Ashes (8 page)

“
Fun,” she says. “All you
care about is fun.”

“
What else is there? None of
us are going anywhere.”

She steps from the darkness at the corner of
the tent. The torchlight is golden on her face, flickering
playfully among her chins. Her breath wheezes like the softest of
summer winds. She is beautiful. My Fat Lady.

The cigarette burns between my fingers. The
fire reaches my flesh. I look down at the blisters, trying to
remember what pain felt like. Juice leaks from the wounds and
extinguishes the cigarette.

“
He shouldn’t be in a cage,”
says the Fat Lady. “He’s no different from any of us.”

“
Except for that part about
eating people.”

“
I wonder what his name
is.”

“
You mean ‘was,’ don’t you?
Everything’s in the past for him.”

The Fat Lady squats near the cage. Her
breasts swell with the effort, lush as moons. She stares at my
face, into my eyes. I crush the cigarette in my hand and toss it to
the ground.

“
He knows,” she says. “He
can still feel. Just because he can’t talk doesn’t mean he’s an
idiot. Whatever that virus was that caused this, it’s a hundred
times worse than being dead.”

“
Hell, if I had arms, I’d
give him a hug,” mocks Juggles.

“
You and your arms. You
think you’re the only one that has troubles?” The Fat Lady wears
lipstick, her mouth is a red gash against her pale, broad face. Her
teeth are straight and healthy. I wish she would come
closer.

“
Crying over that
Murdermouth is like pissing in a river. At least he brings in a few
paying customers.”

The Fat Lady stares deeply into my eyes. I
try to blink, to let her know I’m in here. She sees me. She sees
me.

“
He’s more human than you’ll
ever be,” the Fat Lady says, without turning her head.

“
Oh, yeah? Give us both a
kiss and then tell me who loves you.” He has pulled a yellow ball
from somewhere and tosses it back and forth between his feet.
“Except you better kiss me first because you probably won’t have no
lips left after him.”

“
He would never hurt me,”
she says. She smiles at me. “Would you?”

I try to think, try to make my mouth around
the word. My throat. All my muscles are dumb, except for my tongue.
I taste her perfume and sweat, the oil of her hair, the sex she had
with someone.

Voices spill from the tent flap. The barker
is back, this time with only four people. Juggles hops to his feet,
balances on one leg while saluting the group, then dances away. He
doesn’t like the barker.

“
Hello, Princess Tiffany,”
says the barker.

The Fat Lady grins, rises slowly, groans with
the effort of lifting her own weight. I love all of her.

“
For a limited time only, a
special attraction,” shouts the barker in his money-making voice.
“The world’s fattest woman and the bottomless Murdermouth, together
again for the very first time.”

The Fat Lady waves her hand at him, smiles
once more at me, then waddles toward the opening in the tent. She
waits for a moment, obliterating the bright lights beyond the tent
walls, then enters the clamor and madness of the crowd.

“
Too bad,” says the barker.
“A love for the ages.”

“
Goddamn, I’d pay double to
see that,” says one of the group.

“
Quadruple,” says the
barker. “Once for each chin.”

The group laughs, then falls silent as all
eyes turn to me.

The barker beats on the cage with his stick.
“Give them a show, freak.”

I eat the finger again. It is shredded now
and bits of dirt and straw stick to the knuckle. Two of the people,
a man and a woman, hug each other. The woman makes a sound like her
stomach is bad. Another man, the one who would pay double, says,
“Do they really eat people?”

“
Faster than an alligator,”
says my barker. “Why, this very one ingested my esteemed
predecessor in three minutes flat. Nothing left but two pounds of
bones and a shoe.”

“
Doesn’t look like much to
me,” says the man. “I wouldn’t be afraid to take him
on.”

He calls to the man with him, who wobbles and
smells of liquor and excrement. “What do you think? Ten-to-one
odds.”

“
Maynard, he’d munch your
ass so fast you’d be screaming ‘Mommy’ before you knew what was
going on,” says the wobbling man.

