Only Pretty Damned

by Niall Howell

  “I hear the best way to get rid of hiccups is to scare them out.”

  She winks. “Too bad our headliners have already performed.”

  We both have a good laugh, and by the time I remember my earlier suggestion to get some fresh air, I’ve already cracked open two more beers for us. I assure her that these are our last tonight, having no desire to go through the motions of dealing with a drunken, frisky Gloria. She can be pretty damn determined when she wants to be, and as attractive as she is, I just wouldn’t feel right about it; I’ll always think of her as a kid, even if she isn’t one any more.

  I finish my beer in a hurry, and the instant her last drop goes, I tell her that I’ve become suddenly tired.

  “I’m tired too, Toby.” She yawns for authenticity and then stretches her arms behind her back, making her frowning feathered breasts bulge out at me. “I could fall asleep right now. Maybe I could just say here. My trailer feels like it’s a million miles away.”

  “Nope. Sorry, kid.” I get up and help her to her feet. “My snoring’s loud enough to ruin friendships. Off ya go.”

  I help Gloria down the steps and point her in the direction of her shared trailer. It’s dark outside now, must be well after eleven o’ clock. An ambitious bonfire is raging in the spot where the barbecue was held earlier, and clusters of performers and crew huddle in circles, swigging booze, yakking away.

  I notice the royal couple standing away from everyone else, on the periphery of the fire; the sole members of their own little elite club. Andrew is standing closer to the fire’s glow and is completely visible. He’s still wearing his costume—a red leotard with bright yellow stripes down the side—but the creeping cold has forced him to throw a wool sweater on. He’s talking at Genevieve, and, judging by his slack posture and his graceless gesturing, he’s well on his way to drunk. Genevieve’s form, on the other hand, is steeped in darkness. The light touching her is so scant, so scant that unless you were looking for her, you wouldn’t know she was there at all. Unless you were looking for her, it would appear that Andrew were a delusional drunk standing by himself, yakking his own ear off.

  But I know she’s there. The burning glow may only illuminate a slight line here, a gentle curve there, but I know what those add up to. I know how to fill in those blanks and see a form so familiar that I wouldn’t hesitate to say I’ve got it memorized.

  THE SOUND OF RIGOROUS RAIN TAPPING ACROSS THE ROOF of my trailer wakes me. The gin I downed after Gloria left has made my mouth so dry that my tongue feels completely alien, and a pounding ache seems to have parked itself directly behind my eyeballs. I can hardly see a thing. I rub my hands over my eyes at least five times before I realize the darkness can be credited to the fact that it’s still night and has nothing to do with my disoriented state. With one hand, I grope at the floor beside my bed until I find the small jug of water I always keep there. I bring it to my lips and pour. Much of it leaks out from the corners of my mouth because I’m still lying on my back, but I get enough down the hatch to reintroduce my tongue and dampen the throb of my headache. There are two people fucking loudly in a nearby trailer, though I can’t tell exactly which trailer because of the tap-tapping rain. I don’t recognize the grunts, but one of them sounds distinctly male and the other sounds distinctly neutral. I think of the other trailers close to mine, but once I realize that the nearest one is inhabited by the Sycs, I pull my pillow over my head, deciding that I have no interest in listening to them bump uglies with anything. The pillow cuts out most of the rain, but I can still hear a faint exchange of thuds and grunts through the cloth and feathers—maybe it wasn’t the rain that woke me after all. A few minutes pass and then the noises stop. I realize that it couldn’t have been any of the Sycs because I only heard two grunts and those four do everything together.

  Plagued by the laziness that tends to accompany a bastard of a hangover, I choose not to get out of bed and dig out my pocket watch and instead decide that it is somewhere between four and five a.m. I spend the next two or so hours trying to fall back to sleep, with no luck. Shortly after the rain lets up, I hear someone’s door open and decide that I might as well get up and get some fresh air.

  “Mornin’,” Julian says to me as I lumber out from my trailer, still fidgeting with my pants as I hop down the steps.

  “Morning, pal.”

  “That was some storm last night, hey?” He plucks a pack of Chesterfields from his back pocket and offers me one. I decline with a wave of my hand.

