Randy White - Tampa Burn

Partial truths always make the most convincing lies. But Baxter said he didn’t believe the man anyway. Only pretended to.

We stopped inside the main living area. I turned on a light when he said he didn’t mind. There was a couch that folded out into a bed. There was a worn chair, a table with stacks of books on tape, and books in Braille. A reader. There was a television, too, and the walls were covered with framed carnival posters. He motioned vaguely toward one of the posters and said that it was Prax Lourdes’ mother.

I stepped to the wall and looked at a red, blue, and yellow print painting of a huge, muscle-bound woman with improbably large breasts. She had curly blond hair and

wore a wrestling singlet. The poster read: THE CANADIAN IRON WOMAN THE GRAPPLING BOZARK

Remembering that Lourdes had used the strange word as his internet password, I asked Baxter, “What does it mean? ‘Bozark’?”

“It an ol’-time carney bit. Bozark, that what we used to call a woman wrestler could beat a man. Edith Gauer, she could do that, too. She could beat most any man.

“Men she beat most often, though, was her husband, Benny, and her boy Jimmy. Benny, he were like me, a li’l peeshwank runt of a man. Had him a balancin’ act. He used li’l Jimmy in the act until Jimmy fall and hit his head so bad. After that is when li’l Jimmy turn into Mean Jimmy.”

“Because he fell. You’re saying he wasn’t always mean?”

The old man was shaking his head. “Nicest little boy you could meet even with his ma beatin’ him. Until the wire they was on snapped, and he knocked his brain in so bad, the boy nearly passed over. After that was when he become Mean Jimmy.”

That was a startling thing to hear.

Baxter had a drawer open, taking something from it, and now he handed me a book. “Your boy tell me to give you that.”

It was the Audubon Guide to Florida, the same book I had at the lab.

“Is there anything else? Any message?”

“Oh Lord, you don’t know how mean Jimmy can be if you think the boy dumb enough to risk slippin’ a message to anyone; something dangerous as that. When Jimmy’s head got all healed up, that when he start likin’ to burn things. Cats and such. A chimp once, I’m pretty sure. He crazy mean. No, your boy woulda been riskin’ ol’ Baxter’s life if he’d slipped me a message.”

I leafed through the Audubon Guide more slowly than the other books, thinking that Lake may have, once again, used the animals noted in his e-mail as markers. It’s what I would have done.

That’s just what he did.

On page 307, under reddish egret, barely visible in pencil and written in miniature block letters, I read, “Lv Fl by ship, date X?”

It took me only a moment to understand that my son was telling me that he believed that he and Lourdes, or just Lourdes, would be leaving Florida by ship, departure date unknown.

As I looked up “bullfrog”-found nothing-then looked for “parrots”-not indigenous, so not listed-Baxter said with the same little prideful smile he’d had before, “When you look at the posters on the walls, anybody up there seem familiar?”

I was in a hurry, but I paused long enough to take a quick glance around the room. Something that immediately caught my attention, because they seemed odd and out of place, were a dozen or so photos that were tacked next to a mirror on the far wall. The photos were close-ups of men’s faces-noses, cheeks, whole foreheads. They appeared to be from a medical journal, or a medical reference book. I realized that the photos were of male patients before and after they’d had various forms of plastic surgery.

The list of drugs Lourdes had demanded popped into my mind, and I thought, What the hell is he up to?

Baxter interrupted, pressing, “You don’t see my posters no more? Them posters still up there, ain’t they?”

Once again leafing through the Audubon Guide, now searching for page 296, the American alligator, I looked in the direction the old man was staring.

There was Baxter Glapion. His likeness was depicted on two posters that were mounted side by side.

In one, he was dressed in a straw skirt, gnawing on a human skull, and billed as Kiki, the Cannibal Dwarf. On the other, he was wearing a similar grass skirt. But he also had a turban on his head, and was holding a crystal ball and a magic wand. He was sitting on a cushion, head thrown back, arms outstretched as if in a trance. He was billed as Mystivo, the Pygmy Fortune Teller.

The smile still there, he said, “The fortune-teller bit, I can still do it. Let me think on you a moment now, and I’ll tell you something about yourself. Somethin’ nobody else ever knowed. It’s not a lie, man, it real. I’m from the New Orleans Glapions-our family descendants of Priestess Marie Laveau. I’ve got the voudon blood in me.”

Concentrating on the book, I said, “Voodoo, huh? I’ve got a sister you’d love. But unless you can tell me where my son is, I’m not interested.”

The old man had his head back, arms out, palms up, just like the poster. I heard him tell me my correct age, a figure close to my weight, and the month in which I was born.

Still leafing through pages, I said, “You’re good, Baxter. You really are. I’ve always wondered how you carnival people did that.”

I’d found alligators in the reptile section and was squinting, searching hard for my son’s tiny writing, as he said, “I only know how it is I do it, man. Back when my eyes was workin’, they seen so much ugliness, all the light leaked outta me. My real vision, my good vision, didn’t come back until I lost my sight.”

He was silent for a moment before he added, “I see you had a bad time these last couple years. You and some a your friends, too. You were in the shadow time a your life. But better times here now. Your luck, and all the luck a those around you, done changed for the better. You got bright times ahead. Lots a laughin’ and bed-happy-makin’ love, and party times are ahead for you.”

“Great,” I said, absently. “Good to hear it.”

On the page opposite two photographs of gators, I discovered that Lake had written something, but the letters were so tiny that it was very difficult to read. I stood and held the book next to the light, my face close to the page, as Baxter said in a more somber tone, “But you got you a little bit more trouble comin’, too. I can see that. You got you some trouble comin’ with somethin’ that might happen to one of your two children. You maybe gonna lose one of them.”

He moaned the next words very softly: “Ah Lordy, I sure hope that what I see ain’t true.”

Irritated, I said, “I don’t have two children. I only have the one son, the boy you met. And a crazy man’s got him, so, yeah, he’s in trouble.”

“No sir! I see two children!”

I said, “Well, you’re wrong. Baxter-could you please be quiet for a while?”

Squinting at the book, I could now make out the words “LOURDES WANTS…” as Baxter ignored me and continued anyway, “I see only one more thing in your future that’s bad, man. What I see is, I see that, one day… oh, this is a dark ’un… I see that you gonna have to kill a man who’s been a good friend to you. Whoo-whee-”

That moan again, but this time the sound contained pain and surprise.

“Ye-e-eah, oh Lord, I see this event very clearly. You be an unusual creature, Doc Ford! Yes, you are! That day gonna come. The day gonna come when you kill your friend, that be the darkest time of all.”

I let him push on without comment-uneasy, though, with what I was hearing-and let him finish, saying, “But mostly… yes, I see… you got happy times and good feelin’s ahead. You gonna be a smilin’ man comin’ up very soon-if you help that child of yours that’s in so much trouble.”