“Come morning you’ll hurt in half a dozen places I haven’t even thought of and you’ll deserve all of it,” he muttered.
“Shut up, Doc,” Helen said evenly, and he ignored her.
“Carrying on like a sixteen-year-old, acting like a goddamn drunken sailor so’s people have to sit up half the night wrapping and stitching and putting you back together…”
“What did you become a doctor for anyhow?”
“Seemed the proper profession for a fellow of my inclinations and disposition.”
Lewis smiled at Helen over Doc Morin’s back, saw the cold look she gave him, and looked away.
When the Doc was finished, he put his tools back into his bag. He looked at Lewis’s injuries and shook his head in slow disapproval.
“You’re too damn old for all this, Lewis. This is why I chose to work on animals: for all their stupidity, they never get hurt from willfulness. If an animal is hurt, why then it couldn’t be avoided.” He scowled, fished in his coat pocket for his smokes, nodded to Helen, and left the tent.
“A more evil-tempered, sour-faced medical man I have never seen,” Lewis said. “I don’t know why…”
“He’s right.”
He shrank from the hardness in her voice but refused to concede the point. “No, he’s not. And neither are you, not about this, at least.” Lewis allowed himself to meet her eyes. “It had to be done.”
“I know you were trying to avoid a bigger fight, but somebody else could have done it this time. Just one time you ought to think about letting somebody else fight one of your battles. You are too old for this craziness.”
“Soon, maybe, but not yet. It’s my show…and they’re my friends. And they have to know I’ll stand up for ’em when something like this happens. That’s all I was doing, Helen, nothing more.”
“I think you wanted to pound that loudmouth’s face into the ground.”
“Well, sure I did. But I knew I probably couldn’t. And I’m mighty glad it’s over.”
“I’m glad you didn’t get killed,” she said in a quiet voice.
Lewis stared at her for a moment, then grew self-conscious: he was dirty and sweating and shirtless, and he’d been lying on her clean bed. He saw the hard set of her face and told himself she didn’t want him here, it had been only an act of kindness. Time to leave.
He looked around but couldn’t find the shirt.
“I have your shirt. You ripped it up the back and I put in a few stitches while you were asleep.”
“Thanks. It’s filthy, that shirt.”
“Hard to keep a clean shirt in a circus.”
Helen handed him his shirt, then helped him ease into it. She studied him, noted the odd contrast between the weathered red skin of his neck and the pale flesh of his body. Automatically her eyes sought the star-shaped scar where the Spanish bullet had left its mark, but the bandage covered it. She watched Lewis button his shirt with stiff bruised fingers and looked at the cuts on his face.
“You were always a willful man, and it’s no virtue.”
“So were you. You were always stubborn. Always. Nobody could ever tell you anything, Helen, you…” They both caught the rising note in his voice at the same time. They shared the same surprised look and then laughed.
“I get kinda cranky when I get beat up.”
She rested her hand on his shoulder and for just a second their eyes met.
“Well…” he said, and got up to leave.
“I’m glad you’re all right, Lewis,” she said, and he could see that she was about to say something else, then gave it up.
His arm seemed to move of its own will and he brushed at a strand of hair that had come down across her forehead. She bit her lip and turned away, and he felt his face going red.
With her back to him she said, “You need to go show your face in your tent, let that little boy know you’re not dead. While you were…dozing, he was out there peeking through the door.”
“Boy takes everything to heart, I think.”
“Sure he does. He doesn’t know any other way. This must all seem crazy to him, he doesn’t know what to expect from one day to the next.”
“Neither do I anymore.”
She turned and smiled at him, and he left. He stood for a moment outside her tent. He’d seen the look come into her eyes when he brushed away the hair, he’d seen her moment of discomfort, her confusion.
Now did I figure that wrong? he wondered.
He glanced back at her tent once, then trudged on to his own.
Shelby was sharing the table with Sam Jeanette and a whiskey bottle. The boy was in bed, feigning sleep.
Lewis nodded.
“Look, Sam, it’s John L. Sullivan.”
“How you feel, Lewis?”
“Like the corpse of John L. Sullivan.”
Shelby held up a bottle. “Buy you a drink?”
“Not just yet.”
He stood over the boy’s bed and knew he should say something but didn’t know what. Then he leaned over and tapped Charlie on the back. The boy bolted up and looked at him wide-eyed.
“Just wanted to show you I’m not dead.”
Charlie eyed Lewis’s injuries. “Do the cuts hurt bad?”
“Not so much as my pride.”
“I’m sorry you lost. I thought you’d win,” he blurted, and Lewis could see in his eyes that he already regretted saying it.
He sat down at the edge of the bed.
“You’ve got a higher opinion of me than I do. I didn’t think I’d win. The fight you know you can win is the one you should be able to stay out of. Anyway, I was just trying to show that fella he can’t do any harm to my friends. That’s all I was doing.”
“But you got hurt.”
