Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

  Now she comes talking, Julia thought, now she comes making friends. This is what it’s like. People coming, going.

  “You’re right,” said Zelda, licking her dry lips and looking uneasily away, “I don’t try. To imagine what it’s like to be you. My thoughts run away from it.”

  “Just do it,” Julia said. “I know.” She put down her sewing. “We’ll change places. Go on. I can easily imagine what it’s like to be you. It’s easy. Go on, close your eyes.”

  “Close my eyes?”

  “Yes. And I’ll close mine.”

  They did. “Now,” said Julia. “I’m a lady with a nice face. I can bend like a snake. You’ve got hair all over you. Like the dogs and the burros.”

  They sat for a few moments, then both opened their eyes at the same time and laughed, not knowing what to say.

  “You’re good with a needle,” Zelda said.

  “I’ve always made all my own clothes.”

  Zelda rose with a long sigh. Catching sight of herself in the small square of mirror by the door, she put a finger to the outer corner of either eye and pulled the skin up listlessly. “At least you don’t have to worry about getting old,” she said.

  “Why? Do you?”

  Zelda turned from her reflection. “See you again somewhere,” she said.

  “You take care now, Zelda.”

  When she’d gone, Julia sat up late sewing by candlelight till her eyes were tired. I’m a lady with a nice face, she was thinking. I’m a baboon. A hog, a dog, a wolf. I’m from a deep hole in the mountains where the duendes come out.

  Long after dark they passed through a little place in Vermont with a billiard hall and a big clock hanging over the town square. There was some kind of trouble with Maud’s wagon so they had to stop in the main street while the drivers fixed a wheel. Julia had been dozing on her bed, but she sat up when the wagons stopped and drew back the curtain. She saw a tidy moonlit street, all closed up, and a dozen or so hogsheads standing outside the store. There was a big barn of a place with a sign that said BILLIARDS, and the clock read quarter to eleven. The forest pressed in all around the town. No one was around, but a candle burned in a window high up in a house on the right, and Julia imagined that there was a child up there, a girl who’d gotten out of bed to look down. She was standing there now, wondering about all the freaks down there. She’d love to see the freaks. That could be me, she thought, up there looking down at me. I’m living in that house, sleeping in that room, this is my town. I live with my parents. And someone else is down here. But no matter how much she tried, when she tried to picture the parents, all she could see was her mother’s pigtail.

  The wheel was fixed, and the wagons lurched on through the woods a couple more miles out of town, pulled up in an open space in the back of a circus midway.

  In the morning, up and dressed, opening her tiny window and looking out as she combed her hair, she saw the big circus tent in the distance, and the bright-colored signs along the midway: LOBSTER GIRL. STRONG MAN. ZEO THE WILD HUMAN.

  The air smelled of impending rain. Maud was sitting on the steps of her wagon nearby, eating elegantly with her fingers from a plate of fried bread and bacon while an old man in a long blue jacket, a peddler of some kind, laid out his wares before her on the bottom step. Maud’s fiancé, a tall man in a rumpled white shirt, loafed around in the doorway behind her, swigging from a bowl of coffee. Shivering a little, Julia closed the window, pulled a shawl ’round her shoulders and sat down to pull on her boots. Good old boots, she thought. Never had any that fit so well.

  She heard Maud’s voice: “Well, look at you. No one ever teach you it’s rude to look up a lady’s skirt?”

  And the fiancé, mildly, “What the hell, kid, run away.”

  A laugh, chuckleheaded. A throaty gurgling.

  Cato. Surely. She looked out. There was Maud like an empress indulging minions, the old peddler bowed over on one side, Cato on the other, grinning and lolloping from foot to foot in a grass skirt that came down to his knees. Oh, quick. Of course it took ages doing up her boot laces because she was hurrying too much, and by the time she’d gotten her veil on and opened the door, there was Ezra Porter, all togged up in a fancy suit with a high white collar that looked as if it were strangling him, coming across the field with a skinny girl trailing after him.

  That same nasal voice, “Cato, what are you doing?”

  They hadn’t seen her.

  “He being a nuisance?” Ezra said to Maud. “Sorry, ma’am!”

