“Bwah,” he said.
Then he turned to Bruno and smiled.
“There’s only one thing,” he said, “more humiliating than a strongman playing wet nurse to a freak troupe.”
Bruno waited for it silently. The Chief allowed himself a belt from the bottle before he continued.
“A fake strongman,” he said at last, “playing wet nurse to a troupe of fake freaks.”
Satisfied with himself, Micmac Shawnee began to exit the annex tent.
Bruno could have let it go at that. And, perhaps, on another night, in another town, he would have. But the feel of the bow tie at his neck and the boater, too tight, on his head, had abbreviated his capacity to suffer fools gladly. And as the Chief bent to push through the tent flap, Bruno lowered a hand onto his rival’s shoulder and stopped Micmac’s progress.
The Chief turned slowly.
“I’ll say it again,” Bruno said. “They’re not fakes.”
The Chief looked at Bruno and then beyond him to the freaks, who were still frozen on their stages, several of them wishing their curtains would fall.
“And I’ll say it again,” said the Chief. “They’re the saddest bunch of frauds and imposters I’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s so obvious, I can only think that the ringmaster took them on out of pity.”
“Let me tell you what I pity,” said Bruno. “I pity the paying customer who has to watch a drunken tub of lard like yourself dress up like a real man.”
The Chief responded with a wild and off-balance roundhouse, telegraphed so far in advance of its arrival that none of the freaks even bothered to shout a warning. Bruno sidestepped the punch, pivoted and threw two shots to the Chief’s kidneys. Shawnee went down on a knee, stunned, but only for a second. And when he bounced upright, he barreled into Bruno with an enraged tackle. Both men went to the ground this time, rolling in the dirt and weeds, each trying to squeeze the other into surrender.
The freaks dashed to the lips of their stages to watch the spectacle, except for Antoinette who ran, sobbing, back to the trailer. Chick wondered if he should fetch someone but decided against it, unsure of whom he could trust.
The rolling and groaning and grunting continued for several minutes, each of the giants trying to break the other’s hold with a sudden twist or turn. But for a while, the two appeared well matched.
As it turned out, however, Bruno had youth and cunning on his side. He let the Chief tire himself, let the alcohol in the man’s blood go to work. And as the Chief’s strength began to ebb just slightly, the Bohemian Behemoth sensed his advantage and threw his opponent onto his back.
Bruno capitalized on the toss by rolling up into a sitting position on Shawnee’s stomach, fastening a grip around the Chief’s enormous neck. At once, Micmac began to struggle for air.
“Give,” demanded Bruno.
The Chief only gasped and tried futilely to roll away.
“Give up,” Bruno repeated with more ferocity in his voice. And Milena wondered just how the strongman would know if the Chief did, in fact, surrender.
“I’m telling you,” shouted Bruno, leaning down close to the Chief’s face, “give up and apologize. Or I’ll break your miserable neck.”
Chick and Kitty and Durga all flinched at this, but Bruno, drunk on adrenaline and testosterone and invested fully in the moment, didn’t realize the significance of what he was saying.
The Chief’s eyes began to flicker and the noise from his throat grew deeper and more raspy.
“Bruno, enough,” Chick yelled, throwing over the fencing, jumping down from the stage and running at his patriarch.
Bruno saw the flash of feathers at his periphery and, in that instant, he looked up to see the chicken boy flying toward him. Then he looked back at Shawnee, suddenly conscious of what he was doing and horrified that he was doing it. He took his hands, at once, from the Chief’s neck.
What happened next took only seconds: The Chief, panicked, gasping for breath, bucked. Bruno’s weight shifted and he began to slide off the Chief’s stomach. The Chief lifted his ass off the ground, reached around to the waist of his pants and pulled free his hatchet, then threw himself upward and brought the hatchet down with all his strength. The blade sank into Bruno’s flesh where the arm was joined to the right shoulder, at the socket. It fell to the bone and then it passed beyond the bone, chopping through the hard calcium and into the marrow of the joint’s core.
Blood spurted like a geyser. All of the freaks screamed in unison. Bruno tried to climb to his feet, staggered, swooned, and fell backward. The Chief ran to him, pulled free the hatchet and thought, for just a second, about burying it once again, this time in the skull of the foreign interloper. Instead, he climbed to his feet, waved the bloody blade, hex-style, at the freaks, and ran, wild-eyed, out of the annex.
Kitty jumped off the stage, as did Fatos and Milena. They ran to Bruno, who was in the arms of the chicken boy, whose feathers were turning black as oil, painted by the spray of the blood. Bruno was starting to slip out of consciousness. He tried to speak and managed only a weak grunt. Bubbles of saliva formed on his mouth. His wounded arm sagged next to his body, attached only by flaps of skin and ligament and sinew near the pit.
Kitty and Milena tore sleeves from their gowns and Chick tried to tie off the wound, but the gash was too deep and wide and the flow of blood too rapid. The rags were soaked in seconds and did nothing to stanch the hemorrhage.
“Fatos,” Chick yelled, “run and get the canvasman.”
The mule sprinted from the annex. Behind Chick, Jeta could be heard vomiting and Durga was trying frantically to find a way off her stage. Now, Nadja, Aziz, Vasco and Marcel came running to join the strongman.
The chicken boy looked at his compatriots and struggled for something reassuring to say. But he could feel his feathers and the skin beneath them becoming saturated with the strongman’s blood and this made him lightheaded. He wondered for a second if he were about to fade into the Limbo. But the father voice remained silent. And then Fatos was back with Forrest DeWitt and Dr. Taber, the yokel who had certified Lazarus Cole’s death. For a moment, Chick didn’t understand what Taber was doing here until he realized that the man must truly be a doctor of some kind.
Taber took one look at the injury and said, “Oh, Christ, this isn’t good.”
DeWitt gave him a shove toward Bruno. Taber went down on his knees next to Chick, looked more closely at the wound, and said, “We’ve got to get him into the clinic.”
Nodding gravely, DeWitt said to Chick, “We can take the ringmaster’s truck. I’ve got it waiting outside.”
Bruno passed out completely when DeWitt and the doctor tried to lift him. With the help of Fatos and Milena, they carried the strongman out of the tent and laid him in the open bed of a dilapidated pickup. Kitty and Milena started to climb in and DeWitt said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I’ll go,” said Chick, hopping up into the bed. “The rest of you wait here. I’ll send word as soon as I can.”
The others did as the chicken boy instructed, stepping back from the vehicle and huddling into one another.
Taber and DeWitt climbed into the cab and gunned the engine, producing several backfires and a cloud of black smoke. They eased the truck into gear and drove rapidly across the fairgrounds in the direction of the county road.
Chick lay beside the strongman, cushioning Bruno’s head, whispering in the patriarch’s ear.
“I’m sorry,” Chick said, over the rush of the wind. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.