Mister Boots

chapter nine

As soon as I’m a little better our father hires a wagon and a motorcar and takes us out to a tenting place. I slouch all the way, and he doesn’t say a single word. I slouch so much I don’t even like it myself because I can’t see out the window. Not only that, I have to slouch sideways because my bottom still hurts.

This is a funny kind of place. It’s full of people like us—all kinds of show people. I like it. I wouldn’t mind living here forever. You can hear the creek from our tents. There are big cottonwoods, and you can hear the wind blowing through them. But Jocelyn doesn’t like it. I admit it looks kind of ragged. Away from the trees, people have old blankets strung up so as to make more shade. The whole place looks like a bunch of laundry hanging out, and half of it is laundry.

Our father is still, mostly, staying away from us. Jocelyn says he told her what he wants me to do. Besides an orange every day, he wants me out in the sun every afternoon for my health, bare to the waist, half an hour front and half an hour back, no more and no less, and I have to have my eyes covered. But because of my whip marks, I’m supposed to do this between the big tent and the middle-sized one, toward the back, and Jocelyn is supposed to sit out in front and keep people away. There’s bushes that hide me from the back.

Every now and then I catch a glimpse of our father. He’s easy to spot because he wears his turban all the time. Out here he wears it even when he isn’t onstage, though he never did that before. Lots of people go around in funny hats or parts of costumes. (There’s a clown who wears his big red nose all the time, though the rest of his clothes are just regular.)

We’ll have to be careful with Boots here because there’s a little pasture with the animals that belong to the people of the camp. Of course horses, but goats and sheep . . . all sorts of things. We don’t want Boots to let things go free. We’ll get kicked out if that happens and people find out it was us. Besides, a lot of these are performing animals—there’s a horse that can count. (That’s a lie, like most things around here.) There’s a lot of little dogs here that can do all sorts of tricks. When I’m not soaking up sunshine, I watch them get trained. Boots watches, too. At first he worried about them, but then he saw they were having fun.

Jocelyn is worried because some of these people are kind of dark and look to her like gypsies, but Mister Boots says, “I’m a flea-bit gray.”

Later Jocelyn asked me, What did I think he meant by that?

A brown person does come—a girl about my age. First she hides at the back, where the bushes are, and watches me when I’m roasting myself in the afternoon sun. First I hear her. I uncover my eyes, but I don’t see anybody. Then she creeps out and I put my finger to my lips so she won’t make a noise. Jocelyn might hear and make her go away.

“Can we whisper?”

“Come closer then.”

First thing she says is she got whipped, too.

“Everybody gets whipped.” I say that, though I never got whipped except when our father was around.

“It’s always for my own good,” she says.

“I get whipped for things I didn’t even do.”

“Not me. I do lots of bad things, and they don’t always find out. Except mostly I didn’t know they were bad till after. But sometimes, like if I drop something, I do them by mistake.”

“Grown-ups drop things all the time, and nobody whomps them even when they break something or spill things.”

“I know that.”

“I know you know that.”

“I know!”

She sits for a while looking at my back, and I go on soaking up sunshine like our father wants me to do.

Then she asks . . . the question, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“Which do you think?”

“Sometimes I think one and sometimes I think the other.”

“Have you been watching me?”

“I could find out which you are right now—in half a minute.”

I grab myself with both hands so she can’t.

“Just wait. I’ll get a chance later.”

“You won’t. I’m fast. Besides, I’m magic.”

“I could find out by your name.”

“It’s Bobby. That’s for both girls and boys.”

“I’m Rosie. You can’t make that into a boy’s name.”

(I’ll bet she’d jump if I threw fire. I’ll bet she’d jump if I shot my pistol.)

“I’m ten.” She says it like she’s proud of it.

“That’s nothing; I am, too.”

Then I see that Jocelyn knows she’s here, but she isn’t doing anything about it. That’s a relief. I should have known she’d be on my side.

I don’t care at all that Rosie is one of the brownish people. Besides, they’re not gypsies. She’s from Mexico, and she says everybody’s brown down there. I like her color better than mine. She says her father is a circus-horse trainer. She says Mexicans are the best. Only the Shoshone are better at it.

