Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond Read online

  “After I was blown away.” So she had remembered. I wondered why it’d taken her so long to get in touch. I mean it had been seven years after all.

  Before I could ask, the hallway was as crowded as the cellar hole had once been. Everyone was touching Dorothy—her hair, her shoulders, her hands—saying her name in soft wonder.

  I pulled back, not trusting this part of the story. Could such a glamorous creature really be our Dorothy? And why had she returned, why now?

  They drew her into the living room, where the fire had resumed its one-sided conversation, only this time everyone ignored its snap.

  “Where have you been, Dorothy?” Rand was the only one innocent enough to just come right out and say it. “All this time?”

  Her next words surprised us. “Why, in the Emerald Circus. The performers heard a huge crash near their Missouri campsite and found me under a tree, pieces of wood scattered all around. My memory was as shattered as the farmhouse. All my clothes blown away but my shoes. The little people got to me first.”

  I refused to dignify her story with questions, but no one else had the same reaction.

  “Little people?” asked Em.

  “Dwarfs, used to be miners in Munich. Though they don’t like to be called so,” Dorothy said. “Just Little People.”

  “Oh,” said Em, “the clowns who run around through the audience. I’ve seen them. You did, too, Dorothy,” she said. “We went to the circus once. Together.”

  Dorothy got an odd look on her face. “I don’t remember.” It turned out to be something she was to say many times over the next weeks.

  If Dorothy was to be believed, her life in the circus over seven years had been like a dream. Little people. A freak show full of oddities. Wire walkers. A lion that jumped through hoops. Dancing dogs. Bareback riders. Even an elephant.

  “And yet,” she added quickly, “all just people. Like you, like me.” Then she laughed softly. “The dogs, the horse, the lions, the elephant—not them of course.”

  Well, of course circus folk are just people, I thought, only not like us at all. Though I didn’t say it out loud.

  Dorothy had become part of the show, dressing in tights, a fitted bodice, and silver shoes.

  “Tights! Land sakes!” Em said, her hand on her heart as if she was going to faint.

  Dorothy even got to wear a blond wig.

  “Think of that!” Henry put in.

  Her toenails were painted gold.

  “Real gold?” asked Rand.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Stan said, pounding a fist into his brother’s shoulder.

  At first Dorothy had just walked around the ring, smiling at the folks in the audience, turning and turning like a whirligig. But all the while, when it wasn’t show time, she practiced wire-walking with the Italian acrobats, the Antonioni Family, until she was good enough to become part of their act. They even wanted her to marry their son, Little Tony, and carry on the family tradition.

  “But I told them I was too young, and besides, I wasn’t the marrying kind.” She smiled at Uncle Henry. “I knew that one day I would remember where I came from and want to go back there.” She opened her arms and turned around and around, like she was still performing. “And here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Henry said, grinning.

  But I wondered if it was true.

  All of it.

  Any of it.

  Dorothy stayed, taking her turn at the house chores, gathering eggs, making lunches, cooking soups, plucking chickens. The usual. She seemed content.

  But then, about a month later, she convinced Stan to get a bunch of strands of strong wire, which she braided together. Then he stretched the wire from one part of the pigsty fence all the way across to the other, nailing it down hard on each end.

  We watched as she climbed onto the fence, wearing overalls and a silver shirt. Those little silver dancing slippers on her feet.

  The piglets looked up at her and squealed, but the sow seemed unconcerned.

  I was probably the only who thought we were going to be picking her out of the pigpen, covered with mud.

  She started off cautiously, one small slippered foot after another, testing the tightness of the wire. But after about three steps, she walked as if going along a wide asphalt road. Even stopped in the middle to turn like a whirligig, arms wide open, before lifting one leg high in the air behind her.

  “Arabesque,” she said, as if that was an explanation.

  When she reached the other side of the pen, we all broke into applause.

