Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  She was with him throughout the day. With every shadow that fell across his person, he felt her gaze on him. With every touch—of a comb, of a chair, of a doorknob—he felt the cool balm of her flesh against his. When he drank from a can from the vending machine, he tasted, just beyond the sparkle of carbonation, the sweetness of her breasts.

  When he got off work, he didn’t go home.

  He went straight to the circus.

  ««—»»

  “Is she a freak of nature? Is she the next stage of evolution?” The barker grinned and winked. Imagine if she was your mother…or your girlfriend.”

  Ramsey stayed at the back of the tent, but still the barker’s gaze seemed to find him. Those black eyes lingered on his as the barker continued his patter.

  “She is everything you’ve dreamed of,” he said, pausing to twirl one end of his mustache, “And then some…”

  Ramsey slipped back outside and waited behind the tent, hoping that tonight, he’d be able to talk to her. He heard the clapping from Yvette’s last show of the night, and the burbling murmur of the men filing out and back to the main venues of the circus. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Got a thing for our little Yvette, do ya?” The barker’s teeth gleamed against the growing gloom of night.

  “She took care of you last night, don’t you think that’s enough?”

  Ramsey started, and his captor laughed.

  “You think I don’t know everything that goes on in her tent? I can’t afford to let anything happen to my star attraction.”

  With that, the barker pushed him forward, steering him towards her tent. “I let her take care of her needs. But don’t get the wrong idea.”

  The man gripped him by both arms and stuck a reddened, wrinkling face close to his own. “She doesn’t need you.”

  They pushed through the loose canvas and Ramsey entered the tent of the three-breasted woman for the second time. She had removed the costume from her performance and sat, as if waiting for him, naked on her cot.

  The barker shoved him forward, and Ramsey fell to his knees at her feet.

  He looked up at her, hoping for a sign. Hoping for a word. Something. “Are you okay?” he asked for the third time that day.

  She twisted her lips up, showing her teeth in a hungry grin. And hissed.

  He jumped back, and looked at the barker. “What did you do to her?”

  The barker laughed, and patted his head like a dog.

  “Nothing, I assure you. The question is, what did you do to her?”

  She stood slowly, moving toward them in a feral crouch.

  “Nothing,” Ramsey cried, backpedaling until his shoulders were hemmed in by the barker’s thighs. The woman moved closer, green eyes glowing in the fading light. He was suddenly reminded of the glare of the lioness in the Big Top’s animal taming act.

  “I’d say you two did a little business last night,” the barker laughed, seemingly unconcerned by the strange behavior of his attraction. “I’d say you took advantage of the poor girl.”

  “I didn’t,” Ramsey protested. “I came here to help her and she, she…”

  “She forced you into her bed, did she?”

  “Not forced,” Ramsey said.

  “Hmmm.”

  Yvette hissed again and launched herself at Ramsey, nails raking at his face. He felt her breath an inch away, hot against his neck. He threw his arms up to protect himself from her attack and heard something snap in the air next to his ear. The crack of a whip.

  The barker was holding a long strap, and Yvette retreated to the bed.

  “What the…”

  “Can it,” the barker said, dropping his exaggerated crowd-pleasing demeanor. He suddenly sounded like a tired cab driver. “You had to see and now you have. She’s done with you. She only uses men once and if you’re lucky…she doesn’t touch you again.”

  “How did you make her this way; what have you done to her?” Ramsey protested. The barker just shook his head.

  “We didn’t make her any way, and we did nothing to her. She came to us when she was just a girl. We give her a home and food and a way to find mates. We take her away before anyone asks too many questions. And if you did what she wanted last night, my guess is, at our next town we’ll be billing her as the four-breasted woman.”

  On the bed, Yvette began to growl.

  “Come on, you’d better not stay here anymore.”

  Ramsey backed away from the cot, his eyes drawn to the three heavy teats hanging from the woman’s torso.

  When they got outside, Ramsey pulled the barker to a stop before they reached the midway.

