The Daring Escape of Beatrice and Peabody (2 page)

The warning light inside me goes on and off, on and off, as soon as I hear the creeping around outside and the whispering. I am in the john doing my business. The hairs on my arms stick up. I hold my breath.

‘I think she went in here,’ says a low girl’s voice.

‘You’re not sure?’

‘I saw her coming this way but I didn’t see where she went. You were the one who was supposed to be watching.’

‘No, you were. I gave you one job and it was to watch her while I was getting a strawberry pop. And you messed it up, you little dummy.’

I hitch up my overalls and pull my legs up and wrap my arms around myself, making myself as small as I can without falling in.

‘Kick it.’

‘Me? I don’t want to kick it. You kick it.’

‘Oh, forget it, you baby,’ and then there is a loud thump against the door. ‘What you doing so long in there? Some of us have to go, you know.’

I hold my breath. I wonder how long the lock will hold. I think it is the two girls with the shined-up saddle shoes
who were watching me chop onions. I kept turning my cheek to Pauline, but they hopped from one end of the hot dog cart to the other, poking each other and giggling and asking me are there any onions on the hot dogs because they don’t like onions and are there any pickles left and is there any new mustard because this one is all gone. I know what they were up to. They wanted to have themselves a look.

‘Buy something or scat,’ Pauline told them, waving her hot dog fork in angry circles.

There is more kicking and I whisper a little prayer the lock will hold. There are hushed voices and then somebody kicks on the door again.

‘When you coming out?’

I don’t answer. I pull my legs up tighter. I hold my breath deep inside my chest. I wait.

‘We know it’s you in there. Some of us want a turn, you know.’

‘Maybe she’s trying to scrub it off. Do you think she got burned?’

‘No. Mama tells me when you have one of those you are born with it. Mamas want to cry when that happens.’

Do not, do not, do not
. I pull my legs even closer to my chest.

‘Will I get one?’

‘No, I said you are
BORN WITH IT
. Why are you such a retard? If you don’t have one by now, you’re not going to get one.’

‘Good, because I would just want to die if I looked like that.’

I reach up and touch the diamond on my cheek. I trace my finger along the place where my face ends and the mark begins. The girls are kicking again. They are kicking hard. The door buckles.

I pull my legs tighter and hide my face in my knees. My tears are sliding over my diamond.

‘Hey, what’s going on in here?’ It is Pauline. Her voice is low and hard, mixed with the kind of dare you feel when you want to give somebody a taste of their own medicine.

‘Forget it.’

‘She’s too ugly for us anyway.’

Am not, am not, am not
.

‘Get out of here, now. Bee? Bee, are you in there?’ Pauline knocks on the door. ‘Don’t listen to them, Bee. Bee?’

I reach for the lock and unhook it. Slowly I open the door. And then I am up and I am in Pauline’s arms. I let her hold me and I feel her breath on me and her heart beating. I smell the apple shampoo in her hair and I feel the aching in my heart. I know you should not judge a book by its cover, but most folks do. I am trembling and then the tears are rolling all over my diamond and I am wondering what to do about all that is wrong with me.

‘Don’t listen to them, Bee.’ Pauline runs her fingers
through my curls. I wrap myself tighter around her and bury my face in her neck.

I won’t, I won’t, I won’t
.

It is a whisper only I can hear.

Pauline slides her arm around me and we head back to the hot dog cart. She asked Bobby to watch things while she went looking for me. Already folks are piled up.

Bobby wears thick glasses and needs to slick his hair down all the time. He notices my tears and pulls a piece of ruby liquorice from his shirt pocket and hands it to me. It is a little oily from the bandanna sitting beside it that he uses to wipe up everything.

Pauline says Bobby does not talk much because he has been on the road so long he has seen everything a person could see. Now he has nothing more to say. I do wonder what he saw.

The liquorice smells like pigs. Everything about Bobby smells like pigs. Pauline does not like pigs or the smell of pigs or men with the smell of pigs on them.

But I do. I think baby pigs smell very nice and their snouts tickle your neck when they are nuzzling you. I like pigs and I like Bobby very much. And I know Bobby is sweet on Pauline the way I am sweet on honey buns.

‘Thanks,’ Pauline tells Bobby, tying her apron and scrunching her nose.

