Ghost Boy

by Iain Lawrence

  “Good riddance!” the cook called after them. “Get out of here, Whitey. You spook. Yeah, all of you go, you bunch of freaks. Bunch of goddamn freaks.”

  The gas pump hummed and whirred, a little red-and-yellow ball spinning in the fuel line. The man tending to it was just as nervous as before. In his overalls and floppy boots, he leaned against the Gypsy Magda’s truck, holding the nozzle in place.

  Samuel stood beside him. “That’s good,” he said. “It’s full enough.”

  The nozzle clattered as the man pulled it out. He watched warily under his cap as the Gypsy Magda and Harold and Tina crowded around him. “You’re not eating?” he asked.

  “No.” Samuel took a roll of money from his pocket. It was thick, green, bound by an old rubber band. They were one-dollar bills, and he peeled off a few; he paid for the gas, and for the Cannibal King’s as well.

  When the man reached out for his money, the Gypsy Magda took his hand. “Your wife,” she said. “She has rambling blood. Ask her this: Where does she go in her prettiest clothes?”

  The man looked at her, then up at the windows where the cook stood. He shoved the money in his pocket and went off like a crab, scuttling sideways.

  The Gypsy Magda smiled at Harold. “I’m proud of you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Tina. “That was great, what you said in there. I thought he’d have a fit. ‘I want to be bigger,’ you told him. Say, wasn’t that swell, Samuel?”

  “It was.” The little eyes shone in that monsterlike face. “You’re one of us now. For good or bad, thick or thin. Forever and ever, you’re one of us.”

  Harold glowed.

  “Jolly jam!” said Samuel suddenly, and they crowded around him in a mass of claws and little hands and cold, metallic bracelets. They tilted and swayed.

  “Where does she go?” asked Harold. “In her prettiest clothes, where does she go?”

  The Gypsy Magda laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just make the trouble, I think.” Then she climbed up into her truck. “The boy will come with me.”

  Chapter

  15

  The headlights cast their yellow cones into an empty land beyond the limits of the filling station. Windshield wipers flailed and squeaked, sweeping dust and bugs away. Then Samuel, like a gruesome pilot, raised his thumb and started forward. The Gypsy Magda followed him, hurling herself at the gearshift, tromping on the pedals.

  Her headlights glared from the back of the Airstream, and she let it pull ahead a hundred yards, then fell in line so perfectly that a cable might have joined them.

  “I grew up like this,” she said. “On the road I was born, in a caravan pulled by horses. On the road, I think, I’ll die.”

  She never really sat. She leaned on the edge of her seat as she stood on the pedals, her bells and bracelets jangling as the truck went throbbing to the west. The black scarves were slipping slowly down her arms, and in the pale green light of the instrument lamps Harold saw that her wrists were as bony as a skeleton’s.

  “I had a little cradle that my father made me. When the wagon moved, it rocked. Wagon stops, I cry.” She slid her hand to the top of the wheel and, flinging herself sideways, shifted gears on a slope. “I remember this, my little cradle. Hung all about with pretty things and shining stars of metal my father cut from tin. Ach, the noise! I think it drives my mother mad.”

  The headlights lit the Airstream trailer. It hovered in the windshield, growing slowly larger.

  “We traveled through the mountains and traveled through the forests. Every night we build a fire with big and leaping flames. The Roma—the Gypsies, you call them—they like the dancing; they sing and dance and circle round the fire. My young eyes, they see the fire dancing too, the flames dancing with the Gypsies.”

  She swayed on the pedals. The trailer seemed to slide across the windshield and back again to the middle.

  “I had seven brothers. They are big and handsome boys. From my mother they learn to laugh; from my father they learn to work. We go all across the land.” She was silent then, her face like stone in the trailer’s silver light. “Ach, it’s long ago.”

  “Do you ever see them?” asked Harold.

  “Sometimes, yes. In the mountains. When the wind is high and the rain, it is splooshing in the windows, I see them standing by the road. All battered; torn and battered. They look like buzzards.”

