“Sad birds,” Tex corrected.
“Not birds at all,” said the Flabberghast. “But”—he bowed to Granny Two-Shoes—“I am impressed.”
Nothing more was said on the subject. The Flabberghast unfurled his hands in a herding gesture and once more they all started moving along the gray groove. Tex and Diodiance marched at the vanguard, taking inventory of their pockets, swapping out what they didn’t want with each other. PayDay candy bars for watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers, bullet casings for smooth pebbles, bones for crayons. A happy breeze riffled their hair like a mother’s fingers, conveying sunshine and safety and the promise of joyful rest. Gone too soon.
The Flabberghast, taking up the rear, sniffed for traces of that breeze when it departed. He frowned at what lingered.
Equidistant between them, Granny Two-Shoes rode Sheepdog Sal at a pleasant trot. She didn’t bother listening in on Tex’s and Diodiance’s conversation, which she generally considered comfortable white noise to stimulate her own ruminations. She didn’t look over her shoulder to see what shenanigans the Flabberghast got up to; he had his own agenda, and it was not hers. But she did check the twin holsters she wore beneath her nightgown. One for her switchblade. One for Beatrice’s slingshot. She was ready for anything.
* * *
Rosie Rightly led Beatrice away from the burning buildings. They passed a dusty little market square with tattered awnings over abandoned booths that read, “tender leonard’s jokes and gags!” and “solomon sot’s society of carefree kiddies!” and “frabjous the fool’s popular puppets!”
“Where is everyone?”
Rosie Rightly shrugged. “Those’re the clowns that did their job. Made the kids laugh, helped ’em move on. When the kids moved on, so did they. That’s why the Big Bah-Ha’s here—’cause it’s never funny when a kid dies. We have to learn to laugh again, before we can go through…to whatever’s next.”
“That’s what all the clowns are for?” asked Beatrice.
Rosie Rightly nodded. “That’s what they were for, way back before I got here. I think the Big Bah-Ha was different then. But that’s done with. The Gray Harlequin says we’re all clowns now.”
Beatrice tugged one of her braids. One of her ribbons was missing, and another had gone all loosey-goosey. The thought of losing another ribbon gave her a sick jolt of panic. She tightened it fiercely. The panic receded.
“Were you always a clown, Rosie?”
“No,” Rosie Rightly sighed. “I just…never learned to laugh.” She touched her painted face.
“Oh.”
Rosie Rightly started skipping. Her flounces flounced. Her sequins flashed. Everything about her was gleeful with cheer, except her round blue eyes. She pointed at the dusty market with glittering fingernails.
“I know it looks all sad and dusty and stuff. But really it’s GREAT! It means that if we do our jobs, then some day, we can go back to the mirror. Take a look at ourselves again. Tell ourselves, we brought joy to the joyless. We deserve the next world, too. And this time, this time, we’ll be able to meet our own eyes without flinching. We’ll know we’re worthy. Like Solly Sot, and Frabjoojooface, and Lenny, and Sudsy Aimee, and Snotty Sue. They did it. They learned to see themselves as something other than dead. They got through. I will too. Someday.”
Beatrice nodded, frowning. “Is that hard? Seein’ yourself?”
“It’s the hardest. You look in the mirror the first time, and all you see—” Rosie Rightly gulped. “But the Gray Harlequin says…” Here she stopped, shook herself. Poked Beatrice in the ribs. “Hey. Bee-Bee. You think I’m funny? You do, right? You think I’m the funniest?”
Beatrice patted her gloved hand, avoiding the luminous wound on her wrist. “Keep tryin’, Rosie.”
Rosie Rightly hunched her shoulders. They were just coming upon a section of Chuckle City where a colossal tent loomed larger than any three of the burning tenements put together. The tent’s canvas was striped red and white like the barber’s pole Beatrice had seen in her first moments of the Big Bah-Ha. Red and white. Blood and bone. Near the curtained-off entrance, a twinkling Ferris wheel turned and turned into eternity.
“That’s the Big Top,” Rosie Rightly whispered. Her expression said she wanted to scurry by, but her feet dragged to a standstill. “The tramps live there. They ride tigers and swing from wires.” A shiver wracked her. Beatrice could see the raised bumps beneath her painted flesh.
