calling out

plum e. champlin

"I don't think any of you understand form meets function," Derrick says after their forty-second show in Nashville. "The hell are you doing out there, Val?"

Val sits at their mirror unperturbed, wiping the delicate skin under their eyes. She straddles the tiny stool easily, perched like the rounded body of a wine glass atop its stem. "What they pay me to do, freak."

She sounds more like Gem every day, Derrick thinks, even after all these months. Even more like Scotty, after these two years.

For a moment the wind kicks up outside, lifting the heavy plastic of the tent and sending it down with that heavy plastic snap. Derrick knows he should be over it by now, the disturbance of the sound. Last week Scotty said it was a wash of white noise for him, like the fluid motions of a wave. Then, as always: I long for the ocean, man. Derrick had stayed silent, watching Val juggle onstage, plastic grenades flying from her hands; he didn't want to interrogate what exactly about a moving ceiling, moving walls, still made him queasy. He knows he probably should.

He's silently grateful that his flinch covers up any sign of real hurt. Then, quickly, he plasters on a look of exaggerated shock, all eyebrows and clenched jaw. "You're gonna let her talk to me like that?"

"It's form follows function, Derr," Beth says, not even bothering to look up from her work. She places another careful stitch into the red fabric lining her sequined tuxedo, and reads over Scotty's new material at the same time. "And, yeah. Val isn't a child."

She's in my Circus, you cunt! is something Derrick would have said when he and Beth were still together, but he's so close to that invisible 90-days-without-that-whore chip.

Clean, he thinks like he's sending a wish up to heaven. I'm getting Clean / of her. And the cleanest route is silence, he remembers. Absence. Saying nothing. He slumps into a chair, leans back, grabs the last magazine they were featured in. This makes four.

Scotty speaks instead, clapping him on the shoulder. "Come on, let's take our leave, man. We might put up some more posters at the anime convention, hm?"

"Fuck no. 'M not loitering around any more fucking nerds," Derrick mumbles.

"Tomorrow," Beth says, her voice that of a mother, tolerating her finicky child.

It had been Scott's idea a couple months ago, to tape up the vibrant, messy posters to every wall they could find. After show number nine, they had gone from targeting middle schools and public playgrounds to having the pages slapped to the walls of every D&D den, video game store, high school, and smoke shop in town. No skate park went without a stack of pages trapped beneath a rock, kissing the concrete; no charming co-ed with decent tits went without a five-dollar bribe to pass out a dozen or so on the Quad. Derrick had suggested this bribing scheme with a shaky grin, eyes flitting to Beth, trying to ignore the new hardness in her brow. But she was the one, in the end, trading sweet smiles with these poor, innocent girls. She thought she was better than them, Derrick could tell, even though they were all the same age, and some were certainly older. But she acted with a buffer of superiority, a damning smile that was half maternal, half sisterly. Even they couldn’t resist Scotty’s crude sketches, Val’s carefully curated colors popping off the page.

Derrick knew he was right, though, because that very week they started showing up, and never stopped. By now, every mustachioed hipster and snobbish girlfriend in the county must have passed through their makeshift 'not-so-Big-Top' at some point. Here to see Marie the Carnie, granddaughter of the original Marnie the Carnie, and Counterclown, socio-political  extravaganza. They never did interviews, but Beth allowed photos and Scotty prepared blurbs for reviews if requested. There were journalists in the crowd now, painted by the tall lamps that dripped pink light onto the dark bleachers. They'd sprayed the tents with streaks of red on the outside, the look off-kilter, but raw. The performances were the same.

There had only been one incident in the last week, an empty beer can thrown at Val during the act where she sobs openly to Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit for three full minutes. At first people thought it was part of the show, but a few returning audience members reacted with outrage, and the audience rippled with shock. Val instantly stopped crying and stood perfectly still until the song ended. Once offstage, the mic was kept on, and the wailing continued.

The performance hit hard: Scott's phone rang off the hook for the next three days; shows were still sold out for the next month, and people seemed on the edge of their seats, waiting for it to happen again. When Scotty asks about it tonight, Val shrugs, tugging at their cheek to sketch the shiny blue pencil across their lash line.

"People only really start to see the art when you don't want them to. And white people, you…" Derrick follows Val's line of sight as she glances at Scotty's tan, freckled skin, his wiry blond afro, his dark, bashful eyes. Val reaches out a hand and briefly squeezes his knee, half reassurance, half apology.

He shakes his head quickly, smiles. No harm. It's cool. Not the first time, not the last.

Val turns back to the mirror, finishes the thought: "They always want the part they know they shouldn't."

"Tired of people calling us fucking feminist, too. It's all attributed to feminism, every goddamn time," Beth says, dusting her pink nose with a pale shimmery powder. "I do good work. Me."

"I know. They want to tear it all apart. It's called clown-white, fuckers. I didn't make that shit up…" Val trails off into a whisper, smoothing a shock of chalky powder over her dark cheek.

