The Grand Ballast

THE

GRAND BALLAST

J.A. Rock

http://www.jarockauthor.com

This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.

The Grand Ballast

Copyright © 2015 by J.A. Rock

Cover Art by MC Blackman

Layout: J.A. Rock

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system without the written
permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers
may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all
other inquiries, contact [email protected].

ISBN:
9781310359552

First edition

June 2015

Also available in paperback:

ISBN:
978-1503160637

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Dedication

For all the people who make
things.

PART ONE

1.

THE THIRD SHOW

The night the snake charmer
broke his wrist, Bode stopped taking his pills.

The show was sloppy—an
unexpected performance Kilroy had added after the first two sold
out. Kayak, the contortionist, couldn’t get his own cock into his
mouth. Roulette and Sibyata nearly missed a catch on the trapeze.
The snake charmer toppled from the bench while playing his pungi
and landed wrong on his arm. He screamed. Members of the audience
clapped weakly, unsure whether the tragedy had been staged for
their benefit, while the mechanical snake slithered toward the
exit, rattling its steel tail.

Bode had to breathe deeply
and concentrate on cotton candy during his act, because his mind
kept breaking through the Haze. His nerves rose and bloomed
suddenly, and he started to choke on Long John’s dick. That hadn’t
happened in…months? Years? In what little memory Bode
retained.

After the show. After the
show, if there’s time, I’ll get some fucking cotton
candy.

Calliope music filled the
big top tent in swells and stretches. The tent flap whiffled in the
breeze, revealing the littered ground outside and the
ticket-taker’s jaunty purple shoes. Backstage, he could still hear
the snake charmer moaning. With each moan, LJ’s hand tightened in
Bode’s hair.

The others took their
nightly dose of the Haze in the dressing room immediately after the
show. But Bode left his pills in the small plastic medicine cup and
started to remove his makeup.

“
Pack it in, pack it out;
you wanna see this?” Sibyata pulled down her leotard to show her
scarred and bony chest—small, dented breasts like bruised oranges.
Pulled it down further to reveal a small crater, about two inches
in diameter and one inch deep, in the flesh under her ribs. “Thass
what Kilroy had the doctor put in. So Rou could fuck me sideways.”
She chuckled, a horrible guzzling sound. Then the leotard was off
and kicked to the side, and she was throwing on a loose T-shirt.
“Ay-ah-ay-ah. Nobody’ll look at a dead girl. That’s what I am, huh?
Nobody wants to drizzle this clam. Bode, what’s wrong with my
pussy? All these years, and still tighter than a mouse’s ear.” She
slapped his shoulder. “I bet it’s tighter ’n your ass.”

Most nights she was easy to
ignore, but tonight Bode turned to her. “Shut up.”

“
You had a regular fuck
pyramid tonight, didn’tchoo? LJ plowing your mouth while Kilroy
stabbed your chute? Then the rest of us piled on.” She walked
behind him and pulled his hair, then leaned down in his face and
flicked her tongue repeatedly against the inside of her cheek.
“Cocksuckeerrrrr,” she murmured.

He spun in the chair and
punched her thigh.

“
Yow. Ass!”

He reared back again and
punched her between the legs.

“
Oh,
fuck
!” She gripped her crotch and, with her other hand, raked her
nails across his forehead. Blood trickled over his eyebrow and into
his eye. Sibyata retreated to the corner, grabbed her hairspray and
blasted half the can in his direction before she stormed out. He
coughed, bewildered by the strength of his own anger.

The others didn’t appear to
notice the fight. They exchanged their costumes for loose sleep
clothes and headed outside to the coffin car, gravel crunching
under their feet.

Bode lingered in front of
the mirror with its frame of broken bulbs and removed his makeup
slowly. He stared into the glass until his lips curled upward,
seemingly of their own accord. “Hello, stranger,” he murmured. The
plastic cup in front of him held two pills, bright blue and
iridescent like dyed pearls. Bode thought about throwing them away
but didn’t.

Nearly half an hour later
he was starting to appreciate the absence of the Haze. He felt
alert and attuned to the slightest sound, like an animal hunting on
a cold night, waiting for a message from the wind. The world
unaltered and defogged was a sorry place, but it was sharp and
surprising, and he drew some satisfaction from how quickly things
moved here—moments, molecules, his own reflection.

“’
ello, Gov’nah,” he said
to himself in an over-the-top British accent. “’eyyyy…” He squinted
one eye and pointed at the mirror. “Don’t Oi know yaoouuu from
somewhe’s?”

He pushed his chair back.
“Oh, fuck.” He looked into the mirror again and laughed, stifling
the sound immediately with one hand. He spread his fingers so that
his lips stuck out of the gap. “
Fuck
. Fuuuuu—” He scissored his
fingers, clamping his lips together and turning the word into a
mumble. Slowly brought his hand down. “You didn’t used to say
‘fuck,’” he whispered to his reflection.

