by Amanda Davis
The guy scratched at the black-ink barbed wire drawn around his neck. “No,” he said. “But I’ve only been in Nashville about eight months. Ben Dixon’s the one you ought to talk to,” he said. “He’ll be in here in about an hour. He does a lot of circus people. He did everything on this wall.”
While we waited, a couple of skinny redneck girls pushed through the front door and bells tinkled. They wore lots of makeup and were dressed alike: skintight acid-wash jeans and white sweatshirts. They both had stiff blond hair that stood up in a claw in the front. Counter Guy came out to help the girls. One wanted a heart but couldn’t decide if it should have a name inside or just initials. The other wanted a motorcycle.
“I know what I want, I want a motorcycle,” she said about six times until her friend finally told her to shut up.
And then this guy walked in, tall and skinny, roped in tattoos with a shaved head and small silver hoop earrings—about ten on each ear. “She’s been waiting for you,” Counter Guy said, pointing at me over the tall hair of the rednecks.
Ben had the sleepy expression of someone who’d just woken up. “Hey,” he said. “Let me put my coat away and I’ll be right back. Did you already pick out a design?”
I didn’t know what to say. The fat girl pinched my calf.
“Ow, yes.” I nodded as he disappeared into the back.
“Why’d you do that?” I whispered, but she shook her head.
Ben came back out in a ratty white T-shirt with a gray sweater tied around the waist of his army pants. I stood up.
“Which one is it?”
I pointed at the three chickens and he raised his eyebrows but his expression didn’t really change. He nodded, then led me into the back.
There were rooms back there, small sterile cubicles with doors. He opened one and gestured me onto a doctor’s-examining-table-type thing, black vinyl with a few rips through which I could see the frame underneath. I sat.
“Where do you want it?” he asked, pulling thin translucent paper from a roll.
I held my breath. I pointed to my arm, then changed my mind and pointed to my ankle.
“Ankles hurt,” he said matter-of-factly. He flipped a switch and something began to hum. He selected a few tiny pots from a shelf—red, blue, white, yellow, black—and put them on a small metal tray stand. Then he sat on an office chair, took the paper, lay it over the photograph, and began to roughly trace the chickens. The fat girl stood beside him, looking over his shoulder. When he took another piece of the paper and traced the chickens from the drawing so that they looked smooth and perfect, she gave me the thumbs-up. I scowled.
“Right or left,” he said. “You’ll have to take off your boot.”
“I don’t want it,” I blurted.
Ben Dixon stopped what he was doing and looked annoyed. “Okay.”
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
He put the drawing down on the tray of tiny pots, scooted backwards on his chair, his wheels screeching a little, and studied me. “What do you want?” he said.
“Do you know Charlie Yates?”
He crossed his arms and squinted at me; his mouth squeezed itself into a tiny pucker. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend,” I said. I swallowed. “Annabelle. I’m Annabelle. I need to find him. I need to find the Fartlesworth Circus.”
Ben Dixon rose and shut the door. Yes, he knew Charlie. He’d tattooed Charlie. Yes, he’d help me find the circus but I couldn’t tell Charlie that I’d met him.
“Why?” I asked, but he just shook his head and got a dark, faraway look. And though the fat girl was making faces at me from her place in the corner behind him, I didn’t press it.
He wanted to know how I knew Charlie. I didn’t tell him much, beyond knowing Starling and Clark’s. I didn’t even say why I was looking, though I’d prepared myself to say something cryptic and cliché, something about needing to leave town because things had gotten hairy. But he didn’t ask. He told me to head south. Their route, he didn’t know exactly but he knew how to figure it out.
“They go through Georgia at some point after North Carolina,” he said. “It’s a pattern, South Carolina, North Carolina, a minute in Tennessee, then Georgia. They spend a lot of time in Georgia and Alabama, I know.”
It all seemed simple to him. Simple that a stranger would show up and simple that no questions be asked. There was a strange kind of trust in that, a tentative agreement that I recognized had nothing to do with me but was implied by something else, something larger. Like he would’ve helped out anyone that showed up with those two words: circus, Charlie.
