Nightmare Carnival

The Brandini Brothers Circus roasted peanuts when it set up camp for a show. It was the same batch of peanuts, heated as many times as you could without turning them rancid. If anyone was ever stupid enough to buy some, they’d crack a tooth as soon as they bit down.

I thought it was awful when I went to the circus and saw it, but as I was saying so to the peanut vendor, a man in a green coat tapped me on the shoulder. The coat was velvet, brushed to within an inch of its life, and his hair was blond and shellacked as the peanuts.

“There’s no danger, I promise you,” he said. “The people who come to see us would never buy peanuts for what we charge. Popcorn’s a quarter of the price, and the peanut smell comes free.”

You’d think a thing like that has to be a flat untruth — it felt like one at first — but the one thing the Brandinis did better than run a circus was to never tell an absolute lie.

It was Matthew Brandini who wore the green coat. He introduced himself to me, and explained he went by Matteo for the circus; it wasn’t truly his name, but it wasn’t a whole-cloth fraud. That’s how the Brandini Brothers were about everything.

No one ever did buy peanuts, so far as I could see, but the smell did what it was supposed to do. The popcorn man went through a dozen sacks of corn at every show.

After I joined up with the circus that night, that was the first thing I carried.

I’d grown up the biggest in my family, an inch taller than my older brother, as wide as my father in the shoulders by the time I was fifteen, and that had been ten years gone. I’d been on the verge of quarry work when the Brandinis came to town. If my parents were sad to see me go, they didn’t say anything — it wasn’t as though they could afford to feed me anymore.

You got room and board with the Brandinis, on top of your wages, and as soon as I knew Brandini was going to ask, I knew I’d be saying yes.

(I hadn’t had much experience with employment — it was hard back home, since the war — but you know when work is coming your way: Matthew Brandini told me the truth about the peanuts, and he was looking at me the way men who needed things taken care of had always looked at me.)

It wasn’t bad, as work went. My younger brother was in the quarries and hadn’t come out the same, and my older brother had joined up with the railroads, and barely knew where he was writing from, when he wrote home. At the circus, at least you weren’t working alone, and no one would let you starve, and there were always things to look at that made you feel like the world was exciting.

The clowns I could have done without — they seemed strange and cruel in the makeup even though I knew they weren’t — but we had a team of dogs that danced whenever the right song played, and the four contortionist girls in spangles who always seemed glamorous, smoking outside their trailer wearing thirdhand robes.

I liked all of it, except the lions.

* * *

Daisy was one of the loaders: she’d come from lumber country, and swung a hammer twice as fast as I could. She could have spiked the whole tent alone, I always thought, watching the hammer appear and disappear above the line of backs, and from the space the others gave her to do it, they thought the same.

She wasn’t much for talking, but what she said was always frank, and that mattered more, probably.

“They’re only a pair of old cougars,” she said during my first unload. We were laying sawdust, and she’d caught me looking over at the cage. “Nothing to see there.”

But I kept glancing over, because there were shadows at their edges that moved even when they weren’t moving and drew your eye, though there was never anything there, and even before you’d lifted your head you felt like a fool.

Next time I did it, she tossed her braid over her far shoulder to stare me down and said, “Don’t keep looking at them.”

I kept my eyes on my work after that.

That was all she said about it — not one for company — but she was a quick worker. She steered the wheelbarrow like a racecar driver and handled the shovel like a musician’s baton; the sawdust was as even as new snow, except for the crescent she left around the lion cage.

I did look right at them once, early on. Someone had abandoned the cage a moment on the way to rolling them into the train car, and I took a corner too quickly and startled them.

They were sitting up, two she-lions, unblinking. They looked at me.

You saw them, of course, you saw them all the time, every night in the ring you saw them. But there’s seeing and then there’s seeing.

I don’t remember what they looked like. I was cold, I remember; I was shaking all over for half an hour. Daisy had to hold the other end of everything I carried that night just to keep it steady, until even Joseph the rigger noticed, from three cars away, and came over.

“Nobody’s business,” said Daisy when Joseph asked what happened, in a tone I’d never heard from her. He left us alone.