Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  Lorne tried to roll out of Henry’s way but Henry kept hitting him. He aimed for Lorne’s head now with a clear picture of what would happen after he bashed his skull. Lorne would struggle for breath.

  It was then he thought of Caleb’s hand on his shoulder the day his brother arrived to see him. The simple way Caleb made them friends again, with this one movement of hand to shoulder. He thought of how his father had brushed against Andre’s arm when they were in Edgefield, how this touch arrested his brother at the last second of his charge. He thought of these things, and he knew that killing Lorne was not what he’d been traveling toward. The delivery of justice was not the highest potential of his body.

  The club came down without force, gave Lorne an innocuous thunk on the skull, barely enough for a goose egg to form.

  Henry stopped. He still held the club but his arm was limp at his side and he didn’t say anything.

  Lorne’s hand still guarded his face. Henry saw his wide eyes between the fingers that shielded them. When Henry still didn’t make another move, the animal handler squirmed tentatively, trying to get up.

  It wasn’t easy for him. Lorne held his stomach and chest like he wanted to keep his insides from falling out, and got to his feet. Henry guessed he had broken more than one rib and maybe his collarbone. Nothing they could set at the hospital. They would hurt for a long time but not long enough to make things fair.

  Lorne looked at Ambrosia, who still whinnied, high, urgent sounds, like a squealing violin.

  “You’ll do it, right? You’ll call the welfare people?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Henry, because he knew this was what Lorne wanted to hear. If he heard what he wanted, he would go, and Henry desperately needed him to go.

  Lorne nodded. If he concentrated more on Henry, and less on the horse, he might have doubted Henry’s word. But he looked only at Ambrosia, until he limped away, cradling his side.

  When he was gone, Henry led Ambrosia, staggering, into her stable and left her, frothing at the mouth. He drove back to Caleb and Adrienne’s. It took too long, and he tried not to think about the horse, tried not to think about what he’d done, or what he didn’t do, but his thoughts were still loud.

  Caleb and Adrienne would know what to do. But when he arrived, they weren’t there.

  He paced the living room, then tore through the yellow pages with shaking hands. He called an emergency vet clinic. He explained that there was an accident, but when he described Ambrosia’s injuries, her behavior, the vet tech got all quiet and told him to hold. There’s no time to hold, he thought. But then there was the vet on the other end of the line and she had that sad and serious tone to her voice.

  “Your horse is seriously injured,” she began. She had this little monologue memorized, right down to the gentle, condescending tone in which it was delivered. She’d given it to at least a thousand people, people who were holding tightly, naïvely to a beloved pet that was clearly beyond saving.

  “She isn’t mine. She works with me,” he said. He said this so the vet would know he wasn’t some kid who couldn’t face facts. But it sounded terrible and it wasn’t true. Ambrosia belongs to the circus, and Henry was part of the circus. She was his.

  “I see,” the vet said. Her condescending tone remained. “Well. I can get there in an hour. And whoever she belonged to should be there and be prepared to let her go.”

  “Okay,” he said, but as he said it, he decided against having this woman do in his horse. “Wait, never mind.”

  “Never mind?”

  “I can get to her faster,” he said.

  He found the gun in the hatbox, slipped it between his hip and the elastic of his underwear, and pulled his T-shirt down over it.

  WHEN HE GOT BACK TO the stable, Ambrosia was swaying. She was still trying to get out of her body, still trying to escape her pain, but she had less energy with which to do it.

  Henry loaded the gun.

  He touched the scar on the top of his head, the mean little white zipper line. It had bled and bled. He wondered if it would be the same with her.

  When he got close, she started to thrash again. He wanted her to settle down. He wanted to have to pull the trigger only once. He spoke to her in low tones, touched her nose, avoiding her swollen jaw. She went back to swaying, and Henry knew this was as close as she would come to being still.

  So he did what Lorne should have done. It was another simple motion, a gentle curl of the finger that sent a bullet into her hard, flat forehead. Instantly she crumpled, crushing her own legs beneath her.

