The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  “But if you’re with me, then who’s with everyone else?”

  Jesus: “Think of it like this: every department store has a Santa, right?”

  Me: “Yeah, only I’m too old to believe in Santa.”

  Jesus: “Well, anyway, it’s like that.”

  There was something in Santa’s lap last time I sat on it. When I told Mom about it, she cleared her throat and said, patiently, “That’s called an erection.” Then she walked right up to Santa and slapped his face.

  * * *

  I’m standing on the narrow outside ledge of a skyscraper, pressing myself against its massive façade. Next to me, written on a steamy window, are Jesus’s words: I’M NOT HERE.

  A seagull lands beside me, and begins to preen. “God bless the Midway,” it squawks, spitting truckloads of feathers that float to the garbage-strewn sawdust boulevard below.

  * * *

  The Midway.

  At one end are the carnival rides. At the other, the circus Big Top stretches into the sky. Inside, the clown with white leggings towers over the crowded bleachers, a huge leg in each ring. Below him, twin white horses—with purple plumes on their bridles—trot around the inside of each ring with ballerinas on their backs. The crowd gasps, sloshing sodas and spilling popcorn, when the girls disappear behind the clown’s enormous legs. They whistle and applaud when the girls reappear.

  The horses’ tails brush the giant’s ankles, making him smile. They feel like butterfly kisses, the kind you make with your eyelashes. His shoulders support the tent’s highest riggings; his head bursts through the top. He describes cloud formations (a bunny, a train engine, George Washington), and bellows changes in the weather that echo throughout the fair.

  I sit on a throne under a banner that reads, Circus Fat Lady.

  Mom crouches behind me shaking a can of loose coins, then looks away when the Three Stooges lift my skirt for anyone who’ll pay.

  My legs lead somewhere too dark to see, but men check their pockets for change anyway.

  Emmett Kelly sits down in front of me. David Niven looks over his shoulder. Another man joins him, and soon every man on the Midway stands behind them. Cleo, the Pygmy Contortionist, and the Flying Dutchmen are there, Abbott and Costello, and all of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands.

  Stop looking at me! I try screaming, but the words don’t come out. Only the words of the pony man, who pushes through the crowd holding out a bit and halter and, kneeling between my legs, mumbles, “God bless the Midway,” as he runs his thick calloused hands along my thighs.

  * * *

  I sit up with a start. I’m trembling all over.

  “Good,” Mom says, inching into my bedroom. “You’re awake.” My bed’s center stage in a pool of morning sunshine; I squint to see her through the glare. “I’ve been calling you for ten minutes. Thought maybe the bed ate you up.”

  I blush. I’m wet between my legs, but it’s not my period. The pony man’s hand rests on the place between them. His fingers twitch.

  “Must have been quite a dream; your bed’s a mess.” She gives my room a quick glance before sitting beside me. “I had crazy dreams when I was growing up too. Hormones, I suppose.”

  She kisses the top of my head and leaves, stopping at my door first to say, “Breakfast?”

  I nod.

  The Mamas and the Papas sing “California Dreamin’” on Lauren’s radio. Dad’s electric shaver groans as it fights his thick black beard. Under my bed, Manners shines his shoes, polishes his pocket watch, and practices rolling his bowler hat up and down his arm like Red Skelton does on TV. He wants to look nice for our date tonight. Climbing hand-over-fist up the blankets, burrowing through them to my new warm smells, shaved legs, and . . .

  The sun slips behind a cloud, erasing everything but the smell of burnt sugar, popcorn, straw, and hot grease. Everything but the abandoned trapeze ropes that hang from the ceiling, like spiderwebs on TV’s Dark Shadows. And—in the Midway dirt beside my bed—my mother’s footprints that glow when I slip my feet inside them.

  Chapter 23

  Emptiness Pulls

  It’s late Saturday morning and our parents are gone when Lauren comes barreling into my room.

  “Lily!” she shouts. I look at her over the top of my book. “Some kid riding by on his bike just said a horse fell in the Crawford pit! I think it’s your horse, Lily! The white horse.”

  Beauty!

