Odditorium: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  Ondray’s markup had taken a truly brutal increase from that moment on. The kid knew what he was doing. He had the only game in town.

  There was no telephone up at the Keyes place so in order to call Ondray, Karl had to go out on the front lawn and blow through a conch shell. That was supposed to be the signal. Sometimes Ondray rolled right by, sometimes he came the next day, and sometimes he didn’t come at all.

  Karl had to rummage through several kitchen drawers before he located the shell, a hefty specimen with the words SOUVENIR OF CABBAGE KEY painted on the outside. He hurried into the front yard with it and sunlight hit him like a bucket of hot soup. He tried shading his eyes, but found both hands were needed to hold the shell steady. His flaccid lips had trouble forming the proper embouchure and the first sounds were like the belches of a housecat. He filled his lungs and tried again. The effort brought considerable pressure to bear on both his head and chest; he felt dizzy and remembered a story he’d once heard about a trumpet player who collapsed and died on the bandstand after a solo. The thought of blacking out in the yard, possibly lying vulnerable there for hours, filled him with such terror that he put his every last reserve behind the next blow and came out with a round bass note that made his ears ring.

  With the shell under his arm he ran for the house and away from the light. Sometimes the boy came, sometimes he didn’t. Karl would just have to see. He closed his eyes and drained the cooking sherry. Then, sitting on his haunches in a corner of the bedroom, tearing off bits of fingernail and chewing them up, he lay in wait.

  Karl Gables was not a habitual underdog looking downriver to the breakup of his life years later. That had already happened.

  2

  DENSE BLUE-GRAY CLOUDS floated over the Sergeant Bill Cavaretta Memorial Field. The air crackled with ozone. Brick smokestacks of a knitting mill loomed over the bleachers along the third-base line and behind corrugated tin fencing in the outfield (279 feet to straightaway center). Burdock and pokeweed grew between the ties of an abandoned rail spur. All quiet as the two teams switched positions at the half inning—no claps or cheers, just the low rumble of approaching thunder. Total paid attendance for the Battle of the Sexes Softball Match was 61, not enough to cover expenses.

  The lead-off hitter was Clothilde Soileau, a slight but compact woman with tightly curled brown hair and the kind of pale, hearts-and-flowers face that caused temples to vibrate back in 1925. In white lettering on the back of her green uniform shirt over the numeral 1, it said simply, TILDY. She raked the dirt around the batter’s box with her spikes, took a few practice cuts, then stepped in, crowding the plate and choking up on the aluminum bat, holding it at a 90-degree angle just behind her right ear. She laid off a hummer at the knees for ball one. Tildy winked at the pitcher, an unemployed roofer with end-stage acne, and laid down a perfect drag bunt that dribbled to a stop in the long grass to the right of the mound. She was standing on first base before the ball had been touched.

  Hands on hips, the pitcher talked to his shoes. “The cunt bunts. Real cute.” He bounced his next pitch in the dirt and Tildy took off as it skipped all the way to the backstop. The catcher went after it on bow legs as the first raindrops fell, wheeled and sidearmed a wild throw that ricocheted off Tildy’s back into short right. She lowered her head and pumped her slender legs, rounding second. Two outfielders reached the ball simultaneously, bumped and elbowed for possession until one of them scooped it back in underhand. Rain came hard and heavy, as from a showerhead with a five-mile diameter; Tildy cut the third base bag and kept on. The catcher waited for her now, a heavy hippo straddling the plate with his mask in one hand, the ball in the other.

  She was a dead-sure out and people started running for their cars. Fifteen feet away, Tildy went into her slide, right leg flung above her, flexed at the knee; then her foot sliced out and up, kicking the ball loose, and she sprawled through the wicket of those massive hippo legs.

  Lying face down, Tildy smelled fresh, moist earth. She heard the hissing of the rain, but no awestruck ovation from the stands, not even the umpire’s safe call. Then she turned onto her knees and saw him through the haze, sprinting for the street along with the rest of her teammates. Tildy leaped up and followed, realizing they’d want to scramble onto that bus and make like a blue streak for the motel before any of the suckers thought to ask for their money back.

