The Dog-Faced Boy & the Amazing Winged Man by Tippi N. Blevins

The Dog-Faced Boy and the Amazing Winged Man

(Story originally appeared in Between the Darkness and the Fire, 1998.)

I don't know where exactly we picked up the dog-faced boy. I would guess somewhere between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, but we had seen six cities in as many nights, so I can't say with any certainty. A dozen or so of us had assembled outside the train to put on a kind of impromptu show for the locals. Everyone wanted to see the Amazing Winged Man, whose name and countenance adorned the entire side of one freight car. The picture had been painted long before I joined the show, so there wasn't much resemblance. The wings were the same, though, and that's all that seemed to matter to most folks.

The monstrous contraption of the wings harnessed under my arms with heavy iron clamps. Old turkey feathers, dyed brown and gold long ago to match the wings, formed something like oversized epaulets that covered the clamps. A rope tied around my waist--hidden neatly beneath loose pants--and looped through hooks in the wings, allowing me to flex each wing with a system of hidden pulleys. I took great care to keep the wheels well oiled at all times. Birds may squawk, but they should never squeak.

Now, I call what I did my "act", but there was little acting involved. My set consisted of an enormous birdcage fashioned of lightweight metal and painted a bright, lustrous gold. Once I climbed in, Nora pulled the lever and the cage went up about four feet off the ground. Just low enough to give people a good view, but high enough to keep them from seeing the Winged Man do something all-too human like smoke a cigarette. I sat there, tugging at the rope and spreading my wings, swinging from the wooden perch inside the cage. That's all there ever was to it, really.

I could have fared worse. Atlantis, the Mer-Man who'd been with the show for almost three decades, shared a tank with Phil, the Human Piranha. The two had never gotten along, always arguing about the advantage of bioengineering over mechanization, or vice versa. I don't think either one really knew anymore which one they were, flesh or machine, but it didn't matter. Fights broke out all the time, and afterwards, ticket sales usually went up.

Nora, the bioengineered bearded woman, usually helped me set up for my act. She was lovely, really, tall with a slender waist but full hips and strong legs. She was always sad, though. Sometimes, someone in the train would play some old music, and Nora would sing quietly, eyes closed. As I recall, she had a beautiful singing voice. She could have been an opera star, if that's what she'd been designed for.

She and Meg, the World's Biggest Woman, shared quarters too cramped even for Dono, the World's Smallest Man, who spent his downtime in a shoebox at the foot of Nora's bed. An old-model android, he was prone to overheating and the telling of dirty limericks. When his processor started heating up, he would fan himself vigorously, excuse himself from the show with a dirty poem, and track down Nora and her tool belt.

About a third of us had left the show the year before when Dupuy, the owner, announced pay cuts. All the non-engineered humans called it quits, but the ones like Nora and Meg and the machines didn't have much choice. I would have left then, too, but there isn't much call in the job industry for men who know how to sit in cages and wear wings.

So that day in Oklahoma, I was surprised to see Dupuy hook his walking cane over his arm and pull out a wad of paper money from his pants pocket. He fondled the money between his fingers before finally handing it to an older gentleman wearing a dapper red suit with wide satin lapels. He looked like the devil, but his smile seemed amiable enough. From my cage, I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I could tell by the look in the old man's eyes that Dupuy had handed him a real wad. I hopped off my perch to try to get a better view, but suddenly my cage began to sway.

Looking down, I saw a boy perhaps eight or nine years of age. He wrapped one meaty little fist around a gilded bar and gave it a good, hard yank.

"Please stop that," I said patiently enough.

The child only shook harder. His eyes were black, shiny and hard as obsidian beads. His mouth turned into a nasty sneer. "You ain't no bird, man."

My lips pulled back into the stiff smile I'd rehearsed many times before. "Of course I'm a birdman."

He shook the cage again. "Let's see you fly. Why can't you fly, huh?"

I sighed and got down on one knee. Leaning closer, I said, "Look, kid, I can't fly on account of I'm too big to get off the ground, you see? Just like an ostrich. Do you know what an ostrich is?"

The kid's breath smelled like popcorn and sour milk. "Of course I do," he said. "You ain't no ostrich, either."

