Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (22 page)

He snorted. “No. I don’t. Where are we supposed to be going?”

“Roswell, New Mexico.”

“And what does
that
tell you?”

I shrugged. “You got me.”

“Let’s just say I’m not from around here.”

“Where
are
you from?” But it was sinking in. Of course, I didn’t believe it. I had laid aside the cold turkey alcohol withdrawal theory at this point and was wondering now if maybe I was tilting more towards a psychotic break theory.

“Unimportant. But I’m not a monkey.”

“Okay then. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

“I’m not tired. I just woke up. Why don’t you let me out of this box and give me a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Let’s stop somewhere, then. A gas station.”

I looked back at him in the rearview mirror. “For someone that’s not from around here, you sure know an awful lot.” More suspicion followed. “And you speak English pretty good, too.”

“Well,” the monkey said. “I speak it
well
. And I may not be
from
here but I’ve certainly spent enough time on this little rock you call home.”

“Really?” Definitely a psychotic break. I needed medication. Maybe cognitive therapy, too. “What brings you out this way?”

“I’m a spy.”

“A monkey spy?”

“I thought we’d already established that I’m
not
a monkey.”

“So you just look like one?” I gradually gave the car some gas and we slipped back onto the highway.

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. You’d have to ask my boss.”

I pushed the station wagon back up to seventy-five, watching for road signs and wondering if any of the little towns out here would have a psychiatrist. “Where’s your boss?”

“Don’t know,” the monkey said. “I gave him the slip when I defected.”

“You defected?”

“Of course I defected.”

“Why?”

“Got a better offer.”

It went on like that. We made small talk and Oregon turned into Idaho. I never asked his name; he never offered. I found a Super Eight outside Boise and after paying, hauled his crate into the room.

“So are you going to let me out?”

“I don’t think that’d be such a good idea,” I told him.

“Well, can you at least get us a pizza? And some beer?”

“Pizza, yes,” I said. “Beer, no.” I called it in and channel-surfed until it arrived.

The holes presented a problem. And I couldn’t just eat in front of him. I went to open the crate.

It was locked. One of those high powered combination jobs.

“Odd, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A bit.”

He sighed. “I’m sure it’s for my own protection.”

“Or mine,” I said.

He chuckled. “Yeah, I’m quite the badass as you can see.”

That’s when I picked up the phone and called Nancy. She’d given me her home number. “Hey,” I said.

“Merton. What’s up?”

“Well, I’m in Boise.”

“How’s the package?”

“Fine. But . . . ” I wasn’t sure what to say.

“But what?”

“Well, I went to check on the monkey and the crate’s locked. What’s the combination?”

“Is the monkey awake?” Her voice sounded alarmed.

I looked at the crate, at the eye peeking out. “Uh. No. I don’t
think
so.”

“Has anything—” she paused, choosing her word carefully, “—
unusual
happened?”

I nearly said you mean like a talking space alien disguised as a monkey? Instead, I said, “No. Not at all. Not really.” I knew I needed more or she wouldn’t believe me. “Well, the guy at the front desk looked at me a bit funny.”

“What did he look like?”

“Old. Bored. Like he didn’t expect to see a clown in his lobby.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. “So, about that combination?”

“You don’t need it, Merton. Call me when you get to Roswell.” The phone clicked and she was gone.

In the morning, I loaded the monkey back into the car and we pointed ourselves towards Utah.

We picked up our earlier conversation.

“So you defected? To an insurance company?” But I knew what he was going to say.

“That’s no insurance company.”

“Government?”

“You’d know better than I would,” he said. “I was asleep through most of that bit.”

“But you’re the one who defected.”

He laughed. “I didn’t defect to
them
.”

“You
didn’t
?”

“No. Of course not. Do you think I
want
to be locked in a metal box in the back of a station wagon on my way to Roswell, New Mexico, with an underweight clown who doesn’t smoke?”

I shrugged. “Then what?”

“There was a guy. He was supposed to meet me in Seattle before your wacky friends got me with the old tag and bag routine. He represents certain
other
interested parties. He’d worked up a bit of an incognito gig for me in exchange for some information on my previous employers.”

