Read Online Wonder Show by Hannah Barnaby - Free Book Online Page B

talking, before she lost her nerve.
    “You work here?” She tried to keep her voice even, but she was breathing hard, and she had to squint because the sun was behind him.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Are you the boss?”
    “Only of myself.”
    “Well, is there a boss for everyone else?” She was getting a headache behind her eyes, and her shoes, still damp, rubbed at the edges of her feet. “Someone I can talk to about a job?”
    “That’d be Mosco,” he said.
    The boy folded the page corner down, closed his book, and climbed out of the truck. Closer up, he looked older than Portia had thought. And taller, too. She had seen young men on her trips into Brewster Falls, but those boys had seemed like paintings, part of the scenery, separated from her by great expanses. They met her eye only occasionally, by accident, and they never exchanged words or held her gaze. This boy did. Embarrassed that he might think she was staring, Portia diverted her eyes to the truck and saw that it was red.
    “Is this your truck?” she asked.
    “It’s the truck I drive.” He grinned and pointed at the red bicycle. “Your favorite color?”
    She wanted to ask about the slip of cardboard, the one with the dates and towns that had seemed so much like a secret message meant just for her. But she knew it would sound strange, possibly even crazy, so she asked instead, “Can you take me to Mosco?”
    Neither of them spoke as they wove between the fading painted trailers, ducked under half-empty clotheslines, passed through the temporary town the circus became when it was settled in place. It seemed so familiar, this progression of shapes and structures, like the set of a play Portia had seen before. She kept both hands on her bicycle, leading it beside her as if it were a dog that might try to run away. When they came to the midway, Portia saw a bigger cluster of trucks and trailers on the other side, like a small city, and heard the strange calls of animals through the heavy air. Brawny roustabouts roamed the slim spaces between everything else, hoisting coils of rope, bales of hay, equipment, toting all of these things like ants carrying crumbs to their colony.
    “That’s the circus,” the boy told her. “You want a circus job, gotta talk to the ringmaster. You want a carnival job, you talk to Mosco.”
    She wasn’t about to admit she didn’t know the difference. “Lead the way,” she said.
    Mosco turned out to be a squat, bulky man with the most perfectly bald head Portia had ever seen. He was holding a huge iron ball in both hands, curling it toward his chest and back out again. The muscles in his arms looked like the ropes that staked the tents to the ground. He looked, Portia thought, like a man made of fists.
    The boy cleared his throat, and Mosco dropped the iron ball on the ground with a satisfying thud. He put his cap on and said, “Gideon.”
    Portia realized then that she hadn’t known the boy’s name or told him hers. She still had the chance to make up a new identity for herself, a fake name, a tragic story. But she was unnerved when Mosco suddenly removed his hat again to wipe his forehead. The sun shone off his bald head like a spotlight, and when he growled, “Who’re you?” she blurted, “Portia Remini, sir.”
    “Whaddya want?”
    Gideon cut in. “She wants a job. Maybe she could help in the pie car.”
    “What is she, your girlfriend or something?”
    Gideon blushed violently. Portia fought the urge to laugh.
    “I can make pies,” she said. “Apple, cherry, whatever you want.”
    “Pie car’s not for making pie,” Mosco grumbled. “Ain’t even a car since we went back to being a truck show.”
    “The pie car’s the kitchen,” Gideon explained.
    “I can cook. Just about anything. My Aunt Sophia taught me all her recipes . . .” She could hear the desperation in her own voice, and it made her feel itchy.
    Mosco grunted. “Can you make chicken-fried steak?”
    “Of course,” she said.