“When you’re inside the Big Top and you look up, all you see are spiderwebs. The Eleven Lovely Emilies spin them, web on web. The Emilies all have beautiful red hair, like yours.” Rosie Rightly’s eyes lingered on Beatrice’s hair. “And they have red eyes like hourglasses, and four arms and four legs apiece. They spin nets to catch the tramps should they chance to tumble from their wires. Whenever a tramp falls, the Eleven Lovely Emilies can eat. Their red tongues go all the way down to here!” Rosie Rightly touched her tummy.
Like Dad’s dark ladygods, Beatrice thought, with their many limbs, and scarlet mouths, and the way they could eat whole armies.
Beatrice did not want to see the Emilies. Not without Dad at her side to explain them. Sure, in legends the ladygods could be brought to compassion, to show a mercy as miraculously ardent as their appetites. But no mercy remained here in the Big Bah-Ha, she thought, else Chuckle City would long since have been razed to dust.
“Do you want to see them?” Rosie asked, as if afraid of the answer.
Whatever Dad’s old ’cyclopedia used to say, these Eleven Lovely Emilies could only be hideous. If Beatrice saw them, she knew her heart would break. She tightened her ribbon again.
“I want to see the Gray Harlequin,” she said.
Rosie Rightly began to bounce on the balls of her feet. “We could do that, or…Or! Or! Or!”
“Or?”
“Instead of seeing the G-gray Harlequin, we could go to the petting zoo!”
Beatrice vaguely remembered petting zoos from the olden days. Sad sheep and decrepit llamas, dirty chickens running underfoot, rabbits in cages, bristly pigs setting the stable a-snore, and the whole place smelling earthy and unsavory. But the animals were pretty neat-o. They ate from the palm of your hand.
“Sometimes,” Rosie Rightly nattered on, “the Gacy Boys go big game hunting out beyond Chuckle City. They bag prizes to bring back—and that’s the petting zoo.”
Beatrice did not remind Rosie Rightly of her first assertion—that nothing lived in the Big Bah-Ha outside Chuckle City. No place but here. But if the Gacy Boys could fly beyond these walls, she wondered if she might scale them. Was there a back door? If she ran free, would the Gacy Boys bag her next, and bring her back to put in their petting zoo, and feed her to the beasts trapped there?
“At night, in the arena under the Big Top, the Gray Harlequin will pit one of the petting zoo against his prize tigers. Or sometimes against one of us! It’s stu-stupendous! Action-packed! Irresistible. Wanna see?”
“No,” said Beatrice, very firmly. “I don’t like fights.”
“You don’t like anything!”
Back with her Barka Gang, Beatrice had fought several battles against the Rubberbaby Gang and Aunt Oolalune. The skirmishes were usually quick and dirty. The weapons were grab-what-you-can. Sticks, stones, switchblades, slingshots. Rules were generally, “First blood ends the fight / Whoever’s not bleeding wins.” But of course, first blood had a tendency to enrage and incite. Often it was followed by second blood, and third blood, until there was blood everywhere, and the Tall Ones were slavering at the gravy yard gates in the hopes that their next meal succumbed to death sooner than the slaprash scything it down.
How could any such rule as “first blood” apply here, where nothing bled? You could be burned, smushed, and ripped apart, but you’d still go on and on. Like the fires, and the balloon aminals, and Rosie Rightly’s grin. Horrors without end.
“I wanna see the Gray Harlequin,” said Beatrice grimly.
“All riii-iiight.” Rosi
e Rightly drooped. “If you’re sure.”
“Sure as spit means a promise.”
“It’s just…”
“What?”
“You’re gonna have to look in the mirror before he’ll meet you, and I just don’t think you’re ready, I really don’t.” Rosie Rightly’s grin bent upsy-daisy of itself. “You don’t want to—to—get stuck here, Bee-Bee. Like me. And the rest. You still have time. You might learn how to laugh again before you go and look.” She canted her pink-gloved hands helplessly. “Maybe I could try a cartwheel? I usually fall. Bam! Right on my face. Maybe you’ll think that’s funny?”
Beatrice shook her head. “I’m sorry, Rosie. I know this ain’t my territory. I know I’m new and don’t have all the rules down straight. But I guess I’m used to dealin’ with leaders. You say the Gray Harlequin runs things? He’s the one I gotta see. ’Cause I ain’t puttin’ on no red nose and sweatin’ blood for laughs. There has to be another way outta here.” She shrugged. “I’ll find it. I’m good at that.”
