Bacchanal Read online

  Liza and Jamey saw each other as she was sneaking away, and he caught up with her down the road and hustled her into the truck bed. She bristled when he swung around to go back and get Clay but kept her mouth shut and her head down as Jamey parked around the corner from the jail.

  Soon enough, he called out that he’d spotted Clay and waved him over. They rushed into the truck and sped away, keeping it moving for long enough for Liza to guess the town was out of sight. Jamey then skidded to a stop.

  “She’s gone,” she heard Clay say. “When me and the sheriff got back to the jail, all we found in that cell was a dead rat clutching a key. I slip out while the sheriff is flinging curses and orders like a madman, and what do I find? You and the truck gone.”

  The truck door creaked open, and Jamey said, “Follow me.”

  “You wanna tell me what’s goin’ on?” Clay asked as he slammed the truck door. Footsteps echoed as the two came around back to the bed. Liza poked her head out from beneath a blanket and hopped down. Clay grinned.

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you tried to do for me back there,” Liza said, “but let’s just say an opportunity to help myself arose, and I didn’t turn it away.”

  Clay smacked Jamey on the back, more a fatherly gesture than she would have expected. He whistled his appreciation. “Whatever you did, best we get on back.”

  Liza waved off Clay’s open door and climbed back into the bed of the truck. She sank onto a bale of hay beneath the open back window.

  Being in that cell, even for that short time, had made it difficult to breathe. She needed air. And she refused to answer when Clay asked how she’d managed to get herself free.

  They rode in silence for a spell. Baton Rouge was behind her now. She would work hard in this carnival to earn her keep, and that would be that.

  “You born and raised here?” Clay asked, glancing over through the window.

  Liza shifted and looked at him from the corner of her eye. She hated the inevitable questions that came along with meeting new people. They only wanted to know where you were from to fit you into whatever little box they wanted to. “Born in Florida, around Pensacola.”

  Jamey jumped in as he drove. “What you doing all the way in Louisiana by yourself?”

  “Would you feel better if I was married or something?” Liza said.

  “No, only meant, you know, a woman—”

  “Maybe with three or four babies?”

  “Now, that ain’t what I said—”

  “And another one on the way? Maybe I shouldn’t even own a pair of shoes or slacks, huh?”

  Jamey worked his mouth, but the poor boy’s words must have been crowding and fumbling all over his tongue, because he couldn’t get out another peep.

  Clay grinned at Jamey’s squirming and changed the subject. “We got a couple animals we keep with the carnival, but maybe now with you, we can pick up some more. Question is, Can you control that, uh, gift of yours? Heard a lot of mutterings from them town folk. But the small-minded can puff up a story till it’s got no kinship whatsoever to the truth.”

  What could she tell this man? He wanted to pay her a wage and see that she was fed. She couldn’t admit that she was still learning how to use her gift, that sometimes—no, oftentimes—the animals died. She couldn’t jeopardize her freedom that way.

  “I won’t kill the acts,” she said and then rolled her eyes at the back of Jamey’s skull.

  They trekked through bleak countryside, the truck rattling and shaking with every rut and gaping hole in the pockmarked road. They passed a family walking along the side of the road—a ragtag bunch draped in shabby clothes, miles of dust turned to muddy streaks on their too-thin bodies. A young child held on to his older sister’s hand, the parents walking ahead of them. The boy looked up at the passing truck and locked eyes with Liza. There was nothing of a child left in that empty gaze.

  The road was filled with more of the same, some loners, some groups. All helpless to the crushing heartbreak they had endured for the better part of the decade.

  The swamp fell away on both sides and the sun was beginning to set, a gigantic searing orange mass, determined to suck the life out of everything in its path. There were few cars on the road, but when they did pass one, the driver gave an obligatory wave. Southern hospitality at its best.

  In what seemed like hours but was actually only ten minutes, the chaos that was the carnival started to emerge on the horizon: tents, people, trailers, and stray dogs that seemed right at home. As they pulled up and parked the truck, Liza’s eyes grew wide. For all the nomadic traveling her family had done, she’d never seen anything close to this. Even without everything all set up, the carnival was the biggest rolling playground she’d ever seen. The collage of colors, the smell of meats she hadn’t had in years—why, this may as well have been New York City.

