Professor Renoir's Collection of Oddities, Curiosities, and Delights

by Randall Platt

  With all her strength, with all her heart, she tossed the beam aside and Woodrow popped to the surface! His gasps for breath made her fit to kill for what he’d done, yet leap for joy he hadn’t drowned. She picked him up and stepped away from the crowd, holding him high over her head to hand him to his mother. Woodrow spit out mud and water and screamed through his choking. Finally, he looked down at Babe and his face spread in terror.

  “Help! The giant’s got me! The giant’s got me!” he screamed. He kicked and pounded Babe’s head. “Help! Mama!”

  Babe held him at arm’s length and glared at him, then tried to shake the screaming out of him.

  “Babe! Stop! Babe!” Lotty cried, pulling at Babe’s skirt. “What are you doing?”

  Babe shook her head to bring her to her senses. Then, she cradled him in her arms, hushing him. But he was still stiff with fright.

  “Give him to me!” the drenched mother screamed, now batting Babe’s side with her muddy parasol. “Give him!”

  “Hesh, hesh, hesh, child. I got you,” Babe said soothingly. “You’re okay. Babe’s got you.” Looking into his face, she knew she frightened him. “Here’s your mama.” Gently, she wiped some mud from his face. “Shhhh.”

  She handed him, carefully as she could, down to his crying mother. “He’s okay, ma’am. He’s okay.”

  But the mother had no words for Babe. She turned and carried her Woodrow away, leaving Babe standing in the water, the broken pillar knocking against her knees, the sting of the parasol along her side.

  The carnage around her, the damage, and with the gossip sure to follow, Babe knew, just knew, she would get blamed for the whole thing. Within two hours, Renoir received a bill of damages from the stationmaster. Adding salt to her wounds, Woodrow and his mother sat in the front row center at the evening show, tickets compliments of Renoir. The boy’s face was now free of mud and full of candy. His bright red tongue nah-nahed up at her.

  Babe couldn’t bear to look at him or his prim mother, dressed now in a fresh clean dress, a matching parasol over her head. No respect. Carnies never deserve respect. Only the blame.

  On the road again and sleepless in the stuffy railroad car, Babe sat, her legs dangling out the door, thinking about the day, watching the shadowy landscape of eastern Oregon roll by. She still heard the blast of the firecrackers, the screams of that brat Woodrow, the whap whap whap of the mother’s parasol. She felt the chill of the rising water, the strength of the pillar, and the eyes of the thankless woman. But what bothered her the most was—for an instant—the beast nearly escaped.

  Babe shook her head to scare away those thoughts, pulled herself up, and lumbered to her bed. Her joints ached more than usual. Fourteen and she had the pains of an old woman.

  A doctor once told her giants usually don’t live much past thirty, maybe forty, tops. “Nope, a giant’s heart has a lot of territory to pump all that blood through,” he’d said, showing her the drawing of a giant’s skeleton in a medical book. At first Babe didn’t understand it, being only half a giant at the time. But now, rubbing her aching knees, rolling the stiffness out of her shoulders, massaging her fingers and hands, she began to understand.

  “Thirty year,” Babe said into the dusky car. She used her fingers in the air to cipher the years. “Criminy, Babe, you’re near half done.” Her eyes landed on the ghostly gray of her Magnifica costume, hanging on a nail across the car. It swayed to and fro mockingly with the rhythm of the tracks. “You just think on that, girl. One-half the way to dying.”

  She smiled over at Jupiter, who was snoring as only an elderly bear can. It was music to her. Euclid slept in his cage curled up, childlike, in his favorite blanket.

  Lying down with a grunt, she pulled a light sheet over her, brought her knees to her chest, and held herself.

  “One-half . . .” she whispered, closing her eyes, seeing that medical-book skeleton, thinking, hearing those firecrackers, thinking.

  21

  “You got that book to read us, Lotty?” Babe asked, two nights later and after the last show. She felt too tired, too achy to sleep. “The one about Alice.”

  “Oh, yes!” she said, jumping up and heading to her train car. “I’ll be right back!”

  Babe loved it when Lotty read out loud, especially on warm nights such as this, around a cook fire.

