by Niall Howell
Wally shook his head. “Nah. Got to do more than that to balance things. Coleman’s got a pair of world famous acrobats. The Flying Franellis. Big draw. Lucky for us,” he hoisted the satchel’s strap further up his shoulder, producing another clank from within, “Mister Franelli went and broke his hand in about five different places last night.”
IT WAS JUST AFTER SIX A.M. WHEN I GOT BACK TO OUR trailer. The smell of roasting coffee hit me the instant I opened the door. Our Silex had volcanic aspirations, so you had to keep an eye on it. I always thought it looked less like a coffee maker and more like something you’d see in a mad scientist’s lab, but it made a great pot, so I made peace with its bizarre aesthetic early on. Genevieve was awake, dressed, and made up, ready to be seen by the locals who would begin their descent upon the circus any moment now. She wore a cornflower-blue dress with short sleeves and a thin lace ruffling around the collar and down the front, and she had even gone as far as fixing a white rose clip in her hair. Her beauty had a sly way about it. She always looked stunning, but there were times when some small gesture, like a slight tilt of her head, elongating that milky neck of hers, would illuminate something about her that seemed new, and would magnify her radiance. It would catch you off guard, and the beauty you thought you were used to would sink its fangs into you, making you question everything you trusted as you winced and brought the fresh wound to your lips. Whenever this happened—and it happened that day—a picture would flash in my head of the two of us walking together, like I was someone else, watching us from a safe distance. The picture barely lasted a second, but the contrast it revealed to me would tattoo itself onto all three levels of the iceberg in my brain. I grabbed the mirror on Genevieve’s nightstand to make sure my hair was still slicked and check if there was anything lodged in my teeth, even though I hadn’t yet eaten. I wasn’t much to look at by comparison, but I was groomed enough to pass as a civilized human being.
She placed a kiss on my cheek and then took the mirror from my hand to make sure my face didn’t mess up her rouged lips. “Anything interesting out there?”
“Nah. I couldn’t sleep so I went for some fresh air.” I’d decided not to tell her about Wally and Clowes because that sort of thing bothered her, even though she knew damn well that it happened every now and then.
The coffee was ready a minute later. I poured us each a cup and we took a seat across from each other at the kitchen table. The table sat against the wall that, from the outside, faced the field where everything was being set up. There was a window directly above the table. Rays of light leaked in through the Venetian blind slats. I gave the string a tug and let it all flood in, feeling the warmth on my face right away. Genevieve got up and retrieved her sunglasses, but I was fine with having to squint slightly.
We sipped our coffee and watched the big top go up. A steady procession of cars from the city rolled up the road, and the face of every man, woman, and child that poured out was brim-full of wonder.
THE SUBTERRANEAN FAR OUTWEIGHS THE SURFACE- level stuff. I end up with two tiny scars: one barely the length of a thumbnail above my right eye, and another only slightly longer across my left cheek. Sure, I’d rather have walked away totally unscathed, but when I first woke up after the beating, it felt like someone had tried to cut a jigsaw puzzle out of my face, so, all things considered, I think I can deal with two small scars.
And who knows, maybe a couple well-placed scars could come in handy. Once I ditch this place, I could go straight to Hollywood. I bet there are a handful of pictures that’d need a dangerous, rugged leading man. Like a show about a lightweight boxer who gets tangled up with the mob. They want him to take a fall, and he says he will but he changes his mind at the last minute, so he’s got to fight his way through a bunch of hoodlums to escape the mob’s clutches—what a riot that’d be!
I mulled over the thought of killing Andrew for a short while after Gloria joked about it, but I quickly did my best to push the thought away, blaming its contemplation on the pain I was in, the booze I was drinking, and the sleep that was avoiding me. I told myself, that kind of vengeance was all right to fantasize about, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you actually go ahead and do. Not in real life. So, like I said, I did my best to push the thought away.
And it went away. Or at least it backed the hell off. For a bit.
