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I didn't respond. I never did. Mal, with a look, or Darla or The It or Tilly, any of them, with a simple glance, could make me sit and stay, like a trained dog. All the while, they drove metal through me and made people pay to watch.

“Like a butterfly in a collection,” Mal said as he poured two drinks for us. Someone made a comment about me being a freak. “No. I saw him on TV,” someone else said. Mal smiled broadly at me.

“Someone saw you on TV?” he said. “Must be the tape that oilman made.”

Again, I focused on the old mirror behind the bar, some antique from some other place, a better place, with the slightest ripples running across its surface, ornate wood carvings of flowers and birds twisted, almost gruesomely, into one another across the top. And except for the nailheads poking up over my hand, each a little crooked and at its own angle, my reflection looked like that of a man simply resting his hands on the bar. Just a guy with a drink and a friend with a hammer. I watched everything in reverse in the warped mirror and wished for a moment that I could switch places with the calm stranger, the rested man with the quiet face and easy manner.

A woman with a long mullet dyed like a skunk's tail fanned her boyfriend with her handbag. He looked ready to keel over. The redhead jockeyed for position at my side as another dozen people walked in, trying to see past the crowd. More people threw money on the bar to buy me a drink. Everything had just the hint of a warp to it. The mirror distorted those further away more than those closer, and Mal, right next to it, reflected without flaw. He stood tall, king of the warped world. But then I noticed one small distortion in his reflection, at his center, near his heart, where a curl in the glass created a pinch in his body, made a small piece of him disappear as if it never existed.

Mal held the hammer over his head and said, “One hundred dollars and you can drive a nail into my friend.”
Eyes lit up in the reflection; people raised their money and lined up to pay for their chance. Onlookers clapped. I looked at the redhead next to me, and she leaned in close and smiled. I could smell the sweat and rum coming off her.

I said, “They don't care if I can feel it or not. They just want to see someone hammer nails into someone else.” She laughed as if I were joking and wrapped her hands around my waist.

From the back a guy in a Yankees cap yelled out to ask if we took credit cards.

By the time they were done with me Mal had over a thousand dollars and I was nailed, both hands and feet, in place. Still outside, Redbach was charging twenty dollars a head. Drinks poured themselves. Mal lifted a glass to my lips and tipped it into me.

“We better go soon,” I said. “I'm bleeding here. I gotta lie down.”

“You barely bleed at all.”

“Yeah, but I've been drinking too. The only thing keeping me from falling down is that I'm nailed to the bar.” I shook my head. “I'm tired. Pull these nails out of my feet. I want to sit down.” My lips felt too large.

I had no idea what time it was, other than late. Mal started prying nails out of the floor with the claw of the hammer. He was finally listening. The alcohol must have sedated him because he hummed and he grinned at me as he worked at the nail next to my right small toe.
“You've gone soft. When we were in the circus, you could take your liquor.”

I didn't say anything.

“What are you so quiet for?” he asked.

Once, back in Texas, a few weeks before running away from the circus, before the challenge to go into the cage with Caesar had even been made, I had been near the end of my set when a woman in the audience turned to the man next to her and said, “I can't believe he's so quiet up there as he's doing all that to himself.”

The man had nodded and replied, “Yeah, well, you know it's the quiet ones you got to look out for. They eventually snap and then—boom!”

A few people had chuckled at the man's remark. I'd been snagged by it, stuck in midmotion as I prepared to ask for a volunteer from the audience to use the staple gun on my back. But when I heard that comment, whether meant as a joke or not, I simply stopped and turned and walked off the stage. At that moment I knew I should leave the circus. I didn't know that Mal would go with me, or where I'd go, or that a few weeks later I'd be in Caesar's cage, but I had a vision of myself,  belongings tied up in a blanket and thrown over a  chain-link fence as I ran across dry fields toward slow-moving freight trains. I knew I'd run away from the circus.

In Redbach's bar these memories rushed back to me as I watched Mal. I stood quietly, thinking of the for
tune I had read in the wood. My days of allowing Mal to boss me around were over. I didn't know what I'd do. I didn't know what grand plan I should have. I wanted to sit down. I was tired. I could barely move my right ankle when he finally got my foot free. Disgusted, I realized I'd been standing barefoot in puddles of beer.

