Love was always a fickle-little thing. For most of your life, it seemed just out of your grasp, and sometimes you thought you found it to only turn into pure hate. For most of my life, I had always believed that it was a monster. It lured you in with a sense of security and would be so gentle, but so often it turned to disaster. A young maiden with so much life was killed by a dagger to the heart. A young man standing on the riverbank as a bullet went through his head. The single tear of a young child as her parents fought through each night. She was so young but she held the age of a woman that had seen so much more than her.
I thought I had learned my lesson about love when I was seven. I was in my childhood bed clutching onto a toy black cat that was made from a dress that I had long grown out of and ruined at that point. My babysitter and next-door neighbor, a kind woman by the name of Katherine, had made it for me. I still remembered the green button eyes that it had. I never knew that buttons could be so bright.
I remember staring into those eyes as in the apartment next to us, my mother murdered Katherine with a kitchen knife. That night, my father lost the love of his life, and then his wife went to prison. From that moment on, love seemed more trouble than it was ever worth to me. Throughout high school, many boys would try to woo me, but they never won. Those scratchy beards and the urge to manifest destiny never appealed to me. Oftentimes, I found myself skipping out on dances and being left out of the normal fun things other teenagers did. I was so scared of being burned by life, just like my father had.
However, instead of being burned by love, I found myself in the company of criminals and madmen. Something about them always drew me to them, maybe it was because they reminded me of my mother or never fell for love’s tricks. It was daring for me, to be able to choose money over love.
I was at the local speakeasy while soft jazz filled my ears. I had long since become accustomed to the soft tunes of Miss Ricki and her band. The red flapper dress with glitter hung tightly around her masculine frame. She loved those dresses, but every night she would be forced to retire them for the day as she conformed to society. She would slip her legs into the pants legs of a suit and instead would become Richard.
I had my elbow resting on the bar, Floyd was sliding me a glass of hooch when she walked in. She was wearing the most ridiculous outfit I think I had ever seen in my life. Long flowing sleeves made of stripes of black and white poked out of her baggy blue jean overalls that made it look like she was a kid in her dad’s clothing. Her hair didn’t look much better. It was wild ginger sticking up at all ends as if she had been struck by lightning.
Before I could even pry my eyes off the girl when she made her way over to the bar. One of the gentlemen who was part of Mad Man Willie’s gang blew smoke in her general direction before he began chuckling. If she heard the chuckling over the jazz it wasn’t obvious as she just kept walking, nothing dampening the soft smile on her face. I recognized the Mad Man Willie’s gangster, he was the only Italian in a group of anglo-Saxons. His darker complexion always stood out against their pale skin like an elephant against the snow.
“Hey, Bellomo. What did I tell you about making fun of the newcomers, do I have to get Charlie?” I shout across the room, my Boston accent filling the room. I lifted the glass off the counter, taking a swig before slamming it onto the count. “Then we could both beat your ass, so you don’t complain to Willie about you getting socked by a dame,” I was quickly moving away from the bar now, passing the strange girl.
“You ain’t no dame, Lottie,” He said in his rough, Brooklyn accent. Another breath of smoke escaped from between his lips.
“That’s not what you said when you went running to Willie. Hey Floyd, you remember what he said,” The other patrons of the speakeasy were already beginning to snicker, despite how used they were to my antics of embarrassing anyone that had the unlucky draw of being at the end of my short fuse. Floyd the bartender even once was at the receiving end of it, only that night no one laughed. They knew he’d kick me out, and with Prohibition in full swing, they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“I think it was along the lines of; You gotta talk to Angel Eyes about getting that dame hitched in his group because he got his lip busted,” He said with amusement lacing his British voice. “Though, I don’t know why he’s complaining about it. Bellomo my ass,” That got the crowd laughing. The girl that had caused this whole event furrowed her eyebrows in confusion.
“What does Bellomo mean?” When she spoke, the laughter Floyd had caused was now dead silent. She spoke like a mouse instead of a person. Then the silence was broken by another chuckle from Bellomo.