Rosie says they say if you can kiss your elbow you can turn into a boy. We both try. I tell her, “Just because I’m trying doesn’t mean I’m a girl. What if I’m a boy that wants to be a girl? What if it would work that way, too?”

Even though one of my elbows is crooked, and even though I try really hard, I can’t do it.

Lying here before Rosie came, I’d already done just about all the thinking I could think of to think, but then, after Rosie, I have a new thought. I think one of these days I’m going to go out as a girl. Rosie and I could go out together. Rosie is just about my size. She only has two dresses, and they’re awfully dirty and ragged, but I never did mind dirt like Jocelyn does.

I don’t ever want to leave this place. It’s much better than a hotel, and the people are fun. Rosie and I see each other every day. We found a secret place where we made a whole village. We used sticks for people and we made houses out of stones and we made roads. The only real thing we have is one old lead soldier Rosie found. It’s the hero. We take turns with it. Till now I hardly knew there was such a thing as this kind of playing.

The summer is beginning to be hot, but here by the creek and under these big trees it’s cooler. I keep pretending I’m worse off than I really am. I yell ouch even when I’m not hurting. Jocelyn knows that, but she’s pretending I’m worse off than I am, too. She likes it because our father keeps away a lot. I especially like it because I’ve found my first friend who’s my own age.

Our father is thinking about a clown suit for Mister Boots. Jocelyn is supposed to sew it up, but she’s not sure if she should or not. She thinks our father is doing it on purpose to humiliate Boots. She’s upset that Boots isn’t upset about it. He’s supposed to lope onstage on a hobbyhorse.

“I don’t want him made a fool of. I don’t want him to be a clown.”

I say, “There’s nothing wrong with being a clown. Besides, he’d be what you call comic relief.”

“I don’t want Moonlight Blue to be it.”

But then along comes this lady.

By now, since I’m better, our father is coming around a lot more, so that nice rest we were having is over with. He hadn’t eaten with us for a while, but now he does all the time. So one mealtime this lady comes, and first thing she calls our father My Dear, and she hugs him and kisses him, then steps back and takes a good look at him and then goes through the whole thing all over again. She gets lipstick all over him.

It’s hard to tell if our father is glad to see her or not, but he’s surprised. He puts up a good front, though. He has to be an actor for his job, so he can act any way he wants to be. He calls her My Dear, too.

She says, “It’s been years.”

She has this dead animal around her neck. It has shiny, dark brown, sad eyes. I keep looking at it so much I hardly notice her. It’s hot for wearing a fur, but if I had one I’d be wearing it, too. I wonder if she talks to it? I wonder if it was a boy fur or a girl fur back when it was alive?

It isn’t till later that I notice—I mean really notice—that she has very, very, curly red hair, a lot of it. I know where I’ve I seen that before!

This lady is just the opposite of Mother, but she acts as if she thinks she’s married to our father. Now that Mother’s dead I guess it doesn’t matter, but they can’t both be the real wife.

While she’s still hugging and kissing our father, my sister whispers to me, “That’s the lady in the old poster. She’s a lot fatter now, but I’m pretty sure it’s her. That lady had the exact same hair.”

She kisses our cheeks and then looks at us longer than feels right. She sees things. She says, “How absolutely perfect, a boy and a girl.” She might really mean it, or maybe, unlike our father, she sees what I am right away.

There must be something in our eyes, because she says, “I think you children ought to know right away, your father’s been married to me for twenty-five years, and we never divorced.” Then she smiles a motherly smile that turns wicked right in the middle of it, and she says, “Just don’t ever call me Mother.”

(When it turns out Mother never was really married to Father, Jocelyn feels anything between her and Mister Boots is perfectly all right.)

So now there’s another big tent set up not so far from our group of tents, but it doesn’t have a yellow stripe; it has a big pink rose painted on it.

Pretty soon the show must go on.

