I sensed my chance. Yanking my arm free, I jumped away, then turned and ran into the woods, beyond the beams of light.
“Hey!” he yelled.
After staring at the spotlights, I was blind in the woods. I ran as hard as I could for about twenty steps and ran right over a small tree. The thin trunk bent back under my weight, but didn’t break, and I ended up straddling it, one leg on either side. The branches jabbed at me, poking all over and lifting my dress. My face was untouched, but burning scratches ran down my arms and legs. Worse, I wasn’t sure how to get untangled. The tree and I were locked in a kind of clumsy embrace. At any moment, I thought, George’s hand would clamp around my neck. I stood for a few minutes, breathing hard and feeling furious at the tree for being in the way. Finally, I backed up, slowly pulling my dress from the branches. By the time I got out, the thin trunk was bent lifelessly toward the ground.
I tried to pull myself together. My breath came in deep gasps, and my head felt light. I put my hand on my chest, hoping to slow my heart. The beams of the spotlights didn’t reach this far, so I was safely in the dark, but I could see perfectly back to the fire. George hadn’t bothered to chase me. He was still holding the whimpering boy, dragging the boy behind him as he stalked around the clearing. Another policeman had gathered Gunnar and some of the other boys and had made them sit by the fire with their backs against each other. After the chaos of the raid, the scene was strangely quiet. Behind me, the noises of the fair drifted up again.
I must be crazy, I told myself. Insane. I must have temporary insanity. I used to think that Bunny had a streak that made her do dumb things, but coming out to Banyon’s Woods was beyond dumb, way beyond dumb. What’s happened to me? I used to be so careful—I was about the most careful person I knew. And then Butcher and now this. Temporary insanity, that’s got to be the explanation.
It occurred to me that I should go back to the bonfire and give myself up. It seemed so clear now, temporary insanity. I’d explain it all to George.
I took a step forward and tripped over a root, falling into a bush. I caught myself, grabbing a handful of leaves, but branches crackled under my weight.
“Listen!” hissed the other cop. “Someone’s there.” He stared out directly at me.
“Forget it,” said George. “We got enough.”
“Where’s Mike?” asked the first cop.
“I guess he ran after them,” said George. “He’ll be back. We’ll wait here.”
The cops returned their attention to their captives, working silently, ordering people around by grunts and gestures. Watching from the darkness while the spotlights glared, I felt like a secret witness who was about to see some awful crime committed. I can’t go back there, I realized. I can’t go to the cops.
I waited a few minutes, until the silence of the woods settled around me. Then I began creeping back to the fair. I felt my way among the trees, not knowing where the path was. A bright moon sent some light through the leafy ceiling, and I followed the distant sounds. Going forward, my left hand was always in front of my face, open and palm out, to guard against branches, or worse, cobwebs. My right hand swung back and forth as added protection. With each step, my right foot edged out a few inches and planted itself on solid ground. With those inches safely established, my left foot caught up from behind, and the process was repeated. Moving like that, like a blind cripple, I maneuvered my way through the woods. Soon, the sounds of the fair grew louder, and the lighting began to show the way. After about fifteen minutes, I was again at the fence.
This area of the fairgrounds didn’t look familiar, however. Several big, unlighted buildings stretched ahead in the darkness. No one was around. I found a faint path along the fence and followed that to the right, looking for something I recognized. After about a hundred feet I stopped. These buildings stored tractors and snowplows and other heavy equipment for the county. They were on the opposite side of the fairgrounds from the entrance, and, as far as I could recall, they weren’t anywhere near the fence hole. So I turned and walked back the other way. After a while, the buildings ended and the animal tents appeared. The fence was in a deep shadow, and I walked close, my shoulder bumping against it, so I wouldn’t miss the hole. I stayed hunched over, my eyes toward the bottom.
“Hey!” hissed someone close to my ear.
I jumped back, scraping my hand on the raw edge of the severed wire. There was the hole, anyway.
“Help,” whispered the voice again. It was Muscle. He was visible only as a dark hulk, pressed against the fence. I couldn’t even tell which side he was on.
“What are you doing?” I asked softly.
“Get me out of here,” he begged. “The cop handcuffed me to the fence.”
I couldn’t tell if he recognized me, but I stepped closer. His left arm was attached to the fence at about the height of his head. He pulled on the handcuff and it rattled against the wire. “Do something,” he said. He sounded as if he were about to cry.
“What?” I edged toward the hole.
“Get a saw, get a hammer. Get something.”
“Hmmmm.” I crouched down. I remembered how drowning people act, how dangerous they can be, grabbing at anything to save themselves. Muscle was just on the other side of the fence, just within reach of the hole if he stretched.
“Please,” he moaned, shaking his tethered hand again.
“Sure,” I whispered. I dropped to my knees and scrambled through the hole, then jumped to my feet on the other side. Muscle snatched out, and his fingers caught the left strap of my sundress. I pulled away and the strap ripped out.
“Wait!” he yelled. I ran off between the tents.
