Chapter 5
Five
Loretta’s anger was hot, but her voice was ice cold as she repeatedly stabbed Captain’s chest with a forefinger to emphasize her words.
“No one has the right to buy another human being. You don’t have—no one has—the right to force a child to endure a crucible like that disgusting so-called stage act of yours, to endure it even once let alone over and over again. ”
Captain’s usual bluff and bluster deflated like a punctured tire.
He retreated from Loretta until he backed into a wall.
“I have papers. Papers signed by her mother. Adoption papers approved by a court.” He drew himself up in a pretense of righteous indignation.
“If you don’t get out of here right now, I’ll summon the police. ”
“Summon?” Loretta said. “Should we refer to you as your royal highness? Your majesty? Sure, all right, call the police. You think they’ll storm into a speakeasy that they’ve been paid to pretend doesn’t exist?
And if they do, after the raid, will management just break your legs or maybe put a bullet in your head? ”
Until now, Captain had viewed the world as a planet of rubes, marks to be bamboozled.
This couple that had invaded his domain were neither hicks nor gullible sophisticates.
They could not be cowed by threats, intimidated by pompous attitude, or snowed by an avalanche of words.
Captain suddenly realized that his usual feints and bold flourishes would not win the day.
His customary high self-regard melted like stage makeup under too many hot lights, and something of the boy he had once been came into view.
His round face swelled with petulance and, for the first time in my experience, he glistened with sweat.
There was anger in his eyes, but also confusion and fear.
Any difficult child looked like this as he worked himself into a tantrum.
His lower lip trembled. He made a fist of his right hand.
Franklin shouldered past Loretta and seized her would-be assailant’s wrist below the fist. With his other hand, he clutched Captain’s throat and pressed him so hard against the wall that my keeper’s ever-pale countenance flushed a shade of red that I found satisfying.
“Just settle down, Farnam. Don’t be stupid.
It’s over. You know it. We don’t need to see your papers.
No court would allow a man who’s not a relative—a carnival barker or whatever you are—to adopt a child as afflicted as this girl and put her on exhibit. ”
“You have no damn idea what a judge will do for money,” Captain declared, spittle springing from his lips. “People like you have no damn idea.”
Now and then the band played a few bars in support of whatever Buddy Beamer was doing onstage. The music seemed to come from far away, from another world.
Franklin’s anger didn’t put an edge on his voice, as his wife’s anger sharpened hers.
He sounded like a prosecutor calmly laying out the case against a defendant.
“Even if some judge was pitiless and corrupt enough to sell out to a piker like you, he’ll have scrubbed it from the public record.
So the charge is kidnapping. They fry you for that, Farnam.
But if you’re smart, it won’t go to court.
As much as we’d like to see you locked up, we can’t allow this girl to be splashed through the tabloids so the knuckle-dragging readers of those rags can gape at her and get a dirty little thrill. ”
Captain was certain of my dependence on him and of my inability to take the risk that ordering my life in a new way would be better than what he provided.
He could have tried to pry Franklin’s hand from his throat, but he didn’t.
Maybe he was afraid he’d be unable to do it.
He tried to shake off Franklin with a sneer of contempt and a pitchman’s bravura.
“You see Alida onstage for a few minutes, and you think you know all about her. You really get my blood up, you really do, you snotty high-hatters, you snobs. Black Tuesday meant nothing to you, millions out of work and worse ahead, but you slide through untouched, so then you think you know everything about everything. Well, you know nothing about this girl here. This girl gets her purpose and meaning from being onstage. She isn’t ashamed of her difference.
She likes the attention, how they marvel over her.
She gives them an education just by showing herself, teaches them about the whims of Nature, and that’s honorable work. ”
“I hate it,” I said. “I die a little bit every time. The only reason I’m not dead for real is because I figure you’d pickle my corpse and go on showing me in a big jar, wouldn’t need to buy me food or provide a place to sleep, more profit for less effort. I won’t give you that chance.”
They were all staring at me—Captain with keen vexation and disbelief, Franklin and Loretta with sympathy and a lovely anguish that made me feel as if, after years onstage, I was truly seen for the first time.
Loretta said, “I’m so sorry, honey, so very sorry.”
