by Gini Koch
“Crash, I can’t handle the stuff if I want my hands to be worth a damn.”
“What do you need me to do, Jim?”
His steely eyes were somber and serious. And what’s more, he was waiting on me to give him ironclad instructions which he would follow like gospel—something I’d rarely seen in my time with Sanford Haus.
“I need you to rub the cocaine around the wound in his side, alright? But wash your damn hands first.”
Without question he did as I bade. I filled the handkerchief with snow from outside and tied it into a pouch. When Crash had finished, I handed Artemesia the icy pack and urged her to put it on her fiancé’s side.
Meanwhile, I prepared myself for the minor surgery of stitching up Mr. Mars. I washed my hands, got my needles as clean as a baby’s soul and set out the thread.
By the time I returned to Mars’s bedside, he was calmer. The cocaine had eased a good portion of his hurts, and the whiskey would take his mind to a more mellow place. Examining that great gash, I found that it looked far angrier than it had a right to. The cut wasn’t all that deep, truthfully. Long and bloody, sure, but it didn’t puncture the chest wall. No need to worry about his organs being damaged, but his flesh was mighty torn up. The stitches would be all he’d need, though. That and a few days off his feet.
I grimaced, imagining this might ruin some of the wedding night fun for him and his bride.
While I stitched up her man, Artemesia sat to his other side, dabbing his forehead with freshly cooled cloths.
“I was dead to the world, you see,” she said quietly. “Didn’t even know there’d been a break-in. But Jonny’s such a light sleeper. A feather dropping would wake this lout up.”
She sniffed and I glanced up to see she’d started crying.
“He’s gon’ be just fine, Miss Proust,” I assured her. “Ox like this one won’t be down long.”
From the corner, Crash asked, “Did you see them, Artemesia? Get any glimpse of who slashed at him?”
“No. It was too dark.”
“Did they take anything?”
Peripherally I saw her shake her head. “Not a thing. Bastard ruined my wedding dress, though. Sonofabitch,” she spat.
“Can you show me?” Crash asked.
I pulled away from my work so that Artemesia could vacate the bed and not jostle my hands. When she and Crash took off, Mrs. Hudson took their place in the tent with me. She didn’t say a word. Didn’t stare at me or try to peer over my shoulder. Her presence, though, was calming and steady. She radiated a strength that others lacked. Sure, Crash exuded authority and leadership. But Martha Hudson offered something else: stalwart serenity in the face of fear. Like she’d weathered my storm the night before, she stood there now, bringing peace with her.
I’d just finished sewing up Mars’s side when Crash burst into the room.
“Dandy, look at this.”
He held Miss Proust’s wedding gown. The lovely lace frock would’ve been a sight on the tattooed lady’s delightful form, it’s true. But the creamy fabric had been marred with black stains.
Drawings of two stick-figures standing beneath a cross.
nine
BY THE TIME Mr. Mars was sutured, bandaged and snoring to bring down the walls of Jericho, the morning’s drizzle had turned to a moderate snowfall. With a biting wind snapping its jaws into any who dared venture outdoors, most of the carnies had the good sense to stay in their homes.
So, of course, Crash insisted we snoop around Miss Proust’s wagon sleuthing for clues. “Before the snow has a chance to cover it,” he’d said. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and turned my nose to the ground, searching for any hint of a reason to be upright.
“Artemesia said she didn’t hear anything,” Crash informed me. “That Jonathan roused her sometime after three-thirty or so.”
“Did she say if they came in through the door?”
Haus nodded. “The dress was hanging just inside the door and to the left.”
We loomed over the stairs, gazing at the muddy shapes on the steps. “Crash,” I said heavily, “any prints we might’ve been able to find have been spoiled a hundred times over. You and Artemesia popped up and back a time or two. Jonny, too. God knows who else.”
“The paths aren’t much better,” he confirmed darkly. “We’ve been up and down them all day, we’d never find a clear set that we could tie to our vandal.”
