names, but I kept going out of curiosity. It was when I reached the R's that I saw a name that made my breath catch in my throat and my mouth go dry. I stared at the name, feeling bittersweet memories swell in my mind, and wondered what this particular woman was doing in a town filled with freaks.
Harper Rhys-Whitney was no freak-not unless you held her accountable for the freakish effect she had on the glands and good judgment of virtually every man who had, at least in the past, laid eyes on her. Including me. Especially me. When, as a teenager, I'd first met her, I had instantly decided that this other teenager was the most beautiful and desirable woman I would ever meet in my lifetime. I'd only been half right. I'd since met a number of beautiful women, had affairs with a few, and loved one-a gorgeous and compassionate witch from upstate New York, a woman by the name of April Marlowe. April had not only saved my life and mind but had also given me the courage, for the first time in my life, to overcome the insecurities and feeling of emotional vulnerability that go with being a dwarf and loving someone freely in return. However, my deep love for April notwithstanding, no woman had ever had the same instantaneous, raw, and lasting impact on my libido as Harper Rhys-Whitney, with her aura of primal, animal energy and sexuality.
And all of this thinly veiled promise of sensual paradise radiating from a woman who, while almost perfectly proportioned, couldn't have weighed much more than a hundred pounds and stood only five feet tall-not that many inches taller than I am.
I'd been with the circus a year and a half when Harper had descended upon our company with her scaled menagerie like a bolt of heat lightning out of a clear summer day. Although she was nineteen, certainly of age, she was still, in effect, a runaway. And what she was running away from was influential wealth and power that others would have killed for.
Her family, I was to discover, was blue-blood, Mainline Philadelphia society, seriously rich, their fortune made in textiles in an industrial empire founded by her grandfather. As Harper had told it, she and her family never got along; they considered her a juvenile delinquent, primarily because of her defiance of virtually all authority, but also because of her obsession with dangerous reptiles and her propensity, from the time she was thirteen, to run with motorcycle gangs. Over the course of her childhood and adolescence she was frequently punished by having her snake collection taken away, and she was shipped off to more than a half dozen ultra-expensive boarding schools specializing in educating and smoothing the jagged edges off the troubled sons and daughters of the rich. She was thrown out of all the boarding schools and somehow always managed to start a new snake collection no matter where she was. Finally, upon turning eighteen, she invested a not inconsiderable sum of money into a large, and most impressive, collection of exotic reptiles-including not only many species of poisonous snakes but giant constrictors and a full-grown Komodo dragon with a taste for Big Macs and sauerkraut. She put her collection in cages, packed them all up in a truck, and went off looking for a circus. She worked for a few carny shows, didn't like them, set off again. Finally, she found Statler Brothers Circus. Phil hired her on the spot, with only a cursory glance at her menagerie in her truck. Sex, he'd patiently explained to his dwarf tumbler, sells tickets; if Harper Rhys- Whitney couldn't really handle snakes, then he'd simply teach her to do something else. Anything else. She had that much presence, was that magnetic.
And yet this wild thing with flowing black hair, full breasts, and maroon, gold-flecked eyes had turned out to be a consummate professional.
I hadn't known much about reptiles, their care or handling, myself, but I'd been assured by experts who did know about such things that this fiery girl with the pouting mouth and eerie eyes was one of the best snake handlers they'd ever seen-a talent, apparently, one either had or didn't have, and one which couldn't be taught. The caged Komodo dragon sitting outside the tent, munching on his burgers and kraut, served to very effectively draw the rubes inside; once there, what they saw was sufficient to keep them coming back for more and then spread the word to their friends and neighbors who hadn't yet trekked out to the county fairgrounds to see the circus. Flanked by giant constrictors in cages on either side of her, Harper, dressed in a skintight jumpsuit, sat cross-legged in the center of a huge glass enclosure with only the hypnotic aura of her swaying body and the musical vibrations of an E harmonica to keep four huge king cobras at bay. When I'd asked her why a harmonica and not the snake charmer's traditional wooden flute, she'd replied that it made no difference whatsoever to the snakes, who couldn't hear the music but only responded to the vibrations, which they picked up with their flicking tongues. Her cobras, she explained, liked E harmonica vibrations. A jazzed-up rendition of 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' seemed to be especially pleasing to them, and on occasion she would actually manage to get all four of the cobras swaying back and forth in front of her, together and in time to the music-a weaving, scaled chorus line of death.
She was bitten once, three months after she joined the circus, and barely survived with the help of an antitoxin flown in by helicopter from Dallas. Phil was apoplectic, insisting that she give up her snake-charming act with the cobras altogether, or at least substitute rat snakes. She offered to compromise by going with only two cobras, and Phil reluctantly agreed. He had to; like me, Harper could have had a job for the asking with any of the other big shows, including Ringling Brothers.
She also had virtually every male in the circus constantly in heat, a tension-inducing situation Phil tolerated only because Harper was so exceptionally good at what she did. I'd always considered her only slightly less dangerous to a man's well-being than the poisonous snakes she handled with such grace, invention, and courage. Indeed, she displayed far less grace handling the procession of men who were constantly vying to share her bed. Nobody had ever been killed over her, but over the course of our mutual tenure with the circus there were innumerable fistfights and one stabbing that cost a high-wire artist his spleen and his career. Of course, not a few of her rejected conquests dearly wanted to stab Harper; at least once a week, or so it seemed, Harper ended up 'hiding out' with me, usually near the animal pens where I would be keeping Mabel and the other circus animals company.
I, of course, had lusted after her just like all the rest of the men, most of whom would have killed to spend as much time with her as I did. But I was a dwarf, and extremely self-conscious about it. I didn't make plays for women, and I always went out of my way to avoid any emotional entanglement that could be construed as anything but purely platonic friendship. Harper and I had become good friends, and it was me she sought out in her increasingly frequent times of emotional need.
In the Palmetto Grove directory her name had
Harper's home on the outskirts of Palmetto Grove was a three-story Gothic affair, slightly spooky and not a little amusing, totally unlike any of the single-frame houses in the area. It had cost her some money to build. The huge lawn in front of the house was carefully manicured, and there was an abundance of bright flowers in a number of beds and flanking the walk leading up to the front door. Just visible behind the house were two long, low buildings that might have been greenhouses except for the fact that they appeared to be all wood, with no windows in them at all.
I parked the Isuzu at the curb across the street from the house, turned off the ignition. Harper had obviously been watching for me out the window, because I had just stepped down out of the car and was closing the door when she burst out of the front door, bounded down the steps, and came running toward me.
The sight of her, with the bouncing of her full breasts only slightly restrained by the fabric of her form-fitting jumpsuit, took my breath away, and I just stood, dumbfounded by my own feelings, as she approached. Her hair, once jet-black, was now a smoky gray, and she wore it pulled back from her oval face and tied into a pony tail with a bright red calico ribbon. It didn't surprise me that she did not dye her hair, but its grayness seemed to be her only concession to age. Her strange, gold-flecked maroon eyes had lost none of their shine, and her trim, lithe body was exactly as I remembered it from when we were both teenagers. For me, at least, she had lost none of the aura of sensuality that seemed to radiate from her like some light beyond the visible spectrum, a glow that worked directly on the other senses.
The woman's effect on me was absolutely ridiculous, I thought. Virtually paralyzed, I was still harboring that thought when she finally reached me, draped her arms around my neck, and hugged me to her. The result was to crush my left cheek against the ample, soft mound of her left breast; I could feel her heart beating, and her hard
