The weather was cold and wet, and all day the crowds had been thin in the ten-in-one tent. Up on their platform, Fern and Rose sat on a wide threadbare chair, flanked by a pair of saxophones on stands. Fern read a comic book and Rose practiced her knitting. Baby Carlotta, the fat lady, had recently taught Rose how to knit. There was a hole where Rose had dropped a stitch and she didn’t know how to fix it. She looked over at Carlotta, who sat with her husband, Eddie the Human Skeleton. Eddie and Carlotta were making a Cat’s Cradle with Carlotta’s yarn, pinching and looping the yarn into unusual shapes, and passing the contraption from his hands to hers and back again. To the right of Fern and Rose was Sammy, who had a horny growth protruding from his cheek. The comic book Fern was reading belonged to Sammy. He kept a stash of them under the skirt of worn velveteen frilling his chair: Marvel Comics, Detective Comics, Action Comics, All-American Comics. Slam Bradley, the Batman, the Crimson Avenger and his trusty valet, Wing How, and, Fern’s favorite, Superman.
Outside, Blackie Hyde, the talker, and also the proprietor of Hyde Amusement Co.’s Weirdest Show on Earth, had been talking up a storm, trying to gather a tip, or a crowd, to buy tickets for the ten-in-one tent, and wasn’t having much luck. Blackie was an Albino, wearing a white suit, grimy at the seat and elbows, with a few silver sequins still clinging to the lapels, and dark sunglasses to protect his violet eyes, which were sensitive to sunlight, even on gray days like today. To give people a taste of what curiosities awaited inside the tent, Kimo, a Samoan dwarf, who had no eyelashes or eyebrows, performed his fire-eating trick. Kimo ate a hundred torches a day, at least. He was addicted. The fumes made him tingly and got him high, and then inevitably gave him a crashing headache.
“One dollar, one dollar!” Blackie crowed. “Price of admission to the odditorium, where you will be amazed by the pretty grown-together girls! Bewitched by the Devil Boy! Astounded by the strangest married couple on Earth! Give a big round of applause to Kimo, who just came back to us after making his movie debut in Hollywood, California! Look for Kimo in “The Wizard of Oz,” coming soon to a thee-ay-ter near you! Step right up, folks! See Chief Speaks-to-Eagles, the last of his tribe, with the stupendous strength of ten men! Lovely Arlene, the Armless Wonder! And Neptuna, Queen of the Sea! All positively alive!”
Blackie parted the flap in the tent canvas, and the comic books and knitting were quickly hidden away. Two girls followed Blackie inside. Identical twins. Rose elbowed Fern. The twins, one with popcorn, one with cotton candy, were about the same age as Fern and Rose, who were nineteen going on twenty. One wore a red coat, the other wore herringbone. Their bobbed hair was diamonded with drizzle. The space between them fascinated Rose. Alone, these twins would be as ordinary as milk. Fern and Rose, fused at the hip, always side-by-side, were never ordinary. The twins were trailed by their dates, each sheepishly carrying a plaster Kewpie doll prize he’d won for his girl.
Fern and Rose picked up their saxophones and began playing “Tea for Two.” “The world’s only living united twins,” Blackie intoned. “They have no desire to be separated. Their lives are as gay as those of any other girls.” He paused and nodded at the twins with their boyfriends. “They read, sing, sew, go to the movies, play doubles tennis, swim, and, as you can see, play saxophones.”
On the other side of the tent, Arlene, born without arms, hooked the handle of a teapot on her big toe and poured tea into a cup on a saucer. She picked up a spoon with her foot and spooned sugar into her tea. She added a splash of cream and stirred. Gripping the cup and saucer with the toes of both feet, she limberly brought the tea to her lips. Chief Speaks-to-Eagles, or Gus Greenbaum from Ohio, removed his feathered headdress and flipped his long braid of hair forward so that it hung over his face. He bent down and clipped his braid to a chain that was wrapped around an anvil at his feet. Agnes from Kansas, in a horse-hair wig that hung like seaweed over her shell-shaped brassiere, sat on a chicken-wire rock in a shallow pool, fanning her spangled tail.
The twin with popcorn wiped her buttery fingers on her red coat and drew a pair of souvenir pitch cards from the display on Fern’s and Rose’s platform. In the photo, taken when they were twelve, Fern sits at a little table, pretending to type a letter, and Rose sits by her side, as always, pretending to sew. Rose had pricked her finger with the needle while the photographer snapped his pictures, and when Fern saw the bead of blood it occurred to her, for the first time, that it belonged to both of them. Two hearts, the same blood. She understood then what it meant to share an artery.
