Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  And of course, The Golden Starling, a legendary aerialist under alabaster white-face.

  The first time you saw The Golden Starling—before you ever saw her as Liza—you had slipped under the bleachers so as not to spook the kids behind their cotton candy beards. Between a gangly scrim of legs and droopy socks, you watched her grand finale with the stunned wonder of youth, and for a little while at least, you felt the smile quickening beneath the rind of your skin. You weren’t the burned man anymore. You weren’t the adult who eventually cued into life’s masquerades. Who learned how The Electrifying Basilisk was really a loan officer who once did time for embezzling. Learned how Antoine the Transcendent was really homeless and living out of his VW van by Grand Avoille Cove. Learned how The Stupendous Crane Sisters really weren’t sisters at all, but a couple of strippers from Lafayette who belonged to a doomsday cult.

  As to what you knew about The Red Lion Master, well, you tried not to brood over that hard tale.

  And The Golden Starling? It was after her dismount from the net that first night that you noticed the slight hobble you would peg once more at Leland’s a year later. You’d assumed it at the time to be some muscle tweak resulting from her act, but as you’d observed her in the intervening years from behind tents, kiosks, and wheelbarrows, you came to learn that her limp was as much a part of her as your scars were to you.

  ***

  Sounds drum from the barn. Hefty sounds, as if they’re hammering something of permanence into those brittle walls.

  As your back peels from the tavern’s rolled siding and you skulk to the grove just shy of the barn, you realize all this nighttime cloak-and-daggering is an echo of your public, day-lit world—how you exist solely in the long, thin snippets of light and movement between shadows, or parted doors, or windows, or drapes. At night, well after Leland’s closes and under the interrogation of loon and barn owl calls, you’ll heel-toe carefully down the stairs despite it being empty because, among other lessons, Iraq drilled into you the virtues of stealth. You’ll bypass the mirror without so much as a glance, though you’d make certain to slap the mallet over the door, and then sit in the open nursing a Blatz, forgetting for an hour that you attend AA twice weekly in a repossessed playhouse. You’ll imagine yourself in deep, soulful tete-a-tetes about love and death with some lovely lady, mostly Liza, and you’ll tell her about your Natchez roots, and she’ll wonder about your face with only her eyes and restless fingers, and though your skin is stubborn to reveal it, you’ll assure her that you’re smiling. And she’ll reply in kind that she knows what that’s like, and you’ll feel more at ease explaining the cagey morality of combat, and the persistence of white phosphorous—how it burns until you smother its oxygen, and even then it keeps on smoldering, which was why your scarred, Korean war vet uncle who basically wrote the manual on it referred to it as the “resentment” of ordnance. And you’ll tell her about how sometimes you’ll steal into the animal pens at night and listen to the nocturnal whimpers and moans of striped, tawny beasts so far removed from their homes as to almost sound human in their forlornness, and has she ever felt that same ache herself?

  And as you consider how their musk and grievance always stalks you well beyond their cages, you shudder as, beyond a lattice of morning glory and across a narrow patch of lantana, and ultimately through the snake-wide gaps in the barn wall, you glimpse a menagerie of shadows heaving in ways you can’t define.

  ***

  In a fluke moment mid-season, you and Liza ended up face-to-face for the first time without her makeup.

  The night before, you’d heard her and Beau arguing outside the barn for a good half-hour. Money matters from what you could make out. Vague issues of raising the stakes and opening new markets overseas and the like, whatever that all meant.

  At one point you peeked around the ragged shade of your one window to watch them. It was only a few seconds, Liza standing askance of him, arms akimbo and hard eyes raking the barn walls for harder answers, and Beau gazing at her cock-headed in his bathrobe and Jesus sandals and perpetual shellac of flop sweat, dragging on a hand-roll and sucking at the insides of his cheeks as though to taste his own simper. Testiness grizzled at the core of their relationship, ever since you’d first spied them at Leland’s. They had a dance. Liza, with the practiced, exasperated fortitude motherhood had wrought. Beau, with his feeble indignations and always-pointed finger loaded with duds.

