“Ya, four eyes. That’ll be the day!” Dotty scoffed, running her finger down the map.
“You’d look nice in glasses,” he said, more to himself than her. He’d like that. Glasses would make her look … He couldn’t think of the right word. Neat? No, that wasn’t it. Like she was all put together. Something like that.
She pointed suddenly ahead. “Take that exit!”
As he turned sharply onto the ramp, Canny moaned. She began to cough.
“No, left,” Dotty said.
“She don’t sound so good,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at Canny. He turned right.
“Jesus Christ!” Dotty howled. “I say left and you take a right!”
Just then Canny sat up, her cheeks red and her eyes heavy on him through the mirror. Without a word, she dropped back onto the seat. Certain she had fainted, he reached back, but couldn’t feel her. Down the road was a shopping center. He raced ahead and pulled into the parking lot.
“She’s burning up,” he said, touching Canny’s forehead. He took a dollar from his pocket and shook it at Dotty. “Go get her some aspirin and a soda,” he said.
She laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. “You get it,” she sighed. “I’m beat.”
“Here!” he said, fumbling for another dollar. “Get yourself a soda too.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
“She’s sick!” he said helplessly, looking from the outstretched money to Dotty, then back again.
“She’s sick,” Dotty repeated, her eyes still shut, her voice faint and whispery. “She’s cold. Her pants’re wet. Her ass is sore. Her nose is running. Jesus Christ,” she groaned, opening the door. “I’m so tired of this.”
“It ain’t her fault,” he said softly when she was out of earshot. He watched her move through the dusty haze of the parking lot, her red straw purse dangling from her shoulder, her small round hips tight and high on her long thin legs and the skinny strap heels that glittered like sparks with every step. A young man in a black tee shirt came toward her and every part of her seemed to come alive; her head cocked and her shoulders trembled and her buttocks seemed to flesh out and soften under the thin cloth of her skirt.
“Get ice in hers,” Wallace called suddenly out the window. “And don’t get grape! She hates grape.”
A half hour later, she came back with two cups of soda.
“Where’s the aspirin?” he hollered out the window.
“Shut up!” she hissed, rolling her eyes in the direction of the stout man in a silvery suit, who had followed her out of the store.
“Jesus, you’re a mouth,” she groaned, getting into the car. She opened her purse and flipped two bottles of baby aspirin into his lap. Also being removed from the purse were two brand-new lipsticks, eyeliner, blush, mascara, nail polish, and gold eye shadow, all stolen. Wallace knelt on the seat and gave Canny four aspirins and the ginger ale, which she gulped down; then, with a weak, grateful smile, she fell back to sleep.
“What took you so long?” he asked when they were back on the highway.
“I couldn’t find the aspirin,” she said, blotting her plum-colored lips on the road map.
“You pay for all that stuff?” he asked.
She turned from her compact mirror and smiled. “How do I look?” He grinned. She had braided her hair. She looked better than any movie star he’d ever seen. She blinked and the setting sun caught the flecks of glitter on her eyelids and he thought how she was even prettier than that first day they met; how she’d grown into a beautiful woman.
“I look like shit,” she said, snapping the compact shut. She turned down the visor and closed her eyes. On the flip side of the visor was a picture she had found in an old National Geographic that had been left over from one of the flea markets. It showed the astronaut’s first webby looking footsteps in the moon’s dust. Canny thought the picture was scary and Wallace didn’t like it either. Things like planets and moon walks fascinated Dotty. Once they drove twenty-four straight hours to watch a rocket being launched. Dotty said it was the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen. As they watched the fiery tail dissolving in the clouds, she told Canny that was just the way the spirit leaves a dead person’s body. Just like a rocket. Canny wanted to know where the spirit went. “Into the black hole,” Dotty answered. “And what’s in there?” “Nobody knows,” Dotty said. For weeks and weeks afterward, Canny had bad dreams. It scared Wallace too. He didn’t even like the word spirit. A spirit was a ghost and many’s the night his dreams were chock full of them.
“Hortonville’s another eighty miles,” Dotty said, putting the map back into the glove compartment. “Provided you don’t get lost again.”
