A Stranger Comes to Town

by Abra SW

  But he knew these things, and so he could account for them. He was clumsy? He would test each chancy step. He was slow? It didn’t matter. All he had to do was reach the circus before dawn, and he could guess where they’d camp. His pursuers wouldn’t think to hunt downriver, not for a long time. He had trouble thinking? He didn’t need to think, just follow his plan.

  He splashed downstream as quietly as any fugitive could. He was halfway through the town when he heard a shout go up. Dogs barked and men swore. He froze, swaying. He couldn’t make himself take another frigid step until he heard them heading to the chicory field.

  He plunged onward.

  By the time he made it past the edge of town, his feet and lower legs were insensate, sodden logs that he dragged with him. He followed the stream because that was the plan. His world narrowed to the cold and the dark and the plan.

  It came as a shock when he reached the fallow field on the far side of town and saw bobbing oil lamps. He’d been right in his crazy, last-chance guess of where the circus would go. If they’d hide him—no, they must hide him, he had to believe that—then safety was so close, just across the river and up the bank. He had to ford the river. He could have climbed up the bank on his side and crossed the bridge, but to his cold-addled brain, that seemed a huge risk to take when he was so close.

  He waded into the river. At its deepest point, it rose to his waist. The current tugged at his clothes and tried to pull him away. He was nearly halfway across when he slipped on something his numb feet couldn’t feel, and fell. The river almost won, but he found his footing and kept going. Just a few more steps.

  Something heavy smashed into his side and buffeted his back. He grabbed his attacker and felt bark beneath his hand. The current had sent a long, broken-off branch twice as thick as his arm careening into him.

  The trees really have it in for me, he thought muzzily. That seemed almost normal. Men were after him, and dogs—why not trees, too?

  A thought moved sludgily through his brain. Dogs. Who will smell where I climbed up the bank. The dogs would sniff along the base of the bank to find where somebody had climbed out of the water. Christopher looked at the branch he’d caught and laughed. It hurt, so he stopped quickly, but he dragged the branch through the river with him. It fought like a granddaddy catfish. Half the time, it seemed that one or the other of them would be lost to the river before they reached the other side.

  Each step became easier, until he stood in ankle-deep water. He hoisted up that branch and leaned it up against the riverbank, and then he climbed up it. The dogs would only catch his scent on what he touched. When he got to the top of the riverbank, he threw the branch back in the river and watched the current take it.

  He stumbled forward across the fallow field. The wind sent icy little spears stabbing through his clothing. When he tripped over an exposed root and measured his length in the dirt, it seemed so inevitable that he merely pushed himself up and staggered on, without even bothering to scrape the dirt-rapidly-becoming-mud from his trousers.

  He passed picketed horses. Their soft whickers and ruminations—and the warm, solid windbreak their large bodies made—were so comforting that he might have lingered if the smell of cooking pork and beans hadn’t drawn him on.

  He approached the circus wagons, trying to ignore the leaden fear that they would turn him back over to the townsfolk. A man so perfectly ordinary-looking that Christopher worried he wasn’t with the circus stood beside the nearest wagon, talking with a shawl-swathed, bejeweled, heavily veiled woman.

  Christopher stepped out of the shadows, his eyes fixed on them. When the excessively ordinary man saw Christopher, he tensed and slipped his hand into his pocket.

  “Please, you have to hide me from them!” Christopher pleaded. “Please, help me!”

  He tried to step closer, but his feet were frozen weights. He lurched and would have fallen, except the veiled lady darted forward—with a quickness surprising in one so encumbered—and slipped her shoulder under his arm. She gasped. “You’re soaked through! And so cold!”

  As if her words reminded him, he began to shiver convulsively.

  “Careful, Mrs. Wershow,” the ordinary man said. His eyes narrowed as he stared at Christopher. “Hide you from who, stranger? And what did you do to get them after you?”

  “Ginger, we have to get him warmed up before he’ll even be able to understand questions, much less answer them,” Mrs. Wershow said sharply. She cleared her throat, seeming to remember herself. “Come along, then, young man,” she said to Christopher.