  It explained somewhat her fugue state that following morning when, as you were pushing a gilly wagon of feed after shoeing the horses, you almost collided as she emerged suddenly from between a pair of flat-bed trucks, a bucket of feed in each hand.

  You don’t know for how long you both stood not four feet apart, you gaping stupidly, trying to push a grin to the surface of your blasted skin, and her looking right through you as if sidetracked by a waft of odor from her youth she couldn’t right pinpoint. She was dressed in her performance leotard, which was odd since she wouldn’t be up for another three hours. But she was makeup free. A fresh dapple of bruises tumbled from the base of her neck, past her shoulder and down to her elbows. An especially nasty indentation flared on her right shoulder—vague half-crescents, like bite marks, only too large for the average mouth.

  From her ear grew a single morning glory, which she’d certainly plucked the prior evening from the vines that grew wild against the east wall of Beau’s barn.

  Though clearly out to sea, she nonetheless reacted as if fully aware of your gawking at her welts. Or maybe she’d developed an enhanced sense over time—a protective reflex that showed through as a self-conscious rolling back of the shoulders, as if to spur along a dormant confidence.

  But it wasn’t you that reaction had been meant for, and maybe if you’d bothered to ask her, she might’ve told you that. The jade of her eyes brimmed with the kind of dread you only saw in troops thrown into their first urban fire-fight, and when she finally brushed past you towards the petting zoo with her lopsided stride, it was with the compressed tension of those same troops about to have their frontiers obliterated.

  The limp merely confirmed her identity. It was the morning glory and the bruising that broke your heart and stoked a fire you thought you’d left seething in a German hospital another life ago.

  ***

  If you go another fifteen feet, you’ll be able to peek through one of the knotholes straight into the barn.

  The noises within are mounting. Primitive, rhythmic, muffled. An inverse to the root-canal trill of tree frogs in heat.

  You try to imagine her as you’ve watched her through the years—the version not of the barn, and not the one that rendezvous with odd men throughout town. Men who sate her purse while leaving the rest of her starved. Sometimes, after your AA on Mondays and Thursdays, as she walks home late after a show, you’ll watch her stop by a neighbor’s house to pick up her kids. Two girls and a boy, ages four-through-ten. Those are her best smiles, rivaled only by those in the heat of performance.

  The ones she attempts when pausing at flower beds, or outside bars to listen to the ruckus within, those curve and hold with the strain of arm-wrestlers.

  You edge forward, and at the closest you’ve ever been, the sounds are more brutish, more feral than ever.

  In the mud, over by the barn’s rolling door which you can now make out because of your advanced progress, maybe those aren’t hoof-prints that you see leading inside, but simply a trick of the light.

  Beau’s voice, low, guttural, coaxing, encouraging. The clink of metal, soft and pleasant, as how you remember it trailing from Santa’s sleigh in the town square when you were a boy in Opelousas, and still unwise to the poor shell-shocked Vietnam vet under the beard and red hat who bagged your groceries at the A&P.

  At the swelling of her muffled whimpers between heavy snorts and rumbled neighs, you turn from the barn and slink back to your apartment, trying to convince yourself that maybe you’ve unmasked enough heroes for one lifetime.

  ***
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br />   Later in the night—this eve of the closing of The Golden Starling and The Red Lion Master—you stare at the ceiling long after the lights in the barn have snuffed out, and it’s only the scarlet glare of Leland’s sign to birth shadows.

  Looking at your hands, you try to recall the shade of your skin as it once was, and not the waxy husk that sponges whatever cast happens to fall on them. Often you glance at your feet to remind you, as they were basically unscathed, and maybe that’s what prompts you to kick them out of bed and get up.

  Downstairs in the bar, and the obvious hits you as it tends to, in a series of endless postscripts: that Iraq was the last time you had hair and pigment. The last time you knew who you used to be. Iraq was also the last time your unblemished fingers had built anything, and as you rustle around the storeroom you wonder if there’s enough detergent left to mix with the few gallons of gasoline out back.

