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By Root 1138 0

learned that lesson well, catching whoever his enemy happened to be at the moment alone and unaware in the restroom or stairwell or under the bleachers in the gymnasium. For the most part, however, he was known throughout Coal Creek for his easygoing ways, and to his credit, most of the scraps he got caught up in were because of Lenora, defending her from bullies who made fun of her pious manner and pinched face and that damn bonnet she insisted on wearing. Though just a few months younger than Arvin, she already seemed dried up, a pale winter spud left too long in the furrow. He loved her like his own sister, but it could be embarrassing, walking into the schoolhouse in the morning with her following meekly on his heels. “She ain’t never gonna make cheerleader, that’s for sure,” he told Uncle Earskell. He wished to hell his grandmother had never given her the black-and-white photograph of Helen standing under the apple tree behind the church in a long, shapeless dress with a ruffled hat covering her head. As far as he was concerned, Lenora certainly didn’t need any new ideas on how to make herself look more like the shade of her pitiful mother.

WHENEVER EMMA ASKED HIM about the fighting, Arvin always thought of his father and that damp fall day long ago when he had defended Charlotte’s honor in the Bull Pen parking lot. Though it was the best day he ever remembered spending with Willard, he never told anybody about it, or, for that matter, mentioned any of the bad days that soon followed. Instead, he would simply say to her, his father’s voice echoing faintly in his head, “Grandma, there’s a lot of no-good sonsofbitches out there.”

“My Lord, Arvin, why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Well, maybe you should try praying for them then,” she’d suggest. “That wouldn’t hurt none, would it?” It was times like this when she regretted ever telling Reverend Sykes to leave the boy to find the path to God on his own terms. As far as she could tell, Arvin was always on the verge of heading the other direction.

He rolled his eyes; that was her advice for everything. “Maybe not,” he said, “but Lenora already does enough of that for the both of us, and I don’t see where it’s doing her much good.”

18

THEY SHARED A TENT DOWN AT THE END of the midway with the Flamingo Lady, a rail-thin woman with the longest nose Roy had ever seen on a human being. “She ain’t really a bird, is she?” Theodore asked him after the first time they met her, his usual brash voice turned timid and shaky. Her strange appearance had frightened him. They had worked with freaks before, but nothing that looked quite like this one.

“No,” Roy assured him. “She’s just putting on a show.”

“I didn’t think so,” the cripple said, relieved to find out that she wasn’t real. He looked over and noticed Roy checking out her ass as she walked toward her trailer. “Hard to tell what kind of diseases something like that’s got,” he added, his cockiness quickly returning once he was satisfied she was out of hearing range. “Women like that, they’ll fuck a dog or a donkey or anything else for a buck or two.”

The Flamingo Lady’s wild, bushy hair was dyed pink, and she wore a bikini that had ragged pigeon feathers glued to the flesh-colored material. Her act consisted mostly of standing on one leg in a little rubber swimming pool filled with dirty water while preening herself with her pointy beak. A record player sat on a table behind her playing slow, sad violin music that sometimes made her cry if she had accidentally taken too many of her nerve pills that day. Just as he had feared, Theodore figured out after a couple of months that Roy was tapping it, though try as he might, he could never actually catch them in the filthy act. “That ugly bitch is gonna hatch an egg one of these days,” he railed at Roy, “and I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut the goddamn chick will look just like you.” Sometimes he cared; sometimes he didn’t. It depended on how he and Flapjack the Clown were getting along at the moment. Flapjack had come to Theodore wanting to learn a few