Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 16

  Henry holds the lizard against his chest. “Nothing. Just a little lizard.”

  “Yeah? Chameleon? What color?” Randy wants to know. “Give him here.”

  Henry dilates the careful prison of his fist. What a nice lizard it is. Look at how his lipless mouth creases upward at the ends in a wise little smile, as though pleased to be in Henry’s grasp. His ribs pulse quick and soft against the dirty whorls of Henry’s thumb. The only sign of alarm the lizard gives is the color leaching through his hide, a color a casual eye might call green. But Henry Lemons, who has brought the lizard within two inches of his eye, can see that the lizard’s skin is no single hue but is in fact a mosaic of tiny yellow and blue discs.

  “It’s no color,” he tells Randy.

  “Bullshit, give him here,” Randy says, swatting after Henry’s clutched fist.

  “Bull-true, you fat shit. Get away. He’s mine.”

  Randy Cloatch flushes. At one hundred and seventy pounds, Randy is the fattest ten-year-old at the Indian River County Fair, and he is probably the fattest ten-year-old in Indian River County as well. His arms are like bowling pins. His breasts swing when he walks. Randy wears a heavy blue cast on his left leg. Two weeks earlier, he was hammering the coin plunger on a newspaper machine when the machine fell over and cracked the bone just below his dimpled knee.

  Randy is used to being jibed about his weight, though it seems unfair that Henry should make fun of him now, while he is wearing his cast. What makes the insult even worse is that Henry Lemons is as outlandishly beautiful as Randy Cloatch is obese. Henry is slender, with eyes as dark and glassy as a mare’s. His loveliness makes grown men and women fall silent. Randy Cloatch wants to hit Henry Lemons, but Henry’s beauty emanates a costly sort of power that stalls his hand. It is the same hesitation that seizes him when he is throwing stones at cars passing on the four-lane road beside his mother’s house and an obviously new or expensive one comes along.

  “Hey, I’ll give you two tickets for him,” says Randy Cloatch, hoping to banish the insult by ignoring it.

  Henry points out that you can’t buy anything with two tickets. Even a ride on the trudging Shetlands in the pony rotary costs three. He also explains that the tickets in Randy’s damp hand are technically Henry’s anyway, seeing how Randy wouldn’t have any tickets at all if Henry’s dad hadn’t cashed in a pair of fifty-dollar bills and given tickets to both Randy and his mother.

  Randy grabs the smaller boy’s wrist, groping for Henry’s fist, hoping to force him to crush the lizard. Henry lets out a noise so shrill that Randy lets go of his arm, and Henry sprints off down the midway, past the Teacup and the screaming ruby blur of the Fireball, the Gorilla Girl Alive!, and the Pirate. He ducks down an alley between the Nickel Extreme and the Ghost Train, through a colonnade of portable toilets that the carnival workers use. He finds himself in the trailer lot, where the light suddenly stops, except for the orange droplets on the running boards of idle trucks, dim in the diesel smog.

  Henry waits in the dark, leaning against a truck grille stuccoed over with crisp insects, and watches the Giant Wheel turn. He cannot see his father, but he knows he is on that slowly turning wheel. He decides he’ll watch the wheel revolve forty times, a number Henry feels close to, because that’s how old his father is. He watches it turn eighteen times, loses count, and starts again. The lizard scratches at his palm. He has counted back up to twenty-two, when he notices a man watching him from the pillar of darkness between the outhouses. When he sees Henry notice him, the man walks over to the boy. Henry is afraid that the man might be the owner of the truck he is leaning against, or that he’s come to catch Henry out for straying into an area into which not even the orange tickets coiled in his pocket permit him to go.

  When the man asks Henry what he’s up to here, Henry tells him about how Randy Cloatch is after him. The man nods as though he’s familiar with Randy Cloatch, as though through some trick of time he also suffered at Randy’s hand when he was small. The man says that Randy won’t find them back here, and if he does, the man has a way of taking care of it. Henry grins, wishing Randy would step back in here and see what he would get. The man lights a cigarette. He looks back toward the fair with concern in his face. He tells Henry, on second thought, maybe they ought to hide out awhile, just until the coast is clear. Henry, worried now, asks the man if he is sure. The man says yes, that he knows a place, and he leads Henry into the privy at the end of the row, his steady hand, warm and assuring as a water bottle, pressing between the boy’s shoulder blades.

