by Billie Letts
“Look, you were right. See?” He pulled up his pant leg to reveal the place where his kneecap used to be. “If I’d listened to you when you told me to stay here with the family, I’d still have a whole leg.”
“But you wouldn’t have been the star I saw, working that wire, a hundred feet in the air. No net, no fear. Joy.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I went to Vegas, Cirque du Soleil, and I watched you. I knew then you were right to leave here, to try for something bigger. Your dream, I guess you’d call it.
“Why? Because you were the best.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
LUTIE TAPPED AT the opened door of the costume shop, waited, then knocked, louder this time. She thought about turning away, going back to the house, and taking off the bandage by herself. In case she looked like a creature in a horror movie, she wondered if she might handle the shock better if she saw it alone.
Then from somewhere in a back room, she heard Mama Sim’s voice and the sound of laughter coming from Essie.
But when she walked in, saw what the large front room of the shop held, she forgot momentarily why she was there.
Racks and racks of hanging garments stretched from wall to wall, and as she inched her way up and down the rows, she couldn’t keep her hands from touching clothes she’d only dreamed of wearing. Body-hugging leotards in brilliant reds, royal blues, forest greens, designed with starbursts of rhinestones that reflected light, glistening like jewels; kimonos of sateen in black and silver with ribbons in colors of sunset orange and turquoise; bell-bottomed jumpsuits of bright yellow spandex splashed with sequins and amethyst; velvet ball gowns with swirls of sunstone, the fabric so soft and enticing that Lutie rubbed it against her face.
She discovered sparkling costumes for flamenco dancers, fairy-tale characters, angels, Gypsies, flappers, queens and their courts—all decorated with gleaming crystal drops, delicate lace, and beads of red and green, strands of fringe, tiny gemstones glimmering like diamonds and rubies.
On the back wall, she found shelves that reached from floor to ceiling, some crowded with shawls, boas, sashes, masks, wigs, gloves, scarves, and exotic fans. Others held crowns, nurses’ caps, berets, cloches, top hats, sailors’ caps, and safari hats.
After she made sure she was alone in the costume room, she put on a black-and-gold butterfly mask edged in red fake fur, a mask that hid the bandage on her face. Then she added a shoulder-length black wig and topped it with a green jeweled headdress adorned with the midnight blue plumage of a peacock’s feathers. Finally, she draped a black boa around her neck, pulled on a pair of gold silk fingerless gloves, and at a full-length mirror struck the pose of a model.
“Very nice,” Mama Sim said. “Absolutely lovely.”
Startled to find Mama Sim standing behind her, and embarrassed to be discovered in costume, Lutie began removing the outfit she was wearing, putting everything back where she’d found it. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“For what? Trying on a few things? Goodness, child, nothing wrong in that.”
“Did you make all this? The clothes, the hats . . .”
“Essie and me work on the costumes pretty much the year round. We have two women who help us from the first of the year until the circus goes out in March. That’s crunch time. But stuff like the fans, wigs, the masks, and gloves, we buy.”
“I’ve only seen clothes like these in the movies.”
“Did you get a chance to look at everything?”
“When I came in, and heard you somewhere in the back, I started nosing through these. Guess I lost track of the time.”
“Aw, I’ve been known to play dress-up out here when I’m alone. I’d hate for anyone to see this bag of bones in a sexy leotard, though I practically lived in them for nearly thirty years.”
“I’ll bet you like making costumes like this.” Lutie pulled out a fringed flapper dress.
“I have fun with Essie, but performers having their costumes fitted can be a pain in the butt. ‘Can you take it in about two inches?’” Mama said in a falsetto voice. “‘I don’t like this neckline.’ ‘Why is this so long?’ They drive us nuts.”
Lutie smiled. “Sounds exciting to me.”
Suddenly, Mama Sim pressed her hands against Lutie’s cheeks. “Your teeth! Oh, honey, your teeth. They’re beautiful! Dr. Slice outdid himself.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t so sure about going to a dentist named Slice, but you were right. He’s good.”
