How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

by Connie May Fowler

  As she slowly eased forward, she saw that the flagman wasn’t a child at all, but a midget in need of a shave. The road in front of the green was blocked. A giant trailer with a phantasmagoric painting of a snake-eating man—a short man, a really short man; the snake was three times his height—emblazoned across its aluminum siding was backing up onto the green. Traveling concession stands plastered with pop art images of popcorn, lemonade, cotton candy, candied apples, foot-long hot dogs, grilled corn, funnel cakes, hot pretzels, and snow cones were lined up northbound on Bread of Life Way. All of this paled, however, against the forty or fifty midgets—mainly men: rough-looking, tattooed, carnie midgets—who ran hither-skither, an army of two-legged ants, laughing, cursing, order-shouting, beneath the tall, shining, phallus-reminding fire tower. The bucolic village of Hope, population seventeen (this was an optimistic but government-sanctioned estimate and didn’t include the folks who populated the forest and swamp just outside the city limits), had, in Clarissa’s brief absence, become a bustling carnie town filled with cigar-chewing short people, none of whom could have reasonably convinced anyone but a shit-faced deaf, dumb, and blind man that they tipped the height scale anywhere close to five feet.

  Clarissa, now at a dead stop, nodded at the sweat-drenched midget who was directing traffic.

  “Nice car,” he said, wiping the side of his face with his T-shirt sleeve. “Sixty-nine?”

  “Nope. Seventy.”

  His whistled; it was a long, low, seductive, dirt-bag whistle.

  “What is all this?” Clarissa asked.

  “The All-American Dynamite Dwarf Carnival. Ta-daa!” He struck a pose, arms extended and waving. It was as if all four feet three of him were composed of flourish and pomp. He winked at Clarissa, which caused a shiver composed of hot and cold neurons to glitter flashbulb-style the length of her spine. She was just about to go where she had never gone before—that there was something wildly sexy about midgets—when he pulled on the end of his nose as if it were full of dust and snorted. He put his hands on either side of her window, which Clarissa did not like, but he cut her off before she could say, “Hey, get your grimy paws off my vehicle.”

  “It starts tomorrow,” he said—his voice sounded like buffed rust—“and lasts through the weekend.” He winked again and rapped his knuckles on the top of the El Camino. He had to reach high to get there, and she wondered if he was on his tiptoes. She started to look but stopped, not wanting to appear rude. She felt her ovaries tingle. They always did that when she met a man brimming with confidence, whether said confidence was justified or not.

  “A whole carnival of midgets?” She supposed Hope was so small that only a midget carnival would fit. He smelled like pepperoni. She spied the tendrils of a tattoo curl from his chest and up into the wrinkles and grime of his neck.

  He grimaced. It looked as if he hadn’t shaved in three days, maybe more. A chewed stogie sat perched like a bloated pencil behind his left ear. “Not midgets.” He spit the m-word the way one would spit out a mouth full of maggots. “Dwarfs. We’re dwarfs. Big difference, lady.”

  “Sorry!” Clarissa hadn’t meant to offend. Just as her reptilian brain awoke and whispered in her ear that the guy was an asshole, a dog shot in front of the car.

  The dwarf yelled, flapping his little, tattoo-covered arms (a buxom blonde, a red heart, a bare-breasted hula girl, a flourishing “I love Mom,” a pair of black-and-white dice, a silver-nailed crucifix, a bicep-bulging Popeye—all of them miniature versions of traditional tats). “Money Dog, you’re gonna get smashed. Get back up there in the trailer where you belong!”

  The diminutive Money Dog looked like a chow chow that had been left in the dryer too long. And with his crooked front teeth (his bottom canines jutted up over his lip) and black muzzle, Clarissa decided he bore a striking resemblance to Ernest Borgnine.

  Money Dog wagged his proud foxlike tail and then bounded onto the green. He ran an obstacle course of legs, tents, and traveling sideshows. He paused at the fire tower, peed all about its perimeter, and, satisfied that it was sufficiently marked, jumped into a red, white, and blue trailer that announced it was the home of Rocket Dog and Nicolai, the World’s Smallest Human Cannonball. Painted across the trailer’s side was a wild-eyed rendering of the shrunken chow chow, replete with crimson cape, flying into the arms of a dwarf in a silver jumpsuit. In the background, a golden cannon gleamed.

