Long after she was out of chaps and boots, she had a thing for horses (and still does, though it does her no good, my father won’t buy her one). She went on for a while to her sports stage. Anything that bounced or could be thrown and caught was all she cared about. She spent long hours in the den with my father in the blue light of the boob tube cheering on men with first names like Bucky and Buzz, her dinner served on a tray the same as my father’s.
The death and suicide stage came in her early teens and was a disguised way of protesting having to have anything to do with me outside our home. She took to her bed rather than have to wait for me in front of school, or sit with me in the cafeteria, or say I was her sister.
Now it is hard to tell which one of us is most strange, me or Cowboy, though a dwarf will always look stranger anywhere.
Cowboy doesn’t wear her ten-gallon hat and chaps to school anymore, but in other ways she lives up to her name. She is tall enough to be sought out by the La Belle High girls’ basketball team (the only ones at school who seek her out) and walks as though she just got off the horse she wishes she owned. She spits sometimes, swears she doesn’t, but she stops and hawks into the gutters—I’ve seen her do it. And she smokes Camel cigarettes with no hands. A Camel dangles from her mouth at all times away from home and school, and she lopes around like some tall farm boy coming in from the wheat fields. Her hair is all tight curls, to her shoulders, and tangled, never combed. She claims a comb won’t go through it. Whatever she says comes out of the corner of her mouth. Her shy smiles are always tipped and she rarely shows teeth when smiling. I imagine that she smells of hay and manure, not a bad smell but a musky one my mother says is all in my head: “No one else smells Cowboy, Little Little.”
Cowboy likes to laugh with her hands in her pockets and her head thrown back, and when she’s not relaxed she cracks her knuckles.
“When is Life going to straighten you around!” my mother cries at her, and hugs her, says, “Oh, Cowboy, you are something, aren’t you?”
Our little town in the Finger Lakes, upstate New York, has been partially saved from economic disaster by the arrival of the Twinkle Traps plant, which is Japanese-owned. And Cowboy has been saved from being ostracized by nearly everyone except the girls’ basketball team, by glomming onto Mock Hiroyuki, a Japanese boy her same age, fifteen, new to our town and the country’s customs.
Cowboy is now in her Japanese stage.
She enters our house calling out “Kon-nici-wa,” and leaves with “Sayonara!”
If we ever need Cowboy for anything, we know she is at the Hiroyukis’.
3: Sydney Cinnamon
I WAS ALWAYS A sentimental fellow. My eyes teared at the memories of old times and leaked at the sounds of old songs recalling past days with friends I never saw anymore. I had favorite places, too, and one of them was Stardust Park.
Immediately after I checked into The Stardust Inn that hot Friday afternoon in September, I walked down to the park, even though I knew it was closed because it was off season.
Stardust Park was only thirty miles from The Twin Oaks Orphans’ Home.
When I was at Twin Oaks, I lived in Miss Lake’s cottage, where most of the handicapped lived. There were ramps for wheelchairs there instead of stairs, and sinks and closets and drinking fountains, et cetera, were lower to accommodate us.
All the kids who lived in Miss Lake’s called it Mistakes.
There was every kind of kid to be expected there, but I was the only dwarf.
Stardust Park in the summer was a miniature Disneyland, filled with all the things you’d find in one of those places, from a 62-MPH roller coaster to a ten-foot walking chicken.
I was taken there one time with some others from Mistakes, just as the sun was rising in the early morning sky.
We always went to public places before the public was allowed in.
Some of the employees who ran the rides and sold the souvenirs were sitting around having their morning coffee.
Even though they were supposed to be prepared for the visit from Twin Oaks, they didn’t look it. Their heads whirled around as we filed past them, and I said under my breath, “MyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?”
I always said what everyone watching us was thinking when we came into view. OhmyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?
There was me, and there was Wheels Potter, who had no legs and got about on a board with roller-skate wheels attached to it. There was Bighead Langhorn, whose head was the size of an enormous pumpkin set on a skinny body just a little taller than mine. There was Wires Kaplan, with his hearing aid and his thick glasses and his bum leg. There was Cloud, the one-armed albino, in his dark glasses with his massive head of curly white hair the texture of steel wool. There was Pill Suchanek, whose mother had taken some drug before Pill was born that threw her whole body out of whack and left her with flippers for arms. There were a few in wheelchairs and one on crutches, all led by a teacher we nicknamed Robot, because his first name was Robert and his only
