Goldenland Past Dark (28 page)

Nine, ten, eleven, midnight. At quarter to one, Webern finally got up and started pacing. Marzipan looked up from her knitting with mild concern.

“Stay,” Webern told her. He pointed at the couch.

Marzipan rolled her eyes and went back to work. Webern opened the door and stepped out into the balmy night.

Outside, two of the fat ladies—Rhonda and Tina—staggered around the corner of a wagon, hooting, and Pigalle, the trapeze artist, stood outside her boxcar like a lanky bird with one leg bent, smoothing powder onto a fresh bruise beneath her eye. But most of the boxcar doors were shut. Arguments and laughter and the clinking sound of bottles floated from the windows.

Webern thought about ghosts as he walked: his mother, Schoenberg, Bo-Bo. He wondered if there could be ghosts of people who were still alive. Soon, Nepenthe would be nothing but an apparition—a pink robe, thrown over the back of the chair, glimpsed in the moonlight and mistaken for something else. An empty popcorn bag tumbled along the dusty ground, and Webern froze until it passed.

Maybe Webern himself was a ghost—the spectre of the man his father killed, the man whose name he had inherited. Or he could be the ghost of the perfect child who shattered beneath the treehouse that afternoon. After the accident, when he was still very young, he often looked into mirrors to find his old friend Wags staring back out at him. Something about the way the glass shone, the sharpness of his friend’s small face, made Webern wonder if he himself was just the reflection, and Wags was the one being doubled.

Wags had always seemed more alive than Webern. He had popped up everywhere back in those days: in the empty hallway after classes in the elementary school, pratfalling down waxed hallways dusted with chalk; hanging by his knees in the backyard oak long past midnight. He was always performing. It was tough to know what he was thinking, because to him everything was a joke, a hook, a lead into his routine; even his clumsiness was choreographed. The first person Webern knew who was like that in Real Life—funny he felt a need to qualify it that way, “Real Life”—was Dr. Schoenberg. And even with him, the seams sometimes showed: the strain in his smile, his salesman’s overeagerness to close. With Wags, there was no difference, no line that separated the character he played from the character he was. There was no Real Him.

“The person in the mirror is me,” Webern murmured. The words sounded like nonsense to him. He paused to grip the rusty bars of a wagon cage, just to make sure he could still feel the cool iron against his hands. He hardly noticed the sleeping tiger that lay on the straw inside.

“Say there, fella. Better watch where you’re putting them paws.”

Webern’s lips moved involuntarily. He took a giant step backward and looked up. Sometimes the animal wranglers slept on top of the wagons when they got tired of bunking with the roustabouts. But this didn’t sound like an animal wrangler’s voice.

“Aren’t you gonna say hello?” The tiger stirred in its cage. “What, cat got your tongue?”

Webern shook his head. “I just can’t believe it’s you.”

“Keep trying. It gets easier with practice.”

Wags sat down on the edge of the wagon and dangled his legs off the side. His hair shone faintly in the moonlight, like spun gold or fallen stars, and his face was as much like Webern’s as ever—maybe even more so. He snapped the straps of his lederhosen and laughed out loud.

“How long have you been sitting there, watching me?”

“Too long. You’re a nice guy and all, but I’ve known figurines with more pep.”

“Thanks.”

Wags held out his arms like a child asking to be picked up. “Catch me. If anybody knows how to break a fall, it’s you.”

Webern obediently outstretched his arms, and Wags jumped down. But when he landed he was no taller than a thumb, standing on the palm of Webern’s left hand.

“How’d you get so small?” Webern asked.

“Change of perspective, old buddy. It’s an art.” He danced a little jig. “Always was a particular talent of mine. Remember how I used to run around the clock with the second hand? It was a race against time.”

“No, but I do remember when you ran face first into a slingshot.”

“I bounced back from that one pretty quick. Hey, remember the time I got trapped inside your family’s telephone?”

“That rings a bell.”

“Of course, all of that was nothing compared to the day I got thrown in the laundry.” He clucked his tongue. “If it hadn’t been for the Life Saver in your pants pocket, I would’ve been all washed up.”

“You know, I thought I was going to have to handle this all by myself,” Webern said, laughing. He thought of his empty boxcar, the monkey hair on the couch. “But it’s just like Mom said. You came back when I needed you.”

“Hey, I’m glad to be of service.” Wags took a bow. “But don’t think I’m just the pit crew here to pull you from a wreck.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I may be a saviour, but I ain’t no angel.” Wags grinned; even though his face was the size of a nickel, his smile seemed much larger than that. “Buck up, pal. We’re going to have some fun.”

The alley house was crooked-shaped
to fit the gap between two storefronts. Stairs zigzagged up the side, steep and backless as rungs on tilted ladders: six flights to the top. Wanda and Betsy spoke prayers as they climbed. Each step that squeaked was the alley house’s amen.

“Lord Christ please make our bones like thine, clubs upon a sinner’s pride.”

“Holy Ghost please turn our blood to wine and wake the corpses who have died.”

