Mister Boots (11 page)

I give a couple of big jumps (I need to after so much sitting), then I run off. Every other step is as if saying Mother. Mother, step, Mother, step, Mother, Mother, Mother, step . . . Sometimes I have to realize all over again that she's really dead.

Without thinking, I end up by my tree, walking and running all the way. Nobody comes after me. I'll have to walk all the way back, too. I don't care. It's for Mother.

I shout a couple more shouts. Out here it doesn't matter. I lie down with my head on a big rough root. I make myself as flat as possible so nobody can see me unless they're right on top of me, and I look around at all the mountain peaks. I recognize every single lump and hump and pinnacle in every direction. I've looked at them since I first could look. I could draw them all with my eyes shut.

I suck at the inside of my elbow. Better than a thumb, clean and soft, and not so babyish. I think about Mother. I think, again, how the breeze on my cheek is her touch. I cry some. Until there's no more tears. Then I just lie and look up. I may spend the night here.

All of a sudden, there's something snuffling at me—wet, sloppy, warm. . . . I guess I went to sleep. I sit up fast, but it's just my friend Houdie. Boots has let him go again. I'll bet I'll be blamed for it even though I wasn't there. I'll have a ride home though. Maybe Boots whispered in Houdie's ear, in some kind of horse talk, that he should come out here and bring me home.

So what's the best thing to do? Give him a yell and a slap on the rump and make him run off into the hills while he has the chance? Or bring him on home with me for Boots to let him go again some other time?

 

 

Our father goes to town again to order a wagon to take us and all our stuff to the train; Boots and my sister go off down the road a ways to sit by the irrigation ditch and be alone; so I finally have a chance to count the money. It's five hundred and fifty-eight dollars. I
am
rich. I take the heavy cardboard box that has my new clothes packed in it and I unpack it and make a false bottom. I don't think our father will expect that on an ordinary cardboard box. I put in the money and the pistol and one horseshoe and one rabbit's foot. I take forty dollars to have on me in case of emergencies. I might need to help Jocelyn or Mister Boots in a hurry.

 

 

The day before we leave, our father tries to get Boots to do his horse trick. He works on him half the morning. Boots just shakes his head. (By now he knows how to do it to mean no.) “I never met a man so . . . Are you crazy or just stupid?” He says, “Be reasonable,” a dozen times. “I can't pay you if you won't work.” Then, “Do I have to start to whip the boy to make you do it? I'll do that if I have to.”

He turns and gives me a good swat on the bottom for no reason, all the time looking at Boots instead of me.

Boots kicks out, but just an ordinary, human being kind of kick, though who but a horse would think of kicking first?

Our father believes in fighting, and he's good at it, you can tell. He gets two good punches in right away. Boots is already off balance from trying to kick and down he goes in the dust and gets a bloody nose right away. He doesn't even try to get up, and he doesn't change to Moonlight Blue. I wanted him to. I want our side to win.

Boots sits there looking up at us, calm as could be, but I get up and go right at our father. I'm only tall enough to hit his stomach, except I don't land a single blow. He just puts his hand on my forehead, and I can't reach him.

“Boy, I admire your spirit, but you'd better think a little bit about which side your bread is buttered on.” He gives me a push so I'm on the ground next to Boots, and then he walks away looking disgusted.

I find a rag for Boots's nose. I tell him, “Don't worry anything at all about money.”

“I never do,” he says.

But I'm mad at him. I say, “You don't even know what it is.”

“I suppose not.”

“You ought to find out. You ought to learn things.”

I can't read that horse look of his. I could tell if he had his horse ears on him.

I turn out to be the hit of the show! In one way I'm not at all surprised, though in another way I am. I probably have more magic in me than anybody around here. But I'm the big hit partly because I look so much younger than I really am. Our father has taken advantage of it and advertised that I'm only seven. I have to go along with that, though I don't like it. It's hard enough getting all the way up to ten without going backward.

Except I don't understand how I got to be the main attraction, because our father's so good. People love him. Even I love him. The first performance we do changes my mind about everything. It's nothing like our rehearsals. Everything looks exciting, people ooh and aah, and our father is—he actually is—kind of wonderful. Onstage he's not the same person at all. He looks bigger. Not just fatter but taller, too. Now I see what that loud voice of his is for: booming out, deep and like singing. He's all sparkly under the spotlight. Even his hair looks nice and shiny. Even that funny little mustache and goatee, which I always thought were useless . . . even they look good. He's . . . devilish, black and white all over. The only colors are in the scarves and flowers and painted boxes . . . and me in my pink. (Onstage he calls me Pixie. He says, “I'll bring on my magic pixie.” He snaps his fingers and here I come. I guess I do look like a pixie. I don't mind that, except for being pink.)

I see Jocelyn look at him just the way I must be looking, her eyes as wide-open as her mouth.

And I see how Mother could have fallen in love and not even cared who he was when he wasn't onstage.

I always thought I didn't want him to be my father, but now I think we're two of a kind: born to travel and born to be onstage and born to make our voices go right out across all the people's heads and out the lobby doors, and on into the street. For a change I'm not thinking “
our
father,” I'm thinking “
my
father.”

