by Emilya Naymark
Part I
Fergle
“Exit now,” the GPS lady commanded.
Fergle peered at the hazy highway, swerving as he did. His GPS lady had an Irish accent and reminded him of his aunt Maura, who also loved issuing directions.
The exit caromed around the bend and he took it, the GPS lady satisfied to silence. Still miles from the ocean, the air already had a fresh, marine tang to it—iodine and seaweed. He turned his face into the breeze and inhaled deeply. He needed this.
“Exit now,” the GPS Aunt Maura said, and Fergle obliged, finding himself on a narrow two-lane road. As if passing through a veil, the air shifted from white-bright to silver, and the sky dropped low and heavy over the beach bungalows and pizza shops either side of him.
“You sure?” he asked, but the GPS lady was not in the business of answering questions, same as Aunt Maura when she didn’t want to talk. Like when he was three and kept asking when he could go home, please, and if she would rub his back and sing to him the way his mother used to.
No more going home for him now, not ever. Another family lived in the house where he grew up, and Maura occupied space in a nursing home. The last time he’d visited her, which was yesterday, she had screeched in horror and crab walked along the wall until she found her closet and locked herself inside.
“Maybe she was looking for the toilet,” the dementia ward nurse said, patting his arm, but he knew better. The simple truth was Maura reacted the same way everyone did the first time they saw him—with fear. Six foot seven, big-boned, heavy-browed, with a face that looked chopped rather than chiseled, Fergle’s outward appearance inspired fear.
A sign caught his eye: “Efficiency rooms to let. By week or month.” Fergle crunched into the dilapidated parking lot and unfolded his bulk from behind the wheel. He’d been here before, twenty-some years ago. Not at the motel, but at Old Town Beach, Maine, though he remembered absolutely nothing from that first visit, not even the accident that left him with a broken cheekbone, clavicle and arm. He’d been only a toddler when his mother took him on one of her spontaneous road trips. Yet something of that primordial junket remained in his cells, and a shiver shook him, traveling from the top of his beige hair to his slabby feet.
His phone buzzed, and he put it away without answering. It had been buzzing ever since he walked out of his office building, weighty duffel bag in hand, broken glass and dented metal glinting underneath an emptied display case behind him.
The late afternoon cooled; the town still groggy from winter, even though it was mid-June. Fergle paid for the first night with cash, collected a brass key and entered a small, stuffy, stained room. He threw his backpack onto the bed, opened the window and ducked back out through the doorway.
He’d stay a week. Or two. It wasn’t like he had a job anymore, not after taking the thing occupying half his trunk right now. Even six months ago, being unemployed (never mind under what circumstances) would have distressed him. He loved designing toys, had even majored in just that at university. Lately, however, the toys he built felt a lie, a promise to children the world would not keep.
The phone clamored again; he powered it off. A walk to the beach. A dip in the cold ocean. That’s the thing. At the boardwalk, he passed a tent, and a man as tall and burly as he eyed him, then said, “You here for the job?”
Fergle paused in bewilderment, and only then noticed the half-built carnival rides, the flaccid tents, the boxes of cables and duct tape.
“Sure,” he said, because he was a curious person, and why not.
“All right, fill this out.” The man pushed a clipboard toward him, form attached. Missing his front teeth, the man was a leathery burgundy color, and had a flattened nose that spoke of past violence.
“Axl?” The man grinned at Fergle’s form.
Fergle grinned back. “That’s me.”
The man held out his hand, his crooked and flattened fingers rough against Fergle’s office-smooth ones. “I’m Del. You can start now,” he said. “Three hundred a week and you get a discount on the grub.”
“Sure beans,” said Fergle, because he enjoyed building things, and he figured if he weren’t assembling rides or manning booths, he’d be wandering the hard sand, alone with his thoughts and the phone in his pocket with its thirty-two messages and twenty-seven missed calls.
He spent the rest of the afternoon helping with setup and the early evening running the cotton candy machine. The hour before closing found him at the Wild West shooting gallery, taking sticky tickets and cash, handing out plush animals, all while the tiny manager offered frequent nips from the whiskey bottle she kept under the counter. He accepted, the alcohol wrapping him in cheerful gauze.
