Free Cardinal Numbers: Stories by Hob Broun

trunk of my car a first-aid kit, jumper cables, flares, a heavy-duty flashlight, kept my thermos filled with coffee, was careful to husband my energies and stay alert. Still, as it turned out, the dice weren’t sufficiently loaded.
    I remember a distinct but unnameable shift of light, hard impact, raining glass, and then a kind of torpid, nauseous remove that was almost like snobbery. “Oh, just relax,” I might have said. Or, “Call the roller of big cigars.” I remember a texture of white clamshell, surf hissing around my ears. And O’Hara, unmarked and unfazed, the prick, his Dodge half-ton barely scraped, O’Hara making a cozy offer, his arm around me, snuff-stained teeth and rapid blinking.
    In the taxi, I came more to myself, lenses spread out around me on the seat. Blue sea and blue sky seemed to roll as one. Just the note, I thought, to fill and then combine the chord. Go on. Make friends with it.
    I sold the car and flew home.
    DAY OF ACCIDENT
    May 18, 1986
    TIME OF DAY
    10:15 a.m.
    WEATHER
    Clear
    LIGHT CONDITION
    Daylight
    ROAD SURFACE
    Dry
    OCCURRED ON
    (Name St., Rd. or Rte. #) U.S. 1
    AT INTERSECTION WITH
    (Name St., Rd. or Rte. #) Dade Co. 905
    CITY NAME
    (Or Nearest City) Key Largo
    I look over the four contact sheets while they are still wet, am pleased right off to see a balance of formal and informal, a mixture of broad long-shot and close-in detail. I pour out another glass of Old Overholt, straight rye whiskey bottled in Cincinnati, and, along with my big-band tapes, a habitual darkroom accouterment. True, I like certain things to be just so, but who cares any more about workmanship? These are bits, blips, snippets, and not as careful as they look. Starting anywhere. Taking the last sheet, reading the rightmost negative strip, which on its upper edge says KODAK SAFETY FILM 5063, and on its lower edge names exposures 16 through 21.
—paired gas pumps, rectangular digital display units topped with identical PAY FIRST signboards
    —old man forcing smile in motel breezeway, NAPA cap, bill stained
    —industrial exhaust stacks, low angle
    —church steeple paralleled by traffic light stanchion
    —self-portrait behind the wheel (camera held at arm’s length), visible fatigue, characteristic alternation of aimless and frantic
    —family group at Tastee Freez picnic table, night (flash fill)
    Mom, dad, two girls, one boy. “We’re a service family.” Contemplative dad sipping thick shake. “MacDill AFB, Tampa. Antiaircraft. It’s all computers now.” Taking their latest transfer in stride, fatalists. “Work’s always there, so you follow it.” I had to envy resignation chosen and not settled for. Watched them roll slowly away in a camper lashed with luggage and bikes.
    This is “Prelude to a Kiss.” Benny Carter’s 1942 band, very mellow reeds. And these still are only scraps, chips, slivers. That they can be fixed in a coherent sum is the kind of stance we live on, like entropy or antimatter: pretty fictions that don’t explain, furtive agreements of pretense, a wink and a ducking away.
    Modulate.
    Modulate. All right.
    But I can’t stop wanting to know what I’m looking at.

FINDING FLORIDA
C HE AND AN OLD friend, Alberto Granados, launched on a prolonged tour of Latin America by motorcycle and on foot at the end of 1951 … Chile via Patagonia … Peru … the Amazon … Colombia … Venezuela … Granados stayed in Venezuela and Guevara, travelling in a plane loaded with thoroughbred horses, spent a month in Miami.
    RICHARD BOURNE
    Political Leaders of Latin America
    R UMBLING 12,000 FEET above the Caribbean: The cargo hold was frigid, and Che, wheezing, heated water for maté with an immersion coil.
    “They don’t agree with you, the horses?” asked Placido, the groom.
    “Asthma,” Che explained.
    Supported by canvas belly slings, the nervous animals quivered in their stalls, breathing in short bursts. Placido soothed them, humming, rubbing, adjusting leg pads. Sucking the maté