With the scents of hot french fries, candy, and treats filling the air, a juggler zigzagged through the crowd, tossing bowling-ball pins in the air and narrowly missing a patron or two. A throng of small children trailed behind him like he was some sort of pied piper.
Liza slipped into the rear tent entrance, mumbled a greeting to Uly, and sank onto an overturned crate. She picked at her fingernails. She stood and paced. The crate called to her again. Then one of her plaits needed rebraiding. Uly looked at her as if to ask what she was waiting for, but she held up a hand to forestall him. Mico chittered his agreement. It was time.
Only, she wanted to do her next show like she wanted to return to Mrs. Shippen’s boardinghouse. Which was to say, not at all. Concentration was proving impossible, but the sounds of a restless crowd urged her to stand and drag herself onto the stage with a look on her face that would have won her top prize at a sour candy–eating contest.
“Welcome, everybody. I’m Liza, the Mystical Beastmistress.” A tepid applause in return for a lackluster greeting was fair. She’d better pull herself together.
Sabina floated her an image. It was of Liza sprawled out on a cloud while Sabina and Ikaki regarded her from below in an open field, with a mass of people closing in from all corners. The tiger’s message: Kindly remove your head from the clouds and consider joining us back on earth before the crowd turns feral.
“Get on with it, already!” came a shout from the audience.
Liza straightened her vest and cleared her throat. “I guess it’s time for the dance.”
That didn’t come out right at all. She closed her eyes for a moment and started over. “Our friend Ikaki is what you call an African turtle sprite. And what do turtle sprites like to do? Why, they dance! If I can get a volunteer, I’ll show you just how well.”
She pointed to a small boy who, despite the hardship evident in his attire—a season or two past an untimely growth spurt—still had a child’s glint of wonder in his eye. But as Mico darted over to greet him, a woman decked out like she’d copied the look straight out of one of Autumn’s fashion magazines sashayed onto the stage.
“You don’t mind if I go first, do ya, hon?” she said without looking at him.
The boy shook his head and lowered himself back onto the bench, his expression more curious than offended.
Mico escorted the woman forward, and the way she slurred her words told Liza she was a little drunk. But what she lacked in walking a straight line, she made up for when the music started. So convoluted were her moves that you would have thought it was Josephine Baker herself strutting around.
Ikaki did their best but soon communicated their concerns. Liza waved off the protest and implored them to continue. And the turtle soldiered on impressively.
“All right, then, why don’t we give someone else a try,” Liza said. It was way past time for this woman to sit down.
But in some kind of grand finale, the show-off threw a leg up in the air and sank to the floor in an impressive split. No way a turtle, even a magical one, could manage that one. Liza conjured an image, one with Ikaki swimming in their little pool—a way to tell them the show was over—but the turtle sprite was not to be outdone.
They bounded up into the air, thrust their squat legs out, and tried to land in their own version of a split. But they came down hard on their back leg, sent Liza an image of themself all bandaged up, and snapped their body back into their shell. Liza cried out and ran over to them. They sent mollifying images, she apologetic ones.
The woman muttered, “Sorry,” and went back to her seat.
After sniffing her animal friend as if to make sure they were all right, Sabina trotted forward. Liza signaled to Uly, and he rushed out and took Ikaki backstage. With effort, Liza and Sabina finished the show. Afterward, Ikaki assured her they were fine.
And at the end of it, even though the animals had done all the work, Liza was still exhausted. But Oya’s vision was like a muted beacon, just bright enough to keep sleep at bay. Liza took refuge outside the tent and watched the stars glimmering against the night sky. A section of the canvas flapped in the breeze, the frayed edges, much like her own shredded nerves, in need of mending.
Her show had limped across the finish line—a fluke, or the long-awaited mastery of her gift? That she hadn’t hurt Ikaki directly didn’t matter. It was her inattention, her lack of focus, that had paved the way. Liza sighed. She had better practice.
The idea had no sooner sprung forth than the elephant swept into her mind and swatted it away with a deft trunk twirl. An obsidian blotch then moved against the even darker sky, a skillful rising and spiraling. The raven. Her skin prickled with the badger’s presence, even if she couldn’t see him.
