by C.G. Banks
*
One morning, nearly two years later, Elizabeth had been sitting at the breakfast table of a rapidly vanishing relationship between her mother and a distant third cousin when she relayed an advertisement she’d heard on the radio. A circus was coming to town. The opportunity gave Bill, the tired husband of the third cousin, time for rejoicing and he gladly paid their fare into town to have them out of the house for the evening. By the next morning they were gone for good.
Standing in the line for the ring toss Elizabeth had the strangest sensation about the man standing three up from them. She occasioned the feeling to her mother but Mertle only gripped her hand harder and told her not to look that way. But to this day Elizabeth remembered what it meant to know the man was as good as dead. The knowledge had been radiating off him like heat, and again, she had told her mother. Mertle hushed her again, this time more forcefully, warned her that people close by would hear and know what they were talking about. Elizabeth did, but kept her eye on the man. After the ring toss and a ride they made their way to the concession stand and got a bag of popcorn. On the third handful Elizabeth turned to Mertle and said, “That old man is going to have a heart attack on the way to his car. His wife, her name is Charly, has been dead for five years and his kids haven’t seen him in seven. When he goes it’ll be like he never was. That’s the truth, Momma,” and she shut her mouth, looked ahead as if she’d never uttered a word. Then, as a coda, “He’s got one thousand and thirty-five dollars on him in cash,” she’d said. “He’s never trusted anyone, is why.”
The seemingly spectral information had whetted Mertle’s appetite as well as horrified her sensibilities, and for the next forty minutes she watched the man under a pretense of other inclinations. He did indeed look feeble and unsteady, and he was alone. They had followed him at a distance as he made his way through the gates a short time later. From fifty feet away they both saw his head duck out of sight as he fell. They raced over, the first ones to his body, alone and forgotten in the seclusion of the fairground parking lot. He’d been hunched there as if sleeping, drawn up with his hands in front of his chest. Elizabeth remembered his tongue had just begun to creep out the side of his mouth.
“The money’s in his back pocket,” she said, pointing, and Mertle, as if on a string had hurried over and went straight to it. The wallet had been as big and fat as her hand. The count exactly one thousand thirty-five dollars, each bill as crisp as the day it’d come off the press. Mertle had immediately stuffed them into her purse with the furtiveness of a fox. Her eyes two mean pencil-marks in the darkness.
“How did you know?” she hissed, hurrying the girl away to the lights of the entrance gate. Her steps had been long and jerky, carrying Elizabeth away from the death scene with her feet barely touching the ground. “How did you know, girl?” but Elizabeth had just shook her head and held her tongue.