  Clarissa wondered if the dog liked being called Money Dog better than Rocket Dog and if he responded to both or ignored people when they called him by the one he didn’t prefer. And then she thought, Surely they don’t shoot that dog out of a cannon, and if they did, surely she would call the ASPCA.

  Just as she was imagining picking up the phone to report that the dwarf circus was being cruel to what appeared to be a dwarf chow chow, the truck pulling the Snake-Eating Man trailer, which had nearly cleared the road, backfired, causing Clarissa and the traffic-directing dwarf to jump.

  “Hey, get a tune-up, you freaking knucklehead,” the dwarf yelled, flipping off the snake eater.

  From what Clarissa could tell, the snake eater was also a dwarf. Just as she slipped into a mental meandering about what special equipment the truck that towed the trailer came with in order to accommodate a man with legs only two feet long, it rolled forward, clearing the way for her to proceed.

  “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told the dwarf, sliding the El Camino into gear.

  “If you’re free tonight, come on by. I’ll buy you a beer.” He winked at her again, and Clarissa, being polite, flattered, dumbfounded, shot him a wave ripe with feminine, mail lady flourish, then rolled up her window, flipped on the tunes, and watched the dwarf and the carnival’s attendant commotion grow ever smaller in her splendid rearview.

  As she neared her house (Iggy wasn’t dead after all—no EMS units, no Jaws of Life), her resolve to be firm about why she’d bought the El Camino waned. Maybe he wouldn’t be home and she could put off having to explain. Despite the El Camino’s unapologetic air-conditioning, fear forced a cold sweat to break out along Clarissa’s brow, chin, breastbone. What had she done? What if he flew into a rage, forcing her into that trap of believing she was nothing more than her mother’s child? Maybe she should drive around the block and phone him, prepare him. Too late. Her timing sucked. The Civic was approaching from the opposite direction. Feeling cursed, she checked her phone. It was 5:17. He’d spent the entire day with his freakin’ models.

  Asshole. What on God’s earth was she going to do? She actually had a mental image of herself jumping out of the El Camino, abandoning it in the middle of the road, claiming it was someone else’s fine car. She scanned her inner play yard: Nobody was home. The ovarian shadow women were hiding behind her hip bone. Super Dame was long gone, probably throwing a party in her brain stem at Clarissa’s expense. The pessimist in her was gaining strength. Her husband was not going to like what she had done, and she’d better be prepared for him exhibiting his displeasure in shattering detail.

  “You must be tough, Clarissa. This is not the time for pussies.” Deepak Chopra’s oddly handsome face flickered and then held steady in her ever-running mental movie. He wore big red eyeglasses studded with beautiful ruby rhinestones. That took balls, she thought, wearing those Liberace glasses.

  “Listen to me. Courage is not born; it is seized. Seize your courage, Clarissa. If you don’t, you will regret every day of the rest of your life.”

  This made-to-order Deepak inspired in Clarissa a reexamination. This was her vehicle, and above all else, she’d bought it because she’d wanted to buy it. It was her money, her work, her life. This was not Iggy’s decision to make. If he didn’t like what she’d done, he could pout all by his lonesome. She wasn’t going to care or apologize or accommodate.

  “Go, baby, go!” Deepak adjusted his glasses and gazed at her, mirthful, curious.

  “Yeah, right,” she said, slowing down, letting Iggy turn in first. He didn’t glance in h
er direction. He was in his own world as usual, that smug half-smile teetering on an otherwise impassive face. He was too big for that Civic, like a sausage in a casing. An awful notion took hold: What if the opposite happened? What if he claimed the El Camino for himself? Clarissa was sure he didn’t realize it was her behind the wheel. So she drove a quarter mile past the house to give him time to go inside and her time to try to get a grip. She would not let him steal her car.

