Betti on the High Wire Read online

  I hid my face in Auntie Moo’s chest, just like a baby, and she hugged me tighter. I breathed in Auntie Moo’s special smell of fire and sweat and sweet potato. I knew I’d miss Auntie Moo forever and she’d miss me. But things were like that during a war. People were here, and then they were gone. Just like that.

  “What is my new name again?”

  “They’re going to call you ‘Betti,”’ answered Auntie Moo. “It was Mrs. Buckworth’s mama’s name.”

  “Betti.”

  “It’s a nice name, don’t you think?”

  “It doesn’t sound right at all. No. It sounds weird.”

  Auntie Moo was quiet. “They thought it’d be easier for you to have an American name. It’ll take some getting used to.” She kissed the top of my head. “Having a new name doesn’t mean you need to forget your old name, Babo. You’ll have two names, that’s all. And having two names is luckier than having just one.”

  “Really?” I took a deep breath. “Betti ... and Babo. Babo ... and—but Auntie Moo, you promise—”

  “I promise, Babo.”

  “Tell me again. Please?”

  “I promise if the circus comes back again, I’ll tell them—your mama and dad—where you are. I promise.” Auntie Moo’s promises were always good.

  So there were no words left in any language.

  The Last Wave

  “PSSST, BABO.”

  “Shhhh. Go back to sleep, George.”

  “Wake up! You have to wake up. It’s the day.” George touched my cheek with his hand.

  I grumbled and put my potato sack over my face.

  “The taxi’s coming, Babo,” whispered George. “I can hear it.”

  I wiped away the sleep from my eyes and looked around the lion cage at the leftover children. Dreaming. Crunched together in the corners like always. It wasn’t fair.

  A car was grumbling its way up the path from the village. It was shooting off noisy engine sounds: Pow pow pow.

  I tied my orange bag that I had sewn all by myself. There wasn’t much inside: my potato sack, my pictures of the Buckworths, my old pair of pants and my shirt that was donated to Sister Baroo’s Mission, and a jar of dirt from the circus camp. Best of all was the doll that the leftover kids had made for me. George got one too. They were made out of enormous donated foreign socks. The leftover kids had sewn strands of their hair at the top of the socks, and stuffed the socks with straw, and made strange-looking arms and legs with tied string. They had also painted faces on our socks with ash and red bean paste and pig sloppy slop. My doll was a girl with a good eye and a broken eye. George’s doll only had one arm.

  As for me? My present to the leftover kids was my Big Mouth stories. I’d made them repeat my stories over and over so they wouldn’t forget. I quizzed them about the Tallest Woman in the World with a Tail, and the Alligator Man, and the clowns who all had red hair, and how the soldiers got eaten and smooshed.

  I don’t know if the leftover kids liked my present a bit, but I wanted them to remember. They had to remember.

  I slipped on my new shoes. Sister Baroo had used her egg money to buy George and me plastic flip-flops so we wouldn’t go barefoot on the plane. I was already wearing my circus dress to make me feel better on this horrible day.

  George and I tiptoed over the leftover kids.

  Then we leaped and skipped around the big “We Love You” that the leftover kids had taken two days to carve with stones and sticks into the circus camp dirt. They’d started as soon as George and I found out we were being taken away. It went across the fire circle, through the elephant ring, and all the way down to the ripped-up circus tents. But I was the only smart one who knew that George and I would never be able to see any “We Love You” from so high up in an airplane.

  The taxi pulled up with a screech by the fire circle and puttered to a stop. Our taxi was an old dented Chevy. A driver was sitting in the front seat, chewing and spitting nuts that made his whole mouth red. When he opened his taxi door it fell off into the dirt. The driver cursed. Then he picked up the door and set it back in place and kicked it shut.

  Sister Baroo paid the driver, who nodded all sorts of times. He told her that he was absolutely positive he knew his way to the airport. He picked up our bags and threw them into the backseat. The leftover kids were finally awake and they ran out of the lion cage and over to the taxi. They all scrambled in after our bags. None of us had ever been in a car before. We’d only chased them and tried to touch them as they zoomed down the dirt road by the market.

