Only Pretty Damned

by Niall Howell

  When Rowland spots me walking toward him, he gets this sheepish look on his face and gives me a half-assed wave without uncrossing his arms. “Good morning, Toby.” The crewmen stop what they’re doing when they hear his greeting, but Rowland’s quick to motion at them to get back to it.

  “What the hell’s going on here? We’re not doing the act without the net. Even if I wanted to, there’s no way Genevieve would go for it. You know that.”

  “Yes. Yes, I know that,” Rowland says to me. His crossed arms inch up his chest a little, and I could be mistaken, but it looks as if he tightens his grip on himself slightly. “Toby, Andrew is back. He arrived late last night—too late for us to pack up and be ready to leave this morning—so I’ve decided we’ll do one last night here as we’d originally planned and then leave first thing tomorrow morning. Let me tell you, though, I am more grateful than you’ll ever know for you stepping up and filling in in Andrew’s absence. I know it was asking a lot of you to not only help develop a routine on such short notice, but also to work with Genevieve again after so many years.”

  “Are you telling me—” I start, but my voice peters off. My head feels light. My knees weak; I shift my stance to correct the feeling and try again: “Are you telling me that I’m not performing with Genevieve tonight?”

  “I’m sorry, Toby.” Rowland’s sympathetic eyes sicken me. I want to rip them out and feed them to him. “I won’t need you to perform with Genevieve anymore. But you’ll still be performing your regular act tonight.” He unknots himself, opens his arms to me, and smiles like a salesman trying to distract you from the pointy tail poking out of his pant leg. “The best part of the show, as far as I’m concerned.”

  I leave without speaking another word, realizing once I’ve exited the big top that that was probably the best-case scenario response as far as Rowland was concerned.

  "SO THAT'S IT, THEN. WE'RE LEAVING TONIGHT." SAYING IT out loud does something to her. Her chest rises and falls, rises and falls, she starts nodding and doesn’t stop, she’s biting down on the corner of her bottom lip. “Tonight,” she echoes.

  I nod. “You got it. We’ll catch a lift to Baltimore, spend the night, and then buy a car first thing in the morning. You have a suitcase, right?”

  “Yes. But I don’t want to pack while any of the other girls are around.” She thinks for a moment, then: “We always leave our trailers at least half an hour before the show starts. I can tell them I’m not feeling well and that I want to lie down while I’ve got a bit of time. That’s when I’ll pack. It’ll only take me a few minutes.”

  “Perfect. Now, I’m not organized at all,” I say, gesturing around the trailer, which, now that I’m actually paying attention to the state of the place, is pretty damn messy. “You’d better be on your way.”

  Gloria nods in agreement, gives me a kiss on the cheek, and heads for the door. She opens it a crack, pauses, and closes it. “Toby,” she says, turning back to face me, “we’re really doing this, aren’t we?”

  “You’re damn right we are,” I assure her.

  Once she leaves, I start rooting around for my old green duffel bag. It baffles me how it could take ten minutes to find anything in a place this small, but I spend that much time rummaging before I find the bag in the back corner of the top shelf of the closet.

  The duffel is spacious, and, being a duffel, it’s got some give to it, but I know I’ll still have to leave a lot behind. I stuff it with clothes and toiletries, which I keep in a little buffalo-hide bag that I’ve had for years. The contents of the Samsonite will go untouched. The money—I just like it there. And there’s no way my old magazines are going to be rolled up and forced into a jam-packed duffel bag. I lay my favourite brown suit out on my bed with a fresh cream dress shirt and powder-blue necktie—might as well look half decent for the road—and then give the place a quick once-over.

  The show doesn’t start for another few hours.

  I do some push-ups. I juggle. I smoke and I pace around a whole lot. I’ll need to go and see Rowland soon so I can collect my money for the work I did with Genevieve. Knowing him, he probably hasn’t even budgeted for the money he’d promised us, so he’ll likely try and get me to hold off on collecting until after tonight’s show. I decide to break ritual and shave my head early. How do I get Rowland to pay up before the show? It’ll be damn near impossible to pin him down after—especially if Gloria and I are in a rush to split.

  The idea hits me as I’m rubbing shaving cream across my poky scalp. A gambling debt. I’ll tell Rowland that back when we were in Richmond, I went and made a stupid move by stiffing the wrong guy after a card game. I’ll tell him that I got word that this guy—a real tough customer—has made the trip all the way to Baltimore to settle up, and that if I don’t get paid right away, I’ll be looking at some serious trouble.

  That’ll work. Rowland will go for it. Not because he’s worried about me, but because he knows if some thug smashes my head in, I won’t be able to perform, and if he’s down one top-notcher, it’ll hurt his wallet.

  I give Rowland’s door three swift raps, which are immediately followed by the sound of shuffling feet from inside. Rowland opens the door seconds later, but he doesn’t open it all the way. He greets me with a grave face. “Toby?” he says as if he were expecting the Pope.

  “Yeah, Toby,” I confirm his suspicion.

  His eyes widen and he presses a finger to his lips and shushes me. He opens his mouth to speak, but before he gets a word out, another voice drifts out from inside, somewhere behind him.