  Harold frowned.

  “They’re dead,” said the Gypsy Magda. “My brothers, my parents. All that I knew.”

  The trailer suddenly filled the windshield. The Gypsy Magda tromped on the brake. A hand shot out to brace against the roof, and the scarves tumbled down to her shoulder. And in the silver glare of the Airstream, Harold saw numbers tattooed along her arm.

  “The Nazis,” said the Gypsy Magda. “You know them?”

  “Yes.” It was the Nazis his father had gone to fight in Europe. It was the Nazis who had killed him.

  “They were so powerful, so many. But they were scared of Gypsies. We were dark and wild and free. They made it a crime to be a Gypsy, and they hounded us all across the country. We went west, the way all souls will go, toward the falling of the sun.”

  Harold sat sideways on the seat.

  “We went to the mountains,” said the Gypsy Magda. “We went high in the mountains where the lovely Danube rises. We made a camp, and the wolves were calling in the night.”

  She spoke slowly as the truck threaded through the darkened hills, close behind the Airstream trailer. The light glaring back made gruesome shadows on her face.

  “My father, my poor old father, he said we were close to the passage to the underworld. He said the wolves were dogs, the nine white dogs that guard that path of souls.”

  She shifted gears; they turned a corner. The headlights flashed across the truck ahead, and Harold wished that he was in it.

  “We were happy there,” said the Gypsy Magda. “We dance and sing. We live the old ways and let this war go past.”

  The trailer slid far across the windshield.

  “Then comes the night, the dreaded time. Nine soldiers come to our camp. They are big, blond soldiers, very white. Ach, so pale and white. My father, he says, ‘The dogs have come!’ My mother tells me to hide myself, to hide under the caravan, in the space where the water barrel goes.”

  Harold clung to his seat as the truck leaned around the corner, as the trailer crept back across the windshield. The numbers on the Gypsy Magda’s arm were square and squat and ugly.

  “The soldiers have black coats, big black boots. White hands and white faces, and all the rest is black. They take the men, the boys, and put them on this side, the women on the other. And then I hear a terrible sound: The guns are fed with bullets.”

  She took her arm down and shook the scarves across the numbers. “I see them shot,” she said. “My father first, my brothers in a row. My mother—I still hear her screaming when they carry her off.” The Gypsy sighed. A stone bounced with a clatter from the truck. “A soldier takes a stick from the fire; he comes down the wagons and sets them alight. They are canvas and wood, they burn very fast, orange and roaring. I fall from my place and my dress, she is burning. There are men crying, horses shrieking. But the Nazis, they laugh to see a Gypsy burn.”

  For a long time she was silent. “What happened then?” asked Harold.

  “I don’t remember after that. I’m put in a camp, the dreadful place. The smoke of burning bodies comes black from the furnace. I see graves where bodies swim in mud. I see dead people sitting, talking. I will never forget what I see.”

  Her bracelets rang as she covered her cheek with her hand.

  “Killing is a game the Nazis play, but the Gypsies they keep alive. We dance for them; we play the tambourine. And somehow we are happy in the horror and the dying. We are Gypsies, after all.” She touched her throat, the scarves around her neck. “But one morning the smoke is thick, the fires burning orange in the winter. The Roma, they are gone. And I am the last
Gypsy; only I am left, I don’t know why. They march us through the snow, through the winter, and the guns we hear behind us. In rags we march, dead we go. And at last I see the passage of the souls. It’s small and dark, and I crawl inside and wait there for the ones who will come to take me on my way.”

  “And the soldiers found you?” Harold asked.

  “You!” she shouted suddenly, glaring across the truck. “What happens to you is nothing. Nothing!”

  Her anger was so sudden, so unexpected, that Harold cringed. He sank into the corner of the seat, looking up like a small, white animal.

  “I would like so much to be you. Young, smart, free. You have everything, and still you don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t even imagine.”

  “You said you were proud of me.”

