Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (37 page)

“I’ve been practicing.”

“She has,” said Em. “And performing.”

“Then no potatoes,” Ozmandia said. “No bread. No starch.”

“What’s starch?” Em asked. The only starch she knew was what she ironed with.

“I’ll make a list,” Ozmandia told her.

She turned to Dorothy. “We’re starting again next month. Barnum and Bailey have bought the old man out.”

“No more Mr. Wizard?” Dorothy said. “But it’s
his
circus.”

“He’s retiring to Florida,” said Ozmandia. “For what they paid him, he can afford it. Him and that elephant.”

“Will you stay awhile?” Dorothy said, speaking to her circus friend as if the rest of us hardly mattered. And indeed, probably we didn’t.

“Just tonight, Baby Bird,” Ozmandia said. “I’m getting around to everyone.”

“But I’m special,” Dorothy said.

“You always were, falling out of the sky that way.” She turned to Em. “I assume, madam, that it is all right for me to stay the one night? I can sleep in Dottie’s bed with her. It’s an old circus custom.”

I bet it is
, I thought, but didn’t say it aloud.

She stayed two nights, and no one spoke about it until long after. That first evening, being a Saturday, Dorothy did her wire walk over the pigsty. Ozmandia played a flute as Dorothy performed, and though you probably won’t believe it, the sow and piglets got up on their hind trotters and danced.

Amelia was there as usual, of course, and she and Ozmandia became instant pals, both of them enthusing over Dorothy’s talents.

When we walked home, I tried to hold Amelia’s hand, feeling a sudden tenderness toward her I hadn’t felt in years, but she pulled her hand away.

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t any more.”

Amelia’s mother died that very night, with such a peaceful smile on her face she hardly looked like the same woman. Only Henry and Em, Stan and Rand, and Dorothy came to the funeral.

Ozmandia sent a message the next month, and Dorothy packed up her carpetbag, ready to leave the next morning. Stan was driving her by cart into the city—she was taking a steam engine train from there.

Em watched her go dry-eyed, but Henry was sobbing enough for the two of them. Stan and Rand were openmouthed, breathing hard.

I was there as well, watching Amelia go with her.

“Tom,” she’d told me last night, “I have never done anything for myself before. First there was Mother, and then there was you. I’ve taken the housekeeping money. I’ve been saving some for months. Sell Mother’s house for me, and you keep half. Start that woodworking business for real this time. It’s the only thing you’ve ever really loved. I’ll write and tell you where to send my portion when I know.”

“Are you going to be a wire walker?” I asked.

“I’ll take tickets, sell popcorn, clean out the lion’s cage. I’ll do anything they need, wear many hats, many heads. After all,” she said, “I’m well practiced in that sort of thing.”

And maybe she was, after all.

“Perhaps eventually they’ll let me try the wire.” She smiled. “Even though I’m probably too old.”

“Never too old,” I said, remembering her on our wedding day.

“Tom, you never could tell a lie,” she said. “Don’t start now.”

The cart pulled away and rolled down the dusty road, making it look for a minute like little imps were running behind. If you start thinking that way about the world once, it seems to go on and on.

I watched till the cart with my wife in it was out of sight. When I turned back, Henry was still standing there, the little dog on wheels cradled in his arms. I guess Dorothy didn’t need it anymore.

I guess Henry did.

BY DALE BAILEY

S
o Joe fell the other day.

One minute he’s hanging on the wall, maybe twenty feet away from me, and we’re shouting back and forth, razzing each other the way you do—polish polish polish, till your arms feel so numb they could fall off and you wouldn’t even notice and just razzing each other:
your wife is so heinous you get a mouthful of fur when you give her a hickey,
and
your mom is so fat she gets mistaken for a dirigible
. The kind of thing you do, and nobody’s feelings get hurt. My wife says guys do this because they’re so emotionally stunted that they can’t express their real feelings. But I know this to be bullshit of the most preposterous variety, because when Joe fell I cried like a baby, and that’s not emotionally stunted if you know what I mean.

But I’ve always been a little bit on the sensitive side, even for a Munchkin.

So here’s what happens. We’re on the wall, maybe seventy feet up, razzing each other, when two of Joe’s lines snap. Not one but two, is what I’m saying. His bucket goes clattering down the side of the wall, spraying polish everywhere—it smells like an ammonia bomb has exploded—and his platform swings down on one side, hanging vertically. His safety
harness engages, and he’s suddenly dangling below the platform, still holding on to his rag. He’s just kind of swinging there, this panicky expression on his face, and I say in this very calming voice, the kind of voice you use with your kids when they scrape a knee or something, I say, “Everything’s cool, hang tight,” you know what I mean, only not thinking till later that
hang tight
is not the best thing I could have said under these particular circumstances. But still, the safety harness is engaged, and the guys up top are going to winch him up—that’s the way it always happens—and we’ll all go out for a cold one somewhere after our shift. We’ll clap Joe on the back and say things like
You looked pretty scared up there, pal
and
Did you shit your britches or what? I can fucking smell you, man
, and we’ll have a few laughs, and then we’ll go home to do it all over again, another day on the wall, polish polish polish. That’s the way it always goes down, no pun intended. I wouldn’t disrespect Joe’s memory that way, not for all the world with a cherry on top.

