Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “Good,” Joe Luc said. “It’s dead. Please help.” He carefully let himself down into the pit. He wrapped the greasy rope around the animal several times and gave its frayed end to Trapper. Then he climbed back out, and the two men worked an hour or two—Trapper had gone numb—extricating the creature. During their labors, the sky turned a bright silver.

  After a few minutes’ rest on the verge of the garden, Joe Luc returned to the weretiger to skin it with the big knife. Except for a place where the beast had impaled itself and then ripped at its own flesh, the pelt was lovely—so lovely that Trapper could not watch Joe Luc peel away the vibrant golden-orange hide.

  Without looking back, he limped into the house, eased into his bed, and slept all that hot summer’s day—the last day of August.

  A few minutes after ten of the following night, a messenger knocked at the front door of Trapper Catlaw’s house. He had a registered letter for the old man. The evening was unseasonably cool, and the messenger wore a jacket with a sheepskin collar. When the messenger exhaled, Trapper imagined that he saw—or maybe actually saw—puffs of vapor in the chill of the screened-in porch.

  “Sign here, sir.”

  Trapper signed and went back inside. Joe Luc sat in the only comfortable chair, the one that Sonny had always tried to grab. He was wrapped in the pelt of the creature that he had skinned yesterday morning. Trapper did not like him wearing it, but could not rebuke him for doing so. As always, the television set blared. A newscaster had just finished saying something upbeat about the conclusion of the latest series of peace talks in Geneva.

  Tuning out the newscaster’s voice, Trapper opened the bulky letter that he had signed for. He unfolded several sheets of official-looking papers with a single staple in their left-hand corners.

  “These are your ’doption papers,” he told Joe Luc. “It says here I’m supposed to sign them. Not Sonny—me. It don’t make a lick of sense.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What should I do with them?”

  “Sign them, don’t sign them. It doesn’t matter, Mr. Trapper. I am twenty-one on the first day of September.”

  The room felt like the inside of a refrigerated vault in which hunters store the dressed-out carcasses of their kills. Trapper wanted Joe Luc’s tiger pelt. Stumped, he flipped through the adoption papers again. The news, weather, and sports went off, and a loud used-car salesman started bellowing at them.

  “Please, Mr. Trapper.”

  Hunching his shoulders, Trapper eyed the boy.

  “Please change the channel,” Joe Luc said. “I wish to see the shoot-em-up-Tony.”

  Tithes of Mint and Rue

  LULA CARNAHAN SWEATED AT HER DESK IN THE office of Nichols’s Automotive in Abnegation, Alabama, marveling again at how reliably her bulk made her invisible to men of a certain age (fifteen to sixty-five) and easygoing arrogance (eighty per cent), as if the larger she loomed in her flesh the lower she sank in their eyes.

  “Hello!” cried Ronnie Guptil, searching the open bay. “Anybody to home?” A thirty-two-year-old bachelor and former classmate, he had damp barn-owl eyes and the goatee of a Playboy-cartoon satyr.

  “Just what do I look like, Ronnie?” Lula said, waving the invoice for the brake job on his pickup. “A goose egg inside a zero?”

  He pivoted, hands in armpits so that the tattoos on his biceps—a dragon and a mermaid—leapt into prominence. Then he focused, allowing Lula to emerge from a backdrop of boxed air filters and fan belts. “Geez, gal, you scared the piss out of me. No, you don’t look like a goose egg. More like the goose herself.”

  He never should have said that. A scowl replaced the mask of tight goodwill on Lula’s face.

  Ten years ago, only a month after her marriage to Chance Carnahan (once the second-leading scorer and only white player on County High’s basketball squad), Ronnie had copped a feel during one of Chance’s beer-fetching forays into the kitchen. Lula had fended Ronnie off. In those days, wearing a slimmer body, she warded off three or four of Chance’s friends a week—plus, every time she ventured downtown, some redneck Casanova with Scope on his breath and hands like crayfish claws.

  “Sorry,” Ronnie said, sashaying over.

  Today, sorry didn’t cut it.

  Lula rose, leaned over her desk on the palms of her dimpled hands and snarled, “A goose, eh? Fatted for the slaughter? Well, nobody eats goose on the Fourth, you peckerwood. It’s barbecue and Brunswick stew or fried chicken and cabbage slaw. But you heard the words ‘goose egg’ and couldn’t resist calling me a goose.”

