Louise Hawes

His brother used to trap Payton the same way every time. “What a beauty!” Eddie would stretch out that last word, pulling it like a lure through still water. “You gotta see this!” And Payton would always believe, always follow after, eager to share his brother’s latest miracle.

Lots of times, it was dead things. Eddie would stop a few feet ahead of Payton on the sidewalk. “Wow!” he’d say, standing above a dark shape in the gutter, then getting down on his haunches and staring fixedly. “C’mere, Pay.”

Payton, four years younger and forever trying to narrow the margin, would run to catch up with his brother. Eddie’s husky voice promised wonders: “Look at this, will ya?” Payton would stoop, a compliant shadow, and study the shape in the street. Often it was a squirrel, or a pigeon; once it had been a raccoon. A car had literally squeezed the life out of it. Payton had wanted to throw up, but he’d felt Eddie behind him, known without turning how his brother stood with his hands on his hips, his mouth tight and scornful. So he’d forced himself to look, to watch the upturned snout, the flies congregating around the jelly of the open eyes.

He had run home that day, and raced upstairs to his mother’s room. In the dark, he’d opened one of her dresser drawers. Sobbing, he’d patted the filmy clouds of stockings, inhaled the gardenia scent of her sachet, and lifted a cool silk slip to his face.

The sideshow would be different, though. Payton was sure of it. He was older now, after all, and the whole thing had been his idea. A traveling circus had set up on the Little League field, and the posters were all over town: BRAND NEW FOR 1954! HANDEE’S MUTANTS AND MONSTERS! The sideshow boasted such “Mystifying Mistakes of Nature” as a Fat Woman (her picture showed her balanced in a scale opposite a blue pickup), a five-legged calf, and a Wildman who ate metal and had to be kept behind bars like an animal.

But it wasn’t any of these misfits that interested Payton, who often felt like a mistake himself, glabrous and unfinished beside his lean, confident brother. It was the Tattooed Lady he’d set his heart on seeing. Her poster was the largest of all: It showed her standing, hands on hips, smiling with pride at her magnificently decorated skin.

There were kittens on her arms, a jungle scene on her belly; there were lilies and Chinese dragons and exploding volcanoes—all in commanding, vibrant hues. Most astonishing, loveliest of all, Payton thought, was the green-and-yellow cobra, its hood spread wide, its ruby eyes flashing, that crawled from the lucky lady’s left foot to the top of her thigh.

But Payton didn’t tell Eddie about the kittens or the jungle; he knew how the game was played. “They’re freaks,” he said, knowing the seduction the word held for his brother. “Freaks of nature.”

Eddie pretended not to be interested, but Payton saw the way he forgot himself for a second, the way his eyes widened. So Payton persisted, begged for three days straight, until, finally, the deal was struck. He swore he would be his brother’s slave for a month, no backsies, if Eddie would help him sneak into the show.

Even though he was almost twelve and had begun to think of himself as a teenager, Payton was too young to view legally what waited behind the striped tent flap at the back of the fairgrounds. So, persuaded by the fact that slaves not only had to do your bidding but would also keep quiet about what time you snuck back home from seeing Ella Louise Baines, Eddie paid and went into the tent without his kid brother.

From there, he had promised to scuttle along the canvas, looking for cover. His search probably took only a few moments, but the wait seemed endless to Payton, who remained faithfully rooted to the spot he’d been assigned outside. Finally, Eddie ducked behind a providential trash barrel, lifted the tent’s hem, and whistled with one finger the way Payton never could.

Once inside, Payton found he was shorter than everyone else and had to walk on his toes, straining to see over shoulders, around heads. There were more people in the tent than he’d expected, mostly men, all laughing loudly and pointing. Disappointed in the five-legged calf, whose fifth leg was little more than a stringy extra tail, he and Eddie joined the crowd around the Fat Woman’s metal folding chair. The men jostled and nudged one another with their elbows. “Boy, that’s a mountain of love,” shouted one. “I’d sure as hell want topsies with her!”

