by Chris Offutt
“A bird in hand,” one said.
“Is worth a hand in the bush,” said the other.
“I got a sword she can’t swallow.”
“Get lost, you little pissants,” the Parrot Lady said. She leaned against the doorjamb in the shimmering heat. “Hey, Walrus Man,” she called. “Come here.”
All the kinkers blinked from a doze, staring at me, then at her. I stumbled to her trailer as if moving through fog. My clothes clung to me.
“Save me a sandwich,” said one of the dwarfs.
The air-conditioned trailer made the sweat cold on my body. She motioned me to a couch. Gingham curtains hung from each window, and an autographed picture of Elvis Presley sat on a tiny TV. The room was very small, very neat.
“Thirsty?” she said. “Like a drink?”
I nodded and she poured clear liquid from a pitcher into a glass, added ice and an olive.
“Nothing better in summer than a martini,” she said.
Not wanting her to know that I’d never sampled such an exotic drink, I drank it in one chug and asked for another. She lifted her eyebrows and poured me one. I drank half for the sake of civility.
“The one thing I hate more than dwarfs,” she said, “is the circus.”
She wore a long white dress with a high collar and sleeves that ran to her wrists. No tattoos were visible. A rowing machine occupied a third of the trailer’s space. She topped my drink and filled her own glass.
“This is my fourth circus,” she said. “I’ve worked with fat ladies, bearded women, Siamese twins, rubber-skinned people, and midgets. The three-legged man. A giant. Freaks by nature, all freaks but me.”
“Not you.”
She offered her glass for a toast and I drained mine. She filled it again. We sat across from each other. The room was so narrow our knees touched.
“They hate me because they can’t understand why someone would choose to be a freak. It took me five years to get tattooed. You can’t do it all at once. I had the best artists in the country tattoo me.”
“Did it hurt?”
“That’s the main part of it. Freaks have to hurt and I wanted mine real. Everyone can see that I’m a freak now. I finally suffered for real to get there.”
I nodded, confused. A row of dolls stood on a shelf bracketed to the wall. She poured more drinks and settled into the chair. Her ankles were primly crossed, exposing only her toes. She wore no jewelry.
“I hate them because they’re what I was in secret, before the tattoos. I was a freak too. You just couldn’t tell. I was tired of hurting on the inside, like them. I hate my tattoos and I hate the men who pay to see them. Nobody knows about my inside. The rest of the freaks are the opposite. They’re normal inside but stuck in a freak’s body. Not me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s why I’m telling you.”
“What?”
“I can’t have children.”
I sipped my drink. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t see an ashtray. I didn’t know what to say.
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“You could adopt.”
“Shut up!” she said. “I’ve seen ads in the paper for adoption. ‘Call collect,’ they say. ‘All expenses paid.’ I won’t buy a baby. You better go. Don’t tell anyone anything. Let them believe we fucked like minks.”
I stood and fell sideways on the couch. Moving slowly, I got to the door and turned to say goodbye. Her pale hands covered her face. She was crying.
“I love those dwarfs,” she said. “They’re my kids.”
I opened the door and made it to the bottom step before falling. The difference in temperature was swift and hard as a roundhouse blow. Someone helped me stand. The dust on my skin turned to mud from my abrupt sweating. An aerialist walked me to a truck and lay me in the shade.
An hour later Kaybach kicked me awake, berating me for being late, though he’d heard the reason. I staggered after him. Con men and kinkers wiggled their eyebrows, winked and grinned. A female equestrian caressed me with her gaze as if I were the last wild mustang out of the Bighorns. I barely had time to wriggle into my costume before Kaybach began herding the suckers in.
Our tent had no ventilation and was ten degrees hotter than outside. The water in the pool had a skin on the surface. When I lay down on the fake rocks, the world began spinning. Closing my eyes made me twice as dizzy. From a great distance Kaybach called his cue and I realized that he had been yelling for some time. I slid into the nasty water.
