by Amanda Davis
I could see the frozen ground and I could taste the saltiness of them, each of them, but I couldn’t see any of their faces except Tony’s. He’d held me down and made it happen.
I felt their weight against me, one after the other. And I heard the deep silence after, the descent of the darkness that covered me until dawn, when I’d stumbled home, step by step.
When I was done Charlie’s arm was tight around me and we were quiet like that. Then I told him that’s why I was leaving, that and everything else wrong just added up to too much.
He listened closely and then he said, “Before you go, you should fuck them up good. Maybe with the cops. Or maybe some other way.”
“How?” I said. “I’m open to suggestions.”
He laughed. “How the hell should I know,” he said. “But they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that shit.”
No. I agreed. They shouldn’t.
That night I slept the sleep of inanimate objects. When I woke Saturday morning, every bone cracked as it shifted into place.
“Sleep well?” the fat girl said. She stood over me, edgy and alert.
“Hardly.”
By the time I’d dressed and made my way to the kitchen, there was a note from my mom on the table.
Errands, Lv. M
I crumpled it up and threw it out. The fat girl had her arms crossed over her chest. “I’m ready to get down to business,” she said. “You should be too.”
So I spent the morning brainstorming. The fat girl had an endless reservoir of awful ideas, each worse than the next. “You could bake him poisonous brownies,” she said. “And then stand there and watch him eat them.” Or: “You could borrow a car and run him over.” Or: “You could get a gun and shoot off his thing.”
I doodled on a piece of paper. Firecrackers and severed limbs. I couldn’t believe myself. What would Starling have thought, I wondered. But I’d really never know.
“You could get battery acid,” the fat girl said. “That would be easy enough.”
When my mom came home I was reading the paper. “Hi, honey,” she said. “Are you going to go running today? It’s not too cold.”
I nodded and made myself smile.
“Good.”
She put the mail on the table. The phone rang and she answered it. I looked up when I heard her oh. She watched me with a conspiratorial raise of the eyebrows. “Sure,” she said, and called Faith as though I weren’t sitting right in front of her. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “It’s a boy,” she said, excited.
My stomach bounced but I made myself smile again and took the receiver. “Hello?”
It was Charlie.
“I’m taking you to the circus, doll,” he said. “It’s time to meet Marco. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
When I hung up, my mother sat facing me with her hands on her knees. “So…?” she said suggestively.
“It’s nothing, Mom. Just a friend from work.”
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t pry.” Then a few minutes later, “He sounded cute…”
“Mom!”
“Okay!” She threw her palms in the air.
I walked outside and sat on the porch swing, swaying gently. The air was chilly but I didn’t mind. I twisted from side to side on the swing, my head crowded with ten thousand horrible images, courtesy of the fat girl. What did it say about me that I’d had a crush on someone who did something so awful to me? My throat was tight.
Down the street I saw someone raking leaves. Everything was familiar, but it was astonishing how much had changed in one short year.
And how much hadn’t.
I closed my eyes and tried to refocus my thoughts to the circus, to Marco. When I tried to picture him all I got was Charlie with more tattoos, with a brass ring on his cheek. On his forehead. On his bicep.
A horn honked and I jumped, but it was just a neighbor warning a cat out of the road.
When would I know what it was like to have someone hold my hand?
The fat girl rubbed my back.
“That’s not what’s important,” she said. “That’s not what matters most right now, okay?”
Then Charlie arrived in his beat-up little monster of a car, ignoring the driveway to park on the street in front of the house. He unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and walked up the lawn, a bright flash of copper hair and gray coat against the lush green of the neighborhood. “Hey there,” he said, standing on the steps. In the daylight he looked pale and freckly, skinny and unshaven. His vibrant hair was harsh against his milky skin.
“Come on, doll. We’re off to see the wizard.”
We parked on a side street near the fairgrounds and hiked up the hill, along the highway, against traffic. Cars whipped by and I caught my breath each time a vehicle passed.
“Have you been before? To a circus, I mean?” Charlie fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette but couldn’t find one.
“I think Ringling Brothers. When I was little.”
“Do you remember it?”
I thought back. I remembered noise. I remembered three rings and peanuts and a man shot out of a cannon and a guy locked in a cage with a tiger. I remembered a car full of clowns and my father’s big hand on my head, on my shoulder pulling me towards him.
“Fartlesworth is small,” Charlie said. “Not such a commercial show. You ever been down a midway? Seen a sideshow?”
I shook my head.
“Well, that’s Marco’s gig.”
“What does he do?”
“He eats things. Anything, really: wood, lightbulbs, nails.” He laughed. “Sometimes it’s like kissing a hardware store.”
I’d never seen two men kiss. Somehow, knowing Charlie was gay had always been theoretical. Now I had a weird image of him leaning towards a big blurry man with a beard. I shook my head.
We crossed the street and continued along a chain-link fence, woven with strips of green plastic so you couldn’t see inside. When we came to a place where it was bent back, a hole torn into it, Charlie ducked under and I followed.
We were standing behind a huge red-and-white-striped tent with a few grimy white trailers and pickup trucks parked in the dirt. “That’s the main tent,” Charlie said, “the big top. Wanna see?”
