The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Seeing as how the little girl didn’t have a place, she made herself one. A round full moon resting in Sombra’s lap, that’s how she looked. She didn’t help herself to much that night; she took a biscuit and some water, but little else, though Sombra tried to get her interested in the beans. Nope, she was determined not to have any.

  I sat between Foster and Jackson, and Jackson seemed genuinely happy about the stay we would have in this little town. These folk were dying for some good entertainment. Kids had seen the posters, he said, and no matter the dirt and rips, they’d run home. Foster could picture them digging out cans of pennies. They’d be back and he’d be counting those pennies. Foster always smelled like money, like old paper and metal.

  Denver had been good to us, but this little place would be better. New Mexico was a fine state, and the little girl turned her attention to us as Jackson and Foster talked about the buttes and scrub brush and the way storms seemed to roll right down the mountains and explode on the plains. The little girl shook at that.

  Her whole body trembled. Sombra tried to comfort her, but the girl rolled out of her lap, under the table. Soon enough I felt her curled against my boots. I resisted the urge to reach down and touch her hair. Jackson and Foster changed the subject—back to money—and she calmed.

  Almost forgot she was there. As I made to get up, I felt her weight against me. My movement woke her and sleepily she emerged from the table, covered here and there with crumbs and dirt. They didn’t seem to bother her none. She lifted her hand and I took it in mine and together we walked back to my train car.

  “Going to be here long?” she asked as she climbed under the blue blanket.

  “Seven days at the most.” Jackson had never stayed in a place longer than that. This town was a speck, a speck that didn’t have a name anyone knew, and while the people might be hungry for what we could give, they wouldn’t have much money. Santa Fe would be better, but Jackson had his mind set on heading farther west, toward the coast if possible.

  She was restless in her sleep, kept kicking and shoving me. Finally, I moved away from her, sat in my chair and smoked a cigarette. It was cold, but the snow had stopped for the moment.

  Where had she come from? What had she been doing out on that track? Most things we saw on the tracks were either there by mistake or looking to end their lives. Two years ago, Jackson obliged a young man by the name of Coleman Bean. After that, Jackson didn’t stop his train for anyone. Till a few days ago.

  She twisted and turned and finally sat up, her hair in a big clump on the left side.

  “Could sleep better if the clouds would stop.”

  I crumpled my cigarette in the tin tray and stood. Above the mattress, there was a cargo door and I unlatched the squeaky hook and rolled it open. Above the mattress now, the sky was that soft pink that comes before a snow. The girl shivered, but not from the cold.

  Making things disappear is easy if you think about it, but most folks don’t think. I couldn’t make the clouds disappear; I hadn’t fully mastered clouds or water or flowers. But I could move them along, so I did. Willed them to move on toward Texas. The little girl stopped shivering once the pink sky turned black and the stars made themselves known. She relaxed back into the blankets and I got under with her.

  “There’s Jupiter,” she whispered and extended a long arm beyond the covers. I swear she almost touched that planet with her pointer finger. She sure did blot it out for a moment or two.

  “And Mars, but you know, I think I like Saturn the best.”

  Her little voice broke apart as she ended that sentence and she began to tremble again, like she’d done at the dinner table. I reached for her forehead, thinking to soothe her fear away, but she slapped my hand away, scooted to the other side of the mattress.

  “Don’t take it away,” she said. “It’s all I have left.”

  I did not question her, for it made sense to me. Fear could be a good friend. Lord knows fear had kept me alive during some pretty long nights. It was keeping me awake right now, wondering what the thing beside me was, for though it looked like a young girl, I knew it was not. It was something else, but I still had no name for it.

  She slept then and I left the mattress, tossing the warmed blanket over her before I walked away. I went to my table and picked up the quarters and made them dance over my fingers before making them vanish entirely. They didn’t slide up my sleeves and they didn’t go through the cracks in the table.