  Three minutes later, when she pulled into the yard, she glimpsed in her peripheral vision a flurry of shadow and light. She turned and looked. All she saw was one leaf falling, a whirlybird without anchor. It landed in the cradled branches of a camellia. Stay steady, she told herself, shifting into park; you have the right to buy a car, a truck, a goat, a barrel of whiskey, or a boatload of orphans if that’s what suits you.

  “He can only take it from you if you allow it,” Deepak said, and then he took the slightest nibble from a pink-frosted chocolate bonbon.

  She turned off the ignition, got out of the truck, cursed the heat, tried to push out of her mind all fantasies involving a bonbon-eating New Age guru, and noticed that under the shade of the oaks, the El Camino’s yellow paint took on a deeper hue. Thinking there was a scratch on the door, she rubbed it with her T-shirt; it was only a shadow. She imagined herself becoming one of those obnoxious people who set safety cones around their cars in parking lots. No, I’ll never get that bad, she thought. Besides, those people were begging to get keyed. She walked to the rear of the house, felt her heart beat too fast, and went in through the back door. She slipped into the laundry room and stashed her purse back in its hiding place. In the dim glow of the chandelier room, she closed her eyes, counted to ten, and then went for it.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Where are you?”

  The floor upstairs creaked. He had headed straight to his office. She walked to the foot of the stairs. She could simply let him discover the El Camino all on his own. She didn’t have to say a thing. But now, having already started down the path to confrontation, she felt almost heady about his possible reactions. “Hey! Watcha doing?”

  “Busy,” he shouted. She heard him open and close his desk drawer.

  “Well, take a break. I’ve got something to show you.” That felt good—and dangerous.

  He groaned. Her life—all of its molehills and detours—she realized, was an enormous annoyance to him.

  “I told you,” he said, stepping into the oval of light that defined the landing, “not to take out the truck. And what do you do?” At this angle, his ears looked bigger than his head, or maybe she was hallucinating—the whole heatstroke theory again.

  He hurried down the stairs. His long limbs and torso moved like a baby rattle—loose and disjointed. She wondered if his penis flopped around as much as his arms did and if that was an enjoyable or encumbering sensation. His face was blotchy—red dots on a pale canvas. His skin always got blotchy in the heat. His beard was tangled—nearly matted—and she decided not to ponder how it got in such a state.

  Her spine burned. Stay strong, stay strong. “I had to go out. Didn’t have any choice.”

  “You could have waited until I got back.” His bald head was baboon red. He was sunburned. Good. I hope it blisters and peels and maybe even rots, she thought.

  “You were gone all day.”

  “I had business to take care of.” He looked past her, boredom lengthening his face.

  “And you don’t want me taking the Civic.”

  “I don’t care if you take the Civic, Clarissa.” He hit the c’s too hard, a hiss and a threat. “I care if you take it without asking. I have meetings, people I have to see. You know that. I can’t walk into the yard and find that I have no transportation, now, can I?” He had not yet looked directly at her.

  Clarissa always grew confused, as if her brain filled with nettles, when he spoke to her in his you’re-an-idiot tone. Why didn’t she lay it on the line? Why didn’t she tell him that lunch with his models was not “business,” and that she knew he’d been over at Yvette’s apartment filming them doing only God knew what, and that the Civic was in both their names but purchased with her earnings? Something prevented her from speaking her mind, something she had learned as a girl when her mother was brow-beating her over her figure or her moral character or her tendency to hide behind books. “Why do you read all the goddamn time?” She wanted this conversation to go well, even if it meant playing along with his lie.

  “Did you have a good lunch?” she asked.

  He waved off her words and stormed into the kitchen. “Lunch was fine. It was business.” He gave equal and exaggerated emphasis to the last three words, opened the refrigerator, withdrew a beer, slammed shut the door, twisted off the cap, and said with his eyes closed, as if what he was about to utter caused him such distress that life was barely worth living, “On the way home, I stopped at a new gallery. Downtown near the Capitol.” He took a swig, then stared at the floor as he spoke. “I was showing the fowking woman my book, just about had her convinced to host an installation of my nude wire sculptures, and suddenly she stops and says, ‘Oh! You’re Clarissa Burden’s husband!’ ” He snorted, his free hand clenching into a giant fist. He glared at Clarissa, his lips spreading into a grimace, as if the encounter were his wife’s fault. “I was so fowking mad at the fowking whore I walked out right then and there. I refused to show her one more image.”

