“I ran away from home when I was thirteen, Gus.”
“Wasn't you happy there?”
“Well, yes and no. They loved me, my mother and father. They really did. They just didn't understand what I was all about.”
There was a pain on my neck. I touched a fingertip to the place. It was a boil beginning to grow. I hadn't had a boil in years, many years, not since I was a…
“What's the matter, MI. Rosenthal?”
“Nothing, Gus. Well, anyhow, I ran away, and joined a carny.”
“Huh?”
“A carnival. The Tri-State Shows. We moved through Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, even Kansas…”
“Boy! A carnival! Just like in Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus? I really cried when Toby Tyler's monkey got killed, that was the worst part of it, did you do stuff like that when you were with the circus?”
“Carnival.”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. Did'ja?”
“Something like that. I carried water for the animals sometimes, although we only had a few of those, and mostly in the freak show. But usually what I did was clean up, and carry food to the performers in their tops-”
“What's that?”
“That's where they sleep, in rigged tarpaulins. You know, tarps.”
“Oh. Yeah, I know. Go on, huh.”
The rash was all the way up to my shoulder now. It itched like hell, and when I'd gone to the drug store to get an aerosol spray to relieve it, so it wouldn't spread, I had only to see those round wooden display tables with their glass centers, under which were bottles of Teel tooth liquid, Tangee Red-Red lipstick and nylons with a seam down the back, to know the druggist wouldn't even know what I meant by Bactine or Liquid Band-Aid.
“Well, along about K.C. the carny got busted because there were too many moll dips and cannons and paperhangers in the tip….” I waited, his eyes growing huge.
“What's all thaaat mean, Mr. Rosenthal?!?”
“Ah-ha! Fine carny stiff you'd make. You don't even know the lingo.”
“Please, Mr. Rosenthal, please tell me!”
“Well, K.C. is Kansas City, Missouri…when it isn't Kansas City, Kansas. Except, really, on the other side of the river is Weston. And busted means thrown in jail, and…”
“You were in jail?”
“Sure was, little Gus. But let me tell you now, Cannons are pickpockets and moll dips are lady pickpockets, and paper-hangers are fellows who write bad checks. And a tip is a group.”
“So what happened, what happened?”
“One of these bad guys, one of these cannons, you see, picked the pocket of an assistant district attorney, and we all got thrown in jail. And after a while everyone was released on bail, except me and the Greek. Me, because I wouldn't tell them who I was, because I didn't want to go home, and the Greek, because a carny can find a wetbrain in any town to play Greek.”
“What's a Greek, huh?”
The Greek was a sixty-year-old alcoholic. So sunk in his own endless drunkenness that he was almost a zombie… a wetbrain. He was billed as The Thing and he lived in a portable pit they carried around, and he bit the heads off snakes and ate live chickens and slept in his own dung. And all for a bottle of gin every day. They locked me in the drunk tank with him. The smell. The smell of sour liquor, oozing with sweat out of his pores, it made me sick, it was a smell I could never forget. And the third day, he went crazy. They wouldn't fix him with gin, and he went crazy. He climbed the bars of the big free-standing drunk tank in the middle of the lockup, and he banged his head against the bars and ceiling where they met, till he fell back and lay there, breathing raggedly, stinking of that terrible smell, his face like a pound of raw meat.
The pain in my stomach was worse now. I took Gus back to Harmon Drive, and let him go home.
My weight had dropped to just over a hundred and ten. My clothes didn't fit. The acne and boils were worse. I smelled of witch hazel. Gus was getting more anti-social.
I realized what was happening.
I was alien in my own past. If I stayed much longer, God only knew what would happen to little Gus…but certainly I would waste away. Perhaps just vanish. Then… would Gus's future cease to exist, too? I had no way of knowing; but my choice was obvious. I had to return.
And couldn't! I was happier here than I'd ever been before. The bigotry and violence Gus had known before I came to him had ceased. They knew he was being watched over. But Gus was becoming more erratic. He was shoplifting toy soldiers and comic books from the Kresge's and constantly defying his parents. It was turning bad. I had to go back.
I told him on a Saturday. We had gone to see a Lash La Rue western and Val Lewton's “The Cat People” at the Lake Theater. When we came back I parked the car on Mentor Avenue, and we went walking in the big, cool, dark woods that fronted Mentor where it met Harmon Drive.
“Mr. Rosenthal,” Gus said. He looked upset.
“Yes, Gus?”
“I gotta problem, sir.”
“What's that, Gus?” My head ached. It was a steady needle of pressure above the right eye.
“My mother's gonna send me to a military school.”
I remembered. Oh, God, I thought. It had been terrible. Precisely the thing not to do to a child like Gus.
“They said it was 'cause I was rambunctious. They said they were gonna send me there for a year or two. Mr. Rosenthal…don't let'm send me there. I din't mean to be bad. I just wanted to be around you.”
My heart slammed inside me. Again. Then again. “Gus, I have to go away.”
He stared at me. I heard a soft whimper.
“Take me with you, Mr. Rosenthal. Please. I want to see Galveston. We can drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina. We can go to Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada and work topping trees, we can sail on boats, Mr. Rosenthal!”
“Gus…”
“We can work the carny, Mr. Rosenthal. We can pick peanuts and oranges all across the country. We can hitchhike to San Francisco and ride the cable cars. We can ride the boxcars, Mr. Rosenthal…I promise I'll keep my legs inside an' not dangle 'em. I remember what you said about the doors slamming when they hook'm up. I'll keep my legs inside, honest I will…”
He was crying. My head ached hideously. But he was crying!
“I'll have to go, Gus!”
“You don't care!” He was shouting. “You don't care about me, you don't care what happens to me! You don’t care if I die…you don’t…”
He didn't have to say it: you don't love me.
“I do, Gus. I swear to God, I do!”
I looked up at him; he was supposed to be my friend. But he wasn't. He was going to let them send me off to that military school.
“I hope you die!”
Oh, dear God, Gus, I am! I turned and ran out of the woods as I watched him run out of the woods.
I drove away. The green Plymouth with the running boards and the heavy body; it was hard steering. The world swam around me. My eyesight blurred. I could feel myself withering away.
I thought I'd left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the woods. Having done it, I now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up, and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first, and pulled away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender, pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn't know what they were honking about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding. After I'd gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don't tell sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the rear fender. I pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it, and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.