The family fortuna, p.22
The Family Fortuna, page 22
“Then I don’t want them!” Arturo shrieks. “I can scream as loud as I like — they should all feel grateful to even be given a shot to work for the Family Fortuna. Lorenzo! Now!”
My son comes into the tent, exhausted and harried. He is a jumble of red tape, shuffling pages on his clipboard, trying to straighten them.
“What the hell are you sending me?” Arturo says. “I asked you for the cream of the crop. I can’t charge a rat’s ass to see any of these bums. Patrons will revolt!”
Lorenzo is already small, but next to his father he always shrinks so far down I am worried he will collapse in on himself.
I stare at Arturo, my thoughts spinning as fast as a Hotchkiss barrel.
Is this what I wanted? Is this what any woman wants? We want a man who will raise our babies, bring them up like fragile violets, a man who will help them bloom — and Arturo has always done this for Luna and Avita. He has always treated his daughters like they are the most precious petunias — but my Lorenzo he treats like a weed.
“I asked you if I should prescreen them,” Lorenzo manages to croak, “but you said no, that you wanted to see them all yourself.”
“Because I can’t trust you to send me proper performers!” Arturo throws his head back and pinches the bridge of his nose as if his own son is a thorn in his big toe. “Just — fuck off, then. Make yourself useful to someone else. Go polish a goat’s balls, for all I care. I’ll do this myself.”
The rage burns liquid in my lungs, but I have spent so many years swallowing it down, it doesn’t make it far. My tongue stays cold.
And my son, my dear Lorenzo, leaves the tent before I can apologize with my eyes for what I married. I know without seeing it that his face is like a drawstring purse — cheeks slack, mouth pulled tight.
Arturo runs his hands over his face, tweaking the ends of his mustache. Holy shit, he looks old. He’s hoping his ringmaster’s authority makes up for the wear and tear, but in this light, the years don’t lie — and they’re plain as balls on my own face, too.
“I am never going to find someone,” he moans with exaggerated trauma now that we are alone.
But I’ll have none of it. I’ll breathe flames if he forces me to play along with his invented disasters. “Listen to me. Of course you’re not going to replace her with a new act overnight —”
“I never said anything about replacing her,” he snarls. “We’ve been overdue for a new act for months. Cornelius is breathing down my neck —”
“Horseshit,” I burst. “Cornelius doesn’t have to do anything but wait until you light your own ass on fire. He’s more patient than you could ever be. Just find her and apologize.”
There it goes again — a dull spurt of pain in my thigh. Too many bullet fragments for the doctor to fish out, and so now they are part of me. They did not choose to marry Arturo, so all they can do is ache like dull nails against my bone when he speaks.
“What are you even — you’re so —” He stops, and I barely hold back my chuckle. Arturo is out of words so rarely, it feels like a holiday whenever it happens.
“Why the sputtering? Did a fly buzz down your throat? If you’d put all this attention toward dealing with your daughter . . .” I hope he interprets the quivering of my chin as fury and not despair. “You only have three children, you know?” Fury and not worry. Fury and not all the emotions swimming through me that kept my feet cold all last night.
Avita had not yet returned.
My motherly instinct told me she was crouched in some hidey-hole, balled up in adolescent resentment in the kootchie tent wagons or in the grub tent or behind Bart’s Whirligig target. Arturo could either wait out her angst, or he could bait her with that rarest of all sights: an admission of regret, a plea for forgiveness from the most stubborn man ever molded for this earth.
Yet another instinct, deep rooted and darkly distraught, feared for Avita, feared her being out of our sight.
She did not know what things could happen in the shadows of Peculiar. None of them did.
Lorenzo sticks his head back into the tent. “Do you want to see the rest of them or not?”
Arturo swills the last of his coffee. “Yes, yes! Send one in already!”
And to me, he folds his arms and says, “I’m busy, Quinn, all right? There’s another dozen of these hacks out there and a tent to fill before twilight. Go cluck at someone else.”
