Neither of them had said a word. Yet she was as pleased as if he had tossed her a bouquet of flowers.
She kept that story to herself, not daring to mention it to Harper now.
Jane heard the bedroom door close behind her. She turned her head and saw Harper standing over her.
“I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You ought to be. That was pretty rude.”
“I know it and I really am sorry.”
He dropped down on his hands and knees on the floor and crawled under the bed. She heard him fumbling among the luggage they had stored there.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for your box of paints,” he said.
“What on earth for?”
“I got to paint me a sign.”
“With those? That’s too expensive.”
“I’d be glad to use some other paint,” he said. “But it happens we ain’t got none. We’ve told these folks for the last time. Now I’m putting up a ‘Keep Off’ sign.”
“That’s silly, Harper. You’ve been drinking and that’s a silly idea.”
He backed out and raised his head to the level of the bed.
“You don’t understand. Not at all,” he said. “There happens to be a serious legal problem involved. If they keep on using the path and we don’t put up a sign, then it becomes a common pathway. We don’t want that, do we?”
“I guess not.”
“Want to help me?” he said. “You can letter a whole lot better than I can.”
“No,” she said. “Just help yourself. The paints are right there somewhere.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just for a walk,” she said, shutting the door behind her.
She took the public approach to the beach and avoided the path to save herself from having to pass under the gray scrutiny of Mrs. Grim. She set off south at a good pace, feeling the warm sand between her toes. The tide was coming in now. Jane liked high tide best, though it was hard to explain why, even to herself. Somehow when the tide was high you felt you knew, were familiar with the things the water covered and concealed. At low tide shallow sloughs were mysteries. If you waded you were apt to step on something hidden there, some submarine creature, a quick, brittle, scuttling crab, a jellyfish. (She remembered with a shiver the story of someone stepping on a corpse in the surf.) High tide, though, seemed to be a blessing, the blue waves breaking over and finally covering the beach. The natural impulse of water. It seemed like a fine idea for water to want to cover the land. Perhaps that’s how old Noah looked at it, she thought.
She almost tripped over a dead pelican and started back a step in surprise. It lay on the sand, a crumpled mass of wet feathers, a beak slack as a drunk’s jaw, as an idiot’s, bloody peepholes for eyes (the little birds had already plucked them like grapes), and crawling with black flies and small bugs. She had to hold her nose as she stepped by.
After the last houses and the last bather—a great fat baldheaded man bobbing and splashing like a happy hippo—she felt liberated at last. The sun glared on the empty sand ahead of her. She imagined herself as a pilgrim lost in a far land. It was almost blinding it was so bright, and the breeze had died down so that she could feel the heat of the sun. She started to run. She ran along the beach at the foot of the dunes, ran breathless until she heard the bulldozer working nearby above her.
She was panting and dripping with sweat, for it had been a long run. With nervous, clumsy fingers she took off her clothes. She looked back once to where the last houses were like small toys and saw not a soul now on the beach. She threw her clothes aside and didn’t care, was suddenly drunk with sea and sun and sky and her lonely freedom. She lay back and closed her eyes and let the sun bathe her. Her brain was blank and heat-struck, and her flesh crawled with rivulets of sweat. Would he come to the edge of the dune and stand tall and see her now? Would he laugh then, or be struck blind? Would he bury her alive under mountains of sand? It was a strange sweet dream.…
She must have been dozing literally, for when she came to herself, the sun had gone behind the dunes and she was in shadow. A breeze had sprung up cool. She was goose-pimpled. The sand was uncomfortable and she felt cold and ashamed. She covered herself quickly with her hands and arms and looked around. Still no one on the beach. No one, thank God, had seen her there. No one, she was sure. What in the world had possessed her to do something like that? Crouching over, she slipped into her clothing and noticed, dismayed, that in her distraction, in her fierce haste, she had ripped off half the buttons of her shorts. She must have been insane.
When she was dressed again and had brushed the sand off her arms and legs, she was ready to start the long walk back. It was then that she heard the laughter, soft and mocking, heard as if at a great distance of time and space, like the light laughter of a ghost, like the memory of laughter. She looked up just in time to see four small blond faces, haloed by light, the Quigly children peering over the edge of the dune, disappear into the camouflage of even blonder, blown sea wheat. Stiff and ashamed, she walked briskly away, following now in reverse the path her bare feet had made in the sand.
When she had to pass the dead pelican again, lapped at, tumbled, and turned by the incoming tide, she was afraid she was going to be sick.
It was nearly dark when she came up the back way to the cottage. He was in the red shell of a car, hands gripping the steering wheel, mouth wide open, driving in some furious daydream, and he didn’t see her pass by. Her feet were hurting and she limped a little, but he had nothing, not even pity, to offer her. Just at the edge of the path, facing the trailer, was a sign, crudely lettered with great smears of her good paint (half-empty tubes lay by the path), multicolored, the squandered paint dripping away from the letters as if they had been written in blood:
KEEP OFF THIS HERE PATH
This means you
And beneath this was drawn a skull and crossbones.
