by Cole Alpaugh
Kitt, dressed in old tan khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, closed the book he’d been reading and slowly spun around to make having a conversation with the newest circus resident a little easier. Bagg, not entirely sure of the proper etiquette in this situation, was tempted to lie down next to Kitt.
“It’s better to just kneel,” Lightning Man said, as if reading Bagg’s thoughts.
“I wasn’t always like this. I was an accountant at a regular desk and sat in a regular chair. I had a wife that was about average height.”
“So what exactly is wrong?”
“Barophobia is the exaggerated or irrational fear of gravity. One day I was perfectly fine and then boom!”
“Boom,” repeated Lightning Man, nodding his head sympathetically. He knew about booms.
“Yeah, boom.” Kitt paused to stretch his neck muscles. “The circus came up not too far from our house in Wiscasset, Maine, three summers back.”
“That’s the north swing we used to do.” Lightning Man sat forward in his terrycloth robe on a folding metal chair, absently rubbing his damaged right foot with a scarred hand.
Kitt nodded. “Wiscasset is up Route One, ’bout an hour up the coast from Portland. I figured that, it bein’ a nice evening, I’d take Anne Marie—that was my wife—over to this broken-down circus that had rolled through our little town and plopped down in an empty field. Something to do, right?
“Not five minutes after we’d parked the car and walked toward the ticket booth, the barker starts callin’ people over to this big blue and red cannon pointed up in the air. For some reason, my heart starts beatin’ real fast and I’m breakin’ out in a sweat, despite the temperature already dropping way off since the sun had gone over the hills.”
“He thought he was having a heart attack,” Lightning Man said.
“Yeah, well, I felt like something was really wrong. But Anne Marie was tugging at me, telling me to hurry up; she didn’t want to miss this.”
“The Human Cannonball,” Bagg said.
“The one and only,” Lightning Man said. “May he rest in peace.”
“So, I let her pull me over to where ’bout forty people were standing to watch. Now, these were mostly people I knew and did business for. They were my neighbors and folks who owned the stores I shopped in every day. Some were saying ‘Hey, Skip’ and whatnot, but only half of me was recognizing them, while the other half was thinking they might just as well have been flesh eating zombies about to jump on me.”
“Flesh eating zombies.” Lightning Man repeated the phrase, nodding his head, apparently appreciating this part of the story.
“Yeah, so I’m all surrounded by these killer-monster deli and doughnut shop owners, with my heart slamming up against the inside of my ribcage at a million miles a minute, and my Anne Marie is all goofy and happy about a human cannonball act about to go off. Then the countdown begins, and I get it in my head that my heart is really going to blow up when the barker reaches zero.”
“But it didn’t.” Lightning Man shook his head.
“By that time, all my zombie friends and neighbors are counting down, too. And everybody is yelling out zero and the cannon goes ‘kaboom!’ and I hit the ground.”
“Hasn’t been up since,” Lightning Man added sympathetically.
“Didn’t someone call an ambulance?” Bagg asked. “What did your wife do?”
“She was mortified,” Lightning Man answered for him. “She just walked away and left him there.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me she left you there in a field being used by a traveling circus?”
“A marriage not meant to be,” Lightning Man said, and Bagg, the ever diligent reporter, recognized he was probably being had. But these friendly, burned and broken men were as nice as could be, completely genuine or not.
“You got a wife, Bagg?” Kitt asked.
“No, but I have a little girl someplace.” Bagg wasn’t in the mood to go into details. He had several different versions of the same story, ranging from a quick mention of having a daughter all the way to the one he told when he was drunk. The one fueled by alcohol was much longer, especially drawn out because it was accompanied by shoulder-racking sobs, with the worst details repeated several times to hammer home how unfair life was.
Bagg always felt shame the next morning after confessing the entire story in such a manner. He was ashamed for losing control of his emotions, as well as losing control of his life after his daughter was stolen. It seemed as though he’d asked favors from every reporter he’d ever worked with. He had begged the cops, and he’d even tried begging his congressman. Everyone had seemed sympathetic, and even energetic at first. But, after all, Bagg had once been arrested for threatening to kill his wife. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad thing for the lady to vamoose with the girl.