Beth hums. Derrick's eyes flick back to the magazine in his lap, its bold white font announcing "Nashville's Feminist Freakshow: The Circus is Staying in Town". There are several snapshots of Val during a rehearsal, her glossy white clownsuit’s rainbow dots coming out neon. The largest is a picture of her and Algernon III taken just as Val placed a red foam clown nose at the end of the Clown-Croc's (patent pending) scaly snout. Then, a sequence  of photos capturing Counterclown's trademark finale: Val standing in the sprinkling of faux-rain, their upturned face a muddle of color as the water pours down. Then, their hands smoothing up neck and cheeks, collecting the dripping color. In the last, her palms are raised to the camera, the wetted facepaint seeping between chubby brown fingers.

But Derrick has to force himself to look at these, drinking in the details of Val's face like it might be hiding a salve, if only he stares hard enough. But the smaller pictures prove to only be a distraction from what awaits: the huge, glossy picture of Beth on the other side of the centerfold. Her sharp black bob and even sharper smirk peek from beneath the burgundy bowler hat; if he wanted to, he could tear the page out and hang it up on his wall like a poster. If you’d caught him a month ago, maybe even last week, he probably would have. But now, he flicks the magazine closed and tosses it across the room, listens to it skid on the plastic floor. He can hear it even over the whip-cracks of the tent, still fighting the wind.

*

Tonight, something is different. He can feel the stilted silence of Val and Scott in the wings, which then starts up into muffled chatter once Gem arrives with their gear bag and greets them both with a kiss. He can feel the eerie electricity from Beth’s quick glances his way. She rarely looks at him these days if she can help it, but as they both scan the pooling crowd, he catches her range slip just a bit too far, landing on his face for a few seconds. Derrick can’t bring himself to meet her gaze. 

He feels mechanical, like there’s a ticking inside himself, a bomb waiting for the right number to click into place. There’s no choice involved: it feels like his body is on someone else's side. He doesn't know whose.

Large throngs of theater-goers always love to chatter, but they move as one just after sunset, scattering into the rows of bleachers surrounding the massive garden tent the four of them had modded back in December. Derrick remembered the movers dumping the massive boxes into the lot as he and Beth watched, Scotty and Val trying to help the panting men. “Black Friday,” Derrick had said, and Beth just nodded. The workers toted with them smaller boxes: dozens of fairy-light strings, miniature mason jars, cans of spray paint. And where had all those empty cans gone, and all those boxes? Where was the wreckage? What was left of their work-in-progress?

Derrick stands in the back as usual. The show moves, and for the first time in over a year, he really watches. Each word from Beth is so intentional, settled in like an old tattoo. Each of Val's movements is a tiger's stripe, wild and real, unchangeable. Everything that had been shifting, everything that had to happen up til now for all this to occur, was over. It was all done, leaving behind this new permanence. Inherent existence. Like you couldn't take it apart or break it down into pieces again if you tried. they’re all gone – / no more pieces / to be had. so many // finishings. 

Derrick's eyes cut to Gem at the lighting board, the twist of their hand making the lights flash. They come up slow on Scotty as he brings out Algernon III, the spiritual descendant of the gator he gave up while they were all still in the van. Her cold, thick neck is wrapped in a white ruffled collar, which, believe it or not, she loves. Scotty gives a soft whistle — he’s told Derrick this is mostly for the audience’s benefit, a sense of human control — and she opens her massive jaws. He holds something up to the audience: Algernon’s toy bird, white with a red ribbon around its neck. Then he tosses it into her mouth, and just as it lands on her flat tongue, her jaws snap shut again with a hollow thunk. He whistles a few more times, then flaps his hands around. When Algernon III opens up again the puppet is suspended in the air, its little wings being pulled by red strings on her teeth, so it flaps. Like it's flying in her mouth. People love this one on instinct; their ooh is always involuntary, unanimously awed.

When Derrick enters the empty dressing room after the show, Gem will shut the door behind him and tell him what he already knows. Scott will try to say something, but only a consolation. Beth and Val will be silent. He will throw something at the mirror, buy a ticket back to Boston, and fly home to see his dying father. He will inherit their family's publishing empire, but this would have happened anyway, and he knows it. In a few years, Scotty will bring the van back to him. There will be no use for it; the circus will stay in Nashville, because they will be just as successful, and because Gem will be pregnant, as will Derrick's maid, though she doesn't know it yet. Just a feeling. 

Today, for another moment, Derrick watches the bird fly in the gator's mouth, then closes his eyes. He turns his head upward, and pictures the many sorrowful stars beyond the rippling plastic of the tent. Pictures himself climbing into them, hauling his weight onto the invisible branches that lie between each ripe light. And in his mind, he writes:

you, the night / envelop me, let me be eaten / let me, please, be taken / away / and // held. for i am not promised / to anything