Killer, Come Back to Me

The calliope steamed and hissed and chugged; the brutal roustabouts looked down. Tears squeezed from under Raoul’s lids. “Please, there’s no need of both of us dying!”

The doctor reached for his black bag. The roustabouts did not turn away as he ripped cloth and bared the thin spines of Raoul and Roger. A hypodermic load of sedative was injected efficiently.

Then the doctor set to work at the thin epidermal skin structure that had joined Raoul to Roger, one to the other, ever since the day of their birth twenty-seven years before.

Lying there Roger said nothing, but Raoul screamed.

* * *

Fever flooded him to the brim for days. Drenching the bed with sweat, crying out, he looked over his shoulder to talk with Roger but—Roger wasn’t there! Roger would never be there again!

Roger had been there for twenty-seven years. They’d walked together, fallen together, liked and disliked together, one the echo of the other, one the mirror, slightly distorted by the other’s perverse individuality. Back to back they had fought the surrounding world. Now Raoul felt himself a turtle unshelled, a snail irretrievably dehoused from its armor. He had no wall to back against for protection. The world circled behind him now, came rushing in to strike his back!

“Deirdre!”

He cried her name in his fever, and at last saw her leaning over his bed, her dark hair drawn tight to a gleaming knot behind her ears. In memory, too, he saw her whirling one hundred times over on her hempen rope at the top of the tent in her tight costume. “I love you, Raoul. Roger’s dead. The circus is going on to Seattle. When you’re well, you can catch up with us. I love you, Raoul.”

‘‘Deirdre, don’t you go away too!”

Weeks passed. Often he lay until dawn with the memory of Roger next to him in the old bondage. “Roger?” Silence. Long silence.

Then he would look behind himself and weep. A vacuum lived there now. He must learn never to look back. How many months he hung on the raw edge of life, he had no accounting of. Pain, fear, horror, pressured him and he was reborn again in silence, alone, one instead of two, and life had to start all over.

He tried to recall the murderer’s face or figure, but could not. Twisting, he thought of the days before the murder—Roger’s insults to the other freaks, his adamant refusal to get along with anyone, even his own twin. Raoul winced. The freaks hated Roger, even if Raoul gave them no irritation. They’d demanded that the circus get rid of the twins for once and all!

Well, the twins were gone now. One into the earth. The other into a bed. And Raoul lay planning, thinking of the day when he might return to the show, hunting the murderer, to live his life, to see Father Dan, the circus owner, to kiss Deirdre again, to see the freaks and search their faces to see which one had done this to him. He would let no one know that he had not seen the killer’s face in the deep shadows that night. He would let the killer simmer in his juices, wondering if Raoul knew more than he had said!

* * *

It was a hot summer twilight. Animal odors sprang up all around him in infinite acrid varieties. Raoul walked across the tanbark uneasily, seeing the first evening star, unused to this freedom, always peering behind himself to make certain Roger wasn’t lagging.

For the first time in his life Raoul realized he was being ignored! The sight of him and Roger had gathered crowds anywhere, anytime. And now the people looked only at the lurid canvases, and Raoul noticed, with a turn of his heart, that the canvas painting of himself and Roger had been taken down. There was an empty space, as if a tooth had been extracted from the midway. Raoul resented this sudden neglect, but at the same time he glowed with a new sensation of individuality.

He could run! He wouldn’t have to tell Roger: “Turn here!” or “Watch it, I’m falling!” And he wouldn’t have to put up with Roger’s bitter comments: “Clumsy! No, no, not that direction. I want to go this way. Come on!”

A red face poked out of a tent. “What the hell?” cried the man. “I’ll be damned! Raoul!” He plunged forward. “Raoul, you’ve come back! Didn’t recognize you because—” He glanced behind Raoul. “That is, well, dammit, welcome home!”

“Hello, Father Dan!”

Sitting in Father Dan’s tent they clinked glasses. Father Dan was a small, violently red-haired Irishman and he shouted a lot. “God, boy, it’s good to see you. Sorry the show had to push on, leave you behind that way. Lord! Deirdre’s been a sick cow over you, waiting. Now, now, don’t fidget, you’ll see her soon enough. Drink up that brandy.” Father Dan smacked his lips.

Raoul drank his down, burning. “I never thought I’d come back. Legend says that if one Siamese twin dies, so does the other. I guess Doc Christy did a good job with his surgery. Did the police bother you much, Father Dan?”

“A coupla days. Didn’t find a thing. They get after you?”

“I talked a whole day with them before coming west. They let me go. I didn’t like talking to them anyway. This business is between Roger and me and the killer.” Raoul leaned back. “And now—”

Father Dan swallowed thickly. “And now—” he muttered.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Raoul.

“Me?” guffawed Father Dan too heartily, smacking Raoul’s knee. “You know I never think!”

“The fact is, you know it, I know it, Papa Dan, that I’m no longer a Siamese twin,” said Raoul. His hand trembled. “I’m just Raoul Charles DeCaines, unemployed, no abilities other than gin rummy, playing a poor saxophone, and telling a very few feeble quips. I can raise tents for you, Papa Dan, or sell tickets, or shovel manure, or I might leap from the highest trapeze some night without a net; you could charge five bucks a seat. You’d have to break in a new man for that act every night.”

“Shut up!” cried Father Dan, his pink face getting pinker. “Damn you, feeling sorry for yourself! Tell you what you’ll get from me, Raoul DeCaines—hard work! Damn right you’ll heave elephant manure and camel dung, but—maybe later when you’re strong, you can work the trapezes with the Condiellas.”

“The Condiellas!” Raoul stared, not believing.