Faraway Places (Hawthorne Rediscovery)

by Tom Spanbauer

  I wanted to ask the guys in there if any of them had seen the nigger. Ever since that day I saw those three people together, the day I saw Harold P. Endicott sic those hellhounds on that woman Sugar Babe and the nigger, ever since then I don’t think I ever stopped thinking about the nigger and where he might be.

  There were others of them in the Oasis Bar—other Negro men—and some Sho-Ban Indians too, and I wanted to ask them about the nigger, but what could I say? How could I begin? Hello, where’s the nigger? Did you know that woman Sugar Babe? So I just got a sack for the beer and rolled the cigarettes in my sleeve like the big guys did at the high school and I walked to the railroad park, chugging the beer and smoking a Lucky Strike.

  After I finished them both—the beer and the cigarette—I kind of got sick and dizzy. I puked, but after I puked I felt better. I felt better than I’d ever felt, and I went back that way, feeling better than I had ever felt. I went back to the Blackfoot State Fair, but not to the cows and pigs and pickled beets and quilting demonstrations. I went back to where the rides were, and the sideshows, to the places where you could throw a ball and win things. I took the cigarettes out of my sleeve, just in case I ran into my mother or father. I put the pack down there, in my underwear, in my yellow underwear. For some reason, saying yellow underwear to myself like that really made me laugh that day.

  I rode the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and the Rocket Plane, the Mix Master, and the Snake. I won a Kewpie doll for my mother and a pair of dice for my father and bought pink cotton candy and a Pronto Pup with mustard.

  One of those women who sell you tickets in the booth asked me how come I was having so much fun. Her skin was dark, like Sugar Babe’s, and she wore a scarf that hid her hair but not her big gold earrings. For a minute I thought she was Sugar Babe. I wanted to light up a Lucky Strike and say something neat, something neat like maybe Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift would say, but my Lucky Strikes were in my pants and I never was very good at talking, so I just said something dumb like ’cause it’s the state fair, something really dumb like that. Then I took off out of there.

  And then there was the man, one of those guys who takes your ticket and then straps you in—into the Rocket Plane, I think—and when he strapped me in, he touched me down there on my Lucky Strikes and asked me how my hammer was hanging. He had tattoos on his arms. I didn’t answer. I spent my time on the Rocket Plane knowing what the guy with the tattoos meant when he said what he said about hammers. I was pretty sure I knew, all right. When the Rocket Plane came back down, he unstrapped me and went for my Lucky Strikes again. I almost fell over the platform trying to get out of there.

  That’s when I saw the magician, the one who called himself Mr. Energy. Mr. Energy pulled white doves out of a black hat, and changed them into crows just by putting them in a box and tapping the box with his magic wand. He cut a woman in half with an electric saw—I could barely watch—and then put her back together again. He also took a rope and hung himself by the neck. His assistant, a dwarf, walked under him to show the audience that there was no trick, that Mr. Energy had really hung himself and was dead, but the curtain fell and in nothing flat went up again, and Mr. Energy was hanging there from his feet. In no time, he reached up and untied himself and took a bow while everyone clapped. Then he and the dwarf took a bow together and the curtain went down for good.

  Right after the clapping was over and the audience was getting up to leave, Mr. Energy came out from behind the curtain and walked up to the edge of the stage. He started talking to us as if he was talking to a bunch of his friends. Mr. Energy looked each person straight in the eye as he spoke. He looked me straight in the eye especially, and for a long time. My ears went haywire and I got that feeling like when I saw a rattlesnake one day when I was up in the cottonwoods swinging in the swing—the feeling that something awful could get to you wherever you were.

  Mr. Energy’s eyes got real wide so you could see white all around the colored part. “Everything is an illusion!” he said. “Not just up here on the stage, not just in the circus.” Mr. Energy said, “Everything is an illusion.”

  And then Mr. Energy asked me, or told me, rather, singled me out of the whole audience like that, and told me to repeat what he had just said.

  “Everything is an illusion.” I said what he told me to say.

  And then Mr. Energy said, “Do you think that statement is a true statement, young man?”

  I said, “I guess so.”

