The ghost fly, struggling, sought shelter beneath a blade of grass near Clarissa’s left shoulder. The Villada-Archer family huddled beneath the canopy of the tree where they had lost their lives 180 years and 7 days prior. In the clearing, the skin shed by the black snake disintegrated in the pounding rain.
Curled up amid rodent and insect shit, Larry Dibble vomited. What he retched was not food—this angel rarely ate. It was his past, one that he had managed, despite his boss’s best efforts, to keep buried deep in the convulsive impulse called his soul.
Larry Dibble had died in 1860 of snakebite near his shotgun shack in Capitola, a village twenty-some miles east of Tallahassee and about twenty-five miles west of Hope. He’d snuck into a neighbor’s tomato patch, intending to steal the season’s final bounty. Brimming with fallen and overripe fruit, the patch teemed with rats and, thus, also with rattlers. Two serpents struck him three times: hand, thigh, ankle. It was a painful death.
While the storm raged, pounding Clarissa Burden and Iggy Pretoriun into temporary submission and confounding the sweetest wishes of Olga Villada, Amaziah Archer, and Heart Archer as they sought a new way of being, it was Larry Dibble’s life—not his death—that he remembered.
This thing, barely an angel, was not born Larry Dibble; that was a name assigned at ascension. Lawrence Butler had been the youngest brother in a group of four violent men. He was not of the same ilk as his brothers; though, lacking backbone and a sense of righteous anger, he went along far too often. When the Butler boys arrived at the Villada-Archer home on a clear, hot morning on June 15, 1826, Lawrence thought the purpose of the meeting was to negotiate the sale of the property. These were colored people with a colored child, and Florida was no longer a safe place for them. He did not know—how could he know, he wondered amid his waste—what Maurice would set into motion. Lawrence did not partake in the lynching, the torture, the murder. What he did do, which was what earned him those provisional wings, was to step in when Maurice tried to rape Olga Villada. He pulled his big brother off the screaming woman and the two men fought.
Maurice was strong, with a sadistic streak wilder than a herd of untamed horses. As they tumbled across the floor of what Clarissa Burden would call her chandelier room and out onto the back porch, both brothers spied an ax propped in the corner beside the door. Lawrence calculated the distance and knew that Maurice would get to it first. So, using his right thumb as a spike—he remembered full well what brother Bobby had done to the man in Beaufort who’d beat him fair and square in a card game—Lawrence gouged out Maurice’s left eye. He dug deep and hard. He did not want that woman to get raped. Nobody deserved that. Nobody. Not even a pretty Spanish woman with a colored husband.
Maurice pushed Lawrence off him and—laughing, blood streaming—reached out his long arm, managed a good grip on the ax, reared back with the strength that comes of wrestling both man and bull, and hacked his baby brother’s right arm clean off. Lawrence, yowling with the depth of the damned, writhed on the porch floor. Maurice, now blind in one eye, threw his brother’s arm into the yard and aimed to finish what was left of these people.
Lying in a pool of blood, Lawrence managed to tie off an artery, thus saving his own life. Wounded as he was, he passed in and out, but fate forced him to be a witness. He saw his brothers lynch that family—even the little boy—and he heard the names and taunts, saw the whipping Amaziah took and the sheer pleasure his brothers derived in the crime; but right before he passed out for what would be three and a half days, the man chose to forget. And that was his problem; reconciliation of the soul doesn’t occur without long and painful admissions of truth.
Until his death by snakebite, Lawrence Butler remained a man of compromised morals, stealing from his neighbors, sometimes stopping in to see Maurice in Tallahassee (his big brother had become a substantial landowner, parlaying Olga Villada and Amaziah Archer’s land into valuable real estate near the Florida Capitol) to ask for money and various other favors. He never ratted out his brothers, although given the climate, justice was the province of the few and privileged. But right was right. Wrong was wrong. And he’d committed one brave and noble act, which had earned him not only a pass but a chance. Provisional wings were designed not for eternity, but to allow a flawed man the time and space to atone.
