Chemistry and Other Stories

Dangerous Love

When Ricky threw his knife and the blade tore my blouse and cut into flesh eight inches from my heart, it was certain as the blood trickling down my arm that something in our relationship had gone wrong.

“Cut the rest of it off,” a townie in a yellow ball cap yelled from the bleachers, thinking ripping my blouse was part of the show.

“Work on that dress some too,” said a man on the front row.

Another townie stepped through the tent entrance and sat down.

“What have I missed?” he asked.

“Near about a execution,” the man behind him said.

Twenty feet in front of me, Ricky stared at his empty right hand like he was holding it out for Lady Socrates to tell his future. But Lady Socrates was three tents down the midway. Ricky would have to figure it out on his own what his hand told him. The folks in the stands started whistling and yelling but Ricky just kept staring at his hand. I wondered if he saw his future in the lifeline that crossed his palm. I wondered if he saw a future that included me.

“Don’t waste your money on such as that,” Momma had said that first night, but it was my dollar bill. I’d earned it waiting on smart alecks and grumps, coming home every night with aching feet and smelling like grease and cigarettes. All that for minimum wage and a few quarters thrown on the counter.

I stared at the painting on the tent, the figure of a gypsy-looking woman with so many knives jutting out around her she looked to be sprouting quills like a porcupine. The knife thrower had his hand behind his ear, ready to hurl another knife. He wore a droopy mustache, his long hair flowing down his back. RICARDO MONT BLANC: WORLD-FAMOUS KNIFE THROWER, the caption said.

“I’m going,” I told Momma and handed the woman at the ticket booth my dollar.

The light was shadowy inside. The air smelled of sawdust and sweat. Five rows of half-filled bleachers filled one side of the tent. At the back a piece of plywood stood like a knobless door. A human outline had been drawn on the wood, like on police shows when somebody’s been killed. I sat down in the first row, the only woman in the audience.

A man opened the flap at the back of the tent, what looked like a wooden suitcase in his left hand. He was blonder than I’d expected from the poster and name, so handsome with his green eyes and long, wavy hair. He wore all black from shirt to boots. Younger than I’d supposed too, his brow unlined and mustache fine as peach fuzz. I reckoned he was about my age, still in his mid-twenties.

The knife thrower opened the carrying case. There was nothing inside but black-handled knives with long, bright blades — beautiful, deadly looking knives. He didn’t say a word, just picked one up and flung it. The knife made a loud whack as it entered the plywood, the blade no more than an inch above the outline’s right wrist. He flung another, hitting the same exact spot, except this time above the left wrist.

“Where’s your damsel in distress?” a pimply-faced young rowdy yelled from the row behind me.

“Don’t have one,” Ricardo Mont Blanc said and threw another knife, which landed between the outline’s legs.

“I figured there to be a pretty woman for you to throw at,” the teenager said.

“It ain’t nothing to throw at a piece of plywood,” an old man on the top row added. “There ain’t no risk to that.”

“Then you get up there,” Ricardo Mont Blanc said. “I’ll throw at you.”

“I’d be more than enough willing, but the doctor says I can’t do nothing that excites me. Bad ticker,” the geezer said, pointing to his chest.

“Anyway, he ain’t pretty enough,” the teenager said. “Why don’t you put her up there?”

I didn’t need to turn around to know who he was talking about.

The man sitting next to me nudged my shoulder. “Get on up there, girl,” he said. “Give us something worth looking at.”

Some of the other men echoed his words and I could feel a blush spreading across my face.

“That girl ain’t got the grit to get up there,” the old man said. “I’m getting my money back.”

I looked at him and I knew exactly the kind of customer he’d be. He’d hog a whole booth instead of sitting on a stool and order just coffee and make sure you ran your legs off to keep it hot and up to the brim. He’d sit there an hour and then grumble when he got the bill that seventy-five cents was too much for coffee. There’d be as much chance of a tip from him as from an alley cat.

“I’ll let him throw at me,” I said, knowing me standing in front of that plywood would keep that geezer from getting his dollar back. But it was more than that. I wanted to show Ricardo Mont Blanc that I did have grit.

The tent got real quiet soon as the words left my mouth.

Ricardo Mont Blanc aimed those cool green eyes right at me. Sizing me up, I reckoned. I mostly expected him to say something such as he couldn’t throw at just anyone or there might be a problem with the carnival’s insurance or some other excuse like that.

All he said was “Okay.”

“We got us a show now,” the young rowdy shouted and high-fived another teenager sitting next to him.

Ricardo Mont Blanc led me over to the plywood. He fitted me inside the outline, raising my arms, positioning my head. His hands were soft, not rough and callused like most men’s hands. I couldn’t help but wonder how they’d feel touching other places on my body. But another part of me was all the while looking for the slightest tremble in them.

“What’s your name?” he asked when he had me like he wanted.

