Beholding Bee (7 page)

Pauline winces. I hold my breath.

“This war ain’t gonna end soon, so what we’ll do is set up another show, a stay-put show in Poughkeepsie,” Ellis says. “Some of you will come with me and some will finish out the year with this show and then go south for the winter.” He looks over to the trucks. “What is that noise?”

I grab Pauline’s arm. She looks at me and shakes her head very slowly.

Then Bobby steps up. “One of the pigs has been feeling poorly and has been making an awful racket.”

“Well, do something about it. Can’t have no sick pigs around here. I thought you said you knew how to take care of pigs.”

“Yes, sir,” says Bobby, and then Ellis gets started telling
about a new booth he wants to set up in Poughkeepsie, something he heard about from a show out in Chicago.

“It’s called an African Dip. You put a colored boy in a cage and people pay good money to throw balls at a lever. If they hit it right, the boy drops in the water. Pulls in bucket-loads of money, too.”

Ellis laughs. I shudder. I can only imagine what he would do to my little dog.

I tell Pauline as soon as we get away from Ellis that I think we better find a home for ourselves pretty quick. “Me too, Sweet Pea Bee.” And then she goes off to help Arthur with the Tilt-A-Whirl.

That night Pauline is feeling bad about leaving me all day. She wants to know if I want to play the ha-ha game. I sigh a few times to let her know I am not sure if she is worth my time. Then when I am afraid she might think about changing her mind, I tell her I will give her one more chance.

We drag our bedrolls out onto the grass. Peabody snuggles up beside me. Pauline looks up at the sky. I am looking at my work boots.

Pauline is so quiet I think she has fallen asleep. I snuggle up next to her. She slides her arm around me.

“Bee, I have something important to tell you.”

I am wide awake.

“Are you listening?”

I nod my head in the dark.

Peabody looks up.

“Ellis says I have to go join up with his show in Poughkeepsie.”

“No, Pauline. I want to go to Florida.”

Pauline sighs. I don’t like it when she sighs.

She is quiet for a minute and then says, “Ellis told me I can’t bring you, Bee. He wants you to run the hot dog cart here. I told him I couldn’t leave you, I couldn’t go anywhere without you, that we’ve been together since you were four. He told me I had to do what he said or he would put you in an orphan home tomorrow.”

Even in the dark, I know there are tears winding their way down Pauline’s face. I don’t have any words in me. All I can do is reach over and grab hold of her and let her pull me to her and my tears start flowing and Peabody whines in my ear.

Pauline holds me. “I am so sorry, Bee.” She says it over and over and over and we hold each other for a long time under the stars. When Pauline falls asleep, I stay awake and wait for the lady in the orange flappy hat.

29

It all happens so fast. Bobby is working on the pigpen, fixing where a family was leaning too hard and broke the boards. Every so often he looks over at Pauline.

She doesn’t notice him. She is loading her things in Arthur’s truck for the trip to Poughkeepsie. She carries out the bedroll, then the mattress, then the apple crates of clothes, and finally the shoe box with all her little notebooks filled with her poems. She keeps looking over at me and I know her face is red from all the crying about leaving me.

With each load, my tears roll faster. Bobby keeps clearing his throat and he lifts Cordelia out of the pen and brings her over and puts her in my arms just as the first
ting, ting, ting
s of August hail start falling, a thin pattering of ice all over us. I brush the bits from between Cordelia’s ears and run my fingers through the tracks they leave behind.

“Can’t you do anything?” I sob as Bobby just stands there watching Pauline packing her things. “I know you like her.”

Bobby gets all red in the face. He takes Cordelia from my arms because Pauline is walking toward us. He doesn’t look Pauline in the eye.

But I do. “Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” I sob. I hold on to her neck and get myself tangled in her hair.

Pauline sobs. Her whole body shakes. “Bee, I’ll be back before the winter comes. Ellis promised. We’ll go to Florida
together.” I know Ellis’s promises are good as pie crusts. They are always crumbling. “I didn’t know it would turn out like this, Bee. Honest, I didn’t.” She cries more and more.

While I am all tangled up in Pauline’s hair, Arthur comes over to see what is taking so long.

“Let her be,” Bobby tells him.

