Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  When they left the bar, the Russian had told Caleb not to worry, that things would turn up for his circus. “This world bends to belief, and money follows imagination. Baratucci, this only sounds like optimism. It’s the heaviest of truths, but you’ll work it to your advantage. I am sure of it.”

  Now here they were, a few months from what would almost definitely be the death of that Feely baby. And here he was, still pushing for something new, hoping it would save them. Those bickering clowns were more cirque than circus, and that was no accident on Caleb’s part. They would fight for things because their youth and their training compelled them to, especially Henry. It had to be contained, or it would blow up in Caleb’s face—but that will to fight was necessary for the show.

  ADRIENNE CAME TO HIS OFFICE later that day. She had to duck down to clear the doorway. Once inside, she made the whole room look laughably small, and Caleb felt like he was a child in a tree house, only playing at the business of adults with his desk and his papers.

  “I brought you a sandwich,” she said, dropping a plastic bag on his desk.

  He took out a sub wrapped in white paper. “Did you eat?” he asked her.

  She shrugged, bundled her hair up in one hand then let it fall over her shoulder.

  “You have to eat. How am I going to feel okay about going out of town if you don’t eat?” he said.

  “I’ve been feeling nervous. I just want to sleep and smoke and take baths.”

  Caleb could tell that she was thinner this week than last, her jaw and cheekbones more pronounced than usual. And she hadn’t done her nails. Last week’s polish was flaking off at the cuticles.

  She saw the map lying on his desk and cocked her head to look at it. “How long will you be in Chicago?”

  “A weekend,” he said, chewing his sandwich. He offered her a bite, but she shook her head.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Adie,” he said, “I don’t know what to do with you.”

  “You don’t have to do anything with me. If something needs to be done with me, I’ll do it.”

  “I wish you would come with us. You could follow in the car and sleep in my trailer.” He offered this even though he knew she would refuse.

  And indeed, Adrienne snorted and rolled her eyes. Two people in a tiny bed in a tiny room in the heat. He knew this was not her idea of comfort. What she wanted was for him to stay. He considered telling her that it was his last chance to save his circus, but even that sounded like a lousy excuse.

  “We’ll get a motel,” he said.

  “That would be ridiculous. You might as well quit your job. We’d spend half your salary on motel rooms.”

  “You want me to quit my job?”

  Adrienne didn’t answer. Something had caught her eye on the other side of the small cobweb-covered window of his office.

  “Is that Henry?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Is he sulking?”

  Adrienne frowned. “It is Henry. Why is he going in that trailer?”

  “Probably needs a nap after fighting with Kylie all morning,” said Caleb. He slipped the map into a drawer in his desk.

  “Fighting?” she said, still staring out the window. “Is he living in there? In that hot nasty trailer?”

  “He doesn’t mind it. He’s happy for a space.”

  “Caleb, how could you let him stay there? It’s got to be a hundred and twenty degrees in that thing!”

  “It cools down at night. Besides, he likes the heat. He says it’s good for his flexibility.”

  Adrienne clenched her jaw and stared at him. He knew she believed in the generosity of his spirit. She believed she knew him better, as his wife, than acquaintances who would jump to the conclusion that he was a curmudgeon. He knew that to have this belief challenged, to think that the general opinion of her husband might be truer than her own understanding of him, made her furious.

  “Adrienne, what am I supposed to do? There’s nothing in the budget to put him up somewhere else. He should have planned better before he ran away from home.”

  This was meant to be a joke, a funny thing to lighten the mood so they could have a pleasant twenty minutes together while he ate his sandwich. But Adrienne balled up one of the clean napkins on his desk and tossed it at him.

  “You don’t plan to run away. For one thing. He’s just a kid, and you’re letting him live in a death trap. It doesn’t even have a window AC unit.”

  “Lots of kids live in death traps,” he said. “I’m not letting it happen. There’s just nothing I can do about it.”

  “We have a guest room. We aren’t doing anything else with it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Adrienne lit one of her long cigarettes.