Mal said, “Listen, you had fun tonight. Admit it.” He got the last of the nails out of my left foot and poured alcohol on my feet. “You don't even bleed. Look at that.”

He was right. I moved my feet and couldn't find any wet blood. Just a touch of red dried at the holes where the nails had driven into the floor.

“Just pull these out of my hands.”

Mal stood and rested the hammer on the bar. “Not until you tell me you had fun tonight.”

“This isn't funny, Mal.”

“Say it.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek and took in a deep breath. Someone had moved the ashtray back in front of me, right between my hands, and now I had no way of moving it. It stank, nearly as bad as I'm sure I did. I saw myself as if from above: small, and sad, and stuck like a roach in a trap, same as Mal; he just didn't know it. Actually, he did know it. He just didn't care. Or, worse, he was glad of it.

I said, “I'm sick of being in this shithole. I'm tired of these people coming in and staring.” I was exhausted, more than I'd ever been. I closed my eyes and readied myself for
Mal's reaction, for his defense of the indefensible. Then I said, “And I'm sick of you telling me what to do.”

It didn't come. I counted to twenty, and it still didn't come. I opened my eyes. Mal, quiet, ground his teeth, stared at me. I felt afraid and certain that Mal would do something to me. I could see it in the casual way he turned away, and as he looked over the dirty glasses and ran his hand across the edge of the bar, I thought he would turn and take the hammer and make me hurt. I didn't feel pain, but he would try to make me. Then he did turn toward me, but his eyes dulled over and a smell rose up around us, salty and coppery. Blood. I could practically taste it. I looked down at my hands, spotted only little drips where the nails first broke through the skin. Mal reached for the hammer on the bar and that's when I saw the cut. On the back of his hand, from his thumb to just past his wrist, a mouthlike gash opened at me. Blood came out and ran into a pool on the bar. It collected in the gutter and mixed with spilled beer and alcohol. It ran away from me.

I yelled for Redbach. Commotion outside, but no sign of him.

“What the hell?” Mal said. “I must have hit myself with the hammer.” His eyes swam. “It's not fair. You get hardware put into you and nothing. Me, I bleed all to hell from just…You know, it does look like you've got holes in your hands and feet.” Mal was drunk and distracted and apparently happy to bleed on me. “From where you
drive the nails in. That asshole earlier was partly right. It's like you just have permanent piercings. You probably wouldn't even feel the nails if you could feel pain.” Blood continued to run off his fingertips.

“Just get my hand free,” I said. He pulled the nails from my right hand, his blood dripping onto my hands and the wooden bar, then gave me the hammer. My left hand was stuck to the bar in a little pool of beer and daiquiri mix. I pulled the nails out of myself, something that had become second nature to me, like shaving. There is a sucking sound when nails come out of skin. It's the skin trying to close up and keep you from bleeding to death.

Mal looked into the opening on his hand and said, “Look at this. You don't even bleed. Me, I'm a gusher.”

I grabbed a towel from the bar and wrapped it around Mal's hand. On our way out people wanted my autograph and Mal told them to go fuck themselves. One guy in a leather jacket wanted to punch me in the gut as hard as he could. Mal called him an asshole and said I wasn't Harry fucking Houdini, who'd died after an unexpected blow to the stomach. Redbach asked me if we'd be back the next night.

We got into a cab without answering. The driver turned and smiled and I told him to get us to the nearest hospital. He looked at me like I'd just told the punch line to a bad joke.

“Hospital?” he asked, his accent thick. His hair was
cut like Elvis Presley's, and he wore sunglasses even though it was probably three in the morning.

“Emergency room,” I said, pointing at Mal's hand. “Doctor.” I pantomimed a sewing motion. The driver turned away slowly, kept looking at me in the mirror, and pulled away from the curb. The heavy traffic surprised me, and we moved almost immediately behind a bus, too close to its ad for malt liquor.

“I could use some of that.” Mal leaned heavily on the door, the bloody towel tight against his hand.