“Ellie Higginbotham,” I said.

“Call me Ricky,” he said and took a step back, looked me over a last time.

“Don’t move, Ellie Higginbotham,” he said and walked to the other side of the tent.

Momma had always said I was bad to do things without thinking them through, like after high school marrying Robert instead of taking a scholarship Brevard College offered me. I closed my eyes. Dear Lord, my mother was so right, I prayed. Forgive my foolishness and let me leave this tent alive. I said a silent amen and looked up. Ricky’s eyes met mine. He gave a little nod. My eyes locked on his as his arm came forward.

“YOU AIN’ T THOUGHT this thing through, no more than when you turned down that scholarship,” Momma said four days later as Daddy drove me to the fairgrounds. “You could be teaching school now instead of having knives thrown at you.”

“I don’t know as I could trust a man with a name nobody in South Carolina’s heard the like of,” Daddy chimed in.

“That’s not his real name, Daddy,” I said. “His real name’s Ricky Sandifer.”

“And what does that tell you, him disguising his name like that?” Daddy said. “Where do his parents live? Has he told you that?”

“They’re dead, Daddy.”

“So he claims,” Daddy said. “I’m going to be checking those wanted posters in the post office, girl. You best be eyeballing them too.”

“Even as a child, you always did things different,” Momma said. “Your sisters would never run off with the circus.”

“It’s not a circus, Momma. It’s a carnival.”

“And that’s worse,” Daddy said. “Circus people are high society compared to the riffraff you’ll be with.”

“I’ve made up my mind,” I said and lifted my suitcase from the floorboard.

Momma shook her head.

“That’s what you said when we tried talking you out of marrying Robert,” she said, “those exact same words. Those teachers of yours always bragged about how smart you were, but there’s book smarts and life smarts, Ellie, and they ain’t the same thing.”

“It’s different this time,” I said.

NOW, SIX MONTHS later, I wasn’t nearly so sure. I pulled the knife out of my blouse. The blade had nicked my upper arm, not muscle-deep but deep enough to sting and stain my blouse with blood.

I thought about what Momma said about me not thinking things through. I’d married Robert knowing no more about what holds a man and woman together than I’d known about being an astronaut. But in the years since I’d learned a lot about men and women and love — mostly about how those three things never seemed to make a good fit, at least for me. At eighteen I’d believed love was like a virus. If you stayed around someone, or better yet married him, sooner or later you’d catch it. And maybe love did happen that way for some people, but it hadn’t for me, or at least the kind of love I wanted.

“You expect too much,” my friend Connie told me after the divorce.

“I don’t expect any more than I’m willing to give.”

“Which is everything — heart, mind, body, and soul — nothing held back,” Connie said. “That scares people, Ellie. It’s too intense. It’s like you want nothing between you and the other person, no skin, no muscle, just raw bone against raw bone.”

Connie shook her head.

“Girl, if you don’t learn to lower your expectations, you’ll live a lonely life. There may be a man out there who wants that kind of intensity, has it himself, but he’s one in a million. And even if you found him, how do you know that intensity won’t be like a fire that burns up the both of you? That’s a dangerous love you’re talking about, Ellie Higginbotham.”

BUT I HAD found that kind of love, found it that first night after Ricky’d thrown his knives at me and we’d bought a couple of corn dogs and Pepsis and sat on the steps of his camper. We’d talked easy and open with each other, and before long I was telling him things I’d never told Robert or even Momma. And it felt right to tell him those things, because I’d already trusted him with my heart in that tent. Unlike Robert and the other men I’d known, Ricky wanted to know everything about me. He wanted nothing hidden between us, even on that first night. It was like a hunger we shared, and soon enough he told me about his parents and sister, the car wreck that killed them. He told how he’d worked in the carnival since he was fifteen, first running a cotton candy machine, then working with the Snake Man, throwing knives every morning until he was good enough to earn a tent of his own. All the while he never tried to talk me into his camper and out of my clothes, even when the air got chilly and I snuggled against him.

It was dawn before I left. When I did Ricky knew more about me than Robert had in two years of marriage, more than Momma and Daddy in twenty-four years. I somehow knew myself better too, because different as our lives had been Ricky and me shared something deep inside and we’d shared it with each other for years and not even known. And it was more than how we saw life or how we lived life. It was how we felt life.

“You expect too much,” Connie had said, and in the last four years I’d almost been convinced she was right, but that night on those camper steps I could finally believe she was wrong after all. When I said goodbye to Ricky that morning I knew I’d soon enough see the inside of that camper. I knew already when the carnival left Seneca I’d be leaving with it.

“THOSE TOWNIES DON’T ever come to see me do good,” Ricky had said that night Momma and Daddy brought me to his camper, after I’d unpacked my suitcase, after we’d made love as the carnival’s green and red and blue neon lights splashed across our bodies.

