Mechanique (5 page)

17.

Every performer in the Circus Tresaulti has a costume. The show must deliver real showmanship even in hard times; mechanical people are never as marvelous as mechanical people in suits.

Ayar and Jonah wear dark pants and high leather soldiers’ boots, and nothing else. Their costumes are their bodies; their adornments are the brass hump and the gleaming ribs, the clockwork lungs and the spine.

The tumblers dress in red pants and jackets. (Spinto and Altissimo look sick in theirs—too blond to fight the color.) Boss has had the jackets lined in yellow; when they jump or cartwheel, the tails fly out and up, and the tumblers look like little flames.

The jugglers wear green and grey and red and blue in parti-color, so their arms are a blur of color as they throw and catch. These costumes are easy to maintain. You can make them with scraps; you can make them up for anyone out of whatever you find.

The girls on the trapeze wear blue—grey-blue for Elena, ice-blue for Nayah to set off her dark skin, navy for Ying (“You look young enough without wearing a girl’s blue,” said Elena). Each girl has made her own, fighting for the personality the greasepaint takes away. Sometimes they wear white stockings, the feet cut off for movement; when times are lean, they powder their legs white instead.

Bird wears a dove-grey tunic laced tighter than a mummy, and cast-off stockings from the girls on the trapeze. (“It doesn’t matter about the tears,” said Boss when she handed them over, before Bird could protest. “They won’t clap no matter what you wear, so we might as well save the money.”)

Sometimes in the summer she ties strips of canvas to her feet, so Stenos can hold her without slipping.

Stenos wears plain black, head to toe. Against the pale floor he stands out more than she does; he tosses and catches her in sharp silhouette, and she hovers above him like a ghost.

Alec wore plain canvas pants; not that anyone ever noticed them.

18.

I’ll never understand how there could have been a fall for Alec.

He had wings.

He came in at the grand finale. He swooped from the rigging where no one was watching, hovered in place for as long as the applause lasted. Every night, Alec flew from the ceiling. Every time I saw it—every time I even heard it from the yard, his feathers singing inside the tent—I stopped breathing.

When he fell, I saw it.

I had fought for a space in the front of the crowd, and even as I watched him plummeting I couldn’t believe it. I waited for him to open his wings long after he had been flattened.

The girls were up on the bars when it happened. In those days they crawled up Big Tom and Big George at the end of their act, and each girl threw one arm out to frame his descent for the big finish, and they were all poised with their flourishes when he slid off the bar, wings closed, and dropped.

Elena saw it happening a moment earlier than anyone else—she twisted and jumped for him in a single motion. She didn’t reach him in time, and if Big Tom hadn’t caught her feet with his feet there would have been two corpses.

(Why she helped him, I didn’t know. She’d never moved a toe for any of the rest of us.)

Ying scrambled down the rigging so fast that it looked to me like she and Alec hit the ground at the same time. Ayar was already running inside from the yard; the crowd, realizing something was wrong, was already on its feet, trying to get a better look at who had died. A few screams floated through the tent like in a bad dream.

Now, everyone says it must have been loud—“A panic,” Ayar would say later, shaking his head, and if the aerialists ever talk about it they say the noise was deafening.

That’s not what I remember, though I don’t know if it’s just because time has made some sounds fade and some sounds clearer. Who knows what it was really like. People can remember anything.

I only remember the notes his wings made as the feathers scraped against one another when he crashed, as they sliced through the dust and pierced the ground.

Ayar carried him out of the tent, and Ying and I ran out with him, past the dancing girls and out into the yard where Boss was already waiting.

Jonah was still near the flatbed truck, and he opened the back gate so Ayar could lay Alec’s body out.

We crowded the back of the truck. By then Elena was outside also, her face flickering into view from between people’s elbows as she cut through the crowd and hoisted herself up onto the truck bed fence with one hand. Someone had unhooked Big George from his long arms, and he was there with bare shoulders, resting against the side of the truck for balance. He looked like he had just been sick. (They found Big Tom long after the show, still hanging on the rigging, too stunned to move.)

The crowd parted for Boss, and she approached the truck and looked down at the body.

“What can we do?” Big George asked.

“Go finish,” Boss said.

Elena turned to her. “What?”

Boss snapped, “Go finish the act and bow. They’re turning into a bunch of cattle in there.”

“We have to do something,” Ying croaked. “Alec is dead. He’s dead! You have to fix him, he died in front of everyone, they’re frightened!”

