Ghost Boy

by Iain Lawrence

  Harold launched himself across the gap. He stumbled around a tree and around another, clutching their trunks. He held on to them as a climber would, finding handholds on a treacherous slope. He reached a third tree, a fourth, and peered around it at the cottonwoods, then down at Princess Minikin.

  She sat in the shade below the branches, holding a comic book that looked as big as poster boards in her doll-like hands. “Well, look who’s here,” she said. “Hi, kiddo. I haven’t seen you in the longest time.”

  “I’ve been really busy,” Harold said.

  “Oh, I know you have. Everyone’s talking about it.” She rolled the comic into a tube. “The greatest thing they’ve ever seen. And poor Flip; she’s just beside herself. She can hardly wait to get to Salem and show it to the scouts.”

  “The scouts?” said Harold.

  “Why, sure. Barnum and Bailey always sends a pair of scouts to Salem.”

  Harold felt a twinge inside. Flip still hadn’t told him everything.

  “It’s big of you to do that,” said Tina. “I always knew you were a swell guy, but to set her up like this so she can get away from here? Gosh, a lot of people just wouldn’t do that.”

  “No, I guess they wouldn’t,” said Harold.

  “Everyone here likes her so much; I guess Mr. Hunter will miss her like nuts, the poor dumb lug.”

  Harold nodded. He sat on the grass beside the little princess.

  “It’s swell of you, it really is.” She tapped her toes with the comic book. “Say, she’ll be famous now, and wouldn’t her parents be so proud? The Pharaohs! And those elephants with their cute hats, that great big P in front.”

  Ghosts never cry. He told himself that as the trees and the trucks and the tents grew fuzzy around him. So she had fooled him; all along she’d fooled him with promises and lies, brushing away his fears with her charming little smile and her charming little touches. Her unnatural charm, he realized. Beware the ones with unnatural charm. And all along he’d thought the Gypsy Magda had meant the freaks.

  “Say, what’s the matter?” Tina asked. “Gosh, you look awful. You look so sad.”

  She stood up. Her strange face was wrinkled with worry. “Didn’t you know?” she said. “Oh, Harold, didn’t you know all this?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know anything.

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He tried to laugh, but only snorted dribbles through his nose.

  She took his hand and pulled against it, such a little tug that she made him smile. “Never you mind, Harold,” she said. “She’s not so great anyway. Just a snippet, that’s what she is. Say, you come and sit with us, and maybe Samuel will give you a squeeze.”

  “I was going to meet the Cannibal King,” he said.

  “You were? Oh, gee, I’m glad to hear that. You go and see him and then come by. All right?”

  He let her pull him up, then stood beside her in a slouch, so as not to seem too tall. “What should I say?” he asked. “What should I do?”

  “Just go up and say hi.”

  “To a king?”

  “It’s what I do,” she said.

  “But you’re a real princess,” said Harold.

  She looked up at him, smiling at first and then serious. “Say,” she said, “you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “You’re not?” he asked.

  She put both her hands on his. “You poor guy,” she said. “That’s just a gimmick, just a hook. They call me Princess Minikin to get the people in, because it’s not enough to say, ‘Come and see the little midget lady.’ Gosh, Harold, I didn’t think you believed it.”

  “And Samuel?” he asked. “Isn’t he a fossil?”

  “No,” she said, her little head shaking sadly.

  Harold sighed. He slouched down even more. “I’m stupid,” he said. “I’m dumb as a post.”

  “You’re not!” said Tina. “You’re a real sweet guy who believes what people tell you. You see the good part of everything, and maybe sometimes you get a little mixed up, but gee, I think you’re swell.”

  Chapter

  48

  Harold walked toward the cottonwoods, toward the black car that caught the sun on its fenders. Somewhere behind it was the trailer, its painted sides blurred too closely with the forest. And then he heard the banging.

  It was loud and steady. Not the boom of a drum, but a thudding like the roustabouts’ sledges. It stopped, and door hinges creaked.

