The Wonder in Wonderama
I’d like to say I found just the right potion made of lavender and thyme and mystery, one to make all the world right. Nothing had ever been that easy, and it wasn’t after my father passed. I wandered for a time, just as much as I had in all the times before. I drove over the mountains, through the flatlands. I kept my mother’s gun as a warning on the dashboard of my car when I slept there some nights, telling myself I had the one bullet, just in case. I circled west, east, west. I even found myself at last back in Radiance, at his door. My grandfather’s. It makes a fine story, how he came with me and we found our way to Smyte, found ourselves across the road from the Black Cat Diner the same way I had, all those months back.
Looking over there shocked me. They’d hauled out the tables and booths, even the kitchen sink, which lay upended near the gas pumps, its pipes reaching skyward. The diner sign leaned upside down against the side of the building, pitiful looking without its neon. We could have come upon the aftermath of Armageddon. Here, Precious Seekers. Here is the Hand of the Lord. The Good Lord had yanked out a clothesline full of winter duds, stick-legged nightstands, and a big fold-out table laden with everything from bobby pins to the lard can from the stove.
“I don’t know if you’ll need that fiddle right off.” I nodded in his direction.
“I need it,” he said as he shifted the case higher in his arms.
The dining room was bare, linoleum rolled up and set on end in a corner. “Della?” I called in the general direction of the kitchen, but got an echo and then finally a voice.
“She’s over at the warehouse.” Ona Short had her shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow and rubber gloves. “Look who showed up and when most of the work’s done, too. How are you, Miracelle?”
“What in the world’s going on around here, Ona?”
“World’s shifted, Miracelle.” She pushed straggles of hair out of her face. “I reckon you knew that, if you’ve kept up much.” She studied Leroy Loving out the corner of an eye.
I sighed. “I’m bad that way.”
“Well,” she said. “Della’s cleaning house.”
“I’d say.”
“Bound to leave Smyte, she says.”
“Headed where?”
The kitchen looked like even more of a disaster had made its way through. The door of the fridge hung open, with freezer water pooled in the bottom.
“She’s not sure.” Ona gestured at open boxes. “She’s a whirlwind of a cleaner, that Della.”
We crossed the road, headed toward the building that had held his office. Russell’s. My father’s. Father. The shadow of that word made my heart lurch and fall. I thought of his black eyes, the slouch of his hat. His silver flask and his tattoo of a bird. I wanted wings to pick me up now.
“We didn’t bring a thing for her,” Leroy said. “Not a thing.” He looked nervous, like he needed a package with a bow to hide behind.
“It’ll be all right.” I hooked my arm in his.
In the construction lot in Radiance, I’d picked up the most beautiful piece of coal I could find. A shiny, cobalt-black piece, rubbed slick and round with its own history. He was the other gift. Leroy Loving. A man as grieved by the past as she herself was. The two of them were the only ones left who really knew that time before.
A light was on in the office, and I almost expected to see him in there, his feet propped up on the desk. “Sit yourself down, Miracelle,” he’d have said, and I’d have pushed aside papers and ledgers.
“Well,” Della said. She looked at me and not at him. Leroy stood off to the side, his booted foot testing the waters of the place. “Had a dream about you the other night.” Her eyes were light today. “You were driving someplace with mountains so steep you could go way up on top of them and see forever if you wanted to.”
The top of the desk was cleared of everything but a coffee thermos and a few framed photographs turned in her direction. We were as shy of one another as new lovers or children, and all those feelings that were ashamed of themselves hung in the air.
“You still play that fiddle?” She finally looked at my grandfather.
“Now and again,” he said.
“I always liked that one song you used to play back in the day. What was it?”
“I don’t know if I recollect.” He laid the fiddle case across his knees.
“You know.” She laughed. “That song about winter come and gone.” She laid a hand on her knee. “You used to play so fine, you just about took off flying from the earth. I swear you did.”
“Maybe it was so,” Leroy said, and we got quiet.
“Don’t you see them still, when you close your eyes?” She looked at both of us, at last. “I see them even without my eyes shut.” She shook her head and held her hands up.
“I do,” I said. “I see their spirits, if I try.”
She looked at him now, and it made my heart hurt, the way he looked back.
“They follow me right close,” he said. “They always have.”
He held his hand out to her and she studied it for a bit.
