The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  The circus staked its tent outdoors on Barbour Street that hot July day nearly four decades past. Nobody knew then what made the fire. Nobody knew since. But the tent burned. Fire flew up the walls, glided over the canvas, consumed it. Fiery pieces of the tent collapsed into the crowd, like Hell, the white fires of Hell, the heart of a furnace, windy, roaring. Animal cries came from the mouths of lions and elephants and people. Children. Children in tears and panic, children who were knee-high and waist-high, crawling over the rag-doll bodies of the dead. The dead in piles near the animal chute. The dead in piles near the tent walls. Mrs. Liszak could not remember whether she had wanted to die, but she lived. Her son, Teddy, who was then only three years old (and Suzanne thought of Chryssie coloring on the apartment floor), also had not died. It was an old story, Mrs. Liszak said, and though she sometimes thought the memories were gone, they could still—when she least expected them—bring her to her knees: the brassy shouts of the circus-band trombones; the squeak of rubber-soled shoes as the nurse came to peel Mrs. Liszak’s charred flesh; Teddy’s strangled breathing in his hospital bed.

  Suzanne penciled a brown shadow near the nose, paying less attention to that than to the thought that someone had rescued Mrs. Liszak and her boy. Someone must have dragged them away. Suzanne imagined purposeful hands (and saw the thick, scaly hands of Mrs. Liszak’s husband and saw her father’s), and she envied Mrs. Liszak.

  “Who rescued you?” she asked.

  Mrs. Liszak shrugged her shoulders. “I never knew.”

  “Did someone hear you yelling?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “But you survived.”

  “We were fortunate. Others were not.”

  It was not what Suzanne wanted to hear, and she felt a small start of anger. She studied her sketch. She needed a red pencil, but when she looked she couldn’t find one in her satchel.

  “But you have this nice house,” she said. “You have your husband.”

  “What has that to do with the fire?”

  What had that to do? Everything. It had everything to do with the fire. On the night of the kiss, Suzanne had watched as Mrs. Liszak gained things: a seat in a crowded theater, a ride, companionship, an evening that was strange and beautiful. How? How had she been among those who survived the fire? What made her different? What quality gained her this husband, this home? Suzanne had thought (or sensed or hoped) that what had scarred Mrs. Liszak’s face had also taught her this trick. Suffering brought help. Pain had power to attract those rescuing hands. It must. You just had to know how to use it. But now all the old woman could say was, “We were fortunate. Others were not,” as if all suffering—Suzanne’s, too—were an accident, a coin flip, a dice roll. She could lose forever.

  Suzanne found the red pencil but stopped drawing. Mrs. Liszak noticed, then stood as if the sitting were ended. She stretched: an invitation, it seemed, for the world to inhabit her body. That night’s kiss had convinced Suzanne that Mrs. Liszak would share her secret of loss and gain. But now, everything about her seemed to be an act. Look at her, Suzanne thought. She pretends the world owes her, but what did it take from her in that burning tent? A mother? A father? No, nothing. Nothing. In the accident that was the world, Suzanne had lost more, lost faster.

  She snapped her red pencil. “Why did your son leave you?” she said. “Did he hate you?”

  Mrs. Liszak looked at Suzanne the way Karen had in the days before Howard left.

  “He went to college in North Carolina,” she said. “Then he got a job there.”

  “He could have gotten a job here,” said Suzanne. “He must not have wanted to come back to you.”

  “Aren’t you cruel,” said Mrs. Liszak.

  “No!” cried Suzanne, as she stuffed her sketch pad and pencils into her satchel. “No, I’m not. I’m not!”

  Later, home from Barker Street, she saw that there was still no Z-car downstairs. Inside, too, she found no one. Gone from their places were their mother’s framed Sacred Heart and Chryssie’s quilt of tulips and daffodils. But on the tabletop: five twenty-dollar bills, a bankbook with a balance of more than four thousand dollars, and a note in Karen’s perfect handwriting.

  “Forgive me” was all it said.

