Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “There’s one back there,” the men would say. And the spirit would move them to point at the part of the dump where the tires stood in tall towers, or where the broken refrigerators made blue puddles in the dirt. Wanda and Betsy used their nets.

  Wanda and Betsy understood why the dogs got lost. Before they came to know the faith, they too had strayed from yard to street to vacant lot, from the clean sheets of an even bed to the knotted roots of a tree. They had not known that they belonged to God, that their place was in his House; they had not come where they were Called. Wanda and Betsy tried to teach the dogs what Sister had taught them, but the dogs didn’t always learn. If they didn’t learn, they stayed Lost. Or died.

  Wanda and Betsy didn’t make many friends at the pound. The other dogcatchers didn’t like how they sang songs for Christ, how they committed the dogs’ souls to heaven when the injections went in. They sent Betsy out back to fix their vans and watched Wanda nervously over their donuts in the break room as she studied the crucifixes she’d hung on the wall.

  In the night, sometimes, Wanda and Betsy went for fog walks as they had in the old days. They moved through dewy grass before the world belonged to dawn. This was the time when the world became a ghost of itself, when all colours faded to grey. The earth grew soft and stuck to their shoes, and even without the Word, they felt they were in just one skin again, with no crooked house built up between them. Willow and Billow, for a moment only. Then the dawn came and the fog vanished and the feeling vanished too, and they were glad, for it was a testament to their faith.

  Wanda and Betsy spoke seldom of their family. It had been God’s will, what had passed, and they should not try to understand. Their mother had already made her peace with God, and though she had not loved them they burned votives in her name. She lay beneath the closed trapdoor in the realm of what was done. But when they did speak, they wondered often about their brother, about the soul that hid within that skin. They spoke without anger, again and again, of what he had done, how he had blamed them for his crimes and stood by without confessing. He was a sinner and as such, condemned. How could he find salvation without The Word? How many mysteries did he still not know?

  One night, as they parked the van outside the alley house, Willow raised a single, trembling hand and pointed. Billow’s hand rose, pointing, too. A circus poster, blistered with fresh glue, shone on a wall between two boarded-up windows.

  Nepenthe straggled back to the boxcar around five in the morning. Instead of going inside, she stood on her tiptoes and peeked through the window. She rubbed dust and grit from the glass with one bell-shaped sleeve. Webern wasn’t there, but the ape was—tucked into their bed, no less, and wearing an old-fashioned nightcap.

  Nepenthe sank down onto the steps in front of the door. It wasn’t very often in her life that she knew exactly what she had to do next, and this moment reminded her of the moment, so long ago now, when she climbed out of her dorm room window at the Appleton Academy with only a monogrammed trunk and a thick roll of her mother’s fifty dollar bills to call her own. Then, as now, she had been embarking on a new life, sloughing off the old one along with a closet full of navy blue uniform skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars. She’d felt sick then, too, she reminded herself.

  Nepenthe lit a clove and went over it all in her mind again. She tried to imagine auditioning for a new part in the show, one of the gaudy acts the pretty young girls always wound up with. She saw herself teetering on high heels, flinching as knives whizzed by to embed themselves in the turning board behind her limbs and head—some of the girls had nicknamed knife-thrower Leon “the Barber.” Nepenthe imagined falling on her ass in the bareback act, getting sawed in half by an inept magician, losing her grip on the trapeze swing and hitting the net so hard it left blue-black welts on her back and legs. No. No. It would never work. And Webern would be the one to suffer when she came home, pissed off and resentful, night after night after night. He would be the one she blamed when she lost her hard-won beauty to something as ordinary and hateful as common old age.

  Nepenthe opened her purse—a woven hemp pouch she’d braided together during a particularly dull stretch of shows in the Dakotas the year before—and dug around until she found her notebook, spiral-bound, with the all-seeing eye of the Almighty Dollar emblazoned on the front. Most of its pages were blank, and the others were mostly filled with doodles, song lyrics, and profound thoughts she’d had while she was stoned. But now she felt a poem coming on.

  In the caboose of a real circus,

  I’m sitting, smoking a green

  cigarette in the dewy early.

