by Niall Howell
Gloria notices my gaze drifting out the window. “Don’t worry about them,” she says.
“I don’t.” I assure her, then realize, “Wait, don’t worry about who?”
“You know. Them,” she says, as if it adds any clarity. I look at her blankly. Maybe slightly irritated, but also blankly. “Genevieve and Andrew,” she says. “Don’t worry about them. They’re nobodies. Hacks. So what if they’re headliners? The public wouldn’t know a good act if it kicked them in the ass. They’re nobodies, so don’t let yourself worry about them, Toby.”
I’m about to protest, to tell her she’s way off if she thinks I give a damn at all about those two, but I keep quiet. The way Gloria spoke, her assuring tone, the way she said Them as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, I realize if I’m fooling anyone, it’s not her. The ensuing scowl is almost a relief to my beaten face. Turns out optimism is a taxing expression to wear when you’ve been smacked around a bunch. “I wouldn’t say I worry about them,” I tell Gloria after thinking for a moment. “Worry…worry isn’t the right word. I mean, I worry about the commies nuking us, but I don’t worry about Genevieve and Andrew.” I reach for the bottle and pour what’s left into my glass. I take a long drink. “Hope,” I say, raising a lecturing index. “Hope is the right word. I hope for Genevieve and Andrew.”
Gloria considers this for a moment and then shakes her head. “I don’t think I understand you, Toby.”
“When they climb that ladder to the trapeze platform, I hope that the last step breaks just as Andrew commits all his weight to it. When they swing out into the air, I hope for the sound of a snapping wire. Whenever I head to the city like everyone else does on our days off, and I hear a siren—police, ambulance, firetruck, the fucking national guard, anything—I hope to God it’s something to do with those two. So, you see, Gloria,” a chuckle escapes me, “as miserable as I must seem whenever I watch a dumbfounded audience eat out of Genevieve and Andrew’s grubby hands, I’m still a hopeful guy when you get right down to it.”
“Well, look at that,” Gloria laughs, “I’ve had you pegged all wrong. You’re just a ray of sunshine, aren’t you Toby?”
“Sure am.”
She wiggles her eyebrows in a manner that’s equal parts nefarious and hammy, then she hunches forward over our Scrabble game and brushes some tiles off the board. At first I think she’s cleaning up, but then I realize that while she’s taking some tiles off, she’s keeping others on the board, shifting them around meticulously.
All but a small handful have been removed, and once she looks satisfied with what’s on the board, she stands up on booze-wobbly legs and plucks the cowboy hat from my head, placing it on her own. She pulls it down in the front, like I did earlier, like a vigilante, and picks up the Scrabble board, turning it carefully, as if it were a crowded tray of brimming teacups. “Ya know, pardner,” she begins in a low villain’s register, “if hope ever feels like it just ain’t enough,” she places the Scrabble board before me and gestures to the words she’s arranged, “you could always” KILL THEM, it says.
KILL THEM
Seventeen points if it were all one word.
Our eyes lock. Hers eyes have a glassy, drunken shine to them. The flicker of a candle is encased in her large pupils. We sit in silence for a moment, and then I open my mouth to speak, but before I get a word out, Gloria cracks. Laughter pours out of her. She tosses the hat off, leans back in her chair, hysterical, shooting off her own finger-pistols.
“I’m sorry, Toby,” she manages to get out. “I couldn’t resist, but, oh, what a terrible thing to joke about!” She laughs it up for a while, and just as tears begin to well up around her eyes, she manages to get the laughter down to a containable snicker.
I chuckle along with her. “You know, you really had me there for a second,” I tell her, my laughter climbing. “I-I mean, the hat, the seriousness of your face—you really had me there, Gloria!”
“I thought I did!” she shouts, falling back into her fit. “You—you looked so panicked! Oh, hell, Toby, I’m awful! What an awful thing for me to kid about.”
I assure her that she needn’t be sorry. “If anyone around here appreciates a good dark joke like that, it’s me,” I say. And as the two of us expel any remaining laughs from our systems, I’m thinking, yeah, the best jokes really are the ones that have some truth to them.
