one shoulder and falling down her back like a bridal train, Tildy worked through the tangle of hangers one by one. Nothing much appealed. What were they wearing these days in the Big City?
“I wasn’t planning to get bogged down in this,” she murmured.
Taking her diaphragm from its bed of cornstarch, Tildy held it up to the light to check for tears or pinholes. Fine white powder fell on the sleeves of her jacket. Noises from the front room. Two distinct voices, not just Karl talking back to the teevee set. She hurried out, found them sitting opposite one another drinking beer.
“We’re getting acquainted,” Christo said, saluting her with his dripping can.
“Didn’t I tell you to wait outside?”
“I seem to remember something like that.”
“I had reasons for saying it, damn you.”
“Curiosity got the best of me.”
“Can’t see why you wouldn’t want us to meet.” Karl, suddenly casual, almost smug, sucked foam off his lips. “We gettin’ along fine.”
“Sure,” Tildy snapped. “You’ll cozy up to anyone who brings a six-pack in here.”
“Some temper.”
“Oh yeah. Had that short fuse ever since I knowed her.”
“When was that?” Christo slid forward in his chair, one foot jittering up and down at the termination of a crossed leg. “I always like to hear about how couples first met. That’s real Americana to me.”
“You can both go straight to hell.” Tildy threw her jacket in a corner and returned to her packing, but left the door open so she could listen.
“Seems a lot longer ago than it really was. You know how the time can just seem to leak away on you.”
“Sieve city. I know what you mean.”
“Okay. So I was with this outfit movin’ through farm country up there—Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, so on. I was on the crew put up the rides and broke ’em down. There’s some good rakeoff on that job, too, ’cause them rides, they design ’em to bounce the suckers all over and shake the money right out their pockets. We used to find all kinds of stuff, rings, watches, fountain pens … Say, you mind? I must’ve got too much sun today ’cause I sure am dry.”
“Help yourself.”
Karl unzipped a fresh beer, gargled some down. “Anyhow, Tildy. She joined up with us halfway through as a kootch dancer and, man, could she swing it. Make the hairs on your neck stand right up. July heat wave, we played a weekend in some town full of Polacks and what have you, they decided to throw a polka contest, offered a two-hundred-dollar first prize as bait. Naturally they needed some shills in there and me and Tildy got throwed together for it. Now I got a couple of heavy feet, but with her I was spinning around like a feather in the wind, just as sweet and smooth as could be and we copped that first prize. After that I followed her everywhere, carryin’ my big hammer and all.” Patting the dome at his beltline. “I was in good shape back then, didn’t have this beer keg here and I could do hundreds of fingertip push-ups. Oh yeah, I wasn’t gonna let that girl get away from me. Like she was my fairy godmother or somethin’, like she could give me wings to fly.”
Christo, reaching out for a comradely slap at his arm, said, “That young love, it just breaks your heart, doesn’t it?”
Karl shrugged uncertainly. “We weren’t that young. Got married in August in Saginaw with all the carnies there and wasn’t that a show. Wish we had some pictures.”
“It was Huron.” Tildy’s voice came cold and tolling from the far end of the house. “And if your dancing had been any better, or I hadn’t been so bewildered, it would never have happened.”
Karl was doing a few clumsy polka steps, his thumb pressed over the trowel-shaped opening in the can to keep the beer inside, a look of slowly thickening dismay on his face. By the time he sat down, that hatchet face had grown dim again, the small ritual elapsed, the spirit flown from his body with no reminder.
“I done a lot of things on the circuit, a lot of things, but I never put on no damn caveman suit and bit the heads offa snakes. There’s some men will turn you low and rotten with half a chance, but I got my protection. I got my protection and I hold on.”
Tildy wandered into the room fiddling at the untracked zipper of her suitcase, treating her husband’s load of talk like so much jellied silence.
“She tell you what I’m doin’ now?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“I got the donniker. I’m the donniker man.”
“Sorry,” Christo said. “That goes right past me.”
“Donniker is the public toilet on the midway, see. Some of these owners want to go all modern, tell me to call it a personal hygiene station, but you get the picture. Got soap, towels, cologne, combs and hair tonic. And the paper. Got to come to me for your paper. So there I am, head man in the shithouse workin’ for tips. How about it?”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“Yeah, it ain’t all bad. Nice and quiet in there and nobody I got to answer to. It’s got more of a routine to it, most days just like the last one and the one before. But I remember one time, this was last summer in New England somewhere, we had a real big crowd and there was a drug company had these young bimbos passin’ out free samples of this laxative thing. Problem was a lot of people took it for chocolate candy and gobbled it right up. You should have seen ’em all lined up with the sun beatin’ down, hopping around like rabbits. Oh, I was a rich man that day, mm-hmmm!”
Tildy was the only one not laughing. Her eyes converged at a point high on the spotted gray wall. “I thought I might hardboil some eggs for us to eat in the car.”
“What’s this? What’s this?” Giddy with all the talk of himself, Karl had apparently forgotten about the trip.
