Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Read online

  Stenos always looks upset afterwards, though you’d think he’d just tell her not to do that if he hates it so much. But he must be a glutton for punishment, because he’s there every night in his black costume, standing quietly just behind her, accepting whatever she gives.

  (Sometimes she holds out her hand like she wants to make him up, and when he leans in she takes hold of his throat and looks him in the eye like she’s settling some private fight. He never fights back—never even pulls away—and every time she holds out her hand he leans forward, no matter what. He performs some nights with a silver neck. I try not to look at them.)

  Bird’s the only one in the place who looks better made up. When she’s barefaced it just draws attention to where she’s been mended. It’s better when the paint is on, and you can take in her face like something she’s had done on purpose—I don’t know why Boss made the face plate iron. It just reminds the others what happened to her, and Bird doesn’t need any favors when it comes to being cast out.

  It’s best if you glance at her all made up and just let her gaze go. No point in looking deeper; if you look past the greasepaint at her left eye, you’ll get nothing back; it’s all glass.

  She’s gone cold mad over the years. The wind blows right through Bird.

  She scared even the government man, when he came to take Boss away—for all the good it did her.

  16.

  After the posters went up in a city, we waited a day for people to make up their minds. In the meantime, we set up the tent, dropped beer barrels in the nearest cold water, and made the dancing girls run a lot of errands.

  They suited up in their shirts and spangles, draped themselves in scarves, snapped their metal casts over their hands. (Sunyat’s metal foot was shaped too pointed to walk on. She wore long skirts in the city, so no one would be suspicious when her feet came flashing into the ring.)

  “Right,” said Moonlight to me as they headed out of camp. “Anything you need, little man?”

  They were carrying coils of rope and a sack of rice, and some wiring Boss had decided she didn’t need. They’d barter in the city; drum up a little excitement by looking mysterious.

  I grinned. “Anything more valuable than what you pay for it.”

  She laughed and swiped idly at me, and the four of them smiled all the way down the hill toward the city.

  Boss never went into the city herself until the parade (she thought it looked common), and she wouldn’t let me go except to put up the poster (“You’ll go into the city and wind up your mouth and the next thing we know we’ll be in for it,” she said, every time I asked).

  She was in the workshop, fixing something on Panadrome. They stopped talking when I knocked, and there was a little pause before she opened the door.

  “They’ve gone to the city,” I said. “Should we send the brothers?”

  A pair of Grimaldis sometimes followed the dancing girls. They were stronger than the crew, and faster, if it came to it.

  “No,” Boss said, looking out towards the city. (Maybe she could see the dancing girls; with Boss, you could never tell.) “What did you think of it?”

  “Not bad,” I said. Sometimes we set up outside cities that were little more than rubble and tents, but here the dirt paths were clean, and there had been only one soldier guarding the open square where I pasted the poster.

  Boss nodded. “Let’s hope they don’t tear anyone apart for looking at them sideways, and leave it at that.”

  Panadrome said, “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like anything,” Boss said as she closed the door, and then it was just the muffled sounds of the two of them arguing it back and forth.

  When the dancing girls came back, they weren’t smiling any more, and Sunyat went right to Boss’s trailer.

  “What happened?” I asked, but Moonlight only shook her head and handed me a burlap bag of slightly rotten fruit.

  By the time I got back from Joe at the food wagon, the crew was taking down the tent poles, rolling up the canvas for Ayar to throw into the trucks, and Boss was standing outside her trailer talking with Elena. Elena had her arms crossed over her chest, and once or twice she cast dark glances over her shoulder, down to the city.

  I hung back until Elena was gone, and went inside.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We’re going,” Boss said, “don’t you have eyes?”

  “Did something happen in the city?”

  Boss looked into her mirror, then sighed as if she’d lost an argument and said, “Someone was asking about us.”

  I wanted to laugh, but something about the way she said it made me nervous, so I shut my mouth and waited.

  But Boss only said, “Make sure we all go on to the next city. No crew stay behind this time.”

  I frowned. “Fuck, who was asking about us?”

  “Probably no one,” Boss said. “And watch your mouth.”

  I caught Minette outside the dancers’ trailer just as the engines were starting.

  “I heard about what happened,” I said (half the truth will get you everywhere). “Are you all right?”

  She shrugged. “I still don’t think it was a government man; some people are nosey, is all.” She shot me a smile that was meant to reassure, and I closed the door and ran to give the driver the Go signal.

  I took that leg of the trip in the trailer with the Grimaldis. I didn’t know what to make of it yet, and I was afraid Boss would find me out if she saw me. She had a way of guessing what your game was just by glancing at you.

  (I didn’t believe anything else terrible could ever really happen to us after Alec died; you think strange things, sometimes.)

  17.

  Every performer in the Circus Tresaulti has a costume. The show must deliver real showmanship even in hard times; mechanical people are never as marvelous as mechanical people in suits.

  Ayar and Jonah wear dark pants and high leather soldiers’ boots, and nothing else. Their costumes are their bodies; their adornments are the brass hump and the gleaming ribs, the clockwork lungs and the spine.

