Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  He rolled on his side as Erin kicked her shoes into her trunk with two muted thuds, and slipped off her heavy, gold-lined, red jacket, draping it over a folding chair with a hollow clang of metal beads meeting metal back. As she did every night. He heard her jewelry hit the pressboard of her thin shelving unit. She insisted on keeping one light piece of furniture in their portable “home.”

  She slipped beside him under the covers, cool silk brushing his thigh. Reind could feel her eyes burrowing into his neck.

  “You wanna talk about it?” she said finally. He didn’t stir.

  “Yeah, didn’t think so,” she whispered.

  They both lay there, faces to the canvas ceiling, each knowing the other was awake, as somewhere a clock ticked through the hour, click-stop, click-stop, click-stop, click-stop, click…

  When Reind woke up, Erin was already gone. Part of him was relieved, but another was frightened. What did she know? What would she say, when he finally came clean? He shook away the visions of her screaming and beating at his chest with clenched fists. He dressed quickly, and went out to meet the crowds. He had a show to do.

  He passed his mother, Yvette, “The Three-Breasted Woman” outside of the freak show tent. Her arms were crossed over the objects of her attraction, and she shook her head at him and tsked.

  “Behave,” was all she said— though that was a volume for her—and vanished behind the flap of canvas.

  Great, Reind thought. Did everyone already know?

  The first step was harder than usual.

  The second, almost impossible.

  He couldn’t focus. He kept hearing Erin ask in the darkness, “You wanna talk about it?”

  She knew.

  She knew, damnit. Maybe his mother did too! Shit, maybe the whole goddamned circus knew. But how? It hadn’t been that long. And they’d been careful…Or was he just being paranoid?

  He could feel a change in texture to the rope beneath his foot at step three, but didn’t look down. When you were on the wire, you didn’t turn back, and you didn’t look down.

  But then he felt it again. His foot seemed to slide, just a bit.

  Reind didn’t move his head, but his eyes slid down, staring at the event horizon of the long rope below him. He saw the cause of the disturbance. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his infidelity when climbing the ladder and starting out across the rope by rote, he couldn’t have missed it.

  Someone had wound strands of golden tinsel every few inches, all down the length of rope.

  Cute, he thought, and refocused his gaze. Irritating, but not dangerous. He was already past step five and the rest of the way was just a walk in the park, really. He and Rafe, the tentmaster, would be having a long talk when he got down for this little stunt. You don’t mess with a guy’s tightrope to “pretty it up” without telling him!

  Down on the main floor, the ringmaster was just winding up, getting into his act.

  “Shh, ladies and gentlemen, be very quiet now,” the man in the red- and white-striped suit intoned, holding a finger to his lips. “He is coming up to the most dangerous part. A walk of intense peril. The most dangerous fifteen feet ever attempted by man… Look as he steps out over the ground fifty feet below… without a net!”

  Reind hardly smiled at those familiar words. Old hat. He’d heard them too many times. He stepped, slipped a little again on tinsel, stepped again and stepped…

  “Shit,” he hissed. Something bit into his foot. He hurriedly stepped again and almost fell.

  The rope felt as if it had disappeared and he was treading on a razor. The thin fabric covering the soles of his feet barely shielded them from the rope, allowing him to feel the texture of the strands beneath him. And right now, all he was feeling was pain and a growing heat down the center of his feet.

  His arms struck out and waved for balance as his walk slowed, and the crowd took in its breath with a perceptible gasp. The whole world seemed to creak to a slow motion crawl.

  He stepped again, and this time, cried out.

  And again. The pain was growing, but Reind could not go back. He could not stop. On the wire, there was only going forward, or going down.

  Reind looked down, afraid of losing his focus completely, but unable to stop himself from seeing what had been done to his rope.

  His rope had been taken away.

