I felt like I had just woken up into a dream.
“Life imitates the circus and the circus imitates life,” the old man said. And that’s exactly what was in front of us: a small, bizarre, miniature circus. The hula-hoop was the circus ring. The cat was the ringmaster. The rat was—just a rat, I guess. Add in the music coming from the real circus and it was almost funny, in a sick way.
“What will happen to it?” I asked. Just watching it made me squirm, like it was me trapped there.
“If we leave it? I’d say it has three ways out.” He spoke around his cigar and counted on his hand. “One, a heart attack. Two, starvation—but that would take some time and doesn’t seem too likely with Lousy sitting right there, does it? And Lousy himself is the third option.”
Lousy the cat hunkered down on his belly to survey the rat. He didn’t seem ready to do anything anytime soon. He looked quite content just watching. At least for now.
“You’re not just going to leave it in there, are you?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said. “It’s life. We all make choices, without knowing what the result will be. We all end up in the wrong place at the wrong time…” The child-sized old man looked up at me knowingly from under wild gray eyebrows. “What responsibility do I have to help it out?”
“‘With great power comes great responsibility,’” I said, the quotation just coming into my mind. “I guess because we know we have the power to help, we should at least try.”
The old man nodded, pursed his lips, and looked impressed.
“Very wise, very wise, yes,” he said. “That was Winston Churchill, right?”
“Uh, no,” I said. “Actually, it’s from Spiderman.”
“Mmmm,” he said, looking back at the struggling rat. “Well, it’s wise, nonetheless. What say you we get him out?”
He reached back into the trailer and pulled out what looked like a giant pair of pliers with a spring in the middle and a wide, flat spatula thing on the tip.
“Here.” He handed the weird tool to me before hopping down and plodding over to the hula-hoop. He nudged the cat out of the way. “Get, Lousy!”
I got off the truck and knelt with him next to the rat. It had gone motionless, but I could see its whiskers twitching and I swear I could hear its little heart tapping away at the speed of sound.
“So, you want me to just…grab him?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” he said. He indicated the tool I was holding. “These are spreaders. Put them in the crack next to him, as close as you can, and then squeeze the handles.” He put his hand on the cat and held him lightly by the scruff of the neck.
I put the spreaders in the crack and squeezed, like he’d said. In a few seconds, the ground moved just enough, and the rat darted away into the darkness. The cat tried to chase it, but the little man held him for a good count.
“Give him a fighting chance, eh, Lousy?” the man said. Then he let the cat go. Lousy took a few steps in the direction of the rat before changing his mind and rolling in the dirt instead.
“What are these for?” I asked, holding the spreaders up.
“For when the lion doesn’t let you go,” he said. He took them from me and used them like a cane to push himself to his feet.
“Name’s Remmy,” he said, putting out his hand. I shook it.
“Spartacus,” I said, without thinking. I don’t know why I said it. I’d never introduced myself as Spartacus before. I cringed a little bit, wondering if I’d screwed up big time. If he decided to mention me to Bartholomew, I’d be in big trouble.
“Spartacus? Oh, really now,” Remmy said, giving me a double-take. “Now that’s a circus name. I’d say you’re ready.”
While Remmy went into the tent to get us some food, I sat there wondering what to do. I could just head home. My running away would be a lesson to Dad and Will, a message that I wasn’t going to put up with their crap anymore.
I imagined walking in the door, putting my bags down nonchalantly, while they sat open-mouthed in the living room. I’d wave hello, get a soda from the fridge, and when I’d come back, they’d still be sitting there, staring. Dad would finally say, “Where have you been?” and I’d just say “Out,” before going up to my room.
The thought made me smile.
But, on the other hand, I could also imagine being sent to boarding school—which really wouldn’t have been too bad considering my current status as The Brenville Boy Who Bared It All. But it was more likely I’d be grounded and trapped in the house with Will and Dad. Forever.
That thought didn’t make me smile.
Remmy returned with two bowls of hot veggie chili. We sat in lawn chairs—him in a small one, me in a regular-sized one—and ate. As the sounds of the show continued to drift out from inside the tent—cheers, yells, organ music—Remmy talked, and I learned.
Remmy was either seventy-eight or eighty-two; he couldn’t remember. Remmy’s sideshow, The World-Renowned Sideshow of Curiosities and Mayhem, was the sideshow for Bartholomew’s Circus. Remmy explained that the sideshow was supposed to perform with the circus.
“But on the side, get it?” he asked. “Sideshow?”
Remmy’s team usually traveled with a lot of different circuses and carnivals and even did a few state fairs, but things had been slow, so they’d signed a three-year contract to work only with Bartholomew.
“We’ve always been our own company,” said Remmy. “Sure, maybe this pays better than being on our own, but they don’t respect us.” He spat on the ground. “But then, I don’t respect him. No ringmaster worth his salt would cancel at the last second and have the sideshow fill in. And on the last night of his run when everybody’s expecting the best show? No, sir.”
“So you guys perform if he doesn’t show up?”
