On either side of him, the two sleepy-eyed vendors were folding up their display tables and returning their unsold goods to their cars.
“Slow tonight,” one called to the other.
“Dead’s more like it,” snorted the man on Wallace’s left. Up to now he had ignored their chatter. Their words came into his aloneness as strange and alien sounds to which he could affix no images.
Earlier, the two vendors had seen the big-breasted young woman alight from the rust-savaged car, her soft hips churning eagerly against her clinging dress, and after her, the stuporous, sleep-dredged ghost of a child with strawy matted hair and dirty limbs. They must have noticed the way the little man stared after them, his gaze both ardent and fearful, the whisker-smudged hollows of his face darkening as the woman and the child drew farther away. And then at the moment of their eclipse in the distant crowds, both men must have witnessed the quick, violent, yet strangely motionless seizure that had clutched him, pressing him against the car, where he stood now, still and depthless as a shadow.
They glanced at him and then with shrugs that came almost in unison, they gathered up the last of their merchandise—peacock fans and velvet paintings of Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ and John F. Kennedy. The man on Wallace’s left slammed his trunk shut and, turning, called out to Wallace, “Hey, you been all them places?” He gestured toward the bumper stickers and decals.
In one quick, fluid motion, Wallace had darted around the car, had dropped to his knees, and then, on his back, had slithered headfirst under the car. With only his feet protruding, he banged loudly on the tailpipe with a rock. If the man said more, Wallace heard nothing, so frantic was his commotion of pretended repair.
Just then, he felt something grab his ankle. His eyes jerked the length of the car’s pitted underbelly to the pale little face peering back at him.
“Poppy!” Canny gasped.
He slid out from under the car, relieved that the two men had already left. Canny’s eyes were raw and her nose was running.
“Where you been, dammit?” he grumbled, turning his stiff and clotted handkerchief until he found a clean spot for her. “Where’s your Momma?” he asked, looking toward the midway while Canny blew her nose.
“I couldn’t find the car, Poppy,” she said, taking a deep, sniffling breath. “I was in the wrong lot.”
He stood on his tiptoes and peered over the top of the car. “Which way she coming? I don’t see her.”
“She said to tell you she’ll be here in a while,” Canny blurted, wincing up at him. “She said to just wait.”
“But it’s almost two-thirty!” he groaned.
“It’s not my fault,” Canny protested, her face puckered with tears. “She wouldn’t come.”
“Well you shoulda stayed with her then! What if she takes off?” he cried, shifting his weight from foot to foot as if trying to propel himself toward the midway.
“She wouldn’t let me!” Canny said. “She made me go!”
“Well you shouldn’ta listened to her, dammit! You know that!” he said, his feet shifting frantically.
“But the man …” Canny stammered. “He kept …” She hung her head and clasped her arms over her thin chest and shrugged miserably. Wallace stood perfectly still now. He looked at Canny, but with his head half-turned and his eyes heavy and tired. His hands hung at his sides. A dusty little breeze whipped up and snapped his baggy trousers back and forth against his legs.
“We had slush and fried dough,” Canny was saying. “And then we went on the Wonder Whip and then after, we went on the Leaping Lizard. It kinda wiggled fast like this,” she illustrated with her hand. “Then it went, woop! Like this,” she said, snapping her hand up in the air, “then down. And that’s when I threw up. On one of the downs. So I told Momma I was too sick to go on any more rides and she felt real bad. ’Specially ’cause of the Black Hole. It has shooting stars and space music so we watched for a while and Momma kept teasing me to try it. She said it’s built special, the way they do space ships for astronauts, and she said how they never get space sick now, do they—so acourse, I wouldn’t get sick.…” She shrugged again, only this time it was more like a shiver. Her voice grew shrill. “Then these two guys in cowboy hats came up the ramp. And Momma was starting to get mad at me. She kept saying how I promised her all day I’d go on the rides and how I was always breaking promises and it wasn’t fair. Then one of the guys laughed and he said Momma sounded like the little girl and I sounded like the mother.” Canny laughed uneasily. “And Momma said, ‘Well, that’s kinda how it goes.’ And then one of the guys said he’d do the Black Hole with Momma and I could stand and wait with his friend on the ramp. So I did and then when they came out, the guy with me went in with Momma and the first guy stayed. He put me up on the railing and he put his hand someplace, Poppy.…” She looked at him, but he didn’t understand.
