Читать книгу Impossible Princess - Kevin Killian - Страница 6

with Derek McCormack

I never quit crying.

Mama wrapped me in a blanket. Me, a month old. September. We lit out toward dark.

Folks on horses. And in buggies. We walked. Stepping over shit. Beyond us, cottonfields. Full of hookworm.

Torches burned. Cotton wound around broomsticks. At a booth Mama bought a ticket. She sat me down. I cried. The seat was a plank. On crates. In a field.

A curtain covered a stage. In front, a table piled with blankets and joke books and pots and the like. A man come out. He juggled. Another man come out. He had a doll he made talk. The night smelled like guano. Bats black as blindfolds.

A woman up next. She had on tights. She stuck her hand in a drum. Drew out a ticket. Whoop went the man behind us. He won a French fan. He give it to Ma. She swatted. Flies hung like a net around me. Greenbottles.

The curtain split. A floodlight come on. The Professor appeared. He was old. He had everything silver—beard, fob, cane head. “And when you are dying,” he said, “when you are drawing your last breath, who among you can say that you are prepared to meet the Angel of Death?”

At the lip of the stage he placed a skull, a trumpet, a Bible. “Because within each one of you, right this minute and every minute of your lives, resides Death. Death is within you. Death is your tenant. Death is the worm.

“Death grows fat in your intestines. Death is the animal in your blood. Death is the abscess overtaking your stomach wall. Death is the germ hiding in the alveoli of your lung. Right now. As we speak. In you and in you and in you—Death has found a home.”

“It’s home!” shouted a woman. Her leg lame.

He brought her onstage. “Mere years ago this affliction might’ve killed you. But now we have a cure.”

He held up a bottle of his tonic. Egyptian Rooto-Bark Tonic. He rubbed a rag on her leg. “I can walk!” the lame lady said. He rubbed some on a deaf man’s ears. “I can hear!” the deaf man said.

An old man bounded up. Jaw wrapped.

“You won’t feel a thing.” The Professor give him a swig, then shoved a plier in his mouth. “Get behind thee!” he said, holding up a molar. It was black and white.

The crowd clapped. Mama rose up. “He’s got a bump on his back.” At the base of my spine. A hot strawberry.

The Professor fingered it.

I wailed. The spotlight calcium.

“I tried everything,” Mama said. “A poultice. A lance.”

“Arachnids,” the Professor said. “This baby has been bitten by arachnids. They may now be nesting under his skin. They may be feeding on his blood. They may be readying to tumble out, hundreds of baby arachnids. Arachnids, my friends. Otherwise known as spiders.”

The Professor raised me up over his head. His other hand raised up a bottle.

A piss-stream of tonic down my throat.

Four ladies danced onto stage, two and two like the Bible. One pair, dressed like nurses in white starchy cotton, swept my mother away to comfort her. Another pair in Oriental snake-charmer harem pants hustled me backstage in a cobra-like basket. Backstage, I was confronted by a silent row of babies, staring at me, all sizes from newborn to toddler, mostly dressed like me in flannel diaper made out of old cheesecloth and the like. These babies, held in women’s arms silently, all meeting my stare with insolence.

The Professor’s wife snapped her fingers while onstage her husband voiced the virtues of Egyptian Rooto-Bark Tonic and my mother gaped. Wife says, “That one will do,” pointing to a baby that kind of looked like me. Strong hands pried open his diaper and filled it with spiders, whether real or toy I cannot say. Then the baby was paraded out on the wood stage again, a little senior to me, but one baby looks mighty like another don’t they when they’s crying. Even my own mother looked convinced, her mouth a raw “O” like an onion. I stood behind the curtain, tears dripping down my eyes. She held “me” in her arms while I looked on in undisguised envy.

That other boy, in the spotlight, and me, held back behind the curtain with faceless nobody women and babies. That other boy who, at the right moment of Professor’s peroration, had his diaper dramatically lowered and a host of black spiders wriggled out of his ass and onto the wooden stage to shrieks.

Over my mother’s shoulder he jeered my way, thumb to his nose, fingers wiggling.

Meanwhile a passionate lady with a camera was urging the women backstage to look statuesque, and for all the little children to bury their heads into their mother’s sternums. She was passing around her business card and her credentials from the WPA. “You women are just one step away from the Dust Bowl Trail,” she said. “You’re migrant workers, minus the migrating.”

“Geese migrate,” spat one hard-faced bully.

“I agree,” said Dorothea Lange more heartily, digging deep into her pocket and finding some quarters there. “Now watch the birdie.”

With a quiet boom her camera exploded into light, we all froze in a stoic way. Offstage more applause, the Professor winding up his speech and the snake-charmer girls wafting into the audience with trays of Egypto Tonic, selling like crazy. The little boy who was playing “me” twinkled and shone like a diamond. I hated him, little upstart. My mother didn’t know the difference—she, too, blinded by the spotlight.

The man who made the doll talk sat me on one knee and the doll on the other. I looked at the doll, and the doll looked back at me, first time I ever saw a mirror. The two nurses snuck behind me, marked my tailbone with a red heart and a red “X” to show where the wound had been. Course it was still there but felt smaller somehow. Impostor boy came off the stage, and they shoved me on the stage, happy in my mother’s loving arms. At least—I looked happy. I was only a month old but already I had learned a passel of valuable lessons. Number one, there will always be somebody who can do your job better than you can. Number two, women can’t be trusted. Number three, even a doll can have a personality that’ll make people grin. Number four, you want to go out and knock them dead.