Almost Paradise Read online

  Circus God spun around and said, “Excuse me,” like he was the polite one, which he was not, in case you hadn’t noticed. What he was really saying to her was shut up.

  “You are not excused,” Mother said right back. I had never heard her speak that way to anybody on earth, but as I said before, she was right queer about animals, especially intelligent ones such as you might expect to find in the IQ Zoo. People around us began to squirm. The little pig drove around and around, honking his horn. That was not sightseeing at its finest.

  Mother raised her fingers up and rubbed her forehead like she was suffering a splitting headache. Then she whispered to me, “Pay attention. I have to break that pig out of here.”

  Before I could understand that Mother was suggesting stealing the pig, Circus Girl jumped forward, her majorette uniform sparkling all over. She pointed at us and screamed, “Daddy, Daddy, that boy and his mother are going to steal our pig!”

  I guess, to her, everybody who doesn’t wear a majorette uniform is a boy.

  When I turned back around, Mother had already rushed into the ring and was pulling the pig from the Cadillac. “Let him free!” she cried.

  Well, the entire firmament of a red-striped family was on us. Circus God jumped on Mother and dragged her toward the door. That’s when the gloomy teenager who took our money at the entrance threw me over his shoulder, my cowboy boots cycling uselessly in the air. I hated feeling helpless, but that seemed to be a byproduct of being smaller than everybody else; that’s why small people have to use their brains.

  Mother’s shoe flew off when she was tossed out. Landing outside on our behinds was humiliating, but what could we do? Who heard complaints from the poor in spirit and poor in money? Nobody, that’s who. Especially when it was just plain legal cruelty and bad manners.

  Mother stood up off the sidewalk, smoothed her hair, and brushed the dirt off her skirt. As she straightened her shoe back onto her foot she said, “Ruby Clyde, they may own that pig legally, but not rightfully. Some things are just plain wrong.”

  SIX

  By the time we got back to the meeting place at the water fountain, Catfish was jumping out of his skin. “Well, take your pretty time, ladies! Don’t mind old Carl. He’s just the chauffeur. He don’t matter. Carl’s got nothing better to do than wait all day on a couple of sightseers.”

  He hadn’t waited all day, but I bit my tongue. We jumped into the car and he drove away. What happened next defies explanation.

  “Where’s the doughnut head?” I asked, seeing his new best friend was gone. But he didn’t answer.

  Catfish reached between his legs under the seat and pulled out a big gray pistol. A real metal one. He was driving with one hand and waving that gun around with the other. I was quite speechless. Did he not respect my mother’s history? I turned to Mother, expecting her to be falling apart, but she hadn’t seen the gun. She was staring out the car window at billboards, gone off in that world of hers.

  I looked back at the gun. First real one I had ever been close to, not counting the one that killed my father when I was inside my mother. I couldn’t have seen that one, but I bet I felt it through my mother’s blood, because you know it laid her out so it must have laid me out too. What kind of memory would that be?

  The Catfish’s gun did not look like my showy little cap gun. It was more boring and more real. Long and plain and heavy looking. I was hypnotized. I mean, one pull of that trigger right there under his finger and people could die—forever. And that was a sobering thought, indeed. How could a little piece of metal force itself into your body and displace enough body parts to kill you dead? I have noticed, by the way, that death is often caused by two things trying to be in the same place at the same time, like two cars on the same stretch of highway, or a bullet and a heart. Because of this insight, I am not convinced that world peace is possible, what with everything fighting over limited space.

  Mother finally saw the gun and screamed.

  Catfish drove up on the sidewalk. “Woman!” he yelled.

  I banged the Catfish on the shoulder and screamed, “Use your brain! Get that gun out of her face.”

  Catfish stomped the brakes. “Holy crow! What did I ever do to deserve such a woman?” (I’d been asking myself that same question ever since he showed up in our lives.)

  The car skidded to a stop. Mother gathered herself together, straightened her skirt, and sniffed proudly, “I’ve had a very difficult day, Carl, and it is just too much for me to see a gun. You know, I do not approve of guns.”