I nearly wobble, my heart thumping loud as gunshot. “Maybe you can hire someone to apologize to your second child, too, Arturo, before he walks out on us as well.”
I stalk away, punching through the flaps, my limp heavy. As angry as I am, I make sure to look three times angrier.
“Aw, Quinn —” But the canvas smothers the end of his plea.
This I have learned after twenty years of marriage: There is no sense lingering in an argument. There is no sense staking a tent in a muddy, smelly swamp. Arturo could stand in such a bog for a week straight, weaving sentences out of starshine and algae, and he would always think he had won, even if he were just gabbing at shadows.
I want to speak to Lorenzo, but he is managing a lineup, organizing the crooked crowd of would-be performers outside the tent.
My sweet son. He was not born with any of his father’s charisma; he is missing that particular rib. Even now it is a struggle for him to keep the attention of this group — he holds their futures in his palm, and yet he still cannot persuade them to listen when he speaks.
I will check on him later. I’ve seen him more upset than this, closer to the edge.
But still, the sharpness in my leg warns — Arturo is wearing him out, too. It’s only a matter of time before Lorenzo has had enough, and then he will fly. Just like Avita.
Just like I wish I could do most days. But first I’d need my love for that asshole carved out of me, my devotion. A doctor can’t do it.
Like the bullets from my last performance as Quick-Draw Quinn, that love is a part of me. Embedded.
I wait until the wagon door shuts behind me and I’m near my bed before I release my breath and let the tears sting. My leg hurts, but I find my way to my knees, and through clenched teeth and a tongue that is already practicing comebacks for when Arturo drags me back into his swamp, I pray.
I pray for Avita, for her return.
I pray for Lorenzo, that his patience will never run dry.
I pray for Luna — for what, I don’t yet know. Though I see so much of myself in her, I know so little about my oldest child. That is how I know she is likely in need of a prayer just for her.
I pray for Arturo, even, for heaven to soften his head and pull it out of his ass before it’s too late.
And for myself, I pray for the same thing I’ve prayed for since the last time we came to Peculiar.
Forgiveness.
“For what I did,” I beg, “please, please, please forgive me. Forgive me.”
Forgive me.
This prayer, it is a part of me.
Embedded.
I KNOW IT’S A CLICHÉ OF EPIC AND HISTORICAL proportions to hate your own father.
I could thumb through the books of any town’s library and find at least a dozen characters whose stories are about pushing back against their old men. Oedipus is banished by his own dad. Hamlet is practically suicidal when the late king drops that plea for vengeance on his head like a crown. Isaac is nearly stabbed by Abraham, and even though the angel of the Lord stays Abraham’s hand before the blade goes in, I’m sure nothing is the same between the two of them after that.
The world is full of despicable fathers.
But mine takes the cake.
Last night when I went to bed, I was overlooking a cliff, but my feet were still on the ground. Yesterday he yelled at me for more than an hour about the parade I couldn’t have predicted; the thousand-dollar publicity we hadn’t booked or paid for; the tigers, who were too sick from bad meat to perform, as if that were something I should have anticipated and prevented.
And this morning he barked at me for the shitty local talent who turned up for our open call. When I asked about Avita, who did not show up for breakfast after her botched show, Arturo flicked my ear and told me to keep my nose to my clipboard, mind my own business — as if the Spectacular Aviary Extravaganza, the most important, most lucrative act of the Family Fortuna, were not my business.
And then he stepped backward and knocked me over, and looked down at me as if I were not his only son, but a runny pile of pig shit, before stomping away without a single apology or offer to help me up.
Yesterday I was staring over the cliff’s edge.
Today I am dangling off the side.
I’m gripping the rocks, a chasm of black ocean crashing beneath me, and he won’t lift a finger to help me up. Instead, as I kick to save myself, to crawl back to safety, he barks at me to get the orders from Socorro signed and oversee the ticket booth and why are you such a twit, why haven’t you thought of this impossible thing before it even popped into my own mind, why are you never enough?