Jane opened the back door and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a drink of Harper’s whiskey and tossed it off.
“Is that you?” he called.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s me. I mean it is I.”
She walked through the house to the front porch. Harper was sitting in his mother’s rocker with a double-barrel shotgun in his lap. He was vigorously cleaning it with an oily rag. Jane leaned against the doorframe behind him in weariness and slack despair and watched him work. He jerked his head around and grinned at her.
“Did you see my sign? Did you see the sign I put up?”
“Yes,” she said. “I saw it.”
“I found Daddy’s old shotgun in the closet,” he went on. “Next time I’m going to shoot. They’ve been warned aplenty. The next time one of them sets a foot on this land, I’m going to get me some tail feathers.”
Just then Mrs. Grim came bustling through the living room. She brushed past Jane as if she didn’t see her, and her eyes, her small, pale blue eyes, were bright with triumph. She put a box at the feet of her son.
“Honey boy,” she cried. “I found the shells for the gun. I knew they were around here somewhere and I found them.”
LION
IN THE MORNING they came back, two of them anyway, just as he knew they would.
With the first gray hints of light, when all the earth’s as ghostly as a moon and the smell of the new day is as keen and sweet as mint, Jojo was up out of bed and stealthily crept to the window. Quick as a monkey he jumped from the windowsill across breathless space to catch, in his fall, the limber branch of the oak tree that grew nearest to the house. For an instant, waiting for his breath to come again, letting his heart fall back into its place, he hung on to the limb trembling from the shock, then swung high and easy, skinning the cat until he was safely on the limb. The rest was simple. He straddled the limb and slid down. Where it joined the trunk he swung free once again and dropped lightly to the ground. Then h
e heard the roosters start to crow all over town.
The rest of them, his family, would still be sound asleep. And at breakfast time who would miss him with so much going on, Raymond and Stony and Daddy all yelling for their breakfast at the same time in one loud voice, all of them going to be late for work; Marcia lingering (“loitering” Sue calls it) in the bathroom, taking her sweet time while Sue stands just outside the door, leaning thin and weary against it, beating on it and yelling bloody murder about what difference does it make how a telephone operator looks, she, Sue, being the receptionist for Dr. Trout, the chiropractor, has got to look pretty; and Marcia shouting back at her in her bright voice, cruel as a new knife, that Sue can spend all day and all night too in the bathroom if she wants to and she’ll never look pretty to anybody; then come the tears and more loud beating on the door, and Marcia flushes the pot so she won’t have to listen; while down in the kitchen Mama and Dalmatia, the colored maid, both of them huge and identically awkward as a couple of trained bears dancing on their hind legs, both so alike they might as well be the same person in two different shades, like dolls, both sleepy-eyed, both sloppy, stumbling and blundering into each other and nodding their excuse-me-please’s as the bacon and eggs and toast burn to a crisp and the coffee boils over on the stove; neither of them will speak a word to anyone or to each other until the others have all spilled out of the front door in a simultaneous rush to leave, such a rush to the sidewalk they must seem like a handful of pennies hurled from the house; then the two of them will sit down at the kitchen table, enormous, bulging over their chairs on both sides, and over their own coffee will at last come to life, begin to talk and laugh together; in the midst of all that, who would even notice the presence or absence of Jojo, figuring him small and safe at school or somewhere, even though it’s midsummer already and school’s been out a long time; he whom his mother calls, always with a great belly laugh, her little P.S.?
So Jojo slipped away, quick and quiet as a shadow, and went straight downtown.
There, just as he had known, there were two of them anyway, sitting in the beat-up clay- and mud- and dust-covered ghost of a car with the cross-eyed headlights, parked directly in front of the Sheriff’s brick, one-story office. The one behind the wheel was bald as a rock and short, too, pretty nearly some kind of a midget or a dwarf, wearing a sweat-soaked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the shoulder around arms like sausages, mopping at his bald head with a handkerchief gray as a dust rag, peering out at the empty street through glasses as thick as the bottom of a pop bottle behind which his large pale eyes glistened and swam like fish in a bowl.
“Jesus, Jesus,” he kept saying. “We drive half the night to get here and then the bastard’s still asleep.”
The other grunted and stayed where he was, hunched over on the other side of the front seat with his face pressed against the rolled-up window glass. He was thin-faced as a hawk and very dark, and his black hair shone so and was cut so neat you wouldn’t believe it could be real. He had a little mustache the same way, thin and straight like it was painted on, and the eyebrows, too, so black, so trim, so emphatic, they weren’t to be believed. His eyes were weary and bored and unseeing. His lips, to Jojo’s surprise, looked painted on with lipstick. He wore a dark coat and a bright shirt and a yellow necktie pulled all the way to the top just like it wasn’t summer, and he didn’t seem to be sweating at all. He could do whatever he pleased. He was Alonzo the Lion Tamer. Jojo knew his face, the tired blind eyes, red lips, slick black hair, from the yellow posters and from what had happened last evening as well. The other one with him was the owner or the manager, whoever is the boss of The Grand Clark Brothers’ Traveling Circus.
