NINETEEN
Charlie’s Troubles
Slowly, as though each movement pained her, Helen brought out the contents of the boy’s bag. First his meager clothing, the small box of crayons, a pair of lead soldiers, a book of children’s stories. She spread the items across Lewis’s table, arranging them with gentle movements and then stepping back from the table. She fixed the green eyes on him and he did not like anything he saw in them.
“I wanted you to see this first,” she said slowly, “because I don’t think you’ve ever been through his bag.”
“Nope. Never saw any need to go through…”
“I wanted you to see it this way because this is all he has in the world. This and the clothes, the filthy clothes—the boy stinks, Lewis—the clothes on his back.”
For a moment he looked down at the boy’s things and felt anger growing in his chest. “I can tell you it’s a lot more…”
She leaned across the table and he thought she might strike him. “If you finish that sentence, Lewis, I’ll claw your face for you. I know what you had when you came out West and I know what you had when you ran away with Shelby. But this is not your life we’re talking about here. This is another little boy’s life, and just because he has a carpetbag full of rags doesn’t mean he’s off to a better start than you were. You had Alma, you knew you had family somewhere in the world. You knew there was somebody who cared about you.”
“But he’s got a lot of people here that look after him…”
“No. No, he doesn’t. Now watch.”
Unwillingly he followed her hands as they went into the bag and began withdrawing items, quite different items from the other things on the table. She placed these in a careful line in front of the boy’s possessions until there were more than a dozen different things displayed.
Lewis frowned and tried to make some sense of them but could see no connection. He made an irritated shake of his head: a boy’s crazy collection of things, coins and medals and combs and gewgaws. A coin caught his eye and he picked it up: he recognized the exotic Cyrillic script he’d seen on a number of Dostoevski’s possessions. Maybe they’d given the boy this coin. He shrugged and looked up from the coin to see Helen shaking her head.
“I don’t think so. It’s not just his coin collection, Lewis. Look at this.” She tapped a finger on the last item in the line.
Absently he noted her long slender finger, the knuckles reddened by hard work and windburn. The item she wanted him to look at was a woman’s hairpin. It was long and showy and ended in a small cluster of pearls, one of Lucy Brown’s most cherished possessions, and she wouldn’t have given it away.
“She mighta dropped it.”
“Maybe so. Maybe all these things were dropped and he just picked them up. If he did, he knew they weren’t his and he kept them. But I don’t think he found them on the ground.”
“You think he was in their quarters.”
She said nothing, just looked at him.
Lewis picked up a small bone figure and shook his head. When a man lived in huts and tents he had very little of what a home signified to most people, and it became all the more critical for people to honor the boundaries, the need for privacy.
“He was in their quarters,” Lewis repeated, and Helen was already shaking her head.
“He don’t have any call to steal, no matter how little he has,” Lewis said. He heard her little gasp of exasperation and held up his hands.
“What now?”
“It’s got nothing to do with what ‘things’ the boy has and it’s got nothing to do with him being in their quarters, as wrong as that might be.”
“Maybe not, but we can’t have a thief in a circus camp, we can’t. I told you, Alma said in her letter that he stole a couple things from a store, but I thought it was just a boy seeing what he could get away with…”
“Lewis, the bag was out in the open.” She glared at him.
“So? What’s that mean?”
“He wasn’t seeing what he could get away with. He wasn’t even being a thief, not any kind of thief that makes sense. Look at these things, not a one of them has any real value—I think this is a Hungarian coin. What boy’s going to steal that? A Hungarian coin and a Russian coin and a little piece of carved bone and a…this is an ornamental spoon, what’s he want that for? And a woman’s hairpin. A woman’s hairpin, Lewis.”
He put his hands in his pockets, unaware that he had moved slightly away from the table. He felt embarrassed, her anger confused him. She stared at him in a way that she had when she was waiting for him to say something he probably didn’t know how to say. Lewis ran a hand across the back of his neck, then thrust it back into his pocket.
“A hairpin,” he repeated, just to buy himself time. “I sure don’t know what sense that makes.”
“Doesn’t make any to me. But I’m not a child running loose in the midst of a lot of adults that have no time for him. I’ve seen that boy roaming around your camp, Lewis, and people don’t even know he’s there. I’ve seen him say things to people and not get an answer, I’ve seen him talking to you and get no answer.”
“Sometimes he comes when I’m in the middle of something and starts up with his questions…”
“And he needs someone to take a moment and answer him. He doesn’t get that here, that’s for sure.” She made a long sigh, as though the discussion had exhausted her.
“I don’t understand about this stealing.”
“He probably doesn’t understand it himself. But now that we’ve found him out, he’ll get his share of attention and then some. Not necessarily the kind he wants, and sure not the kind the boy needs, but attention.”
She looked away from him, and he felt his anger rising but was unsure why. Lewis shook his head and went on shaking it for several seconds after she finished. He was unaware that his face was flushed and his mouth set in stubborn refusal.
“This was a mistake from the beginning. I told Alma that. You know this is no place for a child unless he’s from a circus family, no place for a boy like that, especially ’cause he is that kind of a boy…”
“What kind of boy?”
