livin’ in!” Miss Green Glass groused, but she stalked into the hallway again
and the ruckus was over at least for the moment.
“Lord, I’m worn out!” Miss Blue Glass picked up an old church bulletin
and fanned herself with it. “Ben, get up and I’ll show you what you can be
playin’ if you’ll do your exercises like I’ve told you.”
“Yes ma’am!” He jumped up.
Miss Blue Glass settled herself on the piano bench. Her hands with their
long elegant fingers poised over the keyboard. She closed her eyes, getting in
the mood I guess. “I used to teach this song to all my students when I was
teachin’ piano full-time,” she said. “Ever heard of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’?”
“No ma’am,” Ben said. Davy Ray elbowed me in the ribs and rolled his
eyes.
“This is it,” Miss Blue Glass explained, and she began to play.
It wasn’t the Beach Boys, but it was nice. The music swarmed out of that
piano and filled up the room, and Miss Blue Glass swayed slightly from side to
side on the bench as her fingers rippled across the keyboard. I have to say,
it did sound pretty.
Then a terrible screech intruded. The hairs on the back of my neck stood
up and strained at their roots. The noise felt like jagged glass hammered into
your earhole.
“Skulls and bones! Hannah Furd! Skulls and bones! Cricket in Rinsin!”
Miss Blue Glass stopped playing. “Katharina! Feed him a cracker!”
“He’s goin’ crazy in here! He’s beatin’ at his cage!”
“Skulls and bones! Draggin me packin! Skulls and bones!”
I didn’t know if those words were what the thing was screaming, but
that’s what it sounded like to me. Ben, Davy Ray, Johnny, and I looked at each
other as if we’d walked into a nuthouse. “Hannah Furd! Crooaaakk! Cricket in
Rinsin!”
“A cracker!” Miss Blue Glass yelled. “Do you know what a cracker is?”
“I’ll crack your head in a minute!”
The screaming and screeching went on. Over this tumult, the door chimes
rang again.
“It’s that song, I’m tellin’ you!” Miss Green Glass hollered. “He goes
insane every time you play it!”
“Crooaaakk! Draggin me packin! Hannah Furd! Hannah Furd!”
I got up and opened the front door in prelude to running out. A
middle-aged man and a little girl eight or nine years old stood on the porch.
I recognized the man. Mr. Eugene Osborne was the cook at the Bright Star Cafe.
“We’re here for Winifred’s piano less—” he began, before the caterwauling
started up again. “Skulls and bones! Crooaaakk! Cricket in Rinsin!”
“What in the world is that racket?” Mr. Osborne asked, his hand on the
little girl’s shoulder. Her blue eyes were wide and puzzled. On Mr. Osborne’s
knuckles, I saw, were faded tattooed letters. A U.S. on the thumb, and on the
following fingers A, R, M, and Y.
“That’s my parrot, Mr. Osborne.” Miss Blue Glass came up and shoved me
aside. She was mighty strong to be so thin. “He’s havin’ a little trouble
lately.”
Miss Green Glass emerged from the hallway, carrying a bird cage that
contained the source of all that noise. It was a fairly large parrot, and it
was fluttering at the bars and shaking like a tornado-spun leaf. “Skulls and
bones!” it shrieked, showing a black tongue. “Draggin me packin!”
“You give him a cracker!” Miss Green Glass put the bird cage down on the
piano bench, none too gently. “I’m not gettin’ my fingers snapped off!”
“I fed yours all the time, and I sure risked my fingers!”
“I’m not feedin’ that thing!”
“Hannah Furd! Draggin me packin! Skulls and bones!” The parrot was a
bright turquoise blue, not a speck of any other color on him except for the
yellow of his beak. He attacked the bars, blue feathers flying.
“Well, then get him to the bedroom!” Miss Blue Glass said. “Put the night
cloth over him and settle him down!”
“I’m a slave! I’m just a slave in my own home!” Miss Green Glass wailed,
but she picked up the bird cage by its handle again and left the living room.
“Skulls and bones!” the parrot shrieked in parting. “Cricket in Rinsin!”
A door closed, and the noise was thankfully muffled.
“He has a little bitty problem,” Miss Blue Glass said to Mr. Osborne with
a nervous smile. “He doesn’t seem to like one of my favorite songs. Please
come in, come in! Ben, that finishes your lesson for this evenin’! Remember,
now! Thinkin’ cap on! Fingers flow like the waves!”
“Yes, ma’am.” Then he said under his breath to me, “Let’s get outta
here!”
