“Ms. Foley, I’d like to walk you home.”
Bootsey blushed and stammered, “Oh, oh, I-I don’t think so.”
“But I insist.”
“I-I’ll . . .” She glanced over her shoulder. “I’ll call the police.”
Through his bushy muff, the man smiled. “Don’t be silly.” He took her arm.
“I’ll scream.”
“You’ll be the laughingstock of the neighborhood.”
“Ohhh.”
“I’ll just walk you as far as your door. Colonel Thomas asked me to speak to you. Colonel Thomas is fond of you.”
Bootsey brightened but once again blushed. “Colonel Thomas? Yes. I thought he might be.”
“Yeah. Well, ‘Thomas’ is not his real name, of course . . .”
“It isn’t?”
“. . . but he’s a good guy and he wants you to know what’s going on.”
In appreciation Bootsey nodded, permitting herself now to be escorted. At that point, however, the stranger’s tone, which heretofore had been genial, even chivalrous, toughened considerably. “Listen up and listen close. I’m only going to say this once. Are you listening? All right. Good. Your brother’s no longer in custody.”
“He isn’t?”
“Don’t interrupt! He escaped several days ago, with the help of a Satanic cult. We have every reason to believe he’s being hidden in the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. No judge will grant us a search warrant because Playboy is so powerful and influential. And believe it or not, Ms. Foley, some of the L.A. judges are themselves into Satanism. So, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to let him remain where he is. He’ll be very safe, you won’t have to worry, and he won’t be able to harm anybody else. Just pray for the status quo, because if we get our hands on him again, he’ll be put to death as a deserter. Tell nobody of this but your sister. If you flap your lip, your own life could be in serious jeopardy. Never forget a word I’ve said. Never. Very well, then. Count your blessings, ma’am. And have a nice day.”
Back at his rental car, a block beyond the bus stop, Lieutenant Jenks removed his fake beard and theatrical glasses. He burst out laughing. “Just let her go to Johnnie Cochran with that story,” he said aloud. “Even the hacks at the Weekly World News would reach for their butterfly nets.”
Madame Ko dismantled her shrine. The incongruous boot went back into her luggage, the old scrap of kimono with the chrysanthemum on it followed. The little paper origami figure she held in her palm, examining it there before securing it in her purse. Grandmother Kazu most likely had meant it to represent a tanuki, but there was no reason to share that information with nosy inquisitors, was there? We human beings need secrets, she thought, as much as we deserve the truth.
After settling her bill and checking out of the hotel, she placed her bag in storage for the day. Then she commenced walking in the direction of the Hong Kanyasin, as the National Circus was known locally. The day was sultry, and she walked slowly. The bump in the roof of her mouth was now the size of a cherry tomato (definitely vine-ripened), and it hurt to swallow. Her belly was also swelling, seeming to pouf out a little more each day. O-Ko hadn’t warned her that the pregnancy might advance with such haste.
Located in the northern outskirts of Vientiane, the Hong Kanyasin arena was about two kilometers from the center of town. Midway, Lisa paused to buy a tamarind-flavored ice from a vendor and held the syrupy slush against her “implant.” She imagined what it would be like to suck Dickie now. Or Stubblefield. For her, considerably less soothing than the ice, but wouldn’t they be surprised? On second thought, nothing ever surprised Stubblefield. At least, not yet, she told herself, and suddenly, out of nowhere and through the soreness, she chuckled, though it was hardly a laughing matter.
When the arena came into view, her pulse caught like an outboard motor. She might have crossed the Mekong without getting wet. Reminiscing about her life in the circus, she wondered if when other people contemplated the trajectory of their lives, they found themselves shaking their heads at how marvelously strange, in retrospect, the path had been. Sometimes “It is what it is” was an insufficient paradigm: it addressed the ice, all right, but not the flavoring.
The ringmaster had been correct. Not four years had passed before the ruling Lao Marxists, feeling more secure about their revolution now that their enemies, real or imagined, had been exterminated, imprisoned, or driven into exile (and bored, perhaps, by their own burgeoning bureaucracy), reinstated the National Circus. At once the ringmaster and principal performers came out of hiding—and no questions were asked. Such a strong connection had been established with Fan Nan Nan, however, that it was to remain the second home of the circus, the equivalent of the “winter quarters” that American shows have long maintained in Florida. It became the place to repair to when the season was over, the place to rehearse and develop acts, the place where showfolk retired when they became too old, infirm, or chubby to wiggle into their tights.