He looked me up and down. “You can crash at my place tonight if you need to,” he said. “Whatever.”
We wandered around Nashville until Ben Dixon got off his shift and then followed him home. He lived with some roommates in a peeling brown house, with blankets hanging in the windows. Inside it smelled like years of stale smoke. Ben flicked a switch and flooded a fairly large room with the harsh light of a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Against one wall a brown couch spewed stuffing. “You can sleep there,” Ben said.
I put my bag down next to it and he disappeared down the hall. I started to follow him but the fat girl blocked my path.
“Let him go,” she said. The room was incredibly bright. I sat on the couch and my butt sank down. I could feel the springs, but I didn’t care. Even my bones felt heavy. I lay down and used my backpack for a pillow. It had never felt this good to be horizontal, I was so tired. Even though the room was freezing, it didn’t take long for me to fall asleep.
I half woke a few hours later to the smell of pot and cigarettes. Someone had turned out the light and put a blanket over me. There was a conversation going on in the next room, but I couldn’t make out the words, and I drifted off again.
When I woke for good I had no idea where I was. I sat up, light-headed, and looked around the strange, dark room. I could tell it was daytime by the light peeking through the blankets covering the windows. My mouth tasted foul and furry. Next to the couch I was on, there was a small grubby-looking metal table covered in junk mail and cigarette butts and trash. In the corner, a worn armchair held an open pizza box. Apart from some pencil sketches of gravestones and monuments, there was nothing on the dirty walls. A filthy red rug hid most of the floor, but what peeked out was peeling gray linoleum. The fat girl was asleep in a heap in the corner.
I heard the distant sounds of traffic, and it all came back to me quickly: The tattoo shop, the man on the bus to Nashville, the drugstore in Asheville. The gas station bathroom in Gleryton.
Tony Giobambera and all his blood.
My heart pounded. I reached up and touched my short hair. My blond hair. Where were we? How had this happened? How had things gone this far?
I looked at the fat girl, sleeping so peacefully, all curled up like a big bloated muffin. I walked over and watched her breathing softly, her mouth slightly open, and I hauled off and gave her a good swift kick in the kidneys.
She lurched awake, eyes wide, and stumbled to all fours. I kicked her again, hard, this time in the side. She collapsed with a squawking groan and curled up tight. I was crying and shaking, tears running off my face, but I kicked her again and again, for everything, everything, until I couldn’t anymore.
And then I knelt beside her and took her in my arms, wrapping them as far around her as I could, shaking and sobbing.
“You ungrateful cunt,” she whispered. But I held on tight, rocking back and forth, so very sorry for everything.
She forgave me later and she calmed me down. I couldn’t stop crying and she sat on the couch with me and held my hand, rubbed my back.
When I was breathing almost normally, she rumpled my short hair and told me she was disappointed. “In what?”
“That you didn’t get that tattoo,” she said. It made me laugh, which in turn made her laugh, but I had wanted it. In the shop I’d had this fleeting thought that by scratching their secret language o
n my body, I could belong to that closeness Starling and Charlie had shared.
The whole thing was no more ridiculous than sitting in this dirty living room, than me having run away. “I do sort of want it,” I said.
“What?”
“The tattoo.”
I stood up then and crossed the room, pulling one of the blankets aside with an idle hand as I went. A bright column of dusty light flooded in, then disappeared. I opened the front door and a gust of fresh, chilly air swept through. There wasn’t much to see out there. Just houses, a street. A town. People’s uninterrupted lives.
I took a deep breath. The air was delicious. So everything had happened. I had to keep my focus. I had to find Charlie. He would know what to do.
“We could stay,” the fat girl said, rubbing her back. “Or we could leave tonight. It’s really up to you.”
I turned back to her. I didn’t want to stay. “Let’s go,” I said.
“They’re probably looking for you by now.”
“Yeah.”