  She carried most of his weight all the way to the campfire. The ordinary man—Ginger—followed behind, his hand still in his pocket. Now and then Christopher stumbled, but Mrs. Wershow kept him on his feet until she could sit him down on a log beside the fire. Tutting, she unwound one of her shawls, shrinking in the process. She wrapped it around his shoulders. “I’ll beg a plate of food for you,” she said, and left.

  Ginger squatted in front of him. The fire cast Ginger’s face in shadow, but his eyes still gleamed. “I saw you in the field when we rode into town,” he said.

  Christopher nodded, or perhaps he just shivered so furiously his head bobbed. He himself wasn’t sure.

  “Who are you hiding from?”

  “Seppanen Town,” Christopher managed to get out from between chattering teeth.

  “Who in Seppanen Town?”

  “All of them.”

  Ginger rocked back on his heels. “All of them?” There was something almost like admiration in his voice. “That takes talent. What did you do?”

  “Ran away.”

  Mrs. Wershow returned from her conversation with the cook holding a tin plate filled with steaming pork and beans. At the smell, Christopher’s mouth watered and his stomach cramped painfully.

  She set the plate on his knees. “Hold it there for a bit,” she said. “It’ll help warm you up. Don’t eat too fast or you’ll be sick. I will not have somebody being sick on my second-best shawl.”

  “No, ma’am,” Christopher managed. His brain began to thaw. At first he’d thought she wasn’t old enough to call him ‘young man’, but now she sounded just like his grandmother.

  A huge black man approached the fire. Swirling tattoos covered his skin and writhed over bulging muscles. The way he frowned made Christopher particularly notice those muscles. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  Christopher spooned up the pork and beans, chewed conscientiously, and swallowed. He felt the hot, savory beans warming him all the way down to his toes. He closed his eyes for a moment in sheer happiness.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, Bradley,” Ginger said, mildly. “If I wasn’t being constantly interrupted, I’d already know.” He faced Christopher. “Who are you, where did you come from, and why did you need to run away?”

  Christopher spilled the metaphorical beans in hopes of being allowed to eat the real ones in peace. He explained his trade, and how he came to be in Seppanen Town, how he’d fallen asleep in Mrs. Della Rocca’s boarding house and woken up in chains, and how he’d escaped.

  When he’d finished, he shoveled in more pork and beans as they digested the news.

  “They’ll be suspicious unless they find him again,” the veiled lady, Mrs. Wershow, said thoughtfully. “It could be dangerous for us.”

  Christopher looked up, startled. He would have felt betrayed if his standards for betrayal weren’t quite high after his recent experiences. She’d seemed so kind.

  “We are not turning anyone over to slave-catchers!” the strongman rumbled. The gathering dark seemed to swell his size.

  Ginger and Mrs. Wershow exchanged a look. Or Christopher thought they did. It was hard to tell, what with the veil.

  Other circusfolk drifted closer, curious about what was going on—or hungry for pork and beans. Maybe a little of both. The beans are good enough to draw a crowd. Christopher’s spoon scraped the bottom of his bowl.

  “It’s a pleasure to se
e someone properly enjoy my food,” the cook said deliberately, ladling out another scoop that Christopher hadn’t been presumptuous enough to ask for, “but what will he do? With things the way they’re going, can we afford to feed an extra roustabout?”

  “Well,” Ginger said slowly, “we do need a ringmaster.”

  The others stared at him as if he were insane. Christopher was inclined to agree.

  “He’s a total rube!” a midget protested. “And you want him to be ringmaster?”

  “You all thought that I should be ringmaster, after that performance in Boston!”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So I declined the honor. Firmly. But I can teach him to be a ringmaster. At least, I can teach him to be a really good clown, and if you’re a really good clown, you can be the ringmaster if you need to.”

  “A clown?” Christopher asked faintly. Despite the warm plate of beans in his hands, this whole scene was taking on the surreal aspect of a dream. Please don’t let me wake up and find myself in that damned shed.