The other twin ate a tuft of cotton candy, and her date paid for the pitch cards. Cheeks puffed out, fingers working her saxophone, Rose chanted to herself, Cotton candy. Barbe a papa. Candy floss. Fairy floss. Zuckerwatte. She may not have ever had a boyfriend, or ever been kissed, but Rose had seen more of the world than other girls her age. She wished to see even more of it, beyond the hotels and vaudeville theaters, beyond the rooming houses and highways and places the train passes by, beyond the boundaries of the carnival. She wished to pass through the world unnoticed.
The group moved on to ogle Sammy’s horn, which he waggled at them monstrously, but with humor, making the girls squeal and cling to their boyfriends.
“They pity us,” Fern whispered, replacing her saxophone on its stand. “They’re nothing special. And they’ll die alone.”
Rose whispered back, “Everyone dies alone.”
Fern said, “Not us.”
“Quit being so morbid,” Rose said. She wanted nothing more than to be nothing special.
Blackie told some story about how Sammy had been found in the Black Forest, foraging for grubs and berries. He introduced Baby Carlotta — “six hundred pounds of pulchritude, the Empress of Avoirdupois” — and called skinny Eddie “Jack Sprat.”
Fern twirled a curl of her hair. She and Rose still wore it in long ringlets like little girls. She was envious of the twins’ short hair. She would like to have hair like that. Hair cropped at the nape of her neck, like Lois Lane. Fern wasn’t a little girl anymore. The short-haired twins moved on to get pitch cards from Arlene, which she signed with a pen held between her toes. Next, the Chief grimaced theatrically, lifting the anvil with his braid.
After admiring Neptuna, “netted off the coast of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea,” completing the circuit of the ten-in-one tent, Blackie informed the group that the best was yet to be seen. The best was through another flap that led to an adjoining tent. “But first,” he said, “it costs two dollars more.”
Not wanting to seem cheap, the boyfriends paid. Blackie ushered the group into the next tent, letting the flap drop behind them. Fern slipped her comic book out from under the chair. On the cover, Superman, in his blue suit and red cape, lifted a green car over his head, smashing the front end into a rock. Superman had been born on a dying planet, and to save him his father launched him on a spaceship to Earth. He spent his early childhood in an orphanage. Fern and Rose weren’t orphans, but they might as well have been; they had never known their father, not even his name. Their mother left them when they were two days old.
Fern and Rose couldn’t see into the next tent, but they heard Blackie’s patter as he presented the group with Lady Eve, who stood with her back to them in front of a large wooden wheel that was painted with a red and white spiral. She wore a red-velvet outfit fringed with white tassels that stopped at the tops of her thighs and plunged down to reveal a full-back tattoo of a serpent twined around the Tree of Knowledge. A real snake was draped over her shoulders and across her outstretched arms. She turned slowly to face them. A chestnut-colored beard swept down from her chin, tied at the end with a green ribbon bow.
Fern turned the comic book pages, as Superman saved an innocent woman from the electric chair, saved another woman from her violent husband, saved Lois Lane from the hoodlums who kidnapped her, and saved America from becoming entangled in a conflict with Europe.
Rose, frustrated with her knitting, began to unravel it so she could start over again. She cast stitches onto her knitting needle, while next door Lady Eve placed her snake in a wicker basket. Blackie strapped her, spread-eagled, onto the Wheel of Death and gave the wheel a spin. Red and white spiraled hypnotically. He opened a case that contained six knives. Then he took off his sunglasses and blindfolded himself with a satin sash. Thunk! Rose jolted at the sound of the knife biting into wood. There was too much tension in her yarn. Her cast-on stitches were too tight.
Fern thought about superpowers. Not many people could lift an anvil with their hair. Kimo’s fire-eating was kind of a superpower. Thunk! So was Blackie’s knife-throwing. You could say those were just skills, they took practice. But real superpowers took practice too, Fern knew. Thunk! Some superheroes — Batman, the Crimson Avenger — were simply human. Ordinary. Rich but ordinary, and in their desire to fight for the greater good, they had manifested masked alter-egos. Neptuna, shimmering in her mermaid costume, was like them, all flash. But Fern and Rose, Kimo, Blackie, Sammy, Arlene, they had all been born different. Maybe in another world they would not have seemed so different. But here, like Superman, they were oddities.
There was a dusty thud as Blackie’s knife missed the wheel and struck the dirt. This was part of the act, to make him seem clumsy and unskilled, to heighten the element of danger. One knife was stuck beside the apple of Eve’s whiskery cheek, another beside her neck, and another tucked in the crook of her armpit. The next knife landed by her hip, piercing one of her white tassels. Blackie sensed, rightly, that the wheel was slowing and told the group to give it another spin. One of the boys stepped forward, hesitant. Clearly, showing-off his muscle was more important than the bearded lady’s safety, so he gave the wheel a mighty pull. Blackie sunk the last knife right between Eve’s legs.
