Odditorium: A Novel (7 page)

Rechette answered the bell in a velour pullover, designer denims and no shoes. “You never called.”

“I couldn’t think of anything to say. Going to invite me in?”

Rechette grabbed the sea bag and stepped back. “I was starting to think you might not show.”

“I’m not a welsher. At least I try not to be.”

Christo followed along to the living room. The carpeting felt like marshmallow. The decorating theme was early-to-mid 70s men’s magazine: German stereo components, half-ton glass coffee table, African bronzes and carved wooden masks. He settled into a leather-upholstered sofa and took peanuts out of one dish and a cigarette out of another.

“Real nice layout, as they say in the crime films.”

“You look tired. Where have you been?”

“Nowhere. Out and around.”

A tingle moved up Rechette’s leg, spread an insistent puddle of heat around his hips. He ran his eyes over Christo’s hooded face, the round, full arms capable of delivering blows with nonchalance, solidly wedged knuckles twisting against bone.

“Something to drink?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

Rechette poured brandy from an apothecary jar and brought the glass over on tiptoe, bending as he relinquished it to peer down Christo’s shirt.

“You’re sleek as an otter.”

Christo didn’t like the way Rechette was behaving in his home ballpark, all smug in his sportsclothes. His thinning brown hair was wet-combed over his forehead in shaggy Brutus bangs and he gave off a mossy vapor of expensive cologne.

Then, for a moment, he was back in character. “If you’re going to put that down on the sofa, please use a coaster.”

“Good liquor,” Christo said. “The first good liquor I’ve had in six months.”

Rechette sniffed his own glass. “Didn’t Waldo sell to you?”

“Garbage. Grapefruit wine, stuff like that.”

“There never was anybody on the ward quite like you.” Rechette massaged the flesh over his heart. “You were a bloody master.”

“And you’re a swell host, Marty.”

“Come. Get yourself a refill and follow me.”

Sliding down a narrow hallway in near darkness, Rechette led him to an airless corner room in the back of the house, with a paint-spattered floor and exposed wiring. Burlap was nailed over the windows. A mattress and corduroy pillows were against one particle-board wall. From a hatrack overhead dangled coils of nylon rope, dog leashes of various lengths, a hot water bottle. Resting on two packing crates in the middle of the floor was a movie projector aimed at a white sheet.

“This must be the maid’s room,” Christo said.

The soles of Rechette’s feet made a swampy noise peeling up from the floor as he moved to the projector and threaded an 8mm reel. Christo finished his brandy with one stiff-armed toss. It was showtime.

Images fluttered aquatically over the uneven surface of the sheet. A garage. A crew-cut boy with cream-of-wheat skin chained to a grease rack. He was being flogged by a one-eared black man in a studded leather vest and matching jockstrap. Crew-cut bent over. A socket wrench handle dipped in motor oil was inserted into his rectum. Christo listened to the whirr of the tiny fan cooling the projector lamp, to the steady click-click-click of taut celluloid passing over sprockets; and Rechette fell to his knees and, clumsily, urgently, tendons distended at his neck, performed on him an act of oral tribute.

Rechette staggered out to the bathroom to mop up the curds he had squirted inside his pants. For a moment he was inundated with an urge to flee, to break away from the sadly trite cycle of his cravings. He flushed his burning eyes with cold water. When he came back, he looked ten years older than when he’d left.

“King hell, Marty. You look like you need a doctor.” Christo had not moved, sat oozing out of his open fly, knees drawn up, head tilted back against the wall.

“Tell me what you see,” Rechette croaked, tugging at his belt loops.

“I had a cousin back home who was a cheerleader,” Christo ad-libbed. “She was just like a painting in her pleated skirt and the little sneakers with the pompom socks. Sweet kid, a bit erratic maybe, but then she only really came to life during football season. Used to practice her cheers in the middle of the night: ‘Muscle is muscle and bone is bone, come on, Southern, push it into the zone.’ Senior year was very tough on her. Kind of the last waltz, you know? On the bus coming back from the last away game, a six to three win over Collard Polytechnic in a driving rain, she blew the entire first string, offense and defense, and a few of the subs as well. They had to take her to the hospital and pump her stomach.”