  Without the clouds, the air outside was bitter. I turned up the collar of my coat and buttoned it. The ground crunched under my feet and laughter carried to me in the frosty night.

  The Doshenkos were practicing in the main tent, flying through the air with the greatest of intentions. They never seemed to get it quite right. Pasha slipped from Oleg’s hands and plummeted to the netting where she somersaulted. Oleg laughed and so did Pasha. Perhaps one day, he said and she echoed it while climbing back up to try again.

  Away from their circle of laughter it seemed colder, and I hurried my steps to the weird sisters’ tent with purple and gold stripes. I kneeled before the flap and listened, listened so hard that I could hear them breathing inside. The air was spiced with incense here, sandalwood and lavender, and I took a deep breath.

  It merged with their own and for a moment we breathed together. It felt as though I were inside the tent, snuggled between ample breast and small, and then as abruptly as I’d been there, I was here again, kneeling in dirt.

  I didn’t have to dig deep; the quarters were not buried far. All six of them were right where I’d sent them and this time none of them melted. They weren’t a lost thing to me. Not this time. I gripped them hard, till their edges pressed into my fingers.

  Things were easy to lose; hanging on to them took talent. Making things vanish was easy, if you knew where to send them. Knew the exact place as well as you know your own hands.

  And I knew this place, this dark and spicy doorway, for many men had kneeled and gone through—this one included—but not tonight. I took my quarters and whispered goodbye to the sisters before taking my leave.

  The little girl was sitting in the doorway to my car when I returned. Her thin legs swung restlessly. She wanted to run, but didn’t know where to go. Wanted to vanish, but didn’t know where to put herself.

  “We go west from here?” she asked. Her hands plucked at her shift. “I heard the man, Jackson, say west. We can’t go west.”

  I pocketed my quarters and looked at her, wondering exactly how she meant to stop this train and its people from going west. I waited for an answer and she only grew more agitated. The shift was shredding under her fingers; she was plucking hard enough to tear the thin fabric.

  “I can’t go west.” And she was firm about that. “Not even if there’s more hot rolls and marmalade. East,” she said, finally giving me a clue. “And a little south. Would that be so hard? Won’t Jackson reconsider?”

  “There’s nothing that way. Jackson goes where the people are, where the money is. Has his mind fixed on San Francisco eventually. I think he’s got family there.” Did she notice the way my voice caught on that word, family? Her sharp eyes didn’t miss much; they were narrow now, as though she meant to study me the way I’d been studying her. Don’t do that, little girl, I thought and she sat straighter.

  “East.”

  She turned her face up to the stars, but Saturn didn’t lay in the east so I didn’t figure it was a star she was following. “What’s east?” I asked and she didn’t look at me. Didn’t turn away from the stars. Didn’t even answer me.

  And before long, it was too cold to just stand there, so I had to go inside. I started a fire in the small grate, warmed my hands and my feet, and made sure the smoke wouldn’t roll back on us during the night.

  It didn’t roll back on us, just on me, for when I woke she was still out there looking at the stars. I saw her point to one and heard her say, “I am there.”

  But she wasn’t there—she was
here—and that was her entire problem.

  She hadn’t meant to come to Earth, she told me. It was all one big mistake. She’d been running from her family, had to get away, and this is where she ended up. She had to stop running because her ship stopped. Caught something in the engine and when she was about to get it right, a New Mexican storm slapped her down. Two years, that’s how long she’d been here, trying to figure a way back home.

  Two years ago, Jackson had stopped the train for a young man named Coleman Bean. A lot could happen in two years.

  Couldn’t find any of her own kind. Seemed she was the only one, and that thought filled her with an agony that tasted like metal in the back of her throat. She’d climbed onto the tracks to kill herself, but damn Jackson had to go and stop. Had to find that shred of soul within himself and put it to use that night.

  “You was glowing like some firefly,” I said. “I think that might have caught his attention. Maybe he thought you was a diamond.” I grinned and she shoved me. She didn’t look like a diamond or a firefly.