Fern had a secret. Not even Rose knew. Fern had a superpower, a real one. She could fly. Not even Superman could fly, not exactly. He could only leap high like a grasshopper, hurdling skyscrapers with ease. Fern couldn’t fly the way birds do, it was more the sensation of floating outside her body. She willed herself to do it now, to rise up out of the container she shared with Rose, like steam from tea. Nothing happened. It didn’t always work. Superpowers took practice. It was easier at night, in bed, in that state between waking and dreaming.
Part Two
The carnival closed for the night and the clouds cleared. The lights of the Ferris wheel blinked out and a yellow half-moon rose. The dime pitch, break-a-plate, and shooting gallery were all padlocked shut. Game agents, ride monkeys, and roustabouts gathered in the G-Top tent – the “G” stood for gambling – to drink and fritter away their hard-earned pay. Blackie didn’t merely tolerate the G-Top, he gave it his blessing; it kept his workers broke, and kept them from drifting off toward a better life elsewhere.
Fern and Rose sat at their trailer’s dinette, playing Monopoly with Margie, the ten-year-old daughter of their managers, Monty and Hazel. At the far end of the trailer, on the couch that converted into the bed where Fern and Rose slept, Hazel ripped open the side seams on the skirts of two pink gingham dresses. Beside her, Monty sipped brandy. He was in high spirits, and not just from the brandy; tomorrow the Hyde Amusement Co. was joining forces with Professor Pierce’s Tip-Top Big-Top Show to become Pierce-Hyde Circus & Amusements.
Rose rolled the dice and got doubles for the third time in a row. She marched her thimble token to jail. Margie was the Scottie dog, Fern was the shoe.
Monty whistled a few bars of “The Gold Digger’s Song.” We’re in the money, the skies are sunny. He said, “The Professor put up some terrific posters. Picture of a blonde gal on a horse jumping through a ring of fire. That ought to get people fired up.” Hazel nodded distractedly. She was sewing the skirts of the gingham dresses together, fashioning one full skirt to fit Fern and Rose. Monty had seen the posters papering fences and telephone poles when he and Margie had walked to the library in town earlier in the light rain.
Margie said, “I saw a giant chicken today. And an enormous basket of eggs!” She was referring to the monuments that stood outside the fairground entrance, celebrating the town’s livelihood. She threw a five and a six and her Scottie dog hopped eleven spaces to land on Go. She sang, “Two hundred dollars, please!” Fern, the banker, gave Margie two peach-colored bills.
Rose said quietly, “Will we be in the circus parade?”
“What’s that, kid? Speak up,” Monty said, cupping his hand to his ear.
“The circus parade,” she said. “Will we be in it?”
Monty snorted. “Have you ever been in a circus parade before?”
“No,” she said, feeling small. The last circus they had toured with was Uncle Duncan’s Circus Royale. They had traveled by train then, rather than trucks. They had performed in a tent of their own, singing, dancing, playing their saxophones. Back then, they were stars, but lonely, forbidden to mingle with any of the other performers. Except for Vera Dove, with her high soft cooing voice, as her name implied, who was as big a draw as they were. Vera, covered all over with glossy black fur, was billed as the Monkey Girl. Vera fell in love with Leo the Lion-Faced Man, and together they quit show business and settled in Florida, where they were living off of Vera’s earnings, with their furry children. After the Circus Royale, Fern and Rose had gone on to become belles of Broadway, but only briefly. Old Man Depression, talking pictures, and radio had done them wrong, relegating them to the seedy world of the carnival.
Monty lifted an eyebrow. “So, why should now be any different? Why buy the cow –”
“When you can get the milk for free,” Rose sighed, defeated. She brightened when Fern’s shoe landed on one of her railroads, then remembered her thimble was still in jail. She couldn’t collect rent in jail.
Later on, in bed, Fern practiced her flying. She bobbed in and out of herself, up, up, then down, like a balloon losing its helium. Only a few inches at first, then a little more. Finally, she bumped up against the trailer’s birchwood ceiling. She held her breath to stay aloft. Below were the two humps of herself and Rose, who had pulled most of the blankets to her side. Fern didn’t let herself feel the chill, it would have caused her to drop back down into her body. She floated over to the dinette, where the table had been folded and the cushions reconfigured to make Margie’s bed. Monty and Hazel slept at the other end of the trailer in the bedroom. Flying felt like swimming, the same weightlessness, but without the anchor of Rose. Fern exhaled slowly, half expecting to see bubbles, and sank into herself. She tugged at the blankets.