Maynard’s eyes narrow and he turns to the
barker. “What do you say? I’ll give you a hundred bucks. Him and
me, five minutes.”

My barker points the stick toward the tent
ceiling. “Five minutes. In the cage with that thing?”

“
I heard about these
things,” says the man. “Don’t know if I believe it.”

My mouth tastes his courage and his fear. He
is salt and meat and brains and kidneys. He is one of them. I love
him.

He takes the stick from the barker and pokes
me in the shoulder.

“
That’s not sporting,” says
the barker. He looks at the man and woman, who have gone pale and
taken several steps toward the door.

Maynard rattles the stick against the bars
and pokes me in the face. I hear a tearing sound. The woman screams
and the man shouts beside her, then they run into the night. Organ
notes trip across the sky, glittering wheels tilt, people laugh.
The crowd is thinning for the night.

Maynard fishes in his pocket and pulls out
some bills. “What do you say?”

“
I don’t know if it’s
legal,” says the barker.

“
What do you care? Plenty
more where he came from.” Maynard breathes heavily. I smell poison
spilling from inside him.

“
It ain’t like it’s murder,”
says Maynard’s drunken companion.

The barker looks around, takes the bills.
“After the crowd’s gone. Come back after midnight and meet me by
the duck-hunting gallery.”

Maynard reaches the stick into the bars,
rakes my disembodied finger out of the cage. He bends down and
picks it up, sniffs it, and slides it into his pocket. “A little
return on my investment,” he says.

The barker takes the stick from Maynard and
wipes it clean on his trouser leg. “Show’s over, folks,” he yells,
as if addressing a packed house.

“
Midnight,” Maynard says to
me. “Then it’s you and me, freak.”

The wobbly man giggles as they leave the
tent. The barker waits by the door for a moment, then disappears. I
look into the torchlight, watching the flames do their slow dance.
I wonder what the fire tastes like.

The Fat Lady comes. She must have been hiding
in the shadows again. She has changed her billowy costume for a
large robe. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders, her face
barren of make-up.

She sees me. She knows I can understand her.
“I heard what they said.”

I stick out my tongue. I can taste the torn
place on my cheek. I grip the bars with my hands. Maybe tomorrow, I
will eat my hands, then my arms. Then I can be like Juggles. Except
you can’t dance when you’re dead.

Or maybe I will eat and eat when the barker
brings me the bucket of chicken hearts. If I eat enough, I can be
the World’s Fattest Murdermouth. I can be one of them. I will take
money for the rides and pull the levers and sell cotton candy.

If I could get out of this cage, I would show
her what I could do. I would prove my love. If I could talk, I
would tell her.

The Fat Lady watches the tent flap. Somewhere
a roadie is working on a piece of machinery, cursing in a foreign
language. The smell of popcorn is no longer in the air. Now there
is only cigarette smoke, cheap wine, leftover hot dogs. The big
show is putting itself to bed for the night.

“
They’re going to kill you,”
she whispers.

I am already dead. I have tasted my own
finger. I should be eating dirt instead. Once, I could feel the
pounding of my heart.

“
You don’t deserve this.”
Her eyes are dark. “You’re not a freak.”

My barker says a freak is anybody that people
will pay money to see.

My tongue presses against my teeth. I can
almost remember. They put me in a cage before I died. I had a
name.

The Fat Lady wraps her fingers around the
metal catch. From somewhere she has produced a key. The lock falls
open and she whips the chain free from the bars.

“
They’re coming,” she says.
“Hurry.”

I smell them before I see them. Maynard
smells like Maynard, as if he is wearing his vital organs around
his waist. The wobbling man reeks even worse of liquor. The barker
has also been drinking. The three of them laugh like men swapping
horses.

I taste the straw in the air, the diesel
exhaust, the smoke from the torches, the cigarette that Juggles
gave me, my dead finger, the cold gun in Maynard’s pocket, the
money my barker has spent.

I taste and taste and taste and I am
hungry.

“
Hey, get away from there,”
yells the barker. He holds a wine bottle in one hand.