  The tumblers dress in red pants and jackets. (Spinto and Altissimo look sick in theirs—too blond to fight the color.) Boss has had the jackets lined in yellow; when they jump or cartwheel, the tails fly out and up, and the tumblers look like little flames.

  The jugglers wear green and grey and red and blue in parti-color, so their arms are a blur of color as they throw and catch. These costumes are easy to maintain. You can make them with scraps; you can make them up for anyone out of whatever you find.

  The girls on the trapeze wear blue—grey-blue for Elena, ice-blue for Nayah to set off her dark skin, navy for Ying (“You look young enough without wearing a girl’s blue,” said Elena). Each girl has made her own, fighting for the personality the greasepaint takes away. Sometimes they wear white stockings, the feet cut off for movement; when times are lean, they powder their legs white instead.

  Bird wears a dove-grey tunic laced tighter than a mummy, and cast-off stockings from the girls on the trapeze. (“It doesn’t matter about the tears,” said Boss when she handed them over, before Bird could protest. “They won’t clap no matter what you wear, so we might as well save the money.”)

  Sometimes in the summer she ties strips of canvas to her feet, so Stenos can hold her without slipping.

  Stenos wears plain black, head to toe. Against the pale floor he stands out more than she does; he tosses and catches her in sharp silhouette, and she hovers above him like a ghost.

  Alec wore plain canvas pants; not that anyone ever noticed them.

  18.

  I’ll never understand how there could have been a fall for Alec.

  He had wings.

  He came in at the grand finale. He swooped from the rigging where no one was watching, hovered in place for as long as the applause lasted. Every night, Alec flew from the ceiling. Every time I saw it—every time I even heard it from the yard, his feathers singing inside the tent—I st
opped breathing.

  When he fell, I saw it.

  I had fought for a space in the front of the crowd, and even as I watched him plummeting I couldn’t believe it. I waited for him to open his wings long after he had been flattened.

  The girls were up on the bars when it happened. In those days they crawled up Big Tom and Big George at the end of their act, and each girl threw one arm out to frame his descent for the big finish, and they were all poised with their flourishes when he slid off the bar, wings closed, and dropped.

  Elena saw it happening a moment earlier than anyone else—she twisted and jumped for him in a single motion. She didn’t reach him in time, and if Big Tom hadn’t caught her feet with his feet there would have been two corpses.

  (Why she helped him, I didn’t know. She’d never moved a toe for any of the rest of us.)

  Ying scrambled down the rigging so fast that it looked to me like she and Alec hit the ground at the same time. Ayar was already running inside from the yard; the crowd, realizing something was wrong, was already on its feet, trying to get a better look at who had died. A few screams floated through the tent like in a bad dream.

  Now, everyone says it must have been loud—“A panic,” Ayar would say later, shaking his head, and if the aerialists ever talk about it they say the noise was deafening.

  That’s not what I remember, though I don’t know if it’s just because time has made some sounds fade and some sounds clearer. Who knows what it was really like. People can remember anything.

  I only remember the notes his wings made as the feathers scraped against one another when he crashed, as they sliced through the dust and pierced the ground.

  Ayar carried him out of the tent, and Ying and I ran out with him, past the dancing girls and out into the yard where Boss was already waiting.

  Jonah was still near the flatbed truck, and he opened the back gate so Ayar could lay Alec’s body out.

  We crowded the back of the truck. By then Elena was outside also, her face flickering into view from between people’s elbows as she cut through the crowd and hoisted herself up onto the truck bed fence with one hand. Someone had unhooked Big George from his long arms, and he was there with bare shoulders, resting against the side of the truck for balance. He looked like he had just been sick. (They found Big Tom long after the show, still hanging on the rigging, too stunned to move.)

  The crowd parted for Boss, and she approached the truck and looked down at the body.

  “What can we do?” Big George asked.

  “Go finish,” Boss said.

  Elena turned to her. “What?”

  Boss snapped, “Go finish the act and bow. They’re turning into a bunch of cattle in there.”

  “We have to do something,” Ying croaked. “Alec is dead. He’s dead! You have to fix him, he died in front of everyone, they’re frightened!”

  Elena’s only protest was, “We’ve been out here too long. Can’t go back in now. We’ll look like fools.”

  “If someone falls in the middle of the act,” Boss said, “then you point at them like they intended it and you finish. Nobody wants to see you fail a man. Anyone can fail a man. They pay money to see us do things they can’t.”

  (Later Ying would cry in the trailer and ask, “How could she be so cruel? About Alec, it’s not right,” and fall apart into tears so loud I could hear her outside.)

  “They won’t swallow that,” I said. “They saw him falling.”

  She looked at me with hard little eyes. When she folded her arms, the griffin tattoos on her shoulders stretched their wings.

  “If the girls had finished, they would have.” She looked at us as if we were unruly kids. “Rubes don’t want the real. Deliver the illusion, and they’ll clap.”

  After what seemed like a long time, Elena turned for the tent, and one by one the other aerialists followed, and even Big George.

  Finally, when I couldn’t take the quiet any more, I asked, “What do we do?”

