The Daring Escape of Beatrice and Peabody (6 page)

Arthur is a tidal wave washing over us, pulling Pauline out to sea and leaving me and Peabody all alone on the shore.

‘I have to help Arthur again tomorrow,’ Pauline is saying that night as she rushes around her side of our hauling truck, slipping a new dress over her head. ‘Ellis wants to put him in charge of the stay-put show he wants to set up in Poughkeepsie, so I have to teach him everything that goes on here.’

I curl up on my bedroll with Peabody against me. ‘But what about Bobby?’ I whisper. ‘He likes you very much.’

‘The pig man? He doesn’t like me like that, Bee.’

I look at her. ‘How can you not know he likes you so much?’

‘I like Arthur, Bee.’

‘But he’s rotten. It’s like he’s bewitched you, Pauline, and what about me? I know you would never go out all the time and leave me if you were thinking right. Why aren’t you thinking right?’

Pauline stops putting on her dress-up shoes from Woolworths and comes over and tries to squeeze me, but I turn away. When she loosens her hold, I rush out of the truck and Peabody follows right behind.

The next morning I am tucked tight in my bedroll when someone bangs on our hauling truck. Pauline jumps up. Peabody growls. I cover my face.

‘Bee?’

It is Bobby.

‘What’s he doing here?’ whispers Pauline, pulling the covers close to her chin.

‘He’s been teaching me to run.’

‘Run? Why?’

‘If you were here more, you’d know that, Pauline.’ My legs are still wobbly from yesterday, but I get up and climb into my overalls. Peabody pushes his nose out the curtain.

‘You think I’m doing this for my health?’ Bobby asks when I get the curtain open. He is leaning against the truck with his pocket watch and his ready, set, go and his rules about starting slow and ending fast.

‘I’m not running any more.’

‘Why not?’

I look back at Pauline, who is turned to us, listening.

‘Because I hate it.’

Bobby spits off to the side. ‘How’s quitting going to
keep those boys from stealing your dog? Or worse?’

Peabody tilts his head and looks at me.

‘I’m terrible at it.’

‘Well, I have some things I need to show you. Running in the woods, jumping over stone walls and logs, running uphill and down, all this will make you fast. You’ll get better, I promise. You’re not a quitter, are you?’

Maybe I am. ‘I have to get ready to open the hot dog cart.’

‘You’ve got time. Come on. Besides, we’ll be setting up outside of Nashua tomorrow and who knows if there will be a good place to run?’

I cross my arms in front of me and glare at him. Peabody whines.

Bobby crosses his arms, too. ‘Probably best if you remember those boys every time you feel like quitting.’

I look at him with his thick-rimmed glasses and his coal-dark hair shooting up in a hundred directions and I know that if Pauline gave him half a chance, things might go better for us.

Morning after morning, before anybody is up, me and Peabody are out past the Little Pig Race and Bobby has his pocket watch in the air.

It turns out there are plenty of woods outside of Nashua.

‘You have to start out slow,’ Bobby tells me for the hundredth time. ‘Then pick up speed as you go. That’s what went wrong. If you use up all your heart at the start, you’ll never find your second wind.’

He checks my laces. They are tied twice. ‘If you get tired, slow down before you fall down. Got it? And go straight uphill, climb rocks, jump over trees. Understand?’

I nod.

‘At the top of the hill, turn around and fly down as fast as you can. And keep your arms at a forty-five-degree angle. Like this.’ He bends my arms at the elbow. ‘Raise them and push back with each step so it’s like you’re pulling back a lever. Try it. And don’t stoop like that.’

He tells me so many things I can’t keep them in my head. Peabody wags his stumpy tail. Cordelia and LaVerne nose
around the edge of their pen waiting to see somebody else race for a change.

‘Ready?’ says Bobby.

I nod.

‘Set,
go
!’

And we are off.

I start off fast like a rabbit and then go slow like a turtle, straight into the woods, then fast like a rabbit and slow like a turtle.

‘No, no, no!’ Bobby is yelling, following me until I reach the woods.

I slow down until I am a turtle and I keep that pace until I am over a stone wall and have jumped a pile of logs. I try and come up with all the words I know for
turtle
and
tortoise: sluggish, slow, determined
. I plod forward until I reach the top of the hill and then head down again.

When I get out of the woods, I see Cordelia sticking her snout through the fence and the sight of her sets me on fire and I am a rabbit all the way back until I fall at Bobby’s feet.

