A Place Of Light Page 4

  “You having fun, Poppi?” I asked. It was the first time since we’d left home that I’d taken a good look at him. He was beginning to slouch over in the chair, so we pulled him up. He grunted, “Huh, huh,” when we touched him, and once we got him straightened up he glared at me, furious. “We’re at the circus, Poppi,” I told him. “It’s going to be fun.” Music sounded over the loudspeaker, and the men who had been working in the center ring hurried out. “Look there,” I said to Ole Papa, and I pointed to the ring. He continued to glare at me. I had a sudden thought that there was something terribly wrong with our being there, and I wanted to rush out with Ole Papa and Teddy and go back home. But somebody near us said, “Here they come,” and I looked up to see a family of acrobats tumbling into the arena. They built a human pyramid with a girl who was younger than Teddy and dressed in a silver bathing suit standing on the very top of the pyramid. Then the man and woman got on opposite ends of the tightrope and walked toward each other while their kids did stunts on the ground. They didn’t have a net, but they didn’t need one. The tightrope was only about six feet high.

  Next came the clowns, a fat one that kept falling into a barrel and a skinny one that kept trying to keep the fat one out. A lion tamer entered a cage that had been set up inside the arena. The lions paced, their roars like loud yawns. A midget rode a unicycle and threw bubble gum at us. Then there was exotic music and a woman dressed in silky handkerchiefs, with one handkerchief covering her face, rode out on a camel. Teddy squatted with his hands on his knees, craning his head forward to see, his face flushed with the wonder of it all. But all I could think about was how long it would be before the sideshow started.

  The camel had one hump and, like the elephant, seemed old and tired.

  “It looks like a horse,” I told Teddy. I looked over at Ole Papa. He was watching the arena, but I don’t know what he was seeing or what he was thinking, or if he was thinking anything. When I noticed the tufts of hair growing from his ears, a deep sadness came over me.

  “Let’s go,” I told Teddy. The dancing ponies were just coming out and he wanted to stay. “I’m going,” I told him. I stood up and started pushing Ole Papa toward the door and Teddy followed. He kept looking behind us, though, as the ponies danced in a circle while a lady rode standing up on one pony’s back. “We can come back later,” I told him, but I knew we wouldn’t.

  We headed for the sideshow. I caught sight of Old Man Stanford from the diner, watching some kids throw darts at balloons. It looked like he was there alone, without his wife or grandchildren. Just as we passed him he turned his head and saw us, but we kept going. I told Teddy he could try for that pirate bank on the way out, after we’d seen the India Rubber Man.

  I was beginning to worry about Ole Papa. It was a hot day, and I thought he must be getting thirsty. I was thirsty. But I was afraid to give him anything to drink because then he’d have to go to the bathroom and we’d really be in trouble. If he didn’t have his can he just went in his pants. “You okay, Poppi?” I asked him. He didn’t say anything.

  We had to wait outside the tent for the next show to begin, so we looked again at the pictures of the freaks. I remembered my daydream of pushing the legless man up onstage for the show. “We better leave Ole Papa out here,” I told Teddy.

  “Why?”

  “We just better. He can’t go in there.”

  “He’ll fit,” Teddy said. “Look at how wide it is.”

  “Never mind. I’m going to park him under this tree. You think he’ll be all right?”

  “I don’t know if we should leave him,” he said.

  I knew we shouldn’t leave him, but I also knew that we shouldn’t take him in. And I knew, too, that no matter what, I was going in.

  “You stay with him,” I told Teddy.

  “Are you nuts?” he said.

  So we put Ole Papa’s brakes on under the tree, and we hoisted him up in his chair, and I patted him and told him not to worry, that we’d be right back. He scowled at me with a look of absolute hatred. We paid our money and went in. I didn’t look back at the old man. I was afraid to.

  You could only go one way in the tent because they had the inside roped off and partitioned into a line of rooms. Each room held one of the spectacles. The fat lady was fat, but not much fatter than Old Lady Bass who lived behind the beauty shop downtown. She sat in her chair and let you look at her while a midget told you how old she was and how much she weighed and what she ate every day.

