Roger - Deus ex Machina

Cincinnati – Aged 8

I used to have a dog. It was probably my earliest memory. It was back before Pops took me away from the home. He told me I was three then. All I can remember is it was brown, and it was mine. It made me happy, but I had trouble remembering sometimes. Pops always said I did.
One of the other boy’s dogs was hiding underneath the demo stage. He was going there to die. I know that because Pops told me so. I didn’t even have to ask. “It’s a dog thing,” he told me in between bites of his hotdog. We had had hotdogs for the past week because Pops met a guy who was selling them for “pennies on the dollar,” as he put it. Pops traded him two of his mops (that was what he did, sold mops) for two boxes of the man’s hot dogs. They were starting to smell.
The man selling electric shavers started making his final pitch and Pops started getting ready. “You get ready and wait up front for when they start handing the money over.” I hoped to God they would this time. Then maybe we wouldn’t have had to eat hot dogs anymore. After Denver I got a steak. After Chattanooga we got squirrel.
Pops made his pitch and we made out pretty well, selling four mops in that hour. The whole time he was yelling to the crowd I could hear a boy calling out for his dog. I would have told him where it was but Pops doesn’t let me walk away from the stage during his pitch. “Who the fuck else will watch the money?” He had a point there; there wasn’t nobody but me and Pops. Not until that night at least.
Sometimes Pops met up with friends after the markets or fairs closed down, especially if he had sold some of the mops. They’d go to the Gypsy woman’s tent and laugh and sing and bark at each other. Sometimes I had to help him walk back to our wagon. Meanwhile, I would play with the other boys, or if there weren’t any other boys I would just run around the tents, as Pops said we couldn’t afford toys. That night, the only other boy in Cincinnati was sitting in a tent crying either over his dog or his Pops beating him for losing it.
I was sitting out by the parking lot waiting for Pops to come back when I met who would be my best friend. I didn’t notice him walk up at first, he just kind of appeared out of the parking lot gridlock. He leaned against the same fence I was just looking out at the cars, just like I was. He was wearing a silly red suit that was real easy on the eyes.
“You like cars, kid?” he asked. I shrugged. Pops warned me to stay away from strangers. And policemen. He said they would just make things more complicated. I simply tried to ignore the man, but he seemed so interesting. He jumped up on the fence and began trying to walk it like the tight rope walkers Pops took me to in Santa Fe. He was a fairly short man. But very proportional, like maybe he was a dwarf, but a very tall one. He had fiery blonde hair that stood nearly straight up and eyes that were just a bit to skinny and a bit too far apart.
“You pitch?” I asked him. He smiled as if that was a very funny thing to ask.
“Never been much of a salesman, per se. I’m more of a persuader.” He smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Benjamin.”
“I had forgotten how strange names have gotten lately. My name’s Loki. Tell me Benjamin, how would you like to have some pizza?” My stomach growled at the sound of the word, and Loki’s smile grew immensely, quite literally from ear to ear. He leaped off of the fence and grabbed my hand as we ran off together towards the darkening fair grounds.
Mr. Petruzzi’s pizza shack was located on the other side of the fair grounds. “Does he know you?” Loki asked. I shook my head. “Fantastic!” Loki straightened himself, pulling his hair upward. He seemed to grow a foot just by doing it. Loki poked around the back of the shack, looking for some sort of entrance. He peered through a small window in the back, waving me over to him. He lifted me up to the window. Mr. Petruzzi was putting the toppings on a large pizza. The window was directly above an oven.
“Grab a match!” Loki called to me. The matches seemed impossibly far away from reach, resting on the base of the oven, not the top.
“I can’t reach it!” I replied. Loki sighed abruptly.
“Silly boy! Just reach further!” I closed my eyes and stretched my arm as far as it could go. Then further. Then further. I felt the sudden feel of wood. I opened my eyes to see my hand several feet away and grasping a match. I recoiled sharply and fell back onto Loki.
“Good job, my boy! Now, let’s have that match.”
“My arm! It kept going!” Loki giggled and walked around the building to a trash can near the shack. He lit the match off of his teeth and threw it in the can. He ran back just as the fire was beginning to catch. As Mr. Petruzzi ran out with a pale of water, Loki and I snatched the pizza from the shack’s counter and ran off back to Pops’ wagon.
Loki and I sat on the edge of the wagon, devouring slice after slice. The food was so delicious I completely forgot about the funny events of the evening. I did not know where this man had come from, or how he had done the things he had done. The moment was just too wonderful to worry about such things. After our feast we laid in the grass, grasping out stomachs. I closed my eyes and smiled. It had been the greatest night of my life. When I opened them, Pops was standing over me and Loki was gone.
