The Gentling Box Page 29
She stopped, and at first I thought it was to get my attention, but then I realized there was something troubling her. “Sisi is afraid of madness; and I guess maybe someone in her family went crazy. So, what I want to know is,” she said, picking at the tablecloth with her fingers, “since I like learning about herbs, and you always say I look like Mother. Well,” Lenore hesitated. “Do you think when I grow up, I’ll be like her?”
I heard the catch in her voice, and I saw she was frightened of Mimi, of the brooding mother with the haunted violet eyes who silently sat in the corner. I thought of the relief Lenore had shown just moments ago, because her mother finally seemed better. But if the mother Lenore feared was gone, the one I feared more was standing right in front of me. I looked up at her.
Anyeta chortled. “Play the odds, Imre,” she said, ticking her fingers. “Leave her with me? Emm. Hard to say what she might see or learn.” She grinned. “Take her with you? She wants to go to the fair, of course. But it’s hard to know what might happen, isn’t it? Hard to tell how much you can trust yourself. A man in your position gets to the bottom of his character quickly. Such a risk. But oh so interesting to find out how much character you have.”
“Get out,” I said, but she only crossed her arms and stood leaning against the wooden jamb.
“Are you afraid, Imre?” she taunted. “What’s that old gypsy saying—fear is the father to the wish.”
“Get out of here you bitch, get out while I dress—”
The front door snicked open. “We’re going, Lenore,” she called out brightly. “I convinced your father.” She gave me a wicked smile and swung away.
It had been on the tip of my tongue to say I was going to hitch the team, because we were leaving, but she’d stolen the words from me, said them aloud. I could hear her laughing to herself while I pulled my clothes on in a rush.
***
Daytimes were safe, I thought, standing under a large tree on the edge of the fairgrounds where I’d set up shop—so to speak—in order to conduct the horse trading. Around me was the noisy jangle of the carnival.
The nights though—I swallowed. I hadn’t let myself sleep much. I was too afraid of the dreams. I was more frightened still I would fall under the sorceress’ spell and act them out. Please, Poppie, please. That defenseless child-voice, and Lenore, I thought drawing a deep breath—she only called me that when she felt a sudden wellspring of love or when she was hurt.
A customer with a huge brush of a mustache idled toward me. This one was shabbily dressed; he had the look of a browser, not a buyer; and just as I expected, he shook his head that the price of the team I was offering was too high before he ambled off. I wasn’t worried; I watched him disappear into the crowd.
“I’ve been looking just everywhere for you, Papa—” I turned to see Lenore beaming up at me, she put her face up for a kiss, and before I could stop myself, I flinched away. She popped the last bite of a gogos—a pastry like a doughnut—into her mouth, and went on. “How’s the trading going?”
I felt easier. “All right.” I’d been doing a steady business. I’d slicked up the nags we’d arrived with and sold them. I’d taken the money and bought a better team, then traded those horses for the ones—three roans and a bay stallion—now lazily cropping under the tree. I nodded toward them. “Can’t really lose. It’s the last afternoon of the fair. There’ll be lots more stock coming in. If I get the price I want I’ll pocket a profit—if I don’t,” I said shrugging, “these’ll get us back to Hungary.”
She nodded, and I noticed she was wearing a pair of oversized silver hoops in her ears.
“Where’d you get those?” I said.
“I bought them from a gypsy boy.” One hand fluttered up and she set the earrings swaying.
“They’re not real,” I said. “They’re peche and they’ll turn your earlobes green before the week is out—”
An old man walked past, eyeing us, and Lenore whispered in my ear. “Well, Papa, it’s like when you sell the nags. You mix ink and soot to hide the gray hairs in their muzzles or put coal tar into their molars so an old horse’s teeth look like the black centers of a young one’s. You always say ‘I guess about a week from now the customer will be heaping curses on my gypsy head, but a trade is a trade.’”
She giggled, drawing back. “Anyway, I don’t care, I love them.” She twitched her head back and forth making them jingle, then took a small mirror out of her pocket and peered into it to see the hoops flash.