“Maybe they’re here for a reason. Ghosts settled at last,” she said as she reached out, “and ready to wake us.”
It was late summer, August, when I ended up in Knoxville again and stashed my things at the Red Sari. I looked up Willy’s, and the biggest news I could find was a year-old ad for their Grand Re-Opening. View the Wonders of the World, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Don’t Travel Far! See the Two-Tailed Mermaid! The Pencil Headed Woman! The Hits and Misses of Life on Earth! When I actually turned up in the street outside the museum, I found shiny stone lions out front and took the granite steps leading inside.
I bought my ticket for $14.95 without letting anyone at the sales office know I’d been a Willy’s recruiter, and inside I stayed that way, drifting from exhibit to exhibit. In the center of the main foyer was a giant replica of a Neanderthal man made entirely of electrical tape. I studied a map to the newest exhibits. Blind fish from the heart of Mammoth Cave! Girl with Wings!! The boxes and crates and cardboard were gone, and instead there were lit display cases and a crowd of summer tourists. I spent a long while in a room full of photographs and framed newspaper clippings I recognized. Abandoned Ghost Towns of North America. San Toy. Fayette. Prince. Mining towns, all, ones left behind by railway development and the Great Depression. I studied photos of closed-down hotels, empty tipples and water tanks. A headline below a tintype of railroad tracks leading between mountains and a gray sky. Unremembered.
And the shark tank exhibit—a length of blue carpeted hall, quiet and cool and with almost no tourists. I sat on the floor at one end of the hall and wondered if a shark could remember a person.
“Miracelle Loving?”
I’d dozed, lulled by the swish and sway of the shark tails.
Reading glasses perched on the top of her tied-back hair and a gold chain that shone against her skin, it was Marvis Temple. I stood and shook her hand. “It’s me.”
“Back from the grave, from the looks of it,” Marvis said. “Honey, you’ve lost about a stone and look like you’ve seen a highway out of the underworld. What’re you doing here?”
“Couldn’t miss seeing Willy’s,” I said. “What’s with the pants suit?”
Marvis spread her arms and turned around and back “They downsized,” she said. “Got this place up and running, and then they gave the ones of us they didn’t lay off two jobs in one. I run tours, now.”
“You could be running this whole place, Marvis.” I shook my own head.
“I shouldn’t even be here, sister, but you know. There’s something about it.” She looked up at the tank light. “Brought you back, didn’t it?”
I drug the toe of my shoe against the carpet. “I’m between worlds.”
“Come back here to work, girl.” Marvis reached in her pocket, handed me a Willy’s Wonderama card. Best Show This Side of the Mississippi! Wonders Aplenty and Curiosities Galore!!
“Oh, I just wanted to visit some old haunts.” I paused. “Cody. You seen him?”
“Cody.” She tapped the side of her head. “Let me see now. Cody,” she said and winked at me. “Oh! That buddy of yours. Your sweetheart?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” I shrugged. “He been around lately?”
“He was one of the demoted ones.”
“Took off for better parts, I guess?”
“Took off for south Knoxville.” She tapped her chin. “Opened his own place. Just about as full of freaks as this one.”
“What kind of place?” I asked, knowing already what she’d say.
“Tattoos and such.” She took out another card and a pen, and scribbled. “I think that’s its name.” She folded her arms and looked at me again. “You eaten yet? They got a great café in here and I’m buying.”
“I need to get on, Marvis,” I said, but found myself following her along the shark hall and back out into the marbled foyer.
As we walked toward the café, I thought about the name of Cody’s shop. Cody’s Visionary Body Art. Tattoos and News of the Spirit. I pictured the tattoos, the inked swirls and brushstrokes and the empty planes between on Cody’s skin. I pictured his clear, amber eyes and I wondered if he would ever look at me again, much less welcome me in.
I was staying at the Red Sari, doing what I always did. Watching late night television and studying doodads on the shopping network for some home I’d never had. Between, I counted things until I could sleep. Exits signs out of Knoxville. Right-hand turns and left-hand turns by the river in Smyte. The number of salt and pepper shakers at all the booths at the Black Cat Diner. I ran my memory fingers over the keys at the register. Wandered, remembering us sitting outside and neon light inside his truck and us turning the volume up on his tape deck. Mama she done told me, Papa done told me too, ‘Son, that gal you’re foolin’ with, She ain’t no good for you.’ Nothing could make me sleep, and I wanted her ghost voice telling me what to do next, but Ruby was gone, for good it seemed.