“She’s cleared for action,” Christo put in. “I think that’s what she’s getting at.”
“New York, is it? … What are you gonna do up there?”
“We might introduce Tildy around, maybe put a fresh face on her career. I mean, don’t feel scorned or anything like that. Strictly a business venture with me, at least so far.”
“What is it you do for work? I was aiming to get with you on that, then she came in about the eggs.” Karl, just now beginning to sense some type of bunco activity, was fumbling toward truculence.
“Well, it’s not so easy to put a name on what I do. I’m sort of a scout or an agent, free-lance. Maybe ‘catalyst’ describes it best. You take some energy from over here, put it together with some energy from over there and see if anything happens. Sometimes you get a healthy, profitable mix and sometimes you get third-degree burns. There’s no way of telling just how the deal will go down until it does.”
Karl appealed blinkingly to Tildy for translation, but she was verging elsewhere.
“Will you go wait in the car now? I need to talk to him alone.”
“Tempo, tempo. Don’t push the tempo.” Christo let his open hands waver down toward the floor, like a pantomime of “Autumn Leaves.” “Would you like to know what I think? I think the three of us ought to sit down to a nice candlelight dinner and really get to know each other.”
“Yeah, let’s do up some chicken and gravy.” Karl shot out of his chair, began pulling at Christo’s sleeve. “And while we’re at the store we can stock up on more beer…. Olé! Olé!” he shouted; and to himself: This guy’s okay, might be simpler if he just moved in.
Outgunned, Tildy sagged into the empty chair still puckered in the shape of Karl’s wide hams, still warm with his yeasty, drawling smell, and covered her face with both hands.
Balled-up napkins, intersecting rings left by wet glasses, littered bones, beads of creamy wax and fat. Splayed legs under the table and sounds in the dripping light: teeth sucking and belches and Karl grunting as he touched the place at the corner of his mouth where the bent tine of a fork had repeatedly jabbed him. There was sliced pineapple for dessert and then more beer.
Across the floor moonlight was a steel-colored box within which lay a single spattered shoe, its laces trickling off into the dark. Karl asked that the dishes be cleared away so he and Christo could match muscle in an arm-wrestling bout. They drained their glasses and stooped together, fingers wagging then settling into the gaps between bone, elbows wrapped in dish towels, waiting for Tildy to cue them. But she stood to one side rolling a pill of yellow wax between her palms, radiating indifference. Christo took the edge—“Now!”—and pushed fast and hard so that Karl had to rise out of his seat to avoid an immediate pin. He gained leverage until they were back at a rigid right angle, blue veins popping, eyelids clamped tight, the double fist in a tremor now as Karl leaned, condensed his force, and Christo bent at the wrist. The table shivered under them and Karl’s tongue emerged pushing tiny silver bubbles over his lower lip. And then it was over, Christo’s arm slapping down backward, rubbery and dead.
“But you gave up? I don’t get it.”
“I do that sometimes,” Christo said, wiping his face with the towel. “It hurt. And you would have won anyway.”
While Christo finished the dishes, Karl slept curled like a pet on the floor, hair spiky, a low buzzing of mucus inside his bristly nostrils, an oily sheen on his face, the hem of the blanket Tildy had laid over him wadded in his fists. He had collapsed in the midst of his fourteenth can of Gatortail Ale.
Rebuttoning his shirt, Christo backed away from the sink. “I thought it would be easiest this way. No messy farewell scene. We’ll slip out quietly and be gone when he wakes up.”
“It’s cold, but I suppose you’re right. I just wish …” Tildy aligned the soap dish beside the sudsy blue sponge, wrapped half a lemon in wax paper. “I just wish what I was doing made a little more sense.”
Insects clicked in the wet grass and the sky was punctured with stars as they made their way, hand in hand, to the car. Christo looked up at the bright bulb of the moon, pulled her against him and drummed on the trunk.
“Want to take a look inside? See what we’re carrying?”
“No, that’s something else I’d rather ignore.”
6
BASS BUSTERS!!
BUBBA’S WORM RANCH NEXT LEFT
NIGHT WAS A COLD black suction at the windows. Their destination was a ruined city. There was exhilaration in the raw, hot smell of gasoline and the whine of the Fiat’s six cylinders at maximum stress, in the glow of dashboard lights like prowling jungle eyes. A gospel station faded in and out, jammed by a news broadcast two clicks to the right: “I’m gonna walk that milky white way some of these days….” Tildy let the unrolling wilderness contain her. So long as the wheels turned, misgivings were irrelevant.
They passed a pint of Bacardi back and forth, mixing Cuba Libres as best they could: swig of rum, a wedge of lime, a nip from the canned cola balanced on the dash, all swirled in the mouth like dental rinse, then swallowed. Their lips burned and their blood rumbled. Christo, raconteur, riffed on and on.