GLORIA LEAVES EARLY IN THE MORNING. DISCREETLY.
I didn’t sleep much.
KILL THEM.
What a terrible thing to think of. What a terrible thing to consider.
Terrible, but still…something magnetic about the idea. Sure, I’ve thought about it before. Often. But it’s as if, by actually saying it, by speaking the idea out loud, Gloria breathed life into it. Joke or not, that thought was up and walking.
All night, I let it roll around in my brain, and now, dawn cracking the sky, another thought—one that’s perhaps felt a little neglected lately—joins in: $3950.
What if? I’m thinking. What if?
What if not them, but him? Yes, only him. I loathe Genevieve, but to kill her? That would be too much. Granted, in my memories of her, the bad far outweighs the good, but recalling our good times, I realize I couldn’t off her. Those good times haunt me enough with her still above ground. Dealing with those memories if she were to die? When you’ve loved someone, you leave a piece of yourself with them, a piece that they keep forever, even if you both hate each other’s guts. I know I could never harm her. But him… him? What if?
And the money? My money? What if I went ahead and did it and then took the money and left? Got a fresh start in a place where I wouldn’t be plagued by petty jealousy and shitty memories. No more Freddy Folly, no more face paint, and no more shaved head. No more having to deal with talentless hacks like Eddie, no more Rowland. I could put a beefy down payment on a house somewhere. I could buy a car and still have a couple thousand left over. I could get myself on a bigger show—The Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey? They’d be thrilled to have someone of my calibre working with them. Hell, I could even forget about performing altogether and hit the track and see if I could get that $3950 to breed.
What if?
SHE GLIDED TO ME, SEQUINS SHIMMERING. A GLINTING blur of red, she tore through the air against a blasting spotlight and propelled herself off her bar and into a double full twist, completing two full somersaults and a body twist midair.
No one breathed until I caught her. And I always caught her.
Together, we moved flawlessly like a clock built by an old master, a thousand tiny gears and springs operating as one machine with the most elegant synchronicity.
I can’t explain why or how, but after her parents died, the act Genevieve and I put together was better than anything we had ever done. Before we came up to Canada for what ended up being a much lengthier stay than either of us anticipated, we were renowned aerialists, not just admired within Rowland’s World Class Circus, but seen by many rival acts as a team whose skill was something to aspire to. Our act was always very good, but in the Great White North when we rejoined our circus family, we somehow found a way to turn very good into incredible.
We’d do our usual stuff: a knee-hang here, a layout half-twist there, a backend planche, a double angel return, things like that, but we also tried to add some more daring tricks to our repertoire. As a catcher, I was normally situated on one bar throughout the act, with Genevieve, the flyer, alternating between her bar and my bar, where I would receive her. But with this new act, we got a little more adventurous, adding a bar-to-bar passing leap, which is normally a manoeuvre done only between two flyers. It involved Genevieve leaping over me while I swung beneath her. Letting go at the same time as she, I would fly to the bar she had just left, with both of us airborne for the same flash of an instant. That really got the crowd going, but the double full twist that Genevieve pulled off was act’s true pièce de résistance. We always finished our set with that double, and I swear, the rap
turous applause that followed that trick—an explosion of praise you could set our watch to—was the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
The days of moving the whole show by train were slowly creeping to an end. Many of the big shows had already turned their backs to the tracks, but Rowland’s was a circus that embraced change the way a stepchild embraced his new father’s rules; you hold out until you’re whipped into submission. That night in Ottawa was our last engagement before yanking the pegs and hauling off to Toronto. And while Genevieve and I autographed photos and told children that if they drank their milk and listened to their parents, they too would someday be able to fly through the air like we did, the ring crew was scrambling to take down the big top and get everything loaded onto a train car so we could all split.
Everyone who wanted an autograph got one. Genevieve would sometimes go a little further and stamp a big red kiss next to her signature, but she’d only do that for the younger ones. She said if they looked old enough to diddle themselves, they didn’t get a pair of lips on their photograph or their programme.
