Mockingbird (16 page)

“Yes, I said yes.” She is still crying.

Pierrot turns his back to the audience and stands against a building. His bottom waggles as he makes a great show of unzipping himself. Silence falls in the intersection, and then everyone hears a faint trickling hiss. It goes on and on, and Pierrot leans further and further back from the building, until his sharp chin and his sharp nose are pointing directly at the sky. “AaaaaaaAAAAAaaaahhhhh!” he sighs, and then he pulls up his zipper so hard he does a backflip.

A moment later he returns to the Little Lost Girl, holding her shoes by their edges and making faces of disgust.

“It smells like pee,” the Little Lost Girl says.

“So it does.”

“But why? Why did you make the bet if you knew you were going to lose?”

Pierrot drops the shoes on the pavement with a splash and gestures behind him. “You see that crowd? I bet every person in that crowd one dollar that you would ask me to pee in your shoes.” The crowd cheers and people begin to reach for their wallets, laughing and shaking their heads.

“My shoes. They're ruined.” The Little Lost Girl looks at Pierrot. “You promised me you would show me my house.”

“So I did, and here it is!” Reaching beside the girl's head, he draws a photograph out of her ear. It is a picture of her very own house with the white picket fence and the yellow trim and the swing outside, and there is a dim shape you can half see in one window that might be her mother.

“But this isn't my house,” the Little Lost Girl cries. “This is only a picture!”

Pierrot is making his way through the crowd, collecting his winnings. “Don't whine, kid. You're lucky I left you that penny.”

“But—”

He turns sharply and leans down so the tip of his long sharp nose bumps against hers. “What did you expect? Something for nothing? Don't you see I'm trying to teach you a lesson? Once you lose something, you never get it back. That's
life,
see?” And before she can react he plucks the photograph from her hand and tears it into a hundred tiny pieces and throws them into the crowd like confetti.

The Little Lost Girl gasps. The bits of her home scatter in the wind.

“Want my advice?” Pierrot's face is suddenly weary, with no trace of a smile. “Hold on to that penny.”

The Little Lost Girl turns away. She does not say goodbye to Pierrot and she does not pick up her soiled shoes, but starts walking again, barefoot now, looking for her own house with the white fence and the yellow trim and the swing hanging down from the live oak tree outside. And if she hasn't found it, she's walking still.

Cash is cold. That's what Mr. Copper said. That's what I tried to remember. I did not think he would disapprove of me selling Momma's fetishes to Dr. Manzetti. But as for the other Riders . . .
In the days after I called Professor Manzetti, I tried not to look at them. I did not dare close the chifforobe doors, not after the Widow had opened them, but I did my best never to look inside. For all that, I could still feel the Preacher's hard gaze on my back when I was sitting at the kitchen table, or the Widow's pinched and malevolent stare. Worst of all was Pierrot's leer. I could not say whether he approved or disapproved of what I meant to do. But I knew that I amused him, and that was no good feeling.

Richard Manzetti said he couldn't come the following week to view Momma's memorabilia as he had a conference to attend. I vetoed the week after that, so as not to look too desperate to sell. Finally the appointment was set for May 1. For the first time in months I felt able to relax.

“You want to sell your mother's things?” Daddy asked when I told him about Dr. Manzetti's offer.

“You bet. We can split the money three ways.”

“I don't want any of it.”

“Daddy. Be reasonable.” He didn't answer. “Daddy, I really need it. I'm out of a job and I have a child on the way. This is a miracle. This is like maternity leave from God. After the baby is three months old, or maybe six, I can put it in daycare and go back to work.”

“Sounds like you've got it all figured out.”

“Daddy! Are you superstitious, is that it? Are you worried the Riders will be mad?”

“If the Riders don't like it, they will not need my help to deal with you,” he said drily.

“Hunh.”

We were quiet for a spell.

“Your momma always did like easy money too,” my father remarked.

Your parents always know how to poke your bruises.

Still, things were looking up. Morning sickness was past and I had an appetite again. If Daddy disapproved of the idea of selling Momma's papers and fetishes, at least he had not forbidden it. For me, the cash would be a godsend. While money was still flowing out of my bank account instead of in, the rate had slowed since I started living on the cheap, and the prospect of a fat check from Professor Manzetti made things more bearable. I even began to think that it wouldn't be so hard to get a job, which I would do sometime after the baby was born.