The thought flashed on me that it was something Anyeta would do. “Put that away,” I said evenly, and she stashed the hand mirror. In the distance I heard the faint strains of the carousel tinkling like a music box. I looked up. I could see the tip of the gold-painted finial, part of the red striped pole.
Lenore turned too. “Oh,” she said, “that’s why I came. I wanted you to take me on the merry go round. A girl told me they’re selling the tickets half-price because it’s the last day—”
I felt my stomach knot. The carousel, I knew, was fitted out with animals from Noah’s ark. They rode—camels and monkeys and horses and giraffes—two by two around the track of glittering mirrors and bright-painted murals that showed the whole motley crew getting into Noah’s boat and fetching up in a landscape so green it looked like the jungle. I could imagine the animals mounted on their poles, moving up and down. “No. I can’t—in case a customer comes.”
“But you just said you couldn’t lose—”
“You ride. I’ll give you the money,” I said thickly, putting my hand into my pocket for change.
“I want to go with you.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. A sudden powerful image of her child’s body seated before me on the whirling merry go round had risen in my mind. Her tiny back pressed against my heavy chest. My legs curved close around hers. “No,” I swallowed.
“Go ahead, take your daughter on the carousel,” Anyeta said, walking up, flat hips swaying like a cat’s. A paper carnival fan dangled on a yellow cord from one wrist. She toyed with Lenore’s curly hair briefly, then opened the fan.
“Oh, yes, please, Papa. Mother’s ridden with me already. Please.”
“No,” I said huskily, but I didn’t seem able to stop myself. Lenore laughed, tugging me by the hand and pulling me into the throng, while Anyeta watched us, her eyes glowing over the bright circle of the fan.
***
Daytime is safe, I told myself, looking at the crowd of children—their mouths smeared with jelly, their arms full of hideous stuffed prizes—as they clambered onto the merry go round, dragging mothers, fathers with them onto the giddy beasts.
“Help me up, Poppie!” a little girl chirped to her father, while one chubby hand patted the tall flank of a leopard.
Lenore settled onto the padded leather seat atop a white horse with a pink tongue and foam flecked teeth. She gave the gilded reins a flap. “Come on,” she urged.
“I’ll stand here,” I said, curling my sweaty fingers around the striped pole the horse was mounted on. I got a sudden whiff of cooking and smelled hot sausage on the sun-warmed air as sharp as a premonition. Don’t. Don’t get on behind her, a sentient voice whispered in my mind. But I was only vaguely aware of trouble; I had no sense of the terrible sequence of events that led ultimately to my downfall, to contracting the foul disease that is wasting my strength and eating my flesh.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid,” she teased.
“No,” I said, clinging to the pole, and shaking my head stubbornly. “I’ll stand here,” I said again.
“They won’t let you,” she laughed. “No standees, everyone has to ride.” She pointed to an attendant, who was in the act of telling the very same thing to a big-bellied man with rolling eyes. I watched him huff, and the attendant gave him a leg up into the seat behind his grinning son.
“Hurry, Papa,” Lenore said. “The music is starting.”
Daytimes are safe. I felt the wide wooden boards spring lightly under m
y feet and I swung up in the saddle.
***
The carousel whirred up, spinning its dizzy circle. Lenore was laughing. There was the music, the twirling jungle landscape; the sounds of the crowd, their smiling faces reflected in the long glittering glass. I saw Anyeta’s grin become a white blur and I seemed to fall into a spell, swaying lightly with the movement of the horse, jigging up and down, up and down, my hands riding the crest of Lenore’s hips—and I was suddenly aware of her small face, looking puzzled, turning over her shoulder, peering up at me.
