Puppet Wrangler (14 page)

There was no way I could put anyone through that, and I told Bitsie so.

“Who said you had to sing?” he said.

“Well, what else can I do? People are hardly going to give me money for reciting the times table.” Which is about the only thing I was ever very good at.

“No—but people would give you money for puppeteering!”

I was just about to say I couldn't do that either when I realized I didn't have to. For once, Bitsie'd had a good idea.

40
IT WENT TO HIS HEAD...

We were lucky. It was June and warm. There were plenty of people on the sidewalks that night, just strolling around. I found a good place on Yonge Street near an ice-cream stand and took Bitsie out of my knapsack. Only he didn't look like Bitsie very much anymore. Just to be on the safe side, we'd borrowed some things from the costume department and disguised him as a girl.

A very ugly girl. With big red felt lips, glasses, a kerchief with orange braids sticking out, and a peasant blouse with two tennis balls glued underneath in the appropriate places. I thought he was going to hate it, but he was so flattered by the idea that someone might recognize him that he was practically unbearable.
⁵⁴

I told myself this was going to be easy. All I had to do was move my lips as if I was trying not to move my lips and just let Bitsie do the rest. I put out a hat we'd also borrowed from the costume department and got started.

It was easy. Really easy. Bitsie was so into it. He went nuts. He did the Macarena. He did impressions of Nelly Furtado and the prime minister and some famous lady who used to get married all the time. He sang goofy fake opera songs and made jokes that I didn't get.

But I guess they were funny. We'd only been doing it for about five minutes, but we already had a big crowd— and they were all laughing their heads off. Bitsie loved it.

I should have too, I guess. Our hat was filling up pretty fast. But something was making me nervous.

We were too good.

We were attracting too much attention.

I tried to tone Bitsie down a bit—but what could I do? I couldn't say anything because people would get suspicious if we were both talking at the same time (and believe me, Bitsie had no intention of shutting up). I couldn't stop him from moving. He was in charge there too. So I threw my hoodie over his head thinking I'd say, “That's all for now, folks,” and they'd leave and I'd have a chance to talk to him alone about my worries. But that didn't work either. Bitsie just threw the hoodie off, made some joke about puppet abuse and picked up right where he left off.

I tried to relax and go with it. I figured we almost had enough money so we wouldn't have to do it much longer.

I was almost calm—until the lady with the yellow hair asked me that question.

“Where did a young girl like you learn to puppeteer like this?”

Of course I didn't get to answer it. Bitsie took it upon himself to supply all the gory details. He started out okay.

He said, “Mostly I just taught myself. I've always been interested in theater and comedy.”

That would have been fine if he'd just left it at that. But he had everybody's attention, and he was hardly going to waste it.

He lowered his eyes as if this was tough for him to talk about and went on. “Puppeteering became a way for me to escape the horrors of my family life. I retreated into my imaginary world in order to forget the physical and emotional abuse that awaited me at the hands of my cruel stepfather…”

Do I need to continue—or did you see that episode of
Crime Wave
too? Unfortunately, nobody in the crowd seemed to have. They all got these really sad looks on their faces and started throwing more money in the hat. Bitsie, I could just tell, thought he was brilliant. He started adding things that weren't even in the TV show. About how I was living on the street now. About how my stepfather had a contract out on me. About how I'd started to believe that my puppet was talking to me. Things like that.

The lady, who by this time had mascara streaming down her face, touched me on the shoulder. She said, “Wait here.

I know someone who can help you. A policewoman who's dealt with this type of thing before.” Then she ran off to get the cops.

Was Bitsie worried that the law was now on our trail? Ha! It didn't even cross his mind. He was busy talking to a reporter from the
National Herald
, who'd noticed all the people and wanted to do a story on us for the next day's paper.

That's all I needed to hear. I grabbed Bitsie, my knapsack and the hat and bolted through the crowd.

