Valasco Rolez! In a Jury of his Peers

Part 4 of 7 of Valasco Rolez!

Written by Kiefer Lee

Edited by Alexander Taylor

Valasco Rolez slept comfortably. 

He rested until the morning sun made the car’s air heavy and hot.

He shoved the door open with one arm before peeling his head off the seat. Then he pulled his body over to the edge and vomited just outside the car door.

When his throat finished ejaculating he looked around and realized cars were pulling in one at a time. The carnival tents beyond the lot were bright and inviting in the daylight.

So he sat up in the seat, searching for anything he could wipe himself off with, but finding nothing he pulled his shirt to his face and wiped the vomit spit off his lips and chin stubble onto the face of the cartoon zombie. 

He ran his fingers through his hair, then wiped his hands on his pants.

He stood up outside of the car, spit a few times and shook himself off like a dog. Without a hot cup of coffee to pour over himself, Valasco knew it was the best kind of shower he was going to get in the desert.

Valasco leaned against Jimmy’s ride, basking in the morning light and watching as families poured out of the cars and lined up outside the small fence gates.

Mothers, children and fathers were grouped together. Valasco scoped them out as the time went on, but he couldn’t recognize what it was like to be in their place. 

Valasco watched on curiously, seeing angry men of thinning patience take their children by the hands and lead them. His jaw set in a hard way, not understanding why he thought of his parents so much in one week, compared to the course of the rest of his years. He shrugged it off, unconcerned with their memory, despite his daddy’s face staring quietly at him in the back of his mind.

When jugglers and clowns began to appear, the carnival seemed to light up all at once in an electric happiness that was felt between the families and the carnival workers alike.

Valasco bought general admission with Bunko’s money and walked amongst it all, almost careful and delicate, as if he respected something other than himself. He looked at families around him and took steps to remain out of their path. He didn’t shove people or cuss if they got too close, he merely observed as the clowns helped wash the daylight away. 

One by one as he walked by, he surveyed the carnies, and thought that he had much in common with them. Valasco knew that he would have been stabbed and buried if he tried walking the fairgrounds at night, but during the day, the carnival was a place of happiness and safety. A collusion of childlike fun between people that could otherwise not exist together. Even in Valasco’s twisted values, he believed such a place was sacred. 

Standing behind the dunk tank for a cigarette, he watched and listened as the families and carnies interacted with each other in joy. It was infectious.

The day sun cruising from morning to noon felt like a heavenly infinity to Valasco. For several moments at a time he forgot who he was, what he had just done and what he was going to do next. But the thought was always there. The next several days of Valasco’s future would be rife with bloodshed.

All because Jimmy couldn’t keep his head together.

He looked at every skull around him like the plush and flimsy matter it was. That vision of an exploding brain inside Valasco’s mind no longer filled him with fear. Jimmy’s death burned the rest of his bridges and Valasco found contentment being perfectly on his own. He didn’t have anywhere to be, nowhere anybody wanted him except a shallow grave. No appointments or commitments except those to himself.

Valasco bought a carnival sausage and devoured the hot chunk of meat. The grease smeared around his face as he envisioned Carson’s street soldiers gunning for him. As he considered all the different ways he could kill them or be killed by them, the sausage grease began to crust onto his skin. There were many ways to die if he went back, but with food in his stomach he worried less. He walked further into the carnival lot. Watching games as they played, and enjoyed clowns as they performed.

Valasco, distracted by the wonder, had thoughtlessly returned a middle-aged man’s wallet after it fell from the man’s pockets. If money was his concern, that wallet could have paved the road for him. It could have sent him far away from the men that wanted him dead. 

But Valasco never thought of this moment again.

He simply enjoyed it all, as it unfolded around him, as a selfless and impartial observer.

Until some crude and strange shouting caught Valasco’s attention. It was a short, wrinkled, and oddly shaped man giving some kind of speech. He threw his arms and leaned towards the audience with exhilarating passion. He had a black suit that was coming loose, a hat he held to his head so it wouldn’t blow away, and grease paint on his face that seemed to be sweating away with the afternoon heat.

Valasco listened in as he approached.

