The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Miz Forza and Miz Farwander offered an open hand and a shut mouth, which was a hell of a lot more’n most; they didn’t care where you’d been or where you was bound for, and they neither of ’em seemed to count the straight law as a friend. Hard work spent setting up and tearing down got you a share in whatever food might come their way, a part of the day’s take and the right to sling your bed-roll near their fire.

“Depression”, they called it, and that was the God’s own truth. You felt it in your empty gut, your equal- empty chest, as though it was you who’d died instead of everybody else and all this living on you’d done was only a cruel trick, a walking ghost’s delusion. Made your days so bone-weary it was like you was still dreaming — and not a good dream, either, nor yet a bad; nothing so easy. Most like them awful dreams you have where you work all day, then muse on doing the exact same thing all night, back-aching and useless: Ones you wake up from spent as ever, but with nothing to show for all your toil.

So the cooch, with its tinsel and soft light, its sway, its trailing crinolines. the curve of a woman’s flesh barely wrapped, then peeled free by stages. that was a show worth the seeking out, for most men. And at the end of it all they went knees-down for a glimpse of that ultimate holy mystery, some girl’s secretest parts shining like a rose on fire, exposed at the tangle crook of two thighs and framed in stocking-tops and musk.

Under the Mask or not, working cooch was fast cash that left almost no taste of sin behind. Unlikely as hell any of ’em would find herself recognised once she chose to move on, and we didn’t truck with private viewing parties after the lights went down, either — not like most others did. Not unless someone pressed too hard for Half-Face Joe to handle, wouldn’t resign himself to take “no” for an answer. And even then—

— well, we didn’t tend to see those men again, no matter how short a time ’fore we swung back by their town, in future. And nobody, to my knowledge, ever did ask the two Mizes why.

Yeah, I saw how the cooch made fools and kings of men both at the same time, how it drew one common sigh wept out from twenty different mouths at once. Saw how it made ’em throw down pennies they couldn’t afford, or stuff worn-soft bills they should’ve fed their kids with into the girls’ garters with lust-shaking hands.

And I ain’t too proud to admit it, either: After so much toil and sorrow, I wanted me a piece of that, cut big and steaming. Wanted it bad.

Lewis Boll I met in Miz Forza and Miz Farwander’s service, too. He was twice my height but a third of my weight, lanky as a giraffe’s colt, with squint blue eyes and a lick of too-long black hair that always fell down to brush his brows by noon, no matter how hard he slicked it back of a morning. He had stubble on his stubble, a shadow that started well before four o’clock and ran ’til right you could see exactly where his beard would go, if he just let it. And half-grown or not, he was the first boyfriend I ever had that seemed like a man.

Lewis was a genuine Okie from way back in the Bowl, last left standing in a clan that’d once been thirty or so strong; he liked money far more’n he liked his liquor, so we had that in common. Right now he worked roustabout, wrangling ropes and poles for the cooch show tent, but his grand ambition was to either rob banks like Pretty Boy Floyd or get himself in my pants, whichever came first; sounded a deal nicer, the way he used to say it. But fine talk or not, he did get a tad nasty when I told him straight out which one it wasn’t likeliest to be.

“What you savin’ it for, Persia?” he demanded. “I’m gonna be rich — hell, we both are. What’s mine’ll be your’n, you just wait a while. ”

“Uh-huh. Well, holler back at me when you already got some-thin’ to swap me for it — ’cause right now, what you ’n’ me both got’s ’bout the exact same amount of nothin’ much. And that ain’t enough to make me drop my drawers on-stage, let alone off-.”

Lewis coloured a bit at the choice of words, since he well knew where my ambitions lay: Up on that same podium with the rubes all panting up at me like begging dogs, and the Mask of Fear stuck fast to my kisser.

But: “You got your blood yet, Persia?” was all Miz Farwander asked me, back when I made my first play for the position. “No? Then you’ll just have to wait, my darlin’. ’Cause we won’t take no gal ain’t bled yet.”

“No indeed,” Miz Forza chimed in from her crocheting in the caravan’s corner, nodding right along. “No gal ain’t bled can wear her face, for us, or elsewise.”

