Ghost Boy (2 page)

Chapter

2

I
n late afternoon a song came to Harold. It drifted across the prairie and into the gully of the Rattle-snake, and he climbed up the bank to listen.

It was calliope music, a faint little song that came in whistles and wheezes, a cheery song that sang of circuses. And it called to him like a piper, just as it called to every child throughout the whole, flat county.

Harold collected his fish and his stick, his jar of worms, and the dog stood up behind him. And together they went down the old ruts of the Oregon Trail, into a breeze that carried the song in waves across the grass.

From a long way off he saw the circus tents in Batsford's field. They made castle shapes with colorful spires, with banners of crimson and gold. To Harold it seemed that a new town had sprung from the stubbled grass, a town so bright and cheerful that it made Liberty look dreadful beside it.

He plodded along, into the smells of cotton candy and toffeed apples, of sawdust and horses, and corn on the cob. They washed over him on the breeze, along with sounds he'd never heard: the flutter of celluloid birds, the thrumming of canvas, the high and heart-tingling trumpet of an elephant. And above it all, the calliope played, tootling out a circus march with its steamy sighs.

His lips cracked into a smile. His watery eyes gleamed behind their round lenses. He walked down a line of enormous old army trucks, some still in khaki and white stars, others gaudily painted, all smeared with the dust of the road. There were Fords and GMCs and a monster-sized Diamond T, then a silvery Airstream trailer and—last—a bright yellow jeep. Harold passed them all, then wandered on toward the tents. And in the open there, the children found him. They circled him like wolves around a deer.

“It's Whitey!” said one. “Hey, Maggot!” cried another. And three at once shouted out, “I guess he's going to the freak show!”

Harold said nothing. It had been a mistake, he knew, to start across the field so boldly. He put his head down and stared at his boots; he stumbled along, and the children swarmed him. They taunted him with ghostly cries, looming up toward his face, swirling all around him in blurs of brown and gray. “It's the Ghost,” they cried. “It's Harold the Ghost.” One leapt in and snatched away his helmet; another took his little jar of worms. They shrieked and laughed and pushed him from behind, jostling him along to the row of sideshow tents. The dog stayed with him, her clouded eyes wide with fright, her tail between her legs. Harold felt his stick being pulled from his hands. Someone plucked the fish from his shoulder. And when he turned, wheeling back at the tug on the string, feet entangled in his and sent him sprawling in the dust as the children laughed and shouted.

All the time he never said a word, and his expression never changed.
I'm the Ghost
, he told himself.
I'm Harold the Ghost
. And he tried to make himself small and invisible, to vanish into the crowd. He repeated the little chant he'd invented, his eyes closed tight behind his glasses.

No one can see me, no one can hurt me. The words that they say cannot harm me.

Then, like the sudden passing of an August storm, the children were gone again. Harold lay by himself in the grass and the dirt, in the bright shadows of a sideshow tent. It rose above him, the roof hauled up like skirts around the frame of poles, a canvas wall that the sun shone through. The dog nuzzled against him, and he let her take hot, slobbery licks at his nose as he picked up his helmet and his little round glasses and put them on again. He didn't know why he'd been left alone until, looking up, he saw the shadow on the canvas.

Whatever cast it was huge and shaggy, more a beast than a man. Hair-covered arms spread across the canvas, and the cloth puckered in sharp little points, as though the thing had claws for fingers. The sun twinkled through pinholes in the old, faded cloth, and the shadow moved sideways, flickering across the tent like a cartoon phantom on a movie screen.

The head was huge and wild with hair. It pressed against the canvas, blotting out a pinhole.

The dog barked. Harold took hold of her collar. “Come on,” he whispered. “We'd better go, you bet.”

He set off down the tent, and the shadow went with him, pace for pace. Harold hurried; the shadow hurried. Then it bounded before him and vanished in the doubled thickness of a tent flap. The canvas bulged, an arm reached through the gap. The creature really
was
matted with hair. Its fingers really
were
claws, and they clutched on to Harold's shoulder and pulled him into the tent.

Chapter

3

H
arold blinked through the glasses at a swirl of shadows and shapes. At his back, the creature held him by the elbows. His dog howled like a lunatic beyond the canvas wall.

“Say, you're scaring the boy,” said a lady from the corner. “Let him go, you big lug.”

The claws came away from his arms.

“And bring that dog in, for heaven's sakes. It's barking its head off out there.”

The creature stepped around from behind him, and Harold saw shoulders as wide as a doorway, hands and feet so thick with black hair that they might have been covered in fur. The thing swept open the tent flap, and Honey came slinking inside.

“Say,” said the lady, “that's a pretty swell dog. Hey, puppy, come here.”

“She won't,” said Harold. “She won't go to anyone else but me.”