  The privy is yellow plastic, brand name Honeypot. The man pulls shut the Honeypot’s door.

  “Here we go—safe,” the man says, and slides the black tab across the jamb. The plastic door is queered with heat and age. A canted square of brown light seeps through the doorway. In the half light, Henry can make out the man’s belt buckle, a silver disc with a circle of blue stone in its center.

  The lizard leaps from Henry’s open hand and slips beneath the door. Once outside, it settles in a pocket in the sand where a trace of the sun’s heat lingers.

  Warm, damp nights like this one are unpleasant for Leon Delaney, the foreman on the Pirate. Leon is a giant, with a head like a fire hydrant and palms the size of dinner plates. The night’s heat stokes the psoriasis reddening his arms, and he sits in the doghouse, rasping at his rash with a shingle-thick nail so that the sloughings fall on the black metal of the ride’s control panel. Leon is sixty-three, and because he’s had three heart attacks, he is sober except for beer. For nostalgia’s sake, he pauses now and again to mound the dead skin into a line and guesses at its cash value if the skin were good cocaine.

  A young man named Jeff Park stands at the railing, studying a hand-lettered sign reading “Ride Jock Needed.”

  Leon doesn’t like the look of Jeff Park, his boat shoes, or the lobe of hair that hangs over one of his eyes. Leon prefers to hire broke men fleeing bench warrants to sun-kissed beach slouchers. The lieutenant on the Pirate Ship is more Leon’s kind of hire, a wizened fellow named Ellis who smiles and schemes and doesn’t leave Leon wondering for an instant what kind of man he is. Even now, Ellis is supposed to be mopping some puke off the floor of the ride, but he uses the occasion of Jeff’s arrival to lay aside his mop and have his dinner—a can of beef soup he tips cold into his mouth. But Leon’s crew is short as of last night, when the third hand took a piss break and didn’t come back. He needs another man before they take the ride apart when the show packs up two days from now.

  “Hey, friend, you looking for a job?” The giant’s voice sounds as though it runs on gasoline.

  “Yeah, guess so,” Jeff says. “What’s it pay?”

  The giant looks him over. His thumb and forefinger could go twice around Jeff’s upper arm. “You like hard work? You into lifting shit?”

  “I’m all right with it. And what’s the pay, again?”

  “Buck-eighty a week, seven days.” He watches to see whether Jeff flinches at this felonious wage.

  “That’ll work,” says Jeff, by which Leon understands that the young man is in a bad pinch. He should have led with $150.

  “Need something to eat?”

  The young man nods.

  The giant reaches into his pocket and brings out a ten-dollar bill.

  Jeff looks at the money. “Seriously?”

  “It comes back to me on Friday.” Leon then lists the other sums that will come out of his pay: thirty dollars for a hat and shirt, fifteen for an ID, forty dollars per week for a bunk on the carnival train. Jeff Park stands blinking. He has been on the show for fifty seconds and he already owes the giant eighty-five dollars.

  Ellis tosses his cigarette away and jogs down from the upper deck to meet the new man. He is a tall fellow, in his early thirties, but he has a face like a paper bag smoothed flat by a dirty palm.

  “Your name’s what, now?” Ellis asks.

  “Parts,” Leon answers for him.

  “No,” says Jeff. “Par
k. No s. With a k.”

  “Like ‘going to the park,’ ” says Ellis.

  “Yeah,” says Jeff.

  “That’s good, I like that,” says Ellis.

  “A hole is better than some of the Parks,” roars Leon from the doghouse, and his laughter scatters the hoarded skin.

