Entwined

by La Plante, Lynda

  She put on her jacket, looked in the mirror, and then arranged her hair in a tight braid down her back. She pulled it back tightly from her face so that it looked sleek, almost Spanish. She leaned against him as she slipped her feet into her boots. He looked her over, and gave her a pat on the behind.

  “Don’t,” she snapped, “your fingers are all greasy!”

  “You look good,” he said with his mouth full, and she did a small pirouette, then picked up the short whip and her stick. With a final glance at her reflection, she went to the trailer door.

  “Get dressed, Luis, I want you on display, sober and looking good. Everyone heard about our scene, so let’s put up a good front. It’s almost seven-thirty.”

  He laughed. “This crowd thrives on what the Grimaldis do, what they said, who hit whom—tell them to go fuck themselves.”

  She picked up her hat, twisted it, and put it on. “Over and out, big man! See you in the ring!”

  Grimaldi shaved and dressed, and looked at himself in the mirror. Even after a shave and a long sleep he looked beat: his eyes bloodshot, his skin puffy. He checked his hairline; he needed a tint, the gray was showing through.

  He tightened his thick belt. His belly hung over the top, and he hitched the shirt up so it almost hid the extra pounds. And as he stared at himself in the long mirror, he asked himself where it had all gone wrong…he couldn’t blame it all on the mauling. He was falling apart long before that.

  He looked at the wall of photographs, saw his papa and his brothers, and remembered holding tightly to his dying father’s hand. “You keep it going, you marry, you have sons, don’t let the Grimaldi name die. Have many sons!…for your brothers, Luis, God rest their souls.”

  He thought about little Tina. It had been a foolish dream, and yet he had been thrilled to think at last he would have a son, an heir. He had even wondered what it would feel like to hold his son, he never considered it could be a girl: It was a son he had always wanted. Yet he had married Ruda…

  Luis opened a drawer and took out an old folder of small snapshots. He sifted through them, not even sure what he was searching for.

  He inched open Ruda’s closet, wondering where she had stashed all his albums.

  He looked up: There was a row of cupboards on top of the closet. In the first she kept her show hats; in the second he saw an old winter coat and a plastic rain cape. He couldn’t open the third, so he stepped up on a stool and pulled hard. He almost lost his balance as the albums tumbled out. Paper clippings and loose photographs spilled everywhere; he swore as he bent to retrieve them.

  He sat on her bed and began to flip through the books, chuckling and smiling as the memories flooded back. He had had a wonderful childhood. But Ruda never talked of her past; she had said without any emotion that some things are best left buried. She had talked about her life with Kellerman, even, up to a point, about the old magician, but then she would change the subject, as if her life before that was not worth mentioning, or perhaps too painful to bring up, because when he had insisted, she had rolled up her cuff, and had thrust the scar in his face.

  “I have this to remind me. I am reminded every time I stand naked, every time my head aches, that’s enough…Why talk about it? Why open up memories I have fought to forget?”

  When she had been in one of her moods, when she had thrown one of her tantrums—because money was short or his drinking was out of hand—she would turn on him enraged, screaming that whatever pain he was in, she had known worse.

  She would thrust her tattoo defiantly under his nose. “This is my proof, what is yours, Luis? What right have you got to complain about anything?”

  She had taken over. Slowly he turned the pages, asking himself how he had allowed it to happen. The first time he had met her, he was the star, he had money—he had success.

  He lay back on her hard pillow and closed his eyes, visualizing the Florida winter quarters, remembering how he had stood by the cages as the vet went from one animal to the next. He had been working in England, just before all the quarantine laws come into effect. His act had gone down well. He had traveled to Manchester, to Brighton, and then to Wembley for the big Chipperfield contract. In the early sixties he had been at his peak—what a time that had been—and then he had returned to America, at the invitation of a Barnum & Bailey scout.

  With the winter season coming on he had arrived in Venice, Florida, ready to be an internationally acclaimed star.

