Killer, Come Back to Me

“Maybe, I said. Just maybe!” retorted F.D., snorting. “And I hope you break your scrawny neck, damn you! Here, drink up, boy, drink up!”

The canvas flap rattled, opened, a man with staring blind eyes set in a dark Hindu face felt his way inside. “Father Dan?”

“I’m here,” said Father Dan. “Come in, Lal.”

Lal hesitated, his thin nostrils drawing small. “Someone else here?” His body stiffened. “Ah.” Blind eyes shone wetly. “They are back. I smell the double sweat of them.”

“It’s just me,” said Raoul, feeling cold, his heart pumping. “No,” insisted Lal gently. “I smell the two of you.” Lal groped forward in his own darkness, his delicate limbs moving in his old silks, the knife he used in his act gleaming at his waist.

“Let’s forget the past, Lal.”

“After Roger’s insults?” cried Lal softly. “Ah, no. After the two of you stole the show from us, treated us like filth, so we went on strike against you? Forget?”

Lal’s blind eyes narrowed to slits. “Raoul, you had better go away. If you remain you will not be happy. I will tell the police about the split canvas, and then you will not be happy.”

“The split canvas?”

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; “The sideshow canvas painting of you and Roger in yellow and red and pink which hung on the runway with the printed words SIAMESE TWINS! on it. One night four weeks ago I heard a ripping sound in the dark. I ran forward and stumbled over the canvas. I showed it to the others. They told me it was the painting of you and Roger, ripped down the middle, separating you. If I tell the police of that, you will not be happy. I have kept the split canvas in my tent—”

“What has that to do with me?” demanded Raoul angrily.

“Only you can answer that,” replied Lal quietly. “Perhaps I’m blackmailing you. If you go away, I will not tell who it was who ripped the canvas in half that night. If you stay I may be forced to explain to the police why you yourself sometimes wished Roger dead and gone from you.”

“Get out!” roared Father Dan. “Get out of here! It’s time for the show!”

The tent flaps rustled; Lal was gone.

* * *

The riot began just as they were finishing off the bottle, starting with the lions roaring and jolting their cages until the bars rattled like loose iron teeth. Elephants trumpeted, camels humped skyward in clouds of dust, the electric light system blacked out, attendants ran shouting, horses burst from their roped stalls and rattled around the menagerie, spreading tumult; the lions roared louder, splitting the night down the seams; Father Dan, cursing, smashed his bottle to the ground and flung himself outside, swearing, swinging his arms, catching attendants, roaring directions into their startled ears. Someone screamed, but the scream was lost in the incredible dinning, the confusion, the chaotic hoofing of animals. A swell and tide of terror sounded from the throats of the crowd waiting by the boxes to buy tickets; people scattered, children squealed!

Raoul grabbed a tent pole and hung on as a cluster of horses thundered past him.

A moment later the lights came on again; the attendants gathered the horses together in five minutes. The damage was estimated as minor by a sweating, pink-faced, foul-tongued Papa Dan, and everything quieted down. Everybody was okay, except Lal, the Hindu. Lal was dead.

“Come see what the elephants did to him, Father Dan,” someone said.

The elephants had walked on Lal as if he were a small dark carpet of woven grasses; his sharp face was crushed far down into the sawdust, very silent and crimson wet.

Raoul got sick to his stomach and had to turn away, gritting his teeth. In the confusion, he suddenly found himself standing outside the geeks’ tent, the place where he and Roger had lived ten years of their odd nightmarish life. He hesitated, then poked through the flaps and walked in.

The tent smelled the same, full of memories. The canvas sagged like a melancholy gray belly from the blue poles. Beneath the stomaching canvas, in a rectangle, the flake-painted platforms, bearing their freak burdens of fat, thin, armless, legless, eyeless misery, stood ancient and stark under the naked electric light bulbs. The bulbs buzzed in the air, large fat Mazda beetles, shedding light on all the numbed, sullen faces of the queer humans.

The freaks focused their vague uneasy eyes on Raoul, then their eyes darted swiftly behind him, seeking Roger, not finding him. Raoul felt the scar, the empty livid stitchings on his back take fire. Out of memory Roger came. Roger’s remembered voice called the freaks by the acrid names Roger had thought up for them: “Hi, Blimp!” for the Fat Lady. “Hello, Popeye!” This for the Cyclops Man. “And you, Encyclopaedia Britannica!” That could only mean the Tattooed Man. “And you, Venus de Milo!” Raoul nodded at the armless blond woman. Even six feet of earth could not muffle Roger’s insolent voice. “Shorty!” There sat the legless man on his crimson velvet pillow. “Hi, Shorty!” Raoul clapped his hand over his mouth. Had he said it aloud? Or was it just Roger’s cynical voice in his brain?

Tattoo, with many heads painted on his body, seemed like a vast crowd milling forward. “Raoul!” he shouted happily. He flexed muscles proudly, making the tattoos cavort like a three-ring act. He held his shaved head high because the Eiffel Tower, indelible on his spine, must never sag. On each shoulder blade hung puffy blue clouds. Pushing shoulder blades together, laughing, he’d shout, “See! Storm clouds over the Eiffel! Ha!”

But the sly eyes of the other freaks were like so many sharp needles weaving a fabric of hate around him.

Raoul shook his head. “I can’t understand you people! You hated both of us once for a reason; we outshone, outbilled, out-salaried you. But now—how can you still hate me?”

Tattoo made the eye around his navel almost wink. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “They hated you when you were more abnormal than they were.” He chuckled. “Now they hate you even more because you’re released from freakdom.” Tattoo shrugged. “Me, I’m not jealous. I’m no freak.” He shot a casual glance at them. “They never liked being what they are. They didn’t plan their act; their glands did. Me, my mind did all this to me, these pink chest gunboats, my abdominal island ladies, my flower fingers! It’s different—mine’s ego. Theirs was a lousy accident of nature. Congratulations, Raoul, on escaping.”

A sigh rose from the dozen platforms, angry, high, as if for the first time the freaks realized that Raoul would be the only one of their number ever to be free of the taint of geekdom and staring people.

“We’ll strike!” complained the Cyclops. “You and Roger always caused trouble. Now Lal’s dead. We’ll strike and make Father Dan throw you out!”