“She don't even know Italian. She’s probably with the Feds, trying to shut us down,” He spoke up. Another ball of smoke from his mouth flew into my face. His pure tobacco filled my lungs. I hated tobacco. My mother always used to smoke. “Well, of course, you don’t know Italian either, Carl-lotta,”. It was a bad pronunciation of my name. The name that had made my blood boil even as a sweet innocent child that still believed in such things as love.
The next thing I knew, my fist was trying to cave in his skull starting with his nose. The first hit was a hefty blow, I will never forget the sound his nose made. The crunch of muscle and bone as it collided together. I was almost sure that that first punch was enough to shut his pie hole and then he started to punch back. That's when we broke out into a whole brawl and Ricki began to sing her sweet jazz even louder.
I found my hands on either side of his skull, bashing it into the table he was sitting at. His glass tumbled onto the floor, thankfully not shattering into a million little pieces that without a doubt Floyd would try to make me piece back together with pure hope.
Bellomo then spat his cigar out into one of his hands. Then pressed it into the side of my arm. It hurt like a bitch, but I gritted my teeth baring it. I hated Bellomo, even before he suddenly grew the balls to start making fun of other people. He always seemed weak to me. He put his wife in front of everything. He was rumored to have skipped out on a job in favor of taking her to dinner. It’s not like I didn’t understand, her light blonde hair felt like silk. I remember it from the time she had walked into the bar looking for her husband and she bumped into me, but that silk hair wasn’t better than coin and liquor.
That cigar turning my flesh into a hamburger unsurprisingly didn’t soothe my rage, but to my surprise, I couldn’t find myself able to send the next punch to the Italian’s head. The wild-haired girl was grabbing onto my arm, obviously struggling. I stopped trying to move it and she let go, stumbling into the table behind her.
“You don’t have to fight him because of me!” She said, suddenly no longer sounding like a mouse. Though, before it had it was probably at the prospect of embarrassing me. I turned to look at her, her eyebrows once again furrowed. This time they made a look of confusion. Though, but before I could explain that this wasn’t about her anymore, Bellomo fuckin’ punched me. It was the heaviest punch that that son of bitch could probably muster and it sent me flying onto the floor. It wasn’t the punch that knocked me out, it was the sudden force of gravity knocking me into the tile.
When I awoke, the first thing I remember was that wild hair leaning over me saving me from a bright light. My vision was a blur when my eyelids first parted, but after a few seconds, I found my brown eyes meeting ones of a soft blue. The color of the sky during the first light of morning. At first, I found myself just staring into them, but I realized my place and instead sat up, pushing the girl away from my personal space.
“Joseph and Mary, Bellomo been taking boxing lessons?” I asked, not expecting anyone to answer back. I had just thought it was the girl that had caused all this trouble. Then someone answered back, it was the familiar and soft voice of Floyd.
“Must be, typically he punches like a lady,” I turned to stare at him. He was sitting in an old wooden chair, that creaked at every slight movement he had made. He sat there reading a copy of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I chuckled slightly before I turned to the wild-haired girl, wanting to scold her for stopping me from punching Bellomo in his stupid Italian face. I didn’t expect her to have this sour look on her face. Her blue eyes were full of anger.
“Is all you people do is fight each other?” He questioned, her striped sleeves folding on one another at her chest. One of her ginger eyebrows rose as she did so.
“Bellomo and me aren’t a part of the same group, we don’t have to get along,”
“I wish you would-- At least in here,” Floyd called out, his eyes now tracing the lines of the novel in his hands.
“Well, I wish you didn’t fight someone because of me,” She said, and suddenly I was transported back to when I was five and my mother was scolding me for knocking over her beloved cookie jar. It was a gift from her mother and it took the shape of a jolly fat sailor. It was irreplaceable and I had broken it into a million little pieces.
