Buttercup (4 page)
***
strong man
, was also an artist. He made the best posters of her. Amidst Sylvester’s things were gifts from men vying for her time. She loved the music boxes mostly. Some even gave hats or rhinestone necklaces. Nothing too extravagant for a carnival Negress, still they were hers and hers alone.
Tiny allowed it. He thought it good for business to have regular customers.
He would even grant a private show or two. But the rules were to never be broken. Lone Wolf was on hand to make sure no one dared. The rule for all was 'look but do not touch.' Buttercup no longer knew the pleasures of a man. Not after Silvio Garelli.
Of all of the parts of the carnival, here in her train car with Sylvester is where she felt safe. No more forlorn nights on a cold cot in a ratty tent.
She’d earned the right to her own.
Buttercup rose from her chair. She tightened the sash to her robe and picked up Sylvester’s things. He slept in her bed. His light snore told of a day of frolicking and mischief. After dropping his britches and hand sewn shirts in a basket nearest the vanity, she fetched the paper that a townie had left behind.
Her time was short. She could already hear the grunts and shouts of the rousties who pitched the game tents. Soon they’d be calling for her.
But she would make time for this. Buttercup turned up the flame on the kerosene lamp just a tad to make the lettering rise.
‘BLOODSHOT AT IT AGAIN!’ the headline read.
Buttercup dropped to her knees before her chest of secrets. Reading, she held to every word in print. The article proclaimed that Silvio had made away with an undisclosed bounty in a spray of bullets. It also asserted that his band of thieves were terrorizing good citizens while emptying the banks of their meager holdings. She turned the page. Her heart leapt to her throat when the only picture they had of him, a jail-shot, greeted her.
Silvio scowled at the photographer, his glare dark and menacing.
But it mattered little. He was ever so handsome. Unruly waves of black hair, dark eyebrows brooding over the dreamiest pair of jeweled eyes set his face like that of a portrait. Buttercup traced her fingers over his image.
The anger was there too. A hate filled glare at the photograph told of his bloodthirst for revenge. He was not the boy she knew. This man, this thief and killer was far from the man she wished he’d be, despite what became of him because of her. The date on the paper was yesterday. The city of Jefferson was only sixty-five miles east. She pressed her lips together, secretly wondering. How close?
“Della! Tiny says an hour.” A hard bang on her train car door followed. Sylvester rolled on his side. Della expelled a deep sigh. She lifted the lid to her cedar chest; there she tucked the newspaper inside underneath the bible and a journal she kept as a girl. Silvio was not to be.
She’d accepted that painful truth long ago. Della rose from her knees and joined Sylvester on her bed, made softer by pillows. Holding him before a show always made her suffering ease.
Six Years Earlier
1932 Kentucky –A Dancer’s Dream and A Bootlegger’s Scheme
“Della!” Lady Joyce screeched. “Della!”
“Coming! I’s right here!” Della said, throwing open the train car door. Held tightly in her small hands was a large tin of tepid water. The flimsy door swung shut behind her with a smack. In the back, Lady Joyce moaned. The small, cramped, confined space was decked for a queen—a carnie queen.
Lady Joyce rested on a bed of shiny purple and gold pillows. Multi-colored beads, strung up like lines of jewels, were pinned over and tied back by a silk scarf to keep from concealing the back of the trailer. Della believed them to be magical stones when she was a girl. She even stole a few. Balancing the tin of water, she ambled her way toward the back.
Lamps, two of them, were covered with sheer scarves. They cast the place in red lighting, which doubled the shadows. She stumped her toe in her hurry and sloshed the water back over the front of her dress. Della grunted. Her eyes sought a place to set it down. Lady Joyce was everywhere. Frames with her dancing smiling face during her Vaudeville days were tacked to the walls, and her costumes hung about. This train car and Tiny’s were the only two that were wired with electricity. Lady Joyce actually had a radio.
“You yelling so loud you scaring away the townies,” Della smirked.