  Beyond stealth, Desert Storm taught you many lessons, including consequence. That if you’re too cowardly to point-blank a bullet into a double-agent’s head because she’s a woman, and opt instead to set off a device of Semtex and white phosphorous, unpleasant results can happen if you’re not far enough away.

  That if you aim to purge the world of traitorous villagers without the surgical precision it calls for, their babies’ screams will never let you forget how you failed to thoroughly sweep for civilians beforehand.

  Gazing out the tiny storeroom window, you realize how the sounds of the bayou differ so much from the desert, especially at night. Here, the air is thick with verdancy and rot, and light fingers in from everywhere and nowhere at once, splayed by mist and the immortal aqueducts of bald cypress knees. It is light as perceived in a dream, and often you wonder if you’re awake or asleep in this sultry womb. No wonder it’s a place opulent in mysticism and death. Here you can cast your hurt into the bog. Here you can be your unalloyed self. Here you can confess sin and depravity, even if you’re too chickenshit. Don’t worry—the swamp won’t care. It won’t ever tell a soul.

  Using the clincher from your farrier’s pouch to pry open a gas can, you’re waylaid on the spot by new inspiration, and you scratch the torching scheme altogether. Love and desperation will do that you, especially when you realize they’re virtually the same emotion, bordering on madness. The idea is so impeccable as to be ridiculous, but you don’t have all night.

  Should you do it? Beau was in New Orleans today conducting his shady extra-curriculars, but he’s returning tonight. He always does some editing before dawn.

  And of course, it’ll require you entering that barn.

  ***

  In the end, it all goes down fast.

  You prepare Beau’s mallet first, which takes all of three minutes. Then you slip into the neighboring stalls and bridle the spryest looking colt of the bunch.

  At Beau’s barn five minutes later, you pick the padlock open and slip the horse in before re-locking it and sweeping your footprints so Beau will be none-the-wiser, then using a ladder in back, climb through the eave vent and drop onto the barn’s floor through the attic door. The lights are off, but the moon creeps through the siding gaps and blue-washes enough to see the light stands, editing bay, steamer trunks, and bed. The other things you glimpse, you disregard immediately and will not describe here. You simply keep your eyes to the floor and melt into the shadows by the doors. The horse sniffs about, but remains otherwise calm and ignorant to mankind’s darker proclivities.

  ***

  An hour later, someone fidgets with the lock, and Beau steps through. The horse snorts simultaneously with Beau pulling the light chain, whereupon he literally hops back a step and hiccups a high-pitched Fuck! at the sight.

  You don’t waste a moment, muttering an “Adieu, Beau,” before bringing the mallet down on his head with all your zeal the moment he turns to face you. Even as he crumples to the ground, you can see the perfectly outlined indentation of the horseshoe you’d hammered on the end of the mallet start to flower atop of his head—an impact angle that matches well what the rearing of a spooked horse would inflict.

  Surprisingly—or maybe not at all—you feel no fear or anxiety throughout, and the rest is carried out with a smooth, quiet efficiency you can’t help wonder might’ve accompanied your task back in that Iraqi village had you dredged up the stones to do it right. You’ll wear the reminder of that for the rest of your days.

  After re-shoeing the horse with the killing instrument of record, you slap it loose and send it scampering, taking extra care to check the area thoroughly beforehand. You then drag Beau’s body next to a studio light that you make sure is going good and hot before knocking it into a heap of swept-up straw in the manner one might have with flailing arms.

  Before the barn is fully engulfed, and before calling the fire department, you pluck for yourself a tiny clusters of violet, yellow, and red lantana flowers as a memento, so like miniature wedding bouquets for lost brides.

  ***

  A knock at the door.

  Your hands freeze while smearing the last of the red foundation on your cheeks. No one ever knocks on that door or ever tries to come in. The cat wagon is the last big-rig trailer on the lot, and the only one connected directly to the big top. This is for ease of bringing the big cats in and out of the arena, as well as corralling them should one manage to escape their pen within the trailer itself.