  From the cork-lined Situation Room of his corporate headquarters in Jacksonville, Peter F.-X. Sparn—past president of the Florida Vending Machine Association, Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the Muscular Dystrophy Bass Tournament at Crescent Lake—oversaw a bustling amusements empire with the help of his loyal staff: Miss Dolly Varden, personal assistant to Mr. Sparn since 1947; and bonehead son, Vinnie, adopted in 1953 after Mrs. Sparn had her third spontaneous abortion.

  Sparn’s Seminole Star Corporation supplied topless dancers to saloons and army bases up and down the Eastern seaboard; leased juke boxes, pinball machines and video games; and jobbed the finest in candy and confections to movie theaters throughout Nassau and St. John’s counties. But the flagship of the operation, the real nonpareil, was Flora Pepper and Her Cougarettes, an all-girl fast-pitch softball team traveling fifteen states and taking on all comers. The mounted sailfish behind his desk didn’t make him a sportsman; owning a ball team did. After thirty-eight years of hardheaded entrepreneurship, what had he got? An all-electric home with asphalt drive and in-ground pool. A limousine that sailed down the road like a cloud. A beautifully appointed cabin cruiser drawing ten feet of water. A solid-gold walking stick and a diamond ring insured for over five thousand dollars. But he never wore the ring, kept it in a safety deposit box at the bank. And there you had it. Without sport, without fun, his life was so much gilt-edged paper sitting pointlessly in some darkened vault.

  “If fun can be a business,” Pete was fond of saying, “then business can be fun.”

  He’d been around long enough to know that financial success wasn’t everything. There were plenty of business wizards around, but damn few sportsmen. Real old-time classy sportsmen, he meant, not the bored board chairmen noodling around on the golf course or flying off on those nitwit hunting trips where drugged animals were herded up to the patio. Sparn’s team was much more than a hobby to him, more than a toy to keep him entertained between deals; it was the thing that set him apart and gave him prestige. And so what if his accountants (Pennspar & Kezdekian, of Neptune Street) were unimpressed? What did he care that they said revenues accruing therefrom were inadequate in view of current overall tax judgements? He was a goddamn sportsman.

  Every morning, before lifting the smoked Lucite hood of his executive telephone to inaugurate the business day, Sparn read Dolly’s impeccably typewritten boxscores, cumulative batting and fielding averages, as well as the expenses and attendance figures. He pored lovingly over these stats, reveling in the pristine, almost mystical flow of the numbers that Vinnie, the Cougarettes’ manager, had phoned into Dolly the previous night.

  “Another extra base hit for Heidi,” Sparn might say. “Let’s move her up in the order.” Or, “That’s three errors this week for Rosie Alonzo. Get her to an optometrist and have her eyes checked.”

  Dolly Varden made note of these comments, of every grunt and lifted eyebrow, and relayed them to Vinnie at their next phone contact. She did not mind these extra tasks. She did not mind putting in ten- and twelve-hour days, then taking work home to her one-room apartment. Time did not pass for Dolly Varden. She lived in the haunted, unalterable vacuum of a dream. She was a 53-year-old virgin, silently, hopelessly, agonizingly in love with her boss.

  In November of 1946, under the name Flossie McCall, she was doing a specialty act at the Cathay Theatre in Brooklyn. To an uptempo arrangement of “You’re the Top,” she danced up a flight of steps, leaned over backward from the uppermost stair, picked up a glass of beer in her teeth and drank it down. One evening, after a particularly boffo Saturday matinee, a darkly handsome man came to h
er dressing room and presented his card. He had eyes like grommets.

  “Pete Sparn, personal management. You got a great bit there, sugar.”

  He took her out for oysters between shows. Dolly was so beguiled that she was unable to swallow her food. When, calling attention to the dessert cart, Sparn touched her bare arm, she felt the membrane surrounding her heart split down the middle, and then a great swelling in her chest, a torrential rush of blood.

  So fierce was the heat and excitement within her that at the very next performance she lost her rhythm, plunged from the top of that stairway and broke her back. The doctors said Dolly would never dance again. Confined in a complex traction set-up, she lay in the hospital for weeks, alternately numb and delirious, sometimes afraid to sleep because of the wildly lascivious dreams that would descend on her, leaving her tangled in pulleys and straps, the bedsheets puddled with sweat.

