by Amanda Davis
Walking towards him, his face so sharp against the gray stone of the building, against the red brick of the low wall, against the dull noise of everything else.
And the warm heavy cleaver, the pleasantly warm weight of the cleaver in my hand.
“Hey.”
It all dissolved, and I blinked up at Wilma, standing with feet spread, snapping her fingers. “Oh,” I said. “Hi there.”
She pulled her glasses off and polished them against her T-shirt. “We have to pack up,” she said. “Tragedy—it’s really fucking awful—but the show moves anyway and I need your help.”
I nodded. My head still harbored the dull roar. I shook it hard to clear it. Wilma offered me a hand. “Thanks,” I said, and struggled to my feet.
I looked around at the lights and the darkness. Wilma stretched and waved me to follow her and I did.
Elmira, New York. Then Buffalo. Then Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Then Altoona.
Then Ohio. Kentucky. West Virginia. Working our way back. Delaware. Maryland. Virginia. Tennessee. North Carolina. Gleryton.
Working my way back.
Wilma talked as we drove. Talked about how amazing Rapunzel Finelli had been when she was younger, how terrible it was that she had fallen. Talked about how much Wilma’s mother had loved to watch Rapunzel spin and spin. How that was the life they led, aerialists, depending for their very existence on the security of rigging, the hold of a single bolt.
“Religious,” she said. “And superstitious, absolutely, about how to do it, about only doing their own. I mean everyone rigs for himself—fathers don’t trust sons. It’s like that, you know?”
I nodded. I was only half listening. Part of me was there, and part of me was walking across a huge map of the United States wondering who I would be by the time we reached Gleryton, all the while trying to suppress the dull throb of that day.
The warm weight of that cleaver in my hand.
“Hungry?”
Wilma was trying to tune in the radio, banging at it and twisting its knobs, while simultaneously watching the traffic in the rearview mirror. I shook my head. In front of us the night stretched in all directions and our road split it open. The sky was a dark, backlit blue. I felt hollow inside.
“I’m thinking we stop when we hit I-88.” She looked over at me. “What’s wrong? Annabelle, what is wrong?”
I was crying. I couldn’t stop. Tears tumbled down my cheeks.
Wilma took a deep breath and reached over to pat my knee. “I know,” she said softly. “Rapunzel was a real sweetheart.” Her voice broke a little. “We will all miss her. They’re talking about putting together some kind of memorial service for her tomorrow night. It’s amazing how much ritual helps in times like these.”
An enormous wave of exhaustion passed over me. I closed my eyes, but the blackness behind them pulsed with light and I was still crying. I willed my mind to empty, thing by thing, until all I saw was a clean white space, no windows or doors or people or knives. Just clean and empty and white.
Wilma woke me in Elmira. The day was breezy and the air smelled clean. The evening’s performance had been canceled. There would be a memorial service instead.
After the show loaded in and I had mucked the bulls and horses, I went looking for Charlie. Instead I ran into Rod shuffling around with a mopey face outside the Genersh trailer. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
Rod shrugged and swallowed, then shrugged again. He had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, and from the little spikes of kicked dirt around his feet, I gathered he’d been there awhile.
“What’s going on?”
He shrugged again and kicked the ground. This was about the kiss on my cheek he’d given me. I knew it. I knew it and I couldn’t possibly deal with it right now. If I had to drag it out of him, we weren’t going to talk about it.
“Don’t go,” he said in a tiny voice.
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “Don’t go.”
I took a step forwards and waited, but he didn’t seem to have anything to volunteer. It was going to be a lovely day and I was already tired of it.
“Rod?”
He sighed and turned his back to me, kicking at the ground again. “Fine, just go, then,” he said. “I don’t care. Go do whatever you have to do.”
“What is going on with you?”
He didn’t answer. Any other day I would have been able to talk to him, maybe even excited to, but not today. Today I couldn’t do it. I was too folded in on myself. Too full of restless, dangerous energy.
“I’ll see you later,” I said. “I promise. At dinner. Or at Rapunzel’s thing.” I turned away from his disappointment and left him there.
I trudged along the row of trailers until I came to the midway. There they were, all the signs screaming invitations to people. SEE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST TAP DANCING BROTHER AND SISTER, TINA AND TIM! GODZUKIA! HALF MAN/HALF MONSTER! I walked down the dirt center of the midway, trying to read the signs as though for the first time. PROFESSOR CHARLES C. CHARLEY’S REVOLUTIONARY TRAINED FLEA EXTRAVAGANZA!
It wasn’t so hard. These were the folks I didn’t know so well, what with my world limited to scoop-and-dump, scoop-and-dump, and the costume trailer. I certainly didn’t know them as well as the people I saw every day. I had never really noticed that before, had never given it a second thought. But now, as I walked between the games and show tents, I thought about what little I knew of each person inside his or her trailer. The midway folks didn’t hang out as much, they kept to themselves.