  “And guns don’t approve of you, Babe.”

  I wished somebody would just take out his voice box. The whole world would be better if the Catfish opened his big mouth and said absolutely nothing.

  But Mother didn’t scream at him or anything. She was very quiet. Long pause.

  I was waiting for her to say something, like maybe she would say, Shut up, Carl, we’re going home whether you like it or not. She could have said that, but she didn’t.

  What she said was, “I would like very much for you to use your new gun to get me a pig.”

  The Catfish’s jaw fell open.

  Mine too.

  And she told him about the IQ Zoo. As far-fetched as she sounded, I liked her idea of saving that pig. My only regret to having been kicked out, literally, of the IQ Zoo was that we had left without the pig.

  Somebody had to entice the Catfish to get that pig, and again, that somebody was me. It was a good thing I understood him. Nothing worked better with the Catfish than to call his manhood into question. So I said, “Wait a minute, what was all that talk about using that gun to protect her from bullies?”

  “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout? What bullies?”

  “Bullies,” I said, “violent bullies.” So I told him about getting shoved out of the IQ Zoo so hard that Mother fell down and lost her shoe.

  “Babe, is that true?” He turned those wide-spaced eyes on Mother.

  She nodded.

  He looked at her for two or three long seconds, and I swear I could see his temperature rise. Just like in the cartoons.

  Suddenly he hit the accelerator and did a U-turn right over the median, heading for the IQ Zoo. He ran red lights and yield signs and skidded to a stop across the street from the place.

  “Don’t move,” he said, kicking the car door open.

  The next moments stretched in time like elastic, then snapped back with the sound of gunfire. I knew it when I heard it. Strange, since I had never heard a real gunshot before. Dull loud pops came from inside the building. Gunshots. My throat was full of cement.

  Before I could catch a lungful of air, the Catfish came flying out the door. That little pig was under his arm like a football. He pointed his pistol at the sky and fired again while he ran, bony knees popping up real high with each step. A gang of crazies chased him out: Circus God in his bright baggies; the son in his unhappiness; then the mother and daughter in their majorette uniforms; angry men too, from the audience, shouting and shaking their fists.

  And there came the Catfish, happier than I had ever seen him.

  He tossed the pig over the seat to me and jumped behind the wheel. “Whoo-hoo mercy!” he hollered as the car fishtailed and sprayed gravel all over the mob.

  The piglet in my arms was about as cuddly as a bag of potatoes. He went to squealing and crawling up my neck, stabbing me with those hard, pointy feet. That little guy was so excited, I decided to lay my healing hands on him. And it was the quickest healing I have ever done. Just like that, the piglet flopped across my lap and fell asleep.

  I stroked that strange hairy skin of my beautiful new pig and felt a tiny bit of softness toward the Catfish, who had rescued him. The piglet was an even better birthday present than the cowboy outfit, but the gift-giver was a big fat mess. The Catfish could have given me a gift every day for the rest of my life and it wouldn’t have made him the kind of adult who should have been with my mother, not a man who could replace my prince of a father.<
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  SEVEN

  We drove out of Hot Springs straight into the afternoon sun. “Sunset Boulevard—Here! We! Come!” The Catfish’d slap the steering wheel and laugh, then say it again a few miles down the road. Mother glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping pig and smiled at me. After a while we rode in peaceful silence. Then Mother’s head leaned to one side and she slept. She needed her sleep, I knew. It had been a long day for both of us, but I didn’t like her going to sleep and leaving me alone with the Catfish.

  Right on cue, at her first soft snore, the Catfish cut his eyes up in the rearview mirror. Those eyes, those floating eyes, gave me the willies. “What you going to call that pig?” he said.

  I looked down at the pig’s upturned snout, little round nostrils like hole punches.

  “Bunny,” I said. That was the name of my best friend back home, and I missed her so much it hurt my teeth, especially since she would be looking for me on my birthday. I worried who would tell her what had become of me.