“Yes, I did. And so did he. And there’s a lesson in there somewhere but I don’t know what it might be. Right now it’s time for you to get some sleep.”
“That’s what the boy been tryin’ to do, Lewis,” Sam said, and Lewis nodded.
On a sudden impulse, he said, “C’mon, we’ll take us a little walk, get a little fresh air.”
The boy looked at him in confusion, then leapt out of the bed and began pulling his pants on. Lewis watched with a pang of guilt at the way the child responded to his slightest attention.
They walked through the camp in silence for a few minutes as Lewis tried to understand the impulse behind his invitation. Several times he tried to start a conversation but was unsure how to begin.
“So you can’t sleep?”
“No. I tried.”
“You hungry?”
“I don’t think so.”
In the distance Lewis heard one of the horses make a low snort, and he thought he could hear one of the llamas moving about in the small corral, but otherwise the camp was quiet.
“C’mon, let’s get out where we can hear the night sounds.”
Lewis led the boy past the last tents, past the trucks, until they had left the camp behind. They picked their way in silence up a narrow trail that cut through grass and brush and led eventually to a low ridge that overlooked the camp.
“Who made the trail?” Charlie asked.
“I expect it’s a deer path. Most trails start out that way.”
“Are there deer everyplace?”
“Seems like it. Every place I know of except Chicago,” Lewis said, and was pleased at the sudden grin the boy shot up at him.
The light of the half moon showed them a fat log on the ridge and they sat down. Somewhere close by, Lewis heard a high-pitched trill.
“What’s that?”
“Bat.”
After a nervous silence, Charlie said, “Fred Lemmon says they fly into your hair.”
Lewis chuckled. “Fred Lemmon is as full of superstitious nonsense as any man I ever knew.
Your common bat is afraid of people, doesn’t want anything to do with any part of us, hair or otherwise.”
Lewis gazed down the ridge at the small hollow, carpeted now with thin wisps of fog.
“I always liked to look at the fog,” he heard himself say.
The boy was silent for a moment and then said, “Lightning bugs!”
Lewis gazed down into the hollow and saw that the child was right: here and there small yellow flashes appeared and blinked out, and as he watched he saw that there were hundreds of them, that the entire hollow was filled with fireflies.
“Wonder how many nights they been with us, without me having time to notice. Fireflies, some people call ’em.”
“I caught some one time in a jam jar but I let ’em go.”
“That was the right thing to do.”
“I never saw so many before,” Charlie said.
“I did, one time. A long time ago.”
“When you were a boy?”
“Yes.” A moment later he added, “I was with my father.”
Charlie looked up, his mouth making a small “o.” “Was Alma there?”
“Sure she was. It was a night just like this one.”
Lewis saw himself sitting with Alma and their father, gazing out on the prairie in silent wonder on a night when all the fireflies in creation seemed to have gathered in one place.
“Why do they flash like that?” he’d asked.
“They’re saying ‘howdy’ to each other,” his father said, and from the far side of his father Lewis heard Alma wonder aloud how her kid brother could be so ignorant.
Lewis remembered how the chill night air soon had him shivering, and how his father put one arm around him and pulled him closer. Eventually all three of them had begun shivering, but they stayed there watching the show. From the vantage point of forty-five years it seemed a moment of perfect happiness, though he knew it couldn’t have been that, so soon after his mother’s death. Still, he remembered how the three of them had sat there unwilling to leave, to end the moment, not even when they realized the dew was beginning to soak their clothes.
“They’re saying ‘hello’ to each other,” Charlie said.
“You know about insects, do you?”
“My ma told me.”
Lewis realized this was the first time he’d heard the boy speak of his mother.
“You probably think about your ma a lot.”
Charlie nodded. “Sometimes. Some days when I wake up…” he started, and then stopped himself.
“You forget it’s true.”
The boy made a small nod.
“That’s how it happens. That’s how it was with me anyway. I think my ma was dead a year before I finally believed it. When you’re small, you think your people will live forever.”
“But they can’t.”
“No, they sure can’t. Always comes as a shock, though.” He saw the boy nod again.
Lewis watched the boy staring out at the moonlit field. It was probably time to move back to the camp but he said nothing for a long time. Charlie looked at him once and then went back to his study of the field of fireflies.
“I like bugs and things,” Charlie said eventually.
“That’s good, ’cause the world’s full of ’em.”
They watched the fireflies for a few minutes more, and then Lewis saw Charlie shudder. He put a hand on the boy’s head.
“Your hair’s wet.”
The boy seemed surprised.
“It’s from the dew. A few hours and everything will be wet.”
The boy nodded, exhausted now, and Lewis realized his own reluctance to leave.
“Come on, it’s time to hit the hay.”
He patted the boy on the back, and they got up off the log and made their way back to the tent. Charlie was silent, too tired even to ask questions.
He put the boy to bed and joined the other men at the card table.
“Ready for that drink now?” Shelby asked.
“Yeah.”