  I didn’t mean to come to this place, either, I finally told her, though it wasn’t Earth I was meaning. This circus train. But I’d been running, too, and yes, away from family. Sombra and Gemma spotted me in a track-side bar, performing card and coin tricks for a little cash. They told me they had a better deal, both in and out of their tent. They were right, so I came to the tracks and watched the train slow as they said it would. Anything was better than going back.

  “Going back is the only thing,” she countered as she stuck her bare feet toward the flames. “Until you do, you’re in limbo. Fancy Earth word. Why’d you run?”

  “Why did you?”

  She didn’t answer me and I didn’t answer her, and the night blurred into morning as we warmed our feet beside the darkened grate.

  The first night of the show is perhaps the best. Mistakes happen, but that’s part of the fun. Like Manny and his lions; surely he didn’t mean for the male to eat his red coat, but it happened. Buttons and all, down the hatch, and the audience applauded while the big cat licked his lips.

  We didn’t have many animals in the show. The monkeys seemed to be the favorites, but Miss Victoria Solace didn’t appreciate the way they stole her hat and wore it around the ring. They pranced and chattered and the men roared and pointed. I made the hat vanish from the monkey’s paws and reappear on her head, much to her delight.

  Mrs. Isabel Tompkins had the kind of mind I liked, clear and warm like a summer pond. I could see everything that lay under the surface and when she handed me her handkerchief and bade me “vanish it!” it was easy enough to do so. In her mind I could see her orderly kitchen, though her husband Harry was always fussing with the bread box and tinkering under the sink and she wished he would stop.

  I couldn’t make him stop, but I took her handkerchief and folded it in half. In half again, and once more. I folded until I couldn’t fold anymore, until the fabric had no more to give. And then I pinched the fabric between my fingers and it vanished. Isabel’s eyes flew wide and the entire audience applauded and roared.

  She expected me to pull the fabric from my sleeve. They always do. But I could only lift my hands and tumble away toward the next thing to vanish. She would find her handkerchief, folded between the kitchen table leg and the golden but scarred wood flooring. The table would have stopped its rocking, but it wouldn’t occur to her to look for two months.

  The little girl watched the entire show through the legs of an enormously fat man. She was pressed under the bleachers, and though she could have had a much better seat, she didn’t seem to want one. I could understand the need to hide; coming to Jackson’s had been a way of hiding. Couldn’t live with Sherri Lynn anymore. Just couldn’t.

  Her mind was like Mrs. Tompkins, so clear I could see every thought and know them as if they were my own. I could see Sherri Lynn’s past, could know how she felt about her daddy, and how she wished he would vanish. And it was all too easy after knowing that darkness.

  All too easy to pluck him from the hardware store where he worked and bury him in the worm-rich mud beneath the shed of a house he had lived in twenty years before. Sherri Lynn hated that shed, but knew every corner of it. I took that memory, made it my own, and sent him there. The disappearance of Ralph Moody was never explained, though no one seemed to mourn him.

  Still, it was that kind of thing that bothered me. I pictured that man, slowly suffocating in that dirt, and just couldn’t live with the fact that I’d done it. Didn’t matter that he’d touched Sherri Lynn wrong. Didn’t matter that he hit his wife and called her names you wouldn’t call a dog.

  I couldn’t pull him back out of the ground; once he was gone, he was gone. I tried, but couldn’t budge him. Once a thing vanished, it was gone to me. Someone else could come upon him. He could be a found thing then, but to me he was a lost thing. Vanished. Except the quarters, I reminded myself. I was getting better. Maybe in time, things wouldn’t have to be so lost.

  “Rabi,” the little girl said after the show. She slipped her long fingers into mine and handed me a stone. She had picked it from beneath the bleachers; I could feel the very depression it had made in the ground. Shallow and as cool as the night air.