  He took the clip out of the gun, and lay beside her great still body, and stroked her limp neck, and breathed harder than he thought he had ever breathed, his chest heaving. His stroking turned to clawing.

  WHEN HE GOT BACK TO the house, Caleb was in the living room, lying on the sofa, his feet elevated on the armrest. Adrienne wasn’t home. He would never put his feet up like that if Adrienne were home.

  Caleb sat upright when he saw Henry. He was startled. Henry knew he looked wild, knew he smelled like blood. There really wasn’t that much, and he’d washed himself with the hose, but the smell remained, coppery and sickening.

  “You alright?” asked Caleb.

  Henry wiped his eyes. The drugs were still in him—he wasn’t high anymore, but he felt all wrong. His mouth was sticky. The muscles in his legs were fluttering, and acid kept shooting up into his throat. “Is Kylie here?”

  “No,” Caleb said. His brow knit and he stood. “She’s at the music store. Hey, you alright? Did something happen with your brother?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  Henry turned, put his face in his palms. He managed to ask Caleb to help him, though the request was muffled, directed into his hands.

  He heard Caleb take a deep breath and remembered the gun, still tucked into the waist of his pants, the barrel parallel to his spine. He wore it casually, like some kind of punk.

  Caleb moved closer, his bare heels thumping softly on the hard wood. “I’ll help. Just tell me what to do.”

  He must have wanted to ask about the stupid gun and why Henry smelled like blood. He must have thought Henry was nuts—Henry thought Henry was nuts—but Caleb said nothing.

  “You have to get rid of Feely’s animals. If you buy the circus. Or even if you don’t. We have to find a place for them,” he said. He no longer spoke right into his hands but through his parted fingers.

  Caleb sighed, aggravated, and it was the Caleb that Henry knew, Caleb the curmudgeon. He’d shaken off all his concern and fear. “You really hate animals, don’t you? I asked, and you said no, and now here you go with this.”

  Henry’s muscles stopped twitching. Because Caleb pretended that everything was normal, Henry felt, for a second, like himself again, until he thought of Lorne, doubled over, limping across the dust. He turned to Caleb and handed him the gun.

  “What the hell is this?” asked Caleb.

  “It’s Adrienne’s gun,” said Henry.

  “I know that. Why do you have it?”

  “I used it to shoot the horse. She was dying. Lorne bashed her head in. I killed her.”

  Caleb looked down at the gun, turned it over in his hands, two whole revolutions before he said, “Did you see him do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He left the grounds. I didn’t kill him.”

  Caleb raised his eyebrows. “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “I wanted to,” Henry confessed. “I think I hurt him pretty bad.”

  “Well. I’d’ve done the same,” said Caleb.

  His throat knotted up. Caleb was wrong. He would not have seen real death as a possible outcome of any interaction he had with a person. Caleb might have shoved Lorne, kicked his sides blue. But Caleb would never take it as far as Henry had. For Henry, death was a possible outcome; his father was a killer, and that meant that Henry could be one, too, on the right day, in the
worst moment.

  No. Wait. That’s not true anymore.

  Henry couldn’t catch the sob before it escaped him. The implications of his recently revised history were suddenly clear to him: his father was not a killer. Henry had him wrong. He’d had himself wrong. The handful of words his brother had said, scared to death, changed the whole scope of creation, set the landscape. And now the words were gone, undone, and the world was not the world—it was a flower, an apple, the open mouth of a monster. He could not guess on what he stood, because it was not his father’s treatment of his mother that killed her but the drug that he could still feel inside him. His father wasn’t innocent, but he wasn’t a murderer, and neither was Henry. It was a sweet but unsettling surprise, and he couldn’t do anything in the face of it but cry.

  Caleb looked embarrassed. He cleared his throat, made an odd humming noise. He looked around the room for a distraction, an escape from the moment. Henry continued to cry. Eventually Caleb was forced to look at him, forced to laugh just a little at how pathetic it all was, because what else could he do?

