Goldenland Past Dark (14 page)

Brunhilde smoothed her neatly barbered beard and reached under the dressing table for her Dresden suitcase. Opening it up, she ran a reverent hand over the photographs she had shellacked inside, then removed a tube of depilatory cream from the tangle of clothes and squeezed a dollop out onto her finger. Slowly, tenderly, she massaged it into the hollow between her breasts. In Germany, she had been the Girl Esau, but in America, the customers liked their bearded ladies smooth and feminine everywhere but the face. She rubbed a bit more cream onto her forearms and the knuckles of her hands, then considered the tube for a moment. Enrique had stayed behind in Lynchville. Would Dr. Schoenberg finally call his circus
kaput
if another act—say the animal taming—also fell to tatters? Would he finally perform a disappearing act of his own?

Brunhilde imagined tiger fur in the sawdust, Hank’s resignation—the last straw. In her mind, Schoenberg stood over a burnt-out campfire, wet logs and char, while the remaining circus players slept in their tents. He unlocked the yellow Cadillac, and drove away to a new city where he would live alone under a new name, a new set of pretenses, a place where no one could track him for payment of any kind. He would have to see the necessity of it, deluded though he was. He would finally have to understand. Only a child would choose a warped mirror over one that showed him the truth.

Had it not been for the distractions of love, Webern couldn’t have stood what was happening to the circus. The day after the revelation of the empty cashbox, the players had gone about their business as usual. They rolled up sleeping bags, cleaned out the tiger cages, slurped bad coffee, and burned their fingers smoking cigarettes down to the last puffs. They drove five hours, set up camp in a new town, ate, threw their paper plates in the fire, and slept uneasily amid the drone of the cicadas, the woolly darkness that muffled their dreams. The next morning, Webern went to the main street to tack up advertisements, and when he came back his heart lifted at last: Al, Eng, and Vlad and Fydor were hoisting the orange canvas up the big top’s centre pole, and the fabric, filthy though it was, gave off a kind of radiance that warmed him like hope.

The show there drew a decent crowd, and by the end of the evening the cashbox wasn’t empty anymore. But something had changed. The players didn’t debate the merits of a late night visit to the liquor store versus a local moonshine till, and they didn’t loudly argue about what had drawn the biggest laughs or who upstaged whom. Instead, they scattered as soon as the show was done, as if the fact they were still putting out the effort embarrassed them. Webern took Nepenthe to a malt shop in town, but it was already closed. He folded a flower for her from a piece of red cellophane he found blowing in the street.

Lately, Schoenberg had more or less retired to his tent, only emerging for performances or when they packed up to leave town. He’d given up driving the Cadillac, preferring instead the company of the tiger cubs, Fred and Ginger, and the high-piled supplies that bounced along in the red trailer behind the Jeep. He made a strange sight when they opened the door, invariably slouched against one metal wall like a broken doll or a prisoner. Webern couldn’t understand why he’d prefer it in there, with the dismantled bleachers and rolled-up posters, the air thick with the smell of the cats’ straw, but Schoenberg said it helped him think, that he required solitude to draw his plans.

If solitude was all he really wanted, then Schoenberg was a lucky guy, because he was by himself nearly all the time now. He almost never talked to Webern around the fire, and he didn’t even give him orders much anymore. Webern missed the hours he’d spent trudging off to the grocery store with a list written in that unmistakable flourishing hand, the afternoons he’d wasted raking the sand in the ring while Dr. Show looked on, calling instructions into a bullhorn.

Webern had always thought that if he could get away, just for a few hours, he would come up with clown acts that would take the shapes of his dreams, that he would rival even the greats whose feats he’d read about in library books: Joey Grimaldi, Weary Willie, the Fratellini Brothers, Otto Griebling. But now that he had the time, he didn’t use it. Instead, he whiled it away with Nepenthe, bringing her lime popsicles and thumbing through the books she carried in her trunk when she didn’t feel like talking. Though Freud and the poets featured in the heavy volume
Modernism and You
weren’t much like the fairy tales of his childhood, it was comforting to lie by the side of Nepenthe’s kiddy pool, surrounded by pages open like friendly wings. Sometimes, though, he had to look up at her, slouched there in the icy water, a peach pit rolling on her tongue, and wonder just what exactly she was thinking.

Dear Bo-Bo,

I’ve never been happier than I am right now, and I’m still pretty sad. It’s just like you always used to say: “Every rose has thorns, every burger’s got bones.” This postcard is from Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Hope you are well.

Love, Bernie.

