Swan Song (41 page)

Rusty waved his slim hand in the air before Swan’s face. She suddenly saw a red ball appear between the first and second fingers, and then another ball seemingly grew between his thumb and forefinger. He took one ball in each hand and began tossing them up in the air from hand to hand.

“Think we’re missin’ somethin’, don’t you?” he asked her, and when the balls were in mid-air he reached with his right hand toward Swan’s ear. She heard a soft pop and his hand withdrew with a third red ball. He juggled the three of them back and forth. “There you go. Knew I’d find that thing somewhere!”

She felt her ear. “How’d you do that?”

“Magic,” he explained. He plopped one ball in his mouth, then the second and third. His empty hand caressed the air, and Swan saw Rusty’s throat gulp as he swallowed the balls. “Mighty tasty,” he said. “Want to try ’em?” He offered his palm to her; in it were the three red balls.

“I saw you eat them!” Swan exclaimed.

“Yep, I did. These are three more. That’s what I’ve been livin’ on, see. Gravy Train and magic balls.” His smile faltered, began to fade. His eyes flickered over toward the corpse, and he put the three balls in his pocket. “Well,” he said, “I reckon that’s enough magic for one day.”

“You’re pretty good,” Josh said. “So you’re a clown, a magician and a juggler. What else do you do?”

“Oh, I used to ride broncos in the rodeos.” He took off the velvet jacket and hung it up like putting an old friend to bed. “Used to be a rodeo clown. Used to short-order cook in a carnival. Worked on a cattle ranch once. Jack of all trades and master of none, I reckon. But I’ve always loved magic. Hungarian magician name of Fabrioso took me under his wing when I was sixteen and taught me the craft, back when I was shillin’ with the carny. Said I had hands that could either pick pockets or pull dreams out of the air.” Rusty’s eyes danced with light. “That Fabrioso was somethin’ else, I’ll tell ya! He talked to the spirits-and they sure ’nuff answered him and did what he said, too!”

“Is this magic, too?” Swan touched the wooden box covered with lizards.

“That was Fabrioso’s box of tricks. I keep my makeup and stuff in it now. Fabrioso got it from a magician in Istanbul. Know where that is? Turkey. And that magician got it from one in China, so I reckon it kinda has a history.”

“Like Crybaby does,” Swan said, and she held up the dowsing rod.

“Crybaby? That’s what you call that dowser?”

“A woman-” Josh hesitated. The loss of Leona Skelton was still too raw. “A very special woman gave that to Swan.”

“Did Fabrioso give you the magic jacket?” Swan asked.

“Naw. I bought that in a magic store in Oklahoma City. But he gave me the box, and one other thing.” He unlatched and opened the carved box. Inside were jars, crayons and rags smeared with a thousand colors. He dug down toward the bottom. “Fabrioso said this came with the box in a set, so it was right that it went where the box did. Here it is.” He withdrew his hand.

In it was a simple oval mirror, framed in black with a scuffed black handle. There was only one ornamentation: Where the handle was attached to the mirror were two small black masklike faces peering in opposite directions. The glass was a smoky color, streaked and stained.

“Fabrioso used this to put on his stage makeup.” There was a note of awe in Rusty’s voice. “He said it showed a truer picture than any mirror he’d ever looked into. I don’t use it, though-the glass has gone too dull.” He held it out to Swan, and she took it by the handle. The thing was as light as a buttermilk biscuit.

“Fabrioso was ninety when he died, and he told me he got the mirror when he was seventeen. I’ll bet it’s two hundred years old if it’s a day.”

“Wow!” Something that old was beyond Swan’s comprehension. She peered into the glass but could see her face there only dimly, as if through a curtain of mist. Even so, the burn marks still jarred her, and there was so much dust on her face she thought she resembled a clown herself. She was never going to get used to not having hair, either. She looked closer. On her forehead were two more of those strange dark wartlike things she’d noticed at Leona’s; had those always been there, or had they just come up?

