Stunt Read Free

the braided wire would have been, the braided wire that pulled you up.
    One week before you leave, you take me to the library. You breathe as though you have just been bullfighting. You have something to show me. You pull down a heavy book, the whole row with it, thud, thud, thud, not even noticing the bluster, and there in the stacks you say his name.
Finbar,
you say it in a whisper,
Finbar. Finbar
is a spell.
Finbar
is something you do not wish to disturb. You leaf through the book reverently, a family album. With it in your hands, you are no longer an orphan. You are the son of something. Something brave. Again and again, that week, we go back to the library. We go back to the same book.
    I. I. Finbar Me the Three,
Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie:
An Unofficial Autobiography
    Again and again, the librarian tells us stiffly that we cannot take the book home. Even when you empty your pockets andoffer her tobacco, spare change, a comb. Even when you plead with her, on our last day together, that Finbar is your father – the father who left you, twenty minutes old, in the maternity ward of a Kapuskasing hospital the night of the fiercest snowstorm the town had ever seen.
    â€˜Your father?’
    â€˜Yes, Eugenia. My father.’ You stun even yourself with the announcement. And when it is made, it is like someone new has slipped into our room. With the exception of my birth, this is your quietest moment. Not used to it, I break it.
    â€˜But you have never mentioned him before.’
    â€˜It just came to my attention.’
    â€˜How?’
    â€˜You.’
    And, in the hush of the library, you mime doing a handstand.
    Finbar is a tightrope walker. The high wire. He ruled it flamboyant and firm. You show me photographs of him again and again, commenting on your likeness – though Finbar has what Mink would call
a face only a mother could love.
To me, he looks battered. Swollen in burls and hard waves like his bones are punching him out from the inside. They shoot through him, thoroughbreds in a gallop – his face, hooves in motion. I imagine running my hand over it. I imagine it shifting under my touch.
    With your palette knife, you carefully cut the photographs from the book. When we are banned for life from the library, you tell the librarian, ‘You have a neck like a stem, which, if I was intent on destroying flowers, I would snap.’ And then you hold the cut pages up to your face, a mask, and you say, ‘Boo,’and then you laugh, and then you say, ‘Boo hoo hoo.’ The librarian, shaking, frostbitten, says, ‘Beat it, buster,’ and you repeat, ‘Buster,’ and then we do beat it, with the push of a broad man in a blue uniform, cut pages falling from the book like bulky snowflakes, photographs of Finbar stuffed in your pockets.
    When we get home, we close the door to your studio and we iron the crumpled pages flat with our hands, the tightrope a straight line again. Here is Finbar in nothing but dark tights. Swarthy, a handsome musculature, he pushes a baby tiger in a wheelbarrow on a wire the width of your thumb across Niagara Falls. The baby tiger and Finbar appear to be roaring at each other. And grinning. They appear to be in love. They are 160 feet above the gorge. Water churns below them: a death soup. Here is Finbar between two skyscrapers, cooking breakfast on a small stove, the classic: eggs over, bacon crispy, a potato onion hash, strong coffee. I imagine him lifting the coffee to his mouth, staining it. The wind gathers between the buildings. He salutes an airplane overhead. Here he is again, with a woman sitting straight-spined on a chair on his shoulders, flanking Florence, spires crooked behind them. She is tall, remarkably tall. Like you, she is instantly someone you want to know, someone you want to be shuttered in with. She waves to the crowd gathered below. Contrapuntal. They are dead quiet. A frieze. She flutters. Her dress is bandages