I managed to get through the preliminary routines with Kaybach’s patient repetition of cue. He threw a fish as reward, which I dutifully tucked inside the mouth flap. Its body was swollen from heat. Mixed with fish stink was the heavy odor of gin oozing from my pores. I clenched my teeth to quell nausea. While Kaybach spieled about my intelligence, I shoved the dead fish back into the water. The smell clung to my chin and face. Water had seeped through the eye slits, encasing me in an amnion of scum. My head throbbed. As long as I didn’t move, my belly remained under control.
Kaybach asked the yes-or-no questions. I squatted to make the walrus rear on his haunches, each movement an effort. The mask felt welded to my head. Kaybach threw a fish that bounced off my torso. The thought of retrieving it ruined me. My belly folded in on itself, and I knew that the spew would suffocate me. Kaybach was yelling. My face poured sweat.
I pulled my hands from the flipper compartments, worked my arms into position, and treated the crowd to the rare sight of a walrus decapitating itself. The mask splashed into the water. I retched a stream that arced from Louie’s neck. Kaybach stepped into the pool and yelled for everyone to leave. People were screaming and demanding refunds.
I swam to the safety of my fake ice floe. Water had gushed into the oilskin suit, and briefly I feared drowning. I left the costume in the water, crawled to the edge of the tent, lifted the canvas and inhaled. The hundred-degree air tasted sweet and glorious. Sideshow tents were butted against the big top with a small space in between for stakes and ropes. I fled down the alley in my underwear. Peaches and Barney were gone from the truck. I rinsed my body in a tub of her drinking water and dressed in my extra clothes. The parking lot was a rolling field with beat-down grass. Locals worked it for a few bucks and a free pass. The third car picked me up. Twenty minutes later I stood in a town, the name of which I didn’t know.
I oriented myself so the setting sun lay on my left, and began walking north. The Drinking Gourd emerged at dusk. Kentucky produced both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis. Like Kentuckians of the Civil War, I was loyal to no direction. I was neither kinker nor freak, yankee nor reb, boss nor bum. I wasn’t much of a playwright either.
Autumn has fled in a blur of wind and leaves. The first frost never let up, clamping cold to the earth. Rita is now nine months and one week pregnant. If the baby doesn’t volunteer soon, the doctor will induce its birth in a week. Beside the front door is a suitcase packed with food, diapers, cigars, a deck of cards, and a baby-naming book that reminds me of a wildlife identification guide. Rita is weary of her awkward gait, my incessant presence underfoot. I am powerless to comfort her. She listens to an inner music and I hear only the tow of the woods.
The sky is domed solid blue, pale at the edges as if the world floats inside a balloon. Beyond the perimeter lies endless time, an absence of gravity and light, the very world in which our child exists. The fetus is said to dream in utero. I suppose it must recall the passage of its own brief time—the fifth week of its gills and tail, the later limbless period when its organs were blooming. At week twenty-six it forms bones. A month later the brain doubles, increasing its capacity to dream.
Last night I dreamed that Rita gave birth to a boy who was also my father. I became the middle man, discarded and ignored. This morning Rita lay on her side with hands clasped below her bulging belly, as if proffering her child to the world. She said the baby
kicked all night, I stoked the fire and left for the woods.
Wind pushes snow away from the river, forming a powder that shifts like vapor. These ground blizzards demolish vision. It is as if one walks through a haze of chalk. Because I would prefer a son, I say that I want a girl so as not to be disappointed. Rita is honest. She stakes her claim for a boy-child early, choosing faith in her own biology. She has no use for common hope.
There are more females born per year because the X sperm lives slightly longer while hunting the egg. Less likely to be born, men are more prone to death. I am the first son of a first son of a first son, and I want to continue the cycle. Rita says it is a boy. I hope she knows.
Cold air numbs my face above my beard. On certain days the radio forbids pregnant women from drinking tap water. We buy it in gallon jugs, wondering when the amnion will break. Rita recently woke from a nap lying in dampness, the sheets cold against her flesh. She called to me, her voice excited, certain that the time had come. I raced to her side. The sheets were stained pale violet, a color that scared me. My mouth was dry. I rubbed the sheet and sniffed my fingers, surprised at the faint scent of grapes. Rita rolled over. Buried in the blankets beside her was an empty glass of juice. Laughter arrived, always overdue, evidence of life.
