“So,” Telly said, after a moment. “The kid here. What do you think?” He reached over and patted David on the back.
“The poor kid got more than he bargained for,” Annabelle said, favoring David with a look of such pity that he wanted to cry again. “That’s what I think.”
David stuffed his mouth full of cheese and lowered his gaze to the tabletop.
“Disturby Dave. There’s a fire in you, kid,” Cakey said. “You keep it well hidden, but when it erupts, it’s…well, I don’t know what else to call it…it’s purgative.”
“Purgative?” Telly said. “I don’t think you know what that word means. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with excrement.”
“It’s a metaphor, you dense dwarf,” Cakey said, flicking a cracker at him.
Telly batted the cracker away. David was troubled by Cakey’s assessment of him. He didn’t want there to be a fire inside of him. That sounded too much like Vern. But something had broken in him, yes, all the anxiety and fear had boiled up and become something fierce and hateful.
“Tell us your story,” Cakey said.
“My story?”
“When I first saw you, I thought to myself, I said, Cakey, that there is just a poor small town redneck rube with no sense of the broken expanse of world around him. That’s what I said. He’ll tear apart into about ten thousand itty bitty pieces if he’s made to deal with the endless parade of troubles. But there’s more to your story, I’ll warrant. There’s got to be. So what’s the rest of it?”
“I’d like to hear it,” Annabelle said, leaning forward, those dark eyes fixed on him.
And how could David refuse them? He had no easy escape, and the silence was unbearable. He cleared his throat. “I don’t know where you want me to start.”
“Start with everything,” Cakey said. “And work from there.”
“Well…okay,” David said. He had a cracker clutched between two fingers, and he idly pressed the corner of it against the tabletop until it crumbled. “Not much to tell, really. I used to live with Mama in a little town called Parkin out east. Then about ten years ago she met Vern. He talked her into moving us to Mountainburg, and it was a lot worse there. Then I ran away with you guys. That’s pretty much it.”
“Oh, kid, kid, come on,” Cakey said, rolling his eyes. “That’s no way to tell a story. Details, compelling details, that’s what people want to hear. Blah blah Parkin and blah blah Mountainburg. That’s all I heard.”
“But that’s pretty much it,” David insisted. The cracker snapped in two.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Annabelle suggested.
“David, you don’t have to say nothin’ if you don’t want to,” Telly said.
“Sure he does.” Cakey reached over and plucked the remains of the cracker out of his grasp and tossed it onto the platter. Then he leaned in close. David could see the rough texture of his skin, the bright colors lying just under the surface, and smell sour beer on his breath. “Details, kid. Details. What about your real dad?”
“Died when I was a baby,” David said. “I don’t even remember him.”
“How?”
Annabelle laid a restraining arm on Cakey’s wrist, but he flicked it off. David could see that he wasn’t going to get out of telling the whole story, so he took a deep breath and steeled himself.
“Fine, here’s the real story,” he said. “My father was killed. He was a teamster and had a route that went from Parkin down to Eudora and east to the river towns. One night, he was camped along the banks of Lake Chicot, when some men—thieves, highwaymen, whatever you call them—came into his camp and clubbed him to death while he slept. They took his truck and the trailer with all of his stuff in it and left him there. Some other travelers found him weeks later and eventually the body was brought back to Parkin, or the bones or whatever was left. That’s it. That’s the real story, as Mama told it to me. I was too young to know anything when it happened, and I don’t remember him at all. And, heck, maybe Mama lied about the whole thing. For all I know, he never died, and she just left him.”
“Oh, David, I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said.
“Like I said, I don’t remember him,” David replied, running a finger through the mound of crumbs he’d made. “Anyway, years go by, and Mama gets lonely. Who knows why? She had me. She had neighbors. But she gets lonely, so when Vern comes to town, and he lays on the charm, whatever gross charm he had, she took a liking to him. He came to Parkin to set up a handyman business, but it went bust because nobody wanted his help, so he told Mama he wanted to move back to Mountainburg to work with his cousin, Cash. And Mama let herself be talked into it, even though I pleaded with her. She listened to him instead of me, so we went to Mountainburg, and it was a terrible place, and I hated every single day of my life there. The end.”
