by Hob Broun
One Friday Karl won a few hands of five-card stud and went on to close the bars. When Zeke came by to pick him up for Saturday’s expedition to the island, he begged off.
“I been heaving all night. My gut is killin’ me.”
That was the day that Zeke, taking five on the beach with a panatela and a bottle of warm beer, caught sight of a large, gray and waxy mass bobbing in the shallows. Long a devotee of nautical fiction, Zeke knew instantly what it was: ambergris, the intestinal secretion of sperm whales valued so highly in the manufacture of perfume. The agent for the New York cosmetics firm who flew down to confirm the discovery speculated that it had originated with a pod of whales off the coast of Africa, floated down to the South Atlantic, then followed a favorable current back up to the North Atlantic and on into the Gulf of Mexico.
“You must be living right,” he said, shaking his head and writing Zeke a five-figure check. “Goddamnedest fluke I ever saw.”
Karl’s share of the deal, excluding the case of Johnnie Walker that Zeke had delivered to the house, was exactly nothing. A couple of weeks later, with the kind of frigid, superfluous irony that tries men’s souls, Karl was emptying the last dribbles of Scotch into his morning coffee when the mailman dropped off a postcard from Bimini.
Who could have thought an old crud like me could win a limbo contest?? Got a suite overlooking the beach and all the snatch I can handle. Everybody around here knows me. The Whale Vomit Man!! I just sit in the lobby and wait for them to come to me. And you know, I ain’t tired of telling the story yet. Maybe cause I tell it different every time.
God bless your hangover!!
Love, Zeke.
Karl heard car sounds as he moved between rooms, thinking at first that they came from the teevee. Motor shuddering off, screek of car door opening, thunk of car door closing. Then he saw a movement across the window, a flicker of dark blue. Tildy. She had a pissed-off expression, walked with a slight limp and carried some kind of metal tube. He wanted to go somewhere and hide but there wasn’t time.
Seconds later she was in the door and looking at the wine jug halfway to his lips, his skewed hat, guilty eyes.
“Honey, I’m home,” she said flatly. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s a sort of complicated story.”
“I think I’ve heard it already. You got canned, am I right?”
“Yup.”
“For God’s sake, Karl.” She came foreward to gently squeeze, as if it were a clown’s shiny red honker, her husband’s nose.
Karl was all over her then. “Baby, I missed you so.” He sucked her neck, clamped hands behind her thighs and lifted her off the floor. “You got no idea how good it is to see you, darlin’.”
“Put me down.”
“Okay, okay, but what about you? You ain’t supposed to be here neither.”
“I’m out of a job myself. Guess I quit.” She dropped into a chair. “Amounts to the same thing.”
“That’s a cold shot, baby. What do we do for money?”
“Not now, Karl.”
He lowered his eyes. In spite of the bad vibes, he felt happy. She was back. She’d take care of him. “What’s that thing?” He pointed to the tube she rolled between her palms.
“My father. You’ve never met, have you?” Tildy extended the thing as if Karl was supposed to shake hands with it.
He ran his fingers over the cool curve of metal. “Kinda small, ain’t he?”
“He died day before yesterday, Karl. These are his ashes.”
Karl blinked and his head seemed to fill like a balloon. He had been but vaguely aware that Tildy had a living parent. He removed his hat, nibbled momentarily on the brim. “Must be some kind of blue for you, baby. I’m real sorry.” He started toward her, arms out.
“Freeze right there. Don’t you comfort me, damn it. That’s not what I want.”
“Can I sit next to you on the arm? Would that be okay?”
“If you want. Just don’t touch me. I’m booby-trapped.”
Utterly dazed, Karl perched next to his wife, hands held in to keep from stroking her. Hairs were erect at the rims of her small ears.
“You’re lookin’ awful good, considerin’.”
“Please don’t.”
“Forget I’m here then.” Karl slid off the chair arm and went to retrieve his jug.
“Poor Karl. Don’t try to understand me, it’s a waste…. I don’t mean to be mean, it’s just that I’m so tired. And a reunion is not what I’d planned on. I wasn’t ready for you, not at all. What I wanted was a decent interval, you know? Deserted house, blank days, some long-distance-sleeping. Last few weeks, I’ve been bounced all around like a basketball. I need to find out where the bruises are.”