Last month offered a blue moon, the second full moon in the same month. It was the brightest moon of our lifetime, closer to earth than any time since 1912. Both coasts were drenched by enormous tides. Since humans are sixty percent water, perpetually hauling eleven gallons inside our bodies, the moon affects us, too. I thought it might draw the baby from the womb, but Rita didn’t even have Braxton-Hicks, contractions that are known as false labor pains. First-time mothers take longer to give the baby up. First-time fathers, I’ve found, take longer to get to sleep at night.
Rita is the focus of our lives, her belly the pinpoint. I feel the futility of a laid-off worker, the fading sense of being useful. I am left with the memory of our last sex two months ago, in which the child had literally come between us, or swayed below. I’d felt as though I were trespassing, hoping not to damage whatever lived inside.
The wind halts abruptly and I see faint fox tracks at the bottom of a rise. Blown snow fills the upwind side of the prints, which remind me more of a cat than a dog. I follow the trail, aware that seeing a wild animal requires giving up hope, the same way Rita has abandoned her hope for gender. She simply knows. Wind whips mist in the air and I crouch, aiming ray face along the path of tracks. Snow is against my eyes, down my collar. My bad knee begins to ache. The fox never hunts with hope for prey, but with yarak, an Arabic word without English equivalent that means “hunting condition, ready to kill.” As we lost our animal instincts, we replaced them with the veils of reason, love, superstition, and hope. No fox ever hoped for gender. Only humanity hopes, which makes us the most hopeless.
At birth my child’s brain will be equal in size to the brain of a baby gorilla. My father is bald and toothless, exactly the way he was born. By prolonging childhood, we are able to learn the alphabet, mathematics, the sense of awe and doubt, how to kill for pleasure. The palm of a Down’s baby has two lines instead of three, like that of an ape. My father’s palm is often damp. When I made mistakes as a child, he referred to me as a cretin, and I felt proud, believing it meant I was from the island of Crete. I hope for a son who is not like me.
Cardinals slice the air like drops of blood. The wind slows, leaving a drift against a sapling, a larger drift on the parent tree. The fox prints have faded into the swept forest floor and I move in the direction they were headed, trying to imagine the fox making detours around piles of brush, angling for the water’s edge. Ice floes drift in silence. A daughter makes better sense because I’m liable to do more damage to a son. It is my heritage, my instinct, as powerful as a barred owl’s claws in the back of a squirrel.
The trunks of maples along the river are too large for their height, the roots having sucked water for decades, expanding their bodies but not their boughs. They have overevolved, like the Spartan, the Roman, the ancient dwellers of Crete. Wind from the south coats the side of each maple with snow. The other side grows moss. Various animals live in their hollow bodies, kicking all night. A child grows within Rita’s belly and I hope that my professed hope for a girl goes unanswered. Ahead of me the fox knows better than to hope I leave. It merely waits, knowing that I will go.
I follow the river through the morning air of snow like smoke. My sister was the first female Little Leaguer in our county; my aunt, Kentucky’s first female CPA; my grandmother, the first in the family to graduate from high school. The women in my family fare better than the men. They live longer, destroy less, know better than to hope. I still want a son, the dream of many men.
Near the treeline I find fresh fox prints and realize it has doubled back on me, and since I am here now, it has probably doubled back again. The fox is watching me watch my thoughts. None of it matters—not gender, hope, or even health. It’s all over anyhow, decided nine months back, moments after the final cellular brawl of fertilization. The embryo is sexless until the fourth month, when genitals begin to grow. Roman women who failed to produce a male heir were put to death, but we now understand that the flailing sperm decides the gender. A son will carry the family name; a daughter carries the child.