“I guess Fabrioso was kinda vain,” Rusty admitted. “I used to catch him lookin’ in that mirror all the time-except he was usually holdin’ it at arm’s length, like this.” He stuck his own hand in front of his face as if his palm were a looking glass.

Swan thrust her arm out. The mirror was aimed at the left side of her face and her left shoulder. Now her head was only an outline in the glass. “I can’t see myself like-”

There was a movement in the glass. A quick movement. And not her own.

A face with an eye in the center of its head, a gaping mouth where the nose should’ve been, and skin as yellow as dried-up parchment paper rose behind her left shoulder like a leprous moon.

Swan dropped the mirror. It clinked to the floor, and she spun around to her left.

There was no one there. Of course.

“Swan?” Rusty had gotten to his feet. “What is it?”

Josh put the candle and saucer aside and laid his hand on Swan’s shoulder. She pressed into his side, and he could feel her racing heartbeat. Something had scared the stew out of her. He leaned over and picked up the mirror, expecting it to be shattered to pieces, but it was still whole. Looking into the glass, he was repelled by his own face, but he lingered long enough to see that there were four new warts on his chin. He handed the mirror back to Rusty. “Good thing it didn’t break. I guess that would’ve been seven years bad luck.”

“I saw Fabrioso drop it a hundred times. Once he flung it down as hard as he could on a concrete floor. It didn’t even crack. See, he used to tell me this mirror was magic, too-only he didn’t really understand it, so he never told me why he thought it was magic.” Rusty shrugged. “I just think it looks like a smoky old glass, but since it went with the box I decided to hold onto it.” He turned his attention to Swan, who still stared uneasily at the mirror. “Don’t fret, Like I say, the thing won’t break. Hell, it’s stronger’n plastic!” He laid the mirror down on the tabletop.

“You okay?” Josh asked.

She nodded; whatever monster she’d seen behind her in that mirror, she did not care to lay eyes on it again. Whose face had that been, down in the depths of the glass? “Yes,” she replied, and she made her voice sound like she meant it.

Rusty built a fire in the stove, and then Josh helped him carry the corpse out to the circus cemetery. Killer yapped along at their heels.

And while they were gone, Swan approached the mirror again. It called her, just like the tarot cards had at Leona’s.

She slowly picked it up and, holding it at arm’s length, angled it toward her left shoulder as she had before.

But there was no monster face. There was nothing.

Swan turned the mirror toward her right. Again, nothing.

She missed Leona deeply, and she thought of the Devil card in the tarot deck. That face, with the awful eye in the center of its head and a mouth that looked like a hallway to Hell, had reminded her of the figure on that card.

“Oh, Leona,” Swan whispered, “why’d you have to leave us?”

There was a quick red glint in the mirror, just a flash and then gone.

Swan looked over her shoulder. The stove was behind her, and red flames were crackling in the grate.

She peered into the mirror again. It was dark, and she realized it was not angled toward the stove after all.

A pinpoint of ruby-red light flickered and began to grow.

Other colors flashed like distant lightning: emerald green, pure white, deep midnight blue. The colors strengthened, merging into a small, pulsating ring of light that Swan at first thought was floating in the air. But in the next moment she thought she could make out a hazy, indistinct figure holding that ring of light, but she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. She almost turned around, but did not, because she knew there was nothing behind her but a wall. No, this sight was only in the magic mirror-but what did it mean?

The figure seemed to be walking, wearily but with determination, if as whoever it was knew he or she had a long journey to finish. Swan sensed that the figure was a long way off-maybe not even in the same state. But for a second she might have been able to make out the facial features, and it might have been the hard-edged face of a woman; then it went all hazy again, and Swan couldn’t tell. The figure seemed to be searching, bearing a ring brighter than firefly lights, and behind her there might have been other searching figures, too, but again Swan couldn’t quite separate them from the mist.

The first figure and the glowing circle of many colors began to fade away, and Swan watched until it had dwindled to a point of light like the burning spear of a candle; then it winked out like a falling star and was gone.