Dotty wasn’t at the Black Hole or on the Ferris wheel or, as far as Wallace could see, on any of the rides. Canny was tired of walking and being jostled by the crowds. “Let’s just wait in the car,” she begged. “I wanna sleep, Poppy; please.” As they came down the midway a second time, she staggered against him and moaned. Her cheeks and her eyes were fiery red and her forehead burned against his hand. A woman passing by frowned and shook her head disgustedly.
“I’m so tired,” Canny said weakly, sagging against him as he peered into the Munich Beer Garden, which was a raised concrete pavilion over the midway. From here, all Wallace could see were tables and chairs and a bramble of sprawled legs and tapping feet. Country music twanged from the loudspeakers.
Canny followed him up the stairs and they made their way through the smoky haze and the jangle of drunken voices to the farthest corner, where Dotty sat between two men, both wearing cowboy hats. One of the men had his arm around her, his thick hand clamped like a hairy paw over her soft belly. The second man had the clay-colored, blunt features of an Indian. He stared blankly into his beer mug as Dotty drew his friend’s chin close and brushed her pouty lips over his.
“’Scuse me … ’scuse me …,” Wallace muttered past each table with Canny close at his heels. When he got to the table, his head hung and his voice could barely be heard. “We gotta go.…”
Dotty smiled and her smudged eyes closed heavily as she laid her head back on the man’s shoulder.
Wallace cleared his throat and swallowed hard. “Canny’s sick,” he said, trying to say it just to her.
“Leave me alone,” Dotty groaned. The man’s hand lifted from her middle and she pushed it back and patted it.
The Indian grinned. His dark, flat eyes moved eagerly between his friend and Wallace.
“C’mon, Dotty,” Wallace said softly.
“Can we go now, Momma?” Canny whined, rubbing her eyes.
“C’mere, kid,” the Indian said, holding out his arms. Canny pressed in close to Wallace.
“For chrissakes, get her outta here,” Dotty said through clenched teeth. The couples at the next table had turned to watch.
“Who’s that?” asked the man with Dotty. He nuzzled his face in her hair and she giggled and whispered something in his ear that made him laugh.
“We gotta go now,” Wallace said, snatching Dotty’s purse from the table. Her hands flew for it and so did those of the man next to her.
“Drop it,” the man snarled, pointing his finger like a gun. Dotty laughed nervously. The Indian laughed too. The man with Dotty stood up then and grabbed across the rickety table for Wallace’s arm. The Indian tittered as the man yanked Wallace, half dragging him over the table.
“Leave him alone!” Canny screeched. All around them, heads turned, and for a second the only sound was Canny’s voice. “You fat bastard—leave him alone! Let goa him!” She picked up a mug and cracked it across the man’s temple. Moaning, he released Wallace and sagged into the chair. Blood soaked through the fuzzy white rim of his hat and his chin bobbed on his chest. “Momma!” Canny screamed in terror as the man tried
to stand, then toppled across the table, splitting it in two. The glass pitcher and mugs exploded on the cement floor. Women screamed and jumped up as the Indian squatted over his groaning friend.
For the first hour, Dotty and Canny both wept while he drove blindly. The road signs meant nothing. All he cared about was a lot of distance between them and the Hortonville police. Dotty huddled by the door with her face buried in her hands.
“Is he dead?” Canny sobbed from the back seat.
“Probably!” Dotty gasped.
“What’s gonna happen?” Canny cried. “What’ll the cops do?”
“Shoot you!” Dotty screamed.
“Drive fast!” Canny screeched, throwing her arms around Wallace’s neck.