I think it was all the isolation that did it. First, there were those three nights in Baton Rouge, lying in bed, thumbing through my old magazines and doing pretty much nothing else. Sure, I’d occasionally get up and walk around outside. It’s not like I was crippled, but I needed my rest if I wanted to be back in tip-top shape. And I had visitors here and there—Julian, Susan, Eddie, Rupert the Syc, Sal, and, of course, Gloria. She’d come by every night after the show. She’d bring me my dinner and we’d play Scrabble and drink and talk until our legs dangled over the edge of unconsciousness. But even with all those visits, the days really found a way to drag on. I’d read and I’d read, but there’s only so much of that a person can do before their eyeballs start to throb, so sometimes I’d just lie there in my bed, thinking.
When we arrived in New Orleans, I still wasn’t feeling my best, so I didn’t perform on the first night, which is too bad because I love playing in New Orleans. I maybe could have pushed it, but the last thing I wanted was to lower the calibre of my act, so I figured I might as well give it one more day and make my return show one for the books. So that’s three nights in Baton Rouge, one travel day between there and New Orleans, and another day and night once we arrived here.
Five days of nothing much at all.
A person’s mind can do a lot of thinking in that time. You can lie there and think about the past; you can wonder about the future; you can dwell on the tedious present. And after a while, lying there for hours on end with nothing but your own thoughts, you start to think about things you ought not to think about. You sometimes find that the thoughts you did your best—your absolute goddamn best—to push away had really never left at all. They merely slithered into a dark corner, hid behind an old trunk, and waited there for the right moment to come back out and reintroduce themselves, like an old acquaintance you maybe started off on the wrong foot with. And after chatting with that acquaintance for a while, you realize the two of you actually have a lot in common.
"LAZARUS FINALLY EXITS HIS TOMB!" SUSAN PROCLAIMS. She struts over and squeezes my arm. “I must not have paid attention in Sunday School, because I could’ve sworn it was only supposed to be four days.”
I point to her protruding belly. “Forget the tomb, when’s the exit from the womb?”
She laughs and gives me a playful slap. “Glad you’re back amongst the ranks of the living, Toby. This one here,” she cradles her stomach with her hands and gives it the tiniest of shakes, “she’s still going to be cooking for a while yet.”
“She?” I say. “You think it’s a girl?”
“No. I know she’s a girl,” she says matter-of-factly.
I get stopped about three hundred times on my short walk to the big top. You’re out for a few days and suddenly everyone’s got to get their hellos and their nice to see yous in. Julian catches me and insists I join him for coffee, but I tell him I need to get to the big top and practise my act, see if I’m really all right to perform tonight. When I’m almost at the tent, I spot Gloria. Her back to me, she’s huddling with her usual crowd—a few other spec girls, some whose faces I recognize, and some who, for all I know, could have started with the circus this very morning. I’m not sure if it’s telepathy or some sort of sixth sense, but she always seems to know when I’m near. As I pass by, she turns and looks over her shoulder at me. Not missing a beat of the conversation she’s occupied with, she flashes one of her warming smiles at me, no doubt glad to see me not only up and about, but to see me making my way to the big top, my way to work.
I do my stretches. The bit of ring rust I feel when I first sit down on my unicycle vanishes the instant I put my feet on the
pedals and give a push. I’m able to pull off every unicycle manoeuvre I know. Even the more complicated tricks, like jumping onto the curbing backwards and dong a full circle in reverse, are landed without a flaw. Juggling is its top-notch usual, and after running through my acrobatics—frontwards and backwards flips, somersaults, cartwheels, twists and the like—I find I only have the slightest note of pain lingering in my right kidney area. It’s not anything that would impact the quality of my act, though, so I deem myself fit to return to professional astonishing.
And astonish I do.
If Wally Jakes still had a mouth to say it with, he’d tell me I bounced back like a rubber ball with fangs. My evening performance is transcendent. I earn my crowd. My movements are fluid and, my God, these Louisianans are a thirsty bunch. A rolling snare and crashing cymbals punctuate my final set of manoeuvres: a combination of improvised acrobatics from one end of the ring to the other, performed at a machine-gun pace.