  That night Suzanne lay awake. She turned out her light, hoping to sleep, but heard clawing she’d never before noticed from inside the walls. She tried to ignore it, but the clawing persisted, and she imagined rats there, climbing the pipes and the two-by-fours, gnawing through the plaster. She turned the light on, and the sound stopped. She brought a pillow from Karen’s bed into her own and curled herself around it. She heard the old house gurgle and click. She imagined Karen and Chryssie bloody inside the Z-car that had been wrapped around a telephone pole. She imagined Howard in a black rage at the apartment door. Suzanne’s eyes watered from sleepiness. She listened for clawing inside the walls, and when she heard it, fumbled the light on again. She stepped to the kitchen, switching on every light along the way. She drank a beer Howard had left. She imagined rats nesting in her box spring. It was just past two in the morning. Then it was 2:05. 2:06. 2:06 again. She played the radio, but the sound exaggerated the emptiness of the rooms. She called the station to talk with the DJ.

  “Hey, you sound kind of sweet,” he said.

  “I am,” she said.

  “I’ve got to change a record, but don’t go away,” he said, and while he was gone she hung up.

  She tried to finish homework. She found her first-confession rosary and tried to pray. She prayed for daylight, squeezing the beads so hard they left red marks in her skin. She brought Mr. Pibb and stale popcorn and a carrot into her bedroom and shut the door and then watched the shut door, suddenly afraid of what it hid from her.

  In the morning, she stayed home from school. When the telephone rang, she startled, then stared as it trembled on the wall.

  Suzanne had been alone for three weeks. Karen had written her a dozen or so letters, and in some she pleaded with Suzanne to pick up the phone. The letters told her how wonderful California could be for a pretty girl, one who was smart, too. Bus tickets weren’t much—Suzanne could pay out of the savings account.

  Suzanne always felt tired. Dark splotches appeared around her eyes. Her hair went unwashed. She ate only bags of noodles and chocolate bars. She skipped school. At work, she pressed her face against the cold glass and played a radio loud to stay awake.

  “You need coffee or something?” said a man outside the booth. She leaned away from the cold glass, opened her eyes. He was bald and high-cheeked and familiar. Something about his posture, maybe, or the slope of his shoulders. He slid his gasoline dollars into the well. “I could get you coffee.”

  She counted out the five and two ones, put his change back in the well. He reached at the same time. His fingertips grazed hers.

  “You live on Cromwell?” he said. She recognized him now. It hadn’t occurred to her that while she was spying on the bald man, he had noticed her, too.

  “I live on Chester. We’re neighbors. So, can I fetch you that coffee?” He smiled. He peeked at her breasts—no, maybe her name tag. How old was he? Twenty-four? Thirty-eight? She couldn’t tell because he’d shaved his head, and he looked athletic. A jogger, probably. He wore sneakers. She noticed that he drove a Japanese pickup, the bed filled with tools and sloppy buckets. A house painter. She shook her head: no, no coffee.

  When she punched out that evening, she saw his truck parked across the street at the grocery store, too distant to tell whether he was in it. She watched his truck from the bus stop, watched it until the bus had carried her away. She thought of walking home a different route, told herself to grow up, then turned down Chester toward home. He spoke to her from the darkness of his front porch as she passed.

  “What happened to that Raiders banner?” he called out. “Aren’t you a fan anymore?”

  She hesitated before she said, “It was my brother-in-law’s.”

  “So he’s not a fan anymor
e?”

  She gave him a half smile, waved and walked on, hurrying a little. As she turned the corner, she glanced over her shoulder. The bald man followed, a house or two back. She walked faster.

  “Kenny Stabler’s a great quarterback,” he said, loud enough that she could hear.

