The Grand Ballast (4 page)

Garland sighed. “Ah,
the
young
.”

“
Go on.” Bode smiled. “I’ll
handle this.”

Garland waggled his
fingers, turned, and left.

“
I don’t need to be
handled.” Danielle’s voice was firm. “But thank you.”

Bode leaned back in his
chair. “My mother always said you’d have to love someone a lot to
divorce them. Most people—even if they loved each other,
once—wouldn’t care enough to undo a marriage that wasn’t
working.”

Danielle swiped her eyes
with her wrist. “I’m not going to be some stupid baby
about it. But it always seemed like—if you had
that, you’d hold onto it.”

Bode nodded. People said
dancing was beautiful, graceful. But there were a lot of ugly
feelings behind a dance—sorrow and regret and anger and terror. A
lot of unpleasant things the body was asked to do. Danielle had
strong calf muscles and rough, callused feet. Her toes were warped
and knobby like root vegetables, the nails broken and torn. She was
special because she understood the pain that trailed beauty like a
sycophant. She welcomed it. “I don’t know a lot about love,” he
said.
Yet.
“But…I
guess, if it doesn’t work out, that doesn’t make what came before
any less real. Right?”

“
I don’t know.” Danielle
tossed her phone onto a pile of street clothes along the wall. “I
guess I just thought, if it worked for them, then maybe there was a
chance… Forget it.”

“
It’s all
right.” Bode felt a surge of exhilaration. He wanted her to
understand. Grief, anger, desolation—they were important. They made
Danielle a living thing, not a doll. “It really is.”
You see the miracles. You see how music and
movement can change us.
He gazed at her,
hoping she believed him. Her eyeliner was a little crooked, the
wing extending farther out on the left side.

He stood and grabbed the
remote for the stereo. Fired it up and turned it to the oldies
radio station. It was a commercial. “Hold on,” he told Danielle.
“This isn’t going to be quite the beautiful gesture I was hoping.”
They listened to an ad for a lawn care product, and then a terrible
old song, “The Last Rain,” came on. He extended his hand, and when
Danielle took it, he pulled her up and into an embrace.

She laughed tearfully into
his shoulder as he danced her across the floor, but then she
started dancing too.

I wasn’t ever what you
needed

I wasn’t there for the
worst of it

You kept your love the
longest secret

But now, my dear, I’m here
again.

And when the rain comes
pouring down

When we’ve seen the end of
summer

I’ll be here to chase away
the pain.

To tell you that I never
mean to go away again.

And together we can pray
for this to be

The last rain…

O’ FAUH

On the border of Flip
County, Bode stood on a patch of grass and gravel beside the train,
smoking a cigarette. It was late afternoon, and they’d stopped just
outside of a town called Hard Knot. Sibyata was behind Kayak, who
was standing on his hands with his legs in the air. Sibyata grabbed
one leg and cranked it into some bizarre position, then pretended
to gnaw on it.

“
Narm
narm narm.” She laughed, showing teeth stained yellow, brown around
the edges. She caught Bode watching, and her smile disappeared.
“Ain’t you just a
darling
type of shitbrick? What you staring at me for,
fizzy thing?”

Bode took a long drag and
glanced away. A few yards to his left, Mr. Lein and the snake
charmer were practicing with the mechanical snake, Harold. Lein had
wads of wrappers in his pockets and a greasy piece of wax paper
stuck to his hat. The charmer played Far Eastern music one handed
on his pungi, his other hand in a cast at his side. Lein held the
snake’s remote and made Harold slither up the charmer’s leg and
across his shoulders.

When Bode looked back at
Sibyata, she was using Kayak’s big toenail to scrape between her
teeth. She rubbed her lips together and made spitting noises,
gazing down at Kayak’s foot. “You got gritty feet.”

In the coffin car,
Roulette was masturbating. They could all hear the
slap-slap
, and Bode
could see Roulette in profile through the open car door, a damp
curl bouncing against his glistening forehead.