  Across the fifteen-foot gap above where the nets were withdrawn—the “dangerous” part of his walk—a single, heavy steel wire extended. He had stepped, without seeing, from thick rope onto thin, slicing wire. Ahead, where the protective nets again began below, the wire rejoined the treadable thickness of rope.

  He would not be safe until he’d truly “walked the wire.”

  Tears were already slipping down his cheeks from the pain, but he would not, could not stop. To stop now would mean death. Or at the very least, a broken back.

  Another step, and the skin of his feet was separating, slipping down in a wet, bloody kiss around the wire. He lifted his right foot, feeling the skin sucking at the steel as he pulled it up and away, only to place it down again.

  He screamed.

  And stepped.

  Cried, “Oh my god, my god.”

  And stepped.

  The audience was aware that something wasn’t right, and the background noise grew in volume as people pointed and chattered and a thousand voices whispered, “Oh dear, oh my.”

  He could feel the web between the second and third toes of his left foot give way with a painful tear and he nearly fell again, wobbling off balance, arms akimbo, waving from side to side but still his legs not stopping, not slowing, no. He put his right foot down, bloody, shredded and fire-hot to the razoring foot-garrote and swore every curse he knew in a foul blue stream, no longer caring if the audience heard or saw his moment of weakness. Now it was life or death for him.

  This wasn’t a performance.

  This was a survival test.

  This was a punishment.

  At last the filleted remnant of his right foot came down on what seemed to be a foot-wide support of rope, and he pulled his left forward to match.

  He’d made it. Whoever had done this, he’d beaten them. He’d survived.

  He looked down at the familiar surface, checking to see if more foot irritants lurked in the last third of his journey across the sky of the big top.

  The rope was free of exposed wire, and golden tinsel. In their place, was a new decoration.

  Every remaining foot of his walk was marked off with what looked like raven-smooth ribbons. Ribbons made of long, black twists of hair. The slippery, red blood of his foot was dripping down the satiny locks of one curl even now.

  Reind knew whose hair had been shorn to decorate his rope.

  Reind knew whose costume the golden tassels had been ripped and clipped from.

  And when he finally reached the platform at the end of his faltering walk, when he slumped down on his knees to cry and shake with relief on the plywood surface, and saw the glass jar with a fist-sized, bloody organ floating inside, Reind knew whose heart had been cut out.

  The doctor cleaned and stitched and dressed his feet, and assured him that he would be able to walk the ropes again. If he wanted to. Reind didn’t ask about the new jar perched on the doctor’s medicine shelf. The jar with something kidney-shaped floating inside.

  Back at his trailer, Erin waited.

  “They said you had some trouble with your walk today,” she cooed, one eyebrow raised in an innocent question. “Oh my, what happened to your feet?”

  He set the crutches aside and collapsed on the bed next to her, where she kissed his forehead, and stroked his hair.

  “My poor baby,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Reind shivered and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Some things, just can’t be said.”

  She stood up, shaking her head in agreement. “I’m glad you think so. I feel the same way.”

  She walked over to her shelves, and pu
lled a jar from the top. “Your mother gave me this today,” she said, holding it out in front of her, as if to catch the light to see something hidden inside.

  “She asked me what I thought about adding it to the display of two-headed calves and conjoined twins and all the rest of the twisted mutants they have jarred up over there in the freak show. I told her I thought so, but I said I’d ask you. What do you think?”

  Reind took the proffered jar and stared deep within its yellow, formaldehyde waters. Inside, a tiny Tom Thumb floated, umbilical waving like a wrinkled, severed worm. Its eyes, barely the size of a pinhead, were black, and open. Despite its size, Reind could make out every finger and toe. It was perfect.

  “Some things just can’t be said,” she murmured. “And some things just shouldn’t be born.”

  Reind could see a tiny drop of blood hanging like smog near the tiny cord, drifting in the preservative solution. He choked, and nearly dropped the glass.

  Erin rescued it from him, and flashed a sad, weary smile. “So what do you think?”