Larry Dibble sat up, whimpering, and wiped vomit off his mouth with the back of his hand. He’d gotten it wrong, so, so wrong. He stood—unsteady and ashamed—grabbed his rope, and wondered if there was still time to make anything good of his life, to even for one moment begin to make up for the hell he’d helped create on this earth.
A clap of thunder shook the ground, rattling the house’s windows, buffeting the barn doors, sending swamp critters fleeing for deeper cover. Before the sound waves had settled, the hail stuttered to a stop, replaced by cold rain. Larry Dibble—finally attuned to the horrible fact that he’d been a lousy angel but an even worse man, that one decent act did not a good life make—ran into the yard. The family he had helped destroy (he should have, he knew, stopped Maurice before they ever crossed into Florida) stood huddled beneath the great arms of the tree where they had died. They were comforting one another. Rather than bitter, they seemed joyous that something wonderful might be imminent. He stood in the driving rain—the ants that had long made his hair home drowning, his long-nonexistent arm itching for the first time in a hundred years—and finally understood. It was too late for him, but they still had a chance.
He sprinted across the clearing and, relying on the agility he’d gained as an angel even though his wings were now useless, tossed the rope over a low-lying limb, climbed it as fast as he could, navigated the thick oak maze, past big branches and sharp twigs, smothering at times in impenetrable tangles of Spanish moss, ingesting dirt and fungus and leaf dander, his remaining arm aching as though venom-filled, until—with great effort—he ultimately reached the summit. Atop the tree, he hovered, truly angelic yet fully mortal, rising to his full and modest height, asking not for forgiveness because he realized he was not worthy of mercies tender or harsh, and then he turned himself—body and soul; present, past, unknowable, and immense—into a lightning rod.
The wind howled; the rain slashed horizontally. Olga Villada reached over to comfort and protect her son. Amaziah scanned the heavens, looking for God. Just as Olga Villada was about to say, “How long do you expect us to stand out here?” from a great height Amaziah’s long-desired lightning bolt scarred the heavens, burning a jagged path from the dark and roiling cloud bank, sundering the clownish but sincere angel, incinerating the sentinel oak’s green crown, and pulsing—full of fire—straight into the core of its ancient trunk.
Clarissa saw the flash from behind her closed lids. She forced open her eyes just in time to see the two heron lovebirds rise into the sky as the great tree cleaved in half. The scent of sulfur and wood soured the rain. The awful groan of old-growth wood giving way echoed through the swamp.
The rat family in the attic scurried for cover behind the stiff canvas of an old painter’s drop cloth. The armadillo, sheltered under the house, behind a blind of lilies, did not move.
Clarissa began to cry—not because her husband had her pinned in the dirt she had tilled in the garden she loved, but because the tree was falling in two giant, slumberous halves, its crown taking forever to touch the earth. Oh, my God, she thought, oh, my God; the tree is dying.
“Fowking mother of Christ!” Iggy said. “The whole fowking thing is coming down.”
“It’s about time,” Amaziah murmured, batting back tears. He hugged his wife even as he held on to his son, who patted his daddy’s face and watched, wide-eyed, the big tree fall. For nearly two centuries, they had waited for this moment—the time when the suffering and cruelty would be rendered toothless. Their pain and the Butler boys’ sparkling violence were spiraling on paths unseen, being absorbed by the fine, far-flung molecules of heaven and hell.
“It’s over. It’s finally over,” Olga Villad
a said. She kissed her baby’s cheek, held her husband, listened to the tree die, hoped Clarissa would survive her husband’s attack, and that amid what might be a long and happy life, the young woman would one day write the story of the tragedy that unfolded on this very spot. June 15, 1826, had started out so beautifully, she thought: a clear sky, a fair breeze, her son’s laughter, her husband’s buoyant talk of things to come. Olga Villada pressed her face against Amaziah’s chest and prayed that their murderers would not be treated well by history.
