Odditorium: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  “Whatever. It’s still a bit early in the day for that textbook material.”

  “You should just meditate for a while. Get in contact with those bills.”

  Pierce had suggested the ritual money counting. Clearly, their putative dope scam would require more capital than Christo was in any position to supply and so to increase his bankroll, Pierce had gotten him a seat in a no-limit poker game starting up in a few hours. He had suggested the counting as a kind of preparatory workout, a way of tuning in to those ethereal cash frequencies; the motions of gathering, riffling, folding and unfolding, the tactile sensations, all magnetizing Christo for those monster pots.

  “I’ve got my mystical side,” Pierce had said.

  “Uh-huh. Pass the sugar, will you?”

  The game was run out of the East Side apartment of an all-purpose middleman named Ernest Freed. Back in the late ’60s Freed had almost cracked the best-seller list with an espionage novel called The Abramowitz Integer, but his next one had flopped badly and he hadn’t been in hardcover since. The last piece of writing he’d done was the script for a movie about lesbian stock car drivers that was never produced. Now he ran his little gambling operation, introduced his friends to very amiable “fashion models” (the friends, in turn, would occasionally alert him to an upcoming stock manipulation), and dabbled in ghetto real estate. When pressed, he would admit to having a literary project in the works, but indicated the media overlords would never let it see the light of day since it would “blow the lid off their whole lousy game.”

  Freed’s game didn’t need a steerer. He kept to a select clientele, cosmopolites and professional people who wouldn’t get ugly if they dropped a few thousand, for whom it was better to be stone broke than uncool. He made generous contributions to the police department’s bulletproof-vest fund and kept the hard boys away with monthly payments and the understanding that if he booked any sports bets, he’d lay them off with some new talent they were bringing along, a decertified osteopath over in Jersey who was just coming off a three-year bit for Medicaid fraud.

  “So what is it you’ve gotten me into?” Christo asked. “I mean, I’m not going up against pros I hope. I’d hate to get sandbagged all the way back to square one.”

  “Would I lead you into that kind of spot? Hey, you should be able to put four walls and a roof around this type of competition. They’re lightweights, believe me. It’s only a game to them and to you it’s a job. It’s not a question of whether you’ll win, but how much.”

  “Then what the hell is all this for?” Christo pointed to the piles of money and the packs of cards.

  “I want you to be in your best fighting trim, that’s all. A little science, a little superstition. Remember what I said about maximizing your advantages? Now then, I’m going to deal you some straight flushes and I want you to really concentrate on a visual image of those cards.”

  “This is a cash-only game. No checks, no IOUs.” Freed wore loafers without socks, satin jogging shorts and a white shirt open to his sternum. “We play no-limit table stakes here with check and raise permitted. It’s a fixed five-dollar ante, dealer calls the game and I take five percent out of every pot.”

  Christo nodded. “Then I guess we’ll have to try to keep the pots small.”

  “There’s an open bar.” Freed had the rote geniality of a tour guide. “Please help yourselves.”

  Pierce poured himself a large neat Scotch. Christo opted for plain soda with a chunk of lemon.

  “Who’s that?” Nodding to the brown colossus standing by the door.

  “Security. This is his summer job. Rest of the time he’s what they call a nonteaching assistant at some vocational school in Brooklyn. Used to be a pro wrestler, the Mighty Bobo.”

  “I thought these guys were supposed to be well-mannered. Family men.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Then Pierce introduced him to the other players: Steve, the record producer; Randy, who owned a couple of Japanese restaurants; Dennis, the lawyer; and Maury, from Wall Street. They shook hands and went back to arranging their money—fifties, hundreds, great sheaves of them. Freed tore the cellophane off two factory fresh decks, spread them out on the spotless green baize.

  “You fellas don’t use the jokers, huh?” Christo said as all four were removed and torn in half.

  “Where are you from anyway?”

  “Newport, Kentucky. Fast horses, beautiful women, and plenty of side meat with greens.”

  “Swell. A tourist.”

  “Welcome to actionland, pal.”

