The summer I turned fourteen, my sister, just out of high school, went headless. She’d met a classmate’s older brother at a graduation party. “A carnie,” she said, “Ok?” the third time I asked. “But he’s a handyman during offseason.” After I let it slip to our father, she told him, “I know what you’re thinking, but they’re not all bad people.”
Dad looked grim. He kept his eyes on Susan while she glared at me and said that the carnie, whose name was Ronnie Czak, had got her hired as Justina, the headless girl. “All I’ll do is sit there,” she said. “The story is that I’ve been decapitated in a car crash and saved by a doctor who knows how to keep my body alive while he’s waiting for a head to attach.”
“It’s not your head I’m worried about,” Dad said.
Two days later, Dad was looking out the window at a man standing beside a powder blue vintage Impala creased along the passenger side as if it had sideswiped an iron fist. “A man parks at the far end of the driveway and doesn’t come to the door isn’t a good thing,” he said.
Susan held a bag sized for an overnight trip, but she’d already tossed a suitcase into the back seat of the Impala. Dad held a drink like he always did after work. “It’s just a job,” Susan said. “It’s people shopping, no different than standing behind a big box store counter.”
For a moment, when our father moved away from the window, he looked like someone who would stand in the doorway and take my sister’s fists and feet until she exhausted herself and gave up. “Who do you think you are?” he said, but he stood so far from the door she walked around him. When she opened the door, he didn’t turn. “You think you’re all grown up?” he said, but he faced me and his voice trembled.
My sister left the door open, so Dad must have thought she was hesitating. “Think about it,” he said, his voice more confident. His hands tugged at his shirt as if he were smoothing it before he turned. He took three deep breaths before I said, “She’s gone, Dad.”
His hands fluttered and dropped to his side. “Close the door,” he said. “The house will be full of flies.”
I didn’t move, but the light in the room shimmered as if we were near water. The sound of tires on gravel churned and spun away. I walked to my room. I heard the door shut, the bolt slide into place, and ice cubes dropping into a glass.
Susan called once a week, always mid-morning when Dad was at work. “I’m fine,” she said each time. Dad never mentioned her until late July when he called in sick on a Friday and told me to get in the car because we were going shopping.
The carnival, an hour from our house, was set up in the parking lot of a big discount store that had closed a few years before, the lines for the spaces visible as we walked toward the entrance near the four-space handicapped slots. “Your mother is lucky she’s dead,” Dad said when we saw the sign—Justina! Kept Alive through the Miracle of Science.
He handed over two dollars, and we slipped inside. Sure enough, where Justina’s head should have been there were tubes arching up from between her shoulders, a thick one in the middle like a fat artery and six more curling off like in a 60s B-Movie.
Dressed in scrubs, his hair dyed gray, Ronnie Czak hovered over her, fiddling with one of the tubes as if Justina might be in distress. A surgical mask dangled below his chin, thin transparent gloves on his hands. Justina had been rushed to a hospital, bleeding badly, a recorded voice told us. She’d received transfusions. A doctor was keeping her body alive while a search went on for a new head to replace Justina’s disfigured, brain-damaged one. It had been months now, and yet here she was, the doctor still waiting.
It was corny, for sure. Retro, but Dad fixed on Ronnie, and I focused on Justina’s outfit, a halter top that showed cleavage and a skirt half way up her thighs. Without a head, Justina looked like a girl I’d stroke to after I locked my door. Murmurs rolled up when Justina moved her hand. “She’s not a dummy,” someone said. “She’s real.” I glanced at Dad to see how he was taking it, but now he was looking at the customers, maybe a dozen geezers gawking, all of them men.
When we left the trailer, my father confronted the pitch man. “That Justina you have in there,” Dad said, “is my daughter.” I thought of Dad examining Justina’s body to be sure she was Susan, what parts of her made him certain, but the pitch man nodded as if a headless girl was easy to identify. “Keep that to yourself while I pass it along.”
My father seemed satisfied. He bought us French fries and we waited. “You’ll never see a headless boy at the carnival,” he said. “You’re old enough to get my drift. Am I right?”
“Right,” I said, but Susan was already walking toward us wearing shorts and a white blouse buttoned almost to her throat. For a moment, she sized up Dad’s expression. “Hi Dad,” she said. “I’m ok. See?” Dad looked past her as if he expected to see Ronnie, but she was alone. Nobody else walking past us seemed to recognize Justina. Maybe, I thought, hardly anyone paid for that old-timey sideshow, something that made me feel as old as my father. Someone bitter and sad, as if I was outdated and alone way before I ever expected to be.