  The book slips to the floor when I jump off the bed. “When? Right now?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  I touch my desk, dresser, and bed with the pointer finger of each hand, then, scrambling into my tennis shoes, glance at Lauren. She hasn’t moved an inch. Just when she’s the jerkiest sister in the world, she turns all concerned and sweet. I kiss her cheek as I run out of my room.

  “Mom’s entertaining the new neighbors tonight,” she calls after me. “You better not be late. I’m not doing your chores no matter what Mom says.”

  * * *

  Across the street the Bensons’ twin shelties, Elmer and Floyd, rush to their living room window and whine.

  I feel brave and foolish as I ride through the block on my ten-speed, Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth bouncing against my chest.

  “Emptiness pulls,” Allison told me. Did it finally pull Beauty over the edge? Is it drawing me there right now?

  Lauren dreams about falling into the pit, only in her dreams she never touches bottom. I heard you die if you hit bottom, but I’ve dreamed of dying lots of times, and when I do I break into knobby little pieces that skitter around sideways like crabs.

  And it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t anything.

  I’m almost to the quarry’s No Trespassing sign before I remember how I got there: Tearing through the neighborhood, just avoiding the lady Mom calls “Big Hair” as she pulled out of her driveway. Shaking and excited, I fell off my bike twice. And flying down the trail through the woods, I nearly ran down Sister Mary Joyce on her daily walk.

  Finally, only yards from the entrance, I hear Beauty and I know it’s true.

  He’s fallen.

  He’s suffering.

  His cries echo the same high-pitched scream as a rabbit being killed, or a turtle ripped from its shell—sounds I’ve heard on TV nature shows.

  He’s dying.

  I can’t see him yet, but Beauty’s tears already soak my hair and handlebars, and the ground under my bike like the overwatered terrarium at school where the Cracker Jack man lives. If “tears are protein,” like Mom says, the thick vine across the path at the entrance to the quarry must be really healthy. With more tears it could cover everything in Crawford Woods, and it wouldn’t matter what happened to Beauty or Lily Ashes-to-Ashes; they’d find us years later, like an ancient ruin you read about in National Geographic.

  “Emptiness pulls,” Allison told me.

  E-M-P-T-I-N-E-S-S, I spell over and over, breathless and afraid, as I walk my bike into the barren opening. I put it down and look around.

  Ahead of me is the pit. Quiet sad-faced people stand around its rocky rim like game pieces. Some I recognize, most I don’t. Some cry, while others hug themselves, but no one looks away.

  Quarry men walk around the edge in hard hats and denim jumpsuits, smoking cigarettes and speaking into walkie-talkies.

  Where’s Allison? Did she hurt herself in the fall?

  Mrs. Garcia, from the old neighborhood, catches my eye and waves. I haven’t seen her in months. I wave back, then stick my hands in my pockets and stare self-consciously at the little zits of earth between us. I wish I was back home and didn’t know that Emptiness won and pulled Beauty in after it.

  Suddenly I hear his terrible cry again, gurgling up from the bottom of the pit.

  Allison hears it too. I see her across the hole—she’s covered in dust, her dirty face striped with tears. “Beauty!” she cries.

  The hair stands up on my arms and legs.

  Tapping the ground with her riding crop Allison inches towar
d the edge, and I start running toward her.

  Suddenly Mrs. Garcia is next to her, touching Allison’s forearm, gently guiding her a safe distance from the rim. She slips her arm around Allison’s waist and whispers to her, like Allison whispered to Beauty the night I met them, and the frightened girl relaxes. Neither of them notice the dusty saddlebag at their feet, its flaps open, the spilled pages around it. Poems Allison wrote, poems she promised to bring to Crawford Quarry, poetry she wanted to share with me.

  How many Wednesday nights did she ride to the pit and call my name?

  We could have been friends. For two hours every Wednesday night we could have been friends.

  I look at the ground at my feet. The earth is gray and cracked like an open sore on the surface of the moon, and so ugly even the trees stand back farther than they need to. Does Emptiness stop pulling when you’re already down there, or are there deeper, emptier places?

  Maybe it’s not so bad at the bottom. Maybe Beauty wanted to fall. Allison said he was old.