  “Shoo!” cried the taxi driver.

  But the leftover kids didn’t want to shoo from the taxi. They were having too much fun playing with the big wheel in the front seat, and honking a horn that made a sick achoo-achoo sound, and putting their dirty hands all over the windows. The taxi driver got so upset that it looked like smoke was going to blow out of his ears.

  “SHOO!” he cried again, waving his arms around. “Shoo, shoo!”

  Auntie Moo had to pull the leftover kids out of the taxi, one by one. Then she put her soft, sundried arms around all of them as they hugged her wraparound skirt. George and I hugged Auntie Moo too, until the driver cleared his throat, which meant that it was time for us to go. We finally climbed into the backseat of the Chevy taxi. George and I both squeezed our dolls as the taxi driver kicked the door shut.

  Sister Baroo, in her boring black dress, reached her hand through the window. She was waving around the last things that George and I needed: our airplane tickets and other papers she said were very important to get us into America. We stuffed them in the bottom of our bags. Sister Baroo pretended to have a bug in her eye, but I knew she was crying.

  Our driver started his taxi with an old fork. He twisted it around and around until the taxi sputtered to a start. George and I looked at each other. Then we stared out the back window as everyone waved and hollered, “Good-bye! We love you! Good-bye!”

  And... we started rolling.

  Auntie Moo put up her hand in a wave, and I put my hand up against the back window. Our hands stayed just like that. The leftover kids jumped up and down, but soon their screams faded and they were just tiny bouncing dots. Auntie Moo’s face got smaller too, until I couldn’t even see her anymore. Her face was the last face I saw at the circus camp.

  Red Teeth and Hot Spots

  GEORGE KEPT WAVING out the back window even after the circus camp was long gone. He was still waving when the driver turned around from the front seat and smiled at us with crooked red teeth. “Call me Big Uncle,” he said. “You need anything? Well, Big Uncle is right here.” He turned his eyes back to the road and straightened the dusty cap on his head.

  George and I stared at him and nodded. Big Uncle wasn’t a bit big. He was quite short, actually, and skinnier than a scarecrow in a bean field.

  Big Uncle drove us over potholes and ratty roads as we bounced up and down in the backseat. The Chevy taxi was old—very old—and George and I had to scoot around the metal springs that were sticking up through the torn seat. I kept hollering, “Ow ow ow ow,” as I got poked, but George just laughed as if this was the most fun he’d ever had in his whole life.

  “How far is it to the airport, Big Uncle?” asked George, bouncing higher.

  Big Uncle spit out the cracked driver’s-side window. “Not so far. Not far at all, little man.”

  But it sure seemed far to me. An hour in the beat-up taxi rolled into two hours. And three hours. And then I lost track. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t excited about the airport or the airplane or America. The longer the taxi ride, the better.

  Big Uncle drove us through villages and farms and over mountains. Smoke hung over some villages like an umbrella, and small fires burned on the ground when there was nothing left to burn. Buildings were lopsided and drooping, about ready to tip over, while others looked perfectly cut in half.

  “From the war, Babo?” asked George, with his nose straight up against the window. “From a bomb?”

>   I shrugged. To me it looked like an enormous giant had stomped its way through my whole country, squashing tiny buildings and tiny people. Stomp stomp.

  The worst villages only had a few people left. They walked around with ashy faces and glassy eyes like circus animals that had dug themselves out of the ground. Our taxi could’ve driven over their toes and they wouldn’t have noticed.

  George’s stomach started making growl noises, but he was always hungry, so that didn’t mean much. Sister Baroo didn’t give us food money because she said we’d get to eat all we wanted on the airplane. So George whispered, “Do you think Big Uncle might buy us something to eat, Babo?”

  I knew that Big Uncle didn’t even have enough money for himself to eat, so I didn’t want to ask. Instead, George and I pretended that we were already Melons, fat and full, watching Big Uncle on the telee-vizion box. That made us laugh like crazy.

  George dug his hand around in his blue bag and pulled out the picture of his new mommy and the swimming poo.

