Hair Wreath and Other Stories, page 3
Look hard now, the girl thought, look hard. After this, everything changes. See the way the light comes through the lace curtains in the hotel windows and falls on your husband’s face, see the woman in the doorway flanked by men and the great torches burning there in the iron holders. She is magnificent. Who is it that chooses the hunters and the hunted?
She and Rex stood in the dark outside of the torches’ light and watched her husband go into the hotel with the Queen and her retinue.
The girl ran down the stone steps into the dark, wanting to be alone, but she knew Rex was still behind her. She had not thought it would be like this—she had seen it as she and her husband together, then a small break, and then they would be back together again, a neat diagram. But here was Rex, and that woman, and after them another and another, and no one minded.
“Didn’t your mother tell you?” It was Rex’s voice beside her in the dark.
“Yes. But she said when it first happened to her it was cats dancing and sunny and a lovely time.”
“For some people it is like that, for others it is the other side. The dark knight card, the black night of it.”
Then Rex leaned over and kissed her, bending her like a green branch and she knew there was nothing for it but to submit.
Peach Festival
Alexis and her little brother sat at the breakfast table and tried to ignore the rising voices, the hectoring tone of the words spilling out of their parents in the next room. They pushed brightly coloured cold cereal around in their bowls, the sweetish, slightly sour smell making Alexis gag a little. Usually they had pancakes on Saturday morning, but their parents had started early today, and Alexis had been in charge of filling her and Scott’s bowls, pouring the juice in the plastic juice cups while the argument went on in the other room. The bright red kitchen cupboards shone like polished fairytale apples in the morning sun; it would be a great day for the Peach Festival, if they ever got there. Finally, the voices fell silent. Alexis heard her father pound up the stairs, and the slam of the upstairs bathroom door. Her mother came in the kitchen a few minutes later, cheeks flushed, mouth slightly open. Alexis could see the wet gleam of her mother’s teeth through her parted lips, and looked away, back down into her cereal bowl, where amorphously shaped pastel marshmallows were turning the water a sickly pink.
“You kids got breakfast? Good, here’s the money, Alexis, half for you, half for Scotty. I’ll drop you guys off and pick you up at six by the entrance, no fooling around. Keep your cells on. I think at fifteen you should be able to handle this, right, Lexy? You are in absolute charge of your brother. You hear that, Scotty? I am in no mood for fairs today. I’ve got to run some errands, but I will be back at six, no later. Now let’s get out of here before that asshole comes back down.”
Alexis’s mother grabbed her purse off the counter and hustled the kids out the door. Their cereal bowls remained on the table, the contents dissolving into an inedible, sodden mess.
The Ferris wheel hung over the fairgrounds like a skeletal sun. With every drop it made, there were screams and laughter, which floated over the grounds to where Alexis and Scott stood waiting in line for tickets. Alexis was on her cell—her friends were already deep inside the fair, beyond the metal ticket booths and turnstiles, enjoying the promises of excitement that Scott and Alexis could just make out over the shoulders of people in front of them as they stood in line.
“Let’s meet . . . two please.” Alexis paid for the tickets without taking the phone away from her ear. She handed one to Scott and pushed through the turnstile. “I’m in,” she told her friends on the other end of the phone. “Let’s meet here—” Her eyes swept the area just inside the ticket booth. “—by this metal pole, with the picture of the missing girl on it. Hurry, I can’t wait to see what’s up; my parents were such jerk-offs this morning, I swear I thought I’d never get here. Hurry.”
She clicked the phone shut and leaned against the silver pole, her eyes scanned the crowd for any signs of her friends.
“Lexy, can I have my money?”
She looked down at her brother. “Weren’t you supposed to meet Tim or Jim or one of your friends or something?”
“Yeah, we’re meeting in the agricultural building.” Alexis made a face. “That place smells like shit.”
“Shut up, Lexy. Give me my money.”
“Don’t you want to call them or something?”
