Wonder Show

by Hannah Barnaby

  Gideon sat on the ground a few feet away, just far enough into the shadows that she had to concentrate to see his face. “Since my father died,” he said. “Four years ago. He lost all of his money in the crash in ’thirty-three. Never really got over it. There was no family business anymore, so I figured there was no good reason to stay.” He paused. “Can I offer you some advice?”

  “Sure,” Portia replied.

  “It’s not a good idea to ask too many questions around here. People don’t like to talk about themselves. They keep things close.”

  “Things?”

  “You know. History, secrets, where they were before. What they had to do.”

  “You don’t seem to mind.”

  He stood up then, brushed the seat of his pants. “I’m not one of them. It’s different for me.”

  Portia looked around to make sure no one else was listening. “Seems like they’re the ones who are different.”

  Gideon rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Good luck tomorrow,” he said. And the darkness pulled over him like curtains.

  Gideon

  This is subsistence living. Everyone here has just enough money to get them through the days until they get paid again. I find it strangely comforting, not to have to think too far ahead. I know what it is to have enormous wealth and lose it all at once. It doesn’t matter how much you have in the bank one day, if it’s gone the next.

  A system of invisible money. That’s what my father told me about the stock market.

  “It’s all in the numbers,” he said. “What we manufacture is worth only as much as the system says it is. And it’s not our place to toy with the system.”

  My father died in an institution, surrounded by other wasted men who had been betrayed by one thing or another and could not survive the loss.

  Anything can be taken away from you. This is what I know to be true. So I keep only the necessities. A few books, two sets of clothes, six handkerchiefs, a shaving mirror, a straight razor, a pocketknife, a box of pencils, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a blanket. A duffel bag to hold it all. A bit of money in my pocket.

  I will not have anything more, in case some other invisible system decides to break apart and take it all away again. An occasional luxury might appear—chocolate, music, a good cigar—but you can’t trust those things. Everyone here knows that. No good getting used to the easy life.

  Life wasn’t meant to be easy.

  Jackal

  I’d suppose you’re thinking a fellow like me wants nothing good from a young lady like Portia. Thinking I’m liable to take advantage. Thinking I’m working an angle of some kind. A rascal like me must always be working an angle.

  But come now, I’m no con artist. I’m a storyteller. That’s what talking is, standing on that little stage and calling out to people, telling them the beginning of a story and letting them finish out the rest for themselves. And as soon as Portia told me her tale, I knew she could size up an audience. Good talker’s got to have that gift, and there’s no school on earth where it’s taught.

  Of course, it won’t hurt Portia’s bally when we dress her up, shine her like a new penny. She’ll look like Rita Hayworth’s younger sister, or I’ve lost my touch. What I wouldn’t give for anybody to look at me and think I was that innocent. Never in my whole life, friend. Never once.

  Portia reminds me of my cousin Francine. She was a good girl. Never took on airs. That Violet Lucasie could have learned a manner or two from her. She died quite young, Francine, which was a special shame because she could sing like a glorified angel, she could, and everybody knew for sure she’d go and get famous someday. Poor Francine. She was down doing wash at the river with my Aunt Mabel and some of the clothes got away, and Francine, she just jumped right in and swam after them. Poor thing never saw that riverboat coming. All happened so fast. Took days to find her body, too, and that did not help Aunt Mabel, who has never been the same despite all of our best efforts.

  You don’t think I’m just telling tales now, do you?

  I’d be sorely wounded if you did.

  The Woeful Tale of Lord Mountebank

  Jackal and Portia stood in front of the sideshow tent. They stood next to each other, not speaking. Portia was accustomed to silence—Aunt Sophia had been dedicated to the “speak when spoken to” philosophy, and Mister’s house did not exactly inspire conversation. So Portia was not bothered that they had been standing there for several minutes without a word between them. There was plenty to keep her eyes busy in the meantime.

  The stages and the podium and the faded paintings of the acts in the pit show: The Armless Girl and The Strongman and The Sword-Swallower. The banners hung high, advertising the freaks: The Irish Giant, The World’s Smallest Man, The Fat Lady, The Bearded Lady, The Wild Albinos of Bora Bora. The flaps of canvas that led into the sideshow tent, waving in the breeze, beckoning to her but still keeping her out. Drawing her and repelling her with equal force.

  “This is what they come to see,” Jackal finally said.

  “Who?” It wasn’t exactly the right question. What she wanted to know was, what kind of people paid for this? To get in the tent and stare misfortune in the face?

  But Jackal seemed to understand. “Nearly everyone,” he said. “There are those who walk by, who’ve come for the circus and the menagerie and don’t want to lower themselves by associating with our operation. But if fifty people pass me on the bally, I’ll sell forty tickets on a bad day. Curiosity is human nature.”

  He pointed at the banner line. “Have you met our performers yet?”

  “Some of them,” Portia said.

  “And?”

  She tried to think of something nice to say. “They don’t seem so strange once you’ve heard them talking to each other.”