“They’d like nothing better than to see me put a knife right into your heart. That’s why that tent wasn’t but half filled till you stepped inside the outline. You can see it in the way they squint their eyes, trying to send mind messages so I’ll screw up.”

“Then look into my eyes, listen for my mind messages,” I said, pulling Ricky close to me.

And that’s what he’d done. Before each throw his eyes met mine and I thought hard as I could, willing his knife to the right place.

Most of the time, and always on the first night in a new town, I’d be seated in the stands. Ricky would start off throwing at the outline and soon enough someone in the bleachers would complain or demand a refund. Then I’d volunteer and the townies would whoop and clap. When we did it that way they always left more satisfied, thinking they’d gotten more than they’d paid for.

I’d always sit in the same place in the bleachers, end of the third row, because Ricky liked things done the same way every time. He had other rituals as well. He’d get dressed thirty minutes before the show, then take each knife from the carrying case and rub it with a piece of black velvet. He’d turn on his tape player and lie on the bed with his eyes closed.

He played the same song each time, “Don’t Fear the Reefer,” which seemed a strange kind of choice since Ricky didn’t drink, much less smoke marijuana. As soon as the song ended he got up and went straight to the tent.

Everything had gone well the first five months. Then one night as we lay in the sawdust, Ricky said he loved me.

“I’ve known that a long time, baby,” I said, brushing the sawdust from his hair. “But it’s nice to hear you say it.”

“I’ve known it a long time too,” Ricky said, his voice low and serious. “I just didn’t want to admit it, not so much to you but to myself.”

I lay my head against his chest.

“Why not?”

“Because love for me is all or nothing. I don’t know how to hold anything back,” Ricky said. “You’d think that car wreck would have taught me different but it didn’t.”

“That’s who you are, Ricky. That’s the kind of people we are.”

“And you’re glad of that?” Ricky asked.

“I haven’t always been,” I said. “But I am now. I want you to be glad too, Ricky.”

After that night Ricky no longer looked in my eyes when he threw. He’d look above me, below me, anywhere but at me. His aim suffered, most of the time wider and wider, sometimes not even hitting the plywood.

“Hell, boy,” a townie in Shelby, North Carolina, had said. “My blind granny could get closer than that.”

But sometimes he had gotten too close, the knife so near the handle would brush my skin as it wavered. And now he had drawn blood.

“WHAT YOU WAITING for?” a townie wearing a cowboy hat shouted at Ricky.

“It’s just getting interesting,” a bald-headed man on the front row added.

“Show’s over,” I said, my index finger feeling the depth of the cut. “You got more than your money’s worth.”

“But he only thrown one knife.”

“That’s right,” I said, “and if he’d thrown it eight inches farther to the right, I’d be a dead woman.”

I stepped away from the plywood as the bleachers emptied.

“Here,” I said, handing Ricky his knife. “I’m going back to the trailer and sew up this blouse. When you get your knives packed, you come on home. We need to talk this thing out.”

I stepped out of the tent and walked down the midway, everything looking the same to me as it would for someone who lived in a regular home in a regular neighborhood, for though we were two states away from where we’d been last weekend, nothing had changed. The tents remained in the same order, from the Snake Man’s at the start of the midway to the Human Skeleton’s down at the end. The air smelled of corn dogs and cotton candy and the same rides circled and plunged while the same neon lights rainbowed the night.

The Human Skeleton stood outside his tent sipping a Diet Coke.

“Damn, Ellie,” he said. “Looks like you earned your money tonight. If Ricky keeps whittling off your flesh you might end up working with me.”

“I reckon so,” I said and walked behind the tent and up the steps of me and Ricky’s camper.

Ricky came in a few minutes later, quiet and tense, the way he’d been the last few days.

“So what is it?” I asked, and if he’d been any other man I’d known he’d have hemmed and hawed an hour before answering that question. But that wasn’t the way we were with each other.

“I’m afraid I’ll lose you,” he said. “Seems that’s what happened to anyone I’ve ever cared about. You might get tired of this life before long and start looking for a man who can give you a home you can turn around in without bumping into the other person, a yard with grass instead of sawdust. You may decide you want kids, and if you do you’ll not want them living this kind of life.”

I could have said the easy things, maybe the true things — that I’d always want to be with the carnival and would always be happy living in a camper trailer. Or said the thing I most believed, which was that I’d always be with him, and if I did have children I’d want to have them with him, because I’d never find another man who could give me the kind of nothing-held-back love he’d given me. But I didn’t, because always is a tricky word, especially concerning matters of the heart.

“I don’t feel that way now,” I said. “But I’m twenty-four, Ricky. How can I know for sure what I’ll want?”

“I don’t want to ever lose you,” Ricky said.

I stepped over to him, lay my hand on his face.