  Of course she was serious.

  “Okay, I understand that you’re just trying to help him out, and that it isn’t fair that he has to sleep in that thing. But he isn’t a puppy. He’s twenty-four years old and he’s my employee.”

  “You know damn well he isn’t twenty-four. And you leave in a week, anyway. One week. It’s not going to ruin your professional relationship. And so what if it does? This is a circus. It’s supposed to be a family. You’re the only one in a suit.”

  She stood but had to keep leaning forward since she couldn’t stand up straight without putting her head through the ceiling. “I’m going. I just want you to think about it. It’s one week.”

  “It’s our last week together before I leave.”

  Her voice softened. “I know. But we should be generous.”

  Caleb watched her leave through his window. As she walked to the parking lot, she passed Azi and Lorne, stopping to kiss their cheeks. She had to bend down in a significant way for Lorne, though she could reach Azi’s bald head by simply tilting her chin down. She was generous. Everyone knew it.

  He liked that she saw him as generous, too, but it wasn’t accurate. He turned away people who poured their hearts into their auditions, and people who looked hungry, and people who had loneliness written all over their bodies, simply because his outsight told him they were not the best thing for Feely and Feinstein. The only possible exception to this was Lorne, who wasn’t so good, but who was a bargain, a guy who did four jobs for the price of one. No, Caleb was not generous like Adrienne. Adrienne could never think of a man as a “bargain.”

  But that was fine. If Adrienne managed the circus, it would have gone under a long time ago. Henry could stay right where he was.

  HENRY WALKED, ENRAGED, BACK TO his trailer after rehearsal. The fight with Kylie and Lorne had taken a lid off his composure. He tried not to “show his ass,” as his mother would have called it—he tried to talk himself out of his anger. He told himself that Kylie was just incompetent and that Lorne was just strange, but it felt like they had ganged up on him, even Seamus, whose will was carried out by his employees so well that, even though he was hardly around, Henry could feel his absolute control over every show, every tent corner and costume stitch.

  The problem was really that the angel show was extra work that no one wanted to do but Henry, so they’d bullied him out of his idea.

  He was in his head, not paying attention, and found himself in the path of a camel. It was Izzy. He could tell by the small, circle-shaped chunk cut out of the edge of her ear.

  Lorne, who was walking the camel, his T-shirt soaked in sweat, yanked Izzy out of Henry’s path.

  “Excuse me,” said Henry and redirected himself.

  “Hey, clown?” he asked.

  “Yes?” said Henry and kept walking.

  “You afraid of horses?”

  Henry spun around to face him but kept walking backward. “No. Of course not. I’m in that barn smelling her every night, aren’t I?”

  “Then why don’t you want Ambrosia in the show?”

  Henry watched Izzy chew something that she was imagining eating or maybe had regurgitated. “It isn’t about horses or no horses. It’s that I want to do a whole different show.”r />
  “Well … Seamus isn’t gonna let you do a new show. I can tell you that right now. So you should consider using Ambrosia, alright? You should just consider her.”

  Henry wanted to scream. He had absolutely no idea how to work the horse into the farmer act without making it seem forced. He didn’t know how the dilemma had become “either we do a new act, or we incorporate this fucking horse for no reason.” Oh, wait, yes he did. Because Lorne had butted in and insisted that the horse would be a marvelous addition, and Kylie thought, Here’s a way not to learn anything new. He was filling with toxins, a boiling, poisonous anger.

  “Well? Will you think about it?” asked Lorne, and Henry’s anger suddenly diffused. Lorne’s tone was more pleading than insistent, now. The more he talked to Lorne, the more he felt the man had some deep misunderstandings about the world.

  “I will think about it,” said Henry, his voice lowered.

  Lorne took this at face value, immediately brightening. Henry was blowing him off, and most people would have bristled at this, but Lorne thumbed his suspenders and smiled.

  Inside the trailer, Henry stripped off his clothes and lay on the cot in front of the fans, one blowing out, one blowing in. The sheet beneath him became soaked with his sweat almost immediately.