“Come on, darlin’. Let’s go get that bandage off. See what you look like now.”
“Is this why you asked me to wait to see my face? So Dr. Slice could finish up first?”
“Well, that . . . and because Essie planned a little surprise for you.”
“Really?”
“Let’s go back and let her work some of her magic.”
Mama Sim led the girl into one of the back rooms, where Essie was bent over a sewing machine.
“Look who’s here,” Mama said.
“I heard you two talking,” Essie said. “Lutie, let me see those teeth.”
When Lutie smiled, Essie squealed and clapped her hands. “You’re beautiful! Now let’s make you even more beautiful. You ready?”
“I guess. I couldn’t go to sleep last night for thinking about this.”
“You worried?”
“Some. I’m afraid of what I’m going to look like.”
“Here,” Essie said as she turned a barber’s chair away from the mirror.
“You’re still not going to let me look?”
“Not until I’m finished.”
“Okay.”
When Essie gently peeled away the bandage, Lutie looked for some reaction, but Essie’s expression didn’t change.
“Close your eyes.”
Lutie did as she was told, but with reluctance. Even though she couldn’t see herself in the mirror, she wanted to feel more a participant in this event. With her eyes closed, she felt shut out of the action.
As Essie patted a flesh-tone concealer over the scar, Lutie said, “That’s an odd sensation. That place feels numb.”
“Yeah, it will for a while, then the feeling will return.”
Essie took her time blending the foundation for Lutie’s face. She dabbed a bit on, stood back to take in the color, then blended in a bit of pale yellow, which helped to correct a slightly bluish cast. Finally satisfied, she looked to Mama Sim for approval. Smiling, Mama gave Essie a nod.
To give Lutie some badly needed color, Essie brushed her cheeks with a soft coral blush, her eyelids with light brown to accentuate the green in her hazel eyes. She used a thin pencil of eyeliner on Lutie’s top and bottom lids and dark brown mascara on the eyelashes. For the last step, she drew the outline of the girl’s lips in dark rose, then filled in her inner lips with a pale pink lip gloss.
Pleased with the results of the makeup, Essie turned her attention to Lutie’s hair. She trimmed it, shaped it to fall softly around the girl’s face, then back-combed it a bit to add some height.
When she was finished, she opened one of the drawers at the makeup counter, where she’d hidden her surprise: a hat she’d made for Lutie. Beaded with aurora borealis rhinestones in a rainbow of colors, the hat also had a thin veil of elegant gold threads.
As soon as Essie finished fitting the hat on Lutie’s head, she turned the chair so Lutie could see herself in the mirror.
At first, Lutie was speechless. Then she got up and leaned closer to the mirror, slowly turning her head from side to side.
Mama Sim said, “What do you think?”
“Well, I don’t look much like Paris Hilton, but I guess I shouldn’t have expected too much.”
Dub and Juan were walking out of the welding shop when Dub saw Lutie disappear into the ring barn.
“Hey, there goes your girl.”
“Lutie? No.”
“She just went into the ring barn.”
“Why the hell would she going in there?”
>
“Don’t know, but I’ve seen her come out of there twice in the last couple of days.”
“Believe I go seeing what she’s up to,” Juan said. “See you later.”
As Dub started for his trailer, Juan walked down to the ring barn, but when he got there, he hesitated outside the closed door, wondering if he was doing the right thing. Finally, his decision made, he opened the door as quietly as he could, then made sure it didn’t slam behind him. Once inside, he tiptoed as best he could, to stand behind a canvas draped near the entrance. When he peeked out, his eyes scanned the length of the enormous enclosure until he finally spotted Lutie on the balance beam.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
LUTIE HAD JUST left the ring barn when she heard the crunch of gravel behind her, someone or something running, drawing closer to her with each footfall. When she turned, Fate jumped at her, roaring and clawing the air, an animal closing in on his prey. As he pounced, he wrinkled his nose and hissed.