Elena’s only protest was, “We’ve been out here too long. Can’t go back in now. We’ll look like fools.”

“If someone falls in the middle of the act,” Boss said, “then you point at them like they intended it and you finish. Nobody wants to see you fail a man. Anyone can fail a man. They pay money to see us do things they can’t.”

(Later Ying would cry in the trailer and ask, “How could she be so cruel? About Alec, it’s not right,” and fall apart into tears so loud I could hear her outside.)

“They won’t swallow that,” I said. “They saw him falling.”

She looked at me with hard little eyes. When she folded her arms, the griffin tattoos on her shoulders stretched their wings.

“If the girls had finished, they would have.” She looked at us as if we were unruly kids. “Rubes don’t want the real. Deliver the illusion, and they’ll clap.”

After what seemed like a long time, Elena turned for the tent, and one by one the other aerialists followed, and even Big George.

Finally, when I couldn’t take the quiet any more, I asked, “What do we do?”

“Take him to the workshop,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

From the tent came the beginnings of applause.

19.

For them it is not, “When Alec fell.”

For anyone who sees it, a moment like that is never in the past; it is always happening, just out of your sight. Behind Elena’s eyes and Little George’s eyes, Alec is always falling.

When Ying jumps from Big George to Tom, flying under the center of the tent roof, she knows when she passes the spot where Alec fell, the awareness slicing through her like a blade.

When Bird falls, Alec is falling.

When the acrobats or the aerialists do any trick that frightens the audience into holding its breath, Alec is falling, and their ears fill with the sound of his feathers singing.

20.

This is what no one knows about Alec:

Boss could have saved him.

She can replace a skeleton without harming the soul inside. She could have fashioned him a clockwork heart. She had done the same for Jonah.

It was harder not to save him. When she stepped into the workshop, a little of his smoke crept into her lungs (a breath she has never really let out again), and when she touched him she had to fight not to breathe it back into him and wake him. It was not a problem of skill.

If Alec had fallen, he had wanted to fall.

So when she was alone in the workshop with him, she unscrewed the shoulder joints from his tanned smooth back. She wiped the wings clean of blood, and she folded up the copper petals and lashed tight the bone-and-plate ribs, and when she had cleaned up the damage from the fall, Boss called for Ayar and Jonah.

“We have to bury him,” she said, wiping the oil off her hands.

There’s no telling what happens within someone after so long, but she remembers the bright, wild look in his eye every night just before he stepped off the rigging. She remembers sleeping beside him at night. He never settled down, even in sleep; whenever she touched his hands (twitching like a bird’s claws as he dreamed) she got an electric shock just from being so close to him, just because of what he was.

(He slept with his face mashed flat into the pillow, snoring gently, his wings folded tight along his back like a resting dove. This is what no one knows about Alec.)

This is why Boss recognizes Bird when she sees her. This is why it feels as if Boss has been expecting her; the dread is replaced by the knowledge that this is the other shoe that has dropped at last.

“I saw your poster,” Bird says. “I want wings.”

Boss says, “Well, don’t stand there jawing. Show me something.”

The hair on her neck is standing up. She waits by the tent flaps, and does not come any closer to Bird.

Bird goes through the motions, bends and flips and turns with all the adequacy of any other nimble soldier, but she betrays herself; every time she holds out her arms Boss recognizes the spread of those hands, the arch of her fingers, the tilt of her head, the half-closed eyes. She’s another of Alec’s kind.

“Earning wings takes time,” says Boss, later, and crosses her arms over her chest as if it’s gotten cold. “I’ll give you the bones made of pipe. You can do the trapeze, if they’ll have you.”

There is a long silence.

“And the wings?”

Knowing it’s a lie, Boss says, “We’ll see.”

Even then Bird does not agree; she just follows Boss to the workshop, steps inside without making a sound.

This is what no one knows: all the while Bird’s bones slide in, Boss’s fingers tremble.

21.

The government man followed us.

It took him nearly a week; by the time we saw the black sedans coming the tent was already staked, and there was no way to avoid them.

“Set up,” Boss said when she saw them coming, and we scrambled.

By the time the two black cars had pulled up to the camp and the government men slid out of the back seats, everyone was ready. Ayar and Jonah were standing with the crew men, in shirts and too-big jackets. Panadrome was locked inside one of the trailers. The dancing girls were out in force, the aerialists behind. The jugglers were practicing (100% human act, just in case).

