Beards by Ann Marie Potter

Wanda missed the bars that had surrounded her since she was fourteen. They weren’t really meant to imprison her, of course. They were meant to add to her mystique, to convince the carnival customers that she was wild and dangerous, that the fur on her face made her kin to the wolf that had eaten grandma. Turns out, she’d needed those bars to protect herself. Full-grown men, probably deacons in their churches, had growled and laughed and rattled the bars to get a rise out of her. Her mother had trained her not to respond. Middle America was full of idiots who stroked their shotguns like they stroked themselves in darkened movie theatres. Although she was on display, in truth she was the one who had a front-row seat. She’d sat behind those bars for nearly forty years watching a parade of men who grinned like fools when their crops came in and snarled at their families when they didn’t. She was there when young men started coming through with empty shirt-sleeves and even emptier eyes. She’d heard the grumbling when the law said that Blacks could come to the show “right alongside the upstanding White folks” of rural Atlanta. Two-years-ago, she’d reveled in the South’s dumbstruck disbelief when a Black man took a seat behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Wanda missed the children most. Not the sneering packs of eight-year-olds that tore through the carnival tent like hyenas. Every town had them. Clever in their viciousness, they buzzed around her like blood-pumped mosquitos. She’d squashed hundreds of them with her eyes. No, it was the lonely little kids that she missed. Every town had them, too. Little ones with rotten bones, rotten teeth, and rotten lives ahead of them. They’d stare, drink in her other-worldly ugliness, and leave the tent consoled. Their own miseries might not prove fatal after all. What she didn’t miss were the miles between towns. Miles that wore callouses on her bottom and grooves on her mind. Cups of coffee made with rusty water and hotdogs cooked with flickering propane flames. Midwestern dust in her mouth and southern sweat in her crotch. Cold drinking water and hot baths had been as rare as smiles from outsiders.

In May, she and Joey had left the carnival mired in goodbye tears and Selma mud. They’d bought a half-acre of red dirt and sunflowers outside Reverie, Oklahoma. On the road her entire life, Wanda gloried in sitting on the same porch every morning and evening, looking at the same snakeroot and prairie onion plants, watching a pair of cardinals that flitted between their two sugar maple trees. Oklahoma skies were the bluest she’d ever seen, their thunderstorms the most terrifying and wonderful. She knew they were in the heart of tornado country, but at least they would see it coming across the vast expanse of prairie that surrounded them.  They had an honest-to-God mailbox and two months of roots underneath them. Of course, they also had high blood pressure, arthritis, beards the color of sawdust, and hemorrhoids the size of cherry tomatoes. But life was soft and sweet.

Wanda folded the last of the laundry and padded quietly into the bedroom. Joey’s snores were as gentle as the man himself, four hundred and twelve pounds of muscle, tattoos, and Saturday-morning cartoons. The four pounds of furry adoration they’d rescued from the Reverie pound slept soundly on his chest. A pimple on a rhinoceros.

She shut the bureau drawers gently and returned to the living room. Being second-generation carnival folk, her whole life had been forced into a cubbyhole the size of a dime-store doll. Joey had grown his muscles on an Idaho potato farm. He was the one filling their new doublewide with signs of life—growing into the little boy he used to be. Every box of colored tissue, every flowered coffee mug that appeared, made Wanda pause with pleasure. She checked the doors and shut off the lights.

She stopped in the bathroom to brush her teeth and unbraid her beard. Joey liked to nibble on it during lovemaking. Because of the strongman’s size, their repertoire of positions was somewhat limited, but their joy in each other’s bodies was endless. They’d been seventeen the first time, both lonely from the womb. When love had finally come, they had moved toward each other with the hesitant footsteps of crippled children. Joey’s shy eyes had brimmed, his mouth drawing the breath from her soul like a weary ghost from the dead. Then, he had replaced it with his own. Wanda sighed, wet by the memory and content to the soles of her bare feet. Judging from the look in Joey’s eyes during supper, the pimple was going to have to move tonight.

Ann Marie Potter

Image: Pixabay.com – Bars looking out on a brick wall