Smile No More

by James A. Moore

  Miriam collapsed in tears, and tried to make herself smaller than she already was.

  I should have fought harder, I suppose, but he got me with that comment. Miriam was a good woman, and didn’t deserve whatever the local had done to her.

  Alex nodded when I looked away. The stranger was uncircumcised when Alex swung the blade. He could have been Jewish by the time Alex was done.

  They let him go after that, and he did his best to run away, one hand over his penis and the other trying to pull up his pants, even with the shit he’d soiled them with.

  No one laughed, no one cheered.

  The women took Miriam with them as they went back to their tents and trailers. The men stayed behind, and without a word, several of them prepared for whatever the night might bring.

  It brought the police around the same time that the sun rose. And after a very brief conversation, the police left, taking Alexander Halston with them.

  As they were taking him away, Halston looked at me and said with his expression that he knew I was right, had known it all along, but that he could not, would not, let the rape of one of ours go unpunished.

  They’d taken him most of the way to the squad car before they stopped. After a moment’s conversation Halston called out to me and I went over, half expecting to be locked in chains myself. I’d done nothing wrong, but I felt the guilt just the same, perhaps because a few of the people around me might have thought of me as a traitor.

  “Cecil, I’ll be occupied through the rest of the day. No one in town has heard about what happened, and it’s likely to stay that way. We’re going to have business and the show must go on and all of that nonsense.”

  I nodded my head, but had no idea where he was going.

  “I need to you to lead the show for me. Be the ringmaster.”

  “What? Me?” My heart was in my throat.

  “You.” He shrugged as best he could while wearing handcuffs.

  “Why me?”

  “You have a decent voice and a good sense of showmanship. Also, you can fit in my tux.”

  He left a moment later, and I stared long and hard after the police car had gone.

  Later, as I was trying to get myself into costume, Carter explained the facts to me.

  “Alex will be out in a couple of days.” He looked at my reflection next to his as we both put on make-up.

  “You think so?”

  “He didn’t castrate the man. He just cut a little skin and made the asshole know not to try anything else that stupid.” Carter shrugged. “It’s not the first time he’s done it and it won’t be the last.”

  “So what? They’ll just let him go?”

  “They won’t have a choice. They won’t like it, but they’ll let him go.”

  “Why?”

  “The man he cut will drop the charges.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Of course it is. He either drops the charges, or he has to tell everyone what happened to his dick and why it happened.”

  I thought about that and slowly nodded. That made sense. If he had to go to court, the circus had to go to court. His word against one man might not mean much, but his word against twenty or more people who say that he raped a woman, shit himself and got his dick sliced open? That’s a different story. Especially when you considered that he had a wife at home, and maybe even a few kids. Divorce wasn’t a regular thing back then and believe me, most of the smaller towns looked at a divorce as a scandal.

  I nodded again and looked at myself in the mirror. I took off the bulging red nose. It didn’t look right with the tuxedo and top hat.

  I thought I should have been nervous, but the make-up helped. It wouldn’t be me talking to the rubes when the time came. It would be Rufo the Clown.

  Ten minutes later, I headed for the center of the main ring and squinted a bit as the spotlight glared down at me.

  I smiled and listened as the audience grew still.

  Alex used a microphone and I used the very same one as I spoke. “Layyydieees and Gentllllemennnnnn! Boyys and Girrrrrls! Welcome to the Alexander Halston Carnival of the Fantastic! My name if Rufo, and I’ll be your host tonight!”

  They ate it up. I could barely see the crowd out there, but I could hear them as they started to clap and stomp their feet.

  They wanted to be entertained, and that was what we were there for.

  And like the boss man said, the show must go on.

  Chapter Six: Looking for Millie (Part Six)

  I wish I could say I took no satisfaction in murdering the fat couple that robbed my dead sister, but I’d be lying. They deserved to die and I enjoyed every moment of it. I laughed while they screamed.

  And when it was done, I carried the boys from the car’s trunk and placed them in the house on the upper floor, along with the owners of the storage facility, and I locked everything up nice and neat and left a note on the door that said Out To Lunch, Back in Two Hours.

  Then I left, driving to the west, because I needed a place to relax and I decided on Delavan, Wisconsin. I’d never been there, but I understood that was where the Barnum and Bailey circus got its start. Curiosity was my only reason for heading there.

  Along the way, I stopped at a diner or two and occasionally picked up a hitchhiker who looked too miserable to keep on walking. None of them tried anything stupid and most were grateful for the chance to rest a while and get where they were going at the same time.

  When I got to the town, I was a little disappointed. I guess part of me wanted to see clowns and celebrations of the Greatest Show on Earth. I stayed at a place called the Delavan Motor Inn and parked myself in a room where I could lie down for a while and read my sister’s history.