  “Thanks, but I’m a Camel man now.”

  “Huh. No shit.”

  “Yup. Apparently they’re a lot better on the throat,” I tell him as I pull out my cigarette case—a nifty silver number with a golden fleur de lis on top that I picked up when I was in Quebec years ago—and take a smoke for myself.

  Julian’s been with the show almost as long as I have, so you could say we’ve gotten to know each other rather well over the years, despite our best efforts. I’ve always thought he was a decent performer (as far as knife-throwers go), and his wife, Susan, is the best kind of riot, but he and I never really hit it off until a couple years ago, our history with the show proving to be a bottomless well for discussion.

  He and I puff away as we chat about topics that start off on small-talk turf and slowly migrate into juicier territory. Once you get him going, Julian’s like a dam with a hole in its wall. Just as soon as you think you’ve got him corked, another hole will show up out of nowhere, and, well, you eventually realize you’ve only got so many plugging-fingers available before you resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to get drenched. He tells me about a feud between Susan and Carolyn, one of our dancers, that grew out of Carolyn implying that Susan’s ass seemed to be expanding; he tells me that he has it on good authority that Mister Rowland has been nicking the newest bunch of razorbacks on their paychecks and pocketing the extra bread for himself; he tells me that the Sycs are all fugitives.

  Sometimes, being the top-tiers that we are, Julian and I will critique the other performers’ acts, but lately he’s avoided the subject during our chats. I think I maybe put him off when I got a little too worked up a few weeks back during a discussion on aerial technique, but honestly, sometimes I can’t help myself. I mean, Christ, this place is crawling with phonies and hacks masquerading as top-bill material, and I can’t help but let it get to me sometimes. Maybe I’m a dam, too, I just don’t leak as easy. I do all I can to keep it in because I know the water behind my wall is filthy, probably has arsenic or some shit in it.

  We’ve killed four cigarettes between the two of us when Susan emerges from her and Julian’s trailer. She’s resting one hand on her robe-clad stomach and is sporting a smile that could light up a small town.

  “Good morning, Toby, good morning, Julian,” she sings. “My Lord,” she takes a deep breath in, “I love the way it smells after a big storm.”

  “Hey, sweetheart,” Julian says. He puts his cigarette out on his boot, walks over to his wife and plants a kiss on her cheek.

  Susan lingers for a minute, then tells us that she’s going to go wash up and that she’ll see us at breakfast. I open my mouth to ask Julian what his wife is so chipper about as soon as she’s out of earshot, but he beats me to the punch, naturally.

  “Hey, Toby,” he says, gripping my arm, beaming, “just between us,” he checks over his shoulder for spies, “Susan and me, we got a little one on the way! Now, don’t you mention it to nobody, because she’s only a month or so in, but we went to a doctor the other day when we were back in Little Rock, and he confirmed it!”

  “Hey, that’s excellent, Jules, congrats, buddy. A nuclear family in nuclear times, hey?” I give his hand a good shake. “And don’t you worry, I won’t tell a soul,” I assure him, knowing that if anybody spills, it’ll be Julian himself. “Say, what’s that gonna mean for your act, though? You gonna need someone new to whip your knives at?” I’m half kidding, but the other half of me is thinking that Gloria would be pe
rfect to cover for Susan. Don’t get me wrong, being a spec girl is great, but Gloria deserves a bigger spotlight, one that she doesn’t have to share with so many others.

  “No,” Julian says, dragging out the ‘no’ as if I just asked him if he would ever consider a career as a swimsuit model, “Susan’ll be fine until she really starts showing in the last few months. I just won’t be able to throw the knives anywhere near her belly. Gotta be extra careful, y’know.”

  And if I didn’t know him better, I’d think he was kidding.

