Nightmare Carnival

Daisy smoked sometimes, when it was cold outside and she’d fought with Allan (they didn’t get along) or with Joseph (they got along horribly well, right up until they didn’t). Maybe the smoking was to keep her out of fistfights — Peter said it once — but I didn’t think so. She was the kind to level you with a single punch and leave.

When she offered me a drag I took it, an excuse to stay with her a little while. It was deep night by then; only the parakeets and the two of us were left awake. Their song carried faintly on the breeze from where they were, all the way out in the gallery.

Finally, I handed back the cigarette and asked, “What happened to Joseph?”

The lions were in their cage; when I spoke, their ears twitched once, in unison.

She grinned around the stream of smoke between her lips. “Who knows with him. Did he fall out of his bunk again?”

“I mean before.”

“Oh.” She took a drag, let the smoke rise until it vanished. “He went out one night. He was gone so long I went looking for him. Found him in front of the cage slumped like the dead, though he doesn’t remember it now. Nothing at all.”

“What do you think happened?”

“It’s cold,” she said. She dropped the cigarette, hauled herself back inside.

But she’d glanced over at the animal gallery like she couldn’t help it, and the lions hadn’t moved when she spoke, not a paw, not an ear.

For a long time after she went inside I stared at the corpse of Daisy’s cigarette and tried to shake the feeling that the mountain lions were too big for that cage, that it couldn’t hold them, that they should be a thousand thousand miles away from here.

One day when I wheeled the sawdust barrow out, Carvessa was next to the lion cage, peering in and clicking his tongue against his teeth like he was tending a pair of housecats.

“You shouldn’t be looking at my girls like you do,” Carvessa said, still watching the cat and not me, absently scratching behind its ear.

It sent shivers all through me to see him do it, like standing at the edge of Harris Gorge back home and looking down at the tops of trees that were so far down it seemed like a carpet of moss, not pines and oaks and maples anymore.

He shouldn’t have been petting it. That wasn’t just some cougar under his hands; that cat wasn’t his.

“Where did you find them?” My throat was dry.

He looked up at me, finally, and his eyes were as flat and sunken and horrible as those of either of the cats.

“Don’t you like them?”

“They shouldn’t be caged,” I said. I was sure, but the words shook.

“It takes some doing,” he said, low and edged. “That territory’s farther away from anywhere you’ve been that you’d never find it without me. Rough hunting, out where you can catch cats like these, you’d have to be willing to give up an awful lot in that chase. But I could tell you. You want one? I’ll tell you how.”

No, I thought to my bones, like I’d screamed it.

“I want to finish here,” I said, and tapped the broom on the ground until he stepped aside at last and turned the corner of the cage, back to camp.

The cats’ heads swiveled to watch him go. Nothing else moved but the tips of their tails, twitching back and forth in time with each other.

When it struck me that they might turn their heads back and look at me, my ankles felt like they’d gone hollow, and I raced that broom across the ground, dragging grass and dirt with me without ever stopping. I’d been holding the broom handle too tight. My fingers were numb an hour after.

I must have made up my mind then, though it feels now like I must have made up my mind as soon as I ever saw the lion cage.

When rubes came to look at them, they all clicked their teeth, too, and pursed their lips and mewled and murmured to each other about what a pretty pair of cats they were: stupidest people I ever saw.

“Can you get him drunk?” I asked Daisy at the fire, after I’d decided.

She looked at me for a little while. A whole cigarette came and went. Then she said, without asking who I meant, “He already knows how I feel about him. Wouldn’t work. I’ll ask Peter.”

“Have you ever looked at them?”

She shook her head. “Never had the nerve,” she said, her throat so tight I could barely hear.

I said, “Don’t come looking for me, whatever you hear.”

Her eyebrows went up. Then she handed me her flask.

“You’ll need this,” she said.

The Brandini Brothers Circus shut up shop late — card games ran till dawn in the crew quarters, you could slip a key from the Brandini car without anyone missing you. It was dead night by the time the place had settled in to sleep.

My lantern light was shaking all the way out to the cage, because my hand knew better than I did that I was a fool.

The ferrets were tumbling, and a few of the parakeets chirped hopefully when they saw light. But when I approached the lion cage, it got silent.

Not just the birds; the whole night was holding its breath, and as the lions drew themselves out of the dark and sat up to watch me, I could see their claws scraping against a floor that somehow made no sound.