When I land my last flip and go down for a bow, I feel a wave of exhaustion streaming through my muscles, accompanied by a sudden shakiness in my limbs. It’s got nothing to do with my having been hurt or this being my first performance in five days. No, none of this is a consequence of rust or my body crying out for further healing time. What I’m feeling comes from me pushing myself even harder than I normally would. And making my exit from the ring, sending panoramic waves to the wowed masses, it dawns on me that tonight I operated like a man with something to prove.
The moment I step out of the big top and into the night, I’m ambushed by a swarm of congratulatory pats, caresses, and handshakes.
“Helluva comeback, Toby!”
“Can’t keep a good man down!”
“Ya knocked ’em dead, buddy!”
Being what it is, routine takes hold. I start walking back to my trailer, like I always do, the holy trinity—tobacco, bourbon, and solitude—beckoning me. But tonight, for some reason, hearing Rowland’s voice boom out of the big top as he readies the crowd for Genevieve and Andrew has the opposite effect that it would any other night. Tonight, when I hear “…without the safety of a net,” “…fled the vile Communist clutches of his motherland to come to America,” and “…with the woman he loves and be as free as a bird in the sky!” I stop, turn around, and walk right back to the big top, like an ant to an open bottle of honey.
Why not watch the damn act? I’m thinking. I’ve only seen it the once, and that was how long ago now? Two years, or close to. Yeah, it must have been between two and a bit years since I was grounded and Rowland dragged my inferior replacement out of the woodwork. But why not take in their act? What harm can come from watching? Susan made that Lazarus crack earlier, but maybe she wasn’t that far off. I don’t feel like I’ve come back from the dead, mind you, but something does feel different. And come to think of it, I think the change happened about the time I decided to go ahead and kill Andrew. It was like a crack had broken in a wall that I never knew was there in the first place. And I peered through the crack and glimpsed the infinity waiting for me on the other side, away from Rowland’s. I looked through that crack and I saw what was out there, and what was out there was a hundred different roads to the rest of my life.
As I’m returning to the big top, a few people are looking at me like there’s something wrong. One man whose face I recognize but whose name I’m not sure of says, “I’m pretty sure your trailer’s the other way, Toby,” pointing his thumb back where I came from.
“Good to know,” I clap him on the shoulder like an old friend. “Spare a cigarette?”
He hands one over. I light it, take a good, long drag, then go find myself a decent vantage point to catch the show.
Their act is as useless as I remember it. Of course, the crowd goes bonkers for it, but I can’t blame them. They don’t know any better. Any other time, the gasps, cheers, and applause would really cut into me, but not tonight. Tonight, the crowd’s love for Genevieve and Andrew has a calming effect on me; I hate them for the undeserving accolades they receive, and their reign as the royal couple of this circus is a constant reminder of my own fall from grace, but I’ve finally allowed myself to accept that nothing will change on its own. If you’re freezing to death, you can stare at a pile of wood until you go blind, but it won’t turn into a fire until you go ahead and pick up two sticks and rub them together yourself.
I laugh when think back to Baton Rouge, to long those days when I lay in my trailer, stewing in internal conflict, worrying that committing another murder would destroy me. But looking out on Andrew as he stands on my former platform in my former light with my former woman, I realize that this murder won’t destroy me. No, it won’t, not at all. This murder will be the much-needed period on a sentence that’s gone on far too long here at Rowland’s World Class Circus. This murder, I’m sure, will be different.
GLORIA WAVES WHEN SHE SPOTS ME IN THE WINDOW. The hood of her red raincoat is pulled up over her head, its strings tugged tight. She falters in the mud, but catches her balance right away. Once she’s regained her footing, she throws her head back and laughs, giving the skies the opportunity to bathe her face in rainwater. I think she yells, So close but so far! but it’s difficult to hear over the rain. It’s been coming down heavy since early morning. The road leading to our circus has turned to soup, so it looks like yesterday was our last performance here in Pensacola.