  WE HAVE ANOTHER SHOW TONIGHT, AND WE'LL TEAR down right after and hit the road again first thing tomorrow morning. It’s around eight o’ clock, and most people are still in their trailers sawing wood. I’m making my way to the big top when a couple of our guys pull into the lot. They’re coming back from the city, having gone in last night to promote this evening’s show and to tear down any of our competition’s flyers. We don’t end up sharing a city with another show often, but it happens every now and then, and whenever it does, you’ve got to send a couple guys into the city to do whatever they can to make sure we keep our numbers up. It’s all very dog-eat-dog—or sometimes dog-eat-rat—and I’ve even heard of instances where a group of guys from our show will run into a group of guys from a rival show, and they’ll have it out. One time, a few years back, one of our guys came back to the lot beaten so bad we didn’t even recognize him as one of our own. It was around this time of year. I remember sitting around the bonfire that crisp summer night, everybody drinking and yakking away at each other, when someone, I want to say it was Susan, spotted this shape hobbling toward the fire. Once the light hit the guy (who, you could tell right away, had been hit by much crueler things that night), all the chatter dissolved, and for a few seconds everyone just stared. The guy was such a mess; one eye swollen completely shut, his mouth hanging open, looking a few teeth short of a full set. He couldn’t even talk, he just took another couple steps toward us and then collapsed. A few people rushed to him right away. It was Rowland who eventually noticed the snake tattoo on his hand and realized he wasn’t just some bum drifter, but one of our own guys. It was hard to get the full story out of him because he kept fading in and out of consciousness for a couple days, and he had a fractured jaw, among other injuries. But once he was relatively coherent, he was able to write down what had happened. Apparently, he was tearing down a bunch of Ringling flyers and he got spotted by some of their guys. They followed him to a pub, and when he left, they dragged him into an alley and beat the shit out of him. Since then, Rowland has always made sure that at least two night riders (that’s what we call them) go out to advertise and balance the scales of competition. The two I’m looking at right now don’t appear to have run into any trouble in the city. Or if they did, the dark circles under their eyes and the matching looks of weary contentment suggest that it was the good kind of trouble.

  We exchange nods and they pass me, heading toward the sea of trailers, and I slip into the big top. I tie the flap open to get some light in the place and walk to the centre of the ring. Moments like this, the place somehow looks even more beautiful empty than it does stuffed to capacity. The emptiness feels so…inviting…inviting, and right. That’s it, just plain right. Like home. As if those red and blue flaps I just tied back are gates into a paradise that was crafted specifically for me, and only me. At moments like this, I forget everything else and let this place wrap itself around me.

  My eyes always start on the ground, in the dirt, right at the bottom of the ladder. They start at the bottom and then they move onto the first rung and start climbing. Thirty-six steps, one at a time, the rope ladder wavering ever so slightly with each step. My eyes move to the platform. They move to the bar, whose cables descend from above, an intricate web of pulleys and lines that looks messy but is actually the most carefully crafted network you could ever imagine. I see myself swing out into the air, into infinity and…

  Christ, moments like these.

  Moments like these are just moments. Moments, and nothing more. You breathe them in, and, well, you can only hold your breath for so long, so you breathe them out, and they’re gone, and you’re back on the ground, you’re back in the dirt.

  "DO YOU MISS IT?"

  “Miss what?” I ask—a desperate grab for a couple seconds to recover from the curveball. Gloria is rarely so blunt. Normally, the cores of her questions were like holes in the ground, sectioned off by flashy orange barricades: obstacles begging to be danced around. I blame her staggering right into one on the gin, and make a note to be leery about offering endless refills.

  She chides, “Waddaya mean what? Flying! Sheesh, Toby, welcome to the conversation.”

  I laugh an uncomfortable laugh and rub my hand over my forehead—one of those nervous gestures that you’re aware of but can never seem to do a damn thing about.

  “Do I miss it? Hell, I don’t know. No.”

  She takes an ambitious sip and then starts laughing with the glass still to her lips, sputtering much of her mouthful back to be enjoyed again later. Likely not much later. “Come on! You must at least miss it a bit. I mean, don’t get me wrong, your act now is great. Hell, it’s the best part of the whole show, if you ask me, but you must miss flying.”

  I don’t speak. I try to drown in my own drink, hoping that if I don’t respond, she’ll just move onto something else—anything else—sooner or later.

  “I can just imagine,” she says, “you flying through the air like Super—”

  “I wasn’t a flyer. Genevieve was the flyer and I was the catcher.” Goddamn it. Leave it to me to be lured in by a technical correction.