‘Not fast enough,’ Bobby says when I am rolling in the dirt, choking as I try to suck air into my lungs. ‘Twice a day. We’ll do this morning and night.’

My muscles are aching. My shins feel like there is a knife slitting them, top to bottom. My face is burned from the sun and the sweat pours down my chest and the back of my neck.

‘Eighteen minutes,’ he says the next morning in Portland. ‘You’re still running like a girl.’

‘I
am
a girl.’ I glare at him.

He spits out across Peabody’s head toward me. It nearly hits me. I think maybe I am mad as a wet hen. I suck up spit and shoot it back. It lands in a soft wet drip on the top of my work boot.

He grins. ‘That all you got?’

My face is hot from already being mad at him and now even hotter from seeing the spit on my boot.

‘There’s an art to spitting. Most girls don’t know how. Do you want to learn?’

‘No, I do not want you to teach me to spit.’

I clomp off with the spit on my boot. I don’t wipe it off until I get to the truck.

‘Okay, here’s how you do it.’ Bobby sucks up spit in his mouth. I am out watching him feed the piglets the next morning and I am not so mad any more. He scratches each of them behind the ears and talks all sweet to them and calls them Sweet Pea and Darling Dear and Honey Pie. When I am not so mad I think how they are lucky to have him.

‘You have to get a lot of spit worked up in your mouth. Whoosh your mouth like this until you get a lot.’ He swishes his mouth around. ‘Then gather the spit on the edge of your tongue and pucker your lips. Then blow as hard as you can.’

Bobby sends a wad of spit off toward the stone wall. He turns back to me. ‘Spitting is a good thing to know how to do. You never know when it will come in handy.’

I look at Peabody. I think about the tall boy and the round boy with the watermelon cheeks, and how much I would like to send a mouthful of spit straight at them. I swish my mouth trying to come up with enough saliva. I work at it for quite a while and then move the spit to the end of my tongue. This is not as easy as it sounds. Finally,
I open my mouth and blow as hard as I can. A very small gob of spit lands on Peabody’s head.

Peabody rushes over and hides behind the pig shed. Bobby grins and shakes his head. ‘What a girl.’ Then he goes over and picks up Peabody and wipes the spit off his head with his bandanna. ‘Make sure you’re up fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow morning. I want to get you running faster.’

I fume. Bobby goes by the pig shed. Peabody won’t look me in the eye. I tell him how I didn’t mean for it to happen and that I am sorry. He needs a lot of snuggling after that to get back to feeling good about things. Just like Cordelia.

Ellis comes back all fired up about setting up a show in Poughkeepsie. He makes us all go over by Eldora’s Museum of Mystery and sit in the waiting-for-
your-fortune
chairs and hear what he has to say: ‘There’s a big factory making army tanks down there. Lots and lots of folks are working, folks who will have money to burn at night. You get my drift?’

Fat Man Sam and Pete the Alligator Man nod. ‘Yessiree,’ says Silas Meany the Man Without a Stomach. I hold my hair over my face and hear Peabody start whining in the back of our hauling truck.

Pauline winces. I hold my breath.

‘This war ain’t gonna end soon, so what we’ll do is set up another show, a stay-put show in Poughkeepsie,’ Ellis says. ‘Some of you will come with me and some will finish out the year with this show and then go south for the winter.’ He looks over to the trucks. ‘What is that noise?’

I grab Pauline’s arm. She looks at me and shakes her head very slowly.

Then Bobby steps up. ‘One of the pigs has been feeling poorly and has been making an awful racket.’

‘Well, do something about it. Can’t have no sick pigs around here. I thought you said you knew how to take care of pigs.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Bobby, and then Ellis gets started telling about a new booth he wants to set up in Poughkeepsie, something he heard about from a show out in Chicago.

‘It’s called an African Dip. You put a coloured boy in a cage and people pay good money to throw balls at a lever. If they hit it right, the boy drops in the water. Pulls in bucket-loads of money, too.’

Ellis laughs. I shudder. I can only imagine what he would do to my little dog.

I tell Pauline as soon as we get away from Ellis that I think we better find a home for ourselves pretty quick. ‘Me too, Sweet Pea Bee.’ And then she goes off to help Arthur with the Tilt-A-Whirl.

