Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (40 page)

And do
what?
Del wondered. Bearings seemed to roll about in his head. He sensed a malfunction on the way.

The Fort Pru vehicles shrieked to a stop. Crazed life agents piled out and came at them over the flats, firing small arms and hurling stones. A rocket burst nearby.

Possum’s guns suddenly stopped. Ginny grimaced in disgust. “Don’t you tell me we’re out of ammo, Possum Dark. That stuff’s plenty hard to get.”

Possum started to speak. Del waved his good arm to the north. “Hey now, would you look at that!”

Suddenly there was confusion in the underwriters’ ranks. A vaguely familiar pickup had appeared on the rise. The driver weaved through traffic, hurling grenades. They exploded in clusters, bright pink bouquets. He spotted the man with the rocket, lying flat atop a bus. Grenades stopped him cold. Underwriters abandoned the field and ran. Ginny saw a fairly peculiar sight. Six black Harleys had joined the truck. Chow Dogs with Uzis snaked in and out of the ranks, motors snarling and spewing horsetails of sand high in the air. They showed no mercy at all, picking off stragglers as they ran. A few underwriters made it to cover. In a moment, it was over. Fort Pru fled in sectional disarray.

“Well, if that wasn’t just in the nick of time,” Del said.

“I hate Chow Dogs,” Possum said. “They got black tongues, and that’s a fact.”

“I hope you folks are all right,” Moro said. “Well now, friend, looks as if you’ve thrown an arm.”

“Nothing real serious,” Del said.

“I’m grateful,” Ginny said. “Guess I got to tell you that.”

Moro was taken by her penetrating charm, her thankless manner. The fetching smudge of grease on her knee. He thought she was cute as a pup.

“I felt it was something I had to do. Circumstances being what they are.”

“And just what circumstances are that?” Ginny asked.

“That pesky Shepherd Dog’s sorta responsible for any trouble you might’ve had. Got a little pissed when that Possum cleaned him out. Five-card stud, I think it was. ’Course there might have been marking and crimping of cards, I couldn’t say.”

Ginny blew hair out of her eyes. “Mister, far as I can see, you’re not making a lot of sense.”

“I’m real embarrassed about this. That Dog got mad and kinda screwed up your gear.”

“You let a
Dog
repair my stuff?” Ginny said.

“Perfectly good technician. Taught him mostly myself. Okay if you don’t get his dander up. Those Shepherds are inbred, so I hear. What he did was set your tapes in a loop and speed ’em up. Customer’d get, say, twenty-six times his money’s worth. Works out to a Mach seven fuck. Could cause bodily harm.”

“Lord, I ought to shoot you in the foot,” Ginny said.

“Look,” Moro said, “I stand behind my work, and I got here quick as I could. Brought friends along to help, and I’m eating the cost of that.”

“Damn right,” Ginny said. The Chow Dogs sat their Harleys a ways off and glared at Possum. Possum Dark glared back. He secretly admired their leather gear, the Purina crests sewn on the backs.

“I’ll be adding up costs,” Ginny said. “I’m expecting full repairs.”

“You’ll get it. Of course you’ll have to spend some time in Bad News. Might take a little while.”

She caught his look and had to laugh. “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch, I’ll give you that. What’d you do with that Dog?”

“You want taco meat, I’ll make you a deal.”

“Yuck. I guess I’ll pass.”

Del began to weave about in roughly trapezoidal squares. Smoke started to curl out of his stub.

“For Christ’s sake, Possum, sit on him or something,” Ginny said.

“I can fix that,” Moro told her.

“You’ve about fixed enough, seems to me.”

“We’re going to get along fine. You wait and see.”

“You think so?” Ginny looked alarmed. “I better not get used to having you around.”

“It could happen.”

“It could just as easy
not
.”

“I’ll see about changing that tire,” Moro said. “We ought to get Del out of the sun. You think about finding something nice to wear to dinner. East Bad News is kinda picky. We got a lot of pride around here . . . ”

The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue

Holly Black

There is a werewolf girl in the city. She sits by the phone on a Saturday night, waiting for it to ring. She paints her nails purple.

She goes to bed early.