  “Come on, Lula. Let me pay my bill.” Ronnie reached for the invoice even as he avoided her gaze.

  “You could’ve said I looked like a thunderhead threatening eastern Alabama. Or an ocean liner needing three or four tugboats to make it to dock. You could’ve said, ‘If only I had one of those little American flags the Veterans of Foreign Wars hand out every Fourth, I’d stick it in your backside and claim you as a spanking-new U. S. territory.’ You could’ve said—”

  “Lula, please.”

  “—that if I bought just one new dress a year, I could personally guarantee every cotton grower in the South a banner year. Or that if I filled up on helium, you and a few of your buddies could hitch a basket to me and get a bird’s-eye view of next year’s Super-bowl.”

  “Nobody in high school could outthink you,” Ronnie said penitently. “Nobody had more smarts.”

  “If I’d had the I.Q. of a chipmunk, I could’ve outthunk you. Most of your smarts wound up in your balls, and thinking as a pastime appealed to you about as much as manual labor. Some things never change, Ronnie.”

  “Come on, Lula, cut me some slack.”

  Lula Carnahan tore up Ronnie’s invoice, flung the pieces at him, and ambled out of Nichols’s Automotive impressively rolling.

  Thinking to shake the dust of Abnegation off her feet, Lula bought a bus ticket to a small midwestern town she’d never seen before. (Of course, she’d only barely visited Montgomery or Birmingham.) The Greyhound left at 5 P.M. from the front of the High ’n’ Dry Cleaners, where her oldest friend, Sue Rose Foyt, acted as clerk and ticket agent, and where Lula tried to explain to Sue Rose why she had decided to leave Abnegation for the Great Plains.

  “The guys here all think with their gonads,” Lula said.

  Sue Rose said, “That’s the species, honey. There ain’t no other sort of man Up North, Out West, or anywhere else.”

  “Maybe not, but I can’t stand the guys in this backwater.”

  “So why head off to another one? To godforsaken Festivity, Iowa? Iowa, of all places.”

  A cheap suitcase at her feet and ranks of plastic-covered clothes hanging behind her like the husks of the Raptured, Lula perched in her folding chair next to the counter. Squinting, her eyes resembled pinless pink pincushions. Sue Rose regarded her critically, as if recalling when everyone in town, especially Chance, had considered Lula the county’s greatest beauty.

  “For love,” Lula said at last.

  “Of what?” Sue Rose said. “Corn cobs? Grain elevators?”

  Lula’s eyes twinkled in their slits. “Of somebody worthy of me. Of my soulmate, maybe.”

  “Come on, Lula, nobody’s got to travel a thousand miles to get their heart broke.”

  “I do.” In her violet-patterned sundress, Lula shifted her weight to her opposite haunch. “I most certainly do.”

  “Honey, tell me why.”

  “Several nights running I’ve had a dream of this carnival in a field of corn stubble under a crooked moon. Of a sideshow tent where a man in a tuxedo tells everyone who comes in what they must do to find everlasting love.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Sell what they have. Give to the poor. Forsake the place of their birth for the carnival midway.”

  “Oh.” Sue Rose smirked. “Is that all?”

  “They must devote themselves to a lost soul who walks that midway lookin’ not for answers or mysteries but just
for … a true experience.”

  “Some dream. Okay, Lula, have you sold what you own?”

  “Mostly. Chester Philpot’s agreed to find a buyer for my trailer. Plus I got a dime a title at Minna’s Magic Browse for my romance novels and movie mags.”

  “And you’ve given to the poor?”

  “My clothes went to Baptist Thrift and what cash I could spare to Talledega Mission. I reckon that counts.”

  “Sure. But you have to go to Iowa?” The air conditioning thumped, throttled down, droned like a beehive. “To marry this guy in the tux?”

  “Not him. He’s just a ringmaster, a fella who takes us in and then introduces the real attraction.”

  “Takes us in?” Rose said.

  “Not that way. Welcomes us, I mean.”

  Noisily, the bus from Montgomery arrived and idled outside like a panting behemoth, its skirts tarred with road grime, its innards as mysterious behind its tinted windows as the holy of holies in a Hebrew tabernacle.

