I told him what I thought was going on and that Mirchland was onto it too. “Those fleas, whatever they are, drained the life out of all of the animals and now have turned to human blood.”
“You mean Hupsh?” he said.
“Of course,” I answered. “Look at him.”
Just then the man was practicing his act. We looked over toward the center of the tent. The Angel took the ladder as if he were gravity itself. I could feel the weight of each labored step, but up he went, a trooper. Ichbon smoked a cigarette in the time it took him to reach the platform. Once there, he inched out to the edge. He stumbled, grasped at his throat, and groaned pitifully in the descent. He hit with a rattle. The Maestro and I ran to him. There was nothing left but a flesh bag of broken bones covered in sawdust.
When Ichbon caught his breath, he turned to me and said, “Get the clowns.”
Mirchland and I were already there, sitting with Ichbon outside his trailer, passing the Old Overholt, when the Miserable Ones delivered Hibbler to our meeting. The Maestro said, “Pass the bottle to Jon,” and I did. Hibbler was in his graduation gown, which, though no longer part of his act, he still wore to bed.
“We need to talk,” said Ichbon.
“Give me a cigarette,” said Hibbler.
I handed him one and he lit it with the silver lighter lifted by the flea in his show. His hands quivered. “Talk about what?” he asked.
“Falling Angel.”
“A tragedy.”
“We think your fleas did him in,” said the Maestro.
“My fleas? You shouldn’t have said that.” Hibbler became indignant and sat up straight in his chair.
“They have to be squashed.”
The old performer shook his head. “Impossible. There are too many of them. They’re listening right now.” The professor’s bravado of recent weeks was gone, and he seemed shakier than he’d been since I’d known him. After a long draw on the bottle, he wiped his mouth, slumped forward, and gazed at the ground.
“I thought you were in charge,” said Ichbon.
“I thought I was too.”
“Let’s burn them,” said Mirchland in a whisper.
“No, you might as well set fire to yourselves and the whole damn caravan,” said the professor. “Before you could light a torch they could be all over you, sucking you drier than no-man’s-land.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit around and wait till I’m on the menu,” said Ichbon. “Call them together for a meeting and we’ll ambush them.”
“Shhh,” said Hibbler. “I told you, they can hear us.”
“Fuck the fleas!” yelled the Maestro.
Mirchland and I stood up and walked slowly away from the meeting.
Ichbon watched our dull escape. “You chickenshits,” he said.
From my back mouth, I warned him, “Caution.”
Two days later, the Maestro blew his brains out in his trailer. Jack Sprat found him, slumped back in his chair, a hole the size of a silver dollar between his eyes. There were also bullet holes in his feet, his shins, his stomach, his rear end, and his thigh. We knew he must have gone mad from the itching and tried to eradicate his persecutors with bullets. Only the Miserable Clowns dared to touch his corpse. They dragged it out to the edge of the field we were set up in, gathered brush, and made a bier. One by one, the members of the caravan came out of hiding to pay their last respects. There was less said at the event than for the burial of the albino skunk, but as his smoke rose, we watched with tears in our eyes, as much for our own fates as his. The minions made a presence, their rank and file by the hundreds kneeled and prayed. When the fire burned down, the clowns retrieved the Maestro’s blackened skull and mounted it on the bumper of the lead truck in the caravan.
Forgive me if I don’t dwell on the list of my comrades who withered and succumbed to the hunger of the minions. We left a trail of smoldering biers in our wake as we moved inexorably from town to town. By the time we hit St. Joseph, near the Kansas-Missouri border, Jack Sprat, Mr. Electric, the World’s Ugliest Man and his beautiful wife, Ronnie, the Crab Boy, Gaston, the cook, and more had weakened, shriveled, and passed on. No one dared to speak about the horror we were trapped within. To speak out moved you immediately to the top of the menu. Whispers were dangerous. Those of us remaining had to take on more jobs in order to keep the caravan rolling.
Once the itching started your hours were numbered. Most were dragged down in a state of grim and silent acceptance, but there were one or two who raged against it. The latter were far harder to witness, their antics pathetic against the inevitable. As for the performers who survived, the stress of insect servitude, the fact that they were like cattle kept for slaughter, quickly began to undermine their acts. The fortune-teller saw only one future. The knife thrower’s hands fluttered like trapped birds, and his poor assistant was numb with the fear that if the fleas didn’t kill her, he would. The Miserable Clowns lost their sense of humor. As terrible as the rest of the caravan was, at each stop the crowd still showed up to see Hibbler’s Minions. The new grand finale of the act consisted of thousands of fleas coming together to form the figure of a man tipping his flea hat to the audience.
Mirchland and I, cautiously passing written notes, planned our escape. We were fairly certain the fleas could not read. St. Joseph was to be the spot where we would take our leave of the caravan. The plan was to disappear with the crowd at the end of Hibbler’s act, to mingle in with them and, once to the road, try to hitch a ride or run for it. Not much of a plan, but we were desperate. The correspondence we had going was voluminous, most of it pondering the fact that the fleas obviously intended to drain all of us in the carnival before dispersing out into the general population. We never saw news of flea infestations from the towns we passed through and wondered why the minions didn’t spread out and share their horror with the rest of the world. Mirchland thought it was because they were building strength, increasing their numbers for an all-out assault on some unsuspecting hamlet in our path. I, on the other hand, thought it had to do with that part of their act where they transformed through accretion into the figure of a man. “Only together can they achieve their terrifying potential,” I wrote to the dwarf.
Just as we planned, when the evening show let out on our second night in St. Joseph, I met my friend behind the clowns’ trailer. He’d packed a small satchel he had attached to a stick and had a lantern in his hand, the wick brought down so as to only offer a mere glow. He was sitting on an overturned milk crate, his back against the trailer wheel, his feet off the ground. “Hurry,” I said to him. “Let’s go.” I was anxious to be on the move. As I stepped away from him, my other me noticed that he didn’t budge. Then I spotted his empty eye sockets, and spun around.
The fleas issued forth from the twin puckered holes where his eyes had been, two living streams of black. Single file, and if my ears did not deceive me, singing some kind of song in unison. I gagged, doubled up with fear, and fell on my knees. The fleas marched along the ground to within two feet of me, and then drew together to form the word sorry, in my very own script. Something bit my rear end, a warning that I’d not be going anywhere. To my surprise, they didn’t infest me. I supposed I was to be saved for a later meal. Returning to my trailer in a stupor, I spent the night scratching my ass, the itching from just that one bite an agony. The prospect of inevitably being overrun with them made me consider Ichbon’s method of scratching with a revolver no longer insane.
Granted, the fleas were shrewd, but the next day, after torching Mirchland’s remains, the caravan headed away from Missouri and back toward the heart of Kansas. Everyone who had been with the show for a couple of years knew this was wrong, but no one mentioned it. I surmised immediately what was going on. The Miserable Clowns, who drove the trucks that pulled the trailers, were taking us out into the plains, away from the towns and cities. To be honest, I was shocked that they’d have the foresight or concern. When the fleas got through with us, there was nothing stopping them from overrunning humanity. The plan, as I perceived it, was to strand us out in the heart of the Dust Bowl and let them eat each other after they’d devoured us. In the end, if the world was to be saved, it would be saved by miserable clowns.