The Daring Escape of Beatrice and Peabody (3 page)

At night when all the rides are closed and all the folks are gone home, Bobby and Eldora, Fat Man Sam and Cissy and Pete the Alligator Man and everyone else who still works for Ellis go out on the town and talk about the war and about the rationing and if there’s going to be enough gasoline to get us to the next city.

We get extra gas because we are in the entertainment business, but it is still bad and Ellis is saying he wants to set up a stay-put show somewhere.

They talk about all these things when they go out, but Pauline and I stay and play the ha-ha game. Even with our purple curtain open it is too hot to be in our tin can without windows so we go outside and lie in the grass and kick off our work boots and look up at the stars. Pauline tells me stories about when I was little, like how I saw some fancy saddle shoes at Woolworths and I boohooed over them for an awful long time, but there wasn’t any money for them, so she painted a white stripe right across my work boots, and after that I was so happy I wore them to bed, dirt and all.

‘I did not.’ I am red in the face because I do remember those boots.

‘Did, too. I wrote it down.’ She holds up a little notebook, not the one she writes her poems in but a different one, one with a shiny gold cover. This is the one she uses to write down things I’ve been doing since Ellis put us together, called
The Story of Bee
. She reads the whole tale, how I wailed and wailed. She reaches over and tickles me. I try not to be the first to laugh, but sooner or later one of us starts to giggle, and that is why we call it the ha-ha game.

When I ask her why she writes things about me in her little notebook, here’s what she says: ‘Because no one did for me, Bee. And now since I don’t have anyone to remind me about things, I don’t remember hardly anything about when I was little.’

I look up at the stars. I try and feel inside what she is feeling, about not remembering what it was like to be eleven. I stretch out on the grass and breathe deeply and snuggle up next to her. The Big Dipper overhead is pointing to the North Star, just like always. ‘Do you think we could find a real home, Pauline?’

I think maybe she is sleeping. She doesn’t answer for a long while. But then she says, ‘It might be hard, Bee.’

‘But could we do that, could we get ourselves loved like that so somebody would want to keep us?’

‘I don’t know, Sweet Pea Bee.’

I can hear the tired-from-standing-on-your-feet-
all-day
sound in her voice. I tell her how I would like to go
live in a real house where I would not have to worry about folks bothering about my diamond all the time and does she think she might like to live there, too, and she says, ‘Sure, Bee, whatever you want,’ just as she is fading off.

I like that about her.

I like how when she is tired she mostly goes along with my ideas.

Pauline knows Woolworths the way some folks know stars. She can spot one light years away.

She likes picking out things a lot better than she likes frying hot dogs, so she finds plenty of reasons to take Ellis’s truck and get us to one, no matter what town we are in.

Pauline takes me by the arm and leads me through the door. She lets me look at
Superman
and
Captain America
and
The Spirit
comic books and then we go over by the
dollhouses
with the little wooden ranges and refrigerators and the rugs and the wallpaper painted right on the walls. I think about how I would like to live in a house like this one, with a kitchen. I would like a real birthday cake, one that somebody who loved me made for me, not a
quick-hurry-up
slice at a diner somewhere.

Pauline hurries me past the Rita Hayworth paper dolls and the music elephants and the toy Plymouth automobiles and the Popeye crayons. She rushes me through the sweater and underwear aisles (sometimes scooping up things for me because I am growing so) to the books. Pauline is the one who taught me to read and
now I have books on the stars and the planets and on bird identification and all about seashells, trees, wildflowers and the weather. I can tell an oak tree from a hickory by the shape of its leaves and I know a storm is on the way just by the smell of the air. It is good to know about a lot of things, Pauline says.

Woolworths offers a lot of protection for somebody like me because folks are generally running around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for toothpaste and laundry soap and shampoo. I have to be careful at the cash register of not looking somebody in the eye, because if you’re going to have trouble at a Woolworths, that’s where it will happen. Folks stare when they are standing in line with nothing to do and they get irritated from the waiting. And then you have a feeding frenzy with folks looking and whispering and Pauline has to rush me out the door.

One night, Pauline is breathing softly and I am almost asleep inside our hauling truck when, as quick as a snap of my fingers, I am awake.

I listen. The outdoors rings with the call of peepers, but nothing else. Inside, the truck is quiet. I’m not sure what startled me.

I nestle back in my mattress and pull the sheet to my chin. A full moon shines against our purple curtain, sending a stream of light into the back of our hauling truck. I look around and all is as it should be. Pauline has flung her arm up over her head and one of her feet hangs off the mattress. She wears socks to bed, even in the heat of summer.