“Thank you for that,” he said. “The next bottle is on me.”
She waved his words away with a shy smile, her hand fluttering to cover her mouth.
After the lights shut and the motors quieted, Fergle raised his face to the moon. He’d been working such long hours for the toy company—eighty, ninety hours a week—that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been outside like this, cool air on his skin while still alert, awake. Fried dough and onions, body spray, spilled beer and cigar smoke shimmied on the night breezes.
He didn’t want to return to his little efficiency room with its stingy window and thin mattress, and instead strolled through the hushed fairground toward the trucks and tents where the permanent carnival workers were winding down for the night. Their radios and phones emitted classic rock, reggaeton and hip-hop as the ocean rose and fell behind them like a benevolent beast.
He meandered the grounds toward his motel, feeling so light, so hollow, so empty, he wanted to cry, but that reaction made no sense, so he quashed it. He soon found himself facing yet another set of trailers partially obscured by what, even under the moonlight and in his exhausted state, looked like a very unstable billboard wall, thirty feet long, twelve high, acting as a barrier between the two camps. Posters, ads and graffiti announced fireworks past and future as well as concerts and revival meetings. Layers and layers.
Someone was shouting behind that wall, then a thud, and the wood shook as something body-sized smashed against it. Fergle paused. He was drunk. He was tired. This was not his circus, not his monkey.
A grunt behind the wall and the body-sized thing slammed against the wall again. He marched to the corner and peered around the wall’s edge.
The man who’d signed him up earlier (what was his name? Something like a computer) held a young boy immobilized against the plywood with one jumbo hand on his neck, punching him in the face with the other. The boy’s head snapped back with every punch, thudding against the wood.
“Hey!” Fergle stepped forward, his hands closing into fists and his shoulders hunching forward. Usually that’s all he needed to do. He hadn’t had to fight anybody since sixth grade.
The man (his name was Del, that’s it) dropped his hands and faced him, squaring his shoulders. “Not your problem, man,” Del said, echoing Fergle’s thoughts of a minute ago.
“Are you okay?” Fergle asked the boy, who clearly was not. His face bulged in the nose and cheek, blood like a bib over his shirt. But the boy nodded.
Del shrugged. “Kids,” he said. “You got any?”
Fergle shook his head.
“Wait till you got one,” Del said. “They’ll drive you crazy. This one—” he raised his hand and the boy ducked, slid sideways along the wall “—is a dummy. Won’t talk, won’t listen. What’m I supposed to do?”
The boy scuttled away into shadow, and Fergle followed, having a vague idea of bringing the child to the police. He trailed him to the beach where the boy sat down cross-legged, hunched, thin arms around his knees. He shied away when Fergle lowered himself to the sand but didn’t run.
“Are you okay?” Fergle repeated. Up close, Fergle saw the boy was older than he first thought, fourteen or fifteen, but slight, small for his age.
The boy shrugged.
“Here.” Fergle took two twenties from his wallet. It was money he could hardly spare. “You can come with me if you want.” He extended the cash, and the boy stared at him with rounded, bruised eyes.
A heat suffused Fergle’s neck and he said, “No, I mean, if you want to go someplace else. I don’t want anything.” He looked away. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. Do you have anybody? Can I take you someplace else?”
The boy shook his head, then scooted over and grabbed the cash from Fergle’s hand. “Just stay out of his way for a while, okay?”
The boy tucked the money away but kept staring at him, his poor, swollen face simultaneously hopeful and cautious. Looking at him hurt Fergle, so he turned away, wishing he could do more. And then he knew exactly what he could do.
He rose, shook sand off his legs and said, “Come on. I have something for you.” He walked a few paces, paused, and the boy was right there behind him, close, yet out of reach.
“What’s your name?” Fergle asked.
The boy crouched and used his index finger to scrawl a name in the sand. Billy.
