by Anna North
The other track told her to kiss him back, because maybe if she gave him what he wanted, if she made herself soft and sweet for him, instead of a hard thin arrow pointed at her mother, then he would write real words down on his pad for her. Probably he had picked her out of the crowd because he liked her looks, and maybe he would pick her problem out of the great roiling swill of convictions and assaults and disappearances and deaths that poured through his station every day.
Then he put his hand on her left breast, and the second track snapped, and she ran along the first track all the way out of the guard station and onto the soggy street.
It was almost five by the time Darcy got back to her building. She was soaked and exhausted and her panic had turned into a hard heavy thing, like a tumor hanging in her guts. Jorge, the superintendent, was in the entryway, mopping up the asphalt that had melted in the rain and oozed through the front door. Every couple of months the news flyers claimed that a new type of asphalt was on the way, one made of some nonseaweed substance and impervious to rain, but no trucks ever came to lay it, and the street still turned to soup every time the monsoons came.
“Hey,” he greeted her. “Crazy about the Hawaiians, right? You think they’ll come back?”
Darcy gave a depleted shrug.
“I have no idea,” she said. “You haven’t seen my mom, have you?”
He shook his head. “Maybe she’s visiting someone?”
Darcy sat on the stairs and put her head in her hands. Even though Jorge took money from her every month, more if it wasn’t on time, she liked him. He worked for the management company and lived in a medium-sized apartment on the first floor. He didn’t have kids, or a solvent habit, or any of the other things that made people so hungry for money they were willing to sell one another out to get it. He had his job, and she knew he would evict her if he had to, but there was none of the crazy desperate scraping between them that she heard about from Trish, whose landlord kept raising her rent to pay for her daughter’s glaucoma treatments.
“She’s not visiting someone. I went to the docks, I went to the guards. I don’t know what else to do.”
“She’ll probably come back on her own,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Get some rest, maybe have a beer.”
She couldn’t imagine rest. At some point in the future she knew she’d sleep, but her sleep would be only a break between fear and anxiety, probably filled with fever dreams.
“I can’t,” she said. “How would you find someone, Jorge?”
He put the mop down and sat beside her on the step. He smelled like the disinfectant he used when somebody vomited in the hallway.
“I’d wait,” he said, “and see if they came back.”
“What if you couldn’t wait?”
Jorge shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
They were silent for a moment. Dolores Beltran came in wearing her heavy rubber raincoat and carrying a bag of canned vegetables from the big GreenValley store on the Chicagoland border. Darcy avoided her eyes. The more people she told about her mother, the more her absence seemed to multiply, until there were five, ten, twenty versions of Sarah, all of them gone.
“This isn’t really the same thing,” Jorge said. “But my cousin’s son got shot once. He was paralyzed from the waist down. The guards didn’t do anything because it was gang on gang. So my cousin went to this guy, some kind of fixer or something, and he found out who shot her son.”
“Who was the fixer?” Darcy asked.
“He had a weird name. Ansel. Ansel Martinez or Rodriguez or something. When she knew him he worked at the Big Top.”
“And what happened with her son?”
Jorge stood up and began mopping again. The asphalt was drying on the entryway floor, making a blackish-green stain in the shape of a hammer.
“Oh, he’s all right. Still paralyzed. I think he hands out flyers or something. My cousin found the guy who shot him and she went to his house. I told her not to go. She said she just wanted an apology. But I think she must have threatened him. She washed up a couple weeks later on the unrestricted beach.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I didn’t really know her that well. But that’s why I say, just wait. Your mom will probably come back on her own.”
As she opened the door to the apartment, Darcy let herself hope that her mother would look up at her, from the bed or from a perch on the windowsill, laughing, saying, “Have I got a story for you.” The blanket was lumped up on the bed, and she rushed toward it, but when she laid her hand on empty cloth instead of her mother’s skinny hip, she remembered that she and she alone had left it that way, and knew that if she slept at all tonight, she would sleep by herself beneath it. Her stomach gnawed, and so she opened the refrigerator. The steak smelled the way meat smells just before it starts to turn. She sat on the floor and ate it with her fingers, untasting, like a starving animal or a person without a brain.
