Goldenland Past Dark (21 page)

That night, after Venus de Milo finally sashayed back toward the cabin she shared with five other girls from the Parliament, Webern lay in bed with Nepenthe. He watched the lights of the little towns swim by their window. Heat lightning flickered in the June sky, brightening the storm clouds into enormous purple balloons. They were in Illinois, probably not too far from Dolphin River. In all his travels, he still hadn’t been back since that evening, many years ago now, when his old ringmaster had first stepped out of the Cadillac under the streetlight, dressed all in black like a darker slice of night. That memory and the town were inseparable now. When Webern squeezed his eyes shut, Dr. Show’s skin, always so immaculately pale, took on a greenish tint, as though Webern were seeing him through the bottom of a glass of chartreuse.

“Bernie? You still awake?” Nepenthe whispered from inside the spoon their bodies made.

“Yeah.”

“You really did do a good job in the show tonight. I was watching.”

“Really?” Since the Parliament of Freaks was on the midway, not under the big top, Nepenthe had to make a special trip to see Webern’s act. Most of the time she just went home instead. More than once, he’d hurried back with his makeup still on to find her already asleep on the couch, a satirical limerick about Robert McNamara half-finished and forgotten in her lap.

“Uh-huh. I liked it. That thing you’ve been practicing? Using the fork as a backscratcher? You did it exactly right.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Webern didn’t know quite what to say. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if somehow he should have known she was there. He imagined Nepenthe lurking in the shadows, the child’s tiger mask covering her face, as he dunked his hands in pink paint up to the elbows and stuck marshmallows in his ears. He kissed the back of her neck. The dry scales smoothed under his tongue.

“Venus attacked me tonight,” he told her. “But don’t worry, I resisted.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Right after I showed her the pie routine. How can you stand having her around? She’s such a floozy.”

“I trust you. Besides, everyone’s got a fetish.” Nepenthe rolled over to face him and rubbed her knuckles against his hump. “Guess what mine is?”

If Webern had gotten more focused and intense over the years, Nepenthe had softened; she went without her gloves and veil inside the Parliament tent even between shows, and cried more easily—a movie, a song, a hangnail could set her off. But Webern couldn’t tell if she’d gotten more used to her life as a freak, or started to despair because of it. There were some things they still didn’t talk about.

Some mornings, Webern woke up to the sound of her hiccupping into a tissue, but when he tried to rub her shoulders, she just turned away and pressed an ice pack to her brow. She was always hot, too hot, but she didn’t bother with the kiddy pool anymore. She didn’t bother with much of anything that might make her feel better, unless she could light it or drink it. It hurt Webern that he couldn’t console her. In the months after Dr. Show’s death, Webern had wanted her to hold him all the time, to crush the sadness out of him if she had to. But Nepenthe wasn’t mourning someone, and she didn’t want comfort. So, as much as he hated it, Webern had grown used to listening to her cry.

The morning after he performed the Martian routine, though, Webern woke up to utter silence and stillness in the boxcar room. With an unpleasant lurch, he realized he hadn’t dreamt. He tried to cling to any strands of fantasy still cobwebbing his head, but it was too late. If they had been there at all, they were gone now.

Webern carefully climbed over Nepenthe and out of the bed. He hated nights when he didn’t dream, and they happened much more than they used to. It scared him a little, going through life without dreams would be like being dead half the time. And onstage he would be just as dull as Happy Herbert, whose entire oeuvre consisted of sticking a whoopee cushion down the back of his pants.

Webern went to his trunk, swung back the lid, and pulled out a pair of fresh boxer shorts, then went over to the couch, where he found his eyeglasses jammed between two cushions. They were smudged and sticky from the pie. He put them on and scratched his hump thoughtfully. He noticed the train had stopped moving; outside, wagons clattered, and farther away canvasmen cursed at each other as they raised the big top. That meant it was probably after nine o’clock, maybe later. By now all the good donuts would be gone from the cookhouse.