But Arthur doesn’t listen. “Ellis wants us to meet him in Poughkeepsie tonight,” he says, pulling Pauline’s arm and leading her away. I sink to the ground and the bits of hail are not
ting, ting, ting
ing, they are pelt, pelt, pelting. When I look up, Arthur is helping Pauline into the truck and she is turning and twisting to try and keep her eyes on me and then he is slamming the truck door and taking her away.

Peabody licks the streams of water off my cheek. I throw myself into the grass. He lies down beside me so I can bury my face in his fur and sob.

In a moment, Bobby pulls me off the soaking ground and leads me and Peabody to Eldora’s Museum of Mystery, where there are fat sofas to sit on and peanuts to eat. Just before we go inside, I think maybe I see the thin fading outline of an orange flappy hat.

30

Folks hand over their money by the fistful at Eldora’s Museum of Mystery. This is because Eldora tells folks what they want to hear.

Basically, everybody wants to know two things from Eldora: will they get the love of their life, and will they get rich. This makes it very easy for a diviner like Eldora. She tells them yes, yes to all the questions that they are hopeful about, and she throws in just a teeny bit of trouble to make things sound right. She promises the girls will get husbands who look like Cary Grant, and the young men will each get an Ingrid Bergman. She tells everybody they will get a gold mine of money, too. It is hard to believe there is that much gold to go around.

Fat Man Sam says what Eldora does is a sin against God and nature, but Eldora tells him to shush up and he forgets all about sinning and everything else when he wants Eldora to tell his fortune awful bad.

“She gives me the creeps,” Pauline used to say, telling me to stay away from Crazy Eldora with the Bright Yellow Hair, as we all call her. But Eldora never gave me any trouble. She’s the one who told me about how lemons would make my diamond disappear if I used enough of them.

When Bobby and I walk into the tent, we are dripping from all the rain and the hail. Eldora is laying out her cards on a small fold-up table.

“We came to get dry, and that’s it.” Bobby drops onto a fat sofa. I sink down beside him and look around for the dish of peanuts. There’s a dead butterfly on the wall that Eldora pinned to a piece of cardboard, its wings fanned wide so everyone can have a good look. It is so sad, I turn so I can’t see. Peabody jumps on my lap and turns around a few times before lying down. He has his eyes on Eldora.

Bobby leans back and shuts his eyes. “We don’t need any of your monkey business.”

Eldora jangles her bracelets as she deals her cards. Her yellow hair is tied up in silk scarves and she wears a church choir robe she found outside Manchester. The sleeves are so long they cover the cards and you can’t see what is happening under there.

“That’s what you think I do in here? Tell folks voodoo and that sort of thing?”

“Something like that.” He opens one eye. “Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, as far as I can tell.”

I watch Eldora carefully. It is good to get my mind off things. Eldora scoops up the cards and fans them out across the table in a rainbow. Then she scoops them up again and shuffles them, making lots of interesting snapping and popping sounds, and she sets one card on the table, facedown.

“This is the past,” Eldora whispers in her slow and heavy divining voice. She turns the card over. It is the queen of hearts. She makes her voice so smoky I cough. “You had an affectionate, caring woman in your past.”

Yes. Yes, I did. I scratch Peabody between the ears and try not to feel the ache of Pauline leaving.

“That’s enough.” Bobby opens his eyes and glares at Eldora. “We just want a place out of the weather.”

The fortune-teller acts like she is in a trance and cannot hear anything from this world. She scoops up the queen card and pushes it into the middle of the deck. She puts the deck on the table and fans all the cards out again and pulls them back. Bobby folds his arms over his chest and closes his eyes. She scoops up the deck and splits it into three parts and stacks them together. She flips the bottom card onto the top. I hold my breath. Peabody watches everything she does. One of his ears is sticking up.

She lays the top card on the table.

“This is the present.”

I cannot keep my heart from thumping.

She looks at me. “Do you want to know?” Her voice is hoarse. “Some folks don’t want to know.”

I look at Bobby. He is breathing slowly. I picture Pauline walking off with Arthur.

“You can’t get to your right future if you don’t take a hard look at your present.” Eldora waits for an answer.

I nod quickly.