Body curled around a pillow, fingers clawing at the bedspread, she dreams that she’s on a dating show, a reality television one. She’s supposed to pick one boyfriend out of a dozen strangers by eliminating one candidate each week. After eliminations, she eats the guy she’s asked to leave. In her dream, the boys get more and more afraid as they overhear screams, but they can’t quite believe the show is letting them be murdered one by one, so they convince each other to stay until the end. In the reunion episode, the werewolf girl eats the boy who she’s picked to be her boyfriend.

That’s the only way to get to do a second season, after all.

When she wakes up, she’s sorry about the dream. It makes her feel guilty and a little bit hungry, which makes her feel worse. Her real-life boyfriend is a good guy, the son of a dentist from an ancestral line of dentists. Sometimes he takes her to his dad’s office and they sit in the chairs and suck on nitrous oxide while watching the overhead televisions that are supposed to distract patients. When they do that, the werewolf girl feels calmer than she’s felt her whole life.

She’s calling herself Nadia in this city. She’s called herself Laura and Liana and Dana in other places.

Despite having gone to bed early, she’s woken up tired.

Nadia takes her temperature and jots it down in a little notebook by the side of the bed. Temperature is more accurate than phases of the moon in telling her when she’s going to change.

She gets dressed, makes coffee and drinks it. Then goes to work. She is a waitress on a street where there are shirt shops and shops that sell used records and bandannas and studded belts. She brings out tuna salads to aged punks and cappuccinos in massive bowls to tourists who ask her why she doesn’t have any tattoos.

Nadia still looks young enough that her lack of references doesn’t seem strange to her employers, although she worries about the future. For now, though, she appears to be one of a certain type of girl—a girl who wants to be an actress, who’s come in from the suburbs and never really worked before, a girl restaurants in the city employ a lot of. She always asks about flexibility in her interviews, citing auditions and rehearsals. Nadia is glad of the easy excuses, since she does actually need a flexible schedule.

The only problem with her lie is that the other girls ask her to go to auditions.

Sometimes Nadia goes, especially when she’s lonely. Her boyfriend is busy learning about teeth and gets annoyed when she calls him. He has a lot of classes. The auditions are often dull, but she likes the part where all the girls stand in line and drink coffee while they wait. She likes the way their skin shimmers with nervous sweat and their eyes shine with the possibility of transformation. The right part will let them leave their dirty little lives behind and turn them into celebrities.

Nadia sits next to another waitress, Rhonda, as they wait to be called back for the second phase of the audition for a musical. Rhonda is fingering a cigarette that she doesn’t light—because smoking is not allowed in the building and also because she’s trying to quit.

Grace, a willowy girl who can never remember anyone’s order at work, has already been cut.

“I hate it when people stop doing things and then they don’t want to be around other people doing them,” Rhonda says, flipping the cigarette over and over in her fingers. “Like people who stop drinking and then can’t hang out in bars. I mean, how can you really know you’re over something if you can’t deal with being tempted by it?”

Nadia nods automatically, since it makes her feel better to think that letting herself be tempted is a virtue. Sometimes she thinks of the way a ribcage cracks or the way fat and sinew and offal taste when they’re gulped down together, hot and raw. It doesn’t bother her that she has these thoughts, except when they come at inappropriate moments, like being alone with the driver in a taxi or helping a friend clean up after a party.

A large woman with many necklaces calls Rhonda’s name and she goes out onto the stage. Nadia takes another sip of her coffee and looks over at the sea of other girls on the call-back list. The girls look back at her through narrowed eyes.

Rhonda comes back quickly. “You’re next,” she says to Nadia.

“I saw the clipboard.”

“How was it?”

Rhonda shakes her head and lights her cigarette. “Stupid. They wanted me to jump around. They didn’t even care if I could sing.”

“You can’t smoke in here,” one of the other girls says.

“Oh, shove it,” says Rhonda.

When Nadia goes out onto the stage, she expects her audition to go fast. She reads monologues in a way that can only be called stilted. She’s never had a voice coach. The only actual acting she ever does is when she pretends to be disappointed when the casting people don’t want her. Usually she just holds the duffel bags of the other girls as they are winnowed down, cut by cut.