  “Big Uncle? Do you want to see my mommy?” George stuck his hand into the front seat. He tried to put the picture in front of Big Uncle’s eyes, and I was afraid that Big Uncle was going to drive off the road.

  “Nice,” said Big Uncle without really looking at George’s mommy. “Real nice, little man.” Big Uncle cleared his throat and coughed into a ratty hanky and shooed the picture away. George carefully wiped off the picture and laid it on his lap.

  Big Uncle took his taxi job very seriously. Delays and detours made him irritated, which was too bad because the taxi ran into all sorts of delays and detours. George and I had to go to the bathroom three different times on the side of the road. Then Big Uncle swerved to one side and nearly hit a group of women washing clothes. George and I, and all the women, had to push Big Uncle and his taxi out of the mud. And then ... Big Uncle hit an especially big hole in the road.

  George and I heard a hissing, exploding POP. As the taxi stopped with a jolt, both of us ducked down in the backseat and covered our heads with our hands. We thought that someone shot the taxi. I peeked up to see if there was someone—a soldier—hiding behind a tree or a cow. Nothing.

  Big Uncle cried and cursed at his tire. He spit and shook his head. He waved his fist and I would’ve sworn that Big Uncle and his popped tire were going to get into a fight. Fortunately Big Uncle had the brilliant idea of stuffing bubble gum and chewed red nut goo into the popped tire hole. That seemed to do the trick, at least for the moment.

  Big Uncle also had to get out of the taxi and shoo away cows in the middle of the road. The next time he had to shoo away skinny chickens in the road. And then goats. And then a large circle of dirty street children playing marbles. “Shoo! Shoo!” called Big Uncle, waving his arms around. But the animals and the children didn’t want to shoo for Big Uncle or his beat-up taxi.

  So Big Uncle ordered George to get out and do the job. But George ended up petting all of the animals instead of shooing them, and he played marbles with the dirty children. The children cheered and climbed on George.

  Big Uncle grumbled and tooted the taxi horn. The sound, tinier than a sick sneeze, came out—achoo-achoo —which made everybody laugh and made Big Uncle curse.

  From then on, Big Uncle made me shoo everything out of the road.

  The worst delay of all was when we ran into a “hot spot,” as Big Uncle called it. Soldiers were fighting like crazy, so the taxi had to make a detour through four villages out of our way. Big Uncle said that we didn’t want any old soldier thinking that we were traitors, fighting for the other side. Very dangerous.

  “Do you think we’ll miss our plane?” I whispered to Big Uncle as George and I ducked on the backseat floor.

  “No worries, no worries,” replied Big Uncle, clearing his scratchy throat.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t worried a single bit. I hoped we’d run into more cows and hot spots. But George was worried. “They’ll wait for us, won’t they, Big Uncle? The man who flies the airplane? They wouldn’t leave for America without us. Would they?”

  Big Uncle didn’t answer. He just grunted and chewed more nuts, making crunch-crunch sounds.

  Once we were out of the hot spot George talked and talked. I’d never heard him talk so much. I closed my eyes and pretended to fall into a deep sleep—for about five minutes—but George was way too noisy with all his talking.

  “I hope we’ll be next-door neighbors, Babo.”

  “Yes.”

  “And go to the same school too.”

  “That’d be just great.”

  “And play in the swimming poo after school?” George smiled hopefully.

  “Sure,” I sighed.

  “And we’ll probably be friends forever. Don’t you think, Babo?”

  “George, sit still. Aren’t you tired?”

  “How could I be tired? We’re going to America. We’re going to see our mommies!”

  I didn’t even have the energy to explain to George—again—that my mom was not Mrs. Buckworth. My real mom was the Tallest Woman in the World with a Tail. Definitely not a Melon.

  Auntie Moo told me that George’s real mom and dad had almost certainly been killed. That’s what happens during a war. A foreign soldier found George and brought him to the charity hospital because his arm was lost. The soldier named him George and the name stuck. When George was better, the soldier held his hand and led him to the circus camp. George trusts Melons and I think it’s all because of that foreign soldier.

