Odditorium: A Novel (22 page)

“Ain’t no bears,” Ondray said impatiently.

Up ahead, light hit the stagnant water like a fist.

“There’s snakes though. They good to eat.”

Karl moved back out of the sun. Sweat was dripping down his neck and water had begun to seep through his sneakers. The coffee was pressing at the neck of his bladder but he didn’t want to let it out. He had this crazy thought that if he took his cock out, some creature would jump up and take a bite out of it. Crazy. But every time he’d reach for that zipper, he’d imagine what they’d feel like, those little wet teeth, and it was so real his stomach would drop. Hey. Settle down now.

He was duckwalking by the edge of a puddle flecked with scum when he saw one and froze. A black salamander with yellow spots. It was basking with eyes closed and forefeet just touching the water. Karl balanced, set his weight back on his heels, moved his open hand very slowly until it was directly over the target, and then he swooped. Mud and water in his fist and, yes, a little something cold and wriggling, a dark head emerging from between his fingers. He felt behind him for the jar, fascinated by the struggling movements, the shiny jaws widening. He thought he heard a tiny squeak and then there was a new sensation, something warm. He loosened his grip, looked. In his excitement he had squeezed so hard that the salamander’s belly had ruptured and its purplish viscera were all over his palm.

Karl flung the body away, churned his hand in the water, wiped it on the grass. And then he stopped. Ondray was gone and he was completely alone in the cruel emptiness and heat of the slough. Here it came again, that panic of broad daylight that he knew well enough to recognize at its first shifty approach. The trees closed off his route of escape and the sun descended on him from above.

He wanted to call for Ondray but his throat would open only for the thinnest stream of air. No sound came out. His head felt like a sponge full of wet plaster. If he’d had the strength he might have dug a safe hole in the earth. But all Karl could do was curl up in the mud and pray his lungs and heart would keep working.

“Man, you funny. You come out here to sleep.”

“God almighty but I told you. Don’t you ever walk off and leave me that way. I told you we had to stay together.”

“Yeah, okay. But be cool, jes be cool.” Ondray backed up, alarmed by the wild-eyed mudman who wavered toward him. “I found some good stuff back in them reeds.”

He held up his collecting jar; it was filled with clear jelly speckled black.

“What the hell?”

“Frog eggs.”

“You little bastard.”

“Good stuff. These don’t die on the way, I be farmin’ frogs.”

Karl recovered with an ice pack and some afternoon teevee. His favorite show came on at three,
I Married Joan
(“What a girl, what a whirl, what a life!”) with Joan Davis and Jim Backus as Brad.

Joan Davis was no stunner. She had a big nose, almost no chin and a rubbery face that could have been a man’s. But there was something about her that brought the heat to Karl’s balls. He would picture her sprawled across a bed, skirt up around her waist. Conical tits, legs and arms so thin, so helpless. He imagined himself pushing them here and there like a doll’s, grasping that helmet of glossy blond hair and pulling her face close to his. He lay back on the sofa and masturbated, thinking of Joan Davis, of Tildy, of a little girl who let him pee into her hands in third grade; and at the end, as usual, he thought of Jerry Apache’s wife in the emergency room, her dirty sandals and red toenails, her face distorted with grief, tears and mucus running, her knees buckling as she slid down the white tiled wall and fell in a heap on the floor.

He ejected his semen onto a torn magazine. Just as quickly he began to recede. That moment’s appeasement faded into the slack afternoon; his nerves twitched, frantic for something more, and went numb. A droplet fell from his deflated penis, cold and gray on the edge of his thigh.

He reached behind him for distraction, pulling old issues of
Rockhound
,
Prospector’s World
, and
True Treasure Tales
from the tumbling pile in the corner. He knew parts of them by heart, favorite passages he would reread at times of dejection like verses from the Bible. Ah yes, here was the one about the man who discovered a 28-carat diamond while pitching horseshoes with his nephew. There was inspiration in these yellowed pages. All things were possible. One revelatory moment, a fast dig in the right piece of ground, was all it took to turn your life around. Rebirth. Rebirth as a man of means.

Opening a three-year-old copy of
True Treasure Tales
, Karl looked at the pictures and read the advertisements. Then he found an article in the back which, after hurrying through the first few paragraphs, he could not remember having ever seen before. It was written by someone called J. Frank Robey (Former NYPD Consultant). The title was “Jazzman’s Fortune.”