  Finally I stand at the edge with everyone else and watch as, across the pit, Allison stretches out an arm and holds her hand steady, waiting to feel the air, the heat, Beauty’s movement below.

  He’s talking to her with his breath. She’s reading it with her hand.

  When Allison screams, “Oh no!” my heart sinks. She doesn’t need eyes to see Beauty.

  I inhale the gritty metal of his blood when I finally look over. I can’t make him out at first, just the jagged jutting basalt walls blotched with his shiny blood. The muscular white horse and scraped-to-the-bone gray-white floor of the quarry camouflage each other. But then he’s there, like Frieda’s photoflash, a pulsing spot at the bottom of the sun-washed crater; his long face, almond-shaped eyes, and black steaming nostrils jump at me from the dust.

  His legs and side, covered in a thin frothy lather, are cut and bloody. Bits of cloudy, gravelly grit rain on him from the rim, and with each wheezing, strangled breath, his chest heaves and his flesh quivers.

  He’s broken and drowning inside.

  “Don’t move, boy,” Allison says. “Help is coming!”

  But hearing her, Beauty tries to get up, and he throws himself against the rocky interior with a heavy thump. Grunting, he presses a bloodied shoulder into the rock, tucks his trembling legs under him, and pulls himself to a leaning-stand against the quarry wall. An English saddle hangs from a single strap under his belly.

  Daylight. Saddle. Beauty walked too close to the edge, lost his footing, threw Allison, and pitched over. He never fell when they rode bareback at night. Was he blinded by seeing too much?

  “Look!” someone says. “He’s trying to stand!”

  “Beauty?” Allison smiles.

  But the horse can’t get his footing and his back leg slides out from under him again. He collapses with a deep meaty thud, first on his haunches, then on his side. A rib, like a broken steak knife, has torn through his chest.

  People gasp. A woman turns away in tears; a couple walks off. Allison presses herself into Mrs. Garcia, who leads the sobbing girl toward the quarry office. A golf cart suddenly appears in the thinning crowd. An old man drives, while a younger man in a hard hat, tie, and short-sleeved white shirt walks beside the cart talking to him. He carries a megaphone.

  “It’s Old Man Crawford,” someone says. “The blind girl’s his granddaughter.”

  “Folks,” the quarry boss says into the bullhorn. Beauty jerks with the sudden sound. His eyes bulge, the whites brighten. “Please, folks. This is private property. Unless you have permission to be here, you need to leave.” Quarry men walk through the crowd, pointing at the trailhead.

  A worker picks up the saddlebag and poetry.

  In the giant hole, propped against the wall, Beauty looks small and forgotten, like a dirty white sock in the back of my closet. He snorts, making miniature sandstorms with his breath. Dark tearstains sit under each black dusty eye.

  “I’m here,” I say to him, lying down on my stomach. “I won’t leave you.” I hang my arms and head over the crumbling lip, reaching for him like I reached for Lauren two years ago. “Shhhh . . . shhh.”

  Minutes pass. I make myself invisible, and for ten minutes or so I succeed. No one sees me except Beauty.

  Emptiness pulls. Beauty knows he’s dying. And I know why he couldn’t stay away and Allison kept coming back. I know why I’m here too. “Good boy,” I say. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Fine, fine, everything is fine.

  Someone has to lie to Beauty.

  The steam whistle sounds for lunch.

  “Hey, Savage!” a man calls to a young quarry guy. “Ask Bob, in the truck there, if he brought his hunting rifle.”

  Savage?

  “Savage!” the voice repeats. “Ask Bob to get his rifle. Orders, from the old man.”

  Savage pauses before walking back to a dump truck where he raps on the hood.

  The figure in the driver’s seat shakes Himself awake and steps outside. A lopsided halo wobbles over his head. The men talk briefly, and SOG glances toward the pit. He lights a cigarette, grabs His hard hat from the truck cab, and heads to the parking lot.

  What’s He doing here?

  The Savage Boy moves around the pit toward me.

  “Hey, kid!” says the megaphone. “Get out of there!”

  Is he talking to me?

  “I won’t let them hurt you,” I tell Beauty. “I’ll be right here.” Tears roll off my face into the pit. “I’m going to sing to you, okay? Beauty beauty bo-beauty, banana-fana fo-footie . . .” It’s not a real song but it’s all I can think of.

