Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “Huh, huh. Bump.” Happy Herbert undid his belt and attempted to tighten it a notch, then gave up and let the Texas-shaped buckle dangle idly near his crotch. “I’ve been wanting to thank you.”

  “For what?” Webern glanced suspiciously at the other two clowns. Silly Billy doodled with his toe in the sawdust; Pipsqueak whistled and looked over his shoulder.

  “For the laughs, that’s what. For going away and leaving me all your routines. Kids’ve been eating it up. I owe you one.”

  Webern nodded slowly.

  “We better get going,” Silly Billy told Webern. He grabbed Happy Herbert firmly by the shoulder. “You probably need some rest.”

  “What rest?” Herbert protested. “He just got back from vacation.”

  Webern watched the clowns walk away; as they passed a trash can, Herbert punched it. The metal lid rolled on its edge for a few feet before finally tipping over. Webern stared down at the ground. An empty Coke bottle lay gleaming in the dust. Then he looked up again sharply. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn he’d just seen a little boy, no bigger than a mouse, run across the bench just in front of him.

  When Webern got back to the boxcar and found it strewn with brassieres but otherwise deserted, he sat down at his desk and covered his face with his hands. This was bad. Even when he held perfectly still, his thoughts kept whirling around and around, like a carousel of intricately carved nightmares. Bo-Bo’s coffin, flecked with dirt, rolled by, the lid opening slowly. Nepenthe, smiling and blowing kisses to everyone but him, rode on Happy Herbert’s back. Madge, dressed in his mother’s apron and heels, pranced alongside his father, who carried his grandfather’s lion-head cane. Willow and Billow scuttled by on their many legs, dragging a net of cobwebs and bones. And last of all was Wags, snapping the straps of his lederhosen, playing a merry klezmer song on Dr. Show’s concertina.

  Webern stood up. His hands were shaking. He crawled under the bed, pushing aside dust bunnies, Napoleon wrappers, and clove ash, until he finally found a half-empty bottle of Campari. It was warm and disgusting and bitter as blood, but he didn’t care. He drank the whole thing, then lay down on the floor. Now the room was spinning, but his mind mercifully stopped.

  Webern stared up at the ceiling. Everything felt very hard and sharp and clear. Nepenthe would leave him. He thought about it like it was happening to somebody else. Once, a long time ago, she’d said she didn’t believe in marriage because it was impossible to promise you wouldn’t fall out of love with somebody: “You can promise to stay with them forever, I guess, but that’s not the same thing. That’s basically just promising to be miserable if your feelings change. This country is a cesspool of repression.”

  Webern pictured her at a party in an apartment full of beaded curtains and batiked silk tapestries of unicorns, kneeling beside a bong made of swirling coloured glass. “I used to be a circus freak.” No one would even know if the story was true until she started to blubber about how guilty she felt for leaving her hunchbacked midget lover. Then they’d all spring to her defense. “No one could go on living that way,” a guy with a week-old beard and an Oriental tunic would declare. “You have to think about yourself sometimes, baby. Throw off those shackles, you know?” Then he’d talk about how life is cyclical and about three hours later the two of them would be screwing in the bathroom.

  It was so obvious, so inevitable, it was almost funny. But one part of him refused to accept it. That part of him lingered on even now in Nepenthe’s old tent, holding his breath, watching her sleep in silvery water for the very first time. That night, so many years ago, Webern had seen her clearly; he had seen her soul, if that was the word for it, written on every inch of her body, from the knee, draped in sodden fabric, that tilted lazily against one wall of the kiddy pool to the grey fingers that skimmed the water’s surface. She had seemed like no one in the world but herself—stubborn and funny and haughty and angry and shy. He had felt that if he was very careful he would have the luxury to know her all his life.

  Webern’s hump ached against the hard floor. He pulled himself to his feet. Unsteadily, he picked his way through Nepenthe’s clothing and the Polaroids that still littered the boxcar floor, pausing only to kick the Porky Pig Pez dispenser out of sight under the couch. Then he opened the door and stepped outside. He was going to look for Marzipan.

