by Hob Broun
They would go back and forth for a few minutes until Christo, usually clad only in hospital pyjama tops, opened up, blocking the doorway with his body, and threatened Rechette with various types of bodily harm.
“How are you going to explain all those cuts and bruises to Monica Fortgang? She’ll want to know.”
Cowering in his food-stained kimono, Rechette delightedly received a kick in the shin or a light knock to the ribs, and then a kiss on the forehead before Christo shooed him off to bed.
The performance of these various daily rituals required concentration and an appetite for the dismal. It was beginning to wear Christo down, and on the evening that Rechette, nude and wearing a choke chain, insisted on having his dinner from a doggie bowl on the floor, he determined that things had reached the toxic level and it was time to cut out.
The following morning Christo served his host a cup of breakfast cocoa in which two hundred milligrams of Seconal had been dissolved. Within twenty minutes Rechette was snoring rhythmically on the sofa, arms wrapped around his briefcase. Christo moved easily, taking his time and thinking things through. He filled a suitcase with clothes from Rechette’s custom tailor, a former newspaper editor from South Korea. The shirts and jackets were a little tight across the shoulders, a bit short in the sleeves, but the fabrics were elegant and no telling when he might need a quick front. The kind you could slip into in a gas station toilet. From the upstairs study he took samples of a new mood elevator from Smith-Kline, some stationery and prescription pads. There was a small amount of cash in the bedroom and a collection of jewelry as worthless as it was tasteless. He stripped Rechette’s wallet of credit cards and driver’s license. Downstairs the doctor slept deeply, a thin band of saliva trailing out one corner of his mouth. Christo wrapped the television set in a blanket and carried it out to the car. Finally, as a trophy, he grabbed the fiercest of the African masks, pointed, deep-set eye slits and a gaping mouth bristling with nail-head teeth.
The keys to Rechette’s Fiat were where they always were, dangling from a cup hook by the back door. Christo used one of the magnetized Peanuts figures to affix a note to the refrigerator door:
leaving tonite for sao paolo
don’t wait up
love C
It took Christo more than one hour to find the place he was looking for, a place he’d heard about from a grizzled old junkie on the ward. The bastard could barely focus his eyes, but he’d been a hard knocker on the street and he knew the city right down to the ground. The place was on a street almost totally abandoned; the only other building that didn’t have sheet metal over the windows was a chop suey joint about six doors down. Christo circled twice, parked around the corner and walked back. The green awning was full of holes. Behind steel grates padlocked over the display windows, on step shelving covered in pus-yellow crepe paper, was a jumble of merchandise: plastic animals, dart games, flashlights, party hats, a pile of beer trays stamped with the logo of the Cleveland Cavaliers. A buzzer went off and Christo pushed open the door. It was dark inside, with more of the same. Cases of men’s cologne, torn boxes crammed with stockings and pantyhose shoved against the glass counters; crap stacked, stuffed and spilled everywhere so that it was virtually impossible to move. Hovering in the back room near some pipe racks of ladies’ sportswear was a tired-eyed fatso with a head full of pomade and a cheek full of tobacco. This would be Keds, the man to see.
Christo nodded, picked up a traveling alarm clock. “How much you getting for these?”
Keds spat in a coffee can between his feet. “You want it?”
Christo shrugged and leaned across the counter. “Nah, I got nothing to get up for.”
“If you want something, you want something, but there’s no browsing in here.”
“So you’re Keds, huh?”
“So what?”
“So I heard about you. I talked to a guy.”
Keds shifted his wad to the other cheek. “There’s lots of places you can talk to a guy. This ain’t one of ’em.”
“The guy had nice things to say about you, Keds. He really built you up.”
“A guy says nice things about me. So I could pour that on cornflakes or something?”
Christo kicked impatiently at a mound of plastic canteens that was slowly collapsing around his ankles. “Look, let’s cut through the bullshit. This guy I talked to says you’re an honest fence, the squarest in town. You want to do some business or not?”