I leaned in a bit closer. "Your mom and dad take you to see Phil, the Human Piranha yet?" The kid spat on the ground and shook his head. "No? Well, he's right over there in that aquarium. He's a carnivore. Do you know what that means? That means he eats little boys just like you, bones and all."

The kid shoved hard against the cage, but turned and walked away without another comment. So young to be so jaded. It made me sad.

By the time I climbed back onto my perch, the old man in the red suit had disappeared and Dupuy was standing there with a boy. I could only see the boy's back, and the ropes that bound his wrists. He stood nearly as tall as Dupuy, so he couldn't have been all that young. But his posture--the shuffling feet and bowed head--made me think of a child. The denim overalls he wore were torn and stained in so many places that only small patches of blue showed here and there. His arms and feet were bare and dirty. A slave? I wondered. How could Dupuy afford a genetically tailored slave? The wad of bills hadn't been that big.

Dupuy pointed to one of the freight cars. The boy's gaze followed Dupuy's finger, and then I saw what he was.

Dupuy had bought himself a new dog-faced boy.

The boy came up to me after the show before I had a chance to take off the wings.

I was polishing my cage, touching up the flecks of paint that had peeled away to show the ugly black beneath. I turned when I felt the rough point of a finger on my arm.

The boy cleared his throat. "I was watching you," he said quietly. He stared at his feet as he spoke. "I watched your act, I mean. I thought it was the best one of all."

It took me a moment to realize what he had said. His mouth--halfway between a dog's muzzle and a human smile--formed the words with obvious difficulty. The vowels sounded too open and airy, the air escaping through the loose sides of his mouth. The consonants came from the back of his throat, like a cough.

Finally, I smiled and said, "Thank you very much." I set aside the paintbrush and thrust out my hand. "My name is Jack," I told him.

Looking up at me, he took my hand. His own was warm and rough, each finger tipped with a short, black, curved claw. He grinned, showing small, pointed teeth. "My old owner called me Edgar. Eh-gahr. Because it was easy for me to say. But my new owner, Mr. Dupuy, says he's going to change it to R-r-rover. It's harder for me to say, but Mr. Dupuy says no one wants to watch a dog-faced boy named Edgar."

The boy withdrew his hand and glanced down at his feet again. I followed his line of vision and saw the claws on his toes. As he shifted from one to the other, I realized he hadn't been merely shuffling, but trying to hide his feet. I felt a bond between us, as tenably as I had felt his hand in mine.

"How old are you?" I asked. "How long have you been... doing shows?" I flinched at my own euphemism. How long have you been employed as a freak?

Edgar shrugged. "My old owner said I was a hundred and nineteen."

"A hundred and--"

He grinned. "Dog years; that's seventeen human years. I been doing this as long as I can remember."

I rested my hand on his shoulder. The boy looked up at me, eyes wide. I smiled. "Have you met everyone else yet?"

"Some," he said. "I meet Dono. He is so small... but so nice."

"Oh," I said with a flick of my wrist. "Dono's just a machine. He's an old android Mr. Dupuy bought in New York. I meant to ask if you'd met the real people yet. Like Nora and Meg?"

The boy looked down again, shaking his head. "I have met no one else."

"Well, let me take you around and introduce you."

He shrugged out from beneath my hand. "I have to go," he said. "Mr. Dupuy wants to talk to me about my act."

With that, he turned and ran a few steps ahead. Then he stopped and spun around. He hitched his thumbs in the pockets of his overalls and glanced up at me. "I think your wings are beautiful, Jack," he said, gave a shy little wave goodbye, and disappeared into Dupuy's tent.

My own hand went up, then stopped. Beautiful? I looked over my shoulder at the dusty brown and yellow feathers. I should give them a good cleaning, I thought. Make them so they really would be beautiful.

I went back to work on my cage.

I swung back on forth on my perch in that same Oklahoma town the next afternoon. It was that time in summer where you can't remember it ever being any cooler, and you don't have much hope of it ever changing. I was bored and hot and trying not to let it show when a crowd of teenagers gathered around the foot of my cage.

One of the boys, younger than Edgar, hooked his thumbs into his armpits and crowed like a rooster. His companions burst into laughter. If they'd seen the same joke as often as I had it wouldn't have seemed so funny. Now it was my turn to be jaded.

"Very good," I said to the boy. These kids were too old to shut up with a threatened visit to Phil the Human Piranha. "Now let's see you lay an egg."