Pauline’s mattress is pushed against one side of the truck, mine is against the other. Deeper inside the truck is where we keep our crates full of clothes and our books and checkers and my comics. My eyes cannot cut through the dark back there, but nothing seems out of place. My heart rattles, though, and I am very hot.

I pull the sheet off and try and think about something else. I think about how Cordelia likes her back scratched
and how she wiggles her tail all the time and how she can find an apple you are hiding in your shirt in an instant. Baby pigs are very smart that way.

The purple curtain moves, and I pick up one of my work boots very quietly and get ready to throw it. And then, just inside the curtain, I see the lady in the orange flappy hat. She is leaning against her cane, watching me.

I open my eyes wide. I look over at Pauline. She is snoring softly.

The old lady smiles warmly. She points toward Pauline and holds her finger to her lips. Then she hobbles closer. My heart flips in my chest and sweat forms on the back of my neck.

‘You really are cute as a bug’s ear, aren’t you?’ she whispers.

Pauline stops snoring and rolls back toward me. ‘Bee?’

I look at her quickly. She sits up, rubbing her eyes. When I look back the lady in the orange hat is gone.

‘Did you see her?’ I whisper.

‘Who?’

‘The lady in the flappy hat.’

‘Oh, Bee,’ says Pauline, flipping over and pulling her pillow over her head. ‘There’s nobody here. Now go to sleep.’ Her voice is muffled, but I can hear the mad.

I look around the hauling truck again, searching as best I can in all the dark corners.

I have seen the lady in the flappy hat many times before,
but three things are different this time: she never came in the truck before, she never came on a day when nothing has gone terribly wrong, and she never spoke to me.

I try and keep remembering what her voice sounds like in case Pauline wants to know. As I fall asleep, I wonder what the heck a bug’s ear is, anyway.

One day when we are outside of Pittsfield, and hardly anyone is coming to the show because all the men are gone to the war and who wants to ride a Tilt-A-Whirl when you can’t bring your sweetheart, that’s when the temperature climbs past ninety-five. The air is wet with sweat.

No matter how hard you try you cannot get cool when you work at a travelling show. We set up in the middle of a field where the grass feels like dry toast under your feet and I stay as long as I can under the little striped tarp over our hot dog cart. My cheek attracts the sun like butter on a plate. I dunk a cloth in the dishwater and hold it to the back of my neck and then soft against my diamond. In a few minutes the cloth is hot and I have to dunk it and start all over again.

The grill is sizzling and there are flies trying to get at the honey stuck to my fingers. ‘Please, Pauline, please,’ I say about a hundred thousand times.

‘Bee, I said we’ll see.’ Pauline gets all cranky when the heat gets past ninety. She blows her hair out of her eyes in a loud wet sputter. I sigh. I do not want to make her mad. I want to ask her please again, but if I do, she will tell me
I have gone and done it, I have made her mad and she is putting me on quiet time.

‘You cannot put me on quiet time any more. I am eleven.’

‘Just be quiet, Bee.’

Pauline does not like flies all over the food and I bet I could count a dozen trying to get at our honey buns. I count flies while I wait for Pauline to not be mad at me.

I sigh, over and over, louder and louder. It is too hot for folks to even eat, so the hot dogs get dried out. There was a matted little dog sniffing around this morning when I got up to do my business in the john. He was nosing around the pig bucket, where we put hot dogs nobody wants and the honey buns we cannot keep for another day. Already the piglets are getting very fat. I stuff a few hot dogs into the pocket of my overalls in case I see him again.

We close up at nine in most places. Sunday nights we close at six. It is Sunday night. Pauline throws the last of the hot dogs into the bucket. I scrub the cutting board. You never can get all the onion juice out of the wood. I wash the knives and lock them in the trunk and push it to the back of the cart.

Ellis shuts off the music and all the lights. Fat Man Sam and Bobby and Eldora make plans for where they will go out on the town. I am glad Pauline does not go with them. ‘Dump out the dishwater,’ she tells me, and
she heads for our hauling truck. ‘Oh, and Bee?’ Pauline turns, a big smile across her face. ‘Are you a little hot?’

If you ever saw a Little Pig Race in a travelling show like ours, and you saw how fast those baby pigs fly around the track, then you have an idea how fast I rush to our truck, climb the stepladder Bobby made for us and whip the purple curtain open. Even with my legs all wobbly from standing on them all day, I can fling off my apron, unhitch my overalls and jump into my swimsuit. I wrap myself in my towel and put my work boots back on. Finally, I think,
finally, finally, finally
.

No matter where we go, there is always an old swimming hole somewhere to swim in. You just have to ask one of the girls with the dirty ears or one of the boys who sneak smokes behind the trucks because chances are kids like that know where to find an old swimming hole. I just make sure to let Pauline ask for directions.

