Mister Boots (13 page)

“I don't want him made a fool of. I don't want him to be a clown.”

I say, “There's nothing wrong with being a clown. Besides, he'd be what you call comic relief.”

“I don't want Moonlight Blue to be it.”

 

 

But then along comes this lady.

 

 

By now, since I'm better, our father is coming around a lot more, so that nice rest we were having is over with. He hadn't eaten with us for a while, but now he does all the time. So one mealtime this lady comes, and first thing she calls our father My Dear, and she hugs him and kisses him, then steps back and takes a good look at him and then goes through the whole thing all over again. She gets lipstick all over him.

It's hard to tell if our father is glad to see her or not, but he's surprised. He puts up a good front, though. He has to be an actor for his job, so he can act any way he wants to be. He calls her My Dear, too.

She says, “It's been years.”

She has this dead animal around her neck. It has shiny, dark brown, sad eyes. I keep looking at it so much I hardly notice her. It's hot for wearing a fur, but if I had one I'd be wearing it, too. I wonder if she talks to it? I wonder if it was a boy fur or a girl fur back when it was alive?

It isn't till later that I notice—I mean
really
notice—that she has very, very, curly red hair, a lot of it. I know where I've I seen that before!

This lady is just the opposite of Mother, but she acts as if she thinks she's married to our father. Now that Mother's dead I guess it doesn't matter, but they can't both be the real wife.

While she's still hugging and kissing our father, my sister whispers to me, “That's the lady in the old poster. She's a lot fatter now, but I'm pretty sure it's her. That lady had the exact same hair.”

She kisses our cheeks and then looks at us longer than feels right. She sees things. She says, “How absolutely perfect, a boy and a girl.” She might really mean it, or maybe, unlike our father, she sees what I am right away.

There must be something in our eyes, because she says, “I think you children ought to know right away, your father's been married to me for twenty-five years, and we never divorced.” Then she smiles a motherly smile that turns wicked right in the middle of it, and she says, “Just don't ever call me Mother.”

 

 

(When it turns out Mother never was really married to Father, Jocelyn feels anything between her and Mister Boots is perfectly all right.)

 

 

So now there's another big tent set up not so far from our group of tents, but it doesn't have a yellow stripe; it has a big pink rose painted on it.

 

 

Pretty soon the show must go on.

My heart is broken. I have to leave the first and only friend I ever had. And now that our father is around more, I haven't had so many chances to be with her. I have to practice things and do my stretching exercises so as to get back in shape. Rosie is almost as free as I used to be back home. She doesn't have to do anything except help her mother at suppertime.

I sneak away to say good-bye to Rosie. As a going-away present I give her one of my twenty-dollar bills. She didn't know I was so rich. I tell her to keep it for something special and not to tell anybody.

She gives me a piece of dusty candy and a long blue ribbon. The ribbon is the only girl-type thing I ever had, except for knitting needles.

Rosie says some day this money might save her life, and that's true, it might.

 

 

On the way back I take the long way through the yellow grass to where a big batch of boulders fell down the hill and piled up. Rosie and I played house here. (I always had to be the husband.) I wanted to say good-bye to this place, too, but I come to a secret I shouldn't be seeing.

First I hear breathing. Snuffling kind of. I keep on walking around the stones, quietly, so as to sneak up and see what's happening—and then I wish I hadn't.

They're lying on an old army blanket so, for sure, they planned ahead. They're naked. (Jocelyn is almost as thin as Boots, but curvier.) I guess she finally convinced him.

At first I want to yell and stop them, but I'm not in the mood to scare people the way I usually like to do. And what they're about to do seems right. It
is
right—my sister's tawny, liony head next to the black-maned horsey one.

I shouldn't look.

I hear Boots say, “Sweet as grass. Sweet as apples.”

I turn—from them and from the golden grass around them. I run back to Rosie. I don't tell her why. Rosie must think I'm going to get a whipping again. She says she'll hide me. Right now that's what I want the most. She has lots of good places and she takes me to her best one. She has to go help her mother, but I want to be alone anyway.

Before she leaves she says, “I don't blame you for being scared. The way your back looked. You had about the worst beating I ever saw on anybody.”

In a funny way that makes me proud—as if I've passed some kind of test.

“Do you think that really was for your own good?”

I just shrug.

“Because whatever you think, it wasn't.”

 

 

She hides me where there's an unused tent and an unused old wagon. She says, “There's mice and spiders out here, and rats and scorpions and rattlesnakes. . . .” She's trying to make me laugh, but why would I care if I'm a boy? So then she says, “Let's try to kiss our elbows again.” We laughed a lot when we did that, but I'm not in the mood. Rosie has to go back to her mother anyway.

When I sit real still, pretty soon everything comes around, even a beautiful gopher snake. I'm so still he doesn't even care that I'm here. I think about love. I used to think it was wishy-washy. Then I think how our father always says magicians are special, and Lassiters are
especially
special, but I'm not sure about that anymore. Rosie is special.

I don't come back to our camping spot until dark. Mister Boots and my sister haven't changed that you can see. I'm the only one who knows they have.

They're all sitting around our campfire, which is just embers. Watching the fire is one of the nice things about this place. This is the last night for that. I'm not the only sad person. Tears make dark spots all over Jocelyn's tan blouse. She sits cross-legged, her knitting in her lap. Mister Boots has his arm around her on one side. I move close so I can lean against her on the other.

That lady is so far back from the fire, I almost forget she's here. She's still dressed up, even though she's just with us. She has bracelets practically up to her armpits, and she has that fur on her lap. She's stroking it as if it's alive. The bracelets catch the firelight sometimes, and so do the eyes of the fur. We're sitting on the ground, but she's on a chair she brought from her own tent. Dressed like that, you couldn't be on the ground. We're supposed to call her Aunt Tilly.