“
I want to go to town,”
Sibyata whined. “But we ain’t been paid.”

“
I got some money,”
Roulette called.

“
Oh, hear that?” Sibyata
patted Kayak’s calf. “Jizz City’s got some money, so we can all go
into town.”

“
All except Bode,” said a
loud, clear voice. They turned. Kilroy was striding across the lawn
toward them. “Bode has a meeting.”

“
Aww, rugged nuts.” Sibyata
yawned. “You got a real thing for that babydoll, don’t you, Kil?
Where’d you find him, a solid gold sewer?”

Bode’s stomach went
uncomfortably tight. He wished he could remember what meetings
meant. He searched his clouded memories and didn’t come up with
anything but slivers. Roulette was out of the car now, fastening
his pants.

“
What does it matter where
I found him?” Kilroy asked.

“
I’m only saying…” Sibyata
tossed Kayak’s leg aside. Kayak crumpled into a tangle of limbs on
the grass. “We been riding with you three years now, and you ain’t
ever told us where you got pretty Bode.”

Three years. Bode had been
here three years. He stored that information away.

“
Go on to town, then.”
Kilroy waved her off.

“
How many hours we got to
ride to Hilgarten after your meeting?” Sibyata asked. “Can we get
drunk?”

“
You get drunk before
Hilgarten and I’ll turn your cunt inside out and make you squat
over a fire.”

“
Boy, he’s a dapper dandy,
ain’t he?” Sibyata muttered, rolling her eyes.

Roulette passed her and
thumped her in the ribs with his elbow. “And you’re about as
charming as the reflection of my asshole in the toilet water.” He
spun and walked backwards, facing the rest of them with spread
arms. “Let’s get to town.”

Roulette looked hacked-at—patchy beard,
stringy hair, clothes that hung from him like Spanish moss. But in
the right lighting, with makeup filling in his bald spots, he
became mysterious. His movements on the trapeze were passionate,
even if none of that passion came through in his eyes. When he
collided with Sibyata on the bars, they tangled like spiders, and
there was something horrific and appealing about it.

It seemed possible that the trapeze had once
been to Roulette what dancing had been to Bode. That Roulette had
learned his art carefully from the time he was a very small child;
that he had hoped one day to show the world amazing things.

“
An hour and a half—no
more,” Kilroy called. “Hilgarten’s two hours away. We have a show
there at eight.”

Bode watched Sibyata and
Roulette walk off, Kayak crab crawling after.

The snake charmer cried
out. Harold was wrapped around his injured arm,
squeezing.

“
Come
on,” Mr. Lein snapped at the snake charmer. “The people want to
see
danger
.”

The snake charmer threw
off the snake and cradled his wrist. “Get that
thing
out of here. I’m going to
town.”

Eventually it was just Bode
and Kilroy, with Mr. Lein lurking on the periphery, stroking
Harold. Bode finished his cigarette. Felt Kilroy’s gaze on
him.

“
Lein,” Kilroy said. “Call
Mr. O’ Fauh. Tell him we’re ready.”

***

“
I wish he was mine,” said
the man seated in front of Kilroy’s desk. He said it in in the
sighing way little girls in old cartoons used to wish for ponies or
princes. He didn’t look at Bode for more than a few seconds at a
time.

Bode wondered if anyone
made cartoons anymore. He didn’t know how long it had been since
he’d watched television. When he was a teenager he’d liked an
animated show called
The Wild
Man
—violent, interactive, 3D. If you
bought a special box to hook to your TV, it flecked you with warm
water when a character got his guts shot out. Electroshocked you
when characters were being tortured. A young artist had created it,
intent on horrifying viewers, but the show had died quietly after a
single season.

Kilroy offered Bode a
cigarette. They were sitting side by side on the window ledge in
Kilroy’s car. Bode was shirtless, but Kilroy had let him remain
clothed from the waist down.

