Folk of the Fringe

by Orson Scott Card

  But right then Toolie took a step toward Deaver and said, "Well, Deaver Teague, you can see how it is with show people. We have to make a grand scene out of everything."

  That reminded folks that there was a stranger among them, and all at once they changed. Scarlett smiled at Deaver. Katie laughed lightly like it was all a joke. Marshall started nodding wisely, and Deaver knew the next words he said would be as elegant as ever.

  It was plainly time for Deaver to say thank you and get his saddle off the truck and go take a nap somewhere out of the wind till it got time to report in to Moab. Then the Aals could quarrel with each other all they liked. Parting would be fine with Deaver—he'd been a bit of painless charity to them, and they'd been a ride into town for him. Everybody got what they needed and good-bye.

  What messed things up was that when Marshall got pretty much the same idea—that it was time for Deaver to go—he didn't trust Deaver to have sense enough to figure it out himself. So Marshall smiled and nodded and put his arms around Deaver's shoulder. "I suppose, Son, that you'll want to stay here and wait until the offices open up at eight o'clock."

  Deaver didn't take offense at what he said—he was just hinting for Deaver to do what he already meant to do, so that was fine. Folks had a right to keep their family squabbles away from strangers. But giving him a hug and calling him "son" while telling him to go away, it made Deaver so mad he wanted to hit somebody.

  All the time he was growing up Mormons kept doing that same thing to him. They always fostered him out to live in some Mormon family's house who'd always make him go to church every Sunday even though they knew he wasn't a Mormon and didn't want to be one. The other kids knew right off he wasn't one of them and didn't make any bones about it—they left him alone and didn't pretend they liked him or even cared whether he lived or died. But there was always some Relief Society president who patted his head and called him "sweetie" or "you dear thing," and whenever the bishop passed him, he'd put his arm around him and call him "son," just like Marshall, and pretend they were only joking when they said, "How long till you see the light and get baptized?"

  That friendly and nice stuff always lasted until Deaver finally told them "never" loud enough and nasty enough that they believed him. From then on until he got fostered somewhere else, the bishop would never touch him or speak to him, just fix him with a cold stare as Deaver sat there in the congregation and the bishop sat up on the stand being holy. Sometimes Deaver wondered what would have happened if just once, some bishop had kept on being friendly even after Deaver told him he'd never get baptized. If maybe he might've felt different about Mormons if ever their friendship turned out to be real. But it never happened.

  So here was Marshall Aal doing just what those bishops always did, and Deaver plain couldn't help himself, he shrugged Marshall's arm off and stepped back so fast that Marshall's arm was still hanging there in the air for a second. His face and his fists must have shown how mad he was, too, because they all stared at him, looking surprised. All except Ollie, who stood there nodding his head.

  Marshall looked around at the others. "Well, I don't know what I..." Then he gave up with a shrug.

  Funny thing was, Deaver's anger was gone already, gone in a second. He never let rage hold on to him—that only gets you in trouble. Worst of all, now they all thought he was mad because they were sending him away. But he didn't know how to explain that it was OK, he was glad to go. It always ended up like this whenever he left a foster home, too. The family was sending him away because they were tired of him, which was fine cause he never much liked them either. He didn't mind leaving and they were glad to see him go, and yet nobody could just come out and say that.

  Well, so what. They'd never see him again. "Let me get my saddle," Deaver said. He headed for the side of the truck.

  "I'll help you," said Toolie.

  "No such thing," said Scarlett. She caught ahold of Deaver's elbow and held it tight. "This young man has been out in the grassland for I don't know how many days, and we're not sending him away without breakfast."

  Deaver knew she was just saying that for good manners, so he said no thanks as polite as he could. That might have been the end of it except right then Katie came to him and took his left hand—which was his only free hand, since Scarlett had tight hold on his right elbow. "Please stay," she said. "We're all strangers in this town, and I think we ought to stick together till we have to go our separate ways."

  Her smile was so bright that Deaver had to blink. And her eyes looked at him so steady, it was like she was daring him to doubt that she meant it.