I open the door to greet her, holding out a kerosene lamp so she doesn’t trip on her way up the steps. With the door open, the rain sounds like a thousand drawers of cutlery being shaken, an off-time percussion section from hell. I can see the shape of the Scrabble board tucked away, safe and dry, under Gloria’s coat. I help her in and shut the rain out. All four of my kerosene lamps are going, placed strategically to ensure there is an abundance of light at the table where we play Scrabble.
I’m getting better at the game. I still haven’t won, but our matches lately have been neck-to-neck, a far cry from the crushing defeats I suffered nightly when we first began. I’m finally coming to terms with it being a game that’s more about strategy than it is about knowledge. I play as tactically as I can now, always sure to keep the numbers in mind, especially if I’m lucky enough to get a Q or a Z, but my mind is also busy working on other strategies.
How do I kill Andrew? I’ve been sitting on it for days, and of the half-dozen scenarios I’ve conjured up, I can’t come up with a single plan that doesn’t have at least one gaping hole in it. But while I’ve not yet found the right setup, I’m coming to realize that as far as method is concerned, the less complex the delivery, the better. I’ve narrowed the deed down to being committed either by strangulation or by knife, leaning towards the tidier of the two. What I’m having trouble with is the where and the when. I’ve got to do it in such a way that no one would be able to place me—the guy he recently beat into unconsciousness, the guy with a motive—anywhere near the crime. The nomadic life of a circus performer can come in handy if you’re like Eddie and you’ve gone and done something awful and you need to stay on the move, but what do you do when the guy you want to do something awful to is always on the move with you?
She points to the two glasses I’ve set out for us. “I appreciate that kind of portioning, but if you think all it’ll take to throw me off my game is a few mouthfuls of bourbon, you’ve got another think coming.”
I pull a chair out for her and she slides in, giving me a taste of her rainwater and perfume scent. She smells good wet. “Nah, I wouldn’t do a thing like that. A little bourbon on a night like this keeps you warm.”
Since Baton Rouge, these gatherings have become an almost nightly ritual. I’m going to miss her when I leave here.
“It’s awful for business being rained out, but between you and me, I’m glad to have a night off from performing,” she says.
“You could have fooled me. Whenever I watch, you look like you’re having a ball out there.”
She sighs. “In that case, maybe I should have become an
actress.”
“What’s the matter with being a spec girl all of a sudden?”
“Aw, nothing, Toby. I get frustrated with having such a small part sometimes, that’s all.”
She unfolds the Scrabble board and the two of us grab our seven and place them on our tile racks. We get on with the game, but Gloria won’t stop griping about her newfound dissatisfaction with being a spec girl. She tells me that she’s good enough to be more than a supporting player, and that some of the other girls are holding her back because they don’t have the skill to take the routine further, and so on. I nod and agree and say things like That’s too bad, and You’re better than that, and You’ve got a face made for the movies, but my thoughts are elsewhere.
It occurs to me that if I kill Andrew here at the circus, I might as well telephone the police beforehand and ask them to make sure Old Sparky’s wiring is up to snuff so he doesn’t take fifteen tries to fry me. If I’m going to go ahead with it, it needs to be done on one of our off-days, away from everyone else. Earlier, I had considered doing it here and making it look like a suicide, but I figured that there’s too much to cover in staging a suicide and I’d be sure to overlook something. That, and it would be inconceivable to think that someone who loves himself as much as Andrew would ever pull their own plug. Yeah, an off-day in a big city—that’s the way to go. No need to cover anything up there, no sir. But one glaring problem—one that sticks out at me in every scenario I can think of—is catching him while he’s away from Genevieve. The Royal Two are damn near inseparable. If either of Genevieve’s parents were still alive, or, really, if she had any living family she was close with, I could send a wire saying ‘come visit, so-and-so is on their deathbed,’ but as far as I knew there was no one she cared about enough to travel and visit, deathbed or not. She had an uncle in Nova Scotia, but she always had terrible things to say about him, and, if I remember correctly, the uncle was her father’s much older brother, so for all I know he’s worm food now, too. Plus, even if I could use someone from her past or anything remotely personal to lure her away from Andrew, I would in turn be making myself a suspect since I was one of a select few who knew anything about her private life.