  Webern walked past more stilt-walkers and a few contortionists energetically practicing outside in the noonday sun. Normally, this was the time of day he liked best; between the troupe’s rehearsal and that evening’s show, he developed his ideas into new acts. Most days, he took a sandwich and wandered down the line of boxcars; he usually nodded to the old fortune teller beating her rugs and the Ossified Man cleaning off dishes with a hose. The squalling voices of the sunbathing dancers and catcalling motorbike riders put him in a kind of trance, and he often found himself moving again through the landscape of a recent dream, perceiving details—a bouncy ball, a squeaky sound effect—that he hadn’t recalled upon waking, details that he hastily scribbled in his notebook the moment he got the chance.

  Webern jammed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and held his head low as he walked. Today, he just wanted to get away as quickly as possible.

  He sidestepped picnic blankets and wagon cages. He passed the hungry crowd outside the cookhouse, where a vat of spaghetti and a vat of paste for hanging posters boiled side by side, mingling scents and steam. He walked on, past the boxcars still loaded with machinery and tarps, past the rumbling light generator wagons and the empty flatbeds and down toward empty tracks that twinned each other all the way to the horizon. After awhile, he reached a tree on the edge of camp. Marzipan was up in its highest branches, picking summer apples and dropping them into the pockets of her apron. When she saw Webern looking up at her, she bit into one and, chewing thoughtfully, began a long, swinging descent down to where he was standing.

  As soon as she reached the ground, she tossed away the core of the apple she was eating, pulled out a new one, and gave it to him. Webern stared at it there in his hand. Its skin was deep, deep red, so dark it was almost purple, flecked with tiny white spots that looked like stars in a violet sky. As he watched, the stars began to orbit, forming shifting constellations, until they became the sky of his childhood, a sky he recognized from one autumn night, when he stood at the bedroom window in his pyjamas, looking anywhere but Earth.

  Willow and Billow babysat Webern the night his mother died. His parents were going to a costume party, even though it wasn’t yet Halloween, and when they came out of their bedroom they were dressed so strangely he almost didn’t recognize them. Webern’s father wore his old army jacket over a pair of wrinkled khaki pants. When Webern asked him why, his mother cringed, but his father just said, “Because it’s the scariest thing I own.” His mother was dressed as a mermaid, with a green silk skirt and a bodice made of a million clinking seashells. Her heels, taller than the ones she usually wore, made her unsteady. She moved through the house slowly, moving her arms as though parting ribbons of seaweed. Before they left, she came to Webern’s room to kiss him good-bye. She had green glitter in her hair and for days, he kept finding it: on his cheek, his ear lobe, the palms of his hands.

  His parents left in such a hurry they forgot to close the garage door. Webern came downstairs and stood at the living room window to watch their Studebaker drive away. This was the first time he’d been alone with Willow and Billow since before his accident. He was still wearing the brace that was meant to straighten his back, and it squeezed him like a vise. When he heard his sisters behind him, he felt it tighten around him even more.

  “Bernie Bee, we have a surprise.”

  “Come to the kitchen, close your eyes.”

  Webern took a deep breath. His sisters took hold of him: Willow grabbed his shoulder, Billow his hump. He held his eyes shut as they steered him through the darkened rooms. In the kitchen, Webern expected
to see a dead squirrel in a pizza box, or a pair of dead man’s shoes they’d dredged out of the lake. But nothing could prepare him for what actually greeted him when he opened his eyes.

  His sisters had prepared him a feast. Candy corn and watermelon slices, a milkshake dusted with Ovaltine—orange marmalade spread on graham crackers and maraschino cherries dunked in hot fudge.

  “Bernie Bee, we make you eat.”

  “Nothing bitter, always sweet.”