  When he could not relax, he got his brother’s letter out, and lay back down, resting the envelope on his chest. When Henry took a breath, the letter rose on his chest. He told himself that it was paper, light as anything, and that there was no way it could be crushing out his breath. He was strong. He could tighten his muscles and protect the bones and organs they surrounded. Azi, who had to be 220 pounds at least, maybe more, had stood on Henry’s chest before, and the lungs within him kept filling and emptying, as if there were nothing pressing on them at all. The letter was just a letter, he told himself. But the feeling of being crushed would not go away.

  The letter was no longer a comfort, and he no longer had the planning of the angel show to distract him from the responsibility he had to answer it.

  He wrote and revised this in his head, over and over, and never got anything on paper that was the kind of thing to send to a brother. “Dear Andre,” it would begin, “When I sit down to write your letter, all I can think of is Dad hitting you with a chair leg. I think you were ten. I remember wondering where he got the chair leg from, because we didn’t have any broken chairs.

  I can’t stop myself from wishing I could be him in that moment, knocking the wind out of you. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Now, in an attempt to slow his racing, anxious heart, he even wrote a few lines on the back of a Feely and Feinstein flyer: Dear Andre, I’d like to see you, and then a few lines that he scratched out, then a few more. Dear Andre, Guess what? You were right. I’m a traitor. He started over. And started over. Dear Andre, Dear Andre, Dear Andre.

  He gave up, shoving the letter and the flyer back into the envelope. He put his clothes back on. He looked for things to cover himself with. If he could not get out from under this, he would let himself be buried. He would help this slow smothering along.

  CALEB WAS THINKING HE SHOULD paint Adrienne as herself. Not with her as Valentine Tessier and him as Max Beckmann, but as himself, the artist, Caleb Baratucci, and her, the subject, Adrienne Lee Baratucci. He walked the circus grounds that afternoon imagining this and inspecting the trailers, cataloguing the damage that was already accumulated on the vehicles so that he could record any damage sustained during this season’s travel.

  Azi hollered at him, caught up with him. “Baratucci. Lighter fluid. You know we need it?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Use a lotta lighter fluid, man,” he said.

  Caleb sighed. “Alright, alright.”

  The fans were running when he reached the screened windows of Henry’s trailer. From where he stood he could see the boy’s feet. He was lying in the cot, which was right under the window. As he walked further, though, he saw that it was only his feet that were uncovered. The rest of him was under a blanket pulled over his head. He wasn’t moving. Caleb could not see his chest rise or fall through the turning of the fan blades.

  He went to the door and knocked. No answer. He yanked at the door, but the stupid kid had locked it. As if that were any type of privacy when his windows were wide open. He ran back to the screens.

  “Henry, what are you doing?” he shouted.

  When the boy didn’t answer, Caleb pinched the mechanism that held the screen in the window and it fell forward. He pushed the fan inward. Only when the fan hit his legs did the boy jerk upright. Caleb hoisted himself up with his arms and dipped his chest toward the cot, gravity pulling the rest of his body through the window. Henry was under not one blanket, but two, and a large piece of plastic that had been stretched over the window on the opposite side of the trailer.

  Caleb pulled himself back into a dignified position, snatched up the plastic, and threw it into a corner. “Goddammit, Henry.” What was this idiot doing, lying under blankets and plastic in this weather? He knew Henry believed his body was full of toxins—was he dumb enough to think he could sweat them out? Breathing hard, Caleb glanced out the window to see if anyone had been walking by during these last embarrassing moments, if anyone had seen him looking so desperate, a pathetic, frantic man trying clumsily to squeeze through a tiny window.

  “What the hell are you doing? It’s three hundred degrees in here. Are you trying to kill yourself? Are you trying to ruin the show for everyone?”

  Caleb reached out to pull the rest of the blankets off him, and Henry raised his arms to shield himself. His hair was so saturated in sweat that it looked like he’d just held it under a faucet. Caleb put his hands down. He hadn’t intended to hit him, but the boy’s reaction made him feel almost as guilty as if he had.