  Knowing he had the contract, Grimaldi spent freely, even bought two more tigers. Then the bombshell: First to die was his lead cat, a massive Siberian tiger trained by his father. The big animal began sweating, his eyes ran, and his coat quickly began to look dull. The vets diagnosed a virulent, dangerous flu, most likely contracted in England.

  The flu spread like a forest fire. They were going down one by one; the act was disappearing in front of his eyes. He worked every hour God gave him, but no matter what care and attention he lavished on his beloved animals, they died. No injection could save them, his only hope was to segregate the animals. Then the second calamity struck; the surviving animals were poisoned by hay laced with a pesticide intended to kill rodents in the barn from which it came. The fittest of his remaining cats now became dangerously ill, and Luis worked himself into a state of exhaustion. He watched his beasts sweat and cough, their breath rasping as they choked and grew listless, eyes and noses running. Their paws sweat, they refused their food. They died in his arms. A pyre was built, and he stood by watching as the prize and pride of his life burned in front of him. He felt as if it were his own life blazing.

  Out of eighteen tigers only four were left, plus one fully grown lion and a small, sickly panther. The cost of replacing the animals was astronomical, and no insurance covered the epidemic.

  Then, when he believed nothing else could go wrong, a hurricane swept through the state. His trailer was destroyed and two more cats perished. His cages were wrecked, his props and plinths crushed.

  Luis Grimaldi could not sign the contract, his most coveted prize; he didn’t have the resources to buy new animals. He was finished. He moved into a run-down trailer given to him by the circus folk of the winter quarters. That’s where his drinking began. For weeks his old retainers fed and cleaned the remaining animals, without wages, but eventually they were driven by necessity to seek work elsewhere. Only Johnny Two Seats was left, so nicknamed because of his wide, fat ass. He cared for Grimaldi as best he could, and saw that at least he ate the odd meal.

  Winter came and went, the circus performers moved on, and Grimaldi remained. He had nowhere else to go and, out of pity, the owners and managers let him stay on.

  One day Ruda Kellerman had appeared, in a rusty old Jeep, with her obnoxious husband. They were traveling on to Chicago, where Kellerman was to join a troupe of acrobats. She wasn’t half starved anymore, but well filled out—twice the size of her diminutive spouse.

  Kellerman was there only a few hours before he got into a brawl, and was asked to leave. He yelled that it hadn’t been his idea to come to the run-down shithole, but his wife’s, because she wanted to see Grimaldi.

  Ruda appeared at Grimaldi’s shambles of a trailer. She banged on the window. Hung over, unshaven, and stinking to high heaven, he had flung open the door, shouting to whoever it was to leave him alone. She was shocked to see him in this state, the man who had been her idol for years.

  She brought him food, brewed some coffee, told him how she made pocket money doing astrology charts and reading palms. She had laughed at how easy it was to make money.

  Grimaldi wasn’t listening; he sat in a stupor, drinking the thick black sweet coffee. She dug deep into her old trouser pockets, took out a wad of dollars and stuffed them into his hand. “Here, you were kind to me once, I’ve never forgotten that…”

  Kellerman had banged on the door and yelled that they were on their way. She had shouted back for him to wait in the truck, and stood up staring at Grimaldi
, concerned. “I got to go, you take care now, maybe I’ll see you around.”

  She extended her hand, like a man, but he turned away, embarrassed at having taken her money, and yet unable to turn it down.

  For the next four months Ruda and Kellerman had traveled around, stopping off at small-time circuses, never for long. Kellerman held on to his dream of working in one of the main venues in Vegas, but when they eventually arrived there they were so broke he had to sell all his so-called props. He had no act to sell, never mind one that would earn them any cash, and none of the high-class acts would even consider his type of performance. Ruda had to work as a waitress, at a roadside truckers’ stop. She worked twelve-hour shifts to earn enough for them to live on.

