Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (6 page)

“You drive,” Weston whispered to Brooks. “I’ll escort the others. Don’t rev it. No lights. Roll out quiet and dark.”

“What’s going on?” Brooksy asked, a little twitchy but not smiling.

Weston shook his head. “Later. Just go.”

“What about Austin?” He pointed to the dead Border Patrol officer.

“We’ll come back,” Weston whispered.

Brooksy shrugged. He got behind the wheel of the Jeep, closed the door as quietly as possible, then fired up the engine. To Weston, it seemed the loudest thing he’d ever heard. But then it dropped to a purr and he heard Brooksy put it into gear.

“Vamanos. Let’s go,” he said, using the barrel of his M16 to gesture toward Paradise. He put a finger to his lips and shushed them. “Quietly.”

The Jeep pulled away from the opening in the fence and for a second, Weston was sure one or more of the Mexican men with him would bolt for the border. The girl wasn’t going anywhere, and he didn’t think the older woman would try to run it out. But the men . . . 

He glanced back toward the bodies scattered on the desert and saw that slender silhouette again. It crouched by a corpse with its head cocked and in the moonlight he saw the glint of its eyes, watching the Jeep pull away.

His pulse raced and his finger twitched on the trigger. Weston forced himself not to run, instead urging the others on. They were focused on him, and he had to keep them from panicking. They all fell in step alongside the Jeep, which rolled slowly back toward the ghost town. The sound of helicopter rotors came from that direction. The headlights of Jeeps and Humvees had made a circle, like a wagon train preparing for attack. If they could just get back there, they would be safe.

Finally on the move, he snapped the mouth piece of his comm. unit into place. “Weston for Squad Leader. Weston for Squad Leader.”

Seconds ticked by and he was about to radio again when he heard a pop on the line. “What the hell are you whispering for, Weston? It’s all over but the paperwork.”

“Maybe not, sir,”

“What happened? You didn’t catch the coyotes?”

“Got ’em, sergeant, but it’s a mess.” He glanced back, saw the thing—the scavenger—framed in the opening in the fence, standing in the very same spot he’d been in just a minute ago, watching them. Fear ran up the back of his neck and prickled his skin. “And there’s . . . there’s something else over here, sarge. We’re not alone.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Weston thought about that a second. He looked back again.

Only that gaping hole across the border remained, and beyond it the scattered dead. The creature had vanished.

It darted out of the night so swiftly that he barely had time to aim the M16. The creature came from the left, a paint stroke of fluid black across the moonlit landscape, grabbed hold of the Mexican at the front of their little march and tore open his throat and abdomen in a single pass.

The screaming started.

Weston ran past the others, up to the front of the Jeep, and squeezed off a couple of rounds without a chance in Hell of hitting the thing. It blended too well with the desert and the dark.

“What the hell?” Brooksy roared from behind the wheel of the Jeep.

“Weston. Do you read? Are you under fire?” Ortiz barked in the comm. in his ear.

“Under attack!” Weston snapped back. “Not under fire. That was me shooting.”

Ortiz asked half a dozen questions in as many seconds, but Weston wasn’t listening anymore. He pulled the comm. from his ear and tossed it into the dirt. They were three or four hundred yards from the lights and vehicles and weapons of the DEA and Border Patrol. Not far at all.

Not far
, he told himself.

But those Mexicans hadn’t made it very far, back at the border. They’d been picked off one by one, the stragglers, killed quickly. The thing only slowed down to start its banquet when they were all dead and the screaming was over.

Weston swung the barrel of his M16, searching the darkness all around, knowing the thing could come from anywhere. The Mexicans not inside the Jeep huddled nearby him. Afraid as they were, no way were they making a break for the border now.

“Damn it, Weston, what was that?” Brooksy asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, without sparing the other grunt a glance.

“Fuck this.”

Brooksy gunned it. The Jeep’s engine roared and the tires spit hard-baked earth and stones as the vehicle leaped forward.

“Goddamn it, no!” Weston yelled.