  “What did you mean about her becoming a four-breasted woman?”

  The barker grinned.

  “When she mates, and conceives, she grows a new tit. I’ve seen her with as many as eight! A few weeks ago, she was as flat as a boy—we had no freak show at all. Thank god for that kid in Albany. You’d be surprised at how hard it is to find her a guy that sticks around for a night. They all come out to see the freak, but do you think any of them want her? ’Course, some of them want her a little too much and wear out their welcome with her…then I’ve got to clean up and we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”

  He stared knowingly at Ramsey, who shivered at the implication.

  “She has kids?” he asked, after a moment.

  “Kids, litters… call ’em what you want.”

  The barker pushed him towards a mob of people congregating around a juggler in green leotards and a red jester’s cap outside the Big Top.

  “But… where are they? What happened to them?”

  “Where do you think we get the tightrope walkers and animal trainers? Not to mention all those twisted tots for the formaldehyde jars of the freak show display.”

  With a slap on the back and a throaty laugh, the barker suddenly left him, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Laughter and screams rang out all around him, as children ran past with sticky pink cotton candy, parents chasing after them. By the Big Top, teenage girls giggled in groups and flaunted their midriffs for the boys slouching against the painted canvas. Ramsey stood lost in the middle of it all.

  His heart ached to go back, to ask her if it was really true. Would he be a father? His belly froze at the thought. He wasn’t ready. He’d never meant… After a moment, he found himself swept along with the crowd, moving towards the fairground exit. It was closing time.

  He could still taste the ghost of the velvet smooth crush of her skin against his lips. The smell of lilac in her hair. But as he moved away from her tent, he could also hear the angry snarl of her teeth at his neck.

  There was a lump in his throat that felt thicker than all the lumps of caramel the vendors were selling at the fairground gates. Ramsey let the crowd carry him towards home. He brushed a finger softly across his lips and didn’t look back.

  — | — | —

  AFTER THE FIFTH STEP

  After the fifth step, it was mundane.

  Ah…but getting to the fifth step. That was the trick. That was what it was all about. The crowds below, they thought the tough part was in the center, once the safety net was removed. “Oh, such danger,” the ringmaster would cry. “Such daring-do.”

  Such malarky, Reind thought. Once you were moving, in the groove, you didn’t need a net. The difficult part was in placing one step in front of the other when leaving behind the wooden platform. The first step was like a switch between stepping on sandpaper and high-gloss ice—with a slight movement, his foot left behind the immobile, grainy plywood to slip down a quivering, thin decline of twined, worn fibers. It was stepping through the door from plane cargo bay to open, unparachuted air. That step was the first trick. And the second, bringing your anchor with you.

  The hardest was the step after the first. That’s where you gained or lost your balance. That’s where it became a walk or a fall. After the second step, there was no going back. You didn’t turn around on the highwire.


  The third step was a beginning. The first complete motion forward on a new course. The fourth step was an affirmation.

  After the fifth step, it was just walking.

  ««—»»

  Reind put his first foot down on the tightrope and felt the horsehair-thin fibers catch on the Lycra net of his tights. Comforting feeling, that. While an unpracticed person would simply feel his foot slip down on a waving thread of uncertainty, Reind could feel his sole wrap and grip on the tightly-wound fibers of the rope. It wasn’t like stepping on air. It was solid to him. Different than earth, maybe, but solid. If you were in tune.

  Maybe that was the best simile. Walking the tightrope was like performing a violin solo. Long, elegant strokes across thin strands of fiber.

  Of course, if you flubbed a note on a fiddle, you didn’t end up so much dog food in front of an audience of hundreds. Usually. He thought of a spider, stepping without thought across skeins and splinters of web.

  Tarantula, sang a dirge in his mind from a long-ago album by This Mortal Coil. That’s what he tread across. This Mortal Coil. A skein of filigree and shadow. The web of a “Tarantula.” He smiled and hummed.

