Dicey went into the second market, just after the stoplight at the center of town, and bought milk, peanut butter and bread. When she emerged, she saw James studying the circus poster.
“That’s nothing to do with us,” she said. He followed her down off the porch. Sammy and Maybeth stood up from the curb.
A dusty green pickup drove by them, driven by a square-faced man. The head and shoulders of a large dog were visible sitting beside him. The man and the dog looked straight ahead. The truck headed out of Hurlock, past the stop light, back toward the Choptank.
Dicey’s heart jumped. She clutched the bag of food to her chest.
James watched the back of the green truck. “He didn’t see us. I don’t think he saw us,” he said. “What can he do, anyway?”
Dicey couldn’t imagine what Mr. Rudyard could do, but she was afraid he would do something. “Let’s run,” she said. The elementary school might be on the far side of town. They hadn’t passed it coming in. “Come on.”
“He didn’t even turn around,” James protested.
“A circus is here now. There’ll be people and if he does turn around and try to do something, we can get help. Call the police, or something.”
“They wouldn’t believe us.”
“Stop arguing, James!”
Dicey grabbed Maybeth’s hand and began to run. James and Sammy followed.
They ran along uneven sidewalks in front of stores, then houses. Nobody paid any attention to them. They cut past two women who were meandering along, talking. At corners, Dicey looked quickly up and down, for a building that might be an elementary school. It had to be in the town. When she didn’t see it, she dashed across. She couldn’t go as fast as she wanted because Maybeth’s legs were shorter than hers.
At last she saw a modern building that nestled against the ground, down a low sloping hill. Behind the building rose the hoop of a ferris wheel.
The sidewalk they were on went beside a playground, then up to the front door of the school. As the Tillermans, breathing in gasps, were passing the playground, a dusty green pickup swung into the road that circled before the school entrance.
Dicey swerved onto the grass. “James! Go around behind!” She grabbed Sammy’s arm and pulled him. He struggled to keep his balance at Dicey’s pace. Ahead of her, James and Maybeth ran side by side. Maybeth’s legs pumped frantically.
Around the corner of the building, Dicey caught sight of the big tent. She pulled Sammy up even with James and Maybeth. “Into the tent,” she gasped. They dodged around the base of the ferris wheel. Dicey heard footsteps behind her now and the familiar snarling of a dog.
She turned her head. Mr. Rudyard was jogging along easily, pulled by the dog, which he held on a short chain. The rest of the chain he carried looped over his shoulder.
At the open space before the tent, Sammy tripped. He stumbled and fell, rolled over and sat up. Dicey stopped. She turned to face their pursuer. That would give Sammy time.
James and Maybeth had run into the tent. Dicey heard noises from within, voices and the yapping of dogs. She backed toward the entrance. Mr. Rudyard slowed his pace to a walk. He took the loops of chain down from his shoulder and began to play them out. The dog strained toward Dicey. She could see the yellow eyes and the saliva dripping from its tongue.
He was going to loose the dog on her.
Dicey put the paper bag up over her chest and throat, ready to jam it down the dog’s teeth if he should leap. Dogs went for the jugular. “There are people around here,” Dicey panted. Her voice was hoarse. “You can’t get away with it.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He was intent upon her face and her slow backing away.
Suddenly, Dicey’s legs were shoved from behind. Her knees buckled and she fell on the ground, flat on her back. She dropped the bag. Up she sprang to her feet, still facing Mr. Rudyard. He was not the kind of man you could turn your back to.
Three white terriers had charged out from behind her, bowling her over in their excitement. They yapped and yipped, happily. They ran up to the big dog, holding their tails up like little flags. The big dog snarled, growled and dove into their midst. A cacophony of noise burst out of the mass of tumbling dogs.
Claire rushed out from behind Dicey. She laid into the dogs, cracking her whip. The terriers danced away. Claire played her whip around the ears and eyes of the big dog, forcing him backward until he stood at Mr. Rudyard’s side.