  Lula boarded the Greyhound. The driver gazed down on her with the disinterest of a biologist watching a python engorge a frog. Only a few passengers looked up, but Lula still felt like a member of another species, less a mammal than an upright amphibian. Two rows back on the left, a pair of empty seats beckoned, and Lula squeezed into the nearer. Cool air from the window vents washed over her like a blessing.

  The bus pulled out and cruised up U.S. 280. Inspecting her tickets, Lula found that she must change buses three times en route to Festivity, sleeping as she traveled. For courtesy’s sake, she eased over toward the window, but her left hip still encroached on the aisle seat.

  In Birmingham, the bus almost filled up, but no one sat by Lula. A soldier squatted up front until a family of three got off in Carbon Hill and he slipped into a vacated seat.

  In Tupelo, a new surge of riders boarded. A tough young guy with a shaved head, angry freckles, and a swastika earring stopped next to Lula, leaned over, and said, “A hippo like you ought to buy two tickets, honey.”

  Lula lowered her book and smiled. “What makes you think I didn’t, ferret-face?”

  The skinhead peered around, cawed loudly, then leaned back down to whisper, “Next time you smart-mouth me, cow, I’ll slice your liver out.”

  Lula stage-whispered back, “You’d only lose your knife,” then grabbed his sweaty tee shirt and twisted it with both hands. “Make nice so everyone can hear and sit down before I hurt you bad.”

  “Sure,” the man said squeakily. “No disrespect intended, ma’am.” When Lula let go of his shirt, he collapsed into the seat next to hers.

  “Lula Carnahan,” she said. “I can’t imagine you want me to call you ferret-face forever.”

  “Just to Memphis. I’m Walter Cheatam.” The bus swung a curve that pressed him against her, and she smiled with a look that dismissed him as even a minor nuisance, much less a bona fide person.

  Acid filled Cheatam’s mouth, and he caught a glint from the spoon-shaped silver brooch pinned above Lula’s heart. Nodding at it, he said, “Maybe you should wear one shaped like a pitchfork.”

  Lula said only, “My ex-husband gave me this,” and fingered the brooch’s curved handle.

  “Husband? Somebody must’ve poked the poor bastard down the aisle with a shotgun.”

  “No way.” Lula took from her purse a photo of herself as County High Homecoming Queen, sixteen years ago. “I turned my husband down twice before surrendering.”

  Cheatam twisted the snapshot from side to side. “This is you? Va-va-voom! What happened?”

  Lula seized it and dropped it back into her purse. “Take a look. I enlarged.”

  “Well, that’s a shame.”

  “The shame is, I had to.”

  “Had to swell up like a balloon? What crap, Miz Carnahan.”

  Lula tapped his knee and recounted how her teenage beauty kept provoking men to lay hands on her (not religiously) and to try to persuade her to scoot off to New Orleans or Atlanta (not always on their own funds). Worse, Chance despised jealousy as a wimp’s emotion and laughed off her every report of his pals’ betrayals. In self-defense she began to eat, to plump herself out with milkshakes and cheeseburgers.

  At first, when Lula informed him of her pregnancy, Chance tolerated these binges. His wife had to eat for two. He even bought the silver baby spoon that, after her miscarriage, Lula had made into a brooch. She went on gorging. For a while, Chance considered this an acceptable response to the terrible hollowness she felt—but when she kept eating, her increasing bulk alarmed and repulsed him.

  “So the bastid left you,” Cheatam said.

  “Yes. Eventually.”

  “Understandable.”

  Lula squeezed Cheatam’s knee. “Maybe so. But the other guys backed off too. Fat turned them off faster than a dose of saltpeter.”

  “Ow!” Lula stopped squeezing. “Hope that didn’t surprise you,” Cheatam said. “Guys visit strip clubs for the foxes, Miz Carnahan, not the manatees.”

  “What surprised me was, Chance had loved me for the way I’d looked, not for my inside self. So I added some flesh to subtract the jerks pretending to be his friends.”

  “Deep,” Cheatam said.

  “If I didn’t look good, Chance didn’t look good. Solution: divorce.”

  “Maybe Chance thought your extra weight would give you like a heart attack or somepin.”