He may as well shove his boot into my face and watch me tumble.
Before I fall, before I drown again in his demands, I haul my pathetic self away for a respite.
I can’t find a quiet place to hole up on circus grounds, not without Arturo sniffing me out like a wolfhound so he can castigate me until his voice is raw. Still no Avita, and Arturo will make me pay for whatever transgressions sent her running.
So I make for the nearest spot where a man can slap down a penny in exchange for a place to sit unbothered.
It’s late afternoon when I arrive at the Old Boot. Located on the bottom floor of the Macintosh Hotel on Peculiar’s main drag, the red bricks bleached by the sun to a pale brown, the front door grand and ornately carved into a biblical tableau, the Old Boot is at first sight a standard-issue saloon. Some of the polish comes off onto my hand in a greasy swipe as I push my way in, and the scent of raw alcohol and burnt sugar stings my nose.
Once inside, I can see the charm of the place. The striped wallpaper is old but clean, the paintings on the wall are of tasteful Rubenesque nudes, women with their rounded parts carefully hidden by fig leaves and boas and other cheats, framed in fake gold scallops.
Tables abound with the drinkers and punters of Peculiar flooding the local economy with their proclivities. The bar is packed with men making use of the sour towels that hang near their stools to wipe the beer foam off their mustaches. Saloon gals jump like fleas from patron to patron, all apple-cheeked smiles, collecting tips as the cheap ale flows like the Rio Grande.
With a nervous churn in my stomach, I peer around, looking for a space to call my own for a spell while I catch my breath. There in the farthest corner, an empty counter stretches in front of a window, the sunlight infiltrating at its gloaming angle . . . but if it’s not coming from a spotlight, I don’t mind such harshness. If it’s coming from the mere sun, it’ll be a reprieve, comparatively.
I weave between packed chairs, dodging kicked-out spurs and spittoons, until I finally claim my spot.
“What can I bring you?” The gal taking my order eyes me up and down but says nothing of my unconventional height. Either she’s already casting about for a decent tip from me or she’s seen stranger things perched atop her stools.
“Just a beer, thanks.” I plunk down a coin and spread my ledger in front of me, scratch paper at the ready.
She brings me back a whiskey instead. “Beer’s bad today,” she explains. “Real horse piss.”
“Oh. All right.” I don’t usually take to the hard stuff, but she lingers while I sip and chuckles when I cough the fire from my pipes.
“Burns a bit,” she says, “but there’s a nice woodsy aftertaste waiting for you . . . if you can handle it.”
“It should do the trick,” I tell her, and she leaves me to my numbers. The pulpy wood flavor of the drink finds me, and my head starts warming up. I take another sip.
Numbers. All these numbers.
The thing about numbers is they’re so simple. They always add up. They don’t obscure, they don’t fabricate, they don’t bamboozle.
They either match up or they don’t.
And these numbers don’t.
There’s a discrepancy in our books wide enough to drive our caravan through. Arturo sprang for the new posters, the bills, the banner, and flipped all our numbers sideways like he’d played a bad hand at a high-low table.
He’s too absorbed in his little face-off with Cornelius and his conniption over Avita to understand what I can see right here in our ledgers: if we can’t pull away from Peculiar in the black, there won’t be a Family Fortuna. Not anymore.
And it will be his fault. I’ll know it, Mama will know it, every person who has ever encountered Arturo and his big, leaky head will know it — but my father will still be convinced that the failure is mine alone.
I balance the ledger in half a whiskey.
I make a list of things I need to do to achieve this balance on time, either by persuading my father that the ideas are his or by accomplishing them behind Arturo’s back entirely.
Extensions of credit. Cutting costs where we can: ordering the second-best coffee beans, reusing costumes from prior seasons, halting all new hires. Returning goods we haven’t used yet, pawning goods we had no business purchasing in the first place.
Calling off the deal for that ludicrous carousel. Arturo will pop his spleen with rage when he finds out, but if he’d rather auction off his kootchie girls for petty cash to buy his carousel, I’ll hang the horsies on the brass hangers myself.