Take THE WORLD’S SMALLEST TAP DANCING BROTHER AND SISTER, for example. I never saw them around, but I knew Tina and Tim were actually a married couple—midgets, both—who just pretended to be brother and sister, though Tim was black and Tina was Ukrainian. And I knew that Godzukia’s real name was Bill, though I’d never even talked to him. I had seen Amos Ruble, TALLEST LIVING MAN IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE! lumbering across various fairgrounds. He was hard to miss because he was enormous, his hands the size of giant pumpkins—and just about as graceful. In Arizona, his cat had kittens and lots of people had taken one, including Jim. That was the last I remembered anyone mentioning him.
I knew firsthand that THE AMAZING RUBBERBOY was a brat. His name was Glen Block and he spent a lot of time tagging after Jenny Genersh. Rod couldn’t stand him, and I found him irritating. His mother, Gina, was a shiny, voluptuous woman who always wore tight clothes and very high heels, no matter where we set up camp. She seemed to have a crush on Mr. Genersh. On more than one occasion I’d seen her hustling over to the Genersh trailer wearing fresh lipstick and carrying baked goods. Rod told me she’d grown up in the life—her father was a famous clown and her mother had run concessions for Clyde Beatty. Someone else must have been a contortionist—maybe Glen’s dad, whoever he was. But in all the time I’d been with the show, I’d never seen Glen’s act.
And beyond our odd introduction so many months and months before, I hadn’t run into LILY VONGERT, THE WORLD’S ONLY THREE-LEGGED BEARDED LADY much at all. I’d never seen her mysterious third leg. Sometimes I saw her reading in a folding chair by her trailer.
And at the end, just before THE DIGESTIVORE, there was GERMANIA LOUDON, THE FATTEST WOMAN ALIVE! whose kind face I’d really only met that once, at the picnic grounds in Scranton.
From the little I’d seen of the outside of her trailer, Germania Loudon’s living quarters seemed pretty normal—certainly not any bigger than anyone else’s. I stopped walking, checked to make sure no one was watching, then ducked my head inside her show tent and looked around.
There were two billowy yellow curtains set up, and a large, bench-like folding chair. There didn’t seem to be much else there. Just the chair. When Germania Loudon stepped out of her trailer and into that tent she was The Fat Lady, but what did she do? Just sit and let people look at her? Was that what a fat lady was—a spectacle? Something to be stared at?
Then it washed over me how much it must have meant to her to s
ing in the show. It must have meant everything. I wondered if that was what Elaine had summoned her away to discuss the day of the picnic, and whether she’d ever get a chance to do it again.
“Hey.”
I jumped and turned, embarrassed to be caught gawking. But it was just Charlie.
“I thought it was you,” he said.
“You scared me.” I laughed. It seemed silly now, all my peeking at trailers, embarrassing. I walked towards Charlie, hoping he wouldn’t ask, but he did.
“Were you going to visit Gerry?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Just poking around, you know? I’ve been with the show this long and somehow I never come down here.”
“That’s pretty much the way it is. Most of the show performers don’t deign to walk the midway, really. Or not often.” He ran his hand through his coppery hair so that it stood up on one side. I put my hands in my pockets and rocked back and forth on my heels.
“How long have you been with the show by now, anyway?”
“Since right after Christmas,” I said, and remembered what it had been like not to call my mom that day, how the fat girl had whispered me away from the idea.
“That must have been pretty lonely.”
I looked away. I didn’t want to have that conversation. “Whatever,” I said. “I’ve been lonelier.”
He leaned against a tree and cleared his throat. “So why’d you come here anyway?” he said, indicating the big top with his thumb. “You weren’t really looking for me, were you?”
I licked my lips and exhaled. “Yeah,” I said. “I was looking for you. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought you might know.”
“What would I know?”
“Well, I…” I looked around. We were entirely alone. “You said to…Look, I did something. Like we talked about. Only—” My hand flailed around, trying to find some way to put this all into words. “And I left. Just left. You said find you. You and Marco said why not run away with the circus and—”
“I never said—Marco didn’t mean it! You can’t lay this on me—”
“I’m not laying anything on you, I just—”
“I won’t take responsibility, okay? I mean, you shouldn’t have—I can barely…” His gray eyes were wide, and his chest heaved.
“God. Whatever.” I rubbed my face and took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter, does it? For Chrissake, I can take care of myself. Obviously. Obviously I have.”
“Stop it.”
“What?”
“Stop it!”
“Stop what? God! After all that’s happened, it doesn’t matter, okay. I’m only telling you because you fucking asked!”
I crossed my arms. We were both quiet. In the distance I heard Sam yelling at someone and the sounds of a motor turning over. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and watched my feet crush the grass.
He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it with shaky hands, tilting his head back and blowing smoke up into the air. “You’re right,” he said, after a minute. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”
“It’s okay.”
“No. You didn’t ask me to take care of you.” He picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue and flicked it into the grass. “You haven’t asked for anything, really.”
I nodded. The conversation felt so messy, so tangled up. I fished around for what was underneath it all, and came up with the thing I’d always meant to tell him. Might as well lay all the cards on the table.
“Listen,” I said. “About Starling. You have to know it wasn’t your fault.”
“What?” He spit the word.
“Starling…what happened. I know it always worked out in the past, but I mean, I was there. There was nothing you could have done.”
