Free Odditorium: A Novel by Hob Broun

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.”
    So Christo laced up his sneakers, promoted writing materials from the night clerk and trudged up the road to an all-night grocery. He enjoyed a late supper—bar-b-q potato chips, two pralines and a bottle of orange soda—inside the phone booth, watching two girls in curlers walk back and forth under the streetlamp waiting for someone to bother them. He lit a postprandial cigarette and dialed.
    “I’m back.”
    “So you are. Think you might want to drive down to Florida and make a pickup for me? The usual percentage. But I can’t front you anything, have to be C.O.D.”
    “I’m right there.”
    “Fabulous, fabulous. Things have been a bit warm up here, but down in Miami it is really jagged. Street dudes walking into the Sponge Divers National Bank with suitcases full of money. People being blown away in French restaurants. Some of the wheels down there, so I hear, are having their homes electronically scanned for taps, once a week…. Anyway, we’re channeling through the west coast these days. Naples, Fort Meyers…. Get out your pencil and I’ll dictate a map.”

4
    W HEN THE TOUR SWUNG down into Louisiana, Tildy decided it was time to take a few days off and visit her father in Ville Platte. It had been over a year since she’d seen Lucien and he was home from the hospital now. The doctors had thrown in the towel. Nothing could be done to moderate the progress of his disease. Six months at the very outside, they said, but they’d been wrong before. Still, the woman who was looking after him had written twice, hinting strongly that Tildy ought not put the trip off very much longer.
    There was, as well, an even more immediate inducement for her to steal away: trouble on the job. Since the debacle in Coffeyville, the Cougarettes had dropped two more games, as many as they’d lost all last season. There had been a fight on the team bus and Wanda now wore a splint on her left hand. Heidi was guzzling her ulcer medicine between innings and threatening to go back to Virginia Beach and get married. That’s-Mary was juiced most of the time. Two games ago she had stood with arms folded in foul territory behind first base and watched three consecutive relay throws whiz by. Vinnie, who was fast becoming eligible for the sulker’s World Series, crouching off by himself with a stack of detective magazines, was sent in to replace her. On his first chance, he failed to get down on a short hop and was struck in the groin.
    When Tildy went to Ben Salem to ask his permission to leave, he consented without argument.
    “Sure. Take a whole week if you want. I only wish I was going with you.”
    “You won’t mind fielding eight players for a few days?”
    “What the hell difference would it make? Whole thing’s turning into a comedy act anyway.”
    It took Tildy less than five minutes to pack her bag.
    The night man at the car rental agency wore a wife-swapper mustache and high-heeled boots that zipped up the side. Spreading his hands on the counter, he confessed that he had left drafting school for this job because he liked the one-to-one contact.
    “I’m a people person,” he said.
    “And I think you’re overworked.”
    He led Tildy by the elbow to a dark green Pinto and flung open both doors. “See what you think. I personally vacuumed out the interior. On my dinner break.”
    Across the passenger seat and along the console were scaly brown spots which resembled dried blood. But Tildy wrote it off. Just my morbid state of mind, she concluded.
    It was late by the time she started south, a profusion of semis on the road making up time. She picked up a hitchhiker a little after one A.M., a soldier heading for his brother-in-law’s place on a three-day pass. Thoroughly unnerved at catching a ride with a lone woman, his