Goldenland Past Dark (13 page)

“See?” said Wags. “I didn’t get big. The world got small.”

“Oh.” Webern stared down. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. It looked like the backyard of a dollhouse, and for the first time, it occurred to him that maybe God wasn’t an old man with a beard, but just a spoiled child.

Before Webern could finish his thought, the screen door banged shut. Willow and Billow had burst through, and they now moved across the lawn jerkily. Willow’s long stringy hair veiled her face, even as her bony hands smoothed it back. Billow licked her sausage fingers; chocolate smeared around her mouth. Their white nightshirts looked even dirtier than usual: in addition to the amorphous patches of brown, fresh splatters of black and green soiled the pale cotton. The girls seemed purposeful, excited. About halfway across the lawn, they stopped, clasped hands, and looked up at Webern.

“Bernie Bee, Bernie Bee!”

“Way up in the honey tree!”

“We’re locked out, where is the key?”

“Open up your door for me!”

They gazed up at him expectantly, as if they wanted him to finish their nursery rhyme. Standing there in the yard, draped in fluttery white cloth, they seemed like a pair of ghosts that Webern could dispel with the right incantation. But he didn’t know what it was. He glanced at Wags, who only shrugged.

“No girls allowed,” Webern finally called down. He knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say, but it was too late. Smugly nodding to each other, the girls produced, seemingly from midair, a pair of monster masks.

When he saw the masks, made of construction paper and paint and dirt and glue, a shock of terror surged through Webern—the same shock he felt when, during a nightmare, he saw a little boy with glass doll eyes or a lunchbox with teeth—the shock of something familiar, yet horribly wrong. Webern had made masks plenty of times, for Halloween and for little plays he performed for his mother in the afternoons. But he’d never made masks like these.

Willow’s mask, assembled from branches and mud and dead leaves, was a tree come to life—a tree with a knobby, jutting nose, hooked in like a finger beckoning. Billow’s, a perfect circle of white, had a single grotesque feature: a mouth like a crater, a hole, a wound, with ragged edges and inside, only blackness. Webern had to close his eyes. A child’s face, eclipsed by ugliness, is a most terrible thing.

“
Presto chango
,” Wags observed. “Your sisters aren’t very pretty girls. ’Course, they never were.”

“Why’re you here, Wags?” Webern asked, with his eyes still closed. “How come you were gone so long, and then you came back?” The insides of his lids throbbed neon red from the sunshine.

“Bernie Bee, Bernie Bee!”

“Nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee!”

“Just a little show-n-tell session, pal. The world is very small,” said Wags. “It breaks easy, no two ways about that. Thought you should be prepared.”

“Mommy said you were my guardian angel,” said Webern. “She said you might not come back ’til I needed you. Is that why you’re here? Because I need you? What should I do, Wags?”

“You’ll come down, just wait and see!”

“You’ll meet ol’ Mr. Gravity!”

“What should I do?”

“What can you do?

“What can I do?”

“Jump.”

“Wags?
Wags?
”

Webern opened his eyes. Wags was gone. Down below, his sisters had started to climb the tree. As they swung through the lower branches, their rhymes dissolved into sounds, not doggerel, not even words, but speeded-up gibberish, like the nonsense that rushed through Webern’s mind when he woke from nightmares and even the darkness seemed to move.

“Wags!” Webern yelled again. “Mommy!”

Once, Webern went to a movie matinee with his mother, and on the wide silver screen, he saw a man jump off a bridge. As the man fell, images from his life flashed before his eyes—his wife kissing him at the altar, his first day on the job, the SOLD sign on his little white house—each one more nostalgic than the last. Webern sat in the theatre, legs dangling above the sticky floor, teeth aching from the box of Sugar Daddies he’d just consumed, and wondered what a kid would think of, falling like that; if a kid would have enough memories to fill a slow-motion descent.

