“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, boys and girls, kings and worms, welcome to the Wandering Wayfarers! Tonight you will be flabbergasted, gobsmacked, gin-cracked, and stupefied by the sights we are about to show. So sit straight, lean back, or lie flat and put your hands together for the one, the only, the Mimsy Twins!”
A burst of spattered applause and a hiccup greeted this announcement.
“You ready, Mabel?”
“Go, go, go!”
John pulled Page against him as the Mimsy Twins rushed past them backstage. The moth-eaten curtain billowed in the sisters’ wake.
“John?” whispered Page.
“What?”
“This is even better than stories!”
It certainly was up there, John admitted to himself. How many people got to watch the circus before going to bed?
Not many. Nor were there many, he guessed, whose fortnight had been so jam-packed with activity. While the batons twirled and Priscilla sang, John went over the surprising events of the past two weeks.
To begin with, the Coggins now lived in a caravan. Sure, it was a sway-backed specimen with a creaky floor, a flight of shallow stairs, and dust to kingdom come, but it was their very own. There were a couple of bunks for sleeping and a couple of workbenches for props. Page was particularly fond of the ceiling, which was decorated with fading stars and planets, each one encrusted with gold paint.
“It used to belong to a diseased fortune-teller,” Boz explained to John. “It’s rumored she expired with her last respire in your bunk.”
Secondly, John was building something other than coffins. Every morning he sat himself down at a workbench covered in Boz’s half-sucked lollipops and waited for the onslaught:
“Dung Boy, we need a new lid on the long drop.” This from Mister Missus Hank, who refused to explain where the old one had gone.
“Dung Boy, I’d like you to make me a box where I can hack myself in two.” This from Tiger Lil, who was practicing a new routine.
“Dung Boy, I appear to have ripped a hole in my bottom—could you mend it?” This from Gentle Giant Georgie, who was holding a pair of voluminous striped pants.
John would mend and tend and stitch until his fingers bled. His efforts weren’t always a success—Alligator Dan getting wedged in a faulty trapdoor had been an unfortunate episode—but it was excitement beyond belief compared to caskets. All the pent-up streams of his imagination were busting through the dams. John’s brain was being flooded with new ideas.
Thirdly, and for the first time in his life, he had a friend. Granted, this friend was about as useful as a fungus-infected cucumber when it came to work, but you can’t have everything.
“Here’s my theory on manual labor,” Boz told John not long after their arrival. He had sprawled himself out on a bunk and was cracking peanuts in his mouth. “It’s the one truly noble profession left to mankind. What could be purer of heart than a man raising a roof above his squalling babes? A woman tilling the earth to put a hunk of buggy cabbage on the table? Or a bairn bent over double while he fashions a marionette from a collection of scraps and twigs?”
John, who was attempting to string together a puppet for Tiger Lil, looked up through sweating eyelids and grimaced. “Then why don’t you do it?”
Boz smiled and tossed a peanut at John.
“For the simple reason that I am not worthy. Since you have come, I have learned I am but a hock-fisted hack, a scrap, man’s offcut, not fit to touch the tools so hallowed by sacrifice.”
To be fair to the speaker, there was some truth in these words. Even Frank was aware that whatever Boz touched turned into an immediate catastrophe. And since John found it easy enough to make mistakes on his own, it was simpler to work when Boz was nowhere to be found.
Which was quite often. Like a demented hummingbird, Boz flitted in and out of camp at every hour of the day, occasionally stumbling in at dawn singing nonsense limericks. If he wasn’t doing ecstatic dance moves in his sleep, he might be painting his toenails, stealing cheese sandwiches, or monitoring thunderstorms from the apex of the big top.
He was, in a word, unpredictable.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you will direct your feet to the side of the enclosure, we have a special surprise for you!”
John was jerked out of his reverie by Page’s tug on his arm. Gentle Giant Georgie was back onstage and pointing to the open flap in the tent.
“Quick, John! They’re going to do Betsy!” Page whispered.
For days, Colonel Joe had been promising the Coggins they would see Boz and his partner in action. John could hardly believe it was finally going to happen.
Dashing out through the back of the big top, John and Page joined the meager crowd in the field. A U-shaped barrier had been constructed with fence posts and twine. And an ancient cannon lay dormant in the middle of the enclosure.
There was a murmur, a prodding, a flare. Into the center of the U stepped Colonel Joe, a blazing torch in his hand.
“Stand back, now, stand back! Give Betsy some room.”
The crowd shuffled closer to the barrier. John got an elbow in his appendix. Page stood on her tiptoes to see. Colonel Joe brushed the tip of the cannon with his torch and—
BOOM!
The firework exploded at the exact same time as Boz began a soaring parabola over the clover. A flaming jet trail pursued him, his hair blown back by the speed of flight. As John watched, Boz overshot the landing net with mathematical precision and disappeared behind a patch of reeds.
“Boz!” John shouted.
“Where’d he go?” asked Page.
A couple of people in the audience clapped. Four of them booed. One man got a broadside for attempting to touch the cannon.
“Nobody lays a finger on Betsy!” barked Colonel Joe.
“C’mon!” John grabbed his sister’s hand. “We’ve got to find Boz.”
The siblings took off across the field. In John’s head, he was going through all the possible fatal injuries. Broken leg. Fractured skull. Shattered ribs. By the time they’d clambered over a rickety fence, he was bracing himself to build a coffin.
Only to discover Boz emerging from a duck pond, a large frog perched contentedly on his head.
“Are you okay?” John demanded.
“Oh, right as the rain in Coltrane.” Boz shooed the frog onto a tree branch. “Merely a miscalculation on my weight-to-height ratio. I shall indulge in pâté de fois gras for a few days, and all will be right with the world.”
“What does that mean?” inquired Page.
Boz chuckled.
“It means I get to eat more. Shall we join the others?”
Together, the trio jogged back toward the tent. Colonel Joe was herding the last members of the audience back through the flaps. Some of them appeared to be trying to escape from watching the second half of the show.
“So how come the cannon didn’t kill you?” asked Page.
“Kill me?” Boz laughed. “Why, there’s no gunpowder left in good old Betsy.” He patted the barrel. “The Colonel had her rigged up with coiled springs when he brought her back from the war. The incendiaries and associated works are just for show.”
Intrigued, John crouched down to examine the interior. It looked like the springs were hidden behind a metal plate. If he could just get a look at the setup, he might be able to adjust the tension and prevent Boz from overshooting . . .
“Which p-p-part of ‘don’t touch’ did you miss?”
John stood up. At times like this, it was very tempting to tell Alligator Dan exactly where to stick his scales.
“It’s coming on ten. You two should b-b-be in b-b-bed.”
“But I want to hear Mister Missus Hank’s stories about allergic chipmunks,” Page protested. “And watch Priscilla dancing the polka and see Tiger Lil make the tent pole disappear—”
“And I want to talk to Pierre about the hip bath,” John added.
“Now!”
When it comes to self-determination, there’s only so much an eleven-year-old can accomplish. The Coggins went to bed.