The cops had dismissed his initial complaint by telling him to just give it a few days, that these things always turned out fine. But they changed their tune when other reporters started calling and asking questions on his behalf. Some actual police work was done on the Bagg girl’s disappearance when it was pointed out to the police chief that his officers had purposely buried the father’s initial report. That no follow-up had been done even after the ex-wife’s car had been located at the Philly airport. Details like those made for bad press, especially in an election year.
And along the same lines of how the cops brought the hammer down on anyone even thought to have committed any sort of act against a brother in blue, newspapers had their own sense of protective justice. The chief of police had enough skeletons in his private closet to guard; he finally relented and managed to assign two detectives to track down the Bagg lady and the missing kid. It might have all made a good story, a solid exposé mixing unfairness and wrongdoing with a hint of corruption, but even though the newspaper had the goods, Bagg’s managing editor didn’t want to rock the boat quite that hard. Plus, with the girl still gone, there was no happy ending to neatly wrap things up.
Despite all the canvassing phone calls by the reporters and all the begrudging footwork by the cops, the trail simply went ice cold. Jennifer’s friends claimed they didn’t know a thing but wished they could be more helpful.
Weeks turned into months, and then one afternoon it was as if something began to die inside Bagg, as he sat in the newsroom in front of his blank computer screen.
“Hey, Bagg, you realize what today is?” one of the sportswriters, who Bagg sometimes hit a tennis ball around with, had asked while glancing up from his keyboard.
“What’s today?”
“It was a year ago today your daughter went missing.”
Bagg had closed his eyes, feeling the death going on inside.
An odd thing began to happen when it came to the measurement of time for Lennon Bagg. It sped up. He’d drag himself into the paper on a Monday morning, prepared for a long week of boring, routine interviews, only to hear people excited about the weekend. Milk seemed to go bad the moment he placed it in the refrigerator, and crazy amounts of mail would threaten to overflow his box. One day was often really three or four.
Sometimes entire weeks flashed by when he drifted off during a television commercial. Once, he found himself dreading the Christmas holidays, frightened by the depression surely to overcome him amidst everyone else’s joy. But it was suddenly far too warm for December. The trees had grown dark, midsummer leaves overnight.
Some kind of insanity had settled over Bagg, but he had no will to fight. Perhaps the frenzied passing of time was a blessing, meant to bring a quicker end to his daily misery.
Somewhere out there in this world was a little stolen girl who was about to enter kindergarten, but had suddenly turned ten. Bagg wondered what his daughter looked like.
Chapter 30
Katherine Hepburn died, the Globe Theatre burned to the ground, the first appendectomy was performed, and Marvin Pipkin filed for a patent for the frosted electric light bulb. Yet an even more important event falling on a
June twenty-ninth was the bell signaling the end of the school year and the emancipation of Morgan Freeman from Primary Four, at Sandys Primary School.
Most children transformed into screaming banshees, funneling from the whitewashed front archway, but Morgan only slumped forward at her homeroom desk, the overwhelming emotion, one of relief. Abatement from the deific clocks, a reprieve from the cold Pop-Tarts, final absolution for those contraband rolled sleeves, and, thank God, amnesty until September’s heinous return.
Once Morgan sensed the building had regurgitated the last of her schoolmates, she sat back and carefully removed an ancient cigar box from her lift-top desk. She set the object on the desk she’d carved dozens of bird figures into with the sharp end of a protractor. One last furtive glance at the open door, and Morgan lifted the box lid just enough to confirm that the contents were still intact. Satisfied, she zipped it safely inside her backpack.