  The gambling bug took hold of Tommy: Slot machines attracted him like a drug, and he began to borrow more and more money. Then he made the mistake of getting in with loan sharks. He owed thousands, and gambled in a feverish panic to try and cover his losses. Three weeks after their arrival in Vegas, Ruda returned home, worn out after a late-night shift, to discover Kellerman had sold their mobile home at the trailer park—sold it, when they didn’t even own it! But he had at least left word where he had bolted to and she tracked him down to a small, seedy rooming house. The only possessions he had been unable to sell were a few of her clothes. Ruda had told Grimaldi, albeit a long time after, how she had opened her cheap trunk, rummaged through her things, and then slammed down the lid. She had told him how angry she had been, demanding to know what Kellerman had done with her albums and notebooks. Kellerman, so Ruda had said, hadn’t seemed to care, he had simply got out as fast as he could.

  Grimaldi remembered asking Ruda if that was why she had left Kellerman, and she had told him…He frowned, trying to recall what reason she had given, then suddenly it came to him, he remembered exactly what Ruda had said:

  “I was pissed off at him so much of the time, and the thought that he had left my boxes, the ones with all my letters, my customers’ telephone numbers, that really got me mad.” She had grown silent, and Grimaldi had asked about the boxes. Had Ruda got them back? She had shrugged, was dismissive.

  “Yeah, the little shit had that much decency. Oh, Luis, I was so angry, I beat the hell out of him and I really went crazy when I found out he’d gone through them. He knew he wouldn’t find any money there, but what got me so mad was that he couldn’t even leave my boxes alone. It was the last straw that finally made me leave him. He didn’t give me any respect. You see, they’re mine. They’re all I got.”

  Grimaldi could have no knowledge of the importance of the boxes to Ruda. He could not know that Kellerman had watched her check each item: the little pebble, a piece of string, a heavy gold wedding ring, and all the tiny folded squares of newspaper, some

  272 ♦ Lynda La Plante of them brown with age, their edges frayed from being opened and refolded so many times. Ruda had never told her husband of the fight that had followed.

  Ruda was always placing ads in newspapers. In every city, every town, she would run the same, just two lines: “Red, Blue, Green, Ruda, Arbeit Macht Frei” and then the box number where she could be contacted. Kellerman had given up trying to persuade her it was a waste of time; finally he had got so angry he had torn up the neatly cut square of newspaper, ripped it into shreds and screamed: “She will never contact you. She is dead, dead, DEAD!”

  Ruda had looked at him, then calmly opened the kitchen drawer and taken out a carving knife. She flew at him from across the room, and he had saved himself only by crawling under a table. She kicked at him, and stabbed the knife into the wooden tabletop; her frenzied attack continued until she had slumped exhausted onto the floor beside him. She had let him remove the knife from her hands, and like two children hiding, they huddled together under the table.

  Kellerman never brought up the subject again, or acknowledged how much it hurt him to see those words: Arbeit Macht Frei. These words were printed above each hut in the concentration camp. He knew, more than anyone else, the importance of the black box, but he had not realized it meant more to her than he did.

  The morning after the fight, Ruda had given him some money she had earned as tips the previous night. He had promised he would not gamble, he would look for a job, but he hadn’t even attempted to find one. He used Ruda’s money to buy a gun.

  Kellerman and two pals had planned a robbery together. They would go to a circus where he had once worked. Kellerman knew when and where the takings were counted.

  The robbery, seemingly so simple, got out of hand and the cashier, a man who had himself lent money to Kellerman at one stage, was shot and died on his way to the hospital. Kellerman had planned to run away with Ruda, but he had barely arrived back at the rooming house with the money when the police came for him.

  Ruda had been arrested along with him and held in jail, suspected of being his accomplice.

  Perhaps one of the few decent things Kellerman had ever done in his grubby, miserable life was to deny adamantly that Ruda had played any part in the robbery. She was released. She went to see him only once, and had listened to him as he begged her to find a good lawyer. Then she had looked at him and asked how she was to pay for it. He had pleaded with her: “You’ve got to help me, Ruda, please. Help me get out of this!”