  It also happens to double as your dressing room when you feature. Like tonight. The last night before Coolidge & Sons rotates out to another town for four months, and The Red Lion Master dispels into the wind for another season.

  Back to Leland’s paltry paycheck to tide you over till next spring—at least for as long as Freddy the barkeep can run it without Beau before new owners buy it, or it folds altogether, or the Y2K thing really sets back the clocks a hundred years, and circuses reclaim their old glory.

  Back to you without the foundation and the maquillage, and the glory of the tigers and lions, and crowds of children who still adore their heroes.

  You wait a few seconds before stepping to the door, though you’re made up enough to remain unknown, or so you think. Outside you hear the crunch of tanbark—the shuffle of uncertainty before it starts away, at which point you open the door.

  The Golden Starling is halfway down the corridor when she stops. Again, that preparative rolling of the shoulders for baseline self-assurance before turning to face you. In her full performance costume, she’s radiant. An effigy freshly stepped from a niche in the Pantheon. At a dozen feet away, you can’t tell if she’s smiling or not, only that something Mona-Lisa-sublime is sculpted in the greasepaint.

  And this is how you two speak for that first minute, you squinting for purchase in her blue irises which, against her alabaster makeup, mine even more blue. An impossible glacial blue.

  A pair of tears soon rut down her foundation and stamp a parenthesis between her half-smile. Her chin quivers, and slowly this gets transmuted into her hand which ultimately points at you, so like Beau’s castigating finger—if Beau’s finger ever had any caliber behind it.

  That’s when she sees you notice it, because really, it’s been right there before you the whole time. The morning glory, slipped into her ear, scorched and curled like Christmas wrapping tossed in a fireplace, only the inner fringes still bearing a hint of their original violet-blue.

  You imagine the soot leaving a stem-imprint on her temple as the morning glory sloughs from her ear at her first aerial flip, and you only realize she’s already walking away by the fading scratch of her footsteps.

  You want to follow her, but her sensing that you do is enough to lock your knees.

  Blinking your eyes at where she’d stood, hoping she’ll return on her own to refill the space so you can explain your side of things—perhaps finally confess your love—that’s when you see it. The mirror. Beau’s mirror. She’d hung it right across your door the way Beau would have, which is why you hadn’t noticed it till after she’d limp-walked away.

/>   Hanging under it, tied by a braid of what you’re certain is horse hair, a charred bouquet of morning glory.

  On the glass, in white grease paint, you read the three lines of four words she left for you, like an aborted quatrain:

  I HAVE THREE KIDS.

  THEY HAVE TO EAT

  YOU HAD NO RIGHT.

  And for a bright, searing moment, you know that you’re not the last hero, and that she might be. That getting burned and doing murder don’t hold candles to doing those things she’s done for her loves.

  And in a few minutes, after you’ve reframed all motives and recast narratives to keep from stalling out, it’ll be back to the makeup mirror for you, where you’ll pat on the rest of your mask and glorify and pine in silence, and keep on patting and glorifying and pining until you hear the crowd swell at the announcement of the penultimate act.

  She’s scheduled to follow you tonight, and you suppress the sudden fear that you’ve never felt less up to the task.

  But you’ll picture The Golden Starling nonetheless, one hand extended in salutation as the other grips the trapeze, and surely you’ll wonder if those in the audience below see her the way you do. Heroic or crazy? Controlled or reckless? Martyr or victim? Appreciative or ungrateful?

  But will they see the love that you’ll always see? Will they recognize the perfection that is the duo of The Red Lion Master and The Golden Starling?

  Behind you, the big cats yawn and groan their collective torpor at the human hobblers of pride and shame.

  And that’s all you’re gonna say about Liza.

  SEGMENT 4

  TRIPLE-ZEROES

  SURGE

  BEFORE ROXY, YOU thought underground sex shows featured only pasty, overweight swingers comingling every Tuesday night at a Ramada Inn suite in Banning.

  Then she takes you to a decommissioned Long Beach airport hangar for your first date.