“- when God’s experiments on nature were not enough to suit his curiosity, he turned his attention to his greatest and most awful creation: Mankind!” As the man spoke, a child screaming at the top of his lungs ran past Valasco, and without thought, stuck his foot out into the child’s path. They cascaded into the dirt. Valasco paid the child no mind from there on, even as they threw handfuls of dirt and rocks over his feet in retaliation. “Yes, come one and come all! Learn the rare lessons that God and science agree on, the travesty of life! Behold the sights that made the angels flee the heavens! Enter now, into The Devil’s Freakshow!”

It was Valasco’s favorite served for him on a stage: Victims. An ugly grin creased across his awful teeth. His feet dragged along the ground as his tongue pressed behind his bottom lip. His body pulled forward, as if it had gone numb from top to bottom, until he found himself shuffling with the crowd.

“Yes, my dear lost souls.” The host’s voice called out to every face in the crowd, scratchy and trembling between each word, yet enchanting to all that could hear it. Including Valasco Rolez. “The Devil’s Freakshow is a lesson for all! Rising from the ashes of tragedy they became more than victims of a hard God, they became his champions… come one, and come all. Learn the lessons only these souls could teach.”

Valasco drooled as his body began to shake with excitement. Decades of promise in the making. The answers to every question he was left willing to ask. Everything he had ever wanted to see. His feet dragged towards the tent. His fingers scrounged in his pocket for the admission money and pulled out the first fistful of cash he could grab. 

His heart thumped when he counted the dollars and change. It was the exact amount he needed. He didn’t count twice, he only crumpled the money into his fist and squeezed.

He quietly found his place in the crowd, helping them form a line to the tent. He moved politely, with his eyes low. 

“Mother would have taken you.” He whispered, attempting to console himself. With any hope it would ease his overcharged excitement.

Valasco stepped ahead, dropped the money thoughtlessly into the dull-skinned worker’s hands and shambled into the large tent and found comfort in its darkness. 

Suddenly, the crowd around him became objects and obstacles to him. There were bleachers across from the stage which created the rows of cheap seating and Valasco wanted to sit up high. He pushed and shoved to the front of the dumbfounded crowd and eyed a spot to his liking. Any sense that he walked on hallowed ground was stricken down by the call of the sideshow.

Valasco Rolez slammed into a seat and sneered at those who sat down around him. More people flooded into the tent, taking up his space and breathing his air. He wanted the rest of the crowd to drop dead. He wanted the performance to be just for him. But when the last of the crowd had been seated inside, the tent went dark. His eyes shot open and he wrapped his arms around himself. 

He forgot the crowd as they went silent.

Moving along the curved edge of the stage, bodies in the dark lit candles until there was a line from one end to the other.

A melancholy and aging piano started to play by the fingertips of a woman by a similar description. The roundly-shaped and odd man in his black suit reappeared from the shadows onto the stage. He held a lantern in one hand, and relied on his cane with the other. He stopped at the front of the stage, then lifted his cane through the air, and in that silent gesture he hearkened for the audience’s attention. 

Valasco was already holding his breath as he waited.

The host leaned towards the audience, as much as his little legs would allow him, and Valasco leaned forward in his seat, exhaling slowly like the long release of pressure. The Host set the lantern down at the edge of the mainstage and began to speak.

“What you will see here is not trickery, subterfuge or dishonesty. There are no strings that can be pulled. There is no smoke. There are no mirrors. This evening’s show is all a reflection of life’s greatest truths and tragedies. To engage in falsehoods from this point on, would be morally reprehensible.”

He took a deep breath as he leaned against his cane.

“And each of you have come of your own admission, of your own free-will. You seek the truth of life.” The Host shifted his weight between his knees and cane as he stood up straight. 

“It is here, amongst us… in this very tent, in this very place.” As he began to move back into the darkness of the stage, the creaky piano accompanied his steps, and he smiled as his head bowed and his hat tipped over his eyes.

As the shadows ate him, he cried out: “Here and now! You must witness… The Devil’s Freakshow!”

The piano player pressed heavily on the keys, taking the immediate acoustic capacity of the tent and pushing it as far as it could go.

The notes rang out high, then lowered slowly like a leaf in the wind.

The oval-shaped Host reappeared on the side stage; somebody in the dark had moved his lantern from the mainstage over, to sit just below him.

The piano took a somber tone once again.

