Sooner or later the girls would be spotted peeking under the tent, and the barker would kick their heads just hard enough to drive them off. By this time it would be late enough that Stella would permit them to go to the Old West.
One time they got there just in time to see the mynah bird go wild, the blind woman chasing it by following its squawks. The Indian stood, impassive, at the edge of the stage, while the mynah bird lunged in his direction, apparently recognizing its distant cousin in the wheel of ragged feathers that the Indian wore on his butt. And the one-armed logger was no help, drunk and goading the bird with the stub end of his ax.
But Stella’s fixation lay with the Salmon boy, who throughout the pandemonium just sat there and smiled, swaying a little, adjusting the plane of his face until his heavy glasses caught the light and sparked. He was, in fact, an armless, legless black man of indeterminate years, who wore a green satin shirt modified to make the stumps of his arms look like fins. His act consisted of his rolling a cigarette in the trough between his nose and lip, lighting it by curling one stalk from the matchbook backward onto the flint.
Like the rest of the crowd, Ginny drowned her horror in polite applause when at last the gray plumes shot from his nose. Over the PA there’d come a blast of scratchy trumpet as he smoked. Then everyone beat a quick retreat — everyone, that is, except for Stella. Leroy would bow for her for as long as she was willing to clap, until the barker told her to get lost.
That was when they were young, of course, because in later years Leroy was gone, and not just Leroy but all the denizens of the Old West, who became “the disabled” or “Asian-Americans” or “First Peoples” and were moved on, fobbed off, put away, somewhere else. And in this renovation the hootchie-cootchie women were also driven underground. Ginny imagined them wandering the rainy streets — in their nugleejees, like wet moths.
THE OLD WEST was replaced by various booths that urged civic improvement. In the new West, everyone recycled their newspapers and cans. The water district gave out low-flow inserts for people’s showerheads and the city demonstrated the newest in compost bins. Even the wildlife department came with brochures about the perils of DDT and a few mangy birds of prey, to which Stella shrieked, “Kaw! Kaw!” until the young woman on duty told her that if she was going to annoy the birds she’d have to go away.
Ginny always insisted on being the one who drove because the fair, especially the fair, had a way of pumping Stella full of the black humors that made her manic and angry all at once. “Running on hi-test” was how Stella referred to these moods, which Stella traced back to Leroy but which Ginny suspected had more to do with the likelihood of her running into one of her ex-husbands. Sometimes it seemed that the fair existed just to give her husbands an excuse to knock each other around. More often than not, by the time the sky approached its purest dark, and the kids in safety-patrol bandoliers came through swinging their flashlights to herd the crowd home, one of the husbands would be towing Stella toward the car. Then Ginny would have to drive home while the two of them grappled in the back seat. Whenever a car pulled up behind, their bodies would flash as if a strobe light had hit them, lighting Ginny’s rearview mirror. They’d be engaged in some exotic form of either sex or warfare, but Ginny had long ago run out of patience with her sister to care which.
The next time Stella called, she’d sound contrite, though she would feign ignorance about the cause of Ginny’s hurt. What she said was always a variant of: “I mean, I’d understand if it weren’t my husband.”
“You mean your ex-husband,” Ginny says.
“That makes a difference?”
“You have many ex-husbands, Stell.”
“Several. You’re resorting to hyperbole.”
“Then I’m sure you could tell me which one it was,” Ginny says, hating the schoolteacher (which she is, which she’d become) that she could not jettison from her voice.
“Stell?”
“Okayokay.” This is Stella’s standard apology. “Whatever it is that I don’t remember I did, I promise never to do it again unless I don’t know what I’m doing when I do it.”
THE OLD WEST lasted until the girls were teens, by which time Stella had taken to carrying a flask in her embroidered shoulder bag that was spangled with tiny mirrors. Whatever was in the flask made Stella hoot and holler:
“Bring on the fish boy!”
“Let’s have Leroy!”
“Let’s see him roll that cigarette!”
And when he was wheeled into the stage’s brighter lights, she applauded more wildly and stamped her feet. She was wearing a skirt that she’d made from an old pair of jeans, the hem frayed, barely reaching the top of the V of her legs. It was that time of evening when the bay flattened its surface and turned silver, the last trace of sunlight mixed with the first trace of moonlight to create a dusty paste.
Ginny was eleven that first year of the flask, with only a vague idea what drunk meant. But the word was juicy enough to make the stardust cling to her sister’s body, which seemed full of a mysterious sap that garbled her words and caused a few strands of her dark hair to stick to the corners of her mouth. Then she started shimmying, in more or less one spot, while Leroy grubbed his lips through his tobacco. In a kazoo voice she sang, I’ll be your hootchie-cootchie girl, you’ll be the jelly man, while her arms swung and her fingers snapped.
“That girl’s out of control,” said a woman in the crowd as she looked around for someone in a position of authority. But under their breath the men sucked their teeth and whispered, Oh, baby, and Come to papa, as Stella shook the new round breasts that had snuck up on her so quickly that she did not even seem aware of them yet.
“Come on,” Ginny said, touching her sister, but Stella shook loose.
“I’m not out of control. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
Ginny tried to stand so as to block everybody’s view of her sister. “So what are you doing?” she asked under her breath. Stella was pedaling her arms and wobbling her hips, submerged in the sweet liquor that filled her, swimming through it with her eyes closed and her breath held.
“Dancing,” she said, without coming up.
WHAT HAPPENED in the years that came after the end of the Old West was that Stella dropped out of high school, messed around for a while, then took the GED and ended up getting out of college with a degree in accounting before the rest of her class, facts that she recited often and with a quack of glee. She liked to make up jokes at the expense of other members of her profession, like: How many accountants does it take to screw in a lightbulb? (Answer: none, because they make the receptionist do it so that when she climbs up the stepladder they can all look up her skirt.) She said the reason she chose accounting was because it did not require any thinking that could not be performed by a machine. “Like, six plus seven’s thrown me ever since the great brain cell die-off of the eighties, and you know what? It doesn’t matter anymore. They’ve got software that can compensate.”