The dog came slinking past the creature, then bounded toward Harold, and he held his hands to catch her. She was running, he saw, really running for the first time in years. And she ran right past him, to the lady in the corner.

“Yeah, he's swell all right,” the lady said. “Oh, you're such a pretty dog. You're just the cat's pajamas.”

Harold took off his glasses and folded them into his hands. Nearly half the tent was a cage. But the door was open, as though the beast had just wandered out. Beyond it, in a corner where the shadows were darkest, stood a platform draped in velvet. At its center was a little chair, and in it sat a tiny lady no bigger than a doll. She was leaning forward, her head at the same height as the dog's, her little fists buried in its hair.

Harold rubbed his eyes. He couldn't believe he was seeing right, a woman as small as that. Her face was the size of a child's but as old as an adult's. It was hard to look at her, but impossible not to.

“What do you call him?” she asked.

“She's a girl, not a him,” said Harold. “Her name's Honey.”

The lady laughed. “And look,” she said. “She's sort of honey colored.” She grinned at Harold. “You're so clever. I would have called her Muffy.”

Harold shrugged. It bothered him that the dog had gone to her and not to him. “Honey,” he said, reaching out. “Come here. Come on, girl.” But the dog didn't move.

“I like dogs,” said the lady. “Not like Samuel there.” She was quite fat for her size, her black dress swelling down from her shoulders like a small, dark balloon. Then she raised her voice. “Say, Samuel, where are your manners? You're standing around like a lamppost, you big nut. Why don't you get the boy a Coke?”

The big, shaggy figure went shambling to the end of the tent. He rummaged through boxes, his back toward Harold. There was a clinking of bottles; then he straightened. And turned.

Harold gasped. The man was hardly human at all. He had great, thick brows and the flattened nose of an ape, his ghastly face covered all over with hair as coarse as string. He put the bottle in his mouth, between teeth that were crooked and sharp. There was a little snapping sound as he tore off the cap, and the Coke fizzed from his mouth in a froth, tumbling in brown foam down his cheeks and his beard. He thrust the bottle at Harold.

Harold would have run from the tent in a moment if the thing hadn't been blocking his way. The bottle hovered between them.

“Take it,” said the woman. “You'll hurt his feelings if you don't.”

Harold took it; snatched it, really. It disgusted him to feel his hand scrape against the hair on Samuel's fingers, as stiff and bristly as a scrubbing brush. He didn't want the Coke; he felt he couldn't swallow a drop of it after seeing that bottle—a third of its length—inside the creature's mouth.

Samuel stared down at him through small black eyes. And then, for the first time, he spoke. He said, “It's not very cold, I'm afraid. It's the heat here, you see; you can't keep anything cold in this heat.”

It was a sad little voice, even more shocking for Harold than the sight of the creature, half man and half ape, that towered above him. He stared up at the gruesome face, trying to make sense of it. But Samuel turned away and threw himself down on a little round pillow.

“Have you taught your dog any tricks?” asked the woman.

“Some.” The Coke still fizzed from the mouth of the bottle. It was warm and sticky on his fingers.

“Come and show me.”

He sat at the edge of the platform and made the dog shake hands. She shook hands with the little woman. “Sing,” he said, but Honey only looked at him.

“Sing,” said the little woman, and Honey put back her head and wailed.

The little woman laughed. “That's something else,” she said. “Say, Samuel, wouldn't you like a dog like this?”

Samuel grunted. “No,” he said.

“Oh, posh. So, what else can your dog do, kid?”

“Lots,” said Harold. But he didn't feel like showing her. He was frightened that the dog would do tricks only for the woman. “Can I go now?” he asked.

The woman smiled at him. “You can go whenever you want.”

“Come on, Honey.” He snapped his fingers. The dog looked at him but pressed closer to the lady, whose chubby little hands tweaked at Honey's ears.

“Say,” said the small woman. “That shouting we heard. Was that about you?”

Harold nodded.

“I thought so,” she said. “It's tough, isn't it? We know what it's like to be different.”

He wasn't
that
different, he thought. At least he wasn't three feet tall; at least he wasn't half an ape.

“Maybe you should come with us,” she said. “You and your dog.”

The beast grunted. “Don't tell him that,” he said. “He's got a home, a mom and dad. Don't fill his head with notions.”

“Don't listen to
him
,” she said to Harold. “He's just a big stick-in-the-mud. We're going west if you want to come.”

“To Oregon?” Harold asked.

“Why, sure. We go there every year.”

“Have you seen the forests?”

“Gosh, yes! There's forests that go on forever.”

“And mountains?”

“This big!” She stretched up her tiny arms. “They're covered in snow right through the summer. And the ocean! Oh, don't get me started.”

“Too late,” said the beast.

“I'm going to go there,” said Harold. “To Oregon.”