“A boy in all kinds of trouble.”
“Then Alma was wrong, she just made a mistake.”
Lewis frowned and peered at her to see if she was being sarcastic. “That’s it, she just made a mistake.”
Helen nodded and seemed resigned. “She didn’t know what else to do, poor thing.”
“Boy needs a regular family. He’s a city boy. He needs a home…”
“And he doesn’t have one, Lewis. She didn’t know what to do so she gambled. She didn’t send him to her brother because he is a soft touch but because he was once, and for a very long time, a completely unwanted child. Because a man that remembers living in an alley with his sister, that remembers living with a bunch of other boys in a barnloft, that remembers running off in the night on foot in the middle of Wyoming, a man with all those memories might just know how to handle a boy that nobody’s got any goddamn use for.”
Her anger startled him. Tears appeared in her eyes, and her red face matched his. He was about to mutter some sort of apology when she held up her hand.
“You and I go back so long I’m embarrassed to think about it sometimes. We’ve had our…our moments, and there’ve been times when you made me very angry and times when you hurt me, and you can probably say the same things about me. But in all the long years I’ve known you, Lewis, this is the first time I can ever remember feeling ashamed of you.”
She met his wounded gaze, sad-eyed and immovable. Lewis shook his head and searched for something to say in his own defense. Then he saw what he was doing.
“I keep trying to explain myself here, and it’s the boy I should be worried about.”
She made a little shrug and said, “Look under that little pillo
w on his bed.”
Obediently, Lewis pulled back the pillow to reveal a stack of Charlie’s drawings.
“Oh, I know he can draw,” Lewis began.
“Look at them.”
He studied the pictures, found himself smiling at the ones in which the boy appeared to be under attack by Sheba or in imminent danger of being trampled by Jupiter. Then he came to the others, pictures of Charlie with other people, Charlie with Harley Fitzroy, one with some of the children, one with Lewis Tully. In the picture, Charlie and Lewis were sitting on the top log of the corral. Lewis could not remember sitting with the boy at the corral.
Helen began putting the boy’s things back in his bag. Lewis made a move to help her and she slapped his hand away lightly.
“I don’t know what to do now,” he said.
She nodded. “That’s for damn sure. First we find the boy and you can talk to him. Then he moves in with me or we send him back to Alma.”
Without looking at him again, she left his hut. He stared after her. Then he went over and sat gently down on the boy’s cot. After a moment he picked up the carpetbag and hefted it in his hands, surprised at the lightness of it. More than he’d had, a good deal more, but still a lot less than a child deserved.
Unbidden, the question forced its way up: If this were your boy, your son, and someone told you this was his portion, what would you say? If this boy bore the name Tully and the world told him he’d carry all his worldly goods in a carpetbag, what would you say?
Lewis looked around his quarters and tried to see it the way the boy saw it: a small, barren place full of men’s things, bunks and barrels, tackle and crates, cobwebs in the corners, dust and dried mud on the raw wood floor, a half-empty whiskey bottle on the table. It smelled of smoke and whiskey and a pair of strangers old enough to be his grandfathers. He looked down at the dirty sheets on the boy’s bunk and remembered staring at him in the darkness the night before.
I told you I didn’t know what I was doing, son. Now we both know I was right.
He thought about Helen, saw once more the angry, impatient face, and told himself he’d narrowly missed making a fool of himself over her. He could feel the blood rushing to his face.
“Well, that’s done with, for sure,” he said aloud. He was surprised at his own disappointment.
After a while, he hefted the child’s carpetbag. He remembered the musty pillowcase that had come West with him and Alma on the train, and set the bag down again. Then he went out to find Charlie.
The boy had watched Lewis and Helen walking together toward Lewis’s quarters and felt his stomach tighten. He wanted to follow and listen through the thin walls of the hut but this notion was pushed aside by the need for distance. He walked a few steps backward and when he was sure no one was watching him, he turned and ran for the trees beyond camp. He kept running, and when he had cleared the narrow band of forest and broken out into the prairie grass, he kept on going.
Now he leaned against a solitary dead oak and licked his dry lips. He was bone-tired, having walked far out onto the prairie before surrendering to his fear of the total solitude and turning back. On the way back, in his thirst and exhaustion, he’d accepted death, then changed his mind and hoped instead for lemonade and something to eat. A long gentle slope in the land cut off his view of the little wood behind Lewis Tully’s camp, so that it seemed to him that he was still many miles from safety.
He stopped for a moment to watch a small snake slip into a thick clump of bluestem, then found himself face to face with a small herd of cattle. Up close, they seemed huge, threatening, enraged by his presence. He picked up a stick and brandished it. The cows stared dully for a moment, then trotted off. Two calves at the herd’s rear edge bolted away in terror.
As Charlie neared the top of the rise, he saw a huge bird flying overhead in long slow circles—a hawk, but in his present state of mind it became a vulture big enough to carry a lone boy off even before the boy had properly succumbed to the rigors of a lonely death. He tried to run but his feet felt leaden, and so he backed his way up the long slope, swinging his piece of dead wood like a sword.
