by Hob Broun
“Sorry, Mr. H. I guess I got carried away.”
Eight hours a day with this weasel couldn’t be too good for her either. All for three ten an hour and whatever lipsticks and candy bars she could sneak out in her shoulder bag. A jalapeño milkshake to toast the perforation of your stomach, bossman. Go digest yourself.
Tildy’s fifth job in as many months and by no means the worst. The first gig after she got back from New York had lasted less than a week. She got into a rhubarb with some regular patrons (“What is it makin’ your nipples so hard, sweetie?”) and bopped one of them with a beer mug. After that she cleaned motel rooms. A month and a half with the flannel rags and the Ajax and the plastic bags—and an occasional startling discovery: a turd in the middle of the bed, an abandoned chihuahua tied to the sink with a shoe lace. There was even a kind of eloquence in empty liquor bottles grouped just so on an ash-strewn table. Tildy became increasingly sensitized to the things revealed in people’s trash and soiled leavings. Her appetite for such material kept on growing. Scenarios of sleaze began to dominate her every waking moment and finally enough was enough. Curiosity was one thing and fascination quite another. After that her friends at the Alhambra Diner took her on for the dinner shift, but Karl complained about being left alone at night.
Manically sober Karl. He was so much more alive off the juice, and on the muscle these days, wanting more and more from her. There was greater energy between them now than at any time since their first year, beating the bushes with a bus-and-truck show, never flying off to Bermuda like they planned, and not caring. There was clear improvement in the mechanics of romance. Karl’s newborn energy flared brightest in the bedroom and their sex was better than ever. She had even come several times. He was playful, like a little boy sometimes, and would curl around her in the dark, stroking her to sleep. But still she was restless: Is this my compulsion, or something to do with hormones? Assuming there’s a difference.
Karl felt strong and solid, like a newly installed king. He placed his empty coffee cup on the tank behind him, shifted forward on the cool toilet seat and listened to the gurgling of his intestines. The king makes music! All morning long the pressure had been building in the lower regions of his belly and now there was release.
Refreshed in recent weeks by the new domestic harmony (he was a husband again, with all those privileges), by good feelings seltzering through his bloodstream, Karl had become preoccupied with the smallest details of physical action. He went about the most mundane tasks attentively, watching his soapy fingers circle the rim of a dish, measuring the exact extension of his muscles as he reached for some object, relishing the way in which the smooth pistol-grip handle of the metal detector Tildy had given him for Christmas fit in his palm, the easy action of thumbwheel controls.
Now he felt the contours of a smoldering cigarette, rolling it against his fingertips, applying that certain degree of lip pressure that would draw smoke through the cellulose filter. Things could be so easy if you only let them.
“Easy,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
He took a last drag, flipped the cigarette between his legs into the bowl. The orange coal grazed his scrotum, the pain signal reaching his brain at the same moment the butt hit the water with a hiss. Despite the sudden sharpness of the pain, he did not even wince.
Years ago. A dewy, languid morning, early summer. Sitting in his grandma’s two-hole privy with birds squeaking outside, digging with his toes at the earth floor; and that summer peace ripped open by a mean, searing pain behind his little hairless balls. He exploded through the door, ran screaming for the house holding his pants up with both hands, then stopped dead, knees knocking, at the sight of a yellowed curtain flapping in an upstairs window. He knew how Grandma would fuss, wanting to examine the disgraceful hurt, to handle him and touch and poke. So, terrified and ashamed, he bolted into the woods and pressed cool moss to the burning spot, threw his arms around a tree and sobbed. The bark was rough and cold, but it was something to hug.
There he lay for a small boy’s eternity, quivering and filmed with sweat while a new pain engulfed him, an agony in his stomach that pulsed like a drum. Only the grown-ups could save him now. Would he die twitching in the dirt like a fish? For there was no doubt that he must die from a wound received in the midst of such a filthy act, from a punishment some evil toilet god had directed at the most wicked part of his body.
But he made it, stumbled crimson-faced into Grandma’s bony arms, and the first thing he did, with saliva running from his mouth and tears from his eyes, was apologize.