As Webern stood there in his boxers, idly wondering if he should bother getting dressed before suiting up for the one o’clock rehearsal, he heard an unfamiliar sound: a knock, one-two-three, on the outside door of his cabin. No one ever came by performers’ rooms this early, and a chill of nervousness shivered through him. Maybe the Martian act hadn’t gone as well as he thought—it had been a little far out, to use a favourite phrase of Nepenthe’s. He imagined a tough-looking messenger standing on the doorstep, holding a pink slip. Or maybe it was just a bunch of the other clowns, sent over to pie him into submission.

“Um—just a minute,” Webern called, hurrying back over to his trunk for a T-shirt. Pulling it on, he gave the room a quick once-over. Nepenthe stirred in bed; one naked thigh slithered over the blankets. An empty baking tin, surrounded by creamy splatters, half-hid under the couch. An ashtray shaped like a sombrero balanced precariously on a stack of Nepenthe’s LPs, its ceramic hat-brim crowded with green and yellow butts. An overturned jam-jar lay in a dried purple-brown puddle, and a box of Napoleons lay open between two wide-toed, red patent leather squeaker shoes. The knock came again: one-two-three. Hesitantly, Webern went over to the door. Housekeeping didn’t matter much anyway. It wasn’t likely to be a health inspector.

Webern unlatched the door and opened it. The man stood there in the sunlight, blinking. In his grey, worn suit and fedora, he looked for a moment like a Fuller Brush salesman, or an agent from an insurance company, but he didn’t offer his hand for Webern to shake. His face looked ruddy and ill-used, and his nose massed with split capillaries, nearly as red as a clown’s. Webern couldn’t speak at first, and when he finally did, the one word he croaked out seemed nearly false to his still disbelieving ears.

Webern’s father was six feet tall
, with large watery eyes and a cardboard briefcase. His crew cut sparkled silver; his skin was so red it looked boiled. Webern had almost forgotten the stiff, slow way he moved, the strange whistling sighs his breath made. The old man dolefully removed a Porky Pig Pez dispenser from the cushion of the sofa, then sat down and turned the plastic device over in his hands, snapping it open and shut. His motions were deliberate and methodical, but perfectly inconsequential. He looked like an extra in one of the clown acts, doing stage business in the background that no one would remember.

Nepenthe bustled around the train car, the tie of her bathrobe cinched tight around her waist, and Webern watched his father’s eyes follow her as she moved to and fro. She dropped the pie plate, flecks of bacon, and the contents of ashtrays into a greasy brown paper bag, then picked up a can of soda from the floor and popped the tab. It exploded in her face.

“God fucking damnit!” she screamed. Irritated, she violently scratched her arms, then raked more hair down over her eyes. Webern’s father folded his large rough hands and gazed up at the ceiling. Between his shoes and pant cuff, threadbare socks showed.

“Your great uncle was in a wild west show,” he said. “He died on a wagon train. I guess it’s time you knew, you have Cherokee blood. Or maybe Italian.”

Webern stared at the old man, who slumped on the couch like his back was crooked too, and a memory returned to him, of the weeks after his parents’ car accident, when his father still limped slightly from an injury he’d sustained. People had taken their flaws for a family resemblance, when in fact it was only bad luck, separate, undeserved, and excruciating. That was when Webern first realized he didn’t want to be mistaken for a smaller version of his father. He handed the old man a cup of coffee and sat down on a pillow on the floor. The rug stretched out between them. This was as far away as he could get.

“Is there anything I can get you, Mr. Bell?” Nepenthe yelled, using a blow-dryer to blast splashed Moxie from the curtains. As the liquid dried, pale, continent-shaped stains remained.

“You can call me Raymond!” his father shouted back.

“Ray Gun?”

“No, Raymond!”

“What?”

“RAYMOND!” his father yelled just as Nepenthe switched off the blow-dryer. His roar hung in the air for a moment before he coughed and returned his gaze to the ceiling.

“You can’t be very comfortable down there,” he finally said to Webern. He made his first darting pass at eye contact.

“Did you come all the way here just to tell me about Sitting Bull?” asked Webern. His voice sounded angrier than he expected.

Raymond took off his hat and handled it gently—flexed the brim. “Ha.” He changed his tack: “It’s been too long, son, too long.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy.”

Raymond glanced around. His eyes lingered on an empty bottle of rum, adorned with a wreath of Silly String. “I can see that.”

