Cardinal Numbers: Stories (14 page)

And there were promising dust clouds. Slag heaps and cactus signaled the final push. He mopped himself with a blue shirt, tied it over his head; and then, ominously, he ceased to sweat. Fear preceded caution: character was fate. He rolled the windows up as he neared the city. Men in white djellabas lined the road, and they were not too proud to beg.

The Hotel Empire lobby smelled of beeswax and mice. Bullet-riddled furniture had been pushed all into one corner. The hollow columns were wrapped in gold foil. Brick had no trouble locating his man, nibbling salt plums at a glass table beside the pool, sunlight glinting on his hair.

“Glad you could make it,” Rex Morgan said.

“I guess I’m what you’d call kind of a stooge.”

“You were allowed to find me. Not encouraged, not coerced.”

“Fine. Just fine. How much luck does that use up?”

“I’m a doctor. I can give you new prints, a different face.”

“What good would that do?”

Brick saw that his next line would be, “Where is the ethical component?” But he was able to stop himself. Suppose his words were like antibodies: formed in the past as specific response, then stored for use? He could learn to dissolve them.

“Our too shabby flesh, hmm?” Morgan said, pulling Brick’s hand to his throat to feel the driving blood.

Dusk had already happened. Day, having moulted like an insect, exuded a fresh night. Children crouched inside the sandstone wall to pee. Voices out of the lemon grove turned bitter. A salesmen of very first-rate Irish tweed inquired at the desk about licensing. Glasses of sweet mint tea were brought to the table. Morgan tilted in his chair to drink. His cheeks were rouged, his pupils unusually large.

“Is this too scenic?” he asked. “Just say the word.”

“I have an awareness problem. It makes me a little jumpy.”

“I’m a doctor. I can take care of that too.”

“Drugs? A regimen?”

“I know, I know. That’s no way to solve it.” Morgan clenched his teeth, batted at a wasp, edged forward. He sighed. “Just look around you. It’s everything that’s wrong with development policy.”

“A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” Brick’s antibodies were hooked in and he could not interrupt the process. “Scenic, romantic, historic. Resources alarming in their potential, and the keystone for a vital future. Am I talking too much? Just say the word.”

“You need to go up and rest,” Morgan said palliatively. “The fighting won’t begin for hours.”

Fresh smell of citrus. Face of travel clock averted. Wallpaper with a repeating figure of minarets. More than a presence, dismay. Recognizable. As yellow fat taste in mouth. As harsh feel of sheets on skin. Possible tampering with chemistry? Question Rex, but he won’t answer anymore. Room completely dark now. From here cannot quite see over wall. Impossible.

The moon was high, half full. Goats foraged in the empty riverbed. Scooters buzzed and wives bargained for rolls of toilet paper. A prerecorded muezzin’s call was inadvertently set off. Tires burned in the street beside the monogrammed car.

[6]

S
OME GUESTS ON THE
porch had just returned from a hike to the falls. They were loud. Rosella, crouching, studied them from inside the hemlock hedge. One fancy lady had little moss bits on her shoes.

“What swells the heart is timelessness.”

“I must disagree. Rather, it is purity in the here and now.”

This city man wore clothes like a farmer would, and went out every morning to draw. Rosella had followed him to Ship Rock and seen him pee over the edge. And then right away after, Mama looked at her outside the kitchen, said, “Have you been eating pitch again, Rosella?” and smacked her hard.

Mama didn’t like so many guests this time of year, and having to cook for them all because Minnie was away with hectic fever. The foreign people wanted trout for breakfast every day. Which Poppa said meant they weren’t Jews, at least.

Getting out of the hedge meant torn stockings, so Rosella went in the barn to take them off. It was nice to kiss the horse. He gave back warm air out of big nostril holes and pushed with his head. Rosella buried her stockings and shoes in the oat bin. She would say a man from the woods had robbed her.

They were still loud on the porch. About the President’s doctors in Buffalo saying he ought to pull through.

“No reason for a one of these anarchists to be on the loose.”

“But how to discover each one? They are the most devious people.”

“Czolgosz? Anyone with two z’s in his name, lock him up.”

Rosella picked up an interesting stone.

[19]

The cylinder slowed on the Edison machine, and Rosella turned the handle so they might hear the rest of “Jitney Elopement” at its proper speed. Caroline halved the distance between them on the divan and proffered on her snow-white hand a nugget of crystallized ginger.

“I am quite sure,” said she, “that I have never had a more enjoyable Christmas.”

All the guests but her had retired. Beech logs popped and settled in the fireplace.

Caroline looked searchingly at Rosella. “And I hope it is not out of my place to say how glad I am that what between us began as an agreeable acquaintance has, in these few days, grown into a warm, close friendship.”

The song had ended, but Rosella, in flushed perplexity, did not lift the needle.

“It seems so sad to me that circumstances by morning must force us apart.” Caroline’s green eyes glistened in the flickering light. “Might I beg you now for one goodbye kiss as a token?”

Rosella stiffened when the tip of Caroline’s tongue grazed her lips. She smelled ginger and melting wax.

“Oh, my darling,” Caroline wailed, pulling desperately at the fastenings of her bodice. “I would face eternity for you.”

