Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 26.63KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

WINTER QUARTERS

by HOWARD WALDROP

Perhaps I should start "When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus."

Maybe I should begin "As circuses go, it was a small one. It only had two mammoths."

I'll just start at the beginning: The phone rang.

-<*>-

"Hey, Marie!" said the voice of my friend Dr. Bob the paleontologist. "Do you remember Arnaud?"

"Was the Pope Polish?" I asked.

"Well, the circus is in town, and he's in it. Susie Neruda took her nieces and nephews yesterday and

recognized him. She just called me." Then he paused. "You want to go see him?"

"I didn't think you and circuses got along," I said.

"For this, I'll ignore everything in my peripheral vision."

"When would you like to go?"

"Next show's in forty-five minutes. I'll swing by and pick you up."

"Uh, sure," I said, looking at the stack of departmental memos on my desk. I threw the antimacassar

from the back of my office chair over them.

He hung up.

-<*>-

When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus. Dr. Bob Oulijian, I mean. His father had managed

two of them while Bob was trying to grow up. One day he showed up on the doorstep of his favorite

aunt and said, "If I ever have to see another trapeze act or smell another zebra's butt in my life, Aunt

Gracie, I'll throw up." Things were worked out; Aunt Gracie raised him, and he went on to become the

fairly respected head of the paleontology department in the semi-podunk portion of the state university

system where we both teach. What was, to others, a dim, misty vista of life in past geologic ages, to him

was, as he once said, "a better circus than anyone could have thought up."

-<*>-

We whined down the highway in his Toyota Heaviside, passing the occasional Daimler-Chrysler

Faraday. A noise dopplered up behind us, and a 1932 bucket-T roadster came by, piloted by a geezer

in motorcycle goggles.

"Soon you'll be studying them," I said to Dr. Bob, pointing.

"Oh," he said. "Dinosaurs. Très amusant."

-<*>-

Did I remember Arnaud?

It was while we were all -- me, Dr. Bob, our colleague Dr. Fred Luntz the archaeologist, Susie Neruda

(née Baxter) -- undergraduates here, at this podunk branch of the North Carolina state university, just

after the turn of the millennium, that Arnaud showed up. We assumed he was French, maybe Belgian or

Swiss, we didn't know, because he didn't talk. Much, anyway. He had that Jacques Tati-Marcel

Marceau-Fernandel body type, tall and thin, like he'd been raised in a drainpipe. He was in the drama

department; before we knew him, we knew of him.

About half the time we saw him, he was in some form of clown déshabille or mime getup. We

assumed it was for the acting classes, but a grad student over there said no, he just showed up like that,

some days.

-<*>-

"Does he do anything special?" I asked Dr. Bob. "Did Susan say?"

"I don't think so, or she would have. I'm assuming he mostly puts out fires inefficiently and throws pies

with accuracy, unless circuses have changed a great deal since my time."

-<*>-

For what do we remember Arnaud?

It was in November, his first semester, and he was out on the east mall passing out flyers, in full regalia:

a polka-dot clown suit, clownwhite, bald headpiece, a hat the size of a fifty-cent flowerpot. He had a

Harpo bulbhorn he honked as people came by.

The flyer said:

HITLER THE MAGNIFICENT!

An Evening of Transformational Sorcery

JONES HALL 112

7 P.M. NOVEMBER 8th

Well, uh-oh.

-<*>-

It wasn't an evening, it was more like fourteen or fifteen minutes.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: