The Troupe (41 page)

“What is it?” asked George.

Silenus stooped down and plucked it out. George saw it was not a lamp at all, but a bottle, and its contents were glowing. “It is whisky, my boy,” said Silenus. “But not any whisky.
The
whisky. Maybe the first one.” He cackled happily. “They were right about you, Finn my boy. You managed to steal some over from the Old Country, didn’t you?”

“It’s whisky? Why does it glow, then?”

“Because it is
uisce beatha
, the water of life. The whisky they made in the old days, before the darkness came. It is an extraordinarily rare and precious drink, much sought after by knowledgeable aficionados. No one knows how it was made, and there is almost none left in the world. And you,” he said to the coffin below his feet, “you miserable bastard, you tried to have it entombed with you here for eternity.” He laughed again.

“Are you honestly telling me we came all the way out here and robbed a grave for whisky?”

“Absolutely,” said Silenus. He set the bottle on the grass and climbed out. He was filthy from head to toe. “The idea came to me last night, as I stared at my wine. There are only two known bottles of
uisce beatha
remaining in the world, and those are closely guarded
and used for rituals, if they are used at all. But the people I am going to petition for help are… very famous gourmands.”

“Gour-what?”

“Gourmands. Epicures. People who enjoy food, and drink, and refined things. And excess. They are very big devotees of excess, and I think they’ll prize this gift very highly. Now give me some help. I know you won’t dig up a grave, but surely you can’t find anything morally reprehensible about filling one in, right?”

When they returned to the theater Silenus called everyone to a meeting. Colette had discovered the missing funds and was borderline apoplectic, but Silenus did his best to defuse her. “I believe I’ve found a solution to all of our problems,” he said. “I ignored a vital piece of advice for some time.” He nodded to Stanley, who looked worried. “But that was because I thought it was impossible. Yet now I think I might just have figured out a way for it to work.”

“So what is it we’re going to do?” said Colette.

“What we’ve always done,” said Silenus. “We’re going to travel, and put on a show. But this show will be for some very, very discerning people. We want to make damn certain we don’t lose their attention, that’s for fucking sure. And if they like what they see, along with the gift I’m about to present to them, then they may help, which would be enormously good. So everyone needs to pack everything they need and store
all
of our props in my office, and we need to get as rested as possible.”

“Why in your office?” said Colette.

“Because where we’re going can’t be reached by train,” Silenus
said. “Come on. Let’s get started. Even the backdrop, though I can’t imagine what we’d use it for now.”

As it turned out, George would have to move more than just props: the theater manager had informed Stanley that George’s time there was up. They had to move his trunks all the way across town to Colette’s hotel, where Silenus’s door had chosen to appear. Then his father rented him a single room for the night. It was just one more aggravation in the midst of all the moving.

When they were finally done Silenus told them to clean their very best clothes and lay them aside for tomorrow. “We’ll want to make as good an impression as we possibly can,” he said. He was sweating and kept drinking from his flask. “This will be our toughest audience yet.”

George did as his father asked, but when he was done he lay in his bed, staring at the creaky ceiling. He was far too troubled by everything that’d happened to even think of sleep. He eventually rose to find his father, but as he walked by Franny’s room he heard Silenus’s voice: “Hold still.”

“That hurts,” said Franny’s voice.

“Well, it hurts because you won’t sit still, and you haven’t done it in a while. Sit still, please.”

George walked to her door and looked in. Franny sat at the vanity in the corner, staring blankly into the mirror, and Silenus stood behind her. To George’s amazement, he was brushing her hair, gently taking her orange-red curls and running the brush through them. It was such an intimate act that for a moment George thought he was seeing two completely different people.

“Do you not ever brush your hair, my dear?” asked Silenus. “Or am I the only one who ever does?” Franny shook her head, and he
tsk
ed. “I can’t have you looking like this, you know. Not tomorrow. Doesn’t that feel good?”

Again, she shook her head, like a willful child.

