She makes a face, then sighs. “You’d be okay. I’d help you.” Her hand disappears into the skirt pocket and I can hear a soft shuffling.
“I saw you up last night,” I say. Her hands stop moving. “What’s going on with the cards?”
“They’re just being weird.”
When I press her about it, she pounces on me and rubs my hair with her knuckles, hard, burning my scalp. We both start laughing. She tickles my sides and I squirm to get free. An Indian burn ends everything when I twist her forearm until she howls and smacks me upside the head, stopping things as quickly as they started. We fall on the grass. For a second we’re right again.
“You had Alice over last night,” she says, gasping.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“What’s with you and her?”
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t, not really, but I want to protect this old new thing between us.
“I like her. She’s too good for you.” She breaks off a piece of beach grass, puts it between her teeth and chews. “You’d like Rose’s,” she says. “It’s the carnival that came around when we were kids. It’s a family business.”
“How’d you wind up with them?”
“A friend I met reading cards in Atlantic City. He’d worked with Rose’s before and introduced me. I read Thom Rose’s cards, we talked and wound up clicking. It’s good travel and a steady gig through the summers. The money’s not so bad.”
“Did you mention Mom?”
“I’m not an idiot. What, I’m not going to say that my mother worked the circuit? That’s probably why he hired me. He’d take you on if you wanted.”
“And what would I do?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
My understanding of carnivals is esoteric. Here is the reality, my knock-kneed sister with the wild eyes, asking me to run away. It would scratch the itch that’s always wondered what Mom was like before Dad. “Is it like it used to be?”
“Pretty much,” she says. “A little bigger, more rides now, more games. The sideshow’s changed, more acts, fewer bouncers.” She sees my confusion. “Jars, the stuff in jars. Never mind, you don’t want to know.”
Things preserved in formaldehyde, animals and otherwise. I remember standing inside a too-hot-to-breathe tent, fingers glued together by sweat, staring at a milky white pickled shark with two heads, one at each end. “You like it?”
“Sure.”
“You didn’t sound great when you called. And you look tired.”
“It’s not great all the time,” she says. “But what is? Eating crap, getting sick, shitting my brains out.” She stretches an arm over her head. Her shoulder makes a loud popping sound. “I got really sick last year outside of Philly. I go into a bookstore because they clean those bathrooms. I’m in there sick like I’m dying — guts rolling around, staring at the floor trying not to pass out and I see these yellow shoes sticking out in the stall next to me. The lady figures out I can see her feet so she pulls them back, like I’m not supposed to know she’s there. Like, if she picks up her feet she can forget she’s hearing my shit hit the water. You don’t deal with stuff like that. You’ve got a house. You’ve always got your own toilet.” She scratches the back of her neck. The bird tattoo on her wrist flutters. “But most of the time it’s good. Thom would love you.”
“Why do you want me to go so badly?”
“Maybe I miss you,” she says.
“I missed you too.” I did. I always do. Could I go? Pile my stuff in the car, drive down a highway, following a line of trailers, campers, spend days and nights in a chlorinated dunk tank, and come back in six months, dirty, gaunt, and lonely. No, not now. We’re just shy of the 24th and Enola’s here. It feels too coincidental. “Why’d you come home now?”
“Rose’s was coming by anyway. I asked Thom if I could take time to see you. I thought maybe we could talk.” We watch waves grind sand until mosquitoes start in at us. She smacks one. “I do love you some.” Some. It’s what she’s always said, but the way she says it is better than if she’d said she loves me wholly. Those years we were alone, maybe I didn’t do so badly. We pick our way through brush and poison ivy to the path leading to the house. Her hands slip back into her skirt pocket and I hear the slide of paper against paper.
A beaten-up yellow car sits in our driveway — not hers. A lean form stands by it, arm propped on the hood. The figure could not be more striking. Serpentine and crawling with unknown potential.
Enola breathes deep like a diver, shrieks, and takes off running. “Doyle!” Unrestrained joy. Then she’s in this person’s arms, looping her legs around his body. Her shoulders block his face. All I can see are two skinny — tattooed — arms around her waist.
He twirls around, back to me, and she is up against his car. I jog over. Without looking, Enola says, “This is my brother, Simon.”
“Hey. Heard a lot about you. Don’t worry, it’s all good.” A voice made of casual and surf. His hands stay on my sister’s hips. He spares no glance my way, allowing me to stare at a line of tattoos that creep up the side of his neck, over his shaved head, ending in dark green tentacles that wind along his jaw.
“Simon, this is Doyle.”
I say I’m delighted to meet him. I’m not sure what else I say, because I can’t stop staring. Nobody gets a tattoo like this unless they’re actively courting gawkers. The ink slithers as he talks, tentacles writhing over skin. I feel sick. They pull apart.
“Long drive,” he says and stretches, sleeves sliding up to reveal more ink, more tentacles. Does it cover his entire body?
“I didn’t know you were coming,” she says.
He nuzzles her neck, unmindful of my presence, and mumbles something about needing to “siphon the python” and heads into the house. Enola trails behind him, almost skipping. I catch up and put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her short.
“Who is he?”
“Told you. Doyle.”
“And what is a Doyle?”
“A Doyle is a guy who drove a really long way because I told him I was going to see my brother. Be nice,” she says and follows him. Over her shoulder she adds, “We fuck.” There are few things with more visceral power than the sudden awareness that your sister has sex. The image of tentacled arms is too much. It is a full five minutes before I can go inside.
* * *
Doyle is sprawled across my sofa, my bed. I pull my chair into the middle of the room and sit in front of him. Yes, there are tentacles crawling up his arms and face. I can see the fine lines of each elliptical sucker. Enola shuffles pots around in the kitchen. For the moment Doyle and I are alone. There’s a shiftiness to his pointed features. If I turned on the lights he’d skitter behind the couch.
“Wild place you got, man. Wild,” he says. “Your house is pretty much hanging off the cliff.”
“Erosion. It’s a problem around here,” I say. We fuck, she said. This thing copulates with my sister.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s right,” he laughs. A lazy half wheeze. “I’m shit at remembering stuff like that.” He makes a twitching gesture. His hand is also covered with tattoos. Squid? Octopi? “Slept through earth science.”
“So you and my sister.”
“Yeah. She’s a down chick, you know? Real cool.”
I stare.
Enola returns with a box of cookies I’d forgotten about. She flops on the couch, draping herself over Doyle. Neither minds that they’re in my bed. She feeds him a stale cookie and asks if we’re getting along. Of course we are. Just beautifully.
“How did the two of you meet?”
“In Atlantic City, on the Boardwalk,” she says. So this is the one.
“Yeah. She had her cards out and I thought, man, that’s a sweet little bird.”