The Fat Lady pulls on the bars. The front of
the cage falls open. I can taste the dust.

“
Run,” says the Fat
Lady.

Running is like dancing. Maybe people will
pay money to see me run.

“
What the hell?” says
Maynard.

I move forward, out of the cage. This is my
tent. My name is on a sign outside. If I see the sign, I will know
who I am. If I pay money, maybe I can see myself.

“
This ain’t part of the
deal,” says Maynard. He draws the gun from his pocket. The silver
barrel shines in the firelight.

The Fat Lady turns and faces the three
men.

“
I swear, I didn’t know
anything about this,” says the barker.

“
Leave him alone,” says the
Fat Lady.

Maynard waves the gun. “Get out of the
way.”

This is my tent. I am the one they came to
see. The Fat Lady blocks the way. I stare at her broad back, at the
dark red robe, her long hair tumbling down her neck. She’s the only
one who ever treated me like one of them.

I jump forward, push her. The gun roars,
spits a flash of fire from its end. She cries out. The bullet cuts
a cold hole in my chest.

I must die again, but at last she is in my
arms.

If my mouth could do more than murder, it
would say words.

I am sorry. I love you.

They take her bones when I am finished.

###

SUNG LI

There's a story behind every glass eye.

That's what Uncle Theodore says. He got his
glass eye after a fight in the jungle. Said something called a
"goop" got him with a piece of shrapnel. I asked him once and he
told me that shrapnel was a jaggedy piece of metal. Anyway, he's
the one who gave Sung Li to my Mom.

If it's true what he said about glass eyes,
then Sung Li has two stories. Her eyes aren't really glass, but I
like to pretend anyway. Maybe she'll let me tell you her other
story, the one you don't know about yet. But maybe not, since all
you want to do is talk about what happened last night.

Who's Sung Li? I already told that other
police. But maybe they figured since you're a woman police, I'll
tell the truth this time. So I'll tell you who Sung Li is, and
maybe you'll believe me.

She's the China doll that lives on the second
shelf in that little showcase on the top of the stairs. She usually
just lays there. Daddy says that's what girls are supposed to do,
anyway. Lay there and look pretty. At least that's what he always
told me on Mom's library nights. And Mom says if you handle Sung
Li, the value will go down.

Mom really loves that doll, maybe more than
anything else in the showcase. Did you look yet? There's a silver
tray that's got some writing on it under a picture of a sailboat.
Up above that is an old book that's got cardboard poking through
the corners and a little red ribbon tucked inside as a bookmark.
There's some other things, too. Daddy's old bowling trophy, some
dollars from where they don't know how to spell good, and that
knife from Mexico that's made out of volcano stuff. But Sung Li is
the main thing. All the rest is kind of placed around her like an
afterthought.

Mom taught me the word "afterthought." She
sometimes even calls me that. Her Little Afterthought. She smiles
when she says that, but it's one of those crooked smiles where one
side of your face gets wrinkly.

Except to put something inside, Mom only
opens that showcase about once a month, when she takes one of those
dusters that looks like the back end of a chicken. She runs that
duster over the shelves and all that stuff in the showcase. I don't
see why she bothers, because that old stuff in there just keeps
making more dust. When the light's just right, when you hide behind
the door and the sun is sneaking through that little crack between
the hall and my bedroom, you can watch her. After she leaves, you
can sit there and watch the little silver hairs spin and twirl and
then settle down all over again.

But mostly I watch Sung Li. You ought to go
up and see her. Maybe you will, after I finish telling her
story.

She wears this little robe with flowers on it
and she's got a cloth belt tied around her waist. The sleeves where
her hands come out are really wide. She has tiny black shoes and
pants that are the color of raw rice. But her frosty white face is
what I really like to look at.

Her cheeks go way up high under her eyes, and
they're sharp like a naked bone. Her eyebrows are real skinny and
rounded. She has a nose that's almost invisible, just a little nip
of whatever it is they make plates out of. Her lips are bright red
and shiny, almost like they're wet. I know it's all paint, but I
like to pretend about things like that.