If Roy had come to this place, Paul thought, this was the person he’d seek. There could be no mistaking it. This woman could drive any man to his brink and well beyond. One look was a vise on your heart. One touch and you’d swear to God.
Paul began to follow the woman, but Sandy stayed put. She held Paul’s hand, not allowing him forward. He came back to her. “What is it?”
“That woman,” she said.
“What of her?”
Sandy hung her head. She spoke into her chest when she said, “She scares me.”
Paul set a lock of the little girl’s hair back behind her ear. “Why?”
Sandy looked up. Her eyes searched back and forth across Paul’s face. Raindrops tapped her cheeks, making her blink.
“What is it?” Paul said.
“You’ll leave me.”
A bird spread its wings in Paul’s chest. He pulled the girl close and hugged her to him. She dug her face into his collar, clamped her hands around his neck.
“I won’t leave you,” Paul said.
Sandy gripped tighter at his words. Her body shook. He lifted her off her feet and hugged her tightly. She nuzzled into his neck. “Does he love her?”
Paul set her down. She backed up and wiped her cheeks.
“He might,” Paul said.
“He must,” Sandy said.
Paul nodded in the direction of the camp. “Coming?”
They moved quickly and quietly through the rain, picking up ground on the woman. The encampment was a circle of wagons, each one displaying a different circus scene. One showed the white clown’s face of the legendary Joseph Grimaldi, another the three rings of a circus complete with lion tamer and lions, a third depicted a strongman hefting an iron weight. In all cases the paint was faded and peeling, the wood was cracked, and in some places, mended.
Paul and Sandy watched as the woman stopped at the doorway of the largest wagon, seeming perplexed by the latch. She reached beneath her jacket, into the small of her back, and produced a snub-nosed pistol. She drew one deep breath, and then another, before pushing aggressively through the door, pistol at her side.
Roy hung halfway between sitting and standing up from the leather chair. In the doorway was Jesse’s dark silhouette. One hand was tucked behind her waist, no doubt concealing a weapon. A lock of hair hung loose from beneath her top hat. Her body was tense.
Roy eased back down into the chair. He turned up his hands to her, showing only the spoon he carried, no gun.
Jesse relaxed. She entered the wagon and closed the door behind her. “You’re alive,” she said, sounding bored. It was as if a threatening intruder would have been the favorable thing.
“I am,” Roy said.
“Good for you,” she said. “What do you want?” She moved to the dresser and put down the small, silver gun she’d been holding. She pulled off her gloves, tugging one finger at a time.
Roy watched her delicate hands as she unsheathed them. They were as perfectly illustrated as he remembered them. He followed the contour of her arm up past her shoulder to her face. She pulled off the top hat and a few more locks of hair fell across her eyes.
She wasn’t ordinary. Roy could not deny it. She was the embodiment of sex and lust. She was everything a man desired, and yet it was difficult to muster the feelings he once held. It was like understanding that a painting was beautiful and deeply moving to other people, maybe even once to himself, but he could no longer see its beauty, no matter how desperately he wanted to.
“Oh,” she said. “I see.” Her tongue rubbed across her teeth, underneath her lips. She put a hand to her chest. “Did you think it would be so easy?”
Roy felt a twinge of anger. She believed his sole purpose had been to seek her out, to be with her again. And of course she was right. “No.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You have a husband.”
She looked away. Her eyes became unfocused. She placed the top hat on the same hook Jack McLean once used. The hat wobbled for a second before falling still. She began rearranging items on her dresser. She turned a glass turtle first left, and then right. She slid a swan from the back to the front. She swallowed. “It’s my fault. Had I not spent that night with you, none of this would have happened.”
Roy’s heart and head played tug-of-war. His heart was a poet. It pulled for their special night, the most vivid and memorable thing in his life. It pulled to have that night grow in strength and purpose, to become a more important thing. His head was a tax collector. It pulled for protection against childish dreams.