The drone was a prototype, one of a kind so far. But it was perfect. Fergle had designed it over a year ago, drawing it by hand until he saw how every part would work. He’d gone to his manager with the idea and received approval to proceed. He’d called it The Imagidrone. The idea was simple—children played by building things, assembling, disassembling. The Imagidrone contained hundreds of configurations. It could look like a pirate ship, flying against the moon. Or an elephant. A house, a fire truck, an eagle, a centaur. It could be folded into a kite, a swan, a shark, a tulip. There were preprogrammed designs, and a flick of keys and switches would transform the drone. But Fergle’s favorite setting was the free-form one.
Fergle sat on a plastic chair by his car and watched Billy press this and that as the drone bulged in one direction, then another, spluttered to the sky, plummeted, only to stop a foot from gravel, hovering.
“It’s like origami,” Fergle said. “You can take one piece of paper and fold it into anything.”
The boy made a soft, stuttering sound, and it took Fergle a moment to realize he was laughing.
The Imagidrone won awards, and was going into mass production over the summer, ready for the Christmas rush. It had won Fergle’s manager a six-figure bonus and massive promotion.
Fergle still wasn’t clear how the manager’s name, and not his, appeared on all the documents.
The manager’s name on the patent.
And it was the manager, now director of the entire division, who was interviewed in the trade publications.
The boy turned the drone off and put it into its box. He hugged the box and looked at Fergle, uncertain.
“It’s yours,” Fergle said. “Go on. Make something nice.”
After the boy vanished, Fergle creaked to his feet and put his hand into his pocket.
His room key was gone. Wasn’t in his pockets, nor in his boots. He looked everywhere, even under the car. He turned on his phone just long enough to call the motel office, but nobody answered.
The moon had set, and the single streetlight cast a glow so feeble that when a figure darkened the alley between office and motel, he could only be sure it was someone tall, wide and most likely male. He yelled out a “Hey,” but the person dissolved into the alley without answering.
The motel office door was unlocked, and he entered, pinged a little brass bell, heard no response and proceeded to poke around. Ten minutes later he was no closer to locating a spare and was about to crash on the office couch when he noticed another, inner door. Knocking on that one produced no results, but when he put his ear to the wood, he heard voices. Laughter, low music, rustling and thumping told him a party raged beyond.
Feeling a surge of hope mixed with frustration, he put his shoulder to the door, and it popped open, revealing a red-lit room that seemed much too large due to the unusual number of mirrors it contained.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but all at once his brain clicked into gear. The two dozen or so people before him were naked (more or less), horizontal (for the most part) and quite happy. He had to bend his head to the side to figure out what the threesome on the red vinyl sectional were engaged in and was impressed with their agility once he did.
Only when his eyes locked with those of a woman lounging back in a strappy contraption, and she sat up, her face going from bleary pleasure to tight fury, did he register he was intruding. He lowered his head and ducked out, marching toward his car and climbing into the backseat.
Unable to stretch out, he had to open the back door and prop his feet on the plastic chair. He slept like that, two-thirds of him in his car, legs sticking out, the evening’s events fusing into a single fun house movie inside his brain.
Part II
Melissa
Melissa Fraser blotted her lipstick, slathered more concealer under her exhausted eyes and sipped her double espresso. The pull to check if the message was still on her phone overwhelmed her, but she restrained herself because just at that moment her husband hustled into their kitchen, his tie cinched around his bulbous head like a string around a balloon.
She smiled and gave him her cheek to peck because that’s what they did, every morning, weekday and weekend, no matter what. His dependability and sunny disposition were two of his best qualities, and she appreciated them deeply. Days like today she needed a bit of sunshine.
“Early meeting this morning?” he asked, grabbing a banana from the bowl and car keys from the counter.
“Just want to get some paperwork done,” she answered. “I haven’t reviewed the carnival docs yet.”
He smiled, checked his phone, tucked it away and nodded his goodbye.
“Go get ’em, tiger,” he said, just as he always did, and she hoped that meant he hadn’t received the message. He paused at the door, and her heart thumped hard inside her chest. “I’ll be home late, hon,” he said. “I’ve got three kids for tutoring.”
“SATs?” she asked.