  The second step fell true. He sighed, an invisible breath of success. The audience didn’t know the peril of those first two steps. It was the job of the ringmaster to keep them from focusing on that while the tightrope walker gained his composure and rhythm.

  Down there, past the round red-and-yellow painted elephant step in the second ring. That’s where the megaphone man made his plays. That’s where the man with the handlebar mustache barked his exaggerated cries of, “Can you believe it, he’s about to step out on the wire without a net beneath him…quiet ladies and gentlemen, this is very dangerous…”

  That was exactly when Reind didn’t care anymore. That’s where the danger became safe. Sleight of hand and misdirection were the calling cards of the circus.

  After the first few steps, he was home free. The adjustment zone at the intro; that’s where the tough stuff was. It was the job of the ringmaster to keep the audience focused on the center and the false bravado, where it was easy.

  The third step was good, and Reind’s heart slowed.

  Oh yes. Even after all these years of walking, his heart still kicked with a mule’s petulant anger when he put that first toe to the wire. His mind may have been stubborn, but his body wasn’t stupid. He knew that every walk could be his last.

  But with step four, he knew that this was just another day. His bearings found, Reind moved steadily across the rope, one foot in front of the other, each step bearing down lower on the ever-so-slightly sloping rope, until he reached the center, and the object of the ringmaster’s over-exaggerated cries of excitement. Once he started that upward incline on the far side of center (over the spot where there was no net) it was like walking up a hill. From the ground, it actually looked fairly level. But it wasn’t, not quite. The second half of the walk was work, but it was easy. He began to think of Melienda, the night before. The way her fringed gold lame top had slipped from his fingers to the floor, a bouquet of tinsel. The way she’d shown him how a girl could really appreciate the controlled reflexes of a tightrope walker. She didn’t care if his mother was the “three-breasted woman” of the freak show tent.

  She loved his surety of self. She loved his lips for their deceiving softness.

  He loved her eyes for their kaleidoscopic play of spark and dark and mystery. He loved her dimples for their expressive blushes.

  God, he hoped she didn’t tell. This was a dangerous game. All of their other meetings had been during the break between their acts. They’d seen each other on the sly for weeks, but never had a night date before. When he slipped back into his tent to face Erin after midnight, he’d had to make up an excuse about helping Raymond with a faulty rope pulley. She’d yawned and shrugged, and turned away back to sleep. Did she suspect?

  It was one thing for a man of the circus to love a woman of the same. It was another for a man of the circus to cheat on a woman of the circus with a woman of the same. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone talked to the wrong someone else. No matter how careful he was, tongues would wag. A circus was a family, and like any family, nothing stayed secret for very long.

  Erin, Reind’s wife, was a ticket-taker at the front gate.

  She had no “talents,” but she’d loved the smell of the damp bales of hay and the heat of popcorn in the air and the sticky promises that pink cotton candy gave and the front gate cries of, “Step right up ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Barnett & Staley’s Amazing, Mysterious, Phantasmagorical, Traveling Circus. Hear the mighty trumpet of the elephants and the happy horns of the clowns. Taste the taffy of our apples and caramel of our corn. Twist your body in the house of illusions. And for the truly terrifying, visit our freak show. Come and see the frightening Mr. Lee. Dare to meet the stare of Felina of the Five Eyes!”

  That greeted the guests a dozen times a day in every town. They stepped past the ticket-taker girls and oohed and ahhed at the brightly colored, massive tents, at the fire engine red signs in the shape of giant hands that pointed this way and that, noting in daisy yellow script: “This way to the Freak Show. See the three-breasted woman! Hear the tiny voice of the Midget Man!” And another: “This way to the Center Ring, the site of the Show of Shows.”

  The people streamed inside the tent to see what they could never see at home. Sometimes, to breathe sighs of relief that they did not have such freakishness at home. But mostly to lose themselves in the strangeness and warped talent of it all. The circus was ultimately about the people who came to see it. It reflected them. And the people wanted to taste the salt of the corn and the sugar of the cotton and live the vicarious danger of a man on a tightrope and a woman in a skimpy top sticking her head inside the deadly lion’s mouth. They wouldn’t do it themselves, mind you. But somehow, seeing another person tread the wire or brave the teeth gave them satisfaction in their own lives. That was what Reind did… he gave satisfaction. He made life worth living for hundreds of folks every day.