When lunch slows and we are caught up Pauline tells me I can have a break. I hurry over to Bobby because I also like liquorice very much.

Bobby is in charge of four piglets: LaVerne, Big Ben, Vivian and Cordelia. He trains them to run around a path he sets up in each place we stop. They run for the finish line as fast as horses at the track because they are awful intent on getting the corn Bobby hides at the end.

Folks like to watch this very much. They make bets on which piglet will win the race. Usually it is LaVerne because she is such a greedy little pig, but sometimes it is Big Ben.

It is never Cordelia. She is the runt of the litter and she doesn’t run as fast as the others and one of her ears droops. Also, she is more interested in looking at a dragonfly hovering on the fence post, or maybe a bumblebee. I tell her she is a dreamer with her head in the clouds. Folks who do not know this about her will say bad things, like what a slowpoke and even worse things that hurt her feelings awful bad. She needs a lot of snuggling after that to get back to feeling good about things. It turns out I am very good at this.

I watch Bobby get the piglets lined up and in their starting boxes and then he holds up his fingers, one, two, three, and he pulls the lever and the fronts of the boxes flop down and the piglets fly out. This time Cordelia starts out in front because she is chasing a dragonfly and folks are clapping and screaming and then LaVerne pushes right past and wins a gold paper crown. Folks laugh and clap when they see a pig wearing a crown and they buy more tickets.

A little girl keeps turning around and staring at me when she should be clapping and cheering for Cordelia. Lord knows it might help Cordelia believe in herself a little more.

‘Does it hurt?’ she wants to know, and then her mama is pulling her away.

I am not inclined to answer things like that. I can see in her eyes, though, how this little girl does not mean anything bad by it. When you spend as much time watching folks looking at my diamond as I do, you can tell what’s inside of them without looking too deep. It’s like knowing what’s in a bologna sandwich without lifting the bread.

Pauline tells me I have a sixth sense, like a gift you get when one of your other senses is missing. ‘Like when you can’t see, your hearing is really good, Bee, or when your hearing is gone, your heart is big.’ We are lying on our mattresses in the back of our hauling truck. She is writing in her little notebook.

The shine from the moon is peeking into the truck. ‘Or when you can see somebody other folks can’t?’ I whisper.

Pauline knows I am talking about the old lady in the orange flappy hat. She has been showing up since my mama and papa’s funeral. Now that I am older and getting teased, she comes more often. She is sure to appear on the days that truly are very, very bad, the days when a boy says, ‘What’s the matter, did you get burned all over your face?’ or when a mama tells her girls to stay away from me. Those are the days she comes.

Pauline does not like me talking about the lady in the orange flappy hat. I think it’s because Pauline can’t see her, and I do wonder why that is. ‘Stop talking fairy tales,’ she tells me, rolling over.

I want to tell her I know life is not a fairy tale and bad wolves like Ellis do not always hide in the woods. Sometimes they are standing right in front of you.

We are all on pins and needles wondering about what is happening in Germany and Japan. When there’s a war on, you feel like you are waiting for something bad to fall on your head. You know when you go to sleep that when you wake up the whole world could be upside down. Like when Pauline and I were frying Spam and potatoes for supper at our campground in Florida, waiting for spring, and we heard on the radio about all our sailors lost at Pearl Harbor. Folks everywhere were crying at the sadness of it all, even me.

Then came the gasoline rationing on the East Coast and we couldn’t get hardly any sugar. Ellis lost half of the men who worked for him, the ones who ran off and signed on with the army. No one thinks Fat Man Sam will go, on account of his size, and Ellis is too old, but I am worried about Bobby. Pauline says sometimes the army changes its mind about soldiers wearing glasses when the war heats up.

I pull off my apron and hurry over to Cordelia when Pauline starts talking like this. I do like Bobby very much.

To get to the piglets, I have to squish through a lot of
mud. It has been raining since we got into Buffalo and if there’s one thing even worse for a travelling show than a war, it is rain. Ellis shuts off the music when it’s been drizzling because it’s not worth spending the money to open, so it is very peaceful and the only sound is my work boots smacking the ground.

Cissy runs the Guess How Much You Weigh booth and looks up from the checker game she is playing with Pete the Alligator Man. He keeps a live baby alligator in a cage and wrestles with it in a tin tub of water. The things folks will pay good money for is beyond me. Fat Man Sam sits on his chair, unable to get up from eating so many hot dogs. ‘Bee,’ he calls to me as I hurry by.