He nodded again, winked and shut the door behind him, leaving her alone in the large, bright, clean kitchen. It was sweet, really, how he believed his tutoring high school math for forty bucks an hour paid for the stainless-steel smart oven and fridge, the state-of-the-art wine cooler, not to mention the very good wine inside. She could see how he might have, years ago, his salary as math professor being higher than hers as mayor. But now? Not for the first time she questioned his innocence, and, as always, pushed the thought away. Her husband was the King of Denial, as the chief of police told her on many occasions.
The thought of one such occasion—from last night—caused the coffee to turn acrid in her throat, sour in her stomach. She flipped her phone over and brought up the message, then zoomed into the attached pictures. If she wasn’t so queasy, she’d appreciate that she looked damn good in them. She worked hard to maintain her appearance, and between Pilates, yoga and regular Botox, at forty-six she could have passed for ten years younger, in bright sunlight no less.
A wave of nausea overcame her, and she ran to the bathroom where she upchucked the morning’s coffee and last night’s wine. As she brushed her teeth once more and reapplied lipstick, she checked her phone again. The photos were still there. The message was still there, demanding twenty thousand dollars in cash or else.
She had the money. That wasn’t the point. The point was those photographs and the way everything lived on nowadays forever and ever in some ineffable cloud. The point was that whoever sent those pictures might ask for more later, might dig around for real dirt.
Last night had been hazier than usual. Could be because she’d started earlier—her husband had gone to the carnival and came back pale and ill from the sausage and peppers he shouldn’t have eaten, and went straight to bed, gifting her a two-hour head start. Or maybe it was the little pill the chief of police had placed on her tongue (with his tongue) as she leaned forward to smooth his hair.
The memory hit her like an electric shock as she got into her car. There’d been a stranger in the room last night. Usually she liked to close her eyes, but something, a noise, alerted her and she saw him. A big lunk of a man, dangerous looking, obviously a bad actor. She stomped on the accelerator and zoomed into town, parking in front of the village hall before 8 a.m.
Once in her office, she made herself a K-Cup, black, and opened the folder with the carnival’s papers. Then paused and checked the photos on her phone for the umpteenth time. She forced herself to look at each one—pixel by pixel. There. Her finger was so sweaty she had to dry her hand with a tissue, but when she zoomed in, she saw a reflection in one of the mirrors.
The guy, it was the guy, the stranger, his phone and ham hands obstructing his face, but his build and height unmistakable, even with the dim lighting. Sure enough, he was wearing the carnival’s red T-shirt. She could even see part of the word STAFF reflected in the mirror.
A half hour later, she sat back and rubbed her temples. None of the forty-seven driver’s licenses in the carnival’s documents folder belonged to the goon.
A knock startled her, and she jerked, overturning the mug at her elbow, sending lukewarm coffee all over her desk and onto her rose-gold dress. She sprang to her feet, her eyes narrowing at the man in her doorway.
“I’m sorry, Melissa,” Del said.
Melissa Fraser prided herself on her open-door policy. She believed it was one of those things that got her reelected term after term, and it was a great sound bite. But she could have howled for forgetting to lock herself in this morning.
“Have a seat, Del,” she said, ripping tissues from the dispenser to dab her ruined dress.
“I heard dish detergent and vinegar—” Del started, but she aimed a glare of such vitriol in his direction he stopped.
“Close the door,” she said.
He got up, sauntered to the door, shut it, then sat down again.
She abandoned her dress, and unlocked the bottom drawer in her desk, tugging out a small yellow envelope. The envelope contained the results of last week’s raid, or at least as much of the contraband the police chief’s man could stash before vouchering the rest.
“Whatcha got there?” Del leaned forward, his lips stretching apart to reveal black gaps.
“Percs, Molly, Oxy in here—” she pointed to the envelope, then removed a second, white one and placed it on top “—dope in here.”
Del honest to God smacked his lips.
“Twelve thou,” she said.
“Oh, come on. I only got a week,” he said, but the excitement in his voice was unmistakable. She was giving him a very good price.
“Fine,” she said and reached for the envelopes. “I have someone else lined up for these, anyway.”
He placed his paw over the packets. “Nah. It’s okay. I got the cash.”