Then there were footsteps behind me and I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to find Ben Dixon. Instead I met his roommate, Oliver. He jerked his head in the direction of the hallway. “I made some coffee, Annabelle,” he said. “You drink coffee?”
I nodded and followed him down the dark hall to a bright filthy kitchen. He motioned for me to sit at a small table and I did. The fat girl crept behind him, making faces at me, but I managed not to laugh.
He poured himself a coffee and one for me. There wasn’t any milk, but he handed me a box with a solid brick of sugar inside and after banging it on the table a few times, I poured the sugar and promised myself that the coffee would kill whatever germs were living in the mug he’d given me. It had lots of rings, stains of previous beverages around the rim. When I brushed my thumb along its edge, some of the gunk cleared away. I made a lip-sized space and drank from there.
Despite that, the coffee was tasty and it sharpened the edges of things a little. The dismal fog began to clear from my head. “Where’s Ben?” I asked.
“He’s running errands. You were sleeping pretty hard. There were people over last night after Dan’s show and you didn’t even wake up.” Oliver stretched his legs out in front of him and took a long sip. “We thought we should just let you sleep, you know.”
“Thanks.”
He smiled, and his face became less gloomy and long, almost handsome. “No big,” he said, and took a cigarette from a pack on the table. He leaned back and lit it. “So Ben wouldn’t tell,” he said, studying me. “How’d you guys meet?”
“Old friends,” the fat girl whispered.
“Old friends,” I said.
“From North Carolina?”
Alarm must have registered on my face because his expression was instantly more curious. I had to be careful, I reminded myself. “Yeah. My cousin. Ben knew her.”
“I thought it was Chuck Yates,” Oliver said. He tapped his cigarette on the edge of the table and I watched the ash fall to the floor. I looked to the fat girl for guidance. She was leaning against the doorway chewing on a Slim Jim. She shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess him too,” I said. “You know him?”
“Sure,” Oliver said. “He lived here for a while, you know. With us. That was before War Banshee. Back when Terrorist Scum was part of Snot Refugee. I played drums for Snot Refugee.”
“Oh. So,” I started. “Were Charlie and Ben—”
The fat girl drew her hand across her throat, her eyes wide.
“Huh?”
And Ben Dixon walked in. He had a grocery bag, which he set down on the table and began to unload. He offered me a carton of milk, but my coffee was almost cold.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Great.” Oliver still stared at me. I felt my face heat, my cheeks flush.
“How old are you anyway?” It was Ben, not looking at me, just putting something frozen in the freezer.
“How old do you think I am?”
Oliver considered me for a minute, then looked over his shoulder at Ben. “Twenty?”
“Not more than eighteen,” Ben said.
“Huh.” I stood and took the coffee to the sink. It was full of moldy dishes. I didn’t see a sponge or detergent. I turned on the water, which sputtered and choked, then rained out a steady brown stream. I rinsed the cup and set it down.
“So?” Ben was waiting for an answer. I saw the clock behind him and realized it was afternoon, not morning.
The fat girl batted her eyelids from the doorway. “I’ll take either of those answers,” I said. They exchanged looks but didn’t push it.
“I have to go to work,” Ben said. “But we can stop by the diner on the way there if you’re hungry.” My stomach rumbled loudly at the thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Get your stuff.”
Over eggs and pancakes he told me to head to Atlanta, to find a tattoo shop called Wenger’s. To ask for a guy named Lex.
“As in Luthor?” I said. He smiled.
The diner was mostly empty, just a few weathered old men in baseball caps and a skinny couple sipping coffee with their heads close together. Our waitress had a lazy eye.
“You should check out the Lemon Drop when you’re there,” he said. “If you like Marilyn Monroe.”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Marilyn Monroe. It was all flooding back to me again, that unhinged feeling of floating through the world. The incredible dreaminess of it: the lightness in my stomach, the sense that my limbs did not belong to me. I had done something awful and run away. I was running away. I looked at my hands holding a coffee cup and couldn’t be sure they were mine. If made to pick my hands out of a lineup, what would distinguish them? I was undercover, not myself. I touched my hair. It was very short. Short enough to not be mine. Everything was too bright again. Too loud and sharp. Even in that quiet restaurant. I could hear every plate shift, the groan of the griddle as it strained to cook some meat. The clink of each utensil sounded like a drum crescendo.