She swallowed her laugh. Lady Joyce lay in her shiny black and gold polyester robe with her ankle, the size of a grapefruit, peeking through the slight opening at the hem. Tiny attempted to prop it up. She was in a lot of pain. Her skin was pale and pasty, and her eyes were puffy from crying.
She smoked from her long stem cigarette holder with a shaky hand.
“I’m telling you, Tiny!” she began. “Something should be done! I get bit, and I’m the only one suffering!” Lady Joyce groaned as another tear slipped down her rouged cheeks.
“There, there,” Tiny said, stroking her hand.
Della cut them both a look and shook her head. They were the strangest non-couple she’d ever seen. And growing up in a carnival, she had seen her share of strange things. She set the tin on the dresser, water sloshing over the top. Joyce would blow a vein if she used one of her imported silks to tend to the pus oozing from her foot. So she reached down to the front of her tattered dress and ripped at the hem. She submerged it in the cool water and listened.
Madame Danielle Danique, a gypsy snake handler and professed hater of Lady Joyce, said she accidently let her rattler loose. The rattler had to slither from one side of the carnival to the other to slip up behind Lady Joyce and take a plug out of her ankle. If it weren’t for Lone Wolf, that bite would have been the end of Joyce’s dancing days for sure.
Della wrung the cloth until all the remaining water seeped through her fingers. Her ears perked, and she feigned disinterest.
“Danique knows what she done, Joyce. She sends her apologies,”
Tiny groaned.
“Apologies? Apologies! The cunt! I want carnie justice!”
“Now hold on there, Joyce.”
“Look at my foot! Owe!” she shrieked, after a failed attempt to lift it.
“Steady yo'self,” Tiny said stroking her thigh with his nubby fingers.
“How can I when po’ Della got to go on without me? It’s my show!
I’m the one they pay to see from county to county! What them boy’s gon’
do with a colored gal waving her snatch in front of them? Huh? Ansa me that! We gots to cancel.”
“I can do it,” Della spoke up. “I did it in Henry County jus’ fine.”
Della crept over. She went to her knees. She applied the cool rag over the swelling. Tiny gave her a wink. He raised her with Lady Joyce since she could remember. The entire carnival did. Her mama ran off with a Creole magic man shortly after she was born. They were the only family she’d ever known. That’s how they did their own. No matter the color of your skin or the freakish deformity you were cursed with or your outlaw status, once a carnie, you were always a carnie.
"Well I can. You two both know I’m better than Trix. Way better.”
Tiny dropped back down on the footstool at the side of Lady Joyce’s bed. He removed his tattered hat and ran his finger over the thin wisps of hair sparsely covering his oversized head. At barely three feet tall, with stubby little fingers and short arms, he proclaimed himself to be the smallest ringmaster in the world. On some days, he was management, then ringmaster, barker or a diplomat to offer patch-money to pay off the nasty sheriffs that wanted to shut down the hooch tents.
Tiny may have been small, but his control over the Carnies was long. He could be mean and violent if pushed. Lone Wolf was his fist and the other carnies his muscle. Della had seen that side of his anger once and it scared her to death.
“She’ll be fine. If’in it gets out of hand, we’ll protect her. You know that.”
Lady Joyce looked over at Della, her large brown eyes welling with tears. Joyce was quite a striking woman. Plump with big breasts and hips, her hair was always platinum white from the peroxide shampoos. Her skin was ghostly pale and her eyes blue as rainwater. When she was dolled up and on stage, men would pay sometimes more than a dollar to touch her.
And when she took the customers into her train car, she could score as much as ten dollars from a dustbowl of a town like the one they were trapped in for the night.
She was Della’s idol, mother, advisor, and on days she wasn’t liquored on meanness, her friend.
“She aint ready,” Joyce said, her voice broken with emotion. “She shouldn’t.”
Della suspected that the problem was the crowd coming in for the night. Whites in the South were particularly nasty. Once a man waited behind Lady Joyce’s train car near Della’s tent after the show. He had hoped to barter some time alone with the hoochie-coochie starlet. He found Della instead, attacked her, and then tried to drag her off to the woods. Tiny and the other carnies got him good though.