Was Bitsie ever pissed off! He was screaming, “Hey! I was talking to that guy!” and everybody, I'm sure, was thinking what an amazing performer I was to be able to run and puppeteer backwards over my shoulder at the same time. Luckily, they all thought the escape was part of the act so it took a while before anyone started running after us.

There was no way I was going to stop until we were miles away from all those people and that reporter's flashing camera.

I didn't even slow down when Bitsie started biting my ear.

⁵⁴
The guy was an egomaniac. You'd think if they could put a man on the moon, someone would be able to invent latex that wasn't so full of itself.

41
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER.

“You only have $78.37 here.” The guy at the bus station wasn't going to let us go to Bousfield because we were sixty-three cents short. I couldn't believe it!

Normally, I would have just apologized for wasting his time and walked away. I mean, I was hardly the type to argue with people. I was hardly the type to even talk to people.

But this time was different. Maybe it was because I was desperate. Or maybe it was because I was disguised. Wearing those pink glasses of Bitsie's and that stupid kerchief, I didn't look like me anymore.
⁵⁵
I guess I didn't feel like me anymore either.

I said, “I know we're short. I mean, I'm short. But I did have enough money—honest. It's just that I fell when I was running to get here. See?”

I lifted my leg way up to the counter so he could see the hole in my pants and my bloody knee.

“And I was bleeding really badly so I had to use some of my bus money for Band-Aids.”

By now, he wasn't even looking at me. He was busy filling out some form and I thought, How rude! But I didn't let it show.

I just kept going. “I had to use the whole box. It was that bad! I was even getting a little light in the head. Probably because I lost so much blood. Or maybe just because it was so gross. It really was terrible.”

He looked at me and sighed and pushed the form he'd been filling out across the counter.

“One round-trip ticket to Bousfield. That'll be $78.37.

I'll take the sixty-three cents out of my donut money.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” I started squealing like I'd just guessed how much the do-it-yourself face-lift kit cost on
The Price is Right
.

“No, thank
you
,” he said, patting his belly and smiling for the first time. “It'll do me good to have one less sour-cream old-fashioned. Next!”

Giving up a donut for a complete stranger! People are so nice. Sometimes it's easy to forget that.

⁵⁵
And I was hoping that none of those people who had been running after us would think so either.

42
NOW SHOWING AT A
BRAIN NEAR YOU.

We spent the night in the bus station. I was tired and hungry and scared. The donut man had gone home for the night. Everyone still there looked mean or crazy or both. The fact that I thought the donut man was mean at first too didn't make me feel any better at three in the morning. I wouldn't have had a wink of sleep except that Bitsie was desperate to keep me happy. He was worried I was going to take him back to the studio. I'm sure that's the only reason he volunteered to stand guard.

Or rather lie guard. I put my knapsack on the bench so Bitsie could see out the hole at the top. Then I put my head on the knapsack and fell asleep.

It's funny how you say “fall asleep,” because that's not usually what happens. How often do you “fall”? Usually you just sort of float asleep. Like you're on an air mattress or something, just drifting. One minute you're in the shallow waters of Wakey-Wakey Beach; then, without even knowing it, you've floated out into the wide-open seas of the Slumber Strait.
⁵⁶

But that night I fell asleep, and I must have knocked myself out when I hit bottom because I didn't move again until 6:55 when this really loud announcement came on.

“All passengers should now be on board for the 7:03 bus to Neewack, Goldrink, New Cumberland, Bousfield and Lower Shinimicas.”

I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth, grabbed my knapsack and stumbled onto the bus half-awake. I was sort of glad I was feeling so terrible. When you need a toothbrush as badly as I did, it's easy to keep your mind off your other problems. The back of the bus was empty so I put the knapsack against the armrest and stretched out over three seats. I was hoping to just fall asleep again. Hard—the way I did before—so that nothing could start worming around in my brain until I woke up in Bousfield.

Like Bitsie was going to let that happen.

