“I don’t know.” D’Angelus flicked his smoke stick, exaggerating the red glow at its tip. The scent lay upon him and around him like the perfumed skin of a woman. “Even if it’s the butchered slop of the Saints themselves, it’d be a price worth paying. Look at her.” He stabbed the smoke stick at the ring where a she-wolf was pawing a cracked femur and slathering marrow into her mouth. The red mane that tickled her coccyx was threaded with gore. Blood streaked her cheeks like war paint.
Watching from the back of the tent, D’Angelus felt a strange longing. Owner of the Elegance Saloon, he had peddled skin for a lifetime, enjoying many varieties of black, gold and lilied flesh. But all that carnality had done nothing to sate his deepest need. No matter how he mixed tears into their smiles with the lash, or how many of their mouths suckered him, he could not achieve a true, beautified sense of his own fleshness. He wanted to be properly devoured. To be feasted upon.
“Reckon the circus owner’ll sell her on?” Earl gobbed his mouthful of weed onto the soil floor.
“Why risk asking? I’m thinking once the wolf girl’s done supping and is stowed back in her cage, the boys just step behind the curtain and attain her.” D’Angelus bobbed his trekker head towards the fifteen strong crew in his employment.
Earl’s eyes tightened. “They got a HawkEye.”
D’Angelus revealed a mouthful of recycled teeth, taken from dead men and screwed into the gum. “I betcha the HawkEye is just some bum in a mask. Ink him with a regiment’s colours and the townsfolk who roll in once a year ain’t gonna question it.”
He watched Earl retrieve a battered tin from his pants’ pocket, pinch a wad of leaf and squash it inside a cheek. The man was all kinds of ugly, thought D’Angelus. He liked that about him.
“Alright,” said Earl. “‘Cause I ain’t never heard of a surviving HawkEye, only what you get by way of tall tales out at Grenyan’s Bar. Like how they’d take to their lung baskets and be able to spy a jewel wasp infesting a cockroach with her lava from the sky. All those wires and bits of metal inside a face? How’d a man do that to himself, D’Angelus? By the Saints, I gotta tell ya, it’s a dark use to put the body to.” He shuddered and chewed his cud.
A Saint Sister edged around on a nearby bench, grey wimple angling stiffly from her head to her toes like a shroud. The face which poked out had gone off with age.
“By every Saint in the blue, will you pair of suckerloops shut your traps?”
“Beg your pardon, Ma’am.” D’Angelus nipped the brim of his hat.
The Sister scowled, further corrupting her dried features. She turned back to the action just as the wolf girl sunk her jaws into a side of wet meat and shook it like a dog. Blood sprayed the crowd. The Saint Sister rocked back, hands to her face, muttering in disgust. She kept her seat though.
In the realm of the circus, blind fascination won out over revulsion, D’Angelus mused. And he liked the wolf girl even more then because her savage nature was on open display and not disguised behind religion and a wimple.
“Forget the HawkEye,” he told Earl. “Let another couple of acts play out. Allow the wolf to get comfortable in her cage. Then you and the boys head backstage and acquire her.” He broke out his ghoul smile. “Reckon we should introduce her to a new breed of predator. Our clientele.”
Pig Heart manhandled the stripped pallet out of the ring and to one side of the stage curtain. He let go of the rope and eased back his shoulders. Bloody pulp ingrained his hands. Pig Heart resisted the urge to suck his fingers. Instead, he slipped back into the shadows and rooted in a pocket for a smoke stick. He struck a match and applied the flame to the tip. Releasing a piquant mouthful, he let his eyes settle on the wolf girl.
Rust was performing a weird ballet along the low wall surrounding the circus ring. Her legs were short and scrub-covered, her breasts drained of fat and pendulous, more like teats than the usual soft mounds. She threw back her head and howled to intimidate both enemy and prey. Or was it a call to her kind, wondered Pig Heart? Smoke bled from his wet nostrils.
Limbs skittering, Rust chased her shadow round the ring. Pig Heart ate her up – the patch of fur between her legs, the scarred flesh of her rear.
“Quite a performance,” said a nasal voice.
Pig Heart whipped his head aside. It was D’Angelus’s man, Earl, the one with eyes so small it was impossible to see a chink of decency. Earl tucked in alongside him in the shadows and churned his jaw – sign of a leaf chewer.
“Not too gory for you?” Pig Heart snorted as Rust found the steak he had disguised beneath a mound of sawdust and, without pausing to brush it off, started to gnaw the meat.
Earl shot aside a slug of leaf. “Rabid beast ain’t my flavour. Nim, on the other hand..? Well, I sure would like a second taste of that delicacy. When’s her spot?”
Pig Heart grubbed in the bristles of his chin. He felt rage at the mention of Nim – rage at her for presenting him with this opportunity by returning to Sore Earth, rage at himself for taking advantage of the fact.
“After Rust’s finished, it’s the aerial act. Nim’s up next after that.”
“Mr D’Angelus is keen to see what his protégé has been doing with her time these past few months. Travellers off the dust trail claim she’s quite the attraction.”
The pitchman took a fresh drag. He narrowed his eyelids against the bloom of smoke. “Nim gets menfolk squirming in their long johns, that’s a fact. But not even her kootch show distracts from the true blowoff. Ain’t many folk shared tent space with hoppers, which is how they ain’t never gonna know the beasts are mostly harmless. ‘Cept when they swarm.” A dark impression played across Pig Heart’s mind... the scrape of chitinous limbs, fibrous neck folds, burred tentacles. He took the last lungful off the smoke stick and ground the nub under a boot heel. “Make a good show though,” he appended gruffly.
“Shame to miss it, but I got a feeling Mr D’Angelus will be collecting on our exchange before this evening’s grand finale.” Earl smiled, teeth gangrenous with leaf pulp.
Their conversation was interrupted by a grinding noise. A camshaft, fat as a salt pillar, corkscrewed up from the opposite end of the ring, just as the stage curtain drew back so that Rust could make her snap-jawed exit. On top of the camshaft stood Lulu, white-gold dreads cascading over a shoulder, one shapely leg kinked against the other. In a jewelled bodice and tutu, his appearance tricked many assembled below. The air filled with trills of appreciation. The audience’s lust was interrupted by the crack of gun powder and the chime of the propeller’s spring release.
Lulu flew the length of the tent at a steep trajectory. Catching hold of a trapeze disguised in the black canopy overhead, he swung out over the heads of the crowd, looped back in and dropped down, one leg hooked over the apparatus, arms extended in an upside-down V.
The crowd broke into applause.
Pig Heart leaned sideways. “So, I let you know where Nim was. Time to pay up and I don’t want no carnie roll of one dollar bills with a higher note wrapped around. I want the notes separated.”
Earl squinted sideways, a touch of mockery to his lips. “We gotta see the merchandise before we hand over the reward for her whereabouts. A creature of integrity like yourself has gotta see that, ain’t you now, Mr Swine Heart?”
“Pig Heart,” muttered the pitchman. He whipped another smoke stick between his lips and watched the acrobatic antics of the ladyboy. Soon Nim would take to the stage and he could pocket the reward, and none in the troop would be the wiser.
TWO