  Toolie picked up on it and said, "We could use another hand setting up, so you'd be earning the meal."

  Even Marshall added his bit. "I meant to ask you myself. I hope you will come with us and share our poor repast."

  Deaver was hungry, all right, and he didn't mind looking at Katie's face though he wished she'd let go of his hand, and he particularly wished Scarlett would unclamp his elbow—but he knew he wasn't really wanted, and so he said no thanks again and got his arms back from the women and headed over to get his saddle off the truck. That was when Ollie laughed and said, "Come on, Teague, you're hungry and Father feels like a jerk and Mother feels guilty and Katie's hot for you and Toolie wants you to do half his work. How can you just walk off and disappoint everybody?"

  "Ollie," said Scarlett sternly.

  But by now Katie and Toolie were laughing, too, and Deaver just couldn't help laughing himself.

  "Come on, everybody into the truck," said Marshall. "Ollie, you know the way, you drive."

  Marshall and Scarlett and Toolie and Ollie piled into the cab, so Deaver had to ride in back with Katie and Janie and a younger brother, Dusty. The two really old people he saw last night were way in the back of the truck. Katie kept Deaver right up front, behind the cab. Deaver couldn't figure out if she was flirting with him or what. And if she was, he sure didn't know why. He knew his clothes stank of dirt and sweat and the horse he'd been riding till it died, and he also knew he wasn't much to look at even when he shaved. Probably she was just being nice, and didn't know how to do that except by using that smile of hers and looking at him under heavy eyelids and touching his arm and his chest whenever she talked to him. It was annoying, except that it also felt pretty nice. Only that made it even more annoying because he knew that it wasn't going anywhere.

  The town was finally coming awake as they drove to the pageant field. Deaver noticed they didn't go straight there. No, they drove that noisy truck up and down every road there was in town, most of them just dirt traces since nothing much got paved these days outside Zarahemla. The sound of the rattletrap truck brought people looking out their windows, and children spurted out the doors to lean on picket fences, jumping up and down.

  "Is it Pageant Day?" they'd shout.

  "Pageant Day!" answered Katie and Janie and Dusty. Maybe the old folks in back were shouting, too—Deaver couldn't hear. Pretty soon the news was ahead of the truck, and people were already lined up along the edge of the road, straining to see them. That was when the Aals started pulling the tarp off a couple of the big pieces. One of them looked like the top of a missile, and another one was a kind of tower—a tall steep pyramid like a picture Deaver saw in school, the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico City. When the people saw the rocket, they started yelling, "Man on the moon!" and when they saw the pyramid, which they couldn't see till the truck passed they'd scream and laugh and call out, "Noah! Noah! Noah!"

  Deaver figured they must have seen the shows before. "How many different pageants do you do?" he asked.

  "Three," said Katie. She waved at the crowd. "Pageant Day!" Then, still talking loud so he could hear her over the truck and the crowds and her little brother and sister yelling, she said, "We do our Glory of America pageant, which Grandfather wrote. And America's Witness for Christ, which is the old Book of Mormon pageant from the Hill Cumorah—everybody does that one—and at Christmas we do The Glorious Night, whi
ch Daddy wrote because he thought the regular Christmas pageants were terrible. That's our whole repertoire in towns like this. Pageant Day!"

  "So it's all Mormon stuff," said Deaver.

  She looked at him oddly. "Glory of America is American. The Glorious Night is from the Bible. Aren't you Mormon?"

  Here it is, thought Deaver. Here comes the final freeze-out. Or the sudden interest in converting me, leading up to a freeze-out soon enough. He had forgotten, for just a while this morning, that he hadn't told them yet, that they still figured he was one of them, that he basically belonged. The way that these show gypsies were still part of Hatchville, because they were all Mormons. The way most of the other range riders liked being in town, among fellow Mormons. But now, finding out he wasn't one of them, they'd feel like he fooled them, like he stuck himself in where he didn't belong. Now he really regretted letting them talk him into coming along to breakfast like this. They never would've tried to talk him into it if they knew he wasn't one of them.

