Odditorium: A Novel (41 page)

“Found a piece of hose. Hook it to the sink, it might reach.”

“Let’s do it. Our only shot.”

Karl jammed one end of the hose up inside the running faucet and made a seal of encircling fingers. Christo took the other end as far as it would go, had to press his thumb over the threaded socket and arc the spray to make it reach. But it did reach. Already the smoke was thinning. Tildy screamed his name.

“Over here. I’m over here.”

She zigzagged in trying to follow his voice, finally tumbled at his feet, her black face twisted with retching. No time to soothe. Christo got her upright, gave her the hose, told her to keep it moving from side to side. Then he filled soup pots from the toilet and ran them to trouble zones; back and forth, his hands throbbing, back and forth, tripping and spilling, throat constricted, until he collapsed. Tildy aimed the hose at him and he wanted to swim up the stream, curl inside the tubing and sleep for days.

They’d done it. The fire was dead and gone, leaving only soot and blisters and nausea. But it had sucked their reservoirs dry, exhausted their resistance. Hearts ping-ponging, they lay on the wet floor awaiting the inevitable. This engorged playlet, delirious with its own simplicities of greed and power, would have its third act climax all over them.

On the other side of the charred wall, Pete Sparn swallowed a little brown hypertension pill and wondered aloud.

“It never crossed your mind to cut their power line so the water pump wouldn’t function? It never crossed your mind to simply crash in through the back and get what we came for? I’m discouraged, Vincent. I consider all the time and care, everything I’ve invested, to produce the blundering simp standing before me and I’m deeply discouraged.”

Snapping the spring clip into his weapon, Vinnie said, “I’m going to take care of it, Dad. I’m going to take care of it right now.”

“Not that way. We’ve had enough fireworks for one night.”

“Please. Let me show you what I can do.”

“Unfortunately, you already have. And on the dubious assumption that you could carry the operation off, three dead bodies add up to a complication I don’t need.”

“Think about it, Dad. Who’s going to give a rusty fuck for these zeros?”

“A corpse is a corpse and each one has to be accounted for,” Sparn said wearily. “As usual you fail to use basic management principles in attacking the problem. No, I’m going to have to solve this one myself.”

“I’m not letting you go in there solo.”

“Just wait in the car, Son. Dolly needs the company.”

Sparn would have knocked on the door, but it was giving off faint wisps of smoke and he was afraid he might burn himself.

“Aloha, young people. Your tenacity does you credit. All the same, this has turned into too long a night for my taste. Let’s put a final period on it.”

“Go on,” Tildy rasped, knowing in her innards that they couldn’t beat him. “Let the bastard in.”

Christo limped to the door. “Come ahead, bossman. I’ve been wanting to get a whiff of you up close.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a friend of the family.”

“And where do you stand in all this?”

“Probably in your way. Come on, the kitchen’s still basically intact.”

Sparn picked his way through rubble, resigning himself to the defacement of his white loafers, and breathed with the PS handkerchief over his mouth. The sight of Karl and Tildy propped against one another startled him. Their unearthly zombie eyes. A nervous edge came on him.

“Glad you could make it, Pete,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse the mess.”

“Yeah, too bad about that.” With his back flush against the drainboard, he edged along to where he could keep an eye on all three of them. “But we can still resolve this without serious injury. How does that sound?”

“Preferable,” Tildy said.

“You see how it is. We’re all very tired and we can’t stand the sight of each other. Be smart. Give me the fucking goods and we’ll say goodbye forever.”

“Just curious,” Christo said. “You ever done time?”

“I’m a businessman. We don’t do time. We smash it like the atom.”

“Everything comes easy for you,” Christo said. “It’s not healthy.”

Karl was trying hard not to listen. He filled his mind with pinups of fish: Grouper, scup, bonito, yellowtail; all arrested in midthrash, fins stretched and gills open. He felt his wife’s flesh against him like the resistance of water and wished only to go deeper.

Sparn shifted from foot to foot, confident of his machinery, but wary. These people were crazy, unconditioned by basic management principles.

“Through that door, hmmm? Must be. I don’t suppose I can lift it all by myself.”

“Not quite.”