“Maybe you were before,” Rosie Rightly whispered.
Beatrice nudged her, even tried a wink. “Hey,” she said. “I brought myself along with me when I died, didn’t I? That’s the sum of somethin’.”
But Rosie Rightly would not be comforted.
* * *
Tex sniffed the air as they slipped beneath the portcullis. “Smells like bad eggs.”
“Sulfur,” the Flabberghast said absently. “And brimstone. So picturesque.”
Diodiance stood en pointe in her tennis shoes. Widened her nostrils. Nodded agreement. “Reminds me of our Rotten Egg War. Who won that one again?”
“Aunt Oolalune. But we got her back the next week at the Battle of the Baseball Diamond. Sent her howlin’ back to her side of town. Remember—”
Diodiance shushed him. Pointed. “What’re those?”
Granny Two-Shoes petted Sheepdog Sal. Balloons, she thought through her stroking hands. Bad balloons.
Seven sharp barks, staccato, conveyed the message to their comrades.
“Balloons?” was all Tex got out before the first one dove upon them.
“Flee!” cried the Flabberghast. “I will hold them off!”
Springing at the yawning purple maw that snapped with black piranha teeth, the Flabberghast raked its bulbous sides with his thin white hands. The balloon whipped around and pounced at his back, squeaking like a tricycle left too long out in the rain. Two more balloons joined it: one tiger-striped with the long neck of an ostrich, one with the face of a bear and the body of a snake.
Then—POP!
Tex had turned out his pockets of rocks and pointy bullet casings and began to bang that artillery—pop-pop-whap!—right into the polychromatic fray. Beatrice used to say how she bet Tex’d been a Junior League pitcher back in the olden days. He couldn’t rightly know either way, but ever since the world ended, his aim had just improved.
Diodiance unstrapped the thornstick from the loop on her belt, and—BLAM! WHAP! POP!—laid about her. Even Granny Two-Shoes jumped perch, snatching the switchblade from its sheath to thrust it up into the air. WHAP! POP! KERBLOOEY! Sheepdog Sal rose to her hind legs, lunging and gnashing with far greater gusto than any measly thin-skinned balloon beast. Pop! Pop! Wheeeeeeeze! went the whistling things as they rocketed away, deflating as they died.
Suddenly the air was still again. Gray and still. The cobblestones of Chuckle City were littered with rainbow skins. Diodiance whooped out the Barka Gang’s war cry and chanted, “Tex! Tex! Our boy’s the best! Fastest arm in the whole Midwest!”
Leaping up and down Main Street in those great gazelle arcs she’d learned in ballet, Diodiance hollered, “Jeté! Jeté! Tour jeté!” and landed back in front of them with a mighty ululation. Tex received her clap on the back with a sweaty grin, picking up his stones and bullet casings and pocketing them again. He caught Granny’s eye, who returned his gaze with blazing blue solemnity, and said, “Thanks for the warning, Granny Two-Shoes.”
Granny tugged at his camo cutoffs, shrugged, smiled. Her baby teeth were white as Diodiance’s tyranny and fluoride toothpaste could make them, except for the iron gray one in the middle. Dead at the root, Beatrice had said. The Rubberbabies did that, that time they took her for their slave.
“Hey!” Diodiance stopped dancing. “Where’s the Flabberghast anyway?”
“Who cares?” Tex muttered.
Granny Two-Shoes pointed down a street, where the Flabberghast crouched near a tiny ambulance. Balloon skins hung all about his person, making motley of his peacock coat. He appeared to be prodding something with his long fingers, which the Barka Gang, joining him, saw to be the painted head of a small clown. The rest of its body was crushed to death under the ambulance.
“Are you hopin’ the head’ll pop off?” Tex stiffened to kick him. “Gettin’ hungry, are you?”
“This is not a body. Not really. And I do not eat souls. It is forbidden.”
The Tall One almost sounded regretful. He tugged off his lawn cravat and used it to scrub the dead clown’s small face. Off came the ash. Off came the paint. Off came the singed red nose, the curly wig. The child was pale and bald, with sunken eyes the same gray as the sky. As everything.
“Leukemia,” the Flabberghast said. “From long before the slaprash. Here, you see? The ravages of her treatment? She’s been in the Big Bah-Ha awhile. It must have been a harsh death to keep her here so long, and then when the Gray Harlequin came, she found herself fixed. Like the rest of them. Insects on his corkboard. Poor little butterfly.”