“I was mad at him that night,” she said. She took off the red overcoat, peeling it back from her shoulders, first the left and then the right. As she removed the jacket Roy watched her full chest and the flatness of her stomach stretch against her white, custom cut dress shirt. There were glimpses of the tattooed lines beneath, and the dimpled outline of a cigar burn. She was flawlessly shaped, designed by God to weaken men’s knees and stiffen their loins.
“He burned you,” Roy said.
She looked at him curiously.
“That cigar burn.” He pointed at her ribs.
Jesse put a hand over the area of the scar and smiled. “This was our wedding vow.”
Roy blinked. His heart let go of the rope. The tax collector reeled it in.
“I was mad at him,” she said, “because he met with my grandfather alone. They talked family business without me.”
Roy tried to stand, but his legs merely shook. He was no hero, no star-crossed lover. His motivations had been cheap. His mission hadn’t just been a waste of time, but a hoax from the start.
“And then the old man died,” she said, “before I had a chance to reason with him, to let him know the others didn’t know George like I did. They wouldn’t accept him as their leader.”
She sat down on the bed, slid off one boot.
“Where is he?” Roy said.
She regarded Roy coolly. “He’s different now, after what they did.”
Roy waited.
She slid off the other boot and aligned both on the floor. She cracked her toe knuckles and then leaned back with both palms on the bed behind her. There was a time when seeing her like that might have dropped him in a faint.
“You saw the banners out front?” she said.
Roy nodded.
“Did you wonder why yours still stood?”
Roy said nothing.
“I’m sure you did. Well, we can’t have a show without a lizard man, now can we, Scales?”
“My name’s not Scales. It’s Roy Pellerin.”
“And my name’s Jesse Fickas. So what?”
Paul stood on the steps outside the wagon, his hand hovering an inch from the latch. He stood there stupidly while Sandy looked up at him from where she was hidden beneath the wagon floor, behind a wheel. His movement had stopped dead when he heard the woman say Fickas.
The husband she and Roy were speaking of, could it be?
Voices and laughter cut through the rain to reach Paul’s ears. He looked back to see a silhouetted cluster of sideshow performers moving through the woods toward the camp. Out front were two pinheads, dashing and laughing, playing tag. Behind them a woman walked on all fours like a dog. Next to her two men in overalls carried a board between them. No, not a board, a man. As they moved closer Paul could see the prone man’s face was frozen in a horrified stare.
Paul came down the steps. He joined Sandy beneath the wagon, out of sight. He peeked from the darkness to watch the performers parade into the camp. They found their way to their individual wagons and went inside.
From a distance two more figures approached. One was a short, round mass of humanity. It hobbled in such a way to make Paul think the body was actually two side-by-side sections, with each side taking a turn to move out front and propel it along and pull the other side up. This had to be the fat lady. The second figure towered over the first. It lumbered next to her like a bear walking on hind legs.
/> Paul held his breath; he would recognize that gait anywhere. Even with the man’s features concealed by darkness, Paul knew he was looking at George Fickas.
39
“The day before he died,” Jesse said, “my grandfather announced to everyone that George would be taking over as outside talker. As you can imagine, they didn’t take the news well.”
Roy thought of the way they raged when provoked. Always the performers teetered on the edge of violence. Living life under constant scrutiny and threat made them volatile. On stage they performed and smiled, they did what was necessary to survive, but away from the tent they were jaded and intolerant. They’d grown up wanting acceptance, needing it. They’d grown into young adults holding on to the hope that one day their circumstances might change; either they’d somehow transform from ugly duckling into swan, or that society would evolve its way of thinking to accept them. As fully-grown adults they discovered the lie in Aesop’s fable, and the cold truth that the world was as unchanging as their face, their skin, their size, their knees, their missing limbs. With this truth in hand, they no longer sought out acceptance from the outside world, but a healthy disdain for it, and fury for anything, or anyone, that smacked of it.
