Ghost Boy (18 page)

Chapter

37

T
he children came like bees, in a swarm from every side. Sunburned, scruffy boys followed Mr. Hunter as he paced across the field with a paint can and a brush. They bent down when he bent down, and watched openmouthed as he dabbed the grass with whitewash. But they left him when the roustabouts came, naked to the waist with their hammers on their shoulders, and formed circles around
their
circles, around Mr. Hunter's gleaming marks. The boys chanted the roustabouts' chant as the sledges rose and fell to drive the stakes to hold the tent.

Girls in grass-stained white dresses watched the horses stepping from the truck. They watched Flip Pharaoh lead them down the ramp, two abreast with white manes flashing, and wished they were her.

But every child in Trickle Creek, every boy and girl, came running to the bugle call of Conrad.

Harold, high on the elephant's back, hauling poles across the field, saw them coming from every side. He heard their voices; he saw how they raced each other, and fear tingled through him to see an army of boys running at him.

Conrad always knew how he felt. The big, floppy ears grew wide and stiff. The trunk curled up and blasted out an angry, frightened sound. And the chains clanked taut, pulling harder at the bundled poles.

Harold saw the children mob around him. Twenty, thirty children, they moved in a mass as the elephant moved, coming forward behind him, going backward ahead. Conrad's ears were as big and wide as doors. His head lowered and swayed, and the trunk slashed back and forth. It was only the poles that held him back; he ran in slow motion at a redheaded boy the way he had hurtled at Roman.

But Harold found he wasn't frightened anymore. He was part of the elephant, a little white growth on its back, the brains of a creature nearly twenty feet high. He swaggered through the children, his hands on his hips, rocking with the elephant's roll.

They called him “mister.” “What's his name, mister?” they shouted. “How much does he eat?” “Mister, how much does he weigh?”

But Harold didn't answer. He bullied through the group of children, then steered Conrad toward a blur of people and the fuzzy shapes of elephants. Max Graf was there, and he called to Conrad; they bugled back and forth.

Harold knew people by their voices as much as by their faces. He knew Roman's right away.

“Hey, Whitey! Bring those poles over here.”

He nudged the elephant with his foot. The poles slid and rattled behind him. He steered straight for Roman Pinski.

“Okay, Maggot. That's good.”

But he went a little farther, until he towered over Roman, and still he kept going.

“Stop, you freak!”

Harold smiled inside himself to see how Roman leapt away, how he cowered from the elephant. The boy ran a dozen yards before he stopped, quivering, as laughing men unhooked the chains and sent Harold off again.

He went in a dead straight line no matter who was in his way, seeing with a sort of pleasure how people scampered from his path. He brought the side poles and the quarter poles and then the rolls of canvas. And he saw, in snapshots, the big top going up; the center pole standing in its rigging, the tallest thing in sight; the canvas spread around it like a rippled, colored sea as men waded in to lace the parts together; the side poles like a forest of dead trees; the elephants hauling on ropes, and the canvas rising, swelling into shape.

The tent was smaller than he'd thought, all worn and faded by the sun. The new section of canvas was bright and clean, and all the rest looked sadder for it, so often patched that there were patches on the patches. But still it impressed him, and it swallowed whole a huge flatbed truck loaded with ring banks and bleachers.

He brought the pieces of the sideshow tent, the pieces of the cook tent. And the canvas city grew around him, until he rode the elephant down narrow lanes where—an hour before—there had been nothing but an empty field.

Through the afternoon, people came from miles around as news of the circus reached them. They wandered through the lot, around the tents and down the line of trucks. And Harold bullied through them. He knocked aside a farmer and his children, turned a corner, and came upon the painted trailer.

He hadn't planned to go there, or didn't think he had. But he leaned forward, his elbows on Conrad's back, and stared at the home of the Cannibal King. When the trailer started to shake, he thought it was only his eyes. But the trees broke apart as he watched, and a black hole appeared between two trunks, growing wider as the door swung open. Harold straightened.

Out through the door came the Cannibal King, as though he had stepped right from the jungles of Oola Boola Mambo.

He wore a leopard skin that draped to his knees and left one shoulder bare. And underneath he was white as bones, just as white as Harold was. His hair had that color that had no color, like sunlight on the water. But it ballooned from his head in a tremendous bush that shook as he walked on legs like springs from the trailer to his car.

“An albino,” said Harold, half aloud. He breathed the word atop the elephant. He had never seen one before, except himself—the mirror boy he'd always found so white and freakish. But the Cannibal King was handsome, almost beautiful, and graceful as a cougar. He
stalked
toward the car.