Her animal guides narrated a gruesome tale, images of the animals she’d tried to help and lost. As far back as she remembered, and another when she was too young to understand what she’d done. She whimpered with the pain of it. Her greatest shame, her greatest fear, laid bare. Why?
They’d been with her all along; she knew that now. Watching, waiting. Out of ignorance, whether willful or otherwise, she’d ignored them. Ignored the broken fragments of her own story. An ancestry, a heritage, that needed her as much as she needed it. Oya had said she must accept the spirits, but she hadn’t the faintest idea how.
As quickly as the horror film started, it stopped, replaced by an image of Liza herself, bound. No practice, no more killing. But it wasn’t as if she wanted to hurt them. Couldn’t they see that?
A raven caw, then an image of all three with their eyes closed for a beat and then opening slowly. Yes, of course, they understood; they could see. But she must control it now and end her unpracticed blunders.
She endured the pang of the animals fading to the background once more, leaving her with an image of ruin. Bits and pieces of carnival debris. Bacchanal? The spirits didn’t answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE CHALLENGE
Absently, Liza sat on her bunk, cracking and feeding Mico his treasured sunflower seeds. Her mind reviewed the possibilities of her vision like butter in a churn. As much as she tried to fancy herself a woman whom African spirits found worthy of some grand purpose, she could only see herself as a scared and broken little girl, riding away in a fancy car, hastily dousing herself in the camouflage of bravery and indifference.
The rising sun cast the inside of the trailer in a subtle orange glow. A chilly breeze carried the heady scent of grass and earth through the windows they’d left propped open overnight. Liza shivered and tugged the blanket up beneath her chin. Getting up to shut the window would wake Autumn, who lay across from Liza on her bunk covered in fancy pillows and other finery, the ever-present eye mask covering most of her face. Mico chittered his annoyance, and Liza cracked another seed.
“I’m surprised you haven’t given yourself a fit with all that concentrating.” Autumn rolled over on her side and lifted a corner of her eye mask. “I can almost feel you thinking over there, and you’re messing up my sleep.”
Mico snatched a seed from the pile and scampered over to make an early-morning gift offering to Autumn. She smiled and removed her mask, taking the seed and popping it in her mouth. She tickled the marmoset beneath his chin, and he beamed his pleasure. Soon enough, he came back to Liza’s bunk and sat on her knee.
“Sorry I was thinking too loud,” Liza answered. “Some of us have more on our minds than the latest fashions.”
Autumn flung off her thin blanket. “No need to insult me because you got family problems. You bite off every hand somebody extends toward you, and see how many fans you make around here.” She stretched and put on her robe, then hefted a little basket of scented soaps and oils to head out to the donnicker, slamming the trailer door behind her.
Liza exhaled. She hadn’t meant to snap at Autumn. Why was her life so complicated? She contemplated leaving the carnival, but she discarded that nonsense as quickly as it had come to mind. For one, where else was she go
ing to be able to earn a living? And what about Jamey?
After cleaning up, Liza surprised herself by not seeking out Jamey or Hope but instead heading straight for Ishe. The carnival was yawning its way to life, and the sun sat full and round in the sky, shining down on her face, with Mico perched on her shoulder. Smells from the cook tent did little to spur her appetite.
She found Ishe with Bombardier.
“Morning,” she said without any enthusiasm. She shoved her hands into her trouser pockets, looking at anything but the two men in front of her.
“My mother used to have a saying,” Bombardier said. “A woman is like the skin of a kabundi, a tiny wild animal on which two men cannot sit.”
Liza finally met his eyes, offered a smile as welcoming as a cup of watered-down coffee. Ishe looked to his friend and mouthed a silent scolding. He turned to Liza and placed his hand on her back, gesturing for them to move away. They walked side by side, away from an ever-watchful Bombardier.
“Brooding don’t help none,” Ishe said as they walked. “Tried and tried, but never did change nothin’ about my circumstances.”