“No, I don’t want to call them, I want to go over and find them. They were going to be in the building. It’s not that big, I’ll find them.”
Alexis looked at her brother’s open freckled face, with the little nick on one cheek that looked like an insect had taken a bite of his pink skin. Hanging out with him all day would drive her nuts anyway.
“Fine. Here’s your half, but be back here at six sharp. Mom would kill me if she knew I was letting you run off. I’ll kill you if you’re late, you little jerk.”
“I’m eleven, I think I can handle the frickin’ Peach Festival.”
They both laughed and Scott walked away, into the crowds that came together and parted over and over.
Alexis leaned against the pole and flipped open her phone. She scanned back text messages, and changed the screen to read Sexy Lexy, and called her voice mail even though she knew no one had called her since she last checked. While she was listening to the tinny voice telling her nothing in chillingly polite tones, someone grabbed her arm.
“Lexy, always on the phone. Calling one of your boyfriends?”
Alexis shut the phone and dropped it in her purse.
“Jesus, Tiffany, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
Tiffany swung her long red hair over her shoulder and grinned. “You are such a spaz. Me and Erin have been looking for you for hours.”
Erin, who was on the phone, waggled her fingers at them, her blonde bob swinging over the receiver as she whispered something into it, then clicked the phone shut. Alexis turned away impatiently. Erin really did have someone to talk to on the phone. She met guys on the Internet, in teen chat rooms, and they always called her. Boys from their class at school called Erin too, ostensibly to talk about assignments or some other school activity, but really just to sit in silence, happy to listen while Erin went on about her friends, her teachers, anything she felt like talking about.
“God, look at that ugly bitch. Who would kidnap her?” Erin was standing staring up at the poster of the missing girl.
“Erin,” Tiffany laughed, “you are so bold.”
“Well, you’d have to be pretty stupid in this day and age to let anyone kidnap you.”
“I think she goes to our school,” Alexis said. The picture was hard to make out, the pixels blurring the face into anonymity, but something about it seemed familiar.
There was no name on the poster, which seemed weird, just a phone number and the words: “Have you seen this girl?”
“Oh great, I’m sure we’ll hear all about it when we get back to school. Who cares? There are absolutely no cute guys here. Let’s go on some rides before I die of boredom.” Erin led them toward the midway, Tiffany and Alexis on either side of her, their arms locked together in a soft linkage of tan young limbs, fuzzed with sun-lightened hairs, like the skin of a peach.
Scott stood outside the archway to the agricultural building. They had set up a cut-out of a giant wooden peach at the entrance. It wasn’t the hottest paint job in the world, but Scott thought it had managed to catch something of the freshness of peaches, how that colour on the outside advertised the sweetness of the first bite. Wasn’t there some book he had had to read for school about a kid who had lived in a giant peach? With bugs for friends? The kid had seemed like a dope to Scott, kind of whiny, but he didn’t remember much else about the book.
He went into the agricultural building, which was made of stone with high vaulted ceilings. The air was a lot cooler than outside and it smelled of animals. Grassy, dark and warm under the circulating currents of cool air. He looked at the cows and stopped to see the prize-winning peach pie display. Some ugly quilts, some pigs. Pigs always looked to Scott as if they knew some secret, as if they were laughing at him, smiles on their snouts, half-closed eyes. He had hated the story of the three pigs as a child and wished he could rewrite it so the wolf ate them up right away, before they started their building and breaking and killing.
He wandered over to the area of the building where the prize chickens were being displayed. Without thinking, he flipped open his phone and dialled Tim, who was supposed to meet him here, near the chickens. No Service. In the stone building Scott couldn’t get any bars at all on his phone. Shit, he’d have to go outside and try from there. Or he could just go into the chicken area and look around. Tim was probably right inside staring at some rooster or something. Scott put his phone in his back pocket and stepped through the doorway that led deeper into the agricultural building.
