We were supposed to have three days more, but they’ve come early. I hear people say they did that on purpose, came at night, too, so we wouldn’t be ready.
Then I see people starting to get quiet and crowding over toward our place, and I see our father standing up on the back of somebody’s truck telling jokes and doing tricks. His voice is sounding out over all the people’s heads like it always does. People are calming down and laughing and bunching up around him. The whole spirit is changing. Camp people and soldiers stand next to one another and laugh together. All over again I’m thinking: My father. Mine! He’s making everybody laugh and making everybody get along with one another.
He brings out the last of our rabbits (there’re only four left), and every time he makes one appear out of his top hat he gives it to a soldier or a policeman. And then our father sees me and waves me over and says, “Lassiter and Son. And Son!” like he’s as proud of me, right this minute, as I am of him. Then he has me come up on the bed of the truck and do tricks, too. He stands to the side and claps for me. “Let’s give the boy a big hand,” and they do. I thought I was all worn out and couldn’t wait to get to bed, but I’m not tired now.
Before we’ve hardly finished the act, the army wants us to put on a show for them, and if we’re gone we can’t do it. So there’s a lot of talk and then our father and the head of the camp and the sheriff go away, and pretty soon they come back and we not only get our three days, but a whole week more on top of that, all because of our father.
But people don’t trust the police. A lot of them move out right away. They were already half packed up, anyway. Instead of being overfull, all of a sudden the camp is half empty. It’s nice this way.
We have to get ready for the big army show, so I have to keep in practice, but I find some time to be with Rosie. We go back to the boulders where we used to play. The bums are gone, chased out I guess, and it’s a mess, old rusty cans and pans and bottles and pieces of dirty tarp, but all the better for playing house.
We change around. Sometimes Rosie is the husband, and I’m the wife. I say, All right, I’ll be a wife, but no spankings. She says she wouldn’t do that to me anyway, even if I did a very bad thing.
Rosie wears her new dresses all the time, even out there to play in the dirt. Sometimes she changes so as to wear both in one day. She carries her purse everywhere, too. It’s already full of useful things—safety pins and rubber bands and money that I gave her in case of emergency. But I don’t play my rusty harmonica much. The rust hurts my lips. Actually I’m a little worried about germs on it myself.
At the army camp we do our whole big show, and our father and I do doves together and do our cane duet, and our father looks at me like I’m the best thing going.
Except . . . I do a bad thing.
I didn’t mean to. I reveal a trick. I open a box before I should. The whole inside shows. I did it because I got hurt.
Our father makes it a joke the way he does when things happen that aren’t supposed to. I see it does make a difference in how the audience feels. I have blood dripping down my leg, but I know the show must go on. I’ve gone on with a bad stomachache. Once I threw up every time I went backstage, but I knew I had to come back and go on, and not only that, I had to smile. That’s what you have to do.
Those men made all sorts of jokes and said bad words, even though there were ladies present. But our father, even then, got everything back on track.
I lose my appetite for supper. Something’s going to happen. I can see it in the way our father walks. Or maybe it’s my own guilty conscience that makes him seem so scary. Except I didn’t do it on purpose. I wasn’t ready. I got scared. With reason. I have a cut to prove it. And maybe it was even his fault. Maybe he was too fast.
But “No excuses” is his favorite thing to say. When I grow up, I’m going let people have excuses.
“I’ve told you over and over, it’s not for the likes of them to know.”
“So I’m supposed to just lie there and lose half my leg?”
“It didn’t come close to that and you know it.”
“What do you call this, catsup?”
And then he does what he always does, twists my arm up behind me, but this time . . .
I hear it crack. He’s done it again. He hears it, too. He gets an odd look on his face.
It really, really hurts.
Rosie sees everything. She’s the one who yells the loudest yell. She runs out and starts pounding on our father. Yelling and pounding. Next to our father she looks smaller than ever.
Our father starts to laugh. He actually falls down laughing—sits back on his fat hind end and laughs and can’t stop, and Rosie keeps pounding on him. Of course it’s not doing anything to hurt him.