If the old man was trying to make him feel guilty, it wasn’t going to work. Webern remembered more than one occasion after his mother’s death when Willow and Billow had disappeared for days at a time, and their absence had neither cheered nor disheartened Raymond, whose sports games had continued to echo uninterrupted from a living room stinking of gin.

“So, why did you come find me now?” Webern asked. He emphasized the last word a little.

“Well, it’s like this, son,” said Raymond. He squeezed his fedora between his palms. “Your grandma Bo-Bo is failing.”

“Failing? She’s sick?”

“I’d say it’s worse than that.”

Nepenthe, who had been streaking the train car’s window with a damp blackboard eraser, stopped to look over her shoulder for Webern’s reaction. Webern stared down at his knee, pudgy and misshapen, half-covered by the hem of his boxer shorts. An image of Bo-Bo, not half so vivid as the previous night’s, hovered before him, and he saw her pipe—her eye patch—her monkey—in a quick impressionistic swirl. Then, just as quickly, she was gone.

Webern had lived with Bo-Bo for some months after his mother’s death, but though he had come to rely on their daily chess games and the comforting taste of the raccoon meat she roasted each night, the time they had spent together blurred in his memory. No one image stayed seared in his mind the way his mother’s every gesture seemed to, even though Bo-Bo was still alive. Alive—but failing. He hadn’t seen her for almost six years.

“I don’t understand,” he said now. “What’s going on?”

“Well, we’re none of us getting any younger, son.”

“I know that, I’m not an idiot.” Webern was trying to get his father on a technicality. “But did you talk to the doctor?”

“He says it doesn’t look good. And your Bo-Bo, well, she more or less asked me to take you to her. So, when I saw this—” Raymond pulled a folded poster from his jacket pocket and smoothed out the creases with his hand. Webern recognized it immediately. In the picture, an artist’s rendering, a hunchbacked clown waved a red cloth at a charging rhino. The clown’s face, a wide-eyed caricature of terror, bore little resemblance to Webern’s, and the hump was on the wrong side, a fact he still registered with annoyance. His one poster, and they’d done it all wrong.

“When I saw this, I knew it was you,” Raymond continued. He tapped a finger triumphantly on the hump. “I said to your Bo-Bo, I’ll bring him to you.”

“Bring me there? But Dad—” Webern struggled to lower his voice below squeaking range. “Dad, I can’t just leave my job.”

Sometimes, the old man still had the bewildered, wide-eyed gaze of a boy. He blinked at Webern, then shook his head slowly. “She’ll be very disappointed to hear that. You know, when your mother died, your Bo-Bo didn’t have a thought for herself. Bring him here, she said. I’ll take care of him.”

It hadn’t gone like that at all. Little Webern, hovering near a doorway in his pyjamas, had overhead that conversation. He had been eight, but even now he could still play back every cadence in his mind. Raymond had blamed Webern for his grief and drinking, saying, “He’s like a weight on me” over and over until Bo-Bo finally replied, in her deliberate, gravelly voice, “If that’s how you really feel, you never should have had a son.” Now, when he spoke, Webern tried to keep his voice as even and rational as hers had been.

“It’s the middle of the season. You wouldn’t have seen my picture on that poster if they didn’t need me for the show. Now maybe in a few weeks—” Webern glanced over at Nepenthe for help, but she still stood at the window with her back to him. She’d stopped cleaning. Webern tried to imagine how he must sound: like a prima donna, probably, putting his act before an old lady’s dying wish. The show can’t go on without me. As if that were true. He hated himself. He hated everyone: Bo-Bo, his father, Nepenthe, the circus. He looked back up at Raymond. It was funny how normal it was to see him, even after all these years—how nothing had really changed.

“Okay,” said Webern. “Okay. I’ll try to figure something out.”

By the time Webern left his train car, the hired hands had already spread the canvas and unloaded most of the animals. Since Nepenthe was a freak, they didn’t live in Clown Alley, and it was a bit of a trek down the length of the train to the cars where the other clowns—mostly single, all of them men—bunked together and rehearsed. As he walked, Webern sidestepped the burly men hefting trunks and the nefarious claws of the big cats, which swiped through the bars of the occasional unattended cage. He nodded toward Jerry, the Wild Man of the Congo, who touched the bone stuck through his nose in salute before returning to his mystery novel, and Celine, a long-legged tightrope walker who did not return his greeting. This was the time of the day Webern disliked the most—all hubbub and disaster—and he was glad when he reached a cabin that he thought of as Clown HQ, knocked on the door, and let himself inside.

