By: Ron Fischer I hadn't seen Kenny since he was nine. We met again at the funeral of his sister Kelly. I was ten. He was the cousin with, polio, which meant he wore two braces, one on each leg. He was surprisingly nimble and the braces seemed little more than leggings on his pant legs. I marveled at them. "Can you take them off and let me try them?" I asked. I wanted to feel what it was like to have them on my legs. I wanted to find out if I could move as quickly and gently as Kenny did. I never thought of his as odd. Brenda, a girl who once lived next door to us, had a rubbery arm. Polio. I felt it once and even walked around pretending my arm was like rubber for a whole afternoon. She didn't seem less at all because of the arm. I craved to see her, especially in the summers when she and her sister went to bed. Some nights, they would jump up and down on the bed they shared, and as they jumped, the hems of their nighties would fly up and the naked globes of their groins would flash as my brother and I watched, a quick glimpse of that small mound, that naked hump of flesh split by a crevice of skin. How Brenda and her sister laughed and giggled in the yellow lamplight of their room, and the rubbery arm didn't make a difference to the great flash of heat that cracked inside me and smiled me hard. And my teacher Miss Lowery had polio too, each leg in a brace and a pair of crutches that fit her hands. It seemed natural, this polio, and I never imagined Kenny feeling strange, alien because of his condition, but he must have because he ran off with a carnival when he was fifteen. It wasn't the circus he ran off with, as Toby did in that movie Toby Tyler. Kenny left with the sad and grubby carnival that came every summer to Anaconda. It advertised itself as Barnum and Bailey Circus, but there was no circus tent, no tents for belly dancers and fortunetellers, freak shows and monstrosities of nature, no lion cages or galloping horses, no tiger tamers or elephants on stools. All it had was a few rides--a Ferris wheel, a calliope, bumper cars, a boat ride. It had cotton candy and ring toss. The men who ran it were unshaven, their clothes as dirty looking as the rides, their hair oily as the grease on the great chains that creaked to set the hose and flying bi-planes in motion. I always felt the smallness of Anaconda when the carnival came. These yellow-toothed carnie men and the rides that could be counted on to break down let me know that Montana was a faraway place, too small for a real circus to bother, and those of us living there too unimportant to thrill, and the sad carnival made me feel shame, not for the carneys, but for Anaconda, for myself, for my family who had fallen upon mean and shabby times. None of that may have been true, but the carnival made me feel shamed and shabby, so it was a shock to me when my mom told me that Kenny had run off with the circus. "The circus," I said. "What circus?" "The one that was just in town." "That's no circus." It was a horror to me. Why would he want to sit with those sweat reeking men and collect tickets for rides? Endure the taunting of children angry over a broken ride that had to be cabled together in an instant? And then Kenny slipped into the darkness of summer, of growing up, of my life, and for a long time his brother Kelly was the marvel of our family because he had broken up with Polly, joined the Navy, been discharged dishonorably from it and then had had a sex change. I could see Kelly being gay. He had been kind of effeminate, but was the sex change necessary? Why couldn't he just be happy feeling a man's in his mouth and that sudden, salty flash of liquid or feel it hard inside him, making him finally satisfied, released, whole? Why the operation? I too had loved Polly, had even asked her to marry me, and she had slipped off into the world of Rick Grant, that long-haired Californian made dreamy and gentle by pot. His eyes flashed as brightly as his smile and that dark, throaty voice of his seemed like Sunday morning in bed, like rainy day lovemaking. He had taken Polly when Kelly and I had failed. Then Polly had three children and died of leukemia. When I finally met Kelly as a woman and shook his hand, a big, rough, man's hand, I did and didn't know him. He was nothing like the old Kelly, with blue eyes and sandy brown hair. He was Polly, black-haired and coal-eyed. He must have used contacts. His once blonde hair was long and stringy, black, shiny as mica. He had become Polly. I have seen too much in life and even in my own family. I have seen the sociopaths who could do murder for hire. I've seen mentally challenged people raped, lived with the men who could and did kick a man in the head and turn his brain into jelly. I've known hustlers who have gone down on their knees in front of a glory hole, a hole cut into a lavatory stall, and they have sucked up to twenty cocks a night. I have seen the beggar woman in Guatemala who had no toes, all of them cut off by rampaging military men. She said five rations for me, though I thought she needed the prayers more than I did. I've seen the pock marked woman stand in sad rain for five gray hours waiting for someone to buy her. It is a world of broken carnival rides, their beauty, at best, was once just eye catching glitz. We all walk with invisible braces on our legs and the arm inside is always limp and rubbery, but despite those shabby souls we carry, we can rise up nimbly. I believe that, I do, but the sight of Kelly turned into a dead woman I once loved, into Polly, was too much for me. I shook his hand and that night I drank whiskey cokes and tried to make the feel of her handshake go away. It didn't. And Kelly moved to Seattle and died after two decades of heavy drinking. Her heart could no longer work all that booze through the carousel of her veins. It was then, after the funeral, that I met Kenny. "I knew he became a woman," Kenny told me as we sat in the shade of the commons and looked at the Washoe Theater's marquee. "I never knew him as a woman." "You've been away a long time," I said. "Yeah, a very long time." "Why'd you do it?" I asked. "Why did you run off and join the carnival?" "Remember that hermit who lived up on the A-hill?" "Yes," I said. "Isaac. I remember him. My mom |
