Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (37 page)

It wasn’t till the next morning that I learned what had happened while I slept. I got the story from a variety of sources—my nasty grandmother, who loved to talk about it, also from my father and various people in town, and even a bit from my mother, so what I relate now is partially made up, but also mostly true.

During the night, my mother left the house and slipped back into the fairgrounds. She untied all of the elephants and told them they were free to leave. “Get out of here,” she told them. “This is your big break.” She smacked their hindquarters to move them, and offered handfuls of peanuts as bribes. Later she told me she’d planned to get them out of there and leave things at that, but one of the elephants had suddenly knelt down and offered her a ride. My mother couldn’t refuse the gesture, so she swung herself up on its back, and the pack of them rode out of town together, down Highway 88.

They made it to Pennsylvania by the next morning, when a cop spotted them crossing I-90. Negotiating the morning traffic, moving as fast as they could with the cars and semis blaring their horns around them, they were not hard to miss. They were trying to make it into the hills of the Allegheny Mountains, where they planned to hide and rest. The police rounded up the elephants with the help of their trainer, and afterwards they called my father to fill him in. My father, who’d returned in the night, who knows when, tore out of our driveway to retrieve my mother from the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol. “I hope to God they didn’t film this for that police show,” he muttered as he dashed out the front door.

When they arrived home several hours later, my mother wasn’t speaking, and my father kept saying, “Come on, Hannah. Talk to me, baby.” But she wouldn’t. Not a word would come out of her for several days and nights. My father pulled out his wallet and gave me ten dollars. He asked me to go to the fairgrounds and buy my mother a new ceramic elephant to replace the one she’d smashed the previous month, which I did, taking nearly an hour to pick out just the right one.

When I gave her the new elephant later that night, my mother stroked my hair and said, “Have you been washing with my Coconut shampoo, Ellie? Your hair is so silky.” I smiled and said I’d done that, even though I hadn’t washed my hair for a couple of days. Really, the difference was in her hands, I thought. They were slowly becoming as rough and calloused as my grandma’s, and I thought at some point, even sandpaper would feel smooth to her.

My mother’s escape with the elephants had been joyous. She told me that herself. For several hours, riding on their backs, she had felt like she was an explorer, riding up into the mountains, to a place in her imagination that she had never touched. “It felt like what flying must feel like,” said my mother. “Like taking off into the blue air.”

I did not make much of what happened, and I tell you now I wish I had. I was too much like my mother, though, too used to everything, too ready to sweep up the pieces instead of letting them lie there and look at them for a while. If I had said something, encouraged her, told her how proud I was, that she and I should save our money and leave, then perhaps she would have felt that feeling again some day, and learned how to keep a hold of it.

Instead, two years later my father would leave us for good. One morning he didn’t come back from wherever he’d been the night before and after a few weeks passed a letter arrived from California, saying he was sorry but he wouldn’t be back this time. My mother tore that letter to pieces, and afterward I gathered them in the privacy of my room and taped them back together. In case my father did return one day, I wanted to be able to take his words out and say he’d retracted his position from our lives and that I had it in writing. I wanted proof to be able to tell him he could no longer return.

Leaving was probably the best thing my father could have done, and when I think about it I still thank him for finally having the courage to permanently flee whatever it was in our family that caused him to leave temporarily and so often for most of my early years. What I do not thank him for, what I am still angry with him for to this very day, is that he preempted any possibility of my mother ever learning to leave on her own.

It was some time after he left, probably a few weeks after we got the letter, that my grandmother, still caught in the idea that supporting her daughter consisted of talking badly about my father, told my mother, “I knew that man would leave you high and dry, I knew it from the start, but no. You wouldn’t listen. Now if your father were alive, you’d have listened to him, but nooo—”

“Shut up,” I interrupted. “Shut up, you stupid old woman. Can’t you see she doesn’t need your haranguing?”

My grandmother looked at me in shock. Tears filled her eyes, but she left the room and left my mother, finally, alone.