  And Mr. Energy said, “Well, it is!” Then Mr. Energy said, “What is your name, young man?”

  “Jacob Joseph Weber,” I said.

  “Well, Mr. Jacob Joseph Weber,” Mr. Energy said, “tell me, do you understand what illusion is?”

  I was pretty nervous. I’d never had a famous person talk to me like that, especially in front of all those people. I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “Yes.”

  Everybody in the audience kind of chuckled and then Mr. Energy said, “Well, tell me what it is, then, Mr. Jacob Joseph Weber. Tell me what illusion is!”

  “It is everything.” I said. “Illusion is all there is.”

  BUT THE BEST thing that happened that day, better even than Mr. Energy talking to me instead of to any of those other people he could have talked to, better than the Schlitz, the Lucky Strikes, better than buying the Schlitz and the Lucky Strikes, better than the woman selling tickets and the tattooed guy at the Rocket Plane, maybe the best thing ever was this: I saw the nigger.

  I was in the Hall of Mirrors when I got lost. Actually, I didn’t get lost in the Hall of Mirrors at all—you’d have to be pretty dumb to get lost in the Hall of Mirrors. There was nothing to it: just two hallways with different kinds of mirrors along the walls and loud music blaring. Where I got lost was when I went through the door that said No Exit. The door locked behind me and it was pitch black. I was in there for a good long time trying to find my way out, stumbling around in a room that was long and narrow and so dark I couldn’t see my hand when I put it right in front of my eyes. I was scared by the time I found a doorknob behind a curtain. I turned that knob and pushed hard. The door flung open and I almost lost my balance. There I stood in the sunlight. Sunlight was pouring through that door. After my eyes got used to the bright, I looked down and there was the nigger, sitting back behind the trailer that was the Hall of Mirrors, sitting there on a bale of straw, smoking.

  I was never so happy as then.

  The nigger looked up at me, startled. I could tell he knew right off who I was. I wondered how he did. He smiled at first, then got a scared look on his face. I jumped down fast out that back door of the Hall of Mirrors and slammed the door behind me. I thought for sure the nigger was going to run, so I yelled don’t run away and waved my arms, dropping the Kewpie doll in the dust. The nigger was about ready to jump the barbed-wire fence, but he stopped and turned when I yelled. I unbuttoned my Levi’s. The buttons were hard because the Levi’s were new, but I finally pulled the Lucky Strikes out of my shorts, put one of them in my mouth, lit it, and inhaled, just like I had seen the nigger inhaling. Then I tried to button up my Levi’s again.

  The nigger started laughing—laughing in a way I had never seen anybody laugh before—shaking all over, like all he was was laughter. With him laughing like that, he got me going too. Then the nigger said he had to pee, he was laughing so hard, only he said piss, not pee. He turned around and pissed, leaning up against the tree there, still laughing and pissing and trying not to get any on himself. I started coughing. I wasn’t used to Lucky Strikes. Pretty soon I had to piss too, like the nigger. So there we were: together, the both of us, pissing and laughing, only I was coughing too, because of the Lucky Strike. Pissing there on dirt as fine as Johnson & Johnson baby powder, I pissed a small round circle, then tried to keep my aim straight in there in the center. And I did it—kept my aim straight—until I was about done, that is. Then I started dribbling.

  When me and the nigger finally settled back down and wer
en’t laughing anymore, it was quiet back there between us behind the Hall of Mirrors—strangely quiet because there seemed so much to say. As usual, I just didn’t know where to begin. So, while I thought about the things I wanted to say and the best way to say them, all around us there were the sounds of the circus part of the Blackfoot State Fair: the generator for the Hall of Mirrors, the screams of girls riding the Tilt-O-Whirl, shouts from people riding the Snake and the Mix Master. Then there was that haywire sound in my ears again, like I got when Mr. Energy first started talking to me; the same sound I heard when I was in the swing up in the cottonwoods and saw the rattlesnake.

  There were two small trees back there behind the Hall of Mirrors—elm trees with sparrows in their branches. Those trees gave some shade to the bales of straw. The nigger walked over and sat back down on one of the bales under the trees. I went over there too—I wasn’t sure I should do it, but I went ahead and sat down right next to the nigger.