The lady smiled. “You are?”

“You bet,” he said. “When my brother comes home he's going to buy us some horses, and we're going to get on them and ride right to Oregon. We're going to live like mountain men, fishing for trout and hunting for deer.” Forgetting himself, he took a drink from the bottle. “He's in the army now, and some people say he's not coming home, but he is.”

“Sure he is, kid.”

She didn't believe him; he could see that in her eyes. She looked away from him, over at the beast. “Couldn't we take him, Samuel? I could square it with Mr. Hunter.”

For a moment Harold was happy. He saw the convoy of trucks heading west, the big silvery trailers. He saw himself at a window as the prairies went by and turned into forests and then into mountains. He saw himself rattling through the great cities, thousands of children standing to watch, waving at him—at Harold the Ghost, the whitewashed boy. And the picture melted away. He looked at the tiny little woman perched like a bird on the platform. He turned his head and saw Samuel there on his pillow, watching him with those animal eyes.

“No,” he said. “No way. I'm not going off with a freak show.”

“Gee, kid, that's not what I meant.”

He put the bottle on the floor. “If I leave now,” he said, and nodded toward Samuel, “will
he
try to stop me?”

“Of course not,” she said.

He got to his feet. “Honey, come on,” he said. But the dog didn't move. “Honey, please.”

The small woman took her hands from the dog, but still Honey wouldn't move; she only stared at him with her head tipped sideways. Harold felt tears come to his eyes. Then he turned and ran for the tent flap.

Chapter

4

H
is big boots carried him over the field, over the gravel and up to the dust of Main Street. The wind was furnace hot, and dust devils swirled before him, blotting out the writing on the windows. The tilted sign of Kline and Sons banged against the wall, and Harold the Ghost went into the doorway below it.

In the days before the war, his father had kept the building painted and clean. Its big yellow front had sparkled in the sun, so that Kline and Sons, the dry-goods store, had stood out among all the other buildings. But now it was the dustiest building on Main Street, as hollow as an old pumpkin. And Harold reached through the hole where a window had been, and turned the brass knob to let himself inside.

The store was warm but not hot, the dry air thick with a smell of old paper and wood. Spiders had spun skeins of thread from every wall and every corner and shelf. Mice had built enormous nests of ledger pages, heaps of paper in little bits of yellow, white and blue. All around the room great chunks of gypsum had been knocked from the walls so the laths showed through like the bones of the building.

There were times when Harold thought his father still kept the store, tending to a ghostly business in the quiet and the shadows. He had seen his shape standing at the counter, had heard his footsteps and the cheerful little songs he whistled, again and again.

Now it was just a sad place to come to when he was sad, a place to wrap himself in sadness. He sat on the floor, facing the street. He sat for a long, long time. Then a smear of sun appeared across the dusty window, and another below it, a square of sun with a man in the middle, rubbing at the glass. It was Hopalong John, lame in one leg, holding a bundle in his left hand, a cloth in his right. He peered through the window, then came to the doorway. He spoke through the missing pane.

“I didn't know you was in there,” he said. “If I'd knowed, I'd have asked.”

“Asked what?” said Harold. He went to the door.

“Posters,” said Hopalong, lifting his bundle. He carried rolls of paper bound by string, and he stepped clumsily back as Harold opened the door. “I'm putting up posters on windas.”

Harold came out beside him.

“Where's your dog?” Hopalong John stared past him into the building. “Don't think I've ever seen you without that dog nearby. It's like the sun come out and you ain't got no shadow.”

“She's at the circus,” said Harold.

“Guess everyone is.” Hopalong scratched his head. “They're giving out jobs like the Fuller Brush man gives away brushes. They've got me putting up posters, you see?” He pulled out a poster and let it unwind, and the breeze stretched it flat on the air.

Hunter and Green's Traveling Circus, it said across the top. There was a picture of an elephant carrying a dozen children on its back. A man standing beside it barely reached the knees.

“That's one big critter there,” said Hopalong John. Harold squinted at it.

“I knew your daddy wouldn't mind if I put this on the winda.”

Harold shrugged. “Go ahead.”

Hopalong put up his poster, and they both stood back to look at it, Harold with his head at a slant. He could see a circus tent and rows and rows of wagons behind the elephant. In the distance were the mountains, just barely there, a bit of jagged blue.

“I guess if I was younger, I'd go traveling with the circus,” said Hopalong. “If I didn't have a bum leg, I'd be up there on the tightrope, see.” He pointed at the poster. Under the elephant's trunk, so small that Harold couldn't really see it at all, was a figure in a leotard balanced on a line as thin as a thread.

“Damn the war,” said Hopalong. “Damn it all to hell.”

“You weren't in the war,” said Harold.