Behind him came a group of children, creeping around the trailer, dashing from there to the shadows of another truck. They giggled with their hands over their mouths, stealing from shadow to shadow, from wheel to wheel. But the Cannibal King turned on them suddenly, spreading his arms, shouting at them in what must have been the grunted words of the Stone People.

“Bunga!” he roared, his enormous arms shaking. “Unga dooloo makena!”

The children scattered, and he walked on. He opened the car's rear door and pulled out a huge cardboard box, which he dropped to the ground with a rattle and a thud. He pushed it along with his foot.

The children came back, like birds frightened briefly from a feeder. They peered around fenders and bumpers and wheels as the Cannibal King shunted his box toward the trailer. Then he bent and reached inside it. He pulled out a bone, another bone, an arm with fingers at the end. He waved them at the children, roaring at the top of his voice, “Pago pago manihiki!” And the children shrieked and darted away.

The Cannibal King laughed deeply. He hoisted the box through the trailer door and closed himself inside. The door vanished, overgrown by the painted jungle.

Harold stared at the trailer, at the parrots and the monkeys. He wished he lived in a place like that, in the land of the Stone People. He'd be normal there, the same as everyone else, and the freaks would be people like Roman Pinski and Dusty Kearns. He longed for the door to open again, for the Cannibal King to appear.

“Go and meet him,” a voice told Harold. It might have been his conscience, but it came from down below. He looked past the elephant's shoulder and saw Tina staring up, the Fossil Man beside her.

“Go on,” she said. “You've come all this way to meet him, and it's just a few more feet you have to go.”

“Can I do that?” Harold asked. “Can I just go up and talk to him?”

“Sure.” Her little hands rose in a shrug. “Why not?”

“He's a king. You can't just go and talk to a king.”

“Oh, nuts,” she said. “I talk to him all the time, and he's just the same as me.”

“But you're a princess,” Harold said.

“Don't be silly,” she said, and laughed. “You want to meet him, go ahead.”

Samuel never raised his head. “Forget it,” he said. “You're wasting your time. Look at him up there, bigger and better than anyone else. You'll never get him down to our level again.”

Harold blushed on the elephant's back. He wished Samuel would at least lift his head.

“Come on, Tina. We'd better go before he tramples us.”

“Not Harold,” she said. But she wasn't much taller than the elephant's ankle, and she did step away from the enormous front leg. “Harold would never turn on his friends.”

“His friends?” said Samuel. “I don't see anyone like that around.” He bent down and took Tina in his arms. “If we had our little house, I bet he wouldn't come near it. Not even to hear the cuckoo sing.”

Tina looked over his shoulder as he carried her off. Her arms around his thick, hair-covered neck, she looked back at Harold.

“He'll be welcome at my house,” she said. “He'll always be welcome there.”

Samuel said something that Harold couldn't hear. Then he passed the next truck, hidden for a moment by its khaki hood, and when he came out on the other side the Gypsy Magda was walking beside him, as if she'd been waiting there for them. Samuel knelt, and Tina slipped down to the ground, and they walked away, three in a line.

It felt to Harold as though they had left him behind, as surely as he'd fled from Liberty. It felt as though he would never talk to them again.

“Well, who needs you?” he muttered. “Bunch of freaks; who needs you?” He
was
better than them now. He had a job; he had a girlfriend, didn't he? He certainly had the best seat in the cook tent, and he couldn't even move without everyone saying hello. He wasn't the same boy who had left Liberty. That was for sure.

He watched them until they were gone, then turned again to the painted trailer. But the jungles of Oola Boola Mambo shimmered now in his eyes, and that feeling was gone, that urge to meet the Cannibal King. In a way, he was frightened to meet him.

Chapter

38

C
onrad hurried along as he came closer to the other elephants. His feet hammered on the ground as his plodding walk quickened to a trot. Women pulled their children out of his path; men whirled aside with angry shouts. Even Harold was nervous; the elephant felt out of control. It trumpeted, another bugled back, and Conrad hurtled around the big top with his ears pinned back.

In the shadow of the tent Flip was dressing Max Graf in a feathered crimson headpiece. The elephant was kneeling, and she stood atop his forehead as Conrad pounded up beside her, scattering the people who had gathered to watch her work.

“Stop showing off,” she said. “Don't run him like that.”

“He ran himself,” said Harold.

“Then at least
he
knows he should have been here.”

Conrad growled. “You shouldn't get angry at me,” Harold warned. “Conrad doesn't like it.”

