Goldenland Past Dark (9 page)

“Jesus God, kiddo, you’re wrecked.” She opened the car’s back door and negotiated him inside, pushing down on his hump to make him sit. She pressed a hand to his forehead. “Lay down, will you? I’ll get you something to eat.”

Webern shut his eyes. Green clouds, burned there by sunlight, moved across the inside of his lids. Hours later, he woke up, his head pressed against Nepenthe’s shoulder, a cold burger leaking grease in his lap. It was dark; shadowy trees blurred past the windows. Still, they were driving, driving, driving.

Dear Bo-Bo,

I’ve been looking out at the world through a windshield for so long, I’m starting to feel like one of the little people inside the TV. Ha-ha. Life on the road isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You’re probably smart not to drive.

Love, Bernie

Dr. Schoenberg’s circus finally stopped
in a town made of dead ends and chicken wire, where stray cats roamed the alleys and the street glistened wetly, as if it had just rained. Even though it was still September, something about this place reminded Webern of the day after Christmas. He found burnt-out firecrackers scattered in the street.

The town was Lynchville, West Virginia, and it was surrounded by forests that reached in toward it with creeping roots. The circus players set up camp in the one abandoned lot they could find, a field overgrown with long grey grasses under an ashen sky. When Webern walked through the field in the mornings, water filled his muddy footprints. They gathered sticks for the campfire, but the wood was damp. Their sausages tasted smoky and mushy on the inside.

The first day, the circus players pitched the big top, but their hearts weren’t in the show, and the few townspeople who came, dressed in faded calico, sat silent and unimpressed. Out under the lights, pratfalling in his hobo suit, Webern noticed there were only three children in the audience, including one little girl who never removed her finger from her nose. He wondered if perhaps a bigger and better circus had swept through town just before they arrived, taking with it all the starry-eyed dreamers and leaving behind only those with regrets, bad memories, and impossibly high expectations. Either that or he was losing his touch. No one even wanted his balloon animals here.

After an abysmal second performance, they tore down the big top. But they left their own tents up, staying for a third night—a fourth—and then finally for a whole week, the longest they’d ever parked in one town. Dr. Show didn’t send Webern around with the pay envelopes, and he didn’t remind the players that their valiant self-sacrifice was in service of the show’s glorious future. In fact, he barely spoke at all. He appeared briefly at breakfast one morning to tell the performers he was “getting his wits about him”—booking new venues and mapping a route to take them there, in other words replacing the schedule Boulder had stolen. But other than hitting Al up for pocket change to use in the local pay phone, Show did little to indicate that plans were really in the works. A light burned in his tent until late in the evenings, and when he emerged, always briefly, during the day, he came out in full costume, his moustache waxed, his bow tie straight, his tuxedo brushed, but his dark eyes haggard, red-rimmed, and depressed.

With no show to prepare for, the circus players spent long hours counting their meagre savings and speculating about how much worse their current situation would have to become before Schoenberg did something desperate and got himself arrested. The exact nature of his future crime was a matter of spirited debate. Vlad and Fydor contended he would pose as a purveyor of medicinal spirits, which would sicken one young woman and drive another insane. Hank prophesied that Schoenberg would attempt to harness the town’s feral cats to pull a float in the show; he’d be busted for animal cruelty, if they didn’t claw him to death first. Nepenthe spun the wildest stories, about Schoenberg seducing widows who resembled his mother only to dispatch with them during a symbolically charged “cut the lady in half” trick, but she generally trailed off just before the juiciest parts, when she saw the look on Webern’s face.

It did give Webern an ache to hear them all laugh about the prospect of Schoenberg working on a West Virginian chain gang. But he consoled himself with thinking that, even if their suspicions were well-founded, none of them would betray their ringmaster to the authorities: they were all dead broke, entirely dependent on Dr. Show to get them out of this godforsaken place. Enrique got a temporary job as a soda jerk at the local malt shop, replacing a young man who’d gotten a girl in trouble and disappeared, but he was making peanuts, and besides him, the rest of the players stayed away from the locals, who regarded them warily, not as curiosities but as intruders.

During the afternoons, the performers found ways to pass the time. Vlad and Fydor played “the Fool” with a deck of dog-eared cards; they shielded their hands from each other to little avail and cursed dead ancestors under their breath. Eng practiced new stretches. Al strung up a makeshift hammock between a telephone pole and a hickory tree, but the mesh fabric sagged to the ground as soon as he fit his jumbo lanky frame inside. Perhaps inspired by his own tales of animal cruelty, Explorer Hank fashioned elaborate, jingling collars for Fred and Ginger, and Brunhilde clipped pictures from an ancient pile of Life magazines, no doubt assembling materials for a Dresden attaché case. She was the only one besides Webern who didn’t join in the conversations about Dr. Show’s incarceration. One morning, over an early breakfast of remaindered bacon and toast made from hot dog buns, Webern found himself alone at the campfire with her and Al.

“The con up yet?” Al took his seat on the muddied cloth of his former hammock. He stretched, knocking Webern in the head with a gargantuan elbow. “Whoops.”

“He’s probably in there, working.” Webern offered the skillet to him. “When he takes us back out on the road again, you’re all going to have egg on your face.”

“Yeah, right.” Al observed the remaining scraps of bacon with disappointment. “I been with him longer than the rest of you. He’s a goner this time. We’re too broke.”

“Being broke doesn’t make you a criminal.”

“It does if you don’t like being broke.” Al squashed the last three hot dog buns together in his hand, then rubbed them vigorously in the bacon grease. Webern didn’t know how Al managed. Webern never got full himself on their rations, and he was less than half the giant’s size. “And he don’t like it.”

