Kiss an Angel(47)

The other baby elephants had quickly realized she was an easy mark, and she’d become the target for all their mischief. They sprayed her with water, bellowed at her, and swatted her if she got too close. Even worse was the way they waited until she was standing next to them before they did their personal business. Digger told her that as long as she refused to use the bull hook on them, she deserved what she got, but she wouldn’t beat them.

Although she’d stayed away from Sinjun, she’d learned about him from listening to the others talk. He was an old tiger, about eighteen, with a reputation for being cranky. According to Digger, none of the trainers had ever been able to befriend him, and everyone regarded him as both unpredictable and dangerous.

Just like her husband. Alex confused her so much she didn’t know what to think. As soon as she made up her mind that he was nothing more than a sadistic monster, he’d appear at the elephant truck with a new pair of work gloves or a baseball cap so she didn’t get sunburned. And more than once, he’d happened by just in time to wrestle the loaded wheelbarrow down the ramp for her. Most of the time, however, he simply gave her grief.

It was an unseasonably hot day for mid-May. The temperature had soared well into the nineties, and the thick humidity made it difficult to breathe. They were playing in a parking lot again, this one in a small town south of Richmond, and the black asphalt intensified the heat. She’d been swatted twice already by the elephants, badly scraping her elbow the second time she fell. To make it worse, everybody in the circus seemed to be relaxing except her.

Brady and Perry Lipscomb sat in the shade beneath the awning of the Pepper family’s Airstream, enjoying a cool beer and listening to a baseball game on the portable radio. Jill spritzed herself with water and lay back on a lounge chair with the newest issue of Cosmo. Even Digger was taking a nap in the shade.

“Daisy, get your ass moving and do something with that hay!”

Neeco shouted out his order from the doorway of the trailer the showgirls used, then draped his arm around Charlene’s shoulder. Ever since their confrontation over the bull hook, Neeco had been hostile. He gave her the worst jobs and kept her at them for long, backbreaking hours until Alex appeared and told him she’d worked enough for the day.

As she began to move the hay, every muscle in her body burned. Her sweat-soaked T-shirt had a rip at the shoulder seam; filth covered her jeans; dirt, hay, and manure stuck to every inch of her damp skin. Her hair was matted to her scalp, and her grubby fingernails were as broken as her spirit.

Across the lot, Sheba sipped something cool from an orange plastic tumbler and painted her toenails. Perspiration dripped in Daisy’s eyes, making them sting, but her hands were too dirty to wipe them clear.

“Hurry it up, will you, Daisy?” Neeco called out, while Charlene giggled. “We’ve got another load coming in.”

Something inside her snapped. She was tired of being everyone’s whipping boy. She was tired of being swatted by baby elephants and treated with contempt by humans.

“Move it yourself!” She threw down the pitch fork and stomped away. She’d had enough. She was going to find Alex and demand that plane ticket. Nothing she could face on her own was as bad as this.

A great roar reverberated through the lot. With it, her skin began to burn from the heat, and her parched throat demanded water. She saw a hose running from the water truck toward the menagerie, and she hurried toward it, feeling vaguely panicked because she had never been so overheated.

Once again, she heard a roar, and she looked up to see Sinjun’s cage baking in the sun. Waves of heat bounced off the asphalt and made the tiger’s orange-and-black stripes shimmer.

Not all the animals were inside the menagerie tent. Some of them had been left in a small fenced-in area between the menagerie and the big top. Chester, a mangy-looking camel, was tethered not far away along with Lollipop, a cream-colored llama with bedroom eyes. A large piece of mildewed white nylon provided a bit of shade for them, but nothing shielded Sinjun from the low angle of the sun that beat through the iron bars. Like her, Sinjun seemed to have been singled out for abuse.

He stared at her with a sad sort of resignation, not even bothering to pick up his ears. Behind him, the llama made a strange clucking sound, while the camel studiously ignored her. The heat from the asphalt soaked through the soles of her sneakers and burned her feet. Perspiration trickled between her breasts. Sinjun’s eyes seared her soul.

Hot. I’m so hot.

She hated this place where animals were kept in cages to be stared at. The llama’s strange clucking rattled through her ears. Her head ached, and the smell of mildew from the nylon sun shade made her stomach queasy. She took an involuntary step backward, wanting to distance herself from the sun and these sad animals and the awful heat. One of her sneakers squished in a puddle of water. She looked down and saw a leak in the coupling of the hose that fed the animals’ watering trough.

Without even thinking about what she was doing, she ran along the length of the hose until she found the brass nozzle spilling water into the trough. Picking it up, she turned it to shut off the flow of water. It dripped cold in her hands.

She squinted from the glare bouncing off the dirty white sun shade, then felt Sinjun’s eyes burning through her already melting skin.

Hot. I’m so hot.

She looked down at the dripping nozzle so cold in her hands. With a savage twist, she lifted the hose and sent the cool water flying directly into the tiger’s cage.