  “If he did, the creep’s motto was ‘the sooner the better.’ He talked diets to me but never doctors. Then he packed up and moved—two months after my miscarriage.” She rubbed the bowl of her brooch, making it shine.

  In Memphis, Cheatam stood by Lula while a porter unloaded the luggage bin. Then, all solicitude, he carried her suitcase into the station’s waiting area.

  “Whyinhell you want to go to Iowa?” he asked.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of running off to join the circus?” Lula smiled, showing her dimples.

  Cheatam saluted, then pivoted and vanished out the door into the city’s humid predawn. Not until an hour later, while boarding her bus to St. Louis, did Lula notice that her brooch had also vanished.

  From Memphis to St. Louis. From St. Louis to Des Moines. From Des Moines to tiny Festivity.

  Lula arrived at 9 P.M., exhausted, her sundress stained with sweat. A skinny old man outside the drugstore doubling as bus depot told her that a couple of nights ago the carnival had set up two miles northwest of town. Festivity had no taxi or shuttle service, but if she walked out beyond the Sweet Freeze, she could hitch a ride.

  Dozens of cars whooshed by—some more than once, honking scornfully—but nobody stopped. So Lula walked. Half a mile away, she saw the lights of the makeshift fair grounds and heard the shrieks of the carnivalgoers. Not until nearly ten did she reach the Carnaval Milagrosa, her legs as stunned as butcher’s blocks.

  Lula paid and waddled into the parade of townies on the sawdust-strewn paths. Huge canvas posters rippled before her, hyping The Flying Frenellis, The Ugly Rat Boy, The Siamese Transistor Sisters, and Evelyn Stynchcomb (Ten-Performers-in-One!). Ramshackle rides banged and ratcheted. Along with screams of glee and panic, these noises stretched out over the grounds like audible taffy, gumming the very air.

  Just inside the biggest sideshow tent, a carny who looked Mayan made me check my suitcase. I told him it didn’t contain a bomb, but he wouldn’t let me enter until I’d stowed it behind his counter and he’d given me a receipt. Then I sauntered into the tent and between its swaying panels to a stage backed with a crummy drop scene of the Eiffel Tower, with King Kong hanging off it and exposing his crotch. Somebody’d pasted a decal of Joe Camel over this area, though, and before anyone could point out how much Joe Camel’s face resembled the equipment of a male primate, the show’s emcee, wearing a maroon tuxedo like the ringmaster in my dream, strolled out and tipped his top hat.

  “Bienvenido, one and all,” he said. “I am Cesar Sereno, manager of the Carnaval Milagrosa. Tonight, without moving an inch, you will witn
ess in this tent the miraculous talents—the miraculous person—of Evelyn Stynchcomb, Ten Performers in One.” Sereno glanced toward the people still filing in. “Come in. Yes, keep coming. We haven’t begun yet. Plenty of room in the pit for you groundlings.” He made a sweeping gesture of invitation.

  “Plenty of room if you hadn’t stuck your fat lady front-row center!” shouted the beefy man next to me.

  “Look who’s talking,” said a good-looking fella on the edge of the crowd. “A professional nose tackle.”

  Everyone laughed, even me, but our laughter floated up at the edges, like a sheet with a bad smell under it.

  Cesar Sereno bowed to me. “The plus-sized lady down front has gravitated to our amusement as a patron. She has as much right to her space as you to yours, so please accommodate with civility to one another and let the small fry come forward so they may see without hindrance.”

  “Maybe the small fry don’t need to see this!” cried a voice somewhere behind me.

  “Maybe not all of it,” Sereno admitted. “For them, Evelyn Stynchcomb will appear as Eight Performers in One. Later, they will exit this tent for a free frozen-banana pop or a free ride on the midway.”

  The nose tackle bumped my shoulder. “Move over,” he said, from the side of his sturgeon-lipped mouth.

  I put my foot on his instep and leaned. Then I slipped my hand into his pocket and played Captain Queeg. The balls in my palm squished rather than clicked. The man gasped. When I let go, three children—cute Iowa towheads—butted between him and me to the pit’s front row.

  “Without further ado,” said Cesar Sereno, “the wonderful—yes, the miraculous—Evelyn Stynchcomb!”