used to make me take him things to eat." Then Kenny told me a strange story about a circus, a great and wonderful circus that had a high wire act and a trapeze act and great elephants that posed on stools, some standing and stretching their bodies into the air and doing so balanced on one front leg, and how they built themselves into a giant pyramid of elephants. And Isaac was a ringmaster for the horse show, ten horses, all white, wearing wonderfully colored bridles made of satin, with tall plumes on their foreheads. They'd gallop at top speed round and round the ring, with Isaac controlling their speed by the crack of his whip and signaling the tricks they would do by the number of his snaps, all to the crack of his whip, with their hooves flying, the dust of the ring tossed by their pounding legs, their nostrils flared, their long white manes unfurling in the speed of their gallop, their necks bulging, chests heaving, their tails arched and erect; round and round they would go. Ten horses and ten bareback riders, women in plumed and sequined costumes, their legs long and shapely, so hot looking men couldn't even see the horses but dreamed instead of having those legs wrapped around their heads and their faces buried in the loins of a bareback dancer and life finally smiling on him. The star of the bareback dancers was a woman named Zarenella, and she fell once from the beautiful horse, a young horse that showed much promise, a horse that had it in him to be a great show horse. It had a fine mane, long and flying, very striking, as if misty wings and cloud trailings were coming off the thunderhead of his body, and his tail coiled with dignity and power, as if muscular itself and curled into posed reflex. The horse was nimble, learned quickly. It had no fear and became one with the dancers as if it were a young Buddha of the horse world. It was this horse Zarenella was riding during the part of the show when horse and dancers would leap through burning hoops. Zarenella fell and blamed the horse. She wanted the horse killed. The fall had broken her hip and she believed she would never ride again. It would be months before she could even attempt to perform and then it would be a painful and slow comeback as she worked her body to re-learn the bareback routines and she knew she could never ride again as she had, with all the liquid and grace of a dancer whose body is pure eroticism, whose body becomes a tongue that flicks and kisses each pair of eyes in the audience and enflames them with the fire of beauty and true grace. Zarenella knew this grace was denied her and like a person unworthy of grace, someone who should know and be true grace to all who looked at her, she betrayed that grace by calling for the death of the horse she fell from. Isaac could not bear to destroy the horse. He threatened to quit if he had to kill the horse. Zarenella refused to relent. She wouldn't fall again, not to the threats of Isaac, and so Isaac quit and he took the white horse with him. He became a carnie man and did the pony rides and one of the rides in the pony ring was the great white stallion, which became a slumped horse, its tail drooping, chest caved and shrunken, its once proud mane shaggy and plastered, its stride an ambling, broken gait, but Isaac loved the horse and looked on it as if he were still young and handsome, dressed in a top hat and the tails and buttons of a ringmaster and when the horse became too old for the pony ride, Isaac left the carnival and lived as a hermit on the A-hill in one of those shacks along the abandoned rail bed that once used to run to the old smelter's works. And Kenny said he once climbed the A-hill at night and there he saw in that dark and moonless night, a night when the sky was aflame with the bright ribbon of the Milky Way, Isaac and the white horse, the old swaybacked white horse, transformed as it pranced round and round, mane flying, tail erect, hooves pounding, in the night, lit only by the gleam of the Milky Way and Isaac in the center of the circle, pivoting with the white horse, his top hat on, his whip cracking, cracking, cracking. "The sight of it," Kenny said, "made me want to become a carnival man." I looked at Kenny. His legs had stunted him. He was a hairy man with heavy legs. His body, even his hands and fingers, seemed misshapen, twisted somehow, but as he told me the story of Isaac and when he came to the part of how he spied on them, he seemed released somehow, freed of his twisted body and he seemed like that nimble boy who had shrugged off his braces. That night I climbed the A-hill. "Where are you going?" my mother asked me. She was in her seventies now, very sedentary. She sat all day doing her craft work, quilting mostly. Her hands hurt her, but she quilted in her painful and slow way despite that. "For a walk." "But the news is on." She meant the ten o'clock news. "Yes, I know," I said. "But it's a moonless night and I just wanted to see the stars for a little while." So I climbed the A-hill to that flat spot beside the lime quarry, the place where Kenny had said he saw old Isaac with the white horse, and I lay on the rim of the lime quarry with my back to the ground and the Milky Way seemed so many stars, sequins of stars, a naked mound of stars that split the dark universe open with its crack of light. I don't know when I closed my eyes, but when I did, I remembered them all, Kelly and Polly, Brenda and her sister, Kenny and Miss Lowery. I must have dozed off. It was easy to do this in the dark and warmth of summer, and when I opened my eyes, there was a flaming hoop of fire, the red curls of flame leaped into the air and a white horse was running hard, running fast, its nostrils flared, its mane awing, its tail upright. How it ran and ran, leaping through the hoop, leaping to the crack of the ringmaster's whip. As the great white horse was thundered and unfurled, the silent ringmaster raised his whip. It wasn't Isaac at all. It was Kenny, and in his top hat and tailed coat, he seemed released from the gnarled and stunted, polio-wracked body. He stood proud and free, and what I had imagined were deformed limbs that all of us carry inside, with some of us hiding them better than others, suddenly seemed not to be deformities at all but limbs of great tantalizing beauty, curved with grace, naked and smooth, and there in the shadows a bareback dancer waited, her costume nearly nothing, almost totally revealing with just sequined cups and the tight strands of a thong. Brenda? No, Zarenella, I thought. Polly? The young Polly, come back? And then I knew. I knew exactly who it was. |