Fern dreamed of being small, wearing a blue leotard and tights and a red cape, like Superman, but it had the homemade, slightly baggy look of a child’s Halloween costume. Someone big held her horizontally around her middle and whirled her around, taking her for a flying ride. The big person holding her was Rose.
Rose had a nightmare: She and Fern were target girls spinning on Blackie’s Wheel of Death. His knives went thunk, thunk, thunk, and then there was a softer sound. Thick amber-colored liquid flowed instead of blood. She and Fern flattened out, turning to paper. They curled up and fell away from each other.
Part Three
Professor Pierce’s workmen arrived before dawn, and by the time Fern and Rose awoke, the Tip-Top Big-Top had been raised. The white tent loomed against the pale blue morning. An American flag hung limp at the peak. Pinkish clouds were scattered across the sky in a pattern like fishbones. Fern and Rose, in their new gingham dresses, walked with Monty, Hazel, and Margie across dew-flattened grass on their way to the cook shack. Normally, they never ate at the cook shack. Monty preferred to keep Fern and Rose out of sight and away from anyone who might fill their heads with worldly or mutinous ideas. But today Monty was eager to show them off to the Professor.
In the cook shack, the tables were covered with red and white checked oilcloth. Everyone ate hash and eggs off enameled tin plates. Standing in the food line, Fern and Rose scanned the faces, old – Blackie sat with Kimo, Gus, and Agnes; Sammy and Arlene sat with Eddie and Carlotta – and new, but no one looked like he might be the Professor. An unfamiliar blonde ate with another woman, a redhead. The blonde was the bareback rider Monty had seen in the posters the day before.
The blonde frowned at Sammy’s horn. The redhead, who was staring at Fern and Rose, pushed her plate away, indicating that she had lost her appetite. Rose pretended not to have seen this. She had been looking forward to eating in the cook shack instead of being sequestered in the trailer, as usual, and was determined not to let a couple of haughty circus ladies spoil her breakfast.
The cook spooned hash onto their plates. Monty asked him if the Professor had been around yet. The cook said, “He always dines in his trailer. Away from the rabble.” He added, “I hear the bearded lady pulled a disappearing act last night. Ran off with some encyclopedia salesman.”
Hazel brushed crumbs off a table. Fern and Rose pushed two chairs together. A young man in a blue leotard came into the cook shack, balancing on a ball decorated with stars. When he saw Fern and Rose he jumped off his ball and ran over to their table, kissing them on each cheek, as if they were old friends. They shyly recoiled from the stranger’s kisses. “Oh, Fern and Rose, I’m so happy to see you!” He kissed them again. Then apparently he realized that they had no idea who he was. “I am Romeo,” he said. “Romeo Columbo!”
It had been nearly fifteen years since they had last seen Romeo Columbo. The Amazing Columbos, a family of acrobats, had opened for the twins’ song-and-dance act when they were performing on the vaudeville circuit in Australia. Rose remembered seeing little Romeo perched at the top of a twenty-foot pole balanced on his father’s chin. She remembered wishing that Romeo would fall.
Romeo said, “I am no longer an Amazing Columbo. Now I am a Flying Columbo! My cousin Gianni and I, we are daring young men on the flying trapeze.” He thumped his chest proudly. Then he noticed Monty and narrowed his eyes. The last time Romeo had seen Monty, Monty was dragging Fern and Rose out of the Columbo’s hotel room in Sydney. He had dragged them out by Fern’s hair.
The night that Fern and Rose had snuck off to the Columbo’s hotel room, Fern had fantasized about becoming an Amazing Columbo, as she and Rose shared a Violet Crumble candy bar and played dominoes with Romeo’s older sisters. Mr. and Mrs. Columbo danced while Romeo wound the Victrola’s crank. And then Monty came pounding at the door.
Now, with a mouth full of egg, Monty said to Romeo, “We’re eating breakfast, kid. Now scram.” Romeo went off with his starry ball, and blew Fern and Rose one more kiss over his shoulder. He sat down with the redhead and the blonde.
Blackie seemed to be looking in their direction, although it was difficult to tell exactly where he was looking because of his dark sunglasses. Blackie waved and gestured for Monty to join him. “The Professor,” Blackie said, “would very much like to meet you and the twins after breakfast.”
Part Four
The Professor’s trailer was draped with Chinese tapestries and smelled of sandalwood. He wore a monocle, a purple caftan embellished with tiny mirrors, and curly-toed slippers, and he reclined on a mohair chaise with carved lion’s-paw feet. Blackie said, “Professor Pierce, Baron Lamont. Baron Lamont, Professor Pierce.”
“Call me Asa,” the Professor said.
“Monty,” Monty said, and they shook hands.
