Mister Boots Page 9

  Even so, and even though our father keeps telling us he never gets angry, he turns red with holding it in. He’s in practice for having the show go on, though. Red as he is, he keeps everything moving the way it’s supposed to.

  He’s so angry he stays red-faced all evening.

  Usually, in front of strangers, he’s as jolly as can be. He talks to everybody. Tells jokes. Tells about funny things that happened onstage and how cleverly he worked things into the act. Tells about how he met Houdini. Though he doesn’t drink much, he loves to go to bars and takes me, too. He introduces me to everybody, “My son, a chip off the old block. Only seven years old and could do the whole act by himself if need be.” He keeps me up late just to show me off. We hardly ever get to bed before two in the morning. Especially after we’ve given a show and are still all excited.

  Now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Paces, red-faced, then stops pacing, turns his usual pale again, and stays pale all the rest of the evening.

  When I’m just getting ready for bed, he comes for me. “All right,” he says. “Don’t think you don’t need a lesson just as much as Boots does.” He walks me out and down the road until there aren’t any more streetlamps.

  It’s a pretty dark night. There’s only a little half a moon. First thing, he pulls off all my clothes and I think: Here it comes. I get worried. I don’t want to be alone with him way out here when he finds out. Especially not when he’s so upset.

  But it’s too dark and he’s not paying attention. What he does find is my rabbit’s foot and twenty dollars, which makes him even angrier. In this light he can’t tell how much money it is, he just knows it’s money. He thinks I stole it.

  He really whips me. He uses a leather thong kind of thing—four thongs braided into a handle at one end. It was made exactly for this. I’ve seen those hanging in the grocery stores, and I guessed it was for children but I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t do one bad thing—not one single thing. I took care of the doves and the rabbits. I led Boots in just like he said to. Then I was just sitting there reading before getting into bed and at the same time rolling two bits along my fingers, exactly like I’m supposed to do.

  I don’t cry out. What’s the use? I just squeak a little.

  He’s mad about all the other times when Mister Boots wouldn’t let him whip me, though I think he’s mainly mad about Boots.

  He talks all through it. “Turn over a . . .” Whip. “. . . new leaf.” Whip. “Make a man.” Whip. “Man!” Whip. “And hand over that pistol the minute we get back.”

  “It’s back home.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  (I wish I could throw fire anytime I feel like it.)

  But after a few minutes I start to float above everything, as if I’m watching us down here. It’s as if I can see better than I really can: a skinny naked girl (I see that she’s a girl just as clear as could be) and a fat man. At first I think I really have turned into a bird, like Jocelyn says I did, but I don’t go flying off anywhere, and pretty soon I come back down to myself, which is a big disappointment.

  I remember putting my clothes back on and then getting carried, and getting laid on my bed. Gently. I even think he kissed my forehead.

  Later here’s Jocelyn and Mister Boots sitting by my bed, Boots’s arm across her shoulders and my sister’s arm around his waist. They’re not noticing me at all.

  I see I’m in my boy’s striped pajamas, but my sister must have undressed me because things seem to be the same. Jocelyn is saying, “Why don’t you want to?” and Boots is saying, “Human beings don’t do it like that. I’m trying to be one of the good ones.”

  “Stay Moonlight Blue. I never met a man I liked . . . even a little bit.”

  I ache all over, and I want somebody to know it. “Hey,” I yell, loud enough to make them jump.

  Jocelyn gets me water, but when she tries to help me drink, I yell a big “Ouch!” I hurt some, but not as much as I’m pretending.

  My sister leans her head next to mine and starts to cry. Mister Boots nibbles at her neck. She turns around to kiss him. I have to yell ouch again to get them to pay attention. Jocelyn raises me up and I drink, and then she goes to get me broth and crackers.

  We’re in a hotel. Our father said not a very good one. I don’t know why he says that because, though the rooms are small, they’re nicer than back home and the beds are not so lumpy and the bathroom is good.

  I tell Mister Boots I was scared but I didn’t change into anything. “I wanted to fly away, but I couldn’t do it. I did float up a little bit, but just a few feet, and then I came right back down. I wanted to turn owl and fly off silently in the dark like they do.”

  “Human being is better.”

  (When it comes right down to it, if I’m going to change to anything else at all, it ought to be to a boy.)

  The next day I’m really and truly sick—shaky and feverish and wobbly. I don’t know why our father whipped me when he’s supposed to only do things for the good of the show. But, just like he always complains about me, I don’t think he was thinking at all.

  Thank goodness our father is staying away from us. I get to sit with my sister and go on trying to learn to knit. By now I’m getting good at that, too, just like I’m good at everything else. The scarf for Boots is a little lumpy at the beginning but it’s getting better all the time. It’ll look good on him when he wears his red sweater. And Jocelyn is knitting a sweater for me the same color as this scarf. “Moonlight navy blue,” we call it.

  Mostly we don’t talk much, and I get to have her read to me. I’m hoping I stay sick a long time. I don’t know where she got the money, but on her own, she buys Anne of Green Gables, which is a girl’s book, and which we’d better not let our father see. He bought a couple of books for me about heroes: baseball heroes, football heroes, army heroes. . . . My sister doesn’t want to read those to me. She thinks things have gone too far already.