With a creaky swivel, the curtain was dropped over the dark stage, then rose again. Revealing a thin figure in a skin tight multicolored suit. Worn and faded, but colorful against the candlelight.

The figure began to dance, in slow but emphatic gestures. It was elegant, and enhanced aesthetically by the leanness of the figure. Elegant, yet rigid. The soothing moves had been perfected in practice, and so despite the ungiving nature of them, they had not been a struggle.

Then a third arm seemed to grow out of the dancer’s side. The arm slid around the hip, then glided up the chest with the hand attached gripping onto the body where it found purchase. With a shiver throughout the body, another arm appeared from the otherside.

It wasn’t a surprise then, to see the head of a similarly masked dancer appear. But the way the head jutted out onto the shoulder of the dancer was a well executed optical illusion. The stiff movements from before only concealed the other. Valasco glanced to his side. Seated next to him was a young girl in utter disbelief of what she was seeing.

Valasco chewed on his lip, curious of the wonder that might’ve been behind her eyes.

“Behold! The dedication to become one!” The host shouted. The two finally separated, first by a leap, then a spin in tandem that left them staring at each other. Then their hands connected at the center, and together they began to rotate as if on a showroom platform, but there was no hidden assistance or any trick of the eye. With a slight lean, they accomplished a slow, but perfectly steady spin, using their own weight to accelerate. 

It was all very beautiful, sure. But it was incredibly boring.

Just as Valasco was nearly lulled into heavy sleep, the dancers reached over one another, running their hands past their ears onto the back of each other’s neck, then with a firm grip on each other’s jaws, they appeared to snap each other’s neck.

Valasco’s eyes shot open in a thrill. The crowd screamed. But the dancers, with their heads now bent over their own shoulders, continued to spin slowly. One smiled as the other frowned.

The Host didn’t flinch, he chose to smile as the crowd began to understand.

From the darkness on the back of the stage, little pairs of arms could be seen but the bodies must have hid just beyond the light. With some flair the enshrouded arms waved up and down before they began to slap the flat surface of drums. Adding percussion to the charm of the piano’s song.

With the new addition to the rhythm, the two dancer’s let go over each other, and spun out with the same outreaching momentum and hard landing on their heels.

The dancers’ performance had a hypnotic way of mirroring each other, and that perfect imitation wasn’t lost entirely on Valasco. Two people breaking themselves down, bone from bone in such synchronization was truly a sight. Then he realized something, watching the two, and he rubbed his fingers against his sticky chin as he processed his thoughts.

The Host looked out into the crowd, and in a quick scan of the dark faces, he picked out Valasco’s face. Valasco looked back, and with a smile on his face he lifted his hand to the Host, fingers out wide like a wave. Then Valasco lifted his other hand to his thumb, and bent it downwards to his wrist in a quick snapping movement.

The Host did not react.

The little girl placed unfortunately next to Valasco nearly puked.

The Host’s reaction wasn’t important to him, Valasco only started to laugh. As the people seated around him began to glance around, he laughed harder and louder.

“Spin the neck until it completely snaps, that’s the part that really satisfies.” Valasco assured the girl.

All the years of anticipation, a desperate dream by the child Valasco once was, only to discover that the Sideshows were losers. 

The piano player fell off beat momentarily as the cackle overpowered the other sounds in the tent. The piano had no choice but to continue its song, to find the beat, and to hope to outlive the breath of Valasco Rolez. To play despite being washed out.

As part of the dance, the genderless dancers took up curved blades from the edges of the stage. The blades spun around delicately in their hands, then took flight in spinning circles as the dancers began to toss them between each other. As one dancer flipped, the other dancer threw the blade to them. They found a rhythm in what looked like attempted murder, until an outside force cascaded onto them again. Displacing more than the piano player.

“Their fuckin face paint,” He wheezed. “The ballet!” 

“With each other’s lives at stake, they must continue to work together!” The Host was emphatic and passionate as if Valasco wasn’t a thorn-like presence in the side of the sideshow. “If they are not in complete alliance, they will fail each other, and they will fail together!”

First there was strain, then sweat as the arms of the dancer’s no longer pushed themselves steadily off the ground with each flip, desperation and fear appeared on the face of one, and unforgiving hatred appeared on the other.