  Lotty bounded back, carrying a book almost too heavy for her. “Where did we leave off?”

  “Do that potion part again.” Babe settled back against a log, stretching her legs out. “I like that part.”

  Lotty read with great drama and booming voice, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where Alice drinks a potion and pow! she’s big as a room! Bigger than Babe! Big as a tree! Then, Lotty switched to a whispery, teensy voice when Alice drinks the next potion and swoosh! she’s teeny-weeny small! Smaller than Lotty! Small as a twig! As she read, the firelight grew smaller and the shadows grew larger.

  Lotty set the book on her lap and sighed. “Don’t you wish there was such a potion?” She stared, stone-faced, into the embers. “You know. Something you can drink and get smaller? Something I can drink and get bigger?” Her voice had never sounded so small, her wishes so big.

  “I’d pay all the money I ever could get for that, Lotty.”

  “Me too,” she whispered. Then, snapping out of it, she added, “Anyway, it’s just pretend. Just like Madame de la Rosa’s fake mind reading and jujus.”

  “It’s fun to think about, ain’t it?” Babe poked the fire with a stick. “We both drink a potion and meet somewheres in the middle and finally see eye to eye. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “Yes,” she whispered dreamily. Then, “Oh, come on. Let’s think about something else.”

  “Okay. Let’s think on our own adventure. Let’s think about us getting out of here. Betwixt us we got over four hundred dollar. What we don’t got is a plan.”

  “You know,” Lotty said, “I have an aunt.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “She’s my mother’s sister.”

  “She a midget, too?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Babe?” Lotty snapped. “I’m a dwarf, not a midget!”

  “It’s only a word. And it’s fun to say. Mid-jit. What difference does it make?”

  “Well, I prefer dwarf. Midget makes me think of those dummies on ventriloquists’ laps.”

  “I seed one of them acts once. You ever seed one?”

  “Worse!” she said. “I was in one!”

  “Which was you?” Babe asked, keeping her smile low.

  Lotty cast her eyes to the heavens. “Oh ha ha! Yep, I sat on the lap of the Great Martini for a whole season. I was just ten. I’d make like I wasn’t real, you know, made of wood, cranking my neck and flapping my jaw. Fixed my face so it looked like wood. Big dead eyes looking at no one.”

  “I’d pay cash money to see that!”

  Lotty went into her dummy imitation. She lowered her voice and said, “‘So, tell me, Minnie’—I was billed as Minnie the Midget—‘what’s your favorite bird?’ I’d look at the audience, blink wide a few times, crank my neck this way and that, and he’d say for me, ‘Well, it sure ain’t a woodpecker!’ Folks’d laugh and I’d crank my shoulders up and down like the dummy—well, me—would laugh. We played music and dance halls. I hated it, but the money was good and Mr. Martini and his wife kept me safe.”

  “You think just on account of we’re different, folk can treat us different?”

  “Of course they treat us different! Look, Babe, I’ve been with one show or another since I was ten, when I got kicked out of the orphanage.”

  “Ten’s mighty young for”—Babe indicated the carnival world around them—“for all this.”

  “Well, they let me take the eighth-grade exam, and I passed with flying colors. No one was going to adopt a peewee runt like me, they couldn’t teach me any longer, so why not get on with being this? What I am?”

  “I remember when I was about ten,” Babe began, starin
g into the fire. “One little girl said she’d give me a sandwich if she could take me to her Sunday school to show me off.”

  Lotty laughed. “And did you?”

  “It was ham and cheese, Lotty. ’Course I did it! Think that was the first time ever I went on display for commerce.”

  Their laughter melted into silence. Babe broke it. “We was talking about your aunt. You never answered. Is your aunt a midg—dwarf, too?”

  “Oh, I doubt it. Neither of my parents were small.” She sighed, staring into the fire. “If they had been, maybe they wouldn’t have died.”

  Lotty had told Babe about how it was she’d come to be orphaned when she was three. House fire, pushed out through a tiny windowpane, too tiny for her parents to follow her.

  “Wait. If you got kin, how come you didn’t you go live with her?”

  “No one knew. Everything was destroyed in the fire. I don’t even have a birth certificate. Who cares? Some people think I was hatched anyway!”