This was the first in a series of interruptions I would make as I grew older. First with my grandmother, then with my mother as I graduated and left home against her will, left Ohio altogether, to attend college. Then later, with boyfriends and two husbands, then with my own children, after they grew up and became young twenty-somethings who thought they knew better, who thought their mother was a foolish middle aged woman who didn’t know how to settle down. “Shut up,” I’d say, interrupting them whenever they tried to tell me who I was. “This is me,” I’d say. “This is who I am,” I told them all.

Whenever I did that, I’d feel some part of me learning to leave, learning how to leave people who would only bind me to what they wanted. No one, I’d think, would ever keep me to being only one woman again. Each time I said, “No,” each time I said, “Shut up,” or, “Get out,” I’d remember my grandmother’s face from the day I first said something completely mine. I would think of how she crumpled and withered. I would think of the power I felt as she melted to nothing, like a green-faced witch, right before my eyes.

Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus

Neal Barrett, Jr.

Del drove and Ginny sat.

“They’re taking their sweet time,” Ginny said, “damned if they’re not.”

“They’re itchy,” Del said. “Everyone’s itchy. Everyone’s looking to stay alive.”

“Huh!” Ginny showed disgust. “I sure don’t care for sittin’ out here in the sun. My price is going up by the minute. You wait and see if it doesn’t.”

“Don’t get greedy,” Del said.

Ginny curled her toes on the dash. Her legs felt warm in the sun. The stockade was a hundred yards off. Barbed wire looped above the walls. The sign over the gate read:

First Church of the Unleaded God

& Ace High Refinery

WELCOME

KEEP OUT

The refinery needed paint. It had likely been silver, but was now dull as pewter and black rust. Ginny leaned out the window and called to Possum Dark.

“What’s happening, friend? Those mothers dead in there or what?”

“Thinking,” Possum said. “Fixing to make a move. Considering what to do.” Possum Dark sat atop the van in a steno chair bolted to the roof. Circling the chair was a swivel-ring mount sporting fine twin-fifties black as grease. Possum had a death-view clean around. Keeping out the sun was a red Cinzano umbrella faded pink. Possum studied the stockade and watched heat distort the flats. He didn’t care for the effect. He was suspicious of things less than cut and dried. Apprehensive of illusions of every kind. He scratched his nose and curled his tail around his leg. The gate opened up and men started across the scrub. He teased them in his sights. He prayed they’d do something silly and grand.

Possum counted thirty-seven men. A few carried sidearms, openly or concealed. Possum spotted them all at once. He wasn’t too concerned. This seemed like an easygoing bunch, more intent on fun than fracas. Still, there was always the hope that he was wrong.

The men milled about. They wore patched denim and faded shirts. Possum made them nervous. Del countered that; his appearance set them at ease. The men looked at Del, poked each other, and grinned. Del was scrawny and bald except for tufts around the ears. The dusty black coat was too big. His neck thrust out of his shirt like a newborn buzzard looking for meat. The men forgot Possum and gathered around, waiting to see what Del would do. Waiting for Del to get around to showing them what they’d come to see. The van was painted turtle-green. Gold Barnum type named the owner, and the selected vices for sale:

Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus

***SEX*TACOS*DANGEROUS DRUGS***

Del puttered about with this and that. He unhitched the wagon from the van and folded out a handy little stage. It didn’t take three minutes to set up, but he dragged it out to ten, then ten on top of that. The men started to whistle and clap their hands. Del looked alarmed. They liked that. He stumbled and they laughed.

“Hey, mister, you got a girl in there or not?” a man called out.

“Better be something here besides you,” another said.

“Gents,” Del said, raising his hands for quiet, “Ginny Sweethips herself will soon appear on this stage, and you’ll be more than glad you waited. Your every wish will be fulfilled, I promise you that. I’m bringing beauty to the wastelands, gents. Lust the way you like it, passion unrestrained. Sexual crimes you never dreamed!”

“Cut the talk, mister,” a man with peach-pit eyes shouted to Del. “Show us what you got.”

Others joined in, stomped their feet and whistled. Del knew he had them. Anger was what he wanted. Frustration and denial. Hatred waiting for sweet release. He waved them off, but they wouldn’t stop. He placed one hand on the door of the van—and brought them to silence at once.