  "Nope," said Deaver.

  He couldn't believe it when she didn't even pause. Just went on like nothing got said. "We'd rather do other shows, you know, besides those three. When I was little we spent a year in Zarahemla. I played Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol. Do you know what I've always wanted to play?"

  He didn't have any idea.

  "You have to guess," she said.

  He wasn't sure he'd ever even heard the name of a play, let alone a person in one. So he seized on the only thing he could halfway remember. "Titanic?"

  She looked at him like he was crazy.

  "In the cab. You said you were—"

  "Titania! The queen of the fairies from A Midsummer Night's Dream. No, no. I've always wanted to play—you won't tell anybody?"

  He sort of shrugged and shook his head at the same time. Who would he tell? And if it was a real secret, why would she tell him?

  "Eleanor of Aquitaine," she said.

  Deaver had never heard that name in his life.

  "It was a part Katherine Hepburn played. The actress I was named after. A movie called A Lion in Winter." She almost whispered the title. "I saw a tape of it once, years ago. Actually I saw it about five times, in one single day, over and over again. We were staying with an old friend of Grandpa's in Cedar City. We had a VCR that still ran on his windmill generator. The movie's banned now, you know."

  Movies didn't mean much to Deaver. Hardly anybody ever got to see them. Out here on the fringe nobody did. Electricity was too expensive to waste on televisions. Besides, a former salvage man like Deaver knew there just weren't enough working televisions in Deseret for more than a couple in each town. It wasn't like the old days, when everybody went home every night and watched TV till they fell asleep. Nowadays folks only had time for a show when a pageant wagon came to town.

  They were past the houses now, pulling onto a bumpy field that had been planted in wheat, long since harvested.

  Katie's voice suddenly went husky and trembled a little. "I'd hang you from the nipples, but you'd shock the children."

  "What?"

  "She was such a magnificent woman. She was the first to wear pants. The first woman to wear them. And she loved Spencer Tracy till he died, even though he was a Catholic and wouldn't divorce his wife to marry her."

  The truck pulled to a stop at the eastern edge of the field. Janie and Dusty jumped right off the truck, leaving them alone between the set pieces and the back of the cab.

  "I rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus," said Katie, in that husky, quavery voice again. "I damn near died of wind burn, but the troops were dazzled."

  Deaver finally guessed that she was quoting from the movie. "They did a movie where a woman said damn?"

  "Did I offend you? I thought since you weren't a Mormon, you wouldn't mind."

  That sort of attitude made Deaver crazy. Just because he wasn't a Latter-day Saint, Mormons thought he'd want to hear their favorite dirty joke, or else they started swearing cause they thought it would make him more comfortable, or they just assumed that he slept with whores all the time and got drunk whenever he could. But he swallowed his anger without showing it. After all, she meant no harm. And he liked having her so close to him, especially since she hadn't moved any farther away when she found out he was a gentile.

  "I just wish you could see the movie," said Katie. "Katherine Hepburn is—magnificent."

  "Isn't she dead?"

  Katie turned to him, her face a mask of sadness. "The world is poorer because of it."

  He spoke the way he always did to a sad-looking woman who was too close to ignore. "I guess the world ain't to poor if you're in it."

  Her face brightened at once. "Oh, if you keep saying things like that I'll never let you go." She took hold of his arm. His hand had just been hanging at his side, but now that she was pressed up against him, he realized his hand was being pressed into the soft curve of her belly just inside her hip bone. If he even twitched his hand he'd be touching her where a man had no right without being asked. Was she asking?

  Toolie, standing on the ground beside the truck, pounded one fist on Deaver's boot and the other on Katie's shoe. "Come on, Katie, let go of Deaver so we can use him to help with the loading."

  She squeezed his arm again. "I don't have to," she said.

  "If she gets annoying, Deaver, break her arm. That's what I do."

  "You only did it once," said Katie. "I never let you do it again." She let go of Deaver and jumped off the truck.

