The Bear in a Muddy Tutu (11 page)

Fish and Game Warden
Clayton
Flint
was used to
treating
hangovers. It was a matter of picking one’s self up off of
the
floor and
trying to avoid
too many obstacles en route to a fresh, unopened bottle of inexpensive Russian vodka.
God help
you
if
they ever stop manufacturing cheap Russian vodka
, he thought, shielding his eyes from the brutal morning sun
and groping for
the shack’s rusty doorknob.

Flint
’s back was a knot of razor blades and broken glass
,
which shot sparks of bright white pain up his shoulders and neck, onward to his thudding brain. He stepped blindly into the sparsely furnished,
one
-
room building and decided
his first task would be to
pull the shades.
His second
would be
fin
d
ing
the sh
ort, dorm-sized refrigerator
. H
e
yanked the door open so hard it
nearly
toppled forward. The clanking glass jabbed at his skull, and he flicked his tongue across dry lips, tasting a hint of
the
vomit
that
must have interrupted his sleep at some point.

Flint
fished out the first tall, skinny bottle his hand came across and cra
cked open the blue screw
-
top
. He took three long gulping pulls and then paused with his drinking arm half-cocked, waiting for the heat to find its mark.
Flint
’s stomach clenched at the first hit of booze, but the alcohol flooded into his bloodstream within a minute or two, and the world got a little less shaky.
After
a
nother
couple
of
short swigs
,
Flint
’s crippling headache started to release its grip, the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball.

He opened the back door
,
stepped out onto the small deck, unzipp
ed
his trousers and
fumbl
ed
with his penis. He waited for his cranky prostate to allow him to empty his full bladder, tears building up in his eyes as he willed the
urine
to come. And just as it did come, with all the relief God could grant a
tortured
man, h
is blurred vision registered all
the trucks
parked
on Fish Head Island.

“Last night,
”
Flint
said out loud, foggily recalling the line of trucks off in the night
. S
omething about circus music, too. The stream of pee dwindled down to single, strained drops, and
Flint
shook three times and adjusted the bottom half of his uniform.

“Duty calls
.
”
Flint
was surprised not to hate the idea of having a little duty
to perform
around this place. Other than that odd little man he’d fished out of the canal and
a couple of
boys he shooed off for plugging gulls with a .22, not much duty had called in recent months.

The warden slapped his face with cold water from the little kitchenette sink, strapped on his badass forty-four magnum, and took a few extra quick hits off old Mister Ruski for good luck. He headed out the door
to answer the
call
of
duty.

A lion roared, or maybe just hacked something up, someplace disturbingly close.

Warden
Flint
’s
pickup thumped over a deep rut
,
apparently
made by one of the flatbed trucks loaded down
with
a kid-size roller coaster, and slid to a stop
next to
where Billy Wayne Hooduk was holding court with two men and a kid.

The kid,
Flint
saw upon closer inspection
,
was actu
ally a tiny man
with a pencil mustache,
standing no more than belt
high. One of the other men turned out to have full, torpedo-like breasts to go along with a scraggly beard. The third person
had
hundreds of metal piercings
that
puckered, stretched, and did other unnatural looking things to every square inch of his head and face. The man with tits was far less disturbing than the one with earlobe material dangling to his shoulders.

There was actually a fourth
;
Flint
nearly tripped over the crudely built stretcher holding a supine man who seemed glued as low to the ground as he could possibly get.

“Sorry,
”
Flint
told the guy on the ground.

“No problem,
”
Flat Man
answered
, tilting his head for a look up at the warden. “Happens all the time.
”

The
fact that the
c
ircus had come to town
was doing nothing to improve
Flint
’s hangover.

Billy Wayne, though,
appeared to be
in great spirits, breaking away from his odd group to greet
Flint
as he climbed out of his truck. The
hairy
-
faced man or woman smiled at
Flint
and
bl
ew
a theatrical kiss before sauntering off around the big truck.

“I suppose you’re wondering
’
b
out all this
.
”
Bill
y
Wayne
beamed
.
Flint
noticed the troupe had already set up at least four small tents and a couple of cooking fires
that
sen
t
spirals of blue smoke
into the skuzzy gray sky.

“They can’t be here
.
”
Warden
Flint
slammed
his door and
leaned
against the front quarter panel of his truck.
“You might very well be God,
but this land is protected marsh.
”

“It
'
s a beautiful place, in its own way
.
”
Billy Wayne
looked
out beyond the hulking vehicles. “It’s almost
like
com
ing
right down to the end of the world.
”

Flint closed his eyes
and
rubbed both temples with his thumbs in tight, hard circles
,
the pain coming
back in heavy waves
. “It don’t matter what you think it might be the end of. There ain’t no overnight camping, and there sure as shit ain’t no circuses.
”

Billy Wayne turned and slowly walked toward an opening between two of the flatbeds
.
Flint
followed his footprints in the mud. Billy Wayne led them across the gravel drive
,
and they stopped at the edge of solid land to look out at the inlet to
ward
the Atlantic.
Flint wanted very much to turn back and crack open a bottle
of his good medicine
stashed on
the passenger floor of his truck.

“Can’t do it, Billy Wayne.
Just can’t do it
.
”
Flint
sensed something different in the fat little man he’d pulled out
of the canal a few days earlier, the son of that crazy loon.
S
omething had gotten hold of him, or he’d gotten hold of
it
.
Hell, somewhere he’d gotten hold of
an
entire friggin’ circus.