  “Oh…right. I’m sorry. I. Well, whatever you want to call it, I’m sure it was amazing. I once heard one of the girls say that you soared through the air as if you had your own vault full of Get Out of Jail Free cards for Officer Gravity.” She starts to chuckle a bit. “Get Out of Jail Free, you know, like that Monopoly game?”

  “Of course I know the game,” I say, the words rushing out of me quicker, and maybe more jagged, than I intend them.

  We’re both silent for a moment. I turn and look out the window, watching the ribbon of highway unravel behind us. It’ll be at least another few hours before we hit Fort Worth. I look back to Gloria. Her face and body are framed and fractured by the pale glow of the moon, projecting itself through the trailer’s paned window, making it look as though she were compartmentalized into four sections. I can’t help but think of that magic trick, the one where they stick a pretty girl in a wooden box, shove a few swords in the side, and then rearrange the enthralled volunteer to the amusement of herself and the audience. A mere push here and a pull there and you’ve managed to reconfigure an entire human being, just like that.

  Because I can’t think of anything else, I tell her, “We ought to play it sometime,” and Gloria looks at me blankly. “Monopoly, that is. Welcome to the conversation.”

  “Sure.” She sounds disinterested, and I know it’s because of me. The way that I get, the way that my tone alters, the way I tense up when certain…things are brought up. It’s not something I’m unaware of. But I’ve told her a hundred times: there are topics I don’t care to discuss. Usually she doesn’t pry too much, but tonight she managed to jam the tip of the crowbar right into the tiny void around the door of the vault, a void that, it just so happens, a certain nerve likes to call home. And, boy, do I know how she gets when she’s met with any degree of coldness. How she begins to withdraw, how she waits for you to coddle her back into comfort, to pet her with your words and assure her that she’s wanted. It irks me, but for some reason, whenever I see that baited hook floating in front of me in the water, I always bite. No matter how many times it pierces me, I just don’t learn my lesson. It’s always a mouthful of worms and a poke through the lip for me.

  “You strike me as being one of those cutthroat types when it comes to Monopoly,” I tell her. “Like one of those types that puts a big red hotel on every property and bleed
s their opponent dry. Hell, I bet that’s what you paint the hotels with, isn’t it? The blood of your enemies—a warning to any who would dare to cross Gloria, the mighty real-estate mogul.”

  She turns her eyes up to me and gives me just enough of a smirk to indicate that I’m doing good.

  “You betcha, Toby. You’re looking at the Queen of Boardwalk and Park Place. We can play sometime, but don’t expect me to go easy on ya.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it!”

  She laughs and wiggles herself up from the slouch that she’d dipped into, then takes a sip of her drink. We spend the next hour or so chatting away, the steady whirr of weathered wheels conspiring with a bottle of gin and the soothing breath of the Indian summer sky to lure us both to the brink of consciousness.

  Once Gloria is certain that there’s not a drop left in the bottle, she curls up on the bed, closes her eyes, and mumbles goodnight to me. I’m sprawled out on the couch, my eyes getting ready to punch the clock, but willing to put in a few minutes overtime for the noble cause of finishing my drink.

  A few minutes roll by. I sip away at my drink. Gloria is snoring faintly. “Sometimes I do…” I start, but stop myself, because I know that she already knew the answer before she asked me the question. She knew, but she wanted to hear it from me, hear me say it out loud. Say it to her. Unfortunately, I don’t feel up to offering that kind of satisfaction tonight, whether the set of ears I’m talking to is attached to a sleeping head or not. I just plain old don’t feel like it.

  WHEN LOUSY PEOPLE CROAK, THEY GET ESCORTED TO A southbound elevator that zips them straight down to Lucifer’s inferno. But let me tell you, pal, when extra lousy, downright rotten, no-good sons of bitches croak, they get a different kind of southbound trip. They get handed a one-way ticket to Fort Worth, Texas. Keeee-rist! What a town. Unbearably hot, ash-dry, populated by the sorriest bunch of animated corpses you ever saw, and, unlike hell, it doesn’t even have the decency to burst into flames.