Needles & Sins (30 page)

The third step was a beginning. The first complete motion forward on a new course. The fourth step was an affirmation.

After the fifth step, it was just walking.

««—»»

Reind put his first foot down on the tightrope and felt the horsehair-thin fibers catch on the Lycra net of his tights. Comforting feeling, that. While an unpracticed person would simply feel his foot slip down on a waving thread of uncertainty, Reind could feel his sole wrap and grip on the tightly-wound fibers of the rope. It wasn’t like stepping on air. It was solid to him. Different than earth, maybe, but solid. If you were in tune.

Maybe that was the best simile. Walking the tightrope was like performing a violin solo. Long, elegant strokes across thin strands of fiber.

Of course, if you flubbed a note on a fiddle, you didn’t end up so much dog food in front of an audience of hundreds. Usually. He thought of a spider, stepping without thought across skeins and splinters of web.

Tarantula
, sang a dirge in his mind from a long-ago album by This Mortal Coil. That’s what he tread across. This Mortal Coil. A skein of filigree and shadow. The web of a “Tarantula.” He smiled and hummed.

The second step fell true. He sighed, an invisible breath of success. The audience didn’t know the peril of those first two steps. It was the job of the ringmaster to keep them from focusing on that while the tightrope walker gained his composure and rhythm.

Down there, past the round red-and-yellow painted elephant step in the second ring. That’s where the megaphone man made his plays. That’s where the man with the handlebar mustache barked his exaggerated cries of, “Can you believe it, he’s about to step out on the wire without a net beneath him…quiet ladies and gentlemen, this is very dangerous…”

That was exactly when Reind didn’t care anymore. That’s where the danger became safe. Sleight of hand and misdirection were the calling cards of the circus.

After the first few steps, he was home free. The adjustment zone at the intro; that’s where the tough stuff was. It was the job of the ringmaster to keep the audience focused on the center and the false bravado, where it was easy.

The third step was good, and Reind’s heart slowed.

Oh yes. Even after all these years of walking, his heart still kicked with a mule’s petulant anger when he put that first toe to the wire. His mind may have been stubborn, but his body wasn’t stupid. He knew that every walk could be his last.

But with step four, he knew that this was just another day. His bearings found, Reind moved steadily across the rope, one foot in front of the other, each step bearing down lower on the ever-so-slightly sloping rope, until he reached the center, and the object of the ringmaster’s over-exaggerated cries of excitement. Once he started that upward incline on the far side of center (over the spot where there was no net) it was like walking up a hill. From the ground, it actually looked fairly level. But it wasn’t, not quite. The second half of the walk was work, but it was easy. He began to think of Melienda, the night before. The way her fringed gold lame top had slipped from his fingers to the floor, a bouquet of tinsel. The way she’d shown him how a girl could really appreciate the controlled reflexes of a tightrope walker. She didn’t care if his mother was the “three-breasted woman” of the freak show tent.

She loved his surety of self. She loved his lips for their deceiving softness.

He loved her eyes for their kaleidoscopic play of spark and dark and mystery. He loved her dimples for their expressive blushes.

God, he hoped she didn’t tell. This was a dangerous game. All of their other meetings had been during the break between their acts. They’d seen each other on the sly for weeks, but never had a night date before. When he slipped back into his tent to face Erin after midnight, he’d had to make up an excuse about helping Raymond with a faulty rope pulley. She’d yawned and shrugged, and turned away back to sleep. Did she suspect?

It was one thing for a man of the circus to love a woman of the same. It was another for a man of the circus to
cheat
on a woman of the circus with a woman of the same. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone talked to the wrong someone else. No matter how careful he was, tongues would wag. A circus was a family, and like any family, nothing stayed secret for very long.

Erin, Reind’s wife, was a ticket-taker at the front gate.

She had no “talents,” but she’d loved the smell of the damp bales of hay and the heat of popcorn in the air and the sticky promises that pink cotton candy gave and the front gate cries of, “Step right up ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Barnett & Staley’s Amazing, Mysterious, Phantasmagorical, Traveling Circus. Hear the mighty trumpet of the elephants and the happy horns of the clowns. Taste the taffy of our apples and caramel of our corn. Twist your body in the house of illusions. And for the truly terrifying, visit our freak show. Come and see the frightening Mr. Lee. Dare to meet the stare of Felina of the Five Eyes!”

That greeted the guests a dozen times a day in every town. They stepped past the ticket-taker girls and oohed and ahhed at the brightly colored, massive tents, at the fire engine red signs in the shape of giant hands that pointed this way and that, noting in daisy yellow script: “This way to the Freak Show. See the three-breasted woman! Hear the tiny voice of the Midget Man!” And another: “This way to the Center Ring, the site of the Show of Shows.”

The people streamed inside the tent to see what they could never see at home. Sometimes, to breathe sighs of relief that they did not have such freakishness at home. But mostly to lose themselves in the strangeness and warped talent of it all. The circus was ultimately about the people who came to see it. It reflected them. And the people wanted to taste the salt of the corn and the sugar of the cotton and live the vicarious danger of a man on a tightrope and a woman in a skimpy top sticking her head inside the deadly lion’s mouth. They wouldn’t do it themselves, mind you. But somehow, seeing another person tread the wire or brave the teeth gave them satisfaction in their own lives. That was what Reind did… he gave satisfaction. He made life worth living for hundreds of folks every day.

Erin had been one of those people, once. She’d come to see him walk, and hung around after the show to talk. She’d ended up in his bed. She’d asked if he minded, the next morning. How could he have minded? She stayed with him through the next town, helping out as they struck the tents and pulled up the pitons and rewound the ropes. She’d shown up in a “God Left Me for Another Man” T-shirt on the third day with a backpack on her shoulder blades and said, “I hope you’ve got room in your bunk in Cincinnati,” because that’s where they were going. He’d said sure. Aside from the occasional fleas he ended up sharing it with (thanks to the lions), he’d always give up space for a girl like Erin.

Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago… she’d been in his bed at the end of every show, challenging him to walk a different thin rope than the one he slid across in the air. This tightrope was wrapped in a scrim of emotion… and she was weaving it as they went. He was trapped before they left Ohio.

She began to earn her keep at the ticket-takers’ booths.

“I’ll not have you carry me,” she said, on the day that she applied for the job. It’s not like she had a lot of competition. Most of the people who traveled with the circus had talents and skills to show off. Or oddities. All Erin had were her looks and a lover. And free time on her hands.

So she worked the booth.

Reind worked a tent.

They made the circus money, and moved from town to town.

Until, in Peotone, Illinois, Reind met a girl with dark, curly locks that stretched down to tease at the creamy cleft between her purple crop top and the low-slung faded denim of her jeans. And he slept with her in the tall grass just beyond the recently-mowed parking lot. And he found that there was more than a wire, and a ticket-taker, and a suitcase to life. At least, that’s what he thought, as her heavy, forceful tongue invaded his lips.

Reind thought he could quit the circus for Melienda, if that’s what she wanted. He’d never thought that way when he met Erin. But for now, at least, he wouldn’t have to consider it. Melienda had joined Barnett & Staley’s Circus a few months before. She was the newest member of the family and was working in the Big Tent, ushering the animals and clowns and kids on and off the floor. Her name proved she didn’t know how to spell, but she knew a whole lot else. In particular, she knew what made him feel real good. He’d found that out in between shows while Erin was still out at the front gate selling $3.75 tickets.

“Will you see me again?” she asked after, zipping up her jeans across bare pale flesh at eye level with him as he lounged on her wide cot.

“Yes,” he smiled. “I’ll do more than see you!”

Reind reached the middle of the rope walk and smiled, both at his memories of Melienda and his hearing… the barker was bragging of how this was “the most dangerous fifteen feet ever attempted by man…a twenty-five-foot high walk with no net across the deadly center floor of a Big Top.” He could hear the audience take in a collective breath. Oooh. Ahhhhh.

His mind was far from the plodding step of toes to rope. His mind was on the deep, brown eyes and wide, pink lips of Melienda. And on what they might do for him tomorrow.

He almost didn’t even hear the ear-crushing applause when he stepped up on the board on the other side and turned to bow to his audience, perfunctorily, before climbing down the ladder as a lion tamer came running across the dusty dirt floor to take his place in the public’s eye. His private eye had other concerns.

Reind feigned sleep when Erin came in. He couldn’t face her, tonight. He was a terrible liar. And, truth be told, despite his feats on the tightrope, a coward. He lay in bed with his eyes locked shut, wondering if he could convince Melienda to stay in Springfield with him. The circus could pack itself up and hit the road, and when it arrived in St. Louis, it would just be short one tightrope walker and one glitter girl. They could hitch onto another circus easily enough… He didn’t really believe the last part, and he doubted Melienda would either; she’d just finally ended a job search. How many traveling bands of multitalented gypsies were there in middle America? And how many needed performers?

He rolled on his side as Erin kicked her shoes into her trunk with two muted thuds, and slipped off her heavy, gold-lined, red jacket, draping it over a folding chair with a hollow clang of metal beads meeting metal back. As she did every night. He heard her jewelry hit the pressboard of her thin shelving unit. She insisted on keeping one light piece of furniture in their portable “home.”

She slipped beside him under the covers, cool silk brushing his thigh. Reind could feel her eyes burrowing into his neck.

“You wanna talk about it?” she said finally. He didn’t stir.

“Yeah, didn’t think so,” she whispered.

They both lay there, faces to the canvas ceiling, each knowing the other was awake, as somewhere a clock ticked through the hour, click-stop, click-stop, click-stop, click-stop, click…

When Reind woke up, Erin was already gone. Part of him was relieved, but another was frightened. What did she know? What would she say, when he finally came clean? He shook away the visions of her screaming and beating at his chest with clenched fists. He dressed quickly, and went out to meet the crowds. He had a show to do.

He passed his mother, Yvette, “The Three-Breasted Woman” outside of the freak show tent. Her arms were crossed over the objects of her attraction, and she shook her head at him and tsked.

“Behave,” was all she said— though that was a volume for her—and vanished behind the flap of canvas.

Great,
Reind thought.
Did everyone already know?

The first step was harder than usual.

The second, almost impossible.

He couldn’t focus. He kept hearing Erin ask in the darkness, “You wanna talk about it?”

She knew.

She
knew,
damnit. Maybe his mother did too! Shit, maybe the whole goddamned circus knew. But how? It hadn’t been that long. And they’d been careful…Or was he just being paranoid?

He could feel a change in texture to the rope beneath his foot at step three, but didn’t look down. When you were on the wire, you didn’t turn back, and you didn’t look down.

But then he felt it again. His foot seemed to slide, just a bit.

Reind didn’t move his head, but his eyes slid down, staring at the event horizon of the long rope below him. He saw the cause of the disturbance. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his infidelity when climbing the ladder and starting out across the rope by rote, he couldn’t have missed it.

Someone had wound strands of golden tinsel every few inches, all down the length of rope.

Cute, he thought, and refocused his gaze. Irritating, but not dangerous. He was already past step five and the rest of the way was just a walk in the park, really. He and Rafe, the tentmaster, would be having a long talk when he got down for this little stunt. You don’t mess with a guy’s tightrope to “pretty it up” without telling him!

Down on the main floor, the ringmaster was just winding up, getting into his act.