  Chapter

  16

  Just before dawn they stopped at a schoolyard overgrown by long grass. Swings with planks for seats hung on tangled chains beside an old teeter-totter and a little wooden roundabout. A flock of crows perched on the moss-covered beam that held the swings.

  The Gypsy Magda spread a blanket on the grass, and she slept—they all did—until the wind woke them at noon. It hushed through the grass and set the swings creaking. The roundabout revolved slowly on its hub, and the crows came down to ride it.

  Harold, in a grassy nest, watched the clouds rolling past the stalks above him. They were storm clouds, which didn’t surprise him; the Gypsy Magda had long ago sensed the coming of a storm.

  Of the death ahead, she had told him no more. He had peppered her with questions: “Who is going to die? When will it happen? Where? Can’t you tell me that?” And she’d answered mysteriously, “It is better that you never think of it.”

  He lay on his back, his little round glasses reflecting the sky, his helmet pulled close to his eyes. Hours he’d spent like that, in the fields by the Liberty station, David beside him and Honey between them, her tongue hanging out from a run. He found it pleasant to lie there now, and at the same time sad, his thoughts of home passing with the clouds. He saw in them the things he dreamed. A fat, rolling cloud was his mother pacing through the house. A thin one clocking along was Walter Beesley walking up the Rattlesnake, walking out to Bender’s Corner, walking in his banker’s shoes, searching in the bushes. And a fluffy one was Honey. He whistled to it, as he’d always called for Honey, and the fluffy head seemed to rise, as though the clouds had heard him. But then they turned and tumbled away, toward the east and Liberty. The legs snapped off, the tail broke loose, and the dog vanished into nothing.

  Samuel sat up. His shaggy head was higher than the grass. “Listen,” he said.

  “What?” said Tina.

  “Just listen.”

  But she was like a child. She stood, then shouted out to find the grass was taller than herself. And she leapt around the little wallow they’d made, springing up to see across the field, flinging out her arms to jump a little higher. The Gypsy Magda’s bracelets jangled as she too stirred to hear the sounds. She stood, and the wind took her scarves, stretching them out.

  “What is it?” asked Tina. “I can’t see a thing. Say, what do you hear anyway?”

  Samuel laughed. “Just listen,” he said.

  It was calliope music, so faint it was hardly there. It came through the grass like a whisper. And Harold imagined that he could smell the sawdust and the cotton candy, as though the notes were little balloons full of the sounds and smells of the circus.

  “They must be close,” he said.

  Samuel shook his head. “Nothing travels like the music of a calliope.” He called it a cally-ope. “You can hear a cally-ope for a hundred miles on a day like this, when the wind is right and the air is clear.” He stood up. “But no, they’re not so far away.”

  The music was chirpy and bright. “It’s the breaking-down song,” said Samuel. “They’re on the move.”

  He trotted through the grass, his waist and legs below it, his arms swinging forward and back. He ran for the little roundabout and leapt up on its platform as the crows scattered in a black and cackling mass. And Tina ran behind him, down the trodden path he’d left, and she set the roundabout in motion as she leapt and staggered along its rim. Samuel, in the middle, turned round and round, his great arms up in the air. Then they were all at the roundabout, wheeling in circles, laughing to the ring of the Gypsy’s bells.

  Harold pushed, stumbling in his boots, his white arms stiff, a curl of white hair gleaming below his tattered helmet. The Gypsy Magda sat at the edge, trailing her scarves through the grass. Samuel hoisted Tina up to his shoulders, and she sat there, laughing, shouting, “Faster, Harold. Faster.”

  He turned it around and around, then flew off from the edge like a stone from a slingshot. He ran to the trailer and fetched his painted ball and bat. And they played Five Hundred in the long grass until the rain began to fall.

  Then the trucks moved off along the road. Harold, in the big one again, with Samuel and Tina beside him, watched the wiper blades click from side to side. But the rain fell harder, and within an hour the wipers couldn’t keep up. Samuel slowed the truck. The roads turned to mud.

