Mechanique (4 page)

13.

When Bird came to Tresaulti, there was nothing wrong with her.

“Well, not to look at,” Boss says when anyone mentions it, just to let everyone know something must have been wrong elsewhere. Her spine, they guess. Her innards. Maybe her bones were rotting out.

It must be something, because Boss says she doesn’t like to put metal into those who are perfectly good. She’s refused me a dozen times.

(“You just put on your brasses and shut up,” she says, every time I even open my mouth to ask.

Once I say, “Bird wasn’t broken, but you did her!”

“The ones I fix were all broken,” she says, and waves her hand. The griffin on her arm flaps its wings.)

I think Bird must have been mad, and that’s why Boss did it. You’d have to be mad, to ask.

I think Stenos must be mad now. You’d have to be mad, to keep her.

Bird let Boss put hollow bones in, like the rest of them, and she trained alone at night to learn the routine; she did the flips close to the ground, the strength work on the bars to get used to the height, swinging back and forth on the trapeze with her feet pointed out, for hours after the shows were over.

She lasted a few years with them, letting go and spinning, snapping out her arms for the catch, bringing her knees to her chest to be swung up to the rigging. She was elegant, powerful, powder-handed, and weightless. For her, it was the bird and the bird and the bird.

Then it was the ground.

Ying slid down the rigging to go warn Boss what had happened, but the act went ahead without her—Boss’s orders are that the act goes ahead, no matter what.

(“What,” she said, “war without end, and one more body will worry them?”)

Only after the act had finished and the tent was empty did Boss take Stenos to go scoop Bird up from the sawdust and bring her out of the lantern light to the workshop to see what could be done.

(It was a good thing about the bones, after all; Boss was able to put her back together, unbending what was mangled, putting in new pipes where they were needed. Now Bird’s got a thin iron plate over the skin of her left temple, and a glass eye, but it could have been worse. She could have been Alec.)

Sometime after Boss had fixed Bird, while she was still asleep, Boss must have had enough of worrying about people falling. Or she was angry at Stenos about something; there’s never any knowing, with Boss.

Boss hauled Bird onto her shoulders, banged her way outside the workshop, marched across the yard where we were loading out, and dropped her right in front of Stenos.

He had to crouch and shove his arms out flat to catch Bird before she hit the ground. He was so tall and carried her so easily that, knocked out in his arms, she looked like a roll of leftover canvas.

Stenos looked at Boss like Boss had lost her mind.

“The problem’s yours now,” Boss said, with the air of someone delivering a punishment. “Your duo act goes live in the next city.”

Boss disappeared into the maze of the camp, lost among the little pools of lantern light.

Stenos looked down at the sleeping woman in his arms, his gaze unblinking. After a long time, he curled his fingers inwards, holding her tighter.

I left him alone. There’s no talking to some people.

But my skin was crawling the whole time I walked away, and at the edge of the camp by the feed truck I stopped and looked back.

I wondered if they had ever spoken. I remembered their meeting, when they had recoiled from one another, but since then they hadn’t exchanged so much as an angry look.

I thought Boss had gone mad in putting them together. It wasn’t right, the two of them. I could feel it in the air just looking at them, like winter had suddenly come, like we had fallen into some shadow and nothing would be the same again.

Even Ayar’s back tells the right time twice a day, and it was my turn to be right.

14.

The women start calling her Bird while she’s still on the ground, before they even know how badly she landed.

(Before this she had another name, but she wore it like a bad suit, and as soon as the words are uttered, the old name dies.)

“Poor bird,” one of them says (Elena), and one of them laughs (Penna), and one of them is biting back a scream (Mina), and one of them is running for Boss.

The one who runs is Ying; she moves so fast that she scrapes the skin off her palms sliding down the tent pole. She performs in bandages for two weeks after.

Bird has never thanked her. No point; it would only make Ying somebody’s enemy.

“She fell,” Ying calls, which is a lie.

Bird wants to give over—it’s easier, surely, just to die—but she can’t. Her eyes are nothing but blood, and she feels sick, presses her face to the dirt, but her lungs are pushing in and out, sucking up blood and dust and whatever air is left.

Around her, muted, people are applauding. The tent goes dark.