… The diminutive, hunchbacked Webb overcame his handicaps and went on to become one of the premier jazz drummers of his era. Connoisseurs of Negro music still speak in tones of awe about the great bands he led in the 20’s and 30’s at the Savoy Ballroom in New York’s Harlem. Many famous musicians graduated from Webb’s band and made names for themselves elsewhere. Included among these would be Ella Fitzgerald, the great vocalist who’s still making records today and who, as a shy orphan from Baltimore, debuted with Webb’s band in the early 30’s.

Unlike many jazzmen of the time who squandered their money on cars, clothes, liquor, and fast women, Chick Webb was a shrewd businessman who made sound investments and managed them carefully. So it was that shortly after his death, the Harlem rumor mill was alive with stories of a fortune in cash and jewels secreted somewhere in Webb’s sumptuous townhouse. Mounted police were called in on several occasions to control wild mobs trying to break into the property. Over the next few years amateur treasure hunters, as well as some out-and-out criminals, tore the place apart, but nothing of significance was ever found.

The end of the story? Maybe not. Says one-time nightclub owner Dixie Diggs, “Chick sank a lot of money into real estate. He was ahead of his time. He had buildings all over Harlem. Sugar Hill, Morningside Heights. There could be a floor safe or a secret room in one of those places that nobody’s stumbled on yet.”

But what are the chances that the treasure ever really existed? Is it only a myth? A relic of that tumultuous period in our history when the nation’s heart beat in Swing time and men and women danced all night to forget their worries? Dixie Diggs thinks not.

“Chick was always pretty tight with a dollar. It would have been just like him to stash his dough where no one could find it.”

Naturally, Webb’s real estate holdings have long since passed into other hands and tracing them would be a difficult task. But then, who ever said treasure hunting was easy! Maybe that floor safe or secret room is still waiting to be discovered. With some careful research and a little luck, the jazzman’s fortune may yet be found.

New York. A city that big must be full of hidden treasures, and Tildy, who wouldn’t know where to look, had gone without him. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the New York he knew from the movies—blinding neon, overflowing sidewalks. And thousands upon thousands of buildings. It would take a lifetime to search even half of them. Was it really all in the hunting?

Karl went back to the beginning and tracked the story again. He was so absorbed in this second reading that he barely heard the rapping at the door and the rattle of the knob.

“Yo. Yo in there.”

Karl fastened his pants, peeked through the curtains at a man in a polyester suit who turned to one side as he lit a brown cigarette. He straightened, flicking the dead match away, and Karl saw his tense face, with bits of green toilet paper pasted over shaving cuts. He looked too nervous and shaggy to be much of a threat. Probably had the wrong address anyway. Karl puffed himself up and opened the door.

“Karl Gables,” the man said, reading from a slip of paper.

“You’re lookin’ at him.”

“I’d like to speak with your wife, Karl. Is she around?”

“No sir, she ain’t.”

“That is her car parked over there, license number 5Y 213?”

“But she ain’t in it.”

The man smiled abruptly and one of the paper bits dropped off his chin. “What it is, I’m a friend of Tildy’s. I’m associated with her employer, the Seminole Star Corporation of Jacksonville. I’d like to come in and ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. Get a few things cleared up.”

Karl looked at the heavy gold chain around his neck and the grime on his shirt cuffs. “You got a business card or something?”

“Gee, you know I’m fresh out. But I really am a good friend of your wife’s. I know her well enough to tell you she likes mustard on a baked potato.”

“Yeah, okay. That’s good enough,” Karl said, stepping back.

“Fine. Great. Just a few minutes’ conversation, I mean I’m not going to screw up your day, Karl. And I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a bottle of six-year-old bourbon in my car. Good thing to carry when you spend as much time in motels as I do, know what I mean? We’ll have a couple of nips and I’m sure the time will pass quite pleasantly for both of us, okay?”

“Yeah, why not. I’ll get some glasses.”

The visitor was back a minute later with the bottle. He shopped the chairs in the room, chose one, and filled Karl’s glass. “Actually, I think I’ll hold off a couple minutes till I get my breath back. Been humping all around trying to find this place.”

