“Were you married?” I asked her.
She shook her head. Her hair hung lank, the sour smell stirring around her when she moved. “I don’t know. I don’t recall.”
“I was married,” I said, and set my tea aside. “But I don’t remember her name.” Stewart gave me one of his unforthcoming looks. “Anyway, she’s dead now.”
“Lots of people are dead,” said Ms. Bukvajova. “They live in memory.”
I looked at the row of corked colorful bottles stacked on the granite pastry board and at the three or four empty ones racked up in the dish drain. Stewart raised his eyebrows.
“Sure.” I poked my spoon against the side of the sugar bowl. The bottle tree howled loud enough to be heard through closed windows, over the hum of the swamp cooler. “As long as somebody remembers. Is that what you’re doing? Remembering them?”
A tremendous clash rang from the bottle tree, like a string of glass bells violently shaken. I winced; Stewart started; Bukvajova perked up and peered out the kitchen windows. “Caught one?” Stewart asked. “What do you use them for?”
“Memories,” she said. “He can’t get them all if you keep topping it off. If you fill it up fast enough.”
“He?”
She poured herself more tea, tilting the Brown Betty teapot with the skill of a practiced hand. “He eats memories.”
Stewart leaned forward over the table and took her scaly hands. “They get … diluted, Mrs. Bukvajova?”
“You can only pour the water over the same leaves so many times and get…” She made a helpless gesture, and tapped the pot.
“Get tea?”
“Or whatever. Did you boys want something to eat? Jackie, what’s your friend’s name?”
“No, thank you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine being hungry. “Mrs. Bukvajova”—following Stewart’s lead—“why did you leave the circus?”
“There were ponies,” she said. “And a cheetah named Ralph. He was friendly, and you could play with him.” She looked down into her tea, then up at Stewart, as if he had spoken. “I’m sorry, dear, what was I saying?”
“Why you left the circus,” he said.
She shook her head—“But I was never in the circus”—and frowned, painfully. “Was I?”
Another reason I like circus folk is that they have long memories. The sorts of memories we all used to have, when we lived in villages. Which is to say, based more on an oral-history sort of consensus version of events than on what really happened, blow by blow.
It’s the folk process. When something gets passed down hand to hand, identifying details are shaved off, idiosyncrasies smoothed away, personality blurred, until what remains is a refined core of agreement. Memories get conflated, simplified.
It doesn’t start off being the truth.
But because of the way the world works, it becomes the truth before too long. Compromises become history, become something everybody knows. Bloody old ballads are the handed-down tabloid TV of the thirteenth century. It may not be what
As we got back into the car, the sun was starting to creep up behind Frenchman Mountain. “We need to go see the Flying Bukvajovas.”
Stewart knuckled his eyes. When he pulled his hands down, the whites were bloodshot. “Tell me it’s not an evil ringmaster.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not an evil ringmaster.”
“You want to ask them about their lost sheep?”
I shrugged. “I want to find out how the sheep got lost.”
“Well, I don’t want you getting lost as well.” He patted my hand. The aged Toyota grumbled to life. “I don’t suppose you know if this has just started happening?”
“No,” I said.
I didn’t remember.
Getting in to see Bartoloměj Bukvajova was easier than it should have been. The patriarch of the family was in his late fifties, hair still black as a freshly inked brush, wide shoulders rippling under his T-shirt with every gesture. He was the catcher, and I wondered how it affected the family dynamic that they really did know he wouldn’t let them fall.
There was a lot of bitterness in that thought when I thought it, and I did not know why. Whoever my father was, he’d surely been dead for most of a century by now.
I looked at Stewart and wondered if I should ask him my old man’s name, or if it would just freak him out unnecessarily. But he was looking at Bartoloměj, who had stood up from behind a folding card table in his RV to extend a hand.
“You’re the One-Eyed Jack,” he said. “And this must be the Suicide King.”
I shook, and so did Stewart. “You’ve heard of us?”
“Show folk bend our luck a lot,” he said. “It pays to know who the intermediaries are. Have you come for a tithe?”
I reached into my satchel and found a handful of thick poker chips. The Silver Slipper ones were just collectors’ items now, but the ones from the Stratosphere had intrinsic value. I laid three thousand dollars in stamped, high-impact plastic on the card table and said, “Actually, we’ve come for information. This is Stewart. Call me Jackie. Everybody else does, and I want us to be friends.”
He eyed the chips suspiciously, did not touch them, and sat back down. “Information is not something I’m generally comfortable giving out,” he said. “Especially when it commands that sort of price. Too many people think they can buy more than anybody ought to be able to buy for a couple thousand dollars.”
“Mmm,” Stewart said. “You have kids, Bartoloměj? Grandkids? They have health insurance? Take the money. It’s nothing to us. It’s useful to you.”
He eyed the stack. “Tell me what you want to know.”
I looked at Stewart. Stewart looked at me. I shrugged and did the talking. “Did you have an uncle or an older brother, maybe, who jumped ship here in Vegas some time ago and married a local girl?”
Bartoloměj did not look away from my face. But his left hand crept out, encompassed the chips, and swept them to his side of the table.
“That,” he said, “I don’t mind talking about. But you have the story backward.”
“We do?” Stewart, doing his best wide-eyed innocent. It’s amazing how people will rush to fill that perceived void.
“Absolutely,” Bartoloměj said. “You are thinking of my aunt, Branislava. My father’s oldest sister. I never knew her; she left before I was born. She was a flyer, very beautiful, I’m told.”
“I don’t think it can be,” I said. “The woman I’m thinking of is about ten years older than you, I’d guess. But not well. She looks her age.”
“Are you sure?” He raised an eyebrow. “Branka would be in her eighties. Maybe older. Of course, we do tend to live a long time in my family…”
He shrugged.
I put another thousand in chips on the table, and he raised an eyebrow. “I told you I would help.”
“I’m helping, too,” I said. When he grinned he showed a gold tooth, which made me realize he hadn’t smiled before. “What would you say if I told you your Aunt Branka was still alive and needed your help?”
“This kind of help?” He tapped the chips.
I shrugged, copying his gesture.
“I’d say we look after our own.” He sucked on his teeth and pulled his hand back. “And I’d say she left us, and it was up to her to come back and ask if she wants that changed.”
“I don’t think she can ask,” I said, and pulled out the chair across from him without actually ever being invited. “Tell me all about it, why don’t you?”
Bartoloměj gave me that look again, and I pushed the chips toward him with a fingertip. “Good faith