“I’m sorry, Grandma. I hurt myself making kaka. I’m sorry.”
She threw him in the back of the DeSoto and they flew down the hill, across the causeway to the army hospital. At first they thought it was acute appendicitis and were prepping him for surgery when a nurse noticed the lesion on his perineum. She said it looked like an insect bite. The doctors muttered and fiddled around in their white coat pockets. Black widow spiders were not unknown in this part of the country. The females often spun their webs beneath outhouses and their bite introduced a deadly nerve poison into the system.
By the time they hit him up with a jumbo dose of antivenin, Karl was teetering right on the edge. For some hours there was very real doubt as to whether he would recover. When two days later he did, he refused to go home. They tied him up in a sheet and carried him out to the DeSoto. For months Grandma had to lock him in his room to keep him from running away.
The moral of the story was that you were never safe. Each tiny fraction of a second held the possibility of pain and death; and something was always lurking. Always.
All aquiver, sphincter wound tight as a tow-truck winch, Karl got to his feet. He put his head in the sink and let the cold water run and run. Then he turned fast, so as not to see himself in the mirror, and got the hell out of that bathroom. Air, he needed fresh air. He’d take a little stroll by the mailbox, see what was waiting for him there.
That same sample box of fabric softener was hanging from the post in a plastic bag. Been there near two weeks now, had a look of bad luck about it. Karl tore it loose and flung it into the thicket across the road; then he pulled back the mailbox door and peeked inside. Pine needles, gray bits of old wasp nest and, yep, something pale way in the back. But don’t be no fool and stick your hand in. Karl flicked the letter out with a stick.
You were never safe. Never ever. He recognized the sharply angled handwriting, the way his name was written in red. His hands were shaking so badly he had to open the envelope with his teeth. This is what the letter said:
A big hello from Motor City. Sorry you missed your Christmas card this year, but I was busy recuperating from major surgery and just couldn’t find the time. I know how you enjoy news of Little Jerry and me. The streets are covered with ice now and the car won’t run, but we’re pushing on ahead and who needed a set of ovaries anyway? I’m running my own massage studio, living in an apartment upstairs with a view of the switching yards. Little Jerry is with me and a constant inspiration these days. Did you know he wants to be a race driver just like his Dad! Isn’t that sweet?
Many happy returns,
Shelly
There wasn’t a single thing to drink in the house … Except for this dusty bottle of grain alcohol under the kitchen sink. Was that the stuff that made you deaf or blind or something? Just the smell of it made his eyes water. How bad could it be? He remembered a gobbling geek named Suggs who used to drink shoe polish strained through a felt hat; but then, after biting the heads off mice every time he could muster a good crowd, probably anything would do.
Still, no skull-and-bones on the label. Just a little taste then. A tablespoon dispersed in grapefruit juice, one dose of tonic for his nerves.
When Tildy returned home that evening she did not find her husband sprawled across the floor like a bag of laundry. She did not find him at all; just an empty glass on the kitchen table, a disarrangement of solvents and cleansers on the floor
.
Nothing to be alarmed about. She heated a can of soup and filed her nails. Maybe he was lurking in a closet, waiting for her to pass so he could jump out and scare her breathless. Like a little boy sometimes. Then she heard the siren wail outside. She listened hard, wanting it to go on and on and fade in the far distance. But it stopped close by, as she somehow knew it would.
She ran out to the road and stopped. Voices yowling through the trees, a smell of smoke. Something dire going down at the Keyes place. Tildy broke into a sprint, knees pumping high, sneakers slapping hard on the pavement. Up ahead, an undulating orange glow. Down the bending driveway she could see the pump truck setting up, playing out hose. The Keyes outhouse, swaddled in flames, was tipping backward, igniting refuse and scrap lumber stacked around it. Cars flashed by her, volunteer firemen with their domelights spinning. Watching impassively from a bowed front porch, Mrs. Keyes sipped on a beer and shooed her children inside. Just as quickly one of them would pop back through the hole in the screen door and scramble with excitement back and forth along the railing. Water churned out the nozzle now, blowing a hole in the blazing outhouse wall. The firemen cheered themselves.