Boss stood a little behind the first ring of performers, a little in front of me.

(The crest on the car doors was an orange lion; it faced forward, and from where I was standing it seemed to be rearing back from her griffins; recoiling, or preparing for a fight. I didn’t move. I knew a bad sign when I saw one.)

Four of the five men stopped at the nose of the first car. The fifth man, in a suit that matched his grey hair, kept walking towards us, and even though the whole camp was assembled, some fifty strong, he walked straight for Boss like she was all alone.

“Lovely circus,” he said.

Boss said, “Nice car. It must be hard to manage.”

“It’s worth it,” he said, “so I can get to know my country.”

Boss smiled thinly. Her griffins were trembling.

“I’m fond of the circus,” said the government man.

His eyes were almost as pale as Bird’s glass one, and it was hard to look directly at him.

He examined Boss, his gaze drifting up and down. “I’m glad I saw the poster,” he said. “I haven’t been to anything as grand as your circus since I saw you back when I was a boy.”

He had to be sixty years old. There was no way he could have seen us when he was young. Elena had been here ages, and even she couldn’t be over thirty. I’d been here since I was five, and I was a young man still. The Circus Tresaulti couldn’t be half as old as the government man was. He was mad.

Boss said, “You flatter me.”

He smiles. “I don’t think I do,” he said.

(This is no regular government fool, I realized, going cold. This is a man who knows something.)

Boss waited him out.

Finally he said, “You’re right. Forgive me; I should never ask a woman’s age. We’re not barbarians yet, are we?”

“I hope not,” she said. “For my own sake.”

He laughed, and I shivered.

“I’ve half a mind to see it again,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had an evening out.”

My heart pounded in my ears. I felt sick.

“Be my guest,” said Boss, and her voice carried the grind of the workshop drill.

The government man’s face went grim, and he drew himself up inside his suit and turned back for the car. He walked slowly, carefully, like a man without a care in the world.

The men folded themselves back inside the cars—one or two with their hands on their guns—and then there was a wall of dust, and they were gone.

As soon as the cars disappeared, the jugglers ran for Boss; behind them, there was a brief rain of clubs. Stenos reached her, too, and the dancing girls followed, like Boss was a magnet for their worries. Some of the crew began to inch forward, just to listen.

I had some courage back by that time, enough to turn to look at her.

“What do we do?” asked Moonlight.

“We’ve got to move on,” said one of the jugglers. “We can’t stay here.”

“There’s nowhere we can go,” I said, though why I felt that way I didn’t know. We were travelers; surely there was somewhere he couldn’t find us.

“He found us once already,” said Minette. “Better to get it over with. Maybe he just wants a cut, that’s all.”

“We can stay here,” I said. “We just have to hide Ayar and Jonah.” I was glad no one had wings any more. “As soon as he’s come and gone, we’ll pull up stakes and set down in a new city, and everything will be—”

“We change nothing,” said Boss.

Sunyat, whose costume jingled because she was shaking, made a choked noise. “But they’ll see Ayar . . . Panadrome . . . ”

Boss didn’t answer, though she had to know it was true. Everything we were gave us away to anyone smart enough to look past the show.

Boss wasn’t looking at any of us who were close to her, and I thought maybe she was too scared to think straight (I was), but then I saw she was looking over at the other group of that had gathered, farther away.

For a second I didn’t see what she saw, because the difference just seemed to be people who were eager to help and people who weren’t, but then I realized she was looking at Ayar and Jonah, the aerialists, the tumblers, Bird; those who were metal. They were standing tightly together watching Boss without expression (Fatima might have been crying, but I couldn’t be sure). They were standing a little away from the crew, not speaking.

They knew something the rest of us didn’t know—about Boss, about the man with the orange lion on the side of his car; they knew what might happen, without even looking at one another.

I looked back at Boss, more frightened of her than of the government man.

“Get into your legs,” she said, without looking at me. “We have a show tonight.”

On the way to the trucks I passed Ying, who reached out and grabbed my hand hard enough to hurt. We hadn’t talked in a long time, maybe not since Bird had fallen, and I was so surprised by it that I stopped and looked at her. I heard her suck in a breath, like she was going to tell me something, but then some small sound startled her, and she vanished into the tent.

Panadrome struck up his first song of the night, tinny and too-happy, like he knew something, too, and was doing his best to drown it out.