He started yammering away about all the things he and Arnold's puppets were going to do together. It was going to be so much fun after being cooped up with those foam-heads all these years. I couldn't blame him for being excited, but that doesn't mean I had to listen to him. The less I thought about what we were doing, the better. I closed the top of the knapsack to shut out his voice and tried to go to sleep.

He pulled open the side pocket and started talking about how he hoped they had cable up in Bousfield so he and the boys (as he called his soon-to-be new friends) could get the Sports Channel.

I stuffed the fake braids on my kerchief into my ears and rolled over and tried again. But it was too late. I wasn't going to be able to fall asleep anymore. I lay there staring at the grey-carpeted ceiling of the bus and tried not to listen as my “pillow” yakked on and on about puppet movie theaters and puppet bowling alleys and puppet malls and all the wonderful things he was pretty sure he'd find in beautiful downtown Bousfield.

I didn't know how I was going to survive a six-hour bus trip with old Motormouth blabbing away.

Then my head went all quiet inside, and Bitsie's voice disappeared. I hadn't zoned out like that in a long time. Not since Bess stole that bus back in Beach Meadows and it looked like we'd all end up in a ditch or Mexico or something.

Do you know what the funny thing was this time? When I wanted to blank out all the scary things that were happening right then, guess what I thought of.

Bess—stealing the bus. Suddenly, it didn't seem so terrible.

It seemed kind of, I don't know, “charming,” as my mother would say. I thought about Bess gunning down Sow's Ear Road just the way it happened, but without feeling afraid of crashing or afraid of what the Mounties were going to do or afraid of the look on my mother's face when we finally stopped. I thought about Bess singing that stupid song, which didn't seem so stupid anymore, and her making Alyssa feel like a star just because of her bright pink throw-up.

For the next six hours I was glued to my own little mental movie, “Me and My Crazy Sister,” starring the zany but loveable Bess Mercer. The stealing, the lying, the broken windows all started to seem like the good old days.

Maybe that's part of growing up. Have you noticed old people always think that way? Everything that happened before—no matter how horrible it must have been at the time—is better than whatever's happening right now. That's why Grammie gets all dreamy-eyed talking about the war,

I guess. Or why Kathleen loves telling stories about being poor as a kid and eating secondhand Queenburgers and having the heat so low that she had to wear her snowsuit to bed every night. You'd almost think someone forced her to give it all up for a fancy condo, expensive clothes and Apricot-Kiwi Emulsion.

I wasn't thinking all that, of course. I was just enjoying the movie. Every so often a little thought would creep in that didn't fit. Mum crying, say. Or Dad looking out the window at nothing. Or the sound of the social worker dropping Bess's big, fat file on the kitchen table. When that happened the movie would click right off as if someone—probably Bess—had switched the channel to some gross thing like I
Want You Dead
or
Abdominal Surgery
or even one of those ads about starving babies. It's hard to pretend life's just grand when you're watching a kid die or someone get their liver yanked out.

But I'd just grab the remote back—not the real remote, but you know what I mean—and start watching the Bess movie again. I chuckled when she locked the principal out of his office and sang dirty songs over the PA system until the janitor knocked the door down. I smiled at her giving me a shirt for Christmas that just so happened to be her size, not mine. I even had one of those little happy cries over the beautiful Remembrance Day speech she gave about our grandfather's heroic war service, and this time it didn't bother me a bit that our grandfather had flat feet and never went to war.

It didn't matter. The stories did what they had to.

They got me to Bousfield without thinking how stupid I was for ruining my life.

⁵⁶
Okay, I admit it. That wasn't my idea. I stole it from “Bytesie Goes Beddy-bye.” It was as stupid as most of the episodes, but I thought Audrey had a point about that falling asleep thing.

43
THE GREAT VAN GURP.

The man at the gas station gave us directions to Arnold van Gurp's and said we couldn't miss it. At first I thought that was because Bousfield was so small. The correct word for it, I think, is puny. Just the Petrocan where the bus dropped us, a video store that also sells pizza and picks up your dry-cleaning, and a bunch of houses.