The Best American Essays 2013 Page 5

  Back and forth I walked, first close to the house and then venturing here and there as I got to rely on my eyesight and could count on not bumping into the pump handle or the platform that supported the clothesline. The birds began to stir, and then to sing—as if each of them had thought of it separately, up there in the trees. They woke far earlier than I would have thought possible. But soon, soon after those earliest starting songs, there got to be a little whitening to the sky. And suddenly I was overwhelmed with sleepiness. I went back into the house, where there was suddenly darkness everywhere, and I very properly, carefully, silently, set the tilted chair under its knob and went upstairs without a sound, managing doors and steps with the caution necessary although I seemed already half asleep. I fell into my pillow. And I woke late—late in our house being around nine o’clock.

  I would remember everything then, but it was so absurd—the bad part of it indeed was so absurd—that I could hardly bother about it. My brother and sister had gone off to school—being still in public school, they were not getting time off for good exam performances, as I was. When they got home in the afternoon, my sister was somebody who could never have passed through such a danger. It was absurd. We swung together in the hammock, one of us at either end.

  It was in that hammock that I spent much of the days, and that may have been the simple reason for my not getting to sleep at night. And since I did not speak of my night difficulties, nobody came up with the simple information that I’d be better to get more action during the daytime.

  My troubles returned with the night, of course. The demons grabbed hold of me again. And in fact it got worse. I knew enough to get up and out of my bunk without any pretending that things would get better and I would go to sleep if I just tried hard enough. I made my way as carefully out of the house as I had done before. I became able to find my way around more easily; even the inside of those rooms became more visible to me and yet more strange. I could make out the tongue-and-groove kitchen ceiling put in when the house was built maybe a hundred years ago, and the northern window frame partly chewed away by a dog that had been shut in the house one night long before I was born. I remembered what I had completely forgotten—that I used to have a sandbox there, placed where my mother could watch me out the north window. A great bunch of golden glow was flowering in its place now; you could hardly see out of that window at all.

  The east wall of the kitchen had no windows in it, but it had a door opening on a stoop where we stood to hang out the heavy wet washing and haul it in when it was dry and smelling fresh and triumphant, from white sheets to dark heavy overalls.

  At that stoop I sometimes halted in my night walks. I never sat down, but it eased me to look toward town, maybe just to inhale the sanity of it. All the people getting up before long, having their shops to go to, their doors to unlock and window arrangements to see to, their busyness.

  One night—I can’t say whether it was the twentieth or the twelfth or only the eighth or the ninth that I had got up and walked—I got a sense, too late for me to change my pace, that there was somebody around the corner. There was somebody waiting there and I could do nothing but walk right on. I would be caught if I turned back.

  Who was it? Nobody but my father. He too was looking toward town and that improbably faint light. He was dressed in his day clothes—dark work pants, the next thing to overalls but not quite, and dark shirt and boots. He was smoking a cigarette. A roll-your-own, of course. Maybe the cigarette smoke had alerted me to another presence, though it’s possible that in those days the smell of tobacco smoke was everywhere, inside and out.

  He said good morning, in what might have seemed a natural way except that there was nothing natural about it. We weren’t accustomed to giving such greetings in our family. There was nothing hostile about this—it was just thought unnecessary, I suppose, to give a greeting to somebody you would be seeing off and on all day long.

  I said good morning back. And it must have really been getting toward morning or my father would not have been dressed for a day’s work in that way. The sky may have been whitening but hidden still between the heavy trees. The birds singing too. I had taken to staying away from my bunk till later and later, even though I didn’t get comfort from doing that as I had at first. The possibilities that had once inhabited only the bedroom, the bunk beds, were taking up the corners everywhere.

  Now that I come to think of it, why wasn’t my father in his overalls? He was dressed as if he had to go into town for something, first thing in the morning.

  I could not continue walking, the whole rhythm of it had been broken.

  “Having trouble sleeping?” he said.

  My impulse was to say no, but then I thought of the difficulties of explaining that I was just walking around, so I said yes.

  He said that was often the case on summer nights.

  “You go to bed tired out and then just as you think you’re falling asleep you’re wide awake. Isn’t that the way?”

  I said yes.

  I knew now that he had not heard me getting up and walking around on just this one night. The person whose livestock was on the premises, whose earnings such as they were lay all close by, who kept a handgun in his desk drawer, was certainly going to stir at the slightest creeping on the stairs and the easiest turning of a knob.

  I am not sure what conversation he meant to follow then, as regards my being awake. He had declared such wakefulness to be a nuisance. Was that to be all? I certainly did not intend to tell him more. If he had given the slightest intimation that he knew there was more, if he’d even hinted that he had come here intending to hear it, I don’t think he’d have got anything out of me at all. I had to break the silence out of my own will, saying that I could not sleep. I had to get out of bed and walk.

  Why was that?

  I had dreams.

  I don’t know if he asked me, were those bad dreams?

  We could take that for granted, I think.