Actually it was becoming very hard to think of life after the baby was born. Every parent I talked to said, “You can't imagine what your life will be like!” So I gave up trying. September 20 loomed like a wall on the horizon and I could not think of anything beyond it (other than wondering under what possible circumstances Bill Jr. would be in my garden, playing with my baby. And why would I be smiling about it? Unless I had poisoned his drink a few minutes earlier, that is).

Not everything was perfect. Carlos was still stalling Candy about marriage, leaving her trapped between her desire never to see his weedy face again and her increasingly desperate sense that there would be hell to pay from the Widow if she didn't do as she had been told.

I worried about the Riders too. Being mounted twice was like being murdered twice. When the gods came into my head, they had obliterated me. Blotted me out. Just thinking about it terrified me, made my heart race and my head begin to pound.

And worse yet, what if I were doomed to be every bit as crazy as Momma? Crazier, maybe. Now that the Riders had come crashing into my life, I didn't think I had the strength to hold them in check even as well as she had. If it hadn't been for Momma's demons, I was sure I could be a good mother. Well, decent. Well, better than mine, anyway.

All my life I had worked so hard to control things. The Riders destroyed that. They did what they wanted and I couldn't stop them. I prayed every night there would be no more possessions. I prayed and I rocked in my bed, holding a pillow to my tummy where my little baby swam, journeying. I was so afraid I might turn into a mother like my mother was.

Then there were the footsteps.

Not heavy ones, not menacing. Light steps, indistinct. The sort of sounds a barefoot child might make. At first I heard them only as I was slipping into sleep, a footfall or two, maybe a light tread on the stair, and then I was dreaming. Finally I decided to stay up and listen for them.

Daddy was out of town, on the road in Louisiana. I was lying in my bed just after midnight listening for phantom footsteps when I felt the baby move for the first time. It was the strangest feeling, a tiny bump, so faint. A few minutes later I felt it again: bump. Light as a cricket brushing against my leg. Light as a moth trapped in my cupped hands. Filled with wonder, I put my fingers ever so gently on my belly. And at that very moment I heard the clear sound of a barefoot child running down the flight of stairs from my parents' floor to the kitchen.

I stayed awake all night with my pillow in my arms. Small noises crept upstairs from down below. The squeak of a kitchen cupboard opening. An hour later, a brief hiss of water from the kitchen tap. I knew it was the Little Lost Girl. Momma used to say you could hear her, late at night, and now I had.

Scared and yet happy, filled with a sense of portent, I drowsed, not daring to fall asleep. And somehow in my drowsing the tiny kicks inside me and the little noises downstairs ran together in my mind, so ever after I remembered them together. Those faint sounds. Those hidden children.

For the first time in my life I was examining every man I saw as a potential mate, and I have to admit my body returned an immediate
Yes!
when I opened the door and saw Richard Manzetti for the first time. He was a small, dark, intense man in his mid-thirties with a lean face, neatly trimmed beard, and very careful eyes. After a couple of brisk pleasantries he went to examine the chifforobe. He stayed there a long time. Finally he turned around. “Ms. Beauchamp, I want you to think very carefully about this decision. The investor who asked me to come here is prepared to offer you thirty thousand dollars for this collection. I would not blame you if you took it. But I would be disappointed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Right now there are
gods
in that cabinet. By the time they get to the trunk of my car, they will be just puppets. That is a loss.”

“If you think that, Dr. Manzetti, then you have never lived with a god.”

“Maybe.” His black hair was rather coarse. His eyes were very dark brown, almost black, with lots of tiny wrinkles around them. “Maybe you're right. And after all, they swapped Christ for thirty pieces of silver.”

“I know you,” I said suddenly. “You're the Preacher. You think you're here on your own, but actually it's the Preacher trying to get to me. I should have known they wouldn't go quietly.”

Professor Manzetti looked at me for a long time. “I am not aware of being anyone's instrument,” he said carefully.