  The snake charmer came closest to impressing us. The enormous snakes, unlike anything we’d seen, wound around his body. They slithered and arched and raised their heads and looked at you with their snake eyes while they flicked their tongues. I saw Teddy shiver when the snake coiled around the man’s face, and I shivered, too.

  I don’t know what we were expecting to see in the India Rubber Man. Maybe we thought he wouldn’t be human after all or that if he was human he wouldn’t have bones, just like Teddy had said. But he looked pretty much like anyone else, except for being a little too tall and a little too thin, and maybe a little on the grotesque side which, I was beginning to realize, was the way most people looked. His face was a rough one, covered with bumps and gouges, a face that might have been punched a few times. He went through his stretches. “Buddy Pellnick can do that,” Teddy said. The man twisted his arm around his neck, crossed his legs double, lay down on the floor, and said he was going to make a human knot. It didn’t look like a knot. It looked like one of the exercises they make the first graders do in gym because they don’t know how to do anything else. Somebody next to me said the man was double-jointed. “I bet Buddy can do that, too,” Teddy said. All that time I thought the India Rubber Man was leading up to something big – that he would twist into some impossible, inhuman form. But he stood up, said thank-you, bowed, and went out the back of his room. At first Teddy looked surprised. Then he looked disgusted. We walked on to the next room.

  “You want to go now?” he asked me.

  “Don’t you want to see Zonzono?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He kicked at some straw on the ground.

  “You go wait with Ole Papa,” I told him. “I’ll be right out.”

  He kept kicking at the straw, but he didn’t leave.

  Zonzono entered in a whirlwind of crashing cymbals, his cape flying, his beard and mustache jet black. He spoke with a deep voice so that, even from the start, it seemed you were being hypnotized. He did a few card tricks, then one with boxes and a walnut, and one with a pitcher of water that he poured into a napkin and then back from the napkin into the pitcher. He guessed somebody’s name and somebody else’s birthday, and he made a boy disappear in a trunk and made him come back. I was half-trying to figure out the catch to each trick because I was afraid that underneath it all he, too, might be a fake. Yet I believed, or wanted to believe, and when he called for another volunteer my hand was in the air before I knew what I was volunteering for. I strained my arm and waved my hand, looking at him beseechingly. Perhaps I had powers, too, because he pointed at me and said, “Yes, you.”

  I climbed the three steps to his stage in a delirium. I had left my brother without a second thought. I had left the audience and was oblivious to their presence. I felt no fear or doubt or shame. All I knew was that I was standing next to the amazing and mysterious Zonzono, who had chosen me out of all the others, and who was now whispering in my ear on the sly as he talked to the audience in his deep, magnificent voice. To them he described his gravity-defying levitation act. To me he whispered, “Lie down on the platform, keep your eyes shut, and don’t move until I tell you.” He pushed me gently back onto the platform while he told the audience how I was going into a deep trance. “Close your eyes,” he told me.

  There is something disorienting about lying on your back on a metal table in a tent in front of dozens of strangers, your eyes closed, your ears attuned to the sounds of the crowd. I was drifting, drifting. A thin blanket was placed
over me. There was silence, and then I was drifting some more. I became terrified. I turned my head in what seemed to be darkness. I opened my eyes a bit more and thought I saw a horizontal bar connected to the platform on which I lay. It crossed my mind that such a bar might serve to raise and lower the platform.

  I was afraid ever yone had left. I wondered if Zonzono had told me to get up or if he had gone, too. I raised my shoulders and he pushed me back and told me to keep still. He was telling the audience how he was passing a hoop over and around my body that was suspended in midair to prove there were no gimmicks or devices involved. A whoosh of air passed over me. Then I was being lowered and Zonzono told me to come out of my trance. I got up, blinking. He helped me off the platform, and I walked back to my brother, dizzy and confused.

  I was vaguely aware of people around me, of their voices and their movements, but that was all. Minutes passed. Slowly, I became conscious of Zonzono onstage, finishing up one of his tricks, then thanking us all, sweeping his cape around to the sound of clashing cymbals and applause.

