by Lynn Red
She opened the door, but left the screen with the chain lock in place. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The grin on Lyle’s face sickened her, just like his brown teeth and red cheeks. “Bad for business. Don’t you remember givin’ up your pay this week to feed the animals? Come on, little girl, don’t be stupid. People are scared of this cat. I’ll take him off, you can—”
“Wait, hold on.” She put her feet solidly square on the ground. “You said if I found him first you’d leave him alone.”
“Changed my mind. Get out of there or I’ll do it for you.”
Squaring her jaw and leveling her shoulders, Cass put her hand out behind her, trying to calm Lex’s increasingly irritated growls. “This is a really, really bad idea, Lyle. This isn’t a threat or anything, it’s just… no!”
The first of Lyle’s goons kicked her screen in, letting himself and two others inside. “Lex! No! Don’t hurt them!” she cried out, begging the cat not to do anything to get himself killed. As much as being separated from him was going to hurt, having him hurt or killed would have broken her.
Lex curled up his lips in a silent snarl, tensed his massive shoulders and neck, and bared his teeth.
“Calm him down, Cass,” Lyle said. “You’re the trainer, right?”
With a soft pat on the back of his head, Cass curled her fingers in the lion’s mane and tugged. He was pulling against her, straining to get at one of the idiots who had invaded, if only one of them chose to try something stupid.
When the one in the front – the big one with the vacant look on his face – decided to get a little closer, Lex snapped his jaws in a warning that could have easily taken the guy’s hand if he were a half inch closer, or if Lex were just a little less careful with where he snapped.
“See that? He’s crazy! He’s nuts! He’ll kill me, or some kid, or some damn hick farmer or something, and then where will we be?”
“I didn’t want to do this, Cass,” Lyle said, pulling something that looked like a rough facsimile of a gun out of his coveralls. “He ain’t gonna go easy though, and you don’t seem like you’re gonna be much help.”
He inserted a canister into the back, and a dart into the barrel. “Now listen, I told ya I ain’t gonna hurt him.”
The tears were already running down Cass’s face. She took a swing at Lyle’s lumpy head at exactly the same time that he fired the dart. It sunk into Lex’s chest just as her fist slammed into Lyle’s chin, sending a tooth flying. Even with the drugs coursing through him, Lex tightened his chest and let out a half-growl, half-roar that shook the windows. He lunged straight for the nearest idiot, with a rage that was going to take at least part of a head should he choose. She saw that he kept his claws back, but smacked the absolute hell out of the closest man.
Flying backward like a hurled potato sack, the leering, vacant-eyed man hit the wall, flattened somewhat, and slid to the floor. Lex lurched, but kept his paws under himself, at least long enough to send another of the panicked workers sprawling to the floor when he tried to grab Lex’s fur.
Lyle shouted some kind of incoherent profanity and loaded a second dart. He fired it straight into the side of the lion’s neck. “God damn idiot girl,” he whined, clutching his broken lip and sore chin. “This coulda been so much easier.”
The lion was lurching, heaving from one side to the other, obviously slipping unconscious. Lex was fighting, as hard as he could, to keep from succumbing to the drug. He looked to Cass, who was watching him, her pale blue eyes flashing between unadulterated rage, and terror for her friend. She ran toward him, but Lyle grabbed her shirt, yanking her backwards and keeping her from getting where she wanted to be.
“Now calm down, you damn fool,” he said, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. “Nobody else gotta get hurt if you just stop.”
Lex blinked twice, and Cass thought she saw him nod at her, in a way that said everything would be fine, there was nothing to worry about.
She screamed out, kicked backward at Lyle and tried to twist away, but he held his grip tight with those warty, knotted hands. “Calm down!”
Lex took a deep breath and sighed as he finally collapsed. Cass shook, trembling, quaking with anger. She spun around, slapped Lyle directly in the face once, though he caught her other hand when she tried to repeat. “I swear to God, if you hurt him—”
“Why’n hell would I do that? He’s expensive, you idiot! Where am I gonna get another damn lion? I just can’t have him in a trailer with a cage that’s open all the goddamn time! As attached to that stupid cat as you are, surely you can see how that might concern some folks?”