  The boy pushed the blankets off. A smudged envelope fell on the floor next to the cot, and Henry fumbled for it. His clothes stuck to him and seemed to make it hard for him to move. He couldn’t manage to pick the letter up and fell off the cot.

  Then Caleb knew. This was not about sweating out toxins. This was the opposite. This was surrendering to them.

  Caleb replaced the fan in the window. He went to his bucket and filled an olive jar with water. He offered it to the boy but did not feel generous.

  CHAPTER 7

  Edgefield, Indiana

  November 1978

  HENRY MEETS THE SPECIAL AGENT, the one with the van full of floral boxes, one more time. The night it happens, it’s snowing in Edgefield and he is lying in bed thinking about how much he wishes he were the favorite. He wants to be everyone’s favorite: his mother’s favorite, his father’s favorite, God’s favorite. He envies the all-white kittens in litters of tabbies. He envies red popsicles.

  The wind rattles the windows of his bedroom. A train’s howl can be heard above the storm in the distance, chugging, cutting through the icy air.

  He should be the favorite, he thinks, because he’s noticed that he’s better than most people at a lot of different things. For one, basketball: he played with Andre and his buddies, Will Miller and Bud Stinson, all seventh graders, and he made six baskets, even though they were way taller than him.

  For another thing, he could make his body into interesting shapes. Several months ago, he’d seen children on a television show doing backbends and tried it himself in the living room. It was too easy. He walked his hands back toward his ankles. His arms followed, and so did his torso, until his chest planted on the ground and he grabbed his ankles. He propelled himself forward with the muscles in his lower stomach, so that he became a wheel and rolled. Once he felt like the wheel was impressive enough, he called his mother into the room.

  She looked ragged. She was putting Frankie’s pants back on him for about the eighth time that day. Their well was dry, and so she had just come back from the neighbors’ with two ten-gallon buckets of water that she pulled in a red wagon, which was not their toy, but belonged
to another neighbor. “What do you need, William Henry?” she asked.

  “Watch this move!” he said and made his human wheel for her. When he righted himself, he saw that his mother’s sleepy eyes had widened. She stood very still and held her hand, clenched in a fist, at her chest.

  “Holy guacamole! I thought you were going to break your neck.”

  He touched the part of his body that concerned her. “Nope. Neck’s fine,” he said. “I made that move up. Good, huh?”

  Later that evening, they watched Drunken Master, with Jackie Chan, who, their father pointed out several times, “does all his own stunts.” Andre sat next to their father’s recliner, both of them hypnotized by the swiftness of Jackie Chan’s moves. While the smiling, muscular hero on TV whacked guys in the nuts, dunked them in vats of water, and bonked them on the backs of their heads, his mother traced the veins in Henry’s arms with the tips of her fingers. He loved this touch—the light graze of her fingers, but not so light that it tickled.

  “You got some talent, you know?” she said.

  And Henry had thought, This is what it would be like to be the favorite.

  He turns these thoughts over in his mind as he tries to sleep. His mother’s favorite is Andre. His father has no favorites. God’s favorite is Jesus, Henry thinks, readjusting his head on the pillow, and too bad that’s already been established and there’s no way to go back on it.

  He is on the edge of sleep, when, inside Henry’s body, something falls and the impact of its landing jolts him awake again. His mouth feels dry and sticky, and there is a full pitcher of red drink in the fridge. If he’s quiet about it and doesn’t turn on the lights or leave the refrigerator door open too long, he probably won’t wake up his father, who fell asleep on the couch during Charlie’s Angels.

  He walks carefully down the stairs, listening to each footstep’s echo against the stairwell. Each one is a password, getting him safely from one moment into the next. At the bottom of the stairs, he can see into the living room. He passes his father, who is breathing steadily, whistling a little when he exhales. He is in the position he often sleeps in—arms folded over his chest, legs crossed at the ankles. No blanket, even in the cold weather. His hair spreads in a halo around his head.