But Webern needn’t have worried. As he fell toward the leaves that lay like crumpled orange and red construction paper on the ground, his memories rose up to meet him, and they were enough for a lifetime of regret. Webern remembered the baby blue sky outside his bedroom window, with clouds still pink from dawn floating in it; he remembered bath time and the beards he made from bubbles. He remembered walking through the park with his mother, swinging on the swing as she pushed him, her hands light and swift against his back. He remembered Christmas, a symphony of red paper tearing, of tissue crinkling in boxes. And Easter: the hollow eggs, green and pink and yellow, fragile as living things in his cupped hands. He remembered marbles, like tiny shiny planets, and little wax bottles with rainbow elixirs in them, and the tongue of a kitten who’d kissed him once—pink and rough, like a piece of chewing gum dropped in a sandbox. He remembered lying on his back and pretending to walk on the ceiling; he remembered the loneliness, scary as any bad dream, of nights when he couldn’t sleep, when the dark house whispered secrets and his parents snored loudly, like a king and a queen under an enchanter’s evil spell. Webern remembered snow angels and snow suits, sunshowers and galoshes, jack-o-lanterns and costumes—one year, he had been a bumblebee. He remembered storybooks and building blocks and funny jokes and cartoons and the doll hospital. But most of all, he remembered learning how to swim, how he’d tilted his head back trustingly and felt the water holding him up. As he fell, he did the same thing—he tilted backward into the air and trusted it to hold him up. But when for some reason, it didn’t, when it dropped him, sank him like a stone, his one hope was that, somewhere down there at the bottom, mermaids would be waiting to welcome him.

In the weeks that followed their escape from Lynchville
, Webern and Nepenthe took their first hesitant steps toward becoming lovers. It started as soon as they crossed state lines and found a place to camp for the night. Nepenthe and Webern sat side by side during dinner, drinking whiskey from the same toy trumpet as the other players stirred their lukewarm plates of tinned spaghetti. When she rose to go afterwards, Nepenthe took Webern’s hand, and almost without thinking, he followed her. In her tent he felt shy for the first time in days: as a silhouette against green canvas still dimly lit with firelight, Nepenthe could have been any young girl. He couldn’t say the same for his own misshapen form. He stared at her until he could see, dimly, the ridges of her scales.

“Do you want me to stay here tonight?”

“You’d like that, huh?” There was a laugh in her voice that Webern couldn’t stand. He grabbed her hands and tugged on them. He could never kiss her standing up—she was too tall. She would always have to bend down to kiss him. Nepenthe pulled her hands away and moved toward her trunk on the other side of the tent. She lit a citronella candle, then sat down on the floor. She crossed her long legs at the ankles.

“I usually read for awhile before I go to bed,” she said. “Have you got a book?”

Webern stretched out atop the sleeping bag with all his clothes still on, even his shoes, and Nepenthe lay next to him, smoking, the red tip of her clove glowing in the darkness. When he woke up, sometime in the early hours of the morning, he saw that she’d gotten into her kiddy pool where she curled in her pyjamas, a waterlogged blanket pulled up to her chin. He reached into the water to pull it back, but Nepenthe, asleep or pretending to be, rolled over with a splash.

In the mornings, Nepenthe made Webern turn his back while she changed into her clothes; in the evenings, she made him turn his back while she changed into her pyjamas. And at night, she lay awake until he finally, unwillingly dropped off, at which point she climbed into her tub and slept. Sometimes they kissed passionately, rolling around the floor as they had at Beer Can Creek, but Nepenthe pushed Webern away when he fumbled with her buttons or the zipper at the back of her dress. Then it was even more terrible for him to stretch out beside her, still in his clothes, feverish, the taste of peach pit burning on his lips. One night when she pushed him away, Webern couldn’t get himself to lie still. He sat up, his glasses still fogged with her breath, his hands shaking.

“Jeez, Nepenthe.” He rubbed his hump. “Am I really so bad? You knew what I looked like when you met me.”

Nepenthe gazed up through a haze of clove smoke. She crossed her legs at the ankles. “Bernie, don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not.” Webern tugged at his knotted shoelaces. He thought of the clown from his dream, the laughing girl, the wind-up key freezing him in place. “I want to touch you.”

She was silent for awhile. “I know,” she finally said.

“Then why—why won’t you—”

Nepenthe breathed deeply, then exhaled.

“Can you imagine what our kids would look like?” she asked.

Webern went to the drugstore one dusty afternoon in Starkville, Mississippi. The store was empty as he pushed in the door; bells jingled. He glanced around, but the place looked just as deserted as he had hoped. An old man drowsed at an ancient cash register, and three empty stools stood along a soda counter piled high with bundled newspapers and dog-eared back issues of the Saturday Evening Post. A few flies buzzed at the store’s single grimy window. Webern slipped down one of the aisles toward the back of the store. He passed the Band-Aids and cotton swabs, the toothpaste and the ear plugs. His pockets, heavy with change and wadded bills, felt heavy. He had no idea what this was going to cost.