Four of his fellow players were already there: Silly Billy, the unofficial head of the troupe, a lanky bald guy with a rubber face and a knack for tumbling; Professor Shim Sham, who wore his trademark white lab coat even now, over a wifebeater and a pair of pyjama pants; Pipsqueak, an irritating kid who’d joined the company three weeks earlier and constantly talked about his aspirations for “serious acting;” and Happy Herbert, the crudest clown that Webern knew, and the only other little person in the troupe. Webern hated it when people confused them. Webern’s clown name was Bump Chuckles.

“Heya, Bump,” Silly Billy said now, peering over the tops of the little half-glasses he wore offstage. From the look of the room, the clowns had had a late night, too. Several empty wine bottles lay beside the lower bunk, and the four men sat at a table littered with empty glasses and playing cards still sticky with fermented juice. “You look spic and span. What’s the occasion?”

Webern pulled up a chair. He was wearing his clean jeans and a collared shirt he’d begged off a girl from wardrobe.

“Listen, I need some time off the show.”

Pipsqueak whistled, a confused bird twitter. Professor Shim Sham raised his woolly eyebrows.

“You get the gator girl knocked up or something?” Happy Herbert asked.

“Nothing like that,” Webern said. He picked up a joker from the table and turned it in his hands. Two laughing faces mirrored each other across a divide, one right side up, one upside down. “My grandma’s dying, I guess.”

“How soon you have to leave?” asked Silly Billy.

“Soon as possible. Today.”

“And how long till you’ll be back?”

“Not long, it doesn’t sound like.” Webern wiped his glasses on his shirt. “A week, tops. Not even. I could probably meet you guys in Little Falls. You think anybody in management’ll notice if I’m gone?”

“Notice?” Pipsqueak asked. “Jeez, Bump, you’re the whole show.”

“Kid, you’re forgetting. Management never
watches
the show. We could go out there, high on glue and dressed as ladies, they’d never know the difference. As long as they sell their peanuts, they’re happy.” Silly Billy cleaned his nails with a penknife, then gestured at Webern with the blade. “Tell you what. We’ll cover for you in the acts. If payroll comes around asking, we’ll tell them you’re sick, but my guess is they won’t.”

“You sure?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Silly Billy nodded across the table. “We’ll put Herb in your spot.”

“That’s right. Huh huh.” Happy Herbert’s laugh sounded like rusty plumbing; even before makeup, his lips were fat and red. “Nobody’ll even miss you.”

Webern wanted to smack him. Too bad he wouldn’t be around to do it in the show tonight.

“All right,” Webern said finally. “See you in Iowa, then.”

When Webern came back to the boxcar, he found Nepenthe lying on the bed, reading the back of a record sleeve. On the cover, a suburban house blasted off into the night sky.

“So you talked to the guys?” she asked. “You’re definitely going?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I hope you have a good time. Without me.”

“It’s not exactly a pleasure trip. You heard my dad. She’s dying.”

“Supposedly.”

“Are you
mad
at me?”

“Nah.” She hid her hands in her robe sleeves. “I don’t know what I’m worried about. I just feel like something terrible’s going to happen if you leave.”

“It’s not like I want to go.”

“But you will.”

“You would, too.” Webern went over and sat down on the bed. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

Nepenthe reached into the windowsill aquarium and broke off a piece of rock candy. She folded Webern’s hand around it.

“To remember me by,” she said.

Webern looked at the green crystals. He and Nepenthe had never been apart for more than a day before. Being with her now was almost like old times, when they were first together—he filled up with sad, sweet longing, knowing they wouldn’t sleep in the same bed that night.

“I’ll be finished with it by the time we’re out of the parking lot.”

“Guess that shows what you think about me.”

Webern set the rock candy on a stack of LPs, then rolled Nepenthe over on her back and untied her robe. He scratched the scales on her belly the way she liked him to, until thin grey moons of her dry skin started forming under his nails.