She tried not to grimace as he counted bills off the roll he withdrew from some unsavory depths in his jeans. The cash would be split between her and the chief of police, a smidge going to the detective who led the raid. Over the next few nights, arrests would be made at the carnival and these same illegal substances confiscated. They wouldn’t arrest the dealers—no reason to burn those bridges. But they’d recover a good chunk of the drugs. Those would be sold to a dealer out in the suburbs, and she might take her math whiz hubby on a Mediterranean cruise this summer. It would make him happy, and she liked making him happy. Cycle of life.
“Oh,” she said, lightly, as if it didn’t matter, “did you by any chance sign on new people last night?”
“Yeah, five of ’em.” A cautious question in his voice.
“You have their driver’s licenses?”
He grimaced and shook his head. “Tomorrow. Too much going on last night.”
She stared at him until he broke eye contact, settling on her spider plant instead. “Well, do you have pictures of them at least?”
He shrugged. “I might.”
Oh, the slowness with which he extracted his phone and began scrolling, zooming, bringing the phone close to his face, squinting, grunting, snuffling. Was there no end to the annoying noises that man could generate? No. She did not want an answer.
“Here’s one. That’s Henry.” He turned the phone over and showed her a pockmarked, slim man in his forties. Del waited until she nodded and flicked to the next picture. “Frank.” No, this one was an African American, youngish, with pink hair. He flicked forward again. “Axl.”
Adrenaline sent blood to her face. The intruder from last night. No doubt. Tall, big-boned, sandy hair and potato face. The man was standing over a cotton candy machine, lit blue and red from below like a horror movie villain. Which he was. Her blackmailer.
She paid no heed to the next two pictures, and sat back in her chair, affecting a calmness she didn’t feel. “Fine, but bring copies of their licenses tomorrow.”
He nodded, stood. “Sure thing.”
“One moment.” He paused. “That Axl.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“He reminds me of somebody.” She bent to her desk again and pretended to riffle through file folders, pulling one out and shuffling through its papers. “Right.” She shut the folder and stood. She wasn’t as tall as Del, but she’d had a lifetime to practice authority. That’s why people listened to her. That’s how she had the life she had. Which she had no intention of losing. “He’s a perp, Del. I knew I recognized him. He tried to muscle in on our business a few months ago. We ran him off but looks like he’s back.”
Del looked confused. She’d never done more than sell him drugs before and she realized she was being much too oblique.
“What I’m saying, Del, is you need to watch out for this man. He’s going to interfere.”
Del knit his brows. “So—”
Jesus, she could almost hear the rusty gears grind in his brain. “Get rid of him, Del.”
“Oh.”
“You do that, and I’ll give you back the twelve thou.”
A sly look came over him. “It’s risky.”
“Oh, please. Just threaten him or something. Tell him to get lost. Tell him if he meddles with us, you’ll cut his legs off.”
He blanched.
“So, we’re good, right? Once I know he’s gone, you get the twelve thou back.”
“We’re good,” he said.
She gave him her mightiest unblinking stare, the one where she lowered her face just an inch and let her eyebrows form a strict line.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Del said, his shoulders slumped, and his strut less exuberant as he left.
She closed her door with a thump and locked it. Screw the open-friggin’-door policy today. She needed a moment.
Part III
Fergle
The cinder block missed him by bare inches, whooshing along his arm and landing with a subdued but hefty thud onto the sand at his feet. The only reason it missed him at all was because he’d heard a whistle—one of those “hey, look here” kind of whistles—and he’d turned toward it, letting the cinder block fall through air rather than through his muscles and bones.
Fergle stepped away from the billboard wall and looked up. Nothing. He peered in the whistle’s direction. Nothing. Unsettled and pukish from the fried chicken and fries he had for dinner, he walked back into the heat of the carnival and resumed his place at the cotton candy machine. Sleeping in his car last night had left him tired and sore, and by the time he cornered the motel manager and got a replacement room key, he needed to head back to the carnival. And yet the sheer transformation of his life excited him, made even the exhaustion interesting.
Loud. The fair was loud. Screams and laughter, rides and the motors that powered them, classic rock over the PA, all fusing into a throbbing alloy of sound.
