The girl looked at me, and I saw eyes that I had thought of too seldom in the last four years—in the last nineteen years. In their carved-out depths I read things seldom found in the eyes of someone six times her senior. There was pain, rebellion, fear, blame, loneliness, rejection, and beneath it all, unfathomable to me, love. It was illogical. It didn’t belong there! It stood singular, a rose in a field of weeds, begging for attention. How could this child still find room for love? For possibly the first time in my adult life, I wanted to cry.
How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so heartless?
Though this girl did not look anything like my Suzi, the connection was there. At that moment I vowed to find her so I could tell her that she now mattered. That I was sorry that fate burdened her with a father who was so narrow—so careless—that he would allow the two finest things in his life to slide through his numbed hands, without even the flattery of an attempted grasp.
I would have given my life, right then, just to feel Suzi in my arms. To kiss her face and hear her say, I love you dad. I forgive you. To embrace my daughter, the only link to Tippi and the remnants of a life that could have been so good, if not for my ignorance. Perhaps there was still a chance for forgiveness through Suzi.
I went home that evening and poured every trace of alcohol down the toilet. I dumped my after shave, rubbing alcohol, and cooking sherry, bidding farewell to my lifelong mistress, and turned my back before she could seduce me again. For two days, I cleaned my home with a vehemence I could not recall ever having. I scrubbed the floors and the walls, behind the refrigerator, stove, washer, and dryer. I washed the curtains, sheets, and lampshades, and scoured every surface. I wanted to remove any evidence of myself from the house, for fear that the ghosts and demons of my past would haunt the next residents and betray my secrets.
The house sold easily after only three weeks on the market, understandably so for such a fine home. A proud manor for which I could claim no credit; I had inherited it. Any personality shown on or within its walls was the works of Tippi or my parents. I was ashamed to accept money for it.
I sold it for $325,000, with furnishings, much to the displeasure of my confounded real estate agent. The house was appraised at $399,000.
Bob Lynch cried when I told him I was leaving, though the revelation didn’t really surprise him. Like a parent who loses a rebellious child, there is still love and pity. It still hurts.
I couldn’t answer his questions of where I was going, or why. They were answers I didn’t have. I simply told him that I had dropped my heart four years ago, and that I needed to find it. I said no when he offered me money.
My search for Suzi was rooted in the shallow and dry dirt of optimism. The prospect of her being with the circus four years later was paper thin, but substantial enough for hope. Perhaps someone would remember the girl I forgot.
Finding the name of the circus was similar to searching for bugs under rocks; you flip one, and then move to another, knowing that eventually it will turn up. I found an ad in the Portsmouth Herald archives from four years earlier, trumpeting the arrival of Dunn & Barlow’s Magnificent World Fair.
A traveling circus moves like a butterfly. It flutters erratically on an inconclusive path, leaving little clue of where it’s been, and even less of where it’s going. Hampton Beach town records showed nothing except a statement for the land that Dunn & Barlow’s had leased. Like the butterfly, they arrived, left, and never returned. No information was available beyond that.
Bud Martin has a good memory. He owns The Sand Dollar, a diner located across the boulevard from the Hampton Beach State Park, the land Dunn & Barlow’s had rented. Bud’s the talkative sort with plenty of nothing to say, and shares his wisdom with the flip of a burger. He serves an abundance of both for your dollar. He recalled the circus, but remembered no names. He said that it’s better that way. However, he remembered a conversation about a town in Vermont called Woodstock, and then spoke of a concert he attended many years ago with the same name.
For more than three months I followed such leads, a man and his Corolla, tracking baseless clues across the country like a cat chasing a string. I zigzagged across America with my life possessions jammed in the trunk. My conviction and hopefulness died a little more with every dead-end, but in Sarasota, Florida, at 3:00 a.m. in a sleepy café, I met a nosy truck driver named Kennedy who overheard my inquiries. He shared a great story with me.
