Read Online Cardinal Numbers: Stories by Hob Broun - Free Book Online Page B

brewed very dark.
    “Stella! Will you come out from under the table?”
    “Just as a for instance,” I begin. My wife chews grimly. Are these the glinting eyes I fell in love with? “Just as a for instance, isn’t it amazing that at one time in Ireland they bled their cows to mix with milk just as the Masai do in Kenya today?”
    “No.”
    When Daphne has the last word, it is usually of one syllable.
    park-way n. a broad roadway bordered by trees and shrubs. (soften curves, plantings to guard from dazzle and wind, harmonize design)
    free-way n. a multi-lane divided highway with fully controlled access.
    (eliminate curves, invite glare, engineer velocity)
    One idea was, What would Frankie see? How would he react? Would Frankie on the road be restless or deliberate? With a ballpoint I wrote L-O-V-E on the knuckles of my left hand and H-A-T-E on the right, but it wasn’t the answer. Eye-level compositions were not the answer. Should I try not to focus at all?
    Increasingly, my sensible Datsun was an embarrassment, a timid signature. Frankie would drive some kind of muscle car with tachometer, Frenched headlights, a hood scoop. I pictured an expanse of tailfin in thirty coats of hand-rubbed candy-apple red. I thought of the acute angle as an abstraction of speed, thrust, dynamism. What is it to understand a language and still not be able to speak it?
ALBERT FRANCONA
    AKA “FRANKIE”
    White Male
    Age: 29
    Height: 5’ 10”
    Weight: 160
    Color of Eyes: Black
    Color of Hair: Black
    SUBJECT IS WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH SERIES OF AGGRAVATED SEXUAL ASSAULTS IN NEW ENGLAND AND MID-ATLANTIC STATES. KNOWN TO FREQUENT PHOTO STUDIOS, GREASE PITS, BOWL-A-RAMAS. SCORNS FIREARMS, BUT SHOULD BE CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
    It takes vigilance not to succumb to the numbers—f-stops, motel rates, highway designations, diner checks, exposure times—and one is not always up to it. The odometer turning to 50,000 becomes an anticipated Event. The glove compartment fills up with receipts, a wealth of documentation. Billboards and license plates turn unpreventably into algebra. A certain fecklessness sets in. And then a certain tension, which can be relieved only by sight of time and temperature specified in filament bulb mosaic on the rotating sign in front of a smalltown bank.
    Awareness deluges when not modulated, when not finely tuned. It can become a kind of panic.
Expenditure: $62.31
    1738 miles @ 26 mpg
    67 gals, gas @ avg. price 93 cents
    Stella, legally, should be starting school, but my wife and I are loath to part with her. Is this a lack of faith in institutions, or something more selfish? Either way, it probably is natural for members of the overeducated class. Daphne’s mother cannot say often enough that her daughter is “too clever by half.” In my own case, form follows function until exhausted but never catches up. A rerun in every direction, I mean. Stella announces: “Chocolate is fabulous.” Daphne has on Verdi or Bizet, and Stella shudders, yells, “I hate this music!” She has something to say with these words; they are not merely thrown up like tinsel onto a tree. We cherish in her such certainties, such firm insistence, and are loath to see them replaced by anxiety, ambivalence, embarrassment, retreat—what, in short, seem to be the necessary perversions.
ROADWAY VERNACULAR
    (A Preliminary Syllabus)
Baines, Melissa, Urban Motif Congestion , Argon Press, West Covina, 1979.
De Marco, H. D., Rest and Respite: From Caravanseri to Truckstop , printed privately, 1968.
McMahon, T. K., Looking at the World Through a Windshield, HomeRun Books, San Francisco, 1981.
Niemann, Dieter, Phänomenologie des Autobahns, Kultur Zeitung, Bern, 1977.
Platt, David Alan, Neon Democracy, Dreyfuss-Peterkin, Boston, 1983.
Traven, Bob, First with the Best: A History of U.S. 1, Tire & Rubber Institute, Akron, 1965.
    “Don’t get too wrapped up,” said nearly everyone who knew about my project. “Drive safely.”
    I carried in the