He spun pink and blue clouds of sugar and handed the hot, sweet masses to children, to adults and, twice, to a teddy bear behind which a child hid. It took a half hour, but the carnival calmed him. Something about his uncomplicated task, the joy in the faces around him and the sensory stimulation eased his tension. The wall from which the cinder block fell was unsteady. He’d seen that last night, noticed the weak spots without even trying, his engineer’s mind picking up on the splintered and bowed trusses. Nobody was trying to kill him. That was a crazy thought.
And so, when he got pushed from behind and half fell onto the cotton candy drum, he was unprepared, his defenses sluggish. He righted himself, burning his hand, and only after snapping it away from the biting metal realized something was wrong. The muscles in his side spasmed, then pulsed with pain, and he looked down at the same time as a little boy said, “Mister, you’re bleeding.”
All noise fell away and a forceful surge of illness gripped him, bending him. His stomach convulsed, sending his dinner up and out, where it landed at his feet.
“Ewww,” said the boy.
“Oh,” said his mother.
“Excuse me,” said Fergle because Aunt Maura brought him up to be polite. He lurched sideways, hand pressed tight against his obliques, his breathing shallow and panicked.
His idea at that moment was to walk back to his efficiency unit. He wasn’t thinking clearly, shock forcing him to seek a locked, safe room. By the time he reached the far end of the fairgrounds, logic prevailed, and he understood he needed an ambulance.
As he stopped and tried to withdraw his phone with his bloodied hand, someone jumped him from behind, sending him sprawling on the dusty, pebbly ground, the rip in his side screaming red-hot. The person straddled him. Through the haze of panic and pain, Fergle felt the man’s thigh muscles stretch and his hips angle forward. Fergle’s body knew (without it being verbalized in his brain), that this meant the man was raising his arm, and when the arm came down, he’d be dead, and so he bucked and twisted in an instant, teeth slicing through his bottom lip, unseating his attacker.
For a shocked second Fergle lay in the dust, staring at the opponent who was already climbing to his knees. It was Del. The dogged violence in Del’s face jarred him, and he wondered if the man really planned on killing him over last night’s altercation.
But then his animal brain took over, and he rose, screamed (because pushing his right leg back involved moving his outraged oblique muscles) and kicked Del square in the balls. His booted foot connected with an immensely satisfying crunch, and Del collapsed facedown.
Fergle ran.
The little shantytown was just ahead and Fergle made for it, trying to decide if he’d hide in a trailer, a Porta-John or—
He didn’t have time to decide because a knife whizzed into his back and stuck. He didn’t scream. That would have required taking a deep breath and doing so was impossible. Fortunately, not screaming meant he heard that “look here” whistle again, but all he saw was the wobbly billboard wall and a slim shadow at the other end.
Maura used to say his head thought things before he knew he thought them. And that’s what happened now, his body swerving to the left as he staggered along the length of the wall. Reaching the far end, he looked back and saw Del huffing toward him on bowed legs, another knife glinting in an upraised hand.
Fergle squinted at the supports, finding the one he’d noticed last night, the one with the sag in it from the wall’s weight. He threw his whole body against it.
It shuddered, but held.
Del was now fifty feet away.
Fergle wrenched at the support and felt small hands pulling alongside his. Then one of those hands raised a hammer and smashed into the wood.
As the carnival raged and an early firework shot into the purple sky, Del threw the second knife, the wall juddered once more and collapsed to the ground in a cloud of dirt and sand, taking Del with it.
Fergle weakened and plopped into the dust, his breathing louder in his ears than even the crash.
He watched, dumbfounded, as Del’s boy pulled a sheet of plywood off his father’s torso and head, then another one off his legs. Billy knelt and flipped his father onto his back. This took effort, and the boy grew white with determination. He then unsnapped Del’s wallet and key chains, removing them from one pocket, yanked his phone from another pocket. He gestured for Fergle to come closer, and when he wobbled over, Billy pointed to his, Fergle’s pockets. Fergle did not move.
Billy stepped close and carefully, maintaining eye contact, withdrew Fergle’s room and car keys. He then stuffed them into Del’s pocket.
Fergle couldn’t remember the first time his life twisted upside down. In any case, fate or his drunk mother, or the slick highway had altered it on his behalf. He’d had no say in it then.
