Mister Boots

by Carol Emshwiller

  He doesn’t talk either. He’s smoking a cigar and humming. He sounds a lot better than when Boots is trying to sing, but I’d rather it was Boots, grunting out what he thinks is a tune instead of our father’s . . . they call that “baritone.” He sounds as if he can really sing, then, all of a sudden, it’s “Danny Boy,” loud and clear and beautiful. Kind of fits with the sunrise.

  After a long while he says, “Isn’t this cozy?”

  My stomach growls back at him.

  We listen to the birds and pretty soon he says, “You have to admit, a boy of your sort needs a lot of looking after.”

  Sit and sit.

  “Put all that energy of yours into useful projects.”

  Growl, growl goes my stomach, and tweet go the birds.

  All of a sudden he says, “Have a puff,” and hands me his cigar. And I do and then I cough. “If you’re a chip off the old block, you’ll get to like it one of these days.”

  Mister Boots hates that cigar smell. Just thinking Boots makes me see things in a different way. I lie back on the creek bank and see the sky through a screen of weeds. That’s the horse way.

  But there’s somebody out there, way, way off. I lift my head out of the weeds, and it’s Boots. I recognize him from the hat he always wears—Jocelyn’s old gardening hat—a ladylike kind of hat for a man, but Boots doesn’t mind. He’s staying pretty far away, and he’s riding a horse! With his bad legs, he can’t come out here without riding. He’s doing it for my sake, that’s what. I see our father sees him, too.

  Wouldn’t it be funny if Boots changed while he was riding, so one horse was plopped on top of another? I laugh out loud.

  “You giggle at nothing just like a girl. You’ll scare the fish away.”

  Pretty soon I’m so hungry I can’t stand it. I actually get a stomachache. After all, I’m a growing boy.

  Finally we head back, but before we go in, our father says he needs to check on how I throw a ball, and then he’s upset by the way I do it. He says I throw like a girl. He says I can’t eat until I throw properly. It takes a half an hour’s worth of more starving, but I finally do it—throw a couple of times like a boy. I thought maybe I never would be able to, being what I am. I wonder what it means about me that I finally got so I can do it.

  Right after what might be called breakfast, I help my sister do the dishes, which I normally don’t. Mister Boots does that a lot, though our father thinks it’s not a good thing for a man or boy to do, so I’m doing it for lots of good reasons, though it would be easy to get out of.

  “Jocelyn, I want you to teach me how to knit—right now, right after dishes.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “Please, please, pleeeease! I’ll help with the dishes every single time if you’ll teach me. I can practice it while you sew me up the costume for the show.”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “Well, since you think I shouldn’t knit, but I think you ought to marry Mister Boots before something bad happens, then we’re even.”

  “Our father thinks we’re already married, so everything is fine. Besides, how would we do it? I, Moonlight Blue, take thee . . . or, I, Boots . . . ? And I think you have to have papers and things to prove you’re you. Birth certificates and such. Besides, I don’t care one way or the other.”

  “Where were you brought up?” Which is what Mother used to say all the time.

  “This is nothing like any other relationship in the whole world. Boots isn’t a man. He won’t run off like our father always does. And you’d better watch out; our father might run off again. What if he did it when we were stuck out in the middle of nowhere? Then where would we be?”

  “We’re out in the middle of nowhere already.”

  Jocelyn does start me knitting right after we finish the dishes. I think she wants to see what will happen as much as I do. It’s to be a scarf for Mister Boots. She lets me pick the color, which is navy blue.

  She starts me up and sets me out on the porch steps. For the first time in my life I feel like a girl. So this is how Mother and Jocelyn felt all day long and on into the night. My knitting doesn’t look at all like anything she and Mother ever did. It’s not easy. I was sorry for them before, but now, what with dropping stitches and all, I’m even sorrier.

  We’re waiting to see what our father’s going to say, but he fools us. He looks at me hard and long, but he doesn’t say anything. Then he gets busy repairing those old broken magic boxes. And pretty soon he comes out on the porch and sits beside me to paint new golden curlicues on them.