  “He doesn’t know anything about being … a clown,” Mrs. Wershow said.

  “Average height, hair that some will call brown and others blond, a nice, friendly, open face—he’s perfect.”

  “He don’t look funny to me!” the midget complained.

  “None of this is funny,” Christopher muttered. Peculiar, yes.

  Ginger spun to face him. “You don’t think this is funny? Laugh anyway. Laugh like your life depended on it!”

  Christopher stared, his stomach tightening, the beans suddenly sitting uneasily. Ginger didn’t seem to be joking.

  The notion that his life depended on a laugh was worth an uneasy chuckle, the kind a man gives when he’s not sure if there’s a joke or not.

  The midget made a disgusted sound. “Call that a laugh?”

  Christopher’s bowels tightened in instinctive anticipation of bad things. The beans suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.

  In the firelight, Ginger’s face became a thing of sharp edges and shadows.

  Christopher forced a chuckle, a harsh and crackling thing that the midget winced away from.

  “Look—” Christopher leaned forward to plead his case, but he was interrupted by a traitor within.

  A long, sonorous fart rolled out. The combination of beans, nervous bowels, and a sudden shift in position was too much.

  Ginger’s face twitched oddly. The midget’s eyes bulged. Silence hung in the redolent air.

  And suddenly, it was funny.

  Christopher burst out laughing. He had to set his plate of beans to the side because his body was shaking so much he would have spilled it otherwise. It felt like he hadn’t laughed in weeks, and maybe he hadn’t. He laughed at Ginger’s sudden silence and the midget’s bulging eyes. He laughed at his own rebellious bodily gasses. He’d escaped; why shouldn’t they? He laughed at himself for running away to join the circus. He laughed at the idea of his life depending on a laugh.

  He laughed until he cried, and then he laughed some more.

  And somewhere in there, they started laughing too.

  “Oh, you’ll do!” Ginger said. “You’ll do just fine.”

  The black strongman frowned. “They’ll send dogs after him.”

  Ginger looked at the crowd. “We’ve all been on the road a while. I’ve always liked taking care of dirty laundry in the moonlight.” He paused. “I suppose the horses should all be walked down to the stream and watered. After that—it’s a lovely night to take the lion for a walk.”

  A swarthy man with furrowed claw marks scarring his forearms grinned. “Those dogs won’t know what they smelled, but they’ll sure react to it! They won’t care about a boring old human when there’s lion scent around.”

  “Good,” the strongman said. He gave Christopher a nod and a gap-toothed smile. “They’re mostly good people here. You don’t need to be afraid.” With that reassurance, matters were apparently settled to his satisfaction. He lifted a tin plate of beans and headed off into the shadows.

  “I—thank you,” Christopher managed, looking around him. “Thank you so much.”

  The cook smiled. “Finish your beans.”

  Ginger answered more seriously. “You’ll have to work to earn this. Being a clown is more difficult than it looks from the outside.”

  “I will!”

  “Then the first thing to learn is Rule Number 1: Know when to disappear.”

  Christopher didn’t answer because his mouth was full, but he cocked his head. What does that have to do with being a clown?

  “When you want to surprise your audience, you’d better make sure they don’t see you,” Ginger explained. “Tonight, that means hiding. Rule Number 2 is always know how your audience will react. You ran away right when strangers came to town? If the hunters don’t find you right away, they’ll come here for sure.”

  Ginger raised his voice, addressing the dispersing crowd. “Put the word out that anybody who says anything to the townies about our newest member will answer to me. The kid might be wet behind the ears, but he’s one of ours now. Don’t even gossip about him to each other until we’re out of here.”

  “Where should I hide?” Christopher asked, still bewildered.

  Ginger smiled. “This isn’t the first time we’ve needed to hide somebody. The old ringmaster set up something special. Now, most of the circusfolk don’t need to know about this. Some of the animal handlers know, and the fortune teller—that’s Mrs. Wershow—and I. Bradley—the strongman—knows because he once had to hide in there for a week.”

  “A week?”