When they had gone about a hundred miles, Wallace stopped at an all-night gas station and bought a bag of ice, which he wrapped in a towel and set against Canny’s feverish head. She was exhausted. All she could drink of the Coke he bought were a few sips with her aspirin.
“Here,” he coaxed, nudging the can at her. “Have some more.” She didn’t answer. Her sleeping face glistened with sweat.
Dotty leaned forward and pulled her dress over her head. “You know the guy she hit?” she said, slowly peeling the bandage strips from each nipple. “He was gonna get me a screen test. He said he knew somebody.” She threw the bandages out the window and sighed. “The thing I been dreaming of all my life and that brat splits his head open.”
“Here,” he said, holding out a blanket to her. She ignored it and started crying all over again. “Nothing goes right for me, Aubie. Nothing.…”
Two cars pulled off the highway and up to the gas pumps.
“Cover up!” he said, turning the key with his foot on the gas, wincing as he drove onto the highway with Dotty’s raging voice streaming out the window like a scarf.
“She’s a noose around my neck! A goddamn fuckin’ noose and it’s not fair! I’m so sick of this, so goddamn, sonofamotherfuckin’ sick of this! I gotta have some fun, Aubie, or I’m gonna go crazy! You hear me?” she screamed, pummeling the dashboard with both fists. “I gotta have some fun, goddammit! I can’t take this anymore. I can’t! I can’t! I can’t.…”
“Stop it!” he begged. “You stop it now!”
“I’ll stop it!” she screeched, lunging for the wheel and turning it so that the car lurched into the next lane. “I’ll stop the whole goddamn thing … this whole goddamn miserable life.…”
He pushed her hand away and a strangled cry caught in his throat. It made him dizzy to think that if a car had been coming, that would have been the end. He glanced back at Canny. She was still sleeping.
Dotty sat staring straight ahead in a cold-eyed silence with her arms folded over her bare chest. Over the years he had gotten used to her tantrums. It was her hateful, icy silences that frightened him most of all. In these, she was most like Hyacinth, who had once gone seven weeks and six days without one single word to him, or even about him, she later admitted quite proudly.
Dotty had begun to speak now in a soft, wistful tone that brushed his flesh with shivers. Just like that, she could go from crazy to calm, from hateful to sweet, from trying to kill them to snuggling so close her breast slung over his arm.
“It’d be easy, Aubie,” she was saying, whispering, her mouth fluttering at his ear like a moth.
His brain felt jumbled and bruised. She was talking about it again; the same thing she always talked about lately.
“’Member the day we got her and you put a note on her in the gas station?” She nudged him. “’Member?”
He nodded stiffly.
“Well, we could still do that. Only I was thinking … we could leave her at a church. A church’d be …”
“Shh!”
“She’s sleeping.” Dotty continued. “A church’d be perfect. We could leave her with a note telling about her and then we could head for Hollywood, Aubie!” She hugged his arm between her breasts. “Think of it! Just you and me!” She sat forward and pointed to the sign ahead that marked the next exit as INTERSTATE 1, NORTH. “Take that one!”
A truck drew alongside and honked its horn.
“Put a shirt on!” Wallace called over the rumble of the truck, whose driver grinned down in disbelief.
“Turn and I will!” Dotty said, lacing her fingers behind her head and stretching back.
When he turned onto the ramp, she slipped her tee shirt over her head and then she threw her arms around his neck and squealed happily.
NEW YORK NEW ENGLAND ALL POINTS NORTH
Sweat dripped down his sides. He couldn’t drink straight. His foot barely touched the gas and yet the car flew along. Dotty snored softly against his shoulder. Her hair tickled his nose. Struggling against sleep, he held his eyes as wide as they would open. He sat up very straight behind the wheel and the queerest thought came to him. He thought, I could close my eyes right now and take my hands off the wheel and my foot off the gas and we’d still get there, no matter what.
4
Morning had slipped into his consciousness. The new sun spread in the gray sky, like a watery egg.
“How’s it feel?” Dotty was asking.
“What’s that?”