Keds took a half-step forward and shot a glistening brown gobbet onto the counter less than an inch from Christo’s elbow. “Take a walk, kid.” And he disappeared into the shadows of the back room.
“Okay, okay,” Christo said. “Billy Gaines, the smack head. He was the one who recommended you.” Silence. “Billy Gaines—come on, little guy with the hornrims, used to hang out with you at a tavern called Peck Miller’s.” Still nothing. “Said one night you busted a guy’s jaw on the edge of the bar when he tried to unplug the juke box on your quarter.”
Keds lumbered into view shaking his head. “You got no fuckin’ manners, you know that, kid? No fuckin’ manners at all. Now let’s see what you got.”
As it turned out, Keds was everything Billy Gaines had said. He didn’t haggle and gave fair value. Christo even sold him some tools he’d found in the trunk of the Fiat.
His next stop was a pizza shop two blocks south of Aviation Trades High School. There he had a small pie with mushrooms and extra cheese and, out by the dumpster in the parking lot, turned over the Valiums to a grape-eyed fat boy in exchange for sixty-three dollars cash and an underwater watch.
Two hours later, Christo was over the state line. By early evening he had checked into a motor lodge just off the highway. He took a long, steamy shower and stretched out. It felt good to be back on the road, back on the upstroke, but not that good. It had been a grueling day and hospital memories kept tumbling around in his head. He gave up and went for the caffeine. The “complimentary” coffee came out of its foil packet looking like river silt, so he left the empty glass pot on the hot plate until it cracked.
He napped in his clothes until midnight, then placed a call to a comrade in New York.
“Pierce? That you, Pierce …? Turn down the music, why don’t you. Yeah, it’s Christo.”
“Hey, jazzbo, where have you been?”
“Out of action. I got fucked up behind some bad checks, ended up doing six months in the bughouse.”
“Bad checks, huh? When are you going to get off the nickel-and-dime treadmill?”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s in my genes. You got something better for me?”
“You know I just might. Jesus, almost a year I don’t hear from you. But it’s great you’re out in the breeze again. Listen, listen, what kind of line are you on?”
“Motel phone.”
“Going through a switchboard?”
“Yeah, but come on, Pierce.”
“Go find a pay phone and call me back.”
“I really don’t feel much like moving.”
“So call collect. I mean who just got out, you or me? … Oh yeah, bring a pencil and paper.”
So Christo laced up his sneakers, promoted writing materials from the night clerk and trudged up the road to an all-night grocery. He enjoyed a late supper—bar-b-q potato chips, two pralines and a bottle of orange soda—inside the phone booth, watching two girls in curlers walk back and forth under the streetlamp waiting for someone to bother them. He lit a postprandial cigarette and dialed.
“I’m back.”
“So you are. Think you might want to drive down to Florida and make a pickup for me? The usual percentage. But I can’t front you anything, have to be C.O.D.”
“I’m right there.”
“Fabulous, fabulous. Things have been a bit warm up here, but down in Miami it is really jagged. Street dudes walking into the Sponge Divers National Bank with suitcases full of money. People being blown away in French restaurants. Some of the wheels down ther
e, so I hear, are having their homes electronically scanned for taps, once a week…. Anyway, we’re channeling through the west coast these days. Naples, Fort Meyers…. Get out your pencil and I’ll dictate a map.”
4
WHEN THE TOUR SWUNG down into Louisiana, Tildy decided it was time to take a few days off and visit her father in Ville Platte. It had been over a year since she’d seen Lucien and he was home from the hospital now. The doctors had thrown in the towel. Nothing could be done to moderate the progress of his disease. Six months at the very outside, they said, but they’d been wrong before. Still, the woman who was looking after him had written twice, hinting strongly that Tildy ought not put the trip off very much longer.