In the back of the store, Webern found them, lined up in brightly coloured tins the size of cigarette packs. Dean’s Peacocks—Merry Widows—Romeos—Seal Tite—Le Transparent. Who knew there were so many different brands? And what could the differences between them possibly be? Were there different colours? Shapes? Sizes? Webern stared at the label for the Sheik of Araby, which pictured a turbaned man riding a horse across a windblown desert, and the 3 Pirates, which proudly bore the image of a cutlass in its sheath. For the prevention of disease. Shadows: as thin as a shadow, as strong as an ox!

Webern began to reach for a tin, then glanced furtively behind him. His hand slipped up to rub his hump instead. The Tiger Skin Rubber Company. Blood rose to his face. He lingered on Mermaid Brand (perfection maid!) for a long moment, then grabbed a box at random and strode back toward the front of the store. He reminded himself he’d never come back to this place again.

The nearer he got to the counter, the slower Webern walked. The metal container warmed in his hand, and he stared down at his feet, watching the floor boards. When he placed the tin on the counter, the humiliation roared over him in a wave. The old storekeeper started awake, and he and Webern read the brand name on the package at the same time: Napoleons.

“Could you ring me up, please?”

Webern reached into his pocket for the money. He pulled out a dollar, and a hail of change rained to the ground. As he scrambled around, stomping on dimes and quarters, the storekeeper reached into the pocket of his wrinkled shirt to withdraw a corncob pipe and a pack of matches. By the time Webern finally had his money together, the storekeeper was puffing away, his wrinkled lips working around the amber stem. His rheumy eyes moved slowly from the tin to Webern, then back again.

“You’re not from around here, are ya boy?”

Webern stared at the tin as the storekeeper’s claws closed around it. “Listen, I’m kind of in a hur—”

“Well, if you
were
from around here, you’d know I don’t sell sailor caps to whippersnappers.” The tin disappeared beneath the counter. “Shame on you, boy. What would your mama think?”

“I’m not a child,” he said. The words came out as a squeak.

“Oh, come on there, sonny.” The storekeeper smiled slyly. “You can’t be much more than three foot tall.”

“I live on my own.”

“Oh, you do then? What’s your address?”

“I don’t have an address, I’m with the circus. We’re just passing through. Now please—” Webern gestured at the counter, then glanced over his shoulder nervously.

“With the circus, are you now? You got any identiformation that says so?”

“Just look at me!”

“You look like a boy, from where I’m sitting.”

Webern rubbed the toe of his shoe against the tile floor. He couldn’t go back to camp empty-handed. Webern looked up at the storekeeper, who in turn grinned down at him. His wizened face reminded Webern of a shrunken head Dr. Show had almost bought just outside of Tuscaloosa.

“Okay,” Webern finally said, “how can I prove it to you?”

“What is it you’re supposed to do in this ‘circus,’ sonny?”

“I’m a clown.”

“Well then—” The storekeeper slapped the Napoleons back down on the counter. “—better get clowning.”

The storekeeper removed a little envelope from the tin and handed it to Webern. His old bones creaked as he leaned back contentedly.

“You know how to do up all them balloon animals?” The storekeeper tapped his pipe against his single front tooth. “Make mine a poodle.”

Webern looked down at the little envelope in his hand. TEAR HERE. He looked up again. The cashier blew a smoke ring into his face.

Webern slowly unfurled the Napoleon. He’d expected it to feel dry and powdery, like the rubber gloves doctors had always snapped on before sawing off his body cast or aligning his spine. But this rubber was slick, greasy, even. Webern wiped his fingers on his jeans, took a deep breath, and inflated the tube. Even he was surprised at how obscene it looked: milky white with a nipple-shaped protuberance at the tip.

Lubricant left dark patches on the wooden countertop; the Napoleon kept slipping out of his hands. Webern cursed, holding the reservoir tip down with one elbow as he struggled to twist the poodle’s legs.

“Havin’ a little trouble, there, are ya, boy?” The cashier slid a candy jar toward him. “Maybe you’d ruther have a bit-o-honey instead.”

“I’m good, thanks.” The rubber squeaked as Webern squeezed the air out of the poodle’s tail. He knotted the latex into bubble-paws. Somewhere a bell jingled.