I started out, following Davy Ray. The parrot had quieted, perhaps calmed
by its night cloth. And then I heard Mr. Osborne say, “First time I ever heard
a parrot curse in German.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Osborne?” Miss Blue Glass lifted her penciled-on
eyebrows.
I stopped at the door, and turned to listen. Johnny bumped into me.
“Curse in German,” Mr. Osborne repeated. “Who taught him those words?”
“Well, I… have no idea what you’re talkin’ about, I’m sure!”
“I was a cook for the Big Red One in Europe. Got the chance to talk to a
lot of prisoners, and believe me I know some foul words in German when I hear
’em. I just heard an earful.”
“My… parrot said those things?” Her smile flickered off and on. “You’re
mistaken, of course!”
“Let’s go!” Johnny told me. “The carnival’s waitin’!”
“Wasn’t just cursin’, either,” Mr. Osborne went on. “There were other
German words in there, but they were all garbled up.”
“My parrot is American,” Miss Blue Glass informed him with an upward tilt
of her chin. “I have no earthly idea what you’re talkin’ about!”
“Well, okay, then.” He shrugged. “Don’t matter none to me.”
“Boys! Will you close that door and stop lettin’ all the heat out?”
“Come on, Cory!” Davy Ray called, already astride his bike. “We’re late
enough as it is!”
A door opened in the back. Miss Green Glass said from the hallway, “He’s
quiet now, thank the Lord! Just don’t play that song again, whatever you do!”
“I’ve told you it’s not that song, Katharina! I used to play it for him
all the time and he loved it!”
“Well, he hates it now! Just don’t play it!”
Their squawking was beginning to remind me of two squabbling old parrots,
one blue and one green. “Close that door, if you please!” Miss Blue Glass
yelled at me, and Johnny gave me a shove onto the porch to uproot my feet. He
closed the door behind us, but we could still hear the Glass sisters clamoring
like buzz saws. I pitied that poor little Osborne girl.
“Those two are loony!” Ben said as he got on his bike. “Man, that was
even worse than school!”
“You must’ve done somethin’ to make your mom awful mad at you,” was Davy
Ray’s opinion. “Time’s wastin’!” He gave a whoop and took off in the direction
of the carnival, his bike’s pedals flying.
I lagged behind the others, though they kept yelling for me to catch up.
German curse words, I was thinking. How come Miss Sonia Glass’s parrot knew
German curse words? As far as I knew, neither of the sisters spoke anything
but Southern English. I hadn’t realized Mr. Osborne was in the Big Red One.
That, I knew from my reading, was a very famous infantry division. Mr. Osborne
had really been there, on the same war-torn earth as Sgt. Rock! Wow, I
thought. Neato!
But how come the parrot knew German curse words?
Then the happy sounds of the carnival drifted to me along with the aromas
of buttered popcorn and carameled apples. I left the German-cursing parrot
behind, and sped up to catch my buddies.
We paid our dollars at the admission gate and threw ourselves into the
carnival like famished beggars at a feast. The strings of light bulbs gleamed
over our heads like trapped stars. A lot of kids our age were there, along
with their parents, and some older people and high school kids, too. Around us
the rides grunted, clattered, and rattled. We bought our tickets and got on
the Ferris wheel, and I made the mistake of sitting with Davy Ray. When we got
to the very top and the wheel paused to allow riders on the bottommost
gondola, he grinned and started rocking us back and forth and yelling that the
bolts were about to come loose. “Stop it! Stop it!” I pleaded, my body
freezing solid to offset his elasticity. At that height, I could see all
across the carnival. My gaze fell on a garish sign with crude green jungle
fronds and the red, dripping words FROM THE LOST WORLD.
I paid Davy Ray back in the haunted house. When the warty-nosed witch
jumped out of the darkness at our clanking railcar, I grabbed the back of his
neck and wailed to shame the scratchy recorded gibberings of ghost and goblin.
“Quit it!” he said after he’d come down onto his seat again. Outside, he told
me the haunted house was the dumbest thing he’d ever seen in his life and it
wasn’t even a bit scary. But he sure was walking funny, and he hustled himself
off to the row of portable toilets.
We stuffed our faces with cotton candy, buttered popcorn, and glazed
miniature doughnuts. We ate candied apples covered with peanuts. We packed
away corn dogs and drank enough root beer to make our bellies slosh. Then Ben
wanted to ride the Scrambler, with results that were not pretty. We got him
into one of the portable toilets, and luckily his aim was good and his clothes
were spared a Technicolor splatter.