Here comes Aunt Tilly, and I think, Now our father will get it, but first she just stands and looks, at me then at Rosie, then me and then Rosie again, and then she—even she—starts to laugh. I guess it is funny, Rosie, pounding away, yelling and kicking as hard as she can and not getting anywhere. But here I am, trying to hang on to my broken arm and nobody cares. Except Rosie.
And except Jocelyn. She comes right to me without stopping to think or laugh. She forgot to put down her knitting and the needles are falling out and the knitting is unraveling. First she’s afraid to touch me for fear she’ll hurt me. She reaches for my shoulder, but then puts her hand on my head.
Finally Aunt Tilly pulls Rosie away and hugs her tight so she can’t punch anymore, but she waited until she had herself a good laugh.
And here comes Mister Boots, looking like he doesn’t know what to do.
And then I throw up, and then Boots gives a big whinny, sort of like that first time when he told me he was a horse only more so, lifts his head up and back, and starts so high . . . It’s a kind of scream. You wouldn’t think a horse could do that, nor a human being either.
That stops everybody. We’re all posed, as if some big god said, “Silence!”
How can there be any doubt now about what Boots is? Except I’ll bet nobody believes their ears. They’ll all think: Did I really hear that? Then they’ll think: I guess not. I couldn’t have. I’ll just wait until it happens again to see if it really did.
I get out of a whipping, except this is worse. Maybe worse—depending. It’s an adventure because I get hauled off to the doctor in the big town—hauled off by Mister Boots and Jocelyn in a borrowed car. Our father disappears before they even find the car for me. (He never likes to be around throw-up. Besides, Mister Boots, as a horse, always did scare him. After that whinny, he’ll wonder things.)
Before we go, Mister Boots binds my arm up tight to my body. He’s good at that. He can sense how things feel a lot better than anybody I ever knew. He talks to me all the way through, making me think of other things.
Jocelyn drives. She’s not good at it, and she doesn’t like to (it’s kind of jerky at first), but she always comes through when things are important. All the way to town, I don’t even try not to cry. I tell Jocelyn I’m sorry but I can’t help it, and she says it’s all right, and I should do it as much as I want, so I do.
And then I tell her I’m even sorrier but I have to throw up again, and she says that’s all right. Seems to be, when you break your arm, everything you do is suddenly all right.
At the hospital I get called a brave boy by the doctor, and told that most seven-year-olds aren’t this brave. “How about girls?” I say. But the doctor just tousles my hair, and says, “Don’t you worry about girls. Not yet.”
But I really wanted to know.
The doctor says my arm isn’t ever going to be the same, but it wasn’t the same before, anyway.
I get to have a cast and I get pain pills that make me woozy. I get to have a maple walnut ice-cream cone. We get to stay all night in little cabins outside of town that are no bigger than our biggest tent. There’s hardly room for the double bed and the cot. There are nice pictures all over the walls. Jocelyn says they were cut out of the Sa
turday Evening Post. I ask if we can do that someday if we ever settle down, and if we ever can afford a magazine. She says, “Don’t be silly. Of course we can.”
Boots and my sister register as Mr. and Mrs. Blue. I could hardly believe it considering how my sister said she wouldn’t ever do anything to make Boots a real person on paper.
We don’t have pajamas or anything, so I sleep in my underwear the way I used to do back before everything began to happen.
After we get back, nobody says one single word about Boots’s whinny, so it’s just as I thought. Or maybe it’s embarrassing, like something you’re not supposed to mention—a human being screaming a whinny out like that in public.
While we were gone, Rosie and Aunt Tilly went down to the little town we’d been to before and Aunt Tilly got Rosie two dolls. I’d have thought of that myself, but dolls always seemed too dangerous. Even Aunt Tilly never did dare get one for me, but she told Rosie one of these is really for me and which did she want? But Rosie said she told Aunt Tilly, since I’m the one with a broken arm, I should get first choice, but I knew Rosie would want the yellow-haired, blue-eyed one with ringlets, and I didn’t want that one, anyway. She was too girlish. I may want to be what I really am, but there are limits.