“We like it out here.” Karl sucked bourbon fumes through his nose, upended the glass. “Real mellow. You carry good whiskey…. Say, I don’t even know your name.”

Settling deeper into his chair the visitor removed a leatherette memo book and a mechanical pencil from his breast pocket. “They call me Buck, and so can you.”

“Thanks, Buck. How about a refill?”

“No problem.” The visitor filled Karl’s glass three quarters full this time, still poured nothing for himself. “Is Tildy going to be here later? Are you expecting her at any special time?”

“Nope.”

“We figured to have heard from her by now. She left us in kind of a hurry, you know. Not a word.”

“So you work for the ball team, is that it?”

“The corporation has many different interests.” The visitor looked at his watch. “You think I might be able to talk to her, umm, say tomorrow?”

“Not likely. Tildy, see, she’s on kind of a vacation. Her old man croaked just a while ago and she’s been wound pretty tight over that.”

“Yeah, Tildy’s a sensitive girl.” Scribbling something on the pad. “So maybe this isn’t the best time to bother her, but we do owe her some back pay and we’d like to settle up as soon as possible, no hard feelings. You tell me where she’s staying and I can get that check to her right away.”

Karl tried to speak in mid-gulp and spilled bourbon down inside his shirt. “Damn surprise check, huh? Now you talkin’. And we can use the money, yes sir. I just knew there was somethin’ fine all ready to pop up like that today. You know how every once in a while you’ll wake up with a feelin’? Like maybe you had a dream was meant to show you …”

“Where do I find her.” The pencil hovered.

“Tell you what. Seein’ as how you all’d like to get your paperwork squared away, whyn’t you let me have the check right now and be done with it? I could hold it for her till she gets back.”

The visitor flinched, doodled interlocking circles on his pad. “Well, it’s not … It’s not that simple. Before I can, umm, actually … Before I can write anything up I have to discuss a few minor details with her. Per diem expenses, that kind of thing.” The circles expanding now, moving unevenly across the page. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t trust you in terms of holding the money. But … I think I will have one with you.” He grabbed at the bottle.

“Come on ahead, amigo. I’ll go get the radio from the other room and we can listen to some tunes.”

“No, that’s okay.” Shivering at his first sip.

“No trouble. I’ll just plug her in over there.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. Really.”

“Sure. I was only thinkin’ we might have a little party. Got a ways to go on that bottle yet.”

The visitor looked disconsolately at what remained in his glass. “If you don’t mind an observation on my part, Karl, you seem a little nervous.”

“No shit. Mite keyed up, huh? Probably just lonesome is all, cooped up in here.”

“Have you heard from Tildy at all? A postcard?”

“Nah. We don’t get much in the way of mail around here.”

“I hope you won’t get hot, but I have to ask this: Has your wife left you? Did she take a walk on you, Karl?”

“You’re pissin’ on the wrong hydrant there, Buck.” Karl lurched out of his chair, gestured sloshingly with his glass. “You got business with Tildy, you wanna ask me some questions, I don’t mind. But don’t you go pullin’ my chain. I got as much dignity as the next sucker. Goddamn right. Now both of us on the road, me and Tildy been separated a lot, but we got a solid understandin’ and we got plans. Hell, she called me from New York last night just to hear my voice.”

The visitor leaned back and arranged his hair, catching his reflected profile in the windowpane. “She give you the address of the hotel?”

A vague sense that he had left the door to the lion cage open flapped at the outskirts of Karl’s mind. “Never said she was at no hotel.”

“Didn’t you?” The visitor topped up Karl’s glass.

Lounging amid shadows and smoke at the Kenilworth, Tildy and Christo argued over where to go for dinner.

“Anyway, I don’t like Greek food,” Tildy said. “It’s too greasy.”

“I heard you the first time.”

She stretched herself across the bed until her palms were resting on the warped brown floorboards. She wore a green baseball cap, flowered panties and a plastic lei rescued from a garbage can.

“I love these little pork chops,” Christo said, petting her shoulder blades.

A photographic rendering of this scene, the kind of grainy enlargement brought into a courtroom and mounted on an easel, might be advanced as the image of two young citizens in a state of postcoital entrancement. That would be an unscrupulous frame-up. In truth, bodily contact had been negligible. Tildy was bewildered, having expected more, some show of possessiveness after she’d spent a second night at the Chemikazi loft.