Ko Ko’s foster parents stayed in the mountain village permanently, maintaining practice facilities and watching over the circus properties there. Thus, the child grew up with a foot in two worlds: traditional, rural Fan Nan Nan—and La Vallée du Cirque, with its direct ties to another, more glamorous and extravagant reality. Due to the node in her mouth, she was also connected to an even more exotic reality—to a world behind this world—but she’d have no inkling of that until adolescence, and even then the tidings from her mother would not be easily understood.
The maternal message made no explicit mention of tanukis, and any link between those rambunctious animals and the queer nature of her family legacy registered in Ko Ko’s mind only subliminally, if at all. (Indeed, the significance of such a link may be an assumption on our part.) Nevertheless, by the time she was five, she was displaying an unusual faculty for taming the badgers and training them to perform simple stunts. Perhaps this was less the result of any native affinity than the fact that very early on she acknowledged the ardor of their appetites and saw how their rapacity—as well as their almost theatrical exuberance—might be exploited in mutually rewarding ways.
Even so, the girl was well into her teens before it occurred to her that her cherished playtime with tanukis might constitute a lucrative profession. By then, she had tripled her original pair of protégés and with Dickie Goldwire’s help was setting traps in the hills to acquire still more. Dickie had often encouraged the girl in her endeavors because he found it amusing and was touched by the joy it brought her, but it was the ringmaster who eventually recognized the potential of performing tanukis, and when she was sixteen or so, urged her to get serious about it. She did, although she was nearly twenty before her act was polished and controlled enough to be taken to Vientiane and the Hong Kanyasin.
In the meantime, she was being taught some tricks of her own. Stubblefield had developed a special attachment to her early on as a result of her aptitude for learning English. Of all his captive students, young or adult, Ko Ko was by far the most accomplished. Whether formal or idiomatic, English came as easily to her as if she had a linguistic chip embedded in her frontal lobe. Her eagerness and aptitude pleased the ex-academic to no end, nor was he completely immune to the girl’s delightful yet somehow mysterious ways. It was not until she passed through the red gates of puberty, however, and had pondered and absorbed the knowledge passed on to her by her mother, that he realized that she was starting to affect his own worldview.
One day a windblown candle set her hair ablaze, not only scorching her scalp but also causing her for a month to resemble a charbroiled Brillo pad or the reason Raggedy Ann stopped smoking in bed. Most young girls, even in a place like Fan Nan Nan, would have sequestered themselves and not seen the sun again until the scabs fell off and the patches filled in, but Ko Ko went about her business in the village without a hat or scarf, often pointing out her charred head to those who politely pretended not to notice it, laughing about it all the while. “I was the last monkey out of the
forest fire,” she’d joke. Another time, when an agitated tanuki bit her wrist, she bit the badger back, drawing blood. Then, she nursed its wound before tending her own.
Ko Ko’s fearless disregard for convention—the unassuming practicality with which she defied consensual logic—aroused in Stubblefield somewhat the same admiration that he felt for the wire-walkers. As she grew older, other feelings were being aroused, as well, and he had to struggle against physically expressing them. He possessed enough self-awareness to know that it was a struggle he couldn’t hope to win. She must have intuited that, herself.
According to Stubblefield, there was an almost visible aura of destiny around the small hut that Dickie had helped build for her next to the tanuki enclosure. The aura was especially thick on the afternoon when Stubblefield dropped by to scold her for having ventured alone into the gorge that morning to set her traps. He found her calming one of her excitable charges by massaging its grandiose gonads. Usually, his arrival at anyone’s door was accompanied by a torrent of discourse, but the sight of her, not yet seventeen, in a cheap Western blouse and skirt, blithely stroking the overgrown scrotum, took his words away. Nodding in the direction of the gulch, he managed only to mumble, “There may be tigers down there.”
She laughed. “I’m not afraid of tigers.”