  Harold stood by the car. On the front of its hood was a chrome bird so beautifully made that it might have been real. But it had snapped from its little silver stand, lying now with one wing touching the metal, dangling by a wire. And the rest of the car was just as shiny and just as battered as the bird. The fenders that swooped down into wide running boards were dented and torn. The sparkling grille was shattered in the middle, and one of the lights that stuck out from the car like bug’s eyes was missing altogether. A bit of fur was stuck to the wheel well; a cluster of feathers was wedged in the bumper.

  He walked right around the car. There were dents everywhere, but they’d been polished and waxed as though they didn’t exist. Then he bent down to peer into the driver’s window. And just as his hands touched the glass, he heard a shout from the forest.

  Branches crackled and broke. Harold spun around. And out from the cottonwoods came the Cannibal King, slashing a long machete over his head. Under his arm he carried a skull that was stained an awful bloodred at the back. He was naked to the waist.

  Harold fell against the car. He gasped huge breaths.

  But the Cannibal King ran right past him, then back in a circle, thrashing at the air with his glistening machete. “Get away!” he shouted. “Go on, get out of here!”

  Then suddenly he stopped, his head tilted slightly to the left. His eyes were the same watery blue as Harold’s. And the Ghost and the Cannibal King both seemed to gaze off toward the trees, but studied each other with the same curious look. It was almost as though only one of them was real and the other a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

  Harold gazed at the man he had come so far to see, at the wild and unruly hair, at the bulging arms, at the rolls of fat that reminded him of an overfilled cone of ice cream scoops. They were white—all white—even whiter, he thought, than him.

  The Cannibal King twitched. He tossed his head, then sliced his machete through the air above it, and up again, beside his ear. “Bees,” he said. “Geez, I hate bees.”

  Harold smiled. He heard the bee whining around the Cannibal King. He saw that the skull under his arm wasn’t really a skull, but half a watermelon so pale that it was almost white.

  The Cannibal King smiled back. “Hello,” he said. “I’m the Cannibal King.”

  “I’m Harold,” said Harold. “I came from Liberty. I came all this way to find you.”

  “You didn’t look too hard, eh?”

  “I tried,” said Harold. “I—”

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  The bee came to Harold. It circled his head, and he swatted it away. The bee dropped low to the ground, zigzagging from the forest to the sunshine.

  “Would you like to come to Oola Boola Mambo?”

  Harold grinned. He nodded and followed the Cannibal King between the cottonwoods, toward the little trailer that he now sensed was all there’d ever been of Oola Boola Mambo. “You’re not really a cannibal,” he said to the broad white back in front of him. “Are you?”

  The white hair shook. “But I wish I was. Sometimes, eh? There’s a lot of people I wouldn’t mind stewing in a pot.”

  “That language you speak,” said Harold. “What is that?”

  “Rand McNally,” said the King. “I rattle off the names of islands, eh? I made up some words myself.”

  “The box of bones?”

  “Fake,” he said. “Everything’s fake. It’s all a part of the show.”

  In less than a minute they came to the trailer. The door
was open, the grass below it strewn with arcs of watermelon rinds, their inside curves worried down to lime-green linings.

  “You want some?” asked the Cannibal King. He held out the huge half that Harold had thought was a skull.

  “Sure.”

  The machete glinted. The blade rushed up and, swooping down, sliced a wedge away. The point squished in through the red pulp, and the Cannibal King lifted it and held it out.

  “Thanks,” said Harold.

  Another wedge flew off, and Harold sat with the Cannibal King on the steps of Oola Boola Mambo. They leaned forward to let the juice dribble on the ground.

  “Do your eyes hurt?” asked the Cannibal King. “In the sun, I mean, eh? Do they hurt?”

  “Yes,” said Harold.

  “Do things look funny to you? Sort of blurred, and you see them best sideways?”

  “Yes.” Harold nodded with the watermelon.

  “And the other kids. Do they tease you? They call you names, eh?”