“Come back,” she whispered. “Please come back.”

But the vision did not. Swan aimed the mirror to her left.

And behind that shoulder reared a skeletal horse, and on that horse was a rider made of bones and dripping gore, and in his skeleton arms was a scythe that he lifted for a slashing, killing blow…

Swan turned.

She was alone. All alone.

She was trembling, and she set the mirror glass side down on the desk. She’d had enough magic to last her a while.

“Everything’s changed now,” she remembered Leona saying. “All that was is gone. Maybe the whole world’s just like Sullivan: blowin’ away, changin’, turnin’ into somethin’ different than it was before.”

She needed Leona to help her figure out these new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but Leona was gone. Now it was her and Josh-and Rusty Weathers, too, if he decided to go with them to wherever they were headed.

But what did the visions in the magic mirror mean? she wondered. Were they things that were going to happen, or things that might?

She decided to keep the visions to herself until she’d thought about them some more. She didn’t know Rusty Weathers well enough yet, though he seemed okay.

When Josh and Rusty returned, Josh asked the other man if they could stay for a few days, share the water and Gravy Train-and Swan wrinkled her nose, but her belly growled.

“Where do you two figure to be goin’?” Rusty inquired.

“I don’t know yet. We’ve got a strong-backed horse and the gutsiest damned mutt you ever saw, and I guess we’ll keep going until we find a place to stop.”

“That could be a long time. You don’t know what’s out there.”

“I know what’s behind us. What’s ahead can’t be much worse.”

“You hope,” Rusty said.

“Yeah.” He glanced at Swan. Protect the child, he thought. He was going to do his damnedest, not only because he was obeying that commandment, but because he loved the child and would do all in his power to make sure she survived whatever was ahead. And that, he realized, might be like a walk through Hell itself.

“I reckon I’ll tag along, if you don’t mind,” Rusty decided. “All I’ve got are the clothes on my back, my magic jacket, the box and the mirror, I don’t think there’s much of a future here, do you?”

“Not much,” Josh said.

Rusty looked through a filmy window. “Lord, I hope I just live long enough to see the sun come out again, and then I’m gonna kill myself with cigarettes.”

Josh had to laugh, and Rusty cackled, too.

Swan smiled, but her smile faded fast.

She felt a long way from the little girl who’d walked with her mother into PawPaw Briggs’s grocery store. She would be ten on the third of November, but right now she felt real old-like at least thirty. And she didn’t know anything about anything! she thought. Before the bad day, her world had been confined to motels and trailers and little cinder block houses. What had the rest of the world been like? she wondered. And now that the bad day had come and gone, what was left?

“The world’ll keep turnin’,” Leona had said. “Oh, God gave this world a mighty spin, He did! And He put mighty tough minds and souls in a lot of people, too-people like you, maybe.”

She thought of PawPaw Briggs sitting up and speaking. That was something she hadn’t wanted to think about too much, but now she wanted to know what that had meant. She didn’t feel special in any way; she just felt tired and beat-up and dusty, and when she let her thoughts drift toward her mama all she wanted to do was break down and cry. But she did not.

Swan wanted to know more about everything-to learn to read better, if books could be found; to ask questions and learn to listen; to learn to think and reason things out. But she never wanted to grow up all the way, because she feared the grownup world; it was a bully with a fat stomach and a mean mouth who stomped on gardens before they had a chance to grow.

No, Swan decided. I want to be who I am, and nobody’s going to stomp me down-and if they try, they might just get themselves a footful of stickers.

Rusty had been watching the child as he mixed their dinner of dog food; he saw she was deep in concentration. “Penny for your thoughts,” he said, and he snapped the fingers of his right hand, bringing up between his thumb and forefinger the coin he’d already palmed. He tossed it to her, and Swan caught it.

She saw it wasn’t a penny. It was a brass token, about the size of a quarter, and it had Rydell Circus written on it above the smiling face of a clown.