His voice had dropped like he was talking to himself, but the Barkas leaned in, paying close attention. “Those underground said the situation here was dire, but the others did not heed their voices. They mocked me when I paced before the gates and worried. They called my frowns the best jest yet. But I was right to come when I did—no matter how questionable my methods.”
Granny Two-Shoes knelt beside him and closed the clown’s gray eyes. The Flabberghast smiled at her softly, teeth sparkling.
“You are a good girl, Granny Two-Shoes,” he said. “Would that you were a Tall One, and I could stay your friend forever.”
“Seems to me,” Tex grunted, “the dead shouldn’t have to die twice. Not like this—no death rite, no shrine, no gang to go and sing her final lullaby. It just seems wrong.”
Diodiance scowled. “Queen B’d call this whole darn place ice cream.”
Granny looked up sharply. Sheepdog Sal barked twice. Diodiance corrected herself. “Sorry. I mean obscene.”
“Beatrice would be perfectly correct.”
The Flabberghast stood up. The Tall One had never seemed so tall. The Barkas each thought, but did not say aloud, that the sky of the Big Bah-Ha might crack if he jumped.
“What happens when a child dies?” he asked them.
“Well, Flabby, you go and eat ’em.”
Diodiance jabbed Tex in the ribs. “Tex, that’s rude. He’s tryin’ to help us.”
“We’re here to help him, you mean!”
The Flabberghast calmed her with a wave of his white hand. “Peace, Miss Diodiance. That is indeed what we do. We eat the bones. But what manner of being, one might ask, eats what’s left when the bones are gone? What kind of carrion monster eats the haeccitas? The thisness of being? The soul?” He paused, and into his pause came the rushing of a hundred wings. Behind his slender shoulders a shadow moved across the sky, too fast and too low for a cloud.
“Gacy Boys,” he noted. Then, “How are your scabs, children?”
“Still runny,” said Diodiance. “Startin’ to scratch some at the edges. Queen B says that means healin’s a-comin’ close up, makin’ you itch.”
The Flabberghast nodded. “There is still time. But not much.” He pointed to the dead clown on the ground. “The Gacy Boys will try to take this little soul away and bring it where it will be devoured and lost to all memory. Will you let this happen?”
“No!” cried Tex and Dio
diance as one. Sheepdog Sal growled. Granny Two-Shoes unsheathed her switchblade again.
“Then stand,” urged the Flabberghast as gray wings beat around them. “Let us drive these boybirds back to the sky and pursue where they flee. This is the beginning of the end.”
* * *
In a field at the edge of Chuckle City, two massive elephants danced. Rampant, they stood on the great columns of their hind legs, their forelegs rearing to create the crest of an archway. Two opposite pairs of flat feet pressed together, without a seam in the stone to show where one elephant ended and the other began. Ears flared like frozen wings. Tails neither hung straight down nor jerked erect, but seemed caught in a jaunty swish. Their long trunks met, entwining skyward like a single great tree. The inner curves of their hulking bodies supported a mirror.
Had it lain flat, Beatrice might have mistaken the mirror for a lake. Warped and rippled, smoky with age and fissures, the vast glass reflected nothing that stood at any distance from it.
“Where is the Gray Harlequin?” asked Beatrice. “Where are the Gacy Boys?”
Rosie Rightly clung to her elbow. “I don’t know, Bee-Bee. He’s always near here. He lives just outside the arch.”
Involuntarily, Beatrice remembered someone else who lived just outside a great stone arch. She would have shuddered, but the dread inside her could not make her flesh creep or her hair stand on end. I’m not really flesh anymore, she thought. My hair is just the memory of my hair.
“I never liked it here,” Rosie said, teeth chattering.
Beatrice wanted to tell Rosie that she was not really cold; she would never be cold again, but she held her tongue. My memory of a tongue, she corrected herself.
“I can’t—I can’t go with you. I don’t want to use up my last chance. I’m not ready! I’m not happy yet.”
“Hush, it’s all right.” Beatrice spoke in the voice she’d used whenever Granny Two-Shoes woke her up with a midnight crying jag. Granny did not wake often, but when she did, it was bad. She cried like she was the last little girl left alive in the whole wide world. “It’s all right. I can go by myself.”
Bone Swans: Stories Page 27
