The Circus in Winter (21 page)

But he loved the railroad itself, the idea of it, at least. As a boy, Earl loved to play down at the siding, where old cars sat abandoned, like mammoths waiting to die. His favorites were once owned by Wallace Porter, red Pullmans and yellow animal cars beaten gray by half a century of Indiana winters. He liked to go down there and imagine rocking in his sleep with the beat of the train, waking up each morning in a different town. After high school, after he married Peggy, he was offered jobs at the phone company and the railroad—he didn't even think twice.

But perhaps he should have. Sooner or later, VTX would give him the same choice put to the men who were already gone: move to Cincinnati or Jacksonville to keep your job or take a payoff and find some other way to make a living. It was only a matter of time before VTX closed the yard office. The signs were clear. The cinder block building on Canal Street needed paint and new windows; the panes broken by vandals had been covered by VTX with pieces of cardboard. Broken glass, garbage, and cigarette butts were scattered along the tracks snaking along the Winnesaw River.

Leaving Lima. The idea began to take on the distinct, inevitable edges of fact. His mother started inviting him over for lunch on Fridays and made Earl's favorites. "Don't know how long I'll be able to make beef and noodles and rhubarb pie for my baby," she'd say, start crying, and run into the bathroom, leaving Earl in the kitchen with his food and his father who said, "Now look what you done." Peggy put the pressure on him, too. Her folks lived in a nursing home nearby in Kokomo, and she visited them often. If Peggy skipped three or four days, her parents told horrible stories about the patients who didn't have family or friends stopping by. "They get bedsores, Earl. What good things they have come up missing. They cry and no one's there to hold their hand." Her worry kept them up half the night sometimes.

Peggy started putting brochures for correspondence courses and technical schools next to his La-Z-Boy. If he fixed the toaster, she told him he'd make a fine small-appliance repairman. Earl went from a pack a day to two. Sometimes on the way to school, Joey would point to the few businesses left in Lima—convenience stores, used car lots, quick-lube garages. "There, Dad," he said. "Why don't you work there?" and Earl tried to imagine himself punching a cash register, hustling cars, changing somebody's oil. He was forty-four years old.

In the end, Peggy saved them. She was the receptionist at the hospital, which was where she overheard one of the nurses, Altman's wife, say that she and her husband were looking for someone to manage their KOA. They were moving to Fort Wayne to open a Dairy Queen. Peggy acted quickly, and a week later, Earl sat with Altman in a golf cart, writing down the old man's warnings on the back of his VTX paycheck. Pool. Frisbee golf. Bathrooms. Gypsies.

 

THE GYPSIES
appeared five months later, on a muggy August morning as Earl was getting ready for work. He looked out his bedroom window, and through the wet mist, he saw it glittering in the distance, just like Altman had said. A train of Airstreams, Winnebagos, Chieftains, Avions, and Prowlers, thirty of them at least, coming down the road. One by one, they turned in the driveway and headed for the KOA A-frame. Peggy had just left to open the store, and Joey had gone with her to clean the pool. By the time Earl called in sick to the railroad, changed into tennis shoes, and ran down to the A-frame, the situation was already out of hand. Women in colorful skirts pulled children into the bathrooms, and teenage boys swam in the pool fully clothed. The game room was crowded with dark-skinned men pumping quarters into the pool table and humping the pinball machines. Joey was in the camp store behind the cash register, ringing up candy and cheap KOA T-shirts like crazy. Peggy had her hand around the wrist of a little boy who had tried to walk out with a Frisbee, and a gypsy woman, the mother probably, was yelling at Peggy in a language Earl couldn't understand. He thought the gypsies would speak Spanish, like the migrant workers who came through town around harvesttime. But this wasn't Spanish.

He tapped Peggy on the shoulder. "Thank god," she said, giving up on the boy, who walked out of the store with the woman and the Frisbee. "There," she said, pointing to a fat man chalking up a cue stick in the game room. "That's him. The king or whatever. I'd better go check the bathrooms." She stuck ten rolls of toilet paper down her mop handle and marched out the door.

Earl walked into the smoke-filled game room, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself.

"Are you new Boss Man?" The king ignored Earl's hand.

Earl put his hand in his back pocket. "I guess so. I'm the manager."