“I know that.” He stuck a finger in my face and pointed. He had gone very white and his freckles stood out like punctuation marks. “I know that. That’s not for you to tell me.”
He turned and walked a few paces and stood with his back to me. He spat on the ground and I could see his hand shaking again.
I didn’t want this, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. None of it, not this conversation, not any of them.
Charlie blew smoke directly above him. “You’re a good kid,” he said, his jaw tight. “I know that…” He took another drag.
Nothing was supposed to turn out this way. I tried to swallow it down, but it swelled in me, this futility, this exhaustion. I felt my cracks giving, my seams splitting, my shell getting pushed from the inside and the out. What the hell was I to do? It swelled and then it spilled over, and I began to tremble as if I were freezing.
“Charlie,” I said, and my teeth chattered. “I did something awful, Charlie.”
He looked at me and some of the color returned to his face.
“I did something awful,” I said, and I meant she did something, but how could I say that? Because I knew it, I knew it. The fat girl was me, she was part of me, wasn’t she? We had done it together, this thing, this awful thing. We had done it together and it couldn’t be undone.
I clattered and chattered and Charlie pulled me close and hugged me. He held me tight until I stopped shaking. I cried a little, then. And I felt better.
He slung one arm over my shoulder and walked me up the path a little ways. I was embarrassed at my red eyes, at my wet face, but I was also too weary to care. I was Faith and I was Annabelle all at once.
We walked towards the big top, Charlie holding me up. I saw Rod Genersh slumped in a chair by his trailer and when he saw us he leapt up and sank down in one smooth, sad movement. At that moment I understood exactly what he’d wanted to tell me. It was a simple thing, a pure thing, and it was only mine. Rod Genersh loved me. It was like walking or breathing, I understood it without knowing why.
But Charlie led me past all the trailers and the animal trucks and the big top. He led me out of the fence, away from the fairgrounds, away from the circus. We walked along a treed road until we came to a path and could wander off into the woods, and that’s what we did.
We didn’t say much as we moved through the forest. He didn’t ask me any more about what I’d done. He just let me be and we walked quietly until the light was coming from behind us and then we turned around and walked back.
The circus was right where we’d left it, busy and run down, and full of stories and allegiances. I walked through the gate after Charlie and when I did, I had a weird sense of coming home.
I left Charlie to grab a jacket from my trailer before Rapunzel’s memorial service. Wilma was curled up asleep when I came in. I stood and watched her for a few moments. Her cheeks were flushed and her dark hair splayed across the pale pillow. She looked peaceful and vulnerable and much younger than usual.
I cleared my throat, but that had no effect, so I sat on the edge of the bed, ducking my head a little, and gave her shoulder a gentle shake. She blinked in confusion and reached for her glasses. “It’s time for the service,” I said. She nodded. Her eyes were red from crying.
We entered the big top together. Almost everyone was already sitting in the first two rows around the ring. We settled in near the clowns. When I looked to the right, I saw Rod and his brothers staring straight ahead.
It was quiet except for the sounds of chairs scraping wood or the creak of the bleachers themselves and some whispering. Then Elaine took the center ring and began to speak in a loud gravelly voice. “We have gathered today to remember one of our own, the lovely and talented Rapunzel Finelli.”
She looked up. “I first met Rapunzel many years ago, when Mitch and I were just dating. She’d come off a season with Ringling and was thrilled to join us on the Press and Duncan show, was always telling us stories about how much better things were. She was incredibly generous to me—it was only my second season with a show, and she really took me under her wing. And then later—” Elaine’s voice broke. She stopped and put her head in her hand. There were sniffles to my left and right. Someone blew his nose.
&nb
sp; Elaine began talking again but I couldn’t focus. I saw the empty seats and heard the roar of the show, the sound of Rapunzel Finelli’s body hitting the ground. I saw Jim shaking himself all over to remove what he’d just had to do: to carry a broken woman away. I saw Bluebell tossing her tail and swinging her trunk.
“Last year, when Mitch died, Rapunzel was more than just a shoulder to lean on,” Elaine said. “And I was never able to thank her enough for that. She was one of the best hair hangers in the business and we were lucky to be graced by her.” Elaine turned to Steve, the tiger trainer. His groom, Creole Kevin, sat stiffly by his side. “I am so sorry for our loss, Steve. Our prayers are with you.”
Steve nodded. I turned to Wilma, who was studying her hands. “Were they dating?” I whispered. “Steve and Rapunzel?”
She blinked at me. “They’re married,” she said.
Mina and Victor took the ring, stopping to hug Elaine as she left, and spoke, looking up while they did. Then Mr. Genersh rolled his wheelchair out and talked about his wife’s fall. Everyone was crying by now, or at least a little teary, the Genershes, Jim, everyone I could see.
Except Charlie. I spotted him next to Marco, dry eyed and wistful. I stared at him and tried to get his attention but he didn’t look my way. When the service ended, Wilma hugged me, firm and quick, then moved off into the crowd.
I headed for Charlie, but the fat girl tapped me on the shoulder. I ignored her. We were surrounded by people. But then she was in front of me and I stopped. She pointed and I followed her back up the bleachers. We sat.
“You are driving me crazy,” I said.