  At twenty miles an hour they crawled across a land of low and round-topped hills. The truck, the trailer, the Gypsy Magda, went weaving through the land.

  Chapter

  17

  The rumble of the motor, the clacking of the wipers, put Harold half asleep. He was staring blankly from the window when Tina said suddenly, “My father owns a grocery store.”

  “He does?” asked Harold.

  “No, you dope.” She pushed him in the ribs. “It’s a game. Just a game.”

  “Go on,” said Samuel.

  She sat bolt upright on her apple box, her legs poking stiff beyond it. “And in this store he has something that starts with the letter A.”

  “Artichokes!” shouted Samuel. And he laughed and picked it up. “My father owns a grocery store, and in this store is something that starts with the letter B.”

  “Bananas,” said Tina, so quickly that Harold was sure they had played the game a thousand times, for mile after mile to while their journeys away. They went through the alphabet, to dates and elephants.

  “Elephants!” said Harold, a moment after Samuel did. “He wouldn’t sell elephants.”

  “He might,” said Samuel defensively. He looked in the mirror for the Gypsy Magda’s truck. “My father owns a grocery store, and in this store he has something that starts with the letter F.”

  “Figs,” said Harold.

  “Pharmaceutics!” shouted Tina, tossing up her arms.

  Samuel bobbed his head. “Pharmaceutics wins. A bigger word is always better.”

  “But it doesn’t start with F,” said Harold.

  Tina laughed. “Oh, you’re just a sore loser,” she said, reaching out to grab her toes. And the game went on, through oranges and pineapples.

  “My father owns a grocery store,” said Tina. “And in this store he has something that starts with the letter Q.”

  “Cucumbers!” yelled Samuel.

  “No,” said Harold. “That starts with C.”

  “Get away,” said Samuel.

  “It does. It really does,” said Harold, so plaintively that it sent the others into gales of laughter, and Harold laughed himself. “It starts with C,” he said.

  “Gosh, he might be right,” said Princess Minikin. “He’s a real smart guy.” Then she looked at Samuel. “She’s going to like him, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes, she will,” said Samuel.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Flip,” said Samuel.

  “Who’s Flip?”

  Tina shook her hands. “Flip Pharaoh! You never heard of Flip Pharaoh?”

  “No,” said Harold.

  “She’s only the greatest bareback rider that ever was. She’s cute as a bug too.”

  The game was forgotten. Tina opened the glove box and took out the postcards again. She shuffled through them
, spilling them across the seat. Harold saw the Cannibal King reaching through the bars of a cage, glowering down from a tremendous height. Then Tina put a card in his hand.

  “That,” she said, “is Flip.”

  He turned it in his hands; he held it close to the window.

  The girl was blond and beautiful. In a shining skirt of spangles she stood astride a pair of horses that were absolutely white. She was smiling, bouncing up as the horses ran, the skirt lifting at the hem.

  “Her name’s not really Flip,” said Tina. “It’s—It’s—Gosh, what is it anyway, Samuel?”

  Samuel thought, and laughed. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Harold stared at the picture as the truck slithered through the mud.

  “She’ll like you,” said Tina. “She likes guys that are smart. Guys that are brave enough to go looking for something.”

  And guys that are white? he wondered. He shook his head. “No. I don’t want to meet her.”

  “But you have to,” said Tina. “If you want to travel with the circus, it’s Flip you’ll have to talk to.”

  “I thought Mr. Hunter ran the circus.”

  “He only owns it,” she said.

  “Then what about Mr. Green?”

  Tina laughed. “Listen, Harold. If you want to join the circus, you’ll have to talk to Flip.” She stacked the postcards neatly and returned them to the glove box. “But don’t worry. You’ll do just fine.”

  In the last bit of daylight they drove past a church. It was small and white, with a bell tower topped by a lightning rod. Lined along the road beside it were buggies and buckboards, at each one a big farm horse standing patiently in the harness.

  But through the clouds came a single ray of light, a golden beam that shone on the church and the buggies, on men in black and women in dresses that touched the ground.