"I only talk to Boss Man." The king leaned his pool cue against the wall. "We stay for three days, okay?"

"That's fine. How many sites do you need?"

"Over there. We stay over there." The king pointed out the window to the campsites by the Frisbee golf course. They were closest to the woods, the most secluded, and, on the weekends, the most popular. But this was Tuesday, and the sites were empty.

"How many sites do you need?" Earl asked, trying to count the number of campers outside the pane-glass window.

"I don't know. Other Boss Man figure it out."

Earl got a map of the campgrounds and circled off a large area. "This is twenty-five sites. Sewer, water, and electric. How many vehicles do you have?" Outside the window, a few kids zipped around on quad runners, spraying gravel from the fat tires. "And those."

"Oh, many of those."

"I need license numbers. And you can only have one vehicle per site, or you have to pay an extra five dollars each."

From his back pocket, the king took out a roll of hundreds as thick as Earl's arm, held together by a rubber band. The king wet his fingers and laid ten bills on the counter. "This how much last Boss Man charge us. When we go, I to give you ten more. Is this okay, Boss Man?"

Earl stared at the bills on the counter. Technically, the king only owed him $900. Twelve bucks each for twenty-five sites for three nights. The rates were posted right over the counter, but Earl thought maybe the king couldn't read the sign. Instead, the king was offering him more than he'd made during the entire month of July, counting the Fourth. So far, Earl hadn't saved one dime toward buying the KOA; Altman's monthly profit estimates had been grossly exaggerated. At the moment, they had only one site filled, the Ramseys, an elderly couple on their way up to the Wisconsin Dells. Earl took the money.

Joey punched a one and three zeroes on the cash register, and Earl placed the bills inside, trying to be nonchalant. "Checkout's Friday at noon. No later. We're full up for the weekend." Earl pointed to the stack of registration cards, every site booked in advance for Labor Day, the last big weekend of the summer. "I just need you to sign here," he said, making an
X
on the registration card with his pen. The king made another
X
right next to it. "No," Earl said, "I need your name."

The king was walking out the door, but he turned and said, "You write John Smith." Outside, he held up his arm and whistled. Instantly, the game room, bathrooms, and pool emptied themselves of gypsies. The caravan headed back to the campsites, and Earl wondered where all they'd been over the years. Part of him wished he could be like the gypsies, but who lived like that anymore except for retirees and thieves? Earl hadn't even seen a hobo around for at least a decade. When he walked back to give them their three-day supply of garbage bags, Earl found the gypsies completely unhitched and unpacked, campfires ablaze, like magic.

 

THE NIGHT THE
gypsies arrived, Earl opened the
G
volume of the
Encyclopedia Americana.
He'd bought the encyclopedias for Joey, although it was clear his son had hardly used them. When Earl opened the book, the spine made a pained, cracking noise. Earl read the entry for "Gypsies" at the dinner table. Periodically, he'd look up at Joey and Peggy. "They're from India originally," he said, his mouth full of hamburger. "They speak Romany. Hitler gassed a bunch of them."

Peggy nodded her head and said, "Really? That's interesting, honey."

Earl ran his finger down the page. "It's this diaspora thing. They call us
gaje,
like gentile to Jews."

Raising her eyebrows, Peggy said, "Oh. They're Jewish?"

"No, they're not Jewish," Earl said, shutting the encyclopedia. "They're just trying to get by, you know?" Peggy and Joey nodded and kept eating.

In bed, Earl heard the gypsies singing and clapping into the small hours of night. Their voices blew in his windows, open to catch the night breeze. Earl got out of bed and pulled back the curtains. His own camper sat below him in the backyard, dark and abandoned, the wheels braced by two-by-fours. It was a Skamper with a small kitchenette, an oven, sink, refrigerator, bunk beds, and a bathroom stall. It smelled of cigarette smoke, mildew, and fish. When he bought it off a guy at work years ago, he told Peggy, "We can go anywhere now." He'd never seen the country. All he ever saw was the inside of the yard office and the trains passing by the window, bound for somewhere else. Once, Earl had taken them to Michigan, but that was as far as they ever got. When his vacation time rolled around for the next few years, either money was short, or something needed fixing. So instead, they'd camped locally—at the KOA. At night, Earl would sit by the campfire with a beer, trying to imagine that he was somewhere else—a New Mexico desert, a Colorado mountain, a redwood forest—anywhere but where he was, which was five miles from his house in town.

