Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  “Idiot,” Frankie said, not to Henry, but to himself. “Of course you were on the streets. How would you get in so fast with a theatre looking sixteen?”

  “You were close.”

  “Stop saying that. You wouldn’t believe how much school I had to miss. I had perfect attendance before. Goddammit, it would have been worth it if I could have found you. But no, I had to be an idiot. I got nothing out of that whole trip. Except Police Story.”

  “Which you haven’t watched.”

  “I never watch any of them,” said Frankie. “But he just keeps buying them.”

  “Why don’t you watch them? They’re the best.”

  “I dunno. I just don’t want to,” he said. The interlocking shapes on his wall, though, made Henry think that Frankie knew exactly why he wasn’t watching them. He was a kid who could see a pattern. Maybe he wasn’t Robin Hood, wasn’t impervious, but he was smart. He thought of what Andre said the night that he left, about not letting their father know he needed him. How that was the big secret.

  “You can come and watch the show any time,” Henry offered. “You can come and …” He dropped his voice. “I could even come get you if you needed. I already wrote a phone number on the pad downstairs. If you call it, I’ll get the message. You could stay with me.”

  Frankie shook his head like he found this idea mortifying. “Man, I don’t want to do that at all. I just wanted to know where you were. You and Andre, you’re both messed up in the head. I’m normal. I want to go to fucking high school.”

  “Oh, so you think that being a runaway at a circus isn’t the best life for you?” Henry clicked his tongue. “When did you become a snob?”

  His little brother smiled, then, as if relieved of the responsibility of carrying the depressing conversation forward.

  Above, they heard what sounded like a muffled debate over whether or not they had found everything.

  “Do you want to go through this?” said Henry, pointing to the box, then the pictures.

  Frankie shrugged. “I hardly knew her.”

  Henry’s heart sank. He knew this was true, that Frankie spent only two years of his life with her. But some deep primitive part of his brain must have loved her, after all the mushy carrots she scraped off his chin, after all the nights she rocked him and patted his butt to make him fall asleep. Still, for nine years, it was Henry who had pinched him awake in the morning and made his breakfast and walked him to school and tucked him in at night. It would make sense if Frankie missed him more than her.

  As if to placate Henry, Frankie pulled a random picture from the drugstore envelope and slipped it into his pocket. “Maybe you ought to take those videos. Since I’m never going to watch them.”

  Henry shook his head. “Not watching them might be a good idea. Giving them to me isn’t.”

  Frankie eyed the floor. “Doesn’t matter. Whether I watch them, don’t watch them, keep them, give them away. You like all that kung fu shit. You take ’em.”

  “I’m not taking your videos.”

  Frankie skinned one of his pillows and chucked the videos in the pillowcase. “Take them. Take them and we’ll be even. We’ll be good. You left—so what? I’ll forget about it. I won’t hold it against you for another second.”

  Henry took a deep breath. Yes, a strategist. That’s what Frankie was. He knew exactly what Henry wanted most and offered it to him in exchange for what he wanted. Henry wasn’t quite sure why he insisted on, of all things, Henry taking a pile of videos, especially when it was something that might set off their father. Maybe he wanted to show Henry he was strong. Maybe he wanted to be sure that Henry thought of him once he was gone. At any rate, Henry knew his brother’s offer was bogus: it wasn’t possible for Frankie to forget about Henry leaving. It wasn’t possible for them to be even. Still, Henry gave Frankie the keys to the rental car and told him to put the pillowcase in the trunk. Not to be even, but because whatever Frankie wanted, Henry wanted him to have it.

  Andre’s legs dropped down from the hole in the ceiling, and Henry stood up to hold the ladder steady. Both men came down filthy, covered in dust and wads of cobweb and insect carcasses. They were finishing an argument they’d started in the attic, something about life on other planets, about what must be in the goo that life lifts itself from.

  Frankie flew back up the stairs and when he saw them, he shucked another pillow. “You’re getting shit all over my room,” he said, holding out the pillowcase. “Take your clothes off.”

