Willy’s Wonderama
Late at night in the streets of Knoxville with a tattooed younger man, just about anything made sense, but not so much by good daylight. I rolled over and looked at the trail of shoes and underwear leading across the floor, but that made my head ache. I closed my eyes and opened them again, focusing instead on the things I’d put here and there for home’s sake. Taped to the dresser mirror was a photocopy of a palm with all the lines marked for readings. Hepatic Line. Saturnian Line. Double Line of Life. And on the dresser top itself, a ceramic statue of the Holy Mother, a blue wine bottle with a candle in it, and, like in every place I ever stayed, Ruby’s derringer. I’d set it with the handle propped between a thick astrology book and a paper encyclopedia of seashells, which seemed to suit.
The gun, Ruby always said, was part sea-dream, with the fancy gloss of abalone on the handle, and part for show. She’d carried it in her shoulder bag and put it in every kitchen drawer in every place we’d ever rented, and I’d done the same thing. I’d carried it with me to the Northwest that time I had free room and board for canning salmon. I’d carried it to Kansas City, too, and I’d been glad of it when I heard some man praying in a bathroom stall next to me. “One more time,” he said. “One more time and that’s all there’ll be if you help me,” he said, on the edge of desperate. I reached into my bag and gripped the handle of the derringer even though, like Ruby, I kept the thing unloaded. A yellow silk flower stuck out of its muzzle now.
I tossed and turned, lay with a pillow over my head. It’s about time, Miracelle Loving. Her voice again. Time for what? I said back, but she’d gotten what she wanted, I reckoned. I was awake, but I lay there remembering. I could see her just as plain, listening over and over to that song on her old record player. Love me in the morning, love me at night. On nights like that, she couldn’t stand the sight of me. It hurt too much, she said, to see what she was and what I’d likely become. A woman by her lonesome on another Friday night, the only cure for anything a cheap bottle of whiskey and the blues. Love me, Radiance, honey, till long past midnight. Desperate. That was what you called a night like that.
I made coffee and stood bare-ass by the open motel window like I could care less. A diner across the street was called The Pelican when there couldn’t have been anything more landlocked except for maybe my own self. In the mirror above the dresser I had drugstore burgundy hair with the roots coming in, a hole in the side of my nose where a nose piercing hadn’t worked out. Would Cody Black have liked what he’d seen if I’d asked him up here last night? Him all shave-headed and smooth-cheeked, except for one little patch of midnight black hair in the center of his chin. And me?
I paced. I flipped on the television, but there was nothing but ads for a mattress discount store, home shopping networks, and a movie about a woman with a black heart tattooed on her back. I turned the volume down and clicked through the channels, watched faces and eyes open and shut, mouths sending out words I didn’t care about. In the shower I cranked up the hot water and stood under it, trying to let the night before and her voice wash away. Get on with it, Ruby had said, but the best I could do for now was tarot.
I dried off and sat on the bed with my deck. The tarot I owned was cheap-and-good, from some Miami head shop, but if you looked at the fine print on the back of the box, the deck came from a printing company in San Francisco, California. If they knew more about the future than I did, I’d eat the cards. There wasn’t a fortune I’d ever told that didn’t require me looking something up in a tarot book and memorizing some phrase to drop in at the best moment. Every now and again, I took the cards out and held them next my chest and wished on them, like they were stars. The first card I drew, for the past, was the eight of cups. A woman knelt by a lake reaching back into a dark cave, and the eight cups floated inside. An unconscious kind of change taking place on the very deep feeling level. I’d been down the deep feeling road and it sure hadn’t worked out very well. Once in Houston I’d lived for almost three months with a half-rich preacher I’d met at a rodeo, but he turned out to be the farthest thing from preachering I’d come across, so I left him behind in a cloud of Texas dust. I’d made an art of leaving, if I was honest about it. Doors slammed shut.
My present card was a black-robed woman watching three golden cups spill out along a dirt road heading up a mountain. A loss and wishing for what might have been. Being crippled by sadness, grief, and vain regret. No one would know the difference if there’d been a reversal, so I flipped the card and looked in the book again and it was a little better. New prospects and new projects are about to come into your life. I’d only been in Knoxville two days, and who knew about prospects. Some days I felt like I was floating above some memory I didn’t want to reach, some city or little town I couldn’t name. And that far up in the air it didn’t matter much, the day or the time or where I was headed next.