“There are a million ways to end up in the bughouse. Nobody’s exempt. The president of IBM might drop in if it seemed like a good idea for him to disappear temporarily. ‘Exhaustion,’ they call it. Yeah, it’s the closest thing you’ll ever see to a classless society in there. Everyone gets fucked just the same. They don’t care who you are. There was a kid I knew lost his larynx to cancer, had one of those vibrator gizmos he’d touch to his throat when he wanted to talk. One summer he started going around to radio stations and do, you know, anything, he’d sweep out the studio, it didn’t have to be the weather or the traffic report. But he really wanted to get into radio. Unusual, but who could possibly be threatened by it? He’s buzzing away at the station manager of one of those all-news operations, making his pitch, when the guy makes one phone call and, wham, that’s it. They stamp his papers and throw him in with the rest of the nuts. I collect stories like that. Old gent I met up with this last time. He wasn’t just the quiet type, he was the prototype. Lived in a small town all his life, never married, had nothing to do when he retired so he wandered the streets all day shaking hands with whoever. ‘Afternoon, good to see you.’ It got to be an obsession. He’d dash between cars to get to the other side of the street for a clasp. But some people didn’t like the way it looked or something, so they had county welfare put him away. Sound as a drum when he got there, but he’d done two years by the time I checked in and was afraid to tie his own shoelaces. Oh, they get you, one way or another … Shit, you can take my own case. Or one of them.”
He scissored two fingers, took the cigarette she lit for him, his features glazed orange with the first long drags.
“But let me give you the background first. I was running with this Indian girl in Denver a few years ago. Oglala Sioux. Sixteen years old, and like I always say, you’re only as young as the woman you’re sleeping with. Silver had long black hair, green eyes, the sweetest disposition. God, was she lovable. We had a real tight game going, went something like this: I’d rent a late-model car for one week, slap fresh plates on it, make out a phony registration form. Silver would put an ad in the paper offering the car at an insanely low price. A mark would be there in no time and he’d find Silver all upset and crying because the landlord was going to put her out on the street unless she got her rent up that day. The mark’s getting a steal anyway, a couple minutes with those big, wet eyes and he’s happy to help out by paying cash. That night, before he’s had a chance to re-register it, I go over to his house with my duplicate keys, drive the bastard away and we start all over again. Not real sophisticated, but we had it tight, doing three or four sales in a good week. We were building up a stake, planning to spend a year in Mexico in a house overlooking the beach. But then I came home one afternoon and it was all gone, Silver, the money. Gone. All she left me was a can opener and the furniture we’d picked off the street. And you know where I’d been all day? Out looking for one perfect thing to give her on her birthday that would make her just light up. It was bitter, all right. I had a soft spot for her, understand? So anyway, I’m sleeping in the park on frozen ground, living on cupcakes and trying to figure my next move. My body can’t take that program for long; next thing I know, I’m puking all over my shoes in front of the Brown Palace Hotel, cruiser pulls up and I get popped for vagrancy. On top of all my other grief, this was the fatal dose. I wigged out at the stationhouse, screaming my head off. ‘I got important friends’ll make you regret this.’ They didn’t need my aggravation, right? So they packed me off to the state bin and, bingo, case closed. It’s the perfect indeterminate sentence.”
Tildy touched the rim of his nearest ear. “What was it you bought her for her birthday?”
“Parrot feathers. A ten-pound bag of parrot feathers. Now, do you mind i
f I make my point? … Okay. Clear Creek Hospital, a real warehouse. They had a little of everything in there, like Noah’s Ark, and no time to play around. They started breaking you down right from the git-go. Inside of five minutes they’d stripped me down, put me in this flimsy cotton item split up the back, thrown me in a dark lockup. I can’t remember how long it was before I got any food. I was reeling, see, and not yet wised up, I wasn’t hip to the provocateur element, this on-arrival jolt they hit you with. Shout in your face one minute, pat your head the next, ask you trick questions and call you a liar when you don’t give the right answer. There’s a lot of browbeating, real humiliating crap. I’m good and whiplashed after a few days of it and they got me doing a little free labor, scrubbing the linoleum floor with a brush. And all of a sudden I could see what they were making me into. But I couldn’t see far enough because what I did then was right on schedule. I lost it, completely lost it. Suds all over the place and I’m ripping up sheets, just raving. And that’s when they’ve got you, see? It’s all over and those house odds were just too strong: ‘Now you see how dangerous and uncontrollable you are. In fact, you may be even sicker than we thought. We will have to drug you and put you in restraints before you hurt someone.’ It can be months before they throttle back on the medication and give you a standing eight count.”
Tildy shivered, nibbled on lime rind. “I see what you mean,” she said. “You’ve got to watch out for that provocateur element.”
Was it possible? Yes. It was possible to say she was having a good time.
OBEY LIMITS
YOUR SPEED MONITORED BY AIRCRAFT
In search of fuel, Christo switched to a secondary road. The gauge had been pinned on E for several miles.
“Rechette will have put out the word on these cards. They should have made the hot sheet by now.” One by one Christo removed the celluloid wafers from his wallet and scaled them out the window. “You got to know when to ditch these things. I found that out. But we may latch on to some free gas yet.”