Their landlady was a Christian who forbade fornication and hot pots. Their room was attic-shaped, with tilted eaves, unpainted wood, and cobwebs. Wanda and Betsy didn’t mind. They were Christians, too. The home was a vessel for the spirit and if that was pure the home would be also, all appearances aside. Like them, their neighbours below came from the institution, and the grunts and curses that rose up through the vents reminded Wanda and Betsy they were living righteously.

Back when Willow and Billow lived in the treehouse, they had nest-slept, wrapped together in pillows, grey insulation, a tattered coat. In those days, they had woken nights uncertain whose elbow, whose knee, whose fingerbone was whose. It had mattered exactly none, there in the jumble that they made. Now Wanda and Betsy slept in twin beds like dolls in boxes under portraits of the saints. Sometimes, though, they woke in the night under low splintery beams of the alley house, and though their eyes were open they went on dreaming of the treehouse. A trapdoor opened the floor of the attic room; beneath it lay the past. Wanda and Betsy never spoke of it, lying side by side, seeing treehouse in the dark. There was no need. They both still had the same dreams.

They parked their van out front. Gunmetal grey, it had four doors. On its side was written in stenciled letters PROPERTY OF MUNICIPAL ANIMAL IMPOUNDMENT CENTRE. Cages lined the back. Fur tufts and dog shit snagged the bars. It smelled like dogs even when there were no dogs. The van air had a memory.

Wanda was left-handed. Betsy was a lefty, too. When one drove the other shifted gears. Each morning when they drove to report in, the cages shuddered and rattled in the space behind where they sat. Each morning they remembered when a van had come for Willow and Billow. The back of that van had been one dark cage. They lay down there together; Willow lit a match. Later, they learned the sulfur smell of that match had been the reason everyone believed they burned down the treehouse. The van had taken them to the institution, where they lived six years.

The institution wasn’t a hospital or a church. It was a Retreat, the doctors said. For Willow and Billow, it was Surrender. They had no weapons there, no bones and stones and snakes to throw. They had no fog to vanish in, no trees to climb, no birds to catch. No wind and storm howled to them. Together at meals, they could not eat; kept separate at night, they could not sleep. What the doctors asked them, they would not tell. Pills made their minds like cool clay. They sat side by side, indifferent.

Nuns crept through the institution from time to time, footless in their hoods of black. They left marks on nothing they touched with their bloodless hands. When they laughed it was with no sound. Willow and Billow began to follow them through the halls. They followed one to chapel. It was there they became schooled in the ways of faith.

Bible study was four to six. Chapel light came through stained glass, barred up like all the windows in the place. There were no Bibles, only pews, and Sister, who spoke in a swaying, uneven voice, like melody. The other patients left right away, but Willow and Billow understood her words. They were sisters, too.

Sister taught them Revelations, and of the demons that would come, of the lamb with seven glittering eyes, and how the Father appeared as cloud and fire. She taught the mysteries of the soul, how the Father marked creatures as his own. Sister didn’t feed them pills or ask for them to speak or eat. She called them by their Christian names and told them that on the last day, Lord Christ would do the same. She taught them charity, piety, perseverance, gratitude. Sister taught them they were two, with different souls in different skins. They were sinners now and as such, condemned. Only with Christ could they be as one, not consigned to separate flames.

Wanda and Betsy became warriors for Christ; they sang anthems for his glory, even while the TV played and others profaned his name. They confessed their sins to a skittish priest, who kept one finger on the NURSE CALL button: they had disobeyed their mother, they had coveted their brother’s treehouse, they had huffed glue and pretended to be ghosts. Their necks swung heavy with rosaries; each night they prayed over grey meat and plastic knives. They gave up scratching walls for Lent, then gave it up altogether. One day the doctors declared that they were well, and cast them out into the world.

Sister’s brother worked at the pound, so God’s provenance found them vocation there. Called to this work, they learned their trade. The Holy Ghost helped them know where the lost dogs hid. Sometimes the Holy Ghost spoke through the men around the oil drum fire.

“There’s one back there,” the men would say. And the spirit would move them to point at the part of the dump where the tires stood in tall towers, or where the broken refrigerators made blue puddles in the dirt. Wanda and Betsy used their nets.

Wanda and Betsy understood why the dogs got lost. Before they came to know the faith, they too had strayed from yard to street to vacant lot, from the clean sheets of an even bed to the knotted roots of a tree. They had not known that they belonged to God, that their place was in his House; they had not come where they were Called. Wanda and Betsy tried to teach the dogs what Sister had taught them, but the dogs didn’t always learn. If they didn’t learn, they stayed Lost. Or died.

Wanda and Betsy didn’t make many friends at the pound. The other dogcatchers didn’t like how they sang songs for Christ, how they committed the dogs’ souls to heaven when the injections went in. They sent Betsy out back to fix their vans and watched Wanda nervously over their donuts in the break room as she studied the crucifixes she’d hung on the wall.