  So the wire-walking at least was true. I told my wife Amelia about it and she insisted on coming over to watch the next time Dorothy did it, which was every Saturday after that. Amelia watched Dorothy on the wire with an intensity she’d never shown for anything else. Then she turned to me and said it was a homey piece of magic and she wanted to learn it. I put my foot down. Something I rarely ever do. I didn’t fancy her falling in the mud. It would have been me having to clean her up. Somehow, at our ages, I didn’t like the sound of that.

  5.

  About three months after that, I was coming back for lunch where I’d been fixing fences—the prairie wind just devils the wires. I was heading to the cabbage field to give the cabbages a good soaking. Suddenly I noticed a figure standing at the farmhouse door just fixing to knock. I could only see her from the back, but she looked to be a blond-haired, shapely woman. In fact her hair wasn’t just blond but an ashy white-blond, a color you don’t see on a grown woman unless she spends a lot of time at the hairdresser’s.

  “Pardon me, miss,” I called, wondering who it might be, guessing she was there to visit Dorothy.

  She turned and I got the shock of my life, because she was sporting a beard. Not just a few face hairs like some women get in later life—my mother-in-law has them sprouting from her chin and from a mole on her cheek. But a full beard, kind of reddish color, the bottom half of which was tied off with a pink bow.

  A bearded lady, by golly, I thought. Freak show standard. I’d always figured they were just regular women in makeup. Or a womanish man dressed in female clothes. This one had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen—an eerie color really.

  “Are you looking for Dorothy?” I asked, to cover my embarrassment.

  “Dottie, yes, is she here? It’s where I dropped her off some months ago,” the bearded lady said. “She hasn’t written since.”

  “She does that,” I said nodding. “We didn’t hear from her for seven years.”

  “Well, it took her all that time to remember,” she told me.

  I thought that made for a convenient memory but said nothing.

  She held out her hand. “Ozmandia,” she said.

  “Circus name? Last name?”

  She smiled, her teeth pearly above the beard. “Actually, Shirley Osmond, so you’re kind of right either way.”

  The door opened and Em looked out. It took her a moment to put it all together. Then her hand went to her heart. “My word.”

  “I’m a friend of Dottie’s,” Ozmandia said, but even as she said it, Dorothy pushed past Em and threw herself into the bearded lady’s arms.

  “Ozzy!” she cried. “I’ve missed you so.”

  “Little bird,” the bearded lady said and kissed Dorothy full on the lips, the way a man might do. Then she drew back and looked at Dorothy critically. “You’ve gained some weight. It might make you too heavy for the wire, but it suits you.”

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  “She has,” said Em. “And performing.”

  “Then no potatoes,” Ozmandia said. “No bread. No starch.”

  “What’s starch?” Em asked. The only starch she knew was what she ironed with.

  “I’ll make a list,” Ozmandia told her.

  She turned to Dorothy. “We’re starting again next month. Barnum and Bailey have bought the old man out.”

  “No more Mr. Wizard?” Dorothy said. “But it’s his circus.”

  “He’s re
tiring to Florida,” said Ozmandia. “For what they paid him, he can afford it. Him and that elephant.”

  “Will you stay awhile?” Dorothy said, speaking to her circus friend as if the rest of us hardly mattered. And indeed, probably we didn’t.

  “Just tonight, Baby Bird,” Ozmandia said. “I’m getting around to everyone.”

  “But I’m special,” Dorothy said.

  “You always were, falling out of the sky that way.” She turned to Em. “I assume, madam, that it is all right for me to stay the one night? I can sleep in Dottie’s bed with her. It’s an old circus custom.”

  I bet it is, I thought, but didn’t say it aloud.

  She stayed two nights, and no one spoke about it until long after. That first evening, being a Saturday, Dorothy did her wire walk over the pigsty. Ozmandia played a flute as Dorothy performed, and though you probably won’t believe it, the sow and piglets got up on their hind trotters and danced.

  Amelia was there as usual, of course, and she and Ozmandia became instant pals, both of them enthusing over Dorothy’s talents.

  When we walked home, I tried to hold Amelia’s hand, feeling a sudden tenderness toward her I hadn’t felt in years, but she pulled her hand away.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t any more.”