Then, from some deeper region of darkness, came a more familiar voice—Karl’s. “Black widows,” he screamed. “You can’t even burn ’em out.”
Tildy had to take an advance on her salary to cover the costs, a couple hundred to cool the Keyeses’ anger and persuade them not to press charges, and another seventy or eighty for building materials. Karl, on Tildy’s orders, had agreed to rebuild the privy himself.
“I can’t think of anyone more qualified,” she said, driving him home from jail on Saturday afternoon. “I mean that’s your business. Isn’t it, donniker man?”
“Okay, okay. Don’t jump salty on me. I know I deserve it but …” Karl looked down, digging into a seam of the upholstery with his fingers. “But it wasn’t really me did it. It was like me standing outside my body and watching.”
“Just a bad dream, huh?” Tildy tromped on the gas pedal and the Galaxie roared through the intersection streaming blue smoke.
But she couldn’t stay mad at him long. With the wind out of his sails he was bobbing and drifting like an innertube, her fumbling old sad sack again. He moped and whimpered and fawned, promising he’d never go near alcohol again. Oh yes, he should be whipped for treating her this way, putting shame and botheration on her when every week she brought the bacon home. Tildy listened quietly with her eyes half shut. It was almost comforting, this noise, like the lowing of cows.
They had cold cuts and macaroni salad for lunch, then a short nap, with Karl corkscrewing around the mattress but not daring to touch her. Finally, she took his hand and held it.
“Either keep still or get out of bed.”
From under a bulwark of pillows she heard his retreating steps and a thick, low voice as the radio snapped on, low and steady as wind, more soothing than music.
Tildy suction-cupped a sign to the inside of the door—BACK AT in fat white letters and a clock face underneath with movable tin hands. Nudging them forward to 11:15, generously allowing herself a full half hour, she turned the lock, went back to the stockroom and lit up a joint. The very last crumbs of the bag Looie had pressed on her as a memento of their passion. Dear sweet Looie, and she could barely remember the contours of his face. It was good dope, though. Two or three drags and there was that tightness across her chest, a twitching in her brain like an old motor coming to life. Tildy held the smoke in her lungs until she was dizzy, and then, letting go, could hear for a few seconds the tomtom rhythm of her pumping blood before it faded out like the end of a record. An easy mark for distraction now, reading along the wall of a box—STORE AWAY FROM HEAT PACKED AT CENTRAL DIST. CTR. FAIRMEADOW, INDIANA—wondering what Fairmeadow looked like, factory town with an endless strip of muffler shops and fried-chicken stands and not a meadow in sight.
The joint had gone out in her fingers, a blackened stem she stashed for later in the cellophane of her cigarette pack. Envelope glue was what her dry mouth tasted like; and it was suddenly spooky back there with the cartons and shredded paper, an interrogation room. She went and sat behind the register, sucking mints and scratching pictures on a ledger pad: palm trees, a sofa, free-floating breasts.
Someone banging on the door. Only five after but they wouldn’t go away. Tildy stumbled coming off the stool and banged her hip on the edge of the counter. A skinny woman peered through the glass, deep acne scars, lavender eye shadow and pencil marks on upper and lower lids like sun rays in a child’s drawing, stringy blond hair that hung down past her shoulder blades. Tildy stood blinking, rubbing her hip.
“Come on, come on. I really need some stuff.”
My time is your time. Shrugging, Tildy pulled the door open, kicked a rubber wedge under it to let the breeze in. A little late. The woman sniffed ostentatiously, winked.
“I’ll find what I need. You go on back to whatever you were doing.”
She had chains around her neck, bracelets crowded on both wrists and every time she moved it was like somebody shaking a jar of nails. Tildy hung there beside her, rising and falling on the balls of her feet and staring like an imbecile. The woman backed away, tugging at the sleeves of her black cowboy shirt.
“I’d take five if I was you, honey. Your eyes look like silver dollars.”