Another one lifted his arm and flicked a cigarette into my cage. "Now let see you shut up," he said.

Now all of them started in with the crowing. One of the girls in the group swiped a handful of pebbles from the ground and tossed them at me. I turned just in time to catch most of the debris with my left wing, but a few pelted the side of my face. My flinching only made the group break out into more laughter and more crowing. There was nothing I could do.

From across the lot I heard something like a dog's bark. When I turned I saw Edgar running toward the teenagers, waving his arms. He was shouting at them, not barking.

"Edgar, no--"

I didn't get the rest of the words out before Edgar tackled the boy who'd started everything. Down they went, falling to the weedy gravel with a series of grunts and shouts. Edgar grabbed the boy's arm and flipped him over onto his belly. He bent the arm back until the boy yelped.

"Edgar, stop," I said. He looked up at me, lips pulled back in a snarl. "Stop!"

He blinked and some of the animal left his face. He looked down at the boy pinned beneath him as if surprised to see him there. He scrambled to his feet and staggered back a few steps.

"S-sorry," he said, hanging his head. "I--I'm sorry."

The target of Edgar's attack was just gaining his feet. When one of the girls tried to clasp his hand, he jerked away. "Freaks," he spat, looking first at me, then at Edgar. "You ain't worth working up a sweat over."

Slowly they began to move off, looking more like a pack of animals than Dupuy's freak show ever had.

When no one was looking, I opened the door to my cage and hopped out. "Edgar, you shouldn't do that. Dupuy catches you doing that and you'll be in trouble."

His mouth dropped open with a child's indignation. "They were being mean!"

"Lots of people are mean," I said with a sigh. "You just have to try and ignore them. That's what makes us better than them."

Edgar was silent for several moments as he stared at his feet. Then, suddenly, he turned to me again. "Why can't you fly?"

I started to laugh, but stopped. I studied him, trying to tell if the wide-eyed curiosity in the boy's face was as genuine as it seemed. Could it be that he didn't know I was a fake? I shook my head, stunned. A child much younger had asked me the same question the day before, but it had been a challenge. Edgar's question came from innocence.

"I--I'm too big," I heard myself say.

"Oh," he sighed. He nodded seriously. "Does it make you sad?"

"What?"

He shrugged. "You know, doesn't it make you sad you can't fly like other birds?" He looked up toward the sky and when I followed his line of vision, I spied a solitary crow flying south to north. That bird's wings gave it freedom; mine had trapped me here.

"Yeah," I said. "Sometimes it makes me sad."

I began wearing my wings even when I wasn't doing my act. I wanted so much to please the boy, and he obviously took great joy in the very things I had always thought of as monstrous. It seemed like a small enough burden to bear.

On a night about two weeks after Edgar joined the show, I retired early to my tent, eager to remove the wings. It was the height of summer and the dark feathers served to concentrate the heat in a wide "V" on my back. I untied the ropes with bungling fingers, the sweat pooling in the crack of my rear end. The wings came away from my back with a wet sucking sound. My skin was raw and red everywhere the wings had touched me. A moat of reddened flesh circled my waist.

I had just sat down on the mattress that served as my bed when I heard shouting further down the freight car. Holding my breath, I strained to hear. I picked out two voices, one of them quite loud and angry. The other only whimpered.

Going to the flap in my tent, I looked out into the dusky half-light inside the car and saw Dupuy leaning on his cane. He towered over a kneeling Edgar. They were outside Dupuy's tent. The boy held up his arms in a cross over his head. "Please don't!" he cried.

Dupuy pulled back his left arm, his huge hand in a fist. "You stay out here, you hear me, you mongrel? If I catch you trying to crawl back into my tent I'll beat you till you fall apart!"

I ducked back into my tent and shouldered the weight of my wings once more. Sucking breath through my teeth, I drew the rope around my waist and pulled my pants up to hide it.

"Edgar!" I cried out before I was even halfway out of my own tent.

Dupuy looked over his shoulder when he heard me. His face was an angry, mottled red, and his pallid blue eyes quivered in the bloodshot whites. "You get back in your tent, Jack. This has nothing to do with you."

Dupuy turned, drawing back his arm again. I caught his elbow on the down swing, jerking back as hard as I could just in time to keep his fist from smashing into Edgar's upturned face.