There was blood washing over the back of the tent, where only the Host could see.

It wasn’t clear which genderless dancer initially missed the beat, but they weren’t synchronized anymore.

Two halves no longer working together.

The combination of spirit and discipline had been split, and a blade thrown correctly was caught violently as it hacked into the wrist of the mistimed dancer.

Valasco distractedly peeled a strip of skin from his arm inattentive to the pain. 

The crowd gasped as blood began to drip down from the knife lodged in the dancer’s wrist.

The two dancers moved no longer, and the facepaint could not hide the disdain between them.

The curtain dropped, just before a loud thud could be heard from the mainstage.

“Behold.” The Host sighed. “The blood of sacrifice.”

Valasco’s eyebrow cocked up. 

“Even a perfect balance will collapse. If we are not whole.”

Surely the dancer losing a hand had not been planned. But the Host could think quickly, it seemed. To spin the show into his preconceived narrative no matter how it might be dismantled. If it was a challenge, on his part, then Valasco accepted. 

A large man appeared next on the stage, with a skull like the mast of a ship and skin that seemed stretched to the point of tearing. Valasco only needed to see the man to begin laughing hysterically.

The short host did not address Valasco in front of the crowd. He only glanced at him, then continued with a small grin and a wave of his hand.

“Behold, the skin of leather! View as these whips do no harm to the one and only Grand Saint John!” 

Two men in outfits and masks stepped onto the stage. One at a time they bowed to the audience, then presented their leather bull-whips.

When Grand Saint John squatted to his knees, he still stood taller than the whip masters. They began cracking their whips, gaining in rhythm after each one until they lashed the behemoth’s back simultaneously. 

Grand Saint John did not flinch.

He did not seem to know that the whips were even touching him, he only took pride in the cracking sound that attempted to dismantle him.

But he glanced at the crowd.

There, high and hiding behind a mass of people was Valasco Rolez. Laughing at him. Something changed on Grand Saint John’s face. He stood before the whipping was finished, and slowly moved to the end of the stage to make his exit.

The whip masters looked confused and glanced at the host. The host made no acknowledgement and said nothing as the big man left. Hesitant at first, the whip masters accepted the situation and took a bow and exited as well.

The Host nodded at Grand Saint John approving of his choice.

Valasco shook his head. Grand Saint John had chosen not to play Valasco’s game.

Families and spectators moved further away from Valasco as the performers glared deeper and deeper at him. 

Valasco single handedly devalued the price of admission.

The piano tiptoed slowly as the curtain fell early.

“In times of adversity, what will you do in the face of it?” The Host lowered his eyes, with a grin hardly distinguishable under the shadows. “In the face of danger, how will you resist?”

Valasco Rolez felt an old kind of euphoria. Like he was a child again. Like he could be himself again. Without it being his fault. Nobody in the audience stood against him. Their blame held no weight against him.

He could feel the eye of The Host, taking glances at him, but they never again met eye-to-eye. The Host continued on through the act as if Valasco could not distress him.

There was always one, in a crowd of many, that would oppose him. 

The Host grinned as two men wheeled out a cage made entirely of cast iron. They dragged it like a wagon, with two rods in front to pull from. They lifted it with a delicacy, either afraid of breaking the cage or disturbing what hid inside. When they set it down, they ran back behind the stage.

“What is it that makes a man an animal?” The Host himself stepped away from his lantern that gave him his spotlight, and stood in front of the cage. From the back, the two handlers returned with chains, and began to spread those chains out in between the cage and the audience.

“To others, he was known as the Beast!” Then the Host frowned. “To us, he is Mikael.”

The Host tapped the top of the cage gently, and suddenly a man was screeching inside.

“Do you feel it deep down in your guts? Do you feel like death is imminent? As if it is Armageddon?” The Host sighed as knelt down and reached for the latch. The screaming halted just as suddenly as it had started. “Don’t you know it is only one mechanism that traps you?”

The Host pulled, and held the tip of his hat as he stepped back. In a silent shot the man known as the Beast emerged from the cage and rushed forward into the chains. He had scratches and cuts all over his body, chunks of his skin seemed to be picked off. When the handlers pulled on the chains and wrapped around him, the man broke from silence into another screech.

“How quickly do you decide to flee? How often do you decide to fight? What makes one such obstacle as cages or chains feel like imminent death?”