“I reckon you’ve proved it well enough,” the cashier continued, a little uneasily. “You’re with the circus, sure.”

“Oh, no, I’m just getting started.” Webern twisted the poodle’s neck.

“Why don’t you just take your farmerceuticals and get along, then? Compliments of the house.”

“I never leave the stage in the middle of a performance.” It sounded like something Dr. Show would say. Webern double-knotted the balloon poodle’s nose, and, with a flourish, presented it to the cashier. “Now, good sir, I believe an apology is in order,” he intoned.

“Mister, what’s that funny little man doing?”

Webern turned around. Two little girls in party dresses stood in the doorway of the drug store, eating Fudgsicles and watching him. Webern looked from the poodle to the oily splotches on the counter to the cashier. He grabbed the tin of Napoleons and sprinted out of the store.

Brunhilde knelt at her collapsible dressing table, trimming her golden beard. The scissors moved swiftly around her chin, her sideburns, even the nape of her neck. They whispered as they snipped. But, when the hair fell, not a single strand escaped her. She pinched the trimmings in a single tuft between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, and, as soon as she finished, swiftly wrapped tiny locks—only three or four hairs each—around equally tiny cards. Printed with her name and the date, these cards proclaimed the samples “GENUINE LADY WHISKERS.” Her task completed, Brunhilde shut the shears and slid them back into the triangular holster she wore on the belt of her dressing gown. Then she placed the hair cards in a small brown envelope. At the next show, she would offer them for sale.

Once, not so long ago, Brunhilde would never have considered hawking her wares in such a disgraceful manner. But that time was over now. She had lost the crowds that would pay any price to see her long ago, in the firebombing. She had also lost her glockenspiel and her teacher’s metronome, the stages on which she’d danced—the Grimms’ Tales and the cuckoo clock, the kid gloves and the dainty suede boots, the thick carved headboard of her childhood bed with its scenes of villagers sleeping. She had lost her home, her parents, and their bodies, of course.

After that terrifying night of screams and fires, when she’d huddled against a low stone wall and prayed for the last time, she’d passed several years sleeping in the ruined mansions of her parents’ friends, relying on the hospitality of near-strangers. She knew all along it couldn’t last. So when her married cousin offered her a place to stay in New Jersey, the offer seemed too good to be true. She knew now that it had been.

Brunhilde had disliked the little house from the start, with its small, high windows and its artifacts of American kitsch—tea cozies sewn to resemble calico cats, a tiny wooden outhouse in which rolls of toilet paper were stored. She spent her mornings idly circling job advertisements in the paper. When Cousin Lisle and her husband left for the workday—he was a bond man, she a substitute teacher—Brunhilde wallowed on the sofa until they returned. At night, she lay awake in the trundle bed beneath a comforter stitched with tiny sheep in slippers, craving knackwurst and her native tongue, or thrashed with nightmares, seeing again the ruins of her home: a shattered window, a blackened tablecloth, her mother’s bloodied glove. Then, out one afternoon in the town’s drab park, she had met Schoenberg, bent over a miniature easel.

“Say you’ll pose for me. You must allow me to sketch you, at the very least,” he insisted. “I’ll have you know, it’s a high honour indeed. As a rule, I only paint self-portraits.”

He’d offered her fame, fortune, a return to her former standing, and what’s more, his undying dedication to her career. He even tried to address her in his pitiful German until she begged him to stop. She was only the second member to join his little troupe—Al had already signed on—but when Schoenberg spoke of the future, her heart had lifted. Such promises! Silken tents filled up with pillows, performances on the stage, a journey back to Europe in a few years, when, he hinted, she might find her homeland miraculously restored. Of course, now that she saw him for what he was, an escapist so deluded that perhaps even he believed the wild fantasies he spun like straw into gold, she wondered how she could have been so naive. Yet it was impossible to hate him. Once, and only once, the two of them had wandered together through the corridors of a funhouse until they came to a place where their own reflections surrounded them, elongated and rubbery, bulbous and distended. In that room, Schoenberg had kissed her, and before she regained her sense enough to slap him away, a feeling had overcome her, a dizzying sickness, as though, against her own will, she had passed beyond those mirrors into a land of marvellous impossibilities. It was in this realm, she suspected, that Schoenberg dwelled at every moment of his life.