"Stop this," I said, and shoved Dupuy back, hard. I wanted him to know I was a hell of a lot stronger than him. "Stop it, right now."

He sneered at me, his lips loose and wet. His finger jabbed at my chest. "You watch it, birdman. You can be replaced."

I met Dupuy's stare with equal intensity. Holding my hand out to Edgar, I said, "He can sleep in my tent." I looked down at the boy. "Do you mind sharing a tent with me, Edgar?"

Edgar's head snapped up. "Do you mean it, Jack?" I nodded. The boy smiled and slipped his hand into mine.

Pulling Edgar protectively to my side, I looked again at Dupuy. "We're going now, Dupuy. You sleep well now, you hear?"

I didn't wait for an answer. My arm around Edgar's slight shoulders, the two of us turned and headed toward my tent.

At first Edgar slept curled on the floor, but he looked too much like the animal Dupuy and his former owners had tried to make of him. So against my better judgement, I offered him one side of the bed, even though I knew that in order to sleep, I would have to arrange my wings tight against my back and lie on my side at the edge of the mattress. The feathered framework would hang down behind me, out of the way. Edgar accepted the offer with wide-eyed surprise and I believed at once I'd done the right thing. It was an uncomfortable arrangement at times, and it meant I didn't dare stir once during the night, for fear the squeak of mechanics would wake him.

No, that's not it. I feared he would find out just how entirely human I was.

I should have told him, if not the first time we met, then soon after. And certainly before I ever invited him to stay with me. But as the days passed, it became more and more difficult to voice my confession. The more time that went by, the more I realized he would view my silence as a lie. How could I explain to him that it was an illusion, not a lie, when I didn't quite know the difference myself? I said nothing.

I told myself all that mattered was that he needed someone to believe in, someone to care about him. I needed to be that someone.

Dupuy had Edgar performing the most degrading acts to please our finicky audiences. Dupuy took away Edgar's only article clothing and left him in an old tiger cage completely naked before the gawking eyes of the jaded. Dupuy forbade the boy to bathe, to scrape away the animal layers of dirt to expose the human child beneath. But at night, when the boy found his way into my tent, I would put my thumb first to my tongue and then to his soiled brow.

In Kansas, I found an opportunity for one afternoon's worth of escape. Dupuy had a meeting with the taxman and he wanted all of us out of sight. He didn't want to explain why he had almost twenty acts when he had heretofore only claimed nine.

So I gave Edgar one of my shirts and a pair of dungarees and told him we were going to have an adventure. After hitting Nora up for a few oranges and a loaf of bread, I took Edgar in hand and together we escaped into the wilds of a foreign place.

The town we'd stopped in was apparently on the edge of a farming community. Faded red barns dotted the arid, yellow landscape. Fat cylinders of hay provided shade where no trees grew. It was to one of those bales Edgar and I ran, two newfound friends hand in hand, the metal harness of the wings digging painfully into my shoulders. What a pair we must have seemed to anyone who might have seen us. I hardly cared.

Edgar had never been far from one freight train or another, never allowed to stray too far from vans or buses or tents. It was a joy to watch him running though the knee-high grasses. He flew more than I ever had. There was no tiring him. He showed no signs of slowing down as he ran and leapt and followed butterflies. "Come and rest," I called out. I held up an orange. "Have something to eat."

He didn't even slow down. "I don't need to eat," he called back. He tore up fistfuls of prairie flowers as he swooped through the field.

Finally he appeared before me, and held out his hands. He opened his fingers and dozens of flowers rained down on me. With a yelp of joy he collapsed against me and I embraced him. He was feverish from exertion but he was too excited to keep still long enough to cool down.

He pulled back and grinned at me, eyes glittering. "Jack," he said, "tell me about the places you've been. What was your most favorite place of all? I want to hear about places, all kinds of places!"

I shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. Usually I can't remember most places I've been to. I just wake up one day and discover I'm some place different from the night before. After a while, you can only recognize so many different places, and then they all start to look the same." He frowned a little and looked down at his hands. I ducked my head so our eyes were once again on the same level. When he glanced at me, I smiled. "I like this place an awful lot, though."

He leaned back against the hay bale, arms crossed over his chest. He closed his eyes and remained silent for a long while, so long I began to think he'd fallen asleep. Then he stirred. "Jack?"

