The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  The police lights painted the drab concrete plaza in red and blue, so brief as the boys raced past, and pretty. The officers arrived on foot and in cruisers, and they aimed heavy flashlights, and shouted when Dominic and Franco shot away.

  Through red lights and stop signs they shot through the city, Dominic leading the way and Franco following, not wanting to run and not wanting to stop and not knowing what the hell else to do. He followed Dominic without knowing where they were headed, but he figured it out soon enough and thought, “He’s crazy.” Franco looked behind him as they turned onto Preston Street, and the police remained too close so Franco gunned past their houses, past Dominic, glancing only a moment to his left, where he saw the porch of his house lit, and Pop with book still in hand, a dark figure stepping away from the brightness to better see the trouble.

  Through alleys and parking lots. Through schoolyards and people’s lawns. Franco looked over his shoulder now and then to see whether Dominic stayed with him, looking for that single headlight, too often glimpsing police flashers farther behind. Tires tore up grass and screeched on pavement, and twice on corners the bike started to slide away, but he heaved and leaned and pulled it back. Along the river, amidst factories and warehouses, he cut the lights on the bike and ran in the dark, feeling his way by memory and instinct, not looking over his shoulder anymore but trusting that Dominic would follow. In an alley he skidded the bike behind a parked freight truck and stumbled away, down stairs to a cellar door where he crouched and tried to hold his breath. Dominic hurried in beside him.

  “Jesus,” whispered Dominic. “Let’s do that again.”

  Franco’s legs trembled. His arms trembled. He swallowed to keep from vomiting. They waited and heard police sirens pass the alley and fade. Franco counted to thirty, then counted to thirty again, and, when he stepped out of the doorwell, unzipped the leather jacket and beat it against a cinderblock wall.

  “Hey, we need to return that,” said Dominic. But he stopped talking when Franco shoved him against the wall, his hand around Dominic’s throat. “No!” Franco said. “It doesn’t go back. We dump it. We dump the bikes. We dump everything.”

  With his jackknife, he cut the handlebar grips. He reared back and chucked each one in a different direction, then went to work on Dominic’s bike. “God damn, that was stupid,” he said. He laughed. “God damn!”

  They took the bikes to the river and pushed them off a promontory into a deep eddy, the bikes splashing into water and garbage, then sinking, ripples receding into the dark. They put stones in the pockets of the jackets, stuffed them in the sleeves, and tossed them in, too. Then, at the motorcycle repair shop, they threw bricks through the display windows and ran pell-mell away, hoping that what they’d left behind looked like a burglary. Blocks later, they stopped to catch their breath. “I need to eat,” said Franco.

  At the grinder shop, Franco ordered meatball. Dominic had sausage. Dominic wore red sauce at the corners of his mouth. He grinned across the table. He said, “You felt it, didn’t you? You understand it now. When we were kids and did stuff, it was like you were only going halfway. But when you took off on that bike tonight, man—” and Dominic howled right there in the grinder shop so other people turned and shook their heads.

  Franco didn’t howl. He didn’t need to. This wasn’t like Schwartz’s lawnmower. This was real. Franco knew what he was doing when he kicked that motorcycle to life. He sped away from the cops knowing what that meant. He followed Dominic onto Preston because he wanted to, even knowing Pop would be on the porch. Dominic was right; Franco understood now how easy it was, how much fun. He wanted to keep racing police and stealing and bullying Dominic into walls, which is why he wouldn’t do any of it anymore.

  “You want a soda?” said Dominic. He was crouched over the table with its red-and-white checkered cloth, half standing, ready to fetch if that’s what Franco wanted.

  Franco shook his head no, but said nothing. He said nothing for a few moments, and when next he noticed Dominic, Dominic’s expression had changed as if something about Franco surprised him. His jaw had gone slack, his eyes wide and static, his cheeks blushed. Franco recognized the look, or thought he did. He remembered one like it from the day they had discovered the dog in the gutter. Franco, who had been afraid, thought then that he saw something fearful and forlorn in Dominic’s face. Probably he did see that. But now he remembered, or imagined, with greater clarity his friend’s childhood face, and Franco recalled love, maybe, and loyalty, and Dominic’s abrupt knowledge of what he had just inherited. That face must have contained more than fear and misery, because Dominic did not run away. He opened the door of that yellow house where his mother no longer lived and his dog no longer lived, and he stepped inside where his father waited.