Ben passed on entering the tent that displayed the big, wrinkled one-eyed
face. Davy Ray almost chewed his way through the canvas in his hurry to get in
there, but Johnny and I went with him against our better judgment.
In the gloomy confines, a dour-looking man with a nose as large as a dill
pickle held court before a half dozen other freak aficionados. He went on for
a while about the sins of the flesh and the eye of the Lord. Then he drew back
a small curtain and switched on a spotlight and there in a big glass bottle
was a shriveled, pink and naked baby with two arms, two legs, and a Cyclops
eye in the center of its domed forehead. I winced and Johnny shifted
uncomfortably when the man picked up the formaldehyde-filled bottle, the
Cyclops baby drifting in its dream. He started showing it to everybody up
close. “This is the sin of the flesh, and here’s the eye of God as punishment
for that sin,” he said. I had the feeling he might get along famously with
Reverend Blessett. When the man paused in front of me, I saw that the eye was
golden, like Rocket’s. The baby’s face was so wrinkled it might have been that
of a tiny old man, about to open his toothless mouth and call for a sip of
white lightning to ease his aches. “Notice, son, how the finger of God has
wiped clean the means of sin,” the man said, his baggy-drawered eyes glinting
with a spark of evangelical fever. I saw what he meant: the baby had neither
male nor female equipment. There was nothing but wrinkled pink skin down
there. The man turned the bottle to show me the baby’s back. The baby drifted
against the glass, and I heard its shoulder make a soft wet noise of
collision.
I saw the Cyclops baby’s shoulder blades. They were thick, bony
protrusions. Like the stumps of wings, I thought.
And I knew. I really did.
The Cyclops baby was somebody’s angel, fallen to earth.
“Woe to the sinner,” the man said as he moved on to Johnny and Davy Ray.
“Woe to the sinner, under the eye of God.”
“Ah, that was a gyp!” Davy Ray ranted when we were outside on the midway
again. “I thought it was gonna be alive! I thought it could talk to you!”
“Didn’t it?” I asked him, and he looked at me like I was halfway around
the bend.
We went to a show where motorcycle drivers raced around and around a
caged-in cylinder, the engines screaming right in front of our faces and the
tires gripping disaster’s edge. Then we went to the Indian pony show, under a
large tent where palefaces who wouldn’t know Geronimo from Sitting Bull jumped
around in loincloths and feathers and tried to spur some spirit into horses
one hay bale away from the glue factory. The finale came when a wagon with
cowboys on it circled the tent with the pseudo-Indians in pursuit, and the
cowboys shot off their blanks and the white redmen hollered and ran for their
lives. Alabama history was never so boring, but at the end of the show Johnny
gave a wan smile and said that one of the ponies, a little tawny thing with a
swayed back, looked as if it really could gallop if it had half a field.
By this time Davy Ray was freak-hungry again, so we accompanied him to
see a rail-skinny red-haired woman who could make electric bulbs light up by
holding them in her mouth. Next was the Al Capone Death Car, the display of
which showed bleeding bodies sprawled on a city sidewalk while leering
gangsters raked the air with tommy-gun bullets. The actual car, which had a
dummy behind the wheel and four dummies standing there gawking at it, was a
piece of junk Mr. Sculley would’ve scorned. We hung in with Davy Ray, as he
worked up to speed. The Gator Boy, the Human Caterpillar, and the
Giraffe-Necked Woman lured him from behind their canvas folds.
And then we rounded a corner, and we caught that smell.
Just a hint of it, drifting down at the bottom below the reeks of
hamburger grease and doughnut fat.
Lizardy, I thought.
“Ben’s messed his pants!” Davy Ray said. He should talk.
“Did not!” Ben ought to know by now not to invoke this vicious cycle.
“There it is,” Johnny said, and right in front of me was the huge red
LOST with THE and WORLD on either side of it.
The trailer had steps that went up into a large, square boxcarlike
opening. A dingy brown curtain was pulled across it. At the ticket booth, a
man with greasy strands of dark hair combed flat across his bald skull was
sitting on a stool, chewing on a toothpick and reading a Jughead comic book.
His small, pale blue marbles of eyes flickered up and saw us, and he reached
drowsily for a microphone. His voice rasped through a nearby speaker: “Come
one, come all! See the beast from the lost world! Come one, come…” He lost
interest in his spiel and returned to the cartoon balloons.
“Stinks around here,” Davy Ray said. “Let’s go!”
