Odditorium: A Novel (4 page)

The laughter he heard as he turned away had to do with something Tildy said about Roxie’s inability to go to her left, but Vinnie didn’t know that. He went down and across the hall to the room he and Pete were in. Sparn had finished his nap and was sitting up in his piped pyjamas playing cards with Ben Salem, the old gink who looked after the equipment, drove the bus, sold the tickets and umpired the games.

“Your old man is sharp as ever,” Benny said. “I’m about to lose the ranch here.”

“Don’t forget, I came into this game owing you ten acres of prime industrial parkland in North Miami.”

Vinnie opened a beer, propped himself against the edge of the dresser. “You’re playing for imaginary real estate, is that it?”

“Astute, boy, very astute. Real estate’s better than cash any day.” Sparn pushed the cards over for Benny to shuffle. “That reminds me, you ever get that book I sent you?”

“The one on condominium investments? Very interesting, Dad, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, we’ve been so busy. A lot of dates running.”

“We’re busy all right. Too damn busy. I don’t like it.”

“Now you want fewer dates?” Vinnie shrugged. “Make up your mind.”

“Don’t pout. I don’t like that either.” Pete turned palms up and Benny nodded, dropped the deck in his shirt pocket and got up.

“Maybe after dinner we’ll try some Hollywood rummy.”

“Wait, you don’t have to go, Benny. You’re as much a part of this organization as he is…. Now what I’m saying to you is that they’re stale. I see some lackadaisical play out there, you know what I mean? Lackadaisical play shows at the box office and that’s where we’re at right now. There are some things we need to get straight.

“People have to wake up to themselves. Maybe it’s just a matter of losing sight of our goals, I don’t know, but I want to get it straight and it may as well be right now—you round everybody up, Vinnie, and get them in here on the double. I want to have a skull session with these broads.”

“Dad, I don’t know if this is really the best time for a skull session. The girls need a little time to unwind.”

“Fuck that noise.” Sparn was out of bed and pacing now. The great General in his tent. And when the General gave an order … “If you have to, tell ’em dinner’s on me. Just get ’em in here.”

Vinnie stared down through the tear-shaped slot in the top of his beer can and saw the foaming darkness of a slow-moving underground river.

“Let’s wrap it up and bring it along, ladies.” Vinnie rolled into the explicit silence of Tildy’s room jangling the big key ring, as much a symbol of his authority as a Bantu chieftain’s fly whisk. “Pete’s called a team meeting. He wants to see you, like, yesterday.”

Heidi, who was flossing her teeth in the mirror, turned and primly expelled a particle of food into the wastebasket. “I don’t see why he can’t come on in here. Door’s right open for him.”

“That’s right,” Tildy said. “We were planning to just sit around here and smoke and read comic books till mealtime.”

“He’s only right across the street,” Vinnie said, but nobody smiled. They didn’t seem any happier when he told them Pete was offering to spring for dinner. Then That’s-Mary came out from the bathroom trailing vapor and took over for him.

“Go ahead, guys. I promise when it’s over, I’ll find someplace around here that serves lobster.”

That got them moving, but still not everyone was happy. As Wanda Watts filed past, she looked Vinnie up and down and jammed her afro pick half an inch into the wall. Maybe she didn’t like lobster.

Still pacing, Sparn chewed on a cellophane-wrapped cigar while his players found seats on the beds and on the floor between them. Then he folded his arms and made a very small bow in greeting.

“Before we get into anything else, I really would like to say how proud I am of the way you’re all getting along together. I respect that unity. It’s obvious to me that you girls have made some close and lasting friendships on this team.” Sparn’s pyjamas were dark under the arms. “I’m not going to say we’re like a family or any of that crap, but being effective on the field means rooting for each other and I think we all understand that.” Sparn looked around the room to see who had giggled, and became alarmed. “Wait a minute … I’ve got my outfield, I’ve got my infield. Where’s Flora? And M.J.?”

Vinnie counted cigarette burns on the dresser top; Ben Salem, cutting cards with himself over behind the teevee, started coughing as fast as he could. Evidently, Sparn was unaware or had forgotten the nature of the post-game activities Flora and her battery mate engaged in after a win.

It was Tildy finally who spoke up. “They’re in bed, Pete.”