  “We’ll just hide you tonight. You’re a lot less noticeable than Bradley. Also, about half his size. He managed it, so you’ll be just fine. Follow me.” Ginger walked in the direction of the animal cages, extinguishing his lantern as he went. The only light was from the sliver of a moon rising above the trees. Over his shoulder, Ginger said, “Tomorrow, I have other plans for you.”

  “I’ve got a plan of my own! I need to go back and rescue my friend.”

  “A woman?” Ginger asked, with a sigh.

  “No—just a fellow captive. He helped me out a lot when I started in the fields. I owe him.”

  Ginger paused to let the hostlers lead the horses past, down to the river. “But he didn’t escape with you.”

  “He didn’t believe it was safe. And he didn’t want to get the woman watching us in trouble.”

  “You don’t say. Well, tomorrow’s soon enough to discuss such things. Tonight, it’s time to hide.” Ginger stopped beside the ostrich wagon. The giant birds inside shifted, their feathers rustling as they settled down for the night. Ginger pulled aside the canvas protecting the wagon’s carved wooden side panel and its gilt and mirror adornments. “What was it again?” he muttered to himself. “Oh, yes.”

  He pushed down on two mirrored spots simultaneously, reached up and turned a carved piece at the very top of the wagon, and then hooked his finger into a hip-high crevice and pulled.

  The side panel of the wagon came away. A heavy cloth hung behind it. Ginger swept the cloth to the side, revealing a dark space about three feet deep and as wide as the wagon.

  “There’s a blanket in there, some hardtack if you get hungry again—sorry about the quality of the food, but this place doesn’t get used too much and it has to stay stocked—and two jugs. One jug is for drinking water, and one jug is,” Ginger coughed, “empty until you make it not. Don’t get the two mixed up! There’s an oil lantern with matches. Don’t use it unless you have to. The cloth should block light from escaping, but there’s no sense in taking risks. Try to sleep. I’ll get you out tomorrow morning.”

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Christopher Janzen, the Great Doctor Panjandrum!

  Dr. Janzen surveyed his wagon and considered his plans for the evening.

  He remembered the midget’s complaint about hearing “squishing and sawing” during the ringmaster’s autopsy, and so he blocked the gap under his door with
his pillow and a half-full sack of feed grain he’d borrowed when the head hostler wasn’t looking. He hung one blanket in front of the door and another over his window. As he did so, he glanced outside. Other circus members headed to the campfire for dinner. He pushed aside the urge to join them. He was a bit hungry, but he worked best with an empty stomach. The hunger would vanish soon.

  He pulled on a stiff butcher’s apron. He unrolled the cloth holding his medical instruments. He laid them out on the bench. He lit all four of the oil lamps he owned. Only then did he unwrap the gift the Indian mahout had carried back for him after they were attacked: the body of one of the bandits. Dr. Janzen had wrapped it in canvas and stored it in his bunk until they were safely through Seppanen Town.

  Now he unwrapped the canvas, folding the edges up fastidiously to prevent any bodily fluids from escaping. The dead man glared up at him with one remaining eye. The equestrienne’s pistol shot had turned the other eye into a crusted red-black ruin. The bullet’s track passed through the eye and into the cranium. Once in, the lightweight bullet would have ricocheted inside the skull case, slashing through the brain until that organ was an uninformative hash.

  The cause of death was too obvious to interest Dr. Janzen, though he noted in passing that the gunpowder stippling around the wound implied that the equestrienne had shot from a very close distance indeed. What he wished to learn was the nature of the dead man’s life and the condition of his health. Knowing the effects of the aether storm on its survivors could be crucial scientific knowledge, but the uneducated rarely offered up their relatives’ bodies for dissection.

  “Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae,” he said before he began. This is the place where death delights to help the living.

  The gross examination of the corpse showed that the man had lost weight recently but maintained acceptable health. He was in good physical shape, though one of his arms was notably more muscular. He had probably not been a bandit long, since he still had callouses from handling farm tools and dirt under his fingernails. And his clothes were freshly laundered, implying the care of a female.