  “Come on, come on. First jack deals.”

  On the first hand he stayed with all the way, Christo got sandwiched between an ace-high flush and queens full, and lost a little over four hundred dollars. Maury from Wall Street had whipped the pot skillfully and didn’t seem like any lightweight from where Christo was sitting. He glanced at Pierce with raised eyebrows.

  “Early yet,” his partner said. “Pace yourself.”

  Then he cut the cards for the new deal and his face said: I brought you to the zone, but now you’re on your own.

  Tildy, too, was on her own and this was a day weighted with gloom from the moment she’d opened her eyes. In the note he’d left her, Christo suggested she take in a movie or visit the Botanical Gardens, as he’d be tied up all day. Thank you very much. Tildy could accommodate solitude—that was a skill she’d picked up early in life—but not this way, not now. For the very first time, she felt a real need of him, of the reassurance his mere hereness would bring.

  She missed the cramped sameness of home and adoring Karl, childish but unquestioning. She wanted to loll in the warm smells of her own bed and hear the mice chittering under the floorboards. And she wondered if she wasn’t just playing out a long string of blunders reaching all the way back to …

  Half awake, she sat in a murky barroom drinking amaretto and coffee and watching the Bowery Boys on television. The woman behind the bar talked to herself. She counted beer coasters and swizzle sticks and wiped the same glasses over and over. Her black hair was teased and lacquered, her long red fingernails meticulously shaped; they clinked on every bottle and glass she touched. Every few minutes she would glance up at the gray screen, then at the clock on the opposite wall. Her gestures hurried and anxious as if she were waiting for someone who was late, she would take a cigarette out of her purse and light it, and then grind it out underfoot after two or three hissing puffs.

  “I’d like another when you get a chance.”

  “When I get a chance? That’s a good one. When the hell did I ever have a chance? I’m just living the life I got handed.” In the time it took to bark these four short sentences, she had filled the shot glass to the rim, realigned the amaretto bottle and grabbed the coffeepot from the warmer. “You taking cream with that?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Yeah? You married, honey?”

  “Yes. I just don’t wear the ring.”

  “I know, I know. Why discourage them? Right after the tits it’s your hands they look over. And a girl your age—well, my advice would be to get out of it as soon as you can. It’s slow death, honey, the slowest there is. Marriage’ll eat away at your insides till there’s nothing left but the water and the fat and you’re no damn use to anybody.”

  “You must have had a pretty bad experience.”

  “Me? Uh-uh. Fuck ’em and forget ’em is my motto. But I’ve got eyes to see what goes on with people, and sooner or later, young and old, they just about all end up here.”

  Behind her, through a blizzard of static, Leo Gorcey tugged at his bow tie and said, “Don’t bother me with that noise. What’s for dinner?”

  Tildy left her change on the bar and wobbled into the light.

  At 59th Street she bought a bag of popcorn and entered Central Park. Exhausted, she sat down on a bench that looked out over a small pond, and within half a minute, a squad of pigeons had gathered expectantly at her feet. Christo had told her that they were ca
rriers of several varieties of parasitic disease and that every few months some desperate soul would be admitted to the hospital after making a meal of one. “When they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, they mean it.” Tildy munched a few handfuls of popcorn, then emptied the rest of the bag on the cement. The pigeons went at it so furiously they didn’t even notice a few sparrows who sneaked into the feeding circle. When Tildy left, they were tearing up the bag.

  She continued up a gentle rise to a meadow where stretched out before her were a dozen baseball diamonds. The grass was withered, chewed up, and all but two of the diamonds were vacant, their emptiness almost spooky with the late sun flaring on wire backstops. But at the one nearest her, a father served up fat balloon pitches to his small son who, swing after swing, grimacing, hit nothing but air.

  Down in one corner there was somewhat more advanced activity going on and Tildy went toward it, shielding her eyes: street types in a pickup softball game, shirtless outfielders, a pitcher with a transistor radio blaring in his back pocket. As she drew closer, circling around behind first base, the centerfielder sprinted and dove for a humpbacked liner, but the ball skipped by him and three runs scored. His teammates cursed him, loosed insults at him that were in no way playful, and when he finally picked himself up, chest speckled with dirt and dead grass, Tildy saw that he was fighting back tears. Evidently a more serious game than it looked; maybe there was money riding.