Our cab followed the bus to the corner, then made a couple of rights. I watched the stragglers on the sidewalks, the last people who were wandering home. Some couples, but mostly people by themselves. There were young women with bags hanging from their shoulders. They walked past groups of men on street corners. All these men, from the ones dressed in expensive Italian shoes and shirts going home from the clubs to those looking through garbage cans, had the same look in their eyes as the women passed. Mal had that look tonight, I thought.

I turned to him and asked, “What the hell happened in there?”

Eyes closed and head back against the seat he said, “I cut my hand. What happened to you?”

The meter clicked upward. I said, “I can't keep doing these crappy gigs. I can't keep living in that shitty hotel.”

“Do whatever you want,” Mal said. “It was a mistake coming here.”

For an instant I thought he meant the bar and was going to agree, but when he refused to look at me I knew he meant something else. I didn't say anything and after a moment, sensing I needed to hear more, he continued. “I never should have come with you to New York. It's gonna kill me. Should have gone to LA like I wanted, but you had to follow that fucking business card. You're gonna move on. You're fine. You fit in anywhere. Not me. I'm still in the circus, only it ain't in Texas. It's right here, being your babysitter.”

I couldn't see. I was drunk and angry, and either or both blinded me. I hoped the cabbie might accidentally drive us into the river or headlong into a light pole. I heard my teeth grind. I said, “I never asked you to do anything for me.”

His head bounced against the seat, his eyes still closed. “Didn't you? Would you even be here if I hadn't brought you? You'd still be in Texas. Probably still shoveling shit for Tilly, looking at that bloody card and saying, ‘What do you think it is, Mal? Do you think I might have rented the suit there?' Couldn't get past the card. Couldn't get past Darla. If you'd listened to me and just paid that karma back on some other girl, you'd be fine. Instead…” He trailed off.

Car horns blared as we pulled up to the entrance of St. Vincent's Hospital. Mal paid the cabbie with money
from the nail-driving show. Blood on the bills hid dead men's faces. Mine or his, who could tell? He handed the rest of the cash to me.

We walked around the waiting area, bathed in a mix of ammonia and mildew odors. The ceiling radiated wall-to-wall fluorescent lights and the air-conditioning vents blew a racket of cool air through the room. It wasn't a hot night, and the cold air that poured over us raised goose bumps on my arms. Right by the door a man lay facedown on a gurney, a white sheet concealing whatever poked from his back. A woman leaning against the wall wore a T-shirt that said here we go again. The seating area was full, but no one looked sick. An old woman knitted while watching over two sleeping children, and farther down a group of men in green coveralls huddled around one another, whispering, bunkering themselves from the rest of the silent room. It looked like a crowd waiting for a bus, not a doctor. From another room someone cried out. One of the men in coveralls hung up a cell phone in a panic, but he didn't get up.

Mal kept walking around the main desk. It sat in the center of the room, like a giant donut. Near the desk a TV hung from the ceiling. Mal pointed at it. “Look at that. I think that's you.” It was me. A home movie of me made back in Texas. The show must have been one of those send-us-your-tapes-and-we'll-air-it-and-won't-pay-you-a-dime programs. We stood there, staring up at me
in front of a lion's cage, until a man in scrubs approached and looked us up and down.

“What happened here?” he asked. He showed no surprise or amazement, no curiosity. He looked at a magazine he carried with him, folded back on itself and then in half, pinched to a clipboard as if to trick people into thinking he held only official medical documents.

Mal pulled open the blood-soaked towel and showed the doctor his cut. “I slipped while shaving,” he said, “and my friend was recently nailed to a bar and needs to be disinfected. He's had his shots.”

The doctor looked at the cut, then at me, then at my feet. “You're bleeding on my floor.”

I looked down. I'd left my shoes and socks at the bar. Bloody footprints on the tiled floor wandered in lazy circles around the donut in the middle and were punctuated with drips from both my hands.

“Well,” Mal said, “look at that. You do bleed.”

I looked at the young doctor and asked where we should go. “With all these people here. You've got to wait your turn.” Then he turned and walked away, reading his magazine.