by Lucy Corin
And it’s hard work because a lot of the time you are uninformed because you are unqualified and no one told you, and no one really cares that you don’t know what you’re doing, so it’s hard because you fuck up and a horse can be in more pain than ever. Morally, it’s hard work. All the time you have to think about what could possibly ever be the right thing to do. Also of course there is very little money, much less, for instance, than minimum wage. All cash, too, which is fine until Joe just decides you don’t get paid at all.
Gwen was British. She’d kept her accent. At thirteen she ran away to the circus and traveled with it on one of those fabulously painted trains, and then traveled with all the animals and the costumed people in a ship that carried the circus over the ocean to Canada. When it disbanded, when times got tough and too many animals got sick or died, or when Gwen got married to a magician, or to some local barkeeper in some frozen Canadian town, or when she just left it, left the entire circus there on the side of the road, I don’t know when, but at some point she got a husband and some children, and I believe they stayed in Canada for a long time, must have been. I could think through what I knew of Gwen’s history so quickly it seemed she could not possibly be old, that even after she’d gone through two whole invisible countries and two whole invisible families, Gwen and I could each tell our life story in exactly the same amount of time. In fact, we did. She’d tell a bit of hers and I’d match her each time, or she let me think I could. She was that warm to me, that convincing. She made me feel our lives were exactly the same size.
Sometime later, after running away and after the circus, after the train and the ship, and Canada—and this part my mother told me, the only part Gwen never mentioned—she said Gwen, who was at that point already what you call a senior citizen, with no husband or kids in sight—who knows what happened, they disappeared—Gwen lived in a box on Miami beach, and survived on dog food. Imagine. She’s crouched in her box watching waves lap the cardboard. Tough, round Gwen in her white hair like a cap, holding her aluminum feeding bowl, eating from it with a big spoon like it was cereal, looking from her box over the ocean, half in shadow in the afternoon.
No lie. Absurd and absolutely true at once.
Then she got a job at the track, grooming, because she knew animals from her circus days and you could sleep in the tack room. Spiders were as large as hands in there, and rats were the size of cats and in the night they tumbled the lids off the trash cans of grain. Gwen would wake startled and have to coax herself back to sleep quickly or she’d never get enough, but she rose bright as a bird each morning and clicked on the radio, and before dawn the horses in her care were clean and tacked for the exercise riders who arrived, stamping, laughing with cocaine at five. Hot, hot, all day, but there is nothing like the sound of twenty chewing horses in the dusk, the depth of contentedness that shifts into a stable once the people are gone, the rhythm of teeth below the barn fans, when it’s as if one single fly is left in the world and it’s making the rounds, buzzing crosshatched into one stall and then the next, because in each stall it enters, a horse switches its tail once, and you hear one tail switch and then another, under the sound of the fans and over the sound of the chewing, until the fly moves away from the shedrow and into the night. Twenty horses, like twenty tucked-in orphan girls in two rows of ten single beds, each under her own tidy window with its four even panes.
I think I didn’t know British people could be poor. I imagined her running from a castle with teacups tied into her bandana bundle. I imagined her galloping across green fields with foxes, the flowing mane of her circus pony, a bugle to her lips.
Then she got this job at this lay-up stable with the headless plaster horses, a place called Sandpiper for the soft skittery brown birds that dash across the vast tracks at training stables in the dawn, birds we never saw at the lay-up stable. Instead we saw mostly cattle egrets, white birds that stood like emaciated bowling pins, one and then another in the fields, or that walked behind a grazing horse, bending in the quickest pitch of motion for any bugs lifted with the horse’s hoof. The job at Sandpiper included a camper for Gwen to live in. She’d been running the forty-stall barn herself until she got kicked, broke her arm, and convinced Joe, who owned the place, to hire my mother, who’d come looking for work.