  Past the midway, sunlit Adonis,

  driving in tent poles,

  sings the blues with grit in his voice,

  and the midway fortune teller, drunk

  already or still, cackles electric

  two cars down, wrapped

  like a goddess in her dirty sheets.

  No drug, no drug

  in the world, beats this yellow

  light, landing—here!

  and here! and here!—

  on every pore of my skin.

  —July 26, 1967

  Nepenthe squinted through her smoke and nodded approvingly. In fact, the men setting up the tent weren’t singing; from what she could hear, they were just yelling the word, “Cunt!” over and over again at each other with varying degrees of irritation. And Yolanda, the fortune teller, wasn’t quite laughing either: she was hacking and coughing like it was her intention to projectile vomit her lungs at the wall. Nepenthe wished the old lady really was two cars away, or preferably even farther. Judging by the way she sounded, Yolanda probably had tuberculosis, or emphysema, or some kind of yellow, wet-looking tumors that nested inside her windpipe, just beneath the wrinkled turkey wattles of her neck. Jesus God.

  Nepenthe felt depressed all of a sudden. Here she was writing poems; meanwhile, Webern was practically about to be destroyed. Because, not to compliment herself or anything, but wasn’t she the best thing that had ever happened to him? He certainly had been for her. He’d been such a comfort all these years—more than that, he’d been a generous lover, gentle and attentive with a female body that would’ve given most men nightmares. She would take him to San Francisco with her, she really would, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t imagine what their life there together would look like. And—this was the part she tried to skim over in her mind, the part she didn’t like admitting—she couldn’t picture him leaving the circus any more than she could picture herself staying there. He wouldn’t give up this life for anyone. Not even for her.

  Nepenthe blew out a plume of clove smoke and realized that while she’d been thinking, Webern had materialized right in front of her. In the morning sunlight, his eyes looked hooded with exhaustion; his hump pressed down his left side like it was something he carried. He hugged himself, and Nepenthe’s eyes lingered on his little hands, callused like a man’s but still the size of a child’s.

  “Oh, kiddo.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “What are we going to do?”

  The bus station lay on the outskirts of town, just like the circus, but it was a long walk there through the lonely cornfields. Nepenthe and Webern took turns dragging her trunk, which quickly acquired a halo of dust and the wayward brambles of several dry weeds. As he lugged the enormous box, Webern thought again of the cut-out photos of his grandfather. He wondered what had made the old man leave, what might have made him stay. Nepenthe’s hair bounced, her hips swiveled languidly, and Webern tried to forget that this would be the last time he got to watch her walking away like she didn’t care if he followed, like it was an inconvenience to her.

  Nepenthe and Webern passed a scarecrow farm, with its rows and rows of burlap spectres, and Nepenthe wrested the handle of the trunk from Webern’s hand.

  “I’ve got it from here,” she said. She’d been picking wildfl
owers, and Webern saw now that she’d woven them into a garland. She crowned herself with it, turned her back to him, and gave the trunk a tug. Webern didn’t know if this was supposed to be his cue to leave, but he mutely followed her anyway. About a minute later, without looking back at him, Nepenthe said, “You know, Bernie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  Webern held his breath. A dragonfly paused on his hump, rubbed its wings together, and flew away.

  “Just something you should know. In case you want to find me someday, or, you know. If I send you a letter. Anyway, my name’s not really Nepenthe. It’s Elizabeth. I actually went by Liz, if you can believe that, until my condition started up and I got to be Lizzie the Lizard and tried to drink a bottle of Lysol. Then I became Eliza. Rathbone. Of the shipping Rathbones.” The trunk bumped over a rabbit burrow. “I just thought you should know, I guess.”

  “Are you going back to them?” Webern’s mouth felt as dry as the browning stalks of corn that tilted above them. “To your family?”

  “If I went back there looking like this I’d probably get gang-raped by the entire Harvard lacrosse team.” Nepenthe sighed. The wildflowers were molting already. Petals streamed through her hair. “No. It’s just starting to feel like my name again. It’s hard to explain why. Though I’m sure my analyst would have plenty to say about it.”