  Amelia’s mother died that very night, with such a peaceful smile on her face she hardly looked like the same woman. Only Henry and Em, Stan and Rand, and Dorothy came to the funeral.

  Ozmandia sent a message the next month, and Dorothy packed up her carpetbag, ready to leave the next morning. Stan was driving her by cart into the city—she was taking a steam engine train from there.

  Em watched her go dry-eyed, but Henry was sobbing enough for the two of them. Stan and Rand were openmouthed, breathing hard.

  I was there as well, watching Amelia go with her.

  “Tom,” she’d told me last night, “I have never done anything for myself before. First there was Mother, and then there was you. I’ve taken the housekeeping money. I’ve been saving some for months. Sell Mother’s house for me, and you keep half. Start that woodworking business for real this time. It’s the only thing you’ve ever really loved. I’ll write and tell you where to send my portion when I know.”

  “Are you going to be a wire walker?” I asked.

  “I’ll take tickets, sell popcorn, clean out the lion’s cage. I’ll do anything they need, wear many hats, many heads. After all,” she said, “I’m well practiced in that sort of thing.”

  And maybe she was, after all.

  “Perhaps eventually they’ll let me try the wire.” She smiled. “Even though I’m probably too old.”

  “Never too old,” I said, remembering her on our wedding day.

  “Tom, you never could tell a lie,” she said. “Don’t start now.”

  The cart pulled away and rolled down the dusty road, making it look for a minute like little imps were running behind. If you start thinking that way about the world once, it seems to go on and on.

  I watched till the cart with my wife in it was out of sight. When I turned back, Henry was still standing there, the little dog on wheels cradled in his arms. I guess Dorothy didn’t need it anymore.

  I guess Henry did.

  CITY SO BRIGHT

  BY DALE BAILEY

  So Joe fell the other day.

  One minute he’s hanging on the wall, maybe twenty feet away from me, and we’re shouting back and forth, razzing each other the way you do—polish polish polish, till your arms feel so numb they could fall off and you wouldn’t even notice and just razzing each other: your wife is so heinous you get a mouthful of fur when you give her a hickey, and your mom is so fat she gets mistaken for a dirigible. The kind of thing you do, and nobody’s feelings get hurt. My wife says guys do this because they’re so emotionally stunted that they can’t express their real feelings. But I know this to be bullshit of the most preposterous variety, because when Joe fell I cried like a baby, and that’s not emotionally stunted if you know what I mean.

  But I’ve always been a little bit on the sensitive side, even for a Munchkin.

  So here’s what happens. We’re on the wall, maybe seventy feet up, razzing each other, when two of Joe’s lines snap. Not one but two, is what I’m saying. His bucket goes clattering down the side of the wall, spraying polish everywhere—it smells like an ammonia bomb has exploded—and his platform swings down on one side, hanging vertically. His safety harness engages, and he’s suddenly dangling below the platform, still holding on to his rag. He’s just kind of swinging there, this panicky expression on his face, and I say in this very calming voice, the kind of voice you use with your kids when they scrape a knee or something, I say, “Everything’s cool, hang tight,” you know what I mean, only not thinking till later that hang tight is not the best thing I could have said under these particular circumstances. But still, the safety harness is engaged, and the guys up top are going to winch him up—that’s the way it always happens—and we’ll all go out for a cold one somewhere after our shift. We’ll clap Joe on the back and say things like You looked pretty scared up there, pal and Did you shit your britches or what? I can fucking smell you, man, and we’ll have a few laughs, and then we’ll go home to do it all over again, another day on the wall, polish polish polish. That’s the way it always goes down, no pun intended. I wouldn’t disrespect Joe’s memory that way, not for all the world with a cherry on top.

  Not even for the Wizard’s head on a spike, which is something I shouldn’t have written, but hell, sometimes you have to tell the truth or you can’t look at yourself in the mirror the next morning.