Christo reached to take hold of him, but Sparn pulled away with considerable agility for such a round man. He clutched at the air like someone searching for a light switch in a dark room.”

“Have a go, homeboy. I wouldn’t mind.”

Tildy let her eyes go gradually closed, popped them open again. “You men just won’t stop chewing. You leave your teeth marks everywhere. I’ve had enough. My house is still standing, my husband is still lucid, my heart is still available and that’s enough.” She tugged on Christo with her eyes. “I know what I’m doing. Give him a hand.”

Christo winced and blew air. “If you’re sure.”

He and Sparn went at the job without a word or look. They took narrow, sideways steps and had cleared the doorway when Sparn, with a slight alteration of balance, indicated they should set the cargo down. His mouth fell open and he made anticipatory tweeting noises as he fumbled with the lid.

“That crazy Lester.”

Hands on knees, he leaned down for a closer look.

Into Tildy’s blank mind, like napalm into a deserted village, there came an inspiration. It took hold of her and she took hold of it. She whipped off her belt and with the lightning first step that had stolen a thousand bases, reached Sparn before he had even registered the flash of movement. She twisted the belt around his neck and jerked back. He toppled, clawing at her, but Tildy maintained purchase, climbing onto his wide chest and twisting the belt again. Sparn began to go red; his eyes rolled. Stretching, Tildy crossed her shin over his throat and dropped all her weight. His larynx broke with a gelatinous crack. His legs twitched and the front of his pants slowly darkened.

“Stop. He’s done.” Christo had to lift her away.

“He would have killed us all,” she said. “Eventually.”

Karl stepped over the body as if it were a ditch and plunged both hands into his precious stones. “You had to be strong. I just knew it.”

She tipped against him, pressed her cheek under his shoulder blade and just breathed.

Watching, Christo thought: She was protecting him, that’s what it was really all about.

“Savor the win,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Fireman’s carry, that was the answer. Christo’s legs shook as he stood under the weight. He steadied himself, took a few experimental steps. Dead feet bounced behind his thigh.

“What are you doing?” Tildy said.

“Going to dump him. I want them to see.”

“Vinnie. He’ll shoot.”

“I don’t think so. Anyway, he can’t hit the side of a barn.”

Watching, Tildy thought: He’s trying to impress me. How can I love a man who’s as transparent as all the rest?

Swaying into the white flare of headlights, Christo dropped his burden and stepped back. Not bullets, but Dolly who came exploding out of the car, dove across her unreachable love, kissed his swollen mouth.

“I’m with you. I’m with you.” She wept.

Vinnie advanced in shock motion, pausing between each step. Then, before he came too close, he stood as quiet and still as a snowman. Christo took the gun from his hand and threw it into the woods.

“I’ll see you buried,” Dolly hissed. Her face was all bone. “You killed the man, but not his power. That’s mine now.”

There was a quivering balloon of saliva on Vinnie’s lip. He did not respond when Dolly asked him to help carry his father to the car. She had to do that on her own, dragging him by the heels in fits and starts, boosting and butting him onto the rear seat. Beehive lopsided and wobbling, she came back to take Vinnie by the elbow.

And just before she got behind the wheel, Dolly pointed with a trembling finger. “Whatever it takes, I’ll see you buried. All of you. As Jesus Christ is my witness.”

The limo fishtailed away, knocking over the card table and the remnants of dinner.

Christo stayed for a few minutes, listening to the night and feeling himself charge up for another, unexpected run.

He found Tildy and Karl puttering randomly in their fried living room. “Whatever you’re thinking, we’ve got to get out of here now.”

“Right, the Keys,” Karl said eagerly. “I’ll show you how to land the big ones.”

“Not far enough,” Christo said. “Let’s see if I have a better idea.”

He made a long-distance call.

“Jazzbo. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you this soon.”

“I’m all jammed up. Need to get out of the country. That shipment you were talking about, it’s still on?”

They put on clean, dry clothes, took nothing but Karl’s trunk and a thermos of screwdrivers out to the Galaxie. Christo tapped the face of the gas gauge, adjusted the mirrors.

“With any luck, we’ll be meeting a boat in Cape May, New Jersey.”