  “Bunny!” Catfish complained. “That’s a stupid name for a boy pig—a famous car-driving pig! Call him Dale Earnhardt.”

  I held firm. “He’s a Bunny,” I said, thinking, So what if it’s a girl-boy name. I could be a Ruby or a Clyde whenever I wanted. If nothing else, I believed a pig named Bunny would keep me from being homesick. Suddenly my stomach filled with rocks. I wanted to go home. I’d even be glad to see Mr. Upchuck, the eyeless wonder.

  The Catfish muttered and turned on the radio, changed stations a hundred times, then switched it off. A piece of sunlight cut across my mother’s hair.

  “Carl,” I said. I never called him Catfish to his face.

  “Yu-huh?” He raised his eyes into the rearview mirror again.

  “When are we going back home?”

  “Not till I’ve got something to show for it.”

  “There’s nothing for us in Hollywood.”

  “Well, aren’t you the smarty-pants Queen of the World?”

  “I just want to be home and go to my own school. I’m missing the end-of-school party.”

  “School shmool. Who needs school? I never learned nuthin’ in school.”

  Well, that was obvious, but I didn’t say so. I folded the piglet’s ear between my fingers.

  We whizzed past a tall skinny guy standing on the side of the road. His curly hair pyramided out to his shoulders. He had a guitar hung over one shoulder and held a hand-painted sign saying NEW MEXICO.

  “What’s that guy doing?” I asked.

  “That is a hitchhiker. He wants somebody to give him a ride where he’s going.”

  “A stranger’s going to pick him up?”

  “What do you think, Ruby Clyde? You think he knows everybody driving along this road?”

  “But people do that? Stop and pick him up and drive him where he’s going?”

  “Sure, people hitchhike all the time, but they don’t always take you where you are going. They just take you as far as they’re going, then they boot you out and you have to catch another ride.”

  That was good news: I could hitchhike home.

  “So put me out, Carl. I’ll hitchhike.” I’d get out on the road like that New Mexico person, only my sign would say HOME.

  “I should do that.” He laughed. “I should do that while your mother is still asleep.”

  “Okay,” I lifted my chin. “Just pull over, anywhere along the shoulder is fine.”

  “You can’t do that, Ruby Clyde. Where would you live? What would you eat?”

  “Somewhere, something,” I said.

  “How about money, where you going to get that?”

  “Same place everybody else does—I’ll get a job.”

  “A job! That’s a laugh. You think jobs are just out there waiting to be had?”

  “No, it’s not a laugh. I could be a nurse.” I straightened Bunny’s tail, then let it curl around my finger.

  “A nurse! Whoo-hoo mercy!”

  “I could too be a nurse, everybody says so. I help out all the time in the school infirmary.”

  “You’re not at the school infirmary anymore.”

  I don’t know why I wasted my breath on the Catfish. He was too stupid to be a nurse, but I wasn’t. Sometimes he just went out of his way to make me feel bad about myself.

  He kept on, saying things he wouldn’t say if Mother were awake. “Do you know what happens to children without adults? Do you? If they’re not killed and eaten by maniacs, the police pick them up and put them in an orphanage.”

  “What!”

  “Yes, an orphanage.”

  “What if I don’t want to go to an orphanage?”

  “Too bad. You don’t get a vote. They lock you in an orphanage until you’re eighteen years old. Haven’t you ever read Oliver Copperfield? He was an orphan who grew up to be a magician, but not before he got taught a lot of tricks by this cool dude, Fagin.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said, and quit talking. He got the title wrong, and the story. I’d read Oliver Twist at school. Okay, it was only the short version; it’s called abridged when they make a long story short, like chopping out parts and building a bridge so you still get the main story. He was right about Oliver being an orphan. I tried not to believe the Catfish, about me being put in an orphanage, but I couldn’t help it, the damage was done. Holy moly. I was going to be thinking about getting caught and being put in an orphanage for the rest of my life. Stupid Catfish. Why did he put that in my brain? Talk about the unearned willies.