The Professor said, “And you must be Fern and Rose. Please, sit.” Then he called out, “Dmitri? We have company.” A willowy man wearing a kimono emerged from behind a silk curtain. With red lips and long lashes, Dmitri was girl-pretty. He poured them tea from a teapot shaped like a dragon. The tea came out of the dragon’s mouth. Fern wondered if Dmitri was the Professor’s valet. Like Wing How, the Crimson Avenger’s valet. She couldn’t picture these two as a crime-fighting duo.
Blackie rubbed at a blue squiggle of vein that throbbed transparently at his temple. To Monty and the twins, he said, “Our Eve has gone. Left us with a pile of whiskers to remember her by, and a note. She’s marrying a Bible salesman.”
“Bibles?” Monty said. “I heard it was encyclopedias.”
Blackie said, “Nope. Bibles.”
The Professor said, “And while we are delighted that Lady Eve has found her Adam, it leaves us in a bit of a bind.”
“I need a new target girl,” Blackie explained.
Rose prickled with dread.
The Professor winked at the twins through his monocle.
“Wh-wh-what about Agnes?” Rose sputtered.
“Neptuna suffers from vertigo,” Blackie said, sadly shaking his head. “She cannot ride the Wheel.”
“Arlene?” Rose squeaked.
The Professor scoffed. “Throwing knives at a poor armless girl? We’re not monsters! Heavens, no. But throwing knives at pretty Siamese twins is another story. There is a whiff of the possibility that you might accidentally be separated. Not really,” he raised his teacup to Blackie and gave him a deferential nod, “but that is the possibility people will pay to see. And, of course, we need to discuss an increase in salary.” At this, Monty grinned.
Fern took Rose’s hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Fern had faith. Blackie had never missed.
Back in their own trailer, Monty told Hazel about the turn of events. She said, “Do you think this is wise? I mean, is it safe?”
Margie volunteered, “I’ll do it! Mr. Hyde can throw knives at me.”
Monty and Hazel said at the same time, “No!” Hazel zipped Fern and Rose into striped bathing suits they would wear on the Wheel of Death. Faintly, they all heard the oom pah pah of the band starting up, ready to lead the Pierce-Hyde Circus parade into town.
“Daddy!” Margie stamped her Mary Janes. “I want to see the parade!” Monty obliged, and the two of them hurried across the fairgrounds, toward the horns and drumbeats.
Professor Pierce, now dressed in purple tuxedo tails and a top hat, rode with Blackie in a chariot pulled by a pair of swaybacked ponies. They were followed by Baby Carlotta, kohl-eyed in Cleopatra garb, on a litter borne by workmen wearing Egyptian headdresses. Kimo marched in a sarong, twirling a flaming baton. Then came Romeo Columbo, walking on his ball, and his cousin, Gianni, rolling after him on a polka-dotted barrel. The blonde rode a white horse, its head ornamented with ostrich plumes. Next were the clowns and chimpanzees. One sad-faced clown had a pot belly that moved up and down – bosom, belly, bosom, belly. Another clown rode a unicycle and another walked on stilts. Finally, there was the redhead, in a red jacket and thigh-high boots, leading a tiger on a leash, cracking her whip in time with the band.
The parade returned to the fairgrounds and Pierce-Hyde Circus & Amusements was open for business. Blackie attracted the crowd with his talk, and Kimo ate torch after torch, like so many toasted marshmallows. In the tent that had belonged to Lady Eve the day before, Fern and Rose sat alone, wrapped in their dressing gowns, while Blackie led the tour of the ten-in-one tent. The twins weren’t cold but they shivered anyway. When Blackie enticed the group to pay two more dollars to see the blowoff, the final act, Fern and Rose took off their dressing gowns. Blackie said, “This is a show you’ll remember for the rest of your lives,” and opened the flap. A dozen or so men stood there, hands in their pockets, hats pulled low. Fern knew they were hoping the blowoff would be a naked girl. She and Rose bowed dumbly, feeling naked in their bathing suits.
The Wheel of Death was built for one, not two. Fern perched her feet on the narrow footrest. Blackie strapped her ankles to the Wheel, and one of her wrists. Her other hand gripped Rose’s. He belted them around their waists, so tight it took their breath away, and gave the Wheel a spin. The world dipped down and tipped back up, over and over. Blackie opened his case of knives. He removed his sunglasses and put on his blindfold. His pale skin was luminous in the dimness of the tent, lit with a single weak bulb and a small rip in the canvas that let in a scrap of daylight. He held out the first knife, held it by the blade, aiming the handle at the spinning Wheel. The world spun around the axis of Blackie’s knife. Rose squeezed her eyes shut. Thunk! The knife landed near the crown of Rose’s head, where the apple would be in a game of William Tell. She dug her nails into Fern’s palm. The next knife stabbed the Wheel a few inches from Fern’s ear, and she flew up out of her body, flittering about the lightbulb, mothlike and chaotic. She thought miserably, What’s the use of having a superpower if I can’t save anyone? Knives landed under each of their arms. One hit the dirt. The last knife landed between their bound legs, and then it was over. At least, the first performance of the day was over.