  “Ha! I been handed that line, too!” Babe said, snapping a branch in half and tossing it onto the fire.

  “Anyway, I was in two different orphanages. After a few years, news caught up and they learned I had an aunt. Here. In Oregon.”

  “Did they write her about you?”

  “Yes. No answer. Least, that’s what they told me. Probably she didn’t see any good in raising a dwarf.” Lotty sighed. “After all, what do you do with a dwarf once the luster wears off?”

  “You got luster? What’s luster?” Babe asked, trying to joggle her friend out of her blue mood.

  “Well, you know, making like I’m a baby for five or six years. By the time I was a year old, they knew I was going to always be small. So, I went out on a free trial three different times but they always sent me back after a few months.”

  “Why’d they take you back?”

  “Maybe they got tired of telling people I wasn’t a baby but a child. Who cares? I’ve always found some carnie work, and even a traveling home is a home. Sure makes you grow up fast, though.”

  “I reckon,” Babe said, her voice now low like Lotty’s.

  “But it makes me mad as hell I can be a wooden dummy, dance a jig on an elephant’s back, and that’s about all. I can’t be anyone’s pretend baby.”

  “Well, look at me. What am I fit for? Sure as hell I ain’t going to be no highfalutin lady of leisure or gal about town. Ain’t no man willing to take on feeding and dressing me.”

  “But, Babe, you’re stronger than any man. You’ll always find a job.”

  “Men’s jobs. They don’t let women. Besides”—she tapped her forehead—“I’m pretty dang weak here.” Babe lowered her voice. “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Never told anyone before, but I got this thing inside me.” Now she tapped her stomach. “It’s a . . . a beast. She tries to get out and I have to work like grim death to keep her hid.”

  “I think I have one, too,” Lotty said. “My beast is pretty tiny, but she’s there.”

  Babe lit a lantern with a stick from the fire. “What about you? If things was different? If you was . . . normal? What would you be?”

  “Me? Don’t laugh.”

  “I ain’t laughing.”

  “I’ve always wanted to be a nurse.”

  “Nurse? Don’t that take schooling?”

  She sighed. “Yes. And schooling takes money, if I could even find a school that would take me. After all, how could I even—” She stopped.

  Babe envisioned her, all white and crisp and fast, working around a hospital bed. Then it hit her—what Lotty had probably been seeing her whole life, which wasn’t the top of anything. She couldn’t reach the top of a bed or an operating table or even a bedpan. She was too small to do work so big.

  Lotty’s pretty face glowed in the firelight. “Anyhows,” Babe said, “what’s you having a aunt got to do with anything? You thinking about going to her instead of us striking out together?”

  “No! No, Babe! Nothing like that! I was going through the papers they gave me when I left the orphanage. You know, the death papers, my release, graduation certificate. Got to thinking about where we might go, once we get free from Renoir.”

  “I’m thinking maybe we can buy us a bit of land. Just us and our critters. Maybe farm something.”

  Lotty pulled out a folded paper from the book at her side. “This is the last address of my aunt. See here? Miss Valerie Logan. General Delivery, John’s Town, Oregon. I never thought I’d need an aunt until . . . Uncle Dan’s Taxidermy.”

  “What makes you think she’s still there, or, heck, Lotty, even alive?”

  “Must you always look on the dark side? It’s really a very unpleasant feature.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “I found out John’s Town is in southern Oregon, close to Medford. Right where we’re heading. And we can get mail in care of this train.”

  “Mail from who?”

  “From my aunt! Aren’t you listening?”

  “Why for?”

  “Because,” she sighed, “maybe she’ll put us up for a bit, until we can figure out what we’re going to do. I mean, she owes me that.” She held up the paper. “So I’ve written her a letter.”

  “Okay, Lotty, I ain’t saying this to show ’nother unpleasant feature, but if she didn’t write back to the orphanage folk, what makes you think she’ll write back now?”

  She looked wistfully at the letter. “Well, it was worth a try. I mean, we’re going to be so close. Maybe. Maybe she’s alive. Maybe she’s still there. Maybe she’ll answer.”

