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Article Excerpt
"It looks too much like Kentucky Fried," Darla said, pointing to the small bones strewn around three figures kneeling in mounds of confectioner's sugar and boric acid.
"You're getting to be an expert critic around here," Mr. Pearsall said. "Don't you ever go home anymore? Aren't your folks worried about you?"
"They know I'm trustworthy." Darla didn't add that her mother and Dean believed she had joined a softball team and spent her afternoons catching flies in the schoolyard. "I'd put a little more blood on that one," she said, wanting him to get it right. She loved the Donner Party, the illusion of snow, their blackened rags, the forlorn expressions on their faces as they tilted backwards so they could look up towards heaven and give thanks for eating their brethren. Mr. Pearsall had explained the whole thing to her.
Another of her favorites was Lizzie Borden with her gigantic ax and the ruffles down the front of her bloodstained gown, her murdered father lying face down on a divan, her murdered stepmother on the braided rug beside him. Darla liked Miss Borden's welcoming smile, as though her face had no idea what her hands had been doing.
But she liked no one better than Joan of Arc, who stood with her hands tied around the telephone pole behind her, a bundle of dry twigs at her feet. Her chest was as flat as Darla's, and the mannequin looked young somehow. Maybe she originally had been a boy dummy and Mr. Pearsall just dressed him up in a girl's choir robe. But she was beautiful now, a glittering cross hung about her neck, as she waited for her Maker to call her home after the fire had ravished her body. Nothing but ash and bone was left, Mr. Pearsall had said. Burned to a crisp and she never let out a murmur of complaint because she was a Christian martyr. Darla wanted to rescue her, and she wanted to watch her bum so she could see her eyes pop out of her head. This was another of Darla's repeated suggestions: more eyeballs everywhere.
Before they had come to town, Darla already had seen more than most girls her age: the heads of jackalopes tacked onto the walls of waffle houses, candied skulls and dancing skeletons at a Mexican fiesta, even the Border Patrol Museum, where they showed how they shot down illegal aliens. So she'd wanted to visit Mr. Pearsall's museum more than Prairie Dog Village, more than the Ranching Heritage Center, more than anything else in Lubbock, which, from what she could tell, wasn't a place bound to straighten out anything for anyone, despite what her mother had said. The town was a real hellhole. Darla knew her way around hellholes too, already having lived in El Paso and in Truckee, California.
As soon as she shoved her suitcase of private treasures--colored rocks, iridescent shells, a dried-out scorpion--under the day bed in the new apartment, she pushed on the gray diamonds of the screen door, for a moment breathing in its smell of musty despair. Not looking back at the boxes which squatted on the couch and across the thin carpeting, she tripped down the stairs, made of concrete and tiny pebbles, that brought her to the pool, an aquamarine rectangle unmoving in the white sunlight. It reeked of wet bird shit. The pastel lawn furniture had been divebombed repeatedly and seldom hosed down. And the light beat down without the benefit of any shade; the relentless clarity made Darla feel a little sick to her stomach. She clanged out of the pool area, through the meaningless metal gate. Like it would really keep anybody out, Darla thought. Like anybody would bother wanting to come into the Las Palmas Apartment Complex.
She hurried toward the ailing downtown stores, past the Pussycat Theater and the Greek mini-mart. The storefront of the museum was painted black and purple. Even the windows were blackened so the building's eyes seemed to be shut. The shutters were a deep purple, so was the door, and over the door the words "The Museum of Tragedy" had been spelled out in dark red.
Darla took a long swig from the bottle of Coke Mr. Pearsall brought for her. "You should get some of that new Cherry Coke that's out now," she suggested.
Mr. Pearsall looked up from where he was kneeling on the floor. "There's nothing new about Cherry Cokes."
"You know what else you need, Mr. Pearsall? Darla said. "Some new stuff in here."
"I thought you liked the old ones. Like Miss Joan over there." Darla shrugged. "I do. But nobody's going to know who she is anymore, so it's not likely to attract repeat business."
"'Repeat business'? They sending you to business school already?"
"I told you, I'm not in school the whole summer," Darla said, twisting the peacock feathers that hung from her ears, so that the new holes pinched. She had finally worn her mother down although she only got to have two holes, one in each ear, and her selections were limited to studs or small hoops. No skeletons, no scissors, no daggers. Darla saved her new treasures, each earring like a separate eye of the sun, a radiance of nature, to wear when she came to the museum. "I'm just home with Dean, and all he does is mope around," she said. "He just wants to watch TV and make Jiffy-Pop." She wrinkled her nose. "Or have the two of us go for more goddamned laps around the goddamned pool."
"I told you to knock...
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