Rechette had come toward him on hands and knees and was now rubbing his cheek against the instep of Christo’s left shoe. Christo sighed, a long, tired sigh with a whistle at the end, and clanked the rim of the empty glass on his teeth.

“Night of the long jives,” he said to no one in particular.

For as long as he could, Christo camped out at the Rechette home, sitting tight and fattening himself up. He had his own room with a door that locked from the inside and nothing to do but sleep, eat and work on his juggling. He needed time to depressurize before going back on the game. Casually he drifted through the role of houseboy, with its code of laconic passivity, but it was Rechette who did all the chores, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, emptying the ashtrays. The doctor’s desire to serve was unceasing. So were his advances, but he seemed to bask in placid rejections, to relish the indifference showered upon him.

Christo was, however, willing to fulfill his need for mental stimulation and so invented a compliant and correlative past, spinning out anecdotes of a career as a male hustler in Dallas and New Orleans. Gulping vodka and water, Rechette would intersperse hints and clues in a husky drawl—his approximation of black-mirrored boudoir enticement, of the silver screen lovelies from thirty years ago—guiding these vignettes toward his own lust points. The poetry of pain and malevolence. When the heat had risen irreparably and Rechette was knee-deep in the lava of his mind, he would scuttle across the room and nuzzle Christo’s groin like a bloodhound. Christo might permit a few minutes agitation of his flaccid penis before shoving him away.

“You just don’t do anything for me,” he would say, then open a magazine or fix himself a load of pasta with grated cheese.

Ever ready to expand his powers of falsification, Christo withdrew to his room at night to pore over psychiatric bulletins, drug company monographs and the proceedings of various clinical symposia. Additionally, he canvassed the several periodicals to which Rechette subscribed concerning gourmet wine and food. It was debatable to what future use a knowledge of Breton cheeses or the proper technique for poaching quenelles might be put, but Christo did not like to impose limits on his creativity.

Often, Rechette would interrupt these study sessions by scratching at the locked door and begging for attention.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Go ahead. I can hear you.”

They would go back and forth for a few minutes until Christo, usually clad only in hospital pyjama tops, opened up, blocking the doorway with his body, and threatened Rechette with various types of bodily harm.

“How are you going to explain all those cuts and bruises to Monica Fortgang? She’ll want to know.”

Cowering in his food-stained kimono, Rechette delightedly received a kick in the shin or a light knock to the ribs, and then a kiss on the forehead before Christo shooed him off to bed.

The performance of these various daily rituals required concentration and an appetite for the dismal. It was beginning to wear Christo down, and on the evening that Rechette, nude and wearing a choke chain, insisted on having his dinner from a doggie bowl on the floor, he determined that things had reached the toxic level and it was time to cut out.

The following morning Christo served his host a cup of breakfast cocoa in which two hundred milligrams of Seconal had been dissolved. Within twenty minutes Rechette was snoring rhythmically on the sofa, arms wrapped around his briefcase. Christo moved easily, taking his time and thinking things through. He filled a suitcase with clothes from Rechette’s custom tailor, a former newspaper editor from South Korea. The shirts and jackets were a little tight across the shoulders, a bit short in the sleeves, but the fabrics were elegant and no telling when he might need a quick front. The kind you could slip into in a gas station toilet. From the upstairs study he took samples of a new mood elevator from Smith-Kline, some stationery and prescription pads. There was a small amount of cash in the bedroom and a collection of jewelry as worthless as it was tasteless. He stripped Rechette’s wallet of credit cards and driver’s license. Downstairs the doctor slept deeply, a thin band of saliva trailing out one corner of his mouth. Christo wrapped the television set in a blanket and carried it out to the car. Finally, as a trophy, he grabbed the fiercest of the African masks, pointed, deep-set eye slits and a gaping mouth bristling with nail-head teeth.

