Faraway Places (6 page)

I was like that too, like those hot nights in August: burning up, thunder and lightning from down there shooting up to my brain, me in my bed sweating away and staining things yellow. My mother just couldn't wash that yellow out, and I knew that she tried. She'd soak my shorts in the kitchen sink in Clorox and bluing for the whole day.

I wanted to stop—stop yellowing things up—because it was a mess and a sin and I had to count the times and tell Monsignor Canby about every occasion, tick off those sins like the red triangle flags snapping, marking the miles, in the wind. Mortal, every one of them, mortal, every time. But I just couldn't stop the yellowing or the counting neither, couldn't stop counting the red flags. I couldn't let up, just like the sun couldn't that August.

THAT YEAR THE
Blackfoot State Fair was in August, the last week. We always went to the Blackfoot State Fair: my mother, my father, and me. Usually we would get up early and drive to Blackfoot and go to the fair and spend the whole day there and then see the fireworks in the grandstand that night and stay
overnight at my Grandma Hannah's—my mother's mother—then go back home the next morning.

I always used to look forward to the Blackfoot State Fair, used to count the days to go on the calendar, crossing them off. But that year, that year of the chinook, that dry, hot, river-jumping, staining-things- yellow year of those three forbidden people, the year my father lied to the sheriff, was different. I didn't even want to go to the Blackfoot State Fair that year. I wanted them—my mother and my father—to go to the Blackfoot State Fair without me. But my father wouldn't hear of it. I went and did those things like I did every year that I used to like to do and hated now: I put on my black polished Sunday shoes and red socks and my new stiff Levi's—washed only once—and the new shirt my mother bought me at J.C. Penney's: short-sleeved and blue that looked like it was two shirts—a blue plaid shirt under a solid blue vest—but it wasn't. It was all one shirt, and I rolled up the sleeves. I put my toothbrush in with the rest of the bathroom stuff that my mother put in a plastic bag, and a change of underwear, and I got in the back seat of the Oldsmobile. My father drove—he always drove—and we bought Cokes and RC Colas at the Wyz-Way market like we always did and I got a Snickers, and my mother wanted me to sing those same old songs with her: “Faith, Hope, and Charity” and “Going to the Chapel and We're Going to Get Married.” I sang along, all right, but I didn't like it. I wanted to listen to the radio, to the rock-and-roll station.

For the first time that year, as I sang away in the back seat, I wondered why the old man, why my father, never sang with us. Other years, when my mother and I sang those old dumb songs, we were singing for him. We were entertaining him. Seems like everything my mother and I did was for him, and that year, that August, things were different. I was older and figured out what was going on and didn't like it.

Why couldn't he come up with a song once? Now,
that
would be entertaining.

When we got to Blackfoot, there was a lot of traffic and it took a long time to get to the main gate. Then once we got to the main gate, we had to park the Oldsmobile way out there in the sun. It took us a long time to get to the barns, and when we did, we were all covered with dust, and there wasn't any decent place for my mother to freshen up.

But none of those things were really that much bother—at least they didn't bother me. What did bother me at the Blackfoot State Fair was the same thing that bothered me every year. My mother and my father always seemed to pick the Blackfoot State Fair to be mad at each other—be mad and stay mad. Until that year, my mother and father only got mad at each other at the Blackfoot State Fair.

When they were mad at each other, my mother and my father didn't act or talk any way different from the usual, although my father's voice got higher and my mother's got lower and my mother smoked my father's Viceroys in front of him. They still talked to each other, but they didn't say much. My mother said her usual things—
you want another ice cube, Dad
, stuff like that—and my father gave his usual answers:
Yeah, Mom, I'll have one
, or
nope
, and just drive and smoke Viceroys.

What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off—a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. My mother called it
the devil's work
, and crossed herself when she said
devil
, but crossing herself didn't stop the mischief. Everybody drove like they were from Utah, the Cokes weren't cold enough, and somebody always got to the perfect parking space before us, or just as we pulled up, the traffic cop put his hand out so we had to stop and let everybody else and their dog go ahead.

My mother's eye got cockeyed when she was mad at my father at the Blackfoot State Fair, but not like that way it had the night of the chinook. Both eyes went slightly off, slightly askew—her right eye, not just the left eye.

My mother kept saying
forevermore
, and my father made
that clucking sound with his tongue, said those words under his breath, and turned his knuckles white gripping the steering wheel.

Other years, when we went to the Blackfoot State Fair, I used to try to do things to keep them from being mad at each other, tried to keep the conversation going, making comments about things I noticed: how straight the barbed wire next to the road was, what a neat car just passed us, how nice my mother's singing voice was, though it wasn't all that great.

But that year I didn't bother with any of that kind of stuff. I just let it go the way it always got anyway.

My mother said it was a crying shame the way the crops looked on display on the counters in the vegetable barns that year.
A crying shame
, she said,
forevermore
. The sugar beets and the potatoes were half the size of the year before, and the garden vegetables—the carrots and string beans and acorn squash—were a disgrace.
The sheaves of wheat should be as tall as you are
, my father said, meaning as tall as me. But that year they were knee-high, maybe even shorter.

In the cow barns, things were a little better. The cattle and the pigs and the sheep all seemed fat and sassy like other years, and their troughs were full of water, but all everybody could talk about was the drought and how hard it was to get feed, and for a decent price. Everywhere it was the same sorry story.