  “You bet,” said Harold.

  “Buggers, eh?” The Cannibal King ate his watermelon in only three bites, then tossed away the rind. “Well, you know something? It gets easier, Harold. A little bit, anyway. Those kids grow up and they start seeing that they’ve got all sorts of things wrong with them, too. Then they stop calling you Snowman and Frosty, because they’re afraid you’ll turn on them—eh?—and call them Big Ears or something. You see how it works?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Harold. No one had ever called him Frosty or Snowman, and he found himself smiling at the picture it gave him: the Cannibal King bulging and white like a snowman.

  “And you know something else?” The Cannibal King wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sometimes I’m glad I’m on the inside of that tent instead of outside gawking in. It’s hard to explain. But me and Samuel and Tina and so on, at least we’re fake on the outside. Those other people, they’re fake on the inside. You see what I’m saying?”

  “I think so,” said Harold. He remembered looking at Samuel by the swollen river, looking at those dark eyes and seeing a different person behind the hair and ugliness.

  “Those other people,” said the Cannibal King, “they’re normal to look at, but inside they’re really freaks. All twisted up, ugly, mean little freaks.”

  “I know,” said Harold.

  The Cannibal King smiled. “I know you know.” He stood up, and the trailer bounced flat on its springs. “So, you want to come inside?”

  “Sure,” said Harold. “For a minute.”

  The Cannibal King went first. He squeezed himself into a corner to let Harold fit through the door. “Welcome to Oola Boola Mambo,” he said.

  Harold didn’t admit that he’d already seen inside it. He let the Cannibal King go proudly from one belonging to another. But all the time, he stared at the table. There was a jigsaw puzzle there, half finished, a big, heavy mallet resting on top of the pieces. It was a picture of boys playing hockey on a winter field.

  “I do jigsaws,” said the Cannibal King.

  “How do you see them?” asked Harold.

  “Wow!” The Cannibal King slapped his forehead. “No one’s ever asked me that before. No one, Harold. They think it’s a dumb thing for a grown man to do, but they don’t know how hard it is when you can’t see the little pieces. It’s a brainteaser, eh? Well, you know something? I do it by feel, Harold. I do some of it with my eyes closed.”

  Harold squinted at the picture. He leaned over it, touching it, and saw that some of the pieces were jammed into place—into the wrong places—hammered down with their little cardboard tabs all bent and broken.

  “I’ve done others,” said the Cannibal King.

  Harold looked again at the pictures on the wall. Every one was fuzzy, because the pieces didn’t line up.

  “They remind me of my home,” said the Cannibal King. “I come from Canada. From a little town in Canada.”

  Harold moved from picture to picture. He passed voyageurs in a bark canoe and stopped in front of the red-coated man that he saw now as a Mountie on a fine black horse. They were pictures of Canada, all shaky and blurred. They were exactly as the Cannibal King would have seen them in life. The older man’s eyes, Harold thought sadly, were even worse than his own.

  “How do you drive?” he asked.

  “Slowly,” said the Cannibal King. “Like this.” He looked at Harold with his eyes squinted, his cheeks almost touching his eyebrows. “I get terrible headaches, but I like driving, eh? I like the freedom of that.”

  “Me too,” said Harold.

  “Well, that’s about it.” The Cannibal King seemed embarrassed now. “That’s all there is to Oola Boola Mambo.” He got a T-shirt and tugged it over his head. “Now let’s go see your friends.”

  They walked together through the trees, two cream-colored people with hair like sunlight, one small and frail, one huge and fat. They both ate pieces of watermelon and dropped the rinds behind them.

  “Holy smokes!” said Samuel, rising from a chair. “It’s the Stone People of Oola Boola Mango.”

  The Cannibal King laughed. “Mambo,” he said.

  “Mumbo jumbo, you mean,” said Samuel.

  The Cannibal King cuffed Samuel on the arm, and Samuel cuffed him back, and the two of them wrestled like bear cubs. Then Samuel pulled away and smiled at Harold. “Welcome back,” he said.