When the twins had their next turn on the Wheel, Fern rose up and slipped out through the rip in the canvas. She hovered over the midway and glided past the Tip-Top Big Top and the games and the rides – Dodg-Em cars, the Octopus, Tilt-a-Whirl, carousel, Ferris Wheel – and then out past the enormous basket of eggs and the giant chicken that guarded the fairground entrance.
The town was mostly empty of people; everyone had followed after the circus parade, pied-pipering back to the fairgrounds. Fern floated above a brick building with a fading Coca-Cola sign and a yellow chick painted on the side. She heard singing. She also heard a faraway thunk. She flew toward the voices. “Amazing grace,” they sang. “How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” A knot of people in dark clothes stood in a cemetery, where a tiny casket was lowered into the ground. The gravestone said simply: SWEETHEART. There was another thunk. Fern ignored it flew on.
She heard a cheerful whistling, could almost see the musical notes prancing through the air. She went toward the happier tune, and breezed through an open window. Inside, an old man whistled as he sat bent over a bird held between his knees. A parakeet, green with a yellow breast. The old man held a pair of scissors. He fanned out one of the bird’s wings and clipped off the outermost feathers, which fell like green leaves onto the floor. Then the other wing. The old man took the bird in his hands and kissed its head. He held the bird up and released it, and it flapped its wings, but unable to fly it only fluttered down gently.
Thunk. Blackie still had three more knives to throw.
Fern realized that the ability to fly wasn’t her only superpower; she also had the power of invisibility. Now this is something really special, she thought. I could be a spy! Go on secret missions!
Then she felt the quiver of a distant hum. She flew out the window toward the outskirts of town, past the hatchery and the tall grain elevator, past the chicken farms. Below her, sheep in a pen moved like a rapidly shifting cloud. The hum carried her to a weathered sagging barn. Outside, a few bees browsed among the weeds and wildflowers. Fern flew into the barn. There were more bees inside, and she vibrated with their buzzing. She drifted up to the loft, where the buzzing intensified. There was a beehive in the loft. Also, a dirty window. The bees kept trying to fly out the window into the light. They flew into the window, over and over, and eventually they dropped down and died. Beneath the window was a mound, three feet high, of dead bees.
Thunk! This time the sound was close and sharp, as if an elastic band had suddenly sprung Fern back into her body on the Wheel of Death. Then Blackie’s next knife came at her and glanced off the Wheel’s edge. He called for a volunteer to give the Wheel one more spin. Blackie’s last knife struck near Fern’s thigh, the chill of metal raising goosebumps on her skin.
As soon as she was unbound from the Wheel, Fern cried, “The bees! We have to save the bees! We have to tell someone to open the window in the barn!”
Rose was worried about her twin sister. Too many spins on the Wheel had made Fern delirious.
During the third performance of the day, something went wrong. Blackie’s knife clipped close to Fern’s ear, lopping off a thick curl of her hair. One of the men watching let out a girlish scream. Blackie yanked off his blindfold and leapt to the Wheel to stop it from turning. With her free hand, Fern patted the hank of shorn hair, and began to laugh. Blackie unbuckled the twins and Fern doubled over from laughing. Rose was shaking, furious. She said through her teeth, “It’s not funny, Fern!” The chopped-off curl lay like a dead snake in the dirt.
“I’ve been wanting to get my hair cut,” Fern gasped with laughter. “And now it’s cut! Blackie, I could kiss you.”
That afternoon, Hazel cut Fern’s hair short, and Rose’s to match. Then they returned to the Wheel of Death. With each performance, the tent became more and more crowded, as news of Fern’s close shave spread among the rubes.
After the last show, Fern and Rose walked out of the tent with Blackie. Walking was difficult at first; the Wheel had made them wobbly and uncoordinated. They came upon a woman sitting on the ground, her face in her hands, a suitcase and a wicker basket beside her. The woman looked up, eyes puffy from crying. Stubble shadowed her cheeks and chin. It was Eve. “He didn’t love me,” she sobbed. “He didn’t want me without my beard.” Blackie crouched down to comfort her.
The twins walked on. Fern couldn’t stop touching her hair. It was strange not to have curls to twirl anymore. Cool night air thrilled the bare skin of her neck. She wanted to tell Rose what had happened on the Wheel, how she had flown invisibly over the town. She wanted to tell her about Sweetheart, the parakeet, and the bees. But Rose would think Fern had lost her mind.
