Mister Boots (14 page)

I don't want to ask her in front of everybody. I wait, and then I find the perfect place and time. We're in the writing room of the hotel. It's a fancy hotel, but I still like the tents better.

We're making lots of money, and we go all over the place: Pasadena, Long Beach, Palm Springs . . . and all up and down the coast. I worry we won't be going back to that camping place again. I wonder if I'll ever see my one and only true friend.

I'm using the hotel stationery to write to Rosie, even though I don't know how to send the letter. Aunt Tilly said she'd see if it could be done. I have to make it simple because Rosie doesn't read very well even though she was homeschooled like I was.

Aunt Tilly is writing a letter, too, but she's staring out the window a lot. Anyway, she doesn't look bothered when I ask her, can I sleep with Wilhelmina.

“Are you still sleeping with things?”

“I never had anything to sleep with before. Anyway, I'm only seven.”

“Whatever you say.” And then, “You ever going to tell your old aunt Tilly anything that's true for once?”

“We live by lies.”

“Who told you that? I suppose Mister Boots.”

“No, that's what I say. Mister Boots would say the opposite, that we live by the truth.”

“Is there something wrong with Mister Boots? He's so peculiar.”

“It's everybody else who's peculiar.”

But she just goes right on, her own way. “His voice is odd, too. Not like a foreigner, more like he isn't used to talking at all. Like he can't get his lips around the words. It's as if he's not right in the head. Sometimes he does sound wise, but it's . . . the wisdom of a child.”

“People think he's dumb because they can't keep up with him. Besides,
I'm
a child.”

She gets up and comes over to hug me. I let her. “A wise child,” she says. Then, “Do you have any things? Toys, I mean? I haven't seen you with any.”

First I think no, and then I remember my baseball and my mitt, but they're really our father's. I don't even like them, and I've never used them except that one time, so I say, “No.”

“If you tell me how old you really are, you can sleep with Wilhelmina.”

I finally get a chance to not be seven. “I'm the perfect age,” I say.

“I know what that is. I'll bet you're ten.”

 

 

At the hotel, I finally get to hear Aunt Tilly and our father sing duets. I was in bed, but then I hear singing and I know it's them. I get dressed (those knickers and my sweater) and put Wilhelmina around my neck, but I go down only as far as the landing just in case they see me and make me go back upstairs. Aunt Tilly is playing the piano. She can do most everything. They sing “Oh Promise Me,” and “The Last Rose of Summer,” and “Love's Old Sweet Song,” and “Old Black Joe.” I have to wipe my tears on Wilhelmina.

The hotel guests clap a lot. The bellboys, too. I hope everybody knows that that's my father and my . . . not my aunt, stepmother really. I can't believe how, at first, I didn't like Aunt Tilly.

 

 

Pretty soon the time comes for Boots to do his act. I'm the one to lead him out onstage again. I help him into his costume. He wouldn't do that either if not for me. The costume hangs on him. I say, “Hello, Droopy.” I want to make him laugh, but he just droops more than ever.

Aunt Tilly is right; his face is odd. I see that even more as I put red spots on his cheeks and then lipstick on him. I stick on the nose ball. “Are you sad?”

“As a human being in a world of human beings? Never sad.”

I don't want him thinking too much about going out onstage so I say, “Mister Boots, there's a secret, and you're not going to believe it.”

This will make him sit up and take notice. Maybe even make him change to Moonlight Blue right here and now.

The thing is, everybody is forgetting what I am, what with these boy clothes all the time and the talk about, “My son this and my son that.” Everybody! Even Jocelyn. I have a hard time keeping track of myself myself. I want to tell somebody.

But Boots says, “You don't have to tell me. Sometimes it's better not to know, but I will believe what you want me to.”

“I want you to hear it.”

He says, “What you tell will not be wasted.”

“Oh, Mister Boots . . . You tell me something instead.”

“What I have to say is, I want to live a life of service to all beings.”