I sat by the window and pulled back the drapes. Out beyond the Red Sari were streets I’d ridden with Cody Black to bars and coffee shops, to late night diners for plates of hash and eggs. Beyond that, Highway 40, exits I could take, just for fun. If I wanted to, I could even head to Florida and sign on to some high-falutin’ cruise ship to Key West and on from there. Mexico. Puerto Rico. Net mending on a shrimp boat. Deck hand. Mail carrier to South America. There were worlds and worlds I hadn’t seen. I pictured myself in a silk scarf from a hawker’s stall in Thailand, yellow fruit with a spiky skin and, inside, wet-tasting seeds. I could go anywhere I wanted, if I wanted.
One of the last times I’d sat in this very spot it had been late summer and Cody Black had been asleep. I’d tiptoed over and pulled the sheets back and run a fingertip over the crease along his cheek, marks the pillow made. His lips were open and I leaned down and sniffed his sleep-smelling breath and told myself that just maybe, maybe I loved this man. You can’t love a living soul, Miracelle, he’d said to me, and sent me out into the world to learn who I was. Miracelle Loving. My whole history was in that name. Loving I’d never wanted, but searched for like it was the last thing I’d ever find. And here I was, back from searching for the Holy Grail of family and I’d filled in a blank or two or three inside myself, all right, but a hundred more seemed to follow. I was learning, I guessed, to live with the hollow places in my heart.
Nights like these I sat with what I’d saved from the pages Della and I had burned that night by the river. The words Russell Wallen had written to me the night he died.
Miracelle. You want the truth?
I am no man of words and I’ve never believed in much but two fingers of whiskey and a straight line between here and there. And I can hear you asking. What line do you mean, Russell Wallen?
The real truth?
There’s never been a straight line between any two souls in this world.
I’ve known how to howl at the sky but not a sound ever came back but my own name. I’ve known how to grieve but never had a clue about what I’d lost until it was too late to ask. I’ve spit love out like something that I regretted as soon as it was gone. That’s true,
I swear it. Love chased me down. It was bigger than me. I fought it off, again and again.
Still, I loved you.
Didn’t I?
Miracelle, my own sweet girl.
Let me tell you a story.
What I have left you, baby girl, is tonight. I’m lying here in a pickup truck with no sounds anywhere but the way snow falls. The road is covered and the highways too. The whole world is waiting for the sun to come up, move across the snow. That’s the only promise there is.
Take the true road out.
Make your heart your own.
That long Red Sari night I lay awake a long while, listening to my own breath. Where did breath go, after you died? Breath, traveling down back roads, down the narrow lanes of airways, into the dark caves of chests. I thought of Russell lying alone and waiting out the hours until morning, his last night on earth. Breath leaves your body at night and goes out into the living space of the world. When I finally slept, I dreamed of cowboys and cars. Thunderbirds and Chevys. A sunset redder than any that could really exist. I dreamed all their ghosts. Russell and Ruby, two-stepping across a diner floor at midnight. Della, her hands that knew an engine better than love. Hands reaching for other hands, those hands with stories I now know. Cody Black, his back tattooless, the skin new and fresh and waiting for its fine ink. Or them, Willy’s Wonders. Natty-feathered birds taking flight into some strange, huge sky. Ruby Loving, her nails painted red. Sweet one, she said, as she stroked the top of my head as I slept. You’ll come around girl, she said. Oh, you’ll be just fine.
A ghost dream further back than that. Dream of the flat bare earth around Radiance and the house that used to be my grandfather’s. Earth long before the dying trees, their branches barely tipped with green. How my mother used to play out there, her bare feet tough with summer. How her mother tossed pans of dishwater out the open door of the house that used to be. But that dream was still too new. There were a million others behind such simple ones of that family I’d never known. Time upon time. A hundred million years ago, layers of earth moved against earth. Swamps were alive. Seas and rivers were there, sand and clay and a hot heart fire, flames shimmying up and up at the center of everything. The world, my mother said, already full of ghosts before it even began.