“What the fuck is all this mess?” he asked, slurring his words as he did. I had no idea how to answer him. “You steal it?” The words would not come. He grabbed me by the hair and pulled me to my feet. “I asked you a question boy! Now you answer!”
“Yes. Loki helped me! He’s my new friend and he helped me get into the shack and he started the fire and he ate it with me and I like him so please don’t make him go away,” I shouted as directly as one can while being elevated by the hair. Pops stared at me, slightly bewildered. Finally, he set me down and belched loudly.
“Heh, good for you,” he said. “Ain’t got no friends so you make up your own. Next time you nick something you leave some of it for me. You don’t and I’ll put you right back in that orphanage.” It was a threat that I had heard often. I had learned to disregard it.
As we lay on our cots in the wagon, I saw Loki’s hair walk past the window. I slowly got up and went outside. Loki sat playfully on the fence of the parking lot. I sat on the steps and asked him the two questions that were keeping me up that night.
“Are you real?” He did not react. He simply sat, and smiled. He always smiled.
“Will I see you again?” To this he stood and placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“I will be here till you needn’t need me any longer.”
Des Moines – Aged 13
Pops traded in the mops years ago for pigs, running the hog races at whatever carnival would take him. He has started to lose his voice from the years of yelling and the he was having trouble selling the mops. “Nobody trust’s my voice anymore,” he told me. He was right; I didn’t trust much of anything he said, especially after the hogs came in. It was grueling, disgusting work. The hogs were disagreeable and did nothing but eat and shit. But as he had for the past five years, Loki took care of me when Pops couldn’t. We were doing three races a day before Loki had the idea to start taking bets on the side. I was going to take the idea to Pops but Loki didn’t see why he should get a cut. But I wasn’t sure how the hell I was supposed to get away with it without telling Pops about it.
“Find that Gypsy woman and tell her what’s going on. She’ll know what to do,” he told me. I wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but the fortune teller had become of great interest to me as of late. She was the only woman in my life and taught me so many things about manhood. The chance to actually talk to her was reason enough to get me to bring the proposition to her.
Her large wooden shack always lay a bit outside of the carnival, still attracting customers while shying away the coppers. I waited outside for her to finish up with some poor mark eating up some junk about “love as hot as fire.” He left with a smile almost as big as Loki’s.
“Remember, try and look her in the eyes,” Loki whispered to me before I was walking in. She was reapplying make up in the mirror when she saw me.
“You are Pops’ boy, yes?” she said with a thick accent. My eyes were directly on the curve of her breasts. I nodded. “So what is it? He need more of his throat medicine? If he keeps on drinking during the day he’s going to run out of money right quick.” I was stunned. Her figure and the magnitude of what I had to ask had stumped me. I felt a sudden, subtle push from behind. I didn’t need to turn around to know that no one was there. The words flew out of my mouth as if they were from another’s.
“We want to start a racket with the hog races. You give us customers, we give you a cut, 80/20,” I blurted out in a voice close to mine, but a bit off.
“Betting you say. Old Charley’s up to new tricks I see.”
“My father doesn’t actually know anything about it. And, uh, we would like to keep it that way,” I replied. She burst into a cackling laughter.
“Very interesting! Well, you certainly have grown up quickly. But, you said ‘we would like to keep it that way.’ You have, how you say, partner in crime?” My palms were sweating something fierce, either because of her bust line or because I realized I made a mistake. “No worries, my darling. We make agreement, you and me and whoever you work with. I take part of money you make, and your so-called-father will never know what is going on. But it will be 50/50. Split in half.” I tried to turn my head to get a response from Loki, but the Gypsy woman looked suspiciously at me.
“Agreed!” I blurted out. She planted a wet kiss on my cheek and I walked out. I couldn’t stop smiling on the way back to the wagon, so much so that I didn’t realize that Loki was walking with me. He patted me on the back and looked like he was proud. We started pulling in the major dough after that. We hid the money in the back of the wagon and I paid the Gypsy every week. I took the bets in the back while Pops got the hogs ready out front. Loki always sat on the roof. He said he liked to see everything go down. I could tell he was getting bored so I told Pops we should start doing five races a day instead of three. He reluctantly agreed; he was old and drunk most of the time. With the additional races came additional profits. But, Loki was still bored. He would steal women’s purses and rig the Carnival games so that the marks always won, not the house. He would snicker about it later, but it never lasted. Loki had an insatiable thirst for chaos.
After a few months of the hog race racket Loki decided to take the Gypsy woman for all she was worth. From the look in his eye I knew I had no choice but to let it happen. We had enough money to take care of ourselves and even throw a bottle at Pops from time to time, but he insisted it would do nothing but good (for us). I protested when he told me I had to be involved.
