by Daphne Cox
The circus was in town, and Frankie had never seen a circus.
Nothing much came to Waleska, Georgia, so she couldn’t pass this up. She smiled to herself. She knew it would probably be closed, but she wanted to just see it, maybe even walk around a little.
If there are elephants there, she thought, I’m gonna flip out!
Frankie hopped the fence and landed with a crunch on the fallen leaves that covered the ground. She walked ten feet into the trees to be sure no-one could see her and to enjoy the sound of the birds. She lived with her headphones on, listening over and over to her brother’s old punk rock mix tapes, but she enjoyed the sound of the real world when hardly anyone was awake in it.
A cracking sound ahead caught her attention, but she was too late to avoid being spotted.
“Motherfucker,” a voice came, “I thought we talked about this?”
It was Heinrich. He was nearly twenty, balding before his time and only few cheeseburgers shy of a heart attack. He was dressed in army clothes and he gave a toothy grin. When Frankie saw his air rifle she froze.
“These aren’t your woods,” he said, looking confused, “are they?”
Frankie started walking backwards.
“In fact,” he said, “I remember a chat we had where we discussed this, like, at length.”
If Heinrich was here… she thought.
An arm grabbed her from behind and locked around her head tight.
“Get off me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted.
Heinrich was in hysterics, laughing his ass off. Frankie pushed her way free of the headlock and jumped back. It was Henry, Heinrich’s younger brother. He was about half his brother’s size, lengthwise and width wise, with a half-grown mustache and a lisp.
“Did you say something about mom?” Henry said, lisping his way through the S’s.
Frankie ran back towards her trailer. She knew she could outrun both of them. “Fuck your mom!” she shouted, immediately disappointing herself, but they deserve it, she thought.
She could hear them stampeding through the leaves after her. When she was twenty yards ahead she turned sharply and tried to loop back past them. As she did, she felt a sharp sting in the side of her knee that buckled it and sent her tumbling to the ground. She screamed and looked up as Henry and Heinrich walked over.
“Shit,” Heinrich said, laughing and holding up his air rifle, “I’m pretty good with this thing!”
Henry didn’t laugh. Henry rarely laughed. He had the same half-scowl for all occasions.
“What the fuck did you say about our mom?” Henry said.
He kicked Frankie in the side, causing her to curl up like one of those bugs that she used to play with when she was a little girl; she was a human roly poly. Henry stood on her back and then sat down on top of her, pressing the air out of her lungs. He grabbed both of her arms and twisted them back as she cried out.
“Apologize!” Henry said.
“I’m sorry!” Frankie said.
Heinrich stood over her and pointed the air rifle at her head.
“Don’t!” Frankie said. “Please!”
Heinrich laughed. “Hold her still,” he said. He put his air rifle on his back and picked up a handful of dry leaves off the ground. He bent down as far as his belly would allow with the leaves in his hand and said, “Open up, bitch.”
Frankie squirmed and tried to shake herself free in a blind panic. She hated dirt. She couldn’t stand bugs. She wanted to die right there and then. More than anything in the world, she wanted to die immediately so she wouldn’t have to do this. It wasn’t normal to be this afraid of bugs and dirt, she knew that. She couldn’t explain it. But she couldn’t control it either. There was no reasoning with the fear. It overwhelmed her.
Heinrich shoved the leaves against her mouth, but she wouldn’t open up.
“You scared?” Heinrich said. “Ha! She’s scared of bugs, I guess! What a geek!”
Henry twisted her arms back more and when she screamed Heinrich shoved the leaves in.
Then, Henry laughed.
“Eat up, little squirrel!” Heinrich said, almost crying with laughter.
The leaves tasted foul and scratched the roof of Frankie’s mouth. She convulsed violently to get free and spat them out, screaming and thrashing, and Henry got off, having had his fun and enjoying watching her frantic display.