  He was about three and I was about six. None of us knew what happened because George never talked about it. But he smiled on that day, even with a missing arm.

  Weird.

  Big Uncle’s bushy eyebrows arched up as he gave me a look in the rearview mirror. “Isn’t it time for the little man to take a nap?”

  Finally George got tired of talking and fell asleep on my lap. Big Uncle was quiet too. I was afraid that he’d fall asleep like George, so every once in a while I gave the back of the driver’s seat a little poke.

  We left the circus camp in the morning when the sun was coming up, and when the taxi pulled to a stop the sun was down.

  “Taxi ride ends here,” announced Big Uncle.

  The Biggest Bird

  GEORGE RUBBED HIS eyes and sat up. “Are we at my mommy’s house, Babo?”

  I tried to see out the window into the blackness. “George, we haven’t even left our country.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe we drove to America instead.”

  Big Uncle cleared his throat and bugged out his eyes at me in the rearview mirror. That meant that George and I were supposed to get out. So I took George’s hand and we crawled out of the backseat and out of the Chevy. We stood next to each other in the dark.

  Big Uncle revved the beat-up taxi engine. He opened his door and shook our hands and said, “Good luck.” Then he tried to close his door again three times and finally it stuck. Big Uncle drove away fast, shooting up rocks and dirt with his taxi tires.

  I didn’t see a single star and I didn’t see a single airplane. I didn’t see any buildings that looked like an airport and I didn’t see a single excited person with packed bags ready to fly to America. Maybe the plane would be coming soon? Maybe we had to wait? We’d never seen an airplane up close, or an airport, so we didn’t know exactly what we were waiting for.

  But then lights flashed on and there it was. In a mountain of rubble, which used to be the airport, we saw the airplane with wings bigger than the biggest bird in the whole world.

  GEORGE AND I had never been to another country. We’d never even been to another village. We’d never been in a Chevy taxi and we couldn’t remember ever being alone for a whole day without Auntie Moo. So on this day? Well ...

  Airplane people helped us up the airplane stairs and took our tickets and sat us down in our perfectly clean, striped seats. The airplane people wore uniforms like soldiers, but theirs were perfectly blue with no wrinkles and no holes. They told George and me that some lady fr
om the adoption agency was supposed to meet us and help us to America, but officials wouldn’t let her into our country at the last second because it was too dangerous. “We’ll help you, though,” said one airplane man. He had a sunny smile, not at all like a soldier. “We’ll take care of you, okay? Don’t worry.”

  I was worried. The plane finally rumbled and I sucked in my breath. I could see the wheels leave the ground, the front wheels and then the back ones. We went up and up, as George covered his ears and the plane went straight into the sky. I thought I might throw up, while George laughed as if this was the most fun he’d ever had in his whole life.

  He stared with his nose against the window and waved.

  “Who are you waving to, George?”

  “Maybe they can see us at the circus camp!”

  “No. They can see the plane, but they can’t see us and we can’t see them. Remember?”

  “But I see ‘We Love You.”’

  I practically climbed right over him so I could see out the window. Nothing but pure blackness and dark clouds. “There’s nothing there, George. There’s no ‘We Love You.’ ”

  “It’s there, Babo. I see it. You don’t see it?”

  I stared and stared. Maybe it was there. My good eye started watering and playing tricks. We Love You. I wanted to see it, but George had better eyes than me.

  He was still waving out the window an hour later when an airplane lady asked us if we wanted drinks.

  “Does it cost money?” I asked her in English.

  “No,” she said with a sugar smile. “It’s free.”

  George and I looked at each other. Free. George ordered a Coca-Cola, but I didn’t order anything because I knew that nothing ever came for free.

  When George’s drink arrived, I looked at the lady suspiciously. Old Lady Suri at the bean stand said that foreign Melons could be very sneaky. But the airplane lady didn’t ask for money and George sucked his Coca-Cola through a straw and made mmmm-mmmm noises. So when she walked by again, I tugged on her arm and ordered three Coca-Colas. She laughed and brought me all three for free.