  Jamey stalked off, and Clay guided her past the gawkers.

  “How do you decide?” Liza asked as they walked. Color and activity exploded behind her eyes whenever she closed them. “You know, where you set up the carnival?”

  A youngish, muscular man ran past them dragging a set of poles. There were about four of them, and he struggled mightily. “Dang it, Lou,” Clay said. “You gonna splinter the wood. Get somebody to help you.”

  Liza stifled a smirk.

  “Boy don’t got the good sense his mama gave him.” Clay made sure the boy set down his bundle before he continued. “Anyway, I track out for a few days and do some scouting. If the local law and the townsfolk seem ripe, that’s where we go.”

  “My family traveled a lot.” If she could be of use helping guide the carnival, that would help earn her keep, and maybe he’d be more forgiving if she made a mistake on the other front. “My mama sold baskets. African baskets she learned to make when we stayed with the Gullahs in South Carolina. I been most everyplace south, from Florida over to New Mexico. I read and write. I bet I could help you plot the course.”

  Clay’s expression brightened in what Liza hoped was admiration. “Might well save me some travel time. And money. You might prove yourself useful yet.”

  After a short time, they came into view of a bright-red trailer, set aside from most of the others.

  Clay turned to Liza and stopped her. “Now, there’s a bunch a rules that we’ll go over later, but the first one is this. I’m taking you to the red trailer, the management trailer. I handle carnival business there. Nobody goes in that trailer but me. Got it?”

  Liza shrugged. All white men had their weird quirks. Probably kept all his money squirreled away in there. Mrs. Shippen once had a boarder like that, never wanted Liza to clean his room. Figured out later that he’d been cutting out pictures from nudie magazines and plastering the walls with them. Mrs. Shippen had been apoplectic.

  “You got a problem with that, you can turn tail, and I’ll get Jamey to drive you back.”

  Liza chewed her lip. Food and money and freedom in return for keeping her nose out of his business. Wasn’t a hard choice. “I understand.”

  Clay hustled her about ten paces away from the trailer and held up a hand. “Stand right here.”

  Two of the most striking women she’d ever seen stood at the trailer’s entrance. They wore plain clothes but were decorated with bands of beads on their arms, around their hips, and on their right ankles. The women stared at her but didn’t open their mouths to say a polite hello.

  Were . . . were those knives at their waists? Were they some type of guards?

  “That there’s Zinsa on the right and Efe on the left. They make sure nobody goes in there but me. Straight from your dark continent—Dahomey soldiers, they were. Fight better than most men I served with,” Clay said. His expression told Liza he wasn’t exactly comfortable, and she wondered why he would choose guards he was scared of.

  He left her standing alone to enter the trailer. Liza endured the women’s appraisal.

  Staring was impolite . . . but they were mirror images in st
ature: strong and lean, with fine skin of burnished tar. High cheekbones and chiseled features. They wore their pride as easily as some folks slip on a pair of trousers. What kind of outfit was Clay running here?

  Clay had a foot on the first step when the soldier on the left spoke, loud enough for Liza to hear.

  “The white man with the taste for dark ladies,” Efe said. Maybe they’d done some courting, although Liza doubted even the fire-headed Clay could handle a woman like that. Efe brushed a finger across the beads at her waist. “What mischief you bring now?”

  Power radiated off the warriors.

  Clay muttered a response that Liza couldn’t hear.

  The other soldier, Zinsa, piped in. “Where else do you think she would be, out scouting? No, that is your job, which I might add you do poorly.”

  “As poorly as your band of Amazons did against the French?”

  The smiles faded from their faces, eyes narrowed. Zinsa hissed something that made Clay visibly swallow. He pushed past the women and knocked once before disappearing inside.