“You are one to talk.” Liza scrunched up her face. “What do I know about you? What do I know about how you came to be . . .” She struggled to find the words. Ishe didn’t even like to hear the word “hyena.” Finally, she settled on, “What you are?”
“The ‘how’ don’t matter much, now, do it?” Ishe kicked at a rock and folded his hands behind his back. “That’s how it is. Only thing that matter is learning how to live with it.”
“I don’t know what anything means,” Liza huffed and immediately felt five years old.
“What’s bothering you?” he asked, his eyes warm.
She exhaled and told Ishe about the vision with Oya. “You would think my grandmother would have made herself known a long time ago, back when I didn’t have a home or enough to eat, let alone anyone to pass a kind word with. Would have been nice to step in and lend a helping hand when I killed that first animal or the third. Bad sense of timing, if you ask me. And when she did choose to make herself known, she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what she wanted in plain English.”
“That’s your first problem,” Ishe said. “You think the spirits are like real people. They don’t think like us. Don’t got the same motivation.”
“If you know—” Liza caught herself, remembering her spat with Autumn. “How come you can’t control your spirit?”
Ishe rubbed the back of his neck. Liza knew she was taking him to a place he didn’t want to go, but this was about her, not him. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to help her. She looked over at him, admired how the sun fell across his face, lighting up his eyes. What was she doing? Liza turned her gaze back ahead and took in the outline of the town in the distance.
“My spirit is a demon. He’s got the control, and he know it well as I do,” he explained flatly. “You got a chance, if you want it. I don’t. Those discs and seeing Oya all point to one thing: somethin’s comin’. Walking round here poutin’ like somebody stole your lunch ain’t gone change a thing.”
Liza didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept her mouth shut.
Their uncomfortable silence was broken by Jamey marching up to them.
“Don’t start nothin’ you can’t finish, lil’ Clay,” Ishe said as he walked past Jamey. Liza cut her eye at Ishe. Jamey hated it when people called him that.
Liza steadied her breath and cleared her mind.
Jamey tapped her on the shoulder, and she blinked up at him. The war was plain on his face. She tried to mask the war that was struggling on her own. Was she developing feelings for Ishe? Liza hated herself for what she must be doing to them both. But when she smiled at Jamey, she was certain the angry tongue-lashing he was going to give her had died away; he returned the smile.
He held her for a time, inhaling the scent of the top of her head. “Gone be time to get ready soon,” Jamey finally said and then took her hand, leading her back to the carnival.
Liza’s hand was limp as a wet leaf in Jamey’s. Fear of the spirits, the unknown magic, the pressure she could sense but not put her finger on, dogged her, between breaths, in her dreams, slinking around after every other thought. Something was threatening their way of life here, but what? She wondered if she would fare better joining Jamey and fighting gangsters up north with his aunt Queenie.
Jamey must have known there was something wrong, but Wendell ran up to him. “Need your help over with the Ferris wheel,” he said. “Damn gearshift again.”
Jamey turned to Liza. “I gotta go. And I want you to stop hanging out with Ishe so much—you know something about him ain’t right.”
Liza bristled. If being in a relationship meant she had to take orders from a man—well, she didn’t know much, but she would never turn into the distant, go-along-with-everything kind of woman her mother was.
“Ishe’s my friend,” she said. “And that’s all.”
“Make another one!” he called out as he turned to hurry off to the Ferris wheel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CLAY’S HOUSE OF CARDS
With one date in Texhoma, Clay had the G. B. Bacchanal Carnival back on track. Liza’d had her little mix-ups, a couple of missed cues that made it seem like she didn’t have full control of the animals, but she’d recovered well enough and had at least finished the show. Malachi’s Human Pincushion show was a big hit, and he even tossed in some contortions that had the crowd oohing and aahing all night.
As was often the case, on the last night, a few stragglers remained. One lady in particular roamed around the Pickled Punks tent, gawking at the oddities even after the operator had blinked the lights once to signal closing. Malformed fetuses of everything from birds, to lions, to monkeys sat inside their liquid bottled tombs, staring at her with unblinking eyes. Up and down, up and down she prowled as if she were on the hunt. Her eyes inspected each fetus with the intensity of a mother lion probing its young for signs of lameness.
