An Excerpt from A Cabinet of Wonders, by Renee Dodd

Chapter 6: Birthday Whiskey

Neither Dugan nor Mario knew the actual date they had been born, but they still celebrated every year on April 24th because that was the birthday assigned to them by Professor Marshall Clinker,a strict taskmaster who had falsely billed them as fraternal twins in his Freak Show and kept them locked in their trailer between performances. “No showman worth his salt would risk giving a free show,” the Professor used to say, tossing his ring of keys, which spun and flashed and jingled through the air, clinking as he caught them behind his back. Mario and Dugan had the Professor to thank for their names as well, since their real names, like their real birthdays, had been lost to an early childhood that Dugan either could not or would not remember.

Dugan and Mario had been eleven years old—or at least that’s what they were told—when they met twenty years ago, and became friends from the start, bonded by their common situation and their common enemy, Professor Clinker. Clinker had purchased Dugan and Mario from different sources within the same month (April, of course), and considered them to be his property, same as his banners, his stage, and the garters that held up his socks. Playing Dugan’s dwarf distortion against Mario’s midget magnetism, the Professor made quite a profit, packing his sideshow for years, traveling from coast to coast, until he died on one very special Sunday while fishing in Louisiana. Clinker’s swamp guide, a bold, old Cajun, liked to ram his walking stick down gator holes, causing the reptiles to rush up out of the ground and whoosh by the legs of shocked fisherman. This thrill had proven too much for the Professor’s dickey heart, which stopped on the spot and set Dugan and Mario free to pursue more lucrative, and less confining, employment. That was in 1914, when the friends were eighteen (give or take a year), and though they soon went their separate ways, they never lost touch, and they never missed a single birthday celebration.

On April 24th, 1927, Dugan parked the Cadillac he’d borrrowed from his colleague Zimm back in Augusta—the Caddy’s sleek lines and shiny chrome had lured more than a few townie beauties to join Zimm’s Girl Show—and stepped out into the foul fumes of the paper mills along the Savannah River, feeling nervous about the annual meeting for the first time ever. Last year Dugan’s pain had been mild, negligible, something one could chalk up to the cold or to insufficient sleep. Not now. And he didn’t know if he should tell, if he’d even be capable of speaking the words, and really, what good would it do? But despite his inner turbulence, as he walked along the sidewalk he found himself chuckling at the sign which designated the dirty, narrow road as Shady Lane. No doubt this had originally referred to shade cast by glossy-leafed magnolias, or live oaks drippping with Spanish moss, but now that the trees were gone and the lane ran perpendicular to a juice joint, the name remained appropriate—only with a different connotation.

In honor of the celebration, Dugan wore a smart suit in a houndstooth check of cream and kelly green, the colors complementing his pecan-brown hair and eyes, and in the lapel he had tucked a yellow rose with orange-tipped petals. Although aware that others seldom noticed the effort, he never failed to pay attention to detail.

As Dugan approached the speakeasy’s door, he heard a familiar voice call out, “Snappy suit.” It would have seemed like a child’s voice if it weren’t for the ragged hoarseness that worsened with every passing year.

“Thanks. Yours too,” Dugan said, shaking his friend’s hand. Something looked different about Mario this year, but Dugan couldn’t place it. Mario’s suit was pink seersucker with dapper, tapered lines that made it clear he had employed a costly tailor, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

After a hacking cough, Mario said, “I cut a fine figure, if I do say so myself.”

Dugan gave up trying to determine what was different and focused instead on his friend’s tremulous grip. “Your hand is shaking. How long since your last drink?”

“Too long. And wipe that pruney look off your face.”

They rapped on the door and the sliding eye-window clacked open to reveal a pair of narrowed gray eyes. “Who is it?”

Dugan and Mario stepped back a few feet; they had been too close to the door to be visible. When the doorman saw who had knocked, he gawked a moment, then laughed and said, “Sorry, this ain’t a place for kiddies.”

“Stop beating your goddamn gums and open up,” Mario said. Although the doorman continued to chortle, he did open the door. Mario swept past the man without a glance, but Dugan noticed the long jagged scar puckering a path down the man’s cheek to where it tugged at the corner of his mouth and twisted his smile. He noticed, too, the doorman’s missing right hand, the knotted shirtsleeve hiding the stump.

