Truants
| Truants |
| Ron Carlson |
| USA |
| (1981) |
Holz is escaping from her father, a carnival daredevil. Heading west
from Arizona, they meet a third member of the novel’s family—Will Clare,
elderly and forgetful but full of rich memories.
yourself in to the nearest mortuary. Your heart has ceased to function.
This book is about the innate hunger of the human heart to belong. To be
part of a family unit whether or not there are blood ties. It’s about
the refusal of the American adult to be bothered with those young enough
or old enough to be a nuisance. And it’s about the most touching book
I’ve read in many a moon.” —Carolyn Vaughter,
Houston Chronicle
truants
By the same author
Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The News of the World
For my Mother and Father,
Verna Mertz Carlson and Edwin Carlson
…
and other parents
,
Bernice and George Craig
How many chins will you have?
What color will your hair be?
LOUISA HOLZ
Our only hope is to make it to the highway.
KEVIN McCARTHY
in
The Body Snatchers
Contents
*************
4.
Raymond Steele, Mike Rawlins
5.
Electrocution as a Way of Life
6.
The Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls
18.
The Blue Mesa Boarding Home
*******
First
, a pure vision: cut from the night sky like a white coin, a girl rides a trapeze in a spotlight. Her silver circus suit sheds its sequins like falling radiation visible for a second in the extreme light, and gone, sprinkling down through the Arizona dark two hundred feet into the mouths of the crowd. Her image is so bright it puts out the moon. She is connected to the earth, the state fairgrounds, this way: her trapeze hangs from a motorcycle above her; the motorcycle rides on grooved tires along a stout inclined wire that reaches steeply back thirty-five degrees to the wooden platform, fifty feet from where I stand. She sits, still as silver, holding the trapeze, her hands out on the bar, her ankles and knees, symmetries together, her bottom white to the crowd.
Then
, a pure sound: a nine-decibel roar, dragon speech, blasts continually from the motorcycle. It coats the whole picture with the raw edge of mayhem, impending catastrophe, accident. The noise is of a magnitude reminiscent of mishaps in rocketry. It flattens our hair and bends our ears; it holds us here like a press, pushing us to earth while the girl draws us upward.
The sight and sound are transcendent, compelling; they call us away from the Arizona State Fair into the realm of high art, high risk, high hopes. They have certainly calmed this mob; they rush me in a new way.
Safely below in the night and the noise on a little platform of his own, stands the third member of this dangerous attraction, Mr. C. B. Borkanida, an international electrician of Japanese ancestry, who manually swivels the huge damaged light-shell along the wire, following the girl as she ascends under the motorcycle, creating the vision. It is this vision which is impressed indelibly in my memory. The spotlight makes a girl in a crumbling carnival costume, who is scared into stasis, appear to be the princess of us all, and it is a compelling effect.
It compelled me to come out of my barn where I shoveled manure for one hundred and forty prize cattle. It compelled me at twelve, four, eight, and midnight when I’d hear the black rasp of Ring Holz’s black frame motorcycle. Ring Holz would crank, choke, and race that motorcycle with singular animosity while an announcer whispered through static all over the fairgrounds: “Ladies and Gentlemen! In the Horticultural Square, the Arizona State Fair proudly presents Ring Holz and his International Death-Defying Motorcycle Ride!” Then Ring would raise one hand from the handlebars to wave cheerlessly; he had to wring the accelerator with the other to keep the machine from inhaling a belch and dying; and a girl in a stiff, soiled silver bathing suit would appear by his side in the motorcycle thunder. She would nod and take her place on the bar beneath the vibrating homemade junkmobile. The drum-roll was recorded; it didn’t matter. Ring would bear down in earnest and the motorcycle and the attached trapeze would ascend along the broad black wire.
At least twice a day the cycle would die while Ring was waving at the assemblage in Horticultural Square, and the girl would grimly hold the bar while the bike slid slowly back to the starting platform where Ring would jump around on the starter until gas caught, and, shuddering, they’d reascend.
At the top, he’d stop and wave at the crowd, and then, because he was expected to, I guess, he would stand on his bald head on the seat of the machine. He still had to twist the accelerator to keep the thing alive, and as he did, a roiling, humid mist of unburnt petroleum fell among the spectators. The girl never moved. She sat, as I’ve said, still as any precious metal, and she compelled me to quit the shoveling to come take a look.