Two of the Mexican men started running after the Jeep, shouting. The others hesitated only a second before following. Weston yelled for them to stop, but they were beyond listening. Exhaustion, starvation, and despair had plagued them earlier—people who’d been taken advantage of by nearly everyone they’d encountered—but now fear drove them to madness.

Weston pursued them. The night loomed up on either side of him. He could feel the vulnerability of his unprotected back, but knew that they were all vulnerable. The darkness shifted. Every shadow, every depression in the desert floor, seemed about to coalesce and take shape and rush at him with its claws out.

The illegals were stretched out in a line, scattered in their pursuit of the Jeep. The thing came out of the night and killed the woman, punching a hole in her chest. Weston brought up his weapon and fired at it. Two bullets hit the woman as her corpse fell. The thing flinched and he thought he’d winged it, but it rushed off into the dark again, merging with the night.

The taillights of the Jeep grew smaller.

Weston swore, catching up with the four survivors. The teenaged girl fell to her knees beside the dead woman, and Weston heard her saying “Tia” over and over, and knew she had been the girl’s aunt.

They all clustered around the sobbing girl. Weston heard the Humvees revving. One of them pulled away from Paradise, headlights turning their way.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “They’re coming.”

But his fingers felt frozen on his weapon. Ortiz would be coming to get them, maybe with inter-agency backup, but seconds counted. He swung the M16 around, jerking at every sound—real or imagined—from the desert. The survivors stayed low, out of his way. Maybe they hoped the thing would come for him next.

One of the men had begun to cry with the girl.

When Weston saw it, at first he didn’t even know what he was looking at. The thing stood forty feet away, entirely motionless. On instinct he raised the M16 and squeezed the trigger. The thing darted aside, slipping through the darkness, too fast to hit. It stopped, studied him again, cocked its head and gazed with a terrible intelligence. It thrust out that long, thin, snaking tongue and tasted the air with it.

“El Chupacabra,” one of the men whispered.

Engines roared and headlights splashed across them. A pair of Humvees arrived, one on either side of the group, bathing the Chupacabra in yellow light. It bolted instantly, heading for that gap in the border fence.

“Oh no you don’t,” Weston whispered.

Fast as it was, the thing was making a run for the fence in a straight line. He sighted on its back as Humvee doors popped open and DEA agents jumped out. Ortiz’s voice called out, so Weston knew his squad leader was with them.

Once again the creature paused, framed in that opening in the fence.

Weston squeezed the trigger.

An arm came up under the barrel, knocking the gun’s nose up, and the bullets fired into the desert sky.

Enraged, Weston spun on a man wearing a DEA jacket.

“Back off!” he snapped, shoving the man away. When he glanced back toward the fence, the creature had vanished once more, and he knew that the opportunity had passed. “What’s wrong with you? Did you see that thing? Do you have any idea what it just did? What you let get away?”

Ortiz had come up by then. The DEA agent grinned and Weston wanted to break his face with the butt of his M16. But the Squad Leader glared at him.

“Stand down, Weston.”

Weston glared at the DEA prick. “Tell me you saw that thing.”

“I didn’t see anything.” The grin remained. “And neither did you. We’ve got thousands of miles of border to worry about. If there’s something else that keeps them from trying to get across, then it’s doing us a favour.”

Behind Weston, the teenaged girl still sobbed over the corpse of her dead aunt. She’d wanted a new beginning, but instead she’d found an ending to so much of her life. All he could think about was that if the girl had been torn open by that thing out in the desert, this son of a bitch would have kept grinning.

Doing us a favour.

Weston looked at the grim, cautious expression on Ortiz’s face. The staff sergeant was silently warning him to keep his mouth shut. More than anything, that made him wonder. Was the grinning DEA man just happy the scavenger was out there in the desert, helping him do his job, or had he and his people put the thing there in the first place? And if they had, were there others?

But he did not ask those questions.

“A Border Patrol officer—Austin—one of the coyotes shot him. He’s down by the fence, DOA,” he said.

“A tragedy,” said the grinning man. “Died in the firefight that cost the lives of a number of illegals as they attempted to enter the country carrying cartel cocaine. A hero of the border wars, this Austin. You were lucky to survive yourself.”