 

 

But through the whole train trip down, I was getting angrier and angrier with him telling us all what to do and when to do it, where to sit, who got a window seat and for how long, when we'd eat and what we'd eat. (Oranges are good for us. I, in particular, have to eat them. I like them, but I don't want to
have
to eat them every day.) He made Mister Boots and me carry heavy things while Jocelyn, because she's a girl, only had to carry her knitting. I know, like Mother said, life isn't fair, but it ought to be a little tiny bit more fair than this.

He kept saying (just to me, not to anybody else), “Sit up. Breathe deeply. Fill your chest with this good country air.” (As if I didn't always live in the middle of good country air.) “Don't scuff when you walk.” Well, my shoes are too big so I can't help it. But there's no use telling him that. “No excuses!” is another of his favorite things to say. “Do you think there are any excuses in the army?”

We have so much baggage I thought we were never going to get anywhere, but our father's used to moving all this stuff. He was busy and distracted, and he made us keep quiet so we wouldn't, as he kept saying, break his concentration; otherwise it would be our fault if he forgot something important.

He said he'll need us to be quiet before every show, too, so he can compose himself psychically. By the time we got on the train, I was worn out from keeping quiet.

And I got worn out all over again just from how it looked out the train window: a whole other world—black or red volcanic domes and cones; places with a lot of dead trees where there used to be ditches but the water's all taken down south to Los Angeles, where we're going.

Our father was explaining what it all was and how it got that way. I might have liked hearing all that if it hadn't been our father telling it.

Mister Boots and I saw a herd of wild horses, six of them. That was a time when we both had window seats. Boots looked over at me, surprised. The horses ran as the train passed by, tails and manes flying. Boots looked like he'd never thought such a thing could be, or a thing so free, or that it could look so beautiful. Magic passed between us—a different kind of magic. Like we'd seen all the way inside each other. Afterward I could tell he was thinking hard.

 

 

(When we started out and my sister saw me for the very first time, head to toe, in my new boy clothes—cap and shoes and all—she covered her face with both hands and gasped. It's like she finally realized. I guess I did, too. But realizing isn't going to change anything. I realized it before with the baseball and mitt and fishing pole.)

 

 

Pretty soon our father wants Mister Boots to join the act. I don't know why our father needs Boots, what with me being such a big hit, but he thinks he does, and I'm the one supposed to bring Boots onstage and make him change.

I told our father it won't work, and that Boots doesn't care anything about whether he gets paid, or famous, or if he makes a fool of himself, but our father is so sure he'll do it, he's made a poster about it except with the wrong color horse, pure white all over, mane and everything. (Why does he think Boots is called Boots, for goodness' sake?)

I'm on the poster, too: LASSITER THE MAGIC MAN AND SON. And, in smaller letters: SEVEN-YEAR-OLD PRODIGY OF PRESTIDIGITATION.

 

 

So I lead Boots in—this skinny, nothing little man. It's exactly the opposite of when our father's onstage, because Boots looks smaller and thinner than ever, but people clap anyway. They think he's going to do something, or else why would he be out here in front of everybody? I lead him in with a halter dangling around his human-being neck.

Boots is hobbling, head down and forward. He lets me lead him because it's me. He says he owes me a lot, but he says he won't change to Moonlight Blue even for my sake. As we stand in the wings I tell him, “Do something, anyway. Sing or dance or something. Our father's already mad enough at you.”

“I've been trying.”

“I know you have. You always try. You've been doing most of the hard work, but you know he doesn't care about anything except what happens onstage.”

When we come onstage, Boots looks all around, blinking, blinded by the lights. He shades his eyes as if he's in the sun. (Our father said you aren't supposed to do that even if you feel like it.) Nobody is clapping anymore. Everybody waits.

If I had a pin I'd drop it right now.

Then Boots says, “Stop!” His voice isn't strong. It's as if he's a horse right now—it's blowy, too much air in it. Only the first six or eight rows can hear him. “Stop. Think. These rabbits. These doves. Your horses. We labor beside you at the work of the world.”

He bobs his head, horselike as usual. His mane comes loose from its ponytail and swishes back and forth. And there's his bony forehead, bony horse nose. . . .

“Think . . . All your doves and rabbits . . .” As if everybody had them.

But that's all the time our father gives him. He stamps out onstage and grabs him by the halter, twists it tight across his neck, says, “Come on, Dobbin.” Our father leans way back and walks a funny duck walk, high knees, swinging his fat hind end. (He can laugh at himself if need be, especially if need be onstage.) The tails of his dress coat swish back and forth and make the waddle even more so. He leads Boots into the wings. He really is choking him. Boots couldn't say anything more if he tried. Our father finds boxes and such to bang around, so there's a nice clatter from backstage, as if he'd thrown Boots against things that fell over. Everybody laughs. Our father's turned it into a clown act. I jump a couple of jumps and yell, “Whoopee!” to help out. Everybody laughs some more. This is turning out to be a good thing.

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.