“What are you supposed to be?” she asked. “I’m guessing a lion.”
This was not the stunned, terrified response Fate had hoped for. “No, Lutie,” he whined. “Can’t you tell the difference between a lion and a tiger?” When she turned and continued walking, he got in front of her, skipping backward toward the road. “Where you been?”
“Costume shop.”
“Why?”
“Mama Sim asked me to.”
“Why?” He was clearly in a playful mood this morning—little brother pestering big sister.
“Essie took my bandage off.”
“Why didn’t she take it off at the house?”
“Fate, would you stop with the questions? You’re getting on my nerves.”
“You look really good. I can’t even see your scar. But you have lipstick on your teeth. Here.” Fate stopped skipping and made a move toward Lutie, pretending he was going to rub off the lipstick.
“Stop!” Lutie swatted his shoulder.
“Know where I’m going?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“Where?”
“Fishing with Johnny.”
Fate picked up a handful of small flat stones and began trying to skip them across the ground.
Lutie hadn’t thought much about the change in her brother until now, but in her recollection of the past week, she realized he was different. He hadn’t been slinking off to be alone with his books of facts or playing Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit by himself. He hadn’t expressed any new fear of global warming, either. And then it hit her. He no longer reminded her of a forlorn, eccentric old man. No, he looked and acted like an eleven-year-old boy. He was, for the time being, a kid again.
“Did you know Raynoldo left this morning?” Fate asked. “He went to catch up with his circus.”
“I know,” Lutie said. “I saw him before he left. And I talked to Juan. Found out he’s heading back to Vegas in a couple of days. He’ll give us a lift.”
“Back to Vegas?” Fate’s voice was beginning to flatten out.
“Yeah.”
Her response brought him to a stop in the road.
“Lutie, I don’t want to go back there.”
“Listen, Fate, we’ll do it differently this time.”
“No. I won’t go back.”
Lutie was far more stunned by the firmness she heard in his voice than she had been during the abbreviated tiger attack minutes earlier. Still, she thought she could persuade him.
“I’ve been writing down some ideas, making a list of ways to make it easier on us this go-round.”
“I don’t care about your list.”
“I think—”
“Lutie, you don’t seem to be able to see what we have here. Something we’ve never had before. A family!”
“What?! We had a family,” she said defensively.
“Not really. Oh, you did, but only until you were six. When Mom died. I never did because I can’t even remember her. Here’s what I do remember: you and me and Daddy living with any woman who’d put up with a drunk and two kids. But they didn’t make us a family.”
“You had me.”
“And you had me. But we needed more. A family who went on picnics, argued over who was next in the bathroom, hugged, told lies, laughed. Even if we’d just had a dad who—”
“You had a dad!”
“Did I, Lutie? Did you? Did he ever come to see you in a tournament? I was there. Where was he? Did he ever come to school for parents’ night or to see one of us in a Christmas play?
“He never took me fishing; we never played catch, not that I would’ve been any good at it. He took me to a hockey game once, but he got drunk, got in a fight, and we were thrown out.
“He didn’t have a clue about our birthdays. We always had to tell him, hoping for some special gift, something other than a last minute stop at the IGA for a box of Cracker Jack, or a key ring. I was a seven-year-old who didn’t own a key. One year, I think I was nine, he gave me a Gideon Bible from a Days Inn where he’d passed out the night before.”
“The way you tell it, he was always drunk.”
“Come to think of it, sis, I can’t recall that you ever had any friends stay over except for that girl who’d been in juvenile detention for trying to steal her stepmother’s car.”
“You’re making this sound as bad as you can, aren’t you?”
“Can you make it sound any better?”
Lutie wheeled and stomped away. Before she reached the cattle guard at the entrance to the winter quarters, Fate caught her, grabbed her elbow, and turned her toward him.
