Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2404-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2405-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my mother.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First Act

  In the mornings, people aren’t in the mood to be entertained. They walk a wide arc around me, they avoid my eyes and the coffee can I have out for tips. They have to get into one of those gray-glass buildings and they don’t have time for some kid with greasy hair who refuses to get a real job. But I have a long reach. I have a million tricks to close the distance.

  In this act, I hook the audience by offering someone an apple. If they reach for it, I pull it away. Today, the guy I hooked was a tie-wearing, briefcase-toting business man with a Tom Selleck moustache, and when I pulled the apple away, he actually looked a little surprised. I don’t know why. Here I am in whiteface, eyebrows arched up to my hairline, and he expects some kind of serious transaction to go on between us? No, no, guy. You’ve mistaken me for someone who doesn’t wear spandex bodysuits on the street. I’m not the someone who’s going to give you a snack-on-the-go and make it easier for you to get right to your boring job. I’m the someone who’s going to make you late. I delay reality. I don’t feed it to you.

  This morning, with Tom Selleck, I spun the apple on the tip of my finger, Harlem Globetrotter–style, then balanced it on the tip of my nose. Two more people stopped to watch, and I offered him the apple again. Before he could get his hand on it, I popped it twenty feet into the air. At this point, the guy got mad, which was perfect, because people who won’t stop to watch someone’s amazing physical agility might still stop to see a potential fight. I bounced the apple around like a hackey sack. Heel-toe-knee-hip-elbow. I kept it knocking against all the edges of my body, got a nice rhythm going there, then let it hit me in the crotch. Everybody, especially Mr. Selleck, laughed.

  All in all, about five people stayed to see the act to the end, which is pretty successful busking for me. I drew those five people into the space between themselves and the apple, and closed that space with a snap, and locked it, so they’ll never see another apple without thinking of me.

  Also, I made a dollar fifty.

  Christiakov told me writing down my ideas for acts was a good habit to get into, so I’m giving it a shot. The rule I made for myself is that I’ll write five, then I can say that I tried. I’ve never written an act down before but, lately, I forget my ideas, even the details of the shows I’ve already done. I’m too distracted by other things—like how to get to St. Louis. Like the letter that showed up a week ago in my PO Box. Like a backpack full of potholders.

  So, I’m going to take Christiakov’s advice, and this apple act counts as the first.

  It’s midnight and I’m hiding under a table at a McDonald’s where this girl I know is the manager. I’m eating a paper-thin cheeseburger and a really badly bruised apple. I’m so tired, I just want to stare at the wall and not even chew, let this burger disintegrate in my mouth. But once I make a rule, I try to follow it. Rules keep you out of trouble and, even if they don’t, if everything falls apart, in the end you can say, “I did what I was supposed to, so you can’t blame me for the way things turned out.”

  That sounds bad, I guess. I should get a new motto. “Laughter makes the world go ’round”? “Love makes a family”? “A tomato is not a vegetable; it’s a fruit”?

  Oh, well. Some people are born clowns, and the rest of us have to work at it. My own mother thought I was a stick-in-the-mud and, one time, she actually said so. I think I was six. She made a bet with my brother: if she could make him laugh, he would owe her his first month of wages at his first job. We were eating dinner, some sort of noodle with gravy on it that we spun on forks with wooden handles. No sign of our father.

  Andre said, “What do I get if I don’t laugh?”

  And she said, “A Corvette.”

  And my brother clenched his jaw. “You’re on,” he said.

  My mother went back to eating her noodles. Every so often she would make a face, cross her eyes, burp. My brother kept his face tight as a drum. We were good at that. Being real tough shits. My mother was never intimidated by our tough-shittiness.

  So, she picked up her plate with one hand and pulled out the neckline of her blouse with the other. With a deadpan stare at my brother, she dumped the whole plate down her shirt. Andre fell out of his seat laughing.

  But I was scared. I said, “You wasted all that food!” I watched the doorway; I was sure the worst would happen.

  My mother peeked down at the noodles in her shirt. “William Henry, you’re a real stick-in-the-mud sometimes,” she said. “Besides, if you wanna be pragmatic, what’s the price of a few noodles to the price of a Corvette? Honestly, kid.”

  If it weren’t for my mother, there would be a place for me in one of those gray-glass buildings. I wouldn’t have minded that sort of life, not even a little. It’s the ghost of her that keeps me from following rules like “Don’t sleep in a McDonald’s” or “Don’t walk barefoot on a city street wearing lightning-blue lipstick and flying an imaginary kite.”

  Now the only rules I have are the ones that I hold myself to:

  One. Breathe.