“You're too nice, horse or man. Sometimes you have to try not to be.”

“You should help me with my message.”

“I will, but later. Now we have to do this. We'll trot out pretending to be horses. I'll pretend it, too. Your whinny? Remember that? It's a good one. We'll whinny together and lope in circles.”

“No!”

“You told me once yourself there are a hundred different ways of seeing the exact same thing.”

“I can't this minute see more than two ways.”

“Oh, Boots! All right, you hang on to the lead rope and I'll lope in.”

Instead of my main secret I tell him a different one. I tell him, “One of these days—pretty soon now—I'm going to let the doves go.”

I thought he'd like that, but he's not sure they'll be able to survive on their own.

Our father has a half dozen old pots and pans piled up in the wings all ready for Mister Boots, just in case he has to do the same as last time. I get myself ready, too—for anything.

So Mister Boots walks out onstage in front of me with a long, long, long lead rope. People even think that's funny. Boots is halfway across the stage before I finally jig in, wearing my dress suit and a halter. I whinny my whinny. I jump around (shy, that is) with sudden twists to the side. I don't have to practice any of it. There's nothing horse-ish I haven't done already.

People laugh like anything. It doesn't matter now what Boots does. I'm being a pretty good horse myself. I'm even funnier, dressed in my dress suit, cavorting like a crazy person, my tails flying; and Boots is on his hobbyhorse looking at me, so sad and serious . . . that's funny, too. Our father didn't want us to do it like this, but if it works, he won't mind.

If Boots was planning on doing his speechifying about letting every single creature go free, he gets it knocked right out of him. He steps to the side as if to escape all my jumping around, but with that droopy clown suit—the legs hanging over his big phony shoes—he falls flat on his back. Hard. And right after . . .

He changed. . . . I'm pretty sure he did. Maybe out of fear and pain. He did, but for such a tiny moment, and like he didn't mean to. I'm not sure it really happened. I just saw the flash of a white horse. Rearing. And then there was Boots, lying there, looking as surprised as I was.

Everybody is looking at me, but I hear a few people gasp. I look back at our father, in the wings. He's wiping the sweat off his face with a big towel. He didn't see either, but he suspects.

I help Boots off the stage. Slowly. He's dazed and hurt some. I yell, “Come on, White Lightning.”

 

 

I keep telling Aunt Tilly I wish she'd get sawed in half like she used to do. She always says, “Fat-lady-gets-sawed-in-half-no-thank-you.” So I have to keep on doing it, even though I always get itchy in there. (I change to the pixie costume for that and the sword box.)

 

 

Things go along pretty well, though twice our father gets his grocery-store whip out again. Just for on my legs. I wonder who he used it on when he wasn't around us. For sure not Aunt Tilly. She's one of those people you don't mess with.

Aunt Tilly always has her own room, though she sometimes sleeps with our father. “Rich or poor,” she says, “I get to have my own room.” What Aunt Tilly wants, she always gets.

I'm getting known all over. I can't walk down the street without that somebody knows me. The problem is, I want to go off, for once in my life, wearing a dress. Just to see what it's like, but will everybody recognize me? My short hair is a big clue, but I hope, if I'm wearing a dress, they'll think: This can't be him—the one and only famous Robert Lassiter, Jr.

The reason I'm thinking about a dress right now is, there's a girl at our hotel and she's pretty much my size. I don't want to get to know her, because she's not like Rosie, and I promised Rosie she would be my best friend for life. This girl's name is Madelaine-Ellen and everybody calls her the
whole
thing. I don't know if I could stand doing that. She goes to church with her parents and her brother, so I know exactly when and where to get a dress. I'll pick a plain one so I won't be too noticeable.

I'll have to be bold, but magic is being bold all the time.

But when it comes right down to it, I don't pick a plain dress, I pick one I like. It looks as if it ought to be mine in the first place. It's brown with little black outlines of flowers all over it, and little yellow dots in the center of each flower. It has a white, boy-type collar, so it's not prissy.