Karl shrugged, turned up the teevee. “Forget it. Have some wine.”
Tildy was mighty tired of tailoring her behavior to outside specifications, wanted merely to burrow like a mole through the black earth, but she left her seat, moved to Karl’s side, touched him.
“What’s on?” she said.
“You’re lookin’ at it.”
Reclining on a blanket stained with motor oil, Tildy and Karl were silent. Hot dogs crackled on a grill behind them and the portable radio discharged clear channel mood music. Airport rhumba. A crow sailed from the rubbish heap to its mess of a nest high in an overhanging tree. Turning onto his belly, Karl felt the ground with an open hand. He dug through the mat of pine needles and mulch and the smell of earth on his fingers was rich, good enough to eat.
“Another dog?” Tildy said, poking at the coals.
“At least.”
There were no buns so they held the hot dogs by their split and blackened skins, dipping them in the mustard jar before biting. Karl poured wine into a common cup.
“How’s your season been? Steal a lotta bases?”
“I was playing a little flat actually. Been in a slump, just wasn’t seeing the ball real good.”
“And Flora? She still mowin’ ’em down?”
“More or less.”
“I cannot believe you’re really finished with those Cougarettes. You’re a star, don’t you know it?”
“No future there. Don’t expect they’ll last through the month.” Then, anxious to change the subject—“Sun feels awful nice.”
“Sure. Sunshine State, it’s even on the license plates.”
“Looks like you could use some of it, too. Your skin tone is lousy. Been living like an invalid, have you?”
“You know how I get.”
“Do I?”
“We talked about it. You never remember.” Karl plucked blades of grass for chewing. Cheeks unshaven and slightly puffy, his elongated, loaf-pan face flushed with effort; an effort first to locate Tildy’s good graces, then worm his way in. “It’s only sometimes. When you’re away and I have to go it alone around here. I’m trapped in that house. Little things get to spookin’ me. I spring a leak somewhere, start to feel sick every time I set foot outdoors.”
“Is that it? Some people might want to call that a little bit crazy.”
“So maybe I am. Nothin’ I can do about it.”
“Except open another bottle.”
“Nag, nag, nag.” Karl spat green. “I got reasons to drink, sweets, and you’re one of ’em. Bet we ain’t spent more than two weeks under the same roof so far this year. And when you are around, ain’t long before you’ll be remindin’ me, even when it’s not in words, about who’s supporting who.”
“Oh, shut up.” She stood, knocking the radio over; a muffled crescendo of yoyo violins. “For days I watch my team disintegrate into a summer camp revue. I cut loose from there in a rental car for Ville Platte where I watch my father die. Clean up what I can down there, motor nonstop to Jacksonville to retrieve my own wheels, then on in here with an urgent need for peace and quiet only to find my hopeless Karl fired again, moping around like a granny. And within three hours here we are back again on the same old shit as the day I left. Me
, I’m going to take a nap.”
Karl would have liked to join her, but was afraid to ask.
Tildy dreamed of moonlit jungle alleys, the hushed stalking of pygmy commandos, their faces smeared with ash. They hunted her with devotion, wishing only to dance in her honor. The stillness was broken all at once by the flounderings of a wounded beast …
She pushed the pillows away. “Be still.”
Thumps and scrapes of Karl battling furniture outside the door, then a splintering of glass and the last coils of sleep came loose from around her.
“Sellerass them auto workers, ain’t on my shoulders.”
“Shit.” Tildy wrapped herself in the sheet, opened the door and looked out.
Karl was halfway bent, gasping like a beaten fighter. His hair was matted and his eyes looked like bottle caps. “Tildy best watch her feet.” He chuckled. “Them little white toe’s like candy.” He pointed to the broken mustard jar on the floor.
Tildy linked her arms around his middle and wrestled him down into a chair though he outweighed her by some sixty pounds. She closed his eyelids with her fingers. “Play dead for a few minutes.” Kneeling, she picked out the larger chunks of glass and took up the rest with a spatula and paper towels. “One thing at least, I won’t ever need to have children as long as I have you.”
