Goldenland Past Dark (5 page)

But in between these big trips, little disasters happened all the time—nylons snagged, cage latches snapped, salt spilled onto the ground—and Webern never felt quite the same walking into town by himself, especially not when he was going to buy a girdle for Brunhilde or a magazine of pistol blanks for Explorer Hank. Sometimes Webern suspected the others of sending him off on these errands out of spite, or using his trips into town as a means to scare up curiosity for their acts. Still, he always gritted his teeth and set off down the dusty road by himself.

Webern tried to practice his clown acts when he could, but it was a lucky day when he could get an hour or two to himself, let alone a whole afternoon. Sometimes he half-hid, riding his unicycle around the barnacled stilts of a deserted pier at low tide or practicing a bit of mime around the plywood back of a little-visited hot dog stand. Other times he stayed in his tent, trying to ignore all but the most urgent requests shouted in his direction. Every once in awhile, he lost himself in the rhythm of clowning, delighted himself with a new walk, a new face, a new way of holding himself, but other days he found himself knotted up, jumpy and agitated with frustration. If only he had more time! It was bad enough using the same costumes and makeup show after show—greasepaint and burnt cork could only do so much—but to hurry like this, that was the worst constraint.

Now and then, Webern found himself fantasizing about another kind of circus, one with money and a skeleton crew and doors that shut, a circus where he could have his own boxcar and an hour to paint his face. But every time he daydreamed about it, he felt a twinge of guilt. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Show, Webern wouldn’t have found the circus in the first place—he’d still be trapped at home. He took pains not to forget that. Whenever he noticed himself getting greedy, he squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath until the voices of his sisters chattered again in his ears.

The big top seated seventy, but in the time Webern had worked there they’d never had a full house. It didn’t seem likely that they ever would, despite Dr. Schoenberg’s best attempts to advertise. The ringmaster phoned in notices to print in the next town’s pennysavers, and he always sent Webern out with a can of glue and a fistful of rolled-up posters the morning of their first show. Once, in New Hampshire, they had staged a parade of sorts, with tin cans clattering from the back of the Cadillac and Vlad and Fydor blowing kisses from the jalopy’s roof, but the local sheriff had informed them that such displays after ten PM were considered a disturbance of the peace, then had ticketed their red trailer for double parking. They never attempted such a “spectacular” again.

Despite their efforts, though, the show only drew a middling crowd most evenings. Thirty-five to forty was the norm: mostly frazzled mothers, teens who necked in the back row, kids with fruit-punch moustaches, and a few screaming toddlers thrown in at a discounted ticketing price. That wasn’t bad; the creaking bleachers could hardly support more weight, anyway. But lately, some shows had shrunk to a crowd of twenty-five, or once, even fifteen. Al, who’d been with the show the longest, sometimes waxed nostalgic for the early days, when Dr. Show had displayed him in a curtained box outside of flea markets and they’d turned a profit every time. But Hank, Eng, and most of the others—even Brunhilde in her better moods—still believed Dr. Show’s prediction that things were just about to turn the corner with ticket sales. All it would take was one fantastic performance, and the word of mouth would be out there, the best form of advertising, free and invisible but real as talent itself.

That night in Paradise Beach, it almost seemed as if the prediction was coming true. Webern peeked around the flap at the back of the big top where the performers entered and exited. The bleachers were nearly packed—fifty-five at least. In the low lights of the pre-performance, they were mostly shadows, but a few figures toward the front were distinct: a tubby man in swimming trunks and a bowling shirt unbuttoned well down his hairy chest; a lanky girl with a hula hoop balanced on her knees; a busty blonde, babbling obliviously to her beau, who fiddled with the hearing aid in one ear.

“Get a load of this crowd,” Nepenthe whispered. She leaned in close. She was in her show robe, floor-length satiny green with an oversize hood. “What a bunch of weirdos.”

Webern thumped his bowler hat against one leg, then put it on, careful not to smudge the incredulous black eyebrows he’d painted in the greasepaint on his forehead. He pulled a long balloon out of his pocket and stretched it between his hands. He’d make a flower first—a daisy, green stem with a white bloom, kid’s stuff—and give it to Miss Hula Hoop in the front row. Then he’d go straight into the sweeping routine, the one where he wound up dancing with the broomstick.

“Don’t look so scared, little buddy.” Hank patted Webern on the head. Hank was all decked out in his best safari whites; Freddy, the older tiger cub, trailed behind him on a leash. “You know what I always say: it’s not the size of the lion in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the lion. You’re going to do just fine.”

“Cut it out, Hank. Course I am.” Webern resisted the urge to kick Hank, hard, in the shins. He glanced back at Nepenthe. “It’s you guys I’m worried about.”

“Jerk.” Nepenthe pinched his rubber nose. It squeaked. Out on the dunes behind them, Brunhilde practiced singing scales.

After that evening’s show, the performers celebrated around the campfire, drinking warm rum from toy trumpets. Dr. Schoenberg had bought the trumpets for the shooting booth he’d set up a few towns back, but they’d made lousy prizes; now they were going to much better use. Webern thought so, anyway. He lay in the sand off to the side of the group, still wearing his hobo costume with its fingerless gloves and patched-up pants; he’d washed off the greasepaint, but that was all. The audience had applauded; nothing else mattered now. The beach undulated beneath him, and the stars turned above, orbiting too fast, like the speeded-up fake sky in the dome of a planetarium. His toy trumpet tilted up, empty, from his hand.