  “Throws a ball like a girl, but knits like a boy,” he says.

  Pretty soon I hear from the tone of our father’s voice that he’s finally come around to what he wanted to say when he first came out here on the porch.

  “You’ll inherit all these valuable things; everything I own will be yours. All I ask is that you keep the show on the road. That’s all I’ll ever ask, that you learn the business and keep the name Robert Lassiter in the public eye. We’re on the same team, you know. The magic makers against everybody else.”

  Maybe this is a good thing. I’m the son and heir. Robert Lassiter the second. Why not?

  I say, “I will. I’ll do it.”

  He reaches down, pulls my hand away from my knitting (I drop a half a line of stitches), and makes me shake hands—man to man.

  It takes me ten minutes to get back to where I was. I’m not going to give up. I want Boots to have this scarf.

  So we sit awhile doing what we’re doing, and then our father says if I give him back the pistol, he’ll get me a BB gun—a rifle. I think having a real grown-up person’s pistol is better.

  “I’ll teach you how to shoot. We’ll shoot together.”

  Yeah, I know, just like we fished—sit out in the woods without any breakfast waiting for something to walk by and get shot.

  “So, that’s settled, then, all of us going. It might work out. You’ll like the train. I always did like trains. First there’s a hundred miles of the narrow gage. Then we have to change to the full-sized one. You’re going to like them both.”

  Then he says we’ve got to board up the windows. This is getting scary. What will be here to come back to? I start thinking about Mother again. Mother wouldn’t like this at all. She loved this place just as much as I do.

  I have to go somewhere. I get up. I throw down the knitting and give this yell, which I didn’t even mean to. Our father spills his paint, and I hear Jocelyn, way inside the house, drop something that breaks.

  I give a couple of big jumps (I need to after so much sitting), then I run off. Every other step is as if saying Mother. Mother, step, Mother, step, Mother, Mother, Mother, step . . . Sometimes I have to realize all over again that she’s really dead.

  Without thinking, I end up by my tree, walking and running all the way. Nobody comes after me. I’ll have to walk all the way back, too. I don’t care. It’s for Mother.

  I shout a couple more shouts. Out here it doesn’t matter. I lie down with my head on a big rough root. I make myself as flat as possible so nobody can see me unless they’re right on top of me, and I look around at all the mountain peaks. I recognize every single lump and hump and pinnacle in every direction. I’ve looked at them since I first could look. I could draw them all with my eyes shut.

  I suck at the inside of my elbow. Better than a thumb, clean and soft, and not so babyish. I think about Mother. I think, again, how the breeze on my cheek is her touch. I cry some. Until there’s no more tears. Then I just lie and look up. I may spend the night here.

  All of a sudden, there’s something snuffling at me—wet, sloppy, warm. . . . I guess I went to sleep. I sit up fast, but it’s just my friend Houdie. Boots has let him go again. I’ll bet I’ll be blamed for it even though I wasn’t there. I’ll have a ride home though. Maybe Boots whispered in Houdie’s ear, in some kind of horse talk, that he should come out here and bring me home.

  So what’s the best thi
ng to do? Give him a yell and a slap on the rump and make him run off into the hills while he has the chance? Or bring him on home with me for Boots to let him go again some other time?

  Our father goes to town again to order a wagon to take us and all our stuff to the train; Boots and my sister go off down the road a ways to sit by the irrigation ditch and be alone; so I finally have a chance to count the money. It’s five hundred and fifty-eight dollars. I am rich. I take the heavy cardboard box that has my new clothes packed in it and I unpack it and make a false bottom. I don’t think our father will expect that on an ordinary cardboard box. I put in the money and the pistol and one horseshoe and one rabbit’s foot. I take forty dollars to have on me in case of emergencies. I might need to help Jocelyn or Mister Boots in a hurry.

  The day before we leave, our father tries to get Boots to do his horse trick. He works on him half the morning. Boots just shakes his head. (By now he knows how to do it to mean no.) “I never met a man so . . . Are you crazy or just stupid?” He says, “Be reasonable,” a dozen times. “I can’t pay you if you won’t work.” Then, “Do I have to start to whip the boy to make you do it? I’ll do that if I have to.”