I nodded and he led me to a back door (actually a place where the tent hung funny) so we could duck inside. In the darkness it took me a minute to notice that my vision was slatted. We had entered under bleachers. My stomach dropped, but then Charlie reached out and grabbed my elbow and I followed him, ducking support beams, until we came to an aisle and could climb out. We faced a ring made of huge red and blue blocks and filled with sawdust. I shook my head to clear it and saw the amazing web of rigging high above us.
Then I noticed the way Charlie looked. It wasn’t just that he stood straighter, his shoulders thrown back, or that he was walking differently—less stompy and more bouncy. It was that light seemed to spill from him.
He wore a small private smile that I couldn’t read. He shook his head, as though rousing himself, then waved me along and I followed him to a connecting tent. He lifted the flap and I winced at the deep, unforgiving stench of something—a combination of feet and strong cheese magnified a thousandfold.
“Jesus!”
“It’s the tigers,” Charlie said, out of the corner of his mouth. “They stink.”
We passed behind a wooden wall and I heard scratching and shuffling but couldn’t see the cages. I imagined them crouching on the other side.
Then we came to a tented tunnel and emerged, blinking in the sudden daylight. So this was the midway. Carnival game trucks and more trailers were set up in two lines on either side, creating a pavement aisle down the middle. Wooden banners yelled for attention but it was really the flags for the sideshow that interested me. SEE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST TAP DANCING BROTHER AND SISTER, TINA AND TIM! one sign said. And another: GODZUKIA! HALF MAN/HALF MONSTER! There was AMOS RUBLE, TALLEST LIVING MAN IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE! and L
ILY VONGERT, THE WORLD’S ONLY THREE-LEGGED BEARDED LADY, and THE AMAZING RUBBERBOY. And at the end, there was GERMANIA LOUDON, THE FATTEST WOMAN ALIVE!
“Germania Loudon,” I said out loud, staring at the trailer.
“Yeah, Gerry’s cool,” Charlie said, popping with energy and pointing to our right. “Come on, Marco’s in here.”
And he gestured towards a tented trailer that said only THE DIGESTIVORE!
We entered through a makeshift room extended from the front of the dirty white trailer. Its roof was tarp and its entrance was made of overlapping fabric walls. Inside there was a small platform and a few chairs, and behind the platform, painted in huge red and orange letters on the inside of the trailer, it said again DIGESTIVORE!
Charlie walked straight up to the platform and stepped over it, then disappeared through the door to the trailer. I followed him.
Inside Charlie tackled a big man with a shaved head and a huge smile. “Hi there,” Marco said, laughing, and pushed Charlie off him enough to extend a hand to me.
“Hi.”
He was older than I’d thought. He had smile lines around his eyes. An adult. A man who Charlie had sex with. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.
“Faith.”
I nodded and looked around. As if on cue, the elements of the trailer had begun to assert themselves from the background. There was a tiny bed to the left and a tiny kitchen to the right, but the trailer was basically one small room. The floor was a checkerboard of green and black tiles. Red-fringed curtains masked the windows behind Marco and above the bed. A huge, ancient-looking wooden trunk squatted in the corner and the little table where Marco had been sitting was supported by one leg and hinged to the wall. There were black-and-white circus photographs everywhere—a woman balanced on a tightrope; a skinny young man with an elephant standing on its back legs; another woman peddling a unicycle on what looked like a high wire, plates stacked precariously on her head; and lots of different, ancient-looking clowns, their faces painted in shades of gray. Some photographs were framed, some were not. They hung and leaned against walls and on the shallow counters and cabinets. With three of us in it, the trailer was crowded.
“Nice to meet you,” I mumbled, aware of silence and of being watched.
“Sit.” Marco gestured across Charlie, who sat on his lap, and towards a folding chair opposite him. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I sat.
“Off me, kitten,” Marco said, and Charlie extracted himself and pushed his way past us to the bed, where he flopped dramatically onto his back and gave a huge sigh. I watched his movements, but Marco watched me.
“So I hear you wanted to meet me,” he said.
I nodded and swallowed. He sounded grave. It occurred to me that Marco’s entire life was packed into this small, mobile space. “How long have you been with the circus?” I asked.
“With this show? Two seasons. Before that I was with Wittman’s down in Louisiana, and before that in Arkansas, and before that…well, all in all”—he grinned—“I’ve been on the road about eleven years.”
I blinked. So he was old.
“Would you like some ice cream, Faith? Kitten, here, tells me you want to run away from home.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I looked at Charlie but he lay on his back focused with great concentration on trying to balance a pillow on his foot. He seemed unaware that there was anything wrong with spilling my secrets.
“I…” I swallowed. “Sure, I’d love some ice cream.”
“It’s all right, honey,” Marco said. “Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to call your parents or anything. Now, tell me: what kind of ice cream do you like?”
I tried to smile, but my face seemed to have frozen. What kind of ice cream did I like? It was a simple question but I didn’t know what to say.
“What kind do you have?” I asked.
“Oh, now that’s cheating,” Marco said. “What I want to know is what you like, not what you prefer.”