The keys to Rechette’s Fiat were where they always were, dangling from a cup hook by the back door. Christo used one of the magnetized
Peanuts
figures to affix a note to the refrigerator door:

leaving tonite for sao paolo

don’t wait up

love C

It took Christo more than one hour to find the place he was looking for, a place he’d heard about from a grizzled old junkie on the ward. The bastard could barely focus his eyes, but he’d been a hard knocker on the street and he knew the city right down to the ground. The place was on a street almost totally abandoned; the only other building that didn’t have sheet metal over the windows was a chop suey joint about six doors down. Christo circled twice, parked around the corner and walked back. The green awning was full of holes. Behind steel grates padlocked over the display windows, on step shelving covered in pus-yellow crepe paper, was a jumble of merchandise: plastic animals, dart games, flashlights, party hats, a pile of beer trays stamped with the logo of the Cleveland Cavaliers. A buzzer went off and Christo pushed open the door. It was dark inside, with more of the same. Cases of men’s cologne, torn boxes crammed with stockings and pantyhose shoved against the glass counters; crap stacked, stuffed and spilled everywhere so that it was virtually impossible to move. Hovering in the back room near some pipe racks of ladies’ sportswear was a tired-eyed fatso with a head full of pomade and a cheek full of tobacco. This would be Keds, the man to see.

Christo nodded, picked up a traveling alarm clock. “How much you getting for these?”

Keds spat in a coffee can between his feet. “You want it?”

Christo shrugged and leaned across the counter. “Nah, I got nothing to get up for.”

“If you want something, you want something, but there’s no browsing in here.”

“So you’re Keds, huh?”

“So what?”

“So I heard about you. I talked to a guy.”

Keds shifted his wad to the other cheek. “There’s lots of places you can talk to a guy. This ain’t one of ’em.”

“The guy had nice things to say about you, Keds. He really built you up.”

“A guy says nice things about me. So I could pour that on cornflakes or something?”

Christo kicked impatiently at a mound of plastic canteens that was slowly collapsing around his ankles. “Look, let’s cut through the bullshit. This guy I talked to says you’re an honest fence, the squarest in town. You want to do some business or not?”

Keds took a half-step forward and shot a glistening brown gobbet onto the counter less than an inch from Christo’s elbow. “Take a walk, kid.” And he disappeared into the shadows of the back room.

“Okay, okay,” Christo said. “Billy Gaines, the smack head. He was the one who recommended you.” Silence. “Billy Gaines—come on, little guy with the hornrims, used to hang out with you at a tavern called Peck Miller’s.” Still nothing. “Said one night you busted a guy’s jaw on the edge of the bar when he tried to unplug the juke box on your quarter.”

Keds lumbered into view shaking his head. “You got no fuckin’ manners, you know that, kid? No fuckin’ manners at all. Now let’s see what you got.”

As it turned out, Keds was everything Billy Gaines had said. He didn’t haggle and gave fair value. Christo even sold him some tools he’d found in the trunk of the Fiat.

His next stop was a pizza shop two blocks south of Aviation Trades High School. There he had a small pie with mushrooms and extra cheese and, out by the dumpster in the parking lot, turned over the Valiums to a grape-eyed fat boy in exchange for sixty-three dollars cash and an underwater watch.

Two hours later, Christo was over the state line. By early evening he had checked into a motor lodge just off the highway. He took a long, steamy shower and stretched out. It felt good to be back on the road, back on the upstroke, but not that good. It had been a grueling day and hospital memories kept tumbling around in his head. He gave up and went for the caffeine. The “complimentary” coffee came out of its foil packet looking like river silt, so he left the empty glass pot on the hot plate until it cracked.

He napped in his clothes until midnight, then placed a call to a comrade in New York.

“Pierce? That you, Pierce …? Turn down the music, why don’t you. Yeah, it’s Christo.”

“Hey, jazzbo, where have you been?”

“Out of action. I got fucked up behind some bad checks, ended up doing six months in the bughouse.”

“Bad checks, huh? When are you going to get off the nickel-and-dime treadmill?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s in my genes. You got something better for me?”

“You know I just might. Jesus, almost a year I don’t hear from you. But it’s great you’re out in the breeze again. Listen, listen, what kind of line are you on?”

“Motel phone.”

“Going through a switchboard?”

“Yeah, but come on, Pierce.”

“Go find a pay phone and call me back.”

“I really don’t feel much like moving.”

“So call collect. I mean who just got out, you or me? … Oh yeah, bring a pencil and paper.”