Hand in hand, we walked back to our trailer, navigating through a buzzing throng of riggers. Wally was normally in the thick of everything, barking orders and insulting the work ethic of everyone in earshot, but that night, he wasn’t tearing down with the rest of the crew. Being the multitalented guy he was, there were about a hundred different places he could have been at that moment (I wondered if maybe he’d spotted a new guy not pulling his weight and decided to drag him away from the group and tear a real strip off of him—an occurrence not at all uncommon), but as we neared our trailer, I spotted Wally and Rowland standing off to the side, in the shadows. I could only catch a bit of Rowland’s profile, but he was clearly very angry. His face was all scrunched up and his hand motions were vehement and accusatory. Wally, on the other hand, oozed complacency. He stood with his arms crossed, a toothpick rolling from side to side between his smirking lips. I did my best to look straight ahead while we moved past them, watching them in my periphery in the voyeuristic way you watch a bickering couple have at it in public. Rowland was whisper-yelling, but I couldn’t quite make out what was being said. Whatever they were going on about was something to be filed under hush-hush.
As we passed them, I caught Wally shooting a glance my way. I didn’t turn to face him, but I could tell he was looking at me. From the corner of my eye, I saw his smile grow just a little.
“I don’t care for that man,” Genevieve proclaimed the instant I shut the door behind us.
“Rowland or Wally?”
“Both, I suppose.” She shrugged. She kicked her boots off (we only wore our boots when we were grounded—always performing in our bare feet), and walked over to the kitchen area, retrieving a damp sponge. So many of Genevieve’s manoeuvres depended on her ability to grip with—or to be gripped by—her legs, and she had recently taken to chalking her calves as well as the area behind her knees. She took a seat on the edge of our bed and with the sponge began wiping the chalk from her legs. “They both give me the creeps,” she said, looking up at me, “but more Wally than Rowland. Rowland is an oddball, but he’s always been good to me. But that Wally? What a vile individual.”
“He’s a bit much sometimes,” I agreed. “But when you get to know him, he’s not so bad. And he’s always got the show on his mind. Always doing what’s best for the group. Hard to hate a guy who’s got your best interests in mind.”
“I never said I hated the man, Toby. There’s just something about him that bothers me. He’s got this look in his eyes all the time. I see it whenever he’s talking to someone. It’s like he doesn’t just look at you, he sizes you up…like he’s trying to spot a weakness. It’s so...unsettling.”
I shook my head noncommittally, then went to fetch a towel for her legs. I didn’t think she was right about Wally. It wasn’t necessarily a weakness he was searching for. The look Genevieve was talking about was probably nothing more than a creepy stare, something he was either born with or developed over so many decades of poor socialization. What Wally was after was dirt. The guy was like a damn vacuum cleaner. He collected dirt as if it nurtured him. Any dirt he could get was an angle he could work, something to keep up his sleeve, to exploit when he best saw fit.
She made quick work of towelling her legs and then untied her hair and rolled onto her side. Against her cream pillowcase, her freed hair looked like a whirling well of India ink. I took a seat on the bed with her and rested my hand on her hip, on the border between her costume and her bare skin. Genevieve’s costume matched mine in colour, but stylistically it was entirely feminine. It was cut similar to a woman’s bathing suit, leaving her legs, arms, and shoulders exposed. She opened her mouth to let out a lioness’s yawn and nestled further into her pillow. “I wonder what Wally and Rowland were going on about,” she said, closing her eyes, her voice the resigned mutter of one who has given in to the nagging persistence of sleep.
Slowly, I rubbed my hand up and down her bare leg. “Yeah. I wonder that myself.”
She replied with the faintest murmur, and I imagined my voice falling as a whisper from the swirling skies of her dreams.
WE HIT TORONTO AT AROUND FIVE THE FOLLOWING morning, leaving plenty of set-up time for the crew. If the circus arrived in a city any time after seven a.m., you could count on a horde of locals waiting at the tracks, eager to watch the erection of the mighty cathedral of wonders. Five was too early for even the most eager of beavers, but I figured a bunch of folks would show up in an hour or two and get the eyeful they deemed themselves entitled to.
