“When do you plan to tell Mom and Dad?”
“They’ll get the good news from him.”
“Oh no!” Cowboy groaned. “He’s actually going to ask for your wee little hand?”
“Something like that.”
“I couldn’t marry a Goody Two-shoes. I couldn’t be a minister’s wife.”
My Grandfather La Belle had discovered Little Lion at a conference on Christian Views of Eschatology. Which is another way of saying death. (My mother says crossed over, or passed on. No one dies in my mother’s head. They just go on to their next appointment, somewhere the living are not.)
My Grandfather La Belle immediately invited Little Lion to a TADpole party my mother gave last July Fourth.
Little Lion is nineteen, three feet five and a half inches tall, redheaded, and freckled, a catch, who proposed to me in bold script across a sheet of stationery with “WALK WITH ME”—LITTLE LION ENTERPRISES across the top:
Though you have worn my ring only two months, Little Little, my love, we must take long steps to catch up in this world—Hallelujah! I have faith enough for two and enough passion to turn your head around! I would like to announce our engagement at your big birthday celebration. I’ll be coming direct from another appearance on The Powerful Hour (wait until you see my new white double-breasted suit—it’ll blow you away!)…. Also, let me speak to your parents privately before you say anything. That’s traditional. The Bible teaches (Proverbs 22:28) “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” … How I wish my dear parents were alive to meet you! You remind me of my own sainted mother, darling one!
Little presents began arriving, each one with a Little Lion card attached across which he would write: “Love! Hallelujah!”
Among them was a book called Shadow of a Broken Man, by George Chesbro. The hero of the book was Mongo, a dwarf, who was a professor of criminology and a private detective who’d once been in the circus.
“The TADpoles should read this book,” Little Lion wrote. “Here’s a dwarf who got out of the freak show and made something of himself!”
I kept the book in my car library, along with other books Little Lion sent. Most of them weren’t novels, and nearly all of them were about overcoming obstacles.
“Doesn’t he ever read anything depressing?” Cowboy asked me once. “It’d get me down if I had to read about rising above it all the time!”
That morning in our room, Cowboy said she hoped I wasn’t just talking myself into him.
“Well, isn’t that what everyone wants, what last summer was all about? Getting me married?”
“Not necessarily overnight, Little Little.”
“Still, that’s what it was all about.”
Cowboy didn’t deny it.
“When Mom hears the news she’ll be overjoyed,” I said.
Cowboy didn’t deny that, either.
“I couldn’t find anybody better,” I said.
“At least he’s p.f.,” said Cowboy. “That’ll set her heart to beating.”
I said, “You like Little Lion, don’t you? Didn’t you like him when you met him?” I weighed the possibilities of telling my sister I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, watching an ash as long as my first finger dangle at the end of her cigarette before it fell to the rug atop other cigarette ashes. That alone didn’t impress me that Cowboy had good judgment.
Cowboy said, “The Japanese consider it bad luck to shorten your last name. Did you know that, Little Little?”
I said sayonara to any heart-to-heart talk with Cowboy, and went across to my bureau for my car keys.
On my way to Stardustburger, at the beginning of Stardust Park, I saw the same dwarf I’d seen there the day before.
He was walking along by himself, head down, kicking the autumn leaves.
I drove past him slowly, wishing I had the nerve to pull over and ask him if he wanted a ride somewhere.
I remembered the way Little Lion walked. He bounced. Everything about Little Lion was buoyant. I could almost feel a charge of energy when I touched the envelopes his letters arrived in, as though an even more miniature Knox Lionel were inside, racing up and down the loops of the script. His letters were always fat ones, with little fat hearts dotting the i’s. His handwriting was like he was: running boldly all over the place.
Sometimes late at night I imagined us somewhere in a little house raising kids who grew larger and larger, filled with his energy, breaking the furniture as they grew, their heads crashing through the ceilings, their arms holding us over their heads, laughing. “Hallelujah!”
While I was in my car eating my Morning Muffin, I watched the dwarf go inside Stardustburger.
I saw others watching him along with me, one big truck driver whirling around with a grin, nudging another man and pointing.
The dwarf skittered through the door, not looking in any direction but straight down.
He didn’t see me, I don’t think, but I decided to send him some sign that I was around, that he wasn’t the only one that morning.
7: Sydney Cinnamon
AFTER I WOKE UP in The Stardust Inn, I stood on a chair by the window and looked out at the lake, and what seemed like the beginning of another hot September day.
The heat from the lights in a TV studio was nothing compared to the heat of the sun under my shell, when I was performing out in the open. My commercials took less time to shoot, too, and I didn’t use up that much energy.
I hadn’t done my halftime act for a while, and I felt that I needed some kind of warm-up, so I decided to walk down to Stardustburger for breakfast, instead of ordering it served in my room.
I didn’t even have to ask where Opportunity was staying when he arrived in La Belle, but I did, and they told me at the desk he was expected sometime Sunday morning.
I left this note for him:
Dear Opportunity, Did anyone ever tell you that as Little Lion, in your white suit, you look like Pillsbury’s Poppin’ Fresh