  Webern turned toward his sisters in disbelief. The twins wore newly dyed black aprons that left smudges on everything they touched. As Billow proffered a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich, he noticed the dark grease that lined the creases in her palms and knuckles, the undersides of her fingernails. She was taking an auto mechanics class at her high school, and she often came home in the evenings with complex, mimeographed diagrams that she pored over for hours while her sister desiccated cat bones with a hairdryer for biology. Webern thought of the coiled entrails of the Studebaker’s engine, Billow’s tools laid out on his father’s workbench like the scalpels and forceps of a messy operating table, and as the wind howled outside, he imagined dead leaves whispering along the concrete floor.

  “I’ll be right back,” he whispered.

  In the garage, pliers and cranks lay scattered everywhere, and in the centre of the room a discarded bolt lay in a puddle of black motor oil. Webern pushed the button on the wall, and the automatic door clanked down, one heavy panel at a time. Later he would remember how dark and empty it had looked, how sealed up, like a walled-off, unheated room that has outlived its original use.

  When he came back into the kitchen, Willow and Billow clamped their hands around his arms and steered him to the sofa in front of the black-n-white TV, where they waited on him as he uncomfortably watched cartoons. The twins stood behind the couch, holding hands, breathing down his neck.

  “Eat it all—all that you can.” Willow poked him with a Pixie stick.

  “Here, have another ginger man.” Billow nudged him with the tray.

  “Thanks,” mumbled Webern. On the TV, a cat in a convertible crashed into a barn, leaving a car-shaped hole.

  At nine o’clock sharp, Willow and Billow dragged Webern up to bed, then stood over him watchfully as he climbed under the covers with all his clothes on. Cautiously, he folded his glasses and set them on the nightstand, but still the two didn’t budge. A long moment passed. Then they linked arms, and, without opening their mouths, began to hum a lullaby. It was more a kind of buzzing through their teeth, but Webern recognized the tune. It was a song his mother had made up for him. He hadn’t heard it since he was very small. When they finished, the twins smiled at each other.

  “Now go to sleep, our little prince.” Billow switched off the lights.

  “Or we’ll cut your cheeks and make you wince.” Willow closed the door.

  Webern got out of bed immediately and changed into his pyjamas. Then he lay back down. His teeth felt grainy with sugar, and his hump throbbed in a way it hadn’t since just after the accident. He rubbed his hand over it gently.

  “Wags?” he called softly. No one answered.

  After an hour or two, Webern finally fell asleep reading comic books by flashlight. He dimly heard the storm door slam when the girls slipped out for their usual late-night walk. But a few hours later, he jumped up, wide awake, when he heard the collision outside.

  He ran to the window and threw back the curtain. The Studebaker was in the driveway, slammed snout-first into the heavy panels of the closed garage. Smoke poured from its engine, and on the passenger side, his father struggled with the jammed car door. Webern’s mother was in clear sight, her head and shoulders and arms extended like a diver’s through the hole where the windshield had once been. Her face rested on the crumpled hood of the car. Later, Webern would say the metal had squashed like a Coke can, but in that moment, he saw its rippled surface as waves, and the bits of glass that sparkled around her as diamonds and rubies, ancient treasures or lost cargo that could have been found at the very bottom of the sea.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Webern lay under the apple tree, the core of the purple fruit still in his hand. Up above, the leaves whispered in the breeze. He felt empty, as if the wind had been knocked out of him, and for a moment it occurred to him that he could just lay there, under the crisscrossing shadows of the branches, forever. Then Marzipan poked him with her toe. Abruptly, he stood up. She grasped him by the wrist and led him back toward the camp.

  Marzipan and Webern walked together, past the donnikers, their antiquated half-moon doors squeaking in the breeze atop a flatbed car, and through the maze of folded lawn chairs, bottles, and discarded cellophane that was the performers’ campground. It wasn’t until they had passed the fortune teller, who shuffled and muttered to herself amidst several milling cats, that Webern noticed that a line had formed outside his own boxcar.