  “I think it’s going to be hard to walk for awhile,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “Yeah, it looks that way. But you’ve got me to take care of you. We’ll all take care of you.”

  She paused and met his gaze, her eyes hard. “We’re all family, remember? The circus takes care of its own.”

  Then she took the tiny child, and left the tent, leaving Reind to cry in dry, empty sobs over the loss of his son, and his lover, as he stared into the other jar left behind on Erin’s traveling shelves. Reind stared for hours into the deep, brown, floating eyes of Melienda, who would never see again.

  — | — | —

  BIRTH AND DEATH

  Erin knelt at the foot of the bed, steam beading in tiny pearls on her neck from the bucket of hot water on the trailer floor by her thigh. In front of her, writhing silently on the damp sheets, lay her mother-in-law. Every inch of the woman seemed in motion—eight breasts shivering like a glass of water in the early tremors of an earthquake, hands grasping at the bed frame like an electrocution victim, toes clenching and releasing like a spastic row of misfiring pistons.

  Erin worried that Yvette was dying. The Freak Show Tent’s main attraction had been in labor all night, and so far had introduced no new mutated stillborn wonders to the empty mason jars at her left, or new future circus performers to the cribs at her right. Her face was pinched and white, and her breathing erratic. This description was perhaps not unusual for a normal woman in labor, but Yvette was no normal woman. She was the Eight-Breasted Woman (or the Three- or the Four- or the Six-Breasted Woman, depending on how pregnant she was), and after giving birth to dozens and dozens of freaks and fellow performers over the past two decades, childbirth was normally a fairly painless process for her. But her last couple pregnancies had not turned out any viable children, and now, this one seemed to have some major complication…

  A cool draught suddenly chilled the steam on her neck, and behind her, the barker trod with a heavy foot into the room.

  “How is she?” his low whisper growled.

  Erin glanced backwards, taking in the uncontrolled tousle of the barker’s normally pristinely coiffed locks and the red tint to his habitually sharp, glinting brown eyes. He’d been pacing outside the trailer all night.

  “Still the same,” she said.

  “Reind is waiting outside,” he murmured. “And Felina. And Andrese. And Skyy has been here. And the dwarf twins. And some of the others. They all want to help.”

  “There is nothing to do,” Erin sighed. “It is all up to her.”

  They both stared at the sweat-sheened face lying close-eyed on the bed and grew silent. They both thought the same thing; what would the circus be without Yvette?

  Talman was 17 years old and cocky as hell. He had every reason to be. He was there, man. Part of it. Into it. His jeans were five sizes too large, and bagged at his ankles as they revealed the white band of his Jockey briefs. Anyone would envy his look—he had it going on. He wore a gold chain around his neck and a black Kid Rock T-shirt around his middle. He’d shaved his hair in an oblong pattern that suggested a football that had been cut in half and snapped on top of his head. His arms boasted an intricate, complex purple and red and turquoise swirl of ink. Talman had spent a lot of hours hiding out and helping out and tasting the pain of the needle in the back of his uncle’s tattoo parlor. A finely scaled serpent constricted in waves around his biceps twice before its crimson-forked tongue kissed the lips of a well-bosomed, barely clad babe clutched in the claws of a glowing green dragon. On his forearm, a garden of roses decayed into the sneer of a bloody demon. On his shoulder, a skull winked as smoke curled from the cigar between its bare, bone teeth.

  Talman’s back was a more disturbing canvas, but that art he didn’t show off. The tattoos there were the work of his stepfather—a crisscross network of bruises and scars and half-healed scabs. His stepfather Larry had a habit of taking out the frustrations of his pathetic, go-nowhere life on Talman after the lights went out and his mom passed out. But Talman swallowed the blows, and lay still on the bed beneath the belts and punches and eventual callused caresses that signaled a guilty end to the beatings. Talman survived. Nobody was going to stop him.

  He was cocky as hell.

