Carniepunk

by Rachel Caine

  Like he was thinking about with Becca.

  Becca, who was too young to know better.

  “Bartholomew, I want you to stay the hell away from my little sister.”

  Her sister, though, she knew about the big bad wolves in the world. And where the huntsman would carry an axe, she would carry a shotgun.

  Bart looked up from his plate with rage. Unadulterated fury that someone would dare tell him what to do. I looked up and . . . shit . . . I was head over heels. Love. There it was. There she was, and nothing in all my rambles had prepared me for it.

  “Whatcha talking about, Starling my darling?” His hand white-knuckled around his plastic fork, but his voice was smooth as honey and slippery as butter. “Becca came over for change and to see my buddy, Doodle. She’s a kid, for God’s sake. What? You think I don’t know that?” Bart was probably smirking on the inside about how very well he did know that . . . about how much he liked that.

  I’d picked up on Becca having an older sister who played the psychic, but I hadn’t seen her in my few days at the midway. Bart didn’t cross her path . . . or maybe she didn’t cross his. Didn’t want to. As she sat down opposite him, I saw it in her eyes when she looked at him. . . . Here There Be Monsters reflected in onyx mirrors. It might as well have been painted on Bart, which was rather ironic, to her gaze at least. She knew. She knew about wolves and monsters and how a man could be all that and worse.

  Starling’s dark eyes passed over me. “Doodle?” There was scorn in her voice, but it was for Bart, not me. I hoped. “Do you think your buddy there is going to have me thinking you’re nothing but a puppy, all big eyes and milk breath? Sugar, you’re trying to pull the wool over the wrong set of eyes. I know wickedness when I smell it, and you are rank with it.”

  I hadn’t noticed it in Becca, but Starling had a trace of a southern accent. Around twenty-four or twenty-five, she had hair that wasn’t long like Becca’s, but a short cap of dark red streaked with the black stripes of a tiger. It cupped her head less like a gentle hand and more like a warrior’s sleek helmet. Her eyes were dark and fierce, but she had the same five freckles. It was incongruous—the same as if you walked the plains of Africa and a tiger lifted its head from its kill to show a spattering of shooting-star freckles across its bloodied muzzle.

  Sappy, yeah?

  Head-over-heels. What can I say?

  Can you blame me? I mean, seriously, a tiger with freckles. Who wouldn’t fall for that?

  “Wicked? Jesus, Starling, you’ve known me six months now.” And it wouldn’t be any longer than that. Bart was the type to piss where he lived. His stays would be short and his exits in the middle of the night, leaving pain and regret in his wake. Sometimes maybe worse. “What have I ever done to you? What have I ever done to anyone?”

  His hand relaxed on the fork, but it twitched. It was the kind of movement that made me think that had he had metal instead of plastic, she might have been stabbed with it.

  “I don’t know. What did you do to Mr. Murphy? How’d you come by his booth? One day he’s there, the next he’s gone, and there you are with your easy smile, pretty talk, and dead eyes. And don’t tell me he sold it to you. Murph loved the carnival, and as far as I can tell, you don’t love anything but yourself.” A short fingernail painted copper hit Bart in the chest. “So, here it is, Bar-tho-lo-mew, you don’t touch Becca or I’ll get my daddy’s old bowie knife out and make sure you don’t have a damn thing left to touch anyone with ever again.”

  Eyes narrowed, face flushed with anger, unpainted lips peeled back from her tiger’s teeth, she was . . . amazing. And then she was gone, turned and striding out of the tent with her long silk skirt doing nothing to conceal long legs loping after another gazelle to take down.

  Bart, unfortunately, was no gazelle. He wasn’t a tiger, either. Bart was a hyena through and through. He only took down the weak and the vulnerable, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. If anything, this adversary would make him more dangerous . . . thinking, plotting, and full of an ego that was not going to take this lying down.

  And Starling, as demanding and feisty as the bird she was named for, knew him. No one else at the carnival did, but she knew. She might actually be a little psychic, putting truth to that label on her booth. If I’d learned anything in this world, it was that things you think are aren’t, and things you think aren’t can be. Everything under the sun . . .