There was, as well, an even more immediate inducement for her to steal away: trouble on the job. Since the debacle in Coffeyville, the Cougarettes had dropped two more games, as many as they’d lost all last season. There had been a fight on the team bus and Wanda now wore a splint on her left hand. Heidi was guzzling her ulcer medicine between innings and threatening to go back to Virginia Beach and get married. That’s-Mary was juiced most of the time. Two games ago she had stood with arms folded in foul territory behind first base and watched three consecutive relay throws whiz by. Vinnie, who was fast becoming eligible for the sulker’s World Series, crouching off by himself with a stack of detective magazines, was sent in to replace her. On his first chance, he failed to get down on a short hop and was struck in the groin.
When Tildy went to Ben Salem to ask his permission to leave, he consented without argument.
“Sure. Take a whole week if you want. I only wish I was going with you.”
“You won’t mind fielding eight players for a few days?”
“What the hell difference would it make? Whole thing’s turning into a comedy act anyway.”
It took Tildy less than five minutes to pack her bag.
The night man at the car rental agency wore a wife-swapper mustache and high-heeled boots that zipped up the side. Spreading his hands on the counter, he confessed that he had left drafting school for this job because he liked the one-to-one contact.
“I’m a people person,” he said.
“And I think you’re overworked.”
He led Tildy by the elbow to a dark green Pinto and flung open both doors. “See what you think. I personally vacuumed out the interior. On my dinner break.”
Across the passenger seat and along the console were scaly brown spots which resembled dried blood. But Tildy wrote it off. Just my morbid state of mind, she concluded.
It was late by the time she started south, a profusion of semis on the road making up time. She picked up a hitchhiker a little after one A.M., a soldier heading for his brother-in-law’s place on a three-day pass. Thoroughly unnerved at catching a ride with a lone woman, his first ever, he hunched so far forward that his chin brushed the dashboard, mumbling thanks again and again. When Tildy handed him her smokes, asking him to light one for her, his suddenly unresponsive fingers kept tearing sulphur heads against the matchbook staple. His ears were prominent under a lawnmower service haircut and Tildy was positive she saw them turning pink in the gleam of passing headlights.
“They running you pretty ragged at boot camp?”
“They surely are. Yes, ma’am.”
“‘Right left right. Right left right.’ Some kind of life, huh?” Smoke streamed from her nostrils as she turned to face him. “Bet you’re glad to get out of there, even for a couple of days.”
“S’pose so. But it ain’t so bad, not really. They’re teachin’ me a skill. Gonna be a certified radar technician when I get out.”
He looked so familiar, like the boys she used to dance for in the enlisted men’s clubs Sparn pitched her to (“Okay, so she’s not exactly stacked, but you know what they say: It’s not the meat, it’s the motion”) when he first took her on.
She could remember pumping her hips, flashing her sequined pasties at those avid faces. She could remember their heavy breathing, invariable as a parade cadence. And the way they’d haunt her dressing room afterward, certain that someone who displayed her body for a living would be more than happy to open her arms (and legs) to a fighting man. “You’re awful pretty. You know they’ll be shippin’ me to Nam next week.” Tildy tried to be patient with them. She understood how truly innocent they were, how sex was to them a dark and uncharted jungle land, that they were the expeditionary force, full of arrogance and lies about the natives, without a knowledge of the language, or the support of the bigwigs who had sent them.
Tildy swerved to avoid an animal carcass in the road. “Did you enlist or were you drafted?”
“I signed up all right, but it weren’t so much my own idea. It was my guidance counselor, she said I’d be wastin’ my time in college. Nice lady. She even gimme a ride to the recruiter office.”
Two hours later they stopped at his exit ramp. Tildy placed a soft, dry kiss on his cheek and pushed him out the door.
“Watch out for yourself, Harmon. And don’t you be taking any more rides with women.”
She checked the rearview mirror as she pulled out. There he stood in the liquid glow of a mercury lamp, barrack bunk fantasies unfulfilled, staring pitifully after her.