“Yep—but then we’re not the sideshow anymore. Then we’re just The Show,” said Remmy, fanning out his fingers dramatically. “And it’s a shame, a dirty shame, to treat customers like that. These people, they didn’t come to see us. Now, I’m not saying we’re not giving them a show. You ever seen our show?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, you should. I mean, we do it all. We got the knife throwing and sword eating, the Human Blockhead, Spidora, the Two-faced Man, and all the fire breathing stunts—but you’ll see it all tomorrow.” He took off his bowler hat to reveal a shock of white hair that went in a ring around his otherwise bald head.
Why would he think I’d be seeing the show tomorrow?
“But these people?” he continued, ignoring my confusion and gesturing at the tent with his hat. “They don’t come for that. They want the trapeze, the lions, the elephants. They want Athena, the Human Cannonball. The big stuff.”
My eyes widened at this. This man actually knew my mom!
“You just don’t cancel like that,” he went on. “And he’s done this kind of thing so many times in the last year, I’ve lost count. Who does that?”
“I don’t know,” I said politely, but inside my mind was whirring: He knows Mom! But I couldn’t say anything. Not yet.
Gotta keep up the mistrust.
“I’ve been in the sideshow fifty-three years now,” Remmy was saying, looking miffed. “And I never seen no one do it like this. Bartholomew’s got a good circus, I admit. But he runs it all backwards. Not professional in the slightest. Like he doesn’t even care about what people think. It’s not just the canceling. It’s everything. They don’t tell us anything until the last second. They give us our cut of the profits late. To get any info out of them is like pulling teeth.”
Remmy paused for a moment. He pulled a handkerchief out of his suit pocket and blew his somewhat potato-looking nose before saying darkly, “Bartholomew seems like a real gentleman when you first meet him, too. But then you get to know him and…I’m just disgusted with him, if you want to
know the truth. I think he’s a no-good fink.”
“Why did they cancel?” I asked.
Remmy eyed me while he folded his handkerchief back into this pocket, like he wasn’t sure how much he should tell me. “Well, this time they said their lead girl had given everyone pink eye. Doesn’t that just beat all? Pink eye shouldn’t stop a circus. No sir, no circus with any sense of civic duty, anyway. Our kit? We could do our show with our eyes swollen shut.” He spat on the ground again. Then he looked at me with a knowing grin.
“You looked confused earlier when I said that you’d see our show tomorrow,” he said. “You thought I didn’t notice. Maybe most people wouldn’t. You don’t get to be a showman like I am without being able to read people and keep some patter up and then come back to it.”
“I was wondering what you meant by that,” I stammered.
“Well, I assumed you’d be with us tomorrow, and not leaving our fine company, because I know that you’re trying to get a job with Bartholomew.”
I paused, confused. Then I nodded with a slow grin. Now that was a pretty good cover…
“How did you know?” I managed to ask.
Remmy winked at me and pulled a flask out of his jacket—a flask of something that smelled really strong, like something from a medicine cabinet. Lousy appeared out of nowhere, rubbing against his chair.
“Kids showing up at the circus is old hat,” he said. “Bunch of kids want to get a job with Bartholomew’s. But kids accidentally turning up at our little old sideshow when they think they’re at Bartholomew’s? That, my friend, is new hat.”
He took a drink from his flask and then poured a little bit in the lid and set it on the ground. The cat drank it up like it was cream. Then, as if he was reading my mind faster than I could connect the dots and see the whole picture, Remmy invited me to travel with the sideshow to Bartholomew’s next show in Las Vegas—just two days away.
I, Spartacus Ryan Zander, was going to go to Las Vegas!
“And we’ll give you some help for your tryouts. You can’t breathe fire yet, can you? Yeah, that’d be a good one for you to learn. Don’t look so agog, boy, it’s not flattering.”
I was agog. I don’t think I’d ever been agog before, but I was then. Breathe fire? I was going to learn how to breathe fire?
“Why would you help me?” I just about squeaked.
“Well, there was this man named Winston Churchill—a man who was very much like Spiderman,” he said. “And this man said, ‘the price of greatness is responsibility.’ And since the Sideshow of Curiosities and Mayhem is great—and since Churchill is the only church I’ve ever attended—I feel it’s my responsibility to help you out.
“Besides, I like your moxie. I think you deserve a chance,” he added. “I may not think too highly of Bartholomew’s Circus, but I can understand why you’d want to join up.”
“Thank you,” I said, reaching out and shaking his small hand so hard that he had to pull it away. Just thinking about getting to The Incredible gave me adrenaline again. Adrenaline and hope.
But I had to find out how safe I was, how much I should mistrust old Remmy.
“Do you guys know Bartholomew’s people pretty well?” I asked, hoping it sounded like I was just trying to schmooze for the job.
“Kid, do you know what your butt crack looks like without a mirror?”
“Uh,” I thought. “I don’t know. I mean, it probably looks just like any butt crack. So, yes?”
“Well, you’ve got a good point there,” said Remmy. “But what I meant was no, not really. I mean, in some ways we know them pretty well. We work with them a lot and know their performers and their acts. But Bartholomew runs a pretty tight ship. He doesn’t let us in the tent when the circus is going on. And none of his people get too friendly with us. And we’re only allowed to show up the day before the event—sometimes even the day of—and then we have to tear down and move on to the next place immediately after. No camaraderie. No team. It’s bizarre is what it is.”