While Jojo stood staring, the Lion Tamer rolled down the window on his side and extended, lazy, his hand with a coin in it.
“Little boy,” he said. “Run and get us some coffee.”
Jojo snatched the fifty-cent piece from that pale palm, cool as a flower, and he started running up the sidewalk to the French Cafe, hearing over his shoulder the other one saying “Jesus, you’d think he’d be here waiting for us at a time like this.”
Last evening at dusk, just on the shores of darkness, with the last of the sun like a great splash of blood on the sky and already the first stars floating in the waning blue like lights reflected in water, Jojo had seen how it all happened. It began when out of nowhere, as if by magic, first came the car, the same one with the cross-eyed headlights, then the big trucks, so worn and dusty, so solemn and slow in line they seemed like a parade of shambling prehistoric beasts out of a picture book blindly following one behind the other. And he knew at once because of the yellow posters which had popped up brightly on walls and telephone poles a week or so before that this had to be The Grand Clark Brothers’ Traveling Circus. He knew, too, from listening around to what everybody said when the posters first appeared, that the circus would not be stopping here, only passing through on the way to the city. He left one of his secret hiding places, one of his tree places where he could see everything that went on and not be seen, and he followed after, joined the wild herd of children, black and white, and, it seemed, all the yapping mongrel dogs in creation, wishing as he ran along that he was a little bit older, that like the big high school boys he could have his own bike to join in the procession, to wheel precariously, dangerously, in and out of the coughing, ambling trucks, shouting, shrill as birds, and with sometimes no hands at all on the handlebars.
He followed them all the way through town and to the place just beyond the last of the houses where they pulled off the road and parked in a line. The Bald Man was there then, running up and down the line of trucks, shouting at the drivers, pointing, waving his hands, but always only shrugging when any of them leaned out of the high cabs to ask him a question. Jojo wandered under and around the trucks, smelling all the strangeness, staring at the people who climbed out stiff-legged, stretching, to look with indifferent eyes at the town they had just passed through and the darkening land. The Bald Man got one of them to open a fire hydrant, the last one in town, placed out there in the field in a dream of expansion, and the men came with buckets. It didn’t take long, either, for the Fire Chief in his red car and the Sheriff in his black one to come too. They came whizzing, sirens whining, and walked ponderously over and began to yell at the Bald Man above the noise of the running water and the catcalls of the men carrying buckets to and fro. They yelled, both at once, at the Bald Man, and he in turn yelled back at them, waved his little arms, shrugged, and mopped his brow. By the time Jojo got there to stand close by with the rest of the children, they had stopped shouting, though they were still talking.
“We got to have some water for the animals,” the Bald Man said. “That’s all I’m asking for. Just a little water.”
“Seems to me you might have asked first,” the Sheriff said, putting his hands inside the black leather belt that creaked with the bulk of him, that winked with a row of shiny bullets and from which, sacrosanct, a pearl-handled revolver sagged in its polished holster.
“We didn’t think you folks would begrudge us a little water.”
“You’re supposed to get permission,” the Fire Chief said. “You got to have permission first.”
“How long do you plan to be here?” the Sheriff said.
“Just a little while, captain,” the Bald Man said. “It won’t take long.”
“Make sure it don’t.”
Jojo left them all standing around the fire hydrant where the water flowed and spread on the ground and the men with buckets came and went, slipping and staggering in the fresh mud. He ignored the people who had come out of the trucks and huddled together in groups nearby. None of them were freaks or had costumes or anything. He sneaked among the trucks, sniffing for dry hay and the dungy, rich odors of animals, wishing that there was some way he could get to see them. He could smell them in some of the trucks, hear them moving about inside, but it was going to be hard to get a real look at them. He came
to the end of the line.
Disappointed then, waiting for a sign or a glimpse of something strange, hiding under the last truck in the line, leaning against a pair of perfectly smooth tires taller than he was, he saw and recognized at once from the posters Alonzo the Lion Tamer. He came and stood so close that Jojo could have reached out and touched him. He leaned back against the side of the truck. He was wearing riding britches and a high-necked sweater, and he was smoking a little cigar. But Jojo smelled above the familiar odor of leather boots and a cigar something sweet like roses, like Sue’s perfume.
A woman in a red T-shirt and red trousers, so tight around her legs and hips they looked to have been painted on her, came there and talked to the Lion Tamer in a low voice.
“You smell like a French cathouse,” she said and her teeth showed very white in the increasing darkness.
“You ought to know,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
“Can’t you take a joke? Can’t you tell when I’m joking?”
“Sure,” he said. “You got some rich sense of humor. You slay me.
“What’s the matter with you? What am I supposed to do, draw pictures for you?”
“That I’d like to see. I’d like to see the kind of pictures you’d draw.”
“You should hear what the others say about you.”
Evening Performance Page 15