  I looked at photographs first, starting with the oldest, most worn albums and slowly moving forward. In that first volume, I saw a life I knew all too well. I saw my history and that of my family before I left and broke apart the world I’d grown up in.

  There were old, cracked images of me at ten holding the toddler my sister would become. Old black and whites of my mother and my father, the sort that I don’t think get taken often these days. They were smiling, of course, because they were being photographed and they knew it, but there was a look to them, a hunger beneath the surface of their smiles, which most people never see these days. You can’t be truly hungry if you’ve never been starved, and both of my parents lived through the Great Depression and understood what it meant to live on nothing but shriveled grains that had fought hard to crawl from the arid soil. The people I’ve seen in most places in the US these days, they’ve had food. Even if they haven’t had a lot of it, they’ve never starved. There are people that call this country the Land of Plenty, and they aren’t wrong about that. There’s plenty to be had if you want to work for it. Those that don’t want to work for it get pushed to the wayside. I don’t know, maybe that’s my father talking. Sometimes it’s hard to say.

  I looked at the pictures and toward the back of the album, I saw the newspaper clippings. Every report she found about the Alexander Halston Carnival of the Fantastic, my sister clipped from the papers and glued in her book of memories. There were also three letters I’d written from the road, each of which had been wadded up at one time or another and then carefully pressed flat again before she put them in their final resting place.

  I could remember each of the letters clearly. I’d written them after all. Written them, folded them around whatever money I could send, and then mailed them off. At least I knew the family got the money. That was something. Back then, it was all I had.

  There were more pictures, of course. Candid shots of my sister growing up, posed family shots, and everything in between.

  God, I don’t think I’ve cried that much in years. I can’t say whether they were tears of sorrow or of joy; probably a little of both, I suspect. I flipped through all of the books of pictures and stared at my sister as she aged in stills that were cut from her life. I saw her at twelve, and then at f
ifteen. I saw her at her sixteenth birthday and smiled because she was surrounded by family and a small army of friends. She was beautiful, just as I knew she would be.

  I studied her face, her life, the smile that almost never left her, even when I could tell that times were lean. I saw the man she married, who had kind eyes and always had a hand on her, gently, as if to reassure himself that she were real. That’s the way it should be, I think. So in love that you have to check whether or not you’re merely dreaming.

  I read her journals, diaries from different times in her life and the tears came harder than before. There were good times, yes, but there was grief and anger as well. I read of my father’s death, which took place well after I’d shed the old mortal coil, and I read of my mother’s passing a few years later, eaten away a pound at a time by cancer.

  I had known for a long time that my parents were dead, had sensed it, I suppose, or maybe just done the math. Fifty years is a long time to be gone and the odds of them being alive weren’t the best. Still, I thought about the good times, about my mother’s gentle hands, and my father’s rare and precious smiles. I thought about the farm and the dingy house we rented later, and how much I loved both of them.

  How much I missed them, even after half a century.

  I read entries about me, too. I read her worries about her older brother, her hopes that I was okay. I read how much she missed me and I hated myself for ever letting her down. There is so much in the world we make for ourselves that we can regret, and I had a great deal of regrets right then.

  But damned if there wasn’t joy, too. I looked on a life filled with happiness, read of Millie’s triumphs and tragedies alike. She loved her husband and he loved her, too, until he died in Viet Nam. She loved her daughter, and was loved in return, at least for a time.

  Mostly what I did, really, was examine the evolution of my sister from child to adult and finally to her golden years, a history written in ink, but one that showed the changes in her world just the same.

  I read her life for the next two days, learning in bits and pieces how she’d grown and how she’d changed. I wept with Millie when she learned that her husband was dead. I laughed with her when her daughter, Cecilia, first walked and spoke her first word.

  I learned about Cecilia’s growing troubles as her life progressed. A somber child from the beginning of her life, I learned that she blossomed into a beautiful girl and I saw the pictures that proved it.

  I read about Millie’s second marriage and the man who left her one night and never came back. Believe me, I read that carefully and I wrote down the man’s name. Should I find him while he’s alive, we’ll have a long discussion about how he treated my little sister.

  I read about Cecilia’s troubled adulthood. The angry young girl became an angry young woman, and then a starlet in the sorts of movie no young girl should ever be a part of. She had her share of celebrity first as a model in a few legitimate magazines, but the offers of quick money became too much for her and she wound up in the types of movies that used to only play on the seedy side of town in theaters that didn’t bother with selling snacks.

  Cecilia came home to her mother and brought along a daughter born out of wedlock. Her name was Meaghan, and when Cecilia left a second time, she left Meaghan behind as a parting gift. Millie became a mother for the second time, even if she was only a mother in name. She raised her granddaughter as her own, and maybe this time she was wiser, because the second time around she did a better job of it.

  There were pictures of Meaghan, too. She looked enough like her grandmother to almost be her twin. She had the same smile, the same wild mop of dark hair. She even had the same patch of freckles that grew on her face whenever the sun touched her skin.