Webern stamped the postcard and turned it over. On the front was a picture of an old lady waving a hatchet, standing in a splatter of broken glass. Definitely the kind of thing his grandma would appreciate. He leaned his head against the Cadillac’s window and watched the fields fly by. A barn drifted past, its skeleton visible through the chinks in its boards. Beside him, Vlad controlled the steering wheel while Fydor inspected a map. The Cadillac felt wrong, all wrong, without Dr. Show driving it.

Although they never discussed it, Nepenthe and Webern both knew that things had changed once he bought the condoms. As if it were a joke, they started to imitate a married couple. For awhile, she stopped calling him “kiddo” and used “honey” instead; he started kissing her on the cheek when he came home. One afternoon, he even came back to discover her washing his clothes in her kiddy pool.

“You take such good care of me,” he said tenderly.

“I found a flea,” she retorted. “I figured it was probably yours.”

Webern still turned his back when she changed, but he did it willingly now, without waiting for her to insist. He knew it was only a matter of time.

But still, the night they finally lost their virginity, Webern wasn’t prepared at all. As usual, he fell asleep beside Nepenthe on top of the sleeping bag, and sometime later he half-heard her splash into the icy waters of her kiddy pool. Webern moved through vague, dim dreams that floated like clove smoke around his head until sometime around five in the morning, when he woke to Nepenthe’s kisses.

“Hey,” she whispered. Wet tendrils of her hair dangled in his face, but she was dressed in her pink chenille robe, and the thick fabric felt warm and dry beneath his hands. Webern kissed her back, and soon she lay beneath him on the floor of the tent. He reached for the tie of her robe. Nepenthe stared up at him, the beginnings of a scowl showing in the cracks around her eyes. But she didn’t push him away as he loosened the knot. He thought it was sweat he tasted, then realized it was tears.

“It’s all right,” he told her.

“Oh, sure, all right for you maybe.”

“What?”

“Forget it. Just do it quick, like a Band-Aid.”

Webern undressed her. Nepenthe didn’t move. She lay stiffly on her open robe, her arms at her sides. Webern looked down at her body. The scales, flat and silvery-pale, caught the early morning light like plates of mica. In the show, Nepenthe appeared onstage naked except for a loin cloth, stitched from green leather to resemble a swamp leaf, but she always lay on her stomach. Now Webern saw her breasts for the first time. The nipples, wrinkled pink, reminded him of dried rose petals. He leaned down to kiss her hip and noticed the initials ER embroidered on her underpants.

“What’s this?” he asked, touching the letters.

“Nothing. Doesn’t matter. Maybe I got them in a hospital or something.”

Webern scrambled across the floor to his suitcase, then returned with the Napoleons. He kicked off his jeans, then crawled back toward Nepenthe.

“Oh, no you don’t. If I’m naked, you’re naked, too.”

Webern took a deep breath, then pulled off the shirt. Nepenthe touched his hump, feeling the jagged scar there.

“Where did you get this?”

“Maybe I got it in a hospital or something.”

“Okay, okay, explain it later.” She put her fingers in his mouth.

Afterwards, he did explain, about the accident, how they rushed him to the hospital after the fall and stuck him back together the best they knew how. About how they saved his spinal cord, but made some mistakes; with his back, of course, but maybe also with his growing, because they never figured out exactly why he stopped at three foot ten and just stayed there. He told her about how he’d been a mess of blood and splintered bone; how he’d hit the ground flat on his back, and woke up in a body cast covered with the signatures of strangers. He tried to show Nepenthe the star-shaped scar at the base of his skull, faded now but still visible beneath the crew cut, but then he realized she was asleep, for the first time asleep right there beside him. At the time, he felt happy, but later, much later, he would wonder if she heard his story, if she understood he had been normal once—if she knew that like her, he’d never expected to turn out this way.

The clown stands in the centre of the ring, awash in the white glow of the spotlight. He wears his checkered harlequin suit with the soft silk collar, and beneath one eye hovers a single bright blue tear. As the clown stands there, waiting, romantic music begins to play, lovely but warped and strangely distant. It is a waltz, but a waltz echoing faintly from a faraway window, a waltz played on a child’s piano left to dust in an attic.

Before too long, the dance partner arrives. She is seven feet tall, hirsute, lumbering on paws that thump like great overturned tom-toms, but this bear is gentle, and she embraces the clown softly, almost demurely. As the two move together, always in the washed-out glow of the spotlight, the audience does not gasp at the danger, nor do they laugh at the unlikely pair, one towering, the other hunched. Rather, they watch with tenderness, nostalgia even, remembering, perhaps, an improbable dance that they once shared, awash in the softening glow of moonbeam white.