“In bed? The hell they are. I’ll go find them myself.” And, nudging aside Vinnie, who tried to intercept him at the door, said, “There are no stars on this team.”

Sparn hurried to the opposite end of the hall where, as always, Flora had her separate accommodations, and tried the door. It was locked. But through it, as the sound of his knock subsided, he heard a bee-like buzzing, steady like a motor. A sort of electric vibrating sound.

When he got back, he told them all to sit tight and Vinnie would call out for some cheeseburgers.

Flora Pepper had always been athletic. Though small as a child, she could outrun her older brothers and beat them up if she felt like it. As a high school junior, she lettered in basketball, volleyball and track; and at an awards dinner honoring young champions from all over northeastern Ohio, broke the nose of the girl who beat her out in the voting for Sprinter of the Year.

There didn’t seem to be much else to do, so she became a Phys. Ed. assistant at her alma mater, Girls Normal High. She might still have been there leading calisthenics and breaking up fights in the lunchroom, had it not been for a chance Friday night pickup over the pool table of an Akron dyke bar known as Myrtle’s 5 & 10.

The woman’s name was Molly Joan Ulasewicz. She drank bourbon and ginger, and called everyone “bunny.” She wore a piece of chromed sprocket chain around her wrist. Flora fell deeply and irreparably in love with her after one night.

After three nights, she left Girls Normal and moved into Molly Joan’s ramshackle row house on the edge of Little Africa. While her lover wound armatures at an electronics factory during the day, Flora embarked on a rehabilitation program: rehanging doors, puttying windows, sanding the floors and laying down coat after coat of polyurethane. She blew her savings on a waterbed and a set of ritzy china. Pleasing Molly Joan became her exclusive focus, and for the first time in her life she felt calm and balanced.

But on the other side, things were not so rosy. Molly Joan quickly tired of this cozy householdry, the long evenings of beer and adoration. Flora was giving her claustrophobia. Restless and depressed, she fell into savage weekend benders, staring down bikers, and boot-camp studs in the toughest dives in town, vandalizing automobiles, sleeping it off at the bus station.

Early one Sunday morning Molly Joan tumbled in with a caftaned, child-eyed girl whose knapsack had been stolen. She had pale hands and long red hair, and reeked of patchouli oil. Dizzy and emitting foul burps, Molly Joan disappeared upstairs, leaving Flora alone with her catch. The girl said her name was Nebula, that she was on her way to a ginseng farm in Idaho, and that she hadn’t eaten anything in two days. Flora gave her some fruit and cottage cheese. Then Molly Joan came down, put some Dixieland on the turntable and summoned them into the living room where, naked, scrubbed and powdered, she offered herself to both, a hungry castaway on an atoll of red satin pillows.

That evening, Flora slashed open her forearms with a broken lightbulb.

It was at this point, with a comely kind of logic, that athletics salvaged the relationship. Molly Joan had just been elected captain of her company softball team and, as a peace offering, took Flora (just returned from the emergency room) to the next practice session instead of leaving her home to sulk and imagine the worst. Flora’s natural gifts became obvious within minutes. Her conformation was ideal, with disproportionately long arms and legs for maximum leverage, and good depth through the shoulders. Her long, tapered fingers had no trouble gripping a ball twelve inches around. It was a pointless batting practice because no one could get much wood on the ball, but nobody seemed to mind. The team’s coach was ecstatic; this girl could really “bring it.” He kissed Flora’s pitching hand, ran to the nearest telephone and arranged a soft job with flexible hours for her so she’d be eligible to play in league games.

Flora won her first start on a six-hit shutout and went on to sharpen and refine her raw skills in daily practices with Molly Joan at a local playground. These external relationships of pitcher/catcher and protégé/mentor stabilized their life together; Flora no longer woke up crying in the middle of the night and, as she grew in confidence, recaptured and then surpassed the bliss of those first weeks. But it was Molly Joan who reaped the sweetest harvest. It was like a rebirth for her. Molly Joan who had been diving into brick walls for as long as she could remember, who had driven a cab, operated cranes, waited tables, cut asparagus, pumped gas, hawked rug shampooers door to door and cooked at the Skyway Grill of the Cincinnati airport, had at last found something she loved to do in teaching and guiding her Flora, this beautiful animal with whom she could happily spend the rest of her life.

