The remark struck Chick as so wonderfully absurd that he found himself laughing. His beloved Kitty was so thrilled to see her paramour tickled that she, too, let loose with a burst of tittering. The chortling spread like a virus through the clan and soon everyone was venting their shared travails in a parade of unstoppable revelry.
But when they got close enough to read the bannerline on the main tent, Bruno began to shush them and asked them all to have a seat and settle in. The freaks fell into a natural circle on the ground.
Bruno stood behind Chick and said, “I don’t know how long this will take. The route card said that they open for business tomorrow, so things should be plenty hectic on the fairgrounds right now. I’ll search out the head canvasman first and see if they’ve got a sideshow annex. One way or another, I should be back before nightfall.”
He started to leave, turned back and said to Durga, “Maybe I’ll bring back some pie.”
IT TOOK BRUNO longer than he expected to make it to the fairground entrance. As he drew nearer to the run of canvas walls, he was able to read the bannerlines that advertised the show’s various headliners. He saw intricately drawn and wildly colorful notices for aerialists and animal trainers, fortune-tellers and firewalkers. It seemed to Bruno a standard collection of acts and one geared to a rural, less sophisticated crowd. That opinion changed, however, when his eyes landed on the biggest banners of them all, the ones posted on either side of the main entrance flaps. The panels depicted a magician dressed in what seemed to be Joseph’s own robe, a turban on the man’s head bound together with a ruby of heavenly brilliance. The man’s eyes had a definite satanic cast to them. On the left-hand canvas, the magician was depicted kneeling in an Edenic garden of greenery and rainbow flora. Around him circled an angry mob, its members outfitted with all manner of brutal weaponry, from crude cudgels and stones to gleaming axes and swords. On the right-hand panel, the magician was depicted in the same garden setting, but this time he was emerging from an open grave, caught in shafts of radiant light that gleamed down from above. The bannerline read
The Amazing Dr. Lazarus Cole,
The Resurrectionist
See him murdered by an angry mob
Watch as he is declared legally dead by a state-certified physician
Stand stunned as he is buried in a grave six feet beneath the earth
And be astounded as he rises from the dead on the last
day of the Jubilee.
Bruno stared at the banners, trying to decipher the trick. He had known packs of stage magicians, from the obvious to the baffling. And he had even assisted some of them in a pinch. But he had never seen anything like this. He dismissed the banner’s claims as this country’s love of hyperbole. But he could not walk away from the illustrations. There was something about the man’s eyes.
“Show doesn’t open till tomorrow.”
The voice came from behind him and he pulled himself out of his reverie, turning to look at a skinny old man dressed in overalls and carrying a hammer in his left hand.
“Looks like a big one,” Bruno said.
“You’re not from around here,” the old man said. “The Jubilee is the biggest show on the tour. They don’t get bigger than the Jubilee.”
Bruno nodded and gestured to the banners.
“You have an impressive lineup,” he said.
“Top drawer talent,” the man said. “Every one of them.”
Bruno smiled, took a breath and made himself say it.
“You got any freaks?”
The old man didn’t answer right away. He leaned his head from side to side like a deaf mongrel, sniffed and wiped at his nose.
“Not this time,” he finally said. “We tried freaks before. It didn’t work out. Maybe you heard about the problems, huh? Maybe that’s why you’re asking?”
Bruno began shaking his head vigorously.
“I’m show folk,” he said. “I’m looking for work.”
The codger’s shoulders slouched a little and he shook his head. Then he looked Bruno in the eye and said, “Well why the hell didn’t you say so at the start?”
The old man was named Forrest DeWitt and he said he was the best canvasman west of the Desirea Range. He took Bruno to the mess top and bought him a cup of coffee and a tin of slop. He waited until the strongman had finished his meal before he asked, “So what’s with you and the freaks?”
Bruno made the decision to level with DeWitt.
“The truth is,” he said, “I’ve got a troupe of them on my hands.”
“You?” said DeWitt. “I must be losing the knack. I would’ve pegged you for a musclehead.”
Bruno followed his meaning and nodded.
“I am,” he said. “Back home they called me the Behemoth.”
“And where,” asked DeWitt, “might home be?”
Honesty was a fine policy as long as it didn’t endanger you. Bruno said, “I’ve drifted so long, I’m not sure anymore.”
DeWitt loved the answer.
“I know that song by heart, son. Place I was born? It’s not even there no more.”
“So,” Bruno said, “just between two old road dogs like us, can you tell me where the Bedlam Brothers come down on the freak question?”
“Thing is,” DeWitt said, seeming to get a little squeamish, “this is a big stop for us. We play Mach’pella every year this time and we always leave with piles of loot. Not much in the way of entertainment in these parts and the folks are a little, you might say, repressed.”
“Repressed?”
“Little bit restrained, you might say. And more’n would do a person any good, if you follow. They’re a religious people out here on the plains. You have to understand that. We brought in a sideshow of freaks, what, three, four seasons back. It didn’t sit too well.”
“Not much draw?” asked Bruno, disappointed.
“Worse than that,” DeWitt said. “The crowd got, let’s say, uncomfortable, in their presence. Things were thrown, you see. Bottles. Rocks. It got a little bit ugly. The crowd drove those freaks right out of town. We never seen them again. And the kicker was, most of them weren’t real freaks at all. The bearded lady pasted on her beard. The monkey man was just a pygmy in a fur suit. And the rest of it was all pickled punks and shrunken heads.”
“Well, maybe that’s what got the crowd so riled,” Bruno said.
Forrest DeWitt simultaneously shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
“Hard to say anything for sure when it comes to the marks,” he said. “You know that.”
“Well, where does that leave us?” Bruno asked. “You think there’s any chance of us hiring on?”
DeWitt laughed.
“This is a goddamn carnival, son. There’s a chance of anything happening, isn’t there? I’ll tell you what. You go fetch your performers and bring them back to the fairgrounds. We’ll look them over and see what we see. How’s that sound?”
“That sounds,” said Bruno, standing up, “like the fairest words I’ve heard since I came to this country.”
He shook hands with the canvasman and left the mess top. And on his way off the fairground he thought for sure he smelled pie.
SOME OF THE FREAKS were still seated in a circle when he returned. Chick and Kitty were huddled together not far away and Durga was holding a sleeping Antoinette in her arms. All eyes were upon the strongman as he approached the clan. He didn’t want to make them overly optimistic. But at the same time, he didn’t want to kill the hopefulness that had been building since Jeta first glimpsed the tents.
Milena, of course, was the first to speak.
“So what’s the story?” s/he asked. “Are they hiring?”