He said that when you live on the road, lonely hour after hour, billboards play a weighty role. They break the monotony of the blacktop, since they are one of very few things in a long-hauler’s life that change with any regularity.
Dunn & Barlow’s was a name familiar to both the trucker and billboards. Like the truck driver, traveling circuses are nomads, night gypsies that move by the light of the moon. They occasionally cross paths on the dreary road. Kennedy recently saw the name in Pennsylvania, somewhere on route 80, he said.
Twenty hours later, I stood at the edge of a large field in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, staring at the twin yellow peaks of Dunn & Barlow’s Magnificent World Fair’s main tent. My vision swam in the heat of a treacherous June afternoon, causing the sight to ripple lazily in the golden pasture. My heart yearned to run onto the fairway, calling for Suzi, needing the truth. My heart feared the truth.
I walked tentatively, following the crushed grass of the tire-hammered path. Children dashed excitedly by reveling in the vow of the big top. I envied their enthusiasm and faith, and their naiveté.
A profusion of smells, sweltering and concentrated, escorted me onto the concourse. Italian sausage, hay, freshly cut wood, animal waste, and new paint merged and hit me with long-forgotten memories of days when I too ran with reckless abandon and little more to worry about than length of wait at the main event.
The bazaar was alive with noise, the screams of excited children, a pitchman’s banter, and the mechanical whir of the rides. Over the loudspeakers, the voice of W. C. Fields promised a night of wonders beyond belief and miracles every half-hour. I wandered the park hoping for providence, the hand of an angel to steer me along.
Suzi smiled at me from the photo I held. Her face glowed, a paradox between teenage awkwardness and newfound sexuality. Her eyes sparkled with rebel enthusiasm, but they held a darkness that was barely at bay, a frog in a child’s hand struggling for freedom, burrowing for the first opening large enough to allow escape. She had found that hole.
Physically, she was an Americanized version of her mother, a bolder and more solid reproduction. Like her mother’s, her hair was black silk, so lustrous it appeared blue. She had the same almond eyes staring deliciously from above high, sharp cheekbones. The only visual difference being that Suzi was six inches taller and twenty-five pounds heavier. She had the body of the All-American girl.
Tippi had carefully chosen the name Suzi, because it and the girl smacked of both Japan and America; you would never be sure without asking.
I showed Suzi to a barker as he bellowed of the terrors in The Devil’s Den. Stale air and the smell of dead wood were the only ghosts in that haunted house. He shook his head at the picture and shrugged an apology, then offered me a trip into hell. I told him I’d already been there.
Another yelled of freaks and oddities, of Lucas, the two-headed man, of Belle, the world’s fattest woman, of Carla, the human wound, and of Micky, the world’s smallest man. He too offered me nothing but a view into The World of Weirdness. Madam Zorak had nothing to share, but for five dollars could read my fortune—who knows what it would reveal? I paid her twenty not to.
Well into the night I asked, begged, and cried, but received only looks of sorrow and mistrust. Some would ask questions or wish me good luck, but most just wordlessly shook their head.
Nothing could have prepared me for the death of my soul, for the murder of what remained of my heart. I had never experienced such emptiness—an undiluted sense of helplessness, like an astronaut who breaks the umbilical
from the ship then drifts too far. I knew at one point in my insignificant life that the possibility of not finding Suzi was the worst thing that could happen. I had never been so wrong.
I had just viewed Belle, the world’s fattest woman, and the almost laughable sight of Micky, the world’s smallest man, perched comfortably on the meaty pillow of her belly.
I pushed the curtain aside to view the next curiosity. What I saw was a nightmare in flesh. Suzi, or Carla the Human Wound, recognized me immediately. The revulsion I felt when I first saw her was indescribable, though I did not recognize her. The woman, only distinguishable by the swell of breasts in her dark blue bikini top, rose from her chair as I entered the viewing room. A knowing smile seemed to appear on her ravaged face as she neared the glass.