[32]

After Sunday Mass they left the girls with Otto’s mother and drove on out to where the hotel had been. It was a cool day, but clear, and the leaves were still green. They teased and held hands in the car until the road curled away from the water and steepened.

Daylilies had gone wild all over the char. Foundation lines were untraceable by eye.

“This was the dining hall,” said Rosella, standing in burdock up to her knees.

Otto had a piece of melted glass, twisting it in his big knobbed hand like a pitcher feeling the seams of a baseball.

“You had to balance plates all the way up your arm,” said Rosella.

Hair falling over her eyes was lank and wanted washing, the way everything wanted it—roasting pan, black skillet, walls and windows, the children when they filled their diapers, Otto when he came off a train: the day run to Albany, the two-day run to Utica.

“And the flagpole was here,” she said, looking across the gorge for those very private silver-birch cabins called Elka Park.

Otto lifted the back of her plaid skirt. “You smell like ferns, like you was ten years old.”

Crows could be heard, but not seen.

“Feel good you married me?” (He meant, “Wouldn’t you rather have the hotel?”)

“Mostly.”

“Mostly? What the hell is that?”

“Only don’t ask that way,” said Rosella in a voice that was harder than she wanted it to be. “Say, ‘Do you love me?’ and it’s nothing but yes.”

Otto sulked step-by-step to the car. Rosella opened her hand on gleaned hemlock cones and went after him.

[45]

Liddy drew her thumb along the chromed edge of the sideboard. She decided to smile.

“Mom, I’m going ahead whatever you say, so why don’t you say yes and make it nice for both of us.”

Rosella couldn’t decide anything. She pushed her glasses up and rubbed the sides of her nose. A truck passed, then another.

“This house is too close to the road,” she said.

Liddy played exasperation, tsking and rolling her eyes. “Why can’t you see what an important opportunity this is for a girl my age? Gosh sake, Mom, do I want to spend my whole life darning socks and pickling beets and all that? Do I?”

Rosella took no offense. She leafed through the paper. A comedy with Joel McCrea was playing.

“Because I’m calling Merle right now and telling her to get the tickets. I mean it.”

Rosella thought of how long it had been since Otto had written. Maybe his freighter was in a port he couldn’t spell. But she had Prince Valiant, Helen Trent, her chickens and roses to fuss with. Was that why she didn’t miss him more?

Liddy dialed six numbers, hung up, and came clattering back.

“You need quieter shoes,” her mother said. “We need you to lend us the money.” Liddy was going to cry.

[67]

There were the same two chickadees that came every day to the feeder.

She said, “Otto, does it hurt bad today?”

He blinked, smiled at the falling snow.

The man on television said, “Tell her what she’s won, Johnny.”

There was the magazine without pictures which Liddy had sent because it printed her article: “Kings of Song: Armenian Bards in the Seventeenth Century.” She picked it up to try to read it again, but the language was thick. Bard? Someplace they had a dictionary, but it meant climbing upstairs. She wondered how Liddy could be a professor of music and not play any instrument.

It was going to be dark early. She noticed surfaces where snow caught: in a line on the back of the iron deer, where the gnome folded his arms and on parts of his cap. John Ostrander drove a sand truck up the road. Probably John. She couldn’t see into the cab.

The college was in Oregon, but Liddy called each week, took an interest. Still, the big place in her heart belonged to Carol, with a husband in jail and sloppy kids and running out most nights. She knew this was “wrong,” but some things were just there and you didn’t decide.

Otto teased her by slurping his tea. He made waggish eyes.

The man on television said: “See you next time.”

[85]

Girl abusing my arms for the ivy bottles, loud, hair shiny. Married to Jesus and wearing white to show that off, no need so loud and cheerful then try to give pills like the sacrament. Change the rules once you learn following, new tricks for the dog, and marrying Otto in beige, pure as I could be, Mama angry about all the sewing, always true to that, hands on hips, middle of that fire probably, giving hell and hail Columbia. Otto never pretended, fell in love with the way he died and left before hot afternoon dill cucumber soup and white stoneware bowls in all hands on deck for their day not his to wake up on stage, costume faces and white glove pressing—Anita and a black fan three Wolvens Ed and Norma TC who punched him in the railyard confused Connie Fratello who bought the meatmarket Ethel and Sid the fat Garside kids Shorty and Moira who flew a woman from Kerhonkson with dirty boots and hid inside the hedge me seeing them all.

Hob Broun was the son of Heywood Hale Broun and the grandson of Heywood Broun, the newspaper columnist. After publishing his first novel,
Odditorium
, Broun underwent a spinal surgery that saved his life but left him permanently paralyzed from the neck down. By blowing through a tube connected to a specially outfitted keyboard, Broun was able to complete his second novel,
Inner Tube
, and write the short stories of
Cardinal Numbers
. He was at work on a third novel when he died at age thirty-seven in 1987.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Blood Aspens” and “Rosella, in Stages” were originally published in
The Quarterly

Copyright © 1988 by The Estate of Hob Broun

Copyright © 1987 by Hob Broun

Cover design by Kelly Parr

978-1-4804-5262-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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