Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

You’ll recall the pictures, no doubt — migrant mothers, carts jam-packed with Okies bound to pick or beg, Hoover camps in every mud-field and vacant lot. Houses buried window-deep in sand and milk-starved babies buried shameful shallow, or not even buried at all. They look like a bad dream now, or even lies, but they sure wasn’t; I saw it all. Hell, I lived it.

When the crops dried and the dust come down to scour us clear, it was like every drop of colour just went out of the world — drained slow, like a man can die from one little cut alone, he only gets caught the exact wrong way. Like we was all of us being poisoned by coal-dust, or tin, or cheap nickel coating boiled off of pot-bottoms along with our daily mush, and didn’t even know it. Oh, there was symptoms and that, which we mainly put down to hunger, a powerful thing; hunger will make your head ache and give you double vision, sure enough, under any circumstances.

But I can’t think it was hunger alone that drove my Ma stark crazy, always following things from the corners of her eyes that simply weren’t there to any other person’s reckoning — not that, nor having no money, doing things with all manner of men that weren’t none of ’em my Pa, always living hand to mouth, chased from town to town like dogs and thrown rocks at for grappling at scraps.

My Ma said my Pa was some gangster in Kansas City, and she’d had to run from him — or maybe it was her Pa she’d run from, who’d paid men to cram her in a car’s trunk and dump her far from her home, to fend off the shame of her falling to ruin. But then again, sometimes she said my Pa was a wolf, or a burst of lightning, or the wind. Said he’d come winding through sunlight-wise under her window-shade one day, and fell headlong into her lap like a shower of gold.

He made me shiver , she told me. Made me bow down, like Heaven’s king himself. Persia, don’t ever forget. he made you.

I learned to hate just about every person I saw, during those days. While my Ma grew more and more tired, more and more silent, ’til the morning came she wouldn’t say nothing at all, wouldn’t even open her eyes. Wouldn’t even call after me when I left her there by the roadside, sleeping under a tree like King Minos’ daughter after the wine-god told old Theseus he wanted her for himself, so’s he and his had better cut and run ’fore she woke up to complain about it.

I was glad she’d told me stories like that one, eventually; they gave me different ways to look at things and bright scenes to play out inside my head when I sore needed ’em — like radio-music to most, I guess, or those Motion Picture shows I never had a coin worth wasting on. Helped me make my mind up, and told me how one day I’d know I was right to do her like I did. But the further I got from her side, I found, they didn’t give me no damn comfort at all.

It was on down that same road a spell I first met with the two Mizes, though, once Momma’s face had faded into the same dust as everything else that ever fell behind me. And it was only ’cause of them yarns of hers I knew what-all tale them paintings on their caravan’s side spelled out, which (like I told you) soon proved to at least count for something, in their eyes. With that one conversation, I gained what few keys to the kingdom they ever seemed like to dole out: The knowledge while this was their show, in the end, we at least had open invitation to try and keep up with it, for exactly so long as it suited them both that we should.

Miz Forza and Miz Farwander offered an open hand and a shut mouth, which was a hell of a lot more’n most; they didn’t care where you’d been or where you was bound for, and they neither of ’em seemed to count the straight law as a friend. Hard work spent setting up and tearing down got you a share in whatever food might come their way, a part of the day’s take and the right to sling your bed-roll near their fire.

“Depression”, they called it, and that was the God’s own truth. You felt it in your empty gut, your equal-empty chest, as though it was you who’d died instead of everybody else and all this living on you’d done was only a cruel trick, a walking ghost’s delusion. Made your days so bone-weary it was like you was still dreaming — and not a good dream, either, nor yet a bad; nothing so easy. Most like them awful dreams you have where you work all day, then muse on doing the exact same thing all night, back-aching and useless: Ones you wake up from spent as ever, but with nothing to show for all your toil.

So the cooch, with its tinsel and soft light, its sway, its trailing crinolines. the curve of a woman’s flesh barely wrapped, then peeled free by stages. that was a show worth the seeking out, for most men. And at the end of it all they went knees-down for a glimpse of that ultimate holy mystery, some girl’s secretest parts shining like a rose on fire, exposed at the tangle crook of two thighs and framed in stocking-tops and musk.

Under the Mask or not, working cooch was fast cash that left almost no taste of sin behind. Unlikely as hell any of ’em would find herself recognised once she chose to move on, and we didn’t truck with private viewing parties after the lights went down, either — not like most others did. Not unless someone pressed too hard for Half-Face Joe to handle, wouldn’t resign himself to take “no” for an answer. And even then—

— well, we didn’t tend to see those men again, no matter how short a time ’fore we swung back by their town, in future. And nobody, to my knowledge, ever did ask the two Mizes why.

Yeah, I saw how the cooch made fools and kings of men both at the same time, how it drew one common sigh wept out from twenty different mouths at once. Saw how it made ’em throw down pennies they couldn’t afford, or stuff worn-soft bills they should’ve fed their kids with into the girls’ garters with lust-shaking hands.

And I ain’t too proud to admit it, either: After so much toil and sorrow, I wanted me a piece of that, cut big and steaming. Wanted it bad .

Lewis Boll I met in Miz Forza and Miz Farwander’s service, too. He was twice my height but a third of my weight, lanky as a giraffe’s colt, with squint blue eyes and a lick of too-long black hair that always fell down to brush his brows by noon, no matter how hard he slicked it back of a morning. He had stubble on his stubble, a shadow that started well before four o’clock and ran ’til right you could see exactly where his beard would go, if he just let it. And half-grown or not, he was the first boyfriend I ever had that seemed like a man.

Lewis was a genuine Okie from way back in the Bowl, last left standing in a clan that’d once been thirty or so strong; he liked money far more’n he liked his liquor, so we had that in common. Right now he worked roustabout, wrangling ropes and poles for the cooch show tent, but his grand ambition was to either rob banks like Pretty Boy Floyd or get himself in my pants, whichever came first; sounded a deal nicer, the way he used to say it. But fine talk or not, he did get a tad nasty when I told him straight out which one it wasn’t likeliest to be.

“What you savin’ it for, Persia?” he demanded. “I’m gonna be rich — hell, we both are. What’s mine’ll be your’n, you just wait a while. ”

“Uh-huh. Well, holler back at me when you already got some-thin’ to swap me for it — ’cause right now, what you ’n’ me both got’s ’bout the exact same amount of nothin’ much. And that ain’t enough to make me drop my drawers on-stage, let alone off-.”

Lewis coloured a bit at the choice of words, since he well knew where my ambitions lay: Up on that same podium with the rubes all panting up at me like begging dogs, and the Mask of Fear stuck fast to my kisser.