“If you ever grow weary of this gig, old boy,” Dugan told him, “just look me up. Name’s Dugan. Any carny’ll know me. I could spin a marvelous tale about your little peculiarities, put you up on a stage, and make you a star.” He smiled broadly. “Like me.”

“Fuck off,” the man said.

Still smiling, Dugan walked on.

Dugan and Mario surveyed the room. They chose a corner table, near a hearth that sheltered a whispering, popping fire that overcame the stink of the factories and warmed the cool dankness stemming from the lack of windows and the proximity to the river; the corner also rested far enough from the crowd at the bar to assure the men a little peace while they drank and caught up on the past year’s happenings—although Dugan had not yet decided how much of his own happenings he would share. Gleaming from the grease and wear of a generation of use, the table’s unfinished wood had a lovely natural patina, but it sat too high, or the chairs too low, for the tabletop hit the men at chest height. Still, they’d often had worse, and rarely had better, so they made do.

When the waitress, carrying a bottle and two tumblers balanced one-handed on a tray, saw Mario, she squeaked in greeting the way a woman might for a baby or a puppy, then reached out and ruffled his hair, causing both men to recall the private parties that Professsor Clinker had them play off-season: Mario gritting his teeth as the women cooed and pinched him, passing him from lap to lap, while Dugan argued politics with the men, seething because the more astute his observations were, the more they patted Clinker on the back, congratulating him for having such a well-trained monkey.

“Oh, my goodness!” the waitress gushed. “Aren’t you just the cutest, sweetest little thing?”

Mario’s eyes turned to flint and struck sparks against the firelight. “You don’t know how sweet,” he said, grabbing his groin and giving it a squeeze, “but I could give you a taste if you’d like.”

The woman quickly stepped away, as shocked as she would’ve been had the exchange occurred between her and a five-year-old child. Regaining her composure, she looked at Dugan and said, “We got moonshine whiskey. That’s it. But it’s pretty clean and pretty strong.” She set the whiskey and two tumblers on the table. “The level’s marked on the bottle. We charge you by the inch.” With a sneer directed at Mario, she said, “Guess we won’t be charging you much.”

As she turned and walked off, Mario studied her closely. “Her ass is alright,” he said. “Too bad she’s a dumb bitch.” He looked at his friend. “That never happens to you, now does it, Dugan. That cutesy wittle woogy-woogy routine. I’m a grown man, for Christ’s sake!”

“I’m too grizzled for anyone to want to baby me,” Dugan said. “And my figure’s not half as cute as yours.”

Mario barked in laughter, an almost painful sound.

“You’ve been drinking too much of the harsh stuff,” Dugan said, as he did every year when they met. “I can hear it in your voice.”

“The harsh stuff is the best kind,” Mario said, as he did every year in return. He uncorked the plain brown bottle and began to pour the bootleg liquor, which was, if nothing else, whiskey-colored.

“Just tell me you don’t drink Jake,” Dugan said. Jake, the fluid extract of Jamaican ginger, was ninety percent alcohol and the cheapeest booze a man could buy.

Insulted, Mario shot back, “I can afford better than Jake!”

“It paralyzes the extremities, you know.”

“No one’s actually proven that.”

“Come on, old boy. I know you’ve seen it.” Dugan pictured the people he’d witnessed walking with that distinctive Jake-baked motion. Unable to properly work the muscles of their fingers and toes, they dangled their feet as they took each step, smacking the pavement toes first, then heel, with a disconcerting tap-click, tap-click. “Not that this panther sweat is much better for the constitution.”

“It’s fucking wonderful for the constitution. Keeps the blood flowing nice and smooth.” Mario raised his glass. “Here’s to Birthday Whiskey.”

“Here’s to the steady attrition of your throat’s lining.”

Mario grinned and downed the amber liquid in one long gulp. Dugan choked down half, his eyes watering. “It’s got quite a kick,” he said.

Mario took a huge cigar from an interior coat pocket. “Want one?”

Dugan declined.

Mario clipped and lit the stogie, exhaled a pungent cloud as gray and viscous as wet cement, then clamped the cigar between his teeth and slid a photograph out of his wallet. “Here, take a look at my latest baby vamp.”