Weston slung his M16 across his back. One last time he glanced at Ortiz. They already had their version of tonight’s op ready to go. If he tried telling it differently, who would listen?

Slowly, Weston nodded.

“Sir, yes sir.”

The blood seeping out of the midget car was Benny’s first clue that something had gone awry. The audience kept laughing—either they hadn’t seen it yet or they thought it was part of the show—so Benny didn’t slow down. He waddled on his big shoes, storming with exaggerated frustration toward Clancy the Cop, and slapped the other clown in the face with a rubber chicken.

It looked like it hurt.

The audience roared.

Back up.

The night before—a Friday—the circus had ended at quarter past nine on the dot. Appleby, the manager, was a stickler for punctuality. The last bow took place between ten and fifteen minutes past the hour every performance, and when the thunderous applause—which, honestly, wasn’t always thunderous and was sometimes barely more than a ripple—had died down, the ticket sellers became ushers . . . ushering folks out of the tent as quickly as possible. The ushers didn’t hurry people because anyone was in a rush to get their makeup off, but because once the little kids started moving, all the popcorn and cotton candy and soda and hot dogs started to churn in their bellies. Much better to hose the vomit off the ground outside than in the tent.

The clowns ran out of the tent the way NFL teams came onto the field, arms above their heads, whooping and hollering, before the last of the crowd had departed. Benny had always thought it looked stupid, but Zerbo—the boss clown and the troupe’s whiteface—wanted to leave the straggling audience members with an image of the clowns as a kind of family.

Out behind the tent, the family fell apart. The tents and trailers that made up the circus camp were a tense United Nations of performers and labourers without any real unity. Like a high school full of jocks and geeks and emo kids, the clowns and workers and animal trainers and acrobats each formed their own caste, every group thinking themselves above the others. Friendships existed outside the boundaries of those castes, but when it came to conflict, they stuck together like unions. The acrobats were effete, the animal trainers grave and sensitive, and the workers gruff and strong.

But nobody fucked with the clowns.

“You mess with the clown, you get the horns,” Zerbo was fond of misquoting, right before blasting you in the face with an air horn. His idea of a joke. Most people laughed, but Benny had never found the boss clown all that funny.

The Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe had been playing sold-out audiences in a field in Brimfield, Massachusetts for a week. Normally, the grounds were used for the huge antique flea market the town held a couple of times a year, but the circus had been a welcome novelty, as far as Benny could tell. Not that Appleby talked to him about it. Clowns were beneath the manager’s notice, except when it came time for him to talk to Zerbo about renewing contracts. Even then, nobody bothered to ask Benny what he thought.

In the hierarchy of clowns in the Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe, Benny Martini was on the bottom rung. The runt of the litter. The red-headed stepchild. Shit, that last one was probably offensive in these sensitive modern times. No matter. The point was that Benny was an afterthought to everyone, even the audience.

He’d often thought about how much happier he would have been if, like Tiny and Oscar—two of the other character clowns in the troupe—he’d been too stupid to know it. But even Tiny and Oscar were above him. If the troupe had been a wolf pack, Benny would have been on his back, baring his throat for everyone who came along. And why?

It was all about the laughs.

Laughter and his status in the circus, nearly always the only two things he thought about, were foremost on his mind as he followed Zerbo, Oscar, Tiny, Clancy the Cop, and the rest of them into clown alley. Tiny bumped Oscar, then clapped him on the back—they’d successfully completed the Hotshots gag after having totally bungled it the night before. On a façade so rickety even old-time Hollywood stuntmen would’ve shied away from it, three-hundred-pound Tiny dressed in drag and pretended to be a mother trapped with her infant on the third story of a burning building. The fire effects were minimal—gas jets, a low flame, a lot of orange lighting, the whole thing designed by a guy who’d helped put together the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular at Disney World, before he’d been fired for drinking on the job—but it looked great, as long as Tiny didn’t set his wig on fire.