The double doors opened. A worn red curtain was revealed, stenciled with hearts and cherubs. Del extended his hand. He seemed to search behind the curtain, one eye closed in concentration. He looked alarmed, groping for something he couldn’t find. Uncertain he remembered how to do this trick at all. And then, in a sudden burst of motion, Ginny did a double forward flip, and appeared like glory on the stage.

The men broke into shouts of wild abandon. Ginny led them in a cheer. She was dressed for the occasion. Short white skirt shiny bright, white boots with tassels. White sweater with a big red G sewn on the front.

“Ginny Sweethips, gents,” Del announced with a flair, “giving you her own interpretation of Barbara Jean, the Cheerleader Next Door. Innocent as snow, yet a little bit wicked and willing to learn, if Biff the Quarterback will only teach her. Now, what do you say to
that?”

They whistled and yelled and stomped. Ginny strutted and switched, doing long-legged kicks that left them gasping with delight. Thirty-seven pairs of eyes showed their needs. Men guessed at hidden parts. Dusted off scenarios of violence and love. Then, as quickly as she’d come, Ginny was gone. Men threatened to storm the stage. Del grinned without concern. The curtain parted and Ginny was back, blond hair replaced with saucy red, costume changed in the blink of an eye. Del introduced Nurse Nora, an angel of mercy weak as soup in the hands of Patient Pete. Moments later, hair black as a raven’s throat, she was Schoolteacher Sally, cold as well water, until Steve the Bad Student loosed the fury chained within.

Ginny vanished again. Applause thundered over the flats. Del urged them on, then spread his hands for quiet.

“Did I lie to you gents? Is she all you ever dreamed? Is this the love you’ve wanted all your life? Could you ask for sweeter limbs, for softer flesh? For whiter teeth, for brighter eyes?”

“Yeah, but is she
real?”
a man shouted, a man with a broken face sewn up like a sock. “We’re religious people here. We don’t fuck with no machines.”

Others echoed the question with bold shouts and shaking fists.

“Now, I don’t blame you, sir, at all,” Del said. “I’ve had a few dolly droids myself. A plastic embrace at best, I’ll grant you that. Not for the likes of you, for I can tell you’re a man who knows his women. No, sir, Ginny’s real as rain, and she’s yours in the role of your choice. Seven minutes of bliss. It’ll seem like a lifetime, gents, I promise you that. Your goods gladly returned if I’m a liar. And all for only a U.S. gallon of gas!”

Howls and groans at that, as Del expected.

“That’s a
cheat
is what it is! Ain’t a woman worth it!”

“Gas is better’n gold, and we work damn hard to get it!”

Del stood his ground. Looked grim and disappointed. “I’d be the last man alive to try to part you from your goods,” Del said. “It’s not my place to drive a fellow into the arms of sweet content, to make him rest his manly frame on golden thighs. Not if he thinks this lovely girl’s not worth the fee, no sir. I don’t do business that way and never have.”

The men moved closer. Del could smell their discontent. He read sly thoughts above their heads. There was always this moment when it occurred to them there was a way Ginny’s delights might be obtained for free.

“Give it some thought, friends,” Del said. “A man’s got to do what he’s got to do. And while you’re making up your minds, turn your eyes to the top of the van for a startling and absolutely free display of the slickest bit of marksmanship you’re ever likely to see!”

Before Del’s words were out of his mouth and on the way, before the men could scarcely comprehend, Ginny appeared again and tossed a dozen china saucers in the air.

Possum Dark moved in a blur. Turned 140 degrees in his bolted steno chair and whipped his guns on target, blasting saucers to dust. Thunder rolled across the flats. Crockery rained on the men below. Possum stood and offered a pink killer grin and a little bow. The men saw six-foot-nine and a quarter inches of happy marsupial fury and awesome speed, of black agate eyes and a snout full of icy varmint teeth. Doubts were swept aside. Fifty-calibre madness wasn’t the answer. Fun today was clearly not for free.

“Gentlemen, start your engines,” Del smiled. “I’ll be right here to take your fee. Enjoy a hot taco while you wait your turn at glory. Have a look at our display of fine pharmaceutical wonders and mind-expanding drugs.”