Eldora flips over a three of spades. She looks at it for a moment and shuts her eyes for a very long time. I look nervously over at Bobby. He is snoring softly. I check how far it is to the door.

“You’ve had a break in a relationship.” Eldora opens her eyes. “Because of a third person, probably a man.”

I let my breath out slowly. Well, no kidding. Eldora watched Pauline giggle all silly over Arthur, same as anyone. I shrug.

“This is the future.” Eldora takes so long to flip over the last card I just about lose my patience and turn it over myself. When she finally snaps it onto the table, she lets out a tiny moan. She turns to me and stares.

“What? What is it?”

“Child,” she says softly. “I had no idea.”

I push Peabody onto the floor and jump up and Eldora covers the card with her hand, but not before I see it is the nine of spades.

“Is that bad?” I ask her, even though I do not give a fig about her predictions and fortune-telling. “Is it bad?” I search her eyes for truth. She looks away. I search through my sixth sense that Pauline told me I had so much of to see if I can figure out what it means to get a nine of spades.

Bobby opens his eyes and takes it all in, seeing everything in an instant. “Come on, Bee,” he says, jumping up. I lift Peabody into my arms.

“Hold on to that funny-looking dog,” Eldora says carefully, just sitting there and not doing anything about my future card that is sitting faceup. “A friend like that is worth more than gold.”

I don’t need anybody telling me that, I think as I carry Peabody out into the rain. I already know that all by myself.

31

That night, Pauline’s side of our hauling truck is a blank piece of paper, empty, picked clean as an old stew bone. She left only one thing, her little notebook,
The Story of Bee
, which is sitting on my pillow. I look at it, pick it up, fan through it, and throw it on her side of the truck.

Peabody snuggles up close to me. I hold him for a very long time, breathing in the warm smell of his fur, my eyes settled on Pauline’s empty place. “Why did she do it? Why did she go like that?”

Peabody wiggles closer so there is no space between. He answers with just his eyes; he is sorry about everything. It turns out that dogs are very good to talk to.

32

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Bobby says. “Now, let’s see you run to that tree out there.”

I shake my head. It is early morning in Rutland. I haven’t run since Pauline left us two weeks ago. Who can run with such a big hole in her heart?

“I want to try something different,” he says. “You’re ready to work on your speed. I also want to watch your form. I have noticed you’ve been trying to take strides that are too long. You might think that makes you run faster, but it slows you down.”

Bobby is wearing an old pair of white shoes I have never seen before. They have red leather stripes on the side and they are worn through to his big toes.

“Like this.” He runs a few feet, his legs stretched out as far as they will go. “See, I don’t want you to do this.” He takes a shorter stride. “See, like this.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” He yanks his glasses off and wipes the dust off the lenses. His hair pokes out the back of his cap.

“I’m trying to make you a better runner, Bee. I know you
can do it. But all you’re telling me is you can’t, you can’t, you can’t. But you can, Bee. You have to want to get better. You have to look for your own finish line and tell yourself you will cross it, even with Pauline gone, and you have to keep trying and trying and you will find the strength deep inside yourself, and when you find it, you will be proud, really, really proud. When you have a goal like that, you will get better, I promise.”

I look up at Mr. Talk My Ear Off. Things have certainly changed.

Bobby doesn’t say anything. He walks over by the pigpen, opens the gate, and steps inside. Cordelia is the first to nuzzle all over him. Then Big Ben comes and then LaVerne and Vivian. Even pigs love him. I don’t know what’s the matter with Pauline.

Bobby holds Cordelia up over the pen so I will come get her. It is awful hard to resist a piglet when she is looking at you like that. I go over and take her, feel the warm tickling as she nuzzles my neck.

“How do you know so much about running?” I ask after a while.

He laughs at the way Cordelia is trying to get up onto my shoulder. “I held the record for the mile at my high school, Bee. They used to call me the Hurricane.”

Peabody does not like all the attention I am giving Cordelia and he noses at my leg trying to get me to scratch him between the ears.

“How come I don’t ever see you run?”

“I got tripped and busted my knee. I can’t run much anymore. That’s another reason the Army won’t take me.” He
rubs Peabody’s back. “Army doc wouldn’t clear me. But I’m tough, same as you, Bee. Now put that pig down and get moving.”