  The inning ended without further damage, the other team took the field, and their first baseman tossed a few warm-up grounders. He was olive-skinned, tall, with pectorals swelling under a T-shirt that had his name felt-markered across the back: Silvio. A high throw kicked off the heel of his glove and, instinctively, Tildy trotted after it.

  “Bring it here, Mommy.” He had stunning black eyes.

  Tildy looked at the slightly misshapen ball, squeezed it, weighed it, rolled it around her palm. They were all watching her, smirking. She let it drop, bouncing it twice off her toes like a soccer ball, scooped it between her legs, caught it with her other hand and flipped it over her back. She took it on the one bounce and in the same motion launched a throw that trailed smoke as it rose from her shoe tops and whistled toward Silvio’s head. Ducking down and away at the last second, he threw up his glove and the impact of the arriving ball spun him halfway around. He whirled on her, features tense and sharp, but realized in another moment that to lose his temper in front of the others, and at the provocation of this scrawny little bruja, would also be to lose face.

  “What position you play, Butch?”

  “Shortstop.”

  “Okay, Butch. You show us what you can do. Chombo! You go in the outfield.”

  Silvio borrowed a mitt that was slightly too big for her hand and she felt suddenly haggard, ungainly as she took her position, rubbed dirt on her hands. She had not won his respect, only his curiosity…. Check the freak, boys. This ought to be good.

  Her first chance was a slow roller that trickled past the mound. She charged, barehanded it and leaped high on the throw, scissoring her legs. The man was out by eight feet. He stood for a moment, hands on hips, and then spat.

  “Get down with it, Butch.”

  “In his face.”

  The chatter felt good to her, a warming incantation. She caught a soft pop-up, backpedaling, to end the inning and scooted off the field with her head down to conceal the grin that forced itself on her. She flopped down under a tree and Silvio came and sat next to her, rubbing his back against the knobby trunk.

  “You blow some minds out there, Butch.” He shook his head. “Where you learn to play ball, in the joint?”

  “No, I just fell into it.”

  “What else you do, Butch?”

  The hand he had placed on her leg conversationally was still there. Did she imagine a slow, deliberate increase in its pressure? Then he shifted so that the outer curve of his hip melded with hers and there was no mistaking the heat that flowed between them. She felt an odd serenity with this stranger touching her, a soft abatement of her protective reflexes. They gazed into space, said nothing, while his fingers splayed and met, splayed and met, taking small pinching folds in the fabric of her pants.

  “You’re up now,” he whispered. “Go hit a homerun for me.”

  But with men on first and second, Tildy struck out on three pitches, her mind totally preoccupied with imaginings of what Silvio looked like without clothes. She came away from the plate blushing.

  The game ended two innings later on a disputed play at the plate. Silvio ushered her away from the contracting circle of screams and threats, saying he knew a real nice spot where they could go have some beers. This was not an invitation, but an accomplished fact. He was going to take her without even asking what she wanted. It was the kind of arrogance that would normally have inflamed her, but she went along, her silent presence beside him all the consent he required. And when, as they walked, he slung an arm around her waist, she responded instantly (knowing him to be an operator, a man without underwear who carried shiny white knife scars with pride) by crossing her arm over his damp back and smiling into those black, still eyes. She amazed herself.

  Orphan Annie’s was an airless, close-fitting bar that smelled of roach poison. It might have been the noise, the press of the crowd, the urgent, wheedling faces lunging at one another, but for whatever reason the new setting pierced the vacuum in which she had been afloat. That echoing, dreamlike serenity was gone and a sour unease took its place. Drinks with a bastard and in another fifteen minutes, back to his place.

  Picking at the label of her beer bottle, Tildy wondered how she had ever gotten herself into such a box. Was it boredom? Feckless curiosity? Anger at Christo for leaving her alone? It didn’t amount to a damn. For if there was one truth to which she held fast it was that reasons were the province of the doomed; that only results mattered.