Tildy reached Ville Platte just after sunrise, the sky smeared with yellow clouds the color of old salve. She cruised back and forth on half-familiar streets, unable to summon up any sensation of nostalgia. This was a place she’d been before, a place where she had passed some time, but it was not home. Like everywhere else, some landmarks had fallen: Mamou’s Chicken Shack was boarded up and the movie house was for sale. But she felt no sense of loss, any more than she felt relief to see that the old drugstore was still standing, the one where she’d drunk hundreds of vanilla Cokes as a child. She did not stop in for breakfast. She did not care if there was anyone inside she could recognize, or who might recognize her. After a cup of weak coffee from a vending machine, Tildy headed out LaForche Road to her father’s house.
Tildy’s olefactory sense had always been highly developed. Her earliest memories were keyed to smells. There had been a period when she was five or six when the smells of road tar or laundry soap, of cellar mold and simmering red beans had registered so powerfully as to be nearly painful. Later on, she learned to do tricks with her nose. From a whiff or two of someone’s breath, she could tell them what they’d had for lunch. Led blindfolded into a deserted classroom, she could accurately identify it from the lingering pheromones of the teacher.
Adulthood had dulled her receptors, but still, as she strolled in the parched grass at the side of her father’s house, she could smell him through an open window; the stale fumes of his sickness at first, like mist hovering over a poisoned well, and then underneath, his own animal scent as she’d always known it, a sharp blend of vinegar and charred metal. This was the home place, just exactly as she’d left it all those years ago.
Except for the stooped little woman in black tennis shoes standing at the kitchen stove and stirring something in a pot. Her iron gray hair was in a single braid that reached all the way to the base of her spine.
“Don’t you be alarmed, honey. Joby Daigle, I’m the one wrote you them letters. Sit yourself down, I’m jes makin’ Lucy his breakfast.”
“How is he?”
“We takin’ it a day at a time. So you’re Clothilde, the daughter. I could see it right when you come in that door. You got Lucy’s eyes.”
Tildy stood awkwardly beside the wicker rocking chair, as unprepared for it all as she’d figured all along. “Thank you for the letters. And thank you for taking care of Papa this way. There’s really no way for me to tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“Don’t you try, honey. I ain’t due no thanks. Cared for Mr. Daigle three years before he passed, a good sweet man and partial raised right here in Evangeline Parish. Now I’m carin’ for Lucy and seems like that’s somethin’ I was intentioned for. I take my share of pleasure in it, so I ain’t due no tha
nks.”
“Well, thank you just the same,” Tildy said. “You’re what’s keeping him alive.”
Mrs. Daigle turned off the stove, emptied gruel into a bowl and swirled in a few tablespoons of molasses. “Lucy’s got a terrible sweet tooth. You go on in and see him now, take him his farina. Jes don’t be too surprised if he don’t know you right off. Lucien, he ain’t home no more in here.” She pointed to her forehead.
To see if she still knew the house in darkness, Tildy went down the hall with eyes shut, took a sharp left at the stairs, then stood against the doorframe of what had once been her bedroom. She opened her eyes.
Lucien was on his back, the outline of his body, under a tattered wool coverlet, no wider than a light pole. His flickering eyes sat deep in their sockets and all around his hairline and under his jaw the skin was flaky and white. On newspapers carpeting the floor were globs of his viscid black sputum.
Cupped in Tildy’s palm, the bowl was hot. She nudged the big spoon slowly around the rim. Now or never if she was going in there.
“Papa. It’s me, Papa. Your daughter’s come to see you.”
Lucien said nothing. He gave no reaction as she knelt, smoothed the covers, kissed his dry, stubbled cheek.
“As-tu faim, Papa? C’est Clothilde ici.… I can come back later if you want to sleep.”
He rotated his head toward her and his eyes snapped open wide. “You have been where?”
“On the road mostly. I’ve wanted to come and see you.”
“I know, yes. Thems doctors out there no let you in. Devils they are, in that disguise of white.”
“No, no. C’est un rêve. You’re home now, Papa. They can’t bother you here.”
“They know me, yes.” Granular mucus clattered in his throat. He braced his elbows against the mattress, legs twitching, as a series of coughs ripped through him. “They come in the night with metal pipes to drain my body…. I am so weak from this, me.”
“Why don’t you eat something, okay?”
“Clothilde, you say? Ma fille?” He touched her face.