Dunc and Amos Hit the Big Top (4 page)

He turned bright red. “It’s the sauce with the little seeds in it that’s bad. If you swallow
the seeds whole, they don’t hurt, but if you bite them …”

He trailed off and took another gulp of Coke and a deep breath while Dunc shook his head.

“So,” Amos gasped. “What have you figured out?”

Dunc neatly stuffed his napkin and paper hot-dog holder into his empty paper Coke cup and shrugged. “I said I think I’m starting to figure things out, but it’s not all clear to me yet.”

“Well, that’s good, because nothing is clear to me—I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” Amos wadded his trash into a ball and threw it at the trash barrel, missed, picked it up and tried a hook shot, missed, picked it up and stood over the barrel and dropped it, and a gust of wind blew it sideways and he missed again. He finally picked it up, leaned over the barrel, and threw the cup and napkin straight down as hard as he could. It went in. “Two points.”

“The problem is, we aren’t covering enough ground,” Dunc said, flipping his own trash
cup over his shoulder to fall delicately into the exact center of the barrel.

Amos turned from the trash in disgust. “I still don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“What’s going on here at the circus.” He turned to face Amos. “I need more information, more data, and we aren’t covering enough ground.”

“Oh, man, give it a rest!”

“What do you mean?”

Amos held his hands up. “You’re always seeing mysteries in everything. There’s nothing strange going on in this circus unless you count some of the men working for it. It’s just a tacky old circus getting tired and run down.”

Dunc shook his head. “No. There’s something else going on here, something I can’t quite pin down. Something just … that … little … bit wrong.”

“Right,” Amos said. “Like when the parrot made me swear a lot and talked to us and told us about a buried treasure, and we wound up blowing half the town away for some moldy wheat—that little bit wrong?”

“No.”

“Or when you got me snotted by a rotweiler?”

“No.”

“Well, then—admit that you’re wrong this time and that nothing strange is happening.”

Dunc shook his head. “I can’t. I just know it, Amos—there’s something odd happening here, and I can’t figure it out. We need more information.”

“We?
I
don’t have a problem.
I
don’t think there’s anything wrong happening. Why do
we
have a problem?”

“Because we’re partners—I’m helping you on the trapeze, and you’re helping me on this.”

Which of course was true and Amos knew it was true—they were partners, best friends for life—and Amos knew he was going to help, knew he had to help.

“All right.” He sighed. “What do you need?”

Dunc went back to the table and sat down, using his fingers to make imaginary diagrams. “The secret to everything, about everything, is knowledge. I have a feeling that
something is going wrong, but we need to spread out our efforts and learn more.”

“How do I spread out my effort?”

Dunc smiled. “Not like that. We’ve been working together, and what I mean is, we should split up. You work one side of the circus and I’ll work the other, then we’ll get together this evening and compare notes.” He dug in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small notebook and a stub of a pencil. “Just write down anything that looks a little odd to you, all right?”

Amos nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

Which turned out, all in all, to be just about the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

•
7

The plan initially worked so well that Amos literally didn’t see Dunc for nearly two hours.

Dunc had headed for the big top, and Amos had moved toward the sideshow tents. Both boys pointedly and carefully avoided anything to do with the animal enclosure and the wrong ends of the animals.

Amos stopped next to the banner advertising the sword swallower and the fire eater, looking up at the paintings.

They look
, he thought,
as if I’d painted them myself
. The paintings on the banners showed a man about to swallow a sword longer than he was, painted as if it had been
done with poster paint and a thick brush. Next to it, a man who looked very similar was about to shove a flaming torch down his throat while a girl—or it could have been a car or a lamp (Amos couldn’t be sure)—looked on in horror.

He shook his head. Farther down the banner, there was a painting showing what was called the smallest horse in the world. Amos thought it could also be a duck or an alligator with its tail cut off or a really sick chicken or even a parrot. (He knew rather more than he wanted to know about parrots since his run-in with the treasure-hunting variety.) And beyond that was a painting of what could have been either a bowling ball with a neck and head or a black hole with lettering that proclaimed:
UNKNOWN
SPECIES
!
SEE
IT
ON
THE
INSIDE
!

Amos shook his head and took a step to leave—he wanted little to do with the sideshow—when the whole banner system—poles, signs, and all—wavered once, twice, and fell over directly on top of him.

“Wh—”

Amos went down beneath canvas, poles,
and paintings of ruptured ducks bowling balls.

For a moment he was confused, couldn’t seem to find his way out. Then he heard a voice.

“Not to worry, everything will be all right, just fine, don’t worry.”

A large hand came under the canvas, caught Amos by the back of his T-shirt, and plucked him out into the sun.

“See? Right as rain, right as rain.”

Amos found himself looking at a man with dark hair, an almost perfectly square face and head, and a lower jaw like a bear trap.

“Clive,” the man said, holding out his hand for a shake. “Clive Haskins, but they call me The Throat. I swallow things. Swallow lots of things.”

He reached down, took a handful of dirt, put it in his mouth, and swallowed. “See?”

Oh
, Amos thought—
oh good. Another circus person
. Of course they were all circus people, and maybe it would be nice to just meet a normal person, but no, here was Clive, another circus person.