I hopped out of our trailer as soon as the train whined to a halt. I’d been tossing and turning all night, and around three, I figured I’d give up on sleep and just bide my time until we arrived. The fresh morning air felt almost too good to be true, so I lit a cigarette and brought it down a notch. Genevieve smoked as well, but she couldn’t stand it when people smoked indoors. She liked the smell of a burning cigarette but hated the resulting stale stench that made its home in upholstery and pillows and blankets. Sometimes she’d let me get away with smoking by a window, but those times were rarer than a proper steak, so that morning, my first smoke was nothing more than business as usual. A couple others had trickled out of their living quarters, but they were farther down the track and I couldn’t quite make out who they were. Once I finished my cigarette, I snubbed it out on the bottom of my shoe, making sure it was really dead before I discarded it in the ankle-high grass.
The sun had begun its ascent. I reveled in the temporary placidity the scene offered. There was a cluster of fir trees huddling at the far end of the field. They stood together in a tight circle, like a group of boys who’d stumbled across a dead animal and were taking turns poking it with a stick. I started walking toward the trees because it seemed like a decent spot to sit down and have another cigarette in private. If it somehow wasn’t as decent as it looked from a distance, I thought, I could at least pick up a stick and take a poke for myself.
I only made it about halfway there when I noticed a cloud of dust rolling up the road that led to the field. As the cloud drew nearer, I saw that the car responsible was one I recognized: a beat-up silver Ford covered in a rusty rash that made me itch just looking at it. I forgot about the trees, lit my second cigarette of the morning, and headed for the car.
I got there as Wally was stepping out of the passenger-side seat. He buried his mouth in the crook of his elbow and took off his hat and started fanning at the surrounding dust. I wasn’t sure if it was because he felt satisfied with his fanning or if he’d realized the futility of using a hat riddled in holes to shoo away a cloud, but after three good swings, he returned his hat to his head, coughed, then spat out the glob of whatever the cough had shaken loose. A twig of a man named Clowes got out of the driver’s side of the Ford. Like Wally, Clowes was a do-whatever-needs-to-be-done type, but his primary job was to work with any vendors who wanted to set up outside our show. We had our junk shop and a
couple of carts that sold popcorn and Coca-Cola, but Clowes was the guy who’d bring in locals to sell corndogs and pink lemonade and cotton candy and whatever else people liked to stuff in their faces while they watched us perform.
“Howdy, kid,” Clowes said, tipping his hat to me. The dark bags swelling beneath his eyes told me he’d been doing all the driving, but he looked more than merely sleep-deprived. Clowes looked sickly, or perhaps rattled. Before I could respond to his greeting, he turned and walked away from the car, forgetting to close the door behind him and leaving the keys in the ignition.
“Jittery fuck,” Wally grumbled, placing his hand on his hips and shaking his head in Clowes’s direction. He walked over to the driver’s side of the car, plucked the keys from the ignition, and slammed the door shut, then walked to the trunk and opened it up. From the trunk he pulled a satchel made of brown leather. The leather was so faded and lined that it looked as if it would flake into nothingness if you gave it a good flick. When the satchel’s strap settled on Wally’s shoulder, I heard a faint clanking sound come from inside it.
“Shit, Wally, I thought you were taking the tracks like the rest of us. What’d you need to take Rowland’s rolling scrap heap out for?”
He slammed the trunk shut and walked around the car to where I was standing. “Coleman’s Circus was due here two days after we left,” he said. “They got tigers. We’re down to a bunch of dogs running through hoops.”
“Yeah,” I nodded, “our animal section isn’t what it was. No disrespect to Jenny and her dog act, naturally.”
Wally snorted. “You kidding me? Plenty of disrespect to Jenny and her stupid dog act! They run around in circles, they jump through hoops—who gives a shit?”
I laughed politely. “So, you and jittery old Clowes out tearing down opposition paper? Handing out rat sheets?”