Oscar, in character as a clown firefighter, pushed a barrel of water back and forth across the ring, exhorting Tiny to throw him the infant and then jump into the water. The culmination of the whole thing was that Tiny’s aim would be off, forcing Oscar to step into the water barrel in order to catch the baby—only a doll, of course. At the moment he caught it, the trap door would give way beneath the ring, dropping Oscar and the baby and the water through and giving the audience the impression that the baby had been heavy enough to drive him into the ground. It was a pain in the ass to set up the gag, but when it went off, the surprise always led to real laughs, especially when Tiny theatrically threw up his hands, mopped his sweating face with his wig, took a deep breath, and blew out the fire around the windows like candles on a birthday cake. The lights would go dark. Cue the applause.

Thursday night, Tiny had stumbled, throwing off his timing. The doll—to the eyes of the crowd, an infant—had tumbled down to splat in the middle of the ring while Oscar stood watching like a fool, until the trapdoor gave way and shot him down into the space beneath. The audience had to know the baby wasn’t real, but they’d screamed all the same.

Timing was everything, Benny always said.

How Tiny and Oscar could screw up the gag so badly and still be above him in the pecking order, he would never understand.

In clown alley that Friday night, he washed off his makeup without a word to any of the others. Most of the time he shot the breeze with them and tried to ignore the fact that, four years since he’d joined up, they still treated him like a mascot, but not tonight. The cold cream took off most of the makeup and then he splashed a little water on his face and dragged on a pair of stained blue jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt—it had been strangely cool the past few nights, uncommon for July in western Massachusetts.

As he left the others behind and went out to wander the grounds and clear his head, he ran into the lovely blonde contortionist, Lorna Seger. There were tears in her eyes and she gave him a helpless, hopeless glance that made him think maybe she wanted to talk about her breakup with the stunt rider, Domingo.

“Hey,” he said, shaken from the reverie of his self-pity by her sadness. “You okay?”

Lorna smiled and wiped at her eyes. “Could be worse, I guess,” she said. “I could be a clown.”

Benny flinched. Lorna chuckled softly to let him know it had been a joke. He hoped Domingo ran her down on his motorcycle.

“You’re such a bitch,” he said.

Lorna rolled her eyes. “Why is it clowns never have a sense of humour?”

He walked on, fuming, wanting to scream, wanting to get the hell away from the circus but crippled by the knowledge that—like everyone else who performed under the tent—he had nowhere else to go.

Put on a happy face
, his mother would have said. Remembering did make him smile, but it faded quickly.

The wind picked up as he walked the grounds, which were rutted and pitted with tire tracks from decades of vehicles moving through the fields in all weather, turning up muddy ridges, which had then dried and hardened. Loud voices came from the trailers where the workers had made their own small camp, and he could smell sausages cooking on a grill. When he passed a tent, he saw them, standing in a semi-circle, drinking beer, a small radio picking up a static-laced broadcast of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees game. Summer in New England. These guys looked like their entire life was a tailgate party. They worked hard and were content with the cycle of labour and paycheque, beer and cookouts and Red Sox games. In a way, Benny envied them.

The stencil on the side of the converted school bus read ROSE’S MOBILE BOOK FAIR. In a side window there hung a cardboard sign, “New, Used, and Antiquarian—Something For Everyone,” written in thick black magic marker. Benny had seen the bus several times this season, in Vermont and New Hampshire and upstate New York. It might’ve been there when they’d played Bangor back in May, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d never been inside—he’d never been much for books, unless they were about clowns or vaudeville or something useful.

Tonight, he just wanted a distraction.

The accordion bus door was open and a sign indicated that the mobile book fair was as well, so he went up the couple of steps, ducking his head though he’d never be tall enough to bang it. Oddly enough, he didn’t notice the woman right away. At first, all he could see were the books, and he wondered how she managed to keep them all from falling off the shelves while she drove the old beast of a school bus around the northeastern United States. The metal shelving units had been secured to the walls and lined both sides of the bus. Each shelf had an ingenious device, a bar that went across the spines of the books to hold them in place and could be locked into different notches to accommodate racks of books of different sizes.

“Looking for something to read?” the woman asked, and he blinked and stared at her.