Rabbit tracks lead to a patch of scattered leaves the color of pennies found in gravel. The immense hind legs of a rabbit prevents it from walking backwards. A woodcock can see three hundred sixty degrees without turning its head, but we are the only species capable of hindsight. Rita says she cannot remember when she wasn’t pregnant. She no longer recalls her sleeping dreams.
An itinerant coyote treed a coon yesterday, then continued roaming downriver, rare for Iowa. Wind has cleared the tracks away. I envy its reckless lifestyle—the solitary animal seeking fun like the romanticized single man, perpetual bachelor, the lone-wolf cowboy of books and film. The beauty of the coyote is its inability to ponder the past. It is happy in a pack or on its own, honoring the moon, the cycle of women. Very soon my freedom will end. No one is perfect but fathers are expected to be.
I wedge into a tight gap amid three maples that splay the sky. Seedpods lie between my feet. The sun won’t melt the snow till spring. In the fifth century, Pindar wrote that man is but a dream of a shadow. Rita has long dreamed of a child. My father dreams of an heir. In the shadow world of Rita’s womb, the fetus dreams of more space. I think of the future, of my adult child smuggling me from the hospital to die in the woods. Trees dream about the death of an ax. The snowflake dreams of finding its twin.
Walking home is work, trudging into the wind. My feet are slowed by old snow beneath the scuttling powder of today. My mind is the circling fox, sure of instinct, heading for its den. In the house I tell Rita of my thoughts, that nothing matters. She disagrees. “Everything matters now,” she says. “More than ever.”
A week passed thumbing north, my sextant aimed at New England, as determined as Columbus. I stormed the region, convinced of discovering a higher level of civilization absent from the rest of the country. Instead, I found a room in Salem, Massachusetts, with a renegade Pole named Shadrack. Every door in our apartment had been robbed of its knob. Nothing locked. Our single common room was a large windowless kitchen full of dirty dishes. Stray trash surrounded the garbage can like drifted snow.
The first night we met, Shadrack confided that a single yoni hair was stronger than a team of oxen. His life was shimmed at all the joints and he’d taken to shimming the shims. During winter, he slept in a lime-green tent pitched in the kitchen. In exchange for acting as a security guard, Shadrack had a painting studio in an abandoned chalk factory by the river. Chalk dust covered him like a corpse risen from the lime. He was the perfect friend for me—so starved for company that he talked to mice in his studio.
I had quit painting to write, and he was a poet who now painted. We were inverted Siamese twins, connected at the intellect. He’d never complet
ed a painting, which gave him an edge over me since I had yet to begin a play. When the time came, I’d write a single script that would not only eliminate the need for more but nullify the prevailing theater. One play would mortar my manhood into a wall.
My adherence to the journal slid into a strange realm where I viewed my immediate interactions as a form of living diary. If riding a bicycle through a snowstorm sounded like good material for the journal, I borrowed a bike in a blizzard. The actual ride didn’t matter. What I did was try to observe myself as carefully as possible, while simultaneously imagining myself writing everything down later
Shadrack’s current project consisted of sculpture assembled with objects he stole from his friends, When something turned up missing, I merely had to visit his studio and surreptitiously steal it back. If he caught me, he’d complain that I was violating the sanctity of his work. A prolonged argument ensued until I offered to trade him another piece of my property. His attitude toward money was slightly more evolved, in that he never stole it. If I had cash, Shadrack demanded some. I hesitated before realizing that not only would he eventually pay it back but the practice granted me license to take his money as well. We once lived for two months on the same ten bucks passed to and fro. Knowing he either owed me money or would lend me some took the edge off hunger and despair..
The circus had given me a taste for working outdoors, and I quickly ran through three jobs—at a car wash, as a landscaper, and selling flowers from a pushcart. I got to know Salem, founded in 1626, now decayed and gift-wrapped like a mummy’s womb. After the failure of its harbor and mills, the town relied on its shameful history for tourist money. The high school ball teams were called the Witches. A church had recently been converted to a witch museum. Visitors poked their heads through loose-fitting stocks for a photograph to show the relatives.