The future card, another cups card. Cups were for emotions, and this one was an ace. A hand. A long, embroidered sleeve. A cup with the dove of peace. The seed of a new direction, a relationship or spiritual journey, perhaps as yet unseen. An opportunity for joy, contentment. I’d told fortunes for DJs and hairdressers and waitresses in coffee shops and bus stations and in the front seat of my Dodge. I’d read cards and felt bumps on heads and laid little cellophane fish in palms from north to south and west and back east in more places than I could shake a stick at. A new direction sure wouldn’t hurt.
I dumped the whole deck on the bed and stirred around in it, thinking about drawing a final card for good measure. One of the cards stared out at me and I picked it up. A tall young man with a crown walked near a river, a rod held up to the sun. It made me think of Cody Black, though that was a stretch. Cody was no prince. He was a tattooed-up boy with big old holes in his ears and, lordy, him coming in the door of the men’s room and me about laying on the floor, ready to heave my guts out.
Beside the tarot cards I laid the card Cody Black had given me with the little fox-headed man and the insignia. Willy’s Wonderama. I dug the phone book out of the bedside drawer. It showed Willy’s under both Tourist Attractions and Miscellaneous Sales. Willy’s Wonderama. I pictured myself dusting shelves or shoveling gravel in the parking lot, at worst. I pictured myself back at the Red Sari some night soon with Cody Black, waking up with him, drinking motel room coffee. Maybe I’d read a card or two for him. I got up and paced the room again, thinking. At the dresser mirror, I stood looking at myself. I ran my fingers through my hair and wondered how I’d look with it darker or with a henna rinse or at the very least some lipstick, maybe a nice, deep red.
I wished to hell Ruby would speak up when I needed her, but her voice was quiet as I dialed the phone at the bedside. New prospects and new projects, the cards had said. Worse come to worst, I was here for a few weeks, and an adventure or two with Cody Black sounded about right. A recorded voice came on the line. Willy’s Wonderama! Museum under reconstruction! Grand reopening, Summer 1993! Emissaries wanted!! Hmm. I rooted around in a suitcase and pulled on a jacket and slacks and shoes with little heels. In the Red Sari lobby, I jotted down some general directions from the desk clerk and headed for my car.
I laid the directions on the seat beside me and took a bypass around the city, then a couple of exits until I found myself in front of a boxy-looking place in the center of a charred lot. There’d been a fire, all right, but most of the building was still there, the weird offspring of a southern Civil War mansion and a warehouse. I sat thinking about how soon I could be in North Florida if I packed up quick, but I made my way inside to the main foyer. A room on the left bore a plaque that said Office.
Inside, a middle-aged man was blowing his nose and two teenaged girls were wearing jelly sandals and matching sweatshirts that said One Way! Believe! By the time I got an application, my stomach was gnawing after the breakfast I hadn’t had yet, but I figured I’d be out of there in a half hour. Back in the foyer I found a folding chair and set to. Loving, Miracelle. Then lots of blank spaces for dates and towns and education. List all relevant experience. Not till the last page was there a whiff of anything at all exotic. Tell us, the question asked, about any visionary experiences you have had. I nibbled at my eraser.
On the road, I’d slipped inside Holy Roller churches to listen to god-music. Once I’d worked for a few weeks as a janitor for the Tallahassee House of Faith, operated by a pastor named Barbara with tall peroxide-blond hair and a shiny suit. I liked that job best late at night with not a soul around. Streetlight shone into the sanctuary room, a plain place with a slap-hazard cross above a podium like they’d use in a high school gymnasium and no stained glass anywhere. That kind of holiness appealed to me.
“Glad to see you made it.”
Cody Black was toting a mile-high stack of manila folders spilling out of a cardboard box. He set the box down and leaned over my application. No longer in bar light or car light or night light, Cody Black had two tiny star tattoos beside his eyes.
They hired me, and I went in the next morning to learn who was who, what was what. I was ushered to a room on the second floor where a woman with a gauzy dress and sparkles glued on her fingernails told me the basics.