The loose strap flapped down, and my dress sagged, but I kept running, past darkened tents of calves and sheep, past a huge mountain of straw, past a long, fenced enclosure full of goats. Finally, I came to a main path and slowed to a walk. People were wandering by, chattering and laughing, acting as if nothing important had gone on in the world for hours, for days before. They seemed from another country, people I hadn’t seen for years, or perhaps knew only from books. I was exhausted, my body ached all over. Just watching these people drained my last bits of stored energy. Without even talking to me, they seemed to be demanding so much.
A father walked by, holding his son by the hand. When the boy saw me, he stared, twisting his head back as the two went past. My dress was in ruins. Dampness and grass had stained the front, and the loose left strap drooped down over my stomach. I could have been wearing a toga. I felt in back and discovered that the button to hold the strap was gone. The only way to keep the front of the dress up was to pull the strap back over my shoulder and then tuck the loose end under my arm. That meant I had to keep my left arm tight against my side, as if I were wounded or suffering from some deep stomach pain.
I walked along looking for Bunny. I was certain she would be around; she wouldn’t have left without me. I’d check the beer tent and the Ferris wheel, the only ride she’d ever go on. I had to find her. People swept past me, their faces blurs, their clothes just streaks of color. If I concentrated, I could focus my eyes, but I didn’t have the strength. It was easier to move along in a fog. Don’t think. Just find Bunny. Someone called my name—or was it just a memory, knocked loose behind the blur? It wasn’t Bunny, so I kept walking.
The path swung around a big tent and then along a line of clattery game booths. Through the fog, my eyes caught a bare, sinewy arm: Eddie. I focused and found myself staring at the barker for a dart-throwing game. He was leaning over his counter, watching the people go by. He caught me staring. “Hey, honey bun, how about it?” He held up a fist with three dart points sticking out. “Three shots for a quarter. Win a bear.” I looked away and walked past, back into the fog. “Come on, honey bun, where’s your sense of adventure?” he called after me.
I angled left, hoping to get back to the beer tent. The path grew darker, and the crowd thinned. Another wrong turn, nothing but wrong turns. A bright, gli
ttery object appeared in the path, an enormous precious stone blocking the way. I concentrated and saw that it was the silver trailer with the two-headed baby. The woman in the ticket booth was still bent over her book and the blue light still flowed over the man at the entrance. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the soft edges of the ticket I’d bought less than an hour before. Strange that it hadn’t fallen out with all my crawling around. I shuffled a few steps closer, my eyes on the painting. The two beaming faces still seemed to promise something—some remarkable secret, a fantastic possibility just beyond my imagination. For a while, I stood there by the trailer, studying the painting. People came and went, stopping, staring, moving on. I could have been there ten seconds or ten minutes or an hour. Time had stopped.
Then a voice woke me up. “We weren’t doing anything wrong, you know,” it said insistently. “You can’t arrest me.” A cop was coming toward me down the path. Tammy was beside him, her back arched and her chin out. She was lecturing him, and he was sinking under the burden, bumping into her as he drifted from side to side. “My uncle won’t like this at all,” she said. “He’s Ivan Mirkov, on the city council.”
They hadn’t seen me yet. There was still time to escape. I spun. Where to go? I couldn’t let her see me—she’d betray me, maybe even offer me up as a kind of trade. I had to hide. Quickly, I slipped past the booth where the lady was reading. At the door to the trailer, the man had his chin on his chest as if he were sleeping. He heard me approach and slowly lifted his head, examining me with two tiny, round eyes. I thrust the worn, damp ticket at him. When he handed back the stub I walked up three thin, metal steps and went inside.
The trailer was bright with glaring light. On the left, someone had tacked a display entitled “The Story of Life.” In faded color paintings, the kind you see in high-school science books, the sperm met the egg, and the fetus developed. I turned away. On the right, the wall was covered with magazine clippings about quintuplets and Siamese twins. I moved down the narrow walkway.
At the far end, a small metal table had been clamped to the floor. On it was a glass jar, about the size of a gallon pickle jar, fastened down by a metal garter. Three more steps and I was exactly in front.
The baby was floating in a yellow solution. Her skin was a dull red-orange, about the color of dried-up orange peels. Her hips were wide and hanging down between her legs was a third leg, slightly smaller than the other two and crooked. She had a wide chest, but her two arms were normal, and one tiny, flat palm pushed against the inside of the glass. The two little heads were on thick, short necks, side by side. The eyes on each face were squinted shut, the mouths barely open, showing perfect bow lips. The identical noses were perfect, delicate bumps. The baby was absolutely still in the jar, but the head on the right was tilted slightly, so its smooth forehead rested on the forehead of the other. In that pose, the heads could have belonged to two different babies, set down beside each other on a mother’s bed, each lost in a wonderful child’s sleep.
A note printed in careful black letters sat in a small picture frame beside the jar: “Ruth was born to a farm couple in Manfred, Idaho, on January 25, 1947. She lived for eleven minutes before her heart gave out. For that brief time, both heads were alert and crying. Doctors believe she has an extra lung, an enlarged stomach, and badly tangled intestines. Her middle leg is not attached to a hip. Had she survived, it would have dangled behind her like a tail.” In larger letters below, someone had printed, “But for the grace of God, there go I.”