“They were angry,” she said, “but trust me, Scales, their anger wasn’t about you. They got over you quickly. Even my grandfather did. They say it’s about family, but don’t fool yourself, it’s about money. You killed Jukey, and he was our biggest draw. You cost us all.” She turned an ear to the wagon doors opening and closing outside. “They’re back.”
“What did they do with the news?” Roy said.
“They performed,” she said, “what else? They smiled and pretended they couldn’t be happier. They were convincing, too. Camilla even went as far as sewing George a new outside talker’s jacket. Even I thought, for a moment, that it might work out. But secretly they were packing their bags. Can you believe that? A family of freaks ready to take to the streets just so they wouldn’t have to be led by my husband.”
“But they’re still here,” Roy said.
She leaned forward and placed her elbows on her knees. “It was one of them, I know that, but really it was all of them. They must have thought twice about leaving. Instead, they concocted a plan to make sure George wouldn’t stand long behind the podium.”
Randy.
“I found my husband lying behind our trailer, alone and bleeding on the ground, that horrible rock next to his head.”
Roy envisioned Randy atop McLean’s trailer, large rock in two hands, waiting for Samson to pass beneath. He shuddered to imagine the impact on the big man’s head. In his mind he heard Randy whisper, “Yeaaah.”
Tears welled in Jesse’s eyes. She lifted her hand to wipe them away, but then stopped. Her face became tranquil. She straightened her spine and let the tears fall as they may. “But everybody pitches in,” she said. “Isn’t that right?”
“I don’t imagine he’s shoveling horseshit,” Roy said.
“He’s still a part of the show,” Jesse said, “but his act is different now. He’s different now.” She looked at Roy’s hand and shook her head. “That figures.”
Roy looked down to see the spoon gripped tightly in his hand, his thumb involuntarily circling the bowl.
“He’ll be escorting Girda,” she said, “as usual. She’s fallen a couple times in the last year and he’s the only one with the strength to help her up. They’ll be behind the rest.” She went to the window and peeked through the drapes. “They’re here now.”
Roy came to the window just in time to see his old wagon door close. The camp’s center was empty now. All the performers were tucked away and drying out.
“He’s in my wagon?” Roy said.
“You’ve seen it?”
He nodded.
“Then you know what sort of state he’s in.” She moved away from the window and Roy once again found her scent. It cast a shiver over him. He stepped to the wagon door, put his hand on the latch, and looked back. She looked cold and frail. All her guile had fallen away.
“The show needs him,” she said, forcing a smile that didn’t have the strength to remain. “I need him. Don’t take him away.”
Her husband was a brutal sadist, and yet it was clear she loved him.
Roy left Jesse’s wagon thinking how he’d spent his life catering to the nature of others—what they thought, what they felt, what they needed. But what had they given back? He tried to conjure an image of something he’d learned from them, something that made sense, something he could describe and cherish.
No dice.
The sour stench again assaulted Roy’s nose as he approached his former wagon. The windows were covered with horizontal shades, but faint light sliced through the slots. The wagon was noticeably tilted to one end, suggesting the massive figure inside was at the back. Roy pocketed the spoon. He put one hand on his revolver and opened the door. Cigar smoke was the new scent. Cigar smoke and burning meat.
The creature that was once Samson looked up as Roy entered. It was sitting cross-legged at the back of the wagon. On its face Roy could see a manmade pattern in the flesh. Circles. And stretching away from its forehead was a long, red scar with white stitch-mark dots on either side. The creature’s eyes were sallow and drooping, the irises gleamed in the light from the candle on the floor just in front of it. It grunted something like, “Hello.”
Roy managed a small wave. He felt both silly and scared. In one hand the creature held a cigar butt. The orange, cherry end was glistening and crackling. The opposite forearm bled from a new wound. As Roy’s eyes adjusted, he could see the pattern in the creature’s flesh was not confined to the face. It spread out over parts of the creature’s body like... Jesus, like scales. It came up from his hands and wrists and it marked his chest and lower legs. The work was intricate and no doubt time-consuming. Each individual scale overlapped two others below it and was overlapped by two above it. Each was a perfectly round cigar burn, raised from the skin in a bumpy cluster. There fresher wounds were at the edges.