When he saw that it was not leaving, his terror grew. He began to whimper, then to scream at the bird to leave him alone. In his mind’s eye he saw the final confrontation, boy against giant bird, and he saw them come together in one final violent embrace. Days later, perhaps years, Lewis Tully and his friends would come upon the two corpses, intertwined and extremely dead, and realize what a brave boy he’d been. Other vultures would come to fear the place where Charlie Barth had slain the King of All the Vultures.
He renewed his martial efforts, swinging the wood in great lusty arcs and shouting threats and insults at the circling hawk, taunting and daring the bird to come closer.
“I’ll kill you, you old ugly bird and then, you know what? I’ll tell you what! I’ll…” Words failed him and he groped for an image that might make an impression on a vulture. “I’ll eat your eyeballs.”
A thousand feet overhead the hawk spied a ground squirrel creeping from its burrow half a mile away and went into a precipitous dive that took him far from the little hillock. Elated, Charlie made a few halfhearted leaps and swung his stick in the direction of his retreating foe, and then collapsed. He was covered with sweat and his face felt hot, and he wasn’t sure he could walk another step. Nevertheless, he now had a legacy of personal bravery to live up to. Putting his weight on the stick, he struggled to his feet, made it to the top of the slope, and saw to his heart-pounding joy that the little forest was no more than two hundred yards away. Just beyond the forest was the creek and a few feet beyond that, his bed. Leaning on the stick like a wounded soldier, he hobbled toward safety.
From the shelter of the first line of trees, Harley Fitzroy watched the boy approach as he had watched him for much of his torturous walk home. He had seen the business with the hawk and the memorable confrontation with a half dozen heifers, and was renewed in his ancient belief that childhood was one prolonged period of insanity. When the boy was a few steps from the wood, Harley stepped out to meet him.
“Decided to come back, did you?”
“Oh.”
The boy blinked at this forest apparition and tried to smother his gratitude with a steely indifference. Then he decided it was too hot.
“I’m thirsty, Harley.”
“’Course you are, you left on a hot day with no water. There’s some would say that’s a fairly boneheaded thing to do, but I’ll suspend judgment. How far did you get?”
“About thirty miles. Then I came back.”
“So sixty miles, more or less. A pretty fair walk, and a prodigious exploit for one your age.” He squinted up at the sun, just starting its downward slope. “And in less than two hours, by my reckoning—a formidable walker you are, notwithstanding your short legs. Come on, boy, let’s get you a drink.”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man ushered him into the wood and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I saw a vulture. It was twenty feet long.”
“A twenty-foot vulture, you say? Only one kind of vulture that could be. That’ll be your Great Oklahoma vulture. Well, that tops everything. They’re pretty rare hereabouts, you know.”
“I scared it away though.”
“That’s exactly the thing to do with a vulture. They’re terrible eating.”
The boy shot him a quick look. “You ate a vulture?”
“Not my menu of choice, you understand, but yes. On occasion. In my time, I’ve eaten almost everything. I prefer a nice duck…with cranberries.”
The boy nodded and they moved faster, and as the camp came into view, Charlie saw Lewis waiting for them.
***
“We haven’t done right by you, that’s clear.” Lewis Tully met the boy’s frightened, unblinking gaze, tried to maintain eye contact, and gave up.
/> “I’m sorry about what I did. About stealing and all.”
Lewis shook his head. “It’s not the stealing. I don’t claim to understand the ‘why’ of it. Maybe Helen does—Mrs. Larsen—but…” He saw the hard little line of the boy’s mouth at the mention of Helen. “She just wants people to do right by you, son, that’s all.”
“She doesn’t like me.”
“Sure she does. She likes children in general, raised three of ’em.”
“What happened to ’em?”
“They’re fully grown and gainfully employed.”
“You like her.”
“She…has her moments. But let’s just talk about you for now. And what we can do about your…our…” Lewis waved in the air with one hand and finally finished with, “situation.”
Charlie felt the panic rising in his chest. “You gonna send me away? You can’t send me back, Alma said they’d put me in a home. Please don’t send me back, I’ll be good now. Real good.” The child’s eyes filled with tears. “Please let me stay here.”
God Almighty, Alma’d have my head if I sent you back, Lewis thought. To the boy he said, “Sending you back won’t solve anything. We got to figure a way to provide you with…what you need.”
“I don’t need anything,” the boy said. He wiped a wet cheek with a sudden sharp motion, trying his best to look older or tougher or harder and succeeding only in looking very small and forlorn. Lewis nodded.
This boy in my care is terrified. Fine work, Tully. Jesus Christ.
He leaned forward across the table and the child looked away.
“Hard to trust anybody, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve got somebody figured out, they change on you, or at least they seem to. Well, I can’t make you trust me or any of the folks around here, although you sure should. You could travel the country from one corner to another and not find a better bunch of people. It’s why I got ’em together. There’s other acts I could have hired, but these folk here are special. You know that already about some of ’em: I know you like Harley and I think Mr. Shelby’s grown on you some. And the folks you sit with at the table, the Zhengs and the DePerczels and the Antoninis, they’re fine people.”
The Blue Moon Circus Page 17