Buttercup Read Online Free PDF Page A

moaned. The small, cramped, confined space was decked for a queen—a carnie queen.
    Lady Joyce rested on a bed of shiny purple and gold pillows. Multi-colored beads, strung up like lines of jewels, were pinned over and tied back by a silk scarf to keep from concealing the back of the trailer. Della believed them to be magical stones when she was a girl. She even stole a few. Balancing the tin of water, she ambled her way toward the back.
    Lamps, two of them, were covered with sheer scarves. They cast the place in red lighting, which doubled the shadows. She stumped her toe in her hurry and sloshed the water back over the front of her dress. Della grunted. Her eyes sought a place to set it down. Lady Joyce was everywhere. Frames with her dancing smiling face during her Vaudeville days were tacked to the walls, and her costumes hung about. This train car and Tiny’s were the only two that were wired with electricity. Lady Joyce actually had a radio.
    “You yelling so loud you scaring away the townies,” Della smirked.
    She swallowed her laugh. Lady Joyce lay in her shiny black and gold polyester robe with her ankle, the size of a grapefruit, peeking through the slight opening at the hem. Tiny attempted to prop it up. She was in a lot of pain. Her skin was pale and pasty, and her eyes were puffy from crying.
    She smoked from her long stem cigarette holder with a shaky hand.

    “I’m telling you, Tiny!” she began. “Something should be done! I get bit, and I’m the only one suffering!” Lady Joyce groaned as another tear slipped down her rouged cheeks.
    “There, there,” Tiny said, stroking her hand.
    Della cut them both a look and shook her head. They were the strangest non-couple she’d ever seen. And growing up in a carnival, she had seen her share of strange things. She set the tin on the dresser, water sloshing over the top. Joyce would blow a vein if she used one of her imported silks to tend to the pus oozing from her foot. So she reached down to the front of her tattered dress and ripped at the hem. She submerged it in the cool water and listened.
    Madame Danielle Danique, a gypsy snake handler and professed hater of Lady Joyce, said she accidently let her rattler loose. The rattler had to slither from one side of the carnival to the other to slip up behind Lady Joyce and take a plug out of her ankle. If it weren’t for Lone Wolf, that bite would have been the end of Joyce’s dancing days for sure.
    Della wrung the cloth until all the remaining water seeped through her fingers. Her ears perked, and she feigned disinterest.
    “Danique knows what she done, Joyce. She sends her apologies,”
    Tiny groaned.
    “Apologies? Apologies! The cunt! I want carnie justice!”
    “Now hold on there, Joyce.”
    “Look at my foot! Owe!” she shrieked, after a failed attempt to lift it.
    “Steady yo'self,” Tiny said stroking her thigh with his nubby fingers.
    “How can I when po’ Della got to go on without me? It’s my show!
    I’m the one they pay to see from county to county! What them boy’s gon’
    do with a colored gal waving her snatch in front of them? Huh? Ansa me that! We gots to cancel.”
    “I can do it,” Della spoke up. “I did it in Henry County jus’ fine.”

    Della crept over. She went to her knees. She applied the cool rag over the swelling. Tiny gave her a wink. He raised her with Lady Joyce since she could remember. The entire carnival did. Her mama ran off with a Creole magic man shortly after she was born. They were the only family she’d ever known. That’s how they did their own. No matter the color of your skin or the freakish deformity you were cursed with or your outlaw status, once a carnie, you were always a carnie.
    "Well I can. You two both know I’m better than Trix. Way better.”
    Tiny dropped back down on the footstool at the side of Lady Joyce’s bed. He removed his tattered hat and ran his finger over the thin wisps of hair sparsely covering his oversized head. At