  For a moment he stood there, not moving his hand or anything. She just talked to him, that's all. That's all it meant. And even if she meant more, he wasn't going to do anything about it. You don't answer folks' hospitality by diddling with their daughter. After a minute—no just a few seconds—he swung himself off the truck and joined the others.

  Except for picking the exact spot to park and leveling the truck, the family didn't set to work right away. They gathered in the field and Parley Aal, the old man from the back of the truck, he said a prayer. He had a grand, rolling voice, but it wasn't so clear-sounding as Marshall's, and Parley said his r's real hard like the Mormons Katie made fun of back in town. The prayer wasn't long. Mostly all he did was dedicate the ground to the service of God, and ask the Lord's Spirit to touch the hearts of the people who came to watch. He also asked God to help them all remember their lines and be safe. So far only Katie knew Deaver wasn't Mormon, and he said amen at the end just like the others. Then he looked up and in the gap between Toolie and Katie, he could see part of the sign on the truck. Miracle, it said. Then they moved, and Deaver read the whole thing. Sweetwater's Miracle Pageant. Why Sweetwater, when everybody in the family was named Aal?

  Unloading the truck and setting up for the show was as hard as the hardest work Deaver'd ever done in his life. There was more stuff on that truck than he would ever have thought possible. The tower and the missile had doors in back, and they were packaged tight with props and machinery and supplies. It took only an hour to pitch the tents they lived in—four of them, plus the kitchen awning—but that was the easy part. There was a generator to load off the truck on a ramp, then hook up to the truck's gas tank. It was so awkward to handle, so heavy and temperamental, that Deaver wondered how they did it when he wasn't there. It took all the strength he and Toolie and Ollie and Marshall had.

  "Oh, Katie and Scarlett usually help," said Toolie.

  So he was saving Katie work. Was that why she was treating him so nice? Well, that was all right with him. He was glad to help, and he didn't expect payment of any coin. What else was he going to do this morning? Call in to Moab and then sit around and wait for instructions, most likely. Might as well be doing this. Best not to remember the way her body pressed against his hand, the way she squeezed his arm.

  They carried metal piping and thick heavy blocks of steel out about fifteen yards from the truck, one on each side of where the audience would be, and then assembled them into trees that held the lights. They kept tossing aro
und words that Deaver never heard of—fresnel, ellipsoidal—but before long he was getting the hang of what each light was for. Ollie was the one in charge of all the electrical work. Deaver had a little bit of practice with that sort of thing, but he made it a point not to show off. He just did whatever Ollie ordered, fast and correct and without a word unless he had to ask a question. By the time the lights were wired, aimed, and focused, Ollie was talking to Deaver like they were friends since first grade. Making jokes, even teasing a little—"Do they make some special horse perfume for you range riders to spray on?"—but mostly teaching Deaver everything there was to know about stage lighting. Why the different-colored filters were used, what the specials did, how the light plot was set up, how to wire up the dimmer board. Deaver couldn't figure what good it was ever going to do him, knowing how to light a stage show, but Ollie knew what he was talking about, and Deaver didn't mind learning something new.

  Even with the lights set up the work was hardly started. They had breakfast standing around the gas stove. "We're working you too hard," said Scarlett, but Deaver just grinned and stuffed another pancake in his mouth. Tasted like they actually had sugar in them. A gas stove, their own generator, pancakes that tasted like more than flour and water—they might live on a truck and sleep in tents, but these pageant wagon people had a few things that people in the fringe towns usually had to do without.

  By noon, dripping with sweat and aching all over, Deaver stood away from the truck with Ollie and Toolie and Marshall as they surveyed the stage. The missile had been taken down and replaced with the mast of a ship; the side of the truck had been covered with panels that made it look like the hull of a boat; and the machinery was all set up to make a wave effect with blue cloth out in front of it. A black curtain hid the pyramid from sight. Dusty raised and dropped the curtain while the men watched. Deaver thought it looked pretty exciting to have the pyramid suddenly revealed when the curtain dropped, but Marshall clucked his tongue.