Flora’s amazing pitching performances of that summer, including a string of thirty-five scoreless innings, nearly propelled the Dynaco Sparklers to a national championship. They fell short in extra innings of the second elimination round, but Flora got her picture in a national magazine.

That was how Pete Sparn got wind of her. Just the kind of promotion he’d been looking for. Dolly Varden spent a whole day tracking her down and when Sparn got on the phone he was all honey. He offered to fly Flora to Jacksonville to discuss the possibilities of lucrative barnstorming tours with a team he’d build around her.

“Definitely sounds interesting,” Flora said, “but I don’t go anywhere without my catcher.”

“Fine. Bring her along.”

But Sparn wasn’t too thrilled when they walked into his office. He visualized a company of sporting stunners, as lovely as they were lithe and swift, and had no desire to mar that overall chorus-line appearance with a chunky member who had a face like a cheese grater and was pushing forty hard. But Flora said there would be no agreement unless Molly Joan was a part of it. The longer they talked, the more obvious it became that this was nonnegotiable. He took the package or he took nothing. In the vocabulary of dealing, this was known as getting boxed.

Unable to curb himself, Sparn was already in the thick of a speech when his star and her lover waddled through the door in matching terry-cloth robes, redolent of sex.

“Go ahead, Mr. Sparn,” Flora said hoarsely. “We don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Yeah. We woulda been here sooner if we’d known there was gonna be chow. Was there any slaw came with this?”

Sparn had prepared two or three sarcastic fusillades, but he swallowed them all. Much as he wanted to publicly chastise those two, his instincts told him now was not the time. There was bad blood flowing, he could tell, and the last thing he wanted to do was spill some of it.

“Okay, we’ve been talking about spark, or the lack of it. We’ve been talking about showing emotion and pumping that old adrenaline. You know a man once said that winning wasn’t the most important thing, it was the only thing. But I wonder if that really covers it. Frankly, girls, we’ve got a winning team that’s going broke, you hear what I’m saying? It doesn’t matter a damn how many games you win if you don’t pull the crowds. Is that so hard to understand? Remember that you’re entertainers out there, performers. Those routine plays have got to be more than routine and every game has to be fresh. Now everybody knows that Pete Sparn is not a finger-pointer. I’m not going to single anyone out. But I’ll tell you this, when somebody gets a little lazy, a little complacent, well, these things can spread like a virus and infect the whole unit. It’s all a question of attitude. Digging down for that extra burst of effort when you’ve told yourself there’s nothing left. Because we all live and die together. I think of this team as a spiderweb, you know? Like many independent strands linked together in a strong, resilient, ummm … a strong, ummm, network that is, well …”

As Sparn floundered in the muck of this ill-chosen analogy, Tildy slithered between Wanda and That’s-Mary to the front of the bed. She had heard enough.

“Pete, you don’t know one single thing about what we do and that’s for damn sure. We’re right there with it day after day after day, and you buzz on out here from Jacksonville to tell us we don’t put out? That shit won’t float. We play tired and hurt and hungover, anywhere we can get a game. We play at youth camps, in cow pastures, on airplane runways. We play doubleheaders on sandlot fields full of stones and broken glass, and no lights when it starts to get dark so you can’t see the ball till it’s right up on you and meanwhile the catcher is trying to put his hand in your shorts. Then onto the bus and drive all night to the next date, try to put a few hours sleep together before we play again. A bunch of small-town hotshots who’ll never hear the end of it if they get beat by women, and they’re looking to tear our heads off. But, Pete, we play the game and we eat the dirt and that’s all there is to it. So you take a look right here and tell me whether or not we put out.”

Tildy lowered her jeans to reveal a large, ugly raspberry on the outside of her left thigh, souvenir of the slide into home.

“You can check this too while you’re at it.” That’s-Mary thrust forward her leg and pointed to a swollen, purplish ankle.

Heidi displayed her dislocated thumb. Roxie Vasquez showed her bruised calf. And Wanda Watts, just recovering from a pulled hamstring, showed Sparn her middle finger.

Mutinous! Abominable! Sparn would have liked nothing better than to blister each and every one of them with a razor strop, lay on some bruises of his own, instill a little respect the way he used to do with Vinnie, but it was way too late for that. The bad blood he’d wanted to contain was now ankle deep. He would have to back off and make another rush; from a different direction this time.