2
To Darcy’s right was the Las Vegas Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, its Seaboard facade of the old Vegas Strip lit by yellow solvent-burning kliegs. In front of its Romanesque entrance, a fountain spurted weak jets of semichoreographed water while a stuffed tiger looked on with a perpetually open maw. To the left was the Big Top, its Seafiber roof once red, blue, and yellow, now oxblood, gray, and beige. Posters on its wall recommended, “Experience an Alaskan Winter at THREE HUNDRED DEGREES BELOW ZERO,” and, “See Real Live POLAR BEAR! From the Wilds of the Yukon! No Costumes, No Tricks!” Darcy had seen flyers for this show—the Big Top always had something “Alaskan” or “polar” going on this time of year, when the weather was especially hot. A barker at the entrance, bundled in a parka and visibly soaked with sweat, shivered and shouted, “Brrrrrr, it’s so cold in here! Can you handle it? Can you?” Behind him stood three big bouncers with their arms crossed over their chests.
Just east of the Big Top were the porn hawkers and freelance freaks—a woman with a thumb growing out of her shoulder, a macaw that did impressions of passersby, the heavily advertised Man with Projectile Sweat. East of them were the wedding chapels, their doorways belching forth floral scents and organ music, and beyond those were the casinos, and beyond those the whorehouses. Darcy had heard of girls being jumped into some of the seedier ones, but surely her mother was too old, and surely those stories were lies anyway, cooked up to keep girls from going out by themselves at night. She walked up to the Big Top entrance. The barker in the parka shouted “Brrrrrrr!” in her ear.
“Do you know an Ansel Martinez?” Darcy asked him. “Or Rodriguez?”
She was aware of how stupid it sounded that she didn’t even know Ansel’s full name, and the barker’s blank stare was exactly what she expected. Then one of the bouncers spoke up.
“I can take you to see Ansel,” he said.
The other two bouncers stepped forward. They were big; their bellies were bright in their striped shirts; they made a box around Darcy. They bellied her past the main entrance, past the polar bear poster, and through a side door into a long dim narrow room. All along one wall were piled old-style black steamer trunks and brown Seaboard boxes and dented birdcages, some with macaws still squawking in them. Mirrors lined the other wall, hung with feathered headdresses and cowboy hats and prairie bonnets and fake beards. Three brown-skinned women were putting war paint on one another in front of one mirror. At another, a man in the bottom half of a wrinkled gray elephant suit smoked a seaweed cigarette. At the end of the room was a curtain; from behind the curtain, Darcy could hear cheering.
“Is Ansel in here?” Darcy asked.
“You’ll see him,” said the biggest of the men.
His shirt was striped red and yellow like peppered cheese food, and his five o’clock shadow appeared to be painted on.
“Hey Sunshine,” he called out. “We got a good one!”
A tall and skinny woman in a yellow flowered dress turned to look at Darcy. Her skin was brown and pockmarked and h
er hair was oily and her wrists stuck three inches out of her cuffs—she was the opposite of the little milky prairie girl on the World Experiences wall. Her mouth was painted orangey red. Her eyes were messily lined with black; they were small and proud and penetrating.
“She’s too skinny, Tug,” she said to the man in the striped shirt.
“Good one for what?” Darcy asked.
Sunshine rummaged in an overfilled trunk, then held a fur coat open in front of Darcy.
“Come on,” she said.
“What is this?” Darcy asked. “I’m looking for Ansel.”
“If you do this,” Sunshine said, “I’ll take you to him.”
“Do what? I don’t want to do anything.”
“Look, either you leave now, or you put on the costume and do the Eskimo dance, and then you can meet Ansel.”