Cakey nodded, his eyes narrowed. “Until the day the circus came to town and rescued you.”
“Well…yeah, that’s what I thought,” David replied. “Then a whole town full of sick people tried to kill us.”
Annabelle reached over and touched his hand, if only for a second, and he blushed furiously.
“It won’t be like that everywhere we go,” Telly said. “Trust me, kid, it’ll get better. Despite the occasional problem with sick rubes, being a performer is a charmed life.”
Annabelle glanced at Telly, and the look on her face was poisonous, but he seemed not to notice.
Cakey’s eyes were burrowing a hole into David’s forehead, so he cleared his throat and said, “That’s my story. What’s yours?”
“Cakey’s story?” Telly said with a laugh. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“Sure.”
“Kid,” Telly said. “There’s stories, and then there’s stories.”
Cakey leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He was wearing the same yellow clown suit he’d worn the night before. It was blood speckled, dirty and reeked of smoke. “The story of Cakey. Cakey the Jacked-Up Clown. Now, indeed, that is a story worth telling, young Disturby. Wherever shall I begin?”
Annabelle rolled her eyes.
“I will begin on the morning of my birth,” Cakey said. “There was, once upon a time, a country called Romania, far across every sea and twenty thousand miles away. In the heart of Romania, on the edge of an ancient forest, lay a small village called Kurpmignid, and that is where I was born. Minutes after my birth, my gypsy grandmother took me by the heels and carried me to the banks of the Suceava, a sacred river, and she dipped me in the waters. My first sense of the world was the taste of that water flowing into my mouth, the feel of it swirling around my body, my first sight was of blue water, thick as paint. No, not blue—cerulean! That was the color. Cerulean!”
“Cerulean? Hot damn, the story gets more exciting every time you tell it,” Telly replied with a cynical laugh. “I need a beer. Anyone else want one? David? Belle?” He rose from the table and walked over to the cooler.
“Yes, please,” Annabelle said.
Before David could answer, Cakey continued. “She set me on a stone altar in the sunlight to dry, and she bent over me and whispered, You will be very special, for you alone will stand at the edge of the world and gaze into the ever-night. That’s what she said to me when I was hours old, and I remember it.” Cakey grasped his forehead in his hand. “I remember every word.”
David glanced from Cakey to Annabelle, looking for some indication that Cakey was joking. Surely this couldn’t be the real story. Surely he would stop soon and burst out laughing, and the others would join him.
Telly came back with three beers. He set one down in front of Annabelle and one in front of David. The other he kept for himself. David reached for the beer and worked at the cap. He’d tasted the vile swill that Vern and Mama liked to drink, a bitter potato mash that Cash made in his basement. It was like drinking liquid death. But he’d never had beer. He worked the cap off with some effort, chipping the end of a fingernail in the pro
cess, and took a sip. Warm and thick and bitter. He tried to avoid grimacing and discretely set the bottle down, sliding it away from him.
“It was my mother’s gypsy family who taught me to be a clown,” Cakey said. “They used to travel the world, entertaining rubes from Mongolia to the South Pole. Only they didn’t actually like the term gypsy. The Roma people, that’s what they were called. An unloved people by some, but what does it matter? The rubes pay their money and laugh their laughs.”
He reached out and snagged David’s beer, held it up questioningly. David shrugged, and Cakey apparently took this as an affirmative. He took a long drink and set the bottle down, belched and sniffed.