I was definitely out of my element. Did I like the right thing? Flavors spun through my mind. Finally one occurred to me.
“Coffee,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Marco stared intently and I had the distinct feeling that he was somehow looking through my head and deep into me.
“Yes,” I said. “Coffee.”
“That’s your favorite?”
“Actually Coffee Heath Bar Crunch,” I said. “That’s even better.”
At this Marco’s face erupted into a huge smile. He popped up and walked around to the small refrigerator behind me. “Look,” he said.
I turned around. Behind the tiny freezer door he held open were two pints of ice cream. Both were Coffee Heath Bar Crunch.
My mouth hung open. “How did you know…?”
Marco just laughed.
“It’s his favorite trick,” Charlie said from the corner. “The only magic the poor bastard is truly good at…ice cream magic!”
I turned to Charlie, who had abandoned the pillow to face us, his body propped up on one elbow. Out of his freckly throat came a barker’s voice:
“Faith Duckle, may I introduce you, formally, to the great Marco Klieboski, aka the Digestivore! aka the Ice Cream Wizard. A man who can swallow anything, ladies and gentlemen, who can take anything all the way doooooooown his throat and bring it back whoooohooop, right back up, a stomach of iron, a belly of steel! AND an instinct for ice cream that will make you blush!”
By now Marco was laughing, big deep wheezy laughs.
“Seriously,” I said, feeling left out of the joke. “How did you know Coffee Heath Bar Crunch was my favorite?”
“He didn’t,” Charlie said, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. “It’s just my favorite, too.”
After we’d each had a bowl Marco left us at the table and sat cross-legged on the bed rolling a cigarette. His thick fingers were oddly graceful. I found myself unable to stop watching him. He wore black jeans and a tight gray T-shirt and his body was sleek but powerful. He moved like a panther, quick and graceful. Concentrating like this he seemed scary, but when he smiled his entire face transformed. The brass ring tattooed on his forearm was the only tattoo I could see.
“We can stay for the matinee if you want,” Charlie said.
“There are two shows today,” Marco said without looking up. “Two-thirty and eight.”
“He can get us into the two-thirty,” Charlie said. “And if we haul ass and miss the finale we can be at work by five.” His eyes urged me to say yes.
“Sure.”
“Excellent!”
Marco lit his cigarette and smiled. “You ever think of running away with the circus?”
I blushed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”
We walked along the pavement of the midway. I was overwhelmed by everything and I wondered how much Charlie had told Marco, how he’d talked about me. I pinched myself hard and tried to watch the chaos. The midway had transformed in the brief hour or two since we’d shown up at Marco’s. Now there were children and adults everywhere, with balloons and enormous stuffed animals, with cotton candy and popcorn and cheap flashing toys. The place was crowded with movement and color in every direction.
Charlie wouldn’t let me go in any of the sideshow tents, just as he hadn’t wanted me to stay for Marco’s show. “Another time,” he said. “Not today.”
Charlie stopped outside a trailer that proclaimed the psychic talents of THE GREAT ANDRE SARTINI—HE KNOWS YOUR EVERY THOUGHT! “Wait here,” he said, and took a small envelope out of his pocket.
“Can’t I come with you?”
“No.” His voice was firm.
He disappeared and I watched this strange new world. At first I saw only the crowds of parents and kids, but soon I began to notice the other people. The people who seemed to belong to the chaos, who weren’t wearing a mask of excitement or delight. Who looked as though this was a typical afternoon for
them.
I pulled my hat down farther so that it covered my ears. It was not too warm. Across the way a boy was trying to hit a row of moving ducks with a ball or a beanbag. “Come on, Paul!” his father kept shouting.
“You ready, doll?” Charlie grabbed my elbow and steered me towards the big top, but stopped when we were almost there. I followed his gaze and saw a girl with curly brown hair wearing a pair of overalls duck behind the tent. “Shit,” he said.
“What is it?”
He dug in his pockets and pulled out one of the tickets Marco had given us. “I’ll meet you up there.”
He disappeared around the side of the tent, but instead of going straight in, I waited a minute and then followed slowly in his tracks. I peered around the side of the tent. Charlie and the girl stood close together. Her arms were crossed and he was pointing at her and yelling, his face all red, but I couldn’t hear what he said.
Then she slapped him. Hard.
I retreated quickly and scurried into the tent, handing over my ticket and making my way to our seats. We were high up in the bleachers. I watched the crowd but didn’t see Charlie approach. Just as the lights were beginning to dim, he sat down beside me and handed me a box of popcorn. There was no trace of agitation, and in the low light I couldn’t even see if his cheek was red, but he certainly didn’t act like anything had happened.
Then the show began, clowns and animals and all.
So many things happened so quickly: women rode show horses, then a man and a woman led elephants into the ring. A trio of boys flipped and then balanced on each other’s shoulders. Clowns tumbled from a tiny car and spilled onto the sawdust floor. All of it hollered to me, everything robbing my attention from everything else.
Soon Charlie was so beside himself that he seemed like a little kid, a whole other person than the wise adult who’d taught me to bus tables. His instant happiness was contagious.