He leaped up into Miss Proust’s wagon and eyed the doorknob, the floorboards.
“What’s the door frame look like, Crash?”
Haus ran a hand down the wood. “Clean. No splintering. Don’t think they took the trouble to bust it open with brute force.”
“Lock picker?”
“There are some scratches on the plate,” he said. “Just as easily made by a set of tools as by a key held by a drunk. But there’s no sign that someone hunched before the lock and took the time to fiddle it. Most likely, Dandy, that Miss Proust simply left the door unlocked for her fiancé’s convenience.”
“I’d ask her, but I think she’d bite the head off of anyone who intruded on her right now.”
Crash eyed Mars’s tent, clearly debating if he should take the chance of disturbing a woman who’d just had her dress ruined the day before the wedding, and her fiancé knifed in the process.
“Don’t do it,” I warned.
He blew out a cloudy sigh. Then he shut the door behind him and skipped down the stairs with nimble ease.
“Dammit, Dandy,” he cursed. We shuffled toward our wagon. “Do you ever tire of being right?”
“Why do you think I so enjoy your company, Crash?”
He smirked. “We didn’t get to chat yesterday about your venture into town. You left the party rather early. And abruptly. With company.”
I shook my head. “Not like that, Crash.”
“Wouldn’t mind if it was, you know.”
I didn’t want to get into a rehash of my less-than-stellar evening with ghosts. “Did you talk to Maeve and the Professor any more while I was hauling my ass along the tracks?”
“I did. What did you think, I’d just sit on my thumbs?”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
“Damn shame you think so little of me.”
Crash retrieved the key from around his neck and unlocked our vardo. “Shall we trade information, then?”
“I reckon. And maybe you can tell me what you think about those stick figures dancing on Miss Proust’s dress.”
“Excellent!” The door slammed behind him. “Let’s chat.”
I sank into my hammock and let it sway a moment. Crash stoked a small fire in the stove and soon the wagon was warm enough to thaw my thoughts.
“I met with a roadman at the boarding house who was kind enough to tell me that two of them signs have meaning to his folk.”
Crash danced in place and plucked at the strings of his fiddle. “Oh, do tell.”
“One of ’em, the one carved into the floor of the Professor’s wagon? Means ‘orphan,’ if this one is to be believed.”
“Fascinating. And the other?”
“‘Murder.’”
“Spectacular!”
Crash whirled about and put the violin in its case.
“How is that spectacular, Crash?”
“Well it’s more fun, obviously. More interesting than any of the alternatives, really.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You don’t honestly find this whole ordeal more fun for the hope of murder and death, do you?”
“What else were we going to do with the time?”
I closed my eyes and sighed, weary. “What did you find out?”
“Ah-ha! That’s another bit of fun, you see. It turns out that there is more to the Professor’s story than he’d care to tell us.”
“No shit?”
“Surely you can contain your sarcasm for a moment or two more, Dandy. It is rather unbecoming. Anyway, McGann did find his ward trying to rob his vardo
. That much is true. But he failed to tell us that the girl suffers from acute amnesia.”
“How so?”
“When I spoke with her, she confided that she had been living rough for the better part of a year prior to her run-in with the Professor some six months ago. So that’s eighteen months of her life that she can remember vividly and with ease. Anything before her time on the road? Lost.”
“Lost?”
Crash nodded cheerfully. “She has always been Maeve—the street urchin. She can’t remember a home, a family. Where did she come from? Was she born full-fledged on the street like some hobo Athena? It’s delicious, Dandy!”
“You realize you’re taking delight in the fact that a girl can’t remember her kin?”
“Yes! It’s a puzzle! A glorious puzzle!”
“Is that all you found, Crash?”
“Well, for the time being. I am going to write to Adele and see if she’ll do me a favor.”
“I’m sure that’s all you’re going to ask,” I grumbled.
He smoothed his eyebrows and looked smug. “A man can always hope.”