“Nobody’s daddy, uh-uh.” Karl rolled his head from side to side. “Been ten years or more, still get them cards from Shelly. Every Christmas, every Father’s Day. What a joke. Three months gone when Jerry married her … ‘Little Jerry livin’ with his grandma while I walk the streets of Detroit. A widow’s nights are long ones. Hope you think of us often.’ See why I can never get away?”
“You could stop opening the envelopes.” She handed him a glass of water and told him to drink, her body taut and hard under the sheet like a statue on somebody’s lawn.
In the living room, Tildy surveyed the overturned lamps and strewn cushions fanned out in a totemic design of cowardice and reproach; and she wondered how long he could toss the salad of his brain before it flew over the sides of the bowl.
Karl didn’t know how cars worked, but he could drive hell out of them. Won a demolition derby while he was still in high school; tore up the dirt track circuit with his hardass tactics. A housewife with multiple sclerosis started a fan club for him and middle-aged speed nuts with kids his own age squired him for steak at the Elks Club and slipped him “beer money” on the way home.
Then it turned out that the rubbery blonde he’d been innocently shagging was the adopted daughter of the biggest General Motors dealer in the state, a man who could sponsor him for an assault on serious stock car competition. Karl wrecked that first car in time trials, but loyal Margie convinced her dad to ante up again. He made it on his second try at Darlington when the leader blew a piston on the next to last lap. Margie embraced him in the winner’s circle, but instead of congratulations, whispered in his ear that she was pregnant. Karl headed straight for the depot and caught the first available long-distance bus.
Out in Bakersfield, things didn’t come so easy. Those California boys didn’t like him at all. They took him wide in the corners, pinched him back on the straightaways, and one night rode him right off the track into a cotton candy stand. It took a while for his ribs to mend. Karl was running right close to empty on cash and rooting for any kind of work when a pit groupie who adored his backwoods ways (“Oh honey, chew my lips till they bleed”) introduced him to a crewman from a thrill show called Jonny Apache’s Hell on Wheels.
The folks at Hell on Wheels didn’t like him much either, but they’d just lost a man to a poolroom knifing, were about to launch a six-week tour of the Southwest, and needed a driver badly.
“You take dope?” Jonny Apache said, chewing on a quartered lemon.
Karl said no.
“Pack a bag.”
So Karl became the number three man behind Jonny and his younger brother, Jerry. He opened the show with a few simple rolls, joined the brothers for some close-order precision driving, weaves and drifts and so on, and returned later to take part in the death-defying Sidewinder Crash. Jerry starred in this stunt, driving a junker with no glass and the door riveted shut. Jonny usually got on the public address himself to work the crowd. He told them how devoted he was to his baby brother and that even an old pro like himself knew fear. He told them that Jerry would not be wearing a helmet, that his only protection would be their prayers. Way up at the far end of the track, Jerry gunned his motor in a final salute. Ahead of him was a blazing firewall of pine boards, a ramp and another junker parked lengthwise beyond it on which he would land. As Jerry began his approach, left hand gripping the roof, a red bandana flapping in his fingers, Karl zoomed out of nowhere, hitting a 360 degree spin just at the far edge of the ramp as Jerry sailed over him and bellied down on that second junker.
It was a low risk stunt so long as the timing was right. Jonny had insisted on many practice runs employing a fifth wheel calibrated to measure delicate shadings of speed. There was a mere half-mile-per-hour tolerance either way. They did it a hundred and thirty-six times without a hitch. Until Flagstaff.
It was an evening show under floodlights and thousands of papery gray moths embroidered the air. Perhaps it was their erratic flight patterns that distracted him, or breasts in the crowd, but Karl lost it halfway through the first revolution and the front of his car swung out into Jerry’s descending path. He heard someone scream, “Look out,” then watched in fascination as Jerry’s left rear tire bounced on his hood, each serration in the black rubber distinct in that speck of transfixed time, imagining that Jerry could spin on end there forever, a human hood ornament. Karl let go of the wheel, covered his head and smacked into the parked junker, cracking one knee on the steering column. On its side, Jerry’s car slid through grass and dirt like the blade of a giant Rototiller, struck the retaining wall belly first and caught fire. Karl just sat there, blood running warm inside his pants leg, as two young studs from the crowd leaped over the wall, pulled Jerry out and smothered his flaming body.