  The skinny girl went up to Cato and took his hand. “What’d ’e do?” she asked in a hard voice.

  “Tried to lift up Maud’s skirt,” said the fiancé, smoothing back his oiled hair till it was as flat as a plowed field.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t mind.” Maud set aside her plate.

  “No, no, it isn’t right,” said Ezra, “you don’t do that, Cato! You know you don’t do that!”

  Cato grinned behind his fingers, swinging back behind the girl.

  “Oh, let him look if he wants to.” Maud raised her skirt. She was proud of her legs. “There you are, noodle,” she said. Maud’s thighs were like mottled pink slush. Held together, her legs appeared to run into one another like liquid and it was impossible to see where they met. She parted them and pointed her toes, and they firmed up, bulging like mushrooms. Cato peered over his fingers, crooning in fascination. The old man, arranging to perfection his rings and chains and lockets and bangles on the lid of his basket, looked as if he’d seen it all before.

  “That’s it,” said Maud, dropping her skirt, smoothing it down and picking up her plate once again. “Now you’ve seen them. Let me eat my breakfast. Any brooches?” To the old man, “You know damn well I’d never get one of those things over my fist.”

  “These here,” he said in a frail but gravelly voice. His bald head was brown and mottled, wispy white strands of hair still straggling out of it around the ears. Too old to be on the road, thought Julia. His long toothless mouth sank a deep ridge across the lower part of his face, as if a knife had scored it across from side to side.

  “Cato!” she called.

  He remembered her at once, pulled away from the girl and came bobbing over, shoving up Julia’s veil unceremoniously and throwing himself at her chest with an excited burbling.

  “Damnation!” said the peddler. The girl stared.

  “No cussing,” the fiancé said.

  The man’s composure returned immediately and he turned his shoulder against her.

  “How much for the yellow one?” asked Maud.

  “Miss Pastrana! Julia! Great to see you.”

  “Hello, Ezra.”

  “How you doing? We knew you were on the way. It’s all anyone around here ever talks about.”

  “I’m fine, Ezra. And you?”

  “Never better.” He grinned. His face was fatter than before. “I got married. Berniece?”

  The girl had lank brown hair and a serious face. “Hello,” she said, unsmiling, holding out a hand. Julia struggled free from Cato’s embrace, reaching out. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

  “Stop it, Cato,” said the girl, “you’ll strangle her.”

  The old man, chomping on his mouth, was stealing sly glances.

  “Well, this is nice,” said Ezra. “Seems like we’ll be keeping company as far as Boston.”

  “You seem older,” Julia said, sitting with Cato on her top step, “more like a businessman.”

  He laughed. “Ah, well. Sober married man now, you see,” he said. “Cato, come talk to Julia later, we have a lot to do.”

  “Oh, go on then,” said Maud, swallowing coffee. “I’ll take the yellow one. Give him the money, Harv.”

  “Up, Cato, come on now.”

  “Julia now,” said Maud, fixing the brooch on the slope of her breast, “she’s got tiny little wrists. She’ll take a look.”

  The peddler, rising, stiff-backed, took up his walking stick, turned but did not look at Julia.
“Buy the girl a ring,” he said to Ezra.

  “She’s got rings,” said Ezra.

  “Skinflint.”

  Berniece took Cato’s hand and hauled him up. The old man dropped coins into his can, closed the lid and started hauling his wares across.

  “We’re right there,” Berniece said, leaning in close for a good look, her eyes moving rapidly backward and forward over Julia’s face, “on the midway. Halfway along. Zeo. Come see the show.” She looked very young, and her voice came out in garbled bursts.

  Ezra grabbed Cato’s other hand, and he and the girl began hauling him away.

  “Nice boots,” said the peddler, looking at her feet. “A tiny foot means small wrists and fingers. I have just the thing for you.”

  “No thank you,” she said.

  “Quality.” He bent forward, leaning on his stick, taking her left foot in his hand and handling it in an overfamiliar way, as if it were something in a shop he was thinking of buying. His eyes were like pebbles, his blue coat just a rag. “Fine leather.”