My heart is broken. I have to leave the first and only friend I ever had. And now that our father is around more, I haven’t had so many chances to be with her. I have to practice things and do my stretching exercises so as to get back in shape. Rosie is almost as free as I used to be back home. She doesn’t have to do anything except help her mother at suppertime.

I sneak away to say good-bye to Rosie. As a going-away present I give her one of my twenty-dollar bills. She didn’t know I was so rich. I tell her to keep it for something special and not to tell anybody.

She gives me a piece of dusty candy and a long blue ribbon. The ribbon is the only girl-type thing I ever had, except for knitting needles.

Rosie says some day this money might save her life, and that’s true, it might.

On the way back I take the long way through the yellow grass to where a big batch of boulders fell down the hill and piled up. Rosie and I played house here. (I always had to be the husband.) I wanted to say good-bye to this place, too, but I come to a secret I shouldn’t be seeing.

First I hear breathing. Snuffling kind of. I keep on walking around the stones, quietly, so as to sneak up and see what’s happening—and then I wish I hadn’t.

They’re lying on an old army blanket so, for sure, they planned ahead. They’re naked. (Jocelyn is almost as thin as Boots, but curvier.) I guess she finally convinced him.

At first I want to yell and stop them, but I’m not in the mood to scare people the way I usually like to do. And what they’re about to do seems right. It is right—my sister’s tawny, liony head next to the black-maned horsey one.

I shouldn’t look.

I hear Boots say, “Sweet as grass. Sweet as apples.”

I turn—from them and from the golden grass around them. I run back to Rosie. I don’t tell her why. Rosie must think I’m going to get a whipping again. She says she’ll hide me. Right now that’s what I want the most. She has lots of good places and she takes me to her best one. She has to go help her mother, but I want to be alone anyway.

Before she leaves she says, “I don’t blame you for being scared. The way your back looked. You had about the worst beating I ever saw on anybody.”

In a funny way that makes me proud—as if I’ve passed some kind of test.

“Do you think that really was for your own good?”

I just shrug.

“Because whatever you think, it wasn’t.”

She hides me where there’s an unused tent and an unused old wagon. She says, “There’s mice and spiders out here, and rats and scorpions and rattlesnakes. . . .” She’s trying to make me laugh, but why would I care if I’m a boy? So then she says, “Let’s try to kiss our elbows again.” We laughed a lot when we did that, but I’m not in the mood. Rosie has to go back to her mother anyway.

When I sit real still, pretty soon everything comes around, even a beautiful gopher snake. I’m so still he doesn’t even care that I’m here. I think about love. I used to think it was wishy-washy. Then I think how our father always says magicians are special, and Lassiters are especially special, but I’m not sure about that anymore. Rosie is special.

I don’t come back to our camping spot until dark. Mister Boots and my sister haven’t changed that you can see. I’m the only one who knows they have.

They’re all sitting around our campfire, which is just embers. Watching the fire is one of the nice things about this place. This is the last night for that. I’m not the only sad person. Tears make dark spots all over Jocelyn’s tan blouse. She sits cross-legged, her knitting in her lap. Mister Boots has his arm around her on one side. I move close so I can lean against her on the other.

That lady is so far back from the fire, I almost forget she’s here. She’s still dressed up, even though she’s just with us. She has bracelets practically up to her armpits, and she has that fur on her lap. She’s stroking it as if it’s alive. The bracelets catch the firelight sometimes, and so do the eyes of the fur. We’re sitting on the ground, but she’s on a chair she brought from her own tent. Dressed like that, you couldn’t be on the ground. We’re supposed to call her Aunt Tilly.

“All the ways to love,” Boots says.

“Do tell,” that lady says. The way she says it, I’ll bet she can tell everything that happened today.

I think about that old poster and then I wonder, and then I ask, “Are you going to be in our act or what?”

She laughs a big, long laugh. The kind I didn’t think she ever would. (It doesn’t fit with her fancy clothes.) She says, “I’m too fat to be onstage all dressed up in practically nothing, and too fat to get lifted up on nothing and too fat to even begin to get in the sword box.”

“He’s fatter.”