The woman sat for their inspection, insulated by her shiny folds. Lost in the flesh of her face, two small eyes stared out impassively at her tormentors. “Where’d you get that dress?” someone beside Payton yelled. “The circus lend you a tent?” Payton turned to see Eddie, felled by his own cleverness, doubled over with laughter.

Payton, who was used to Eddie’s teasing, suspected that the Fat Woman, too, knew how to take words that were hurled at her and turn them into a sort of music, a loud, bristling symphony that, if you focused, got fainter and fainter until it hardly mattered at all. So he and the woman waited until Eddie had had enough, until he led his brother away from the crowd and they moved at last toward the pale green curtain where Payton’s favorite poster was hung.

When they saw her, though, the Tattooed Lady was the biggest disappointment of all. She was such a letdown, in fact, that Payton tugged on his brother’s shirt until Eddie turned around. When he had the older boy’s attention, Payton complained, indignantly and much too loudly, as if he’d suddenly mastered Eddie’s cynicism, “She’s not like the picture at all!”

And she wasn’t. None of the intricate wonders on the poster had been reproduced on this woman’s sallow, lifeless flesh. She sat, rather than stood, as if even she knew she had nothing to show off. She wore a stiff, corseted bathing suit like the one Payton and Eddie’s mother put on once a year when the family went to Kreller’s Amusement Park and Swim Land. Covering the parts of the woman that weren’t hidden by the suit was a jumble of blotches that had, undoubtedly, once been separate tattoos. But they had long ago lost most of their colors and run together in a sort of purple rash.

Here and there, Payton could pick out the faded suggestion of a howling wolf or letters that still yearned, vaguely, to spell something—a name, maybe? But there were no volcanoes, no rain forests, and, though he checked every surface except the undersides of the woman’s legs, no bright and rippling cobra like the one that had figured so prominently in the poster.

When the Tattooed Lady finally looked up at them, then turned away to spit, like a man, on the ground beside her camp stool, Eddie pushed Payton back toward the curtain. “C’mon, Pay,” he said. “There’s stuff way better than this.”

Payton let his brother lead him away, followed him to a new crowd that had formed around another exhibit. Surprisingly, though, these men were all silent. Not one laughed or pointed or dug his elbow into his neighbor’s ribs. The girl they watched was painting with her teeth.

Even if the men had yelled or stamped, Payton decided, the girl couldn’t have heard them. She and her canvas and paints were sealed away from them in a small glass booth, where, he hoped, the smells of cotton candy and elderly apples glazed with syrup couldn’t reach her.

She was young, not much older than Eddie. Payton, who stared in wonder at her lovely, flushed face, at first thought the girl was behind glass because she was so beautiful. He had a box at home, a velvet-covered heart that had once held chocolates. He’d rescued it from the trash and used it to save things he liked to look at, things he wanted to keep forever. The girl in the booth wasn’t splashy and loud like the poster of the Tattooed Lady, or sparkly and hard like Eddie’s girl, with her perfectly arched and penciled brows. This girl was softer than that—a tune hummed instead of sung; a dream you couldn’t remember when you woke up; a pale, small-faced violet poking through moss. Payton stood for a full minute, spellbound in front of the glass, before he realized the girl he was staring at had no arms or legs.

Her torso was strapped to a cushioned chair, and she was dressed in a pink cotton blouse, its empty sleeves hanging limp at her sides. The bottom of the blouse, under the black strap at her waist, was folded and neatly draped over the cushion.

Payton willed her to look up, but she ignored the faces trained on her. It was as if he and the rest of the crowd didn’t exist, as if they stood behind a one-way mirror, their stares and whispers bouncing off the glass. The girl concentrated on her work instead, never once taking her eyes from the tangle of flowers and leaves on the canvas propped in front of her chair.

Gently, methodically, her lips closed around the tapered handle of a paintbrush. As if she were sipping from a straw, she sucked it from a forest of palette knives and brushes in a drinking glass on the table beside her. Next, she dipped the brush into a pot of paint, like one of the stolid, round jars Payton had used in kindergarten.

Her eyes nearly closed as she stroked glistening red along the canvas. Everywhere her brush touched, a bright rose blossomed like sudden blood. Her lips trembled and puckered, and the quick flowers bloomed in miraculous patches. Payton watched, mesmerized, until Eddie broke the spell. “God,” he said, sounding strangely awed, “that gimp sure can paint, can’t she?”