He thrashed at the handlers, reaching for their necks and biting at their hands. Watching him struggle was admittedly entertaining for Valasco.

He bit down violently on the chains, doing nothing at first, but as he sucked down on them, they appeared to dissolve and melt, dribbling down like the saliva on his lips.

The handlers adjusted the remaining chain to wrap around the Beast’s neck, where it started to screech once again.

The Host, leaning against his cane as he walked, moved to the man he called Mikael.

To get the Beast’s attention, the Host lifted his hat and slowly played with it in front of the Beast. The Beast was mesmerized, and found immediate calm from the Host’s appeasement. Tilting his large hat upside down, he reached in, and between his pinched fingers he pulled out a large yellow grasshopper.

The Beast’s eyes widened and he began to pant like a dog, but violently squirmed in his chains all the same. Valasco was salivating inside his hateful grin.

The Host moved closer, and gently moved his hand towards the Beast’s face. The mouth of the Beast was wide open, and his jaw clenched like he would clamp down on the Host’s fingers. The Host held the grasshopper inside the mouth of the Beast, his own fingers and all. The Beast did not bite down, he even became still for a moment as he waited, but sweat began to crease over his face as the Host held perfectly still over him. Lightly, the Host dropped the insect. Instead of pulling away, the Host looked towards the audience, and pulled back the Beast’s mouth with his fingers against the Beast’s teeth. Showing to the whole audience that the grasshopper was dissolving in his mouth like acid.

The crowd gasped in awe of the spectacle.

“What about a set of testicles?” Valasco heckled. He felt the heads of half the crowd turn to him and glare collectively in hatred. He felt like a teenager again, and alongside that feeling came an impatient agitation like horniness. 

When the Host finally pulled away, the Beast tried biting down onto the insect, but there was nothing left of it, and so his teeth smashed together uselessly and he began to rage once again. The handlers were nearly pulled off their feet.

“You must free yourself of this hatred to be set free! Can’t you see this?” The Host cried out in a sudden desperation to the Beast. 

“Now!” The Host cried out. The Beast’s eyes started straining and every muscle began to pull. The handlers glanced towards the Host and froze. 

“Now! I say!” The handlers looked towards each other, and obeyed. They began to unwrap the chains off of him, but he clawed out at them.

“You must stop squirming or else they can’t take off the chains!” The host screamed out, covering his face with his hands but watching the audience as he did so. “Oh, Beast! Why do you allow yourself to suffer like this?”

The handlers wrenched the chains away, tearing at his skin, to get away for their own safety. The Host reached into his hat, and it caught the Beast’s sporadic and violent attention.

“Suck on this!” Valasco taunted with pure disdain in his voice, as he ripped a glass soda bottle from the hands of the girl next to him, and chucked it to the stage.

When the glass shattered, the Beast’s focus was broken and he began screaming as he barreled to the edge of the stage. As if he would burst out into the crowd. People snatched their children and held them tight.

The handlers tackled him down, but the Beast continued to lash around, beating back those that tried to make him heel. Valasco’s eyebrow raised for a moment, as if he could smell blood before it was shed. 

But two more attendants appeared between the Beast and the crowd.

Valasco leaned back in his seat and sighed. Now pressing a knuckle into his cheek. Mourning his sense of danger. 

Grand Saint John returned from behind the curtains and gently placed his large hands around Mikael the Beast. When he felt the touch around his shoulders, he gave in, and allowed himself to be led back to his cage.

The people surrounding Valasco had moved themselves and their families further away from him, just as he may have wanted earlier on.

He felt his own age again. Tired and waiting to get high. It felt like ages had passed him by. His desires came and went. Everything he ever enjoyed eventually became dull. Valasco felt his back pocket as they dragged the cage off of the mainstage. His bag of fun still waited. Everything else was dull and yet this urge never went away.

Where others would be itching to use, and restless until they had given into themselves, Valasco was patient. He did not know when he would, he just knew that he could make the event special. He trusted himself. He trusted that he would know the right time. 

Then a woman stepped out onto the stage. There was something odd, or maybe familiar about her. But Valasco’s mind flashed with the image of blowing out Jimmy’s skull before he could take in any details of her.

