Precious (27 page)

They are always traveling. In early September, they come by train along tracks that once transported coal to the region, along rails that hum in the heat, a low metallic sound that gradually ascends into a rumble as the train passes, metal hitting metal, the wheels flattening pennies left by children who wait to collect the thin copper and then wear the shiny discs around their necks, medallions for good luck, coins that transform them into kings.

A whistle. Blue cars and red cars emblazoned with gold lettering, lavish wagons with carved windows and flower beds—Gypsy wagons that transport performers who swing on the trapeze, dancers who twist upon wires—as well as flatcars and boxcars painted pink with waves of peach undulating like psychedelia. On the beds sit massive chunks of machinery, pieces of the carousel and Ferris wheel, the tilt-a-whirl and whip, the spider and bumper cars, the maze of mirrors. Tractors, too, sit idle, waiting to pull and haul equipment. Eighty beds in all, snaking
down the tracks, towering against the sky. Around the corner the train chugs into town and slows, finally, to a halt. And with the arrival on an otherwise ordinary day there is crazy hoopla, ascending conversations, fluttering activity. Crowds gather to watch; couples with children point and chatter happily, snapping photographs and instant Polaroids as burly men unload equipment and escort llamas and horses and elephants down dusty ramps. Work crews and teamsters descend with ropes and harnesses. Three men—one red-faced with a wiry-looking beard; one with an octopus tattoo curling down his arm; the other with a cap and black vest—bark out orders about where equipment should be taken and erected. One of them ropes the wagons to tractors and carts them across the field, the smell of wood on his hands and bare back.

On this same day, others suddenly appear in town, arriving in campers and motor homes. They park at the edges of the field, near the tracks. Rosary beads and dice and coins hang on rearview mirrors; state stickers plaster the windows: ten, twenty, thirty states, from Florida to Maine and out to Wyoming. There is noise then, more noise: banging pots and Coltrane’s jazz blaring out the windows. Women appear in trousers and T-shirts, silver bracelets littering their arms, turquoise rings on every finger. They string lines from trailer to trailer and hang out wash. Others appear, performers dressed noticeably well in tight shirts and pants that hug their slender curves.

The world’s fattest woman—four hundred pounds of impenetrable, dimpled flesh—the wolf boy, a horse two feet tall, a midget who swallows fire and spits it out again, a lion trainer looking for a lover in the belly of a mangy beast. A spectacle for all to see, this circus, this circus hired to celebrate a town that was established two hundred years before, to celebrate people, those who first came from overseas, mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and children with dark eyes and empty stomachs. All those who crossed borders and oceans for steel and coal, to work in mines and plants that would, over time, catch fire and burn or shut down completely. Long ago, they came with their hope inside
them. They settled and rooted, gave birth to more children, those who grew and stayed in this same town and rooted in it again, like seeds scattered outward, in circles, from trees. They told stories to their children, stories of small towns and things remembered across time, they gave hope that their families held within them, dreams they kept.

The crews move quickly and efficiently. The men lug out canvases worn from age and lay them flat on the ground, like faded suns seeping into the grass. They erect tents on poles, snapping them up in the air, securing them with cross-wires and metal. Teamsters, some of whom consist of local hires made quickly, without question—men who range from the unemployed to the transient, drunk, and indigent—help haul equipment, and then collect pay. A few children play nearby with blocks and sticks. Later, as the tasks of the day are completed and the circus tops and stands and rides are assembled, men roll barrels from the train and place sheets of plywood over the rusted lips. They sit around these ready-made tables on folded chairs and play stud. Some of them, in a boozy swagger, will ante up their wives instead of quarters.

Downtown on this Thursday afternoon, on the ordinarily quiet cobblestone streets left to pedestrian traffic, activity heightens in anticipation of the bicentennial celebration. Natalia leaves Sissy to congregate with girls from school: Beth Trexler, Dana Salazar, and Dawn Grath, children of mothers Natalia knows distantly from sporadic school functions. “Behave,” she says to Sissy. “Don’t get lost.” Then she heads into Orr’s for their basement sale, and Sissy watches as her mother strides away, the line of smooth underwear showing through her white pants, her flats clicking against the pavement.