  Franco knew what he’d done when he roared past Pop standing on the porch. He knew what awaited him back home. He’d walk through the door ready. And if he lost, if he took a beating, he was ready to love Pop even more.

  “You sure you don’t want a soda?” asked Dominic.

  “What the hell. Why not,” said Franco, and Dominic looked grateful, smiling as he counted out his change and signaled to the teenager behind the counter, an underclassman Franco recognized from school, who wore a paper hat and a boy’s happy, ignorant frown.

  Mrs. Liszak

  TEN MINUTES INTO THE MOVIE AND THE ONLY SEAT LEFT WAS in the front row. Suzanne Randall thought that was where the old woman should sit, the one who had come in late clutching a pillow and carrying something in what was either a pillowcase or a large pouch, and who stood watching the movie from the aisle. Now and then the woman peered around the theater as if pleading with the darkness to offer her a seat. Her helplessness distracted Suzanne. Apparently it also distracted her date, an Eagle Scout with pink knuckles and a ’75 Firebird who was the nuns’ favorite at South Catholic High School. He had asked her to the movie, Suzanne believed, only because it was saintly to spend time with the girl who had no parents and no car. Suzanne’s sister had said, “Any guy on a Friday night,” and badgered her to go. But now her date excused himself and left his seat to show the woman to the one that was empty. Suzanne watched the Eagle Scout point, and then he and the woman spoke in whispers, and then the woman started toward the vacant seat beside Suzanne. The Eagle Scout shrugged an apology before heading to the open chair down front.

  The woman’s old-lady perfume preceded her. She bumped Suzanne as she arranged herself: an elbow here, a knee there. Just when it seemed the woman would settle down, she opened her bag. She took from it packages wrapped in wax paper. Whatever was inside stank of garlic. Suzanne hated the woman.

  “She said she couldn’t see from the front,” the Eagle Scout explained after they found each other in the lobby. “She asked to trade seats. She’s older than my mother. What was I going to do?”

  They saw her again as they stepped from the theater into the Hartford night. Cars inching through after-movie traffic steered around her, and drivers honked as she strode the center line of Washington Avenue, caught in the now-and-then headlights. At the bright moments Suzanne could see her clearly, and the woman’s straight back, her head carried high, made Suzanne dislike her even more. She wore heels and a neat skirt and a puffy blouse. Her hair—gray and black, thick, unruly—added to a sense of majesty Suzanne hadn’t noticed in the theater. What power, she wondered, could make such a woman appear helpless in the aisle? Drivers yelled at the old woman to get out of the fucking road.

  “Of course,” said the Eagle Scout, with sudden recognition. “That’s Mrs. Liszak.”

  Her? That was Mrs. Liszak? Even though Suzanne had been in the neighborhood only a year, she had heard of the woman with the scar. She had been burned in a famous fire years ago, people said. Now she did odd things like play hopscotch by herself or waltz without music on street corners.

  In the center of the street, Mrs. Liszak smiled as she tried to thumb a ride from teenagers steering toward a kegger or to the reservoir t
o neck. The Eagle Scout frowned, and Suzanne knew he wrestled again with the dilemma of date versus duty, but she said nothing when he called out to Mrs. Liszak, who accepted his invitation. The Firebird had only two doors, and Suzanne meant to keep her spot in front, so after some hesitation Mrs. Liszak squeezed into the back, pushing aside cassette tapes and dirty chamois and bringing with her the odor of strong garlic. She thanked them. She spoke with an accent—Russian or something, Suzanne thought—and seemed not to think it odd that they would know her name and offer her a ride.

  “Where to, Mrs. Liszak?” said the Eagle Scout.

  “Take me someplace beautiful or someplace strange,” she said. “No place dangerous. Strange or beautiful only.”

  “What about home?” said the Eagle Scout.

  “Strange or beautiful only,” she said again.

