Russell Locked Me Outside The Tent While My Wooden Children Waited

Russell Pike tied the tent flap shut from the inside while I stood in the gravel with a broken thumb.

The thumb belonged to a wooden king. I had carved it that morning behind our truck, where the wind could carry the dust away from breakfast.

“Open up,” I said. “His Majesty needs his hand.”

“We need to settle something first.”

The zipper moved six inches. Russell's face filled the gap.

I was a lean Chinese American man of forty-five, with close-cut black hair going gray above my ears and a pale burn mark across my left wrist.

Making marionettes had given me the burn. Touring with them had given me the gray.

Russell was a broad white man of forty-six, with sandy hair, pink cheeks, and a silver tooth that flashed when he smiled.

Usually that smile could sell a school show during a snow warning. He had once filled a hall near Ogallala by telling every diner that our wooden horse could sneeze.

It could. I had built the bellows.

“The company owns the puppets,” he said. “You can work under a new agreement, or you can leave.”

Behind him, my king hung from a peg. His bare wrist turned slowly in the draft.

We had reached Kearney the night before. Our tent stood on rented ground outside town, near a row of cottonwoods and a road full of grain trucks. Inside, four people were waiting to rehearse a storm at sea.

I had spent twenty years making the eighteen figures in those cases.

“What agreement?” I asked.

He slid a sheet through the opening. It offered me $110 a show as an operator. Below that, it said all stage figures were company property.

“You'd get steady work,” he said.

“I already have work.”

“You have a hobby that I turned into a business.”

I put the king's thumb in my shirt pocket. It tapped the brass thimble I always carried there.

That little click helped me keep my voice level.

“Our business has a lease,” I said.

Russell laughed softly, as if I had confused a grocery list with a deed.

“Handmade toys don't have titles, Jian.”

He had always called me his partner when a bill came due. Now he called me a hobbyist.

Prairie Lantern Touring was our company. Russell held sixty percent and handled bookings. I held forty percent and ran the stage. The tent, lights, and trailer belonged to the company.

The figures had come from my workshop under a separate rental agreement.

“You signed an inventory every season,” I said.

“For insurance.”

“Read the line above your signature.”

The flap closed.

I stood there long enough to hear him clap twice.

“People! Small change in staffing. We press on.”

Then Alma Gutierrez came around the back of the tent carrying a coil of cable.

At fifty-three, our Mexican American stage electrician could find a bad connection by touch and a bad promise by smell.

“He told us you quit,” she said.

I showed her the paper.

She read it once.

“That's a long way to spell stealing.”

“Please keep everyone inside. Don't let this become a fight.”

“Honey, I carry enough cable for a fight. Doesn't mean I start one.”

She handed me my tool bag. Russell had left it by the rear stake line. My coat was folded on top like something put out for collection.

Eli, our young second puppeteer, watched from behind her. He had rent due in Lincoln. Tess had left a grocery job for this season. Ben drove our truck and sent money home every Friday.

They could not eat a principle.

“Is tonight still happening?” Eli asked.

“Wait for a clear answer,” I said. “Don't promise anyone a show yet.”

Russell owed me six weekly rental payments of $720. Two weeks earlier, I had mailed the notice our lease required. He had called it a timing problem.

Tomorrow's ticket money would fix it. Tomorrow's school check would fix it. Russell spent tomorrow so often that today had become an empty drawer.

I walked to the motel beside the highway. Our room was still booked in my name.

Under my bed sat a flat blue case. It held workshop ledgers, material receipts, and carbon copies of every rental inventory. I had kept it apart from the stage cases because wet canvas ruined paper.

On the oldest ledger page, I had drawn the king's hand beside a receipt for basswood. The date was twenty years old.

I set my thimble on that page.

My phone rang before I could call anyone.

Alma spoke quietly.

“Jian, a man just came for the cases. He says Russell sold him the whole collection for eight thousand dollars.”