“Don’t be fooled. With me it’s fat, but your father is strong as an ox.”

“But you’re all packed up to come along with us.”

“Honey, it’s a free ride.”

So that’s that then—good-bye to our camping in the country, to stream sounds, to trees-in-the-wind sounds, campfires, clumps of yellow grass.... But everybody’s going off to bed just as if it’s a completely ordinary, everyday night.

That lady takes up more space than any of us except our father. I think of all the things I could bring along if she wasn’t here.

Mister Boots is the opposite. He says he never had so many things in his life before. His belongings take up one little box you can carry under your arm. He says he doesn’t want one thing else except the scarf I’m knitting for him.

Riding down, that lady lets me wear her fur. I think it’s because it’s such a hot day she’d rather it be on me than on her. I don’t care. I like wearing it no matter how hot.

I ask her what the fur’s name is. At first she looks at me funny, and then like: Should she tell me? She squeezes her eyes shut and makes a face. (For a minute she reminds me of Rosie.)

She’s sitting across from me in the car. I’m in the jump seat, and everybody is across from me. (Everybody except our father. He’s with the wagon full of baggage.) It’s sort of like being onstage, the three of them in front of me. This is the first time I’ve really looked at Aunt Tilly. Maybe she isn’t what I thought she was.

“It used to be Wilhelmina,” she says. “Funny, I haven’t thought of that for a long time. You know boys don’t wear furs.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’re a funny kid, you know that? How old are you really?”

At least she’s not asking what sex I am.

“I’m . . .” But maybe I’m not supposed to tell my age even to her. “I can be any age you want.”

She looks at me seriously for a minute and then crosses her eyes. You’d think she really was Rosie. You’d think she wasn’t even ten years old yet.

Before, I thought she had a look about her as if, any minute, somebody was going to cheat her, even us, but on the ride down, she’s more relaxed. She even sings. We’d join in except she’s so good. We just listen. She sings “The Last Rose of Summer,” and “My Wild Irish Rose,” and “All Through the Night.” She even brings tears to her own eyes and has to stop.

I say, “I’ll bet you and our father used to sing together.”

“We did. We sang onstage before we went into magic. That was a long time ago.”

Then I ask Jocelyn why we can’t live back at that camp all the time, like Rosie’s family does.

She laughs as if it’s a silly question. “Might as well go back home,” she says, “where we have a nice little house all our own.”

“No, I mean with other people around and campfires.”

“Too many ants. . . . And, well, Rosie’s very nice, but I don’t trust those people. Like I told you before, they might be gypsies.”

“They’re not gypsies!”

Thinking of Rosie reminds me that I have the piece of dusty candy she gave me in my pocket. I suppose it’s dustier than ever, but I put it in my mouth anyway. I try to do it in a way nobody can see, but that Aunt Tilly person notices and winks.

Our father’s got three shows in a row lined up, in three schools. He’s as nervous and blustery as usual, telling everybody what to do and to keep quiet and not to bother him with details.

Except that Tilly person talks about anything she feels like whenever she wants, and he lets her. Sometimes she tells him what to do, and he just goes ahead and does it.

It’s Aunt Tilly who sews up the clown costume for Mister Boots. I didn’t think she’d sew. (She won’t cook or do dishes. “Never again,” she says. “I’d rather eat nothing but crackers and cheese than cook.”)

She makes Boots a hobbyhorse, too, out of a mop, and with part of an old tire for a head. Boots gets a nose just like the one that clown at the camp wore all the time.

Nobody will ever get any acting out of Boots. So there’s no such thing as rehearsing. He just is as he is. And how do we know he won’t try to make another speech? I guess it won’t matter; our father will make it part of his clowning like he did before.

One thing in all this bothers Mister Boots a lot. He keeps saying, “I ought to use whatever I have for a good purpose. I shouldn’t waste it.”

I always say, “First of all, what’s good for one creature might be bad for another.”

He always says, “True.”

“And then how about worms?”

“Worms? What worms? Just because they’re small. Why, without worms—”

I always say, “I know. You already told me about worms.”