But now? He dug his phone out of his pocket, dropped it and ground his boot heel into it until it cracked, and ground some more. Billy watched, then picked up the pieces and stuffed them into his father’s sullied jeans.
Billy next lifted a remote control from his waistband and the Imagidrone dove from the sky. The boy had made extensive use of the freeform setting. The Imagidrone looked like a medieval mace, and it smashed into Del’s face in a fountain of blood and gore. It got stuck for a few seconds, but the boy maneuvered it out, and it flew up, then slammed down again. And again. And again, until Del’s head was hamburger meat and glistening bone. When he finished with the head, the boy turned to his father’s hands.
Afterward, Billy’s cheeks, nose, chin, shirt and jeans black with blood, he held Del’s truck keys in his palm, extended them to Fergle.
Billy waited, looking at Fergle with a question in his battered eyes.
Breathing was hard. Thinking was hard. But just as his aunt always said, Fergle had thought his thoughts before he knew them.
“Do me a favor.” He shifted so his back was toward the boy. “Take this out, would you?”
He’d spent his childhood shell-shocked, blindingly lonesome, and as an adult tried to bring magic into children’s lives to make up for reality. But brutal realities breed brutal magic, he saw that now. He considered going to the police. He imagined Billy in a foster home, or in a home for delinquent youth. Unloved. Beaten for being small, strange, mute. He felt, in Billy’s body language, a tentative trust. The boy had humanity in him yet. When he’d pulled his father’s knife out of Fergle’s back, his touch was light, gentle, and he’d pressed against the wound with a small, cool hand until the blood slowed.
Fergle asked the boy to unlock Del’s phone for him before Billy rushed to his trailer to gather his and his father’s things. They’d go west. They’d sell the truck for cash, buy something else. It was a big country. There were other carnivals they could join, smaller ones, wait things out. Fergle would figure it out. One thing he knew for sure, he had a chance to improve someone’s life. And what kind of person would he be if he didn’t take it?
As he peered at the dead man’s phone, ten photographs popped up and his finger froze over the screen. There was the red-lit, mirrored room from last night. There was the woman who’d seen him, her head thrown back in ecstatic joy, eyes shut.
Fergle blinked, thought, and erased each picture. He then entered a coordinate into the GPS.
Seven hours later, with the sun rising behind them, and Fergle drifting in and out of sleep as the boy drove, the new GPS lady said, “Exit now.”
And they did.
Epilogue
Melissa
Melissa Fraser, mayor of Old Town Beach, Maine, stood in front of the new tombstone and smiled as the local reporter took her photo. The stranger had blown into town almost a year ago on a bad wind, and sent her world spinning for a few days. But she didn’t get to where she was by cowering in corners every time a bully tried to take advantage of her. No, not her.
The murder had caused a great commotion at first, but she took control and swore up and down that Old Town Beach was, and always would be, the perfect family-friendly vacation spot and a wonderful place to live. Within hours of the grisly discovery under the fallen wall, cops broke into Del Baciano’s trailer, where they discovered a stash of heroin in a white envelope and an assortment of pills in a yellow one. Del, his son, his truck and most of his belongings were gone.
As far as she knew, he hadn’t been found yet, despite being on the most wanted list for all the municipalities in the country. And what of the stranger? Her instincts had been right all along. After that night, not a single new threat came her way, though she’d worried for months, and still had an occasional nightmare.
They were never able to identify the murder victim. The name he gave on his job application was false, and he paid for his room with cash.
Melissa patted the tombstone she’d funded with her own money. She hadn’t really meant for Del to butcher the man, and wasn’t sure how her request could have been so misinterpreted. Still, though, the interloper had threatened her very life.
On the other hand, theirs was not a town to throw a stranger into a pauper’s grave (Did they even have pauper’s graves anymore? She didn’t know.) or to cremate his body without a soul to mourn him. No, they were a kind, friendly, welcoming town. Where the good deserved to be remembered, and wannabe villains forewarned.
She’d come up with the epitaph herself, and was quite proud of it.
this stranger came to town
and a wall fell on him.
it happens.