  Mr. Murphy . . . That was a new name I didn’t know anything about. Bart could be a bigger predator than I’d thought, a pack of hyenas all on his own. Which wasn’t good—not for Becca. Starling had tried to push around Bart, command him. Bart was a man . . . (a thing) . . . you didn’t tell what to do, because sure as shit, he’d do exactly the opposite for spite alone.

  Well, fuck.

  What did I do about that? About little Becca? About her gloriously wild sister? I was Doodle. While the Barts of life walked around with hands dripping pain or blood, Doodles, we didn’t get involved. I was always on the outside looking in. I wanted to see the world, I didn’t want to be the world. It was too complicated. Standing up for something, I didn’t know how to do that, to be that. I was content being the camera, not the subject.

  I only wanted to watch. I only wanted to see.

  What about Starling, anyway? She’d watched me, but she hadn’t seen me, not really. Sometimes I blended in a little too well, and blending in with Bart’s kind wasn’t the way to her heart, that was for damn certain. I shifted a little and grimaced at how that had come back to bite me in the ass. Bart hissed and glared at me, raising a hand to aim a slap in my direction.

  Stopping at the last moment, he snapped, low and mean, “Son of a bitch.” Then he stared at where Starling had sat. “Or just a fucking bitch—period.”

  The rest of the evening and night, Bart spent thinking. What he was thinking, he didn’t say out loud. I wasn’t surprised. If it was close to the thoughts I was working through, words like that . . . they do something to the air. They taint it with shadows and the smell of week-old roadkill. Words like that—I’d heard enough of them in my life, and I didn’t care to hear any more of them.

  When Bart went to bed that night, I left as I always did. Sometimes I lay in the grass and watched the stars. I waved to them, too, like I did the reflections in the mirror maze . . . just in case. Sometimes I’d investigate the carnival further, which was how I discovered that the magician had four arms and his hat had teeth. No wonder he kept a giant cage constantly full of at least twenty-five doomed rabbits. I let them go. That wasn’t much interference.

  Tonight I found a family sitting outside their trailer. The mother and father were listening to music, drinking wine, kissing, and laughing, laughing, laughing. Here was the love Bart knew nothing about. I watched from the dark, then wandered behind the trailer, where someone else had wandered as well. Their little boy. He was two, two and a half. Baby ages are hard. Strawberry-blond hair stood on end and pudgy hands were waving in a vain attempt to catch fireflies. He saw me, pointed, and laughed.

  I smiled at him and whispered, “Hi.” I pointed to my chest. “Doodle.”

  He pressed his finger against my nose. “Doodle!” He laughed again.

  “Doodle,” I agreed. I liked kids. Kids were uncomplicated and easy to understand. I didn’t have to worry about keeping my head down and not being noticed. Kids accepted. They weren’t suspicious or judgmental. They took me at face value and it didn’t matter what I knew or didn’t know. If I wasn’t always sure how to behave, because I was a little different, it didn’t matter. To them being Doodle was enough. I was about to ask what his name was, although I wasn’t so good with talking—words were difficult to get out for me—when I heard his mother calling. Reluctantly, I trudged back into the dark.

  He called after me. “Doodle! Doodle!”

  I heard his mother laugh at him. “Who are you talking to, silly bear?”

  Those were two nice memories. Love and wine; a little boy and fir
eflies. I’d keep those when I moved on.

  I wandered some more, watched the stars, and got back to Bart’s trailer by morning. It was important, as a professional hanger-on, not to be gone long enough to be noticeably absent. That led to second thoughts about poor Doodle. I wouldn’t want Bart to get too used to being without me—not yet.

  I expected him to start a campaign to win Becca’s trust. Buy her a gooey, sugary pastry, all fried dough, cherries, and powdered sugar. Talk to her as if she were a grown woman, not a fourteen-year-old. Try to get her to brush off Starling’s warnings as an over-protective big-sister reaction. It would’ve been typical pedophile behavior.