  It was almost evening. The waves of heat were gone, and Harold saw that his arms had goose bumps in the coolness from the mountains. Tina was there, and the Gypsy Magda, and they came toward him.

  “Jolly jam!” shouted Samuel. “Come on!” He waved them in. “Let’s squeeze this little geezer.”

  They crowded around him, and Harold cried as they rocked and hugged him. And then they all turned away for a moment, to let him wipe his eyes, and they sat together in the grove of trees. He felt a part of the group, shoved into it like one of the Cannibal King’s jigsaw pieces.

  “So, Harold,” said the Cannibal King. “How did you come to be here, eh?” And Harold started to tell him. But Tina interrupted, and then Samuel, and they talked about the trip he’d made, every mile of every day.

  “Remember the filling station?” Samuel asked, and talked about that.

  “And remember the farmer?” said Tina, and talked about that.

  “And remember,” said Samuel, “when we stopped by that schoolyard? The one with the swings and the roundabout?”

  “Oh, I loved that roundabout,” said Tina.

  “And then we played baseball,” said Samuel. “Didn’t we, Harold?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “We played Five Hundred.”

  “And the Gypsy Magda got lost in the grass.”

  Bells and bracelets jangled. “Ach, I did not,” said the Gypsy Magda. “I only played at getting lost.”

  Samuel laughed. He sighed, and it seemed to take the breath from everyone. They all sat there, smiling at their shoes.

  Harold rubbed his arms. He stood up and stretched. “I have to get back,” he said. “The elephants are loose.”

  “The elephants are loose!” cried the Cannibal King, in a laughing way. “You even talk like one of the Stone People.”

  Harold smiled. He felt shy, standing with everyone sitting. “I’m not supposed to leave them,” he said.

  “We understand,” said Tina.

  The Cannibal King too stood up. “Is it true?” he asked. “Do they play baseball?”

  “Yes,” said Harold. “They’re pretty good.”

  “And they’re going to play in Salem?”

  “I don’t know.” He kicked the grass with his boot. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “Let it happen,” said the Gypsy Magda. “The future is like the grass you stand on; if you try to cut it down, it only grows again. But faster.”

  “Do you really know the future?” Harold asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “How old are you?” he asked. She seemed, to him, as old
as Earth. But she smiled now, and in her withered and toothless face he saw that she was too shy to tell him, and that she was far, far younger than he had ever thought.

  “Twice your age,” she said. “A little less, maybe. A little less than twice your age. But now you had better go.”

  Harold started off across the field. He heard Samuel say, “Wait a minute. You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to play baseball with an elephant.”

  “Yeah, so would I,” said Tina. “Can we do it, Harold? Can we all go?”

  Harold turned back. “Sure,” he said.

  “Let’s take my car,” said the Cannibal King.

  They piled into it, all in the front, and drove across the field in that big, bashed-up boat of a car. Jostled by the ruts and holes, laughing like children, they passed the cook tent and headed for the willows.

  They plowed through grass as high as the fenders. The six horses galloped across their path from left to right, and the elephants appeared ahead, reaching with their trunks for the highest branches.

  “It’s like Africa here,” said Samuel.

  “Oh, you lug.” Tina laughed. “You’ve never been to Africa.”

  The old Indian came out to meet them from the little grove of trees. He held up a hand, his fingers spread apart, as the Cannibal King stopped the car.

  “Hi, Bob!” shouted Samuel, tumbling from a door. “Hey, Bob!” said the Cannibal King, coming out another.

  The old Indian nodded. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “We’re going to play baseball,” said Tina. “Say, you want to play?”

  “Sure,” he said. “How do you play baseball?”

  Harold got the bat and ball, and the elephants came on the run, trumpeting eagerly. He drew out a diamond with the end of the bat, and for bases they put down their shoes. Samuel’s, being the biggest, made the pitcher’s mound. He set them carefully in place. “What are the teams?” he asked.