  She started to jog. Her house was only a few away. She looked back, but he wasn’t running. Just walking, hands in the pockets of his shiny sweatpants, as if he were out for an evening stroll. At the top of the stairs, she tried to find the keys in her satchel, throwing out everything else—her sketchbook and all her pencils tumbling over the steps. Her hands shook, and she missed the keyhole once, twice. She heard the door open downstairs and heard footfalls on the steps. Then she had the apartment door open, and she slammed it behind her, twisted the deadbolt, ran the chain. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God.” Suddenly, she worried that someone was already in the apartment. She didn’t know which room would protect her and which room was a trap. He knocked on the door. “Suzanne? Did I do something wrong?” he said. His voice was soothing, quiet. “Did I scare you?” He knocked again. She remembered the back porch—had she locked it before work?—and ran to check. He was still speaking through the door when she came back, but he spoke so softly she couldn’t hear him. She drew closer, leaned near the door. He said, “I’m sorry if I scared you. I was just making small talk. I only walked after you to apologize. I wouldn’t do anything to you. My name’s Weinbaum. You know where I live. Why would I do anything to you? I was just trying to be nice. You’re right to lock the door. That’s what your parents would want you to do. You’re a good kid. A smart kid. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  “I’m fucking calling the cops!” she yelled.

  She felt her heartbeat in her throat, against her eardrums, in her fingertips. She realized she had been crying, the taste of salt on her lips. She crouched low at the door and listened. His voice frightened her, but it was so calm, so comforting, that it soothed her, too. She doubted her fear for a moment, thought that he might be right, that she was silly, overreacting, too sensitive. Her hands trembled when she placed her palms flat against the door as if she could feel him through the wood and paint, feel his honesty or deception, and she found that she wanted to feel honesty.

  He said, “I’m leaving now. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  She listened as he stepped down the first flight, and she heard floor-boards creak as he turned onto the landing. She gasped for breath and left her palms on the door, and she stayed there a long time until she felt certain of his absence, and was glad for it, and missed his voice. She hadn’t yet stopped crying. She began to sob and to speak as she sobbed, only half-aware of what it was she was saying. “Daddy,” she gasped. “Daddy.”

  From the moment Suzanne sneaked their father’s last note back from the trash, she had imagined him still in her life.

  She had seen such things in movies. She imagined that he sold the house, then moved into an apartment in Hartford. He knew it was best he stay away but—tortured by longing—came to the schoolyard in the morning to watch her start her day. He watched her walk home. He spied on her in the park when she took Chryssie there on the days Howard and Karen wanted the apartment to themselves. He arrived at Mass after the service began and admired her from the back pew, leaving just after communion. So in church, she turned to search the back rows, and she paused in the schoolyard to study cars parked nearby, and at the park and at the grocery and even from the back porch of their apartment, she looked for him.

  When in her fantasies she found him, or when he showed himself to her, she forgave him.

  After the bald man left, she stayed in the house for four days. She kept the doors locked. She quit her job by not going. When she slept, she could not tell she was asleep. When she was awake, she could not tell she was awake. She ate almost nothing. She kept the television on but didn’t watch. She crept once into the stairwell to retrieve her pencils and sketchbook. She tore drawings out of her sketchbook and taped them to the walls, and when she ran out of tape she stapled them and when she ran out of staples she used a hammer and nails. When she ran out of faces she drew more. She drew Karen and Howard and Chryssie. She drew her father. She drew the bald man. She drew until the tips of her pencils were nubs and then until the nubs were flat. Even then there weren’t enough faces. The walls still had space.

  The Liszaks weren’t home, so she sat on their porch to wait. She wore a wrinkled sweatshirt and frayed jeans and open-toed clogs, and she felt cold. It was morning and cloudy and damp. The Liszaks did not keep a blanket on their porch.

  She had a plan. She was a girl in a crowded theater, and there was only one seat open. She had practiced her speech. Orphan girl. Abandoned by her sister. She could keep Mrs. Liszak’s husband company on those days he waited for his wife to tire of what was strange and beautiful and to come home. She would keep her money a secret. She would stay in Hartford and find her father or be found by him. So she sat on the Liszaks’ porch, trying to look helpless. She hugged herself, pressed her legs together against the chill morning, and shivered, and waited.

  They walked home together, Mrs. Liszak’s husband carrying grocery bags. He looked surprised to see Suzanne. Mrs. Liszak did not. She unlocked the door.

  “The girl’s freezing,” he said, and he put down the bags. “Come inside, girl.”

  But Mrs. Liszak touched his shoulder, turned him away. “Take the groceries to the kitchen, Charlie,” she said. “I’ll worry about Suzanne.”