“I told you,” Amaziah said.
“Yes. Yes, you did. And what’s two hundred years”—Olga Villada smiled up at him, wiping away her ghost tears and reaching again for his hand—“when you’ve just been released from an eternity spent thinking about the moment we died?”
“You ready?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Absolutely.”
The family gathered in a single knot—ghost to ghost to ghost—the little boy, as on the day they died, protected within the eternal cocoon of his parents’ bodies.
Olga Villada said, “This is a good thing, baby. Do not be afraid.”
Hidden in the grass, the ghost fly wondered if he should join them on their journey but decided he could not bear to leave Clarissa, his murderer, his beloved. So he remained there—in the tall reeds, Clarissa by his side—listening to the Villada-Archers whisper words he would never forget: I love you, Mama. I love you, Papa. I love you, Olga. I love you, Amaziah. We love you, baby, we love you. Oh, how I love each one of you.
The herons circled the dying oak, spiraling higher at each turn, their heron song sounding like plaintive weeping, but really it was simply the song of life changing, and for the length of one strong inhalation, even the wind did not stir. After 180 years of limbo, during the updraft of the herons’ final spiral, Olga and Amaziah and Heart—a family entwined—left the old earth.
The storm edged eastward, toward the Atlantic. Daybreak unfurled like a dream, tinting red the few remaining stars. The angel named Larry Dibble, who had been as compromised in death as he had been in life, became a single speck of carbon, carried to far shores by a restless breeze.
Clarissa Burden, for the third time in less than an hour, escaped her husband’s grip. She watched her ankle slip through his long Dutch fingers. She did not want to die this way, at the hands of her husband. She had nothing with her—no keys, no access to Yellow Bird, no money, no shoes. So she ran. This time she decided the swamp would kill her. Best to move toward people.
Her feet burned against the asphalt, which held the previous day’s heat despite the rain. She would not let that stop her. She had never before wanted so deeply to live. The ovarian shadow women ran with her. The carnival was only three blocks away.
The ghost fly watched her flee. He tried his wings, but they were soaked through and useless. How could he, a ghost, be immobile? He had, he realized—his little heart aching under the weight of being unable to help his beloved—so much to learn.
Money Dog watched the final preparations for the carnival’s opening day from the awning-covered stoop of his owner’s trailer. Moments before, he had eaten a breakfast of scrambled eggs with chopped sausage, a luxury his owner shared with him at intervals he could not measure. He had consumed it in six fast bites, hoping for more, although more never came, at least not until some unknown point in his unknowable future that he, frankly, hadn’t the ways or means to contemplate.
For now, he was focused on his most recent obsession. No longer content with being a sideshow, Money Dog yearned to take center stage. Show after show, his owner, a man named Nicolai, bedazzling in a tight silver suit, flew through the air after being shot out of a golden cannon. Sure, Money Dog, show after show, leapt on cue—his little doggy red cape flapping—into his triumphant owner’s arms. And sure, using his stage name Rocket, he never failed to delight as he hopped and flipped and twirled on his tippy toes before making the required grateful leap. And no doubt the crowds—especially the children—adored him. But there was something about the visage of his owner flying through the sky that got to Money Dog, that made him ache to crawl into that golden cannon and see for himself what the ride was like.
As an early morning storm raged and as roustabouts, cursing the weather, continued with the business of preparing for opening day, Money Dog contemplated his desire to be the one who flew and also the fact that this was a carnival, after all, so nothing was as it appeared. Even the names were illusions. Nicolai—who sported a goatee and a fake Russian accent when speaking to fans—was actually from Toledo, Ohio, and his name was Glenn, and he had a sweetheart who was very tall named Rane.