When everything is quiet again, someone picks her up; she feels strong hands shaking under her. She thinks,
Soon it will all be over.

(But she knows better; Boss told her what would happen when she gave her the bones, and so Bird knows this is not the end. She must wait, and bear it. Someone is holding her.)

In the workshop, Boss’s hands pass over her body. She feels the motion (it’s pain, it’s all pain, the air is beating against her), but doesn’t move. One eye is gone; she doesn’t want to open the other. Best not to move. Best just to die.

(She can’t die; she fights; she pulls breath through the holes in her copper ribs.)

“I should have known better,” says Boss, like an apology. “Elena can tell about this kind of thing.”

Her throat is too full of blood to answer. The pain is like a brand.

Boss says, “Stop fighting it,” and there is the ring of a hammer on copper, then nothing.

Bird doesn’t wake up until the next night, and knows from Panadrome’s waltzes that the show is happening without her. She sits on top of one of the lighting crates, her legs folded under her, and listens to the rubes shouting and stamping until the ground shakes.

After the show, Little George tells her that Elena performed with a black eye.

“It was Boss’s present to Elena for letting you fall,” he says, making fists at his sides and rocking on his heels. His metal casts creak. “She slapped Elena right in the face.”

The other one says, “Some people have all the fun.”

His name is Stenos; Stenos whom she has never believed about anything. But he was holding her when she woke up, carrying her through the camp like a dangerous animal that had been found asleep.

Now he is sitting beside her, on her left side; she cannot see him. The heat of his leg bleeds through her skin, warms the metal in her left hand where she grips the edge of the crate.

(The wings. He is after the wings.)

They have managed, so far, never to speak to one another. But now she does not try to break away from him. She lets the heat of his skin fan out through her hand, soak into her wrist. She leaves her hand where it is.

You must live in the place that has been carved for you; this much, now, she understands.

You must live in the wagons with the aerialist girls and their slippery hands. You must sleep in an upper bunk with your face close enough to the roof that the rain leaks onto your neck, with Elena lying across the narrow aisle, sleeping the sleep of the just.

You must live in the crook of the man’s arm when you walk through the towns, giving the illusion that you are a pair; when you are not ready to jump and he is gathering the strength to throw you; when you are tired from practice and cannot walk.

You must live on the ground.

Now, she is Bird. If she remembers some other name, she wouldn’t think to answer to it.

She must live with the name that has been carved for her, because of the fall; because of the height of her twists and leaps; because of the wide, bright eye that never closes.

15.

Everyone paints up. Boss believes in a real show.

The aerialists are pink and brown and gold, and Boss makes them paint up all alike—round white faces like a set of dolls, thick black lines along the eyelids, gold shadow from the brow to the cheek and all the way out to their pulled-back hair. Their mouths are plastered white, so if their lips tremble no one can tell.

Tumblers get red for their mouths, to match their jackets, and black pencil for their eyes. It gets frightening as the act goes on and the sweat leaves streaks of grey and red over their faces, but Boss doesn’t mind if they look scary, I guess.

Ayar and Jonah don’t get anything except a little kohl. (“No one’s looking at your faces,” says Boss, pushing her work goggles back into the frizz of her hairline and looking at one or the other. “What would you two do with a clown’s face? Hopeless, both of you. Now come in here, Ayar, your right shoulder is bent.”)

Bird makes up, too. Somehow she found silver shadow the same color as the iron plate, and she makes wide gunmetal smears over her eyelids and her good temple, staring defiantly into the trailer mirror, like she’s doing something she’s not supposed to.

Stenos doesn’t wear anything but the kohl, not on his own. Sometimes Bird will turn from her seat at the big mirror and find where he’s standing (he’s within arm’s reach of her before a show, always), and she’ll look him right in the eye and draw one finger over his brow, or across his mouth, and leave a trail of grey on his skin.

Stenos always looks upset afterwards, though you’d think he’d just tell her not to do that if he hates it so much. But he must be a glutton for punishment, because he’s there every night in his black costume, standing quietly just behind her, accepting whatever she gives.

(Sometimes she holds out her hand like she wants to make him up, and when he leans in she takes hold of his throat and looks him in the eye like she’s settling some private fight. He never fights back—never even pulls away—and every time she holds out her hand he leans forward, no matter what. He performs some nights with a silver neck. I try not to look at them.)