Chaos in the emergency room. Jonny asked an intern to give Jerry’s wife a sedative. Shelly was on the floor, slamming a plastic ashtray against her head. And there was that gink from the crew, the one who had hooked Karl up in the first place, pushing past the security guard to announce that with his very own eyes he’d seen Karl pouring gin into his intermission Coke.
The bleakest tragedy of all was that Karl owned up when he didn’t have to.
“Jonny, I know how it looks …”
He saw the sudden deadening of faces, sensed the collective tensing of muscles, musk in the air, a circle of predators closing around him…. Just one little shot. Hardly more than a tablespoon. Not enough to slow his reflexes. Really. His head had been clear. Something just got away. You’ve got to believe it was an honest mistake.
But could there be such a thing as an honest mistake when a man lay packed in ice, horribly burned over three fourths of his body? When he would remain in pure agony for eleven days and nights before the ultimate relief?
Karl was all played out. Tildy undressed him and coaxed him to bed. Dutifully, without feeling, she stroked his nestled head as he rattled on, mumbling into the mattress as if the disaster was only hours old and he could still secure the forgiveness of that emergency room lynch mob.
Finally, as dawn arrived, he went to sleep. “I don’t feel guilty,” he said before slipping away. “I feel pursued.”
Tildy rallied herself under a hot shower and drank some orange juice with a raw egg whipped into it. Then she put on some clothes and got back in the car.
Nerves of steel in a bed of grease. Tildy walked the streets of Gibsonton waiting for something to open up. Illogically, the air cooled as daylight advanced. The sky took on the texture of overripe cheese, and mist came in on a westerly breeze. A thunderstorm to start the day? It might be nice, wash away all the muck. Tildy buttoned up her leather jacket.
She crossed and re
crossed a vacant lot, gouging divots with her sneakers, then crouched to fill her pockets with stones. Aiming at the ceramic insulators of a telephone pole across the street, she threw them in rapid succession and scored a perfect zero. Her shoulder was tight, would not rotate smoothly.
Of the Cougarette fielders it was generally agreed that Tildy had the most accurate throwing arm, if not the strongest—that distinction belonged to Wanda Watts who had once shattered a shatterproof windshield at fifty yards. On grounders deep in the hole or to her backhand side Tildy could beat most runners by three or four steps, delivering the ball time after time to a perfect chest-high spot so That’s-Mary seldom had to move her glove more than an inch in any direction. Distressing to think this ability could have evaporated so fast.
Tildy sprinted awhile, trying to pump out the tar and nicotine with which she had lately been varnishing her lungs. Noticing a splash of light on the pavement ahead, she slowed, entered the Alhambra Diner, climbed on a rotating stool at the counter. The woman who poured her coffee without being asked had a wiry black beard that curved Ahab-style around her prominent jaw. Her husband, covering the grill with bacon strips for the breakfast stockpile, wore the briefest of tank tops, revealing portions of the classical tattoos that covered his torso: Botticelli’s Annunciation, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Diana and her Companions by Vermeer.
Inscribed glossies hung in clusters on the wall: “Captain Troy and his Amazing Trained Spiders”; “Mongo the African Methuselah”; “The Flying Arnheim Sisters”; “All the best from Apeman Adams, this Missing Link is missing you.”
“How’s business, Etta?”
“We’re holding up pretty well. Paid off that new freezer last month. Albert, give this child a couple pieces of bacon…. You look awful washed out, honey. Been getting enough sleep?”
“How much is enough?”
“The heat’ll take it right out of you.” Patting her chin, “I always give myself a trim this time of year.”
Albert lumbered over with some bacon in a folded paper napkin.” Who was the last National League infielder to be killed in a plane crash?”