  Then this next thing happens, which is Joe’s safety harness snaps, and down he goes like the bucket, bouncing off the wall, which has this gentle slope to it. Thump thump thumpity-thump crunch kersplat—this meaty sound like a squadron of monkeys has just dropped a side of beef from a hundred feet up just to see what will happen. Fucking monkeys. Anyway, that’s what I remember most is that sound, crunch kersplat, blood and bones, you know, blood and fucking bones. Looking down, it’s like a kid has dropped a jar of strawberry jelly. Joe’s just exploded like a meat bag full of blood, and what I’m thinking is, some poor son of a bitch is going to have to scrape him off the pavement, and some other poor son of a bitch is going to have to wipe down the wall and polish polish polish till it’s like it never happened. I’m hoping it’s not me, too, which makes me feel kind of guilty, because even though he’s a Winkie, Joe’s my best friend, you know.

  That’s what got us thinking—me, Dizzy, and Hops. We go out for a cold one, this little hole-in-the-wall in the tunnels, Frankie’s, where we go sometimes after a shift. There are two overlapping shifts, fourteen hours each, six and a half days a week with half a day Sunday, which you’re supposed to spend with your wife and kids tossing the old Frisbee around and grilling burgers, but you can’t ever do that because you’re just so fucking tired—you know what I mean. You’re just so tired. Calixta always complains about it, prodding me with her foot and saying Get up lazy bones. Don’t you wanna see your kids? And I do, but I’m just so tired. My arms feel like they’re not connected to the rest of me, my hands are clenched into these hooks or claws. It takes me all afternoon and evening to work them back into hands again, and I’m supposed to throw a Frisbee? Besides, where we gonna throw it? You can’t do it in the tunnels, with all these sad little holes-in-the-walls that we rent as “apartments,” if you know what I’m saying, these one-room little dens with a couple of stinking straw pallets, all infested with lice and bedbugs, one for Calixta and me and one for the kids. We usually end up screwing Sunday night once my hands uncramp, but there’s no real pleasure in it. All the time I’m worried about my snot-nosed little apes—are they awake or are they asleep, and what kind of psychological damage is it doing to them to watch their parents humping away on that stinking mess of straw.

  But I appreciate it, because Calixta is bone-tired, too. She works in the Wizard’
s kitchens, buried deep underground like these fucking sewer tunnels where we live, and her hands are always blistered and burned from taking bread out of the ovens or stirring the stew, with the chef riding her ass all day long like she’s his own personal horse and he’s in a hurry. But there she goes riding me or hunkering over on all fours so I can take her from behind, because she knows a man’s got needs, and she’s a good wife. I couldn’t have done better, even if she’s running to fat these days, and her hair is always limp and draggled and kind of greasy from the hairnet she wears all day at the office. Get that? That’s a joke. Office, like a sweltering kitchen where you raise blisters on your hands four or five times a day is a fucking office. The only advantage to the office is that she can pinch the leftovers now and then, so we eat better than your average Munchkin.

  But I guess I’ve got sidetracked. Calixta does that to me. What I was trying to say is that me, Dizzy, and Hops stop in at Frankie’s the day Joe goes tumbling down the wall, and we get to talking. And here’s the thing: people do not fall off the wall. Oh, they injure their backs, and the work makes you old so quick that nobody lasts, and you have to go find easier work, which there is none, so you take to begging—but never on the streets, not unless you want to be arrested by the City guard, in their red-breasted uniforms, and beaten or pummeled with fire hoses for your trouble. A lot of guys, they get arrested, and you never see them again. And their wives take to the streets, if you get what I’m saying—but never up top—and their children take to stealing so bad that you practically have to nail down the little bit of stuff you’ve managed to pull together or it’s like to just up and disappear. What I’m saying is there are two cities, one right on top of the other: the Emerald City above, all shining and clean and green with its immaculate polished walls and not a speck of litter on the grass, where everything is fresh and aromatic, and the city below, which I’ve pretty much described to you, where the smell of sewage hangs in the air so thick that it’s almost a pleasure to go to work, and the flies swarm so bad sometimes you can’t even see.