And Rocket, who was known as Money Dog among the carnies because people seemed never to be able to get enough of the short little fox-tailed thing, was neither Rocket nor Money Dog in reality. Upon finding him scavenging for food after the show had gone dark, and seeing that he was a mess of sticker burrs and want, and assuming correctly that he’d been wandering for a good long time, Tom Brown (a clown known as Shorty) dubbed the dog Ulysses and brought him into the fold, where he was promptly won by Glenn in a poker game.
Ulysses was a curious dog, and like his namesake who traveled the Greek Isles for ten years, he enjoyed seeing the world. And what better way to do that than with a carnival? True, he preferred his given name to Rocket or Money Dog, which even he knew sounded crass and maybe a little dirty. But given that he was a dog, sometimes it was best to answer to what the humans called you. Wise dogs—of which Ulysses counted himself as one—knew when to walk away from a fight. And as for his stage name, that just went with the territory. Hell, even Petunia the Potbellied Pig preferred to be known as Alice.
He scratched behind his left ear, heard the sizzle of lightning making contact, caught the scent of something ancient singe the storm-scrubbed air, lifted his nose, and tested the wind. The echo of a dying tree passed over him. When the rain had all but stopped, he went in search of the cannon, peeing on every tent spike he passed.
Clarissa was not of a mind to take in the sights. But if she had been, she would have seen the little mechanism—this clock’s heart known as a carnival—begin the countdown to its day. The All-American Dynamite Dwarf Carnival opened its gates to the public in just three hours, and there was much to do. Costumes to be ironed. Beards to be waxed. Hair—depending on the person—to be straightened or curled. Bolts to be tightened, hinges oiled, signs dusted, apples candied, miniature horses and pygmy goats groomed, banners unfurled, bulbs changed, throats cleared.
Nearly every member of the carnival found comfort in the redundancy of his or her nominal predicaments. The smallest this, the tiniest that, provided a stable foundation from which to live, and even embroider, their lives.
Gloria, the World’s Smallest Trapeze Artist, went for a couple of whirls naked—platform to somersault to rope to platform—for good luck before breakfast. Hiding behind a trash barrel, Krestar, the Tiny Fortune-Teller, watched, counting how many seconds she spun, resplendent and nude, in the hot, hot air.
Jack and Jill, the World’s Only Married Dwarf Siamese Twins, who were not Siamese or twins or related in any way, had loud sex in the front room of their small trailer. Jill was also Contessa Alexandra, the Two-Pint Contortionist, so the sex was particularly exciting.
Out behind the bevy of food booths, Dick, the Universe’s Smallest Dwarf—he stood only two feet tall and may well have deserved his carnival moniker—lifted weights (Ben Wa balls, a gift from an old girlfriend), while Vladimir, the World’s Last Remaining Fire-Eating, Sword-Swallowing Dwarf, spotted him.
In the privacy of his darkened bedroom, Shorty the Clown stared at himself in a hand mirror. He dreaded this day, as he did every other day. He did not want to become even more hideous as he disappeared behind his whiteface makeup; he did not want to be the butt of the joke, the crowd laughing not because he was humorous, but because he was a freak; he did not want to be afraid to pick up the phone and call his son, who was a ta
ll person, standing an astonishing five feet eight inches—his beautiful, beautiful, normal son. He hated living in a world of paradox and extremes. Nevertheless, in the still, dark room, using his real voice—not his clown voice—he said, “You are also a father. Freak, maybe. Father, definitely.” So he set down the mirror, picked up his cell, dialed the number, and hoped against experience that this time, unlike the past forty-three attempts, his son would answer.
Happy, the Teensy Human Pincushion, busied himself with what he did every morning: He read. On June 22, 2006, he was thirty pages shy of finishing Remembrance of Things Past—his fifth time devouring Proust’s masterwork. He loved this passage:
And I begin to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I rediscover the same state, illuminated by no fresh light. I ask my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. And so that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention against the sound from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is tiring itself without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy the distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to refresh itself before making a final effort. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it; I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 26