When we got through with looking at the crops and the animals, usually we would go to the canned-goods part, then the arts-and-crafts section, where there was quilting and embroidery and fruit drying out; then we would go to where the machinery was and wait while my father talked combines and beet toppers and grain drills with the John Deere man. That's usually how it went. We usually did the machinery right after the crops and animals and canned goods and arts and crafts, and that year was no different. My father's eyes lit up soon as he saw those shiny new green John Deere machines. He headed straight for them, and everything seemed the way it had always
been at the Blackfoot State Fair. But then my mother gave me two dollars and told me not to tell my father she'd given me the money. Then she told me to take off out of there and have a good time before it was too late to have any more good times. I looked at those two dollar bills in my hand and asked her what time I should be back by.
It's a small world
, my mother said, and
you're not getting away from me that easy. There's plenty of time to worry about time
, she said. I hugged my mother, fast, and was all of a sudden very sad for her, things starting to seem suddenly different than usual at the Blackfoot State Fair. I hugged her fast, right there by the new three-bottom John Deere plow, and took off.

I GOT MY
hand stamped when I left the fairgrounds so I could get back in, and I walked down Main Street Blackfoot, past the courthouse and past Klegg's Used Furniture Store where my mother and my father had bought my bed. I walked right into the Oasis Bar and bought a bottle of Schlitz and a pack of Lucky Strikes. I didn't want to buy Viceroys; they had filters. The bartender was an old woman, half-blind, and I think she was drunk. She gave me back too much change, but rather than say anything, I just left the difference—fifteen cents—on the counter there.

I wanted to ask the guys in there if any of them had seen the nigger. Ever since that day I saw those three people together, the day I saw Harold P. Endicott sic those hellhounds on that woman Sugar Babe and the nigger, ever since then I don't think I ever stopped thinking about the nigger and where he might be.

There were others of them in the Oasis Bar—other Negro men—and some Sho-Ban Indians too, and I wanted to ask them about the nigger, but what could I say? How could I begin?
Hello, where's the nigger? Did you know that woman Sugar Babe?
So I just got a sack for the beer and rolled the cigarettes in my sleeve like the big guys did at the high school and I walked to the railroad park, chugging the beer and smoking a Lucky Strike.

After I finished them both—the beer and the cigarette—I kind of got sick and dizzy. I puked, but after I puked I felt better.
I felt better than I'd ever felt, and I went back that way, feeling better than I had ever felt. I went back to the Blackfoot State Fair, but not to the cows and pigs and pickled beets and quilting demonstrations. I went back to where the rides were, and the sideshows, to the places where you could throw a ball and win things. I took the cigarettes out of my sleeve, just in case I ran into my mother or father. I put the pack down there, in my underwear, in my yellow underwear. For some reason, saying yellow underwear to myself like that really made me laugh that day.

I rode the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and the Rocket Plane, the Mix Master, and the Snake. I won a Kewpie doll for my mother and a pair of dice for my father and bought pink cotton candy and a Pronto Pup with mustard.

One of those women who sell you tickets in the booth asked me how come I was having so much fun. Her skin was dark, like Sugar Babe's, and she wore a scarf that hid her hair but not her big gold earrings. For a minute I thought she was Sugar Babe. I wanted to light up a Lucky Strike and say something neat, something neat like maybe Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift would say, but my Lucky Strikes were in my pants and I never was very good at talking, so I just said something dumb like '
cause it's the state fair
, something really dumb like that. Then I took off out of there.

And then there was the man, one of those guys who takes your ticket and then straps you in—into the Rocket Plane, I think—and when he strapped me in, he touched me down there on my Lucky Strikes and asked me how my hammer was hanging. He had tattoos on his arms. I didn't answer. I spent my time on the Rocket Plane knowing what the guy with the tattoos meant when he said what he said about hammers. I was pretty sure I knew, all right. When the Rocket Plane came back down, he unstrapped me and went for my Lucky Strikes again. I almost fell over the platform trying to get out of there.

That's when I saw the magician, the one who called himself Mr. Energy. Mr. Energy pulled white doves out of a black hat,
and changed them into crows just by putting them in a box and tapping the box with his magic wand. He cut a woman in half with an electric saw—I could barely watch—and then put her back together again. He also took a rope and hung himself by the neck. His assistant, a dwarf, walked under him to show the audience that there was no trick, that Mr. Energy had really hung himself and was dead, but the curtain fell and in nothing flat went up again, and Mr. Energy was hanging there from his feet. In no time, he reached up and untied himself and took a bow while everyone clapped. Then he and the dwarf took a bow together and the curtain went down for good.

Right after the clapping was over and the audience was getting up to leave, Mr. Energy came out from behind the curtain and walked up to the edge of the stage. He started talking to us as if he was talking to a bunch of his friends. Mr. Energy looked each person straight in the eye as he spoke. He looked me straight in the eye especially, and for a long time. My ears went haywire and I got that feeling like when I saw a rattlesnake one day when I was up in the cottonwoods swinging in the swing—the feeling that something awful could get to you wherever you were.

Mr. Energy's eyes got real wide so you could see white all around the colored part. “Everything is an illusion!” he said. “Not just up here on the stage, not just in the circus.” Mr. Energy said, “
Everything
is an illusion.”

And then Mr. Energy asked me, or told me, rather, singled me out of the whole audience like that, and told me to repeat what he had just said.

“Everything is an illusion.” I said what he told me to say.

And then Mr. Energy said, “Do you think that statement is a true statement, young man?”

I said, “I guess so.”

And Mr. Energy said, “Well, it is!” Then Mr. Energy said, “What is your name, young man?”

“Jacob Joseph Weber,” I said.

“Well, Mr. Jacob Joseph Weber,” Mr. Energy said, “tell me, do you understand what illusion is?”

I was pretty nervous. I'd never had a famous person talk to me like that, especially in front of all those people. I didn't know what to say, so I just said, “Yes.”

Everybody in the audience kind of chuckled and then Mr. Energy said, “Well, tell me what it is, then, Mr. Jacob Joseph Weber. Tell me what illusion is!”