  “Take him to the workshop,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  From the tent came the beginnings of applause.

  19.

  For them it is not, “When Alec fell.”

  For anyone who sees it, a moment like that is never in the past; it is always happening, just out of your sight. Behind Elena’s eyes and Little George’s eyes, Alec is always falling.

  When Ying jumps from Big George to Tom, flying under the center of the tent roof, she knows when she passes the spot where Alec fell, the awareness slicing through her like a blade.

  When Bird falls, Alec is falling.

  When the acrobats or the aerialists do any trick that frightens the audience into holding its breath, Alec is falling, and their ears fill with the sound of his feathers singing.

  20.

  This is what no one knows about Alec:

  Boss could have saved him.

  She can replace a skeleton without harming the soul inside. She could have fashioned him a clockwork heart. She had done the same for Jonah.

  It was harder not to save him. When she stepped into the workshop, a little of his smoke crept into her lungs (a breath she has never really let out again), and when she touched him she had to fight not to breathe it back into him and wake him. It was not a problem of skill.

  If Alec had fallen, he had wanted to fall.

  So when she was alone in the workshop with him, she unscrewed the shoulder joints from his tanned smooth back. She wiped the wings clean of blood, and she folded up the copper petals and lashed tight the bone-and-plate ribs, and when she had cleaned up the damage from the fall, Boss called for Ayar and Jonah.

  “We have to bury him,” she said, wiping the oil off her hands.

  There’s no telling what happens within someone after so long, but she remembers the bright, wild look in his eye every night just before he stepped off the rigging. She remembers sleeping beside him at night. He never settled down, even in sleep; whenever she touched his hands (twitching like a bird’s claws as he dreamed) she got an electric shock just from being so close to him, just because of what he was.

  (He slept with his face mashed flat into the pillow, snoring gently, his wings folded tight along his back like a resting dove. This is what no one knows about Alec.)

  This is why Boss recognizes Bird when she sees her. This is why it feels as if Boss has been expecting her; the dread is replaced by the knowledge that this is the other shoe that has dropped at last.

  “I saw your poster,” Bird says. “I want wings.”

  Boss says, “Well, don’t stand there jawing. Show me something.”

  The hair on her neck is standing up. She waits by the tent flaps, and does not come any closer to Bird.

  Bird goes through the motions, bends and flips and turns with all the adequacy of any other nimble soldier, but she betrays herself; every time she holds out her arms Boss recognizes the spread of those hands, the arch of her fingers, the tilt of her head, the half-closed eyes. She’s another of Alec’s kind.

  “Earning wings takes time,” says Boss, later, and crosses her arms over her chest as if it’s gotten cold. “I’ll give you the bones made of pipe. You can do the trapeze, if they’ll have you.”

  There is a long silence.

  “And the wings?”

  Knowing it’s a lie, Boss says, “We’ll see.”

  Even then Bird does not agree; she just follows Boss to the workshop, steps inside without making a sound.

  This is what no one knows: all the while Bird’s bones slide in, Boss’s fingers tremble.

  21.

  The government man followed us.

  It took him nearly a week; by the time we saw the black sedans coming the tent was already staked, and there was no way to avoid them.

  “Set up,” Boss said when she saw them coming, and we scrambled.

  By the time the two black cars had pulled up to the camp and the government men slid out of the back seats, everyone was ready. Ayar and Jonah were standing with the crew
men, in shirts and too-big jackets. Panadrome was locked inside one of the trailers. The dancing girls were out in force, the aerialists behind. The jugglers were practicing (100% human act, just in case).

  Boss stood a little behind the first ring of performers, a little in front of me.

  (The crest on the car doors was an orange lion; it faced forward, and from where I was standing it seemed to be rearing back from her griffins; recoiling, or preparing for a fight. I didn’t move. I knew a bad sign when I saw one.)

  Four of the five men stopped at the nose of the first car. The fifth man, in a suit that matched his grey hair, kept walking towards us, and even though the whole camp was assembled, some fifty strong, he walked straight for Boss like she was all alone.

  “Lovely circus,” he said.

  Boss said, “Nice car. It must be hard to manage.”

  “It’s worth it,” he said, “so I can get to know my country.”

  Boss smiled thinly. Her griffins were trembling.

  “I’m fond of the circus,” said the government man.

  His eyes were almost as pale as Bird’s glass one, and it was hard to look directly at him.

  He examined Boss, his gaze drifting up and down. “I’m glad I saw the poster,” he said. “I haven’t been to anything as grand as your circus since I saw you back when I was a boy.”

  He had to be sixty years old. There was no way he could have seen us when he was young. Elena had been here ages, and even she couldn’t be over thirty. I’d been here since I was five, and I was a young man still. The Circus Tresaulti couldn’t be half as old as the government man was. He was mad.

  Boss said, “You flatter me.”

  He smiles. “I don’t think I do,” he said.

  (This is no regular government fool, I realized, going cold. This is a man who knows something.)

  Boss waited him out.

  Finally he said, “You’re right. Forgive me; I should never ask a woman’s age. We’re not barbarians yet, are we?”