  He let me wait to go on, he didn’t ask anything. I meant to back off but I kept talking. The truth was told with only the slightest modification.

  When I spoke of my little sister, I said that I was afraid I would hurt her. I believed that he would know what I meant. Kill. Not hurt. Kill, and for no reason. None at all. A possession.

  There was no satisfaction, really, once I had got that out. I had to say it then. Kill her.

  Now I could not unsay it, I could not go back to the person I had been before.

  My father had heard it. He had heard that I thought myself capable—for no reason, capable—of strangling my little sister in her sleep. He said, “Well.”

  Then he said not to worry. He said, “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.”

  He said this quite seriously but without any sort of alarm or jumpy surprise. People have these kinds of thoughts or fears if you like, but there’s no real worry about it, no more than a dream. Probably to do with the ether.

  He did not say, specifically, that I was in no danger of doing any such thing. He seemed more to be taking it for granted that such a thing could not happen. An effect of the ether, he said. No more sense than a dream. It could not happen, in the way that a meteor could not hit our house (of course it could, but the likelihood of it doing so put it in the category of couldn’t).

  He did not blame me, though, for thinking of it.

  There were other things he could have said. He could have questioned me further about my attitude to my little sister or my dissatisfactions with my life in general. If this were happening today, he might have made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist. (I think that is what I might have done, a generation and an income further on.)

  The fact is that what he did worked as well. It set me down, but without either mockery or alarm, in the world we were living in.

  If you live long enough as a parent, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about as well as the ones you do know about, all too well. You
are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don’t think my father felt anything like this. I do know that if I had ever taxed him, he might have said something about liking or lumping it. The encounters I had as a child with his belt or the razor strop. (Why do I say encounters? It’s to show I’m not a howling sissy anymore, I can make light.) Those strappings, then, would have stayed in his mind, if they stayed at all, as no more than quite adequate curbing of a mouthy child’s imagining that she could rule the roost.

  “You thought you were too smart” was what he might have given as his reason, and indeed one heard that often in those times. Not always referring to myself. But a number of times, it did.

  However, on that breaking morning he gave me just what I needed to hear and what I was to forget about, soon enough.

  I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning appointment to go to the bank, and to learn there, not to his surprise, that there was no extension to his loan, he had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn around and he had to find a new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at the same time. Or he may have found out that there was a name for my mother’s shakiness and that it was not going to stop. Or that he was in love with an impossible woman.

  Never mind. From then on I could sleep.

  RICHARD SCHMITT

  Sometimes a Romantic Notion

  FROM The Gettysburg Review

  AT SCHOOL TODAY an esteemed member of my department said his grandfather, at age eighteen, “ran off” to join a circus. I thought, Why do people say it like that? Anyone who ever joined a circus seems to have run away to do it. My colleague is a poet, a wordsmith, a teacher of language, trained to be precise and accurate. I asked him why he said “ran off.” “Was your grandfather a runaway? A fugitive of some kind?”

  “Well, no,” he said. He didn’t know why he said “ran off.” “The romantic exotica we associate with circuses, I guess.”

  We don’t say that about other institutions. No one says that they ran off to join a university, or a sports franchise, or a Fortune 500 company, but circus employees are deemed runaways. Even the word employee doesn’t jibe with public perception of circus workers. Circus people are not considered employed in the way one works for AT&T or Walmart. In a recent PBS documentary about New York’s Big Apple Circus, the initial segment was called “Run Away.” I can say for sure, because I know people on that show; very few of them, if any, are dyed-in-the-wool runaways. A few directionless young people? Sure. A middle-age crisis or two? Maybe. As Washington Post reviewer Hank Stuever said, “Though the dream may be very much intact as a metaphor for escaping life’s monotony, people don’t run away and join the circus much anymore.”

  Did they ever? I have not mentioned to my colleagues that by the time I was seventeen, I had run away from home three times. It was not romantic. I lied about my age, worked shit jobs, paid rent on squalid apartments with degenerate roommates. No car, no girlfriend. One morning in 1970, riding in the back of a flatbed truck on the way to a job site, I saw the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train parked under an I-95 overpass in Providence, Rhode Island. The train was white. The train yard black. I was a brick washer then. I spent my days at a construction site with a hose and a wire brush, scrubbing dried cement off red bricks. Before that I had a job pulling bent nails from boards and pounding them straight with a hammer. Minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. My roommate was huddled in the back of the truck, a junkie, hugging himself and shivering, the wind roaring and whipping. I pointed down at the train yard. “A white train,” I yelled. The kid stared at me. He was drooling. All he heard was the word white.