The fur smelled like sweat and rancid cheese food, and Darcy didn’t want to do any sort of dance in front of a bunch of people. She had no way of knowing if Ansel could even help her, but he was the only lead she had. If she gave up now, all she could do was go back to the apartment and wait, and the waiting would drive her insane. She slid her arms into the sleeves, pulled the hot hood up over her head. Then Sunshine handed her a pair of padded pants and heavy fur-lined boots with holes in the soles. Finally she shoved several pillows down the front of the coat to make Darcy look fat.
Loud tinny music came piercing through the curtain into the dressing room, along with the sound of applause.
“Time to go,” said Sunshine. “Don’t forget to shiver, like you’re cold.”
“If I was really an Eskimo, why would I be cold?”
Sunshine didn’t answer. Instead she led Darcy past the elephant, past a girl in a cowboy hat practicing gun twirls, past a man with a fake beard trying to put a dress on a monkey, through an open curtain, and out into very bright light.
She knew she was onstage only because of the screaming. The white light shone straight into her eyes, and she could see nothing except the wisps of fur around her face. Next to her, Sunshine was calling, in a strange accent not her own, “Here she is, ladies and gentlemen! Inge, the real-life Eskimo!”
The crowd’s voice rose up to meet Sunshine’s. Whistles and whoops stuck up out of the general yowl. Someone yelled, “Take off the coat!”
Sunshine disappeared, and a man’s voice from downstage shouted, “And now, Inge will perform a traditional dance from her home in the frozen north!”
Darcy’s vision cleared enough for her to see a round, short man in suspenders and a weird long coat pointing up at her. She stood very still for a moment, vehemently not dancing, and then she ran to where she hoped the curtain was. The man Sunshine called Tug was standing there, his arms crossed over his chest. He gave her a simple warning look. She turned and ran across the stage in the other direction, ducked behind a Seaboard cutout of an igloo, and came up short against a wall. The crowd began to boo. Darcy heard something wet splatter on the stage.
“Looks like Inge’s not in the mood for dancing tonight,” said the man with the suspenders. “Let’s give her a little incentive.”
The crowd screamed again. Darcy wished she had something to throw back at them. She thought about killing the man with the suspenders. She thought about driving an ice pick down into his head. Instead she took the fur coat off and threw it into the crowd. The pillows slid away from her body and fell to the ground with a shlump. Then Tug opened the curtain and some smoke came out.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man in suspenders began.
Something was moving in the smoke. It was moving slowly and making gurgling sounds. Tug reached back and hit it and then it was charging toward Darcy, snarling.
The man in suspenders shouted, “The famous polar bear!”
Darcy was running. She was running across the stage and the bear was running after her, its steps heavy, its claws clacking on the boards. She could smell its body—it smelled like jellyfish and urine. Its growl was higher and angrier than a dog’s—it sounded like it was hurt somewhere inside, like it wanted to hurt someone else. She hid behind the igloo and then it came at her from around the side, and she saw that it was covered with white paint that had worn away in places, exposing the black fur underneath. She put her hands up in front of her face, and it stopped for a second, just inches from her. It made a sound in its throat that was not a growl. It was more like a sigh. She looked at the bear’s eyes and saw dark ooze shining around them. This bear was sick, and it was tired, and it was trapped, and it was humiliated, and Darcy was not going to be like this bear. She ran again, but this time she ran straight forward, and jumped off the stage, and landed in a white pool of pure pain.
A second later she could see but she didn’t want to see. She wanted to wrap her brain around her ankle like a warm cloth so that the pain could not get in. She thought of the pain as something coming into her from outside, from the floor, and so she kept trying to lift her ankle off the floor, but every shift made the pain feel worse until finally she curled up tight, like a grub, and sobbed.
She could hear voices around her, and voices on the stage, singing, distracting, and voices from the crowd booing and yelling, and then Sunshine’s face swam forward into her eyes, and a pair of arms slid under her as though to lift her up.
“No!”