Between the barn and the house was a small above-ground pool, about four feet deep, about the size of a box stall, actually. When it was too hot to help my mother even by rolling bandages, I’d get to sit in the pool, and one afternoon was so hot Gwen joined me, standing on her toes, buoyant, and leaned against the pool wall with her cast on the redwood ledge, lifting one leg and then the other through the water, feeling each leg cut and bubble the water as it rose. It was so hot that although we filled it from the hose the pool grew warm as a bath. Flies circled our heads, big stinging greenheaded horseflies, and mid-sentence Gwen would dunk her head and flip her hair back, which was white and stood up like a punk rocker’s when it was wet. She flexed and unflexed her hand in the cast, touching her index finger to the plaster bridge that divided it from her thumb. From time to time she’d slide under with her arm raised, let herself slip down with her elbow at her head, making a kind of inadvertent Black Power gesture like I’d seen in movies, a gesture like an accidental cheer, her eyes closed and her face peacefully blurred underwater.
We talked about songs on the radio and a couple other things, a couple of the horses, and a dog that had been hanging around. Then she asked me about Adam Walsh, the boy in the news who’d been abducted from our mall, whose head was found in a canal one hundred miles north of us. She asked me what I’d been thinking about that.
Gwen knew my mother and I had fought that morning. I wanted to take the bus to the mall because some girls I knew were going. My mother said no. She said it was too complicated and she didn’t know what time she’d be done with work, or which bus I should take or what. I was mad, and hot, and a horse had stepped on my foot because it was so hot I couldn’t pay attention. I’d been walking a horse that had his legs blistered with Reducine. In fact I’d held him for the tranquilizer and watched my mother apply the black tar to his legs with a corncob, wearing rubber gloves to protect her hands. I could smell the chemicals working at his skin. My stomach quaked when I thought of it. My neck clenched as we walked.
Heat accumulates. I can’t say it enough. It might not immediately feel hot, but when it keeps on, you get so heavy with it, it’s like wearing that many layers of clothing. It gets so it feels like you’re encased, cocooned in heat, mummified. Several times a day I’d get overcome with sleepiness. It had to do something, I swear, all that heat, it had to stunt us somehow, all the effort it took to move through it, pushing through layers and layers, the sheer intensity of attempting to move through the world, of taking it in through pores so bent on seeping, your skin so obviously a permeable membrane, and too much two-way molecular traffic.
The skin on the horse’s cannon bones hung in flaps from the blistering, in sheets like the bark of eucalyptus trees. The goopy disinfectant ointment that covered the wounds turned from yellow to red in the heat, dripping. Dirty sand clung to me. I was in such a daze, leading him in the sun that I almost forgot him and I walked under a low branch where he couldn’t follow, so he balked and we had a little tangle. It hurt, but mostly I cried because I was so mad and frustrated and so strangely sleepy and I couldn’t pay attention to anything. I kept pissing off my mom. I didn’t know what to do, so she sent me to the pool to cool off, to get ahold of my mind.
So when Gwen told me about Adam it wasn’t like Ted and the bugs. Gwen wanted to make it a really good reason that I couldn’t go where I wanted to go. Like if my mother hadn’t been so busy and so exhausted she’d have told me no because it was dangerous, and not because she was busy and exhausted.
When our skin was wrinkly and we still weren’t cool, I followed Gwen to her camper to change into dry clothes. The whole thing tipped a tiny but measurable bit when we stepped on the corrugated
foldout steps. Inside, Gwen lifted the vinyl bench seat in the dinette and got out a road map. We stood over the map, dripping. Her suit was white with giant orange blooms, the kind of suit that has a brassiere built into it, and underwear built in under a skirt-flap that hides the tops of your legs when you wear it. She showed me the Turnpike and Fort Pierce. It wasn’t the same as Ted, who brought out the bugs, I’m pretty sure, so that I could watch him proceed.
The way Gwen used her voice and her hands, it was so tentative. She showed me as a sort of geography lesson, but a geography we were discovering together: here’s where he was playing with toys at Sears, here’s where they found his head in the canal. Four giant flies, two of them the kind with green heads, were flying in the tiny kitchen space. I slapped one when it landed on the plastic table and the table shook on its one bolted leg. “Good one,” Gwen said, still studying the map, trying to decide something about it.