Ben Dixon moved an empty sugar packet back and forth across his plate. And then I asked him, “How do you know Charlie?”
He watched his hand, the waving sugar, and didn’t answer for so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard me. But when I went to ask him again, made brave by my imminent departure, the fat girl put her hand on my arm and silenced me.
“Let me give you something to take with you,” he said, finally, carefully. And that was all.
I could tell he thought it was weird that I chose the chickens, but he didn’t question it. He carved them really tiny on my ankle, like I asked. “A parting gift,” he said. “For Charlie.”
“And you can give him this for me too,” he said just as I was about to leave, backpack slung over one arm, coat in the other, ankle wrapped in cellophane and masking tape. He leaned over and kissed me full on the mouth, his tongue slipping between my lips. I jumped back, tasting him. I backed away. And nodded.
“That was weird,” the fat girl said later as we walked alongside the early evening traffic. I was still floating somewhere in my head, lost in a thick soup of random thoughts.
“Hey,” she said, “space girl.”
“Sorry.” My ankle throbbed a little, a warm dull hum, but the pain was oddly nice. Even while Ben was cutting into me with those tiny whirring needles, it had felt good somehow, brave, the pain more real than anything else. Permanent. And a thought had flashed across my mind for a minute like a translucent message pulled by a prop plane: Starling would never believe this.
Ben had loaded me up with antibiotic ointment and bandages. “Keep it clean,” he’d said. “Seriously. And don’t pick the scab off, whatever you do.”
My boots were good for this, protective.
“The kiss and everything, you know?” The fat girl was working on a giant roll of SweeTarts.
“Yeah.” I could still feel his mouth on mine. My first kiss, really. Even if it was intended for someone else, it was
still at least partially mine.
“Whatever,” the fat girl said, and rolled her eyes.
We didn’t exactly have a plan to get to Atlanta, though we still had $532. We decided to wait a few hours to hitchhike, to wait until the world was sleeping.
We found a graveyard and climbed over its high stone wall to sit in a dark corner and rest. It felt like the center of night. We sat on the damp grass with our backs against the stones and our legs out in front of us and we looked at the sky arching overhead. I wished for a cigarette, but I hadn’t taken any, even though Counter Guy had offered as we left the shop. I was oddly happy though, under the dim stars in this graveyard in this strange city with the fat girl. I wasn’t thinking of Fern or my mother or Starling or Andrea Dutton. Or Tony Giobambera. Any of it.
SEVEN
A crazy hippie lady with lots of wild gray hair picked us up hours later in a rusting Chevy Nova and gave us a ride out of Nashville. She said, “I’m only pulling over because I’m sleepy. I’ll take you as far as Chattanooga if you keep me awake. I want you to sing, not chitchat.” I was relieved not to have to make small talk. I sang camp songs, “Oh Sinner Man,” “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” and the Beatles whenever it looked like she was nodding off. The fat girl dozed in the back.
She left us at a truck stop and there was such a chill in the air that I barely felt my fingers and toes. A big trucker named Willie found us there, standing outside the restaurant and stomping our feet to keep the blood moving, and gave us a lift all the way to Atlanta. I was wary of him, but the fat girl didn’t seem concerned. I stared out the window and watched all the towns slip through the darkness along the highway. Mostly my eye caught the neon of chain stores and gas stations, but occasionally I saw a tract of houses or a strip of neighborhood.
He left us at a gas station and I tried to clean myself up in the bathroom. Old makeup smudged in half-moons beneath my eyes. My hair was an awful yellow-orange and stuck up all over. I did what I could in that fluorescent room, even taking off my sweater and swabbing at my armpits with paper towels and shiny pink soap.