The girls walk to Toys and Magic on Main, marveling over the circus advertisements that line the telephone poles—clowns with red bulbous noses and dunce caps juggle balls into perfectly ordered arcs; an Asian woman in purple tights and a tutu flies on a trapeze; a blonde, skinny as a candlestick, poises atop a wire; a lion jumps through a ring of flames; a man with charcoal hair and a sinister mustache curled up at the ends shouts into a microphone. One poster obscures a photograph
of Vicki Anderson that, in the heat and rain, has grown shredded and worn.
Gone,
Sissy thinks,
almost the entire summer.
There were times, in the unending quest for possible career paths and worldly achievement, when Vicki spoke of joining a circus and swinging high above the ground like a daredevil. Sissy loses herself in this thought momentarily, but then is swept up in the girls’ chatter—the plans for bumper car rides and dunking booth attempts, for cotton candy and funnel cakes. The weekend will bring not only the circus but also craft shows on Main Street, stands with crocheted dolls, wicker wreathes, knitted boots, and wooden signs engraved with street addresses. Whitewashed rickety booths have already been erected on the square with signs featuring pierogies from the Polish church; kraut, kielbasa, and bratwurst stands; apple fritter stations. At the close of the weekend, fireworks will pop and crackle in the sky, a hiss of fire raining down like spent stars. In honor of the celebration, Mr. Morris, owner of Toys and Magic, has erected a giant LEGO Ferris wheel in the window. The entire wheel spins, making it a desired object among the girls today, though the sign next to it clearly reads
NOT FOR SALE.

The girls prattle on and make animated displays with their hands. Beth tells them all about a circus she went to in Florida and how her father slipped into a tent to watch a girlie show late at night. As she speaks, her top rises over her plump stomach, and her pink glasses slide down her nose. “That’s nothing,” Dawn, the most worldly of the girls, exclaims. “I got stuck in the house of glass once. It was
dreadful.
I thought I’d die of embarrassment.”

“Dreadful,” Sissy says, marveling over Dawn’s creamy complexion, her obsidian hair and strikingly blue eyes.

They plan what rides and amusements will be of most interest, what prizes they hope to win. Sissy impulsively partakes in all this, though there is still the task of asking her mother if she might go at all. Things have been busier of late: Her mother has been working at the florist; her father has been working odd jobs that sometimes keep him out until all
hours of the morning. She and Eva have been sent on errands, paying for things at the grocery store, the last dollar counted in change.

“I saw them,” Michael Massit calls. He pedals fast on his bike, his lanky form upsetting his center of gravity. His blond hair shines, as does his pug nose. Although there is a collective effort on the part of the girls to ignore him, he stops, finally, breaking up their huddle. He grins. “I saw them.” For no earthly reason, he flexes arm muscles he doesn’t have.

“Saw who?” Dawn asks, narrowing her eyes. She stands with her body kinked, one hand on a hip like a model.

“Carnies. That’s what my dad calls them. Performers, drifters. They all used to come by train, you know; now only one or two do.”

“What happened to the rest?” Beth asks, her interest piqued. She pops a huge bubble and peels it from her mouth.

Sissy leans against the toy store window and folds her arms haughtily. “He doesn’t know. He’s only
pretending
he knows.”

“I do too know.” He says this with such authority that Sissy doubts herself immediately. She slumps more, acting as though she can barely be bothered to listen. She lifts her hand and inspects her fingernails. Michael pauses for several moments before speaking again, knowing that, regardless of Sissy’s newly found nonchalance, he has everyone’s attention. “Well, some of them were sold and some of them went broke and some of them come by bus and truck now.” He lowers his voice, which causes two of the girls to lean in. “Carnies are tricksters and thieves. My dad says if anyone comes to the door saying their car broke down, it’s a trick. They keep you busy at the front door while the others sneak in your back door and steal from you.”