  They drove with electric guitars loud on the tape deck and the windows open. Suzanne gazed out her window, trying to ignore the Eagle Scout and their surprise chaperone. The Eagle Scout fiddled with his mirrors, his attention here, then there, as if he were watching for the dripping, toothy monster from the movie. It had been a scary movie, but not frightening to Suzanne, who had been too aware of gasping teenagers and Mrs. Liszak’s garlic to lose herself. This was how it was with her and theaters. Nothing on the screen ever convinced her to leave the crowd.

  Now the Eagle Scout drove them through boring downtown, then past the winos at South Green, then onto the Silas Deane Highway. There they passed the gas station where Suzanne sat twenty-eight hours a week in a glass booth, taking money and writing down license plate numbers. She thought of the reservoir and necking.

  “I see these streets all the time,” said Mrs. Liszak.

  “I won’t take this car into the North End or Frog Hollow,” said the Eagle Scout. “They’ll steal the hubcaps while we’re moving.”

  “How about Massachusetts?” said Mrs. Liszak, and the Eagle Scout barked.

  Suzanne turned, said as if giving an order: “Buy us some beer.”

  “Bad idea,” the Eagle Scout mumbled to the steering wheel.

  “I only brought money for the movie,” said Mrs. Liszak.

  Suzanne put her hand on the Eagle Scout’s corduroy-covered thigh. He owed her for this terrible date. “You have cash,” she said. He looked cuter now that he was nervous.

  After a stop at a package store, they parked across from Trinity College. The Eagle Scout led, a blanket he’d pulled from his trunk rolled and tucked under his arm like a football. Suzanne wanted to hurry, but the Eagle Scout made her wait so that Mrs. Liszak, slower in her heels and her age, could keep up. They passed from dark place to dark place to avoid the college cops, but once happened into a lighted archway, and Suzanne noticed then the dull lavender-colored scar that covered half of Mrs. Liszak’s forehead and spread around her right eye down her cheek. Because stealth and speed were important, Suzanne stole only a few glances; she thought the scar seemed exotic and revelatory.

  The college’s lawn sloped away from its Gothic dormitories into a comfortable darkness where they spread the blanket and peeled open beer cans and sat watching the city lights. They kept silent for a long time until the beer and the night sky turned them toward talk. Mrs. Liszak judged the lawn and the surrounding campus to be beautiful but not so strange. She revealed that she was not Russian, no: Polish. Suzanne announced that she wanted one day to have a dog. Then she told the others that she forgave them, that there were worse things to do on a Friday night than drink beer with a neighborhood flamingo and a cute guy. Mrs. Liszak said she liked being called a flamingo. The Eagle Scout sipped his fourth beer and swiveled his head, keeping watch like the nervous man in the movie whose nervousness meant he would die next. Suzanne used the Eagle Scout’s lap as a pillow, and his cologne made her crave licorice. She wished his hands toward her, even just to rest on her, but he kept hold of his beer can, sipping. Now and then the three of them paused to consider the echo of car speakers, the backfires that might have been gunshots, or the sounds of insects and small animals rustling near them in the grass.

  “I have seen the largest rat,” Mrs. Liszak said.

  The Eagle Scout looked around. “Where?” he said.

  “Behind the typewriter factory on New Park Avenue,” said Mrs. Liszak. “In a culvert. She came out of the storm drain while I watched. She didn’t creep. She wasn’t careful. Her tail is thick as a tree branch. Her fur shines. Her black eyes are as big as yours. There is no rat larger. Not in Puerto Rico or Siam or East Germany.”

  Suzanne laughed. “How do you know it’s a her?” she said.

  “Because only a woman can be so magnificent.”

  The Eagle Scout giggled. Mrs. Liszak reached across the blanket and tapped his head with her knuckles, as if rapping a door. “You’re a smart boy,” she said.

  Then the Eagle Scout and Suzanne argued whether Sister Katherine, who taught history, was a bitch. Mrs. Liszak translated into Polish phrases from the movie (“I wonder what happened to the rest of the crew?” and “Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky”). They discussed the examples of the saints. Suzanne asked about Mrs. Liszak’s husband. “The only strange and beautiful thing he loves is me,” she said. “I always come home. He never worries.” She did not speak about her scar, and Suzanne did not ask. Nor did Suzanne give away anything of consequence about her own life. Though Mrs. Liszak was seductive, she also seemed untrustworthy, perhaps even greedy. Suzanne kept her own pain like a treasure.