I rolled on my side, putting my back to him and his lecherous glee. I spent the day drowsing, sleeping off the surges of adrenaline and ignoring my roommate’s clatter. By the time nightfall rolled around, the snow was coming down hard, with a wind howling to the moon.
THE PROUST/MARS union had to be postponed on account of the ground being whiter than the most pristine virgin’s wedding dress. A blizzard came through and coated our little camp with more snow than I’d seen in all my days of living. The paths connecting the tents and wagons filled with fresh powder and treacherous ice. Anyone with a lick of sense hunkered down and kept to the warmth of their home.
After the first day of being snowed in, we’d run through what little food we kept in the wagon, but it was genial enough. Our windows iced over, but we stuck our heads out from time to time for fresh air. Like groundhogs, the carnies poked up from their dens to check on the weather, on one another. Since the wedding had been diverted into 1936, we spent the last hours of 1935 listening to the others in the camp. Music, discordant but lively, came from around the grounds. Cheering, laughing. Sounds of joy. Crash and I held our own celebration with some reefer, sharing secrets men daren’t speak among civilized folk whilst simultaneously attempting to solve the problems of the mad, spinning world.
On the second day, Haus seemed intent on playing his fiddle in a terrible harmony with the braying wind. Though the gale shook our vardo to the point I thought the hodgepodge wagon would disintegrate to flinders, we survived with the roof still over our heads.
However, come sundown, Crash and I were like a couple of bears sharing a cave—and neither of us was too particularly keen on being awake in the dead of winter. I was content reading a stack of tattered pulps, but a toasty fire in Crash’s brainpan led to trembling hands that even a drag off a spliff wouldn’t quiet.
Instead of smoking his mind to peace as was his nature, Haus took up most of the floor dissecting some contraption that looked like a cross between a frying pan and a child’s guitar. What little body there was on the thing was swamped by a rectangular metallic plate across the lowest curve, covering the strings. A neck longer than a giraffe’s stretched up to a head with six tuning knobs and a plaque declaring the thing a Rickenbacker Electro. The strings should’ve been taut down that neck, but Crash had surgically spread them apart so they stretched off in all directions.
“Do you mind?” he snapped at me.
I stared at him quizzically. “Do I mind what exactly?”
He didn’t bother to look up at me, just kept his eyes on the Electro and sneered. “That incessant scratching. It’s like having my ears scoured with a steel bottlebrush.”
“It’s pencil and paper, Crash,” I sighed.
“It’s distracting. We’ve been trapped in this wagon for a month—”
“It’s been three days.”
“—and my mind is a flowering garden of possibilities. Ideas. Work. Never a stagnant moment. And yet you insist on introducing thorns. They snag my attention, pry me away from my work, tear at my very sanity. Briars you’ve wrought with the lead of your damnable pencil.”
I blinked at him in utter amazement—a sight lost on him on account of him still studying his unusable frying pan. “You might be the most dramatic sonofabitch I’ve ever laid eyes on. You know this about yourself, right?”
“Bothersome fiend,” he spat.
I grinned and went back to my scribbling.
“What the devil are you doing anyway, Dandy?”
“It’s called writing, Crash.”
“Writing?”
“Yes. A form of communication where one uses drawn letters to spell out words and phrases, and generally have a conversation with a person not directly present at the time of composition. You might want to try it sometime,” I added. “I’m sure Moira would be pleased to hear from her wayward uncle.”
Silence. Sweet, glorious silence from Haus.
I peeked to see if he’d keeled over dead. No such luck. He stared at the wiry guts of his project. “What are you writing?”
“A letter. Or a journal entry. The two aren’t all that dissimilar for me,” I admitted.
“Explain.”
I tucked my pencil into the small sheaf of papers I’d put together, rolled it up and stashed it into my bag. “Back in my Army days a lot of the guys wrote home to their sweethearts. Or their mamas. I didn’t have either, but it was dreadful to try to keep all of those stories in my head. I needed to tell someone about the trip into Château-Thierry, about the first time I killed a man, or lost one in the medic tent. Or how our unit single-handedly introduced jazz to the British boys.”