I have a whole new kind of costume, too. I’m not a pink pixie anymore. I’m a little version of our father, tails and all. We both wear a top hat, and we do duet kinds of things. I finally get a magic wand of my own, and I get to have a magic cane like his, and I get to do a cane dance duet with him where both our canes move by themselves. As we dance he keeps looking sideways at me with this grin. You’re supposed to do that. And you’re supposed to smile out over the people, too. My smile is like my voice: big. Onstage it’s good to have a big mouth and black eyebrows and black hair like our father and I have. When we take our bows, our father holds my hand up and bows to me. Mostly I get a standing ovation. I bow even lower than our father taught me, my head right down on my knees. People laugh. Our father’s too fat to bow that low.

When Aunt Tilly sees me onstage for the first time, she’s impressed. Everybody always is. She feels about me the same as I do about our father. She said, “I don’t care what age you are, you’re good for any age there is,” and, “Where did you get that voice?”

Before, I was thinking I’d borrow that fur and keep it hidden for a while with all the rest of my secret things, but I don’t want to take anything from Aunt Tilly anymore. I’ll just ask her—not if I can have it, but if I can sleep with it.

I don’t want to ask her in front of everybody. I wait, and then I find the perfect place and time. We’re in the writing room of the hotel. It’s a fancy hotel, but I still like the tents better.

We’re making lots of money, and we go all over the place: Pasadena, Long Beach, Palm Springs . . . and all up and down the coast. I worry we won’t be going back to that camping place again. I wonder if I’ll ever see my one and only true friend.

I’m using the hotel stationery to write to Rosie, even though I don’t know how to send the letter. Aunt Tilly said she’d see if it could be done. I have to make it simple because Rosie doesn’t read very well even though she was homeschooled like I was.

Aunt Tilly is writing a letter, too, but she’s staring out the window a lot. Anyway, she doesn’t look bothered when I ask her, can I sleep with Wilhelmina.

“Are you still sleeping with things?”

“I never had anything to sleep with before. Anyway, I’m only seven.”

“Whatever you say.” And then, “You ever going to tell your old aunt Tilly anything that’s true for once?”

“We live by lies.”

“Who told you that? I suppose Mister Boots.”

“No, that’s what I say. Mister Boots would say the opposite, that we live by the truth.”

“Is there something wrong with Mister Boots? He’s so peculiar.”

“It’s everybody else who’s peculiar.”

But she just goes right on, her own way. “His voice is odd, too. Not like a foreigner, more like he isn’t used to talking at all. Like he can’t get his lips around the words. It’s as if he’s not right in the head. Sometimes he does sound wise, but it’s . . . the wisdom of a child.”

“People think he’s dumb because they can’t keep up with him. Besides, I’m a child.”

She gets up and comes over to hug me. I let her. “A wise child,” she says. Then, “Do you have any things? Toys, I mean? I haven’t seen you with any.”

First I think no, and then I remember my baseball and my mitt, but they’re really our father’s. I don’t even like them, and I’ve never used them except that one time, so I say, “No.”

“If you tell me how old you really are, you can sleep with Wilhelmina.”

I finally get a chance to not be seven. “I’m the perfect age,” I say.

“I know what that is. I’ll bet you’re ten.”

At the hotel, I finally get to hear Aunt Tilly and our father sing duets. I was in bed, but then I hear singing and I know it’s them. I get dressed (those knickers and my sweater) and put Wilhelmina around my neck, but I go down only as far as the landing just in case they see me and make me go back upstairs. Aunt Tilly is playing the piano. She can do most everything. They sing “Oh Promise Me,” and “The Last Rose of Summer,” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” and “Old Black Joe.” I have to wipe my tears on Wilhelmina.

The hotel guests clap a lot. The bellboys, too. I hope everybody knows that that’s my father and my . . . not my aunt, stepmother really. I can’t believe how, at first, I didn’t like Aunt Tilly.