“I won’t,” he said sheepishly. After they left the shopping center, Dotty had fallen asleep and he had taken a wrong turn, driving some sixty miles back the way they’d come.
“You still got no sense of direction whatever,” Dotty was saying. “You’d think after all this time and all this moving around, you’d get to have some anyways.”
He laughed. His getting lost all the time was an old joke with them.
“I’m serious,” she said, and he squirmed on the hard edge of her voice. “How the hell’dya get around all those years before you met me?’ She looked at him. “Well?”
He shrugged. “Just kept to the same roads, I guess,” he muttered. She was on to something. It was there in her voice, in her words that darted like bright minnows below a calm, dark surface.
“I’ll bet you never even left Atkinson till you met me.” He didn’t answer. Canny sat up and yawned. “Where’s Atkinson?” she asked, leaning forward between them on the back of the seat.
“Not even Atkinson,” Dotty laughed scornfully. “But the Flatts. That’s where your old Poppy’s from,” she said with a peck at Canny’s cheek. “You’re all cooled off!” she said, and held out her arms for the little girl to climb into.
“Where’s the Flatts?” Canny asked, snuggling into Dotty’s lap.
“It’s way up in the cold, snowy mountains, where the Kluggs and the Mooneys and the Wallaces all live and have babies with their sisters and their mothers,” Dotty laughed and rested her chin on Canny’s moist head.
“But where’s that?” Canny persisted. “What’s the state?”
“The Flatts is a state of mind,” Dotty said, lighting a cigarette over Canny’s head.
“I mean the fifty states,” Canny said, with a little whine. She waved away the smoke.
Wallace stared over the wheel. Any minute now, she’d have Dotty screaming at her.
“Like all the states we been,” Canny was saying. “In Florida, and New Mexico, and Tennessee … you know what I mean. Which one’s Poppy’s state?”
“How the hell should I know?” Dotty said, dragging deeply on her cigarette.
“You know!” Canny insisted.
“Don’t start that whining!” Dotty warned, and she dumped Canny off her lap onto the seat between them.
“I’m not whining,” Canny pouted. “Tell me the state.”
“Vermont,” Dotty said, and Wallace’s mouth fell open. She looked at him and shrugged. “What the hell,” she said, and shrugged again.
“That where you’re from too, Momma?”
“No,” Dotty laughed, rubbing her knuckles into Canny’s scalp until she squealed. “I’m a creature from outer space. I came in one of those UFOs. We’d been circling around and around the whole country tryna find the handsomest, smartest man on earth. And then one day I got so sick of being in orbit all my life and I said to the driver—well, the pilot, really—I said, ‘Set this sucker down, Zeebor. I’m picking the first pair of pants comes along.’” Dotty laughed and jabbed Wallace’s shoulder. “And here he is!”
Canny and Dotty giggled. Wallace shivered. A chill crept up his spine as he thought of that day and how she had just appeared out of nowhere. His eyes widened. Barefoot over the blazing hot tar, she had come. Like she was floating. Like a creatu
re from space would float. Coming toward him, her eyes had locked on his like a cat’s on a bird.
“What’s snow like when you walk on it, Poppy?” Canny was asking.
The car behind him blared its horn as he suddenly changed lanes and swerved into the breakdown lane. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He jumped out of the car and ran down the gully, unzipping his fly as he went. Afterward, he hobbled back. Lately, it burned so bad he wanted to cry each time he urinated. He was too embarrassed to tell Dotty and the last time he’d been to a doctor was in the Home.
Dotty was changing her clothes. She took off her bra and flipped it into the back seat. Canny was ripping open two bandages for her. Wallace picked grime from the crevices on the steering wheel and tried not to look at Dotty’s naked chest. That is, he didn’t want Canny to think he ever looked at Dotty when she was naked—not that it mattered to Canny or Dotty if he saw her like that. But it mattered to him. It mattered what Canny thought of him.
Dotty pressed a bandage strip over each pink nipple. “Don’t they hurt when they come off?” Canny asked, watching closely.
“Depends on who’s taking them off,” Dotty laughed, as she slid her arms up through a white jersey dress with a big red parrot on the skirt. She raised her elbow. A price tag dangled from her underarm. “Can you get it?” she asked Canny, who caught the plastic strip between her teeth and bit it in two.