“It’s come to me that sooner or later we all arrive at a crossroad
.
”
Flint
stood listening quietly. A few gulls did a quick flyby but found nothing interesting and rode the slight breeze south. “I came face to face with my personal crossroad not half a day ago.
”

Flint
said nothing, just listened to the strange howls and grunts and swears coming from
the
men and animal
s
behind them. It was high tide on a full moon, and the briny water surged up to cover what was normally dry ground here on Fish Head.
Flint
was partial to this cycle of the tide. It filled the canals and carried away a good bit of the trash. It covered the mud flats and things didn’t smell so much like death and rot.

“It ain’t an easy thing,
”
Billy Wayne went on. “The entire course a man’s life takes depends on which direction he decides to turn when he reaches that crossroad. Sometimes we’re walkin’ toward a thing and sometimes we’re running away from it. I think you know what I’m talking about.
”

“I know you people ain’t supposed to be down here with all this stuff
.
”
Flin
t’s voice didn’t hold
any real conviction.

“Of course we aren’t
.
Just like a man such as yourself probably wasn’t meant to spend year after year in a rundown shack, lookin’ out for seagulls and snapping turtles. But somethin’ in your life brought you to a crossroad, and this was your choice, am I right?
”

Clayton
Flint
shrank from the question, feeling accused by the son of a woman whose life he’d wrecked pretty
darn
good.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,
”
Flint
said.

“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t
.
”
Billy Wayne
tried
to look
Flint
in
the eye.
“But I
can look you straight in the eye and see
you understand that sometimes we need to take a leap of faith. To do something
that
seems
all
wrong
and against the rules. But
we know in our heart of hearts it’s right. That it’s something we have to do. You follow me on this?
”

Like the tide,
Clayton
Flint
’s hangover crested under
the morning
’s
glare. Looking out over the calm water
where
he’d stared a million times before, he
again
hear
d
the plaintive voice on his answering machine tell
ing him about a baby he’d put in that crazy broad’s belly
. He sure as hell hadn’t done a very good job with that particular crossroad. The voice
on his machine had been
one of the reasons he’d sold his truck with the big green plastic bug screwed to the roof. The voice was probably the only reason he sold the tanks and sprayers and told his landlord he was
taking
off to
find
greener pastures. There were a half-dozen openings in the newspaper classifieds for state jobs down
by
the shore. Jobs for fish and game, which he knew a little about
’
cause he hunted and fished, but there were also a couple listings for insect control. And insect control without the carnal temptations was just what the doctor had ordered for
Flint
.
G
et
ting
out from under the dreams he kept waking up from, start
ing
all new and fresh.
Clayton
Flint
may not have had a guilty bone in his body, but something had gotten inside him enough to let him know he was done with lonely housewives.

“You know what I’m askin’ of you?
”
Billy Wayne folded
his arms
over his round belly, rolling a small rock under
the
toe
of his shiny old shoe
.

Flint
shoved
his hands deep in his front pockets, still looking out over the water, hearing Allison Hooduk’s voice louder than ever.

“What I got here is a group of lost souls
.
”
Billy Wayne
nodded
back over his shoulder to where his lost souls were now frying bacon in a big iron skillet and tossing a flat, deflated football someone had found in the grass.

The fish and game warden’s crusty old heart wanted more than anything to know what
had
bec
o
me of Allison Hooduk and
the
baby she’d called and called about. He’d been hiding in these marshes and mud flats for too many years. As stupid as i
t
sounded, he could half believe some sorta higher power had brought
this
fat
little
man
back into his life. Was it some sort of punishment? Was he supposed to make things right? His thumping head was about to explode from the questions and voices. His past hadn’t just caught up
with
him. It had caught up and wrapped its hands around his
sorry
neck.

Clayton
Flint
took off his faded
,
state-issue
d
cap and folded it over in his hands. The cool breeze felt good on his balding head
,
and he wiped his brow on his forearm sleeve. The same state seal logo had been engraved on the bad
ge he’d lost a few years back. Well, n
ot so much lost as skipped out across the inlet water not far from where they were standing. He’d been drunk
, of course,
and especially down in the dumps that night. He vaguely recalled saying something about quitting, right before sending the round badge skipping across the top of the water,
where it
disappear
ed
into the blackness. He also recalled waking up the next morning right there in the mud
. A
tern,
its black head
shaggy as if
it was
wearing a wig,
had
ey
ed
him with disgust from a few feet away.

“I quit,
”
Warden
Flint
had repeated to the bird, but it squawked at him and hopped away.

“I’m just asking for a place to do what seems right
.
”
Billy Wayne
dared look
th
e warden square in the eye.

Off in the distance, a lion roared again, or maybe just hacked up something else. Someone swore and someone else laughed. Music he didn’t recognize faded in and out on the breeze, and
Flint
could smell the bacon sizzling over the fire. He struggled to put
his finger on what had been
missing, and it came to him slowly as he turned to watch a small pony with colorful cloth pieces woven into its shaggy mane trot down to the water’s edge. The pony lapped at the salt water but then shook its head and backed away, not happy with the taste.

There
i
s suddenly life here
, the warden thought.
Maybe it had been missing because so much of him had died inside, or maybe it
was all the pesticides. P
erhaps this
wasn’t the sweetest life, like salt water to a pony, but
Clayton
Flint
decided the circus
needed to stay.