“I don’t want to lose you either, baby,” I said.

Ricky closed his eyes.

“Now when I throw I get afraid. I think about what could happen if … I could lose you that way too.”

“That’s how it is, Ricky,” I said, “at least in the kind of relationship me and you have. Maybe it’s best when nothing’s held back, nothing’s taken for granted.”

And when I said that I thought about nights after we’d finish the performance, the knives that had whizzed inches from my flesh still stuck in the plywood. The last townie would barely be out of the tent and Ricky and me would be tearing the clothes off each other like they were on fire. We’d make love right there in the sawdust, unable to wait the two minutes it would take to get to the camper. Because we’d taken each other to a place few people go together, a place where your faith in each other is a matter of life and death — him believing I wouldn’t move an inch, me believing his aim would be true. Those moments I felt more alive than any time in my life, and I could tell Ricky felt the same way. We’d lay there covered with sweat and sawdust, our hearts pressed against each other’s, as close as two human beings can ever be.

“I want you to wear this,” Ricky said, and pulled from under the bed what looked like a cross between a corset and a knight’s armor. “It’ll fit under your clothes. Nobody will know the difference.”

I felt the weight of the thing, lighter than you’d expect.

Nobody but you and me, I thought.

“I’m tired,” Ricky said. He pulled off his boots and clothes and lay down in the bed, his face turned to the wall.

I sat in the chair and stared at Ricky’s back, the back my hands moved across nights our bodies merged into what seemed the sweet everlasting. I could hear the music and loudspeakers and shrieks as the townies got flung around the sky, but everything outside that camper seemed miles away. I was deep inside myself, thinking things out.

I laid the body armor beside the door and undressed. I lay down beside Ricky, my breasts touching his back, my arm on his side, my hand spread across his stomach. I knew he was still awake. I moved my hand higher, feeling the smooth skin, the hair on his chest.

“Don’t,” he said, removing my hand.

I lay there listening to the noises, knowing neither of us would sleep much that night. I got up after a while and went to the pay phone out by the front gate.

Momma answered on the fourth ring, still half asleep.

“What’s wrong, Ellie?” she said, because after midnight she knew well as me no one calls with good news.

“It’s complicated.”

“Then I reckon there’s a man involved,” Momma said. “Are you and Ricky having problems?”

“Yes, but not what you’d think.”

“So it’s not money, drinking, or snoring.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, if it’s sex you best read Cosmopolitan. All I know is what it’s like for me and your daddy, and I got the feeling you’d rather not know the details.”

“It’s not that, either. Ricky says he’s afraid he loves me too much.”

“Well,” Momma said, “all I can say is there’s many a woman who would be happy to have that kind of problem.”

Right then I knew there was no way to explain it to Momma. There was one person who could help me work this out and he was back at the camper.

“Yes, Momma,” I finally said. “I guess you’re right. I’m sorry I woke you.”

I walked back to the trailer and lay next to Ricky. His breath was deep and regular, and I knew he’d finally managed to fall asleep. I thought how it had been with Robert and how one morning I’d woke up and felt to be in bed with a stranger. I thought about the family photos, how I was always on the edge, almost out of the picture — even in the five-by-seven black-and-whites somehow apart from the rest of the family. I thought about how the last eight months I’d found something that finally felt like home. Because home for me wasn’t so much a place but a feeling you were where you should be, and at the center of that feeling was Ricky. I finally went to sleep. I dreamed I stood in front of the plywood. Ricky was down at the far end of the tent, a bow in his hands. It was not knives that crossed the space between us. It was arrows.

WE SLEPT TILL noon the next day, and in the hours before the show we had little to say to each other. Ricky and me had always been good at talking to one another, but it was like we’d taken ourselves to a place where we needed a new language, a language we hadn’t yet learned to speak.

At six-thirty Ricky lay down on the bed. “Don’t Fear the Reefer” blasted through the speakers. I listened to the words careful, hoping they might say something Ricky’s words couldn’t say. And they did, because I suddenly realized I’d been hearing the song wrong. The singer was saying “Don’t fear the reaper,” not “Don’t fear the reefer.”

Ricky left the camper before I did. I changed into my blouse and skirt but left the body armor by the door. The Human Skeleton was leaving his camper at the same time I was, so we walked to the midway together.

“We got a change in the weather coming,” he said. “I can feel it in my bones.”

I walked into the tent and saw the bleachers were already full. Ricky stood near the entrance, his knife case open. I pressed my back against the plywood. When Ricky picked up his first knife and turned to face me, I raised my hands and unbuttoned my blouse until the V between my breasts showed. The townies cheered and clapped but that meant nothing to me. My eyes and Ricky’s met as the world narrowed to the twenty feet from him to me. He raised the knife to his ear as if the blade might whisper something to him. Then his arm came forward and the knife flashed out of his hand, closing the distance between us.