  And so a few minutes later when Silvio danced off to the men’s room, she bolted for the door and ran. Full out. For blocks and blocks.

  Down and dirty. Pierce dealt the final hole cards with care, sliding each one across the table with his finger, detouring around the green mountain in the center. Christo checked his pair of kings and Steve the Record Producer blew a few blasé smoke rings. He had four spades to the ace showing.

  “I’ll go two thousand,” ironing the bills with the back of his hand, laying them delicately on the crest of the mountain.

  It was two big ones to Randy Restaurants, a heavy loser all afternoon who’d been annoying everyone with such irrelevancies as the stale tale of screenwriter Ellie Sebring dropping dead at his sushi bar. He stalled, picking his eyebrows, massaging his overbite, and finally dropped.

  “Yeah, what suspense,” said Dennis the Lawyer, throwing in yet another busted straight. “I can’t catch pneumonia here.”

  Playing with the jogtrot conservatism of a loan officer from the Corn Belt, Pierce had been drifting back and forth across the breakeven mark all day long. Now, true to form, he dropped without even looking at his seventh card.

  That brought it around to Eddie the Agent, a big, silk-suited noisemaker from the William Morris office who’d bought in only an hour or so ago and immediately lost four big pots in a row. He was showing paired eights and a couple of junk cards.

  “So Steve is hot to trot with his spades, eh? And ace high, too. Fuck, is this déjà vu or what?”

  “You really ought to put out some more face towels, Ernie.” Maury from Wall Street was just now returning from a pit stop in Freed’s black tiled bathroom. “The one I used was all wet…. Say, this looks like our biggest pot so far.”

  “Shut up, Maury.”

  “Yeah. If you’re out of the hand, stay out. What’re you up to, Eddie?”

  “This is so exciting I just have to call.”

  “Then I have to raise,” Christo said, counting three thousand into the pot.

  Steve the Record Producer exhaled very slowly. “And two more. That’s three grand to you, E
ddie.”

  “Well, that’s damn exciting, but … But I don’t think I can stick around for the showdown.”

  “You and me,” Christo said. “Let’s see it.”

  Slamming the edge of the table, Steve the Record Producer threw open his hand in disgust. He had three red cards down and a second ace. Christo turned kings over nines and drew in the pot on the blade of his arm.

  “Outstanding read,” breathed Maury from Wall Street. “Hell of an outstanding read.”

  “Fucking ridiculous is what it is.” Steve the Record Producer was going a little pink about the ears. “There’s no possible way you can raise into me and then call me out with two cocksucking pair.”

  “It was easy once he folded the winning hand. Trip eights, wasn’t it?”

  Eddie the Agent shrugged helplessly.

  “I must thank both of you.” Christo looked for a moment into the bursting silver bubbles of his club soda. “You did exactly what I wanted you to.”

  “And your buddy was dealing, too. What did you do with the rest of the spades, Milbank, swallow ’em?”

  “Back off, Steve.” Freed was behind him and kneading his shoulders. “It’s history, babe,” he said gravely, the wise old infantry sergeant who’s seen men die a hundred different ways.

  As discreetly as he could with all eyes on him, Christo counted his money, he found that he was roughly thirty-one thousand dollars ahead. “Gee, I’d buy a round of drinks for everybody but they’re already free.”

  He was not making friends.

  “New cards,” said Eddie the Agent. “New cards coming out.”

  So a few rounds later, in a gut-out five-card stud hand, a couple thou in revenge was extracted by Steve the Record Producer; and when things went no better over the next half hour, Christo began to suspect that he’d blown it, failed to recognize his peak and bail out before traveling the inevitable downside of the curve. Eddie the Agent was being dealt out while he “made some calls,” Dennis the Lawyer had tapped out and left, and Pierce was folding most opening bets, acting bored: Now was the perfect time to push the game into breakup and run with the profits. But on the other hand, there was still a great deal of money on the table that wasn’t his.