  Without pausing their argument or questioning Frankie’s order, Andre and his father began by removing their shoes. Andre said, “Mars,” and their father said, “Impossible!” They stripped off their shirts and unbuckled their belts and their clothes dropped softly into the pillowcase that Frankie held open. They gesticulated in their boxers and their holey socks while Frankie rearranged the two bare pillows.

  Andre said, “All humans came from the sky, goddammit. Yes, they did. We’re all children of extraterrestrials. And furthermore, those extraterrestrials that left us here come and check on us from time to time.”

  Henry wanted to write this all into a sketch because this was the truth he could never manage to tell about his family: they were naked and mean, trying to get information from each other about what they were, where the fuck they came from, and when the ones that loved them would come back to make sure their feet were still stuck to the ground, that the light from the stars still reached them.

  CHAPTER 26

  THERE WERE ONLY A FEW pictures. In one, a little girl held her mother’s hand at a birthday party. In another, the girl was older, around thirteen, in a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses smiling out at them from a porch where people had gathered to cook out. A yet-older version of this girl wore a cowgirl costume, which was less a costume, and more a set of underwear that suggested cowgirldom. In this picture, she licked the boot of another near-naked girl in a ten-gallon hat, somehow managing to grin coyly, even with her tongue out.

  Once they got back to St. Louis, Andre and Henry rifled through her treasures, crouched in an alleyway in Dogtown, trying to shield themselves from the gusts of wind that pulled the pictures from their hands. Andre winced at the picture of his mother publicly displaying her lean torso and deep cleavage but Henry thought his mother’s smile was just as sweet in the dark club as it was in the picture of the cookout. In fact, it was almost sweeter. He knew without knowing that his mother was a performer, and here she was, performing.

  Only one of the pictures had anything written on it, which was also the only picture that featured any of her children. It seemed to be in the same subterranean place, only this time their mother was more clothed and less shellacked in makeup. Her shorts were rolled up, her hair loose and curled. She held a baby with fair hair and fat thighs. On the back of the photograph was their mother’s handwriting, a cursive full of extraneous curls and loops: Rylan, 21, with Junior, eleven months.

  “That’s me!” said Andre, snatching the picture from Henry.

  Andre examined the photo as if to be sure it wasn’t counterfeit. While he squinted at every dark corner of the picture and analyzed the handwriting on the back of it, Henry opened the floral box full of Southern Blue cosmetics.

  False eyelashes and gold-ribbed tubes—like bullets, Henry thought, and shivered, because he had made this mental comparison before, long ago. Velvety bright colors were in every compact, and now that he had seen the pictures, Henry knew why he never saw his mother use this makeup. This was for the stage.

  When he touched the round floral-print box nestled in the bottom tier, he felt the same thrill and panic he felt as a little boy searching though his mother’s things.

  He twisted the lid. There was no powder—no, of course there wasn’t. There never was. There was plastic. He remembered the plastic, the blue smudges, but here, the sources of the smudges were apparent. Little round pills, robin’s egg blue. He pulled out the plastic bag and shook the old drugs into his hand.

 
; “What is this?” he asked Andre, who looked up from his picture with reluctance.

  “Where’d you find that?” Andre asked, snatching it away.

  “In her makeup kit.”

  His brother held the bag up to the light. Henry had a good guess about what these pills were, and judging by the way Andre’s face fell, he had a good guess, too. The wind blew through the alley, and the bag fluttered between them. Andre’s face reflected Henry’s own reaction to the sequence of memories that surfaced now. What their mother had gotten done during the course of a day when they were children was considerable, wasn’t it? The damn well was always going dry. She grocery shopped with at least one of them in tow and often all three. Sometimes she didn’t shop. She just made food appear, and no one ever wondered how, because mothers did that sort of thing, right? She swung Frankie around, she made Andre go to school, and teased Henry until he smiled, and cooked and cleaned and fixed whatever their father told her to fix. And wasn’t it strange that she rarely seemed tired? And weren’t her good spirits always a little frenzied?

