Cover Up

© 1999 All Rights Reserved........By Margaret Karmazin

My wife was born with one of those big purple birthmarks down the side of her cheek. We met in St. Louis when I was a clown for the Wheeler Brothers Traveling Circus. They brought in someone to teach the performers better makeup techniques and Trudy was it. She knew how to cover up anything, make herself look beautiful even. I fell in love the second day she was there and when I finally saw the birthmark, I was far-gone and it didn't matter.

Over the years I learned makeup by osmosis even though I long since gave up clowning. Since Trudy died, I keep her makeup kit on the coffee table. It's got some of her spirit in it. I wouldn't tell anyone this but twice when I thought I'd never cuddle a warm body again in the night or have a woman to sit with at a table sprinkled with toast crumbs, twice I opened up that box and made up my own face. It was stupid looking, part clown, part monster - I didn't care. When I cried, the tears made pale gray lines through the rouge.

This is a trailer park pure and simple. Not one of those new kinds with the fancy trimmed lots and double-siders the size of houses that young couples start out in or retirees decorate in teal and peach. My sister has one of those. One-inch thick carpet and you have to take your shoes off at the door.

My place is metal and has that window overhang deal and a tinny sound to the door when it slams. I bought the dump from some divorced guy in his twenties who thought he was going to be a rock star. It's nothing to write home about but it serves me. On one side is an ex-army man, a big drinker who spends a lot of his time passed out. I feed his dog. On the other side used to be a crabby old lady. She was sick most of the time, hence her bad state of mind I suppose. When she was feeling good, she brought me baked beans and they were worth putting up with her moods for. I was the one found her dead.

It's funny how you think your life is, for all practical purposes, over and then suddenly you're packed up and in a van heading to Arizona. You think you're just pacing time 'til the heart attack or the discovery of a lump somewhere and trying to find distractions to keep your mind off it and then you find you've woken up one morning with your heart leaping and your hands tingling with let's-get-going. But I'm jumping ahead.

The woman rented the trailer from the old lady's son who works at the plant up in Dandridge. Said she'd clean up on her own since he said he didn't want anything in it. I think he was in the midst of a divorce and was just glad to be rid of the problem. Right off I saw she didn't fit in around here, didn't look anything like the other women in the park.

Not that we don't have some lookers around here, but let's just say there's a difference in style between them and her. They wear black around their eyes and tease their hair out and run to fat past twenty-five. But this woman - and I watched her on the sly for two-three days - she's in pretty good shape though she's fifty if she's a day. Her short brown hair looks like she spent the night with it up in rollers like women in the church choir wear. In short, she looks like a middle-aged lady who bakes brownies for her grandkids and once a year takes a trip to Vermont. The only thing that doesn't fit is what I think I saw on the back of her hand - a tattoo of some kind. That just doesn't go with the rest of her. Women who look like they make pies for cover dish dinners don't usually have tattoos.

Figuring I've given it long enough, one morning I take over a plate of the cinnamon toast I'm famous for. "Hi, I'm Jack," I say. "Your immediate neighbor. Hungry?"

"Not exactly, but that never stopped me from eating," she says. "Would you like a cup of tea? I don't drink coffee so I don't have any around."

I'm not fond of tea but I agree to suffer a cup down. I look around at her place while she sets out the cups and puts the kettle on. It doesn't look like she plans on settling in, although she's made the place somewhat cozy. There are paperbacks on the little dining table and a red Mexican blanket thrown over a chair. In a Snapple bottle on the table are a bunch of daisies and those tall delicate yellow flowers - I think they might be buttercups. Other than that, the place is furnished with the old lady's stuff. As she bustles about the kitchen, I see the tattoo on her hand is a big star outlined in purple. The inside of it looks like the night sky - dark blue dotted with white stars.

"What brought you here?" I ask, knowing full well from her accent she is not from Pennsylvania.

"What do you like in your tea?" she asks instead of answering my question.

I hate everything in tea, I want to answer, but say, "A little Equal's okay. I gotta use that stuff since I'm diabetic."

She pushes a little holder towards me and I help myself. "You been diabetic all your life?" she asks.

I explain the onset of the disease when I was in my forties, back when I liked my junk food and ate like a pig every chance I got. I'm lean now, but I sure miss all the good stuff.

"I've been pretty lucky health-wise," she says after I'm finished.

There's something about that sentence that implies she hasn't been lucky about other things.

"Got any kids?" I ask then.

"Would you like a piece of fruit?" she asks. "I guess you aren't supposed to eat your own cinnamon toast, right?"

She never will tell me anything about herself. Even her name, "Jane Winslow," sounds phony. Over the next few weeks, she learns everything there is to know about me, but I know squat about her. The only thing she does tell me is about the tattoo on her hand. "Oh, back in the early seventies I was in a band. We called ourselves the Star Babies and all had stars tattooed on our hands. I was different then."