I looked with her, and it was an amazing thing that map showed me, I remember: the dot on the map that meant us was smack on the beach. I had no idea. We must have been on the inland side of the black dot for me to have missed it. I knew kids went to the beach a lot, but I didn’t know the beach was right there. I thought maybe other kids had a lot of time, like the whole family would pack up the car and a basket of ham sandwiches and spend a lot of time driving there. We’d been living in that town over a year and never been to a beach. Maps hung like window shades over the blackboards at school, but no one ever pulled them down.
Gwen set the newspaper on the little table, folded so the current article about Adam faced up, and compared the information it held to the map. She leaned over it like a detective, with that same look on her face, working to put incongruous pieces together. The paper said “spawned.” It said Adam had spawned an all-out manhunt, that they were looking for a psychopath who could strike again. Years later he spawned a TV movie and a TV series. He spawned a variety of investigations and a variety of laws and charities. Years later, in college, in my dark apartment, reading my biology textbook on the living room floor by the light of a candle lantern, I came to a section about marine animals that “broadcast spawn,” and in the mindflash it took read the phrase as spawning broadcasts, I thought of Adam, and then I skipped directly to a memory of health class at that middle school before or after they found Adam’s head, I don’t remember, the class that warned about pregnancy, when they said Yes! You will get pregnant the first time and Yes! You will get pregnant even if he, as they say, removes himself prematurely and Yes! If you sleep in a bed and sperm is anywhere on the bed you have to know that sperm will live on a sheet for forty-eight hours and sniff you out and wiggle up you while you’re sleeping. After which Mrs. Brodie—whom I can see now was so nervous in front of a chalkboard when she liked to be standing at the sidelines of the blacktop track, who couldn’t bring herself to teach the dance unit and had two girls from the high school come over for extra credit to do it while she sat with her whistle in the bleachers and listened, with all of us, to incessant repetitions of “Let’s Go to the Hop,”—set the textbook spine bent on the desk and said with a put-on-wry-frankness, “You have all gotten your periods, right? Raise your hand if you still never got your period. Good, then. We’ll skip that. We’ll move on to psychology.”
There’s a reason, I thought, studying on my floor in college, in the anonymous cavelike dome of space created by the candlelight, something to do with being a little kid in the seventies, I thought, that while my grandmother’s been dead for years and years and I rarely think of her, let alone anything particular about her, I remember every pattern of wallpaper in her ridiculous apartment. No wonder, I thought, remembering, no wonder there’s this kind of serial perception. I remember the overlapping golden splotches like sunspots, the interlocking metallic squares of glued-on sand, the tiny farm animals suspended in red-and-blue plaid, and I remember the pattern in her green lace shower curtain, the shapes that let the opalescent liner show through in cutouts that looked like miniature hamburgers, and the bedspread in her bedroom with millions of pointy white flowers, and the blanket I slept under when I stayed there, with its scattering of yellow stars on vacant white fuzz.
No one else could have done it, they say in the article. If we’re dealing with a criminal, they say, someone with a criminal mind, he might have shot the boy or something. And I say him, they say, because dismemberment is not something females are noted for. So what we’re dealing with is a psychopath, they say. Or else he wouldn’t mutilate him. What we’re looking for is something that looks like a pattern.
That’s what I think of Adam Walsh.
I did, I adored Gwen, and I believe that brief as our friendship was she adored me, too. For a few weeks out of the few months my mother worked at Sandpiper, I’d chatter about how I wanted to learn how to play a piano. Really I was talking about a friend from school, a girl I liked a lot who played the piano and was always saying she’d be a concert pianist, and I liked how she could say that word “pianist” and not feel foolish when she said it.