“Thirty dollars!” Canny said, looking at the tag.
“Well, that was just the asking price,” Dotty laughed and threw the tag out the window.
“Momma!” Canny giggled. “You didn’t pinch it, did you?”
“Course she didn’t!” Wallace said sternly. “You know your Momma wouldn’t do nothing like that.” He started the car.
“Course not!” Dotty said, trying to keep a straight face. Even Canny was trying hard not to laugh.
3
Dotty said Hortonville wasn’t too far from Washington, D.C. This was the farthest north Wallace had been in five years. Every few miles cruisers crept up on them, then sped past. Dotty said it was his imagination, but he was sure he’d never seen so many cops on one stretch of road. He slowed down to forty-five and slouched low behind the wheel with the visor of the baseball cap almost meeting his nose.
As the night wore on, Dotty grew more and more excited. She sang along with the radio and snapped her fingers and tapped her feet, and as one song ended, she would switch quickly to another station so there couldn’t be even a moment of silence. Dotty hated quiet. She said when it got too quiet you could hear the planets pinging off one another’s sound waves and the fizzy static of all the dead souls trying to make contact with someone on earth.
Even with the windows open, the crowded car was hot. The rushing night air seemed to crackle with Dotty’s feverish energy. For the last half hour she had been either talking or singing. Rock music blared from the radio, its drumbeat pulsing in Wallace’s temples. She could barely sit still. Like a child, she squirmed and stretched, then crossed her legs, then drew them up on the seat under her, then folded her arms and laid her head back on the seat, then sat up suddenly and, with a sigh, trailed her arm out the window through the humid, inky night.
Her laughter came like a bright, thin shatter of glass and he knew without looking that her cheeks flared with color. Next to her he felt small and drained, and all at once he was conscious of just how tired he was, how achy, and unshaven, and fuzzy-mouthed. His eyes felt dry and gritty and his throat burned when he swallowed. There seemed to be no air to breathe; Dotty consumed it all.
In the back seat, Canny tossed and turned and groaned uncomfortably. “Poppy,” she murmured through her sleep. He turned down the radio, expecting Dotty to angrily turn it full blast. But she was busy brushing her hair. From the corner of his eye he could see the rapid flick of her moist white arms snapping the brush through her hair. Sparks seemed to trail the brush. A flutter rose in her breath like quick little wings. “Do I look nice? How’s my hair? Oh jeez, I need more gloss.… We didn’t pass it, did we? Close the window—my hair’s getting mussed.… Canny! Wake up! Wake up, we’re almost there.…” She knelt on the seat and reached back and nudged Canny. Sitting back down now, she peered closely out the side window at the passing lights and now at a sign that said HORTONVILLE, 3 MILES. With a frantic gasp, she began to brush her hair again. She lifted each arm over her head and rolled on more deodorant. From her purse, she took a slender glass atomizer and doused her throat with the smell of sun-drenched roses. Nervously, she snapped the purse clasp open and shut, then, leaning forward, began to tap her sharp glittery nails over the dashboard. Like the canary bird his boys used to have, he thought, its feathers puffed and trembling, just waiting for the wire gate in the little cage to lift open.
Dotty strained forward. Ahead, the dark sky was rent with bars of light. “We’re here!” she cried, reaching back to shake Canny. “There it is! Look!”
The fairgrounds was a sea of rippling lights and pulsating music and human voices that seemed to swell and crest, then fall, then swell again with the tumult of crashing waves.
Canny sat up sleepily. The fluorescent parking lights made her small face look bony and gray. She winced and rubbed her eyes. The flea market was part of the fair. Dotted among the sideshows and rides were hundreds of vendor tables and trunk setups. Wallace usually sold out of the trunk of the car. That way, if there were any questions about where he got his things, all he had to do was slam the trunk shut and be on his way. Sometimes, though not very often, cops came around the flea markets checking for stolen goods. It had only happened once to him, but fortunately Dotty had been there. Nervous as she was, she flirted and fooled around so with the cop, he ended up buying one of Wallace’s plastic ice scrapers in the ninety degree heat a few miles south of Tampa.