I stood so still I hardly breathed. The long lights buzzed over my head. The inside of the trailer seemed crystalline, so fragile that the smallest shock, the least shudder would shatter the room and everything in it. After a minute or so, I heard voices at the door behind me. People were coming in. I moved around the table, past a tall, blue screen, and out the back door, which faced the fence and Banyon’s Woods. After the glare of the trailer, the night was particularly dark, but I moved quickly and surely across the fairgrounds.
TWENTY-SIX
I hurried along the main path, still holding my dress strap under my arm and not bothering to look for Bunny. A man wearing a baseball cap was standing at the exit. “Do you want to get stamped?” he asked gruffly.
“Huh?”
He brandished a rubber stamp. “Are you going to come back?”
I shook my head and brushed past him. A steady line of cars was moving slowly toward Katydid, about half a mile away. I started walking along the side of the road, picking my way through the patches of gravel and tall grass. After a while, I came to a sidewalk, the farthest reach of town. I followed it along Altgeld Street, past several blocks of little houses put up for workers years ago by the KTD. I passed the Rock Creek Elementary School, Dixon’s Corner Store, and Mayor Krullke’s house, floodlit from the lawn, as always.
Eventually, I came to the square. The bandbox, the usual hangout, was deserted, and no one was around the drinking fountain. Along the paths, near some of the benches, the red tips of lit cigarettes brightened and faded like fireflies. The old people were out, people you’d hardly notice on busy days. I skirted the square to the north, avoiding the big, empty shell of the old Montgomery Ward building on the south side, and then turned up West Morgan Street, toward the Congregational Church. The streetlight at the corner was out and, in the darkness, the church building squatted on its small hill like a solid outcropping of red rock. I walked around the corner. A lamp was still burning in Reverend Vaughn’s study. From the sidewalk, all you could see was a wall crammed with books.
My dress clung limply to my skin. In hurrying away from the fair, I’d started to perspire. Using the loose strap, I wiped off my forehead. I picked up the hem of the dress and flapped the air a few times. The breeze felt good curling up my legs and cooled some of the scratches. I knew I looked a fright, but there was something I had to tell Reverend Vaughn, something I’d held in for days now that had been released in the crystal light of Ruth’s trailer.
“My God,” the minister said, when he opened the door. “What happened to you?”
I glanced down at my dress. It was worse than I’d thought.
“Come in, come in,” he added quickly.
“I’m kind of a mess,” I said, stepping into the study. The room was lit by a single, bright ceiling light.
His eyes wandered from my head to my feet. “You look as if you fell off a hayrack.”
“Actually, I was out in the woods. It’s a long story.”
“The woods?” He frowned. He was wearing a dress shirt and a dark, striped tie; instead of shoes, though, he had on sandals. Like his fingers, his toes were white and thin and very long. “Sit down and tell me about it.” He gestured toward a couch. “Can I get you a glass of water?”
I shook my head and sat down. The study was comfortable, but spare. There were bookshelves on two sides, a compact wooden desk, several plain chairs. A nature calendar and a framed degree were hanging behind the desk, but otherwise there was nothing personal about the room—no pictures, no knick-knacks—except, of course, the books.
“How was your trip?” I asked. He was standing over me, still inspecting.
“Oh, fine, fine.” Finally he sat in one of the chairs. “What happened in the woods?”
I didn’t really want to explain. In a way, it didn’t seem important now, or, at least, not important enough to waste time on. But I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened, so I told him about Tammy and the bonfire and the police raid. I told the story quickly and simply, leaving out details where I could. He asked many questions, fleshing out my account. In the end, he shook his head and combed his hair with his fingers.
“It’s that factory,” he said.
“The factory?”
“Don’t you see? The whole town is panicked over the KTD closing, but instead of doing something useful, they take out their frustrations on you. It’s not you personally—it’s just that you’re there, you’re an easy target.”
It bother
ed me for a second that he was always talking about the KTD. Even when he’d start talking about me, the factory always seemed to come up. “You really think so?” I asked.
“It’s obvious.” He paused and shook his head again. “Of course, no one in this town would understand the psychology of it, except you.”
His eyes were deep blue—not pale, like Eddie’s, but rich and unthreatening. He stood up and came over, sitting beside me on the couch. For a moment, I almost expected him to draw me close, even to kiss me. I felt pulled toward him, as if someone were lifting up my end of the couch, and I were falling inevitably into his arms. All he did, though, was take my hand—my left hand, which loosened the shoulder strap again. The dress sagged.
“Look,” he said, ignoring the dress, “you’re an obvious target. Someone like you is too full of life for a small town, too smart, too eager to learn. A town like Katydid can’t hold you—you’ve got to experience the world, to taste things. You’re not willing to settle for some mundane job and mindless life. The people here realize that. You’re above them, and they resent you for it.”
I nodded, staring into his eyes. Is this what love is like, I wondered. He was so wrong about me. I’m not like that at all. It was Bunny he was describing. She’s the one who’s full of life.
Martha Calhoun Page 25