  In her mind, she showed me where she wanted the rock to go. The desert plain was lit by only starlight; the brush and cactus made strange shadows over the ground. In the ground, buried beneath rock and mud, was a piece of a lost thing. Metallic and not something I could fully understand. I tried to, but I felt the same murk I did when I tried to look into the little girl. She was giving me this, allowing me to see, but I couldn’t understand.

  The rock vanished from my palm and the breath went out of her. It was like wind moving through trees, that soft whooshing sound the leaves make. She made this sound, her hand relaxed in mine, and we continued on toward my train car, without another word spoken between us.

  Come morning, Jackson was more excited than I’d seen him in days. He interrupted everyone’s practice and called us all to the main tent. Pasha Doshenko stayed on her trapeze, swaying above us as Jackson talked.

  “It’s a good deal,” he kept saying while he rubbed his hands together and paced before the crowd of us. It’s like he was trying to convince us, but he never had before. He’d always told us where we were going and those who wanted to follow did. A few had been lost along the way, but what better show was there than Jackson and his unreal circus and marmalade?

  “There’s a man, you see,” he said, and I did see, a round man with round glasses and thick hands, and this man offered Jackson more money than he’d ever been offered for a performance. “Food and real shelters included,” Jackson continued, and I saw in his mind a hotel with a swimming pool and everything. I saw warm baths and soft beds. “We’d stay for the winter, till things get warm again.”

  That part of the deal was important, I realized, and I felt the pain in Jackson’s hands as though it was my own. He was young, but his bones had already started to rub together, causing him pain no matter how he moved. Jackson wanted to bed down somewhere warm for a few weeks and move on when spring came.

  “Dallas,” he finally said. Which was backwards from where we were going. It would delay San Francisco, he said and I got a flash of a woman in his mind. Not his lover, but perhaps his mother as he remembered her from his childhood. Jackson wanted to get home, wanted it badly, but didn’t know if he could stand the winter ride to get there.

  This was agreeable for the little girl who began to purr against my side. I’d forgotten she was there, but traveling east was fine with her and when Jackson took his vote, her long pale arm was one of the first to rise.

  Didn’t matter to me where we went, really, but Dallas was a little too close for my comfort. Close to Sherri Lynn, close to the little house that had been ours. She was still there; she wouldn’t leave her roses nor her turtles for anything in the world. She liked her teaching, liked being far from her family.

  “Limbo,”
the little girl whispered and I wondered then if my mind were clear to her like Sherri Lynn’s had been to me. “Goin’ east, goin’ east.” She couldn’t contain her excitement.

  “What is it you want me to make vanish?” I asked, wanting this over. Once I did the trick, she would go. Wouldn’t she?

  But she shook her head and her pale hair rubbed her shoulders and then my coat as she nuzzled up to me. I went stiff under her touch. I didn’t need this, didn’t need her telling me I was in limbo. I wasn’t. I’d moved on with my life, did what was best for me and Sherri Lynn both.

  The little girl didn’t answer, and I found out later that night that Gemma, now as dark as Sombra, and Sombra, now as light as Gemma, had named her Vara. Vara curled herself up at my grate once more and slept through the show, while I danced and performed until exhaustion claimed me and I made a man’s vanished coin appear in a woman’s all-too visible cleavage. He chuckled, she shrieked, but the play went on.

  The train moved at a steady pace through the New Mexico desert. It was strange to see snow across cactus and scrub brush, over the red and taupe earth, but there it was and it looked pretty.

  Vara didn’t move from the small window much. She stayed huddled in the blanket and her breath made small puffs of fog on the pane. Every now and then she pressed her fingers against the glass, as if trying to measure distance. Once, she got excited about a landmark, but we passed it and she realized it wasn’t the mountain she’d been thinking about.

  She started wailing the next day, as the train drew closer to the state line. She woke me with her crying and there was nothing I could do to calm her. Her cries rose until the window shattered and the train ground to a sudden halt. Froze up on the tracks, as though it was caught in ice. Vara wrenched herself from my arms, scrambled out of the car, and across the frozen desert.