I jump out of the truck. ‘It’s up the road,’ Pauline says a minute later when she steps out. Her hair is down around her waist. Boys look at me for one reason, but they look at Pauline for another. She is pretty as a buttercup, I tell her. I do not tell her too often because I do not want her to get any ideas about boys and leaving me.

‘Did you get the flashlight?’

‘Yes,’ I say, turning it on to test it.

‘Don’t waste the batteries, Bee.’

She tells me this every time. I roll my eyes. If she saw
me doing this she would tell me girls who roll their eyes can just sit by themselves in the hot truck. This is why I do not let her see.

There are no lights at swimming holes and sometimes we stay so long the stars come out. That makes them very safe if you do not want folks looking at you when you are busy splashing like a trout.

‘They said it was up past the filling station.’

‘I didn’t hear you asking anybody.’

‘It was a surprise, Bee.’

I look for a narrow path. Cars and trucks slow and drivers look at Pauline. Sometimes boys hoot at her. I pull my hair over my diamond and keep my eyes on my feet.

‘It’s not far,’ Pauline says soon as I find the path and rush straight up a hill. Swimming holes are usually like that. First you climb and then when you get to the top and look down over, it steals your breath away.

‘Tree frogs around Pittsfield are louder than anywhere, don’t you think, Pauline?’ I am skipping very fast, so happy to be off the road and closer to the swimming hole.

‘Shush,’ she says from behind.

We walk after that as quiet as old tree stumps. We get up a steep part and the path swings a little to the left and then we are at the top looking down at a dark hidden pond covered with shadows. Everything smells heavy with wet leaves and damp mud at a swimming hole. I breathe deeply. It all smells very good.

A frog bellows on one side and another answers near us. The pond is about the size of four of our hauling trucks pushed together. Around and around we look, checking every tree and every rock. You cannot be too careful. ‘Stay here,’ she says.

Pauline climbs down the bank and wades into the water to test it, one toe at a time. I am frustrated the way I am when somebody cannot decide what to put on a hot dog and I have to stand and wait for about two thousand years. Pauline says I could learn a thing about patience. I tell her I already know plenty.

My towel is on a rock and I am jumping up and down. If I am hot and steamy the water will feel even better on my skin.

‘How is it?’ I can hardly bear the waiting. A fish jumps and ripples rush out to Pauline and touch her before she is waist-deep.

‘It is really fine,’ she says, diving in. Then she swims on her back to the middle of the pond. Pauline laughs out loud. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, Bee.’

Pauline is a wader, but I myself am a jumper. My smile pushes across my cheeks. Ready set go, I rush off the rock, fly through the air and slip feet first into the inky depths.

The water yanks the breath out of me and when I find it again, I lie back, my hair swimming behind me, and I look up at the moon, just rising. I flip over and dive
down, deep, deep, to where the biggest trout hide, and I am laughing so hard inside myself that I wonder if the fish can hear me.

When I rise to the surface, Pauline swims over and tells me I can climb onto her back. We paddle around pretending we are different animals: frogs, horses, dogs, mountain lions. I am too happy to worry about the diamond on my cheek when we go swimming. That is why I like this so much. I jump off Pauline and paddle from one end of the pond to the other, back and forth, over and over. I breathe deeply and dive to the bottom again and again.

When it is getting late, Pauline has to tell me about a hundred times to get out of the water.

‘Bee?’

I dive down so I do not have to hear her telling me to get out.

‘Bee?’ she is saying when I come up for air, but that is all I hear, because I dive right back down again.

‘Bee?’ Pauline is saying when I come up, and this time there is mad around her voice.

‘What?’

‘I said a million times already that it is time to go.’

‘Oh, I didn’t hear you.’ I smile at the water. And then I dive down once more because I have to thank the trout and the sunfish and the rocks and the mud and the turtles and everything else below the surface of the water. It has
been a very wonderful night.

I wrap my towel around and around and sit on the rock and listen to the tree frogs. An owl hoots ‘Who cooks for you, who cooks for you’ in the distance.

‘What kind?’ asks Pauline as she sits down beside me.

‘Barred,’ I say, screeching ‘Who cooks for you’ back to the woods. It is good to know about many things.

Then we check for leeches. Leeches are the only downside I can think of to a swimming hole. Leeches like to suck on your legs and your arms and sometimes your back. They are hard to get off because they change shape from short and stubby to long and thin, quick as a wink, like an accordion. That’s why it is good not to swim alone. I know some folks get all worked up about leeches, about how they suck at the skin between your toes. I want to tell them, worse things could happen than a leech stuck to your belly.