Morgan had loved Mrs. Jones during the first weeks of school. Maybe it was the kind smile and soft voice so unlike her mother’s. Morgan stayed after school to talk to Mrs. Jones back then, so very long ago. Mrs. Jones confided in Morgan how she, too, had come from far away, another island called Australia. Mrs. Jones said she knew Morgan’s father had passed away from a sudden illness, as had her own father. And Morgan bought right into it. She was the first person who might have understood Morgan’s search for her father. The funny, strong, handsome man who had thrown her up into the air a thousand giggling times and told her the bear becoming a magic butterfly bedtime story every time she’d asked. Morgan shared and shared, telling every memory she had coveted for such a long part of her short years.
“I’m trying to find him,” Morgan told Mrs. Jones.
“What do you mean?”
Morgan’s voice was low, sharing her secret for the first time. “My father’s a bird and I’ve been trying to find him.”
“You mean a bird that flies?”
“Yes!” Morgan had nearly shouted. Of course this gentle teacher could understand. The kids had teased her for talking to the birds, had ostracized her so boldly it had come to the faculty’s attention early on. Birdbrain, Daffy Duck, and Looney Bird were just a few of the nicknames she’d accumulated.
But Morgan experienced her first bitter taste of genuine betrayal late that afternoon. She had hugged Mrs. Jones and nearly skipped all the way home, planning to spend time in her room with her drawings, rather than deal with the kids on the beach. Morgan’s mood was too good to have it spoiled by the nasty kids who taunted her mercilessly while she bobbed beyond the small breakers, out by the various ducks and gulls. Out by the birds who either left her alone, or took time to listen if she needed to talk.
The phone had rung near dinnertime and she had crept to the door crack to listen.
“Hello, Mrs. Jones,” her mother said in her most pretend-nice voice, reserved for people who her mom either wanted to impress or wanted something from. “She told you what?”
And Morgan’s heart broke again.
“I see. Yes, I understand … right … I completely agree.”
No, she had not seen and she had not understood! Mrs. Jones had listened and understood! How could she do this to me?
Morgan ran to her covers and buried herself, wishing she was dead and that she could fly away from that place where grownups were liars, only pretending to like you in order to hurt you. She expected her door to open, the springs of her bed creaking as her mother came to sit with her. The phone conversation was over, but Morgan heard nothing. No squeak of her door, no footsteps, only the tick of the clock on her bed stand and an occasional slow-moving car passing her window.
It was hot under the blankets, but Morgan held her ground, waiting for whatever trouble she was in to come to her. She was uncomfortable in the tangle of her school uniform, the navy blue skirt and blouse with the stiff collar that always poked her neck. The passing minutes turned into an hour, and Morgan heard the click of the living room television and then bits and pieces of a newscast.
Night eventually arrived outside of her pile of blankets, and at some point her mother popped her head into her room. “Brush your teeth,” Morgan’s mom said and left just as quickly. There was no, “I’m disgusted by this obsession.” Not this time.
“Therapy” was another word Morgan’s mom had floated out there, but Morgan knew it was an empty threat. No way would her mother risk having anyone finding out her child was in therapy. Talk about crazy. People might look at Jennifer Freeman as if she were the cause of her daughter’s problems.
The next morning, Morgan saw Mrs. Jones in a whole new light, and everything was different. She had obviously mistaken her kind smile, since it now didn’t look the least bit welcoming, more like a grimace. And there was something sour about her voice. Something to make you cringe, like watching someone bite into a lemon.
Morgan cringed when her teacher said, “Good morning, dear.”
“How could you?” Morgan wanted to say.
And Mrs. Jones smiled that same smile each time she came by Morgan’s desk to snatch away the small pencil-on- paper drawings she’d worked on so diligently. They were drawings of gadwalls, grebes, herons, kites, sandpipers, and egrets; drawings of kestrels and a Bald Eagle. Maybe even a drawing of her father.