  After eight hours of brick scrubbing, blue jeans covered with red dust, I walked under the I-95 overpass, the steel stanchions droning with rush-hour traffic, and into the train yard. The white train was long, split in two sections, and lined up on parallel tracks. I walked between the cars on a concrete walkway receding to a common vanishing point. I looked in the windows and open vestibules. I saw a tanned woman in a gold thong lying on her stomach on a plastic chaise lounge, the folding kind you take to the beach; it was August, and she was gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. Beside her on the concrete was a can of Pepsi in a Styrofoam cooler, and next to that were the shining steel wheels of the train. I walked by in my brick-dust sneakers. She didn’t budge. I passed a small cast-iron barbecue grill and ducked under a makeshift clothesline with laundry drying in the sun. Regular laundry, no spangles or sparkles. Further on a guy stood on a stepladder washing windows. He didn’t look at me. It was very quiet. At some point I climbed three steps into one of the vestibules between cars and looked down the narrow hallways, carpeted, shoes outside doors. I hopped out the other side. There was nothing to see but this brilliant white train in the grimy Providence train yard.

  So the picture is clear; I was a directionless youth seduced by what my colleague referred to as romantic exotica. Fair enough. But I was already a runaway. I thought I might find a job here as a practical endeavor, to get away from brick washing and junkies. And though the train was ethereal in context, it seemed more military than magical, functional over fantastic. Bleached underwear hanging over a barbecue grill, a woman sunbathing, a guy washing windows. There were no skirt-swishing, heel-slapping, tambourine-shaking gypsies doing folk dances. No one played an accordion. I headed back to the civic center.

  People say “run away to join the circus” as if there is only one, and as if there is no doubt about joining it. As if the option resides solely with the runaway. One is fed up; the need to escape strikes; you find this entity called circus and presto, you are embraced. I found this was not true.

  When I got back to the civic center, I saw piles of animal excrement steaming in the road, steel cargo wagons, elephants chained in a line, large cats in cages, men in blue work shirts with nifty patches: The Greatest Show on Earth. You think circus and expect this, but it was disorienting in dismal downtown Providence. The potpourri of people, animals, and apparatuses squelched the mundane stench of diesel exhaust and roaring gears from the nearby Greyhound bus station. Workers, people, hustled through massive doors on the backside of the civic center; it seemed anyone could cruise on in. But when I tried, I was halted abruptly by a stick across my chest, a cane wielded by an elderly white-haired gentleman with one leg about six inches longer than the other. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I was hoping to apply for a job,” I said.

  “A job, huh? What can you do?”

  “I can do anything.”

  He scoffed.

  What was I going to say? I’m a brick washer? A nail puller? Among the few things circuses do not have are bricks and nails.

  “You gotta see Schwartzy, and you can’t come in here until you do.”

  “Where might this Schwartzy be?”

  “How the hell do I know?” His cane swept menacingly overhead. “What do I look like?” He was stout, with his spinal cord warped like a bow, his longer leg thrusting out to one side to accommodate its extra length, and he had a thick orthopedic shoe on the short leg. Later I found out this was Backdoor Jack. An integral part of a system designed to make running away with the circus not as simple as people romantically believe.

  I retreated. People scurrying about were unapproachable; they moved with purpose, function, with no intention of stopping to talk to a town punk. That was another thing I learned later: I was a town punk. A condition glaringly obvious to circus people. I approached a longhaired fellow. “Excuse me.” He shouldered on, uttering guttural sounds. Of course, I thought, circus people are foreigners.

  Among the array of wagons scattered behind the civic center was a diner on wheels: burgers sizzled, a line of people stood at a serving window, a woman with a beehive hairdo took money and handed out food and soft drinks. I got in line. I had seventy-five cents. When it was my turn, the woman looked me in the eye. “Cup of coffee, please,” I said. />
  She set down a Styrofoam cup. “Fifty,” she said, holding out her palm.

  I fumbled with my coins, making sure I had her attention. “Where’s Schwartzy?” I said, as if I knew him.

  “Train, probably,” she said. “Where else would he be?”

  I took my coffee and got out of the way.

  Train, probably. That was a long walk the first time. I headed back. Maybe I could be a window washer. I was qualified for that. I walked and spilled coffee as hot as molten lava over my hand. At the train, the window washer was gone; his stepladder was there, his bucket and squeegee. The tanning woman sunbathed; talking to her was out of the question. I walked between cars, had to be a mile of them. After a while the class of cars deteriorated, the spit polish and flash of the first few cars gave way to peeled paint and sooty squalor. There were garbage bags. The windows weren’t washed. It was like walking from the good neighborhood to the bad, from wide lawns and barbered bushes, to saltbox suburbs, to tenement walkups, to actual animal habitat. Stockcars, pervasive zoo odors, heavy wooden ramps soiled with various types of dried animal crap. Then from the underpinnings of the train, a nest of gray hair atop stooped shoulders emerged, a hunched, troll-like figure crawling from the black belly of the train, dragging a fat rubber hose, the type used for pumping septic tanks. An old man covered in soot and rail cinders. His face resembled a tire tread in dried mud. He chewed something.

  “Schwartzy,” I said. “I’m looking for Schwartzy.”

  “Pie car,” the old man said, his gums working.

  “What’s a pie car?”

  The old man considered this. “Pie car,” he said, pointing back the way I’d come. “152.”