The man in the chair was
Charles O’ Fauh. Bode didn’t know much about him beyond that he was
an associate of Kilroy’s—though he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d
met O’ Fauh before.

“
Bode is invaluable to me.”
Kilroy held up a lighter. A few years ago, those words would have
had Bode curling his body like a pissing, wagging dog. He leaned
toward the flame and inhaled, waiting for his cigarette to catch.
“A star, to be sure.”

“
Fuckin’
right I am.” Bode blew smoke toward the ceiling.
Audiences
did
love him. He was a cele-bri-
teeee
.

He had done a lot of
thinking in the forty-eight hours since he’d stopped taking the
pills. His thoughts weren’t terribly articulate—slashes of anger,
crude recollections, an uncharacteristic desire for company. He’d
decided that the most important thing was not to let on to anyone
how confused he was.

“
I’ve
missed you,”
Kilroy had said last
night as they’d lain in bed together after their dance.

Bode glanced now at the
bed. Wondered how many times he’d lain on that mattress, clinging
to threads of awareness. He was surprised to find he recalled last
night moment for moment. He even remembered his dreams.

“
Audiences lerve him.” O’ Fauh had a tendency to pronounce
his
uh
sounds as
er
, and was inclined to speak of Bode in the third
person.

“
I’m fortunate to have
him.” Kilroy wiped under his nose with the back of one hand and
ashed his cigar on the windowsill. Bode stared at the ash. It
looked like a clot of filthy snow. He reached to put the tip of his
finger in it. Stopped as he noticed bruises in a circle around his
wrist. He tried to recall where he’d gotten those.

“
Surely you didn’t come
here simply to drool over Bode,” Kilroy told O’ Fauh.

Why not?
Bode continued to study his wrist. What would
Kilroy do if he started gnawing on it like an animal? If he grinned
with lips slick with fat and blood, little vessels caught in his
teeth, and then went back to chewing until
bone bone bone
and no way to get
through.

O’ Fauh leaned back. His
chair creaked, and Bode noticed a tiny trickle of blood on the
man’s temple—from what looked like a popped pimple. “There’s no
doubt you have wern erv the finest X-shows around.”

Kilroy tensed visibly at
“one of.” “I’d like to see one better,” he said quietly.

O’ Fauh pinched his
too-short pant legs and tried to pull them down. He was as bulky as
Mr. Lein, but without Lein’s sharp nose. His features seemed to
drip down his face, and the bristly roll of loose skin under his
chin looked like a ruff. “You heard erv the Hydra
Arena?”

Kilroy used the ashtray
this time. “Heard of it, yes.”

“
That’s getting serm
attention.”

Kilroy shook his head and
puffed the cigar. “They all get attention at first. Then the
novelty fades and they fold.”

Bode turned to peer out the
window behind him. Evening was falling—a soft, lush blue. Spindly
trees held only a last few dry, curled leaves, so pale they looked
like lights threaded through the drooping branches. Kilroy’s hand
brushed his knee, and he snapped forward again, nearly losing his
cigarette.

“
This one might be ehround
a while.” O’ Fauh scratched his thigh through his trousers. “All
takes place in eh fancy-pantsy swimming pool. And the performers
end the show dead.”

“
Dead?” Kilroy
repeated.

“
Well, not all erv ’em.
Some erv ’em they take close to the edge—bleed ’em, choke ’em—bert
let ’em live. Bert for the finale they have the werns who wanna die
do these, errr, elaborate scenes ernderwater—then they kill ’em.
Pretty ferked erp. And I don’t say that about many
things.”

Bode’s heart pounded. He
didn’t want to think about people dying in X-Shows. Didn’t want to
think about it at all.

“
I fail to see the
entertainment value in what you describe,” Kilroy said coolly. “Any
slob can kill. People can go to the Last Operas if they want to see
someone slaughtered onstage.”