Hopalong squinted. “I was thinking of you. Look what it did to you. Took your daddy and killed him. Took your brother, David, and never gave him back.”

“He's coming home,” said Harold.

“Don't I know it?” Hopalong gathered up his bundle, his cloth, the little bucket of paste he'd set below the window. “Why, he's probably sitting in Tokyo now, figuring out how to get back.” He jabbed a paste-speckled finger at the poster. “But don't you think that looks like him? That little guy there in the tights?”

Harold stood so close to the picture that his nose almost touched it. The tightrope walker, he saw, did look like David, tall and slim and bulging with muscles. He gazed at the figure, remembering things he was afraid he'd forget: splashing through the Rattlesnake with David, swinging from the fence rails, just walking down the street and feeling big as Gary Cooper. No one dared to tease him then, with David right beside him.

“What else have you got there?” he asked.

“Well, I'll show you.” They started back along the main street, and on every window was a poster. The pictures hung askew on doorways and wrapped around telephone poles. There were clowns. There were people on trapezes, a juggler and a bareback rider.

“And look at this,” said Hopalong, coming to the credit union.

It was an enormous poster, and across its top it said Freaks of Nature. And there was the tiny lady and the ugly giant of a man that she'd called Samuel. Princess Minikin, the poster said; She Lived Among the Crowned Heads of Europe. And beside that: The Fossil Man! Is He an Ape or a Man? He's the Missing Link, a Living Fossil Direct from Darkest Africa!

“I met them,” said Harold.

“Did you, by gosh? You met a living fossil?”

“I guess I did,” said Harold.

“And did you meet the Cannibal King?”

“Who?”

“The King! The Cannibal King!” He hopped up on his one good leg. “Well, come and look, Harold.”

Even limping, Hopalong John went faster than Harold. He scuttled ahead, waited, then scuttled along again, to the corner of the drugstore. “Well, here's your dog,” he called. “Here she comes after you, sure as pigs follow the slop bucket.”

She came around the corner, but Harold didn't stop. He would ignore her, he thought; he didn't care if she followed or not. And then he looked back, to show that he didn't care, and Honey was lying flat on her stomach with her paws on her nose.

“Oh, come on, then,” he said, and she trotted up by his side. He bent down and ruffled the fur between her ears. He cuffed her ribs the way she liked.

“What's that she's got in her collar?” asked Hopalong. “See there? She's got something stuffed in her collar.”

It was a piece of white paper folded in three, with a ticket inside for the circus. Harold held the ticket in one hand, the paper in the other, and read the writing that went in a crazy scrawl.

To the boy from Libberty

Deer boy,

Jist to show theres no hard fealings heres a tikket to the circus. We are jist going to bee hear for only one nite so you better come to nite. Drop by and see us if you like to. We hope you will.

Your freinds,

Samuel and Tina

“Geez, it's your lucky day,” said Hopalong. “Now you can meet him.”

“Who?” said Harold.

“The Cannibal King! Come on and look.”

They went halfway down the building before Hopalong stopped. The poster was close to the ground, and he beamed at it so proudly that he might have painted the picture instead of only pasting it up on the wall.

“You see?” said Hopalong. “There he is. The Cannibal King.”

The man on the poster was wearing a leopard skin and a necklace of bones, a round white shell for an earring. His hand was held high, and dangling from it by its hair was a shrunken head. He stared ferociously out of the picture.

“You see?” said Hopalong John.

Harold nodded.

“He's just like you.”

“Yes,” said Harold.

The Cannibal King was an albino.

His skin was white, his hair a woolly shock, like a feathery cloud on a summer day. But what a cloud! It rose like thunderheads, billowing out in wild array, a huge white mass of hair. His eyebrows were the same, and his hands were like blocks of ivory.

“You see what it says?” said Hopalong. He pointed at the poster, reading out the words. “He's the strange king of a strange tribe—the Stone People, from the jungles of a Pacific island. They hunt for human food! They boil their hapless victims and shrink their heads for trophies! And now he's here on his first world tour, the Cannibal King of Oola Boola Mambo!”

Hopalong took down his finger. “Lordy!” he said. “I didn't know there was
anyone
looked like you. Not anyone.”

“No,” said Harold. All his life he'd felt alone.

“You've got to meet that fella, Harold. You've just got to.”

“Where do you think Oola Boola Mambo is?”

“Oh, miles away,” said Hopalong. “Maybe he'll take you there.” Then he frowned. “Do you think he's really a cannibal?”

“If it says it's true, it must be true,” said Harold. “You can't say it's true if it's not.”

“I guess so,” said Hopalong.

“But maybe he's not
always
a cannibal.” Harold looked sideways at the bones and the shrunken head. He wasn't sure if he wanted to go to Oola Boola Mambo. But he was certain of this: He had to meet the Cannibal King.