Mister Boots

I turn out to be the hit of the show! In one way I’m not at all surprised, though in another way I am. I probably have more magic in me than anybody around here. But I’m the big hit partly because I look so much younger than I really am. Our father has taken advantage of it and advertised that I’m only seven. I have to go along with that, though I don’t like it. It’s hard enough getting all the way up to ten without going backward.

Except I don’t understand how I got to be the main attraction, because our father’s so good. People love him. Even I love him. The first performance we do changes my mind about everything. It’s nothing like our rehearsals. Everything looks exciting, people ooh and aah, and our father is—he actually is—kind of wonderful. Onstage he’s not the same person at all. He looks bigger. Not just fatter but taller, too. Now I see what that loud voice of his is for: booming out, deep and like singing. He’s all sparkly under the spotlight. Even his hair looks nice and shiny. Even that funny little mustache and goatee, which I always thought were useless . . . even they look good. He’s . . . devilish, black and white all over. The only colors are in the scarves and flowers and painted boxes . . . and me in my pink. (Onstage he calls me Pixie. He says, “I’ll bring on my magic pixie.” He snaps his fingers and here I come. I guess I do look like a pixie. I don’t mind that, except for being pink.)

I always thought I didn’t want him to be my father, but now I think we’re two of a kind: born to travel and born to be onstage and born to make our voices go right out across all the people’s heads and out the lobby doors, and on into the street. For a change I’m not thinking “our father,” I’m thinking “my father.”

But through the whole train trip down, I was getting angrier and angrier with him telling us all what to do and when to do it, where to sit, who got a window seat and for how long, when we’d eat and what we’d eat. (Oranges are good for us. I, in particular, have to eat them. I like them, but I don’t want to have to eat them every day.) He made Mister Boots and me carry heavy things while Jocelyn, because she’s a girl, only had to carry her knitting. I know, like Mother said, life isn’t fair, but it ought to be a little tiny bit more fair than this.

He kept saying (just to me, not to anybody else), “Sit up. Breathe deeply. Fill your chest with this good country air.” (As if I didn’t always live in the middle of good country air.) “Don’t scuff when you walk.” Well, my shoes are too big so I can’t help it. But there’s no use telling him that. “No excuses!” is another of his favorite things to say. “Do you think there are any excuses in the army?”

We have so much baggage I thought we were never going to get anywhere, but our father’s used to moving all this stuff. He was busy and distracted, and he made us keep quiet so we wouldn’t, as he kept saying, break his concentration; otherwise it would be our fault if he forgot something important.

And I got worn out all over again just from how it looked out the train window: a whole other world—black or red volcanic domes and cones; places with a lot of dead trees where there used to be ditches but the water’s all taken down south to Los Angeles, where we’re going.

Mister Boots and I saw a herd of wild horses, six of them. That was a time when we both had window seats. Boots looked over at me, surprised. The horses ran as the train passed by, tails and manes flying. Boots looked like he’d never thought such a thing could be, or a thing so free, or that it could look so beautiful. Magic passed between us—a different kind of magic. Like we’d seen all the way inside each other. Afterward I could tell he was thinking hard.

(When we started out and my sister saw me for the very first time, head to toe, in my new boy clothes—cap and shoes and all—she covered her face with both hands and gasped. It’s like she finally realized. I guess I did, too. But realizing isn’t going to change anything. I realized it before with the baseball and mitt and fishing pole.)

Pretty soon our father wants Mister Boots to join the act. I don’t know why our father needs Boots, what with me being such a big hit, but he thinks he does, and I’m the one supposed to bring Boots onstage and make him change.

I told our father it won’t work, and that Boots doesn’t care anything about whether he gets paid, or famous, or if he makes a fool of himself, but our father is so sure he’ll do it, he’s made a poster about it except with the wrong color horse, pure white all over, mane and everything. (Why does he think Boots is called Boots, for goodness’ sake?)

So I lead Boots in—this skinny, nothing little man. It’s exactly the opposite of when our father’s onstage, because Boots looks smaller and thinner than ever, but people clap anyway. They think he’s going to do something, or else why would he be out here in front of everybody? I lead him in with a halter dangling around his human-being neck.

Boots is hobbling, head down and forward. He lets me lead him because it’s me. He says he owes me a lot, but he says he won’t change to Moonlight Blue even for my sake. As we stand in the wings I tell him, “Do something, anyway. Sing or dance or something. Our father’s already mad enough at you.”

When we come onstage, Boots looks all around, blinking, blinded by the lights. He shades his eyes as if he’s in the sun. (Our father said you aren’t supposed to do that even if you feel like it.) Nobody is clapping anymore. Everybody waits.

Then Boots says, “Stop!” His voice isn’t strong. It’s as if he’s a horse right now—it’s blowy, too much air in it. Only the first six or eight rows can hear him. “Stop. Think. These rabbits. These doves. Your horses. We labor beside you at the work of the world.”