  He turns and gives me a good swat on the bottom for no reason, all the time looking at Boots instead of me.

  Boots kicks out, but just an ordinary, human being kind of kick, though who but a horse would think of kicking first?

  Our father believes in fighting, and he’s good at it, you can tell. He gets two good punches in right away. Boots is already off balance from trying to kick and down he goes in the dust and gets a bloody nose right away. He doesn’t even try to get up, and he doesn’t change to Moonlight Blue. I wanted him to. I want our side to win.

  Boots sits there looking up at us, calm as could be, but I get up and go right at our father. I’m only tall enough to hit his stomach, except I don’t land a single blow. He just puts his hand on my forehead, and I can’t reach him.

  “Boy, I admire your spirit, but you’d better think a little bit about which side your bread is buttered on.” He gives me a push so I’m on the ground next to Boots, and then he walks away looking disgusted.

  I find a rag for Boots’s nose. I tell him, “Don’t worry anything at all about money.”

  “I never do,” he says.

  But I’m mad at him. I say, “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You ought to find out. You ought to learn things.”

  I can’t read that horse look of his. I could tell if he had his horse ears on him.

  chapter eight

  I turn out to be the hit of the show! In one way I’m not at all surprised, though in another way I am. I probably have more magic in me than anybody around here. But I’m the big hit partly because I look so much younger than I really am. Our father has taken advantage of it and advertised that I’m only seven. I have to go along with that, though I don’t like it. It’s hard enough getting all the way up to ten without going backward.

  Except I don’t understand how I got to be the main attraction, because our father’s so good. People love him. Even I love him. The first performance we do changes my mind about everything. It’s nothing like our rehearsals. Everything looks exciting, people ooh and aah, and our father is—he actually is—kind of wonderful. Onstage he’s not the same person at all. He looks bigger. Not just fatter but taller, too. Now I see what that loud voice of his is for: booming out, deep and like singing. He’s all sparkly under the spotlight. Even his hair looks nice and shiny. Even that funny little mustache and goatee, which I always thought were useless . . . even they look good. He’s . . . devilish, black and white all over. The only colors are in the scarves and flowers and painted boxes . . . and me in my pink. (Onstage he calls me Pixie. He says, “I’ll bring on my magic pixie.” He snaps his fingers and here I come. I guess I do look like a pixie. I don’t mind that, except for being pink.)

  I see Jocelyn look at him just the way I must be looking, her eyes as wide-open as her mouth.

  And I see how Mother could have fallen in love and not even cared who he was when he wasn’t onstage.

  I always thought I didn’t want him to be my father, but now I think we’re two of a kind: born to travel and born to be onstage and born to make our voices go right out across all the people’s heads and out the lobby doors, and on into the street. For a change I’m not thinking “our father,” I’m thinking “my father.”

  But through the whole train trip down, I was getting angrier and angrier with him telling us all what to do and when to do it, where to sit, who got a window seat and for how long, when we’d eat and what we’d eat. (Oranges are good for us. I, in particular, have to eat them. I like them, but I don’t want to have to eat them every day.) He made Mister Boots and me carry heavy things while Jocelyn, because she’s a girl, only had to carry her knitting. I know, like Mother said, life isn’t fair, but it ought to be a little tiny bit more fair than this.

  He kept saying (just to me, not to anybody else), “Sit up. Breathe deeply. Fill your chest with this good country air.” (As if I didn’t always live in the middle of good country air.) “Don’t scuff when you walk.” Well, my shoes are too big so I can’t help it. But there’s no use telling him that. “No excuses!” is another of his favorite things to say. “Do you think there are any excuses in the army?”

  We have so much baggage I thought we were never going to get anywhere, but our father’s used to moving all this stuff. He was busy and distracted, and he made us keep quiet so we wouldn’t, as he kept saying, break his concentration; otherwise it would be our fault if he forgot something important.