  By the time they’ve had enough of the Giant Wheel, Sheila Cloatch thinks she might be a little bit in love with Jim Lemons. They kissed a couple of times up there, and in the high quiet over the bright grid of the fair, it seemed to matter more somehow, to count. He was careful with her body, not like her ex-husband, who would grab at her like he was trying clutch his way to a place where he’d never have to touch a woman again. Jim Lemons is different. She had to put his hand up her skirt because he wouldn’t do it on his own. She likes his shyness, his glasses, and his arms, which have muscles but not much hair. She’d like to invite him back to her apartment, to put the boys in front of the Nintendo and sit out on her little concrete balcony, drinking the expensive blue cognac liqueur she’d laid in. It won’t give you any hangover if you mix it with Gatorade.

  Sheila’s son, Randy, is waiting alone by the platform, picking at his cast. His mother gets it out of him that he and Henry Lemons had an argument. “Goddammit, you’re ten. He’s seven. You’s supposed to look out for him.”

  “But, Mom, he called me a shit,” pleads Randy Cloatch.

  “I’ll call you worse than that,” she hisses. “Seven years old and you ran him off.”

  Twenty minutes later, Jim Lemons finds his son at the head of the midway, watching a man in a bow tie demonstrate the mystical absorbency of a square of chamois cloth. Henry doesn’t say much about what happened to him in the privy, but he says enough. Jim isn’t sure about the story. In his heart, he believes Henry is a dishonest boy, that his beauty has made him as vindictive and conniving as a movie star. Little fistfuls of coins go missing from Jim’s change jar when Henry comes over. On their last visit, Henry claimed a rattlesnake wagged its tail at him through the sink drain and he begged to go back to his mother’s. He wouldn’t give up the lie all weekend, even when Jim spanked him for it. Jim would suspect the boy of lying now, of deliberately trying to ruin his date. But Henry is missing his underwear and one of his shoes, which gives the story a bad ring of truth.

  Jim brings Henry to a police officer staffing a booth devoted to DUI awareness. More police arrive. A patrolman explains to Jim Lemons that he will have to take him and his son to the police station in town to log his statement and conduct an exam. Henry isn’t crying, or even close to it, but the tears are coming out of Sheila Cloatch like she’s auditioning for something. Mascara soot runs down her neck. She gives Jim a long, fierce hug. Her bleached hair gives off a reek of scorched plastic, and her breath is sharp from the gin they had with frozen lemonade on the Giant Wheel.

  “I’ll ride with you to the station, Jim,” she says. “I’ll be there with you. I want to.”

  What Jim wants Sheila to do is leave before the officers notice how drunk she is. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” says Jim, using his office voice. He leaves her and goes to the waiting patrolman, who insists that Jim and Henry ride with him in the cruiser. Jim Lemons understands that the policeman is suggesting that he might have reason to tamper with the evidence left on his son, but he feels so waterlogged by the night’s events that he doesn’t take offense.

  The cruiser rolls out of the Midway, through the parking lot, to the county road where the stars get the sky back from the fair.

  “How we doing, chief?” Jim Lemons asks Henry, who is humming the theme song from a television show.

  “Fine,” says Henry in a flat voice that refuses Jim the comfort of providing comfort.

  Jim Lemons tries not to think about what Henry might have experienced in the portajohn. Instead, he concentrates his worry on the phone call he should already have made to his ex-wife. The split wasn’t friendly. She spent a lot of lawyer money to make sure Jim doesn’t get to see Henry more than two days a month. When he let Henry watch Harry Potter, she asked the parenting coordinator to cut his time in half on grounds of parental irresponsibility. Jim Lemons has a hunch that it could be months, maybe years, before he sees his son again. This is how he’ll have to remember Henry for a good long time: one shoe on, eyes dull as nickels.

  He scratches his neck. It itches, the little red dent where Sheila Cloatch’s big earring pressed against him for a while.

  Here is how Jeff Park wound up on the show:

  At the age of fifty-eight, Jeff’s mother met a man on the computer and moved to his house in Melbourne, Florida, which was large with a view of the beach. Jeff was in Phoenix, taking a break from school, and his mother flew him out to spend a week or two. It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne—a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother’s new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn’t seem to have moods anymore, and she didn’t fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons. Jeff’s visit lasted four months, and he figured he’d let it go on four months more, at least.