“She” was what they both called the Mask, though damn if I knew why — what everyone called it, even the gals who’d put it on, none of whom got to keep it for long. Like I said, they came and went; went faster than came, if I’d stopped to think on it. And the one time I collared one to quiz her on how it felt to be inside, she’d only shook her head, as though there weren’t words enough to answer my question in the short span of time she had ’fore the next show rolled out.

“You just sort of have to be there,” she said, finally. “Be in it. That then. that’s when you’ll know.”

But being hungry makes a gal apt to stay maiden far longer than if she’s well-fed, as I’d long since found out and hitherto been grateful for, seeing how it meant no matter what-all might occur along the road, I wasn’t too like to catch myself a child from it. So all I could do ’til my courses came was sit there and watch Miz Forza handle the Mask of nights, curing its slack white face like leather with delicate strokes of that awful-stinking salve. Sometimes she’d raise it up so they was eye-to-eye and contemplate it a spell, mouth pursed and sad-set, like she ached to kiss it. Then Miz Farwander might brush by and pat Miz Forza’s dainty-gloved fingers with her own grease-black ones, delicate enough to not even leave a smudge behind.

“Courage, my dear one,” she’d murmur. “Her time will come again, and ours with it.”

And: “I don’t see how,” Lewis said, from the other side of the fire. “That Greek fella of Persia’s did for her way back when, ain’t that so? Took a sword to her, and sawed her neck right through. Cut the head off a snake, what the body does after don’t matter none; it’s dead ’nough from then on, all the same.”

Miz Farwander shot him a dark look. But Miz Forza just give a light little laugh, suitable to polite dining-room conversation.

“Oh, men do like to think that,” she replied, to no one in particular. “But a woman like Her — She’s right hard to kill, just like that serpent with a hundred heads: Strike off one, two grow back out, twice as poisonous. Cut off the head, more monsters just leak out; new monsters, maybe. Maybe even worse.”

Agreed Miz Farwander: “A woman like that can strike every man alive blind, deaf and dumb without even tryin’, root him to the spot and make him stand stock-still forever. That’s why cooch plays so well, in the end; they say all’s we are is pussy, but what comes from pussy, exactly? Blood, and dirt, and salt, and wet. poison like wine, fit to turn both heads on any man ain’t queer. Any man, at all.”

Lewis give a disgusted look, and spit hard.

“You bitches is somethin’ else,” he announced, probably aiming it my way, as much as theirs. But I’d still been following that last thought along, which was why I suddenly heard myself come out with—

“Well. everything does, don’t it? Everything.”

Miz Farwander grinned her too-sharp grin at that, all those metal fangs a-glint in the firelight, like scales on a skittering lizard.

“Reckon you got the right of it there, Persia. So don’t you let no one tell you you ain’t smart enough to keep up, not when it really counts.”

That night Lewis took me up into the midst of a fallow corn-field to show me the gun he’d won in a card- game two nights back, and I let him kiss me ’til I was wet and panting, slip my shirt off my shoulders so’s my titties could feel the night on ’em while up above a storm came rolling in, fast as Noah’s Deluge. Don’t rightly know why myself, but I wanted to, even if it wouldn’t go no further; good enough reason for that night, at the very least.

But then ball-lightning started to roll back and forth ’cross the sky, snapping at the clouds like some big invisible body was riled near to bursting by the idea of what we were doing — and when he pushed his hand down under my skirt it come up dark red, copper-smelling, with proof of my sin come upon me at last smeared all the way up his palm to the wrist.

“Finally!” I blurted out. “Very first chance I get to run Miz Forza down, that damn-almighty Mask is mine!”

Lewis looked at me like I’d grew another head, then, and that made me angry — angry so much, I hardly couldn’t speak.

“Don’t want that for you,” was all he said, shaking his head.

“What should I care what you want, Lewis Boll, ‘for’ me or elsewise? You ain’t my damn Pa.”

His eyes sparked. “That’s ’cause you ain’t got no Pa, Persia Leitner, nor no Ma neither; you did, maybe you wouldn’t be ’spirin’ to flash your trim at every Jack Henry got the fare.