6
Evanston City, Wyoming
Rooster leaned a shoulder against a stack of folding chairs at the tent’s exit, and to the casual observer, he might have looked bored with the proceedings. The casual observer might not have seen that the fingertips of his right hand rested on the butt of a Colt M1911 in his waistband. They for sure wouldn’t have seen the shoulder holster he wore under his battered denim jacket, nor the Beretta M9 within it. There was no way they could have guessed that the shaft of one boot contained a slender, wicked boning knife inside a sheath, and that the other housed a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38. The casual observer wouldn’t know that Rooster Palmer carried an entire arsenal in the back of his pickup truck. Right now, he was just a grungy guy with too-long hair who didn’t seem properly enthralled with the spectacle taking place in the center of the tent.
That was the way he wanted to be seen.
Right now, all eyes were on Red.
She stood on a little stage made of pallets and plywood, wearing the flowy white dress with the long, fluttery sleeves they’d bought in a thrift store in Pasadena to serve as her costume. Red had ripped and re-stitched it over and over so that it had a pieced-together, but pleasing look, like something a Bohemian princess would wear. Her mane of red hair fell in waves and curls down her back, gleaming beneath the Christmas lights strung up on poles around the tent. She had her back to Rooster, and he watched her hair shift and glow like superheated copper as she moved. She held both hands up above her head, tilted back at the wrists, fingers splayed in an elegant gesture. And in each palm, she cupped fire.
The Wyoming families who filled the tent watched with open-mouthed, rapt attention as the two points of flame swelled, crackling audibly. Rooster knew they were searching for matches, for oiled cloths, for propane gas lines snaking up Red’s arms, madly wondering how she was doing it, and delighting in it anyway.
Red held her pose a moment, the fire getting larger, brighter, and then she swept her arms out and down, the flames streaking around her in a circle.
Gasps. Exclamations. A few scattered claps.
Red executed a tight spin, fire twining in ribbons around her, grinning with her whole pixie face, wild and exuberant.
A casual observer would have thought she liked performing.
Rooster knew that, for thirty minutes at a time, in a grubby carnival tent, Red got to feel exactly like herself, and not a science experiment.
They’d seen the flyer for this particular carnival – one of those nameless, knockoff brand fairs with Ferris wheels that got stuck and especially sketchy corndogs that usually set up in empty parking lots for a day or two without much warning – two towns over yesterday, a bit of blue paper tacked to a corkboard outside a diner. They’d just spent their last five bucks on two Cokes and a piece of cherry pie, and Red had sent him one of herpretty please, Roolooks. And. Well. Here they were. The manager had promised them cash if they could pull in a crowd, and people were still coming into the tent, one after the next; Rooster could hear a swelling chatter of voices on the other side of the dirty plastic walls. The fire girl was real – or at least looked it – and everyone wanted to see her with their own eyes.
On her makeshift stage, Red danced with a dreamy, fairy garden sort of slowness, artful movements of her arms, deep spins that fanned her hair around her shoulders. The audience didn’t watch her – they watched the fire, twisting and writhing and leaping from hand to hand, spinning into elaborate streamers and bursting like overripe tomatoes – but Rooster did. One of those rare moments when he didn’t have to play the guardian. The protector, the chauffer, the decision-maker. The one with the burden of living, and running, and hiding. For the half hour that she danced, he could just watch her use her gift, marveling at the way she’d somehow, right under his nose, grown into a woman.
Red dropped her hands low, and began the grand finale, a circle of fire springing to life around her on the stage, leaping up waist-high. Women in the audience shouted in mixed delight and fear. Red shot both arms up, straight overhead, and the fire soared to meet around her, enclosing her in a column of flame so powerful Rooster felt its heat against his face. The crowd felt it, too, shrinking back, shielding their eyes with upraised hands.
And then the fire began to lift up from the floor. There was agapnow; first Red’s bare feet, then her shins, then her knees visible. The fire lifted, impossibly, shrank down, rushed to land in her palms. Down, down, down, until it was nothing more than two handfuls again.
Red closed her hands into fists, and the flames went out.
Total silence reigned for the span of a heartbeat.
And then the applause.
Red’s arms shook visibly as she lowered them to her sides. When she curtsied for her clapping audience, she wobbled.
Rooster stepped up to the stage and caught her around the waist when she turned to him. The second she was no longer facing the crowd, the smile dropped away, eyelids flagging and mouth going slack with exhaustion. It was always this way after she used her power; she was always weak, and shaky, hardly able to walk.
“Come on, Little Red,” he murmured, setting her back into her boots, right where she’d left them on the spongy grass. “Let’s get you something to drink.”
“Did I do okay?” she asked, leaning into his chest, letting him hold her weight.
“You always do.”
He felt the shape of the smile she pressed into his shoulder, happy and sweet, warm as the hood of a running car.
~*~
Rooster bought a bottle of Coke from one of the concession stands and found an out-of-the-way spot behind a tent, where Red could sit down on a plastic crate and catch her breath. The day had been warm, but it was cool now, after dark, the wind toying with her hair. She shivered, and Rooster immediately shrugged off his jacket.
“I’m alright,” she said, but tucked her nose gratefully into the Sherpa collar when he draped the jacket around her shoulders.
“Drink your Coke.”
“Bossy,” she accused, but smiled, and took a few more sips.