  “Yes,” she said, “they’re nice old boots,” trying to withdraw from his hand, but he held on.

  “I know quality.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  He let go, delved into his trove and came up with a horrible bracelet.

  “It looks cheap,” she said.

  He shot her a look of dislike.

  “There’s nothing I want. Really.”

  “Fair prices. Better than most. Quality.”

  “These aren’t quality.”

  The man packed up his basket and stood straight. “Good day to you,” he said, walking away.

  “Pinheads,” Maud said, looking down at her new brooch, “I never get used to them.”

  It rained and worms came up in the field. Covered well, under an umbrella, Julia picked her way carefully across the grass and joined the public meandering up and down the midway. She wasn’t on till the evening. The talkers were yelling, the tang of hot cotton candy mingled with the wet green smell of surrounding woodland. She passed by the sword swallower, the skeleton and the frog-eyed girl, stopping at Zeo the Wild Human’s banner. Lions and tigers snarled through the giant leaves of a jungle. FROM DARKEST AFRICA, it said. LAST OF HIS TRIBE. CANNIBAL. Zeo himself, painted in his grass skirt, ran on all fours with a bone in his nose. More hung ’round his neck. It was a good likeness but it didn’t do him justice. Pictures never did. Ezra was up on the bally, tapping his cane on the ticket box. His high voice carried far. “Presenting! The amazing Zeo! Only surviving member of a lost human race, all the way from deep, deep, deep in the Congo jungle, the very darkest of darkest Africa! Zeo! Alive! Alive, right this way! Show’s about to begin, folks!”

  The crowd shoved forward.

  “See it now!” shouted Ezra. “Hurry along! Let the people through.”

  Julia let herself be carried by the crowd.

  “You may never get the chance again! Don’t wait, you’re just in time! Right—this—way!”

  She arrived at the booth and Berniece, who must have recognised the veil, waved her through. Inside it was crowded, green and dim, with rain drumming softly on the canvas. Sometimes being small was an advantage. By degrees, she was able to insinuate herself up near the front of the stage. A green and blue curtain, threadbare in patches, hung over it.

  “That’s it, folks,” Ezra yelled. “All for now. Next show in half an hour.”

  The show began.

  “Move in close now, ladies, gentlemen. Move in close. Any second now, I will draw back this curtain and I will reveal— The most incredible, the most important scientific and anthro-pol-ogical wonder of the world! But first let me tell you a little about how this remarkable specimen came to be here in this country. Thank you, thank you, come in at the back there. Move across now, please—”

  Ezra certainly had the talker’s gift. She’d never have thought it.

  “Zeo! The Wild Human! Remnant! Of a lost tribe of early humans, a precursor of Man as we know him today. He was found naked, ladies and gentlemen, scuttling, on all fours like a beast! By intrepid explorers into the many secrets of the Dark Continent.”

  “Let’s see him,” someone yelled.

  “Patience,” said Ezra. “At the time of Zeo’s capture, the nails of his hand measured seven inches in length. Can you imagine that? And they were capable of disemboweling a chicken in one movement. The courage of these brave men as they brought to bay this most rare of wild creatures, this lost hominid, this—words fail— Ladies. Gentlemen. I give you—”

  The curtain was drawn back. Cato sat against a painted jungle in his grass skirt. He didn’t have a bone through his nose but he wore a long necklace of claws. Cato grinned at the audience and a great throaty sigh rose from their throats. “Oh my God!” someone said. He jumped up and darted to the front of the stage, beaming wildly. A few people backed away. A girl reached up to touch him.

  “He fought tooth and claw when they threw the net over him, ladies and gentlemen,” Ezra said, as Cato capered up and down the front of the stage, throwing his knees high and laughing. “Six months before he could be approached without risk to life. You can see how very well behaved he is now, ladies, gentlemen. Oh, yes, Zeo is harmless now, but believe me when I say this did not happen overnight.” Cato was walking along, bending over to shake the hands of the people at the front. “It required endless patience, months and months of careful training. Believe me, ladies, gentlemen—”

  After that, they all wanted to shake his hand.

  “—only the most humane and enlightened means were used in the taming of Zeo. At first he would eat nothing but raw meat.”