  Today, he felt so cocky he’d ditched his L-with-a-capital-thumb-and-forefinger Loser job at the Dairy Queen (DQ to the regulars) and turned up with 16 bucks in pocket at the circus. It was only in town for the weekend, and how often did a circus come to an out-of-it backwoods like Liberty, Illinois anyway?

  He was gonna see some shit today, goddamn. Hell with the endless litanies at school and work about when and where he should spend his time. Hell with Larry and his beatings. Hell with Uncle Pete and mopping up the back room floor dotted by spots of anxious, mistaken blood and angered, broken needles.

  Talman hit the circus with attitude. Not a little of it desperation, though he’d never have put it that way. Talman was on the rail. Hell, his back wasn’t even too sore today.

  ««—»»

  The two-headed boy cried four trails of tears as the audience threw the usual, unimaginative jeers and jokes his way.

  “How would you like to have to think the same thing twice all the time?” the barker called out, accusing the crowd with a long shaking finger and stifling the urge to hug the poor child in public. All of the circus performers were worried about Yvette, and an easy audience dig of “So tell me freak, are two heads better than one?” which would normally have rolled right off Andrese’s twisted back, had brought tears. The insults were all part of the act, but neither the barker nor Andrese had the strength to go on today.

  “All right,” the barker crowed, a lump in his gravelly throat. “Let’s say good day to the boy who proves that two heads are better than one and hello to the girl who proves that spiders aren’t the only ones to get around quickly on eight legs.

  He fled to the shadows of the freak show tent and wiped away tears as Yvonne, the spindly girl with four legs leaving her hips, and four arms dangling from her shoulders (two of them as disproportionate as Tyrannosaurus limbs) shambled like an arachnoid across the stage.

  Yvette’s last truly successful freak creation was in tears before she pirouetted across the center boards of the stage. The circus was not a happy place today, as its mother and soul lay gasping for breath in her trailer. Everyone—from ticket-takers to clowns to freak show paraders—knew that Yvette was in a bad way. And there was nothing that could be done.

  The makeup of Wen and Wong, her dwarf children who served as keystone cop clowns in the Big Top, was being touched up every hour, and the skintight red costume of Skyy, the three-eyed fortune teller, was purple with sweat, as the grieving child sought to tell fortunes for her clients while thinking incessantly of the pain of her mother just a few tents away.

  She would find herself tracing the lines of an innocent’s palm and saying “You will die” without hesitation, and th
en, seeing the shaking, quailing fear in the eyes and hands of her clients, she would backtrack and pat their shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she begged as they pushed away from her to scurry from the tent. “My mother is very ill…it was her fortune I was channeling. I am so sorry.”

  Skyy would think of those words as her clients ducked through the canvas back to the sun of the Midway and cry.

  Her mother ought to be living to enjoy the circus, now that it was beginning to become wildly successful. Of course, with Yvette sick, maybe this was the beginning of the end, and not the beginning of the beginning.

  Outside she could hear her brother Reind, filling in briefly for her usual ticket-taker Matthew, urging passersby to stop in to her tent to “sneak a glance behind the shadowy veil of the future.” He wasn’t as mysterious as Matthew, but he was persistent. And suddenly, the flap of her tent moved, and the iridescent strings of beads and bells rattled and chimed, and the most colorful man Skyy had seen in weeks stepped up to her table.

  “Good day,” she intoned softly.

  “Hey,” he said. And then, “Fuck.”

  He stood before her, arm half raised to his head, mouth locked open in an O for seconds.

  “You’ve really got three eyes,” he gasped finally, staring at the offending orb that blinked calmly in the center of her forehead.

  She nodded.

  “That’s fucked up.”

  She shrugged and pointed to the chair in front of her. “Please, sit. Relax.”

  He pulled the chair back cautiously, his eyes never leaving hers. Never leaving her forehead, really. Finally, he eased his long body into the seat, and was soon slumped back, one arm anchored on the table, the other hanging listlessly off the edge of the chair to dangle pointing at the floor.