  Liza wondered who this she was. Was Clay married? Did his wife live inside the trailer, and was he keeping her prisoner in there? Despite her promise, she wanted to take a peek inside. The Dahomey women settled their fierce gazes back on her, and she decided it was better to let it go.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AHIKU COMMUNES WITH THE BONES

  “That girl doesn’t look anything like an alligator wrestler,” Ahiku said as soon as Clay closed the door.

  “Well, Geneva, that’s because she ain’t.” Ahiku was known to these Americans as Geneva Broussard now—only a few at the carnival knew her by her true name. Clay shifted from foot to foot, and she knew her front man hated himself for betraying his discomfort. “The gator man got bit something awful, but guess who saved him? That little lady out there, that’s who. Stopped that giant lizard right in its tracks without lifting a finger. Don’t know how she did it, but she talked to the damn thing and it listened. Got it to back off the wrestler while he got out of there. Folks in town say that’s her talent. They give her a wide berth but use her to, uh, parley with their animals when they need to. Figured we could put her in some fancy getup and use her as an animal tamer. The marks would love it.” Clay clamped his mouth shut; he’d been rambling. The hard sell never worked on Ahiku.

  Ahiku sighed. “I’ll see about her. Have a seat.”

  Clay eased back into the corner near the door but stayed on his feet, his eyes fixed on her.

  Ahiku arranged the bones on the table and sprinkled out a series of plants and herbs. She recited a few words, and a tendril, invisible to all but her, snaked beneath the curtain along the wood-plank floor and through the cracks of the door.

  The girl waited impatiently with some type of little monkey perched on her shoulder. The tendril eased over the earth, a wisp of evil. Before the tendril reached the girl, the unmistakable sound of an elephant’s trumpeting echoed. Ahiku frowned; there were no elephants in her carnival. But her spirit friends could be mischievous. The girl looked startled, as if she, too, had heard it, but it was clear that Zinsa and Efe hadn’t noticed a thing.

  The tendril curled about the girl’s body, probing. Tense minutes passed before it uncoiled, slithered back to the ground, and returned to its lair. As the tendril settled on the bones, they rearranged themselves in the “no” position. Ahiku opened her eyes, disappointed. How many years had she been steering the carnival around the country, searching for Oya’s daughter? Just as she’d promised the wannabe queen, she’d hunted down her potential enemies one by one. She had traveled year after year in this godforsaken carnival, seeking every oddity she could find, destroying a few who actually had dangerous power. But recently she’d been coming up empty-handed time and again. Surely the last person who could defeat her, end her, was close. She could taste the trail Oya’s daughter had left as she ran from her.

  This girl with the strange talent was harmless. The bones had never been wrong. This time they had, however, revealed a chance for amusement. The girl’s thoughts were full of a certain landlady with a vile enough nature to earn her sway in the underworld.

  “She may stay, Clay. Good job.”

  Clay had a hand on the door handle almost before she’d finished. “Thanks, Geneva. I’ll be going to get her settled.”

  “You do that,” Ahiku said and then dissolved into a putrid black smoke as she escaped back to the underworld.

  She knew Clay hated that part.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BEGINNING OF A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP

  Liza and Clay navigated the carnival grounds with the last scraps of sunlight warming their backs and a flimsy breeze providing little relief from the heat. Though the boardinghouse was only a ten-minute ride away, it was another world. Her senses were accustomed to a much slower pace, and she struggled to dissect the bustling activity.

  When they’d arrived, Clay had told a few of the workers—“carnies,” they were called—to start getting ready for a weeklong date in Baton Rouge. That’s when things came to life. Tents were raised, some striped with reds and blues and greens, some with intricate colorful prints, a few needing repair. Orders were shouted. Grunts of physical exertion echoed. And the people were mostly like her. She’d never seen so many Negro folks working in one place, outside of a farm.

  Her stomach growled at the lingering smell of a dinner full of delicacies she could only dream about. The pitiful plate of rice she’d had before the gator show had been insufficient moments after consumption, a bitter memory now.