  When at least she was released, twenty pounds lighter and using a cane, Dolly had less than ten dollars in the bank and no prospects, but there in the lobby was Sparn with roses, a basket of fruit and the offer of a brand-new career as his personal secretary. The cane clattered to the floor as she grasped his camel’s-hair lapels and sobbed her gratitude.

  Sparn paid for typing lessons and a fresh wardrobe (an unflattering selection in severe governess grays). He revamped her grooming habits and put her on a diet of steak and shellfish. He brought her bulging cartons of Billboard and Variety back issues, requiring a daily oral report on what she had read. He coached her in the proper way to behave on the telephone and how to deflect hustlers who came to the office.

  “I promised I’d make you into something and I will,” he said.

  Dolly proved herself an obedient subject, soaking up information like a sponge, memorizing in less than four days the name and hierarchical rank of every talent booker and summer stock producer in town. She grew into the job with astonishing rapidity, slithered through the office in her corrective shoes, the image of placid efficiency from a vocational slide show. Most of all she wanted to become “indispensable,” and after a while, largely unbeknownst to Sparn, she did. Dolly cast herself in “Man’s Favorite Secretary” as the sympathetic, symbiotic underling who could anticipate the thoughts and wishes of her Boss. But only up to a point, as it turned out.

  On the very day when she had at last summoned the courage to invite him home for May wine and sauerbraten by candlelight, Sparn asked her to run down to the engraver’s to pick up his wedding invitations.

  That night Dolly destroyed much of the contents of her apartment, and did not return to work until the following week. She did not attend the ceremony uniting Sparn and the 16-year-old daughter of Falco Andretti, importer of olive oil and ricotta cheese. She did not attend the elaborate reception held at the Ansonia Hotel with a thousand dollars’ worth of white chrysanthemums and entertainment by Red Kingston and his Mellow Fellows. She did not join the bon voyage party catching kisses and paper serpentines launched by Sparn and his bride, bound for a Havana honeymoon, from the railing of the S.S. Paloma.

  Instead she raged and shivered and wept, living on doughnuts and coffee, sleeping on the linoleum floor of the office and often waking spattered with dried blood from having abused the flesh of her arms and legs during the night with a fountain pen, until that moment when her body became only a body, a pulpy, self-propelled machine, and she did not have to weep ever again.

  Now as she stood quietly by his desk awaiting instructions, Dolly did not see a bloated old man, but the handsome Johnny who had come to her dressing room: that smoothly cast face, those black grommet eyes, the swaggering energy she had imagined taking physical form as a crown of cartoon lightbulbs on his head. So much time. So much time that had not passed.

  “Think you can clear my calendar for this Friday? Time I sat in on a Cougarettes game.”

  “I don’t see any problem. I always hold the fort for you.”

  “You’re a gem, Dolly, a gem of the first water.”

  The Cougarettes were in command, leading 4-0 after five innings; several at the far end of the batting order went into the stands to hawk candy bars and the souvenir illustrated programs, fifty cents a copy. Flora was on the cover—a grainy action photo taken when she still bleached her hair and wore it in a ponytail. Flora was on page one—a still grainier picture of her shaking hands with Hector Rosario, a welterweight from Miami, and under it some biographical highlights: 70 no-hitters, 23 perfect games, 4500 strikeouts, a lifetime E.R.A. of 1.12. The finishing touch was her unique accomplishment of last season, setting a man down on one pitch, a figure-eight windmill change-up he’d wiffed at three times.

  Flora was also on deck. After replenishing her chaw (mentholated snuff inside a wad of bubble gum), she stepped to the plate and rocked a whistling liner into the gap in left center for an inside-the-park home run.

  “That’s a Hall-of-Famer, folks. You’re looking at a Hall-of-Famer right there.” Rhythmic clapping from Coach Vinnie Sparn at his position behind the chicken wire screen. “Five up, let’s get some more…. Come on, Wanda, little bingle in there.”

  Right next to Vinnie was a plastic trash barrel of iced beer, one dollar a can. Just another managerial task, keeping the crowd happy. He wore a sun helmet, and around his waist, a canvas apron with his initials on it. As Vinnie made change he looked nervously to his left where his father was sitting. Nodding excitedly to himself, Sparn calculated the biorhythm cycles of the Cougarette players on a specialized, mail-order slide rule, and made notes on a pad.