“That’s a lie,” Sissy says, even though her mother once told her the same story.

“It was in the
paper,
moron. My dad read it to me. Crazy stuff!” Michael shakes his head, mulling it all over.

The girls exchange glances, their excitement visible and imaginations running wildly ahead of them like galloping horses. Sissy pictures
women in long skirts and bandanas swooping into the house like vultures, sneaking out with her television and diary in hand. She opens her mouth to argue, though she doesn’t know why she wishes to argue with Michael at all. She doesn’t even read the paper; she doesn’t know what he’s said that’s true or not. She watches as Dawn lifts her sweet-smelling necklace and nibbles candy from it. She bites one off for each of the girls and passes it to them, speaking now of the
carnies,
saying it as though it is a dirty word.

“My dad is what you’d call a
minor enthusiast, ”
Michael continues
.
“Back in seventy-two one of the trains was even flooded right here in PA. Some flipped off the rails, killing people and animals. Some disappeared, and now they’re here again, and I’ve seen them.”

Sissy takes all this in, thinking that if it’s true about the accidents and about the disappearances then they are a cursed lot, all of them, and no amount of crossing could possibly change their luck. Absurd and outlandish permutations of Michael’s story race through her mind: a doomed people, drifting from town to town, searching for lost family wandering like Gypsies. She bites her nail, horrified by the last thought, wondering if she’ll have to take extra precautions with her bedroom window, or perhaps spend the weekend tucked in Eva’s bed.

“I wouldn’t go to the freak show.” Michael flexes his arms again. “You could be eaten by that wolf boy, or maybe even by that fat woman. What else do you think a woman that fat eats but us kids?”

“A boy?” Sissy asks, wincing. “A fat woman?”

“There aren’t kids there,” Beth says, popping another bubble. She glances over to Dawn, who raises her arms.

“You’re lying.” Still, Sissy is no longer sure. Didn’t her mother also tell stories of this, stories of people who wandered the countryside, tricksters with children who ran barefoot, their faces smudged with dirt, their bellies tanned and thick? Is it possible, she wonders, that all the Gypsy children were stolen away from other places and other homes? Given over to the fat woman for dinner? Changed into wolves, along with other unseemly shapes: roosters and bears and mice? Or put to
work performing manual labor, lugging buckets across dusty fields, stumbling as the water sloshed around? The thought of it all sends her into a small, shrill panic.

“I hear they keep that wolf boy locked in a cage for his own protection, and for yours.”

“Go on!” Dawn says.

“He’s lying.”

“Is there really a wolf boy?” Beth asks, excitement overtaking her.

Michael kicks back his stand and lets his bike lean, one sneaker positioned on the ground now. Sissy notices he’s drawn triangles on the scuffed rubber rims. From his shirt pocket, he pulls out a candy cigarette and sticks it into his mouth, rolling it over his tongue first. “Crazy-looking men, too,” he continues. “You get a little bit of every sort.”

Beth takes a step back, debating. “We need protection.”

“You should think about something,” Michael says, “because you’ll never outrun them. You all run like girls, that’s for sure.”

“We can run,” Sissy says. Her tone is snotty and dismissive. “We can run faster than you.”

Michael pulls out another cigarette and snaps it before popping it into his mouth. He grins at Sissy and then takes a bite of it, right in the middle.

“You’re awful,” Sissy says, staring at the chunks of pulped candy he shows her on his tongue.

Bells jangle against the door, and Mr. Morris sticks his head out, his white mop of hair brushed back in a wave. “Don’t lean against the glass,” he says. “You can look, you can buy, but don’t lean, Sissy Kisch.”

Sissy apologizes and begins to tell him how much she likes the Ferris wheel, a compliment issued in the hope that Mr. Morris might see fit to gift it to her right then and there, but his head is already gone and she hears bells singing as the door closes.