Pretty soon the time comes for Boots to do his act. I’m the one to lead him out onstage again. I help him into his costume. He wouldn’t do that either if not for me. The costume hangs on him. I say, “Hello, Droopy.” I want to make him laugh, but he just droops more than ever.

Aunt Tilly is right; his face is odd. I see that even more as I put red spots on his cheeks and then lipstick on him. I stick on the nose ball. “Are you sad?”

“As a human being in a world of human beings? Never sad.”

I don’t want him thinking too much about going out onstage so I say, “Mister Boots, there’s a secret, and you’re not going to believe it.”

This will make him sit up and take notice. Maybe even make him change to Moonlight Blue right here and now.

The thing is, everybody is forgetting what I am, what with these boy clothes all the time and the talk about, “My son this and my son that.” Everybody! Even Jocelyn. I have a hard time keeping track of myself myself. I want to tell somebody.

But Boots says, “You don’t have to tell me. Sometimes it’s better not to know, but I will believe what you want me to.”

“I want you to hear it.”

He says, “What you tell will not be wasted.”

“Oh, Mister Boots . . . You tell me something instead.”

“What I have to say is, I want to live a life of service to all beings.”

“You’re too nice, horse or man. Sometimes you have to try not to be.”

“You should help me with my message.”

“I will, but later. Now we have to do this. We’ll trot out pretending to be horses. I’ll pretend it, too. Your whinny? Remember that? It’s a good one. We’ll whinny together and lope in circles.”

“No!”

“You told me once yourself there are a hundred different ways of seeing the exact same thing.”

“I can’t this minute see more than two ways.”

“Oh, Boots! All right, you hang on to the lead rope and I’ll lope in.”

Instead of my main secret I tell him a different one. I tell him, “One of these days—pretty soon now—I’m going to let the doves go.”

I thought he’d like that, but he’s not sure they’ll be able to survive on their own.

Our father has a half dozen old pots and pans piled up in the wings all ready for Mister Boots, just in case he has to do the same as last time. I get myself ready, too—for anything.

So Mister Boots walks out onstage in front of me with a long, long, long lead rope. People even think that’s funny. Boots is halfway across the stage before I finally jig in, wearing my dress suit and a halter. I whinny my whinny. I jump around (shy, that is) with sudden twists to the side. I don’t have to practice any of it. There’s nothing horse-ish I haven’t done already.

People laugh like anything. It doesn’t matter now what Boots does. I’m being a pretty good horse myself. I’m even funnier, dressed in my dress suit, cavorting like a crazy person, my tails flying; and Boots is on his hobbyhorse looking at me, so sad and serious . . . that’s funny, too. Our father didn’t want us to do it like this, but if it works, he won’t mind.

If Boots was planning on doing his speechifying about letting every single creature go free, he gets it knocked right out of him. He steps to the side as if to escape all my jumping around, but with that droopy clown suit—the legs hanging over his big phony shoes—he falls flat on his back. Hard. And right after . . .

He changed. . . . I’m pretty sure he did. Maybe out of fear and pain. He did, but for such a tiny moment, and like he didn’t mean to. I’m not sure it really happened. I just saw the flash of a white horse. Rearing. And then there was Boots, lying there, looking as surprised as I was.

Everybody is looking at me, but I hear a few people gasp. I look back at our father, in the wings. He’s wiping the sweat off his face with a big towel. He didn’t see either, but he suspects.

I help Boots off the stage. Slowly. He’s dazed and hurt some. I yell, “Come on, White Lightning.”

I keep telling Aunt Tilly I wish she’d get sawed in half like she used to do. She always says, “Fat-lady-gets-sawed-in-half-no-thank-you.” So I have to keep on doing it, even though I always get itchy in there. (I change to the pixie costume for that and the sword box.)

Things go along pretty well, though twice our father gets his grocery-store whip out again. Just for on my legs. I wonder who he used it on when he wasn’t around us. For sure not Aunt Tilly. She’s one of those people you don’t mess with.

Aunt Tilly always has her own room, though she sometimes sleeps with our father. “Rich or poor,” she says, “I get to have my own room.” What Aunt Tilly wants, she always gets.