As they drove along the outskirts of the fairgrounds, the barkers’ voices flapped past the windows like tattered streamers.
“… do you want to go faster? … she walks, she talks, she crawls on her belly … five packs of Camels on the red square … than the speed of light … at the stroke of midnight all rides will … march that little gal right up here—yessir, that one! The one with the monkey doll … five-gotta-five-gotta-five-gotta.…”
“The Magical Mystery Flight!” Dotty squealed, naming the rides they passed. “The Reptile! The Starlight Skewer! Jesus Christ, that thing’s so high I can’t see the top.… The Wonder Whirl! Look, Canny, the Black Hole.…”
Canny’s eyes were heavy on his through the mirror. “I feel sick,” she whispered at his ear. For fear of what Dotty would say, he pretended not to have heard. “My stomach hurts,” Canny groaned.
Dotty whipped around. “You shut up! I’m so damn sick of you spoiling everything all the time!”
“She’ll be okay,” Wallace said quickly: “Won’t you, Canny?”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“She better be,” Dotty muttered, her attention back on the swirling crowds and the spinning, whirling commotion of rides. “I never seen so many different ones,” she gasped.
“I ain’t got but a few things left to sell,” Wallace reminded her.
“Look at all those people,” Dotty said, smiling out the window at the young men in colored shirts and string ties and their broad-bottomed, pasty white women, all dressed up and drifting between the stands and flea market tables, nibbling cotton candy with their eyes dreamy and trancelike, looking to buy something cheap and pretty and not too chipped and worn.
“Buncha lookers, is all,” Wallace growled, driving slowly until he found a parking spot that was far enough away from other cars to discourage conversation with other sellers. Dotty flew out of the car before he had even turned off the motor. She stood by the door, smoothing her dress over her hips. Canny climbed out and sagged against her. Before they left, Wallace made Dotty promise she wouldn’t let Canny eat a lot of junk.
“She’ll get sick if you do,” he called after them. “’Specially fri
ed dough.…”
He watched them head toward the midway, where the Ferris wheel spun like fiery spokes in the starless night. Next to Dotty, Canny looked like a little hobo. She had on rubber sandals, a grubby pink windbreaker with the hood half torn off, and bright orange shorts, so big they flapped like a skirt around her skinny knees. Everything she wore, he had scrounged from Salvation Army and Goodwill bins. He took off his hat and scratched his head. Just then, Canny looked back and waved and before he could lift his hand, they had disappeared.
He lugged two boxes from the trunk and set their contents out for display on the warm dusty hood. Most of it was junk, some plaster figurines ready for painting, a few eight-track tapes of Christmas music, a half dozen green plastic pots for plants, a rusty tackle box, and a dozen wooden coat hangers. His big item tonight would be the eight cans of HiGrade motor oil he’d clipped at their last gas stop. He took out his white stickers and labeled each can a dollar. The other items already had prices on them from previous flea markets. Some had been marked down so many times, they bore four or five stickers.
It was long past midnight, and Wallace’s only sale had been the eight cans of oil two hours ago. Since then no one had even stopped to browse.
In the distance, the midway had paled and the night drew closer and thickened. The rides seemed to turn and spin slower and slower and even the barkers’ cries sounded thin and plaintive with fatigue. Close by the side of the car stood Wallace, his quick, furtive eyes scanning the rows of parked cars that flanked the wide descent to the midway. Everywhere he looked, he thought he saw Hyacinth, whose apparition lurked always on the cloudy peripheries of his vision and now, in easy step with his guilt and his dread, had assumed the gaits and distant images of policemen and prowling dogs and drug-swaggering thugs and even an old man, drunk and muttering curses as he staggered past.
The hair on the back of his neck bristled. It was always this way when he had been alone too long. Without Dotty and Canny he felt weak and afraid. He felt his knees grow stiff and bloodless as the aloneness and suspicion and dread began to clash in his head like shrill discordant songs that left no room for his own thoughts. Rooted here, he could not move. Dotty inhabited his brain, and the child, his heart, and if they did not return, he knew he might stand here forever.
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