I felt my eyebrows furrow. “
Other
interested parties?”

“Let’s just say your little rock is pretty popular these days. Did you really think the cattle mutilations, abductions, anal probes and crop circles were all done by the same little green men?”

“I’d never thought about it before.”

“Space is pretty big. And everyone has their schtick.”

I nodded. “Okay. That makes sense, I guess.” Except for the part where I was still talking to a monkey and he was talking back. It was quiet now. The car rolled easy on the highway.

“Sure could use a cigarette.”

“They’re bad for you. They’ll kill you.”

“Jury’s still out on that,” the monkey said. “I’m not exactly part of your collective gene pool.” He paused. “Besides, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“What do you really think they’re going to do to me in Roswell?”

The monkey had a point. The next truck stop, I pulled off and went inside. I came out with a pack of Marlboros and pushed one through the little hole. He reversed it, pointing an end out to me so I could light it. He took a long drag. “That’s nice,” he said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Suddenly my shoulders felt heavy. As much as I knew that there was something dreadfully wrong with me, some wire that had to be burned out in my head, I felt sad. Something bad, something
experimental
was probably going to happen to this monkey. And whether or not he deserved it, I had a role in it. I didn’t like that at all.

“Have you seen a monkey around here?” the California Tan Man had asked me two days ago in front of the CARECO building.

I looked up. “Hey. I saw that guy. The one in Seattle. What was the gig he had for you? Witness protection type-thing?”

“Sort of. Lay low, stay under everyone’s radar.”

Where would a monkey lay low, I asked myself. “Like what?” I said. “A zoo?”

“Screw zoos. Concrete cage and a tire swing. Who wants that?”

“What then?”

Cigarette smoke trailed out of the holes in his crate. “It’s not important. Really.”

“Come on. Tell me.” But I knew now. Of course I knew. How could I not? But I waited for him to say it.

“Well,” the monkey said, “ever since I landed on this rock I’ve wanted to join the circus.”

Exactly, I thought, and I knew what I had to do.

“I’ll be back,” I said. I got out of the car and walked around the truck stop. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. The guy had a mullet and a pickup truck. In the back of the pickup truck’s window was a rifle rack. And in the rifle rack, a rifle. Hunting season or not, this was Idaho.

I pulled that wad of bills from my wallet and his eyes went wide. He’d probably never seen a clown with so much determination in his stride and cash in his fist. I bought that rifle from him, drove out into the middle of nowhere, and shot the lock off that crate.

When the door opened, a small, hairy hand reached out, followed by a slender, hairy arm, hairy torso, hairy face. He didn’t quite look like a monkey but he was close enough. He smiled, his three black eyes shining like pools of oil. Then, the third eye puckered in on itself and disappeared. “I should at least try to fit in,” he said.

“Do you want me to drop you anywhere?” I asked him.

“I think I’ll walk. Stretch my legs a bit.”

“Suit yourself.”

We shook hands. I gave him the pack of the cigarettes, the lighter and all but one of the remaining hundred dollar bills.

“I’ll see you around,” I said.

I didn’t call Nancy until I got back to Seattle. When I did, I told her what happened. Well,
my
version about what happened. And I didn’t feel bad about it, either. She’d tried to use me in her plot against a fellow circus aficionado.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said. “We were just outside of Boise, early in the morning, and there was this light in the sky.” I threw in a bit about missing time and how I thought something invasive and wrong might’ve happened to me.

I told her they also took the monkey.

She insisted that I come over right away. She and her husband had a big house on the lake and when I got there, she was already pretty drunk. I’m a weak man. I joined her and we polished off a bottle of tequila. Her husband was out of town on business and somehow we ended up having sex on the leather couch in his den. It was better than the last time but still nothing compared to a high wire trapeze act or a lion tamer or an elephant that can dance.

Still, I didn’t complain. At the time, it was nice.

Three days later, my phone rang.

“Merton D. Kamal?” a familiar voice asked.

“Yes?”