Flip's face was nearly as red as the feathers. “Then where have you been?” she demanded.

“I thought I'd walk him for a while,” said Harold. “I thought—”

“No, you didn't.” The long feathers ruffled across her face. “You didn't think at all. The circus starts in an hour, and there's a million things to do. So get offa there and help me.”

Harold pulled his feet from the strap. “Down trunk,” he said, but Conrad didn't move. “Down trunk!” He kicked against the hide.

Conrad stood facing Flip, huffing breaths that shook his chest. He stepped forward.

“Back!” shouted Harold, pulling at the leather. With a sudden rush of fear he thought the elephant would go after Flip. But Roman Pinski raised his head over Max Graf's rippled trunk and slowly edged away.

“You white creep,” he said. “I told you, keep that thing away from me.”

Conrad lashed at the ground with his trunk. Harold laughed. “You'd better go,” he said, and laughed again as Roman turned and sprinted off toward the tent, through the doorway in its back. “Yeah, you'd better run, you bet.” He was glad there were people to see it.

“Proud of yourself?” asked Flip.

The elephant knelt, and Harold clambered down. Instantly he felt smaller. He stayed close by Conrad.

“You'll ruin that elephant like this,” said Flip. “You know that? You're making him mean and ugly.”

“I am not,” said Harold, patting Conrad's trunk. “Roman shouldn't have been here.”

“
Someone
had to help me,” said Flip.

“Well, I don't want him here.”

She rolled her eyes. “You sound like Roman.”

“Good,” said Harold, but he blushed. He could hear his voice like an echo in his mind. He had sounded
exactly
like Roman.

“Now please come and help me,” she said.

Together they fixed the feathers onto Max Graf. As more people came to watch, they placed a saddle blanket of tasseled velvet on his back, shining collars on his feet. And Harold grinned to see how proud Max was, bending up his trunk to preen the feathers on his head.

“I gotta get ready, so you'll have to do the others by yourself,” said Flip. “Give Conrad a wash before you dress him, and when you've finished they can each have two oranges. There's six in the harness box.”

“Wait,” said Harold. There was quite a crowd by then. “Can't you stay and help?”

“I would,” she said, with a brilliant smile. “But you came so late there isn't any time. I'm gonna dress the horses and come right back to get you.”

“Can you make these people go away?”

“Oh, I wish I could,” she said. “But everything is part of the show in a little town like this. They've maybe never seen a circus, let alone an elephant.”

His eyes jiggled. He had to tilt his head to see her.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “You'll just have to get used to it. If this was Barnum and Bailey, there'd be
thousands
here to watch you.”

She touched his shoulder and stepped away, and Harold groaned inside. He fumbled with the bucket as he set it down by Conrad's head. He fumbled with the brush so badly that it popped from his hands like a bar of soap. And when he bent to pick it up, he stepped on it by mistake. The people laughed behind him; they screamed with laughter. Harold whirled around to see that Conrad had drained the bucket and sprayed the water across the crowd. A little man with stringy hair—an important-looking man—was dripping from his nose and chin. But he was laughing harder than anyone.

Harold smiled. It was the elephants they were watching, not him. And he went to his work with a feeling of pride, knowing how strange the animals looked to people who had never seen an elephant. Conrad reveled in all the attention that he got. Once more he sprayed the crowd. Then he tipped the bucket upside down, picked it up and set it on his head.

“What's his name?” a woman asked.

“Conrad,” said Harold.

“He's a monkey, isn't he?”

“Gosh, ma'am,” said Harold, feeling awfully sorry for the woman. “He's an elephant.”

He washed Conrad down, put on the feathers and the blanket and the collars. He dressed Canary Bird as well. Then he got out the bag of oranges, and the elephants twitched and murmured. He put on a show, tossing the oranges to Canary Bird, who plucked two in a row from the air. He fed two to Max, seeing how the people craned forward to watch, seeing for himself how strangely an elephant ate, the trunk curling back to stuff each orange into a tiny slit of a mouth.

As he fed Conrad, he heard a little boy shouting, “Mom! Look at that. Mom, the elephant's taking oranges in its tail and sticking them up its bum!”

There was a burst of laughter. Everyone laughed, except for Harold. He heard, in his mind, the Gypsy Magda's voice raised eerily high on the prairie.
Beware of the beast that feeds with its tail.

He felt as though he had to see her, that he couldn't wait another minute. But already the calliope was playing, its music growing louder. Already Flip was coming to get him.

She pushed through the crowd in a white robe that was tied at her waist by a gleaming black ribbon. “Okay,” she said. “Let's go.”