“If we see you in here again,” Henry said, “I’m gonna bring my daddy’s gun. And that doesn’t shoot pellets, you get me?”
Frankie stood and wiped the tears from her eyes and the dried bits of leaves from her mouth.
“You get me, little squirrel?” he said again.
She nodded, scowling
Heinrich cleared his throat and spat on Frankie's t-shirt. "Van Halen sucks," he said.
Frankie was shaking as she brushed her hair out of her eyes and wiped the dirt from her face. She took slow steps backwards away from them and in the direction of the circus. She turned and started walking, slower than before, limping a little, her face burning with shame.
“Ugly bitch!” Heinrich shouted after her.
He fired his air rifle in her direction again, hitting a nearby tree.
Frankie ran. The harder she ran and the farther away she got from Happy Heavens, the less she cried.
It was always the same.
Whether it was her daddy or any other asshole, Frankie always ended up running.
Frankie felt worthless and pathetic and alone. The anger would come later.
This is how it always was.
*
Waleska, Georgia, wasn’t much to look at. There was very little in the way of redeeming features, as far as Frankie could see, other than it being smaller than most places and therefore having fewer people. The population had only in the last decade or so crept up over five thousand, thanks largely to the boom in the popularity of trailer parks after the economy died a death. The owner of Happy Heavens was making a killing, but there were few local businesses and therefore there was no real reason for anyone to be in town. This meant that mornings were quiet. You could walk down the main street and not see a single car. Frankie headed down past the auto repair shop where her daddy used to work, before the bad times. She went around the high school she rarely attended and cut through the football field to avoid seeing the intersection where a truck took away her mom and her older brother. A half-mile in she cut back onto the same road and saw the circus tent rising up over the trees ahead.
Frankie couldn’t bring herself to smile again yet after the beating she took, but she was starting to put it to the back of her mind. For the time being, she had scolded herself for being pathetic, cursed herself seven ways from Sunday, and decided that it was OK because one day she would leave this place. She had decided the same thing a hundred times before, of course, but the promise still helped her to cope. She’d developed a knack for dealing with these kinds of beatings over the years. It was almost a skill.
The circus was pitched in a field with a red banner hung from the border fence. “Bakker Bros. World Famous Circus!” it said, showing a grinning clown face and a trapeze artist mid-jump. The big top tent was white with red stripes and as high as a three-story building. Frankie ran up to the gate and she spotted bumper cars, hoop games and popcorn stands. She couldn’t see any people.
Frankie climbed over the gate and walked carefully up to the corner of a closed-up hot dog truck nearby. She peered around it. No alarms sounded and no dogs barked, so she decided to take a walk around.
The sky was brightening some now, and, though she wished she could see it at night all lit up, Frankie was captivated by the place. Most of Frankie’s time was taken up by chores, but the rest she devoted to reading. She didn’t like science fiction or horror or anything too old. She jumped from book to book as fast as she could, and she loved more than anything to read about faraway places – real places – and imagine that one day she could visit them. She had read about circuses, seen them on TV when she
was allowed to watch, and visiting one had made it onto her mental list of things she’d do once she was free, when she had her own place - a house, not a trailer - and her own money and no-one to tell her what to do. Frankie used to consider running away all the time, crafting elaborate plans and staring at maps, but now her plans had been replaced with a simple deep longing to be somewhere else. She didn’t want to get her hopes up with place names and deadlines. Once, she really tried to leave. She took her school backpack, filled it with canned food, stole twenty bucks from her daddy, and bought a bus ticket. She was found three towns over on the same day and beaten so hard she ended up in the infirmary. She was twelve years old. Since then, she didn’t make real plans. Instead, she spent her days running away in small ways, through her route maps of the trailer park, through staying in her room and pretending to go to sleep earlier than she really did, and through her books and tapes.
Reality, for Frankie, meant chores and shouting and punches and cruel names and no friends, so she shut out as much of it as she could.