Gaping scars crossed every viewable surface of her body, parallel furrows bisecting every half-inch. She posed, distending her chest, presenting her legs, arms, and back, as if she were a prize bodybuilder. She ran her fingers down the length of her leg, following the course of the channels in her skin.
Smaller ravines ran from her chin, mouth, nose, and eyes to her ears, which were tattered ribbons of flesh and cartilage. That is when I recognized her … Suzi. Those almond-shaped eyes, just like Tippi’s, were the only recognizable part of the once beautiful girl.
Her upper lip was split under the nose, giving her mouth a cleft feline appearance, and whatever remained of her lovely oil-black hair was now a patchwork of stubble and scar tissue.
I watched benumbed as Suzi performed. She modeled with a fervor she probably showed to no other customer. Today’s audience was special. Suzi advanced to the Plexiglas wall, her eyes locked with mine, and that smile, that ghastly smile, fixed on her face. Merely inches apart, our faces divided by only half an inch of plastic, Suzy licked the glass. Her tongue was divided into three even strips.
I ran from the sideshow, horrified and appalled, trying to escape the incredible blackness that threatened to fold over me. It fluttered at the edge of my consciousness, some horrendous truth, like enormous bat wings that wanted to trap and smother me. I collapsed beside a booth outside, fighting the nausea that coiled like snakes in my stomach.
How could she do that to herself?
Why?
What would make someone do that?
I knelt in the dirt, shaking and sobbing as people walked warily past.
“Come with me,” someone said. Belle, the world’s fattest woman, helped me onto my shaking legs then led me to a Winnebago. I didn’t resist; I was too weak.
I followed her into the trailer and she motioned me to sit at a small table. “Wait here,” she said and left the camper, which rose significantly with her departure. Inside, it was surprisingly clean and smelled of coffee and fried onions. On the counter near the sink was an open bag of Canada Mints, so commonplace in a world that had just become so alien and foreboding.
“Hello, father,” she said. Her words ill-formed on the tattered strips of her tongue. She came through a doorway at the far end of the camper, wearing an emerald-green robe and looking so normal through the dimness of the tight hallway. She carried a bag of cotton balls and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. She set them on the table and sat across from me.
“Suzi?” I said, feeling sick, saddened, and very uneasy.
“Carla, please. Suzi died four years ago.” She raised her leg on the bench beside her, freeing it from the housecoat and exposing the web of scars. “Why’d you come here?” she asked, her question whistling, but logical from her tortured mouth.
“Tippi … your mother died two years ago,” I told her. I was rattled and had a tremendous desire to run, to escape this nightmare and run until I could run no longer.
“Yes, I know. Killed herself.” She uncapped the alcohol and poured some into a shallow saucer and looked at me. “I knew that was coming. We had different ways of escaping you, she was just better at it.” Her words confirmed what I had already known, though a small part of me had vainly hoped differently.
She took a single-edge razor blade from her robe pocket and unwrapped it. She dipped it in the alcohol, and then ran the blade deftly along a rut on her calf, opening a narrow line of blood inside the existing wound. My body contracted in an icy convulsion, and the blackness threatened again. I felt as if I’d just grabbed a live wire.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s a living,” she said, and then accusingly, “it’s a life.” She dabbed a cotton ball in the alcohol, then ran it along the fresh wound. Her jaw tightened slightly.
“Isn’t it odd,” she said, displaying the blood-tinged swab, “that the same spirit that cleanses my wounds rotted your soul?”
“You’re on the wagon now, right?” she asked. “Reformed?”
“I’m trying. It’s been a few months.”
“A little fucking late, wouldn’t you say?”
I was defenseless. I could say nothing. She ran the blade along another wound.
“Why do you do this, Suzi? Carla?”
“They’re Novocain. These wounds hurt less than others, but they help take my mind off the bigger and deeper ones.” She swabbed at the slice in her leg.
I could sense something bigger than life creeping up on me. Like a stalking cat, it stopped every time I tried to focus on it.