I stop, knowing what he will ask me.

‘Can you get me another hot dog?’

I shake my head. I am in an awful hurry.

‘Beeeeee.’

‘I can’t now. I have to go see the piglets. I will in a few minutes.’

There is always a job to do at a travelling show.

Ellis thinks he is the hero of my life. He thinks how since he kept me on, he is deserving of some sort of award.

He is not.

‘Watch her,’ he told Pauline. She was sixteen and was already working for him when my mama and papa died in the truck crash in Florida one winter. I was four. Pauline told me Ellis wanted to drop me off at an orphan house and leave me there but I held on to Pauline so tight he gave up trying to break us apart. He said I might grow up to be of use to him, looking like I did, and he told Pauline she could come off the merry-go-round and take over my mama’s job running the hot dog cart and watching me.

Pauline says I would not let go of her hand for six months after that. Ellis told her if anybody nosed around asking what a little girl with a mark on her face was doing without a mama or a daddy, he would drop me off somewhere, because the last thing he needed was trouble. ‘You can sleep in the back of the truck,’ he said, and that is how we do it now.

When we are travelling from one town to another, we carry tents in the back of our truck. Bobby drives and
Pauline spends the time with her face in her notebook, wrinkling her nose and wishing she did not have to sit near a man who smells like pigs. I’m thinking of telling her maybe she is the one who could use some glasses.

When we pull into a town, we unload and then Pauline and I get our bedroom back. We could close up the back doors to keep out mosquitoes and wolves, but then the inside of our truck would get hot as a fire pit. Sometimes you have to make a choice in life. So we leave the doors open and I string up a purple curtain because when you are sleeping in the back of a hauling truck you do not want anybody coming in and bothering you.

Pauline shakes like a leaf when Ellis tells her do this or do that. Sometimes I ask her why she does whatever he says and she says we are lucky to have a job.

‘Well?’ says Ellis. He is watching Pauline. She is standing there looking at the money in her hand, and then she looks at me. He wants her to go to Woolworths and buy paint. He tells me I can’t go. He pulls a piece of Beech-Nut chewing gum from his shirt pocket, unwraps it and pops it in his mouth. He flicks the foil on the ground and it lands at Pauline’s feet. She bends over, picks it up and puts it in her apron.

Pauline pulls me to her and whispers, ‘Get all those onions chopped and then start the hot dogs. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back. And don’t let the hot dogs burn.’ She looks over at Ellis and then she hurries to the truck, starts it and drives off.

Ellis stays in the shadow of the hot dog cart watching me. He likes shade. He is very pale. His cowboy hat hides his face so you can’t see his eyes, but I know there are snakes under there.

I try to act like I do not know he is looking at me, but
I cannot help reaching up and checking to be sure my hair hides the diamond on my cheek. I used to think that when I got bigger the mark would get smaller. But stains on your face do not work like that. They get bigger when you get bigger. My diamond stretches from my eyebrow to under my cheek. It is a map of all my heartache.

Pauline says everyone has troubles. Some folks have troubles on the outside for everyone to see, and some have troubles on the inside where they hide and fester. ‘But everyone has something, Bee. So you are not alone.’

I think it must be way easier to have troubles on the inside where no one can see. I tell her this. She says there are some things I might not understand because I am only eleven. I tell her I understand things pretty good.

I try and think about the onions I am chopping and if I can make them small enough to disappear. I try and make myself disappear. I am a candle blown out, a whisper at night, an old lady in an orange flappy hat. I try and make myself nobody at all.

The tears from all the onions are rolling right down over my diamond and I do not want to wipe them off because that would draw attention. I do not need to be a flag waving, not with Ellis standing there.

He spits his gum out and grinds it in the dirt and right away pulls another piece from his pocket and folds it up and stuffs it into his mouth. Then he walks right up next to me. I smell the sweet Beech-Nut. He reaches for my
hair and pulls it up and looks at my face. I stiffen, unable to move, boulders in my shoes. There is an awful waiting.

‘If that thing were a real diamond, you’d be worth a fortune,’ he whispers.

I yank my hair out of his hands. Real tears mix with onion tears and I do not look up until he walks away.