“All the ways to love,” Boots says.

“Do tell,” that lady says. The way she says it, I'll bet she can tell everything that happened today.

I think about that old poster and then I wonder, and then I ask, “Are you going to be in our act or what?”

She laughs a big, long laugh. The kind I didn't think she ever would. (It doesn't fit with her fancy clothes.) She says, “I'm too fat to be onstage all dressed up in practically nothing, and too fat to get lifted up on nothing and too fat to even begin to get in the sword box.”

“He's fatter.”

“Don't be fooled. With me it's fat, but your father is strong as an ox.”

“But you're all packed up to come along with us.”

“Honey, it's a free ride.”

So that's that then—good-bye to our camping in the country, to stream sounds, to trees-in-the-wind sounds, campfires, clumps of yellow grass.... But everybody's going off to bed just as if it's a completely ordinary, everyday night.

 

 

That lady takes up more space than any of us except our father. I think of all the things I could bring along if she wasn't here.

Mister Boots is the opposite. He says he never had so many things in his life before. His belongings take up one little box you can carry under your arm. He says he doesn't want one thing else except the scarf I'm knitting for him.

Riding down, that lady lets me wear her fur. I think it's because it's such a hot day she'd rather it be on me than on her. I don't care. I like wearing it no matter how hot.

I ask her what the fur's name is. At first she looks at me funny, and then like: Should she tell me? She squeezes her eyes shut and makes a face. (For a minute she reminds me of Rosie.)

She's sitting across from me in the car. I'm in the jump seat, and everybody is across from me. (Everybody except our father. He's with the wagon full of baggage.) It's sort of like being onstage, the three of them in front of me. This is the first time I've really looked at Aunt Tilly. Maybe she isn't what I thought she was.

“It used to be Wilhelmina,” she says. “Funny, I haven't thought of that for a long time. You know boys don't wear furs.”

“I don't care.”

“You're a funny kid, you know that? How old are you really?”

At least she's not asking what sex I am.

“I'm . . .” But maybe I'm not supposed to tell my age even to her. “I can be any age you want.”

She looks at me seriously for a minute and then crosses her eyes. You'd think she really was Rosie. You'd think she wasn't even ten years old yet.

Before, I thought she had a look about her as if, any minute, somebody was going to cheat her, even us, but on the ride down, she's more relaxed. She even sings. We'd join in except she's so good. We just listen. She sings “The Last Rose of Summer,” and “My Wild Irish Rose,” and “All Through the Night.” She even brings tears to her own eyes and has to stop.

I say, “I'll bet you and our father used to sing together.”

“We did. We sang onstage before we went into magic. That was a long time ago.”

Then I ask Jocelyn why we can't live back at that camp all the time, like Rosie's family does.

She laughs as if it's a silly question. “Might as well go back home,” she says, “where we have a nice little house all our own.”

“No, I mean with other people around and campfires.”

“Too many ants. . . . And, well, Rosie's very nice, but I don't trust those people. Like I told you before, they might be gypsies.”

“They're not gypsies!”

Thinking of Rosie reminds me that I have the piece of dusty candy she gave me in my pocket. I suppose it's dustier than ever, but I put it in my mouth anyway. I try to do it in a way nobody can see, but that Aunt Tilly person notices and winks.

 

 

Our father's got three shows in a row lined up, in three schools. He's as nervous and blustery as usual, telling everybody what to do and to keep quiet and not to bother him with details.

Except that Tilly person talks about anything she feels like whenever she wants, and he lets her. Sometimes she tells him what to do, and he just goes ahead and does it.

It's Aunt Tilly who sews up the clown costume for Mister Boots. I didn't think she'd sew. (She won't cook or do dishes. “Never again,” she says. “I'd rather eat nothing but crackers and cheese than cook.”)

She makes Boots a hobbyhorse, too, out of a mop, and with part of an old tire for a head. Boots gets a nose just like the one that clown at the camp wore all the time.

Nobody will ever get any acting out of Boots. So there's no such thing as rehearsing. He just is as he is. And how do we know he won't try to make another speech? I guess it won't matter; our father will make it part of his clowning like he did before.

One thing in all this bothers Mister Boots a lot. He keeps saying, “I ought to use whatever I have for a good purpose. I shouldn't waste it.”

I always say, “First of all, what's good for one creature might be bad for another.”

He always says, “True.”

“And then how about worms?”

“Worms? What worms? Just because they're small. Why, without worms—”

I always say, “I know. You already told me about worms.”

 

 

I have a whole new kind of costume, too. I'm not a pink pixie anymore. I'm a little version of our father, tails and all. We both wear a top hat, and we do duet kinds of things. I finally get a magic wand of my own, and I get to have a magic cane like his, and I get to do a cane dance duet with him where both our canes move by themselves. As we dance he keeps looking sideways at me with this grin. You're supposed to do that. And you're supposed to smile out over the people, too. My smile is like my voice: big. Onstage it's good to have a big mouth and black eyebrows and black hair like our father and I have. When we take our bows, our father holds my hand up and bows to me. Mostly I get a standing ovation. I bow even lower than our father taught me, my head right down on my knees. People laugh. Our father's too fat to bow that low.

When Aunt Tilly sees me onstage for the first time, she's impressed. Everybody always is. She feels about me the same as I do about our father. She said, “I don't care what age you are, you're good for any age there is,” and, “Where did you get that voice?”

Before, I was thinking I'd borrow that fur and keep it hidden for a while with all the rest of my secret things, but I don't want to take anything from Aunt Tilly anymore. I'll just ask her—not if I can have it, but if I can sleep with it.