In the night, sometimes, Wanda and Betsy went for fog walks as they had in the old days. They moved through dewy grass before the world belonged to dawn. This was the time when the world became a ghost of itself, when all colours faded to grey. The earth grew soft and stuck to their shoes, and even without the Word, they felt they were in just one skin again, with no crooked house built up between them. Willow and Billow, for a moment only. Then the dawn came and the fog vanished and the feeling vanished too, and they were glad, for it was a testament to their faith.

Wanda and Betsy spoke seldom of their family. It had been God’s will, what had passed, and they should not try to understand. Their mother had already made her peace with God, and though she had not loved them they burned votives in her name. She lay beneath the closed trapdoor in the realm of what was done. But when they did speak, they wondered often about their brother, about the soul that hid within that skin. They spoke without anger, again and again, of what he had done, how he had blamed them for his crimes and stood by without confessing. He was a sinner and as such, condemned. How could he find salvation without The Word? How many mysteries did he still not know?

One night, as they parked the van outside the alley house, Willow raised a single, trembling hand and pointed. Billow’s hand rose, pointing, too. A circus poster, blistered with fresh glue, shone on a wall between two boarded-up windows.

Nepenthe straggled back to the boxcar around five in the morning. Instead of going inside, she stood on her tiptoes and peeked through the window. She rubbed dust and grit from the glass with one bell-shaped sleeve. Webern wasn’t there, but the ape was—tucked into their bed, no less, and wearing an old-fashioned nightcap.

Nepenthe sank down onto the steps in front of the door. It wasn’t very often in her life that she knew exactly what she had to do next, and this moment reminded her of the moment, so long ago now, when she climbed out of her dorm room window at the Appleton Academy with only a monogrammed trunk and a thick roll of her mother’s fifty dollar bills to call her own. Then, as now, she had been embarking on a new life, sloughing off the old one along with a closet full of navy blue uniform skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars. She’d felt sick then, too, she reminded herself.

Nepenthe lit a clove and went over it all in her mind again. She tried to imagine auditioning for a new part in the show, one of the gaudy acts the pretty young girls always wound up with. She saw herself teetering on high heels, flinching as knives whizzed by to embed themselves in the turning board behind her limbs and head—some of the girls had nicknamed knife-thrower Leon “the Barber.” Nepenthe imagined falling on her ass in the bareback act, getting sawed in half by an inept magician, losing her grip on the trapeze swing and hitting the net so hard it left blue-black welts on her back and legs. No. No. It would never work. And Webern would be the one to suffer when she came home, pissed off and resentful, night after night after night. He would be the one she blamed when she lost her hard-won beauty to something as ordinary and hateful as common old age.

Nepenthe opened her purse—a woven hemp pouch she’d braided together during a particularly dull stretch of shows in the Dakotas the year before—and dug around until she found her notebook, spiral-bound, with the all-seeing eye of the Almighty Dollar emblazoned on the front. Most of its pages were blank, and the others were mostly filled with doodles, song lyrics, and profound thoughts she’d had while she was stoned. But now she felt a poem coming on.

In the caboose of a real circus,

I’m sitting, smoking a green

cigarette in the dewy early.

Past the midway, sunlit Adonis,

driving in tent poles,

sings the blues with grit in his voice,

and the midway fortune teller, drunk

already or still, cackles electric

two cars down, wrapped

like a goddess in her dirty sheets.

No drug, no drug

in the world, beats this yellow

light, landing—here!

and here! and here!—

on every pore of my skin.

—July 26, 1967

Nepenthe squinted through her smoke and nodded approvingly. In fact, the men setting up the tent weren’t singing; from what she could hear, they were just yelling the word, “Cunt!” over and over again at each other with varying degrees of irritation. And Yolanda, the fortune teller, wasn’t quite laughing either: she was hacking and coughing like it was her intention to projectile vomit her lungs at the wall. Nepenthe wished the old lady really was two cars away, or preferably even farther. Judging by the way she sounded, Yolanda probably had tuberculosis, or emphysema, or some kind of yellow, wet-looking tumors that nested inside her windpipe, just beneath the wrinkled turkey wattles of her neck. Jesus God.

Nepenthe felt depressed all of a sudden. Here she was writing poems; meanwhile, Webern was practically about to be destroyed. Because, not to compliment herself or anything, but wasn’t she the best thing that had ever happened to him? He certainly had been for her. He’d been such a comfort all these years—more than that, he’d been a generous lover, gentle and attentive with a female body that would’ve given most men nightmares. She would take him to San Francisco with her, she really would, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t imagine what their life there together would look like. And—this was the part she tried to skim over in her mind, the part she didn’t like admitting—she couldn’t picture him leaving the circus any more than she could picture herself staying there. He wouldn’t give up this life for anyone. Not even for her.

Nepenthe blew out a plume of clove smoke and realized that while she’d been thinking, Webern had materialized right in front of her. In the morning sunlight, his eyes looked hooded with exhaustion; his hump pressed down his left side like it was something he carried. He hugged himself, and Nepenthe’s eyes lingered on his little hands, callused like a man’s but still the size of a child’s.

“Oh, kiddo.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “What are we going to do?”