“It didn’t have to be this way,” Cass said, her words hitching in her swollen throat. If she thought she could have killed every one of them, Cass would have done it without a second thought. How dare they invade her place, take her friend? How dare they?
“If you hurt him,” she said between gritted teeth, “I’ll—”
“Sit there and watch, whine a little bit, maybe? Then what? You gonna hurt me? You gonna sneak in at night and kill me? Fuckin’ idiot girl. Come on you buncha rubes, get the cat, let’s get going.”
Cass stared at the bulbous roll on the back of Lyle’s head as he ordered the men around, and the group finally managed to heft Lex’s huge body up and out of the trailer. When they were gone, and she was alone with Lyle once again, he turned to her, jabbing one of his sausage-like fingers in her face.
“We both know the deal. You know how much you owe me. Eight—”
“Seven,” she cut him off. “Seven thousand, thirty-eight dollars. Don’t think for a second that I don’t remember every single cent.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said dismissively. “You’re mine until I’m paid off. You do what I say, when I say it. Where would you be without me, kid? Huh? Jailhouse in… where was it? Some shithole in Ohio?”
“Nebraska. You remember that, don’t act like you don’t.” Cass clenched her teeth so tight her jaw ached. She knew it was true though. “You found me when I was at my weakest, Lyle,” she hissed. “You pretended like you cared, but you were just waiting until I was strong enough to stand on my own again. Then, as soon as I could, you waved that notepad in front of me like a hospital bill. Every noodle I ate, every Tylenol you gave me, every—”
“Bottle of hooch you nursed?” The smile that crossed Lyle’s face was crooked, red, bleeding, and so smug it belonged on an underwear model. “We all have our debts, Cass,” he said, drawing near her, and grabbing a handful of dark brown curls. “And they all gotta get paid.”
He drew a deep breath, inhaling her scent into his lungs. He closed his eyes, shuddering dramatically as he exhaled. “One way or another, they all gotta get paid.”
-3-
“There’s the line over there. He crossed it so far we’re in the next county over.”
-Cass
She didn’t have any tears left. Not a single one, not for Lex, not for herself, not for anyone. The three days of travel between Turnbow and the next nothing town they were playing, Cass spent sitting her trailer, bumping over the road, and staring.
Staring, thinking, and trying to come up with a plan.
I got nothing. No way to get out, no way to get revenge, no way to do anything except sit here and do exactly what he says.
Hopelessness sank in somewhere between Oklahoma City and Dallas. It turned to resentment and anger somewhere around Houston, and by the time the winding route stopped in Beeville – some tiny town an hour and a half north of Corpus Christi – it had all circled fully back to numbness.
The night before, their second on the road, she tried to sneak around the loosely circled camp to find wherever they took Lex, but had to keep slinking back in the shadows to avoid detection. Most of the other animals were kept in horrifically small trailers designed to keep them from “getting too wild” as Lyle put it so beautifully, and those box cars were usually situated at the center of wherever they camped.
<
br /> It was easier, that way, for whoever was on animal slopping duty to clean.
She hadn’t heard any noises, or picked up on anyone talking about the lion at the group meals, which was the only time Cass ever appeared in public. And even then, she’d avoid them if they happened near dark, out of a well-developed sense of self preservation.
She hardly slept, and the small bit of time she did spend with her eyes closed was dreamless. Cass, with no dreams. That’s how she knew something really, really bad was going on in her head.
The truck pulling her trailer creaked to a halt, and a few moments later, the hitch dropped. As always, her dwelling squeaked, groaned, and finally settled, but not before throwing at least a handful of the few books she had onto the dirty linoleum.
Cass closed her eyes as she picked up the ratty old copy of Dracula she’d bought a year or so back at a used bookstore somewhere in Florida. She couldn’t remember the town, exactly, or much of that trip. Then again, she couldn’t remember very much of any of the trips. It had been a long, hard, often terrifying, seven years.
