McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [19]
Nash smoothed out the photo, holding it open himself. He stared until full understanding settled in on him. He felt buoyed by it; he could make sense of this. Almost giddily, he whispered, “Mary’s family, then?”
“What?”
“The elephants who were killed here on the hunt. They’re Mary’s family, aren’t they? She’s been having her revenge.”
There was a rotten silence in the room as Pelkin sized him up, astonished. Not in a pleasant way. At once, the sourness of the circus returned to Nash. Pelkin’s look was the kind reserved for the lowest hick, the kind who buys the Fiji Mermaid, the he/she dancer blow-off, the pickled punks and the lemonade, all of it, hook, line, and lead-heavy sinker.
“You think . . .” Pelkin grinned. “You think Mary, an elephant, is the mastermind, or something?”
“Well.”
“Look.” Pointing again into the group of hunters. Toward the left, isolated from his comrades, arms folded, wearing no gun himself, was Joseph Bales.
“Oh! How? How?” Nash paused, helplessly.
“You know him as Bales, right? That’s not his name. His name is Bowles. The clever ones, when they change their names, make them similar enough they’ll answer to them in their sleep. Bowles was supposed to be promoted, and he wasn’t. I hear he was a terrible safari member, made a big fuss about everything, spent hours telling his fellow men around the campfire how uneducated they were. After the safari, he was fired. He went bitter, Nash. How bitter, no one knew. Some bitter guys, they scheme but they don’t have any follow-through. They fade. Not Bowles. He went out and became a circus clown, the way some of the really bitter ones do. For the last dozen years, he has been luring these men to their deaths. The day before your circus arrived in Olson, Phelps received a telegram telling him to ride his horse to the parade, as a wonderful surprise was waiting.” Pelkin shook his head. “Wasn’t so wonderful, in my opinion.”
For a great deal of time, Nash said nothing. He felt he should say something, but the specifics eluded him. Pieces of this macabre plot surfaced: Bowles scheming revenge, Bowles becoming a circus clown, alighting on the poetic justice of death-by-elephant. Finally, he said, “Aristotle.”
“What?”
“He liked Aristotle,” he said, blushing a bit.
Pelkin shrugged, and then wrote Aristotle on the back of one of the photographs. “Any ideas where Bowles might have gone?”
“Why did he kill her?”
“Pardon?”
With no difficulty, Nash was back in the circus wagon, with Bales opposite him, Bales holding back tears—or was he actually crying them?—and determined to have Mary hanged. “He said killing her would serve justice.”
“Oh. Yeah, the justice expert. Sure. He was done, Nash. He’d managed to get her out of trouble four times before that. Slipped away in the dead of night four times, changing her name, changing his name. This time, he didn’t need her anymore. He’d killed everyone he wanted to, and this way he wasn’t going to leave any evidence behind.”
“Hmmph.” Nash nodded. “So he betrayed her.”
“Sure,” Pelkin said. Like most railway detectives, he was terse, but when revealing secrets he took a shameless delight in relaying the horrors behind them. “They were partners. She didn’t know the game was rigged until the blow-off.”
“I see.”
He now wanted Pelkin to depart, as he was beginning to feel a strange and restless feeling, as if impatient for a loved one returning from a long trip. He wanted to throw open the door, look down the drive, and see, bags in hand, himself. He hardly listened as Pelkin snapped out another pair of photographs.
“These men, though, it seems Mary—or whatever her name was at first—she killed them in 1902. That was two years, as far as I can tell, before she met Bowles. It was a pretty fair partnership, I’d say. A good match.”
“Yes, yes, I see,” Nash said, impatiently. He was beginning to listen not to Pelkin but to a story unfolding in his brain. Mary, an animal, whose