“I’m Marvis Temple.” She pointed and I took a seat.
Willy’s, she said, was the South’s most famous museum. Had bitten the dusts with three fires, most notably the Armageddon of 1989 and the suspected arson in 1992. That last time, they’d lost a good majority of their strange phenomena.
My job was finding talent for when Willy’s reopened. She gestured toward a small desk stacked high with piles of unopened envelopes.
“Here’s the main thing about this place.” She handed me a three-ring binder labeled Recruits: What to Do and Say. “You’ll be what’s called an Emissary,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“It means you’re supposed to know what you’re doing.” She laughed. “Or sound like it, anyway.”
I flipped through doctored-looking photos of four-horned this or that, chickens with no beaks.
She polished her nails on her sleeve. “You’re a lookout for new talent.”
There were people photos, too. Some with not but one eye, others with no nose at all except a flat place with holes for breathing. A note was stuck to the photo of a woman with a shag hairdo. Finds places no longer there.
“Study up, your first day or two.” Marvis handed me a stack of more notebooks. “Then see what you can find.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“The public library, when you need it. And there’s boxes of old stuff down in the basement.” She paused. “And there’s letters.”
She passed me one last notebook. I opened it and read the first page.
Letter. Dated December 16, 1990. Photographs (images of conjoined baby elephants). Origin of letter Northern European. (Of interest. Big box. Possible shelf life.)
I was in the attic yesterday and there was a box, a mahogunie one with a big lock and I broke it because the house is mine now after all these years and from my grandpapa, who once was a big-game hunter and is now dead, not from any rifle wounds, but from apoplexy. Anyway. The house and this chest are mine. And so are all the photographs, like this very one I hold out for you now.
“You read and you take notes, and if anything strikes you right”—she waved ceilingward—“then you send it on up.”
I assumed “up” meant another office and a person who wasn’t just a wonder-finder, but I looked at the photo that went with the letter. A boy stood beside the joined dead bodies of the two elephants, their small tusks pointed at the sky.
All of it made me sad. The piles of paper—letters and envelopes and who knows what—covering all the small desks in all the cubicles. I imagined swiping it all into the trash can, but I reckoned I’d hold out for a few days.
Those days were soon full of claims to wonders—three-eared dogs, mockingbirds that wouldn’t mock, conjoined miniature this, legless miniature that. I stayed somewhere between tickled and nervous, but other than that, the job meant gray walls, gray particle board partitions. On one side of my cubicle was a woman named Cynthia, and on the other was a girl named Joan who wore so much eyeliner and lipstick she would have been a marvel next to a Kewpie doll. The three of us spent the days divvying up the mail, which was packed with more letters about people with most of themselves there but essential parts gone in one way or another. Wonders of the World, Willy’s called them in the advertisements they sent out here and yon. What they got back were letters.
Letter. Dated November 14th, 1992. Typed, to all evidence on an old manual typewriter. Copy is carbon-papered. Origin: Puerales, New Mexico. (No interest. Too much god-stuff.)
Dear Willy’s Wonderama:
Twenty years ago, I was called upon by a young couple to perform the Sacred Rites of Baptism on an infant with pupil-less eyes. Is this boy a Wonder of the World?
In between mail runs, there were leads to follow, meetings and brainstorming sessions, phone calls to take, calls to return. The mail was the main thing, and I’d had only one letter that took my fancy.
Letter. Not Dated. Handwritten. Female. Mid-forties. Origin: Babcock, Kentucky. (Maybe.)
Dear Willy:
I have a daughter, just the one, and she is a soul beyond reason, and I do not mean cruel, sirs. She is a gift, and I have worked long to know how to receive her.
She is a seer, my girl, and her name is Maria. I named her that because it sounds almost like a miracle, and it sounds like the smallest thing inside us too. And together the three syllables of her name make heavenly music. I believe that. But at first I did not believe what is really true about my girl.
My Maria has seen what others have not. Once she knew there was a chest inside a wall in a house down the road, knocked on the very place they opened to find it and a lost deed, right inside. Another time she woke and all she said was, look there. And she told about a barn three counties over, how they’d find a missing child there. Oh, but Willy, she sees more than all that. Maria sees ghosts.