“Papa,” she began, “there’s something lumpy on the seat.” She hitched her behind forward, trying to turn against the forward motion of the spinning carousel. She used one hand to feel beneath her—
My lap. Dear God her hands are in my lap because—I felt a thick horror as sudden and stinging as a slap. My cheeks burned hot, and I heard a low groan straining deep in my throat. She’d felt it: My prick, gone stiff, iron hard against her back. I saw the confusion on her face, she was (Oh dear Christ I prayed) convinced it was some oddment on the saddle, uncertain because the seat had seemed smooth before.
Oh God, God help me, I grieved, overcome with guilt and fear. I jerked away from her, leaping from the saddle. I ran forward in a stricken crouch. My steps were unsteady, the boards were spinning giddily under my feet, and I fled the carousel. I pushed my way through the crowd. Then I saw Anyeta’s laughing onyx eyes peering over the edge of the yellow fan.
“You did it! For the love of Christ,” I screamed, putting my face close to hers. “She’s a twelve-year-old child!” There was a pause, the crowd stepping back from me, and I ran.
Behind me I heard the saccharine music grinding on and on, the sound of shouts: What’s the matter? Did you see that? That man suddenly jumped off the merry go round! I glanced over my shoulder, seeing the kaleidoscopic blur of color and glass, the fantastic hazy shapes of the animals, and above it all, Lenore’s tearful face beneath the cloud of her dark shining hair.
***
I got drunk and found a whore.
The drunker I got, the more it seemed to me that the only thing that could take the taste out of my mouth was to screw some low woman. There are always a few working the carnival crowds. Now, I stood lounging at a booth draped with bright yellow cheesecloth, drinking straight from the neck of a brandy bottle, waiting for someone likely to stroll by. I wanted someone blonde. I wanted her to be old. Above all, I thought, wiping mist from eyes, I wanted her not to fit against me—the top of her head close to the middle level of my chest—the way Lenore did. I watched the crowd, deliberately winking at a pair with raucous voices.
“Buy us a drink, lad?” the shorter one said. She was a skinny girl, no more than nineteen, wearing a huge bonnet with curling pink streamers.
“Sure.” I nodded to the bartender and he set out two glass tumblers. They crowded close to me, lifting their glasses and nodding thanks. I kept my gaze fixed on the big one. Blonde and as wide and rolling as a box car. She was taller than me. Perfect. I spoke under my breath and transacted the business.
“Sure you wouldn’t like us both?” said the shorter one. “I’m younger and spryer than Marta. It won’t cost but a fraction more,” she said, giving my thigh a surreptitious squeeze under the gauzy folds of the cheesecloth bunting. “Sure it has to be a blonde?”
“Shove off,” Marta said. “He wants a ample girl with . . . experience.”
“Says you.” She sniffed, giving the pink ribbons a toss. “I call it lardy old pig-fat.”
I bought another bottle, and we walked away, my arm circling her thick waist.
***
She brought me inside a kind of lean-to that was tacked onto the back of a wooden booth. On the other side of the canvas an old woman was selling a hodgepodge of pots and pans, herbs, jams, honey and teas. She did a brisk business, I guessed, by the sound of the jangling pots strung up on a rope around the booth. My whore did, too. The first thing she did was hike up her ruffled skirt, displaying a thick thigh, reach into the black roll of her stocking for money. She put it in a crock by the door. “I got an arrangement like,” she said.
I sat down and started to undress.
“Uh-uh, can’t use the bed,” she said shaking her head at the dirty mattress where the old woman vendor slept nights. “She don’t like me to use her bed.”
So I did her standing against the wall. Three times, while she crooned in my ear, “Easy now, easy—the old lady don’t like her customers on the other side to catch on, you know.”
I kept my eyes open the whole time. Made myself concentrate on the heavy flesh, the coarse pores of her skin, the bright yellow hair. In between I swigged from the bottle, wiping the mouth with my hand before I passed it to her. She didn’t drink much, only sipped when I pressed her.
“You ain’t been gettin it regular, have you, pal? I can tell,” she said, beginning to button up her dress. I made her stop. I wanted to keep Lenore safe, to force myself on her again, to drain myself until there was nothing left.
“Cost you extra,” she said, and I nodded.