Roy opened the nearby cigar box and looked inside. It was loosely filled with cigar butts and two full-length, unlit cigars. The butts weren’t chewed and mangled like they’d be if someone had smoked them. Instead they were still round and uncut at the lip end. Roy picked up one butt and examined it. The burnt end was waxy and crusted over with the skin and blood that had been melted to it. He looked down to see all the butts had the same waxy look. There must have been a dozen of them.
The thing reached out its current cigar butt to the candle before it. It rolled the end in the flame. Absently, it said hello again. Its voice was rough, but still recognizable as Samson’s. The butt grew bright with embers, and the creature found the appropriate spot on its arm. It drove the burning cigar into its flesh with a sizzle. Smiling at the pain, the creature began rocking forward and backward. The wagon moved under its shifting weight.
The thing extinguished the cigar butt on the floor and dropped it. It fished out something from a pile of straw and held it up. Roy’s knife.
“Pretty,” the creature said. It rubbed the knife’s handle with its thumb, making sense of what Jesse had said about Roy’s spoon.
“Yes,” Roy said. “Pretty.” He held out an upturned palm. “Can I see pretty?”
The creature clutched the knife close to its chest. It shook its head back and forth with a petted lip.
“Okay,” Roy said.
The creature loosed one hand from the knife and pointed at Roy’s waist. “Pretty!” it said.
Roy looked down to see that the creature was pointing at his gun. The candlelight gave the iron ring a yellow glimmer.
“This?” Roy said, indicating the gun.
The creature nodded.
Instead of reaching for the gun, Roy reached into his pocket. He produced the spoon and held it out. “What about this?” he said.
Candlelight splayed against the silver, making the spoon glow brilliantly. The creatu
re’s eyes widened. Its jaw unhinged. It stopped nodding. It stopped rocking. The wagon fell still.
“Mine,” the creature finally whispered. One giant hand reached out for the spoon.
Roy pulled the spoon back.
The creature’s eyes met Roy’s. Its brow came down and a scowl came to its face. “Mine!” it said. It flexed a series of muscles in threat. Veins appeared everywhere.
“Trade,” Roy said.
The creature blinked, seeming unable to comprehend the word.
“Trade,” Roy repeated. This time he pointed to the knife.
The creature looked down at the knife in its hand. It looked at the spoon. It looked back at the knife, and then again at the spoon. “Trade?”
Roy nodded.
In a flash the creature’s hand moved, snatching the spoon from Roy’s grip.
Roy looked at his empty palm in disbelief.
The creature grinned. “Mine!” It pounded two fists on the floor, knuckles down. The wagon shook. The candle wobbled. The creature hopped to a crouched position with two feet on the floor, Roy’s knife in one fist, his spoon in the other. “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!” It pounded the floor with each repeated word. The candle fell. Roy snatched it from the ground before it lit the straw. He drew his revolver and backed away.
The creature’s body fell into shadow as the candlelight now hardly reached it. Roy saw only a black, hulking mass and two yellow eyes fixed on him. He cocked back the revolver’s hammer and trained the sights on the dark space between the thing’s eyes. He didn’t dare move the gun off target when he heard the wagon door open behind him.
40
The wagon walls shook. The windows rattled. Inside George Fickas was screaming, “Mine, mine, mine.” Paul gripped the door latch with an icy hand. He needed to turn it. He knew that. It was just that his hand refused to move. His neck throbbed. His mind was overrun with childhood memories. In one moment he was watching a scabby skinned boy run through the schoolyard. In the next he was lying on the ground, unable to breathe, with George Fickas standing above him. In another moment he and Roy were running through the bayou, laughing.
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