“So I was twelve years old, and we had worked our way across Europe, performing in cities and towns and villages, in tents and theaters and bars and on the balconies of rich people’s villas. And so we come to the moment, that vivid moment, burned into my memory like a sunspot, in a place at the end of the world called Gibraltar. I am standing on a pier, my grandmother holding my hand as orange sunset fire burns the western horizon, and she says to me, Far away, far away, blessed one. The ever-night is coming. It is coming forever. Here we must be parted. And she kisses me on top of the head and leads me up the ramp into a ship. And I, alone of all my people, sail across the seas, and the curtains come down on the old life as the lights come up on a new.”
Karl let out a great snort, rustled his blankets and struggled to sit up. Cakey paused in his story, as everyone turned to watch Karl fling off his blankets and rise. He ran both hands lightly down either side of his bruised and battered face, winced, then opened his good eye and looked to Cakey.
“If I have to hear that lousy story of yours one more time,” he said, in a voice thick with pain, “I’m gonna hop out the door and head back to West Fork.”
Cakey offered him a wan smile. “The boy wanted to hear it.”
“Every word of it is a lie,” Karl said.
David looked up at the others to see how they would react to Karl’s comment. Telly had fixed all of his attention on his beer, but Annabelle met David’s gaze with a shrug and the barest hint of a nod.
“All of it is not a lie,” Cakey said. “In fact, my dearest Touches, I would venture to say you can’t prove any of it is a lie.”
“Fine,” Karl replied. He started to stand up, then thought better of it and sat back down. “Maybe you really were born in Romania and dipped in a magic river and all the rest, but we all find it curious that you never even told that story until the shootout, and then, whoops, guess what, friends, I’m a magical gypsy child from Kurpytown across the sea!”
“We all find it curious?” Cakey said. “We? So it has been discussed, I take it?” He looked at Telly, and when Telly would not look back, he snatched his beer away, “You agree with this big slab of meat? You guys talking about me behind my back?”
Telly grabbed for the beer, but Cakey moved it out of his reach. Telly sighed. “Tell your story, Cakey. Tell people any old thing you want to tell them. I don’t care. Just give me back my drink.”
Cakey handed him the bottle and rounded on Annabelle. She blinked very slowly and looked up at him, unflinching. “And you? You talk about me behind my back? Call me a liar?”
Annabelle gave him a look of such contempt that David felt embarrassed being in the room, as if he were suddenly intruding on a very private and ugly moment. “You are a liar,” she said, in a quiet voice full of venom. “I’ll say it behind your back. I’ll say it to your face. Do you really want to talk to me as if I don’t know you? Do you want me to start using that other name that you pretend you don’t remember?”
Cakey withered under her gaze and finally ducked his head and turned back to David. “Fair enough,” he said. “Truth is stranger than fiction, lad. What can I say?”
Annabelle continued staring daggers into the back of his head. Telly finally rose, clutching his bottle to his chest and stepped away from the table. “Enough chit chat, friends,” he said. “I’m retiring to my quarters.”
And with that, he walked around the table and disappeared down the hallway. That left David sitting alone at the table in the awkward aftermath of what had just passed between Belle and Cakey. He cleared his throat and tried to think of something to say. He took another sip of warm beer, but he could scarcely stand it. Cakey was still staring at him.
“Uncomfortable, in’t it?” Cakey asked, giving a strange little bark that might have been an attempt at a laugh.
“What…what was the shootout?” David asked. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know, but it was the only question that came to mind.
At first, nobody answered, and David thought maybe nobody was going to. Karl was staring at the floor, Annabelle was still glaring at Cakey, and Cakey was doing his best to keep her out of his field of view.
“Bad times,” Karl said finally. “Really bad times. Not worth saying more than that. Do us a favor and don’t press for details.”
“Oh, okay,” David replied. “Sorry.”
“My gypsy story is a heck of a lot better,” Cakey said. “That’s for sure. And it ain’t all a lie, no matter what these goons tell you.”