  Cato giggled.

  “Which he tore with his long sharp teeth, ripping it from the bone.”

  “Let him eat some raw meat!” a boy shouted.

  “But no!” Ezra cried. “As I shall very soon demonstrate, he has learned to eat exactly the same things as we do! You love cake, don’t you, Zeo?”

  Cato nodded sharply, up, down, up, down, laughing hysterically. The audience surged toward him, enraptured, their senses struggling with him. The great V of his smile stretched itself beyond comprehension.

  “How can a brain fit in there?” someone asked. “There’s no room.”

  “That’s interesting, ladies and gentlemen,” Ezra said. “Notice the shape of the head. Notice how similar to the head of the ourang-outang. Zeo lived with the monkeys in the jungle. No one knows how long ago his particular type of the human race branched off. Even the foremost men of science are wonderstruck! What a chance!” Ezra’s eyes gleamed fanatically. “To fathom the mystery of these creatures—for there—still—deep in the deepest and darkest of jungles, they live on, these ancient races. Is Zeo a human being? Is that what a human being looks like? No! Human beings don’t look like that. Is he an ape then? Some kind of a bald ape? No! He is something older still, ladies and gentlemen.” Cato, knowing his cue, stood still, smiling mysteriously up and over their heads. “Older, and far, far stranger—a race as yet unknown to science—notice, as I say, the shape of the head. So close to the monkey! You see how this is perfect for a creature of the wild, a beast suited to swinging from branch to branch, a hunter of prey. Who would like to shake his hand? Come up, lady! You see, he has excellent manners!”

  Oh God, the time! Julia had no idea of it. She slipped away as quietly as she could, but when she got out it was strangely dark. She thought for a second that night had come, but it was just the sky that had fallen in a great black roll of cloud to just above the tree line. The gate to the field where the show wagons were was blocked. A cart lay on its side, a man and a woman screaming at one another beside it. She was late. The crowd, which had doubled since she’d gone into the tent, heaved nauseously. Turning down an alley between two tents, she hurried along the midway’s back, shuddering as the mud sucked at her red boots. There was another gate. Her heart hammered. She lost herself in a jumble of small tents and tethered horses and emerged somewher
e beyond the midway at the far corner of the field. There weren’t too many people here, just a bunch of children by the gate, and one or two families heading home from the fair. The old peddler was sitting on the ground by the hedge with his pack and stick by his side, eating a stump of bread.

  “That’s her I was telling you about,” he said. “That’s the ape woman.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “I recognize the boots.”

  “You’re kidding me,” a boy said.

  “That’s her. She’s an ape under all that. God’s truth.”

  Rain again, softly pattering down.

  “You’re not, are you?” The boy stepped toward her. He was ten or eleven, short and round with a pale bulbous face. “You’re not the ape woman.”

  “No, I’m not.” Her hands shook as she put up the umbrella.

  “God’s truth,” the old man said, “that’s her.”

  “God’s truth?”

  “God’s truth.”

  “Go on then,” said the boy, “give us a look.”

  “Yeah, let’s have a look,” said a cheerful gawky girl, dragging the hand of a whiny toddler.

  “Excuse me,” said Julia, slanting the umbrella to shield herself from them, “I really am late.”

  It rained harder.

  “You are the ape woman,” the boy said, “or you wouldn’t be wearing that veil.”

  A boy appeared in front of her, smiling. Black hair, long face, buck teeth worn with pride. Her height exactly, probably about ten. A knife jumped in and out of its sheath at his belt, hopped from hand to hand.

  “Excuse me,” she said. Her voice was firm. Inside she shook.

  “Why?” he said. “What have you done?”

  The girl with the infant laughed.

  They’re only children, thought Julia. Walk past. She looked ’round. What, eight, nine of them, boys, a girl on the gate, the baby with its long red curls and swollen red cheeks. Still, some of them are big. Rain thundering now on the umbrella. They moved stealthily apart from one another, surrounding her more entirely.

  “Can you tell them to let me pass?” she called to the peddler, but all he did was look at her with hard eyes, mashing the bread with his old wreck of a mouth. There were others too, just watching from a distance.