"Yes?"

His eyes were still closed. "Do you think... do you think I'm ugly?"

I blinked and leaned back a bit in surprise. He opened his eyes to look at me and then just as quickly looked away again.

"Never mind," he said, "I already know. I know I am ugly."

I patted his hand, at a loss for a comforting gesture. "That's not it, Edgar. You just surprised me, that's all." As he opened his eyes, his gaze floated up to meet mine. "It never occurred to me to think of you as anything besides perfectly beautiful."

He grinned. "I think you're beautiful, too, Jack. And not just your wings." His arm slipped around my back and he nestled into my wing.

I returned the embrace and we sat there together like that for some time. Then his fingers went to my waist.

He pulled back. "What's this?" he asked, and tugged on the rope.

The wings moved.

Edgar's mouth opened, but no sound came out.

"Edgar," I began, "please try to understa--"

He pushed away from me, kicking out with his feet. He flailed and turned, scampering up onto his legs. He stumbled backwards and pointed at me with a clawed finger.

"Think I don't understand!" he shouted. "You think we--we aren't as good as you."

"Edgar, what--"

He cut me off with a growl. For a while he said nothing, and then came the accusation. Quiet, barely a hoarse whisper: "You let me believe."

I wanted to say something, to explain the wings and why I had remained silent, but he was already turning, running too fast for me to ever catch.

I stayed out in that field until the sun began to set. When I could no longer stand the silence, I headed back to the train. I hadn't even bothered to remove my wings. The pain of wearing them seemed trivial now.

When I stepped onto the train, the first thing I saw was Dono. Or, rather, pieces of him. Wires and bioflesh and his little glass eyes. Like confetti after a child's party, they littered the floor of the boxcar. The trail of destruction led to my tent.

Someone was inside.

I could see the hulking silhouette of Dupuy, his back hunched and his cane raised high overhead. He brought the cane down again and again, each time with the horrible crunch of breaking machinery.

"Dupuy!" I shouted. "What the hell is going on?"

A moment later, his round, florid face appeared outside my tent, and then the rest of him followed. Leaning on his cane, he sneered at me and wiped a long strand of saliva from his chin. He pointed back at my tent with the tip of his cane. "Rover tore up Dono. Clean it up," he said, and hobbled away.

I didn't wait for Dupuy to disappear into his own tent before ducking into mine. And then I saw.

There, lying on the floor, was Edgar.

Bits of his metal skeleton showed through the torn flesh. His arms were twisted grotesquely at odd angles to his body and the side of his head bore deep dents where Dupuy's cane had come crashing down. A red light flickered in Edgar's eyes.

His lip twitched, pulling back over his teeth. "Just a... machine," he said.

The red light dimmed as I watched.

Two men came to take Edgar away the next morning. They handed Dupuy a few paper bills--"for parts", they said. For parts. I watched as they put all the pieces of him into a burlap bag, flinching at the metallic sound of his bones settling toward the bottom. Of course, I now remembered the little signs I had chosen to ignore, things that should have told me what he was. I remembered with a sting of shame how I'd dismissed Dono as "just a machine" and Edgar's reaction. His turning down the food I'd offered. He didn't need to eat. He'd told me himself. His words came back to me: You let me believe. I'd let myself believe.

I watched as one of the men tied the bag closed, and together they drove away from the train heading north out of Kansas.

I couldn't moved from that spot for a long while after they left. I kept remembering how Edgar had fought those cynical teenagers at the show, defending me, and I couldn't stop thinking how I'd just stood there as the men drove away with the broken pieces of him. It made me ill.

Finally, I went to my tent and remained there for the rest of the day. I removed the Amazing Winged Man's wings, removed all my clothing. I stared at myself for a long while in the mirror and surveyed the damage. My shoulders were bruised, as was the back of my neck. A deep red gash encircled my waist. The scar would never heal.

By the next morning, I had already made up my mind to leave. I had something I needed to do, to set right if I could. I had no doubt Dupuy would find himself another birdman, some guy as content as I was to live in the inertia of that cage. I already felt sorry for whoever it would be.

The weight of the few belongings I carried in a cloth sack over my shoulder was curiously light. Having grown accustomed to the weight of my mechanical wings, I felt every step northward as flight.

The End