"What's the matter?" laughed another of the men, and I could see now that there were five of them. "Cat got your tongue?"
I made an attempt to reply, but again nothing came out.
"Why pay money for a freak show when we can look at you for free?" said the blond man.
I gave up trying to speak and just glared at him.
"Ugly little bastard, isn't he?" said another.
"Come on," said the blond man. "I'm getting tired of looking at him."
"Maybe he's getting tired of looking at you," said a familiar voice behind me.
"Who the hell are you?" said the blond man.
"I'm the guy who's going to make you apologize to my friend," said Thaddeus, stepping between them and me.
"You and what army?" laughed the blond man.
Thaddeus didn't reply. He just stepped forward and hit the blond man full on the jaw, and slammed a fist into another man's stomach before the first one had hit the ground.
"My friend is still waiting for that apology," said Thaddeus, a wicked smile on his face.
The other three jumped him, and I ran off to get a policeman while Thaddeus started cursing and hitting with equal vigor. When I returned with two security guards a minute later three of the men were lying on the ground, while Thaddeus and the other two were still flailing away, blood pouring down their faces.
The guards broke up the fight and decided to settle for ejecting everyone from the grounds rather than making any arrests. They let Thaddeus and me leave first.
"Well," he said as we were driving out of the parking lot, "aren't you going to thank me for saving your ugly little neck?"
"It wasn't necessary," I said. "They were just teasing me. You do it all the time."
"I've got a right," he said. "They don't."
"They wouldn't have hurt me," I persisted.
"How the hell do you know?" he shot back. "Besides, I like an occasional fight."
"Especially after a woman has turned you down," I said softly.
"I've got to do something with all that energy," he agreed. Suddenly he turned to me. "What makes you think she turned me down?" he asked sharply.
"Just a guess," I said.
"Well if she hadn't, I wouldn't have been around to pull your fat out of the fire," he said petulantly.
"They wouldn't have hurt me," I repeated. "They were about to leave."
"Goddamned ungrateful little dwarf," he muttered. We drove the rest of the way in total silence.
Chapter 2
Thaddeus calls me a dwarf, but I'm not.
What I am is a hunchback. He knows it, of course, but he can't make any money displaying a hunchback in a sideshow. He says that people have this regrettable tendency to feel sorry for hunchbacks, rather than being fascinated or scared by them. He doesn't know why, given the splendid example of Quasimodo, but that's the way he says it is. He even tried billing me as the World's Smallest Hunchback—the best of two worlds, he called it—but it didn't work. (Actually, if I could stand erect the way I used to be able to do when I was growing up, I'd probably be five foot three or four: not enormous, but not a dwarf, either.) He also calls me Tojo: it isn't my name—or, at least, it didn't use to be. But my eyes are kind of narrow, and my hair is black, and my skin has a yellow cast to it from all the times I've been sick. Thaddeus decided the first time he saw me that if my name wasn't Tojo it ought to be—and since I didn't want my parents to find me and send me back to the sanitarium, I figured that Tojo was as good a name as any and better than most. To this day, I don't think Thaddeus knows my real name.
We share a trailer except when Thaddeus has feminine company, which means we don't share a trailer very often at all. The night we came back from the Ahasuerus Traveling Sideshow, Thaddeus picked up one of the local girls, and I spent the night with Jupiter Monk, our wild animal trainer. He's a nice, friendly guy, and one of the few members of the carny who can discuss books with me, but he keeps a pair of leopards in his trailer and I spent most of the night sleeping in his tub with the door locked. Every now and then he'd knock on the door and ask if I needed anything, and when I told him I didn't he'd go back to wrestling with his animals.
Still, it was better than spending a night with some of the others. Jason Diggs—he runs our games and is known, less than lovingly, as Digger the Rigger—won't let me in unless I agree to play cards with him. Even playing for nickels and dimes, a night's rent can get pretty expensive. And Billybuck Dancer, our trick-shot artist, just sits in his chair all night and stares at photographs of Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo; I think he's a little crazy, even if he is the best gun-and-knife man I've ever seen in a carny.
In fact, thanks to Thaddeus' incredibly complicated love life, I spend two or three nights in every trailer on the lot during the course of a season. Except Alma's, that is.
Alma is Alma Pafko. She's also Honeysuckle Rose, one of the girls in the strip show, although Thaddeus replaced her as the headliner last year. She's also Thaddeus' steady bedmate, although that gets a little complicated, too.
She knows that he sleeps with other women in the show, and while I know it bothers her, she puts up with it; but she goes crazy when he picks up one of the locals. She loves him, and she won't sleep with anyone else, but she realizes that he has his faults, so in her mind she's drawn an imaginary line around the carny: as long as he keeps it in the family, so to speak, she tolerates it.
Alma and I used to be friends. In fact, for a long time she was my only friend. She would take care of me when I got sick, and she'd stick up for me whenever Thaddeus started picking on me, and she even set up a kind of screen so that I wouldn't have to leave the trailer on cold nights. I used to lend her books, and while she was never really interested in them, at least she'd make an effort to read them. We even traded Christmas presents.
We would spend long afternoons sitting around the trailer discussing the future. Alma was always going to quit the girlie show, though of course she never did. I don't think she felt especially degraded by stripping, but it always bothered her when Thaddeus would pass the word that the cops were in the bag and the girls could work strong. She didn't mind the men pawing and kissing her, but it upset the hell out of her that he didn't mind it either.
She kept talking about wanting to become a legitimate actress on the New York stage (unless, of course, she could talk Thaddeus into marrying her, which was what she really wanted). I don't think she had ever seen a live play in her life, but I don't imagine it was any sillier than my own ambition: from the day I first saw Thaddeus standing on a platform in front of the girlie show, taunting and joking with his audience, teasing and prodding them into buying tickets and out-heckling the hecklers, I'd wanted to be a barker for a carny.
I even sent off for a couple of speech-improvement courses, but they didn't improve my stammer any more than the Albee and Williams plays I loaned Alma improved her acting.
Still, it was nice to sit around and dream, and we did a lot of it—until the day Thaddeus got an opportunity to buy out Jonas Stark, the carny's owner.