Equus

by Rhonda Parrish

  “You know where to find me,” Carlotta said, firing up another cigarette and watching the girl leave.

  The cool summer night took to her sweat when she stepped out, and she felt something rotten in her stomach that she wasn’t sure what to do with, only that she was a little bit out of control, navigating through a nightmare, and somewhere in the center of it was a sad, unfortunate person who liked southern gothic and could only tell anyone after being hit hard enough.

  The story went round and round in her head like an endless wash cycle and she turned with it, scanning the tents beyond the rides, themselves mechanical beasts who’d been buried beneath the Earth, but were just now climbing free, their great steam-powered fingers crawling with children.

  And then she saw it: the Hideous Horse Boy.

  One of several attractions advertised at the Freakshow tent. She’d never gone inside, never even considered it. Always thought it probably tacky and fake, and horribly insensitive, besides.

  But here she was, slightly outside of herself anyway, and she found herself crossing the gravel fairgrounds towards the Freakshow tent.

  She shelled out the money to the caramel-toothed barker, his face ruddy from the sun, his wrinkles perfectly filled with lines of dirt. He peeled back the entrance with a cane. It was hotter inside than in Carlotta’s tent and smelled like hay and manure and something miserable. She made it through rooms bathed in different colored gels, all sea-weed greens and toilet-cleaner blues, which made her slightly sick. All around her animals with multiple heads and distorted fetuses floated in tubes of formaldehyde.

  And then she was in a dark, quiet room, black as slate but with a soft cream light that came up gradually.

  In the center, a large cage with the words “The Hideous Horse Boy” written loudly above it and a hunched body inside. His knees were pulled up to his chin and she couldn’t see him entirely, but his silhouette was misshapen, and what she could see of his right foot was wrong. The toes had jammed together, only a nail or two growing across all of them, and she saw what the designers of the carnival wanted her to see: that it was a hoof.

  Then the light was high enough that she could see one eye above his knee, the rest of his face bulky and obscured by shadow. He watched her sadly and she stepped towards him with a feeling that overwhelmed her, where nausea and outrage cohabitated.

  “Is your name Eli?’ she asked, kneeling before the bars of the cage. He blinked and slid backwards, and she caught more of his face. It was flat, the top of his mouth and his nose merged together and the left side of his skull was bulbous with small strands of brown hair growing out of it and down his face without any sort of pattern. But the right side was smooth and young and spoke to what his face might have looked like, beneath the mass of scars and cartilage Carlotta had spoken of.

  Then Taryn felt that tightness in her guts explode and she hated herself just a bit for thinking about what his face might have looked like when he clearly had a face, for treading with trepidation on the other side of bars. For going along with it, whatever it was. She stood, dusting off her knees.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” she said.

  He tilted his head.

  “What I mean is, this doesn’t look like you’re having any fun,” she tried again. “Do they pay you well?”

  Then she felt rude, as though she was being presumptuous. Maybe he loved this job, though she doubted it from his body language and the way Carlotta had spoken of him. Maybe this wasn’t a job at all.

  So she sat down again.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be like this,” she said, combing her hair behind her ears. “I’m just…”

  Terribly lonely, is what she wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Instead, she said, “I don’t know who you are, and I heard you liked these books is all.” She produced the books and looked at him eagerly.

  He stared at them, and then moved his arms away from his face. She saw him in full, the bones piling together, the vertical drop they made, the way they carelessly accentuated features without bothering to resemble the way most people looked. He was one of the most interesting-looking people she’d ever met and he was looking at the books with sensitivity, and now an urgency, that she hadn’t seen in a long time.

  He smiled, his lips thick on one side and coiling upwards.

  “You like them too?” he finally said quietly, and the timber of his voice shocked her. The words came out slow, with difficulty, but the sincerity there reflected what she saw in his eye.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, sliding down on her knees. “And you’ve read them?”

  “Yes!”

  “That’s amazing, I don’t know anyone who’s reading these,” she said. “Do you read a lot?”

  He nodded and smiled and it unlocked something boyish and sweet in his features. There was an unevenness to everything, especially his smile, but the part that curled up was dashing, and the younger-looking eye was arched now, almost conspiratorially.

  “All the time,” he said. “When they get me books.”

  “You don’t have, like, a library card?” she said.

  He laughed. It was husky, metallic, and he said, “I’ve never been. They say I’d scare people.”

  He moved an arm and she could see that both of his legs were like that: hooved and arched dramatically. It was too dark for her to see everything, but she could tell he was shirtless, and blushed a little at the sight of his chest, hairless and tense with coiled muscles. Nothing wrong with that part of him at all.

  She was staring, and did her best to look away.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said. “Are these people your parents? Your family?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “Well they should let you have some fun,” she said. “Can we take a walk together or something?”

  He shook his head. “No. It’ll ruin the show.”

  “Okay. Well when the carnival shuts down, then.”

  He paused, then looked back at the books. “No. No I don’t think so.”

  “Do they let you out of there?” she finally asked. “Because if they don’t I’m going to call the police.”

  She smiled at that, but the look he reflected back at her was tense.