Sam Jeannette gave him a curious look. “You and the boy been out havin’ adventures, Lewis?”
“Watching fireflies.”
“Fine thing to do on a nice night.”
They chatted and played a few hands of poker, and when they were ready to turn in, Lewis said, “I think those fellas in the town might pull something tomorrow when we’re moving on. We need a plan for that,” and the other men nodded.
THIRTY-SIX
Rearguard Action
They were moving by nine. A couple of miles outside the town, Lewis pulled over and let the caravan pass him. The last vehicle was a truck. Shelby drove, and with him in the truck were Alexei and Joseph Coates, Foley, Emmett McKeon and his sons and two of the bigger canvasmen.
“This looks like as good a place as any,” Lewis said.
They were in a large stand of aspen where the road narrowed and the dense trees formed a wall on either side.
“Looks suitable,” Shelby agreed. The two men stood next to Lewis’s car and stared at a ridge a mile south. A single horseman stood at the crest of the ridge, staring back the way they had come.
“Jack kinda looks like a statue there, don’t he?” Shelby asked.
“He does.”
Shelby rolled a cigarette and Lewis studied the clouds, and they had been in the little forest for less than ten minutes when Jack lifted his hat.
“Company,” Lewis said.
Jack Vance waved his hat twice.
“Two cars. All right. Be careful and don’t take all day.” He clapped a hand on Shelby’s back and got into his car.
The men in the pursuers’ lead car were almost on top of the tree when they saw it: a rotting tree trunk placed neatly across the road. The big street fighter climbed out of the car and motioned for the others to join him. There were seven of them, and they lined up along the length of the dead tree.
“They did this, knew we were coming,” he said, and gave them a hard smile through a swollen face. “Let’s go.” He bent over the tree, and they were struggling to get under it when they heard the chain drive of a truck.
Shelby plowed into the rear car, tipping it over until it careened off the raised road and fell onto its side. He put the truck in reverse, then came back for the other car. The kid and his men started running toward the truck, then realized what Shelby had in mind and froze. Shelby hit the car on an angle from the rear and bulldozed it off the road, wedging it between a pair of trees. The car collapsed like posterboard and the radiator burst, sending a white cloud of steam into the air.
Then Shelby was clambering out of the truck with a wrench in his hand, the other men close behind him. They hit the ground running and each picked out an opponent. A dark-haired man came at Shelby with a rock. Shelby ducked, came up to one side, and bounced the wrench off the man’s head. The man dropped, and Shelby looked around for the kid, then saw that he was too late. Joseph Coates was walking calmly toward him and the big kid had taken his stance. His right hand was cocked and he was trying to manage a sneer when Coates clubbed him senseless with a single punch.
An hour later, the truck caught up with the Tully Circus. Lewis pulled his car out of line and dropped back until he was even with the truck.
“Everybody all right, J.M.?”
“Depends on who you mean by ‘everybody.’ Everybody here is just fine, just some bruised knuckles, and I’m gonna be sore where Mr. Coates knocked me over in his…his zeal to get at some of those fellas.”
Joseph Coates gave Lewis a guilty smile and hunkered down further into the seat of the truck.
Lewis studied the battered front of the truck and raised his eyebrows at Shelby.
“There was an accident,” Shelby offered.
“I’ll bet.”
“They’ll be on foot for a whil
e, those fellas.”
“Pleasant country for a walk,” Lewis said as he turned away.
***
In camp that night, Helen was mending a costume for Irina when Lewis passed by, bent over slightly to favor his injured ribs. The Russian woman watched him, gave Helen a sidelong glance, and saw Helen look up quickly from her sewing.
“I think that one is beautiful.”
“Who is?” Helen said, refusing to look up.
“Lewis Tully. I think he is beautiful man.”
“I’ve always thought Lewis a little on the homely side.”
The women looked at one another and Irina frowned.
“‘Homely?’ This is ugly, yes?”
“Well, not really ugly but sure not handsome.”
Irina shrugged and made a face. “Of course, not handsome. But he is beautiful.”
Helen studied her. “To each his own, I guess.”
“I have Alexei,” Irina said, smiling, “and I don’t need other man. Alexei is beautiful, too, I think. And smart and good man, and very big. Big arms, big shoulders, big…” Irina’s blue eyes widened and she caught herself. “Everything,” she finished, and turned dark red. Helen blinked, put down her sewing, and started laughing, and the Russian girl could no longer hold it in, collapsing with laughter.
“You are shameless, Irina. And I’m glad you joined us.”
“Good. I like you, and Mr. Lewis Tully. And you watch him when he goes by. I see this.”
“Oh, don’t be silly, I’ve known Lewis…”
“I see this. It’s fine, you are still pretty woman, he has no wife…”
“I’m too old, and more importantly, he’s Lewis Tully. I’ve known him for most of my life, and he’s no man for a woman to pin her hopes on. That’s why I married someone else. That…and the fact that I was never enough for him.”
“Maybe now?”
The Blue Moon Circus Page 29