She’d been there all along, of course, but it felt almost as if he’d dreamed her into being. Slender and fit, perhaps forty, she wore black pants and shoes and a tight pink tank with a bright red rose silhouette stretched across her breasts. Rose—for how could she have been anyone else?—had an olive complexion and a proud Roman nose, and she wore a kindly expression, her gaze alert and attentive. Though the interior of the mobile book fair was lit mainly with strings of old white Christmas lights, he could see that her eyes were icy blue. It both pleased and unnerved him to have someone study him with such intensity—such intimacy. People looked at him all the time when he had his clown makeup on, but he couldn’t remember how long it had been since anyone had really
seen
him when he didn’t have it on.

“I doubt you’d have anything for me,” he said. “I’m not a big reader.”

“Didn’t you see the sign,” she said, amused. “Something for everyone. What do you do here?”

He almost lied, but she would’ve taken one look at his little pot belly and stiff shoulders and known he wasn’t an acrobat.

“I’m a clown.”

Her eyes lit up. “I’ve got a small section back here. Not a whole shelf, but a handful of interesting antiquarian books I picked up from an old guy in Cheektowaga, when his carnival went belly up.”

Most of the books were things he’d seen before. Way back in high school, he’d researched Grimaldi and Tovolo and Ricketts, studied the Fratellinis, and watched the films of the great movie directors who had started their careers as circus clowns, like Fellini and Jodorowsky. Charlie Chaplin had become his god, and he mastered the rolling walk of the Little Tramp. There were many schools of comedy, but Benny had never been much interested in telling jokes or doing stand-up. In his heart, he had always been a clown. Though some of them were probably quite valuable, none of the books Rose’s Mobile Book Fair had on her shelves were unfamiliar to him.

He’d just begun to turn away when he noticed the frayed spine of a book lying on its side atop the dozen or so she had shelved at the end of her boys’ adventure section. The worn, faded lettering was almost unreadable in the shadows, but when he slipped his slender fingers in and slid the volume out, the cloth cover made him stiffen in surprise. The comedy and tragedy masks were there, along with the initials G.T.

Quickly he leafed to the title page and a warm feeling spread through him.
Charade: The Secret to Being a Clown
, by Giovanni Tovolo. He had never even heard of the book, had not run across it in any of his reading and research, even in the biography of Tovolo he’d read. The famous Italian character clown had retired after a horrifying accident had taken sixteen lives in a big top fire outside Chicago in 1917. All but forgotten, Tovolo had been a particular fascination of Benny’s because the man had earned his reputation doing characters. Most of the famous clowns were whitefaces or augustes. Tovolo could do anything, at least according to what Benny had read . . . but now, to read it in Tovolo’s own words.

Maybe Tovolo could help him figure out how he ended up spending four years at the wrong end of clown alley. He glanced up at Rose, unable to stifle his excitement and hoping she didn’t take advantage of him.

“How much do you want for this one?” he asked.

She took it from his hand, opened it to see the price she’d penciled on the first page. “Twenty-two dollars.”

Benny swallowed hard, knowing his smile was too thin. Did she not realize that, to certain collectors, this book would be worth a hundred times that? Or did she simply not care, having paid next to nothing for it herself.

He smiled. “I’ll take it.”

Benny’s mother always thought he was funny. All through his childhood he had been encouraged by her laughter, egged on by the way her face would redden and she would wipe at her eyes when he made silly faces or did the big, galumphing walk that would one day become his trademark. At the age of nine he had begun rearranging living room furniture so that he could stumble over it, practicing pratfalls and somersaults and rubber-leg gags—anything that might elicit laughter from his mother. Once she had laughed so hard that she had to wave at him to stop so she could catch her breath. Her chest ached for days afterward, and she had joked often that if he wasn’t careful he would give her a heart attack.

That’s how funny Benny Martini was as a kid.

He loved to make her laugh. He watched the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and forced his friends into helping him reenact their gags. Mrs. Martini took young Benny to the circus every year, and when the clowns made the audience roar with their hilarious antics, he watched with fascination and a dawning envy. For weeks after a circus trip, he would mimic the clowns, practising the faces they pulled, their walks, their timing.