“To be so far up north?”
“I dunno. I ain’t been thinking much,” he said gruffly.
She laughed. “Well it feels good to me.” She took a deep breath out the window. “Smells good too! Smells like clothes on the line, clean and stiff.”
In the back seat, Canny stirred. “Momma?” she called in a far-off, panicky voice.
Dotty knelt on the seat and pulled the little girl over into her lap. “Poor kid, you’re all wet,” she sighed, peeling off Canny’s soggy jacket.
“The ice melted,” Canny said apologetically.
“Her fever’s broke,” Dotty said laying her cheek on Canny’s matted head. Canny’s hand went to the nape of Dotty’s neck, to the soft little hairs she liked to stroke through her fingers.
“You’re a good kid, you know that?” Dotty said hoarsely. Canny curled her grimy legs under her and nestled in the curve of Dotty’s arms. “You were such a good baby,” Dotty said with a sigh.
“Did I cry a lot?” Canny asked.
Dotty laughed. “Just when you looked at your Poppy.” She laughed again.
“What did I look like?” Canny purred.
“You were the most beautiful baby I ever saw. You had big blue-blue eyes and one of them little button noses and your mouth was just like a juicy, little heart. And your hair was all soft and curly and so light in the summer it was almost white. Everywhere we went people’d say how you oughta be in TV commercials you were so pretty.”
“Am I still pretty?” Canny asked hopefully, tilting her head back and looking up at Dotty.
Dotty studied her a minute. “Well I’d say you’re a different kinda pretty now.”
“Am I pretty as you?” Canny’s voice shrank and she seemed to wince.
“Course you are!” said Dotty.
“Will I look like you when I grow up?” Canny asked.
“You’ll look like you,” Dotty laughed.
Canny frowned. “But I wanna look like you, Momma.”
Wallace cleared his throat. Don’t, he thought. Don’t say nothin’. Don’t tell her.…
“You don’t wanna look like me, babe,” Dotty sighed bitterly. “Jesus, I don’t even look like me anymore.”
He was surprised when Dotty said they were in New Jersey. She called out the different license plates. Besides all the New Jerseys and New Yorks, she had seen two Maines and a Connecticut.
“Look,” she said, nudging him excitedly, “there’s a Vermont!”
He stared straight ahead. What if it was her? What if he looked up and there she was, after all this time, right in the next lane, and no matter how fast he drove or where he turned, she kept right alongside him. His eyes blurred with the thought of her granite profile traveling in the next lane from state to state, from coast to coast
.…
He veered sharply off the highway and onto a back road, not stopping until he came to a small grocery store. He gave Canny two dollars and told her to buy three doughnuts and two milks. A truck pulled in behind them. The driver followed Canny through the lot and held the door open for her.
“I’ll be right back,” Dotty said. “I feel like stretching my legs.”
He grabbed her wrist before she could open the door. “We gotta talk, Dot, before Canny gets back.”
“About what?”
“’bout bringing her back.”
“What about it?” she said, raising her eyes coolly to his. He looked away. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. “Well?” she said.
He thought a minute. “What’s the note gonna say?”
She shrugged. “Just that we’d like her brought back to her family, I guess.”
“Who’s gonna do that?”
“The people that find her!” She was getting exasperated.
“But I thought you forgot the town.”
“Well if I say Massachusetts, people’ll know. They can figure it out anyway.” She looked at him. “Unless they’re retards or something.”
Canny ran up to the car then and handed Dotty her milk and the doughnuts. When she started to open the door, Wallace shook his head. “Your Momma and me’re talking,” he said. “It’s private.”
“I won’t listen,” Canny said.
“You wait out there,” he said. “Go sit on the hill up there and have your doughnut.”
“No! The grass is all wet! And it’s cold, Poppy,” she whined, balancing the milk carton under her chin so she could open the door.
He reached back and pulled it closed. She glared at him.
“Up there,” he said, pointing to the grassy knoll over the road. He watched her scamper up the hill and sit down facing the car.
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