The stranger turned left, left again, reappeared on the far side of a wagon. Brynt hurried. Never once did he look back. She wouldn’t have cared, wanted him even to look back, to see her, so great was her rage. She knew her strength; she had dropped a mountain lion once with a single punch in a wretched little town in Mexico. That was years and years ago; she was much older now; but she was strong enough to handle a man of his size. Fear was for small folk.
He stopped at Felix Fox’s tent. Then he swept inside, was gone. Brynt glowered. She was swinging the shovel at her side and had her head low like a bull and her small eyes pinched tight and she didn’t slow at all. She slid on a patch of mud, then regained her footing and at the tent she took a deep breath and lifted the flap with her shovel and went in.
Inside was dim. Quiet. She paused to let her eyes adjust. A desk, a filing cabinet. Three chairs, empty. The loose boards were grimy with crusted mud as she stepped forward. The back half of the tent was separated by a curtain and behind it Felix had his little bed and wardrobe and his washing pail and she went back there to look but the stranger wasn’t there and Felix wasn’t either, of course he wasn’t, he would be rehearsing the acts in the big top at this hour. But she didn’t understand; the stranger couldn’t have left: there was only the one exit. She went back through and stood with her shoulders bowed to keep from banging the ceiling and the shovel loose at her sides and she listened but she couldn’t hear anything.
“You’re not crazy,” she muttered, catching sight of her hulking figure in the pier glass.
All over the desktop lay a fine dusting of powder, and she stooped, uneasy, and ran two thick fingers through it, leaving a pale crooked trace on the wood. Her fingers came away black.
* * *
When Felix Fox left Mr. Beecher, with all his ledgers and his columns of little numbers and his railroad timetables, and walked tiredly across the muddy grounds to the big top, it was already night. His spectacles were folded in his trouser pocket. The lanterns blazed up ahead. He could hear the horses nickering off by the corral. They would need to be moving on soon, all of them, tickets were just not selling. That was the sum total of Mr. Beecher’s complaint. But they had still not repaired all the wheel castings on the equipment wagons after that big storm caught them outside Bloomington, and the new blacksmith was drunk every morning by breakfast.
Well, let Beecher worry over that, he told himself. His partner handled the money, the organization, the schedules and bookings. Hell, he fairly ran the circus in its touring season. But if Beecher was its brains, Felix Fox was its heart. He was an artist. He’d studied Pierrot in Bologna, puppetry in Prague, he’d worked with acrobats in the sun-kissed villages of Provence. It was he, Felix, who dreamed up the styles and themes and choreographies of the acts, and he, Felix, who worked in the ring every afternoon training them up, and he, Felix, who painted the sets and built the cabinetry and double-checked the knots in the safety lines. Without Beecher, true, there’d be no circus; but without Felix, there’d be no show.
He lit a cheroot as he approached the big top. He could hear laughter from inside. Scootch was working the tickets at the door, cashbox at his neck, hands stuffed in his pockets.
“Slow night?” said Felix softly.
“Slowern a snail’s asshole.” Scootch shrugged, tipping back his hat. “I reckon it’s near to dried up hereabouts, Mr. Fox, sir. If you don’t mind me saying it.”
Felix winked. “We’ll be moving on soon enough, lad,” he said. “Fresh pastures and all that.”
He went in. The bench seats weren’t even a quarter filled. Young Astrid in her greasepaint and ballooning pants was stalking the ring, blowing out a tune on her bugle as she went. A fine talent, that one. Not even fifteen yet, kid could juggle and ropewalk and clown as good as any. She had a bruise from a fall discoloring half her face but the audience would never know it, not when she was up there in makeup. It never ceased to amaze Felix, the beauty of it all, how a shabby tent spattered with mud could transform, in the firelights, into something so beautiful; how the performers with their weary shadowed eyes, their hungry ribs, could be made so beautiful; how the mules with a daub of paint here and there could transform into stallions as graceful as any that ever ran. Oh, there was a magic in it, beyond question.
He put on his spectacles and slowly walked the perimeter of the ring, counting heads despite himself. There were fire lanterns hanging from nails on posts above the bleachers and mirrored candles serving as footlights in the ring and the air was smoky and filled with shadows. Felix counted twenty-three heads, eight of whom he recognized as crew, meaning only fifteen tickets had sold, even at the new reduced price. Pitiful. He took off his spectacles, pinched his eyelids shut a moment. Perhaps the sideshow was better attended.