  “That is precisely why they don’t speak in the tent. We don’t want to ruin the effect. We don’t want to invite a lot of questions, either. It wasn’t easy for Mrs. Collington to break the habit, but she learned, in time.”

  The Armless Girl painting was behind the middle stage, the largest of the three, with The Strongman on the right and The Sword-Swallower on the left. Marie was obviously the main attraction on the outside stages. Her portrait was bigger than life-size and faced the midway, as if she might leap into the audience. She looked dangerous, almost predatory. The painting of Mosco had been done on a slightly smaller scale, so he appeared more compact than he actually was. As for The Sword-Swallower . . .

  “Who’s that?”

  “That is Charleston Granger, or so he called himself. Only he and God know his true identity, and God might be the only one who remembers, given Charleston’s affinity for drink. He has left us, sorry to say.”

  “Did he die?” It looked obvious to Portia that it would be impossible to survive having six swords thrust down one’s throat.

  “No. He was recruited last year. I simply can’t bring myself to take his picture down.”

  “Recruited?”

  “By another show. A ragtag, slipshod affair. I don’t know what he was thinking, going to work for those ne’er-do-wells.” He shook his head. “But I digress. I was going to tell you my own story.”

  “I’m all ears.” Portia shifted her weight and tried to ignore the grass tickling her ankles.

  “Long have I traveled these roads,” Jackal said with a heavy sigh, “and long have I waited for the day when I could lay my burden down.”

  “Just tell me the story,” Portia said irritably. “It’s too hot for all the dramatic parts.”

  Jackal whipped his cane against the tent. The snap of the wood on the canvas was like a gunshot. “The dramatic parts,” he said, “are the entire point of the exercise. Now sit down and listen, or I’ll send you back to the pie car.”

  Fine with me, she thought, but it really wasn’t, so she did as she was told.

  “Now, where was I? Ah, yes. I was born at the dawn of the century, the fifth son of Lord and Lady Mountebank, a displaced nobleman and hi
s ailing wife. My mother, rest her soul, barely survived my entrance into the world. My father worked as a traveling salesman to support us, and my mother was very lonely, but we were poor and my father had no choice. Each time he left, more and more time passed before he returned. My mother and my four brothers and I waited patiently in our one-room shanty in the middle of the prairie—”

  “How can you remember all this if you were just a baby?”

  “Don’t interrupt,” he snapped. “There we waited, half starved, all alone. My father was days overdue, and it seemed neither hope nor salvation would ever find us, when there came a knock at the door. A man and his wife, making the journey from Vermont to California, had stopped to ask for shelter for the night. My mother was weak, but she was also very kind, and so she invited them in.

  “The woman told my mother how much she wanted a family, how she had lost hope of having any children of her own. ‘We will have a big house in California,’ she said, ‘with many empty rooms. It nearly breaks my heart.’ She looked at my brothers and me. ‘You are very lucky,’ the woman told my mother, ‘to have so many strong sons.’

  “‘I fear they will not be strong much longer,’ my mother told her. ‘For we are very poor, as you can see, and I am not long for this world. My husband has been gone for many days, and I think he may not come back.’”

  “Is this supposed to be a true story?” Portia inquired. “Because, frankly, it’s more than a little unbelievable.”

  Jackal glared at her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “When the man and the woman departed in the morning, they took my brothers and me with them. They tried to take my mother, too, but she was too weak to leave the shanty. ‘I will wait here for my husband,’ she said. ‘Whether he finds me dead or alive, I cannot say.’ And so my brothers and I were carried west to begin our new life.”

  “Did your father ever get back to the shanty?”

  “He did,” said Jackal. “He found my mother alone, and when she told him what she had done, he was so overcome with rage and grief that he shot her. And then he turned the gun on himself.”

  “What? I thought he was so kind and—”

  “No, no, it was my mother who was kind. My father was not a nice man. And word has it he was a terrible salesman.”

  “How much of that story is true?” Portia asked.

  Jackal waved the question away as if it were a mosquito. “What does that matter? Truth is not what the audience wants. They want tragedy, adventure, misfortune for the rich and glory for the poor. And”—he winked—“a little murder doesn’t hurt.”

  “So,” said Portia, “if your father was Lord Mountebank and he’s dead, does that mean you’re Lord Mountebank now?”

  “Why, it surely does, my dear.”

  Portia stood up and brushed the dry grass off her skirt. “And who does that make me?” she asked.

  “Whoever you want to be,” Jackal said, and he tipped his hat and was gone.

  Why She Was There

  Though she was sure Jackal’s story was utterly untrue, it had been so long since anyone had told her a story that she turned his over and over in her mind. Worried it like a stone in her pocket. Smoothed the edges, felt all around it, until it became like a fairy tale she’d heard as a child. The story sparked inside her, igniting others, the ones she had spoken to Max and the ones she had never spoken to anyone, until it seemed that she might actually split open from so many words.