  “Is that fucking Toby?” The words are so slurred, like they came from a puddle. Somehow, though, I can still recognize the voice.

  Rowland steps back from the door, closing it almost all the way, and hisses a response, “Goddamn it! It’s not Toby! Now will you just shut up and sleep?”

  The door opens again—this time wider—and Rowland squeezes out. “Walk with me,” he says, securing his trailer.

  We walk around the back of his place, in the direction of the big top. Once he’s determined that enough distance has passed, he glances over his shoulder to make sure no Russian spies are trailing us, and then turns to me. “That fucking idiot. He’s done, Toby.”

  “He sure sounded done,” I say.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone so drunk. It will be a miracle if he doesn’t need to get his stomach pumped.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  Rowland shrugs. “Well, you know most of it. He went to Baltimore, fucked a young man who ended up dead in his hotel bed, and spent a few days in police custody. Thanks to me greasing the right palms, though, he’s not even going to get a slap on the wrist for the fairy stuff.”

  “So why’s he in such a state?”

  Rowland looks at me like I’m king of the dunces. “Why the hell do you think? Genevieve, Toby. My God, you’ve never seen a woman so cross.”

  “Well, can you blame her?”

  “Of course not! But, hell, her and I, we had a talk about this. Her and I had an agreement.” Rowland slams one fist into his open palm for emphasis. “She said she’d stick it out and work with him until the end of this season. And, boy,” Rowland huffs, “you better believe I promised her a pretty penny for it.” He shakes his head and drags his palm down his face, forcing his wrinkles to rearrange themselves. “But when he came back, Toby…holy hell.”

  “What do you mean? Stop beating around the bush.”

  “I was there when he first came back. I figured I ought to be, you know. When he came back, he had this look, reminded me of a dog who’d shit on a fancy Persian rug and knew a beating was coming. You could see it in his eyes, Toby—pure guilt, pure shame. So I watched the two of them greet each other, and you know, despite the tension—and make no mistake, you could feel the tension—but despite it, I thought they’d actually be okay. I had no illusions about them patching things up, but I honestly thought that they’d be able to work together for as long as I needed
them to. But once I left them alone, well, you can imagine that was another story altogether.

  It was shortly after I’d spoken to you earlier today. We’d just finished putting the safety net away when Sal comes in and tells me he’d spotted Andrew wandering off in the field, stumbling around like a zombie or something. I left the big top right away, went with Sal to go see what was up. It took the two of us a while to track him down, but when we did… Jesus Christ. We found him lying on the ground, in the shade beneath some trees. The smell…you wouldn’t have believed it. Now that I think of it, we might have smelt him before we saw him, Toby. It was just rotten! You’d think we’d stumbled across a hidden distillery. He was lying there at the base of a tree—we couldn’t even tell if he was breathing—as drunk as a man could ever be, blood all over his face and shirt. Naturally, we assumed at least some of it was Genevieve’s blood. We panicked. I sent Sal to her trailer to check on her. Once Sal was gone, I leaned in and got a closer look at Andrew. I noticed some of the blood on his face was coming from scratches—looked like the work of a sharp set of fingernails by my best guess. Then I noticed that the blood on his shirt wasn’t on the outside, but that it looked to have seeped through from inside. I undid the buttons on his shirt and took a look. Toby, it was…” Rowland just shakes his head.

  “Come on,” I say, “it was what?”

  “Awful. That’s what it was. It looked like he’d been jabbed repeatedly with something. Not stabbed—I don’t think she took a knife to him—but jabbed with something that wasn’t too sharp but could still break skin. Maybe it was the pointy end of a high heel shoe. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it had sure tenderized him. He was covered in purple bruises and bloody holes—five or six of them—messy things. Every breath he took sent a trickle of blood oozing from him. I waited until Sal came back and the two of us carried him to my trailer. I had Harriet Lane come over and patch him up, but she’s still awfully worried about him. Worried about infection and about alcohol poisoning.”

  “Well, wouldn’t that be a shame.”

  “Oh, come on now, Toby. I know you two hate each other, but if you could see him right now—”

  “I wouldn’t bat an eyelash.”

  His gaze fastens to mine, and for a moment, neither of us speaks.

  “I need something from you,” Rowland says, breaking the silence, but not the stare. He digs into his breast pocket and pulls out a stuffed billfold, empties it into my hand. It’s more than he owes me. So much more.

  I guess I can save that fake gambling debt for another time.

  PRIMEVAL DRUMS POUND. MY HEARTRATE ADJUSTS to their pace. Someone once told me this rhythm was called Ferry Through Acheron, but I can’t remember who. Rowland bellows through his megaphone: “Ladies and gentlemen! It is with great pleasure that I present to you our final act of the night!”

  Genevieve gives my hand a squeeze. Together, we step toward the curtain. I haven’t spoken to Gloria since this morning. I looked for her after I saw Rowland, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I wanted to tell her about what happened with Andrew, about how I’d be headlining the show one more time. I wanted to tell her about the money Rowland had given me—more than I ever would have even considered requesting for headlining another string of performances—and I wanted to tell her to take her suitcase and head for my trailer right after the show and wait for me. She probably knows to do that, but I get anxious.

