I had a plate. It was a decorative souvenir, with a yellow Florida printed on it. The image of the state was edged with things like pelicans and leaping sports fish and tropical flowers.
In the pocket of somebody’s peacoat hanging on an old hat rack, Roger had found a handful of old tickets from the dog-track.
A draw, we concluded.
In the third round, I wandered several moments, with an increasing sense that time was running out. I spun around and plunged into the depths of the attic—and almost put one of my eyes out blundering into Roger’s hat rack, the one with the peacoat. I grabbed it by its bole to prevent it falling over and taking me with it. I wound up hugging it. After I caught my breath, I released it from my embrace and stepped back. The peacoat had fallen to the floorboards. Tied around one of the arms of the hat rack was a gauzy and glittery scarf. It seemed so familiar that I thought it must have been Mama’s.
I just made the end of the round, with the scarf turbaned around my head.
Roger had a blue-glass candleholder.
Grady had turned up a horsewhip.
The boys admired the scarf teasingly but we all agreed to award Grady the third round. His prize was three paper cups of iced tea to the one that Roger and I each tossed back. We smoked another cigarette before we began round four, for which we allotted seven minutes. Roger and I spun Grady around and pushed him off in one direction. Roger spun me around and pushed me off. He took another direction yet.
I barked my shins on one thing or another and had to brush the loose ends of the gauze scarf out of my eyes. The gauze was as sweat soaked as the rest of me. Even the palms of my hands were damp. I wiped them on my shorts, to no avail, as they were so sweaty that they were sticking to me. I looked around for any sort of absorbent material and spotted a rug covering a trunk. Placing my candle stub carefully on a nearby stack of suitcases, I knelt down next to it to dry my hands on the mangy wool fibers of the scrap of faded Persian rug. With my hands a little drier, I started to rise. A sharp pain exploded in my head. I went back to my knees and then to all fours, bracing myself against the pain that grew duller and more comprehensive. Then I dropped to my stomach, as if by getting lower, I could duck under the head pain. My eyes were tearing steadily but my face was so wet with perspiration it hardly made any difference. Droplets tracked down my face and dripped from my jaw and chin.
I closed my eyes. After a moment or two, the misery seemed to ease. I heard Roger and Grady, already back at the tarp, talking to each other.
I pulled my knees up under me again and pushed upward. A twinge in my head. The scarf around my head felt as if it had tightened. My fingers worked at the knot that held it but the fabric was wet, too slippery to move. Giving up on the knot, I managed to get back on my feet. I could only think to bumble my way back and admit defeat. As I blinked the blur of moisture from my eyes, I saw someone. Not Grady. Not Roger. Someone else. And then I recognized the flicker of shape in my eyes as a reflection, of myself. I saw the frame around it. Propped a few feet away, on top of a cluttered table, was something framed under glass. I snatched it up. It was a large frame but more bulky than heavy. The whole thing seemed to be about the size of the window on the landing, the one with the stained glass in it. The frame was incredibly dusty, and I grimaced at the filth but then I realized the dust was absorbing the moisture from my fingers and palms.
Embracing my find, I lurched breathlessly onto the tarp just as the timer buzzed.
Roger whistled at how close I had come to missing the deadline.
Holding the framed whatever-it-was against my front, I squatted down with them.
Grady produced a box of playing cards folded to look like cranes. Each had a bit of string piercing it that made it obvious that they were meant to be hung up.
Roger had an old black umbrella, like something that an undertaker would have to shelter mourners from rain.
Awkwardly because of its size, I turned my discovery around so that they could see it. I tried to see it myself at the same time but could not, so I propped it against the attic wall and wriggled around in front of it.
“Wow,” said Roger.
“Amen,” Grady said.
I rubbed at the dusty glass.
It was a framed poster.
Around the legend that took up the middle of the poster, various circus acts were depicted in gaudy colors.
A parade of elephants, a spangle-clad woman in the howdah on the first of the great beasts.
Drawn by white horses, a calliope on wheels, with a woman at the organ keys.
A man in a top hat and tails stood beaming in a spotlight.
A mustachioed man in jodhpurs with a whip, surrounded by complacent lions.
A very painted woman with big gold hoop earrings offered a crystal ball to the viewer.
An enormously fat woman sitting on a loading scale.
Clowns, all crammed together in and falling out of a pumpkin-shaped coach drawn by sheep.
Another man in tails, holding a top hat with a bunny peeking out of it.
An orange-haired woman in tights, full-bodied, in a costume like a corset, balanced barefoot on a high wire. Bringing my candle close to the poster, I peered at the high-wire walker. She bore a shocking resemblance to Fennie Verlow. I wondered if I really remembered Fennie Verlow’s features that well. The woman could not be Fennie Verlow, for the poster was far too old, the costuming and hairstyles suggesting the nineteen-aughts.
I rubbed more dust away and held my candle stub close and examined every human figure on the poster intently. The fortune-teller’s scarves were very like the one around my head. The name Tallulah popped into my mind, but no more useful information than its bald syllables. Did I know the fat woman on the loading scale? The very tall thin man stretching himself like rubber? Could it be Mr. Quigley? The ringmaster in the top hat and tails: Father Valentine? The woman running the calliope was the spit of the current Queen Elizabeth, I thought. No, it was Mrs. Mank she most resembled. I shook my head in amazement, realizing it was Mrs. Mank who looked like Queen Elizabeth—who always had.
The woman in the howdah, sitting cross-legged like a snake charmer, her legs in net stockings. Her face was a rough approximation, I saw with a jolt of my heart, of the woman depicted in the photograph inside the egg. She held a lighted candle in one hand, and on the other perched a scarlet macaw. Lightly sketched upon the bird was the suggestion of a harness. At once I understood the odd nature of the loops of silk in my pocket, the ones on which the egg hung. It was the harness, not of a rat, but of a bird as large as a macaw.
We three huddled close, peering at the poster.
“This is old,” Grady said. “Like a hundred years.”
“More ’an ’at,” said Roger.
“Calley wins all,” said Grady.
Roger nodded his head yes.
We sat back on our heels and had another round of iced tea. The ice in it was long melted and the bourbon taste somewhat diluted. Our thirst was greater and we drank eagerly, while we continued to study the poster.
“I’m filthy,” I said. “Miz Verlow sees me like this, she’ll wan know why.”
I had an idea that I was going to go downstairs and clean up. But when I started to get up, I had to sit back down again.
Roger said, “Uh-oh.”
“Tight?” asked Grady.
“Am not,” I insisted.
“Better stay sat down then,” Grady advised.
“I’m gone melt,” I said. I leaned forward to blow out my candle.
The boys weren’t expecting the sudden darkness around me. They jumped and then snickered to hide their momentary alarm.
I drank the last of the tea. Queasy, dizzy—I closed my eyes.