That night Pauline is feeling bad about leaving me all day. She wants to know if I want to play the ha-ha game. I sigh a few times to let her know I am not sure if she is worth my time. Then when I am afraid she might think about changing her mind, I tell her I will give her one more chance.

We drag our bedrolls out onto the grass. Peabody snuggles up beside me. Pauline looks up at the sky. I am looking at my work boots.

Pauline is so quiet I think she has fallen asleep. I snuggle up next to her. She slides her arm around me.

‘Bee, I have something important to tell you.’

I am wide awake.

‘Are you listening?’

I nod my head in the dark.

Peabody looks up.

‘Ellis says I have to go join up with his show in Poughkeepsie.’

‘No, Pauline. I want to go to Florida.’

Pauline sighs. I don’t like it when she sighs.

She is quiet for a minute and then says, ‘Ellis told me I can’t bring you, Bee. He wants you to run the hot dog cart here. I told him I couldn’t leave you, I couldn’t go anywhere without you, that we’ve been together since you were four. He told me I had to do what he said or he would put you in an orphan home tomorrow.’

Even in the dark, I know there are tears winding their way down Pauline’s face. I don’t have any words in me. All I can do is reach over and grab hold of her and let her pull me to her and my tears start flowing and Peabody whines in my ear.

Pauline holds me. ‘I am so sorry, Bee.’ She says it over and over and over and we hold each other for a long time under the stars. When Pauline falls asleep, I stay awake and wait for the lady in the orange flappy hat.

It all happens so fast. Bobby is working on the pigpen, fixing where a family was leaning too hard and broke the boards. Every so often he looks over at Pauline.

She doesn’t notice him. She is loading her things in Arthur’s truck for the trip to Poughkeepsie. She carries out the bedroll, then the mattress, then the apple crates of clothes, and finally the shoe box with all her little notebooks filled with her poems. She keeps looking over at me and I know her face is red from all the crying about leaving me.

With each load, my tears roll faster. Bobby keeps clearing his throat and he lifts Cordelia out of the pen and brings her over and puts her in my arms just as the first
ting, ting, ting
s of August hail start falling, a thin pattering of ice all over us. I brush the bits from between Cordelia’s ears and run my fingers through the tracks they leave behind.

‘Can’t you do anything?’ I sob as Bobby just stands there watching Pauline packing her things. ‘I know you like her.’

Bobby gets all red in the face. He takes Cordelia from
my arms because Pauline is walking toward us. He doesn’t look Pauline in the eye.

But I do. ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,’ I sob. I hold on to her neck and get myself tangled in her hair.

Pauline sobs. Her whole body shakes. ‘Bee, I’ll be back before the winter comes. Ellis promised. We’ll go to Florida together.’ I know Ellis’s promises are good as pie crusts. They are always crumbling. ‘I didn’t know it would turn out like this, Bee. Honest, I didn’t.’ She cries more and more.

While I am all tangled up in Pauline’s hair, Arthur comes over to see what is taking so long.

‘Let her be,’ Bobby tells him.

But Arthur doesn’t listen. ‘Ellis wants us to meet him in Poughkeepsie tonight,’ he says, pulling Pauline’s arm and leading her away. I sink to the ground and the bits of hail are not
ting, ting, ting
ing, they are pelt, pelt, pelting. When I look up, Arthur is helping Pauline into the truck and she is turning and twisting to try and keep her eyes on me and then he is slamming the truck door and taking her away.

Peabody licks the streams of water off my cheek. I throw myself into the grass. He lies down beside me so I can bury my face in his fur and sob.

In a moment, Bobby pulls me off the soaking ground and leads me and Peabody to Eldora’s Museum of Mystery, where there are fat sofas to sit on and peanuts
to eat. Just before we go inside, I think maybe I see the thin fading outline of an orange flappy hat.

Folks hand over their money by the fistful at Eldora’s Museum of Mystery. This is because Eldora tells folks what they want to hear.

Basically, everybody wants to know two things from Eldora: will they get the love of their life, and will they get rich. This makes it very easy for a diviner like Eldora. She tells them yes, yes to all the questions that they are hopeful about, and she throws in just a teeny bit of trouble to make things sound right. She promises the girls will get husbands who look like Cary Grant, and the young men will each get an Ingrid Bergman. She tells everybody they will get a gold mine of money, too. It is hard to believe there is that much gold to go around.