  And two. Stretch.

  And three. Write.

  And four. Keep going.

  Five. Open wide. Eat this reality so someone else doesn’t have to, so someone else has a story about why they were late to work. It’s when I can do this that I feel her the most. Like she’s hovering in that space between me and an apple and a stranger, waiting for me to close the gap.

  CHAPTER 1

  St. Louis

  April 1990

  CALEB HAD A SPECIAL WAY of interv
iewing candidates, which involved getting to know them as little as possible on a personal level. He had a list of questions he never updated or deviated from, and he tried to keep eye contact to a minimum, in case his interviewee was prone to interpreting eye contact as an invitation to go on tangents about their childhood, their last marriage, or their substance abuse problems. The template interview was the fair way to do things, since the more he got to know performers, the more they generally frustrated him. They were criminally narcissistic, unhappy people. If it weren’t for them, his job would be just like any other business manager’s. He would take inventory, hire the employees, choose the dates, crunch the numbers, count out the register, call it a day.

  But circus business was not like any other business, namely because the performers were not like any other people. The boy who sat across from him was supposedly twenty-four and had several years of performing experience, though his splotchy stubble and overeager, damp handshake pegged him at about eighteen. His application said his name was William Henry Harrison Bell, and the fact that he blushed when Caleb said his full name aloud assured Caleb that it was his given name, and not some kind of terrible pseudonym. Caleb noticed that he was antsy and smelled like he had slept in his clothes, which were all frayed around the edges. He needed a new pair of shoes; the tongues lopped out of his Converse high tops, and half the rubber on the toes had peeled off.

  “Could you just call me Henry?” the boy asked.

  “Of course,” Caleb said, drawing a line through the three other names.

  The boy, Henry, was a candidate to fill the position of “clown.” There were two open clown positions, in fact, and in order for the performers to have enough practice time before shows began in June, Caleb had to make the hires by mid-month. It was April 5. He had already done fifteen interviews, and none of the candidates so far had been satisfying.

  “So, first,” Caleb began, “can you do any sort of aerial stunts?”

  “I can do everything,” he said, leaning back and smiling, pleased with his answer, no doubt certain that Caleb would be pleased with it, too. His eyes were soggy and hopeful. Delusions of grandeur and an iron deficiency.

  Goddamn performers.

  Caleb had worked for Feely and Feinstein’s International Circus for ten years, hiring the talent and managing the finances. He made sure everyone got their checks and submitted their tax forms. He kept track of their sick days. He took the receipts for their travel expenses and made sure the talent got their travel schedules and all their paper work up to date. Considering the circus was a mobile one, which traveled to about ten different cities every summer, managing the travel alone was a heavy workload.

  When Seamus Feely, his childhood friend, offered him the job, he had said, “Caleb, how would you like the most boring job in the circus? You’ll have your own office.”

  At the time, Caleb was thirty-seven years old and managed the Louisville Hanky Panky Party Shop. He’d asked, “Why would I want a boring job at a circus when I can keep the boring job I have now?”

  And Seamus said, “Well, there’s the office thing. Like I said. And you won’t get a lot of lip from the talent, because they don’t know anything about tax forms or work visas, so they’ll do what you say, and they’ll respect you. You’ll meet interesting people. You’ll wear a suit.”

  It had seemed like a move up. Before he’d been sidetracked by death, by money, and by an endless parade of needy weirdos in his life, he had once wanted to be a museum curator. He’d gone to college for this, majored in art history, and had barely grown his beard out and learned to eat cereal for two out of three meals a day when his father got sick. He left school to take care of his dad, and by the time he died, Caleb couldn’t remember what was so important about school. In fact, he couldn’t seem to drum up a reason why anything was important but continuing to breathe, to eat, to shit, to ward off nonexistence. Living itself was success, and bully for him, he kept on succeeding, day after day, and there was no sense in taking risks that would only complicate the goal. He did his own mediocre paintings and worked wherever he could, until he ended up at the Hanky Panky Party Shop, a place with a horribly frank combination of supplies for bachelor parties and children’s birthdays: G-strings and plastic Mickey Mouse flatware.

  Managing a circus was a lot more like being a museum curator than selling Magic 8-Balls to grown men and edible bras to little girls. And besides, he missed his native St. Louis. Louisville, Kentucky was not the same, even if the two cities did happen to be named for the same French guy.

  So here he was, in a wood-paneled office in a portable building on a big desolate stretch of dirt in St. Louis, interviewing some transient high school dropout, and wearing a very nice suit that was too tight around his arms.

  “Do you have experience with animals?” he asked.

