Effigy (37 page)

A flush of pity made him bold. He took several steps before a certain inward-delving gesture of the cageboy’s brought him up short. In the following instant Bendy located the movement’s meaning in his own limbs. The creature in Stanley’s lap was nothing more or less than his own foot. He was bent on forcing it beyond its limits, on lifting and hooking it behind his head.

The curse Stanley let escape brought Bendy to his senses. To spy on a man engaged in an act so personal, so utterly hopeless, was wrong—more to the point, it was dangerous. He dropped to his belly and rolled out of the moonlit strip, into the shadow beneath the mountain lion’s cage.

He could have kept on rolling out into the open, but he found himself arrested by the idea of what lay overhead. He could smell the big cat loud and clear—her scat on the planks above him, her urine in the earth beneath his back. He strained his ears to catch a shifting of haunches, a scraping of claws. Nothing.

Then Stanley swore again, and Bendy rolled, two further revolutions, out onto the charred grounds. Ash in his clothing, his hair. No Philomena tonight. He could go through with his nightly charade—lead the gelding into the ring and practise riding bareback, maybe try out a few tricks—but somehow he hadn’t the heart. He lay with his eyes closed for a moment, refusing to look up at the night sky. Then rose and slipped quietly away.

There were times—three times, though he did his best not to count—when Bendy arrived to find the corridor empty. When he threw back the tent flap and helped the brown horse inside, only to be greeted by noises from beneath the plum-coloured cloth. A chorus of groans. All of them Stanley’s, as near as Bendy could
tell, but it didn’t stop him seeing Philomena—on her back, on all fours—in his mind’s bloody eye. Those nights he turned the gelding round and led him back, unexercised, to his stall.

Then there were the times when the cageboy was exactly where he ought to be—dead to the world on the stable floor, or on the straw pile in Philomena’s cage—and something else got in their way. Pitch getting a second wind and showing up to check on Bendy’s progress, talking a blue streak of pointers complete with the inevitable lengthy asides. Or Camden, struck with a fresh idea, hammering together little carts to be drawn by parakeets, monkeys swarming about him like children, climbing the curve of his spine.

Still and all, a month of nights had passed since the show first rolled into town, and Bendy had lain with Philomena for half of them. Always in the den at the heart of the straw blind. Always in silence. A sharp suck of air in place of a cry. Her soft, insistent panting in his ear.

He soon came to understand that the fur did not, as he’d first imagined, render any given part of her much like any other. On the contrary, Philomena’s coat was all variation. It was long and slippery over her head, thin at her wrists, woolly in the cleft of her buttocks and between her thighs. Her face fur was soft, though her eyebrows bristled like any woman’s. Finest of all was the hair that flowed south in the valley of her spine. Neck to tailbone, a thumb’s-width ribbon of silk.

She smelled of good meat cooking. A joint in the oven, a chop in the pan. She smelled of salt. A little—he couldn’t help grinning whenever he caught a whiff—of cat.

Fifteen times.

The last of which fell on a night when Stanley woke with a start, possessed of a terrible thirst. He bellowed for her, “MENA!”
and when she didn’t appear, he kicked open the cage door and dropped to the ground. He was fast for one so bleary. He came lurching round the corner of the blind as Bendy was scrambling to his feet and Philomena’s head was beginning to emerge.

A body can only bend so far before breaking, even the rubbery corpus of a freak. Stanley came at him bare handed to begin. Then, when Bendy was down and gasping, blind with his own blood, when Philomena had torn away into the night, loping a desperate track to the Gillespie Hotel in search of help, the cageboy staggered off to find a weapon. He was back in moments with a large wooden wedge, yanked from beneath the cage’s wheel.

Swinging the block on its rope handle, he broke Bendy’s collarbone, four of his ribs and the thinner of the two bones in his right forearm—they heard that one go. He was doing his best to ruin both legs when his uncle hauled him off. Camden had a good hold, Stanley’s arms a thick bow at his back, his head drawn back by the hair. When Pitch doused his son with the contents of a water pail, the offspray caught Bendy in the face and helped him see. Clown and cageboy. Ringmaster. Dog girl nowhere to be found. He scuttled backwards on his behind, head singing, chest a bright butterfly of pain.

“Get off me!” Stanley lashed out behind him with his boot heels, but Camden was quick on his feet. “Get off!” He bucked and wrenched, and, giving up on words, let out a bellow devoid of sense.

The ringmaster watched Bendy struggle to his feet. “I’d be going if I were you.”

“Going?” Bendy dropped a tooth with the word.

Pitch nodded. “Gone.”

Bendy never knew how long Camden Pitch kept hold of his nephew—only that it was long enough for him to make a delirious getaway down Kearny Street to the plaza, spot a hollow beneath a watering trough and hide himself away.

Boots came and went, but none of them were Stanley’s. With dawn an hour off, Bendy decided to crawl out of there while he still could. Wicklow would’ve taken him in, helped him back to the old narrow stall, called for a doctor, maybe even sat with him until the doctor came. The idea of it made Bendy’s chest ache to bursting. In the end he chose an older path, dragging himself to Gripp’s.

The rooming house was a miracle of sorts, survivor of a dozen great fires. The mountain man was wholly blind now, skimping on lamp oil, navigating like a grey steamer through the gloom. He let Bendy have his pick of a bunk—the place was three-quarters empty, a condition unknown during the rush—and he sent for the bone-setter, but that was no more than any man would’ve done.

Bendy was still there a week later—flat in his stinking bunk beside the open window, mending but not yet mended—when he caught sight of the show leaving town. The parade passed like memory—Pitch leading the lovely grey, Camden and his five bright balls. Bendy hauled the blanket up like a robber’s kerchief, his heart thundering, as Stanley swung past on the tailgate of the lion’s cage.

Philomena brought up the rear, motionless in her nest of straw. He was too afraid to call out to her. He rose up on his good elbow and, though it pained him, he waved. If she saw him, she gave no sign.

SHE WON’T LOOK AT HIM
. It’s been two days now since it happened, four meals at the same table and still not so much as a flicker of her eyes his way.

Bendy drags through his evening chores. Later, long after the windows of the ranch house have gone black, he leans up against Ink in her stall, pulling his fingertips down the tracks of her scars. Every stroke is a question—should he, should he not. Drawing the last of them to its conclusion, he decides.

He’s out in the night air, kicking across the shadowy yard, before he can change his mind. He can’t help but feel he should be clutching a spray of flowers—the picture of a man making amends. Instead, he brings only an idea.

She takes forever to answer his knock. He’s grinding a slow turn in the dirt when the door emits a cry.

Running things over beforehand in his mind, Bendy saw himself surveying the collection again, asking a question or two, maybe even examining a few tools. Faced with the first touch of her gaze he’s felt since the night before last, he spills his offering the moment he steps through the door.

“I watched this family one time. Not hunting or anything, just
messing around outside their den.”

She nods, releasing a flood of relief in his chest. He steps all the way inside, drawing the door shut after him.