  “Lily,” Mike Savage says softly. He stands several feet away. Gravel kicks free under his boot. It catches in the rocky ribbed walls of the quarry pit, like a marble skipping along the roulette wheel where my beautiful mother and Sean Connery (as James Bond) play, his eyes glued to her big breasts. They smoke Turkish cigarettes and toast each other with martinis. “Shaken, not stirred,” Mom says when she orders another round.

  “You have to go,” Mike Savage says. He holds out his hand.

  I ignore it. “I know who you are too. You looked in my window.” I’m not afraid. I came for Beauty.

  “I remember. I’m sorry,” the blond boy says. “I’ve straightened out. I’m going to school and working this job.”

  “I know who He is too,” I say, looking at the figure carrying a rifle at His side.

  A dog barks in the woods.

  “You know Fred?”

  “Hey, girly!” Jesus calls out. He’s red-faced and overweight. “Get the hell out of there!”

  “Get up, Lily. Go home,” Mike says nervously. “Something bad’s going to happen. You don’t want to be here.”

  I’m on my belly on the edge of the pit just like I was when Lauren fell over. “No! Go away! I’m not afraid!”

  Across the way, Allison stands in the doorway of the quarry office. She must have heard my voice. “Lily? Help me, Lily!” she calls. “Beauty fell! They’re going to shoot him!”

  I never should have come.

  Jesus followed me here, and now He’s going to do something terrible.

  “Lily!” Allison screams. She holds her body stiff and waits for my answer. “Lily?” she calls weakly. I feel my heart break into little knobby pieces.

  Allison listens to the silence between us, then collapses against Mrs. Garcia.

  I lied to Beauty, and now I’ve lied to Allison. I’m a liar and a phony. I scoot away from the edge, press my ear to the ground, and listen to the Savage Boy walk away.

  “She’s confused,” I hear him say. “Just give her a minute, Fred. She’ll leave.”

  But I don’t, and when Jesus sets the rifle on the ground beside me, He slips a meaty arm around my waist and yanks me to my feet. “Skinny little thing,” He says. He smells of cigarettes and BO. “Didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  The phone rings in the quarry office.

  The golf cart heads toward th
e parking lot. Allison sits alone on the back, staring blankly toward the pit.

  My heart beats so fast I’m dizzy. “Please don’t kill him. He didn’t do anything.”

  “The horse is dying. It’s unfair to let him suffer more,” Jesus says. “Now get out of here before you fall and I have to shoot you too . . . Just kidding.”

  I stare at Him. “Why do you follow me? Why do you always hurt people?”

  “I haven’t hurt anyone. And I sure as hell ain’t following you!” He glances at my medical bracelet. “You sick or something?” For a second he looks like any of the other quarry guys. “Listen, kid, I’ve got a job to do and you’re in the way.” He picks up the rifle. “Hey, boss!” He yells across the pit. “She doesn’t want to leave. Better call the police.”

  “Jerk!” I yell. “I hate you!”

  I jump up and run to my bike. Dump trucks and steam shovels wave goodbye.

  I don’t look back as I ride away. But I do.

  I don’t hear Him cock the gun. But I do.

  I don’t hear the fatal shot, or Beauty’s last high-pitched cry for Allison.

  I should have stayed with Beauty.

  I should have climbed down in the pit and refused to go. That’s what Reverend King would have done.

  A long lean dog appears on the trail ahead of me. It’s feral and hungry, I can see its ribs from here, and I yell for it to get out of the way. It joins me instead, running beside my bike, growling, panting, yipping as I sail through potholes, fallen branches, and the mangled guts of something wild and partially eaten. The dog tells me I’m free and I don’t have to go home; I don’t have to return to the pit or see Allison either.

  “Mrs. Wiggins is inside you,” the dog reminds me. “Join us.” And for a minute I imagine myself as Dog Girl, running from one dark treelined panel to another, like a hero in a comic strip.

  But Lauren is waiting, and I told her I wouldn’t run away without her.

  I speed off and finally, unable to see through my tears, I hit something. And fly off my bike.