Dicey turned around then. She saw a ring of people, with Will at the center and James beside him. Two men were dressed as clowns; three more large, muscular men in jeans and workshirts inched forward with clenched fists; a girl in ballet tights stood tensely beside an older man who wore glasses and chewed on a fat cigar.
Claire looked Mr. Rudyard in the eye. In her high heels, she was six inches taller than he was. “Hold your dog,” she said.
His hand took the leather collar. Dicey edged toward James.
“Where you going?” Mr. Rudyard’s voice demanded. He surveyed the group. “They’re my kids, foster kids,” he said.
“No, we’re not,” Dicey said. She turned to Will. “We’re not, you know that.”
“You in charge?” Mr. Rudyard asked Will. He sounded surprised.
“I am,” Will said. He stepped up beside Dicey.
“They gotta come back,” Mr. Rudyard said. “I got papers.”
“What kind?”
“Legal papers.”
“Show me,” Will said.
“I’ve got them back home,” Mr. Rudyard said.
Dicey looked at James. She saw Maybeth and Sammy standing in the gloom just within the tent entrance. They could still run, maybe. How did Will know what was true? How could he possibly know they were telling the truth? He seemed to be thinking about what Mr. Rudyard was saying. Nobody knew the Tillermans, except back in Bridgeport, nobody even knew they were alive. Why should anyone care what happened to them?
And how was Dicey going to keep them safe?
“I want them kids back now,” Mr. Rudyard said.
“I’d need to see those papers first,” Will answered slowly. He took a couple of steps forward. His boots creaked.
Dicey’s legs felt watery.
“I said, I’ll take them now.” Mr. Rudyard’s voice was steely and he didn’t bother to disguise the threat.
“I don’t think so,” Will said, still slowly. “Not until I see the papers.”
Mr. Rudyard loosened his hand on the dog’s collar.
“I wouldn’t,” Will said, still slowly. “Claire here—she’s got one nasty temper—and a good hand with a whip. That so, Claire?” Claire smiled. “And I’ve been chased by dogs myself often enough not to be overly scared of them. Animal dogs or human dogs.”
“Nigger!” Mr. Rudyard hissed the word.
Will didn’t move a muscle of his face or body, but the three big men behind him did. Claire, however, was the one who attacked. She moved smoothly, like a snake. She cracked her whip before her, at the dog’s feet and chest, at his head. The dog whined and growled and backed away. Mr. Rudyard was forced to move with him.
Claire moved steadily forward. She cracked the whip again, at Mr. Rudyard’s feet, then at his knees, then at his hand where he held the dog, then at his shoulders. He was wearing another fancy shirt, red with long white fringe hanging from the shoulders. Claire snapped the whip at one shoulder then the other, back and forth.
He backed steadily away from her. His eyes burned cold at her.
“Get out,” she said. She didn’t shriek it, she hissed it. “You make me sick.”
Mr. Rudyard looked as if he wanted to say something. Instead, he spat into the dust at his feet. Then he turned his back to them and walked slowly away, the dog at his side. Claire lifted the whip and snapped it sharply against his fanny. He leaped forward.
Dicey held herself stiff until she heard the motor of the truck start, and then longer, until she saw the truck pull up the long slope before the school building
and turn back to town. Then she let her legs collapse underneath her.
The people drifted away, leaving Claire, Will, the Tillermans and the three terriers, who ran happily in circles.
“Well, Claire,” Will said.
“Well, Will,” she answered, looking him straight in the eye. Her cheeks were red.
“I always said you’ve got quite some temper.”
“You could use a little of it,” she said shortly. “I’m going back to work.”
Will turned to the Tillermans. “Why don’t we talk this thing over?” He sat down beside Dicey. James, Maybeth and Sammy joined them. Dicey kept trying to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and she couldn’t make words come out. The others waited for her to say something first.
“What’s in the bag?” Will asked. “Food? Lunch?” Dicey nodded. “Go ahead and eat. If you’ve got enough, I’d like something too. I seem to have a bad taste in my mouth.”
