Of course it had occurred to him to hire another strongman and spare himself the inconvenience of performing, but the only thing more bothersome than doing the shows would have been paying someone else to do them. He was capable. And the exercise was good for him.
And it gave him an excuse to be standing front and center when Marie took the stage. As the plucky opening strains of Josephine Baker’s La Petite Tonkinoise wafted out of the speakers above the stage, Marie stepped gracefully from behind the curtain and took her position. As if in a dream, Mosco watched as Marie stood on one leg and brought the other foot to the small wooden table at her side, selected a knife, gripped it between her toes, and fired it at the target with perfect accuracy. Then, with the thud of the knife piercing wood, a shudder went through the crowd like a chill wind through tall grass. It was the precise moment when the spectacle became real, when they realized what was before their eyes: a beautiful, deadly, disfigured creature. Marie, the Armless Knife-Thrower.
Anna appeared at the other end of the platform, removed the knives from the target, replaced them on the table, and returned to stand with her back pressed against the target.
Marie could make a knife do anything. Pin a fly to the wall, cut an apple in perfect halves, cut a lock of her sister’s hair without ever drawing blood.
But she didn’t do her best tricks anymore. The only thing worse than being poor, she said, was being famous. That’s when you stopped being a real person. People told stories about you, and the stories got bigger until you were more in their eyes than you could ever be in your own. They took your soul that way.
So she did enough to stay well known, enough to keep Anna in good clothes and herself in sharp blades, and tried to forget about the rest.
Except some nights, every now and then, she let it roll back to her like water coming through a dry riverbed. She tucked her head through her leather sash and let it fall around her neck, walked to a stand of trees or an empty building, and threw knives in the moonlight. She did it by feel, by the position of her leg and the strength of the wind (if there was any). She did it by sound. By instinct. By magic, almost.
It was there, in her own quiet country, that Marie was truly happy.
Her costume was dark blue satin, like a layer of the ocean no one had ever seen. It had a halter neckline because she liked to show off her perfect shoulders, below which there might have been a pair of perfect arms except that she’d been born without them. She was not ashamed of the emptiness along the sides of her body. In fact, she couldn’t imagine having limbs there—how unwieldy they would be, dangling there, waving around, whatever arms might do. She did not mourn the lack of them. She simply did not need them.
Marie could sign her name, comb her hair, clean her kitchen, turn the pages of a book as delicately as if her toes were fingers. When she spoke, she sat down and crossed her legs and gestured emphatically with her upper foot.
And of course, she could throw a knife with unflinching accuracy.
“Show me how you do it,” Portia begged. She had watched Marie’s show a dozen times by then and still couldn’t figure out how the knives went from Marie’s toes to the standing target board at the other end of the stage. It happened too quickly. There was Marie standing like a crane, poised on one foot with the other leg raised, holding a knife between her toes, and then she gave a little kick and the knife was in the target. She made it look easy, but Portia had tried to mimic the motion (knife free, because she didn’t want to cut anyone, especially herself) and felt nothing but awkward.
Marie shrugged her orphaned shoulders. “You can watch me rehearse, if you like. But I cannot throw the knives any slower. You must watch more closely.”
“How did you learn to do it, though? Do you remember when you started?”
Marie ignored the question. She raised a slippered foot and pointed to the thick roll of felt waiting on the steps of her trailer. “You can carry my knives for me. Anna has gone into town.”
“How’d she get Mosco to let her?”
Marie shrugged again. “She is quiet, my sister, but she is persuasive.”
Portia grabbed the bundle, and they walked the short distance to the midway stage.
Marie used her toes to hold the back of her shoe and lifted her heel out, first the left and then the right. She wiggled her bare toes in the grass. “I was very small when I began. My father taught me—he was a knife-thrower in the old days. He quit when he met my mother, but he never forgot the art.”
The word father made Portia swallow hard. “Did he use his feet, too?”
“You’re asking me if he had arms.”
“Yes.”
“He did. But he tied his hands behind his back so he could teach me to throw with my feet. We learned together that way.”
“Did he teach Anna?”
“No. She was normal.” Marie rolled her head side to side, to loosen up and make sure her sister wasn’t nearby. “She is normal. She can do other things. She did not need to learn the art.”
“That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t want to know how to do it,” Portia said.
Marie mounted the steps, walked to her mark, and tapped the stage with her toe. “The knives, please.”
Portia ran up and set the bundle down at Marie’s feet. She untied the ribbon that secured it and unrolled the felt, revealing the long row of knife handles. The blades were concealed in deep pockets that were sewn to fit each knife like a tailored sleeve. Aunt Sophia had the same kind of case for her knitting needles. She had made it herself.
Portia wondered who had made this one for Marie.
Before she could ask, Marie waved her away with the flick of a foot and started to slide the knives out of their pockets. Not all the way, just enough so that she could grip the base of each blade with her toes and lift the knife into position.
“It is important,” said Marie, “to have each knife in the same place each time, because each knife is different. So each throw is different. If I throw the fourth knife just the way I throw the third, the pattern will be ruined.”