  Later, after the Eagle Scout bragged that this was the first time he’d ever been drunk, Mrs. Liszak took his car keys. She drove, even though the Firebird was a stick shift.

  Outside Suzanne’s house, Mrs. Liszak left the car and met Suzanne on the moonlit sidewalk, promising that she’d see the Eagle Scout to his door. “Thank you for sharing this night,” she said to Suzanne, then stepped close, tickling Suzanne’s cheeks with strands of her unruly hair. She kissed Suzanne’s lips.

  Mrs. Liszak hummed something flat and out of tune as she walked back to the car, and Suzanne thought the melody funny and beautiful. She drew a circle on the sidewalk with her toe. The Eagle Scout offered a thumbs-up out the passenger window as they drove away; the tail-lights of the Firebird described their trail.

  In bed, Suzanne licked her lips to recall the kiss. The surprise of it had stayed with her as she undressed, as her head rested into the pillow and she pulled over herself a stiff polyester sheet. The kiss played childhood games inside her and invited her to play along. Her own lips were softer than Mrs. Liszak’s, but clumsy, not so proficient. Mrs. Liszak’s kiss had been quick and casual, like a handshake—but happier. Her breath had been spiced with garlic and beer.

  The next morning it rained. Suzanne lay in bed until the night’s beer and the rainwater running along the gutters forced her to the bathroom. As she peed, she could hear the TV through the door, but not her sister’s voice, or that of her sister’s husband. She washed her hands and face and noticed a new pimple near her hairline, which she wiped cool with a cotton ball dabbed with rubbing alcohol.

  Suzanne lived with Karen and Howard and their little girl, Chryssie, on the third floor of a three-family house east of Goodwin Park. Theirs was the only family living there: the second-floor tenant had recently been evicted, and the old woman on the first floor was hard of hearing and had her meals delivered by St. Cyril’s. The building was like all the three-families in the neighborhood—rectangular, flat-faced, home to pigeons—except that from their back porch hung a weather-faded banner trumpeting the Oakland Raiders. Suzanne lived with Karen because their mother had bled to death in the hours after Suzanne was born, and through the ensuing years their father prolonged his grief through gin and became helpless. The day Karen turned eighteen she eloped with Howard, and nearly two years later, Suzanne, then fifteen, moved in with them. She hadn’t wanted to, but Karen needed help with Chryssie, and their father encouraged it. Then he sold the house and moved away. Suzanne and Karen only learned t
his when a cashier’s check arrived with a note. The note did not say where Mr. Randall had gone. “Love each other,” he wrote. “Think kindly of me.” Karen told Suzanne to toss the note in the trash. With the money Karen paid debts that had come with her baby girl, bought a new used Z-car, and invested in savings bonds to pay for Chryssie’s college. Karen put Suzanne’s share in the bank and used it to pay the tuition at the Catholic high school. The rest, she said, Suzanne would receive when she turned eighteen.

  Suzanne did not miss her mother. How could she when she had never known her? Her mother was to her a curiosity, the explanation for her red hair and milky skin, but little else. She imagined lefthanded people wondered about being right-handed in the same way she wondered about growing up with a mother. She knew people pitied her, and she had the sense that she’d lost something—a security, or a snugness, a confidence that other people took for granted—because she’d had no mother. She felt her mother was not even hers. Mrs. Randall, in her death, belonged solely to Karen, who sanctified her mother’s memory, and who still wept for her with no warning, and those tears made for hard silences between the sisters.

  When Suzanne came barefoot from the bathroom that morning she found Karen at the table cutting grocery coupons. Howard sat in his rocking recliner with an ashtray balanced on the overstuffed arm. He studied maps in a road atlas, looking up now and then at the Saturday morning cartoon on the television. He’d lost his production line job a few months back and hadn’t been able to find another. But he had a friend who’d moved to California and who had once made Howard a standing offer of work. The preceding week Howard had called him and accepted. He planned to leave Monday.