For a long moment, they stared down each other, though stealing glances at the bouncing balls. At last, pointing to his tattoo (he wore a white silk sport coat without a shirt), he said quietly, almost dolefully, “You’d better be afraid of this one.”
Ko Ko kissed the pacified tanuki on its nose and shooed it out into the pen. Slowly, she came toward Stubblefield, unbuttoning her blouse as she walked. Her small, pale breasts were like the headlamps of an approaching kiddie car, and he could only blink as they bore down on him. When the blouse fell away, the firm little titties seemed to spring to life like puppets escaping their master’s strings, and the next thing Stubblefield knew, she was rubbing them along the length and breadth of his bare chest. “This tiger doesn’t scare me, either,” she whispered.
For them not to have fucked then and there would have required such a reversal of the laws of nature as to cause Newton to spin in his coffin and NASA to discontinue the space program.
Over the next few years, the bearded MIA taught the delectable Japanese-Lao girl everything he knew about sex, which was of sufficient quantity to fill the Kama Sutra from cover to cover, with enough left over for a couple of recipes in a Tijuana cookbook. Those lessons, if one could call such interactive propositions “lessons,” she soaked up with all the eagerness and fluency with which she had mastered English.
Once awakened from childhood slumber, her clitoris was inquisitive and inclined to prowl. Certainly, Stubblefield couldn’t object to her trying some of the young men in the village on for size. He, after all, had his personal backlog of experience, not to mention a villa full of concubines and a brain full of libertine ideals. When, however, she confided that she was entertaining an itch to sleep with her other longtime benefactor, Dickie Goldwire, an uneasiness overtook the maestro of Villa Incognito. It wasn’t, cynics to the contrary, that he’d showered with Goldwire often enough to be thoroughly aware of the younger man’s artful appendage and felt threatened by it; nor, sentimentalists to the contrary, that her confession had forced him to recognize that he cared for the girl even more than he cared for his principles of freedom. No, the real reason was that Stubblefield knew Dickie’s heart.
It should be noted that Lisa—that’s how she was called then by those who didn’t call her Madame Ko—was now twenty-three, and home from the Hong Kanyasin, where she’d been appearing for three years. (Her popularity was growing in Laos, but it would be another two years before she and her tanuki troupe began to get engagements throughout Asia.) One twilight during that off-season, when monsoon clouds were piled like fat black boxing gloves just below the heights of Fan Nan Nan, she did slide into bed with Dickie and was made love to with scant intermission until a cock of a different feather announced the dawn. She awoke around noon, late for rehearsal, to find Dickie smiling at her almost apologetically. “I guess I’d been saving up,” he said.
“You’ve given me calluses,” she moaned, but it did not sound like a complaint.
There followed a year during which, on those occasions when she was home from the circus, she spread her thighs equally (equal opportunity, equal ardor, equal affection) for the two Americans, although a woman with half of Lisa’s sensitivity could have perceived that—for different reasons, perhaps—neither of the men was entirely comfortable with the arrangement. Once, she drew the third American aside to ask his advice, but Dern brushed off her concerns. Dern wanted to talk to her about animism. Dern wished to know if she believed there was a threshold of matter and spirit, a point where distinctions between the two disappeared, and if so, which animals, plants, and objects, if any, lent themselves most readily to a bridging of physical and metaphysical realms. She professed ignorance, with at least partial sincerity, and then proceeded to seduce him, too, to see if it would distract him (it did); to see how it would feel (it was nothing special); to see if it would alter the prevailing dynamic in some way (it did not). She merely learned once and for all that while sex without love could have its thrills and satisfactions, sex without soul was like salad without dressing—a bowl of roughage fit for cattle and goats.
The prevailing dynamic was destined to be altered, however, and by the following year, Stubblefield altered it. He invited her to the villa, wined her and dined her, and sat her on his ample lap. Having seen her thus ensconced, he proceeded to shock her silly by announcing that he was giving her to Dickie. “Whatever part of you that I’m privileged to lay claim to—and I’m vain enough to believe it a relatively substantial portion—I hereby bequeath, without prejudice, without regret, without strings attached, to Goldwire. No arguments, please. No discussion. It’s my gift to the pair of you, a boon you both deserve.” He smiled serenely and pinched a tear from her cheek.