  They arrived at the bus station in time for Nepenthe to buy a seat for the 8:15 to Des Moines. She determined she could transfer from there to Omaha, and from there on to Ogallala, Cheyenne, and Denver, where all things would be possible, including a transfer to her ultimate destination, San Francisco. Webern stood behind her and tried to ignore the man behind the counter, who inspected him with naked curiosity. Webern gazed at station’s one clock instead, frozen in the eternal smile of ten oh five. On his own wrist, Dr. Schoenberg’s watch kept on ticking.

  “So that’s that.” Nepenthe tucked the ticket into a pocket of her dress.

  The two of them sat down on a wooden bench. Outside the station’s windows, a shirtless man with a large red, white, and blue eagle tattoo tinkered with the bus’s engine. Webern’s stomach tightened as the hood swung down with a clang.

  An old grandma with a sewing basket, a scraggly boy with acne that looked like grease burns, and a portly man with a tuba case each boarded the bus in turn. Nepenthe’s foot began to jiggle. Finally she turned to Webern. Her face had a look on it that he wasn’t expecting—blank fear, like temporary amnesia.

  “Listen, this is ridiculous. Just come to California with me.”

  “I can’t be a clown in San Francisco.”

  “There’s other stuff you could do. You could be a mime, out on the street. Or, I don’t know, maybe you could make balloons for kids’ parties or something.”

  “Upstaged by cake,” Webern murmured.

  “What? What did you say?”

  He didn’t say anything. He imagined himself boarding the bus to California, the way she would inch farther from him in her seat with each passing mile. He saw them disembarking and her vanishing instantly into a crowd where she blended in completely.

  “Bernie, look at me. Please.”

  Nepenthe stood over him in a flowing paisley dress, her hair corkscrewing in all directions, dotted here and there with the silky hearts of black-eyed Susans. She looked as perfect and unreachable as a girl in a fashion magazine, and for a second he longed for a pen to draw scales all over her. But then he looked away from her clothes, her body, her face even, into those emerald green eyes, and despite himself, he saw her there—a flicker of something familiar and wondrous, like the tip of a mermaid’s tail just above the waves.

  “I’m not going to forget you, okay?” she told him. She clutched the handle of her trunk. “You ought to know that by now.”

  The bus mechanic walked by the window. Webern’s eyes followed his eagle tattoo. A permanent mark. If you care so much, why don’t you stay? As the tattooed lady, as my wife? But he already knew the answer. She would never put ink on that skin.

  As soon as he walked in, Webern knew it wasn’t an ordinary meeting at Clown HQ. The place was too quiet, to start with. The others sat around the table in a half-circle, like they were waiting for him, but even when he closed the door, they didn’t speak for a long slow moment. Professor Shim Sham raised a skull and crossbones bottle to his lips; Punchy Joe gnawed beef jerky; Pipsqueak rubbed off lipstick with his thumb; Happy Herbert chuckled, low and constant, the first tremors of an earthquake. They reminded him of jurors, jurors or a firing squad. And that was before Silly Billy started talking.

  “Now listen, we know you’ve had a rough time lately, Bump. And I’d be the last one to discount what you’ve done here. I mean it. Most of the guys haven’t been around to remember, but I do. Before you came, we hadn’t had a new routine in years. It was all banana peel gags. Bullshit cribbed from Three Stooges movies. You put us on the map. But now we just want to shake things up a little bit. I’m not gonna lie to you—the crowd loves Herb. No hard feelings, it’s just a fact. Between you and me, I was as surprised as the next guy, but there it is. With his mugging and your routines, we’re going places. I mean ticket sales. The kids love his Martian. You saw the show last night. Pandemonium. Management’s starting to notice. So we’ve been thinking. Why not make the most of our talent? Your routines—but with Herb front and centre. Just see what happens. We’re not scaling you back, just moving everybody around a little. You hear what I’m saying, Bump? Just do some things different. See how it works. Like a trial.”

  “A trial,” Webern repeated.

  “That’s right,” Silly Billy said encouragingly. “A trial.”

  Webern looked around the room—the empty bottles, the sticky playing cards, the dusty rug, the pile of girly magazines in one corner. It looked the same as always. It didn’t look like a trap.

  “So what do you want me to do?” he asked.