“It doesn’t feel good?”

“Nothing you do feels good,” she said. “I’m mad at you.”

His brushing slowed. “Mad at me? What are you mad at me for?”

“I can’t remember. But it’s something.”

“Please don’t be mad at me,” he said. “It troubles me to see you angry.”

Then Franny looked up and saw George in the mirror. She smiled and said, “Hello, Bill.”

Silenus stopped brushing and stared at her. Though George could only see part of his father’s face in the vanity mirror, he could see the man had just turned white. “Wh-what did you say?”

Then Franny waved to George in the mirror, and Silenus turned around and saw him standing in the door. “George?” he said. “What are you doing in here?”

“I could ask the same of you,” said George. “Why are you brushing her hair?”

Silenus’s face darkened, and though George had seen his father’s fury many times it had never been as threatening as this. “That is
none
of your fucking concern, boy,” he spat. “Now what is it you want?”

George stammered. “I… I wanted to know if maybe I could get a bottle from you.”

“A bottle? A bottle of what? Whisky?”

George nodded.

Silenus pointed to the top of the chest of drawers. A half-empty bottle sat next to his father’s hat. “Take it. I don’t fucking need it. Just fucking get out, all right?”

George grabbed the bottle and fled. He’d infuriated his father before, but it’d never been like that. It was as if Silenus thought it was a terrible violation for George to witness that moment.

As he walked away he heard Franny speak again: “There he goes again… I haven’t seen him in so long. Did you ever know Bill?”

With a soft tremble, his father’s voice answered: “Yes. Yes, my dear. I believe I once did.”

George was so miserable with his situation that he could only find solace in thinking about Colette. Maybe, he thought, there was a way to repair the damage he’d done. Eventually around midnight he began to devise a grand gesture to win her back. He knew he’d fouled things up terribly, but if he went to her now, he thought, when they were both alone before a huge performance, and he tried to express how he really felt about her, maybe then she’d understand.

He did not ever think that his reasoning might have had something to do with the near-empty bottle of bourbon by his bed. Instead he began stringing together an extensive speech, one that would put his stifled confession on the rooftop to shame and inspire the love he felt he truly deserved.

Then he dressed in his very best tweed, drank one final glass of bourbon, and crept out of his hotel room. The halls were very dark and confusing, and he wandered for a while, squinting at room numbers, before again catching the scent of Colette’s perfume.

He followed it to one of the rooms. He was not sure if this was hers, yet he figured it was the best lead he had. He raised a fist to knock, but then realized something: he could not remember the first line of his speech. Or, for that matter, the second or the third. He struggled with himself for a moment and withdrew down another hallway to review it. It now seemed very labyrinthine and complicated in his head, and he tried to untangle his many amorous professions one by one.

When George had it sorted out he turned to go back to her room. But before he took a step, the handle twitched, and the door very slowly fell open. George froze and stepped back to watch.

Someone slipped out of the room. It was not Colette, but someone short and thick. And judging by the mustache, he was most definitely male.

Confused, George shrank up against the wall of the hallway as
the figure walked past. The man stopped to readjust his pants, then sighed and drooped a little as though saddened. Then he continued on down the hall.

George knew that gesture very well; it was something he saw every day. It could be no one but his father.

In his drunkenness George assumed he’d gotten turned around, and witnessed his father walking out of his own office door. The scent George had smelled must have been from when Colette last visited the office. Yet when he followed his father down the hall out of curiosity, he found that the big black door was on the other side of the hotel, and his father quietly walked in without a word. So whose room could that have been? George wondered. Who had he been visiting?

It was as he tiptoed back to the room door that he realized the scent of Colette’s perfume was now much stronger, as if she’d been walking there herself. But only his father had been in the hall. Had Harry been wearing Colette’s perfume? No, thought George, that’d be absurd. He would never wear such a thing, unless…

Unless.

Unless, unless, unless.

Maybe he had not been mistaken. Maybe that
had
been her room.