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“Bim, when I threw that first punch it wasn’t because of you,” I explained to her. My hand traveled the length of my opposite arm, finding bandages wrapped around where Bellomo’s cigar had met with my tanned skin. It wasn’t the work of Floyd and I knew it couldn’t have been the work of the girl. It was the familiar work of Ricki, who before running away from her wife and children has been a famed doctor on the west coast.
“Well, then what was it!” She explained, throwing her hands into the air. She seemed to get confused a lot, but looking at how she was dressed she didn’t quite understand the normal principles of society. This one or the one at the large, where men married women and went to work in an office.
“He called her Carl-Lotta,” Floyd spoke once again. This time his eyes had been snatched from the pages of the classic.
The girl with the wild-ginger hair, that began to remind me of a dying bush, quickly put her arms down. “Is that not how you pronounce it,”
“Carlota. It’s Spanish, but most people just call me Lottie,” This earned a chuckle from Floyd that could have in turn earned him a throw of the nearest item that was next to me, but for some reason, I held back.
“They call you Lottie because they’re scared of that happening,” He began, looking the girl in her eyes. “Lottie’s our local troublemaker. Always looking for a fight, to prove herself I guess,”
“To prove you can run this joint and I can still kick your ass!” I called, glaring at him.
The girl ignored me and so did Floyd, he was used to it and after that first incident, he knew my words were empty threats. It wasn’t just because I knew the ban would be longer than the one week that I had spent mostly scraping the blood from between the floorboards of Angel Eye’s warehouse, but it was also because Floyd was my best friend at that point. He understood my anger. He knew how to make me not pissed off, which was a talent.
“To prove herself?” She echoed softly.
“A broad from Boston isn’t exactly one that has respect gained so easily,” That’s when something clicked within the ginger’s eyes. She finally understood and her face grew a soft pink, no doubt from some sort of embarrassment that she had yelled at me almost as soon as I had woken up.
“Floyd! Mad Man Willie’s here to collect his boy!” Someone called out from the bar. Floyd in return groaned and stood up from his chair, tossing Frankenstein onto the nearest surface that wasn’t the floor.
“Now I’m off to clean up the mess you made. Angel Eyes better start paying me if I have to keep doing this,” Then like that he was gone. Passed through the doorway that was covered in red curtains, and when it hit me I was in Ricki’s room. Her dressing room, where she typically spent at least two hours dolling herself up. Where she had first learned that Richard didn’t have to live in pain for the rest of his life.
I pushed myself off of the bed I had been laid out across. Parts of my body screamed out in pain, no doubt starting to bruise under my shirt and pants. I walked across to where Floyd's novel laid out. I grasped the cup of water that sat only a few inches away. It was room temperature, but I didn’t complain. I knew Floyd was mad at me for causing a mess, so it wasn’t surprising that he wouldn’t give me a cold. I took a sip of water, looking at the cover of the nearby novel.
I then boosted myself onto the counter, crossing my legs whenever my ass had met with the marble. I turned my attention back to the girl, studying her. I could tell she was around my age, maybe a few years younger, but not older. The too-large overalls she was bundled in had patches of fabric closing the spots where holes had been. Her face was covered in freckles that made me think of the constellations that I had seen on the many trips to my grandmother’s house in the summer as a child. She wore brown boots that seemed to be the only thing in her outfit that fit her properly, and I could only tell that because they didn’t make her look like she was wearing clown shoes. One of the boots' laces, though, was beginning to be untied. I considered telling her about it, not wanting her to trip on her way back to wherever she had come from, but I decided against it. Why should I care anyway?
“How’d you even find this place?” I finally asked after a few minutes of silence. “You don’t strike me as the type to be with the mob,”
“I could be!” She argued back, quickly. “I could-- I could be the tricky one. The distraction so that others could make off with the money,” This caused me to laugh, and her face became flushed with red. “What?”
