Pilo Traveling Show (Pilo Family Circus #2)

9. ABOVE

The campsite was a bustle of activity, waking Jamie from a few hours of fitful sleep not easily come by in the clown tent. All night the weird noises and sleep-talking utterances of Doopy and Goshy had colored his dreams with sickly pink, red, and blue monsters rising from the depths of garish rainbow lakes to lunge at him with clattering teeth.

He rose and went to find Dean, who'd been helping dismantle tents and trying to act as naturally and fearlessly as he could. Jamie took him over near the gazebo, where they crouched from the carnies' sight behind a waist-high wall of hedge. Jamie said, "There's a circus down there, bigger than this one. I went through those gate things and saw it."

"Down where?" said Dean.

"I'm not sure. But it can be reached with the gates and with those elevators. The lifts can take you anywhere in the world. We'd just need to learn the number code of each location and to take one of those card gizmos they call pass-outs." Jamie related all he'd seen yesterday, including the run in with Steve and the apparent plan of Gonko's show: to starve out the show beneath and get George removed as boss.

"So how do we use this?" said Dean.

"See that's the thing. Gonko was terrified that I'd blabbed down there about what he's doing up here."

"Terrified?" Dean said skeptically.

"He expressed it with homicidal anger, but yes. So he has a weakness there, but it does us no real good. If they learn down there what he's doing, they'll punish him, maybe kill him, maybe kill us for helping him, then just put someone else in charge of the clowns. We'll be just as trapped beneath as we are up here. And having been down there, I can tell you, we're better off up here. At least we're not getting whipped all day like they are."

Dean scoffed. "Just the odd drowning up here, right?"

"You can't make Gonko mad like that. Obey him and you're fine. You shouldn't have gone up onstage."

"Wasn't me, like I told you. It has to be the face paint—it changed me. I came back to myself when it washed off."

"So here's what you do. Tell Gonko you don't want to be a clown, that you'll do some other job. Say sorry for yesterday, suck up to him, then ask if you can be a ticket collector."

"Why?"

"I just have a feeling it might be useful if you learn how those gates work."

"All right. But get me a tub of that face paint."

"Why, Dean?"

"Because I remember how I felt wearing it. Bulletproof. Hell, I even beat up a couple of those other clowns. And it felt like I could have taken on Gonko and won."

"Bad idea, Dean."

"Just telling you how it felt. Get me some of that face paint. I'll hide it until I need to use it. Okay?"

"Fine. How's Jodi?"

Dean's smile was grim. "You hear her screaming when they took the makeup off her? She freaked out, fought like a wildcat. Five of them had to hold her down. Now she's Emerald again, Queen of the Park. And I'm her Romeo, but she keeps asking what happened to my big muscles." He laughed. "This is some ride you got us on, bro."

Jamie sighed. "Maybe you can blame me for it all some other time? I'm trying to keep myself together here and that really doesn't help."

"All right, I'll blame you later. Let's get this out of the way."

They went back to the others, where Gonko watched, smiling, as Rufshod and Doopy squabbled and wrestled over whose job it was to tidy up the mattresses. Dean said, "Gonko, sir?"

"Well hi hi hi, Deeby. Wanna go for a swim?"

"It's Dean, sir, with all due respect, not Deeby. Just wanted to tell you I don't want to be a clown. You remember when I invited you into my apartment then begged and pleaded to join the clown show?"

Jamie winced at this boldness but Gonko just said, "Yeah, yeah. So spit it out, chump. I got word that George is having another show today so we've gotta hustle and get this show to a new location."

"Why are we moving, Gonko?" said Jamie.

"Curls was right," said Gonko. "The trick authorities smell a rat around here. You seen all the cop cars coming through? All last night and this morning. Not just cops either, some of those fancy intel cars, what with the men in dark sunglasses and all that fun. Normal tricks won't see us too clear, but you never know what gizmos those fancy dark sunglasses tricks might have. So we're shifting to a spot north of here, half an hour away. Plus we used up a good chunk of local tricks already. No point milking 'em again."

"Well, obviously I need to make myself useful, sir," said Dean. "How about I help the ticket collectors? I admit I'm not much of a clown."

Gonko shrugged. "Talk to Curls. But in the meantime you can drive the truck."

"What truck?"

On cue, Rufshod pulled into the car park in jerking lurches with a large semi-trailer. The truck clipped a tree, looked ready to veer right through the tents.

"Brakes!" someone screamed at him.

"I already broke it," Rufshod called, then figured out the brakes and brought the truck to a lurching stop. He jumped down, hauled from the passenger side the hog tied driver and dumped him in the toilet block.

"Load up!" Gonko screamed. In little more than an hour the box trailer had been filled with tent parts, the seats, and the disassembled stage. The caravan (to its owners' chagrin) had to be broken to parts again to fit. Dean drove with Gonko in the passenger seat, who said nothing but the occasional "Turn here." They dropped the load off at the new campsite—this one further from civilization than was Wiley Park. In three trips, all performers and apparatus had been moved, leaving no trace of themselves at the campsite beyond marks in the ground, and the truck driver, slowly regaining consciousness.

