“You've never knocked on my door in your life. You send Logan, or you text, or you stand fifty feet away and wait for me to notice you like a haunted scarecrow.” He props a shoulder against the frame, and I see the exact moment he clocks that something's off about me. His eyes narrow. The grin starts building. “What do you need?”
“Nothing.”
“You knocked on my door for nothing.”
I hesitate for a second longer. “I need a favor.”
“Oh, this isdelicious.” He flips the knife once, catches it by the blade. “Look at you. You're doing the thing with your jaw. You only do the thing with your jaw when you have to say something you'd rather Logan set you on fire than say.”
I start turning. “Forget it.”
“No, no, no.” He hops down the steps and plants himself in front of me, as close as he's allowed, which is closer than most. “You came to me. Not Logan. Not Jonah. Me. Which means it's either knife-related, or it's depraved, and you have a whole wall of your own knives, so...”
I stare at a point over his shoulder. The Big Top ripples in the morning wind. In the monkey tent, Pip is screaming at Squeak about something.
“The old boards,” I say. “From your act. The ones you retired when you built the spinning wheel.”
Cole narrows his dark eyes. “What about them?”
“You still have them?”
“Equipment trailer, back left, behind Jonah's spare chains.” He tilts his head. “Why does the animal tamer need a knife board?”
My throat works. The words are right there. I could still walk away. I could tell him I want to build a new enrichment structure for the monkeys, and he'd believe me, and I'd go back to my trailer and stare at Idaho and think about her mouth for the next twelve days and do nothing about it.
“I need to cut a hole in one,” I find myself saying.
Cole blinks. “A hole.”
“A hole.”
“What kind of hole?”
“You know what kind of hole.”
Silence. One second. Two.
Then his face does something I've only seen it do around fresh blood—it lights up from the inside, unholy, delighted, every tooth on display.
“No.”
“Cole—”
“A glory hole. You're asking me to help you build aglory hole.Out of my knife board.” He presses a hand flat against his chest. “This is the greatest morning of my life. I need to sit down. I need a cigarette. I need to write this in a journal so future generations?—”
“I'll ask Jonah.”
“You willnotask Jonah.” He's already moving, herding me toward the equipment trailer with his hands without touching me, the way all of them have learned to steer me over twenty years. “This requires an artist. This requires someone who understands that the hole is aframe, Rowe. Placement is everything. Height is everything.”
“Please stop talking.”
“I will never stop talking about this. Not ever. When I'm eighty, this is the story I'm telling at your funeral.”
The equipment trailer smells of machine oil and canvas. Cole hauls the boards out from behind Jonah's chains one by one—big slabs of poplar, four feet by seven, scarred with two decades of blade strikes, the faded silhouette of a woman's outline still ghosted on the oldest one in chipped paint.
“Not that one,” I say.
“Agreed. Weird energy.” He flips the next board around. Clean-ish. Solid. A constellation of knife scars across the top third and nothing below the waist. He raps a knuckle against the wood. “This one. Good thickness. She kneels on the far side, you stand on this side, and nobody's driving a splinter into anything load-bearing.”