Lisa studied him, she studied him long and hard, but his countenance betrayed no tinge of spite, bitterness, rejection, facetiousness, hokum, manipulation, self-pity, or false nobility; nor, for that matter, was there any discernible jot of good old Stubblefield perversity.
“Stop looking for motives,” he chided her. “I am what I it. It it was it is. We’ll keep it to ourselves, so as not to burden our innocent Goldwire, and should you insist on thinking of it at all, think of it as . . . as the shadow of a wild duck flying backward.”
Now, any man who has the faintest comprehension of the female mind knows that were any ordinary woman informed by a lover that he was “giving” her over to his rival, she would instantly detest him with a hellish fury—while at the very same time want him twice as much as she ever had before and would neither sleep nor eat until she’d somehow devised a means of impressing upon him the error of his ways, the intensity of her desire to win him back being appreciably magnified by his employment of poetic phrases such as “the shadow of a wild duck flying backward.”
Ah, but Madame Ko was no ordinary woman. Rather quickly she understood where Stubblefield was coming from in regard to Dickie, and refrained from questioning it further or uttering a word of objection. From that evening on, she was Dickie’s girlfriend, returning his love to the extent to which she was capable, although chronically aware, even after accepting his eventual proposal of marriage, that a time would be coming when her hereditary “condition” would baffle and hurt him and rip them asunder.
The 2001 edition of the Lao National Circus wasn’t scheduled to open until November, when the monsoon clouds would have eviscerated themselves and, like empty wineskins, been swept away. It was none too early, though, at the end of the first week of September, to be repainting interiors in the Hong Kanyasin, to be sprucing up props and costumes and testing new lighting and rigging. The hippodrome was abang and arustle with various labors, and as she stood on an entrance ramp watching
painters, electricians, seamstresses, and roustabouts preparing for the season, Lisa felt a fluttering in her stomach that could not be attributed to the loaf that was rising therein.
It wasn’t long before she caught the eye of the ringmaster, now in his seventies and soon to retire. The gentleman rushed to salute her, told her how grieved he’d been to hear that she’d lost her wonderful animals, and how fervently he hoped that she’d acquire another set of them and be back on the world stage in a year or two. “Your act was unique in the way it affected people,” he said. “Nothing ever like it, nothing at all.”
Lisa thanked him but, patting the slight bulge in her abdomen, declared that as she was soon to have other priorities, she would be joining him in retirement. The old ringmaster cannot be blamed for shuddering as she said this, for he remembered when her mother had announced her own pregnancy: he remembered how O-Ko had spoken with an identical (and previously nonexistent) speech impediment, and he remembered how much O-Ko changed after that, even as her speech returned to normal, and how she in time went away, vanishing, as near as he could tell, from the crust of the earth.
Too polite, or too puzzled, to give voice to his thoughts, the ringmaster squeezed Madame Ko’s shoulder, wished her ten thousand good fortunes, saluted her again, and excused himself to go supervise some activity or other. Lisa wandered farther into the arena then, and took a seat in the front row of the stands, directly facing the ring in which she and her curious companions had once entertained the masses.
The ringmaster had opined that Madame Ko’s act was more than entertaining, that it somehow “affected” people, although he’d failed to support that opinion with any evidence, and it isn’t easy to know what he meant. Certainly, the feats the tanukis performed were neither unique nor spectacular, consisting primarily of cartwheels and somersaults and pile-on pyramids, of simulated volleyball games and wrestling matches, of dives through hoops (including, as a finale, a hoop of fire), and the balancing of sundry objects upon bobbing snouts. Thus, their ability to “affect,” as the ringmaster would have it, was due to something other than their repertoire; and, also, no doubt, due to attributes beyond those twin globes of testosterone bunched between the male tanukis’ hind legs: it’s true that the grand gonadal display occasioned snickers from many in the audience and murmurs of disbelief or disgust from others; and it’s even true that Christian vigilantes in some American cities complained of the poor animals’ natural and involuntary adornments, demanding that the creatures be either castrated or banned; but since the reader has likely never seen live male tanukis, it should be emphasized here that their bulging nut baskets, while prominent, are nowhere near the immensity of the legendary scrotum of Tanuki, Himself. Imagine how that one might play at a Saturday matinee!