“Just pick them up and swallow them.
That’s how I got started when I was a kid. Swallowing things. Be walking along, see a bug—bam! Pick it up and swallow it. See a nickel—bam, swallow it. See a pretty marble—bam, swallow it. Here, hold this rope.”

He handed a rope to Amos, who was wondering just how odd things had to be before he wrote them in the notebook for Dunc.
Note one: I met a man who swallows things. Sees a bug—bam, swallows it. Sees a quarter—bam, swallows it. Sees a parrot—bam
.… He shook his head.

“You a rousty?” Clive asked.

“I don’t know,” Amos said, shrugging. “What’s a rousty?”

“Roustabout—you know, helper. You a helper?”

Amos nodded. “I was just on my way to work on the—”

“Never mind that. I need help setting up the geek show. You can do it.”

“What’s a geek show?” Amos looked around, half expecting to see a bunch of geeks coming at him.

“This—the sideshow. They call it a geek
show because that’s what they used to show—a geek.”

“Just exactly,” Amos asked slowly, “what is a geek?”

Clive snorted. “Man, you kids don’t know nothing.”

I know enough not to swallow dirt
, Amos thought, but he remained quiet.

“Geeks was wild men, kid.” He rolled his eyes and pretended to be crazy. “Wild men from the Borneo jungles. They sat in a cage with a chicken, and when the crowd was pitched right, they’d grab the chicken and bite the head off it.”

So that
, Amos thought,
is what my sister means when she calls me a geek
.

“ ’Course they didn’t swallow it,” Clive said sarcastically. “They just bit it off and spit it out. Your basic geek or even your top-line geek wouldn’t hold a candle to a good swallower.”

“Oh.” Amos was again working mentally on the notes.
Geeks, chickens, swallowers
.

“It’s the puking.” Clive pulled the banner up and tied a rope off.

“Pardon?”

“It’s the puking that makes the difference. Some will get sick when a man bites the head off a chicken, but to really make them puke, you got to swallow a sword. It’s a real gagger.”

Maybe
, Amos thought,
if I go away quietly
 …

“Proudest I ever been was when I had a full ten banger. Ten people, and all ten blew chow. Let’s see a geek top that!”

All the time he was talking, Clive kept working, and the banner was now fully back up and tied down.

“Come inside the tent.” He moved back into the tent, and Amos followed. He didn’t want to follow, he was sure something awful would happen if he followed, was sure he would be a gagger if he followed, but he followed just the same. He couldn’t help it.

But inside Clive just helped him set up panels to make booth areas for each sideshow. There were no other acts around, and when he had finished helping, Clive waved him away. “Go help somebody else. You got to keep moving, you want to be a circus man—got to keep moving. Of course, if you want to stay and learn how to swallow, I could teach you.”

Amos shook his head. “No—I’m not cut out for it.”

Clive looked at him suspiciously. “You ain’t a geek, are you?”

Only if you ask my sister
, Amos thought, but he shook his head. “No. I’m just a rousty and maybe going to be a trapeze person.”

“Fallers,” Clive said. “That’s what they are. Do good until they slip, then they’re fallers. Splatter all over the place. Biggest mess you ever saw. No, you want job security, you got to be a swallower.…”

He was still mumbling as Amos moved around the corner of the tent, took two steps, and ran face-first into a man’s chest.

“Watch where you’re going, kid.”

Amos looked up and found himself staring directly into the eyes of Blades.

•
8

Amos gulped, wondering if that made him a genetic swallower. “Nothing.”

“You rousting?”

Amos nodded. “I was helping put up the geek—I mean, the sideshow.”

Blades studied Amos. It was, Amos thought, about like a snake studying a frog it was about to eat. Oh great. Another swallowing joke.

“It doesn’t look to me like you’re doing anything. Come on.”

Blades waved Amos to follow and moved off down the midway away from the big top to where some men seemed to be working. They
all looked like Blades. Dirty jeans, dirty T-shirts, hair back in ducktails with lots of grease, scuffed and dirty engineer boots. All of them, every one including Blades, had a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth.

They were putting up a canvas wall to shield the side of the circus from people who would try to get in without paying, and when Blades approached them with Amos, one of the men laughed.

“Hey, Blades—we’re almost done. What do you want us to do?”

Blades looked at what they had been doing and shook his head. “Naw, it’s all wrong. Tear it down and do it over.”

“But—” Amos started to say. Even with no experience, he could tell the job was done right and would force people to go through the ticket booth.

“But what?” Blades turned on him, his eyes flattened into narrow slits, the smoke from his cigarette passing in front of them. “Have you got something to say?”

Amos shook his head. Quickly. “No. Not me. I’m fine. I was all wrong. I can see how it needs to be done over.”

“Then you do it.”

“What?”

“We’re going to take a break. You take down this whole canvas wall and put it up again the right way.” While he spoke, he moved from tie rope to tie rope, untying them and letting them drop until there was nothing holding the curtain up. It wobbled back and forth and fell to the ground in a crumpled heap. “There. And I expect it to be done when I get back, understand?”

He waved at the other men, and they left Amos standing there looking at the canvas and poles.

“It’s impossible,” he muttered. Even with three or four men it would have been hard. Alone, it simply couldn’t be done.