Making the sandwiches relaxed Dicey. It was such an ordinary thing to do. She spread the peanut butter with her jackknife, then wiped the blade clean on her shorts. She made everybody one sandwich and two for James. She opened the milk and set it on the ground.
“We’re not foster kids,” James finally said. “That’s the truth. He—it’s so crazy I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe it—we took jobs as pickers and—”
“He never paid us!” Dicey realized.
Will chewed contentedly on his sandwich. “Happens I do believe you. That was one mean man.”
“Boy, was he,” Dicey said. Her voice had returned. “We—thanks, you know?” He waved that away with a hand.
“My idea is you ought to stay with us awhile,” Will said. “We’re going south to Salisbury for our next shows, then Berlin. After that down to Virginia. Where are you headed for? You ought to tell me. Don’t you think?”
“We can work,” Dicey said. “We can help out. We could pay you, too.”
“Let’s start somewhere solid,” Will said, smiling. “Like names. I’m Will Hawkins.”
Dicey introduced them. She picked up her sandwich and began to eat. Between bites, she told their destination, as briefly as she could, not about Momma and the journey to Bridgeport, nor about leaving Cousin Eunice’s house, but about Crisfield and the grandmother there they’d never met and about needing some kind of home. He listened, nodded, asked no questions and made himself another peanut butter sandwich.
“We’ve got two nights here and then we break. We’ll be a week in Salisbury,” he said. “What say you stay with us and we run you down to Crisfield one of the days in Salisbury. That okay?”
“That’s fine,” Dicey said. “That’s great. But do you have room for us?”
“It’s a bit primitive. We live in trailers—you could go in with Claire.”
“Wouldn’t she mind?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll have to ask her, of course. But she has all those dogs in there, I don’t see four kids would make such a big difference.”
“We can sleep anywhere,” Dicey said. “As long as we’re together.”
“We’ll have to think some what to do about him,” Will said. “But not now. I’ve got work to do now. Stick around—hear me? He might come back.”
“I know,” Dicey said. “We’ll stay close.”
They stayed near the tent all that afternoon. Sammy hung around Claire until she finally let him help her by holding hoops and moving the little stools the dogs perched on. James went to watch the man with the cigar who operated the ferris wheel. Soon, he too was working busily, passing tools and squirting oil. Dicey and Maybeth cleared away litter from the midway. They ate supper back where the trailers were parked, at a campsite that had only three trailers on it. Each of these had a picture painted on its side of a lion jumping through a flaming hoop and the words Hawkins Circus spelled out in bright letters. “But there aren’t any lions,” Dicey said to James. He shrugged.
At dinner, Maybeth helped with the serving and clearing. Dicey wanted to help too, but the cook, a tiny black woman with her hair grown out into an Afro, said the two of them were just fine and she didn’t think she’d ever had a better assistant. When Will asked them, James told how they met up with Mr. Rudyard. “We were walking down the road,” James began, “feeling pretty good.” Everybody listened. Dicey sometimes forgot to eat because she was so interested, as if this was a story that had happened to somebody else.
That night they went to the circus with Mattie, the cook, who was married to one of the big men Dicey noticed earlier, a man named Samson whose head was entirely bald even though he wasn’t at all old. Dicey insisted on paying for all their rides and games, as if they were real customers. She was through worrying about money. While she had it she didn’t need to worry. When she ran out, she would earn some more. They sat in the front row for the show. They clapped for Claire, who looked like the Snow Queen in the fairy tale, white and glittering. They smiled at Will in his black cape with red lining and a tall hat he swept off his head. They gasped when the tightrope walker fell off into a net and cheered when she climbed right back up to try again.
The Tillermans slept in Claire’s trailer, James and Maybeth on the second bunk, Sammy among the nestled pile of terriers, Dicey on the floor. When Dicey awoke the next morning, she saw filmy shadows, as if the inside of the trailer was swathed in veils. She awoke to the quiet sounds of seven creatures deep in sleep. For a while, she lay and listened.