  Silly Billy waved his hand. “The usual. Crowd work. Straight man parts. Playing the double to Herb. We’ve got a great one we start rehearsing tomorrow—a mirror bit. Kind of a take-off from that painting routine you do. Real funny stuff. It might be good for you. Take it easy, relax. Unhealthy to work as hard as you do.”

  “Unhealthy.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Silly Billy picked up his penknife. He poked Webern’s chest with it. “Go home. Sleep on it. We can talk again in the morning if you want. Otherwise, rehearsal at one tomorrow.”

  Webern stared down at the floor. His sneakers were untied, the laces dotted with burs from his walk home through the fields. A shriveled balloon-poodle lay on the ground by his feet. He realized he was supposed to leave.

  “Okay,” he said. The other clowns blurred into each other. He opened the door to the boxcar and stepped carefully down to the ground.

  Outside, Marzipan was waiting for him. She held out her hand and Webern took it. Her skin was cooler than he expected, her palm hairless. But he never would have mistaken it for a human’s. Webern let her lead him home.

  Pipsqueak joined Silly Billy at the door of Clown HQ, and they stood there, watching Webern shuffle away.

  “Now to me, that’s just sad.” Pipsqueak applied a pair of tweezers to his eyebrow. “In the theatre, they always taught us, if you have to bow out, do it with style. That way, they remember you for next time.”

  “The guy thinks he’s an artist. He’s sensitive.” Silly Billy folded up his knife and dropped it into a pocket. “And from what I hear, his main squeeze’s shacking up with a motorcycle gang.”

  From the table, Happy Herbert snorted. “He wants to be an artist, he can move to gay Pair-ee. We like things big and cheesy over here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was the beginning of a dark time for Webern. He thought about his mother more and more—about how years before he was born, she too had faded to a ghost of herself, only to be b
rought back to life by the volts that arched and crackled through the temples of her skull. As he sat alone in his boxcar, slumped in the red polka-dotted underpants Nepenthe had given him for Valentine’s Day, listening for his sisters and drinking his dead grandma’s ape under the table, he wondered if there was such a cure in the world for him.

  Webern knew that his sisters would come for him now. They had done it before. He remembered peering through their keyhole at glass jars with holes poked in their lids, wings fluttering inside like darkly beating hearts, muddy red handprints cave-painted on the walls. Webern’s mother kept the house neat as a pin (her phrase), but she let the door to the twins’ room remain shut as she pushed the roaring vacuum past. Once, long before Webern could remember, she had surprised the girls in their play, and Willow had bitten her. She bore the scar, star-shaped, on her palm for the rest of her life. She hid it in her fist with a private shame that Webern couldn’t understand.

  Willow and Billow frightened Webern when he was small, but in those days the world was full of frightening things: the laundry hamper that opened onto an abyss of black; the oak tree branch that rapped insistently at his windowpane; the garbage men, who came to eat his trash. His sisters were six years older than him; they could leave the house of their own accord, but unlike his parents, they had no stated destinations and they brought no stories when they returned. He believed that one day he would awake knowing why they had brought a squirming red possum runt to die in the living room, or why they kept their costume jewelry buried in a box in the backyard. But he knew now that their lives had always been a mystery to him. Their motives were their own.

  Webern put his feet up on his desk. He tilted back in his chair.

  “Let ’em come and get me,” he muttered.

  Nepenthe had left a week earlier, and since she’d gone, the state of the boxcar had taken a definite turn for the worse. The first night, Webern had bundled her newspapers and magazines together with the belt of her forsaken pink robe, but he had become too exhausted and depressed to finish the job, so the pile of papers sat directly in front of the door. Whenever he wanted to go out, he had to kick them aside; The Druid Free Press was covered with footprints. Marzipan kept trying to throw them out, but Webern wouldn’t let her touch anything that belonged to Nepenthe. The chimp spent her days on the couch, which was shrouded under rumpled blankets and the two or three dirty T-shirts Webern had been wearing the last several days; when she did rise, which was less and less often, she left behind a great number of coarse black hairs and a lingering scent of Scotch. Right now, she stared up at the ceiling vacantly, arms folded behind her head, as the train jolted and stuttered its way through the dark night.