Carnie justice.
Thanks to that mean bastard, the Carnival can’t ever travel to northern Mississippi again. And that’s when Tiny’s rule was made into law. No man, carnie or otherwise, was to ever touch Buttercup.
“I’s fine. I can do the show, and if they don’t like it then I don’t care.” Della stood up proudly. She was eighteen. Grown by all standards but still the baby of the group. She wasn’t a virgin either. She gave her cherry away to a townie when she was fifteen and did it once more for an ace behind Tiny and Lady Joyce’s back. She didn’t like doing what she called 'the pokie'. It felt like nothing between her legs. But she liked the attention. Problem remained that if Tiny or Joyce ever found out they’d skin her alive. Of that she had no doubt.
“Settle down, Buttercup. We all know what you can do.” Tiny waved her off. He patted Joyce’s thigh once more. “You rest. If you want to see to her, have Lone Wolf carry you in the tent. Otherwise, it’s Buttercup tonight.”
Joyce sighed. Tiny’s word was law. No one questioned it. Not even Joyce if the matter was decided. Tiny reached for his cane, a whittled walking stick made of old oak. Della grabbed it and handed it over. His dwarfed legs weren’t working for him as well as he’d like. He made his way to the train car door, stooped to pick up his hat, and sat it on his round head. He cast them one more parting glance. “You come on down in half an hour. Joyce, make sure she wears yellow. She’s our Buttercup after all.”
Della smiled. “Thanks, Tiny!”
She closed the door behind him. Before turning, she could feel Joyce’s’ eyes on her. “What is it? What’s so different from me performin'
with ya, than without ya?”
Joyce scooted back into her pillows, several dropping to the floor.
She grunted, putting down her cigarette for a fan. “The difference is that you gettin’ to like it too much. I should’ve never let you on. You coulda’
done the trapeze like Tiny wanted, or read them cards like Adeline. Hooch dancin’ ain’t just about rolling those brown hips of yours or turnin’ a few in the back of a train car, which I better neva’ catch you doin!” She wagged the fan at Della, then popped it open to chase away the sweat beading over her brow.
Della’s smile faded.
“Come here. All I want is to make sure you’re safe.”
Della moved closer. Lady Joyce patted the lumpy mattress on the bed for her to sit. She did. Her surrogate mother gave a sad sigh.
Della tried to comfort her. “I knows that. But I can help. Folk’s ain’t payin’ and comin’ like we need them to. We can’t afford to not have a show,” she sighed. “If you don’t like it, then fine. Tell me what to do and what it’s about other than what I do out there with you.”
“It’s about sellin’ yo'self, Della, and not just the physical. Sellin’ it all. They call it hooch dancin’ because you got to get them boys all liquored up so they thinking a peek and sniff is better than bread and potatoes on their family tables. They dangerous, Della, and mean. You know how mean they can get. Get ‘em all riled up and… you need me on that stage to handle them.”
“I hears you. I won’t do it. I trust you. Always have. We make the scratch how we can. I can play the shill and draw them marks over to Lone Wolf and Ed’s tables or sumthin’.”
“A colored gal in these times actin’ as an
outside-man
. It’ll clue in every one of them townies that you makin’ a play for their pockets.” Joyce shook her head, sinking back into her pout. Della knew the truth. They were living in the days of the soup kitchens and bread lines. Sober, these townies were looking for a fortune, not trying to spend it. Drunk, they all stumble into a hooch tent. These shows were the Carnival’s lifeblood.
Regular cons were only turning over pennies.
“Be careful is all. Jus’ be careful. Get Trixie up there tonight. Get a dress for you both.”
Della squealed. Leaping to her feet, she threw her arms around Lady Joyce’s neck. Her surrogate mother grimaced in a tight breath through her teeth. “Sorry!” Della laughed. “Okay then!” She turned to the stringed up line of costumes and snatched dresses before Joyce could speak. Then she ran for the door. Her tent was just beyond it. She couldn’t wait to get dressed.