Read Odditorium: A Novel for Free Online

was already in the thick of a speech when his star and her lover waddled through the door in matching terry-cloth robes, redolent of sex.
    “Go ahead, Mr. Sparn,” Flora said hoarsely. “We don’t mean to interrupt.”
    “Yeah. We woulda been here sooner if we’d known there was gonna be chow. Was there any slaw came with this?”
    Sparn had prepared two or three sarcastic fusillades, but he swallowed them all. Much as he wanted to publicly chastise those two, his instincts told him now was not the time. There was bad blood flowing, he could tell, and the last thing he wanted to do was spill some of it.
    “Okay, we’ve been talking about spark, or the lack of it. We’ve been talking about showing emotion and pumping that old adrenaline. You know a man once said that winning wasn’t the most important thing, it was the only thing. But I wonder if that really covers it. Frankly, girls, we’ve got a winning team that’s going broke, you hear what I’m saying? It doesn’t matter a damn how many games you win if you don’t pull the crowds. Is that so hard to understand? Remember that you’re entertainers out there, performers. Those routine plays have got to be more than routine and every game has to be fresh. Now everybody knows that Pete Sparn is not a finger-pointer. I’m not going to single anyone out. But I’ll tell you this, when somebody gets a little lazy, a little complacent, well, these things can spread like a virus and infect the whole unit. It’s all a question of attitude. Digging down for that extra burst of effort when you’ve told yourself there’s nothing left. Because we all live and die together. I think of this team as a spiderweb, you know? Like many independent strands linked together in a strong, resilient, ummm … a strong, ummm, network that is, well …”
    As Sparn floundered in the muck of this ill-chosen analogy, Tildy slithered between Wanda and That’s-Mary to the front of the bed. She had heard enough.
    “Pete, you don’t know one single thing about what we do and that’s for damn sure. We’re right there with it day after day after day, and you buzz on out here from Jacksonville to tell us we don’t put out? That shit won’t float. We play tired and hurt and hungover, anywhere we can get a game. We play at youth camps, in cow pastures, on airplane runways. We play doubleheaders on sandlot fields full of stones and broken glass, and no lights when it starts to get dark so you can’t see the ball till it’s right up on you and meanwhile the catcher is trying to put his hand in your shorts. Then onto the bus and drive all night to the next date, try to put a few hours sleep together before we play again. A bunch of small-town hotshots who’ll never hear the end of it if they get beat by women, and they’re looking to tear our heads off. But, Pete, we play the game and we eat the dirt and that’s all there is to it. So you take a look right here and tell me whether or not we put out.”
    Tildy lowered her jeans to reveal a large, ugly raspberry on the outside of her left thigh, souvenir of the slide into home.
    “You can check this too while you’re at it.” That’s-Mary thrust forward her leg and pointed to a swollen, purplish ankle.
    Heidi displayed her dislocated thumb. Roxie Vasquez showed her bruised calf. And Wanda Watts, just recovering from a pulled hamstring, showed Sparn her middle finger.
    Mutinous! Abominable! Sparn would have liked nothing better than to blister each and every one of them with a razor strop, lay on some bruises of his own, instill a little respect the way he used to do with Vinnie, but it was way too late for that. The bad blood he’d wanted to contain was now ankle deep. He would have to back off and make another rush; from a different direction this time.
    “Of course you work hard, I don’t question that. You have a lot to put up with, fair enough. Don’t let’s overreact.” He sighed heavily and circled to his right, in the