Nightmare Carnival

But then, instead of explaining that, she releases the brake, keys the ignition, and turns the truck off the gravel, back toward Clarkston and civilization, where people cling to their days amid the memories of their dead, and shut their houses tight against the prairie wind, and play their parts, simply by doing their best to go on living.

HIBBLER’S MINIONS by Jeffrey Ford

It was 1933, and we wintered at the Dripping Springs west of Okmulgee. The Dust Bowl was raging, money was scarce. People didn’t buy what they didn’t need, but one thing they still needed was Wonder. The folks out on the Great Plains could always scrape together a dime or two for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors, a wandering menagerie of freaks and exotic beasts. We put on shows from Oklahoma to Ohio and back each year. Granted, the custom of carnivals was dying, and it faded another few inches with every town we rolled into. Dying wasn’t dead, though, and in those days that was something.

Ichbon was an old-timer by then, having started out with Barnum in New York City at the American Museum when still in his teens. The great showman helped set the young assistant up with connections and cash to run the Caravan of Splendors. By the time I came to the Maestro, as we were required to call Ichbon, he had seen all the wonder he could stomach, and at nights was given to drinking Old Overholt. Although he’d lost his sense of splendor, he retained his shrewdness for a dollar through those weary years and always managed to keep us in food, drink, and a little pocket money. He dressed like an admiral, complete with a cocked hat ever askew on his bald head. His trucks were dented, his trailers were splintered and rickety, his tent was threadbare, his banners were moth eaten, and his beasts were starving. A lot of us, though, in the grasp of the Maestro, had nothing but the show between us and destitution. Who would hire a man born with an extra face on the back of his head? I was Janus, the Man Who Sees Past and Future. In reality, I saw neither, and even the present was murky.

On a day in late February, Ichbon instructed the laborers, also known in their act as the Three Miserable Clowns, to erect the tent so as to check it for repairs. In a few weeks we were due to set out on that year’s journey. I was standing with him beneath the vaulted canvas, the ground still frozen beneath our feet, the sunlight showing dimly through the fabric. “What do you see in the future, Janus?” he asked me.

“Hopefully dinner,” I replied.

“I predict a banner year for the caravan,” he said.

“What makes you optimistic?”

“People are in such desperate straits, they’ll seek refuge in nostalgia.”

“Refuge we shall give them,” I said.

“Nostalgia,” said Ichbon, “is the syrup on the missing hotcakes.”

Mirchland, the dwarf, appeared then through the tent’s entrance with a stranger following. “Maestro,” he said, “this is Mr. Arvet. He’s come from all the way up by Black Mesa in the Panhandle to see you.”

I could tell the man was a farmer by his overalls and boots, and that he was beset with hard times by the look in his eyes. His face was a dry streambed of wrinkles. Ichbon took off the admiral hat and bowed low. “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said. He straightened and put his hand out to the man. “I am Ichbon.” The Maestro’s credo about the public was “Treat them each like visiting emissaries from a venerable land. It’s good for the cash box.” The two shook hands. I expected the fellow to ask to join the show. I’d seen it before a hundred times. But instead he said, “I have something to sell you.”

“What might that be?” asked Ichbon.

“It’s out in my truck in a crate.”

“An animal?”

“We had a black blizzard back in the fall. God’s own wrath came barreling across the dead fields a mile high, and in its clouds it bore the face of Satan. You couldn’t touch nobody in the midst of it or the electricity in the air would throw you apart. When it passed it left behind a plague of centipedes and a beast.”

“Bring your truck in under the big top,” said the Maestro, “and I’ll have the clowns unload it.”

“The big top,” I thought, looking up at the tattered canvas, and my other face laughed. I stopped laughing, though, when the Miserable Clowns, using all their strength, unloaded a long crate from the back of the truck. The sounds that issued forth from it reverberated inside the tent, reed thin but raspy, and their strangeness made my hair stand up. A moment later, a horrible stench engulfed us.

“Pungent,” said Ichbon and drew out his handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. From behind his makeshift mask, he asked Mr. Arvet, “Can you bring it out of the crate?”

“I made the box so the end slides open,” said the farmer. “Do you have a cage of some sort we can empty it into?”