“By that standard, we are all criminals, Alfred.” Both men turned to look at Brunhilde. She reached for the empty hot dog bun bag. “Who would choose this life?”

“Well, I would.” Webern poured himself some more coffee, but it was from the bottom of the pot and mostly sludge. “I did.”

“Did you choose this life, Webern?” Brunhilde chuckled. She shook out the crumbs, then started filling up the hot dog bun bag with little pictures she’d cut out of her magazines. They showed through the wrinkled plastic: tanks, flags, a coach drawn by horses on fire. “I suppose you also chose the colour of your eyes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brunhilde didn’t say any more. She hummed loudly to herself. Webern dumped the coffee out of his mug and went back to the tent he shared with Al.

Pretending that no one would notice them leaving together, Webern and Nepenthe spent their afternoons exploring the woods that sprang up so near their muddy field. They found trails there, badly maintained—one could only be identified by the slashes of blue paint that marked the trunks of certain trees. Nepenthe often got far ahead of Webern on these excursions, and he struggled to keep up, watching her curls bounce as she slunk away, walking like it was an inconvenience to her.

Each day, they walked until they found the stream they nicknamed Beer Can Creek. On its banks, Webern peeled off Nepenthe’s gloves and veil—she never volunteered to take off any more than that—and they lay down on the blanket they brought with them to have a picnic. They used the word “picnic” very loosely. On the first day, Nepenthe brought a smushed peanut butter sandwich for them to share; after that, a bag of chips, then a donut. Webern brought a bottle of Coke, then a couple of Rheingold beers, then a half-empty bottle of hard cider. It didn’t matter much; mostly they were occupied with each other. Dead leaves crackled beneath the blanket as they rolled and grappled like wrestlers. And, just when things got to the point that Webern could barely stand it anymore, Nepenthe always extricated herself from him and started telling stories.

She obviously missed having a psychoanalyst. Lying on the blanket, arms folded beneath her head, peach pit rolling on her tongue, Nepenthe described her parents: her father, a company president, always staying in the city overnight for meetings; her mother, whose afternoons began and ended with the death-rattle of the cocktail shaker. She talked about her home in Connecticut, the cruel life of an all-girls’ boarding school, her longstanding aversion to horses (she’d once been bitten on the knee), ballet (she called tutus “an affront to women’s sexuality”), and tennis (“Swatting at those goddamn balls reminds me of killing yellow jackets at our summer house”).

Webern also found out that her deformity, which he’d assumed she’d been born with, was more recent than his own. Although Nepenthe’s scales had made brief appearances on her knees and elbows for as long as she could remember, her full-blown freakishness had not begun to take hold until 7th grade, when she’d started at the Appleton Academy. Even then, it had seemed containable for awhile—first it was just the legs—then the arms—then the back and shoulders. By the time it spread to the torso, neck, and face, she had already begun her visits to a vast array of Manhattan’s finest dermatologists. On weekends and holiday afternoons, when other girls went shopping in town or dressed up for mixers, her mother had driven the lurching, champagne-coloured Mercedes up the gravel drive to collect Nepenthe for her doctor’s appointments. But though the dermatologists charged plenty, they only made matters worse.

With every word Nepenthe spoke, Webern’s claim on her seemed to retreat to a smaller and smaller region of her heart. Sometimes it terrified him so much that he pulled her back down on top of him and kissed her fiercely on the mouth, even while she tried to keep on talking.

The clown, dressed like an organ-grinder’s monkey in a red suit and fez, stands on an overturned drum, frozen. He holds a pair of golden cymbals. A large silver key sticks out of his back. It glints in the spotlight.

A young girl happens along, wearing ribbons in her hair. She sees the clown, stops, and ponders him. She walks around him slowly, pokes him in the ribs, even kicks his shin. No response. She pouts, then sees the key in his back and suddenly understands. She twists it all the way around, then steps back to watch.

The clown bangs his cymbals together three times, drops them, then jumps down off the drum and runs offstage. He returns riding a unicycle. He circles the drum once, then hops off, rolls his ’cycle offstage, and, with a herky-jerk waddle, approaches the girl. He pulls a daisy from his pocket and offers it to her, then leans in, puckering up. But just as he is about to kiss her, he lurches forward and freezes again. Wound down.

The girl thinks this is a scream. Giggling, she lifts the clown up and puts him back atop the drum. She straightens him up, puts the cymbals back in his hands, then walks around him again. She twists his key—this time with some effort—in two full revolutions.

The clown bangs the cymbals together six times—faster now—then exits and comes back riding the unicycle. He circles the drum once, twice, then leaps off. In a sped-up waddle, he goes up to the girl, holds out two daisies, then leans in for a kiss. But just as before, he lurches to a stop, a wide ape’s grin still stretched desperately across his face.

Laughing, slapping her thighs, the girl tries to recover, but for a moment can’t. Finally, she lifts the clown up onto the drum, puts the cymbals back in his hands, and exits stage right, still chuckling.

For a long moment, the clown stands alone on his drum. Though his expression is the same, something seems different now—his eyes? His posture? It’s as though freezing pains him. Seconds tick by. Then, from stage right, the girl returns with a sailor. She points to the clown, and her companion examines him, walking slowly around the drum. His short sleeves reveal nautical symbols tattooed on bulging muscles. With a show of strength, he easily cranks the key in the clown’s back, not once, not twice, but three times all the way around.

Crash, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash, crash!
go the cymbals.
Squeak, squeak, squeak!
sings the unicycle’s wheel. The clown holds out the bouquet, leans forward—but this time the machinery in him is still turning and he presses his puckered lips against the girl’s cheek in a kiss. As he grinds to a stop, though, the sailor’s fist comes out of nowhere and sets him spinning once again.