“I need a clown for my act.”

“Does it involve talking monkeys?” I asked with a grin.

“Monkeys can’t talk,” the monkey said.

So I wrote Nancy a note, thanking her in great detail for the other night. After putting it in her mailbox, I took a leisurely stroll down to the Greyhound Station.

When the man at the ticket counter asked me where I was headed, I smiled.

“The greatest show on earth,” I said. And I know he understood because he smiled back.

The Quest

Barry B. Longyear

On the planet Momus, south of the Town of Tarzak, lies the village of Sina nestled between the Fake Foot river delta and the glittering expanses of the Sea of Baraboo, named in honor of the ship that stranded the original circus on Momus two centuries before. The sun, just peeking over the edge of the sea, bathed the rooftops of Sina in red, while tufts of idle clouds warmed themselves in the glow above the water. Far below them, two figures dressed in hooded robes of purple stood upon a rotting wharf. The taller of the two scratched, then pulled, at a long white beard as he stared out across the Sea of Baraboo. He turned and looked at the scowling face of his corpulent companion. “Please, Durki. Try to understand.”

Durki raised one thick black eyebrow and settled the scowl on his face more deeply. “You will kill yourself, you old fool!” His voice, high and nasal, grated on the ear. “You will drop dead from age, if you escape the storms, the exiles, and monsters. I say it again, Pulsit, you are an old fool!” Durki folded his arms.

Pulsit raised his brows. “Now, Durki, that is no manner in which to address your master. You are a terrible apprentice.”

Durki snorted. “I might say a thing or two about your qualities as a master, Pulsit. I am over forty years old, yet I am
still
an apprentice!”

Pulsit winced. “Ah, Durki, please keep your screeching voice to a bearable volume.” He shook his head. “How can I turn you loose on an audience with that voice? That’s why no other master storyteller would take you on. But, I took you on, Durki. You owe me something for that.”

Durki turned down the comers of his mouth, raised his eyebrows and nodded. “True.” He reached within his robe and extracted a small copper bead. He held it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it into Pulsit’s hand. “I trust this squares our accounts?”

“One movill? That’s what you figure your debt is after eight years as my apprentice?”

Durki shrugged. “I may have been too generous, but keep the change. It helps ease my mind for allowing you to go off and kill yourself.”

Pulsit turned his gaze back out over the sea. “Bah! What concern is it of yours, you disrespectful wretch?”

“I have plans on becoming a storyteller, Pulsit, not your partner in suicide. You’ve never been off the central continent; I doubt you’ve even been as far as Kuumic—”

“I have too!”

“—and now you want to travel the girth of the entire planet Momus! You know nothing of the dangers! Nothing!”

“Keep your screeching down!” Pulsit looked up the wharf toward the houses along the shore. “Everyone in Sina will be demanding coppers from us for driving them out of bed at this hour. Where is that fisher?”

Durki looked up the wharf, then back out over the ocean.

“Perhaps Raster thought better about it. Perhaps he would feel responsible for your suicide.”

Pulsit frowned and turned toward his apprentice. “You must stop saying that! I have no intention of killing myself. I am a storyteller, Durki, and I must have experiences to draw upon. All the priests have to do is record history; the newstellers relate events; a storyteller,” Pulsit tapped the side of his head, “must have imagination.”

Durki shook his head. “You have been a storyteller for many years without having to leave the continent to fuel your imagination.”

“My fires—”

“Which were none too hot to begin with.”

“My fires . . . are cold. It is only a great adventure such as I have planned that can replenish them.” Pulsit looked back up the wharf. “Ah, at last. Here is Raster now.”

Durki turned and watched as an enormous hulk, garbed in the yellow-and-green stripes of the freaks, reeled out from between two buildings and staggered onto the wharf. Under the fellow’s left arm were two large jugs, while a third hung from a finger. He grasped a fourth jug with his massive right hand, taking gulps of the contents every few steps. Between gulps, he would wipe dry his black beard with the sleeve of his none too clean robe. Durki shook his head and looked at Pulsit. “To whom should I send your belongings?”