  Clarissa did not know how to respond. How troubled should she be, she wondered, that his resentment ran this thick? “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  He studied the bottle’s label as if it were the most fascinating read on the planet. “No big deal. The gallery is a shithole. She’ll be out of business before Halloween.” Once more, he leveled his gaze at Clarissa. “The owner whore is a stupid cunt.”

  The words hit Clarissa like a whip. He was baiting her. But she would not bite. Her ears started to ring; she needed the world to leave her alone for one day, one week, one month. That was the solution: run. But to where?

  “Courage, Clarissa. Born or seized?” Deepak was frowning.

  Clarissa forced a smile. That’s how you don’t take bait. You ignore it. “I’ve got a really great surprise for you. Come with me.” She walked ahead of him and said over her shoulder, surprising herself with how careless she sounded, “You’re not going to believe it!”

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do, Clarissa. I told Yvette and Natalie I’d have proofs for them tomorrow.”

  Lovely little Yvette and Natalie. “Are they coming back out?”

  “No. I’m going to…” He paused, and in those three seconds, Clarissa perceived the pulsing vulnerability of yet another lie. “Um, meet them in town.”

  “I see.” Clarissa threw open the front door. “This won’t take long.”

  They stepped onto the porch. “Goddamn, this heat!” he said.

  Amaziah, from his position behind the wheel, saw Iggy and Clarissa and sensed trouble. He put his hand on his son’s head. “How about we go for a walk?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Heart kicked his little legs. His face beamed.

  Olga Villada took one look at Clarissa and knew that if it weren’t for the presence of her husband and son, she’d stay put and interfere. The young woman looked absolutely vanquished, as if the man she had married were stealing her soul. Quickly she pecked her son’s cheek. “What a good idea!”

  Hand in hand, the three of them tumbled through the hot wind until they reached the hardwood grove behind the barn, a safe distance from the sentinel oak and the El Camino.

  “What do you think?” Clarissa asked. Her instinct to stay safe propelled her into the yard and out of reach.

  Iggy remained on the porch. He stroked his beard as if deeply contemplating the situation. Without warning, he spun around, slapped the porch rail that Amaziah had hand-carved, and yelled, “What the fowk did you do, jou teef?” He pounded each word.

  Jou teef. You bitch. “I…” Clarissa looked down
at her feet. She felt every shred of that day’s happiness float away. “I bought a car.”

  He snorted. “Well, that’s obvious. How badly did you get taken? How many miles does it have?”

  “That’s the thing. This old guy in Dead Oak owned it. It was like his hobby car. He barely drove it.”

  “How many, Clarissa?”

  “Only forty-six thousand.”

  “Yeah, right. Forty-six thousand after they fowked with the odometer. What other bullshit did they feed you, eh?”

  Clarissa did not say another word because she couldn’t. Fury, pain, and embarrassment had frozen her thought processes, rendering her mute, immobile. It was the same feeling that overcame her when her mother beat her and called her a stupid fat whore. None of those three words had any basis in fact. But Clarissa took them in one by one, like poisoned slices of an ancient apple; she swallowed, every time.

  “What did you do with the truck, Clarissa?”

  How could she explain that its tires had been ice-picked and that a one-eyed man she’d just met whose name was Cracker Bandit who loved Sopchoppy earthworms with his whole heart had given her five hundred dollars cash for it? Five hundred dollars—it wasn’t worth that much money—and the junk heap went away. She didn’t have to think ever again about the stupid truck or how she would get to the grocery store or how she longed for the illusion of freedom. And she had five hundred dollars in her pocket—her lucky day. And a couple of thousand in her secret bank account. She wasn’t going to tell him squat.