  Dad just loves these unannounced visits, Vinnie thought. The bastard. Not much of a show; no wonder he isn’t paying attention.

  How Vinnie dreaded the arrival of the old man. It always came at the wrong time. Not last night, when they’d been up against a decent factory team and had pulled in close to a grand, but today, on a crappy Little League field across from a laundromat against a squad of local “All Stars” (a disheveled group Vinnie had recruited in bars and union halls at ten bucks a man). The uniforms they wore came out of a cardboard box in the back of the Cougarettes’ bus and fit badly. The crowd was sparse and abusive.

  Dad is going to shit a brick, Vinnie thought. I just know it.

  Sparn was motioning him over with emphatic swoops of the hand. Vinnie tried to hide under the brim of the sun helmet, but it was too late.

  “Good game, huh? A little dry, Dad? Want a brew?”

  “How we doing on them? What kind of deal are you getting?”

  Vinnie turned around to cheer through cupped hands. “Let’s bring another one home, Roxie. Show us some chili pepper up there.”

  Sparn rapped him on the top of the helmet with his ball-point. “I’m talking to you, Vincent. What I called you over here for is I got to know how many posters you put up last night?”

  “Well, see we’ve been running low on posters and I thought, you know, not to spread yourself too thin and all, so I …”

  “You’re low on posters? So for Christ’s sake tell Dolly about it and we’ll get some more printed up. What the hell do you think I have you call in for every night, if not so we can stay on top of this thing? Do you read me? Let’s communicate, okay?”

  “Right, Dad. I’ll let you know.”

  “Great. Beautiful. Let’s stay in goddamn touch on this stuff.”

  Vinnie kicked the dirt, but was inwardly relieved when Roxie Vasquez bounced into a double play to end the inning. Just one more to go, he thought, and we can get out of here.

  The room Tildy and Roxie shared was the only one with operational hot water. It was filling up with funky, gritty bodies.

  “You better watch your ass, girl.”

  “Turn your fuckin’ face around.”

  There was some scuffling going on in the shower line. After an eighty-mile bus ride, with windows open since the air conditioning was out, the Cougarettes’ collective mood was right nasty.

  “How’d you like to eat this shampoo bottle, Wanda?”

 
Wrapped in a couple of towels, Tildy sat at the head end of the bed turning the pages of a newspaper. Roxie was cross-legged at the other end, searching for tunes on a transistor radio and wedging cotton between her toes before applying a fresh coat of nail polish.

  “You just sitting there, Frenchie. You want to use my hairbrush or something?”

  “I’d probably break it.” Tildy spoke without looking up from her paper. “Haven’t touched this hair in years. That’s the secret to these great curls.”

  “You ought to brush once in a while.” Roxie shook her head. “You could get spiders living in there.”

  According to the souvenir program, Roxie was a pearl diver from Corinto, Nicaragua. Actually she could not swim a stroke and came originally from Oakland. One night she had beaten Vinnie up outside a bowling alley and Pete Sparn, on one of his surprise visits at the time, had been so impressed that he fired his left fielder on the spot and gave Roxie the job.

  “I can handle a bat, no problem,” Roxie said. “I used to be a bouncer at the Hoja Roja in Modesto.”

  That’s-Mary, who was late for everything, came dancing through the door in slippers and a chenille robe. Beer from a paper cup sloshed on her hand as she shimmied to the back of the line.

  “Gimme some more volume, Rox. I’m in a party state of mind.”

  “When haven’t you been in a party state of mind?” Tildy asked. “You ought to retire from ball and move to Vegas.”

  “Thinkin’ about it, thinkin’ about it … Come on, Roxie, make it loud … ‘Heart’s desire creates love desire, goin’ higher and higher….’ Woo, will you look at that. I just greased these hip joints this morning.” That’s-Mary slanted forward on the balls of her feet and shook her ass as if it was on fire. “I’m a tiptop bebop can’t-stop butt-monger.”

  “All right, T.M. Get down with it,” somebody shouted from the front of the line.