  Catfish drove up on the tail of a big hauling truck. That truck was chock-full of cows, just like children in an orphanage. I could see bony tails swatting at their hind legs. Big wobbly eyes stared at me through the slats. Ears rotated on their heads. Poor orphan cows smashed into the dark truck.

  When we got past the cow truck, we sped up.

  There was nothing to do but block the Catfish out of my mind, all his talk about orphanages—I was stuck in the car, but my brain could go anywhere.

  I pulled out my workbooks. Some hangman puzzles fell out; my friend Bunny and I used to play those. I had stumped her with P_IG_T. The word was plight. She guessed six times—got a head, body, arm, arm, leg, and leg and then hung. Plight was a good word; people forget about the G-H-T. I flipped the pages, visiting words like old friends. Porcine, piggish, hoggish. (Just a vocabulary word last year, now I was a Pig Owner, myself.) Perturb, irksome—two of my favorite words. When my mean grandmother would use them to describe me I’d shout out “Wordly Wizard” like the teacher taught us to do when we heard one of our words out in the world. That always confused my grandmother just before it made her mad. She liked everything to be orderly and biblical—her version only. She’s the reason I have the whole book memorized, practically, at least the parts she liked, with the definitions she liked. Once I read the real definition of faith to her: the firm belief in something for which there is no tangible proof. “Blasphemy,” she cried. “What are you doing reading books by wizards?”

  The wind was whistling all around the car. Along comes this monster pickup truck, it pulled up alongside us, and I saw that New Mexico hitchhiker sitting in the flatbed holding his hair like it might blow away. I pressed up against my window and waved; he waved back. I pulled Bunny up and waved his little hoof and New Mexico laughed. The pickup driver took off like a rocket, blasting past us, like he owned the world. It’s weird all the people you see in this world that you will never see again. All those cars, sidewalks, buildings just full of people and you go right past them, then you never ever see them again. What is the point of so many people everywhere?

  As the truck pulled away I wished New Mexico would be my friend and take me home. I didn’t even care if I had to sit outside like that.

  EIGHT

  Mother woke up, finally, and that freed me from the stinky Catfish, who’d scared me silly with all that talk about the orphanage. I couldn’t take it anymore; if I was going to be stuck in the car all night, I wanted Mother awake. One of her lo
vely arms stretched straight up. She put a flattened palm on the ceiling of the car and pressed. “Yow—ohhhhh,” she yawned, then sighed and looked around. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere,” Catfish answered.

  “Anybody hungry?” she asked.

  We mentioned my birthday cake and the box of doughnuts. “Bleh!” Mother said, and reached for a doughnut.

  While I daydreamed about hitchhiking home, Mother pinched off bites of her doughnut and offered them to Bunny. The little pig nibbled the sweet off her fingers. It’s funny how dainty pigs can be. And polite too. When Bunny chewed his sugar doughnut, he blinked his little round eyes at me and smiled.

  We settled in for a long stretch of driving. The green trees gave way to dry rock and the sunset turned the sky blood orange. That was the first full day I had ever spent driving in a car, and it is odd, being on top of each other like that for so long. You talk and talk and talk, then you stop talking and think and think and think. After a while you go back to talking.

  To pass the time I reached forward and brushed Mother’s hair. There was nothing quite like the smell of my mother’s hair. It was floral but human—like what babies would smell like if they came out of the earth on stalks, wrapped in fresh spring leaves. I brushed all of her hair, from the scalp down to the tips. She enjoyed it so much she purred.

  “Carl!” Suddenly Mother leaned forward and read a road sign. “Is this the right road?”

  “I’m always on the right road,” he said, as if that were the stone-cold truth.

  “But…” Mother wanted to agree with him but she knew something was wrong.

  He interrupted her and said, “This is the absolutely correcto road because I am taking a detour to Austin.”

  Mother slammed back against the seat and raised both hands to her face.

  “What’s wrong with you, Babe? Gus Luna said Austin is a great place to make a little money. Besides which, you have that sister there. Can’t we invite ourselves to stay?”