  We walked out. Teddy hung close to me. After a while I asked him, “Did you see it?”

  “I saw,” he said, nodding.

  “Was I in the air?”

  “Yeah.” He looked dazed. “Were you hypnotized?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. What happened?” I asked him.

  And then he told me all about the hoop and how I was floating in the air. “Crimast, it was spooky,” he said.

  When we reached Ole Papa I was surprised at how different he looked, like something had happened to him while we were gone. His face seemed sad and lost, and he looked past us to the trees beyond the tents. Even when we spoke to him his face didn’t change. Old Man Stanford from the diner was lurking near him, watching while we straightened Ole Papa up. “Where’s your mother and father?” he asked us.

  “They’re not here,” we told him. He watched us undo the brake.

  “Are you kids here alone?” We didn’t answer him. “Do your parents know where you took your grandpa?”

  “We take Ole Papa anywhere,” I told him, and I started wheeling away fast, afraid he’d think I was being smart.

  “I wonder what your father is going to say about all this,” Stanford said.

  “Cripes Almighty,” I said to Teddy when we’d gone a distance. We didn’t say anything else, either one of us, we just went, and fast.

  When we got to the sidewalk Teddy wondered if it was past suppertime. “It’s not that late,” I told him. But I wasn’t sure.

  “We’re going to get it,” he said.

  “I know it,” I said. “I know it. You don’t have to keep reminding me.”

  If there is such a thing as true remorse for your sins, then that is what I felt as I wheeled Ole Papa home. On the way to the circus, and even while sitting under the big top, I had had my moments of doubt and my twinges of guilt. But now I feared that something irrevocable had taken place. I had betrayed my grandfather. As we trudged along in silence, I imagined all I would do to try to make things right between Ole Papa and me: I would sneak him a piece of chocolate, which he wasn’t supposed to eat, or I would help him hold the neighbor’s dog, because he loved dogs and ours died last year, or I would find the money to buy a pint of strawberry ice cream, his favorite, and feed it to him in secret.

  We got to the bridge, and I took a deep breath. I could see Teddy brace himself, but we were too exhausted or bewildered to even bother trying to divert Ole Papa’s attention this time. All I said was “We’re almost home, Poppi.” I tightened my grip and pushed, not running, but moving fast just the same. Ole Papa sat there holding the armrests, and he didn’t make a sound. His pale head bobbed along as we hit the cracks in the walk. Then we were over, and none of us said a word, we just kept going.

  It was Ole Papa’s silence that finally got to me. When we reached home I wheeled him into the kitchen. Mother was still in bed and Father hadn’t come in from work. I pushed Ole Papa up to the table and poured him a glass of water, then peeled a banana and put it down on the table near him. A banana was about the only thing he could eat without help. Teddy slipped away without a word, going up to his room, I supposed. I, felt that I should touch Ole Papa, or hold him, or say something to him, but I couldn’t do any of those things. I waited for him to look at me. He kept his eyes on the glass of water. There was no expression in his face – nothing, nothing at all. I ran out the back door.

  I climbed the pear tree and sat there waiting. I could feel something welling inside me. But I felt dried up, too, and beyond tears. I didn’t know what was going to happen when Father found out, and I knew he would find out because either I would tell him, or Old Man Stanford would, or else we both would.

  I started thinking about the strange and solitary man I could not know, my grandfather. And I thought, too, about all of us, about my grandmother who was dead, and my father and his dead brother whose name he had, about my mother and her lost baby and her headaches, me and Teddy, all of us.

  I touched the bark of the pear tree. I had been transformed and levitated, suspended in midair so that a hoop passed over and around my body proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that no trickery was involved. I had seen some of the wonders the world had to offer.

  Yet everything, everything felt old.

  A PLACE OF LIGHT

  When Robert’s car broke down the second time, he said, “You kids stay out of my hair. Go across that ditch to those weeds.” Ma leaned her head against the window and looked out. She wasn’t crying. “You, Injun,” he said to me. “Take the blanket and get.” Naomi followed me through the tall weeds. We could hear him swearing back there. Already we were getting bit up. We peed, then we spread the blanket and sat down.