George’s knees began to feel very weak. He suddenly remembered how Colette’s eyes had gleamed as she’d spoken of Harry’s plan to doll her up like a princess. “Smart-ass,” she had said fondly, shaking her head and smiling. He remembered how Colette and Harry were always in some argument or another, dragging one another away to squabble, and Harry’s doting nickname for her: “Lettie.” And she’d been so upset when she’d heard Harry had a child. And then there was how she and Harry spent so much time together in his office, talking about business and budgets…

But were they? Were they really? What else could they have been doing together, alone?

“Oh, no,” whispered George miserably. “It… it can’t be. It
can’t
be.”

He went and stood before her door, wishing to knock and beg her to tell him it wasn’t so, it couldn’t be so. But before her door the scent of her perfume was headier than ever, and he knew that it must have been soaked into his father’s skin…

“No,” George whimpered. “No, no.”

He trudged back to his room as if in a dream. He remembered how she had always been so loath to touch him or be close to him, and how she’d been so embarrassed when he’d proclaimed his love for her on the rooftop.

It was not that she did not love him. It was that he was her lover’s son. The very idea of any love between them was perverse.

George walked into his room and shut the door. He drank another enormous tumbler of bourbon, and lay facedown on his bed and shouted into his pillow.

Stanley tapped at George’s door well before sunrise, then pushed it open and reluctantly looked in. When he saw George look back, with his skin drawn and his eyes swollen from tears and blackened with fatigue, Stanley withdrew slightly, shocked. Then he gestured and George nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

They all rose and, in their finest clothes, took a streetcar to the outskirts of town. Franny said to him, “My, George. You look almost as bad as me.” She smiled a little.

“Didn’t sleep,” said George.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” Her eyes wandered away and she began to hum tunelessly to herself.

“Why the hell didn’t you sleep?” said Silenus. “I told you we needed everyone rested.” But George could not even look at his father, let alone answer him.

Silenus carried a small canvas sack, and he kept checking the time on his pocket watch. “I think I know where we need to be for this,” he said. “But we may have to wander for a little while to find the right spot.”

“You don’t know where these people are?” asked Colette.

“I know where they are, but getting to them is different,” said Silenus. “You’ve got to come at them the right way. We need the right place. A good set of crossroads should do… I know this area pretty well, so I think I’ve found a place that will work.”

“Why do we need crossroads?” said Colette.

Stanley wrote:
BECAUSE THEY PRESENT A CHOICE
.

“A what?” she said.

“A choice,” said Silenus. “They represent a chance when things can go in more than one direction. At that moment, all roads before you and what you encounter upon them are possible. And in that moment you are exposed to other elements. Ones you would normally never be vulnerable to.”

The streetcar let them off, and Silenus led them across crumbling ditches and frigid, wet fields that had not yet awoken to spring. It was bitterly cold out, and in the distance there was a gray, misted forest. The fields sloped down, and at the bottom were two spindly little intersecting roads that must have seen very little traffic. A small, withered sapling sat in one corner of the intersection.

George’s sense of foreboding increased as they approached the little crossroads. “What people are we meeting here again?” he asked no one in particular.

To his surprise, it was Stanley who turned and considered answering him. He took out his blackboard and wrote as he walked. He gave George a doubtful glance, and turned the board around. It read:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES
?

Silenus took out his pocket watch again and checked it. “Still an hour until sunrise. Good. That’ll give me some time to prepare. We’ll have to arrange tokens to catch their attention.”

They watched as Silenus set down the bag and took out what looked like a bundle of sticks. They were soaked in something dark and syrupy that reeked horribly. “Nothing like tar fumes to wake you
up in the morning,” said Silenus. “This is very old tar, as well. It has lain untouched for countless years in the darkest places. Which is what we want.”

He arranged the tarred timber on the side of the intersection facing the forest. Then he took out his bag again and rummaged around until he produced a small cloth sack. He opened it up and dumped its contents into his palm. They looked like tiny, fragile bones.