Fat Man Sam says what Eldora does is a sin against God and nature, but Eldora tells him to shush up and he forgets all about sinning and everything else when he wants Eldora to tell his fortune awful bad.

‘She gives me the creeps,’ Pauline used to say, telling me to stay away from Crazy Eldora with the Bright Yellow Hair, as we all call her. But Eldora never gave me any trouble. She’s the one who told me about how lemons
would make my diamond disappear if I used enough of them.

When Bobby and I walk into the tent, we are dripping from all the rain and the hail. Eldora is laying out her cards on a small fold-up table.

‘We came to get dry, and that’s it.’ Bobby drops onto a fat sofa. I sink down beside him and look around for the dish of peanuts. There’s a dead butterfly on the wall that Eldora pinned to a piece of cardboard, its wings fanned wide so everyone can have a good look. It is so sad, I turn so I can’t see. Peabody jumps on my lap and turns around a few times before lying down. He has his eyes on Eldora.

Bobby leans back and shuts his eyes. ‘We don’t need any of your monkey business.’

Eldora jangles her bracelets as she deals her cards. Her yellow hair is tied up in silk scarves and she wears a church choir robe she found outside Manchester. The sleeves are so long they cover the cards and you can’t see what is happening under there.

‘That’s what you think I do in here? Tell folks voodoo and that sort of thing?’

‘Something like that.’ He opens one eye. ‘Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, as far as I can tell.’

I watch Eldora carefully. It is good to get my mind off things. Eldora scoops up the cards and fans them out across the table in a rainbow. Then she scoops them up again and shuffles them, making lots of interesting
snapping and popping sounds, and she sets one card on the table, face down.

‘This is the past,’ Eldora whispers in her slow and heavy divining voice. She turns the card over. It is the queen of hearts. She makes her voice so smoky I cough. ‘You had an affectionate, caring woman in your past.’

Yes. Yes, I did. I scratch Peabody between the ears and try not to feel the ache of Pauline leaving.

‘That’s enough.’ Bobby opens his eyes and glares at Eldora. ‘We just want a place out of the weather.’

The fortune-teller acts like she is in a trance and cannot hear anything from this world. She scoops up the queen card and pushes it into the middle of the deck. She puts the deck on the table and fans all the cards out again and pulls them back. Bobby folds his arms over his chest and closes his eyes. She scoops up the deck and splits it into three parts and stacks them together. She flips the bottom card onto the top. I hold my breath. Peabody watches everything she does. One of his ears is sticking up.

She lays the top card on the table.

‘This is the present.’

I cannot keep my heart from thumping.

She looks at me. ‘Do you want to know?’ Her voice is hoarse. ‘Some folks don’t want to know.’

I look at Bobby. He is breathing slowly. I picture Pauline walking off with Arthur.

‘You can’t get to your right future if you don’t take a
hard look at your present.’ Eldora waits for an answer.

I nod quickly.

Eldora flips over a three of spades. She looks at it for a moment and shuts her eyes for a very long time. I look nervously over at Bobby. He is snoring softly. I check how far it is to the door.

‘You’ve had a break in a relationship.’ Eldora opens her eyes. ‘Because of a third person, probably a man.’

I let my breath out slowly. Well, no kidding. Eldora watched Pauline giggle all silly over Arthur, same as anyone. I shrug.

‘This is the future.’ Eldora takes so long to flip over the last card I just about lose my patience and turn it over myself. When she finally snaps it onto the table, she lets out a tiny moan. She turns to me and stares.

‘What? What is it?’

‘Child,’ she says softly. ‘I had no idea.’

I push Peabody onto the floor and jump up and Eldora covers the card with her hand, but not before I see it is the nine of spades.

‘Is that bad?’ I ask her, even though I do not give a fig about her predictions and fortune-telling. ‘Is it bad?’ I search her eyes for truth. She looks away. I search through my sixth sense that Pauline told me I had so much of to see if I can figure out what it means to get a nine of spades.

Bobby opens his eyes and takes it all in, seeing
everything in an instant. ‘Come on, Bee,’ he says, jumping up. I lift Peabody into my arms.

‘Hold on to that funny-looking dog,’ Eldora says carefully, just sitting there and not doing anything about my future card that is sitting face up. ‘A friend like that is worth more than gold.’

I don’t need anybody telling me that, I think as I carry Peabody out into the rain. I already know that all by myself.