  He said he’ll need us to be quiet before every show, too, so he can compose himself psychically. By the time we got on the train, I was worn out from keeping quiet.

  And I got worn out all over again just from how it looked out the train window: a whole other world—black or red volcanic domes and cones; places with a lot of dead trees where there used to be ditches but the water’s all taken down south to Los Angeles, where we’re going.

  Our father was explaining what it all was and how it got that way. I might have liked hearing all that if it hadn’t been our father telling it.

  Mister Boots and I saw a herd of wild horses, six of them. That was a time when we both had window seats. Boots looked over at me, surprised. The horses ran as the train passed by, tails and manes flying. Boots looked like he’d never thought such a thing could be, or a thing so free, or that it could look so beautiful. Magic passed between us—a different kind of magic. Like we’d seen all the way inside each other. Afterward I could tell he was thinking hard.

  (When we started out and my sister saw me for the very first time, head to toe, in my new boy clothes—cap and shoes and all—she covered her face with both hands and gasped. It’s like she finally realized. I guess I did, too. But realizing isn’t going to change anything. I realized it before with the baseball and mitt and fishing pole.)

  Pretty soon our father wants Mister Boots to join the act. I don’t know why our father needs Boots, what with me being such a big hit, but he thinks he does, and I’m the one supposed to bring Boots onstage and make him change.

  I told our father it won’t work, and that Boots doesn’t care anything about whether he gets paid, or famous, or if he makes a fool of himself, but our father is so sure he’ll do it, he’s made a poster about it except with the wrong color horse, pure white all over, mane and everything. (Why does he think Boots is called Boots, for goodness’ sake?)

  I’m on the poster, too: LASSITER THE MAGIC MAN AND SON. And, in smaller letters: SEVEN-YEAR-OLD PRODIGY OF PRESTIDIGITATION.

  So I lead Boots in—this skinny, nothing little man. It’s exactly the opposite of when our father’s onstage, because Boots looks smaller and thinner than ever, but people clap anyway. They think he’s going to do something, or else why would he be out here in front of everybody? I lead him in with a halter dangling around h
is human-being neck.

  Boots is hobbling, head down and forward. He lets me lead him because it’s me. He says he owes me a lot, but he says he won’t change to Moonlight Blue even for my sake. As we stand in the wings I tell him, “Do something, anyway. Sing or dance or something. Our father’s already mad enough at you.”

  “I’ve been trying.”

  “I know you have. You always try. You’ve been doing most of the hard work, but you know he doesn’t care about anything except what happens onstage.”

  When we come onstage, Boots looks all around, blinking, blinded by the lights. He shades his eyes as if he’s in the sun. (Our father said you aren’t supposed to do that even if you feel like it.) Nobody is clapping anymore. Everybody waits.

  If I had a pin I’d drop it right now.

  Then Boots says, “Stop!” His voice isn’t strong. It’s as if he’s a horse right now—it’s blowy, too much air in it. Only the first six or eight rows can hear him. “Stop. Think. These rabbits. These doves. Your horses. We labor beside you at the work of the world.”

  He bobs his head, horselike as usual. His mane comes loose from its ponytail and swishes back and forth. And there’s his bony forehead, bony horse nose. . . .

  “Think . . . All your doves and rabbits . . .” As if everybody had them.

  But that’s all the time our father gives him. He stamps out onstage and grabs him by the halter, twists it tight across his neck, says, “Come on, Dobbin.” Our father leans way back and walks a funny duck walk, high knees, swinging his fat hind end. (He can laugh at himself if need be, especially if need be onstage.) The tails of his dress coat swish back and forth and make the waddle even more so. He leads Boots into the wings. He really is choking him. Boots couldn’t say anything more if he tried. Our father finds boxes and such to bang around, so there’s a nice clatter from backstage, as if he’d thrown Boots against things that fell over. Everybody laughs. Our father’s turned it into a clown act. I jump a couple of jumps and yell, “Whoopee!” to help out. Everybody laughs some more. This is turning out to be a good thing.