The three girls had been up and down the midway once already. They had bought cotton candy, which tasted like the sugar cereal Alexis had for breakfast. They unwrapped the long sugary pink strands with their fingers, which they sucked clean as they walked.
Carnies called to them in voices that carried over the noise of the crowds: Hey cutie, come on and play, I’ll make it worth your while; Sweetheart, I’ve got three balls for you, I’ll throw in an extra one for free; Lookit that, three peaches, how ’bout if I play the game and you girls be the prize.
A tall man wearing a soiled jean jacket, with long hair that swung in his face, staggered up to them. He leaned into Alexis and said, “Smile, sunshine, it can’t be that bad.” The three girls skittered away, giggling, Erin and Tiffany laughing about Lexy’s new boyfriend, but Alexis felt he was still watching her. She turned her head quickly to look over her shoulder, but the crowd was thick and she couldn’t see him if he was there, only the carnies leaning on their booths while their calls endlessly rose above the mass of people crawling along the midway.
The smell hit Scott right away. He had to agree with his sister; the place did smell like shit. He hadn’t known chickens were so stinky. Heavy wire cages piled on top of tables held more varieties of chickens than Scott had ever realized existed. There were deep green iridescent feathers, rust-coloured feathers, plumes nodding on heads, bald heads showing pimply skin, chickens with strange mop-tops that hung in their eyes so they looked like the Beatles, all of them clucking and gabbling. Occasionally the cry of a rooster would punctuate the mayhem. The sound, familiar to Scott only from movies or cartoons, made him shiver and tense his shoulders, waiting for the unpredictable next cry.
Scott could tell the roosters were angry, too many other roosters in their space; they wanted to kick the shit out of somebody. He looked at the caged birds, their naked and hard feet with curved nails, each mean beak set in a sharp point that would stab to get what it wanted. He opened his phone again, but there was still no service. He was giving up on Tim; he had to get out of this stink. He would try him from outside and if he got a hold of him, great—if not, well, he would go on some rides and then call Lexy to meet him.
He started walking back toward the entrance to the main agricultural building when a rooster in one of the cages started to crow. It was all white feathers, with elaborate plumes falling over its face. Its beak was reddish pink, opened now in a piercing cry. Scott took a step closer and the bird stopped. It shuffled in its cage and the feathers over its face moved side to side. He saw its inhuman, avian eye looking past him, cold and determined, and when it shook its head again and the feathers shifted and settled, he saw its other eye was nothing more than an empty red socket with white foam oozing over its rim.
The three girls decided to go on the Himalaya first. They stood in line and gossiped and Erin got another call on her phone. It was a boy from their class, and all three girls took turns talking to him. The metallic rattle of the ride, the linked cars speeding around on the lifting and falling track punctuated their conversation. When they made it to the front of the line, the three girls grabbed for a car, but the carnie running the ride stopped them.
“Sorry gals, only two to a car.”
“What? You’re kidding.” Erin swung her blonde hair out of her face and put her hands on her hips.
“We want to ride together.”
“Them’s the rules. You and red get in this car, and I’ll put your friend right behind you.”
“God, what a rip. Okay, come on, Tiff.” Erin grabbed Tiffany’s hand and climbed into the car, pulling the bar over their legs.
“Sorry, Lexy,” Tiffany said, and then she turned to Erin who was waving at three boys in another car.
The carnie took Alexis by the arm and sat her two cars behind Tiffany and Erin.
“Hey, there were three boys in that car, how come . . . ?” But the carnie brought the bar down hard across Alexis’s thighs before she could finish.
“You’re just a little too plump to squeeze in there with your girlfriends.” The carnie ran a hand across her thigh. “I like your jeans, where’d you get those jeans?”
Alexis’s cheeks were burning. “My father bought them for me.”
“My father’s dead.” He took his hand off her thigh and grinned.
The ride started with a jerk. The cars spun around the track, while rock music from twenty years ago played loudly.
The carnie called over the loudspeaker, “Do you wanna go faster?”