The drawings were relinquished back to Morgan on the final day of school, and she secreted them away in the special cigar box. The box had once resided on her father’s dresser before their home was broken. It was in the background of photos, somehow left behind by him, and then packed away and shipped on to Bermuda. If her mom had recognized it as her father’s she would have stomped on it, or burned it in the fireplace like so many of the pictures Morgan had wanted to keep. It was the box where she kept a pink flamingo feather she’d discovered along the road to school and hoped to someday transform into a quill pen. The box was a piece of her father, even though she couldn’t imagine him ever smoking a cigar. Was he a secret cigar smoker? Had he found the box? Had it been his father’s? Morgan cherished every possibility, made up stories for each.
June twenty-ninth was a hot day, and her backpack was heavy with spiral notebooks and art class drawings she rescued before the janitors came through to scrub the school clean of any remnants of the year. She made her way down busy Broome Street, to Long Bay, and then cut through backyards to No Name Lane. She unclipped the front door key to their little blue bungalow from the main zipper on her backpack. Her mother wouldn’t be home for at least an hour, and this was Morgan’s time to pour a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, pee, and then throw on her one-piece swimsuit.
Energized by the sugar and thoughts of no school for two entire months, Morgan grabbed a towel, her swim fins, and her boogie board. Sticking the house key in her sneaker, she slammed out the back door. The best waves were over at Dunkley’s and Hungry Bay and on down to the south shore beaches, but Morgan didn’t really care if there were waves or not. If the swells kicked up over on the East Coast, the boys who usually hung out at Margaret’s Bay would climb on the bus and leave her with rolling swells that gently splashed the pink sand. Morgan also loved the times that the low pressure systems steamed by off the western horizon, close enough to churn up waist-high or better waves, but far enough out that the wind didn’t chop the waves apart. Riding big waves was like flying and it was good practice for later on.
The storms would also populate the bay with every bird imaginable. Although they had found refuge, they were also nervous and short-tempered from being in a strange environment. Morgan was entertained by the birds’ interactions; they were territorial and oddly aggressive. Various species, unused to such close proximity, were just like people from different countries who suddenly found themselves huddled together during a disaster.
The water was dead calm this hot June day, and only a small group of kids huddled in a shady spot at the very north end of the beach. Morgan could smell the cigarette and marijuana smoke as it drifted ever so slowly down on the light breeze. She buried her hou
se key as usual, putting her towel over the spot, and weighed it down with her sneakers. There was nothing worse than when one of the old farts with a metal detector came by and scooped up your house key, which they were known to regularly do.
Grabbing her boogie board and fins, she padded down to the center of the long beach, wading into the warm water while tightening her board’s wrist strap. Twenty yards out, she rinsed the sand from her fins, slipped them onto her feet, and remounted her board. Morgan rested on her elbows, holding the board tightly, slowly kicking her way due west.
The first fifty yards was shallow water over sand, and then she reached the coral reef that ran parallel to this section of Sandys Island. She kicked her way through a line of gulls who begrudgingly made way for the little girl on the boogie board.
“Are you being rude or are just too lazy to move?” she asked them, and one answered in its seagull language. “Thank you,” Morgan said, as the gulls closed ranks after letting her pass.
She kept kicking, despite entering a place much farther out than her mom would have ever permitted. The water deepened beyond the reef, with fast-moving boats and possibly some large biting fish. Morgan’s destination was a circular reef, thirty yards in diameter, about five hundred yards from the beach. From back on land, it would seem as if the little girl had disappeared among the light chop stirred by the steadier breeze that blew this far from shore. As if she’d vanished into thin air.
Morgan kicked and kicked, finally reaching the distant reef and finding the friend she knew liked to hang out here. The brown pelican bobbed in the shallow water over the center of the reef, cocking its head to eye the girl.
“Hello, Gus,” Morgan said.
“Hello, Morgan,” she heard him say in return.
“How’s the fishing?”
“I have a belly full. You’re done with school for the summer?”
“Yes, finally.” Morgan paddled in a wide slow circle around the bird, which had a long beak that looked like a weird smile. The reddish brown mane of hair on its head looked a little like the Mohawk-style some of the tough boys in Hamilton sported. But Morgan knew Gus was anything but tough. The old bird had once been a much-loved primary school art teacher in Hamilton, according to stories he’d told.