  His mother’s husband, David, was a quiet man without much to say to Jeff Park. A retired optometrist pushing seventy, he spent his days in the backyard greenhouse, where he grew tournament peonies, their blossoms as red and heavy as beef hearts. Days would go by and the two men wouldn’t trade a single word. But one morning last week, he came to Jeff’s room with something to say. “Jeffrey, there’s a favor you can do for me.” He placed a green tub of Turtle Wax on his bedside table. So Jeff spent three angry hours squatting in the sun on the white concrete of the driveway, waxing the old man’s Volvo and the Audi wagon he’d given Jeff’s mother to drive.

  Then today, while Jeff was on the glider in the sunroom, reading a magazine, David pulled up in a Chevy Suburban and presented Jeff with another tub of Turtle Wax. The Suburban, he explained, belonged to a gentleman in his barbershop quartet whose wrists were bad.

  “You want me to wax your buddy’s truck?” Jeff asked.

  “That’s correct,” the old man said.

  Jeff laughed and went back to his magazine. He said, “That’s a good one,” and the old man slapped him hard on the face. Then a leggy, grunting scramble happened on the brick floor of the sunroom. Spit and four months of stored hate poured out of the gray gentleman. Jeff put him on his back and got the old man’s stringy biceps under his knees. He didn’t want to hit him, hoping in a minute or two the fever would leave his stepfather, but he stayed red and foaming, trying to thrash free. Jeff’s mother went out of the house to wail by the pool. Jeff told the old man he was going to get off of him and leave the house for good. David closed his eyes and nodded. Then, when Jeff took his knees off of his stepfather’s arms, the old man did a move where he tried to bite Jeff on his balls. He missed, however, and clamped his teeth on Jeff’s bare inner thigh where his shorts had hiked up. He broke the skin. At that point, Jeff did find it in his heart to punch the old man many times on the hinge of his jaw. When it was over, dark blood was pooling in his stepfather’s ear, and Jeff had a hole in his thigh. Jeff Park got up and stuffed some clothes into a bag. Then he ran past his mother and out through the peony garden, where the sprinklers were coming on.

  A detective stops by the Pirate, wanting to know where Leon and Jeff Park were at six fifteen that evening. Leon says to the cop that he was sitting right here on his stool with about a hundred motherfuckers watching him. Jeff Park says that he was walking up from Melbourne on the shoulder of Route 1. “That,” says the detective with a chuckle, “isn’t one
of the seven alibis of highly effective people.”

  “For what? What happened?” Jeff Park asks.

  “Anyway,” the detective says. “We’ll get it all straightened out when we come back and get a sample of you-all’s blood and hair.” He copies down the information from Jeff’s driver’s license and then he goes to buy an elephant ear.

  When the cop is gone, Ellis crawls out of the engine well.

  “Fuck were you?” Leon asks.

  “Shimming blocks,” Ellis says.

  Leon tells the story of the cop and the DNA samples, and Ellis spits in the dirt. “That right there’s a classic case of some horseshit,” he says. “They can’t take your hair without a court order.”

  “They can take mine,” Jeff Park says. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Ellis smiles. “Yeah, but even if you did.”

  At the Pirate Ship, a line of riders grows at the entry corral, among them Sheila Cloatch and her wide son. Sheila’s face is powdered white, and her hair is white, and she wears white jeans and a white halter top. With his blue cast, orange shirt, pink face, and black hair, it’s as though Randy somehow siphoned the color from his mom.

  “I don’t care about this gay-rod boat,” Randy says. “I want to go home.”

  “That works out good. We only got enough tickets for one.” Sheila’s in a bitter mood. Her heart goes out to Jim Lemons. She’s prayed three times already for Jim and his son, yet she can’t help but think what a waste it is that he left in the patrol car with at least forty dollars’ worth of ride tickets in his pocket.

  She hands her last three tickets to Jeff Park, who says, “I’m sorry. It’s four to get on.”

  “You go on, ma’am,” Ellis says, waving her three tickets away. Sheila thanks them and takes a seat.