James turned restlessly, uneasily, and the sheets rustled around him. Maybeth was still. One of the dogs yipped gently: Dicey raised her head and saw his little legs moving as he lay on his side with his eyes closed. What did dogs dream? Sammy had an arm around another of the dogs. All that Dicey could see of Claire was her hair spread out on the pillow. She snored gently, like the waves on Long Island Sound, soft and regular.
Making no noise, Dicey slipped out to sit on the metal trailer steps. Animals stirred, birds and squirrels, two timid rabbits. Distant motors stirred beyond Dicey’s sight. The branches of the tall pines stirred in a rain bearing wind. These pines were not like the thick, cone-shaped trees of New England. On these pines, the needles hung like pompoms in sparse clusters along lank branches. As the trees grew taller, the lower branches fell off, so they grew into giant lollipops. Loblollies, Will called them, and it was a good name for them.
Mr. Rudyard could have caught the Tillermans so easily. Were they just more stupid and helpless than most people? And what about this farm they were going to, their grandmother’s farm. When you walked down a road, you could be walking to anything. Anything. What if this grandmother, too . . .
Well then, Dicey thought, they would beg to return to Cousin Eunice, and Dicey would know enough to be grateful, really grateful, for someone who took them in and meant to take care of them. Cousin Eunice wasn’t perfect, and she wasn’t Momma, but they could work things out with Cousin Eunice.
If she would. Maybe she wouldn’t take them back. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
A squirrel up in a tall oak tree set up a terrific chittering. He was furious, frantic. His tail thrashed up and down.
What good did it do, worrying and making plans, and more plans, if the first plans failed. It was like money. If you had it, good. If you didn’t, then you had to find a way to earn it. There was nothing to be gained by fretting over maybes.
Dicey took a deep breath, which tasted of dampened sunlight and moist earth. They were living with a circus for a day or so. For a day or so they were safe. Something would happen after, but that was after. You had to keep alert and watchful, she’d learned that. You had to be ready to run. But if you wasted every day worrying about the next . . . And you never knew what was coming, anyway.
After breakfast, Will took Dicey into town. “To get some stuff,” he said, “and see someone.” The stuff, as it turned out, was clothing for the Tillermans, underpants (three new pairs each, because they came in packets of three), T-shirts, and shorts. Will also got toothbrushes, tooth
paste and a comb. They dropped the packages in the windows of Claire’s big white station wagon. Then Will insisted on buying Popsicles, which they ate as they walked to visit the somebody, a friend of his who was a reverend. Will explained to the reverend about Mr. Rudyard, and Dicey listened. The reverend said he thought he could speak a word to the sheriff about it. He asked Dicey if she was sure she didn’t want to speak to the sheriff herself. “She can’t,” Will said, and the reverend didn’t ask any more questions.
As they walked back to the car, Dicey said, “I used to think that everyone was the same, pretty much like us. They’re not though, are they?”
“Not a bit of it,” Will answered. A minute later he added, “Everybody’s different, and everybody thinks everybody else is the same and they’re the only one different.” He smiled at Dicey then. “We’ve done the most we can, just about,” he told her.
Back at the circus, Sammy dashed up to tell Dicey that he was going to be in the show with Claire, helping, as long as they stayed with the circus, that Claire thought he would be funny and he thought so too, that Maybeth and Mattie were making him a costume with spangles on it, like Claire’s. James was busy with the machinery that ran the carousel. Dicey spent the day drifting around. She had passing, lazy conversations with people. After a conversation, she would walk away slowly and sit somewhere private to think over what she’d heard. She would sit and watch the people moving about, like characters on a TV screen with the sound off.
She was alone all afternoon. The sky got heavier with rain, but no rain fell. It was a gray afternoon, the kind of gray that darkens and deepens the greens of leaves and grasses. She had nothing to do, and she didn’t want anything to do. Her thoughts whirled among bits of information and ideas that crowded into her brain, and blew about there, like dry leaves in a storm.
Sammy came to find her late in the afternoon. She was sitting in the grass by the playground, pulling out the blades and looking at them. But she wasn’t seeing them, she was seeing the windy dunes at Provincetown and all the days they had lived there.