“We mostly run liquor, Jane. Not a lot of bank heists, though those do happen sometimes,” I explained to her, still chuckling slightly from the idea of Hugh, a man who was a member of Angel Eyes’ gang alongside me, trying to break into a bank. He was the opposite of stealth, he had once tried sneaking up on me but instead had tripped on the corner of a rug and cut his face on a nearby loose nail.
“My name’s not Jane-- Or Dame-- Or whatever other word for a woman you’ve said that I can’t quite remember,” I raised an eyebrow at her, an amused look scrawling its way across my face. She just stared back, confusion once again making its usual home on her face. Her rose lips pressed together.
“Well, I don’t know your name, twist,” I said the last word with more emphasis as it was yet another word for women.
“It’s Lula,” She stated in a soft tone. That was when the world suddenly transported me back once again to my childhood.
Katherine, before her death, was a lover of animals. Whatever time she spent not waiting for my father or her husband to get home or spent watching after me, she spent that looking after injured animals. I was six when she showed me this little thing wrapped in an old yellowed towel. She had a kind and bright smile on her face. A little songbird was wrapped in the towel, shaking from fright. It was late into the year and babies weren’t meant to be still hatching, its mother had likely left it in favor of flying south. “I think I’ll name her Lula,” Katherine had hummed softly, patting my curly dark hair.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I told her, crawling my way out from the happy childhood memory. Lula in turn groaned, throwing her head back in annoyance. Her hair was bouncing as she did so.
“Horace-- Our Human Blockhead, was a former member of one of the early gangs-- Lucky Windsor or something-- and he told me they served something with a bit of a punch here-- And I’ve never had any before so I wanted to try it. He was meant to arrive shortly after me, honest,” She was never as she explained herself as if she was scared of being judged. Judged for not getting the facts right or not explaining something well. I couldn’t see her face as I began laughing, but it was no doubt something along the lines of mortified.
“You’re a carnie!” I hollered, still laughing. “What do you do to feed the human zoo?”
“No! I’m the sword swallower!” Her cheeks were puffed up with air, from the combination of anger and embarrassment.
“How big are the swords?”
“Regular sword size!”
“I’ve never seen a sword! Swords could be tiny!”
“It depends!”
At the end of the small argument, we found each other laughing. I was laughing at the whole thing in general and didn’t have a clue what she was giggling about. The fit of laughter was only broken when Floyd came back into the room, looking bewildered at the sight of me laughing. It wasn’t very common. After the laughter died down, with Lula being the last to stop, Floyd turned to look at the girl.
“Some guy with a nail in his skull is looking for you,” He simply said. I knew he wanted to ask, and I would tell him about what we had talked about once Lula had left.
“Oh! That’s Horace! We’ll probably get a drink or two before we go back to our camp,” She smiled. “It’s the one at the top of Central Park, you guys should come to see it. It would keep someone from fighting and would give the other one a break,” She chuckled and waved before she walked out of the room. I walked her the entire time.
“Oh, Lottie,” Floyd said softly in a whisper. “You’re falling for a carnie girl,”
“I’m not falling for her!” I sputtered. My cheeks grew a soft pale pink. “And even if I was, you’re dating Ricki!”
“So? Ricki is a wonderful lady and stockbroker!”
I began to laugh at that, and soon after Floyd joined it. We talked for a few minutes more before he left to go make the drinks for Lula and Horace. I didn’t go out to say goodbye to the girl I had gotten knocked out for, because I felt love’s puppet strings tying knots around my heart. It forced images of Lula’s wild ginger hair and blue eyes into my face. I didn’t know if I wanted to stop.
It was the first time in my life I began to understand why Katherine dated my father behind the back of my mother. Love gave her a chance that was irresistible, a family. A wonderful man that helped everyone that he met and a little girl that would listen to every story she had to say. I would like to say that I didn’t fall in love that quickly with the carnie girl, but that would be a lie. From the moment I felt those strings pulled across my heart, I knew. I knew that I was going to follow in the footsteps of Katherine and risk the chance of being killed by someone that was just like my mother.