He was staring with his
head tilted and his eyes wide, pretending to be a doll, a creepy
doll, when the curtain over the door parted and Kilroy walked in.
Kilroy wore his shabby red and black tailcoat and his riding boots,
but not his hat. His fine blond hair was plastered to his head,
whorled in sweat-darkened patches. He carried the ring stick—a
thick, tough stem, blanched as bone and covered in
thorns.

“
Bodeee.” He spoke as
though Bode were an old friend he hadn’t seen in some time. He
twirled the ring stick once. Bode tried not to flinch.

Kilroy would have made a
better creepy doll than Bode. He had light blue eyes and full lips
and skin so pale it seemed to give off a glow like a winter halo.
He wasn’t beautiful—he looked too clever, too
fast
for the stillness beauty
required. But Bode had once thought him very appealing. The memory
of that time, which the Haze would have buried any other day,
pricked him in a dozen places and drew strings of blood.

Kilroy spotted the
unemptied pill cup. “Oh.” He used the stick to tilt the cup toward
him and peered inside. “Ohhh.” He glanced at Bode. “Take your
medicine.”

Bode laughed. “I’m not
taking those anymore, you fuckin’ hideous old man.”

Kilroy smiled. His mouth
often moved languorously in private moments, though in the ring the
grin blazed across his face. “How old do you think you are,
Bode?”

Bode didn’t
answer.

“
Because I’m quite young,”
Kilroy said.

“
I’m younger.” Bode was
sure of that much. The Haze had made it hard to keep
track.

Kilroy stirred the cup with
the end of the ring stick. The tips of the stick’s thorns were
burnt-looking. “I thought we had a deal.”

Bode hunched. “I don’t know
anymore.”

“
Part of the deal is you
don’t have to know. You just have to do.”

Bode leaned back, making
the chair creak. A jewelry chain was draped over one of the broken
bulbs to the left of the mirror. In some towns, they weren’t given
dressing rooms—they got ready in the equipment car of the train.
But some towns were pleased to host them. Some gave them broken
bulbs. “I don’t want to do it anymore. I hate you.
Fucker.”

Kilroy was quiet. He tipped
the cup over and the blue pills skittered across the
table.

You didn’t used to say
fuck.

Bode watched from the
corner of his eye as Kilroy drew the ring stick back to his side.
“You’ve paid your debt, then?”

Bode stared at the mirror.
A small stream of sweat trickled down from one armpit. His throat
went tight and his eyes blurred. He should have been ready for
this. Without the Haze, ghosts had enormous power over him, and
Kilroy knew that.

Kilroy tapped the ring
stick lightly against Bode’s shoulder. The sharpness of the thorns
forced Bode to focus. He sat straight and twitched, wanting to
shrug off the stick but knowing better than to try.

“
I’ll still work for you.”
Bode’s gaze traced a streak on the mirror. “But I don’t want the
Haze.”

Kilroy dragged the thorns
in a slow, sweeping zigzag down his back. Bode let out an uneven
breath. He glanced down at the table’s edge, his cock hardening.
Each night, in the ring, he could have pleasure if he chose. A
cloud of it, made dull by its own abundance. The Haze gave him an
artificial ecstasy, steroidal orgasms that brought no joy and left
no memory. This was different.

The sensation was smaller,
concentrated, but it was real. And it brought with it the
recollection of a thousand times he’d felt like this around Kilroy
Ballast: feverish and squally with rebellion and youth and a skin
of love with no meat to it. So strange, what he’d once mistaken for
love—like an untrained dog asked to find someone buried in snow,
uncovering rags and stones and creatures’ dens without
understanding there was a larger goal, a prize beyond these small,
dubious treasures.

Now Kilroy’s hands were on
him, the ring stick set aside—and good, because of all the
indignities Bode had suffered over the last however many years, the
ring stick was the worst. Heat dipped into him like an oar,
vanished as Kilroy pulled him from his chair, then returned as
Kilroy spun him and kissed him.

They shared their hunger
until Kilroy made the feast one-sided, stilled Bode with his
aggression. Bode’s lips hurt. His scalp too—Kilroy was pulling his
hair. Kilroy pressed his lips to the crook of Bode’s shoulder and
whispered, “All right. But I need to know you can still perform
without it.”

Their limbs were gold in
the light from the bulbs. Undrugged, Bode could see more,
understand more—and yet the newness was so overwhelming he didn’t
feel sure of anything except the roar in his bones, the hot dash of
blood from his heart through the whole of him. He bit Kilroy during
their next kiss, and Kilroy chuckled, clapping him between the
shoulders.

“
You’re my star
attraction.” Kilroy held him tightly, rocking him. “I can’t lose
you.”

Bode turned to nuzzle
Kilroy’s cheek, and Kilroy’s hand slid to his cock. Kilroy gripped
hard, too hard, and the dance was familiar, though he and Kilroy
had both become unrecognizable since the day they’d first taken
hands and stepped out onto the floor.

Bode wished for the
strength to hate Kilroy, but his mind recycled stars, calliope
music, the glittering oddity of a circus in a silent town full of
empty people. An hour ago, he’d been someone else, sleepwalking his
way through a performance his muscles knew better than his mind.
Now he was awake and ready to lash the world like rain.