I battered away at her, but this time I felt myself shrinking in the wide used-up depths of her sex. I was drunker still and crying by the time she pushed me away. “Oh Christ, Mimi, forgive me,” I wept. “I was afraid, so afraid, and there was nothing else I could do.”
“All right, all right, that’s enough now—you’ll be pumping till Christmas before you’re primed again.” She pulled her dress closed. “Go on back to your wife now.”
“I will,” I said, sniffling tears, and wiping my nose.
“But if I was you, I’d take a piece of advice. Don’t be singing out that there Lenore’s name while you’re doing her—”
“What—” I felt my face go white.
“Sure, the whole time you was slobbering on me, you was whispering your girlfriend’s name. It don’t sit with a wife.” She sucked her belly in, and began fastening the buttons down her dress. It suddenly seemed very hot inside the small canvas tent. Outside the pots clanged and the old woman rang up a sale. My head rattled with a fierce pain, I felt queasy. “Men,” she shook her head, looking up at me. “You’re all the same.”
Trembling, I took the bottle and left.
***
“Hey, I’m not in any rush,” I said to a man wearing a brand-new black suit, a pair of shiny patent leather boots. There was a fancy pin in the white stock at his throat. I took a long swig from my bottle, then held it out to him. He shook his head, his eyes betraying a fleeting disgust.
“No?” he said. “I know every gypsy trick.” He smoothed one gloved hand up along a brown mare’s head; he glanced at the glove, then lightly pinched the flesh beneath its glassy eyes. “You use a straw to puff air under her eyes so they don’t look sunken?”
“No,” I said truthfully. The sun was hurting my eyes, making my head pound more fiercely. I didn’t like this pompous man, I wanted to get a move on. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, grimaced. “Buy or don’t. There’ll be a hundred men who want these horshes come this afternoon,” I slurred, wondering briefly if he’d caught it.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He tamped a cigarette against a flat silver case. “It’s three o’clock now,” he said, spreading his hands. “Where are they—”
I scoffed. “What do you take me for—some kind of rube? They hold this fair because of the annual drive for the livestock. The sheeps—sheep—going out to the spring pastures—”
He gave me a regretful smile. “Where’d you say you came from? Gradistea? Maybe you haven’t heard. Lots won’t be here—not this year—there’s been glanders in the district.”
“Glanders—”
“A disease found in horses, often passed to men who can infect others—”
“I know what it is,” I said hotly, my head throbbing. The lesions and bloody crusts. Wet flesh gone runny with thick pus—I shoved the thought aside, took the last drink from the bottle and tossed it. It glittered in the grass.
The man talked in a low voice while he probed gently with one finger inside the mare’s nostril, feeling for tiny nodules that would grow larger, thicker—
“Papa—”
“Not now, Lenore.”
“Papa,” she said again, “I only wanted to say I was sorry if I made you angry—”
And this time I turned all the way, hands on my hips, about to tell her I wasn’t angry, but to let me conduct my business, but the words died on my lips.
Her eyes had a blank look. She arched up on tip-toe, and before I could shamble backwards, her lips brushed mine. I felt the point of her tongue, her small hands clasped tight to my waist.
My mouth fell open, I felt my face burning, I felt the curious eyes of the high class customer taking in the scene. Could hear him looking at our shabby clothes, thinking we were out of the backwoods where incest was so veddy, veddy common . . . . “Lenore,” I croaked, smudging my sleeve across my damp lips.
Lenore giggled, then stepped back, and it was then I saw the blinding flash of the silver pendant draped around her throat. Oh dear Christ, she had that filthy crescent moon, the pendant Zahara had stolen and worn around her throat. Lenore was falling under Anyeta’s spell. My child marked by the sorceress like a slave with a choker! Everything, all of it rose up in me in one furious mind shattering blast.
“Where did you get that, where?” I screamed, seizing her shoulders and shaking her. Her head bobbled like a rag doll’s. Shamed, I let go. Oh Christ, why did I keep it?