  “Shit,” said Andre. He opened the bag and ate one of the pills.

  “Andre. Jesus, what are you doing? That could be anything,” said Henry.

  Andre wrapped one arm around his knee and went back to staring at his picture. “Pretty positive it’s speed.”

  “But you’re not totally positive,” he said.

  “Yeah, there’s only one way to be positive.”

  He offered the bag to Henry.

  “It’s old,” Henry said.

  “Don’t matter. You’ll feel it. Maybe not as strong, but it’ll get you high.”

  “Jesus …”

  His brother sighed. “You don’t have to take it. I’ll tell you what it is when it kicks in. But, whatever it is, she took it.” He shook the bag. What he meant was, this was a chance to be near her. If Henry took the pill, he would feel something his living, breathing mother had felt. But once the effects of this pill wore off, his mother would still be dead, and his body, his only home, full of poison.

  Still.

  Andre tipped the bag into Henry’s open hand, and Henry put his hand to his mouth, dropped the pill on his tongue, worked up a wash of saliva, and swallowed.

  “Okay,” said Andre. “Let’s divvy it up. I got to get on a plane.”

  “The drugs?”

  “Hell no, we’re throwing the rest of this shit away. I mean, the pictures and stuff.”

  Andre had two giant ziplock freezer bags to put things in. They claimed what they wanted, without disagreement. As they loaded the bags, Henry saw his brother smiling to himself.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You. I can’t believe you took that. You’re such a fuckin’ mama’s boy.”

  Henry sealed his baggie. Biographies of the American Presidents hung out by one corner. Certainly it was the book that inspired her to give Henry his name. He would read it, carefully, and look for clues, messages from her about who she thought he might be.

  CHAPTER 27

  HE DROVE HIS BROTHER TO the airport in Caleb’s car, which Caleb had given over reluctantly.

  “Caleb, I swear on a stack of bibles—” Henry said.

  “And I swear on an even bigger stack that if I don’t see you in two hours I will find you and end your life,” said Caleb.

  At the airport, Henry helped Andre carry his bag to the ticket counter before saying, “I’ll see you at Christmas or something.”

  Andre wasn’t sure what shoulder to bow toward when Henry opened his arms to embrace him. They were a family of people who slipped out in the night, on freight trains, without explanations or apologies—not one that accompanied one another to the airport, seeing one another off with a hug or a promise of return.

  “For sure, little brother,” Andre said.

  After his brother boarded the plane, Henry took the car to the circus grounds to get the last of his things out of the trailer. They had found a new place to rehearse, a gymnasium in a church’s rec center, so he didn’t plan to be spending much more time on the grounds. He’d left an old costume, a can opener, and a big spoon in his trailer, and though he knew it was easy to replace a thing like a spoon, he didn’t have many possessions, and that spoon was his.

  He realized that he was thinking about spoons kind of loudly. In fact, all his thoughts were loud, his mind narrating everything in a shouting tone: The stripes of the tent are blue-green-yellow, the dirt is soft and my feet are sinking in it a little, and the wind cuts between my arms and my sides and it rolls over my shoulders and my legs are like scissors, slicing. This is because of the drugs. This is what new feels like. This is what my mother felt like.

  There are circles on the ground, the loudest voice of his thoughts interrupted, different circumferences, all dark red. In the dust, they looked like round patches of velvet. But the patches got bigger, and Henry’s already pounding heart thudded even harder when he realized it was blood—sticky like blood, smelling like blood. The smell triggered his reflex to run, and he found his legs spinning beneath him.

  Someone had done something.

  A scream confirmed this, and Henry wanted to run away from the sound, wanted to ignore it, but no, there he went, right toward it, to do what? To stop it? To get murdered? He wasn’t making decisions, he was just doing what the world forced his body to do, move, move, move. Move toward the sound.