  “Of course they let me out,” he said, though he couldn’t look at her. “This is just part of the act. Anyway, don’t call the police.”

  The distant way he spoke made the tension rise up in her belly again.

  “They don’t let you out, do they?”

  “Don’t call the police,” he said again.

  She put her hands on the bars.

  “They won’t let you take a walk with me.”

  Then, there was a shuffling behind them. Someone else walking through the freakshow.

  “You should go,” he said quietly, then reached for her fingers with his right hand. His fingers were soft and delicate, and he squeezed her hand. “I’m fine. Really. This is all just for show, but I don’t want to go out tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay.” More shuffling behind her, and she stood.

  “But what books do you want me to bring?” she asked, and he blinked at her. “For when I come back. What books do you want?”

  Then, without missing a beat: “Flannery O’Connor.”

  His smile was uneven and broken and somewhat sophisticated and she smiled, too.

  “I’ll be seeing you soon,” she said, and left the tent.

  Derrel was outside. Stumbling, plastic cup of beer frothing into the dust of the ground. He demanded to know what she’d been doing in there. What took her so long. She brushed past him and kept walking as he howled at her to stop.

  She saw a policeman working security and understood something when Derrel called her a bitch and the officer only chuckled.

  By the time Derrel stumbled home, his father had already begun his talk about the Horse Boy’s mother. Derrel collected himself in the doorframe of the kitchen and ran a hand down his face. H
is father stopped his speech and gazed up at him, his grin folding upwards into a hideous wrinkled sneer above a grease brown wife beater that had once been white. A whisper of tangled silver hair clutched at his collar. “Derrel, so nice of you to join us,” he drawled.

  The old man sat before nine or ten young men, situated around a dinner table that hadn’t known a woman or a child since Derrel’s mother had left. Derrel’s grown little brother sat front and center; a round, happy-looking head wreathed in peeling wallpaper that honestly advertised the nothingness that lived behind his eyes. He stared up at his drunk brother, giggled, then returned his attention to his father.

  “The Horse Boy’s mother was a magnificent beast,” Dad said, fanning warped, knuckly hands before the boys. “Strong legs, like a horse, but the upper half was all woman.” He pantomimed sloping breasts on his chest and some of the youngest men laughed. “She even had wings in the back. Great, terrific flappers, though I never saw her fly. Never saw anyone fly around this shit heap.”

  In the old days, Derrel thought, when Dad would give this speech, some young knucklehead would inevitably call bullshit, that there had never been a voluptuous horse woman at the carnival, and Dad would punch them so hard their teeth would rattle around, or ooze out in thick, molasses coils of blood.

  Now no one questioned him. The Horse Woman had been real.

  And she’d killed a child.

  That was the secret.

  So the men in town had chased her into that mine and pulled her wings off and cut off her legs and slit her throat and talking about it was the only thing that could get them excited anymore.

  Derrel grimaced, collected himself, steadied his consciousness behind his eyes. He was too drunk, though Dad said it helped with the hunt. He wasn’t wrong.

  “What she did to that little child…” Derrel’s father frowned, and when every wrinkle frowned with him, he looked truly tortured. A mask of guilt and horrified sadness that Derrel knew was only show, but the effect was impressive. “Pulled her fingernails out. Tore her hair and scalp right offa her head. Ate her, mostly. That little girl surely died screaming. So, in return, we took the horse woman’s son. Tit for tat. Normal-looking baby who’d started developing his mother’s…eccentricities. His baby feet were becoming baby hooves and little wings were starting to grow in the back. So we got rid of the wings. Broke his fingers and toes to make sure those eccentricities would never develop and beat his face that might have otherwise been beautiful. And now we do it every year, in honor of that little girl. We chase him through the mine. We hunt the Hideous Horse Boy.”

  All ritual. All hokem. But the young men were bowing their heads, seriously taking to the old man’s challenge. To rise up. To serve in this ritual, to become men. The goose step was fraternal, and they took to it. Derrell took, too. To not was to admit something too terrible to contemplate—that there wasn’t a point to anything around here. That all they had in this town was the yawning blackness.

  “You all don’t know how lucky you got it,” he said. “Catching his bitch of a mother, now that was hard work. Man’s work.”

  They also didn’t know something Derrel knew: that the Horse Lady had never killed a child.

  They’d stumbled upon that little girl in the basement of a man in town too decent to have done what the scars on her body suggested he did.

  So they blamed it on the Horse Lady. And hunted her.

  Now they got to hunt the Horse Boy. And so it went.

  In the meantime, Derrel was hunting a lady all his own.

  He had the gun in his car. He thought about Taryn, thought about how he had enough bullets to do them both, if it came to it—if the sun ever went well and truly down in this empty town and the yawning blackness got to be too much.

  Until then, there was the hunt.

  So he filed out of the kitchen with the other boys and went to work.

  Taryn rooted around in the dark, moving delicately so as not to wake her parents. She found a flashlight under the kitchen sink and scanned a small hoarder’s collection of used books until she found O’Connor. She smiled happily, grabbed the volume, and schlepped her way through the dark toward the carnival, where the lights had been put down. She felt their absence in the skyline, like the stars she knew were there, and took it on faith she was marching in the right direction.