But that’s all the time our father gives him. He stamps out onstage and grabs him by the halter, twists it tight across his neck, says, “Come on, Dobbin.” Our father leans way back and walks a funny duck walk, high knees, swinging his fat hind end. (He can laugh at himself if need be, especially if need be onstage.) The tails of his dress coat swish back and forth and make the waddle even more so. He leads Boots into the wings. He really is choking him. Boots couldn’t say anything more if he tried. Our father finds boxes and such to bang around, so there’s a nice clatter from backstage, as if he’d thrown Boots against things that fell over. Everybody laughs. Our father’s turned it into a clown act. I jump a couple of jumps and yell, “Whoopee!” to help out. Everybody laughs some more. This is turning out to be a good thing.

Even so, and even though our father keeps telling us he never gets angry, he turns red with holding it in. He’s in practice for having the show go on, though. Red as he is, he keeps everything moving the way it’s supposed to.

Usually, in front of strangers, he’s as jolly as can be. He talks to everybody. Tells jokes. Tells about funny things that happened onstage and how cleverly he worked things into the act. Tells about how he met Houdini. Though he doesn’t drink much, he loves to go to bars and takes me, too. He introduces me to everybody, “My son, a chip off the old block. Only seven years old and could do the whole act by himself if need be.” He keeps me up late just to show me off. We hardly ever get to bed before two in the morning. Especially after we’ve given a show and are still all excited.

When I’m just getting ready for bed, he comes for me. “All right,” he says. “Don’t think you don’t need a lesson just as much as Boots does.” He walks me out and down the road until there aren’t any more streetlamps.

It’s a pretty dark night. There’s only a little half a moon. First thing, he pulls off all my clothes and I think: Here it comes. I get worried. I don’t want to be alone with him way out here when he finds out. Especially not when he’s so upset.

But it’s too dark and he’s not paying attention. What he does find is my rabbit’s foot and twenty dollars, which makes him even angrier. In this light he can’t tell how much money it is, he just knows it’s money. He thinks I stole it.

He really whips me. He uses a leather thong kind of thing—four thongs braided into a handle at one end. It was made exactly for this. I’ve seen those hanging in the grocery stores, and I guessed it was for children but I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t do one bad thing—not one single thing. I took care of the doves and the rabbits. I led Boots in just like he said to. Then I was just sitting there reading before getting into bed and at the same time rolling two bits along my fingers, exactly like I’m supposed to do.

But after a few minutes I start to float above everything, as if I’m watching us down here. It’s as if I can see better than I really can: a skinny naked girl (I see that she’s a girl just as clear as could be) and a fat man. At first I think I really have turned into a bird, like Jocelyn says I did, but I don’t go flying off anywhere, and pretty soon I come back down to myself, which is a big disappointment.

I see I’m in my boy’s striped pajamas, but my sister must have undressed me because things seem to be the same. Jocelyn is saying, “Why don’t you want to?” and Boots is saying, “Human beings don’t do it like that. I’m trying to be one of the good ones.”

My sister leans her head next to mine and starts to cry. Mister Boots nibbles at her neck. She turns around to kiss him. I have to yell ouch again to get them to pay attention. Jocelyn raises me up and I drink, and then she goes to get me broth and crackers.

We’re in a hotel. Our father said not a very good one. I don’t know why he says that because, though the rooms are small, they’re nicer than back home and the beds are not so lumpy and the bathroom is good.

I tell Mister Boots I was scared but I didn’t change into anything. “I wanted to fly away, but I couldn’t do it. I did float up a little bit, but just a few feet, and then I came right back down. I wanted to turn owl and fly off silently in the dark like they do.”

The next day I’m really and truly sick—shaky and feverish and wobbly. I don’t know why our father whipped me when he’s supposed to only do things for the good of the show. But, just like he always complains about me, I don’t think he was thinking at all.

Thank goodness our father is staying away from us. I get to sit with my sister and go on trying to learn to knit. By now I’m getting good at that, too, just like I’m good at everything else. The scarf for Boots is a little lumpy at the beginning but it’s getting better all the time. It’ll look good on him when he wears his red sweater. And Jocelyn is knitting a sweater for me the same color as this scarf. “Moonlight navy blue,” we call it.

Mostly we don’t talk much, and I get to have her read to me. I’m hoping I stay sick a long time. I don’t know where she got the money, but on her own, she buys Anne of Green Gables, which is a girl’s book, and which we’d better not let our father see. He bought a couple of books for me about heroes: baseball heroes, football heroes, army heroes. . . . My sister doesn’t want to read those to me. She thinks things have gone too far already.

He goes onstage by himself, but everybody’s heard about me and they all want me. Jocelyn was there, and she said they yelled not only for me but for “the magic horse.” They think they’re cheated unless they get everything that’s on the poster. Our father had to get out his old posters, where there’s only him. But some of those old posters have a woman on them with fuzzy red hair, and she’s dressed in pink with puffed sleeves just like I am, except you can practically see her whole chest.