  There were scars on his arms and hands that the hellhounds made.

  Just as I sat down, the nigger got up. The nigger got up, took three steps away, then stopped dead. He didn’t turn to face me, and I knew he was going to bolt any minute. I tried to think of something to make him stay. There was so much I wanted to ask him: how he had got away from the hellhounds, about mother and motherfucker, but all I could do was sit there and look at his black skin, the scars across it, and where there weren’t any scars, where his skin was smooth and hairless as a black river stone.

  The nigger turned his black rattlesnake eyes on me. His lips were pink on the inside, like bubble gum, and the palms of his hands pink too, but not the pink Endicott’s skin was. The lines of the nigger’s palm were as black as the rest of him.

  I didn’t know what else to do to make him stay, so for some reason, I don’t know why, I just blurted out my secret name. “Haji Baba,” I said. “My name is Haji Baba.”

  Once I had said it, said my secret name out loud, I felt red all over. To hear my name out loud like that—my name that only the hawks and the pigeons and the cottonwoods knew—made me sorry to have said it. It sounded like a name a child would call himself, like the name of a geek in a sideshow, not the name of a real man. I thought the nigger would laugh. I hated that he was going to laugh like the big guys did in physical-education class, in the locker rooms after class, like my father laughed, the way I guess the men in the posse laugh, the way the sheriff and Endicott laugh for sure. I hated that I had ever given myself that name, a silly kid’s name, a girl’s name. I hated even more that I had just blurted it out like that, not making any sense in front of the nigger. Haji Baba, Haji Baba went around in my head like liar, liar, pants on fire. I wished to God that I would finally grow up and stop making up silly names; wished to God that I would learn to think straight and not blurt dumb things out like I just did with Haji Baba.

  Snakes can hypnotize you with their eyes and that’s what I thought the nigger was doing to me, looking at me that way. The haywire sound was getting louder and louder, and then, suddenly, the nigger spoke: “And my name is Geronimo,” he said without laughing, without moving his eyes. Then he smiled, warm and friendly. The world got flat as a cookie sheet and the sky became a bright dome. The light filtering through the tree leaves made the nigger look like those pictures of Jesus with a halo around his head.

  And then he left. He disappeared around the Hall of Mirrors trailer. I ran after him and touched him on the shoulder, but he didn’t want me to touch him or be around him anymore.

  “She was your mother, wasn’t she?” I said.

  The nigger looked at me like he hated me then. He doubled up his fists and stepped toward me and I thought for sure he was going to hit me. But he stopped.

  I started to tell him that I knew, that I had seen what the hellhounds had done to his mother, that I had tried to help but couldn’t because I was too scared, and after, because no one would listen to Haji Baba. I wanted to ask him to take me with him so he could tell me about things, about feelings coming up strong from down there like that, because he knew about those kinds of things. I could tell. And he knew about things like the chinook and probably about one thing leading to another and illusion and important things like how far it is from the tip of a hummingbird’s wing to its heart.

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask him. Instead I gave him the rest of my money—twenty-eight cents—and the Lucky Strikes. The nigger’s hands weren’t fists anymore and he didn’t look like he hated me. He took the twenty-eight cents and the Lucky Strikes, said thank you, and was gone.

  WHEN I FOUND my mother it was at the Catholic Women’s Booth. I gave her the Kewpie doll and she liked it, but my father didn’t. “Waste of good money,” he said.

  And then my mother said, “Joe”—that was the first time I had ever heard my mother call my father that—“when’s the last time you brought me a prize?”

  My father didn’t say anything.

  I kept the dice.

  SOMETIME AFTER THE Blackfoot State Fair but before school started again, my mother finally got the window in the kitchen she had always wanted above the sink, so she could look out to the west while she washed the dishes. Before she’d had to look at the wall with a picture of the Last Supper on it.

  My mother had talked about that window all that summer and the summer before, maybe even the summer before that. Forevermore is how long she had wanted that window, she said.

  One morning at the breakfast table, my mother slammed down the plate of eggs and sausage and toast and hashbrowns in front of my father and told him she was going to go find a bar and get drunk the next Saturday if she didn’t have a window above the sink by then. My mother slammed his coffee cup down too, spilling coffee into his saucer, which was something my father hated.