A haunted house caught Frankie’s eye with wooden cut-out ghosts and a deep-sea diver that looked just like the one in Scooby Doo. She was easily tall enough to get in, but it was shut, the cars covered with plastic sheets. The cars were built for two people, she noticed. She wondered what it would be like to be able to notice something like that without feeling sad.
“You work here?” a voice came.
Frankie raised her eyebrows and looked to see an Indian man staring at her with a look of confusion. He was tall and dark-skinned with long, black hair and he wore jeans and an Atari t-shirt. He looked about thirty years old and his accent was pure California. He had tattoos on his arms, Frankie noticed, but they were just big, black blotches, as if they were once normal tattoos that had now been filled in and covered up. They looked like leopard spots.
Frankie fidgeted with her hands a second and nodded.
“What do you do?” the man asked.
“I - uh…” Frankie started. Behind the Indian man she saw a midget walking past. He looked like the clown on the banner, but he was wearing shorts and t-shirt and carrying a Chihuahua. He looked at Frankie and nodded good morning.
“I’m…” she tried again.
“You can’t be here,” the Indian man said. “If the boss catches you, he’ll lose his shit.”
“What do you do here?” Frankie said. “I’ve never been to a circus.”
“You can’t be here, kid,” he said. “Come on.”
The Indian man walked over and put his hand on her back to usher her back towards the gate. When Frankie flinched away from his slight touch, he stopped and his face softened as he looked at her. Frankie didn’t know what he was looking at, but she didn’t like to be touched. She didn’t like people looking at her.
I just want to see the goddamn elephants, she thought, her stomach turning with disappointment.
The combined fear and hurt and hope made Frankie feel sick. And it made her look scared.
“I tell you what,” the Indian man said, “what if I could get you some tickets for tonight’s show?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I have things to do. Daddy would be mad.”
The Indian man looked like he was becoming impatient or angry, Frankie couldn’t tell which. He looked all around to see if anyone was watching, then, seeing no-one, he lightened up.
“Alright,” he said, putting on a smile. “How about a tour? I don’t think the boss is around, so it should be alright."
Frankie’s eyes lit up. “Do you have elephants?”
The Indian man laughed. “We have one, yeah. You want to meet her?”
Frankie nodded, feeling joyful tears hit her eyes at the very thought of it.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Frankie,” she said.
“Francesca?”
Her mom used to call her Francesca.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Frankie, it is. My name’s Tommy.”
“Tommy?”
“Tommy Hawk,” he said with a smile. “Let’s go this way.”
They started walking past the big top tent.
He whispered, “It’s not really, but that’s what the posters say. My real name’s Teddy.”
Frankie smiled. That was a much better name, she thought. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“I’m from LA originally.”
“No, I mean… Um…”
”Oh,” Teddy laughed. “I’m Cheyenne through and through.”
“There was a boy in school was a… uh…”
“You can say Indian,” Teddy said. “It’s not a dirty word. What tribe was he from?”
“He was a Cheyenne, too,” she said.
“Then that’s what call him, a Cheyenne. Not many of us left. Here we are.”
They’d arrived at a smaller tent. It wasn’t designed for visitors and looked more like a military tent. A sign outside said, simply, “Animals”.
“Is there really an elephant in there?” Frankie asked. “You’re not shitting me?”
Teddy laughed. “No shit, Frankie.”
The tent was empty but for two large cages and buckets of some kind of animal feed. The first cage was empty. Teddy looked shocked for a second and whispered, “Oh, God, no! The tiger’s escaped!”
“Shut up,” Frankie said, grinning. “I’m not an idiot.”
“No, you’re not,” Teddy said with a nod. “Frankie, meet Tabitha.”
Tabitha was gray and wrinkled with pock-marked skin and small course hairs on her head. She was the size of a van. Her trunk touched the ground and was curled up slightly. Her tail flicked here and there. She was very still otherwise, only moving her head slightly when she saw her visitors. Frankie ran up to the cage and put her hands on the bars.