I guess our father has kind of the same idea: I mean about giving me things in exchange for a broken arm. He sends a big package that is full of smaller packages. I get excited in spite of myself, though, since it’s from our father, I ought to know better. Rosie and I open them alternating and as slowly as we can. We want to make the mystery of it last as long as possible. I know the mystery is going to be a lot better than the reality. I suppose that’s how magic is, too—much better not to know. Which is exactly why I have a broken arm.
Rosie likes the presents more than I do. For her they’re unusual, but I’m sick and tired of always getting things like this. First I open a toy fire engine, and then Rosie opens a soldier suit my size (which is Rosie’s size, too). She says, “Please, please, please, please, can I have it, pleeeeease?”
“Of course, yes, and good riddance.”
And another thing, more yarn. That must have been hard for him to give.
Then a big bag of pecans and a jar of honey and some oranges. Things he thinks are good for me.
Aunt Tilly says, “What if it was a couple of steaks to grill? Now that I would even cook myself.”
Mostly we keep having stew, served on top of crackers. If you’re rich enough for bacon, that goes in, and cheese, too, and most anything else. We’re about rich enough for cabbage and corn and potatoes.
I’ve a good mind to go buy a steak for Aunt Tilly myself, but how would I explain how I got it? No matter what I said, everybody would think I stole it.
But we have to get out of here just like all the ordinary people. We start packing. I help even though I’m in a cast and my sling. I need to pack all my secret things, and I need to do it by myself.
When we sit around our campfire, we talk about where we should go, like maybe home to our house, but Aunt Tilly says our father will be back. She says whatever we decide to do, he’ll change it no matter what it is, so we should just pack and not make plans.
He comes exactly on the next to last day, with a car and a wagon and plans for a performance just outside Los Angeles.
He comes at suppertime, but he won’t eat our stew. He’s smoking a cigar as usual, and then he gives us one of his lectures, so he must be feeling better now that he has a job lined up. The lecture is mostly to me.
It’s dark when he comes. The days are getting shorter, and it’s cooler. We have a big fire, and Mister Boots propped logs up behind it, slanty-wise, nice and neat, to throw the heat out toward us. Rosie and I sit next to each other like we always do. Our father stands on the far side, hands behind his back, looking even more like a devil than usual. The mustache and the little nothing of a goatee . . . Everything very neat. The red glow of the fire on his face reflecting red. Even his white shirt looks red.
It turns out I’m not out of the new show just because of a mere broken arm. I have a duty to my public to make an appearance even if I can’t perform my usual tricks. Then he tells me, “You broke your arm in a fall from our trotter. That’s how it happened.”
We don’t even have Houdie anymore.
I hear my sister gasp.
He says it again slowly and louder. “From. Our. Horse. You landed on your elbow.”
He looks as if he believes it himself. I’m beginning to think he’ll never believe anything that’s true. I’ll get breasts—maybe even big ones—I’ll look like Aunt Tilly, and he’ll still be calling me “Boy.”
“Just go out and take a bow and do something simple. We’ll do the cane duet. You can do a dove one-handed and a few scarves. You can pull them out of your cast. They’ll go for that.”
“When did you ever let me ride Houdie?”
“I hardly let myself ride him; you know that.”
“How could I know that when you rode him all over the place back home? Besides, he’s sold.”
“That horse shouldn’t be ridden at all, only by experts.”
“Mister Boots is an expert.”
“Your Mister Boots . . . He’s hardly good for shoveling you-know-what.”
We’re all looking into the fire. We’re all not saying anything. Something has happened to us, which doesn’t count our father. We work together like horses hitched to the same coach. Well, better than that, because some horses let other horses do most of the work. And here, Rosie appears with us and pulls with us, and we all pull together with her, too.