Bird’s the only one in the place who looks better made up. When she’s barefaced it just draws attention to where she’s been mended. It’s better when the paint is on, and you can take in her face like something she’s had done on purpose—I don’t know why Boss made the face plate iron. It just reminds the others what happened to her, and Bird doesn’t need any favors when it comes to being cast out.

It’s best if you glance at her all made up and just let her gaze go. No point in looking deeper; if you look past the greasepaint at her left eye, you’ll get nothing back; it’s all glass.

She’s gone cold mad over the years. The wind blows right through Bird.

She scared even the government man, when he came to take Boss away—for all the good it did her.

16.

After the posters went up in a city, we waited a day for people to make up their minds. In the meantime, we set up the tent, dropped beer barrels in the nearest cold water, and made the dancing girls run a lot of errands.

They suited up in their shirts and spangles, draped themselves in scarves, snapped their metal casts over their hands. (Sunyat’s metal foot was shaped too pointed to walk on. She wore long skirts in the city, so no one would be suspicious when her feet came flashing into the ring.)

“Right,” said Moonlight to me as they headed out of camp. “Anything you need, little man?”

They were carrying coils of rope and a sack of rice, and some wiring Boss had decided she didn’t need. They’d barter in the city; drum up a little excitement by looking mysterious.

I grinned. “Anything more valuable than what you pay for it.”

She laughed and swiped idly at me, and the four of them smiled all the way down the hill toward the city.

Boss never went into the city herself until the parade (she thought it looked common), and she wouldn’t let me go except to put up the poster (“You’ll go into the city and wind up your mouth and the next thing we know we’ll be in for it,” she said, every time I asked).

She was in the workshop, fixing something on Panadrome. They stopped talking when I knocked, and there was a little pause before she opened the door.

“They’ve gone to the city,” I said. “Should we send the brothers?”

A pair of Grimaldis sometimes followed the dancing girls. They were stronger than the crew, and faster, if it came to it.

“No,” Boss said, looking out towards the city. (Maybe she could see the dancing girls; with Boss, you could never tell.) “What did you think of it?”

“Not bad,” I said. Sometimes we set up outside cities that were little more than rubble and tents, but here the dirt paths were clean, and there had been only one soldier guarding the open square where I pasted the poster.

Boss nodded. “Let’s hope they don’t tear anyone apart for looking at them sideways, and leave it at that.”

Panadrome said, “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like anything,” Boss said as she closed the door, and then it was just the muffled sounds of the two of them arguing it back and forth.

When the dancing girls came back, they weren’t smiling any more, and Sunyat went right to Boss’s trailer.

“What happened?” I asked, but Moonlight only shook her head and handed me a burlap bag of slightly rotten fruit.

By the time I got back from Joe at the food wagon, the crew was taking down the tent poles, rolling up the canvas for Ayar to throw into the trucks, and Boss was standing outside her trailer talking with Elena. Elena had her arms crossed over her chest, and once or twice she cast dark glances over her shoulder, down to the city.

I hung back until Elena was gone, and went inside.

“What’s happened?”

“We’re going,” Boss said, “don’t you have eyes?”

“Did something happen in the city?”

Boss looked into her mirror, then sighed as if she’d lost an argument and said, “Someone was asking about us.”

I wanted to laugh, but something about the way she said it made me nervous, so I shut my mouth and waited.

But Boss only said, “Make sure we all go on to the next city. No crew stay behind this time.”

I frowned. “Fuck, who was asking about us?”

“Probably no one,” Boss said. “And watch your mouth.”

I caught Minette outside the dancers’ trailer just as the engines were starting.

“I heard about what happened,” I said (half the truth will get you everywhere). “Are you all right?”

She shrugged. “I still don’t think it was a government man; some people are nosey, is all.” She shot me a smile that was meant to reassure, and I closed the door and ran to give the driver the Go signal.

I took that leg of the trip in the trailer with the Grimaldis. I didn’t know what to make of it yet, and I was afraid Boss would find me out if she saw me. She had a way of guessing what your game was just by glancing at you.

(I didn’t believe anything else terrible could ever really happen to us after Alec died; you think strange things, sometimes.)