On the way to their trailer, they ran into Romeo, who was hauling a wood pallet. He let it drop and gave Fern and Rose his customary kisses on each of their cheeks. He told them the wood was for a bonfire to celebrate the union of Pierce and Hyde. “You will come?” he said.
Rose felt a zing on each cheek where Romeo had kissed her. She lightly touched two fingers to her lips, imagining what it would feel like to be kissed on the mouth. “Yes,” she said. “We will.” She decided that when she got the hang of knitting she would make a scarf for Romeo, blue with stars.
At the trailer, Hazel made them a late supper of sardine sandwiches. Monty was having steak. “So,” Fern said to Monty. “Do you want the good news or the bad?”
“Get the bad news over with,” he said and forked a piece of fat into his mouth.
Fern said, “Eve came back.”
Monty chewed slowly, turning increasingly red, and then he slammed his steak knife into the dinette’s surface. “And the good news?”
“The good news is that Eve came back?” Fern put up her hands to protect herself in case Monty decided to throw something. Margie began to cry, and Hazel hustled her into the bedroom.
Rose said, “The performers are having a bonfire tonight.”
“Goody for them,” Monty said.
“We’re going, too,” Rose said.
“No. You are not.” He pulled his steak knife free and pointed it at the twins threateningly. “You should thank your lucky stars that I care enough to save you from being shut up in an asylum for cripples. But if you fail to make more money I won’t have a choice.”
After riding the Wheel of Death all day, Rose wasn’t afraid of a puny steak knife. The one thing that would make Monty happy, she thought, is if gold coins fell from her mouth whenever she opened it. “Fine,” she said, spitting an imaginary gold coin at his eye. “Whatever you say, sir.”
Part Five
When Monty and Hazel had gone to bed, Fern and Rose crept out of the trailer. They walked quickly past the G-Top, wafting its beer and tobacco-smoke smells. The whoops and grunts and snarls that came from within sounded to Fern like a pirate jamboree. To Rose it sounded like full-moon wolves.
At the bonfire, Romeo was sitting with the trick-riding blonde. Fern and Rose sat down on an overturned crate. Carlotta drew a bow across a saw to make it sing. Eddie played the spoons. Blackie cupped his harmonica, fluttering his fingers. Eve sat beside him, looking fragile and exposed without her beard, eyes shining with sadness. The circus band blew their horns. Rose wished she had her saxophone, and said so. A member of the band lent her his.
Gus, the Chief, sang in a gruff baritone, “I went down to the St. James infirmary. I saw my baby there. She was stretched out on a long white table, so cold and fine and fair.” Armless Arlene swayed in the firelight. Agnes, sans fishtail, danced with a clown. Sammy blackened a marshmallow on a stick. Kimo dipped a torch into the fire, then daintily extinguished it in his mouth. Romeo’s cousin Gianni had his arms around the redheaded tiger tamer. Everyone was there except the Professor.
“Well, now you’ve heard my story,” the Chief sang. “Give me another round of booze!” Someone passed Fern a flask. “And if anyone should ever, ever ask you, I’ve got the St. James Infirmary blues!”
Romeo came over and sat next to Fern. He took Fern’s hand in his, and Rose’s heart sank. The scarf she imagined knitting for Romeo unraveled. She blew a long mournful note on the saxophone until her breath ran out. Romeo asked Fern to dance. “You, too, Rose,” he said. She put down the saxophone, and the three of them held each other, weaving around the bonfire. Rose felt like the odd one out.
With his blue leotard and black hair, Romeo reminded Fern of Superman. But Superman was all square-jawed bulk and brute strength, he had none of Romeo’s grace. Fifteen years ago, when Monty was pulling her and Rose away from the Columbo’s hotel room by a fistful of Fern’s hair, she had prayed for Romeo’s father to save them. He didn’t. She whispered to Romeo, “I want to see you fly.”
Fern felt a tap on her shoulder. It was the blonde. “Mind if I cut in?”
Romeo leaned toward the blonde and kissed her on the mouth. He made room for her, and they all continued to dance awkwardly as a foursome. “Fern, Rose,” he said. “You have met Doro, my fiancee?”
Rose let out a bitter laugh.
“Charmed,” Doro said to the twins, sounding more bothered than charmed.
Romeo called to Gianni, who was dancing with the redhead on the other side of the fire. The redhead’s name was Valentina. She was married to Gianni. Rose thought, not kindly, A regular showbiz family, la dee da. Romeo spoke with Gianni in Italian, and then he announced that the Flying Colombos were putting on a special show. He waved for everyone to follow. The band stayed behind at the bonfire. They’d seen the act many, many times before.