  But Bart proved me wrong. Bart showed he wasn’t typical . . . not in this case. Maybe he would be normally, but Starling had stood up to him, beat him down, and seen him for what he really was. She saw through his mask, and of all the things she’d done, that was the worst. No one saw Bart for what he was. If they did, how could he continue being what he was? How could he get away with it?

  He couldn’t.

  She might tell others. They might believe her. Bart couldn’t have that.

  No, he could not.

  While he sulked among the teddy bears, taking dollars in exchange for guaranteed failure, he kept his fake smile plastered to his face, though he mumbled under his breath. I couldn’t make out words—just the static buzz of what were likely psychotic ravings.

  Bart had been a mistake. I should go now. Before I spent the next night and the one after peeking in the window of Starling and Becca’s trailer.

  Too late.

  No self-will at all, that was me. When Bart turned in, I was at their trailer window. The curtains were the brilliant green of Irish fields, with a crack between the two halves. It wasn’t a large one, but large enough that I could see through. It was late, with Bart exhausted by his porn for the night and already asleep. But Starling was still up. She was curled up on a tiny couch with a cup of tea, wearing pajamas patterned with ice cream cones. Her bare feet were pink with copper-painted toenails, her smooth cap of hair was ruffled in completely ridiculous spikes and cowlicks, and the curve of her lips was relaxed. She was a long way from the “gypsy psychic” she’d been while facing down Bart, when she was dressed in silk and beads with black ice for eyes, nails the color of a Burmese sunset, and teeth bared in threat. It was different now, a picture of domestic bliss. . . .

  Until you noticed the giant bowie knife that was cradled on the cushion next to her. That made it even better.

  Perfect domestic bliss.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. A she-tiger sat in ridiculous pajamas, drinking tea, studying her toenails to see if they needed repainting—and had her knife at the ready for Bart in case some wicked piece of anatomy needed to be treated like a breakfast sausage.

  Love could be wine under the stars, but love could be this too.

  I’d never felt it before, not really, but love . . . I didn’t have the words for how it made me feel. I was Doodle and words weren’t my thing. But I felt and I wanted and I dreamed and Starling, she was all of that. She was a tiger, my tiger, and she wouldn’t ever back down from anything.

  Laughing had been a mistake, though. She whipped her head toward the window and was up and moving. She was fast, but I was faster. I’d traveled far and wide and learned you had to be fast to survive.

  Later I returned and tried the back where the bedroom would be. It was a small trailer, only big enough for one foldout bed. I saw Starling and Becca tangled up like children under the blankets. Becca slept curled up on her side, doing her unconscious best to scoot Starling out of the bed onto the floor. Starling slept—out of self-preservation, probably—on her stomach with one arm hooked around the edge of the mattress as if it were a lover of last hope. Lavender and tiger-striped hair mixed together in the dark, inseparable.

  My heart warmed. Becca was less Starling’s sister and more her cub. Starling would kill Bart and wouldn’t shed a tear over it. Such was the way of the wild, and that was another good thought and memory to keep. Fierce protection and soft hair mixed under piles of blankets.

  It was enough. I didn’t spy anymore. I wanted to see new things, but I didn’t want to dirty them . . . unless they were already dirty, and then there wasn’t much more I could do there anyway. I learned that when one of the poodles chased me back to Bart’s trailer. I nearly lost a strip of my hide to a fast-moving tentacle, but I still loved the little monsters. They were so damn funny.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY was the same as the others. Or so I thought until that night, when Bart spent three hours digging up Mr. Murphy and moving him farther away into the woods. Starling had spooked him. And Bart spooked me. He didn’t know I was there, watching. He wouldn’t have known if the whole carnival was there, cheering him on. He was muttering to himself with flecks of saliva flying from his mouth and a body tense with absolute molten rage. This time I could hear what he was saying: “Bitch, bitch, bitch. Fucking whore. Telling me. Telling me what I can do. She’ll be sorry. She’ll be so fucking sorry, she’ll beg. She’ll beg and beg and beg—she’ll beg. . . .” After that it was more incoherent, the rage a language all its own.