  “I don’t like animals,” said the boy, pulling his worn-out shoes underneath him, so that he was sitting cross-legged in the chair. He couldn’t stay still—Caleb kept thinking that any moment he would lean back just a bit too far, hit the wall, and knock down the framed print of Beckmann’s The Acrobats that Caleb’s wife had given to him two Christmases ago.

  “You don’t like them, or you’re afraid of them?”

  As soon as Caleb asked this question, he knew he shouldn’t have. It opened a space for the boy to squeeze in personal details. Fortunately for Caleb, the boy only shrugged, as if he didn’t know the answer.

  “So go back to the aerial stuff, then. What exactly do you have experience with?”

  “Aerial silks. I’ve done stuff suspended, on a hoop. Never tried the trapeze, but I could probably do it.”

  Caleb made notes on his clipboard. Few people claimed to be as well-rounded as this kid, but it was obvious he was stretching the truth. Caleb started to doubt the wisdom of even letting the boy come in for an interview—he had no tapes, no portfolio. But the applicant pool was shallow, and he had decided to interview anyone who applied, even if they seemed like a long shot. And then, of course, the boy had the Russian’s recommendation, which Caleb couldn’t ignore.

  “Ever been shot from a cannon?” This question wasn’t on the list, but Caleb was bored with the conversation, already convinced that the boy would be a bust, as they were all busts.

  “No. Once I jumped out of the bed of a truck, though. It was moving pretty fast at the time.”

  “Okay.” Caleb pretended to write “no” beneath the imaginary question. He took a deep breath. “So, tell me about your act.”

  “Well. I mean. I’m just going to show it to you, right?” said the boy. His eyes had dropped, and Caleb knew that he had succeeded in sounding so uninterested that the boy lost confidence.

  “Yes. But I want to know where you got the idea for it. How did you come up with it?”

  Here, he brightened again. As the boy talked about the inspiration for his act, his admiration for Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Chan, Caleb still found himself only half-listening. It had been a long afternoon, searching for new clowns. The last two that worked for him were good, two Finnish cousins, not a word of English between them. They’d gotten an offer from a circus in Finland, and how could they resist a position that would take them back home? Caleb didn’t hold it against them, even though they’d left him in the lurch. Adrienne told him to see it as an opportunity, and he tried to take his wife’s advice because she was always right about these things, about ways of seeing.

  Caleb interrupted the boy, who was still talking about Jackie Chan.

  “All right, then. Let’s see your audition. Follow me,” he said.

  The boy sprang up from the chair and picked up his prop trunk, which had rested near him during the interview. He knocked it against the wood paneling of the office before stepping out into the hall.

  Outside, the squat portable building that housed Caleb’s office was a small rehearsal studio with a rounded roof. Clustered near it were the blue-and-white trailers that carried the circus from city to city
during the summer. They were rusted around the windows, and the roofs peeled up at the corners. Someone driving by who didn’t know that this was Feely and Feinstein’s International Circus might think this was a depressing place, and they might not be wrong, not on this particular day. Once the tent was up, though, the lot would stop looking like a good place to get knifed by a hobo, and more like a child’s craft project, shoddily put together, but charming. Or so Caleb liked to think. The sky would get blue again, the kids would come, and everything would smell like funnel cake.

  He led the boy into the studio, which had wooden floors, badly in need of refinishing, covered partially by forest-green rubber mats. Mirrors hung along the walls on either side, and the room was damp, smelling slightly mildewed. Caleb probably could have gotten rid of the smell with a little Pine-Sol, but he liked it.

  “Don’t mind me. Just relax and do your stuff,” said Caleb, as he unfolded a metal chair close to the stage. He sat, clipboard and pen in hand, careful not to smile.

  The boy closed his eyes.

  Caleb watched as the boy then opened his trunk and took out a plate of spaghetti covered in plastic wrap. It was real, the meat and spice pungent and fresh, probably from one of the Italian joints on The Hill. Caleb had no idea how the boy had managed to keep the sauce from leaking out all over the rest of the props, and then realized that he probably hadn’t. The boy uncovered the plate and placed it and a fork on the mat, took his place behind the plate, rolled his neck a few times, and took off his shirt to reveal a face painted upside down on his back in permanent marker. Then, he flipped his ass in the air and tucked his knees next to his ears so that the marker-drawn face turned right-side up.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll clean up when I’m done,” he said.

  For a second, hope crept up on Caleb and he thought there might be a slender chance that the boy would be as good as he said he was, a thing that people would pay to see. God, kid, if you could just be good, please be good. If people didn’t start paying to see things, then this season would be Feely and Feinstein’s last.