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“What’s the matter?” Sam asked, catching up.
“It’s… Billy,” Johnny said between hiccuping gulps of tears. “He’s… dead.”
The performers, still in their robes and pajamas, came out of their compartments and gathered around the animals’ cages on the open train car. The goat lay in the straw. His neck had been torn out. There was a jagged slice down his belly, and his intestines had been dragged out through the hole. His heart was missing. Elsie the equestrienne turned and vomited into the mud while one of the acrobats patted her back. Sam felt a little green himself.
Johnny wiped his nose on his furred arm. “Who would do such a terrible thing?”
“What is it?” Theta asked, coming up behind Sam. She gasped when she saw the mutilated goat.
“I’ll get a shovel,” Johnny said. “I’ll bury him out yonder.” He walked away, still saying, “Who would do such a terrible thing?”
“I fed him last night,” Theta was saying to Sam and Evie as the train finally got under way. “He was kind of agitated. I think there was somebody in the camp. I kept hearing noises. Last night I’d have said it was just some drunkard, but not after this.”
“Shadow Men?” Evie asked.
“Why would Shadow Men go after a goat and not take us?” Sam said. “I’ve spent time with those fellas. And while I’m sure they’d kill anything, I’m also sure they’d come for us over a goat
.”
Heavy-hearted, Theta returned to the compartment she shared with Evie. Dry leaves littered the floor. “For Pete’s sake, Evil, you are the biggest slob,” Theta said. She swept up the debris, opened the train window a sliver, and dumped it out.
Evie found she enjoyed circus life. She was particularly enamored with the circus’s grande dame, the flamboyant Zarilda. When Zarilda laughed, her whole face laughed. It was a cackle that started low and deep, then rumbled up through her lungs and out of her mouth bright and sharp as machine-gun fire. Sam had told Evie he loved Zarilda’s laugh so much he would tell jokes just to hear it. She dressed in flowing, jewel-toned dresses and capes that swished and swayed as she moved among her circus family, giving a cheek a pat of encouragement or delivering cups of strong Turkish coffee served in delicate china cups that she swore had been carried to this country in a basket strapped to the strong back of her Roma great-grandmother. It was hard to know if anything Zarilda said was true, but when it was so much fun, who cared? Zarilda’s caravan traveled in style.
She absolutely refused to wear a girdle. “Don’t like ’em. They pinch in all the wrong places. Listen here, I’m fat. I know it. I’m fine with it.” She winked. “So’s Arnold.”
Arnold the Painted Man was Zarilda’s great love. Every inch of him—from his toes to his bald head—had been inked. There were even two thick blue-black curlicues around his eyes like Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. Evie had found the sight of Arnold terrifying at first. But soon she came to see him as a walking story. Every tattoo had a tale to tell. “The whale and anchor are for his days as a sailor,” Johnny the Wolf Boy explained. He spoke for Arnold most of the time, Arnold himself being mute. “That one there, the shamrock, is for an old Irish lover, and that”—Johnny pointed to the inked heart just above Arnold’s own—“is for Zarilda.”
“Arnold saw something he shouldn’t have when he was a kid,” Zarilda told Evie later. “Whatever it was, it shut him up for good. But there are other ways of talking. Arnold makes his point clear.”
Just like Arnold’s tattoos, every person in the circus had a story, too. Polly’s parents and the townspeople had seen her beard as a manifestation of something evil. When she was seven, her parents sold her to a traveling carnival, where the owner beat her regularly. She’d had a baby by the time she was fourteen. The baby didn’t live. Finally, Polly saw her chance. They were in Ireland when she stowed away on a ship bound for America. She met Zarilda the first month.
Theta’s palms heated up as she listened to Polly’s tale. She felt the abuse as her own. “I know what it’s like having somebody parade you on a stage every night,” Theta said, nodding at Polly.
“My fur started when I was nine,” Johnny said. “My mother tried shaving it off. I’d be covered in nicks for a few days, and then it would just grow back. Finally she took me to the priest to see if they could exorcise it from me. They said it was a demon. But it was just hair,” Johnny said. “That’s when I ran away and joined up with the circus. I figured this was the one place they could love me like this.” He gave a small dismissive laugh that was completely undone by a hopeful sideways glance.
Mr. Sarkassian had escaped from the Armenian genocide. His entire family had been shot by the Turks. Elsie, an equestrienne, had left her Boston Brahmin family when her marriage to a wealthy playboy became too much to bear. Flora’s family in Brooklyn was so poor, she said, “I never seen soap till I joined the fuckin’ circus!”
“Flora. Language?” Zarilda said with a nod toward Isaiah.
“Aw, shit. Sorry, kid.”
“Everybody’s running from something,” Zarilda said. “But here, everybody’s got a place.”
Theta had bought a newspaper as they’d left their last town, and she and Evie sat side by side eating stale popcorn and scouring its pages for any mention of their friends. Mostly, the local papers reported on local things, which was a relief. On page three, though, was a slim column about the New York Daily News publishing poems and reports sent to reporter T. S. Woodhouse from some possible anarchist collective called the Voice of Tomorrow.
“The Voice of Tomorrow. That’s Memphis. I know it,” Theta said, grinning. She told Evie about the poem Memphis had shared with her back in Harlem. “He’s alive.”
The article went on to say that the Bureau of Investigation was tracing the postmarks of the letters. The last several had been posted from Greenville, Mississippi, the site of the terrible flood. So Memphis was alive, but he was in danger. Theta knew the Shadow Men would be on their way to Greenville now, and she hoped he had moved on.
“Please be safe, Memphis,” Theta said.
The train was passing through Kentucky, which, Mr. Sarkassian had told Isaiah, was a name derived from an Iroquois word that meant “land of tomorrow.” Isaiah liked the way that sounded. Land of Tomorrow. Sometimes he could see tomorrow, though it wasn’t always happy when he did. The train came around a hilly curve of thick green trees. Morning fog poured down the hillside and settled into the valley below. They were coming up on one of those small depots where the people often came out to wave. The driver blew the whistle to let folks who had a mind to come see the circus passing through do that. The train slowed as it neared the depot.
“Where is everybody?” Isaiah asked. He opened his window and stuck his face out. The air felt wrong somehow, and it smelled bad.
“Whew!” Evie said, waving a hand in front of her nose. “Is there a sulfur stream nearby?”
“Looks like coal mining,” Sam said. He put a hand over his nose.