  Our father keeping away from us is a nice rest. He’d probably tell me not to slouch even in bed. He’d say, “Lie straight like a soldier, and keep your toes pointed up.”

  He goes onstage by himself, but everybody’s heard about me and they all want me. Jocelyn was there, and she said they yelled not only for me but for “the magic horse.” They think they’re cheated unless they get everything that’s on the poster. Our father had to get out his old posters, where there’s only him. But some of those old posters have a woman on them with fuzzy red hair, and she’s dressed in pink with puffed sleeves just like I am, except you can practically see her whole chest.

  chapter nine

  As soon as I’m a little better our father hires a wagon and a motorcar and takes us out to a tenting place. I slouch all the way, and he doesn’t say a single word. I slouch so much I don’t even like it myself because I can’t see out the window. Not only that, I have to slouch sideways because my bottom still hurts.

  This is a funny kind of place. It’s full of people like us—all kinds of show people. I like it. I wouldn’t mind living here forever. You can hear the creek from our tents. There are big cottonwoods, and you can hear the wind blowing through them. But Jocelyn doesn’t like it. I admit it looks kind of ragged. Away from the trees, people have old blankets strung up so as to make more shade. The whole place looks like a bunch of laundry hanging out, and half of it is laundry.

  Our father is still, mostly, staying away from us. Jocelyn says he told her what he wants me to do. Besides an orange every day, he wants me out in the sun every afternoon for my health, bare to the waist, half an hour front and half an hour back, no more and no less, and I have to have my eyes covered. But because of my whip marks, I’m supposed to do this between the big tent and the middle-sized one, toward the back, and Jocelyn is supposed to sit out in front and keep people away. There’s bushes that hide me from the back.

  Every now and then I catch a glimpse of our father. He’s easy to spot because he wears his turban all the time. Out here h
e wears it even when he isn’t onstage, though he never did that before. Lots of people go around in funny hats or parts of costumes. (There’s a clown who wears his big red nose all the time, though the rest of his clothes are just regular.)

  We’ll have to be careful with Boots here because there’s a little pasture with the animals that belong to the people of the camp. Of course horses, but goats and sheep . . . all sorts of things. We don’t want Boots to let things go free. We’ll get kicked out if that happens and people find out it was us. Besides, a lot of these are performing animals—there’s a horse that can count. (That’s a lie, like most things around here.) There’s a lot of little dogs here that can do all sorts of tricks. When I’m not soaking up sunshine, I watch them get trained. Boots watches, too. At first he worried about them, but then he saw they were having fun.

  Jocelyn is worried because some of these people are kind of dark and look to her like gypsies, but Mister Boots says, “I’m a flea-bit gray.”

  Later Jocelyn asked me, What did I think he meant by that?

  A brown person does come—a girl about my age. First she hides at the back, where the bushes are, and watches me when I’m roasting myself in the afternoon sun. First I hear her. I uncover my eyes, but I don’t see anybody. Then she creeps out and I put my finger to my lips so she won’t make a noise. Jocelyn might hear and make her go away.

  “Can we whisper?”

  “Come closer then.”

  First thing she says is she got whipped, too.

  “Everybody gets whipped.” I say that, though I never got whipped except when our father was around.

  “It’s always for my own good,” she says.

  “I get whipped for things I didn’t even do.”

  “Not me. I do lots of bad things, and they don’t always find out. Except mostly I didn’t know they were bad till after. But sometimes, like if I drop something, I do them by mistake.”

  “Grown-ups drop things all the time, and nobody whomps them even when they break something or spill things.”

  “I know that.”

  “I know you know that.”

  “I know!”

  She sits for a while looking at my back, and I go on soaking up sunshine like our father wants me to do.

  Then she asks . . . the question, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

  “Which do you think?”

  “Sometimes I think one and sometimes I think the other.”

  “Have you been watching me?”

  “I could find out which you are right now—in half a minute.”

  I grab myself with both hands so she can’t.

  “Just wait. I’ll get a chance later.”

  “You won’t. I’m fast. Besides, I’m magic.”

  “I could find out by your name.”

  “It’s Bobby. That’s for both girls and boys.”

  “I’m Rosie. You can’t make that into a boy’s name.”

  “I’m a boy.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I am, too.”

  “Prove it.”

  (I’ll bet she’d jump if I threw fire. I’ll bet she’d jump if I shot my pistol.)

  “I’m ten.” She says it like she’s proud of it.

  “That’s nothing; I am, too.”

  Then I see that Jocelyn knows she’s here, but she isn’t doing anything about it. That’s a relief. I should have known she’d be on my side.

  I don’t care at all that Rosie is one of the brownish people. Besides, they’re not gypsies. She’s from Mexico, and she says everybody’s brown down there. I like her color better than mine. She says her father is a circus-horse trainer. She says Mexicans are the best. Only the Shoshone are better at it.

