Lots of blood.
Sore losers.
In the last bout, the sore loser chased the winner out of the tent swinging a length of heavy chain.
Ryan hardly noticed. His attention was elsewhere. Whenever a roustabout came or went, he tracked him or her to see what was being carried. Whenever a trailer moved in or out, he watched it closely. So far, everything that had come into the tent had gone out again.
Well, almost everything.
The only trailer that hadn’t moved sat on the other side of the center ring. It had been there, in the same spot, when the companions had entered the tent— an oblong box on a wheeled bed, with a facing mirror wall on which was painted a mural of predark circus scenes.
When the competition ended, the carny master announced the next act. “Friends, prepare yourselves to witness the strangest thing you will ever see. Something so unusual, and so startling that I guarantee you will never forget it as long as you live.” Then he waved to the wings and gave the order, “Roll in Baldoona.”
The cage containing the two-headed scalie was dragged on its trailer into the center ring. When it was in position, one of the moving crew tossed Crecca a long, metal-tipped pike and he used it to viciously prod the great lump of scale-covered flab.
In outrage, Baldoona’s heads snarled and squealed respectively.
“Bastard fat, isn’t it?” Crecca said to the crowd. “And if you’re all wondering how it got that way, you’re all about to find out.” He turned to the wings again and shouted, “Bring in his dinner!”
Two roustabouts trotted in a half-grown pig that weighed roughly one hundred pounds. It walked like a dog beside them, with a long, coiled leash of rope around its neck. The men used some kind of white grease from a tub to coat the pig’s body head to foot, then they tied the end of the rope to a stake that had been pounded deep into the dirt. When they walked away, the pig tried to follow them, but was brought up short by the end of the rope.
“I don’t want any of you to panic when we let out the scalie,” the Magnificent Crecca told his audience. “Pig is its favorite food, so it won’t pay you any mind until it’s done. And there’s another thing…old Baldoona knows there’s a time limit.” On cue, a pair of roustabouts carried what looked like a giant stopwatch to the tent pole and hung it from a hook there, in plain sight of all the seated spectators. Obviously predark, it had a black minute hand and a thin red hand that counted seconds.
“Baldoona has to catch and eat as much of the pig as it can before the clock’s alarm goes off,” Crecca continued. “Once the bell starts ringing, it knows it either steps away from the carcass, or it gets the shit kicked out of it by my rousties.”
With that the music swelled, a different theme now, a happy but tension-building, tick-tock song. One of the crew very carefully opened the scalie’s cage door, and the carny master started the time clock.
There was much laughter and thigh slapping from the crowd as the obese mutie pursued the greased but tethered pig around the center ring. The act’s opening antics were undeniably comical, but once Baldoona got a firm grip on the animal’s left rear hock, things quickly took a turn in a different direction.
Some things are harder to watch than others.
Baldoona ate the pig from the feet up, its adult head attacking at the front, baby head working on the rear, both mutie mouths gobbling for all they were worth, with the pig shrieking like a steam whistle the whole time. It didn’t stop shrieking until the adult head bit out its heart.
When Ryan looked over at his son, Dean was shielding the face of the little girl from the ville against his chest, a gentle hand resting on her slender shoulder. The boy wasn’t looking at the macabre spectacle; he was glaring at the carny master.
A look that Ryan knew well.