“So you wrote letters to who?”
“No one in particular. Myself, mayhaps.”
“Does it help?”
“Sometimes. It’s like they say, confession being good for a soul. Mine won’t ever be pristine, but I might be able to scrub off some of the dirtiest spots with a little bit of lead or charcoal from time to time.”
Crash nodded humbly. “Scribble on, my friend.”
I regarded the roll of papers. I’d been writing about my time with the circus. Specifically my time with Crash as a friend. Thinking about it, I decided I didn’t need to dwell there when I had a living specimen of Sanford Haus before me.
“What’s that contraption?” I asked.
“An electrified guitar,” he said proudly.
“Where’d you pick that up?”
“Found it in storage a few days ago when we went to dig out the carousel. Glad we didn’t try putting that thing together. This snow would’ve been frightful on the gearwork. You have no idea the things that are in that shed, Dandy!”
“What good’s an electrified guitar?”
Crash studied the frying pan. “Well, I’m not sure. But the mechanisms are simple and intriguing. I don’t care so much for the guitar itself, but what else could I do with the concept? Would my violin take a similar wiring and give off the same distorted sound? Can I create illusions of sound using a few magnets and wires?”
I shook my head. “Your mind does strange things, Crash. Strange, but fascinating things indeed.”
ten
AFTER TOO MANY days of snow and grey clouds, the sun decided to make one hell of an entrance. Opening the door on the camp was like staring into God’s own heart. The sunlight blazed white and holy off every flat surface, turning the snow into fire, and the ice into glittering diamond.
The biting wind had died down, and while the day was a brisk one, the cold weren’t too terrible. It felt good to be out, stretching my legs—even if the drifts were taller than me in some places.
Diamond Joe and a few of his hands had set to the grueling work of re-shoveling the camp walkways, and smoke rose from Mrs. Hudson’s cart. For the first time in what seemed too long, the camp was bustling and living again.
Of course, that’s just abou
t the time trouble came to call.
I sat near the small cook fire drinking my coffee and talking about nothing special with some of the other folks when a ruckus erupted from Mrs. Hudson’s repurposed railcar. Pots and pans clattered about while the woman herself shouted a blue streak that would make Satan blush.
I didn’t hesitate, nor did Slaney with his huge shovel. We ran around the back end of the cart and found a scrum of tramps trying to force their way in. Mrs. Hudson whacked at ’em with her best frying pan, both hands wrapped tight around the handle. She struck one of the hobos in the hand and swung back to clock him good in the shoulder, too. His arm hung slack and he went down into the snow with only his pain to keep him warm.
“Hey, rube!” Slaney bellowed. His voice echoed around the camp, and soon more shouts took up the alarm.
“Hey, rube!” came the carnies’ cries. A bell began ringing, too. A veritable call to arms.
Slaney dove in, shovel swinging left and right with reckless abandon. I flattened myself to the car and came up on the backside of a chap that had a mind to rob my favorite woman on this earth. He’d climbed into the cart and began putting his hands on anything that weren’t bolted down. Mrs. Hudson swung at him with her pan, but just missed his kneecaps. His reach, however, was long enough. He lashed out a hand and shoved her on that fine rump of hers.
My vision went red with ire and I didn’t need any more excuse to send this man back into the snow with the nothing more than the bones God gave him. And I wasn’t too particular if those bones were intact at the time.
I grabbed the tramp by the back of his collar and yanked, while at the same time my right foot kicked at the back of his knee. A joint popped as he reeled, and I let him fall to the floor. My boot found his ribs. Twice. As he doubled in on himself and rolled to protect his stomach, I took him by the belt of his trousers and balled up my fist in his scraggly, dishwater hair. With a roar, I sent him flying back from whence he came. He took out a couple of his hobo mates.