The second half of the whiskey I sink into like a hot spring.
I think I understand now why some reach for the bottle — without meaning to, I’ve unhanded my heaviest burdens. Simply dropped them at will, let them melt from my spine, away to some unknowable hole in the universe. All that is left in my head is this warmth, this wool.
The great spread of apathy covers me like a quilt, cozy, congenial.
Money troubles? Why worry? If Arturo isn’t going to swirl his brains over the dams in his cash flow, why should I? Permits? Contracts? Infrastructure? Busywork! My father would make a show out of a couple of moldy boards and a jar of fireflies? Let him!
He’s Arturo Fortuna, he loves to boast — so let him be. Let him be all of it: ringmaster, dictator, monarch, and God. I certainly never get to be God. God gets all the credit and none of the blame, and I’ve been sneered at for a snowstorm pulling down our tents in Lubbock.
“Another?” The girl handling my drinks has a fresh pour in front of me before I can think to answer. I don’t lift it to my lips right away; I want to savor this — this buoyancy, this disillusionment that has me so at ease. One more drink, and I could tip out of weightlessness and into inebriated wrath. But every minute that passes brings me closer to sobriety, and to the patrimonial gauntlet in which I spend my torturous days.
Here, I am stuck.
Here, I am weightless.
I wish I’d brought a book.
Piercing through the window, the sun spears its golden rays across the valley, across my face, blinding me to everything but its glow —
Until a silhouette blocks out the light.
A soldier, young, silver-buttoned, and blue-eyed, scoots out the stool beside me. “Do you mind?” he asks. “I hate to drink alone.”
His name is Stewart. He’s an infantryman in Company C. He is chatty.
He’s on leave for the week, and while the rest of his company get their boots resoled and shop for women, he’s been ordering steaks on the government’s dime, nursing good liquor before it’s back to the bucket-made grog he’ll have at the fort.
He was previously located across the frontier in the Dakotas, but he’s marching to a new assignment in West Texas.
“A promotion?” I say when he dances around the word.
He grins like a weasel in a henhouse and points to his lapel. “Got a spot for that brass right here. And my brother David’s the one who will pin it on. He’s all decorated himself. Sergeant major for two years now.”
A regular family affair. I take another sip of my red-hot. “A pair of soldiers wearing the brass. I’ll bet your old man’s proud.”
“Proud?” Stewart scoffs good-naturedly. “He recruited us himself. My father’s Lieutenant Colonel Woods, fourth brigade, first division — but I know what you’re thinking. I earned my rank fair and square. No favoritism, I guarantee it.”
But you are favored, I nearly mutter. You can talk about your father without a whiskey to loosen you up first. You can say your father’s name without cowering small enough to be the cow shit he thinks you are. The very fact that you are defensive about it means you’re favored enough to have never needed it.
“What do you do?” Stewart glances at the papers sprawled in front of me on the counter. “You’re a numbers guy?”
He locks eyes with me, and his smile is like an autumn night. “I’m a numbers guy,” I affirm, “but I’m actually much more of a words guy. Do you read?”
The light shifts just then, and I assume the sun has banked into the horizon.
But there is a head on the other side of the Old Boot’s window, a face glaring at me through the pane. Arturo’s glower could split a cabbage.
My conversation, over.
My spirits wilted, my body drying itself out as I gather up my papers and toss a bill on the counter.
Stewart might be addressing me as I hop down from the stool, but I don’t hear him. My limbs have their own priority: to get me to Arturo, front and center, and to take in his demands before he starts thumping at me for dawdling.
“We’re in the fight of our life, and this is where I find you?” Arturo spews as I scramble out onto the saloon’s porch. “Bending elbows with the rabble while we’re wearing ourselves to shadows?”
Mouth still tinged with the peaty fire of the whiskey, I take in a breath. “I was working. I was balancing our books.” I lift up the ledger as proof, all my numbers in tidy rows and columns. “We’re still in the red from the art commissions —”