She was snarling like the bear. She was flailing her arms.
“Come on,” Sunshine whispered. “You’re hurt. I’m trying to help you.”
Darcy writhed, and Sunshine took her chin between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed hard.
“Stop,” she whispered.
Darcy stopped.
“Let me help you,” she said, gesturing up at the stage, “or they’re going to come down here and kick your stupid ass.” More loudly, so the others could hear, she said, “And you better stay out!”
Darcy gave up and let herself be carried. Sunshine walked slowly, grunting with her weight. The man in the suspenders scolded the crowd in a scared, joking voice. The girl in the cowboy hat came onstage.
“The famous Annie Oakley!” the man in the suspenders yelled.
Then Sunshine pushed open a door under the stage and carried Darcy through a dark close place sliced through with beams, and then into an even darker place, with a smell of sawdust and rat poison and a sound of snoring. She laid Darcy down on something soft, like a blanket or a sleeping bag. She heard a rustle, then a man’s voice in the dark.
“Who are you?” it asked.
“Ansel, meet—who are you exactly?”
“Darcy Pern.”
“Darcy, meet Ansel. Now stay put. I’m going to get something for your leg.”
Ansel was close enough that she could smell him—his unwashed hair, the private, meaty smell of sweat.
“What brings you here, Darcy?”
His voice was young to be so courtly, and high, with a crack running along it. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a long-nosed, high-domed, avian head, with thick dirty black hair and a nasty parrot-fever scar under the left eye.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “Then I got my leg broken by your polar bear. He looks like he needs some medicine, by the way.”
“He’s a she,” said Ansel. “And like most women, dangerous in ways you don’t expect.”
Footsteps broke into the darkness, and Sunshine was standing over them, smelling like sweat and paint and, strangely, apples, rustling and riffling in her incongruous prairie dress.
“I don’t know why you were looking for this clown,” she told Darcy. “But I wouldn’t listen to him. He’ll only get you in trouble.”
“I am not a clown,” Ansel protested. “I am merely an Eskimo on hiatus.”
“Permanent hiatus, if I have anything to say about it,” Sunshine said. “I wish they’d shoot that stupid bear.”
“Now Auntie,” Ansel said, “that would be violent. And you don’t approve of violence, do you?”
“Shut up. You need your rest.”
/> Sunshine knelt over Darcy and held something hard against her right leg. She began to wrap a cloth around it. Pain shone at the edges of Darcy’s vision.
“I don’t really know how to do this,” she said, “so you should probably get a real doctor to redo it when you get out of here.”
“You guys should pay for it. You tricked me!” Darcy shouted. “That bear could’ve killed me.”
“Keep your voice down,” Sunshine hissed. “Believe me, I know. We’re struggling. We used to have a moose—it died. Same with the wolves. People want to see all the old animals, you know. Something from back home. But pretty soon all we’ll have are monkeys and people in costumes.”
“Polar bears aren’t from back home, are they?”
Sunshine knotted the cloth around Darcy’s calf.
“They’re from the snow. It’s close enough. Look, I’m fifty years old. I was born in the real Las Vegas. For me ‘back home’ means getting a rash in your crotch because there’s no fruit and you got scurvy. Does that sound like a good circus to you?”
Ansel’s laugh sounded like glass breaking.
“It’s not funny,” Sunshine said. “You weren’t there, you don’t know.”
“That’s true,” Ansel said. “I don’t know anything about deprivation. I’ve never gone without food because other people had to stuff themselves. I’ve never risked my life so other people could laugh.”
Sunshine sighed. Darcy thought of her mother, how she would come home some nights so tired and hungry she didn’t make sense, her body all light and empty like a balloon. She’d sing snatches of cowboy songs and tell broken jokes with no punch lines, and every five minutes she’d ask what time it was. “Let’s dance,” she’d say, and then she’d twirl once and fall into a chair, where Darcy would take her by the feet and twist her ankles back and forth until she laughed.