At the end of the summer, my mother quit that job for one at a stable that seemed better. Gwen visited the triplex a couple times and one time she brought a present for me: a plug-in, three-octave Casio organ. Still, she remained an aristocrat to me. Even with the bathing suit, which I managed to imagine was like what the Queen of England must wear, for modesty, when bathing, even with the Casio and its bossanova rhythm button, it was meant to lead me to a Steinway on a stage. What funny circus songs it made. What a tinny, broadcast version of sound. I can’t see Gwen born in a broken East End flat or what have you. I see her only in her castle, a round and rosy princess clever enough to jump and land on a spongy green pillow of a hill, and to tumble along with her teacups to the stable, to pack up her pony and go.
What’s left of the people who move through your life and make you who you are? There’s no knowing them, especially when you are a child, and you follow your folks, and you’re tied to their backsides. You know the one where the mommy says to the little kid: you can go anywhere you want, just don’t cross the street. Anywhere I want! thinks the kid. Years and years and around and around the block she goes.
Imagine, it’s sunset over Gwen’s box on the beach. She’s watching rosy waves lap the cardboard. Behind the box, behind her back, between the dunes and the sun there are giant blond girls wearing sunglasses made of plastic mirror and bikinis that glow. Their skin is dark: there’s no telling what color it is in the distorting light. They’re sparkling with the residue of sand. Behind the box, legs with minds like flamingos are on parade. They’re in silhouette like cutouts, like paper-chain dolls. Like they aren’t real. But worse, they’re as good as real.
It turns out, right at that same time, back before it turned out he was a racist homophobic homosexual cannibal serial killer, back before that, when he was only collecting mannequins, Jeffrey Dahmer lived on Miami Beach. He was living there while I was talking with Gwen in the four-foot pool and the camper dinette. The beach belonged to the city, and I don’t know if any of the kids went there except perhaps the ones who ran away to sell Quaaludes, who said, “I’m going to ditch this town and go to Miami Beach to sell Quaaludes,” and when they never showed up back at school, I supposed that’s where they were. We were the suburb of a suburb of a city minor to that city, a suburb so malformed it was more like a nub than a limb, the Siamese twin of the real suburb that was little more than a tumor off a child’s shoulder. Miami hung like a mirage outside my vision and informed everything. People came from there, beaten by it, and went back when they were beaten more. I don’t know how long Dahmer lived there. I don’t know if he’d been, say, one box away from Gwen. I don’t know if what they mean by Jeffrey Dahmer lived on Miami Beach means on the beach like in a box like Gwen, or in a room, an apartment, or anything.
It used to be almost every night, and this was as a little, little girl, not a wracked pubescent thing worried about shopping centers, but little and sugar-faced,
I’d fall asleep to my made-up stories about someone coming in the bedroom window and taking me away. Sometimes I let the half-dream turn the wrong way out the window and I’d be bound, legs up like a bug in the checkered backseat of my father’s Maverick, but only the masked intruder was driving. It could get dark, if I let it, with knives and arrows.
But I could make it evolve, if I let my mind move in just the right way, into a long dancing thing where the long dark hands dropped me through canopies of leaves and into a dewy forest, with a mossy stone cottage and sixteen girls like me in their cotton nightgowns. We played around the cottage and we had a camp-fire. Long flowery vines trailed behind us that might have been our hair, because we might have been becoming the woods. Behind each of us, in the past, in a kind of comforting back-room place in each girl’s mind, a gauzy white curtain billowed over the bed where long dark arms had stretched and lifted us like so much air, each girl from each human family. The idea of parents lay in shadows behind the curtains, like a warmth in our stomachs hours after a meal of forest stew, but there were no real parents, and when we looked at one another we knew it was good to let them stay far away, wherever they were.
One time I did, I asked my mother, “Will someone kidnap me?”
She was brushing a horse, or wrapping a leg, or fluffing bedding in a stall. She said don’t worry, silly, no one will. She said people want ransom and we don’t have that kind of money. Which of course made me want it even more. To be special enough to be stolen anyway.