“She’s beautiful!” Frankie said with a wide grin. “Come here, girl.”
The elephant moved back a little. Its eyes, old and tired around the outside but vivid and alive within, watched Frankie warily. Tabitha’s enormous ears twitched as a fly buzzed around her head.
“How old is she?” Frankie asked.
“She’s ten, I think,” Teddy said.
“Is that old?”
“She’s still a baby. Elephants can live until they’re sixty, you know?”
Frankie was impressed. She smiled and tried again to reach out to touch Tabitha, but Tabitha backed away. Something about her troubled Frankie. In the twitches of her ears, the light flap of her tail and the shifting of her great weight on her feet, Tabitha looked nervous. Frankie noticed her cage was only somewhat bigger than the elephant herself, and food was piled on the ground and left uneaten.
Teddy noticed Frankie’s smile starting to fade.
“She’s, uh, very friendly usually,” Teddy said. “She’s scared of new people, I guess.”
Frankie drew her hand out. “Does she come out of the cage much?”
“Only for shows,” Teddy said, grimacing a little.
Tabitha turned in her cage to face away from them.
“We better leave her rest,” Teddy said.
Frankie noticed whip marks on the elephant’s back.
Teddy caught her looking at them and started walking away from the cage, expecting Frankie to follow. “Come on,” he said. “You want to see where I work?”
Frankie looked at Tabitha a little longer. Tabitha didn’t look back.
Maybe she doesn’t like to be looked at or touched either, Frankie thought.
*
Teddy worked out of a small, brightly colored gypsy caravan.
“Cheyennes don’t live in these, do they?” Frankie said.
“No,” Teddy said, “but it’s all the same to the whites who run this place. They don’t think anyone can tell the difference.”
Inside was decorated with clay and wooden ornaments of owls, deer and wolves, and feathers hung on strings from the roof. A compartment at the back, behind a curtain, had just enough room for a small refrigerator, a t
elevision set, an old Nintendo and a bunk.
“What do you do?” Frankie asked.
“Tattoos,” Teddy said. “Mostly temporary tattoos of Indian designs. Sometimes I have to branch out into face-painting for the kids to make a little more money. I can do real tattoos, though. I taught myself a long time ago. I got pretty good at it.”
“Were you in prison?” Frankie played with a feather that was laid on a table in the middle. Teddy sat down.
“I was,” Teddy said, going into the back. “I’m not so scary, though.”
“I know,” Frankie said.
“Here,” Teddy said, handing her a soda pop. “You eaten anything today?”
Frankie’s face turned red. “Leaves,” she said. She sat down and held the feather in her hand. She looked at it so she wouldn’t have to look at Teddy. He was a do-gooder, she could see that now. The trailer park was full of them. A hundred times Frankie had walked around with a black eye or cigarette burns on her arms and people would stop her and say how terrible it all was, but none of them would ever do anything for her. They thought saying was enough, but it wasn’t.
She didn’t want words.
“Your daddy make you do that?” Teddy said.
Frankie shook her head. Teddy handed her a Twinkie and she opened it up, smiling a sad thank you.
“Hey,” Teddy said, “how about I give you a tattoo? A little one? I can do a little elephant for you.”
“My daddy wouldn’t like that.”
“Just a temporary one. I can do it at the top of your arm there, where he wouldn’t see.”
Frankie’s hands shook as she nibbled her Twinkie. “He’d see,” she said, “wherever it was.”
Teddy went into the back and came back with a beer for himself, opening it with his teeth and spitting the bottle cap out on the floor. As he had his back turned, Frankie wolfed down the Twinkie. She didn’t like people to see her eat. Teddy sat and drank - he appeared changed in some undefinable way - and Frankie had some of her soda. Frankie saw that Teddy’s hand was shaking a little, too.
“Can I tell you a story?” Teddy said.
“Sure, I don’t mind,” Frankie said.