  It’s been a while since I’ve watched her perform, but I did tonight. She seemed a little off. It wasn’t overt, but it was there. Every step seemed to come the tiniest bit late. It’s not the sort of thing most people would notice—probably not even other dancers—but I sure noticed.

  And it wasn’t just her movements that were off. Her smile looked so phony you’d think it was pinned on. You can’t get nervous like that. I know we’re pulling a real stunt here, but you can’t let nerves get to you. Not if you want to call yourself a professional. If you’re top-notch, you go out there with steel nerves and you make people gasp, no matter the circumstances.

  Hell, look at me and Genevieve. Most performers would probably have a fit if they were in our shoes. Getting to the big top and seeing that the show had started and the damn safety net hadn’t been set back up. But we’re professionals. Sure, Genevieve took some convincing, but I got her to come to her senses eventually. I reminded her how smooth our act was. How it was all elementary stunts with a bit of spice thrown on to make them look more daring than they actually were—the kind of stunts even a novice could pull off.

  “Knock ’em dead, you two!”

  “Break a leg out there!”

  I smile and nod. Genevieve doesn’t react.

  “A man and a woman who gravity fears!” Rowland paces about like a demented preacher, the roving spotlight following him around the ring, his shadow a menacing silhouette.

  Father-to-be Julian catches my eye. He raises his cigarette in a toast, and gives me nod and a wink. I notice that his knife belt is fully stocked and that one of the handles is a fresher shade of red than the others. I wonder if he’ll let Eva live it down before Susan returns to the target.

  “Please join me in welcoming Mister and Missus Angel!”

  Through the curtain, into a tent full of cheering, whistling, applause so deep you could drown in it. The rest of the band joins the drums as Genevieve and I run to the ladder and climb, up, up the writhing ladder, one hundred fifty feet.

  We step to the middle of the platform, hand in hand, and strike a pose, bringing the music to a clean halt.

  One, two beats of silence, then the drum roll starts. Genevieve’s dismount is punctuated with gasps. I follow her out a moment later. More gasps.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, we pendulum, syncing our rhythm.

  Tick-tock.

  Redemption.

  After so many years. After all I’ve done, redemption. Tonight I leave this tent an acrobat.

  Tick-tock.

  Two rhythms meld into one. The rolling snare drum below grows in intensity. Genevieve lets go of her bar, drifting through the air toward me, and...

  “NO! TOBY, NO!” The scream is shrill and desperate. The scream is familiar. It tears through the air from somewhere below. It doesn’t affect my timing. I’m a professional. I catch Genevieve, my hands locking us together at the forearm. That’s when I feel it.

  “NO, TOBY!”

  The wire breaks with a crisp ting. We slide off the bar. The gasping crowd sucks every mouthful of air from the big top.

  “NO!” That fucking scream, it cuts through everything.

  Genevieve screams, too. Her body is rigid, but her arms and legs flail with such intensity that for half a second, I think they might actually save her.

  The ground is rushing to us. I won’t scream.

  I have just enough time to correct my form.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Bottomless gratitude to all the wonderful folks at NeWest Press, a publisher that I am proud and privileged to work with. Thank you to the remarkable Jenna Butler for lending her editorial talents to this book and for providing vital guidance and insight throughout the process. Many thanks to Marketing and Production Coordinator (and noir enthusiast) Claire Kelly, for her tireless work and unwavering dedication. And thank you to NeWest General Manager Matt Bowes, who, in addition to believing in this story, taught me the importance of answering phone calls every now and then, even when you get one from an unfamiliar number. You never know, it might be good news.

  Thank you to the talented and telepathic Kate Hargreaves for her brilliant book design.

  Special thanks to Micheline Maylor and Richard Harrison for their mentorship and inspiration, and also to Beth Everest for her guidance and encouragement when I was first scrambling to find my footing as a writer. I’m still scrambling, but much less frantically thanks to the three of you.

  My good friend and fellow writer Jason Wall was kind enough to offer much-needed feedback on an early draft—Jason, many thanks for tha
t. You are definitely not a squid. Huge thanks are also due to the (now) Victoria-based poet Alex Williamson, who shared his insight on early sections of the book.

  To my parents, Jim and Ann Howell, I am grateful for your support of my creative endeavours over the years. Thank you for that, and for creating a home where stories of all sorts were appreciated. Thank you as well to my top-notch sisters, Mariann and Claire, the Pawlak family, my Grandmother Marty Hollox, and to all of my fantastic in-laws.

  I must also extend my gratitude to my friends. There are too many to mention here (which I realize makes me very fortunate), but you know who you are, and I thank you for inspiring, supporting, and indulging me while I rambled on about crime novels and film noir over beers.

  Lastly, thank you so much to Alicja, my amazing wife. Without your endless patience, love, and encouragement I never would have finished this book. This is for you.

  NIALL HOWELL was born and raised in Calgary, where he still resides. His short fiction has been published in The Feathertale Review and FreeFall and he holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Mount Royal University, and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Calgary. He enjoys playing bass, and obsessively collects records and comics.