18

 

Cherokee Spring fairgrounds bloomed with the red and yellow striped tents. Clouds on the horizon sparked with lightning.

Guthrie checked a rope on his own structure, then stepped over the counter that would be his home for the next few weeks. The Glass Shack sat just east of the ring toss and south of the Tower of Strength. He unpacked his equipment—the mask, the long clear glass cylinders—and unrolled his pliers and tongs from the green felt bag. One tool slot remained empty. He checked his blowtorch. Tanks full. Guthrie had inherited the booth, and the knowledge of his craft when he was a young man, the day his mentor was caught with one ace too many in a card game with the carnival master.

“Cheat at life, face your death.” Randall had spat the eulogy as Guthrie had shoveled a final pile of dirt on the unmarked grave in the Ozark backwoods.

They’d given him the Glass Shack as consolation, near thirty years ago, since no questions were asked. From that day on, Guthrie knew he had to give up the sauce, at least on driving days. He couldn’t make figurines if his hands shook, or spin molten glass while doused in an alcoholic haze. This was the only place left to call home. He was out of options. This was his purgatory. He barely remembered what came before, as if it were some dream from which he’d never roused.

“You all right there, Guthrie?” Maya Randall, the carnival master’s daughter, walked over. She was sixteen with curves where she used to be stick straight. “Just making sure everything made it safe.”

He averted his attention. “Yes’m.” He twisted to glance at the exhibit pieces, flicked the spark to his blowtorch, adjusted the narrow blue flame, and lowered his visor. “I’m all unpacked.”

Across the field, near the forest’s edge, other tents popped up their tops. White canvas ghosts, they floated under the moonlight, near the skeleton of the old schoolhouse. “Look at them, up there.”

“That’d be the Revival folk setting up.” He swallowed a shard. “Wrong side of the highway.”

“You ever been to one?” Maya leaned her elbows to the edge, the fire red of her hair dangled across one shoulder.

“Not for quite some time.” The blue flame whooshed, heat and light. He tightened until it almost burned invisible. “Pastor’s getting ready to save some souls.”

“Pa’ll snag a few down here, too, I reckon.” She tilted a wicked grin as she reviewed the figures in the haphazard display, a mini carnival in its own right. She pointed to the clown. “You gonna finally give that to me this year?”

Guthrie shook his head. “Nope.”

Her lips pressed into a full pout. An idea brightened those agate-colored eyes. She reminded him of a tiger, ready to pounce as she leaned halfway over the counter. “Make me something?”

“Already started.” He dragged the amber stick of glass over, warmed it, set his hands in motion. Guthrie made the same form that he made for her time and again, bunching the tiger’s shoulders, jaws open, tail swirled around its lithe body. He used the fine tongs to twist the cooling glass just so.

Maya scrunched her lips. “Why do you always make me tigers?”

“It’s what your eyes tell me.” Satisfied, he set about cooling the figure, using a heavy cloth to draw the heat out.

The girl in the alley had eyes that showed him something altogether different. His mind replayed the scene he’d witnessed a few days ago, and he started his next project for the menagerie. The heron. The trout. With competent, quick fingers, the animals took shape from tubes of glass.

Lips pursed in an O of surprise, Maya ignored the tiger and watched him work. Childlike, she clapped.

The sloshing bottle pressed in his breast pocket as the glass sparked under his hands. He cleared his throat as he wove in bright blue for the bird’s wing. A slight line of yellow melted under the blaze of his torch. He tweaked it with the finest pliers, forming its beak, the crest at its head.

“I want that one.” Maya blinked brandy-colored eyes.

“Always want what you can’t have, don’t you?” Guthrie gave a swift shake of his head. “You take care of the tiger now, Maya.” He cooled the heron, quick-like to keep it from breaking, and secreted it away between heavy cloths.

“I never will get how you do that.” She frowned, turning the cat over.

“Tried to show you once, remember?” He smiled, teeth hidden behind his lips. “You didn’t give it a chance.”

“Patience isn’t my strong suit.” She flipped her ponytail, a laugh on her lips. “I ended up with a blob.”

“Paperweight,” he corrected. “Everything deserves a chance—even if it needs to be re-melted. Formed into something new.”

“If you say so. I call it trash.” She set off toward her pa’s trailer without so much as a glance back.

Looking back up the hill, Guthrie’s heart throbbed. The last of the Revival tents bloomed out. Someone sang, a guitar hummed through loudspeakers. A voice lilted, laughed.

Inside, curtains drawn, lights burning, Maya’s father—Carnival Master Randall—plotted and planned the next moves for his carnival of fools.