“But here, Lutie,” he said, making a sweeping gesture to include not only the circus grounds, but the whole town, “I feel like I’m part of a family. And get this: They care about me. And they care about you even if you have acted like an asshole.”
Lutie’s eyes flared with anger. “Fate, you talk like you’re living in some fairy-tale world where everyone is just so nice.” She pulled at the word nice, twisting it with her lips and tongue, trying to make it seem ridiculous.
“Hey, I like that. Fairy-tale world. It is, you know, ’cause I don’t just have a family, I have a friend, too. A real friend. A best friend. He can throw better than me, but I can run faster than him. We both have the same favorite color—purple, because Donatello was the Ninja Turtle we both liked best. Johnny’s someone I can talk to about anything. He keeps my secrets, I keep his.”
Her face showing her impatience, Lutie said, “Are you finished? Or do you plan to go on with this bullshit until I fall down at your feet crying, asking your forgiveness for not seeing things the way you do?”
“Yeah.” Fate ran his hand through his hair. “I guess I’ve said all I have to say.”
“Finally! Now, I’ve listened to your story. You listen to mine.
“Forget what happened in Vegas before and think about how different it’ll be this time. We won’t have a car, for one thing, so we won’t have to worry about the cops picking us up or some thugs coming after us ’cause we’ll be living in a nice place. Not like the Gold Digger.
“See, I’ll check the newspaper every day, and those free apartment guides, too, and I’ll answer the ads where someone is looking for roommates to share a house. Or an apartment. Whatever. Then we—”
“What a great idea. Unless we end up with a pervert child molester. Or a serial killer. Or maybe that nutcase you picked up in Wyoming. The hitchhiker who intended to choke you to death and wanted me to—”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.”
“When we move in with this cannibal or slasher or ax murderer, what do we do for money? Or is he going to let us live there free if we like being sodomized and having our flesh burned?”
“I’m going to ignore that.”
“Thought you would.”
“We tell her, our nineteen-year-old roommate who is a college freshman from Vermont, that if she’ll pay the first three months’ rent, then we’ll pay the next three. That’ll give us ninety days to
put the money together. You can go to school, work in the afternoons and on weekends. I’ll work full-time. Believe me, Fate, this can happen. I just know it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I learned a lot about how to survive when we were there.”
“But you didn’t learn the most important lesson.”
“Which is?”
“We can’t take care of ourselves without help.”
Lutie’s demeanor changed with the anger that seemed to burn from inside her. “I could have taken care of me,” she said, her words clipped with indignation.
“Oh, here we go again with that ‘You should have stayed in Spearfish’ speech.”
“Well, there’s the question. Why didn’t you?”
“I wanted us to stay together. Still do. Why? Because I love you.”
“Here’s some news. I don’t know how I feel about you right now.”
She’d hurt him then, she could tell by the look on his face, the look of a whipped dog. Of course, she’d wanted to injure him, but she hadn’t intended the wound to cut so deep. She turned and started toward the house.
“Lutie, what’s pushing you to leave here, to go back to Vegas? What was so wonderful there?”
“I told you before, Fate. I’m not going to settle for what most girls do—marriage to some jerk and a bunch of squalling kids. That’s not what I want. I want to be the girl people notice, the girl people talk about.”
“Yeah, you want to be popular. No, famous.” Fate grinned, but something in his smile suggested it was coming from a darker place. “I remember how you used to pose in front of Floy’s long mirror. Said you were going to be a model. But from what I can tell, you started at the bottom.”
She stopped, caught her breath as her skin paled. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“This.” Fate pulled the porn page from his pocket, the page he’d torn from Johnny’s sex magazine with Lutie’s naked photo. He unfolded the paper and held it up for her to see. “And how about your movie debut? The movie you made in Vegas. Let’s see, what was the name of that film? Wasn’t it Charlotte the Harlot? Not a very imaginative title, but it rhymes.”