  “And this is the cook tent,” Clay said, seemingly in answer to her secret prayers. He pointed to a largish tent with row after row of remarkably neat wooden picnic tables covered in checkered cloth. Along the back edge was a long buffet holding a spattering of metal food containers that were being carted off one by one. From the looks of it, she’d missed dinner. One more night, and me and hunger can part ways amicably.

  She grinned inwardly, always pleased when she could use one of the big words Mrs. Margaret had drilled into her head. Sometimes it was as if she spoke three languages: a heap of southern colored, seasoned with half a pinch of an African language she couldn’t name and tossed up with a sprinkle of the King’s English.

  “You get three squares,” Clay said. “And Mabel’s a damn fine cook. Don’t bug her when she’s cooking, though, or she’ll bite your head clean off.”

  “When do I get paid?” Liza was overwhelmed at the prospect of the three squares, but she’d need money if she truly hoped to be able to take care of herself and, one day, hopefully Twiggy. Her heart squeezed, as it always did, as she wondered if her little sister was okay.

  “When you put together an act that’s worth a damn, we can talk.” Clay went on to explain that right now the animals were presented as an exotic zoo exhibit. They didn’t do much but sit in a cage, and people paid a full nickel to get a look at them.

  “From the sound of it, anything I do will be a step up.”

  Clay stopped and turned. “Gettin’ ahead of yourself, don’t cha think?”

  Liza hunched. She tried to put on a face of calm. Confidence. But inside she was as scared as that time she spotted a bear in the Pensacola woods. There was still a chance she could hurt, or kill, one of the animals. “You asked me to come here. I wouldn’t dare to call your good judgment into question, Mr. Kennel.”

  “You got the mouth,” Clay said. “That much I can see.”

  They moved behind the cook tent to the trailers where the carnies and performers slept. Most were lined up like a long trail of marching fire ants. Two others sat apart—namely, that red trailer that Clay was all closemouthed about and another, plainer trailer.

  Liza thrust her chin at the plainer one. “Supposing that red trailer is yours, who sleeps in the other one?”

  “That one is mine.”

  “Your wife’s got her own trailer, then?” If Clay kept his wife holed up like a prisoner, best Liza know now that
was the way women were treated around here.

  Clay’s expression oozed a warning. “My wife is none a your concern. She ain’t here noways. And you’ll get one reminder.” He held up an oil-stained index finger. “Not another word about the trailer.”

  She nodded meekly. Why couldn’t she just have kept her mouth shut?

  The stare-down lasted a moment longer, perhaps to drive home his point, and then the carnival owner moved on as if the exchange hadn’t happened.

  “Here is where you’ll be bunking up. Ain’t a palace or nothin’, but you get a bunk to yourself, and there’s only two to a car for the performers. Hope here’s our fortune-teller—you won’t be bunking with her, but she’ll help you get settled.”

  The woman, who had been walking up, looked startled. “Well, a good evening to you, too, Mr. Kennel,” she called at Clay’s back as he took his leave. He waved a hand behind him.

  She smiled at Liza. “I’m Hope,” she said. “Hope Child.”

  She has good bones. Mrs. Margaret’s words came to Liza’s head unbidden. A crop of dense curls brushed her shoulders and framed a perfectly heart-shaped dark-brown face. Doe-like eyes sat above chiseled cheekbones. A full nose and mouth that accented but didn’t dominate. Her smile was marred only by a chipped side tooth. For the first time, Mico stuck his head out of Liza’s right pocket.

  Hope’s eyes slid down to the oddity. Most backed away at the sight of the creature, but this woman held firm. She gave Liza’s hand a quick shake. As their fingers brushed, the fortune-teller shivered. There was something unreadable in her eyes—in a good way, though.

  “You okay?” Liza asked.

  For a moment Hope only blinked. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She turned her attention back to Mico and grinned even wider and bent down to take a closer look. “Who do we have here?”

  “His name is Mico.”

  “And what, where—” Hope stuck out a tentative finger to try and pat the fuzz coating the pygmy marmoset’s head. And to Liza’s surprise, instead of Mico taking a good chunk out of the finger, he let it rest, briefly, on his head before he shook it off.