Not even for the Wizard’s head on a spike, which is something I shouldn’t have written, but hell, sometimes you have to tell the truth or you can’t look at yourself in the mirror the next morning.

Then this next thing happens, which is Joe’s safety harness snaps, and down he goes like the bucket, bouncing off the wall, which has this gentle slope to it.
Thump thump thumpity-thump crunch kersplat
—this meaty sound like a squadron of monkeys has just dropped a side of beef from a hundred feet up just to see what will happen. Fucking monkeys. Anyway, that’s what I remember most is that sound,
crunch kersplat
, blood and bones, you know, blood and fucking bones. Looking down, it’s like a kid has dropped a jar of strawberry jelly. Joe’s just exploded like a meat bag full of blood, and what I’m thinking is, some poor son of a bitch
is going to have to scrape him off the pavement, and some other poor son of a bitch is going to have to wipe down the wall and polish polish polish till it’s like it never happened. I’m hoping it’s not me, too, which makes me feel kind of guilty, because even though he’s a Winkie, Joe’s my best friend, you know.

That’s what got us thinking—me, Dizzy, and Hops. We go out for a cold one, this little hole-in-the-wall in the tunnels, Frankie’s, where we go sometimes after a shift. There are two overlapping shifts, fourteen hours each, six and a half days a week with half a day Sunday, which you’re supposed to spend with your wife and kids tossing the old Frisbee around and grilling burgers, but you can’t ever do that because you’re just so fucking tired—you know what I mean. You’re just so
tired.
Calixta always complains about it, prodding me with her foot and saying
Get up lazy bones. Don’t you wanna see your kids?
And I do, but I’m just so tired. My arms feel like they’re not connected to the rest of me, my hands are clenched into these hooks or claws. It takes me all afternoon and evening to work them back into hands again, and I’m supposed to throw a Frisbee? Besides, where we gonna throw it? You can’t do it in the tunnels, with all these sad little holes-in-the-walls that we rent as “apartments,” if you know what I’m saying, these one-room little dens with a couple of stinking straw pallets, all infested with lice and bedbugs, one for Calixta and me and one for the kids. We usually end up screwing Sunday night once my hands uncramp, but there’s no real pleasure in it. All the time I’m worried about my snot-nosed little apes—are they awake or are they asleep, and what kind of psychological damage is it doing to them to watch their parents humping away on that stinking mess of straw.

But I appreciate it, because Calixta is bone-tired, too. She works in the Wizard’s kitchens, buried deep underground
like these fucking sewer tunnels where we live, and her hands are always blistered and burned from taking bread out of the ovens or stirring the stew, with the chef riding her ass all day long like she’s his own personal horse and he’s in a hurry. But there she goes riding me or hunkering over on all fours so I can take her from behind, because she knows a man’s got needs, and she’s a good wife. I couldn’t have done better, even if she’s running to fat these days, and her hair is always limp and draggled and kind of greasy from the hairnet she wears all day at the office. Get that? That’s a joke. Office, like a sweltering kitchen where you raise blisters on your hands four or five times a day is a fucking office. The only advantage to the office is that she can pinch the leftovers now and then, so we eat better than your average Munchkin.

But I guess I’ve got sidetracked. Calixta does that to me. What I was trying to say is that me, Dizzy, and Hops stop in at Frankie’s the day Joe goes tumbling down the wall, and we get to talking. And here’s the thing: people
do not
fall off the wall. Oh, they injure their backs, and the work makes you old so quick that nobody lasts, and you have to go find easier work, which there is none, so you take to begging—but never on the streets, not unless you want to be arrested by the City guard, in their red-breasted uniforms, and beaten or pummeled with fire hoses for your trouble. A lot of guys, they get arrested, and you never see them again. And their wives take to the streets, if you get what I’m saying—but never up top—and their children take to stealing so bad that you practically have to nail down the little bit of stuff you’ve managed to pull together or it’s like to just up and disappear. What I’m saying is there are two cities, one right on top of the other: the Emerald City above, all shining and clean and green with its immaculate polished
walls and not a speck of litter on the grass, where everything is fresh and aromatic, and the city below, which I’ve pretty much described to you, where the smell of sewage hangs in the air so thick that it’s almost a pleasure to go to work, and the flies swarm so bad sometimes you can’t even see.

But there I go getting distracted again. Writing is not my thing, if you understand, and the only reason I can do it at all is that my mother was a schoolteacher in the days before the Wizard came, and she worked hard to learn me my letters even after he did. I remember working late hours into the night on my letters—this after my mom put in fourteen-hour shifts as a seamstress in the Wizard’s sweatshops, sewing up this rich apparel for state dinners and whatever. Anyway, what I was saying is that me and Dizzy and Hops went to Frankie’s after work that day. Dizzy is called Dizzy because he used to be a Winged Monkey until they chopped his wings off and sent him below for shitting on the sidewalk upstairs, which he couldn’t help because he had dysentery, or that’s what he says. But when they cut off his wings they threw off his balance, and he’s been dizzy ever since. Most folks won’t serve his kind, but Frankie’s liberal on the issue, unless the joint is hopping. Which brings me to Hops. Hops is called Hops because that’s what his mother named him—he’s a Munchkin like me—but he lives up to it because he can put down prodigious quantities of the cold stuff without ever acting drunk or getting hungover in the morning.