"Were you famous?" I ask.

"No, it was just a small band. We had gigs in Virginia, some in West Virginia. Only lasted three years."

"You don't seem the type to have a tattoo," I venture.

"I guess I'm not anymore," she says. "You feel like helping me do some work on the porch?"

She's referring to the broken down sagging mess attached to the front of her trailer. She doesn't have to twist my arm.

I fall in love. Didn't think it would ever happen to me again. Didn't know a sixty-four year old man could have a stomach full of butterflies. But I'm afraid to let her see it. She's probably fifteen years younger and I'm not any prize. Old circus people look like old circus people. I'm covered with faded tattoos and my face looks like someone went at it with an ice pick. Had an acne problem in my youth. I'm tall though and people say I've got a nice build for an old guy. And I've still got my hair. It's half-gray now but it's there.

She knows how I feel; I can tell by the look in her eye and the flush on her neck. We hold hands a few times and once I kiss her, just a quick one on the lips. I take her to see a couple afternoon shows and out to Friendly's for supper on Friday nights. But I still don't know anything about her. There are no photographs that I can see anywhere in her trailer. She never gets any phone calls when I'm there. After a couple weeks of looking for a job, she finds one as a receptionist in a beauty salon. Since she has no car, she walks the mile and a half to work. Sometimes she lets me drive her. Things go on like this for five months and we settle into a nice routine, although I'm concerned about the lack of information. I mean I want this to go somewhere, but where can it go? There's a wall of silence around her and I'm afraid to ask questions.

"Thinks her shit don't stink," says my neighbor across the road. This is Melanie Connor. She's in her thirties, divorced twice, has five kids from four fathers and has let herself go. If my father was alive to see her, he'd say she looks like a whore about to drop from the vine.

"What makes you say that, Melanie?" I ask for the hell of it.

"She don't wanna come over for beer and hamburgers. And she never stops by for a cup of coffee. I think she thinks she's high class. Yeah, like living in a trailer park is high class. I'm real impressed." Melanie sniffs.

This conversation is going nowhere I want to go. "Well, I don't know," I mumble and start to head off.

But Melanie isn't finished. "Somebody was here lookin' for her yesterday. Some man."

I feel a stab in my gut. "What did he want? What did he look like?"

She smirks, enjoying my worry. "Little squirt. You know those little guys who grow up smart-assed since they feel inadequate 'cause they're short? He was one of those, I could tell. A redhead, all freckled up."

I know what she means about some short guys. They get tired of being beaten on all the time and turn mean. "Did he ask any questions?"

"Just where the woman was who lives in that trailer."

"What did you tell him?"

"That she was working."

I'm alarmed all out of proportion. "Did you tell him where?"

"No. I don't know where she works. I don't care where."

I sigh in relief, but she takes care of that. "He said he'd be back."

I'm waiting on Jane's stoop when she comes home. "Someone was here looking for you," I tell her. Her face turns gray.

"What is it?" I ask. "Tell me."

"Did he have red hair?"

"Yes."

She looks like she's going to collapse. I have to help her in the door. "He must have threatened someone. I don't know how he got it out of them otherwise."

"Got what out of who?" I demand. My heart is beating too hard for comfort.

"I might as well tell you. They have this kind of underground railroad for abused women. They find you a new place to live and set you up under a new name. You have to be willing to give up everything."

I feel instantly enraged, like I want to kill someone. "He hit you? He beat you up?"

Her face is tired and suddenly old looking. "No, he never touched me. But there are other ways of abusing someone. My husband is a white supremacist. He is president of this group in West Virginia called 'God's Guards'. He indoctrinated our son into it too. At one time he had me helping out but that was before I understood what it was all about. I'd been under the impression they were just conservatives but I found out the truth one night when Lou and his buddies murdered some poor Black kid who accidentally ran into Jerry's -that's my son's - car in the school parking lot."

She starts to cry a helpless kind of crying like my mother used to do. "You don't want to know what they did to him. You don't want to know."

"But didn't the police-"

"No," she interrupts. "The county sheriff was a member of the organization."

"Why did you tell someone higher? The FBI or something. Why did you stay with a man like that? You must have partly believed in that shit!"

"I never supported any of it. I didn't know the extent of it, what they were really up to at those meetings. I just stayed to take care of my son and then Lou took him to the meetings and brainwashed him. My own son turned into a stranger. I feared Jerry was involved with the murder, but didn't know for certain. If I turned them all in, I was afraid I would ruin my son's life. All the while I hoped that someday he'd come to his senses. It was only Jerry I cared about. I stopped caring about Lou a long time ago."

"What made you leave then?"