  We heard him swear and bang on the car, and Ma told him to go find help, there was nothing else he could do by himself. Naomi lay down on her side, her back to me. I thought about the way she slept in the night lately, with her fists clenched and her eyes squeezed shut. I said her name, but she didn’t answer. She was the oldest and had always been the boss. You’d never know it now.

  I think Naomi stopped talking somewhere in West Virginia, when she realized we weren’t going back. Now we were across the border into Alabama. Heading for Galveston, Robert said. She hated him, maybe more than I did.

  It was okay the year he went away. Ma didn’t even mention his name. She took his picture off her dresser and laid it face down in the drawer, under her stockings. Then he came back, just like that, and the picture went up again. He started right in with his fighting.

  “Why’d you let him come back?” I asked Ma.

  “I don’t know,” was all she said.

  “If he hits me once . . .” I told her.

  She looked down at her hands. “He’s not going to hit you,” she said.

  “Or you,” I said.

  She shook her head, still looking down at her hands. Once, I heard her say she used to love him. “He was so good to me after their daddy died,” she said. She was talking to our neighbor, though, not to me.

  I remember when Robert came to live with us, after our father died. I remember, too, the story Ma would tell about when I was born, how I looked so dark – redskinned and with lots of black hair – that she thought they had given her the wrong baby. “She looked just like an Indian,” she said. Robert heard that story, and he started calling me Injun and saying how someday he would find an Indian family to send me back to, where I belonged. Ma heard him talk like that to me, but never said a word, so I wondered if it was true that I was the wrong baby.

  When things got really bad with Robert, though, Ma said what she felt like to him. Sometimes he’d slap her for it, sometimes he didn’t do anything. You never knew when it was coming. He’d gone after us just once and Ma lit into him, fists and all. Then afterward, because we were scared and crying, she came into our room. She stood in the doorway, like a caught animal. She held onto the doorfra
me with both hands. “It’s all right,” she told us from where she stood. “You’ll be all right,” she said. She didn’t come any closer.

  Now Robert was going to Galveston to work because he knew somebody there. Really he was going to get away from “trouble” – all the people he owed money to. “Mean son of a bitches,” he called them. “Just love to kick a man when he’s down.” He made Ma buy the car with the fifty dollars he gave her, and he put some old plates on it that he found somewhere. Ma wanted to get to Galveston as much as he did. She had a cousin who lived nearby in Beaumont, and an aunt, too, and maybe they could help us. She didn’t tell Robert about the cousin and the aunt.

  “You thirsty?” I said to Naomi.

  “Uh-uh.”

  Something skittered through the grass, and I jumped, held still, listened. I heard more sounds: bugs, birds, animals, the breeze through the grass. The afternoon sun beat down. A nearby tree gave some shade. I lay down, too. I rolled over so I was touching Naomi, and I fell asleep.

  I woke to the sounds of Robert banging on the car, still trying to fix it. Naomi shaded her eyes with her hand and watched a gray bird in the tree.

  Ma called, “Audrey. Naomi. Where are you?”

  We went back to the car. Ma was sitting in front, on the passenger side, with the door open. She was combing her hair. Her face was flushed from the heat. She started pinning up her hair, and it made her face look thin and old.

  Robert leaned under the hood. Tools lay on the fender. “You go in those woods,” he told me. “I saw some kind of shack in there. Maybe somebody lives there.” He pointed. He knew better than to tell Naomi to do anything. She wouldn’t look at him or answer him. Once, when Ma wasn’t around, he slapped her face for it. She didn’t even blink.

  “You tell ‘em the car’s broke down,” Robert said. “Tell ‘em come help.”

  I looked at Ma. “Go ahead,” she told me. “We’re not going anywhere.” She knew I was thinking about that time he drove me and Naomi out in the country and made me get out because he said I was acting smart. He came back and got me half an hour later.