“She looks like the rest of them. Big and blonde.”

“Hollywood keeps itself well-stocked with my kind of tomattoes.”

“Big cigars and big blondes,” Dugan said. “The two favorite pastimes of all professional midgets. Mario, you’re a parody of yourself.”

“Nothing wrong with living up to the stereotype if you enjoy it, which I do—immensely.” He tucked the photograph back into the wallet, which he returned to his coat. “Don’t be bitter ’cause I get all the girls. You could bag quite a few smarties yourself if you were a little more open-minded.”

“Why would I care to be open-minded in regards to curiosity seekers?”

“Nubile young things, longing to discover if it’s true what they say about dwarfs…why not? Especially since I happen to know that it is true in your case. I say hop off your high horse and grab yourself a girl.”

“Nubile young things, my ass! I used to partake as much as you, and I know full well that they’re nothing but a gaggle of quiffs with a fetish for—hey, hold on. How do you know if it’s true or not? I don’t recall us ever playing doctor.”

“Well, I have been known to have a few tête-à-têtes with your exlovers. I run into them on my travels and the pattern never changes. It always begins with them asking after your health and ends with them crying drunkenly on my shoulder, pouring their hearts out and wondering what went wrong.”

“And who gets them drunk?”

Smiling mischievously, Mario shrugged and poured another few inches into his glass before topping off Dugan’s. “Here’s to embarking upon our thirty-first year!”

“Or as near as we can guess to it. We could be thirty-two, or only thirty—who knows? We probably aren’t even the same age,” Dugan said. He took another gulp of the homemade hooch. “This shit is like petrol.”

A gust of foul river stench swept in from outside, and the chatter at the bar rose, punctuated by outbursts of nervous laughter. When Dugan and Mario looked to see what was stirring up the drones, the two experienced carnies stared slack-jawed for a moment before recovering their nonchalance. Half a man taller than the tallest person in the room, the man who had just walked in had to stoop to avoid colliding with the ceiling’s support beams. Broad through shoulder and chest, he was built proportionately to his height, except for his head, which, no larger than your average man’s, appeared tiny atop his towering frame.

“Your friends are already here, Freak,” the doorman said, elicitiing more uneasy laughter from the barflies.

The giant stared for some time in Dugan and Mario’s direction, and Dugan wished he were close enough to read the stranger’s face—if only to help clarify what it was that he himself felt at that moment—but he could not discern the man’s expression, only the shrug of his great shoulders as he approached their corner table by the fire.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” the giant asked. “I could really use a drink, and you seem to have the best seat in the house for those with our—”

“Special talents?” suggested Mario.

“Sure. Special talents. I like that.” Though the giant’s voice was calm, it resonated in his enormous ribcage like thunder through a cave. He pulled a bench over from a neighboring table and sat with his back to the room. When the waitress brought his bottle and glass, her hands trembled.

Once she’d gone, Mario said, “I’ll bet she’s right to be scared. I’ll bet you’re no gentle giant—thank the Lord. I can’t stand a big man who’s chicken.”

The giant shook his head. “I’m not chicken, and I’m not exactly gentle, but I’d never hurt a woman.”

“Why not?” Mario asked. “What’s so special about women?”

“Well, everything. Everything’s special about them,” the big man said, his eyebrows quirked in bafflement.

“Spoken like a virgin and a mama’s boy,” Mario said.

“How about we introduce ourselves before we proceed to disparage one another? I’m Dugan. This uncouth midget here is Mario.”

Dugan extended his hand in greeting, but suspended the motion in mid-air when confronted by the giant’s vast hand, the palm nearly the size of a dinner plate. Without having touched, the dwarf and the giant let their hands drop and swiftly assigned them other duties—Dugan lifting his tumbler for another gulp, the giant uncorking the new bottle to pour a few fingers of whiskey into his glass.

“Call me Sean,” the giant said, looking up again, and the three men studied one another and their surroundings, absorbed the extremes of scale, and felt themselves grow and shrink according to which segment of the room they appraised.

“Well,” Dugan said, after a long silence. “I can see why people like you and people like us have always had a peculiar relationship..."