Portia had the beginning of a thought, the image of Anna posed against the target board and a knife thrown the wrong way. She shook it away and concentrated on the chain of motions Marie created with her throwing leg. Her right leg, closest to the edge of the stage, closest to the audience.
She could throw with her left just as well, but if the crowd couldn’t see the whole sequence, it simply wasn’t as impressive. And above all, Marie was a performer.
“It is quite simple. A combination of heart and precision.”
“That’s what Aunt Sophia used to say about baking,” said Portia.
“Was she right?” asked Marie.
“Sometimes,” said Portia. “But not always.”
From the Notebook of Portia Remini
Once upon a time
I made an apple tree
It grew too tall to climb
It shadowed over me
On every reaching limb
The apple blossoms flowered
But when the fruit came in
The apples all were sour
Once upon a time
When promises were made
The stories all were mine
But now the stories fade.
Family Recipe
In her notebook, Portia wrote stories told by other people, rhymes a child might sing, bits of conversation she overheard on the midway, descriptions of the rubes that processed through the tent every evening like ghosts. She tried to be watchful, and to see every face, and she kept a tally of how many men she saw who could have been Max but weren’t. Each one was a bit wrong in some way—too short, too old, too young, loud, cruel, sad, heavy, dark. Looking so closely at strangers gave Portia the sensation of wearing spectacles that distorted everyone just slightly. She began to wonder if the sideshow tent actually changed people, as if upon entering they were rendered different by one degree.
The only folks who looked right were the o
nes on stage.
Every night, after the bally was done and the crowds had dispersed from the last circus show, as the roustabouts broke down the lot and prepared to get back on the road, Portia huddled in her trailer and scribbled words onto paper, hoping they would mean something, make something happen.
How many more days could she tell herself one more day? This had been her only plan. She was immobilized by the possibility that it simply would not work. Worse, Gideon seemed to have adopted her search for Max as a personal cause. Perhaps to make up for having teased her about the bicycle, or for reasons of his own that he did not decide to share, he hounded her daily about her progress.
“See him?” he’d ask. “Anything?”
“No,” she mumbled.
Having to say aloud over and over that she had not found Max, nor anyone who even closely resembled him, made Portia furious. She did her best not to show it—her temper had gotten the best of her before. But this time, she lost her resolve.
“Leave me alone!”
Gideon looked as if he’d been slapped. His hands sank into his pockets, and he let his breath out slowly. Then he said, “I put up a sign in the ticket window with his name on it, saying he’s got free tickets waiting for him. Word could get around that way.”
Portia blinked. “How do you do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Just . . . breathe like that. Stay so calm. How do you do it?”
He smiled, drew his hands out, spread them in front of her. “Magic,” he said, and began whistling like a calliope.
Portia laughed. It sounded strange to her, her voice bending to that cadence. Gideon smiled again.
“You’ll find him,” he told her.
She knew he was only trying to make her feel better. There was no reason to believe in Max showing up on the lot, no mysterious force that kept fathers and daughters in the same universe simply because their blood was the same recipe. And yet, as Portia looked around, at the dusky sky and the great flat expanse of prairie and the bones of the circus readied for their journey, she thought she could feel something—a buoyancy, a lifting of the ground under her feet, keeping her upright. Perhaps this was the physics of faith, the knowledge that the earth was moving and so was she.
“Thank you,” Portia said.
And she continued to spin.
More Secrets
Each week was a cycle, built out of scheduled tasks that no one ignored or questioned. Bathe on Monday, wash clothes on Tuesday, go to the market on Wednesday, clean house on Thursday, mend costumes and canvas on Friday. Extra shows on Saturday. Day off on Sunday. For the circus performers and the human marvels (plus Jackal and Portia), every day brought rehearsal, and for the roustabouts and mechanics there were constant repairs, and the near-daily breakdown, transport, and reassembly of the circus. But that was work. The rituals of regular life happened one day at a time, each week, like a wheel in perpetual motion.
The circus and the Wonder Show followed the same schedule, but the circus people did certain things first. There was only so much space in the dining tent and only so many washtubs and only so many stalls in the bank of outdoor showers, so the carnival folks ate second, washed their clothes second, bathed second. They were accustomed to eating warm food instead of hot or cold, to bathing under high noon sun instead of low morning light, to wearing clothes that were never quite as clean as they might have liked.
Portia, though, had gotten used to the privileges of living in Mister’s house (dubious as they were). And she did not appreciate having to wait around for the seemingly endless trail of circus performers to finish eating or bathing or washing their clothes before she could do the same.
She and Violet were sitting in the ancient lawn chairs, watching the sun climb the sky and waiting for their chance to clean up. Portia felt especially filthy—it had been almost two weeks since her escape from Mister, and she’d had only one real bath. Most days she had to be satisfied with a bowl of lukewarm water and one of Jackal’s handkerchiefs. The trailer she was sharing with Violet was, to put it kindly, a classic model. No running water, no electricity, and no bathroom. Some of the better-known circus performers had new Airstream trailers with all sorts of modern luxuries (or so Violet said), and Portia glared at their gleaming steel skins with all the envy she could muster. But it was too hot even for that.