Everyone on the ride screamed “yes” except Alexis. Tears were running down her face and being whipped away by the speed of the ride.
She saw Erin’s hands go up into the air in front of her, and the carnie called, “Do you wanna go backwards?”
Again the screams, and Alexis slid to one side of the car and couldn’t move, the ride’s force keeping her against the side of the car, the skin on her cheeks stinging as the tears dried and the wind pulled them taut. A high-pitched siren started and the ride went even faster. The fairgrounds were a blur—the other people in the cars in front of her seemed to melt into one stream of colour and noise. Alexis put her head down and waited for the ride to stop.
“Another chicken got him.”
Scott turned to see who was speaking to him. It was an older boy in a black Nirvana t-shirt. He was probably Lexy’s age, Scott thought.
“Is it yours?” Scott asked.
“Hell no, I just saw them separate the two birds this morning after one put this one’s eye out. They probably would have killed each other.”
Scott and the boy looked at the bird in silence. It strutted around its cage in baleful silence, fixing them alternately with its good eye and the foaming hole.
“Actually, I’m with the sideshows. Well, my mother is. We travel with the midway.”
Scott looked at the boy with new interest. Wait till he told Tim he met a carnie, or at least a carnie’s kid.
“Cool. What’s your mom do? Does she run a ride?”
“She’s Madame Leyenska, the fortune teller.” The boy spat into the dirt. “Let’s get out of here, this place stinks.”
Scott and the boy walked back out onto the fairgrounds. Scott checked his phone and saw that the battery was dead. He had forgotten to plug it in last night. This day was turning out to be a bust. For a minute he’d hoped this carnie kid could maybe get him on his mom’s ride, but his mother was some freaky fortune teller.
“Well, it was nice meeting you.” Scott stuck his phone back in his pocket. “But I’m supposed to be meeting a friend around here, and I should try to find him.” He looked into the crowds milling around the agricultural building, hoping to see Tim.
“Hey, don’t you want my mom to tell your fortune?” The boy grabbed Scott’s t-shirt from the back.
“No. I don’t believe in that crap. Let go, I’ve gotta find my sister.”
The boy dropped his hand and Scott shrugged his shoulder under the shirt to get the feeling of the boy’s sweaty palm off of him. The boy stuck his hands in his pockets and spat again. “Whatever, just thought you’d want to know if your parents were getting divorced.” The boy started to walk away.
Scott stood there for a minute, fingers pressed against his useless phone, and then went after him.
The ride ended and Alexis staggered off. She didn’t see the carnie, or Erin and Tiffany, and she didn’t care. She sat down on a bench and put her head between her knees.
“Oh, Alexis, you are such a wuss.”
She could smell Erin’s sugary perfume.
“Hey, are you okay?” Tiffany sat down next to her. “Yeah, just needed to catch my breath.” Alexis raised her head. Erin was a short way away, talking on her cell.
“God, that ride was so fun. We’re going on the Tilt-a-Whirl next. Wanna come?”
“No, you two go. I’ll wait here on this bench; maybe I’ll get some water.”
Tiffany looked at Alexis closely. “Well, if you’re sure.” Erin waved to them from over by the ride.
“Okay, well I’ll tell Erin. We’ll meet you back here, okay?”
Alexis just nodded, closed her eyes and put her head down again. When she looked up, the girls were gone and she was alone.
Anyone who saw the two boys walking together would have taken them for brothers. Both skinny, wearing black t-shirts and baseball caps; the younger, shorter of the two was maybe ten or eleven, the older fourteen or so. They walked close to each other, bumping shoulders but they didn’t hold hands. That would be beneath their dignity, no matter what their parents might have told them about keeping close in the chaos of the fairground, the older responsible for the safety of the younger. The two of them entered a small grouping of tents and trailers, away from the main thrust of the fair, where there were no crowds of jostling teens and haggard-looking parents toting younger children. The older boy looked around quickly, and then, taking the younger boy by the hand, pulled him between the flaps of a nondescript grey tent.