“Get a move on!” she heard from outside.
He’s chipper this morning, she thought. Lyle must’ve started early on the booze. Cass stood on her mattress and pulled the trash bag she’d taped to the window aside, looking out. This place was a whole lot like the last one. If she hadn’t had the physical sensation of moving for the last two and a half days, she might even be convinced they hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
The only difference, as far as she could tell, was that the scrubby little oaks of the Oklahoma panhandle had been exchanged for equally scrubby mesquite trees.
Cass sat back onto her bed, thinking about how she came here, how in the world she’d managed to stray this far from the high school sophomore with a 3.8 grade point average, and the loving—at least on the surface—family she grew up with.
Ever since she was small, darkness came over her from time to time. She felt like she didn’t see the world the same way anyone else saw it. Feeling like she couldn’t let any of it out without being an outcast from her gloriously normal upper middle class family, she kept it all bottled up inside. Deep, deep inside.
Four times thought, the pain made its way out. She’d fall into these long, horrible stretches where all she could do was read a book to stay awake. The first time, she was ten, and her parents convinced her she had the flu. That explanation worked well enough, except that she didn’t have a fever, didn’t throw up, or do any flu-things.
But denial was easier than reality.
The next time, she was thirteen and knew better, so they just told her she had a bad case of teenager attitude. Easy come, easy go. Her third funk came at sixteen and ended in a round of therapy that her father summarily dismissed as “idiot voodoo.” Terrible spell four came when she was nineteen, the year before she finally got the gumption to leave home. That one involved some pills – enough to knock her out but not enough to do any real damage – and also included a stint at a hospital that lasted until she was declared “cured” and released.
An inadvertent tear slipped down the side of Cass’s face, which she instinctively wiped away. She took a deep breath and steadied her nerves. Memories weren’t going to do her any good. None at all.
Cass stood up and stretched her back. If there was a show tonight, that meant she’d see Lex. And if she saw him, she could figure out where they kept him. And if she found that?
She shook her head, banishing the thought of some heroic rescue and running off into the night. That’s going to do about as much good for me as remembering what it was like to be a lost, scared little kid, Cass thought. Not a damn thing.
*
When Cass emerged from her lonely trailer, the sun was hanging low on the dusty, flat plane of the south Texas horizon. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of earth and the smell that only comes from wide open plains with nothing to block the sky.
Already visible, the stars overhead danced through her mind, making shapes that seemed almost real.
Of all Cass’s issues, imagination was a constant companion.
She tightened her thick leather belt so that it bit softly into the skin above her jeans, and closed her eyes to try and block out the lights of the bigtop and the growing noise on the makeshift midway.
A test of strength game dinged. Someone yelped with delight as a dart popped a balloon and someone won a cheap, stuffed gorilla. The sounds of laughing kids were only infrequently broken up by the shouts of someone who didn’t want to lose any more money to try and get their kid, or their sweetheart, a dumb tchotchke.
And then, with the din of noise fading as she wandered behind her trailer, Cass’s thoughts turned to Lex. What is it with those eyes? Why do I keep thinking about the way they stir my soul? Why can’t I just keep my head down and my eyes forward? Cass shook her head, theatrically oversized bandana flapping in the slightly warm, dry breeze that blew through.
Circling around to the trailer’s front, she could see the entire expanse of the carnival – the rickety rides, the barely-working games, and the canvas tent where she was about to do the duty she’d taken up. The only hope she had was Lyle wouldn’t make dance.
There’s enough people tonight. He’ll make decent money, and we’ll make some too. No need for dancing tonight probably. But in the back of her mind, all Cass could think about was how badly she missed Lex. She ran through the plan once again. I get out right after the show, I watch where they take him, and then… Yeah, well, that’s about as far as I’ve got a plan.