Inside the Tip-Top Big-Top, with its empty skeletal bleachers, Fern and Rose sat on the curb of the red circus ring, as Romeo and Gianni climbed up rope ladders on each side of the trapeze rig, quick as monkeys. There was no net. Up on their platforms they dusted their palms with sacks of chalk. Gianni held his trapeze bar and swung out, flipping himself over so that he hung by his knees. He said, “Hep!” And then Romeo jumped from the platform, swooping out on his trapeze. Again Gianni said, “Hep!” and Romeo released the bar, swanning through the air, then he suddenly snapped his body into a jacknife, and stretched out, extending his arms toward Gianni. Their chalky hands locked onto each other’s forearms.
On an upswing, Gianni threw Romeo back into the air – down below Rose mouthed, “Don’t fall, don’t fall” — and Romeo somersaulted one, two, three times, and hooked the trapeze with his ankles.
Now Romeo said, “Hep!” Gianni did a double twist and Romeo caught him by the wrists. Romeo tossed Gianni back to his trapeze, and then they both cried, “Hep!” and released their bars, to soar past each other and switch trapezes. Then, “Hep!” they switched back again.
When the Flying Columbos returned to their platforms, everyone clapped and stomped and whistled. Fern called up, “I want to fly! I want to fly like you do!”
Romeo said, “You can!” Fern laughed at his joke. But he was completely serious.
“But there’s no net,” Fern said.
“I will catch you,” Romeo said.
Rose said, “We can’t climb the ladder.”
Fern looked at the rope ladders. It would be hard enough for one person to climb. For them it would be impossible.
“I’ll give you a boost,” the Chief said. He hoisted the twins up on his shoulders, and Fern grabbed the ropes and struggled to get a foothold on one of the rungs. She clung sideways to the ladder, carrying the weight of Rose on her hip. Rose could only get one foot planted on the ladder, and she had to reach around Fern to hold onto the ropes. Fern felt the weight of Rose pulling her downward. The Chief braced the ladder to hold it steady, keeping the ropes taut.
Fern said, “We can’t move.”
“We’re stuck,” Rose agreed.
The Chief said, “Use your upper bodies.”
Fern and Rose pulled themselves up a rung.
Blackie cheered, “Atta girls!”
Then up another rung. There was still a long way to go. “Keep going,” Romeo coached them from the platform. They kept climbing. And with a final heave they made it up to the top. Romeo helped them onto the platform. Then he leapt off and swooped out to join Gianni on the far trapeze. The platform was shaky. The Columbos hung by their knees, side by side. Fern and Rose dusted their palms, raw from the climb, with chalk. Romeo gave the bar of the empty trapeze a swat, knocking it toward the twins. Fern caught the bar but almost lost her footing, and Rose’s too.
Rose said, “This is crazy! We can’t do this!”
“Sure you can, sugar!” It was Valentina, the redhead, who had been sickened by the sight of Fern and Rose at breakfast in the cook shack. Rose was not inclined to trust this woman.
“Please,” Fern said to Rose. “Let me do this. I have to do this.”
Below, Carlotta had her hands over her eyes, peeking through her fingers. Sammy tugged nervously at his horn.
“What the hell are you two doing up there?”
Monty. He was in his pajamas and an overcoat, and he was ugly with anger. Then his face changed, lit up. It was as if all the straw strewn around the circus ring had suddenly been spun into gold. Fern and Rose knew what he was thinking: A new act. Flying Siamese twins. The best act ever.
“Wait!” he yelled. “Stay right there! Don’t move until I get back!”
Fern and Rose held the trapeze bar and waited for Monty. When Monty came back, he was accompanied by a crew of workmen he had enlisted from the G-Top, who were carrying a long roll of canvas. They unfurled the huge canvas tarp under the trapeze rig. Each man held onto a section of canvas, and they were joined by Blackie, Kimo, Carlotta and Eddie, Sammy, Arlene – holding on with one foot, standing storklike on her other leg – the Chief, Agnes, Eve, the blonde, the redhead, and the clowns, all holding up the tarp to catch Fern and Rose if they fell.
Fern started to float, lifting out of her body, and silently commanded herself to come down. It was like commanding soda pop to stop fizzing. She wanted to be in her body for this. She wanted to feel it.
Romeo said, “Hep!” Fern and Rose knew that was their cue to jump. They gripped the trapeze bar in their chalky hands and stepped off the platform. Dropping through space, suspended in the pendulum swing – would they fall, would they die? – then arcing upwards, their fear was transformed into the elation of flight. They swung backwards toward the platform. Once more Romeo said, “Hep!” They sailed out and up, and let go.