Further on, at a lonely crossroads under a canopy of pines, they passed a disabled vehicle with its hood yawning. Seated on a flat rock just beyond were Flora Pepper, the Submarine Queen pitching machine, and her Polish lover.

But there was no moon at all and nobody recognized anybody.

Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore

The snake has shed its skin upon the floor

—
Wallace Stevens
, Farewell to Florida

A
SLENDER BIRD DROPS
from a balsa tree and its belly is the same pale cloudy green as the river over which it swoops. A languorous river. A wide undulating stripe of water walled in by forest. This is dense and boundless forest, a thick vegetable custard poured over the land. Smooth trunks rise twenty and thirty feet, then spread decisively, foliage entwining to make a second sky. Light comes through slits in the canopy, slides down vines that spiral around each other like living cable, into the feathery arms of ferns on whose broad blades tiny mosses live—parasite on parasite on parasite—and finally strikes the spongy floor, heating the soup that nourishes vast root systems below. Sad, damp smells hover here like flies. There is a weak but steady hum as of concealed machinery, some remote device that irradiates this endless spectrum of greens.

With an escort of matted sticks, a lone rubber sandal floats on the sleepy current past overhanging bushes studded with fruit, past crocodiles basking stupidly on a brown beach. By a filmy pool just beyond, where the river has chewed on the soft bank, a vulture tears meat from a bloated coypu, backs away, and before eating shakes the water from its feet.

Narrowing some now, the river runs clear over white sand and white butterflies dart erratically over the surface. Here the trees have thinned out, are smaller; slim palms that rustle with each swell of the breeze, cast shadows slanted away from the river, falling in long parallel lines that by accident here and there merge with other palms. With more open space, undergrowth is thicker. Waxy leaves shaped like cups tremble and spill their cargo of reflected sunlight. Tendrils, let loose, coil and slip into the water like snakes. The geography of light and shadow is more complex here. Colors mount and recede; background shapes bend and break.

Just ahead on the left, below a crude clearing where felled trees lie across one another like jackstraws, there is a beached canoe and next to it on a piece of canvas, a small outboard motor half disassembled. A few banana trees have been planted in giddy, spasmodic rows. Through the glutinous air, which up till now has held the suggestion of a snoozing cow’s breath, come the sharp smells of smoke and charred herbs. A tight bend up ahead; the river picks up speed over sloping rocks peppered with mica. Accompanying the monotonous burble of the water is the sound of someone alternately sucking and blowing on a harmonica.

The shore is sandy and flat, wide open to a torrid but indifferent sun. There are perhaps sixteen huts clustered here, each one different from the others in size or shape or in the mix of building materials. A path, almost the suggestion of a road, leads into the pushed-back woods. On either side of it are scattered garden plots haphazardly fenced. Many broken stalks here, leaves brown and stiff. The soil is particular about the things it will grow. A small dog noses around lumps of trash at the water’s edge, some of it delivered by the river, some of it drifted down from the settlement. The rubber sandal arrives now, bouncing off an outcropping stone, spinning in a gentle eddy until it comes to rest against a formation of rags and curved tin. The dog paws the sandal up onto shore and begins to chew, her jaws squeezing out the water it’s soaked up. She sucks this rubbery tasting juice to the back of her tongue with great pleasure.

By the hut that is farthest from the others a cookfire burns, a blackened pot balanced over the coals. The woman peers into it, a broken piece of comb clenched between her teeth, then stands up again and plucks at the ragged fringe of hair over the man’s ear. With finality, she twice clacks together the blades of the scissors she borrowed from Lita, whose son breathes the pain of his ulcerous legs into his harmonica, and pats the man’s brown back.

“It’s not exactly Charles of The Ritz,” Tildy says, “but it’s the best I can do.”

Christo touches his bare neck. “I should have a real good sunburn back there by tonight.”

“Well, at least you don’t look like a hippie.”

“That’s great. Tomorrow I can go and apply for a job at the bank.”

Tildy just smiles and backs away. She hardly notices his jabs anymore. Intimidation is pointless here. She squats by the fire and looks into the pot. In boiling gray water the chunks of armadillo rotate slowly. Karl was so proud when he brought it in that morning, the first thing ever caught in his traps.