When his vision cleared, Valasco first remarked that her figure was perfect. However his eye was slow to notice the bright red tone of her skin. Bright red as if she was a demon or as if she was skinned alive! Valasco nearly stood up in his seat.

He wanted to speak with her. 

He saw the way she walked and he wanted to feel her.

How tender to the touch they would feel to each other.

He was frantic as he checked his pocket for a lighter or a match. He’d just torch the car, follow her down, join the circus and maybe even…

Then he laughed again. Unbeknownst to the crowd, he was laughing at himself. Valasco Rolez laughed at himself for being such a fool.

He gazed at her through his own noise. But her eyes were vacant. She saw no detail in the crowd.

She denied him everything.

Valasco thought of shouting to her.

He wanted her to know he was there.

But he felt like a man trapped in a separate glass box. A new world awaited him if he could jump the line and escape.

His mind envisioned a picket fence future for himself and her, a life full of joy and children and happiness and love and…

Then he wasn’t laughing. 

What a fool. Love? Marriage?

Valasco Rolez had fallen in love at first sight and broke his own heart on the second thought.

He wanted anything for her to look up into the crowd and see him. To look into his eyes and see his astonishment for herself. To justify some degree of his pain.

Then he thought of the Beast.

Never free.

Then her show was over.

She stepped off the stage. And Valasco finally sat back down.

The images of his fantasies burned in psychotic fires he himself set ablaze in his mind’s eye. A house and a lawn, scorching. A wife, children and pets blockaded inside.

That life disappeared from him a long time ago, the same way the mutilated woman disappeared behind the curtain. 

‘I shouldn’t even be here.’ He leaned back.

For a moment he considered standing up and freeing himself from the tent. But the idea of fleeing only depressed him. There was no place to run to. He settled into his chair, and turned silent. When she finally exited the stage, he sank deeper into his chair.

Then, like an explosion onto the stage, was Doctor Rose, a man of razor sharp skin. A normal, if not unkempt, looking man at first sight, his skin reflected the candle light in little glimmers.

“Through many years of study, and painful trial and error, Doctor Rose is able to walk around with razors embedded throughout his skin.” The Host was grinning proudly.

With the right flexing of his muscles, Doctor Rose’s blade infested skin bristled like porcupine quills.

Valasco sucked the drool from his bottom lip as he gazed onwards.

“His life is in the hands of none other! Should he so desire, the kindly Doctor could slit his own throat with the flex of a muscle! A simple seizure could end his life, yet he continues to mystify and defy us all!”

Bringing his arms overhead he flexed his lean muscles, and blood trickled evenly from his neck. Valasco leaned forward while the audience repulsed and pulled away.

“Watch! For your money’s worth you must watch!”

With a smile, and blood drying on his skin, Doctor Rose revealed a razor blade resting on his tongue.

“What do you have to show us tonight, Doctor?” The Host raised his cane up in a clenched fist. “Are these amongst us privileged enough to see your handiwork?”

With a devious grin, the Doctor nodded at the Host. Doctor Rose’s skin stretched and tore like little ripples beneath his chin as he leaned his head back and stuck out his tongue. 

“Then by all means! Show us… how you delight yourself…” The Host bowed to the Doctor, then stepped back almost out of sight.

Doctor Rose lifted the blade between his fingers and licked his lips as he removed it from his mouth.

He nudged the metal blade back and forth against his chin, cutting as it sought for its new home. Fingers throughout the audience clenched into cringing fists as they witnessed basic surgery. The skin pushed outwards as the blade nestled around, but didn’t tear. The blade was nearly layered into his skin, but an edge hung just precariously beneath. Then, Doctor Rose pulled his fingers away. Slowly they drifted like an invisible river. But the job was yet unfinished. The blade looked awkward amongst his stubble.

His fist clenched. 

Then he hammered the blade inside with a blow to his own jaw.

The thrill seized the breath in Valasco’s throat. In his amazement he turned to the seat next to him. And it was empty.

It had always been empty.

Doctor Rose staggered back, but in his daze he smiled for the first time. 

“You must ask yourself why!” The host seemed to lose himself. “For what reason could you cause so much self inflicted pain?”

Valasco’s genuine enjoyment was gone. 