Nobody asked you, but okay. Tildy climbed onto the stool and tried to look busy pushing papers around. Flitting among the shelves the woman studied bottles and spray cans intently, lips moving as she read the labels; and then her eyes would roll to one side and catch Tildy doing it too. They were watching each other, appraising. Tildy wanted to start a conversation, but felt timid and blocked. What the hell was going on? All the shivery tension of a blind date.
“I’m looking for a conditioner.”
“What?”
“It’s just so lifeless.” Raking fingers down her scalp. “I should have it cut off…. But if it’s all right, lemme ask what you use on your hair.”
“Nothing.”
“Well, nothing really works for you. It’s got a kind of innocent look, like, I don’t know, some silent-movie star.”
Not very surreptitiously, the woman ripped open a bag of malted milk balls and ate a few. She browsed at the magazine rack and tried on several pairs of rubber sandals. Squatting on the floor and talking to herself, she experimented with different hues of nail polish, didn’t bother to screw the caps back on the bottles. Tildy didn’t bother to camouflage her amazement, either. She envied this one’s gall.
Finally, in one concerted sweep, the woman filled her arms with products and swaggered over to dump them on the counter: tampons, foot powder, wart remover, orange sticks, baby oil, a toy airplane, and three of the magazines that Holstein, left to himself, would never have stocked in the first place.
“You ever check out these pussy books you got? They make the girls too pretty if you ask me. It’s better with all the hair, dirt under the nails and maybe a pimple here and there.”
“So maybe they should leave the faces blank altogether.” Tildy was ringing up her items very slowly, peeling the price tags off.
“But it’s got to be real, see?”
“Yeah, I used to be a stripper about a hundred years ago. Worked three straight nights at this place with a terrible case of hives. They loved me. On the fourth night they wanted to paint them on.”
“No shit, you really did that? How was it?”
“Lousy. But I liked the hours.”
The woman dug into her greasy jeans, spilled a hash of bills and coins on the counter. “Hope I got enough.”
Tildy took a crumpled five. “Tell you what. Pay me for what’s already on the machine and we’ll call it even.”
Shown in a wide smile, the woman’s teeth were small and gray. “I can have the rest for nothing? You sure?”
“Doesn’t matter to me. I’m not working for commissions.”
“Well, muchas gracias. Y
ou’re damn good down-with-it people, you know that … uh, Tildy,” reading the plastic name tag, then hooking a thumb at herself. “DaVita. Big D, small a, big V. My mom wanted something unusual, the old cow, and I guess she got it. Yeah, down with it. So what time you get off here, Tildy? I’d like to buy you a drink.”
“Around six. But I …”
“Cool, cool. Can you meet me then at the Paddle Wheel? It’s down Route 17, just past Sears. I’ll wait for you in the parking lot and we can go in together.”
“Why not.”
But when Tildy found her perched on the hood of someone’s jeep around by the rear entrance, DaVita had already been inside. There was a table waiting for them.
“I know the bartender,” DaVita said.
She seemed to know everyone at the Paddle Wheel. As they were sitting down, an older woman in an orange caftan rushed over and threw a drunken sloppy kiss on DaVita’s chin.
“This little girl is just so full of life,” she yipped at Tildy. “I just love her right to death. So full of life. Wisht I could be your age again.”
“Really needs a man, that one,” DaVita reported as the woman shouldered her way back to the bar. “Hasn’t been off work more than forty-five minutes and already she’s sloshed out of her old head. So what do you do for fun, Tildy?”
“Could I get a glass of rum with no ice?”
“Sure. Let me catch my breath a minute. Whoo, but this shit can become a way of life, like Donnie says I should just go on and move in here, all the time I spend. Him and the two kids there in a house-trailer, so if I don’t get out regularly—you know—I got to flip out from all that time boxed up. You married?”
“Seven days a week.”
“Mmm-hmmm. It can get that way. Men seem to move a whole lot slower, that’s what I’ve noticed. They’re like lizards or something around the house. Where’s the fun? Like, Donnie just came off the work farm. Some bank guy came to take the car back and Donnie punched him around. So he pulls three months on the farm and what does he want to do his first day out? Drink beer and fuck me while he watches television. That’s the most fun he can think up in three whole months. Moves too slow for me, that’s all.”