No Place for Conquerin’ Heroes

A Work of Flash Fiction

No Place for Conquerin’ Heroes

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            Wyatt was traveling with the circus when we met. Now, I know that seems like a cliche way to start tellin’ a story, but it's the God’s honest truth. Anyway, the circus was small, one ring with mostly animal acts, you know, dancing dogs and the like.

He came and sat next to me on the rim of the fountain in Jackson Square. It was early in the evening on a Saturday night, and the air was clingy, but a slow, thick breeze kicked up a cool spray from the moving water. He smelled like Old Spice and horse shit, and we stared at the statue of Jackson, with his hat waivin’ in the air, for a long time.

            You see, my mom was trying to keep us a few steps in front of what she called the taxman. I’m sure there was more to it than that, but her and I went our own ways long before I could ever find out what she was really running from. That winter, though, we were still together, and she would set up a cheap folding table on the cathedral side of the square and read tarot cards for tourists. At night, we would find a spot for our old Ford truck camper on a back road somewhere in what the locals called the Bayou, but just seemed like plain old swamp to me.

            “I don’t think this world has a place for conquerin’ heroes anymore,” he said. 

            “What?”

            “Jackson, he came and saved New Orleans from the British.”

            “Is that the kind of shit you say to meet a girl?”

            “Well, no. I just thought that since you’d been here so long admiring that statue.”

            “I’m not lookin’ at Jackson. Just watching my mom’s back.”

            “I’m Wyatt,” he said, “Which one is she?”

            “I’m Annie,” I said, pointing her out. She was slumped forward in a brown metal folding chair, her eyes squeezed all but shut beneath a lavender headscarf pulled down to her eyebrows. The cards were dealt in a cross on top of a dingy white doily of a tablecloth. My mom was trying for all she was worth to convince a middle-aged woman in red polyester pants that she could see the future.

            “I bet she’s tellin’ her she will meet a man in New Orleans,” I said.

            “Maybe a black man from the Quarter who plays trombone,” he said. His voice a husky whisper.

            “The scandal.”

            The woman in the red pants got up and laid a few bills, pulled from her cleavage, down beside the cards. My mom snatched them from the table and swiftly pushed them between the buttons of her white blouse. She looked in my direction, and when she caught sight of Wyatt sittin’ close to me, her face went sour. She stood up and began to fold the tablecloth.

            “Looks like it’s time for you to go,” he said.

            “Yep, she sure as shit doesn’t like the looks of you.”

            “Maybe I’ll see you here again tomorrow,” he said. He slid close to me as he got up to go. His hand brushed across my leg, and I could smell the thick earthy scent of his sweat through the old spice and horse shit. Where he was sittin’, he left a red slice of paper printed with the broadside for The Collins Traveling Circus.

            My mom always would tell me, no matter where we were, that it was a bad idea to get stuck in with the locals. And even though I told her that Wyatt wasn’t no local, the next few days, she set up her table on a street corner a block or so up Chartres St. to keep me from seeing him again. It didn't take her long to realize that the people on the street were going to and from places and didn't have no time to stop and have their fortunes read, so we ended up back in the square.

            And sure enough, our first day back in the shadow of the cathedral, Wyatt slid in next to me on the edge of the fountain.

            “What, you didn't find the money quite so good out on the street?” he asked.

            “You sure do have a way of startin’ off a conversation,” I said.

            “How about this then? Do ya think you and your mom would want to come out to our winter camp and see about hookin’ up with us when we head back to the road in the spring?”

            My mom wasn't really all that keen on the idea, but a couple a days later, we drove out to a bit of mushy ground outside of a town called Killian north of Lake Maurepas. And there, among a bunch of rusty old pickup trucks parked in a ring around a blazing bonfire, my mom sat and talked in whispers with Wyatt’s old man, Dylan.

            He was an odd duck. A sideshow performer who pounded nails through his hands and swallowed swords, and my mom took a likin’ to him. So, she decided we would travel, at least for the next season, with the Collins Circus.

            She read tarot cards in a horse trailer draped with black flannel. I learned trick riding and handled a Burmese python called Nixon in an open-sided panel truck. And when she cut out some time during the end of July or the beginning of August in a shit town somewhere in Ohio, I moved into Wyatt’s Airstream.