Ever since they'd moved to the KOA, Peggy had been after Earl to sell the Skamper. "We live at a campgrounds, for godssake. What do we need with a camper?" she said. Earl knew she was right, but he said, "I like the idea of keeping it around, just in case we get a chance to go somewhere."

Across the field, the gypsies' campfires flickered, and he imagined them moving north in the summer, south in the winter. In his dreams that night, he was in the king's Chevy Silverado, headed west with the windows down, mountains on every side.

***

IN THE MORNING
, the Ramseys came into the office to complain. "We're missing our lawn chairs and an Igloo cooler," Mr. Ramsey said. "I think we both know where they're at."

Earl remembered what Altman had said:
They pretty much take over while they're here.
Finally, Earl understood the deal struck between Altman and the king: Altman made a much-needed profit, and the gypsies got free rein of the place. Earl shrugged his shoulders at the Ramseys. "I'm sorry. There's not much I can do. I doubt they'd cough up your stuff anyway." He punched a key on the cash register, and the money drawer flew open. "Look, why don't I re-fund the two days you paid up for. Maybe you could head up to the Dells a little early?" Earl smiled, but he felt bad, buying them off this way. The Ramseys took the money, packed up their Winnebago, and headed for the highway.

After they left, Earl called the yard office to take a couple personal-leave days. He half listened to the "This isn't good teamwork" tongue-lashing from his supervisor, a College Boy named Jones—Travis or Trent or something like that. A few weeks earlier, College Boy had spotted boxes of VTX urinal cakes, toilet paper, and industrial cleaning supplies in the back of Earl's truck. He'd been saving on expenses this way, and College Boy knew it. "This is the last break you get, Earl," he said, and hung up.

Sitting at the camp-store counter, drinking his morning coffee, Earl tallied the numbers from the night before. The gypsy's $1,000. A bucket of quarters from the games. Sales in the camp store had doubled. Sure, a lot of merchandise walked out the door unpaid for, but the markup was high enough that he'd still come out ahead. As a sign of this blessing, a string of cars and trucks led by the king's Silverado passed by the window, shining in the pink morning light.

A few hours later, some of the trucks returned. The king, dressed in a suit and tie, walked into the office escorted by five young men in jeans and short-sleeved dress shirts, smelling of incense and cologne. "Boss Man," the king said, "where we find a pig and a sheep?"

Joey stopped refilling the candy jars, and Earl looked up from the T-shirt racks, losing his count. "Excuse me?" Earl asked.

"We christen new babies this morning. These the fathers," he said, gesturing to the men. "Every year, we come here, and then we have a feast."

Earl pointed out the store window. "There's grocery stores in town."

"We want big ones."

"You mean
alive?
"Joey said, his eyes wide.

Earl set his clipboard down on the counter. "There's farms all around here. You can ask. We just moved and I don't know any of them right well yet."

The king straightened his tie. "I understand. We be back later." He started to walk out of the store, but turned at the door. "Boss Man, you need paved driveway here. We do good job."

"Thanks, but I think everything's okay," Earl said, waving his hand.

The king shrugged and walked out the door. Children streamed into the camp store clutching quarters in their hands, clamoring for candy and pop. Earl's father usually only came out to help on Sundays with the pancake breakfasts (he was a navy cook during WWII and could prepare a meal for fifty more easily than for two). But today, Earl had assigned his father to stand guard in the middle of the store. He frowned, folded his arms sternly over his chest, and asked, "What do you want?" in a gruff voice anytime a child wandered toward the merchandise. The gypsy children fled to the game room, where Joey waited with his arms folded, trying to look as imposing as his grandfather. Peggy was on hold with the phone company. The pay phone outside the camp store was full; since the moment the gypsies had arrived, the booth had been occupied by a steady stream of gypsy women, gesturing and yelling into the silence of the enclosed glass, dropping coin after coin into the slot.

A skinny young boy ran up to Earl, who was wrapping rolls of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. "Boss Man, your machine took my quarter."