She reached up and loosened the string tied around the mole on her chin. “I expect this big old mole ought to be falling off before long,” she said. “This string here’s cutting off the blood to it.” Holding both ends she pulled the knot a little tighter and retied the bow.
She held out two peppermint sticks for us to take. I noticed her long fingernails were yellowed and dirty. I’d wash the candy when I got home.
“I’ve got to keep candy hidden,” she said, nodding in the old man’s direction, “on account of he gets choked easy. I’ve got to keep an eye on him while he’s eating it too.” She handed him a piece of twisted peppermint. “Now you just suck on that, you hear?”
The candy was our signal to leave. It was time for the six o’clock news.
Like most everybody I knew, the Dunkleys never missed it.
The familiar voice of Gabriel Heatter came over the radio as the screen door banged closed behind us:
“Ah, there’s good news tonight.”
We went to bed before the chickens stopped squabbling, leaving Aunt Lila and Charles Landwehr in the front room talking and drinking a second pot of coffee. And that’s where Grandma found them when she came downstairs the next morning. They’d talked the whole night through. She sent Aunt Lila upstairs to bed and Charles Landwehr to the guest room downstairs.
The Morning Glory Tourist Home was cancelled.
Charles Landwehr called his sister back in New Jersey to tell her he’d been invited to stay another week and he was taking us up on the offer.
“I’m having too much fun to leave now,” I heard him say. “Here, they cook cats and chase each other with butcher knives—and the whole lot of them think they’re normal.”
It was a lightning-quick romance.
He proposed fast and Aunt Lila said yes fast. Grandpa asked if they were sure what they were getting themselves into.
“Absolutely not,” Charles Landwehr replied, “but sometimes you have to take a deep breath and jump in the deep end.”
Aunt Lila said she couldn’t swim a lick, but she was jumping.
Grandma made the bride a blue-velvet suit to wear for the wedding, and Vonnie and I held boughs of greenery tied with strips of the blue velvet. Grandpa lent the groom a blue striped tie.
And so it happened that before the two week visit was up, Grandpa married Aunt Lila to Charles Landwehr in our back yard, autumn leaves drifting down on them like blessings.
22
There Be Dragons
The half-man, half-woman stood at the back of the stage. He or she, I wasn’t sure which, wore a full skirt and a shirt and tie. I thought I noticed a slight swell of breasts. A dozen or so people milled around waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. The men, coal miners most of them, wore overalls or blue jeans. They bent forward and hacked shards of blackened lungs into red bandanas to hide the blood. Their women, some holding children by the hand, wore pageboys and clean print dresses.
The carnival was in town, and Vonnie and I had talked Grandma into letting us go. We each got a dollar to spend, plus we’d broken our piggy bank and split another dollar and eighty-two cents. Grandma was still hanging in the car window giving my brother Hursey instructions as Grandpa pulled out of the driveway. This was the first time she’d let Hursey be in charge of us. He was sixteen, my sister, Vonnie, eleven, and I was nine.
As soon as Grandpa got out of sight, Hursey took off with his best friend, Billy Johnson, making us promise to meet them in an hour at the big beacon light that fanned over the town every night, beckoning people to come.
Madame Vadoma had set herself up near the entrance to the carnival, which was only a short piece down the hard road from the gypsy camp. Her “KNOWS ALL, SEES ALL, TELLS ALL” sign leaned against a table where she sat, long bony fingers splayed around a clear glass ball set in the middle. The gypsy man standing nearby sawed away at his violin, trying to drum up some business, but the people hurrying by hardly gave them a glance.
They’d probably seen the gypsies before.
Now they had a need for something new.
The barker called out to us. “Try your luck right here! Bust three balloons and take your pick from that bottom shelf for just one thin dime. Everybody wins and nobody loses. Come on over here, Blondie, win that kewpie doll you been eyeing.”
Flush with money and raring to spend it, Vonnie tried for the kewpie doll with the curl on its forehead, but after spending thirty cents and only winning a paddle-ball and two kazoos, she gave up.
The man’s eyes followed my sister as she walked away.
We stopped at the carousel and Vonnie climbed on a palomino that matched her hair, while I mounted a wild black steed with flashing red eyes. We scuffed through the sweet smelling sawdust to the refreshment stand and bought ten-cent hotdogs and pink cotton candy for another dime each, eating as we gawked up at the rusty old Ferris wheel. Although I wasn’t too keen on the idea, I let Vonnie talk me into getting on it. The old wheel lurched and screeched up and up as riders were loaded into the swinging seats below. Just as we got to the top, it shook itself like a wet dog and stopped dead, holding us captive high above the midway while the operator cussed and kicked at the gunked-up machinery to get it started again. Vonnie, who tended toward a nervous stomach, began to heave. I told her to stick her head over the side, and she did, just in time to puke up pink cotton candy. I didn’t see where the throw-up landed, but I imagined it splatting down all warm and gooey on somebody’s bald head. When I told her that, she