"It was becoming clear that Lou was worried I might talk. He didn't trust me. I was growing more and more afraid. I also couldn't stand the life, the rhetoric, the military attitude. Lou wasn't like that when we got married. It was over the years that he changed. Believe it or not, he was in that old hippie band with me. He has the same star tattooed on his own hand." As soon as she says this, we both have the same thought. We stand up and look at each other.

"I have to move on," she says. "There's no hiding that tattoo, is there? I've changed a lot of other things but he'll know me for sure with that star on me. Believe it or not, Jack, I don't normally look like I sing in the church choir. I was a blonde. My hair was long and curly. I always wore jeans and tight jersey tops. This me you see - well it's not really what I'm like."

All kinds of things are running through my mind; I'm a mess of feelings. For a moment there I'd been full of disgust that she could have let herself stay married to a bigot bastard for so many years. Can I believe her that she is innocent? At the same time, I'm in a panic that she's going away forever and I'll never see her again. All that stuff I've been fantasizing about in my head will never come true now. It's just the dream I suspected it is and I'm just an old man rotting in a trailer park for the rest of my miserable life.

"Please don't go," I say. "Please."

Her eyes are wet. "I've got to, Jack. I'll call the women's underground and they'll tell me where to do. I'll be out of here by tomorrow."

My mind is like a hive of bees. "Wait! I know what to do. I know what. You stay with me in my place. I'll fix you up. We'll put him off this trail."

She shakes her head.

"Just come over for a minute so I can explain."

The next morning we watch the red-haired man pull up outside her trailer in his Cherokee. Just by the sound of his door slamming I can feel his rage. He pounds on her door with his fist.

I step out onto my stoop. "Looking for somebody?" I ask.

He turns angry piggy eyes on me. "Yeah, my wife. You seen her?"

I walk down the two steps. "Your wife? I think you have the wrong place, bud. My sister lives in that trailer."

The man spits on the ground. "Your sister? Yeah? Well, I've heard otherwise. Besides, how could a dirty Indian like you have a blonde Arian sister? You think I'm stupid?"

So he picked up my half Native American ancestry in one good look, huh? I remain cool and collected. "You're way off base, mister. The woman who lives there is no blonde whatever-you-called-it. She ain't as dark as me - took after our mother's side, but she's no blonde either." I turn and holler into my trailer. "Hey Jane, come on out here! Some dude thinks you're his blonde wife or something! Put that towel down and get out here!"

The man spits again and saunters in a smart-aleck manner over to my little walkway. I see the star on his left hand. Behind me I hear Jane step out onto the porch.

The man takes one look and sneers. "What's the matter with her?" He steps closer.

Jane is standing hunched over with her head tilted and her mouth drawn up to one side. I've drawn dark eyebrows and under eye circles on her and shaded in her cheeks. She has on my reading glasses and is wringing the dishtowel. In a slow, hoarse, mangled voice you can barely understand, she asks, "What's he want?"

"For Christ's sake, what's the matter with her?" the man demands.

"Had a stroke," I say. "Her mind's okay, but she can't talk real good. It's okay, she can still work at the plant, but they had to put her on packing instead of assembly. I moved her here next to me to keep an eye on her."

He's still suspicious and suddenly lunges past me up the steps. "Let me see your left hand!" he orders.

I knew she's shaking and I have to say something. "She shakes like that since the stroke. It's a pity, she was so pretty before."

He grabs her hand and examines it, turning it this way and that. Then he lets it drop in disgust.

"All right. Somebody must've sent me on a wild goose chase. I'll get even."

Jane stiffens at this.

The man clomps down the two steps and back to his truck without saying good-bye or even bothering to turn around. We watch him pull out in a cloud of dust.

She stumbles back into the trailer and I hold her while she cries. "I'm afraid to go to my place," she says. "He might come back."

"You stay with me," I tell her and she nods.

We wash the water-proof make up off with a special cream my wife had in the kit but Jane wants to keep the tattoo covered just in case. I hold her in my arms all night long.

"What if he hurts the women who run the railroad?" she asks. "What can we do?"

"They take this chance when they do that job," I say, but then can't really live with that. "You want to warn them?"

We leave the next afternoon for the West. Just pack up the both of us and head out. I call my sister to ask her to put the trailer up for sale and we just leave Jane's as it is. From Pittsburgh, we call the women's railroad to warn them about Lou. From Ohio we call her landlord to tell him she isn't coming back. And then we don't stop running 'til we reach Oklahoma where we camp out for a couple of days. Tomorrow we'll be on the last leg of the journey; Arizona here we come.

Turns out her name is Lonnie. She says she's letting her hair go back blonde. And she bought herself a pair of tight jeans. I never thought I still had it in me.

---

If you haven't used the Inditer.com 'Critique Page', get started! Send in your comments and critique on Margaret Karmazin's story. Inditer.com is a community of like minded writers and artists. Each wants and deserves the help of the other. Do it! It won't cost a dime! You'll be glad you helped!

---