“On my eighth birthday the Preacher gave me a whipping for caring too much about my presents,” I said. “Daddy had to be out of town the whole week and wasn't there to stop him. Momma had worked for two hours to bake me a cake, and afterwards there was a scribble-card from Candy and a new bicycle and a pretty yellow sundress. Momma had painted me the most beautiful card, six wild ponies running together. But the Preacher got her just as I was blowing out the candles. Threw the cake in the garbage to teach me a lesson. Ripped up the card. ‘Vanity, vanity.' That's what he said.”

“I didn't mean—”

“Don't you dare lecture me about gods,” I said. “Don't you ever dare.”

“Okay.”

“If you wouldn't trade a god for thirty pieces of silver, then you're a damn fool, Dr. Manzetti. I would like to see you one time when your head started to ache and you went dizzy and Sugar murdered you with the smell of peaches. I'd like to see just how much you'd like it. I'd like to see how you would feel three hours later when you woke up and found you had whored yourself to the gas station attendant. That really happened, you know. Me and Candy in the car for twenty minutes and Momma in the bathroom with the gas jockey. We were driving back from somewhere, maybe San Antone, and she was so ashamed when Sugar left her head. Did you write a paper about this, Dr. Manzetti? Do you know this story? How about the part where I wouldn't stop crying so she made me get out of the car on the side of the highway and then drove off saying that was what I deserved? Drove on out of sight. Came back for me forty minutes later. Did you write that up? Is that the holiness you are searching for? Or are the Little Lost Girl stories the only ones you care about?”

Just then I finally realized it wasn't me, Toni, talking anymore. Toni would have sat and seethed, or told Professor Manzetti to screw off. But not daunted him. Not tried to hurt him. ‘If you wouldn't trade a god for thirty pieces of silver . . .' That was purely Momma, in her best Gypsy Bitch incarnation.

It worked like magic. Professor Manzetti stood there at the kitchen table absolutely paralyzed, partly ashamed and partly fascinated and utterly hooked. I almost blew the whole effect of my speech by giggling; I almost lost it at the sight of him, still as a cat in the dog pound, trying to figure out what to say next.

My God, my mother was a bitch. Not your common or garden variety bitch, though. Momma was the Notre Dame of bitches, the Empire State Building. She had range like a b52 and more stopping power than a .357 Magnum. Women like her should only happen in operas. And like any woman in the opera, she had a boundless capacity for love. God she loved us. Me and Candy and Angela, John Simmons and Mary Jo and Daddy too. It's a wonder we were all still breathing.

I decided to ease up on poor Dr. Manzetti. Actually, I found him attractive as hell, even though he was kind of a bastard. I liked the little black hairs on his forearms. I liked his sense of principle, although it was woefully misguided in the case of the Riders. And I like a man who can hold his silence. I have come to see restraint as a great virtue. “You said you wrote a paper on Momma. Did you ever come here to see her?”

“No. I phoned and talked to your mother once, but she said she didn't want to see me or answer my questions. I tried to respect her privacy.”

I laughed. “Privacy? Momma loved an audience. She just didn't care for the truth, that's the problem. I can just see her face at the idea of a trained scientist coming to investigate her. It would be like inviting the IRS to come over for a friendly audit. Still, you should have called back again the next day, you know. Momma probably would have said yes. I don't think she could resist any listener for long.”

“I wish I'd known that.” He walked back over to the chifforobe. Carefully he reached for Mr. Copper's polished fetish. “May I?”

“No.” The word was out before I even stopped to think.

“Okay.” His hand froze and then retreated.

“Sorry. We just . . . we don't touch those,” I said.

“Okay.” He took a step back, away from the chifforobe.

“Sorry,” I said again, and immediately felt stupid for having told him not to touch the dolls, and doubly stupid for feeling stupid about it. Why are we always apologizing to men when we haven't done anything wrong? “So how did you come to hear about Momma?”

“When I was an undergraduate I went to New Orleans one year for Reading Week. I had a bit too much to drink,” he said. “I got lost.”

I waited. “And?”

He looked at me. “I got really lost. So lost I wasn't really in New Orleans anymore. I was down on the east side of the Quarter . . .” He stopped. “I haven't told this story very often.”