Annabelle raised an open hand, as if she meant to slap him. Instead, she shook her head, rose and stormed off to her room. Cakey cringed until she was gone, then laughed again, that same uncomfortable bark of a laugh. He started to say something else, but the truck rumbled to life, the whole trailer shuddered, and they began to move. David’s bottle tipped over, but he caught it. Beer sloshed onto the table and ran like tears across the slick surface and over the edge.
Cakey’s attempt at a smile finally failed, and he rose, reaching out to the wall to steady himself and headed back down the hallway to his room.
“Kid, you’d be better off not finding out any more about them,” Karl said, and lay back down on the couch. “You got enough bad memories of your own to deal with, from the sound of it.”
David sighed and took another swig of beer. He reckoned Karl was right. He held the warm beer in his mouth for a few seconds, then turned and spat it into the sink. Then he dumped the rest of the beer in there, as well, and set the empty bottle in among the dishes.
Shortly, Karl fell back asleep and resumed snoring. The trailer rattled and thumped along the highway, moving slowly, and David smelled sooty air coming through the broken window. The hint of ruins moved past, crooked walls and piles of bricks, skeletal wood frames rising up from the high grass. The broken expanse of world, Cakey had called it, and David wondered if this was what the rest of the world looked like.
After a moment, the radio crackled to life in its drawer beneath the makeup table.
“Jefe, we’re coming up on a settlement,” Gooty said.
Since no one else was around to answer it, David walked over, moving carefully as the floor beneath him shifted and bounced, and opened the drawer.
“Jefe—boss, you there?”
David picked up the small black radio, fumbled around with the buttons for a moment and held it close to his mouth.
“Hey, it’s me, David,” he said. “Telly went to his room.”
“Well, you tell that little clown we gotta stop,” Gooty replied. “There’s a roadblock up ahead. A big one.”
“Okay, I’ll go get him,” David said, setting the radio back in the drawer.
He walked past the table to the hallway and stood there for a moment. He felt the trailer slowing down, the shuddering of the floor beneath him, and heard the squeal of brakes. All of the doors in the hallway were closed, and he had not paid attention to which one Telly had used. To his right, he heard someone moving about in one of the rooms, heard a wooden whoosh and thud, as of a heavy trunk lid slamming shut. On the left, he heard soft whimpering sounds, as of someone in pain. He leaned in close and realized it was the sound of crying. Annabelle, but her voice was muffled, as if she had covered her mouth to dampen the sound.
“Telly?” David called out.
Immedi
ately, the crying stopped, and whoever was moving about in the room on the right stopped.
“What is it?” came the weary reply.
“Gooty needs you up front.”
A door at the end of the hallway opened, and Telly poked his head out, looking annoyed.
“Needs me for what? And why have we stopped?”
“Says there’s a roadblock,” David said.
Telly rolled his eyes, stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him. He removed his hat, slicked the few hairs back with his hand and strode past David.
“Follow me, kid,” he said, putting the hat back in place. “Let’s see what’s going on.”
David opened his mouth to protest—he could only imagine that this roadblock, whatever it was, was bad news—but Telly was already moving to the door. As he strode past the makeup table, Telly reached down and picked up the billy club, tucking it through a belt loop. David sighed and went after him.
Stepping onto the porch, he found himself in a sea of decay. Broken down buildings, bare foundations and tumbled walls stretched out in all directions. But in among the ruins he saw people, rag-draped bodies crouched here and there, peering out of the shadows like mice in a landfill. Then he stepped down from the porch and rounded the corner and saw the gate and the city wall. The massive iron gate stretched across all four lanes of the highway and had a high watchtower on one end. The guard in the tower had a mounted gun pointed at the truck. A half dozen other guards dressed in bright red uniforms stood in front of the gate, rifles slung over their backs.
“Friendly sort of place,” Telly said over his shoulder.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go here,” David said.
“If we turn the truck around now and make a run for it, they might open fire. We got no choice but to win them over.”
“Open fire?” David squeaked. “I thought you said none of these border towns had guns.”
Shadows of Tockland Page 12