At the new site, the tents were soon up, the stage was reassembled, and the kissing booth was put in place. The freaks settled uneasily in their new home. Light was beginning to fade, and the ticket collectors (Dean among them) had a longer walk to the nearest train station to set up their gates. Curls had grunted his indifference to Dean joining their ranks; it was no secret Curls wanted an easier job than this, running a card game in the alley rather than being the guy in George's likely firing line at the end of each failed show day below.

Rufshod took the truck a short drive away and ditched it, in case it had been reported stolen by now. "So how many shows we gonna have to do up here?" he asked as the clowns sat relaxing in the brief interval before tricks arrived.

"Dunno, Ruf," Gonko said, poking a freshly made baby Goshy with a stem of grass, making it wriggle around crying "Help!" playfully. Goshy and Doopy watched, the latter fascinated, the former indecipherable. "See, this three-days-straight thing? Weird, and it tells us it's working. They're getting edgy, the bosses below."

"So why'd they wait so long to give George the go-ahead?"

"No one knows how they think. They see things we don't and are blind to some of what we see. But they had plenty of dust down there to last 'em, I saw piles of it myself. Managed to swipe a little, once or twice. See, they don't use it like we do neither. They just keep it around in little mounds and it keeps 'em fed til it slowly fades away. I seen 'em down there take a single grain of it, and just by looking at it they can see the whole life of the trick it come from. They could eat the trick's pain or taste the trick's pleasure, all that stuff. And they could look out through the trick's eyes and see what it could see . . . if the trick's still alive, that is. It's not just their food, it's their entertainment. And they get bored easy. I'd guess George could count on one hand the number of failed shows he's allowed to put on before they lose patience and send for him."

"And put Kurt in charge?" said Rufshod.

"Good old Kurt, who will owe us all kinds of payback, payback of the Thanks, clowns kind. Oh, and by the way. If the MM did as I asked, a JJ beat down is on tonight. So, come with me below when we're done here. Jamie, you too. You're in for a little surprise.

But all of you, keep your mouths shut and don't go near the fortuneteller. Our situation's dicey til George is gone."

Doopy's lips were on Jamie's ears and the loudness of his voice made Jamie jump and scream. "A little surprise," said Doopy. "Golly, ain't that swell?"

Goshy hissed like a snake.

"Don't be mean, Goshy. It's time to make the people laugh again, just like a clown, Goshy. You gots to put on your funnies, you just gotta!"

And they did. As with last night, the tricks arrived fresh off the commuter train, weary from work, needing showers and bathrooms, but all that was forgotten as the music box handle twisted, sprinkling its notes and inviting them all into a cheerful waking dream. The sideshow games did a better trade tonight, despite the declining mood of unrested carnies who insulted and snapped at the tricks.

The clown show was a replica of yesterday's, with Jamie finding (to his own disquiet) that he enjoyed himself, loved the crowd's laughter even though he knew it was not real, that they were caught up in this as much as him. Onstage, there was no room or time to think about it, there were rolling pins and brick pies to dodge, and that was a blessing.

Emerald did another whopping trade, despite a prima donna threat not to host her booth tonight. In fact, she pulled in more powder than the rest of the show combined while the gypsy women cooed their approval at her shoulders.

The freaks did well, courtesy of Fatso, though the move had upset him and he was not as cheerful as usual. Nor had his special protein powder had time to heal the previous two shows' bite gouges. His one-liners ("The boss says to me, what's eating you Fatso . . . I says, well, I am,") were delivered deadpan flat. "Nonsense," the head-in-a-jar rebutted. "Healthy discourse. Pish posh!"

Exhausted, the carnies nonetheless collected the day's takings with the same greedy eagerness. It took well into the night for the lot of it to be bagged and stashed. Gonko paid everyone double yesterday's wages with plenty left over, this time including Jamie and Dean.

The ticket collectors got back just in time to coincide with George's show below. Once the tricks were herded through the gates, Dean took Jamie aside. "Come for a walk," he said. "Got something to show you." They went out of earshot of the rest of the carnies. Dean pulled from his pocket a folded piece of paper. "Map," he said. "See? I think this is the kind of thing you were after, right?"

It was a large map of the world, old and battered with small digits on many parts of each country and continent (only Antarctica was missing.) Some of the numbers were too small to read without a magnifying glass. Jamie pointed to them. "Are those numbers what I think they are?"

"Lift codes. Curls gave this to me. He hates his job; he's happy to have a new guy keen to do it, so he's telling me everything. I already know how the gates work. Well, not how they work but how to use them. The numbers, you put those in the lift somehow, on the lever or whatever. Can take you almost anywhere, except you see those gaps, where there's deserts or bodies of water. Ticketers need to know all this, since they're meant to be going to other circuses all over the place to set up gates."

"Can you get another copy of this?" said Jamie. "Maybe it'll be useful to have."

"I'll ask. And I'll show you how to do the gates later, when we won't be seen. As for this powder, don't use it."

"Hadn't planned to, but why do you say so?"

"Bad feeling, that's all. Keep it for trading or bribing, but don't melt it and drink it like the others do."

"Jamie!" Gonko's voice called across the dark. "Cometh hither, my sweet. We go below."

"A big surprise!" Doopy called. "It's gonna be soooo great."

Jamie sighed heavily. "Here goes."

Dean clapped him on the shoulder. "Good luck, stay cool."

***