  She started at the hills, their greens newspaper gray at night, then followed the veins of roots on the outside of the woods, before finding that hard scrabble road that scarred the ground, the small petrified houses that lined the way. She followed blacktop until it was gravel, until the landscape rolled and they were near the old mine that the carnival’s midway backed up against.

  She slid into the freakshow tent undetected, and stood before his cage again.

  She figured the show must have only just recently ended, as he was still in the cage.

  At least, that is what she hoped.

  He was standing, his back to her though the chiaroscuro of the dark created an effect that might have been misleading. It looked as though the corners of his back beneath his shoulders had little broken thumbs that wriggled in the dark, like the roots of mutilated wings. The thought made her dizzy—her eyes must have been playing tricks.

  He stood up on his toes, his knees almost bent inwards at what must have been double joints. Legs wide, his exposed backside plump and lovely, strong and dovetailing into a back cut through with slashes of raised keloid. His nakedness startled her and she cleared her throat.

  He spun around, made no grabs for modesty and smiled at her through the tortured landscape of his face.

  Once more, the young man shone through his eye.

  “I’ve got her,” she said. “Flannery.”

  “Excellent,” he said, pulled by excitement towards the bars. Then he paused, dipping his eye, and said, “I didn’t know you were coming back tonight.”

  “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she said dreamily, marching up to the bars. “You don’t mind…?”

  “No,” he said.

  “All right then. So how about that walk, like you promised.”

  “I can’t…”

  “But the show is over.”

  He bowed his head, delicate fingers curled around the bars, arms strong and unspooling from broad shoulders, the divots in his face emphasizing the concern in his eyes.

  “What don’t I understand?” she frowned, and that nervousness returned to her stomach.

  “It’s better for me to be in here. At least for tonight.”

  “What happens tonight?”

  He parted his lips to speak, then swallowed whatever it was.

  “I think it would be better if you came back tomorrow. I’ll read this and we can talk about it then.”

  She tilted her head. “And if I don’t? It’s just…I feel like you’re in trouble. That if I leave I won’t see you tomorrow. Am I wrong?”

  He nodded slowly, silently, then said quietly, “It’s just this thing, you know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “For being born. Something they say my mother did. So tonight, I have to pay. I don’t mind it anymore, but I don’t want you to be here when it happens.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Taryn said, tracing her fingers down a bar, feeling an apology bubble at her lips, when a rustling sound behind her snapped her out of her reverie.

  “You need to hide,” he said, the sudden clarity of his voice frightening. “Now.”

  She folded herself into the shadows of the corner as a figure approached.

  She recognized the tall elegance and even the smell of Carlotta, whose silhouette was an oil drop navigating wet shadow. She’d been drinking and swayed in the dark.

  “Eli?” she whispered, her voice dry. Quiet. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  The rattling of keys and the cage was open. He stepped out, hunched over to stand her height. Without the hunch, he would have towered over her.

&
nbsp; She pulled his head gently towards her lips and kissed his forehead, her hands visibly trembling. “Remember to run for the promised lands,” she said. “They just want a chase, they’re not looking for a fight. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he whispered.

  “Promise. For your mother.”

  “I promise.”

  All the while, the faint growl of diesel had been rising beyond the thin walls of the tent, like the bilious gurgle of demons, and rising above that was some kind of shouting. Hysterical, hyena cries. Taryn’s eyes widened, as the hostile laughter became closer. Footsteps rattled the midway alleys outside and then they were in the room, young men in jeans and boots, the smell of liquor and sweat thick in the air. One ran a crowbar over the bars of the cage, while the other closed his grip over Eli’s throat.

  And then a third appeared in the doorframe, his belt wrapped around his fist, and when he raised it in the air Taryn screamed.

  “Stop!”

  Propelled by a nervous energy she didn’t know what to do with. She rushed forward, and the first man let go of Eli’s neck while the one in the door lowered his fist. He stepped forward, and the little bit of light in the room caught his face. The cruelty in his eyes. He tilted his head, his face a horror show of contempt.

  “Taryn?” Derrel said slowly. “What are you doing in here?”

  She stood defiant as he raked his eyes over her body. She’d left her sandals in the shadows behind her and now stood barefoot in a sundress that rode up her legs, dirt and dust drizzling her skin like sugar. His throat bobbed and he sighed a little.

  “You won’t touch me…but you’ll spend the night with the Horse Boy?” he whispered. He didn’t ask so much as declare, and she felt words forming at her lips when he pulled a gun from the back of his pants. Carlotta gasped and Taryn felt the words in her throat mutate into a scream.

  Then he fired.

  Flashbang.

  Eli shoved Derrel’s hand away, the bullet buried itself in the ceiling, and Derrel stumbled back.

  One of the other boys rushed Eli, but he kicked him in the throat with his hooved foot and the boy fell to the ground, thick spittle sputtering from his lips, black with blood. The other boy only stared.