The Last Rakosh

Bondy looked at him wide-eyed, his forehead wrinkling up to where his hairline should have been. Probably no one had talked to him that way in a long, long time.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Nobody you want to know right now. Maybe you should call it a night.”

Bondy took a swing at Jack’s face. He telegraphed it by baring his teeth. Jack raised the rod between his face and the fist. Bondy screamed as his knuckles smashed against the iron, then did a knock-kneed walk in a circle with the hand jammed between his thighs, groaning in pain.

Suddenly a pair of arms wrapped around Jack’s torso, trapping him in a fleshy vise.

“I got him, Bondy!” Hank’s voice shouted from behind Jack’s left ear. “I got him!”

Twenty feet away, Bondy stopped his dance, looked up, and grinned. As he charged, Jack rammed his head backward, smashing the back of his skull into Hank’s nose. Abruptly he was free. He still held the iron bar, so he angled the blunt end toward the charging Bondy and drove it hard into his solar plexus. The air whooshed out of him and he dropped to his knees with a groan, his face gray-green. Even his scalp looked sick.

Jack glanced up and saw Scar-lip crouched at the front of the cage, gripping the bars, its yellow gaze flicking between him and the groaning Bondy, but lingering on Jack, as if trying to comprehend what he was doing, and why. Tiny rivulets of dark blood trailed down its skin.

Jack whirled the pike 180 degrees and pressed the point against Bondy’s chest.

“What kind of noise am I going to hear when I poke you with this end?”

Behind him Hank’s voice, very nasal now, started shouting.

“Hey, Rube! Hey, Rube!”

As Jack was trying to figure out just what that meant, he gave the kneeling Bondy a poke with the pointed end-not enough to break the skin, but enough to scare him. He howled and fell back on the sawdust, screaming.

“Don’t! Don’t!”

Meanwhile, Hank had kept up his “Hey, Rube!” shouts. As Jack turned to shut him up, he found out what it meant.

The tent was filling with carny folk. Lots of them, all running his way. In seconds he was surrounded. The workers he could handle, but the others, the performers, gathered in a crowd like this in the murky light, in various states of dress, were unsettling. The Snake Man, the Alligator Boy, the Bird Man, the green man from Mars, and others were all still in costume- at least Jack hoped they were costumes- and none of them looked too friendly.

Hank was holding his bloody nose, wagging his finger at Jack. “Now you’re gonna get it! Now you’re gonna get it!”

Bondy seemed to have a sudden infusion of courage. He hauled himself to his feet and started toward Jack with a raised fist.

“You goddamn son of a-”

Jack rapped the iron bar across the side of his bald head, staggering him. With an angry murmur, the circle of carny folk abruptly tightened.

Jack whirled, spinning the pike around him. “Right,” he said. “Who’s next?”

He hoped it was a convincing show. He didn’t know what else to do. He’d taken some training in the martial use of the bamboo pole and nunchuks and the like; he wasn’t Bruce Lee with them, but he could do some damage with this pike. Trouble was, he had little room to maneuver, and less every second: the circle was tightening, slowly closing in on him like a noose.

Jack searched for a weak spot, a point to break through and make a run for it. As a last resort, he always had the .45 caliber Semmerling strapped to his ankle.

Then a deep voice rose above the angry noise of the crowd.

“Here, here! What’s this? What’s going on?”

The carny folk quieted, but not before Jack heard a few voices whisper “the boss” and “Oz.” They parted to make way for a tall man, six-three at least, lank dark hair, sallow complexioned, his pear-shaped body swathed in a huge silk robe embroidered with Oriental designs. Although he looked doughy about the middle, the large hands that protruded from his sleeves were thin and bony at the wrist.

The boss-Jack assumed he was the Ozymandias Prather who ran the show- stopped at the inner edge of the circle and took in the scene. His expression was oddly slack but his eyes were bright, dark, cold, more alive than the rest of him. Those eyes finally settled on Jack.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“Protecting your property,” Jack said, gambling.

“Oh, really?” The smile was sour.

“How magnanimous of you.” Abruptly his expression darkened. “Answer the question! I can call the police or we can deal with this in our own way.”

“Fine,” Jack said. He upped his ante by throwing the pike at the boss’s feet. “Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe you pay baldy here to poke holes in your attractions.”

The big man froze for an instant, then slowly wheeled toward the ticket seller who was rubbing the welt on the side of his head.

“Hey, boss-” Bondy began, but the tall man silenced him with a flick of his hand.

The boss looked down at the pike where sawdust clung to the dark fluid coating its point, then up at the crouching rakosh with its dozens of oozing wounds. Color darkened his cheeks as his head rotated back toward Bondy.

“You harmed this creature, Mr. Bond?”

The boss’s eyes and tone were so full of menace that Jack couldn’t blame the bald man for quailing.

“We was only trying to get it to put on more of a show for the customers.”

Jack glanced around and noticed that Hank had faded away. He saw the performers inching toward the rakosh cage, making sympathetic sounds as they took in its condition. When they turned back, their cold stares were focused on Bondy instead of Jack.

“You hurt him,” said the green man.

“He is our brother,” the snake man said in a soft sibilant voice, “and you hurt him many times.”

Brother? Jack wondered. What are they talking about? What’s going on here?

The boss continued to pin Bondy with his glare. “And you feel you can get more out of the creature by mistreating it?”

“We thought-”

“I know what you thought, Mr. Bond. And many of us know too well how the Sharkman felt. We’ve all known mistreatment during the course of our lives, and we don’t look kindly upon it. You will retire to your quarters immediately and wait for me there.”

“Fuck that!” Bondy said. “And fuck you, Oz! I’m blowin’ the show! Ain’t goin’ nowhere but outta here!”

The boss gestured to the alligator boy and the bird man. “Escort Mr. Bond to my trailer. See that he waits outside until I get there.”

Bondy tried to duck through the crowd but the green man blocked his way until the other two grabbed his arms. He struggled but was no match for them.

“You can’t do this, Oz!” he shouted, fear wild in his eyes as he was none too gently dragged away. “You can’t keep me here if I wanna go!”

Oz ignored him and turned his attention to Jack. “And that leaves us with you, Mr...?”

“Jack.”

“Jack what?”

“Just Jack.”

“Very well, Mr. Jack. What is your interest in this matter?”

“I don’t like bullies.”

It wasn’t an answer, but it would have to do. Wasn’t about to tell the boss he’d come to French fry his Sharkman.

“Does anyone? But why should you be interested in this particular creature? Why should you be here at