  Inside the stable he found the source of the screams and the circles of velvety red. It was the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Horse of a Different Color. Her cries sounded like a woman’s, and when Henry saw her, he thought he ought to be relieved that she was just a horse. But the froth of saliva that gathered at the corners of her mouth stopped him from feeling anything resembling relief. The skin of her broad, flat nose was split and she stood on unsteady legs outside her pen, Lorne beside her, holding a club.

  Lorne didn’t see Henry and before Henry could gather his breath to yell, Lorne swung the club against Ambrosia’s head. It landed on her jaw with a sickening crack. She whinnied, another wide-open, human-sounding scream, and when her mouth opened, Henry heard the echo of the crack resonating.

  Her head shook from side to side. No, no, no. But she was not saying no, Henry realized. He recognized this movement, the thrashing of her head, the way she stomped. She was in pain, and in her stupid animal brain, she thought that if she could just move enough, she could escape her own body.

  Lorne saw Henry then, but that didn’t stop him from swinging again, this time hitting the horse’s shoulder. She faltered, going down on one knee for a moment, but then somehow lifting herself again.

  Henry wasn’t sure what he did to close the distance between himself and Lorne, or how the club ended up in his hands. His actual memory of the movements, the motions, would be overshadowed by his much stronger memory of what happened inside him.

  Inside, he became Jackie Chan.

  Henry did three or four front flips and grabbed Lorne by the neck, using his feet. Lorne fell forward, and Henry, who could right himself faster than gravity could pull Lorne down, popped a heel into the chin of the forward-reeling man. He tossed Lorne into the air with a roundhouse, and as the man flew off in one direction, the club flew off in the other. Henry’s head whipped to the side as he saw the club and he leapt for it, catching it mid-air. This was how he wound up with the club in his hand, and his foot on Lorne’s chest. Or at least, he felt like this was how things went. He couldn’t be sure.

  He hit Lorne with the club. Managed to avoid his head. And Henry heard him say something that sounded like an apology, but Henry had heard it all before. He’d heard it coming from his own mouth. You say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, when this is happening to you, but what you’re really doing is asking to be set free from pain: stop, knock me out, kill me.

  Lorne tried to say something else, but Henry jammed the end of the club into his chest. Lorne had tears in his eyes, and he grasped at something invisible.

&nb
sp; Henry stopped hitting long enough for Lorne to find his voice.

  “It’s not like you think. Call the animal welfare people, they’ll take her now. They’ll fix her. They’ll find her a home—she’s practically royalty. But if I waited—if I waited until Seamus sold the circus off, she’d be glue, Henry. This is mercy.”

  Henry knew he was supposed to see the logic in this, but he didn’t, so he hit him again, this time in the stomach. “It’s not mercy to break a thing’s jaw! Put a bullet in her head. That’s mercy.”

  Lorne groaned, curled up. “But she won’t get to live,” he said. “You want to put a bullet in someone’s head, put it in Tex’s. And make it a big one. Because she doesn’t have a chance. Jesus Christ, Henry, please. I didn’t want to do them both. I swear to God, I was trying to save her. Call the welfare people if you don’t believe me. Call them right now.”

  Henry looked at Ambrosia, thrashing her head, jaw slack, white foam oozing from her lips. The blood kept trickling, wet and fresh from her ear. She would not be the same. Whatever was in her head that made sense of the world no longer worked.

  “You’ve done this before,” said Henry.

  “Just once,” whimpered Lorne. “At the park on the way back. I wanted to see if I could hit her at all. She forgave me.”

  Henry smashed the curve of Lorne’s spine with the club, and he cried out even louder than Ambrosia had whinnied. The impact moved up the length of the club and stung Henry’s hand. He hated and loved how this felt. It seemed he’d been traveling toward this for a long time, traveling to the place where he met the highest potential of his body.

  It was here, in this. He didn’t doubt this was justice.

  This was what Andre must have felt when he went after Ice Cream Boobs’s johns. Strong and vindicated. But Henry’s mind kept going back to Ambrosia and her broken jaw and her suffering and it ruined the thrill of justice.