  It was like a freak show in reverse. The Skeleton Dude stood near the front; the delicate calligraphy of his shadow zigzagged on the dusty ground. Behind him, three pinheads carried useless gifts: an empty, flapping cardboard box, a tennis shoe, and what looked like a makeshift doll, styled out of horsehair and a Mrs. Butterworth bottle. The giant came next, in his ten gallon hat; he led the Shetland pony he kept near him at all times to give his audience an exaggerated sense of scale. The others stretched on behind in single file: the albino girl, her pink eyes flashing, her blinding white hair avalanching down her back; the Elastic Man, his distended arm-skin hanging in two drooping folds like fleshy wings; the Missing Link, his thick fur coarse and bristling, tangled with lint and old popcorn kernels.

  Sitting on an overturned crate in a one-piece bathing suit, Nepenthe greeted each of them in turn. She hugged the Skeleton Dude and exclaimed over the pinheads’ gifts. She stroked the Shetland pony’s mane and leapt up to shake the giant’s hand. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, her smooth thighs shone in the sun, and when the albino girl leaned toward her to share a confidence, her laughter rang out like the first notes of a melody. She had never seemed so happy, so completely at ease with the other freaks as she did now that medicine had proved she wasn’t one of them.

  Webern thought of the storybook princess who dropped her golden ball into the mossy well where the frog king made his home, the way her cries had summoned him, malformed and web-footed, into an unwelcoming realm of palaces and light. As the Human Torso poked Nepenthe’s shoulder blades with a riding crop he clasped between his teeth, Webern slipped past the crowd unnoticed, up the steps into the boxcar.

  For a long time, he lay on the bed, watching rock candy grow in the windowsill aquarium; he squinted his eyes till he believed he saw the crystals forming. He didn’t move until Marzipan finally returned from the errand he’d sent her on, with a bottle of Scotch and two Dixie cups. Then they sat on the bed, Indian style, and facing each other proceeded to drink. Marzipan’s eyes, large and brown, glowed with a warm amber light that Webern could only identify as understanding. As she poured him another glass, he began to appreciate why Bo-Bo kept her around; she was everything pleasant about a human being, without the mess and confusion of words.

  Nepenthe came inside about an hour later, carrying a bottle of cheap champagne and two Mickey Mouse juice cups Webern had sometimes seen the pinheads using. Venus followed close behind, dressed in a slinky red dress with the armholes sewn up, and a pair of strappy sandals that showcased her red, glossy toenails. Venus’s eyes were done Elizabeth Taylor Egyptian style, with two small black tails curling away at the corners.

  “Hey, Pluto.” Nepenthe waggled her Mickey Mouse cup by one of its ears. She flung herself down on the bed between Webern and Marzipan, then made a grab for him, but Webern backed into the pillows at the head of the bed. His legs jackknifed up against his chest.

  “So where’ve you two been?” he asked. The strap of Nepenthe’s swimsuit had slipped off o
ne shoulder.

  “Haven’t you heard? Your girl works for the ball toss now. She just stands there and the dopes all win her prizes.” Venus smiled slyly, uncoiling on the sofa.

  “Shut up!” Nepenthe shrieked. She laughed a little too loudly. Marzipan got up and, glancing over her shoulder surreptitiously, put the Scotch away in one of Webern’s desk drawers. She pulled out the desk chair and sat down. Nepenthe went on, “We were right outside, kiddo. Didn’t you see us?”

  “I saw some kind of crowd. I dunno, I was tired. I am tired.” It was true. Right then, there was nothing Webern wanted more than to close his eyes.

  “Poor fella.” Venus kicked off her shoes and flexed her long toes. “Needed his little naptime, huh?”

  Nepenthe ran a careless hand over her knee. The curves of bone moved visibly, languidly beneath her skin. “Well, you should’ve stayed. It was my retirement party.”

  At the word “retirement,” Webern pulled off his glasses and pressed the heels of his hands to his face.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Venus asked. Papers crinkled as she paged through one of Nepenthe’s underground newspapers with her feet.

  Webern felt the springs of the bed quake beneath him as Nepenthe rose.

  “Let’s put on some records,” he heard her say. A minute later, the record player’s needle scratched into the well worn grooves of her Question Mark and the Mysterians album. 96 Tears.

  “You know, this guy had a vision that he’d be singing this song in the year ten thousand?” Nepenthe’s feet padded across the rug. “I heard him on the radio.”