  Rosie says they say if you can kiss your elbow you can turn into a boy. We both try. I tell her, “Just because I’m trying doesn’t mean I’m a girl. What if I’m a boy that wants to be a girl? What if it would work that way, too?”

  Even though one of my elbows is crooked, and even though I try really hard, I can’t do it.

  Lying here before Rosie came, I’d already done just about all the thinking I could think of to think, but then, after Rosie, I have a new thought. I think one of these days I’m going to go out as a girl. Rosie and I could go out together. Rosie is just about my size. She only has two dresses, and they’re awfully dirty and ragged, but I never did mind dirt like Jocelyn does.

  I don’t ever want to leave this place. It’s much better than a hotel, and the people are fun. Rosie and I see each other every day. We found a secret place where we made a whole village. We used sticks for people and we made houses out of stones and we made roads. The only real thing we have is one old lead soldier Rosie found. It’s the hero. We take turns with it. Till now I hardly knew there was such a thing as this kind of playing.

  The summer is beginning to be hot, but here by the creek and under these big trees it’s cooler. I keep pretending I’m worse off than I really am. I yell ouch even when I’m not hurting. Jocelyn knows that, but she’s pretending I’m worse off than I am, too. She likes it because our father keeps away a lot. I especially like it because I’ve found my first friend who’s my own age.

  Our father is thinking about a clown suit for Mister Boots. Jocelyn is supposed to sew it up, but she’s not sure if she should or not. She thinks our father is doing it on purpose to humiliate Boots. She’s upset that Boots isn’t upset about it. He’s supposed to lope onstage on a hobbyhorse.

  “I don’t want him made a fool of. I don’t want him to be a clown.”

  I say, “There’s nothing wrong with being a clown. Besides, he’d be what you call comic relief.”

  “I don’t want Moonlight Blue to be it.”

  But then along comes this lady.

  By now, since I’m better, our father is coming around a lot more, so that nice rest we were having is over with. He hadn’t eaten with us for a while, but now he does all the time. So one mealtime this lady comes, and first thing she calls our father My Dear, and she hugs him and kisses him, then steps back and takes a good look at him and then goes through the whole thing all over again. She gets lipstick all over him.

  It’s hard to tell if our father is glad to see her or not, but he’s surprised. He puts up a good front, though. He has to be an actor for his job, so he can act any way he wants to be. He calls her My Dear, too.

  She says, “It’s been years.”

  She has this dead animal around her neck. It has shiny, dark brown, sad eyes. I keep looking at it so much I hardly notice her. It’s hot for wearing a fur, but if I had one I’d be wearing it, too. I wonder if she talks to it? I wonder if it was a boy fur or a girl fur back when it was alive?

  It isn’t till later that I notice—I mean really notice—that she has very, very, curly red hair, a lot of it. I know where I’ve I seen that before!

  This lady is just the opposite of Mother, but she acts as if she thinks she’s married to our father. Now that Mother’s dead I guess it doesn’t matter, but they can’t both be the real wife.

  While she’s still hugging and kissing our father, my sister whispers to me, “That’s the lady in the old poster. She’s a lot fatter now, but I’m pretty sure it’s her. That lady had the exact same hair.”

  She kisses our cheeks and then looks at us longer than feels right. She sees things. She says, “How absolutely perfect, a boy and a girl.” She might really mean it, or maybe, unlike our father, she sees what I am right away.

  There must be something in our eyes, because she says, “I think you children ought to know right away, your father’s been married to me for twenty-five years, and we never divorced.” Then she smiles a motherly smile that turns wicked right in the middle of it, and she says, “Just don’t ever call me Mother.”

  (When it turns out Mother never was really married to Father, Jocelyn feels anything between her and Mister Boots is perfectly all right.)

  So now there’s another big tent set up not so far from our group of tents, but it do
esn’t have a yellow stripe; it has a big pink rose painted on it.

  Pretty soon the show must go on.

  My heart is broken. I have to leave the first and only friend I ever had. And now that our father is around more, I haven’t had so many chances to be with her. I have to practice things and do my stretching exercises so as to get back in shape. Rosie is almost as free as I used to be back home. She doesn’t have to do anything except help her mother at suppertime.

  I sneak away to say good-bye to Rosie. As a going-away present I give her one of my twenty-dollar bills. She didn’t know I was so rich. I tell her to keep it for something special and not to tell anybody.

  She gives me a piece of dusty candy and a long blue ribbon. The ribbon is the only girl-type thing I ever had, except for knitting needles.

  Rosie says some day this money might save her life, and that’s true, it might.

  On the way back I take the long way through the yellow grass to where a big batch of boulders fell down the hill and piled up. Rosie and I played house here. (I always had to be the husband.) I wanted to say good-bye to this place, too, but I come to a secret I shouldn’t be seeing.

  First I hear breathing. Snuffling kind of. I keep on walking around the stones, quietly, so as to sneak up and see what’s happening—and then I wish I hadn’t.

  They’re lying on an old army blanket so, for sure, they planned ahead. They’re naked. (Jocelyn is almost as thin as Boots, but curvier.) I guess she finally convinced him.