This was all good news for me and The Plan. If the sideshow and Bartholomew’s people weren’t too close, that meant I could stay hidden from the circus. However, that also meant I might not learn very much from Remmy about Bartholomew, either.
“But,” Remmy said, his round face going serious. “You have to know what you’re getting into. I want you to really think about this tonight, before you do anything.”
He leaned forward in his seat and I did too.
“Bartholomew’s may be a circus, but it sure ain’t no picnic. That circus has some mean folks in it. Like the kind of folks you wouldn’t want to turn your back on unless you were wearing chainmail under your jacket, if you get what I’m saying.”
I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded.
“I don’t want to talk too bad against Bartholomew’s, because there’s a lot of good folks, too, but I think you should know.”
I wasn’t sure what expression I should put on for Remmy: shocked by the news or determined to join the circus despite Remmy’s warnings. Inside, of course, it didn’t surprise me. I already knew Bartholomew was evil.
I don’t know what Remmy read in my face, but he leaned back in his chair.
“Just think about it, okay?”
I nodded, and he seemed content with that.
It turned out Remmy didn’t actually perform in the sideshow—he used to be what was known as the “outside talker.”
“The outside talker,” Remmy said, “is the guy who stands outside the circus or fair or whatever, and talks to people outside to try to get them to come in. And I was one of the best. You should have seen me when I was at the top of my game and we had a Single-O set up on the midway,” he said. “I could get any mark to pay any amount to see something.”
He told me a Single-O was one of those things you see at the fair where there is just one thing inside, maybe a scary animal or a lady covered with gorilla-hair or a fake head in a jar. Sometimes the animals are taxidermied, like the alligator-man I’d seen once in Washington—a mummified alligator with a human head.
“We have a pretty great Single-O with Matilda, if I do say so myself. She’s a genuine killer from Madagascar!”
“Matilda,” I repeated, thinking about the spreaders from earlier. “What is she? A lion? A bear?” Or maybe he was he talking about a person.
“A killer. That’s all you need to know. Here’s a clue—if she looks at you and decides it’s your turn to go, she’ll point a finger at you. Then it’s just a matter of time before you’re dead.”
“Why would anyone want to see that?” I asked.
“So you believe it?”
“No, not really,” I scoffed. But I hoped he wouldn’t make me see her. It. Whatever It was.
“You have to see her. You’ll be beating yourself up the rest of your life if you don’t.”
I saw that he was trying to sell me on Matilda like I was one of the people at the fair.
“Just tell me, not like I’m a, uh, what did you call them?”
“Marks? The suckers?”
“Yeah, like I’m not a mark—is it real?”
“Do your parents know where you are?” Remmy shot back. I sat back in my seat and looked away, embarrassed. I didn’t answer.
“See? There are some things you can’t tell people,” he said. “Even if you like them.”
I looked back at him and he gave me a small apologetic smile before lighting up another cigar.
He told me how he’d been with the sideshow since the 1950s. He and another performer, a younger guy named Robin Marx, had bought the sideshow a few years back. Robin was the front man inside, running the whole operation, keeping the performers comfortable and the patrons happy.
“You won’t find a much better bunch than my gang,” said Remmy, nodding his head. “But then, you’ll be meeting them all soon. Wh
at say we get you set up for the night?”
Remmy went off to set up a bedroll for me in one of the dressing rooms. I fetched my suitcase from the makeshift bathroom and headed toward the fairgrounds entrance.
The show was still going on, but there was no one around. I wondered if my Goth friends were still around, trying to wake the dead. They’d probably figured out it was the wrong circus, though, too.
I pulled my backpack from its hiding spot under the dumpster, and started walking back, lost in thought.
Why had Bartholomew split town?
Maybe it was because his goons had spotted me in the convenience store parking lot, but Remmy said they’d canceled that morning, before they had seen me. Did Bartholomew get scared for some reason? Something had to have happened. Then again, Remmy said Bartholomew had done that kind of thing before. But there was something else weighing on my mind, since the police station. I had that little brain itch, the kind that tells you that you forgot something. Or were about to remember something. I knew I needed to look back at my mom’s postcards and try to find the source of that itch.
I hurried back to Remmy, who was waiting for me at the back of the tent.
“I’d offer to introduce you to some of the sideshow folks,” he said, “but they’ve still got a bit of work to do tonight—and you look dead on your feet.”
“Don’t you have work to do, too?”
“Didn’t I mention it? I’m retired. Well, semi-retired. I’m like a figurehead. I do odd jobs here and there. Mostly I just order people around and sign things. During the shows, I get to relax. Which is what you should be doing.”
I nodded, thinking about that memory itch. I had to think about things. Plan some things.
As he led me through the tent, I tried to think of some small talk, like maybe telling him how long I’d been on the road. But I couldn’t even remember how long it had been. It felt like weeks, months even. I did the calculations and discovered it had only been two days.
Spartacus Ryan Zander and the Secrets of the Incredible Page 15