“Last call, ma’am,” Clay called out from the entrance.
“I paid my nickel and I’ll be done when I’m good and ready,” she snapped. Clay eyed the woman furtively as she ran her fingers over the bottles, returning again to one in particular. The card said it was the fetus of a monkey, but no one could tell for sure. The arms and legs were so humanlike, the bald head and toothless mouth calling to mind a human infant. It floated pale gray in an amber-colored liquid. She tilted her head to and fro. “Why, in the right light, it looks so much like a human child,” she muttered.
“You say somethin’, ma’am?” Clay poked his head back inside.
“No.” She waved him off. “Give me a moment, would you? All your yapping won’t get me out any sooner.”
“That a fact?” Clay said. He tipped his hat to the woman and backed away.
The woman had not quite recovered from the loss of her own child three years prior. The pain was as raw as the expertly covered bald spot on the back of her head where she’d yanked out strands of her hair.
She lifted her hand to wipe away the tear tracing a path down her cheek but never made it, as she stumbled backward, staring at the bottle in disbelief. Had that thing smiled at her? She chided herself. Her mind was playing tricks on her. Still, when she took a few tentative steps forward, her legs were as wobbly as the stock market.
She gasped, drawing her hands to her mouth. The little monkey fetus made swimming motions with its hands, as if life in a bottle were simply nothing more than an afternoon dip in an Olympic pool.
The woman screamed and knocked the bottle to the ground. When the lifeless object only stared at her with its dead, unblinking eyes, she fled the tent.
“Thanks for your patronage!” Clay called after her with a wicked grin. He walked into the still tent and went down the aisle. The bottle containing the monkey sat right where it was supposed to. He leaned in, tapped the bottle with an index finger, and winked at the fetus. It grinned in response.
> Outside, Clay bid Jamey good night with an order to make sure the last of the stragglers were out before he closed things up. The kid was proving more capable every day, and Clay wondered if the boy seeing his aunt hadn’t done some good after all.
Clay trudged to the rear of the midway and the sanctuary of his trailer. He contemplated the warnings that littered his road to perdition: a call for a U-turn when he got puffed up with false pride. A sharp curve in the road had tried to turn him away from his sinful pursuit of the almighty dollar. He’d crossed that blighted bridge going a hundred miles an hour and had stood helpless as the grotesque outstretched arms of salvation struggled in vain to pull him back.
The seemingly conjoined trailers: Geneva’s and his. Always side by side, looming. Geneva would probably pop her demon head out soon.
His own trailer was wood, weathered to a dark gray. The words G. B. BACCHANAL CARNIVAL were painted in ornate red lettering on both sides. Like Geneva’s, there were two windows, one on either side of the trailer, propped open by a stick. Inside, Clay tossed his hat onto the small writing table to his right, took one last look over at the demon’s trailer, and closed the door. He tripped over the stool in front of his writing table again and muttered a curse. There wasn’t any other place for the thing, so it stayed where it was.
He flicked on the lone bulb hanging from the ceiling. A metal bunk was pushed into the far-left corner. Unlike what he ensured his carnies had, his bed was covered with a simple white cotton sheet and a rough woolen blanket. The pillow was a case stuffed with hay pilfered from the animal tent. At the foot of the bed sat a black chest that held his few worldly possessions. He reached inside, moved the two neatly folded pairs of pants and shirts aside, and took out the picture of his wife and the knife.
Crosses of every shape, size, and constitution lined the interior walls. The largest was a wooden carving mounted at the rear wall. He struck a match and lit the two votive candles on either side of the cross. Beneath the wooden cross, a small altar held a mirror, a picture of Jesus, rosary beads, and a Bible. He kissed the picture of his wife and carefully positioned it next to the Bible. Clay removed his shirt and draped it on the bed, revealing a patchwork of scars on his chest. He knelt and prayed, rocking back and forth, tears streaming from his eyes.
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