  She found Gideon on the border of the midway, sitting on a water barrel and gazing toward the big top. “Better not let Mosco find you like that,” she said lightly. She knew, already, that there was always something to be done, some chore, some form of motion needed to keep the circus on schedule. Sitting still was rarely an option.

  Gideon smiled. “I can always tell him I’m on clown patrol.”

  Portia smiled, too. She didn’t know what to say next. She felt—not nervous exactly, but restless, jittery.

  “You finished with Jackal already?” Gideon asked.

  “I guess so. For today. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be learning from him. All he told me was a story about—”

  “Lord Mountebank?”

  “Yes. I thought you said people here didn’t like to talk about themselves.”

  “Well, for one thing, Jackal’s not quite like everybody else. And for another, that story’s not really about Jackal. That story’s been bumping around since the talker before the talker before Jackal. According to Doula.”

  “I figured,” Portia said. “Still, it was interesting.”

  Gideon wiped at his forehead with the back of one hand, then shaded his eyes and looked toward the circus again. “First o’Mays think everything’s interesting around here. Especially the sideshow.”

  “First of what?”

  “First o’May. Somebody who signs on with the circus because they’re curious. Or in trouble. Running away from something, usually.”

  “Is that what you think I am?”

  “Aren’t you? Nothing wrong with it.”

  But it sounded wrong to Portia, like an insult or a bad joke, to be so easily identified with other strangers. People who had come and gone and left no mark. People who had simply disappeared into the past and never been seen again.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she snapped. “You don’t know why I’m here or where I’ve come from, and you don’t want to know. You want me to keep my secrets? Fine. But don’t accuse me of hiding something when you’re the one who told me to mind my own business.”

  “I didn’t—” Gideon started, but Portia was already striding away.

  “Wait!” he shouted, and then she heard his feet thumping the dry ground as he ran up behind her and grabbed her shoulder. His hold was firm, but careful, and Portia willed herself to stand still, to feel her own bones beneath his hand, before turning to face him.

  “I didn’t mean—” he stammered. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve seen a lot of folks come through here, acting like they care about the show and then running off again. Couple of ’em turned out to be reporters. Just wanted to take pictures of the freaks and put them in the newspaper.” He scuffed his shoe in the dirt. “There aren’t that many good reasons for normals wanting to join up with the sideshow, y’know. Mostly they’re after something.”

  He looked at her.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” Portia said quietly.

  “Then why?”

  “I—” The words, again, pushed at her from the inside, wanting to get out. “I’m looking for my father.”

  Gideon seemed relieved, as if he’d been afraid that Portia’s reason was something insidious, something much worse than a lost parent. “Does he work for the circus?”

  It was a simple question, one that Portia had tried not to ask herself too directly. Because the truth was that she did not know whether Max really had joined up with a circus, much less this circus. She did not know if he was here, or within a thousand miles of here, or even if he was alive. Her throat burned, and she swallowed hard.

  “I don’t know where he is,” she whispered. “I just . . . I had to find a place to look for him. And he loved the circus, once.”

  “It’s as good a place as any,” Gideon said, “to look for someone. You’ll see, tonight. It’s empty now, but pretty soon there’ll be people everywhere, more than you can count. I can help you, if you want.”

  She shook her head, but smiled. “Jackal wants me by the stage, so I can keep an eye out.”

  “Well, I’m working the ticket wagon tonight, so I’ll see everyone except the folks who sneak in. If you change your mind—”

  “Thank you,” Portia said. She couldn’t say why, but she felt that this was her work to do, that if anyone was going to find Max in the crowd, it should be her. It must be her. Besides, how could she describe him to Gideon, tell him who to look for, when she didn’t have a picture to show? Even the picture in her head was more than fi
ve years old, and five years could change a person. She doubted Max would recognize her.

  She could only hope that, if he did set foot on the midway that night, she would find a way to see him, to know him, and this time, not to let him leave without her.

  Inside

  That evening Portia went inside for the first time.

  Jackal said she needed to observe his methods before she could make any attempt at her own bally, and he told her to bring a quarter for admission. But Portia was not about to surrender any of her precious savings to follow Jackal’s orders, even with the added bonus of finally having her curiosity satisfied. It was unheard of for Jackal to give anybody anything for free. But he had become addicted to having a pupil. So he relented, and Portia became the only nonpaying sideshow spectator in the history of the Wonder Show.

  The crowd had been drawn, as they were meant to be, by Mosco’s and Marie’s acts. They were the pit show, designed to entice passing rubes with their strange and marvelous tricks. Portia stood to one side of the stage. She thought again of The Pinhead and the accordion, the strains of tinny music reaching her ears as she sat high on the stranger’s shoulders. She glanced at the faces below—she could see everyone, but it was like looking into a forest from far away, impossible to distinguish one tree from another. Still, she scanned the crowd, searching for anyone she recognized.

  It would be impossible to find someone, Portia thought, if you lost them here. She looked again behind the carnival games, past the place where she knew the trucks were parked, into the blackest dark. And she felt such despair that she had to close her eyes.

  The night voices threatened to speak again, and she fought them off.