The stage is lit so that she can’t see the three people sitting in the audience too well. It’s one of those converted warehouse theaters where everyone sits at tables with tea lights and gets up a lot to go to the bar in the back. No tea lights are flickering now.

“We want to teach you a routine,” one of them says. A man’s voice, with an accent she can’t place. “But first—a little about our musical. It’s called the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue. Have you heard of it?”

Nadia shakes her head. On the audition call, it was abbreviated ATCR. “Are you Mr. Aarne?”

He makes a small sound of disappointment. “We like to think of it as a kitchen sink of delights. Animal tales. Tales of magic. Jokes. Everything you could imagine. Perhaps the title is a bit dry, but our poster more than makes up for that. You ready to learn a dance?”

“Yes,” says Nadia.

The woman with the necklaces comes out on the stage. She shows Nadia some simple steps and then points to crossed strips of black masking tape on the floor.

“You jump from here to here at the end,” the woman says.

“Ready?” calls the man. One of the other people sitting with him says something under his breath.

Nadia nods, going over the steps in her head. When he gives her the signal, she twists and steps and leaps. She mostly remembers most of the moves. At the end, she leaps though the air for the final jump. Her muscles sing.

In that moment, she wishes she wasn’t a fake. She wishes that she was a dancer. Or an actress. Or even a waitress. But she’s a werewolf and that means she can’t really be any of those other things.

“Thank you,” another man says. He sounds a little odd, as though he’s just woken up. Maybe they have to watch so many auditions that they take turns napping through them. “We’ll let you know.”

Nadia walks back to Rhonda, feeling flushed. “I didn’t think this was a call for dancers.”

Rhonda rolls her eyes. “It’s for a musical. You have to dance in a musical.”

“I know,” says Nadia, because she does know. But there’s supposed to be singing in musicals, too. She thought Rhonda would be annoyed at only being asked to dance; Rhonda usually likes to complain about auditions. Nadia looks down at her purple nail polish. It’s starting to chip at the edges.

She puts a nail in her mouth and bites it until she bleeds.

Being a werewolf is like being Clark Kent, except that when you go into the phone booth, you can’t control what comes out.

Being a werewolf is like being a detective who has to investigate his own crimes.

Being a werewolf means that when you take off your clothes, you’re still not really naked. You have to take off your skin, too.

Once, when Nadia had a different name and lived in a small town outside of Toronto, she’d been a different girl. She took ballet and jazz dancing. She had a little brother who was always reading her diary. Then one day on her way home from school, a man asked her to help him find his dog. He had a leash and a van and everything.

He ate part of her leg and stomach before anyone found them.

When she woke up in the hospital, she remembered the way he’d caught her with his snout pinning her neck, the weight of his paws. She looked down at her unscarred skin and stretched her arms, ripping the IV needle out of her skin without meaning to.

She left home after she tried to turn her three best friends into werewolves, too. It didn’t work. They screamed and bled. One of them died.

“Nadia,” Rhonda is saying.

Nadia shakes off all her thoughts like a wet dog shaking itself dry.

The casting director is motioning to her. “We’d like to see you again,” the woman with the necklaces says.

“Her?” Rhonda asks.

When Nadia goes back onstage, they tell her she has the part.

“Oh,” says Nadia. She’s too stunned to do more than take the packet of information on rehearsal times and tax forms. She forgets to ask them which part she got.

That night Rhonda and Grace insist on celebrating. They get a bottle of cheap champagne and drink it in the back of the restaurant with the cook and two of the dishwashers. Everyone congratulates Nadia, and Rhonda keeps telling stories about clueless things that Nadia did on other auditions and how it’s a good thing that the casting people only wanted Nadia to dance because she can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

Nadia says that no one can act their way out of a paper bag. You can only rip your way out of one. That makes everyone laugh and—Rhonda says—is a perfect example of how clueless Nadia can be.

“You must have done really well in that final jump,” Rhonda says. “Were you a gymnast or something? How close did you get?”

“Close to what?” Nadia asks.

Rhonda laughs and takes another swig out of the champagne bottle. “Well, you couldn’t have made it. No human being could jump that far without a pole vault.”