  Shit, Doodle, I thought with grim resignation, what have you gotten yourself into now?

  Breakfast was not good. I kept wondering why I was still here and not in the wind. That was my number one rule, the Doodle motto: Watch but don’t participate. Don’t get involved. You’re different, you’re weird, and no matter how harmless I tried to look, people wouldn’t want me around once they knew me—the real me. I was a freak.

  Wasn’t that ironic? In a carnival where there were no freaks anymore and the word itself was now bad and wrong, I was still a freak. Just a different kind of one.

  Facts were facts: if people knew me, they would shun me. That meant I couldn’t let anyone see behind the mask or through the reflection. I wanted to talk to Starling and tell her all the places and things I’d seen. The world was huge and its mysteries and secrets never-ending. I wanted to see her small, fiercely suspicious face smooth into smiles. I wanted to see her throw that neatly shaped head back in reckless laughter. I wanted to make fun of her pajamas and have her make up an outrageous fortune for me. Most of all, I wanted to sharpen her bowie knife for her and tell her never to warn men like Bart first, to just go ahead and put them down.

  I wanted all those things, but I knew that Starling, for all her wild ways, wouldn’t react differently from anyone else when it came to me. I was too different, and while the world changed all the time, that wouldn’t.

  Couldn’t.

  I watched as Bart shoveled down his breakfast. Wondering. Wondering. What should I . . . The thought was interrupted. The couple from three nights ago walked by, swinging their little boy hand in hand. He saw me and squealed, “Doodle!”

  His mother, ponytail swinging, looked over and smiled. “There is a Doodle, isn’t there? Hey, Doodle.” She laughed cheerfully. It wasn’t the throaty wine laugh from before, but I still liked it.

  Bart was not thrilled. “You get more action than I do, asshole,” he mumbled under his breath while waving at them and giving them the patented Bart smile, that cork against a human bottle of psychopathic rage and hate. See the smile, but never look past it.

  The mother didn’t, and they were past us and gone. I relaxed slightly. Bart had something planned for either Becca or Starling, I knew that. I didn’t want to add any further collateral damage.

  By that time Bart was done. He left his plate and cup on the table, uncaring, which wasn’t a good sign. You didn’t do that in the carnival. You cleaned up after yourself—always. The mask was slipping.

  —

  THAT NIGHT IT dissolved and Bart—the real Bart—came out to play.

  I could hear a thousand crickets when Becca slipped out the trailer door and Bart approached her with, “Hey, sweetheart, where you going?”

  I saw the flash of wariness in her eyes. Her sister had told h
er about Bart and, unlike most girls Becca’s age, she believed. She listened to her big sister, and now she wanted nothing to do with Bart.

  “Oh . . . Bart . . . and Doodle.” Her smile was a small, pained thing, because it was meant to include me. But as everyone had seen that I stood with and behind Bart since I’d arrived, it didn’t throw Bart off. Her voice wasn’t casual and breezy as she hoped. It only showed her fear and her weakness, and I could see Bart was already high at the sight of both. “I’m just going to Bartleby’s.” She tilted her head toward the next trailer. “We’re out of milk for Star’s tea.”

  It was barely dark. It was just next door, but even so, I found it hard to believe Starling would let her go alone . . . not when the big bad wolf lived just across the way.

  “Tea.” Bart rolled the word around his mouth. “She drinks tea. The bitch drinks tea. How fucking boring. I’m surprised she doesn’t drink acid, for all the shit that comes out of her mouth.”

  Becca was frozen. In her life probably no one had ever talked to her that way, not even in a carnival. Bart used that. And he clubbed her down with one blow of his fist. She was a puddle of green and heather and ivory silk at his feet.

  I hissed. This was wrong. Wrong. The world could be a bad place. I knew that. From the beginning I knew and had promised to stay out of it—for the very reason that I was as wrong in my way and my help might not be any better than the things I tried to stop. I watched. That’s all. That’s . . .