No one had ever spoken to me with such affection. I’m not sure why I pulled off my hood to let my hair fall around my face. Perhaps I wanted to remind her there was a part of me anyone might find easy to love if what my robe concealed could be put out of mind.
“You ungrateful little bitch,” the Captain said.
“After all I’ve done for you, all the trouble I’ve gone to.
If I’d never come along, your mother would have strangled you and thrown your lifeless body in a garbage dump to feed the rats.
” He had more—and much worse—to say. My longtime keeper might have indulged in a lengthy, vicious tirade, but after maybe half a minute, Franklin let go of Captain’s throat in order to punch him in the face.
Although I am a peaceful person, I will admit that, in this case, the sudden violence warmed my heart.
Captain had no inclination to defend himself if a face-to-face confrontation was required.
I suspect he preferred retribution of the knife-in-the-back variety.
With one hand over his bleeding nose, unsteady on his feet, he sidled along the wall to a straight-backed chair that protested the sudden burden of his bulk.
His voice hollowed by the need to pinch his nostrils shut to diminish the bleeding, he said, “That was assault and battery. You can go to jail for assault and battery.”
“After we resolve the matter before us,” Franklin said, “I’ll drive you directly to police headquarters so you can have me booked for assault and battery while I have you booked for violating this state’s child welfare laws and other crimes against a minor.”
“You broke my nose.”
“I didn’t break it,” Franklin said. “I punished it a little. Anyway, it wasn’t your best feature, the way it stuck out too far.”
“If you insist on having the whole story told,” Loretta warned Captain, “there will be outraged people standing in line to break your nose every day of the week.”
Franklin said, “Well put, darling.”
“Thank you, Franklin.”
Belatedly parsing what Franklin had said immediately after the assault, Captain asked, “Resolve what matter?”
“The future of this girl,” Franklin said. “Birth certificate—”
“There is no birth certificate.”
“Then tell us the place of birth.”
“On the road, in a carny bus, between one county fairground and another. Who bothers with a birth certificate for a thing like her?”
“What is her mother’s name?” Loretta asked.
“She had a dozen of them. I never knew her real name. I think even she didn’t know it anymore.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“Somewhere dead and buried, the way she lived her life.”
Loretta glanced worriedly at me, and Franklin asked Captain, “Lived it how?”
“She was an alcoholic. Loved her hashish. Laudanum. Ayahuasca. You name it. Good-looking woman. Had two occupations, if you want to know.” Captain lowered his hand from his nose and looked at me.
“She danced in the hootchy-kootchy show and whored herself to anyone who had seven dollars in his wallet.”
“You wretched sonofabitch,” Loretta said.
Captain shrugged. “You wanted to resolve the matter before us.”
Loretta came to me where I sat on the vanity bench with my back to the makeup table and mirror, and she put a hand on my shoulder. “You shouldn’t have had to hear that, honey.”
I met her eyes. They were a lovely shade of green. “It’s okay, ma’am. There are truths that can hurt you and truths that free you. All that he said was just the second kind.”
She got down on one knee and took one of my gloved hands. “You’re amazing, aren’t you. Everything changes now, sweetheart.”
I was about to ask how everything would change, which was when Franklin said, “If she wants to, the girl’s coming with Loretta and me. What will it take for you to just walk away?”
Captain stared at his bloody fingers for a long beat. “I never let go of what’s mine. I hold fast to it.”
“She isn’t yours. She never was. You can explain yourself to the police and make an argument for keeping her—or you can tell me how much you want to stay out of her life forever.”
“People like you think you can buy anything.”
“We’re not buying her. We’re paying ransom to her kidnapper, ransom to bring her home where she belongs.”
Captain looked up. There was a terrible meanness in his eyes. His lips glistened with blood that oozed out of his nose. I’d read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a compelling though fanciful novel that, just at this moment, didn’t seem so fanciful after all.
He said, “You can’t kidnap what the mother didn’t want, what the mother would have thrown away. If you save a dog from the pound before they put it down, that’s no crime.”
“So it’s the police, then,” Franklin said. “You’re that sure of yourself, are you?”
“I didn’t say police. I’m just laying my cards out so you can see it’s not for sure a losing hand. There’s potential in it.”
“Name a price.”