  “Hey. You’re okay. It’s done. It’ll be okay,” Caleb said.

  There was certainty in Caleb’s voice that Henry had not been able to find in his heart—it relieved him, and the relief felt like exhaustion. He stopped crying, too tired to continue doing anything at all, including stand. He leaned back and was glad there happened to be a wall there.

  “Careful,” said Caleb. “You wanna chair or something?”

  “Nah,” said Henry, sinking to the floor.

  Caleb squatted down next to him. “You sure? You look like shit.”

  He knew he did. He could feel the snot and tears drying on his face, the heaviness of his eyelids.

  “Promise me about the animals,” he said.

  “I promise,” said Caleb.

  CHAPTER 28

  September 1990

  CALEB WATCHED HENRY AND KYLIE perform at Washington University. The buildings all looked to Caleb like medieval libraries, and they were performing in the shadow of one of those buildings. They’d charmed a student group into inviting them to campus to perform, and here they were, doing their angel routine. They couldn’t put out a bucket for change, but the student group had promised them a hundred dollars in exchange for the show.

  It was a pantomime, all done without speaking. The noises they made were only that: shouts and sighs and whistles. Kylie played her angel with a crooked walk and a lazy smile. Henry, the tramp, seemed to be trying to help her back up to heaven, but she resisted—sometimes by making her body seem limp and heavy as a sack of sand, and sometimes by outwitting the tramp, hiding, making excuses. She was glad to be free of heaven, euphoric about the change of scenery.

  Caleb was the one who suggested asking schools if they would host their performance, and it was Caleb who suggested offering the show for a hundred dollars, just to build a portfolio. Next time, Caleb would suggest they ask for two hundred. They’d drawn a small crowd, even in the wet, chilly weather, and the people who’d come were staying, even though they were hugging themselves like their sweaters and jackets were not enough.

  The audience was made up of mostly students, but there were a few children, too, little brothers and sisters, or sons and daughters brought by the college kids. The students were too brainy to laugh too hard. They were marveling at the physical challenge for the players, they were analyzing the themes of the show. All that thinking distracted them from laughing. The children, though, laughed plenty.

  Sure, they could charge two hundred dollars. They were worth it.

  He hadn’t told the clowns, per se, that he planned to manage their careers, and he hadn’t committed to anything but a short-term stay at his house. But Caleb couldn’t picture cutting them loose with anything less than a secure gig and a web of connections. He couldn’t imagine not sticking with them, helping them navigate the mess of show business. But without Feely and Feinstein, his resources for helping them were limited. Adrienne’s medical bills were astronomical. Kylie and Henry were furnaces; in Caleb’s estimation, they must burn about six thousand calories a day. In the last week, they’d gratefully eaten whatever Adrienne put on the table, but Caleb could tell it was not quite enough.

  They had less than they’d had in a long time, right when they needed the opposite, an absolute windfall, in order to save the circus and find homes for the animals. Caleb had promised that he would help Tex and those pungent, smug-seeming camels, and he meant it, even though he didn’t have a plan or the authority to do anything. It surprised him that he would ever make a promise without thinking it through and be so assured that he would be able to keep it. It made him feel powerful, but a little frantic, and he had the sinking certainty that this was not the last time he would make such a promise to this boy, who was not exactly a boy, but a young man who had waited as long to hear a promise like this as Caleb had waited to make one.

  Kylie swooned, and Henry caught her. She feigned death. When the tramp looked helplessly at the audience to figure out what to do, she peeked at him with one eye, and closed it tight again when he looked back at her. The children laughed, and just like that, Caleb knew how to keep his promise to Henry, and how to keep working on his life’s project. If there was anyone who had the capital and the heart to help Caleb revive a dead circus, it was the man who had sent him Henry, Luka Christiakov.