  Suzanne peeked up; her plan had called for pity in Mrs. Liszak’s face, but she saw only disdain. Mrs. Liszak said: “There’s nothing for you here. Go away.”

  “Can’t I—?”

  But Mrs. Liszak had followed her husband and shut the door behind her.

  Suzanne listened to the click of the deadbolt. Locked out of a house, locked into a life. That was it, then. No Liszaks. No Eagle Scout. No Karen. No mother. No Daddy.

  She doubled over, weeping. She noticed through tears the chipped polish of her toenails poking out from her clogs, saw a carpenter’s nail stick up from a floorboard, saw rust on the flat head of the nail. The nail’s shaft was bent. Another nail beside it stayed driven into the dry, gray wood. She counted four nails per plank. She counted a dozen planks. Two dozen. So many nails. Nails everywhere. She felt grief everywhere. It filled the porch and the yard, the street; in comparison she grew into insignificance. She wept and watched herself shrink, helpless. Her head reeled. She felt a peculiar peace.

  She would know this strange calm again, but not for years, not until two serene hours trapped alone in a broken elevator during a week of art-school exams. She would not understand this peculiar peace until she had lain in a sleeping bag in a New Hampshire mountain meadow, her fiancé snoring and the Milky Way unraveling across the sky. Years after that, she would expect to feel it (and would) in the delivery room of a California hospital as she watched Karen bring forth a second son. But now it made no sense, this thrill at her own impotence, her own triviality, not here on the Liszaks’ porch, having gone too long without food, exhausted, vision blurred. Time stopped, too, and she stumbled in it, floated away from the porch, crashed into the cement walk. She felt grit in the skin of her forehead, and it didn’t matter. In her mouth, she tasted blood—a tooth hung loose—and it didn’t matter. The world turned upside down, then flipped back. Hands gripped her arms; hands lifted her. Someone spoke her name. Inside, the house was warm.

  At the Beach

  I. DOG AND NOT DOG

  ROSA’S CAT WAS SHORT-HAIRED, BLACK AND WHITE, WITH HALF its left ear torn away and a tail that twitched when the cat meant to do evil. If Rosa failed to notice the tail, the cat might rake claws across her hand as she petted him. She fancied herself a cat lover, but this animal led her to thoughts of betrayal.

  She enjoyed the fruits of her thirty-three years: friendships, loving parents, success in property law, and an expensive condominium in a city that valued its magnolias a
nd crepe myrtle. People who knew her saw a woman confident in herself and her powers. She dated, but unmarried men her age proved immature or too damaged to warrant anything more than sex.

  One year, in June, she left to spend a week at the beach with a KKG sister and the woman’s family. This was an annual retreat, a chance for sun and talk with a friend she saw too rarely. She brought the cat along in a carrier. The house they’d rented had weathered gray and offered a view from all four bedrooms. Molly and her husband took one, put their children in another and Rosa in the third. Her bed was too soft, and she lay in it restlessly, listening through the air ducts to the kids tease each other. The fourth bedroom they gave to a friend of the husband’s. The friend owned small-circulation regional magazines Rosa had read in boutiques. He was a transplanted Yankee and, as Molly had promised, single.

  “Married once,” he said. “College sweethearts. We both learned things.”

  Also, he’d brought a dog.

  Later his dog met her cat, and it was a day before the cat would come out from under the house. It clawed her when she finally pulled it into her arms, left hot little lines, the blood beading atop the cuts.

  None of this made him memorable. She had met single Yankee men before. Some even had dogs. What struck her about him (what would strike anyone) were the scars that marked his arms and legs, chest and back. The jigsaw patterns changed color in different light. In some places his body hair grew out of his scarred skin as it would on any other man, and in other places—where, perhaps, the scars were deeper?—his skin looked papery and bald. The resulting impression was of a man unfinished. Molly had whispered the cause to her when the Yankee was off fishing: a bad fire when he was a boy. Molly believed everyone had a soft spot for wounds.

  He apologized for his dog and after that took greater care when she or her cat was nearby. He befriended the cat, which crawled on his lap when he sat on the porch, the two of them fixated on the yellow-blue horizon. The cat never clawed him.