Was it a dream or was it wishing when I finally slept deep? Dreamed of family, or what was left of one, become a mighty success. The Black Cat, moved east to Radiance, becomes a one-night-a-week performance hall for a once great fiddle player and on occasion his fortune-telling granddaughter. And Della? She fixes your ride for you, fixes engines of their miss. She fixes breakfasts and suppers, orders up and serves. And she owns a place that makes paper, too—song sheets and cards, menus and recipes, labels for perfume. Paper, she says, has no staying power—it can flare up, match to corner, corner to flame. But that, too, is right in this dreamed version of a family.
Awake or dreaming, I took all their ghost-hands. Come awake, you little ones, come awake to the love always there. Like it was floating from his house to this empty earth-place, the sound of my grandfather’s bow and strings and voice. I danced every dance I’d ever known and more that came to me now, a revelation. I twirled and hummed along. I was the child I had never been and could be again with my own longing. I swung and do-si-doed by my own self. I took hold of notes I’d never imagined and flew with them around and around as the shadows of the room brightened, began to become first light. Ruby. Della. Russell. Dream or waking, my heart had danced with them and I knew for certain there were so many stories ahead. Ones about souls who love, ones who can’t, and those who must, at last, come home.
It was August, hot as the dickens, and I sat the next morning for the longest while, just studying my own palm. If you looked at a palm the right way, you’d see mountain peaks, and I could even see a tiny little speck that was me in my Dodge Dart, climbing up and across the two peaks, toward the sky and to the other side of my hand and beyond. I could have predicted a road out for myself, but what I did instead was pick out a tank top and an indigo skirt with seahorses on it to wear to go see Cody Black at his shop.
Outside I moved against thick air and sat with the windows down and the door open until the car was aired out enough for me to hold the steering wheel. I read and reread the name and address on the back of the card Marvis had given me. I hadn’t talked to Cody again since after the funeral at the Black Cat, so maybe the Cody I remembered wasn’t even real. Maybe he’d ridden off into some Knoxville sunset where I could never go. Still, I found 13th Street, then cruised the block up and back before I saw the sign for Cody’s shop.
Once I’d parked and dropped in enough quarters for two hours, I inched my way toward the large sign, one lit up, even in the daytime, with some light not of any earth I knew. It was smoke-purple and pink, and the closer I got, I realized that at the center of the sign was a forehead and an eye. The third eye, Cody had called it. I stood for a long time, thirty paces from the shop door, which opened and swung shut twice before I went inside. I’d heard about his world so often, I knew it without even opening the shop door.
Tattoo drawings covered the walls, the shoulders and arms and back shots, photos of recent customers who were becoming nearly famous for their sleeves and chests, their lips rings and tongue piercing photos thrown in for good measure. On the walls, month-by-month calendars of the most-tattooed woman, the most-decorated man. Bottles of ink, indigo and fuchsia and violent oranges, lined up next to cups of water and brushes, inviting as a child’s art room, a painter’s dream. Mats and massage tables. Padded chairs. The hum of needles, something Cody had always found soothing. A sound like a heartbeat and pipes swept me up as I walked inside, and I smelled peppermint and sage. The same light from the sign outside was everywhere, a softer, cooler version that felt like an ice cube moving slowly down my sweating summer skin. Two signs painted on cloth in another shade of purplish red were tacked on each wall, and they blew out and in from the overhead fans. Let Your Body Head East. Dream Your Way Toward Unconquered Space.
Cody. Standing beside a vinyl-covered table. Him and his tattoo gun and a woman draped in a white cover-up. She made a sound somewhere between a moan and a hum of pleasure as he made the final sweep of a long lilac line, the edge of an iris’s petal.
I took a seat in one of the recliners on either side of the room. He worked with a focus I’d seen not long back, in the way my grandfather’s hands stroked a fiddle with a bow. The kind of focus that started midchest, worked its way down a body to the feet that stood on the earth we all walked, then back up again to the heart, the throat, the center of the head. Cody said that holy places were inside our own selves and that we could find them with the touch of hands. My grandfather, for one. He touched strings and notes floated out, set free to soothe, to set you free, to remind you of who you are.
When I looked up, Cody had paused in his work and he was watching me. “You a customer?” he asked at last. “Or do I know you?”
“Could be a little bit of both.” I held his look, reacquainting myself with the exact color of his eyes.
“That so?”
“Could be,” I said again, and then I moved closer so I could see the iris Cody was etching on the woman’s back. It blossomed like a living thing, a door to a soul stepping outside her own skin.