All around the fire, the other circus players talked and laughed, but their words blurred to incomprehension in Webern’s ears. Al was playing Louis Armstrong on his portable record player, and Dr. Schoenberg accompanied the album on his concertina. Everyone else was trying to stop him, but Webern liked the combination: the concertina’s yawns and sighs, melancholy and comic at the same time, twisted in and out of the singer’s honeyed voice.
Sometimes wonder why I spend the lonely nights . . . dreaming of a song . . .

“Bernie? You out for the count already?”

Webern opened his eyes. Nepenthe towered over him, dressed in the lime green bedsheet burka she usually put on after the show. At first she’d looked exotic, but now she just reminded him of a child in a Halloween costume.

“Hey, what’s so funny?” Nepenthe glared down through the slit left for her eyes. She kicked sand at him.

Webern swatted at her foot. “Stop it, stop it.”

“Get up, then. We’re out of rum.”

“Ugh.” Webern pulled himself up onto his elbows, then sank back to the ground. “Why do I gotta go get it?”

“Because you drank most of the last bottle. Come on, come on.”

It occurred to Webern that he ought to do a drunk act sometime. With a groan, he pulled himself to his feet. He swayed, first to the left, then to the right. He could get a big jug with a skull and crossbones on the side—the Demon Liquor. Maybe Eng could dress up as a devil and chase him across the stage on all fours, with his legs bent back over his head. Then again, that might scare the little kids.

“Bernie?” Nepenthe waved her hand into his field of vision. Her gloves were green too, but darker, the colour of leaves.

“I’m going, I’m going.” Webern pushed past Nepenthe and stumbled off into the dark.

“Come back soon!” she called.

Webern walked carefully as the sand shifted under his feet. Behind him, the campfire crackled, and a chorus of cheers rose into the night as Al finally prized away Dr. Show’s concertina. Webern was a ways away when the sound of waves crashing grew louder than the party around the bonfire.

Even at night, the big yellow Cadillac was not too difficult to find. It gleamed softly in the darkness like an oblong moon. Webern groped his way around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. Inside, batons, leotards, masks, wigs, and tins of greasepaint and rouge lay together in a jumbled heap. Webern saw a burnt skillet—a roll of canvas and Dr. Schoenberg’s special set of paints—a yardstick and a record of klezmer music—and rummaged past a frayed whip, a beaded shawl, and a sombrero. At the very bottom he finally found a half-empty bottle of Jamaican dark, right next to Mars Boulder’s sword.

Webern had never really gotten a good look at the sword, but now, seeing it under the moonlight, he began to understand what the fuss was all about. Jewels crusted over the hilt, an elaborate arrangement of what looked like rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. The blade itself was smooth and flat. Webern saw himself darkly reflected there. He leaned in closer. Even though he practiced funny expressions or made himself up almost every day, it had been a long time since he’d really looked at his face.

“That’s me,” he murmured. “That’s me.” It made less sense the more times he said it. He thought of a riddle he’d heard once: if that’s me in the mirror, then who am I? He pulled off his glasses and peered again into the sword. “That’s me. That’s me.” His features began to separate from each other. They were as much a part of the night as of him. “The person in the mirror is me.”

Webern’s trouble with mirrors had begun the day they cut off his body cast, when he was six and a half years old. The carpet had felt strange beneath his feet, uneven, and he’d wondered why he couldn’t straighten up all the way, why he felt lopsided. He’d thought maybe he was just stiff from so much bed rest. He had tried to stretch. Then he had looked into the glass. For a second, before he saw his own face, his own body—stunted and crooked, terrifyingly unfamiliar, but his just the same—he had glimpsed someone entirely different on the other side of the mirror: another little boy, one he had no trouble recognizing.

“O!—Cruel fate! Horror of horrors!”

“Aah!” Webern grabbed the rum bottle and whirled around, brandishing it like a weapon. A spectre loomed a few feet away. It occurred to him that he should have picked up the sword instead. “Get away!”

The spectre moved closer, and Webern lowered the bottle.

“Sorry, Dr. Show. I couldn’t really see you.”

Schoenberg swept the top hat from his head and held it reverently to his chest.

“This wretched, vile duty! I cannot tell you—but I must. Bernie—young Bernie—the dark horseman of fate has swung his cruel axe.” His hooded eyes lowered; one hand stretched out as if it held a skull.

Sometimes Dr. Show was tough to understand when he shifted into full-on Shakespearean mode. Webern squinted at him.

“What do you mean?”

“O, torment me no longer!” Schoenberg turned away. “I cannot say. But come quickly! There may still be time.”

Dr. Show’s black tuxedo jacket rippled in the breeze as Webern followed him back to the campsite. Webern listened for his friends above the plunging waves, but he couldn’t hear them at all now—no laughter, not even a note of Louis Armstrong. When he saw the other performers standing in a tight circle around something he couldn’t see, he wanted to go running down the beach in another direction. But he kept moving forward, drawn almost against his will. He saw his feet plodding along the sand, tasted sea air spiced with woodsmoke, and felt the heavy bottle in his suit coat pocket
bump bump bump
against his thigh. In his mind, he saw his face again as he’d seen it in that sword.

The hushed circus performers turned to look at Webern and Schoenberg as they approached the campfire. Vlad and Fydor laced their arms around each other, as if they were afraid of being separated. Al held the concertina in one hand; the other covered his mouth, hiding his expression. Brunhilde, fingering her locket, let it drop when she saw Webern coming. Explorer Hank wore an exaggerated frown and held onto his riding crop with two clenched fists. Eng sat on the ground with his legs over his shoulders, rocking. And Enrique stepped aside so Webern could see what so keenly held their attention.