  At the hobo’s insistence, the angel swapped her halo for his hobo’s jacket. She didn’t want to be in heaven, so he volunteered to take her lot. Now the angel masqueraded as the tramp, and the tramp masqueraded as the angel. The trouble, it seemed, was that the tramp was really still just a tramp. His wings didn’t work. Henry plucked two children from the audience, both about eight years old: a dark-eyed white boy with two lines shaved into the hair above his temples and an impish-looking Mexican girl in neon-pink everything. He stood them so they faced each other and demonstrated how they must hold hands, weaving their fingers together, and they were too old not to be shy about this, but they did it anyway. Henry nodded his approval and showed them how their hands would be his catapult, launching him into the heavens. The little girl let go of the boy’s hands.

  “That won’t work!” she said, outraged. Kylie’s angel-gone-hobo shook her head vigorously in support of the little girl’s statement.

  Henry patted her head, condescendingly. There, there. Yes, it will.

  “You’re nuts!” the girl said, and Caleb laughed loud enough for the rest of the audience to glance over their shoulders. Henry’s eyes darted in his direction, though they quickly returned to the little girl. Caleb knew Henry had figured his laugh into his calculations of what must happen next, what he must play up and play down, what he’d do to win favor, what he’d do to surprise.

  After two leaps that missed the catapult created by the children’s hands, Henry released them back into the audience. He started to climb up the side of the building then. Hand over hand, he scaled the facade, using as footholds the grotesques and the places where the mortar had receded between the stones.

  The student group that had hired them glanced around nervously, biting their lips, whispering in each other’s ears. This was ad libbed. This was reciprocity for Caleb’s laughter.

  The children clutched their parents’ jeans. When Henry rose above the second story windows, the adults started to cling to their children, too. They had not pictured this happening in a show the student group had billed as “traditional mime.” Kylie ran back and forth below him, spreading her skirt as if the flimsy thing would act as a safety net if he plummeted. The real safety net was a cluster of bushes with waxy soft needles. It was not much of a barrier between life and death. But, perhaps stupidly, Caleb found that he trusted Henry. This was the punch line to a thrilling joke, and the best thing, really, for Caleb to do was to stand back, and shut up, and have a sense of humor about it.

  The mothers and fathers and Caleb waited for Henry to turn to them, to cue them that he had arrived, that h
e had gone up as far as he would go.

  The children held their breath.

  ADRIENNE MISSED HENRY AND KYLIE’S show at Washington University (again) because she was out selling cosmetics to a bunch of smiley twenty-five-year-olds, who all had their first grown-up jobs and were trying desperately to look like women instead of girls, so their bosses didn’t do things like wink at them and say “You remind me of my daughter.” They didn’t have to tell this to Adrienne. She just knew, and that was why she could sell to them—because she knew what they wanted. That was her art. Figuring out what people wanted and giving it to them.

  When she arrived back at her house, she had a thousand dollars’ worth of orders in her purse, the commission for which would translate to a couple of weeks’ worth of groceries.

  It would not pay the mortgage.

  It was certainly not the money that Caleb needed to buy Feely and Feinstein.

  She had her lunch, and afterwards, instead of smoking, she injected herself with octreotide, like a good girl, to keep the tumors away. She was on a lower dose now, just once a day, so she didn’t have such a hard time finding a place to stick the needle.

  Today, she found herself with a strange sort of housekeeping task ahead of her. It was one she had researched and planned since Seamus’s call. She’d listened while Caleb suggested at least a dozen different ways to come up with the money, none of which were realistic. It didn’t even take a person with Adrienne’s particular gifts to see that Caleb wanted to buy Feely and Feinstein more than he had ever wanted anything. It was, after all, his creation. Seamus had a claim to the circus in name only—it seemed to Adrienne that he was more like a pushy benefactor than an owner, asking Caleb to sculpt the statue of David, and then standing behind him the whole time, insisting that he put a moustache on it.

  She checked her watch. She had to pick up her husband, Kylie, and Henry at the campus in one hour, after which they would go directly to Richard’s appointment with the vet. She popped a stick of Big Red in her mouth and clapped her hands together once. Get to work.