She sees souls inside souls.
Yours,
Mrs. Dauphine Murdy
I read that letter over and over. Souls within souls made me think of an old black-and-white television Ruby and I once had, how all you could see on it were shadows of movie stars. When Ruby was gone all night, I held my hands across the television’s snowy screen and told myself I was touching ghosts, telling lives better than my mother ever could. At the library, I searched phone listings for Babcock, Kentucky, and Dauphine Murdy. I dialed and the tone was from one of those old-style phones, then silence.
“Hello,” a sleepy-sounding voice finally said, and I launched into the Willy’s script. “Ma’am? Is this Mrs. Dauphine Murdy?”
“Last time I checked.”
“I’m excited to be phoning you with some good news.”
“Could use any of that you got.”
I scanned the letter, searching for the way to start. “I see here,” I said. “I see you’ve got a girl you’re real proud of.”
The phone went quiet again. I could hear dogs in the background. “What you know about Maria?”
“You wrote us about her.”
A throat cleared. “Who are you?”
“Willy’s, ma’am.” I paused and tried to sound more official. “I’m a representative for Willy’s Wonderama. The museum you wrote to here in Knoxville.”
“That place that wants stories?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, we’ve got enough stories around here lately to keep us.”
“Is that right?”
The woman sighed. “My girl knows more things than she ever did, here of late.”
“What kind of things?”
“Why, honey, it’s got so she knows the color of the weather before I open the drapes.”
“She does?”
“And she knows more than that.”
“Like what?”
“She knew two weeks before the fellow down the road showed up for the revival.”
“Yeah?”
“He was a preacher and you couldn’t trust a word out of his mouth and Maria said so. Right up in front of everybody. Told him what was what about believing what you believe and bearing false witness.” I stopped her, but she went on. “And she’d know about you, too, honey, if you looked her in the eyes.”
“That’s what I called about,” I said. “Meeting her, that is.”
“What’s that?”
“I believe Willy’s Wonderama would like to meet her.” I hesitated. “Make her the wonder she is.”
“She is a wonder, that’s the truth.” The woman laughed, a thin sound that broke and put itself back together. “When I got up this morning, first thing she said to me, she said, Mother.” She cleared her throat. “She said somebody would be calling us today.”
“She did?”
“Somebody with the name Ruby.”
I held the phone with my ear and shoulder and rubbed my arms. I felt cold.
I heard the shifting of furniture, the slamming of what could have been a drawer.
“Ruby’s an old-time name, and I wouldn’t likely forget it.”
“I guess that’s a fact,” I said. I held the phone and my mouth was dry.
“And another thing,” the woman said. “She said something about fiddle music. It playing so pretty.”
“She said all that?”
“I don’t know. Let her tell you her own self.”
She laid the phone down. Chairs shifted, and there was urging. “Oh, talk to her. What could it hurt?”
More scraping, then breathing on the line.
“Maria Murdy?” I asked.
“I am.”
“I read about you,” I said. “About your miracles.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call them miracles.” Her voice made me think of sad eyes, ones sure of what they knew.
“What do you call them?”
She laughed. “Just a little seeing and knowing, I guess.”
I thought about the name the woman had said. Ruby. “Was that your mother?”
“It was.”
“She said the name Ruby just now. How did she know that name?”
“I told her it was a name that come to the person who’d call. A name that come as a voice.”
“I don’t know about any voices,” I said, my voice faint.
“Listen.” She got quiet, and the line hummed. “Listen to what the voice says to you. To the stories it tells.”
“And if I do? What comes after that?”
“Well, I feel like I’ve seen some sign or something.”
“No. I mean like a sign with lights, and a purple cat.”
A purple cat? That was a little better than God. I was ready to hang up, but I waited for her to say more.
“The only thing I really know for sure is there’s a town with a name like light.”
“That should be easy enough. Is there more?”.
She laughed. “Onliest thing you don’t know how to do?”
“What’s that?”
“Love, I’d say. But I don’t know enough about that to tell you much.”
“I don’t either,” I started to say, but the line went to static and then I held on awhile more until I was sure she was gone.