“This is ridiculous,” Violet said irritably. “I swear it takes longer and longer every week for them to get finished. What are they, showering the horses, too?”
“At least we get to go first after they’re done. It’s nice of Mosco to set it up that way.”
“Nice, nothing. If the men went first, Mrs. Murphy and Mrs. Collington’d likely string him up by his belt loops and leave him for dead.”
The rest of the women paced nearby—Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Collington, Mrs. Lucasie, Anna, Marie . . .
“Where’s Doula?” Portia asked. “And the twins?”
Violet shrugged. “They usually go to a hotel in town. The twins make enough money from the blowoff to get a room for a few hours, and Doula goes with them. To help them, I guess.”
“What’s the blowoff?”
Violet lowered her sunglasses. “Jackal hasn’t told you?”
Portia shook her head, and Violet sat up in her chair and leaned forward. She was suddenly crackling with energy.
“Remember what I said about the ten-in-one? How this used to be a real show?”
Portia noticed Mrs. Murphy squinting in her direction and hoped she couldn’t hear what Violet was saying. It felt a little rude to be gossiping with everyone so nearby. Violet, however, wasn’t bothered.
“Well, without The Human Torso, the two big draws are Marie and the twins. So Pippa decided she and Polly should do something different, something more interesting, to draw the crowds. She got Mosco to let her and Polly start a new act on the back stage.”
Behind the curtain Jackal had refused to let her pass through.
“What kind of act?”
Violet leaned closer. “They dance.”
“So?”
“Naked.”
Portia’s face blushed hot, and for some reason she thought of Caroline. She would have been horrified, Portia told herself. And I would have told her she was silly for it.
“Are you all right?” Violet asked.
Portia fanned herself with one of Violet’s movie magazines. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”
“I was bound to find out sometime,” said Portia. “Anyway, there are worse things in the world than dancing girls.”
Men without remorse. Families who leave their little girls behind in dark places.
“I suppose there are,” said Violet. “Anyway, you should see it. The act. Especially if you’re supposed to be the inside talker.”
“Jackal won’t let me in.”
“I’ll get you in,” said Violet, determination in her voice. “Done it before.”
Then it was their turn for the shower, and suddenly Portia felt self-conscious, as if talking about Polly and Pippa’s being naked had changed what being naked meant. She tried to imagine the feeling of it, on stage, with an audience looking at her. Men, looking at her.
She finished her shower and dressed quickly, wanting to be covered, not caring if her clothes stuck to her still-damp skin.
Mosco
Look, I’ve been on this circuit a long time. My whole life, maybe. I can’t remember anything other than this, so it might be my whole life or it might just be I can’t remember anything else.
I always knew I’d have my own show and it would be a respectable operation. No pickled punks or monkeys turned into mermaids. No pinheads. No naked girls.
But sometimes a man has to make concessions. There’s certain things the rubes want to see, and the twins, they wore me down. I love those girls like they were my own, and I never wanted ’em jiggling around in front of a crowd full of perverts, but they wore me down
. They know the game. They’re either on the regular stage getting the same pay as everybody else, or they’re the blowoff. Hell of a lot more money in the blowoff. And you can’t have a blowoff that’s tame. They know that.
I protect them. That’s all I can do. I’m next to the stage at every performance, and those guys in the crowd have already seen me outside. They’ve seen me bend a steel pipe in half. They won’t mess with the twins while I’m there.
That’s all I can do.
Still.
I don’t ever look.
Polly
Sometimes me and Pippa get to meet other twins when we go to new places. Never twins like us, y’know, attached like us, but still it’s nice to talk to them. These girls from Biloxi said sometimes they have the exact same dreams, just like me and Pippa. And they had a secret language, too, like we used to have. I guess we grew out of it, though.
People think we must be just alike, me and Pippa, but we’re not. She’s smarter than me, and she reads more books than me. I learned how to knit so I’d have something to do when she’s reading. I’m pretty good at it now, but I still get bored. I guess I’m lucky I’m on the left, because I can do all the driving and Pippa can read while we’re on the road. I think I’d go crazy if I couldn’t drive.
I know we’re real lucky, too, because we each have two arms we can use and two legs, too. We heard about some twin boys from Italy who only had two legs between them but they had separate top halves and they couldn’t even walk. They had to crawl around on the floor like babies. That would be awful. I think Pippa would hate me even more if we were like that.
She says she doesn’t hate me at all, but she’s the one who always talks about if we were different. I don’t even like to imagine if we were different. I would miss her so much. And if we were born like this, doesn’t that mean God made us this way for a reason? I don’t even say that to Pippa anymore, though, because she says she doesn’t believe in God, and that makes me upset. The preacher said those who don’t believe will go straight to hell.
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