Next morning we’re almost ready to leave. Mister Boots is about to take the garbage to the dumping spot. Big paper bags of it. (He always does the garbage jobs. He’ll do all the messiest things. He doesn’t want anybody else to have to do it, least of all Jocelyn.) Aunt Tilly is carrying packages to the wagon. I help take things that only need one good arm.
Our father is packing the wagon because he’s the absolutely only one who, as he keeps saying, can do it properly. He keeps telling us, “For heaven’s sake hold steady, for heaven’s sake use your noggin, and hurry up; we have to get down south so we can unload while it’s still daylight.”
If he wasn’t here we’d be just as fast—maybe faster—and I’ll bet we’d all be humming.
The fire is still hot and the coffeepot is still propped on a stone near it for everybody’s one last drink. (Except for me; I’m still not allowed coffee.) Jocelyn is sweeping the last tent. It’s down, and she’s sweeping the top of it before folding it up. She makes a funny face at Boots, and he waves and drops the garbage bags. (As a human being he’s always so clumsy!) The garbage spills out of both of them. When our father sees that, he punches the railing of the wagon and then tosses his turban way, way out—I can’t believe it—it knocks over the coffeepot and lands right in the fire.
“That’s it!” he says. He jumps off the back of the wagon and heads right for Boots. Boots is leaning over, up to his elbows in garbage, trying to get it back together. Our father gives him a kick in the behind that knocks him right into the mess.
Talk about “That’s it!” I’m tired of all this myself: tired of our father and tired of moving around from one place to another all the time and tired of having a broken arm and tired of not having any horses to ride and tired of me and Mister Boots always getting the brunt of everything.
I bellow out—my stage voice, but no words. A big, just plain bellow.
All right, this really is it.
By now I know better than to try and shout, “I’m a girl, I’m a girl.” Nobody will pay attention, and our father will say, “Don’t be sassy.”
It’s not so easy with a cast, but I take off all my clothes.
It doesn’t take him—not half a minute—to realize. So fast I think he must have suspected.
He comes to our baggage, fat-man fast. . . .
Like I dreamed it before. And like a dream. The sound of the hippopotamus.
Which I don’t know what that is, but this is it. Fire crackling. The sword box burning, and the box where I disappear, even the swords and the saw, into the fire. Boxes with our clothes . . . gasping . . . sputtering . . . our father . . . making this hippopotamus noise.
I have my treasures packed up in my pockets, but my knickers are down around my feet now. I reach down to get the pistol, but our father pushes me away and reaches faster. He shakes my clothes and out comes everything. Money all over the place. The rubber bands that held it have broken. Money, in the air. Even in the fire. Which is bigger and bigger all the time.
And there’s my pistol.
Everything is slowing down. I see the paint on the boxes fizzling, the red goes first and the gold after. I hear a raven sound a warning. I hear the stream. There’s plenty of time. I pick up the pistol.
Except there isn’t any time at all. I get off one shot. There’s a thump and the ground spits where the bullet landed. Our father takes the gun as easy as could be and kicks me away like he did Boots. I’m going into the fire with everything else. I’m flat-out right in it.
Everybody’s staring at the money flying by. Except Boots. It’s Moonlight Blue, right into the fire, to me. To save me. A horse from . . . hellfire! Like that man said. Red and smoke and horse screams and the sound of the hippopotamus.
Our father, grinning like the crazy man, shoots. All the rest of the shots, the four, into Moonlight Blue. And Moonlight Blue topples over right in the middle of fire, partly on me.
I think, as if looking back already: Once we had a horse. A long time ago we had a horse who was a man. As sweet, as sweet . . . as wet grass.
Sparks fly up. Blow! Way, way up all over. The money flying up and away, too.
And here’s my sister, hauling the collapsed tent, throwing it over both of us. I didn’t know I was on fire, but I guess I must have been. It’s terrible under there, dusty and smelly and suffocating. There are so many things in this life you just have to do no matter what, and keep on doing.
Mister Boots Page 13