  My father ate his breakfast without saying a word. When it came time to drink his coffee, he poured what had spilled in the saucer back into the cup. He even got up himself and got the dish rag—didn’t ask my mother or me to do it—and wiped off the bottom of the cup and then finished his coffee.

  So, that Saturday, my grandfather—my father’s father—came over, and my father and my grandfather, who was a carpenter, put the window in; at least my father tried to help my grandfather.

  Everything started out fine. My father bought the window and got all the materials ready. My grandfather was supposed to come over Saturday afternoon, and he showed up, all right, but he was three hours late and real drunk. That’s why my father had never tasted liquor, or so he claimed—I found out different later—but that’s what my father told me: that he had never tasted liquor because his father was an alcoholic.

  My mother said it different. She said that Grandpa Weber was a drunk, an old drunk, she said, a damned old souse, and when she called him that, she crossed herself.

  When my grandfather started cutting a hole in the wall for a window, we all just left him alone. There was no use talking to him, trying to make sense to him, once he got a notion in his head when he was drunk like that.

  That noise that electric saws make—that high-pitched loud sound that gets lower as it gets deeper into the wood—is what I remember about the kitchen window, that and my grandfather outside on the stepladder, sticking that blade into the side of the clapboard house, sawdust flying in his face, him cutting and cussing away. Didn’t even measure, just walked up the ladder and stuck the blade into the house.

  My father took off out of there fast, in the Oldsmobile, tires spinning and gravel spitting all over the place—he told my mother he was going irrigating—and my mother stood in the kitchen against the far wall and stared west, her hands on her ears, waiting for the blade to poke through the wall and praying for a miracle. Finally the saw blade poked through and as the hole got bigger, flies started coming in. Soon there were flies on everything; we couldn’t hardly see the kitchen ceiling for flies. My mother crossed herself and went into her bedroom. She locked the door behind her and put a towel in the space under the door
so the flies couldn’t get in. Behind that door, I could hear her crying.

  When my grandfather was done, I saw that the bottom of the hole he’d cut started at about my mother’s chin; the glass part didn’t start until her nose. She could see out, all right, but just barely. When she looked out, all she would see was sky.

  The hole that my grandfather cut was too big for the window we’d bought to put in it, so my father spent the next day patching, even though it was Sunday and there wasn’t supposed to be any servile work done. On the outside my mother painted my father’s patch-up job white. Inside, she ended up repainting the whole kitchen, and later on that week she made a special trip to town. She bought some Virginia-creeper plants—one thing always leading to another—and planted those Virginia creepers and watered them every day for the rest of the summer to keep them from drying up. She trained them to crawl up the side of the house and around the window to cover up the eyesore, which is what my mother called it: the eyesore. The old souse’s eyesore, she’d say, and cross herself.

  So when that Saturday night came around, my mother didn’t go find a bar and get drunk in it, and my father never said anything about her going to a bar, and he never said a thing about the eyesore. I never caught him so much as looking at it.

  SCHOOL WAS BACK on and I wasn’t going to the St. Joseph’s School anymore. I was going to the Hawthorne Junior High School and I didn’t know anybody because everyone at Hawthorne was Mormon. I was Catholic, so I found I didn’t like it there much at school. The worst—as usual—was physical education class, but I liked Miss Parkinson and my American history class.

  She taught English, Miss Parkinson, and she wasn’t a nun. She had blond curly hair that she stuck her pencil in, and when she talked to the class she would once in a while fluff up her curls, then shake them loose. She used to take a deep breath and pull her stomach in, and straighten out her dress under her belt. All the men teachers, especially Mr. Hoffman, the American history teacher, and Mr. Ashly, the science teacher, stopped by during home room to ask her things, like if she wanted coffee or if everything was all right. Mr. Hoffman, and sometimes Mr. Ashly, but never both of them at the same time, would stand outside in the hallway and when Miss Parkinson took a deep breath and pulled her chest up the way she did, and sucked in her stomach, you could see Mr. Hoffman or Mr. Ashly, depending on which one of them was out there in the hallway watching, take a deep breath too.