  Erin had been one of those people, once. She’d come to see him walk, and hung around after the show to talk. She’d ended up in his bed. She’d asked if he minded, the next morning. How could he have minded? She stayed with him through the next town, helping out as they struck the tents and pulled up the pitons and rewound the ropes. She’d shown up in a “God Left Me for Another Man” T-shirt on the third day with a backpack on her shoulder blades and said, “I hope you’ve got room in your bunk in Cincinnati,” because that’s where they were going. He’d said sure. Aside from the occasional fleas he ended up sharing it with (thanks to the lions), he’d always give up space for a girl like Erin.

  Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago… she’d been in his bed at the end of every show, challenging him to walk a different thin rope than the one he slid across in the air. This tightrope was wrapped in a scrim of emotion… and she was weaving it as they went. He was trapped before they left Ohio.

  She began to earn her keep at the ticket-takers’ booths.

  “I’ll not have you carry me,” she said, on the day that she applied for the job. It’s not like she had a lot of competition. Most of the people who traveled with the circus had talents and skills to show off. Or oddities. All Erin had were her looks and a lover. And free time on her hands.

  So she worked the booth.

  Reind worked a tent.

  They made the circus money, and moved from town to town.

  Until, in Peotone, Illinois, Reind met a girl with dark, curly locks that stretched down to tease at the creamy cleft between her purple crop top and the low-slung faded denim of her jeans. And he slept with her in the tall grass just beyond the recently-mowed parking lot. And he found that there was more than a wire, and a ticket-taker, and a suitcase to life. At least, that’s what he thought, as her heavy, forceful tongue invaded his lips.

  Reind thought he could
quit the circus for Melienda, if that’s what she wanted. He’d never thought that way when he met Erin. But for now, at least, he wouldn’t have to consider it. Melienda had joined Barnett & Staley’s Circus a few months before. She was the newest member of the family and was working in the Big Tent, ushering the animals and clowns and kids on and off the floor. Her name proved she didn’t know how to spell, but she knew a whole lot else. In particular, she knew what made him feel real good. He’d found that out in between shows while Erin was still out at the front gate selling $3.75 tickets.

  “Will you see me again?” she asked after, zipping up her jeans across bare pale flesh at eye level with him as he lounged on her wide cot.

  “Yes,” he smiled. “I’ll do more than see you!”

  Reind reached the middle of the rope walk and smiled, both at his memories of Melienda and his hearing… the barker was bragging of how this was “the most dangerous fifteen feet ever attempted by man…a twenty-five-foot high walk with no net across the deadly center floor of a Big Top.” He could hear the audience take in a collective breath. Oooh. Ahhhhh.

  His mind was far from the plodding step of toes to rope. His mind was on the deep, brown eyes and wide, pink lips of Melienda. And on what they might do for him tomorrow.

  He almost didn’t even hear the ear-crushing applause when he stepped up on the board on the other side and turned to bow to his audience, perfunctorily, before climbing down the ladder as a lion tamer came running across the dusty dirt floor to take his place in the public’s eye. His private eye had other concerns.

  Reind feigned sleep when Erin came in. He couldn’t face her, tonight. He was a terrible liar. And, truth be told, despite his feats on the tightrope, a coward. He lay in bed with his eyes locked shut, wondering if he could convince Melienda to stay in Springfield with him. The circus could pack itself up and hit the road, and when it arrived in St. Louis, it would just be short one tightrope walker and one glitter girl. They could hitch onto another circus easily enough… He didn’t really believe the last part, and he doubted Melienda would either; she’d just finally ended a job search. How many traveling bands of multitalented gypsies were there in middle America? And how many needed performers?