“I can’t do this on my own, my boy. You won’t be there when it goes down. I just need you to do a bit of the prep work for me.” I sighed. The next time I dropped of her money she was entertaining the men with booze and dancing, just like Loki planned. I threw the money in the back and grabbed her hair brush on the way out. Loki took the hair and burned it. The flames were several feet tall, and I could see people moving inside of them. He left that night without saying a word.
The evening of the con he was pulling his hair (and himself) up to the preferred height when I asked him the only pertinent question.
“But Loki, is she going to be able to see you?” I asked.
“My good Benjamin. She will see and hear and feel all that I wish her to.”
Loki told me to stay behind but I followed him to the Gypsy’s hut. Loki straightened himself out and entered the tent. I ran up to the side of the hut and held on to the ledge of a window to see. The gypsy woman was entertaining the men when Loki walked in, but he wasn’t Loki at all. He was a tall, dark man dressed in peasant’s garbs. The woman immediately recognized him, standing in utter shock. She rushed the men out of the room and stood still with the man that was Loki. I could barely hear their words, but they were certainly not in English. They talked with a passion and intensity that made me uncomfortable. They embraced deeply and the Gypsy woman gave over to me. The man who wasn’t Loki looked up to me in the window and threw me a smile as massive as ever. I turned away and went home.
In the morning Loki returned with ten thousand dollars wrapped in the Gypsy’s gown. The carnival moved that day. As we drove away I saw the Gypsy woman calling out hysterically into the empty field. She was wearing torn clothes and had black tears streaming down her face. I went to the back of the wagon and looked at all of the money we had and cried. Loki stayed away from me.
Joliet – Aged 17
I split from Pops just over a year ago, and for too many reasons to really count. Highest of which being that he was old and I was young, and with Loki around I simply didn’t need the old man. Also, I figured out that he wasn’t my father, just a thief who needed a partner. He shot himself shortly after I left. Loki told me that father’s were overrated anyway. He was probably wrong, but I don’t ever really remember having one, so it didn’t matter.
Loki and I had immassed more money than we had any clue what to do with. It just sat in the safe we bought in Reno. We were both getting us into more trouble than we could handle. I got a job working a game of skill but I had couldn’t help but rip off the marks and the house. I ended up spending too much time hiding from cops and carnie admins that I had to quit. Loki wasn’t as upset as I thought he would be.
“You got that larceny in your heart, my boy. You just gotta work on thinking it through first,” he told me. It didn’t sit well. I didn’t want to run anymore. For the first time in my life, I realized I had a choice.
None of that mattered much to Loki. He knew we would have to leave town anyway, so he figured we might as well work a new angle before we left. Mr. Tolbert was the carnival owner and was in town for a week.
“Break into his office and find me his books, or papers, or anything that’s got his budget on it. You can always find mischief in the order of numbers,” Loki said.
He got everything ready and we were good to go in the morning. I awoke early and grabbed a bag and threw every cent we had into it. I threw it over my shoulder and headed for Mr. Tolbert’s. Loki was waiting for me in front of the building.
“You sure you know what you’re doing? You sure you know what it means?” he said.
“I guess I just need to have a choice, that’s all.”
Loki frowned for the first time in almost ten years. I walked past him and into Mr. Tolbert’s office. I gave him the bag and told him I wanted to invest in his company. He handed it to a secretary who looked at me in utter confusion. These people did not scare me. I was not intimidated. I was simply doing what I had always been doing: surviving.
That evening I went back to my tent and couldn’t find Loki anywhere. He had been around forever, and I knew he wasn’t exactly real, but he had always been around. I didn’t know how to call him, so I just went to the one place I know he couldn’t resist. “I met you here, remember? The parking lot in Cincy.”
“I have forgotten more meetings than you will ever know, my boy,” he replied. We sat up against a fence watching the chaos of the parking lot. Cars moving slowly and abruptly, the chance of a crash at any moment. People making ill informed, brash decisions that had only backwards benefits, only slowing down the group attempt at leaving in an orderly fashion.
“I made a promise, my boy. I would be by your side as long as you needed me. This is the case no longer,” he said. I wanted to hug him, but it wouldn’t be right. He would probably just steal my wallet to teach me a lesson. Instead I spit on my hand and offered it to him. He cackled with delight and spit on his and shook it. He walked out into the parking lot. He was half way through the lot when my heart nearly jumped out of my chest; a car slammed on its breaks just before it hit Loki.
“Sorry about that,” the driver said.
Loki patted the hood of the car and walked off.