  She had high hopes and bold dreams, Meaghan did, and so Millie did everything she could to make those dreams come true.

  I read about my family, the ones I loved and the ones I never knew. It was enlightening, heartbreaking and I’ll even say it was cleansing, like a good rain after a few weeks without; the air smelled cleaner when I was done.

  Millie was dead, but she’d died after a long and happy life. What possible reason could I have for wishing to change that except for personal greed? None, so I left her in peace and I mourned the loss of her in my world, as I’m sure she’d once mourned for me. I didn’t know what the afterlife held for her, but I knew it had to be better than the hell I got stuck in for half a century.

  Cecilia could be anywhere in the world, alive or dead, but in time, if I could, I’d look for her. I had pictures of her, all of the ones that Millie collected over the years, and I thought I could find her with remarkably little effort if she was still alive. But she was a lower priority.

  I wanted to know about Meaghan. I wanted to see what she’d made of her dreams and ambitions, and I knew where to look thanks to the journals my little sister had kept of her life and the lives that touched her the most.

  In her own unusual way, my grandniece had joined the circus. I intended to find her and meet her. Perhaps after that we could discuss the past and the woman who raised her.

  In the meantime I was off to a different sort of circus, one that was based, oddly enough, on the life and times of Alexander Halston and the second family I had come to know and love.

  ***

  Detective Michael Carver stared at John Booker and tried to read the kid in front of him. It was harder than he expected. The cold, blue eyes that looked back at him offered nothing. He didn’t act nervous, didn’t even seem overly concerned about the fact that he was being interviewed, but there was something about him that set off alarms in Carver’s head. After seventeen years with the police, he’d learned to trust his instincts, but he was the first to admit they led him wrong from time to time.

  “Did you know Gary Peck, Mr. Booker?”

  “Not really. I saw him around, but he was one of the stars. I just build stuff.” Booker shrugged his shoulders as he spoke.

  “How about Brad Lowman?”

  “Yeah. We worked together a few times.” Nothing. His facial expression didn’t change in the least.

  “What did you think of him?”

  Booker shook his head and sneered just a bit. “Kind of a pervert, if you must know.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I saw him looking at pictures of little girls on his computer. Naked little girls.”

  “Did you report him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m new. I didn’t want to make waves.”

  “You understand that child pornography is against the law, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you didn’t feel the need to report him?”

  “Have you ever worked behind the scenes at a show like this, Detective?”

  “I can’t say as I have.”

  “You do a lot of work that puts you in dangerous positions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean things like standing on a ladder while working with a power saw and leaning out until you’re barely able to hold your balance.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I think a lot of people liked Brad Lowman. I think they liked him a lot, because he was always cracking jokes and glad to let you bum a cigarette.” Booker stared at him now, and Carver did his best to stare back. The man’s eyes were unsettling, not merely cold in color but in their lack of emotion. He could have been staring at matching marbles for all the expression he got off the man.

  “And?”

  “And I have to work with those people. Would you want to report somebody who was well liked and then have to trust somebody you barely know to hold the ladder while you’re leaning out and cutting away with a power saw?”

  Carver nodded his head. “Good point.” He leaned back in his chair until the two front legs were off the ground and stared hard at the man in front of him. “Did you kill Gary Peck or Brad Lowman?”
r />   “No.”

  “Did you want to kill either of them?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anyone who wanted them dead?”

  “No.”

  And there it was, the end of the interview. There was nothing else to ask the man in front of him.

  “How did they die, Detective?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How did they die? Maybe you should be looking at that instead of just trying to guess.”

  “There’s not much to go on, but what I do know I’m not at liberty to talk about.”

  Booker nodded. “Just seems to me that if the deaths are connected, there should be an underlying reason for the connection.”

  “Like what, Mr. Booker?”

  “Beats me. I’m not a detective.” Booker smiled for the first time. It was a tight, closed-mouthed little smile.

  Carver stared long and hard, still without any proof that the man he was looking at was dirty and still with a deep sense that something was wrong with him just the same. He might not have done anything lately, but he gave off a vibe that said he’d done bad things before and maybe would again.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Booker.”

  Booker nodded and stood up in one fluid motion. He didn’t say another word as he left, but he hummed a tune that was familiar.

  “That song, Mr. Booker. What’s it called?”

  Booker turned back and smiled. “Tears of a clown.” With that he was gone.

  Carver had a dozen more people to interview, but he wrote down Booker’s name and circled it three times. On a whim, he called one of the uniforms, Josh Wilkins, over and handed him Bookers name and pertinent information with a request to find out what he could about him. He needed to look into the man. Something there, he knew it, but just wasn’t sure what that something was.

  He was halfway through interviewing an attractive young woman who was the stand in for the female lead when the officer came back to him. The girl noticed Wilkins had returned.