“Get out there!” Lyle was coming up the path to her trailer, but stopped halfway. “They got your damn lion in the tent, and he ain’t happy. You go deal with him. I’m startin’ to lose patience with both you and that damn cat.”
Cass didn’t hear him past his saying Lex was in the tent. That’s all she needed to hear.
*
“That’s bad.” Cass started running when she heard the first confused, angry roar. She’d been with him long enough to know his sounds, and this one was definitely not a good one.
Her heavy, thick-soled boots made running slightly difficult, but she forced herself to continue. The dusty breeze was starting to whip too, kicking dirt all around, through her hair and into her eyes. Another roar broke through the night, which led to a cheer rising from the crowd who had started to gather underneath the striped canvas.
“This is really, really not good.” Her foot-beats came faster, heavier. Cass knew Lex wouldn’t hurt anyone, not on purpose, but if those idiots were doing something to him, he was just an animal after all. Right?
She threw back the worker’s entrance tent flap and swept her eyes from left to right, trying to adjust to the dimness backstage.
“Lex?” she called out, “where are you?”
A soft, muffled roar was her answer. “It’s all right,” she said in a low voice intended to coax the lion into calm. Just hearing her voice was beginning to have that effect. Instead of brutal roars and screaming workers, she heard some snuffling, and relief.
She made her way along the cordoned segment of the tent, and shortly found herself standing in front of a small pen, which held Lex. The giant golden lion had been hobbled with a cuff on his back left leg, and a thick leather collar, which had been ratcheted on too tightly, restricted his breath. Seeing this, Cass shot a nasty glance at the leering man who had obviously done it, judging from the way he laughed. With a grunt of effort, she wrenched the collar looser, to the proper size, and patted Lex as he caught his breath.
“You’re damn lucky he didn’t gut you,” she spat at the man, who had begun to walk away, bored with the end of the excitement. “What kind of moron tries to pick on a lion?”
Lex nuzzled her hand, and then her hip, almost knocking her over before she knelt and hugged him. “They’re not gonna get away with this,” she said.
He let out a purr, and nudged her again. If she could understand him, he was saying exactly the same thing she j
ust did. But before any heroics or anything, there was the small matter of a show that needed to be performed. And it had to be done in a way to make sure no one suspected anything. Lyle was the type to punish first and think later, especially when it came to Cass.
She checked her watch and settled beside Lex to wait for her cue. The lights dropped, the PA blared to life with a scream of feedback, and then the voice that she’d heard every night for the last seven years met her ears.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” Lyle announced, slowly at first, but growing louder and faster to match the crowd’s excitement, to bring them to a mood where they’d throw money at whatever came their way. “The moment you’ve all been waiting for, the show of a lifetime. You’re going to see things so wild, so unbelievable, that you won’t believe them. But I promise you one thing – all the stunts are real, all the acts as deadly as they are exciting . Bertram & Martin is the real deal, the true story, and you are in for a real treat.”
A murmur swept through the crowd. A handful of midway workers wormed their way through the folding chairs and portable bleachers that ringed the dirt floor. They hawked snacks and drinks, and if a person had the right amount of money, they got to go outside and buy other things. Anything a person wanted, Lyle would provide.
Cass looked at Lex.
Except safety. Except security. She scratched his ears. He looked in her direction, golden eyes sparkling. “Why do I get the feeling this is the last time we’re gonna do this?” she asked him, as soon as the thought occurred to her. She shook her head. “I’m an idiot. A wild-dreaming idiot. Why do I keep taunting myself thinking about stuff like that?”
She cast her eyes to the floor, staring at the tips of her boots. Lex nudged her with his nose, making Cass lift her face and gaze into his eyes. He let a long, slow, rumbling growl escape from his chest.
“I wish I could understand you,” she said, distractedly looking past the lion and toward the living cartoon in the middle of the spotlight. “Maybe someday I’ll figure it out. I’ll be like that guy, Cesar what’s-his-name. I’ll be the Lion Whisperer.” She laughed softly, running her fingers through Lex’s mane.