  She hadn’t even waited for the visiting time to be over; instead she had said, with a half smile: “No, Tommy. I’m through helping you. You see, Tommy, you should never have opened my box. It’s mine.”

  Ruda never tried to contact Kellerman again. She read in the papers he had been sentenced to eight years. By this time she was already heading back to Florida, and arrived at Grimaldi’s winter quarters on the same day he had been asked to leave. Grimaldi was broke: The people who had befriended him could extend their charity no longer.

  Ruda acted as if he were expecting her, putting down her suitcase beside the table, picking up his notice to leave, and walking over to the manager’s office. She paid over two thousand dollars in cash and asked if she could use Grimaldi’s shack for fortune-telling. They all knew about Kellerman’s arrest—the fact that he had stolen from his own people—but Ruda stood her ground, saying she had walked out and filed for divorce as soon as she knew what he had done.

  Grimaldi had run up huge debts, and just to have the rent paid made Ruda’s appearance acceptable. She promised that from that moment on she would take care of him, as though she had wished to substitute one loser for another. Luis asked himself why. Why had she come to him?

  Ruda had returned to the run-down trailer and ordered Luis to get out while she cleaned the place up with buckets of water and disinfectants, washing and scrubbing as he sat on the steps drinking beer. She borrowed a van and carried the filthy sheets and laundry to a laundromat; she ironed and tidied, bought groceries and cans of paint. She was up at the crack of dawn, painting the outside of the old trailer, forcing old “Two Seats” to lend a hand. Grimaldi never lifted a finger.

  Ruda slept on the old bunk bed in the main living area; Grimaldi had the so-called bedroom.

  One morning, Grimaldi leaned against the open door, watching her work. She was sweating with the effort, it was a blistering hot day. He caught her arm as she was about to push past him.

  “Where’s Kellerman now?”

  “In jail. We’re through, finished. He’s history.” She released her arm, and went inside. It was dark, there were flies everywhere. She poured water from a bucket into the sink—they didn’t have running water.

  “We got a quickie divorce, only cost a few dollars. If I’d known how cheap it was to get rid of him I’d have done it years ago.”

  Grimaldi slumped into a chair. “So you married him?”

  She turned, hands on hips. “Yeah, I married him. I had no way of getting out of Berlin—he was my way. That answer your question?”

  He looked up at her helplessly. “I don’t know what you want from me. Why are you doing all this?”

  “
You got somebody else?”

  He laughed. “Does it look like it? I’m just trying to get a handle on what you want.”

  Her eyes were a strange color—amber—they reminded him of his cats, and even in his drink-addled mind he felt she was dangerous. She had moved close to him; it was not sexual, it was a strange closeness. She put out her hand and covered his heart.

  “Marry me.”

  He had laughed, but her hand clutched his chest. “I’m serious; marry me. I’ll get you back on your feet, I’ll get you going again. All you need is money, I can make money, I can get enough so you can start again, but I want some kind of deal, and if I am your wife, that’s a good enough contract.”

  “My wife?”

  She returned to the sink, began scrubbing a pan. “Think about it. I don’t want sex, sex doesn’t mean anything to me. It’ll just be a partnership.”

  Grimaldi grinned, not believing what he was hearing. “You got any idea how much cats cost?…and feed, and transportation? Then there’s the training, it’ll take months to get an act, any kind of a decent act together.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it’s a lot, but we can do it, and I am willing to learn. I can muck out, do anything you tell me to do. I’ve been around circuses now for long enough, I know the ropes, and I know it’s hard work.”

  He sighed, shaking his head. “No way, I couldn’t do it…I’m finished.”

  She threw the pan across the room. “You were the best, the best, and you can be the best again. I’m giving you a chance.”

  He grabbed her hand, dragged her out of the trailer, and crossed to the back of the sheds, to the pitiful remains of his once fine act. He shoved her against the bars. “Look at these animals, they’re as fucked and as finished as I am…You don’t know what you’re talking about, you have no idea of what an act, an act the likes of mine took, years—my father, his father before him…and that’s what I’m left with…”