I bring it back to my room to try it on.

I'm thinner than that girl, so the dress doesn't look very good. I say, “Hello, Droopy,” to myself. I guess whatever dress I borrow, I'll look like a clown anyway. My short hair adds to the clown look. Girls don't have hair like this unless they just had head lice.

I watch myself in the mirror and practice how to be a girl. It feels funny. Airy. Maybe I'm supposed to have a slip. I practice looking delicate. Except Rosie wasn't like that. She was even tougher than me. Maybe as tough as Aunt Tilly. The more I think about it, the more I don't know how I should behave.

The dress has pockets. I'll bring along forty dollars and flash paper and the little magic lighter. I won't take the pistol. The pockets aren't big enough.

 

 

I don't want anybody around the hotel to see me, so, although I love the elevator and the elevator man, I take the stairs. There's nobody. Who would be there when you could ride in the elevator instead?

I run across the lobby as fast as I can, out the hotel door, and down the street. I don't look to see who's watching, I just go and keep on going. Then I slow down and walk—still pretty fast though. Nobody pays attention. Is this all there is to it?

There's a nice big park with swings and slides and teeter-totters. I've seen it as we passed by on the way to someplace else, but I never got to go there. I wasn't heading for it now, but here it is. Since it's Sunday morning there's nobody around. I sit on the bottom of a teeter-totter and wish Rosie were here to get on the other end. I think how my skirt goes up and my underwear shows, which is boy's underwear.

Then I put my skirt under me and slide the slides, all of them, even the baby one, and then I swing. (It's the opposite of the dressy tails of my costume. Those you have to
not
sit on. If I don't put the skirt under me the seat is scratchy. That's another girl thing you have to find out.)

It's a wonder I even know how to swing, but I catch on fast. I feel scared and embarrassed even though there's nobody here, except I feel good, too, but then I start to feel sad. It isn't that I want to wear dresses so much, I don't; it's more that I can never be the truth about myself. And when I think how I've hardly ever been in a playground and how Rosie is my only friend and I had to say good-bye to her forever.

All of a sudden I have to swing really hard and high. I go so high the ropes of the swing get loose at the top of the arc. I wonder if you could go all the way around. I wouldn't like to do that, but I keep on, swinging hard.

 

 

Somebody has been watching me all this time, and I didn't even know it—all this time that I've been looking at my boy's underwear and pulling down my skirt.

I don't see him till he gets up and starts toward me. I'm still swinging to beat the band, and I keep on. He'd better not come too close or I'll kick him in the jaw. “Right on the button.” That's what our father says.

Except he does come close. He's angry already, and I haven't said a single word. It's as if he already knows everything about me and doesn't like any of it.

I can smell him, even though I'm swishing back and forth making my own breeze.

He says, “If you were good, you'd be in church.”

I keep swinging hard. “So would you. Besides . . .” (More lies. Why not?) “My mother and my father and my two big brothers . . .
They're
there. That counts.”

“If you don't go to church, you'll think there isn't any hellfire. You'll go bad.”

“What about you then?”

That's when he grabs me. It stops the swing so fast I nearly fall off. My skirt is up around my waist. He pulls me all the way off and pulls my skirt even higher.

“You can't fool me. You're really a boy.”

I try to get away. He hangs on and laughs. “Boys like you go straight to hell. You can struggle all you want, it's hellfire top to bottom. All the way down.”

Then he grabs me right
there
and says, “Well, well, well,” surprised, and pushes me flat on my back, pulls my underpants to my knees, and takes a long look. (How long does it take for him to see that I'm a girl?) And then he takes a feel.

He's so smelly I can hardly stand it. But I can't stand
any
of it. Not for a single minute more.

“I have money.”

At least that makes him feel for my pockets instead of me. He pulls out my two twenties and then my flash paper, which looks to him like a little nothing tablet. He takes the money and throws the paper down beside us.