The show went on but his laughter, thrill and presence just seemed to fade away. A relief to both the spectacles and the spectators. None in the audience could see that Valasco was no longer smiling, but the short Host kept an ever consistent but emotionless eye on him. He sat very still but looked as though he could collapse from his chair. Valasco’s body was perhaps finished, an aging thing begging for mercy, but his mind remained defiant and clung on. His eyes hung low but intent watching as each abnormality crossed the stage. He was slack-jawed and almost drooling but he continued to watch like it meant the world. His dream was of course everything he ever expected it to be.

Disappointing.

He sat in that fixed position until the show was clearly ending, then he cleared his throat as loud as he had laughed in the first half, and spit on the chairs in front of him.

He slammed his feet on the steps as he made a show of leaving early. Although the audience couldn’t help themselves from growling, the host did not give any attention to Valasco as he left. He remained emotionless, his pale-painted face rested like stone and he ended the show as he always had before:

With a somber warning to the audience, followed by a tip of the hat and curtain close. 

The world behind him vanished as he walked through it. He did not even see the handless dancer smiling at him as he walked by.

Beyond the gates and towards Jimmy’s car the circus seemed to fall silent behind him. He leaned against the driver-side door and let in a gasp of air. Unsure how long he had been holding his breath.

Something inside of himself wanted to cry. The pain seemed to spread across his chest like a black smoke. But he hadn’t cried since he was a teenager. His heart and his chest were too rigid to give way to tears. He felt a pain in his forehead building up pressure as his chest flared one last time.

Then it went away.

So he whipped out his junk and began working on it.

There were still some cars around but Valasco had an audience before. Besides, nobody would see Valasco’s handle as long as they didn’t walk around to his side of the car. It was reason enough, to Valasco.

He didn’t have any magazines or tapes, so he had nowhere else to look but the horizon. Valasco was too paranoid to close his eyes and drift away.

He could try to fantasize for a minute about the secretary in the closet or the blonde from Lou’s. But he was distracted, and could only stare at the desert.

He couldn’t focus on anything pleasurable.

He wasn’t blind to the fact that he couldn’t keep riding around in a stolen car, with a stolen gun. But he wanted to get back to the city before dumping the car. 

Jimmy’s car.

Images of red flooding out of Jimmy’s skull were intrusive but not entirely unwelcome. It didn’t help him get it up but it made things clear to him.

Bunko had to die. He knew he should’ve seen it coming. Bunko was more vile than Valasco was, and crafty like the devil. Of course that whale would have a trick or two stored under his fat. He should’ve gone to see him with a clear head and sharp eyes.

‘That’s why I don’t drink.’ He thought. Then he reached for his back pocket with his free hand, feeling the untampered bag. He knew he was in for a good time soon, and it made his body throb. Valasco was almost getting into it. Sexual urgency began to pulse through his veins. 

The man who parked next to Valasco Rolez should have known better. There were signs that the man ignored. From the state of the car and the strong vomit smell residing around it, with a light marijuana scent permeating behind it, the man had his warnings. He may have heeded them if he wasn’t so worn out from the American Dream and the long drive to the carnival. Now he had to walk his family back to the car and he could see the black haired man’s arm shaking.

Well man recognizes man, and he knew what was happening. He would have jumped over and beat Valasco into the dirt, but he turned to look at his children. Enjoying confections and souvenirs. The opportunity to redeem his intelligence came to him, and he cleverly distracted the children by reenacting things they had seen at the clown show and making promises of fast food until they got in the car. To keep their eyes forward he launched into a song then turned the keys to ignite the engine.

The father would now have to keep up that childish energy on the way back like he did on the way in. Despite his exhaustion and how badly he shook from his anger. That’s when the mother of those kids leaned out of the car window, and in a perfect arc she chucked a paper cup of warm cola. It splashed against the back of Valasco’s head as they drove away.

Valasco grunted and stuffed himself back into his pants, reached in through the black car’s window and pulled out Jimmy’s pistol to aim at the dirt cloud forming behind their car.

He aimed, and steadied his hand as the car got further away. When the car turned he could see and hear the family more clearly out the window. They were loud, joyous and ignorant of Valasco Rolez.

Then he lowered the gun.

With his free hand he gripped his junk, and felt very little sensation.

So, he shrugged and tossed the gun into the passenger seat.