Days, I’d stand in the flat, sharp shadow of the barn leaning on my shovel, watching that girl turn gray in the exhaust. Nights, which I preferred. I’d stand just out of the yellow square of light that fell from the barn door, watching her in the perfection which night allows.
The citizens at the fair filed past me into the barn to show their children what cattle were. They all repeated the same wisecracks about the cows and the cowshit. All one hundred and forty cattle in the barn looked exactly alike, except for Hippo, a Charolais bull, who received more attention than the cows, not because he was male, but because of his close resemblance to the kind of monsters which threaten metropolitan centers in old movies. Actually, he just looked like a mutant, dehorned, white rhinoceros. The crowd milled through, while outside in the sky the girl on the bar sucked the deadly motorcycle smoke.
It was there, leaning on a shovel in the Arizona evening, an atmosphere redolent of exhaust, cowshit, popcorn, and occasionally marijuana, as I watched a man stand on his head on a motorcycle seat waving at the multitudes, that I realized that though there were millions of girls in the same world in which I was a boy, there were really only two kinds. One kind strolls past, their breasts unencumbered and lilting with their stride, within reach, the kind you’d like to roll upon suddenly in a tight urgent embrace meant to alleviate glandular distress. The other kind are the ones you could look at forever as they sit on trapezes in the thundering distance, trailing their ankles in wind indifferently, ignorant of you. And I realized that the second kind of girl, a kind of disembodied figure—a vision—was the most intriguing.
This is only a digression in that it does not speak of the decisions incipient in my head at the time, the decisions to run away from the Noble Canyon Home, to distinguish myself from Steele and his felonious attitude, to hop a train, to find my father.
Among the many lies I might tell, I do not want to picture the state fair days that summer as being unconfused in a massive way. They are plainly impossible to sort out, interpret. I have enough trouble understanding one thing at a time, let alone the way it leads to another. But the vision of that girl is central; somehow that silver circle and its terminal descent became the catalyst for my flight—it compelled me to write the future more than Steele and Rawlins, more than the dead bear, even more than the letter from my father could have ever compelled me.
And even after I’d decided to run, it was with the plaguing anxiety that I had broken my only egg rather than put it in one basket.
*********
Let me tell you what I could have done. Let me point out the
impossibilities
.
I could have relaxed, taken a deep breath, and played with the cards I was dealt, instead of asking to draw three, tipping over the table, throwing my chair and my few chips out the window. As it were. Excuse me. I could have sanely kept my summer job at the Arizona State Fair, cleaning the cowbarn, until September when I would have returned to my senior year in school at the Noble Canyon Home where I was a resident, where I was incarcerated. It might have been a good idea, since I would have had an entire year free of my friend Steele’s malevolent influence and dire tutelage. Steele was getting out, graduating, in one month and he had applied for another state job which was a sure thing. I could have tried to locate my father by using the phone book, the yellow pages, or a private detective instead of acting beserkly, and in the first person, which for me at the time was the same thing.
I could have.
Except: 1. Steele was going to assassinate me. 2. Ring Holz was going to assassinate his daughter. 3. I had a ride.
Besides, let me ask you a question: Have you ever been so completely, fundamentally misunderstood that you felt completely and fundamentally alone, I mean so radically alone that you felt alone even in your own body? The question is better put: Have you ever committed mildly felonious acts in your own home in order to discourage your father from entertaining a series of unreluctant divorcees, and have him respond—over a two year period—with nothing, then reproof, then silence, then legal action? Have you ever been put in the state facilities for the ungovernable? Don’t answer. At the charged age of twelve?
I had not planned an extended life as a criminal. I had, I admit, designed a short interval of disruptive activities in our north Phoenix home which were meant as
corrective
. What a word.
I want to get this all correct.
My mother, Elizabeth Gary Elder, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June of 1940. Her father, Grant Gary, was killed in an automobile accident in the Philippines while serving with the Marines there in 1944. At the age of five, at the war’s end, my mother was already a serious person, older than her years. My grandmother never remarried, and instead turned her energies toward raising and educating my mother. This was in Minneapolis. My mother, as a result, became a very careful, literate, and as I said, serious young woman. She was a promise in every one of her teacher’s lives.