  “Them’s a lot of ‘maybes.’”

  “Maybe ‘maybe’ is all we have, Babe.”

  “Read to me what you writ.”

  “Wrote,” she corrected.

  “Wrote.”

  “Hold the lantern still. ‘Dear Aunt Valerie; How are you? I am fine. I got word from the nuns at Grace of Glory Children’s Home that you are my aunt. Maybe you met me when I was very small. I am still small. My mama was your sister, so I am your niece. I am fourteen years old now. I would like to visit you this August. I will be traveling with a friend and it would be nice to meet you. Our train is the Huxley Line. It is private and uses the Southern Pacific tracks, so you can send me a letter in care of the train and I will get it. Your niece, Carlotta Jones.’”

  “Jones?”

  “It’s the name the nuns gave me.”

  “Good thing you don’t mention who we’re bringing with us,” Babe said.

  “Well, like you said, she might even be dead.” Lotty folded the letter with her delicate hands and slipped it back into the book. “But, Medford is close to the end of the line for us and them.” She nodded her head toward Babe’s cattle car. “That taxidermy man is in Klamath Falls, and that’s close to Medford.”

  The word taxidermy made Babe’s heart jump, and she felt that rage rising up again. Lotty was right. This aunt of hers just has to be alive and willing, and, yes, she did owe Lotty at least this.

  “That don’t give us much time,” Babe said.

  “Think you can take a few more falls for half the purse?” Lotty asked, giving Babe a sly smile.

  “As long as you keep finding me a come-on guy, then sure. That’s twenty-five each time I take a fall.”

  “Renoir’s starting to get suspicious, you know.”

  “I told him I get wearied sometimes. Besides, what can he do?”

  “And I can pick up some extra money making those horsehair jujus and conjure bags for Madame de la Rosa.”

  “Are them the ones for love or for hate?”

  “Neither. They’re the ones for fortune. They sell like hotcakes. Who doesn’t want fortune?”

  “Make a few for us, will you?” Babe said. “Can’t never hurt.”

  22

  “Have you seen JoJo?” Serena asked Babe and Lotty. “You know she’s afraid of the dark.” The last show in Hermiston, Oregon, had closed, and the train was mostl
y packed away with track clearance to leave the siding at dawn.

  “Did you find her?” Rosa asked urgently as she dashed into the mess tent.

  “No, I haven’t seen her since my first show,” Donny said. “She helped with the dog jumps. Sometimes she crawls in the cage to sleep with my dogs, but she wasn’t there, either.”

  “Not like her to just disappear. Especially after dark,” Serena said, looking around the tent.

  “She likes to hide then jump out and scare the bejesus out of me,” Lotty said. “But she hasn’t done that since we became friends.”

  “She wouldn’t just wander off,” Lucretia said, setting down a cup of coffee.

  The others in the tent circled and offered an explanation or idea. “Did anyone look in her bed?” Vern asked. “Maybe she was just tired and called it a night. She’s no spring chicken, you know.”

  “Nowhere on the train!” This ’n’ That Ernie announced, coming into the tent. “We looked everywhere. Tents, cars, even boxes and crates. Now, this wouldn’t be the first time she’s gone and hid herself.”

  Voices outside were calling for JoJo. Babe thought back—didn’t she see JoJo that night? Where? What? “I remember,” she whispered. All eyes were on her. “Yes! During my act! There was some boys. Podunk town rowdies. Didn’t see much past my stage lamps, but I heard JoJo laugh.”

  “You don’t think she’d go with a stranger, do you?” Rosa asked the crowd.

  “You’re the mind reader, you tell us!” one of the cooks called out.

  “They got JoJo! They got JoJo!” Ina, Mina, or Tina shouted, as all three ran into the tent. “Us girls were in town after the show!” one said, catching her breath.

  “Someone swiped JoJo’s doll and made her come after it,” another said. “They went into a tavern!”

  “We went inside and saw them teasing her about her doll.”

  “One man was holding it over her head!”

  “Then another man teased her with a brand-new doll! Said she had to sing for it!”

  “She wouldn’t come back with us. Come on, someone! Help!”

  “Lotty, you stay here,” Babe said.