It was then Payton started to imagine what the girl looked like under her pink blouse. Warm and guilty, he pictured breasts and pubic hair floating under the sheer fabric. A body that couldn’t do anything, a body you could do anything to.

He tried to shake off the nauseating sweetness, the sticky residue coating his throat and nostrils. He wondered if the girl had heard Eddie, if she felt where the men’s eyes burnt holes in her cropped body. He wondered what he could ever do to deserve arms, to be worthy of legs. Until the heat in the small tent filled his chest. Until the light glancing off the girl’s glass cage made him dizzy. Until he ran outside, crouched behind the tent, and threw up blue cotton candy all over the ground.

Afterward, Eddie, who didn’t need to consult his slave on their agenda, and wouldn’t, in all likelihood, have checked with Payton anyway, dragged him off so they could get their pictures taken. They found one of those souvenir photographers, where you stick your head through a cardboard hole so your face appears on top of a cartoon body. “Come on,” Eddie yelled over the music from the flying tea cups. “I want to be a pirate.”

It was like walking into the dreary, echoing cistern near school, to come into the photographer’s tent from the noise and light outside. The last thing Payton wanted to do was to stand in this half-light while his brother pawed through the painted boards.

“Here’s a good one for you, Pay,” Eddie called from the back of the musty tent. He held up a board with a monkey’s body on it. The monkey was swinging from a tree and holding a banana up to its mouth. “Yeah, that’s you, all right,” Eddie said, chuckling. His voice was loud, self-conscious. “C’mere.”

Dizzy with the thick, sad smells, nursing shame, Payton did as he was told. Dutifully, he bent his head through the hole in the cardboard, then sat down on a small stool behind it. The photographer, an old man with veined hands and pants that spilled over the tops of his shoes, held up a mirror to show him what he looked like.

Payton sat on the stool and stared at his monkey body in the glass. At his own burning face, and behind that at Eddie’s smile, distant and amused. “Payton, the monkey,” Eddie said from the summit of his sixteen years. “Payton, the Ape Boy!” At first, encouraged by his brother’s anguish, he upped the ante. “Come one, come all,” he hollered. “He’s got a face like your backside and a backside that lights up at Christmas.” Glancing for a minute at the photographer for approval, he hurried on. “Yessir, yessir! Payton, the Freak of Nature. Don’t get too close, folks. He might just bite off your arm.” That was when Payton started to cry.

And once he started, he couldn’t stop. It was as if his grief were a thing apart; as if the harsh, doglike yelps were coming from someone else. Even though Eddie specialized in the fine art of bringing his younger brother to tears, the sudden, eruptive force of Payton’s misery seemed to bother him. “Aw, Pay,” he kept saying, shifting from one sneakered foot to the other. “Come on, Pay. I didn’t mean nothing.”

Still sobbing, but on the wind-down, Payton watched a strangely penitent Eddie shuffle over to the photographer. “This is kid stuff,” Eddie told the photographer, helping Payton to duck his head, lifting off the yoke of the board. “Me and my brother, we’ll just take a picture like we are.” Then, as if his kindness embarrassed him, he added, “It’s for our mother. She’d like it better plain.”

So they’d posed together, and Payton, tears drying on his face, had felt the weight of his brother’s arm around him. As if they were two friends, two careless boys together out of choice, not bound by the strange and oppressive ties of brotherhood.

When they took the photograph home, their mother wanted to glue it in the scrapbook, but Payton begged to keep it instead. That night before he fell asleep, he pulled the candy box from under his bed. He held the new picture for a while, staring at it in the moonlight coming through the blinds, memorizing the sweet curve of his brother’s arm around his own small shoulders. Finally, he removed the velvet top of the box and put the photo inside with his other treasures—the mysterious, crenulated nest of a paper wasp; the featureless, pancaked quarter some boys had left on a railroad track; the pale, frosted wing of a luna moth; and a whole family of Guatemalan worry people with bendable wire bodies and tiny, smiling faces, each no bigger than the head of a match.