“They’re my protection and my savior,” she was saying, her distorted voice barely audible above the pulse pounding in my head and in my ears. “My guarantee that no man—no bastard—can ever hurt me again.”
Sweat ran down my back, from my brow into my eyes, stinging as it mixed with my tears.
She opened her robe, exposing her mutilated breasts. Revulsion and remorse attacked me, a feral beast tearing at my heart. I screamed at the pain.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” She spit. “You don’t find it attractive anymore, Daddy?”
There it was. Like the boy who discovers the forgotten bag of marbles hidden on the top shelf, it all came tumbling down on my head. Sneaking into her room, pushing the chair under the doorknob. Ignoring her terrified eyes and her tears. Hiding from Tippi. Hiding from myself.
Suzi closed her robe, her eyes burning into me. For once she had the upper hand. For once she was the tormentor. I lowered my head to the table and covered my ears, trying to block the truth, hoping it was all an illusion.
“Please leave,” she said. “I don’t want you here. I don’t need you opening old wounds. I do that fine on my own.”
What could I say or do? I’m sorry would be a colossal insult. It wouldn’t amount to a speck of dust in the universe of irreparable harm I caused her. Devastated by self-disgust, I rose without a word and left.
Shortly after, I returned to the camper with two suitcases. One contained several of Tippi’s personal items that I hoped Suzi might want; the other contained the cash from the sale of the house.
“These aren’t mine,” I told her, and slid the two suitcases in. I know that I could never correct what had happened in our lives, and I wasn’t going to pretend that the money and Tippi’s belongings were a token of such. I stated it as it was. They were not mine. I had done nothing to earn any of it.
Suzi dismissed me with a nod of her head and returned to her handiwork.
I left with nothing, which was truly my own.
LISTENING POST FOUR
By Allen Gamboa
Four months after infection….
Lieutenant Ian Black, formerly Lieutenant Colonel Black, sat in front of several computer screens watching endless loops of the endless horrors the world had now become. A new, nightmarish world that Black had had a personal hand in creating. It was sickening to him to watch the world literally eating itself to death. The flowing bottles of Jack Daniels that Black kept in his desk helped it all go down smoother.
Lieutenant Black’s job was to monitor as much Internet information and chatter as he could and send anything useful to wherever the Government was holed up. Hell, he didn’t even know who was in charge anymore. They had a
plan though. Yeah, right.
Captain Randy Cruse, who was Black’s commanding officer at the desolate outpost, sat at the crowded desk across from him and manned his own bank of computer and monitors. Cruse was a Coast Guard captain without any combat experience. Black was a battle-hardened warfighter who only wanted to choke out the captain three times a day.
“Well, Hickam Field is still online,” Black said, reading an e-mail. “Amazing. Those guys are barely holding on.”
“Pearl?” Cruse asked, yawning.
“Still broadcasting every hour.” Black yawned. He was tired, so very tired. The junior officer was glad the outpost was in a remote area and protected by a dwindling platoon of Marines. At least he didn’t have to sleep with one eye open anymore.
“ How long you think we’re going to have power?” The Coastie asked.
“As long as they can protect that power plant.” Black watched a fuzzy CTV video of a mob of undead shamble down a destroyed New York City street, looking for something or someone to devour. A chill went down his spine. He was thankful there weren’t any of the living dead close by. He’d seen enough of his share of the living being torn apart by the dead to fill his nightmares. “New York still looks pretty bottled up.”
“That’s ‘cause anyone left alive is hiding,” Cruse said, opening a chocolate pudding pack. “Waiting to be saved.”
“By whom?” Black watched another e-mail pop up on a screen.
“By us of course,” Cruse said around a mouthful of pudding.
“Well, we’re not going to save anybody from here, Captain.”
“Such a downer, Lieutenant, really.” Cruse smiled, shoving in more pudding. Some of it dribbled onto his white uniform. Black looked at him in disgust and thought, Screw it. Tomorrow I’m not wearing my uniform. This fucker doesn’t respect his own! Who cares anymore?
Happy Little Horrors Page 17