When the boy first saw the sick man swallow iron, he waited five long hours with the others for him to shit out a nail. The sick man didn’t look good to swallow a runny egg, he looked like a dying animal, but the nail eventually came, and the boy lost his two dollars. It was a lot of money to lose on the routes. The boy himself never carried more than five in his socks.

It took the man ten minutes to pack up his kit. In another ten he’d found the last dinette on the road out of town and ambled up to a free stool at the counter. He swung his legs up one at a time, felt his gut where the nails were made. He looked up at where the air conditioning wasn’t blowing through his personal vent in the drop down ceiling, wondering when the last time was it had blown for anyone.

The boy stood a few minutes in the temperate sun before joining the man at the counter. He ordered a Sadat citrus drink for five cents and began playing with a defunct fingerprint scanner someone had left behind. He wondered if it was a toy.

Next to the boy sat a decrepit Korean woman addicted to the industrial sweetener Zeet. In a booth behind him, two crows, one in a long dark jacket missing sleeves, the other with only sleeves. They were both sucking Zeet.

When the sick man stood to leave, the boy didn’t want to go. He still had half his Sadat left. He pondered the senseless wastage, but for just a moment. He was soon on his feet and following the man out the door. The man was already moving at a clip over the asphalt that cut through the tall new grass. The asphalt glistened like fat on a bone.

“You walk fast for a sick man,” the boy said. “Too fast. You sure you’re not one of them things?”

“One of them things with brains you mean?” the man said without breaking his stride. “You’re following me.”

“I just lost two dollars on you.”

“You were the fool to bet it. I told you what I could do.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to believe you.”

“But you did. Any man that bets against a thing like that secretly pines for it to be true. You wanted to see me shit out a nail and lose all your money. Probably you wanted to see me die.”

Hours ago the boy had thought of that. The other loners in their gathered-together outfits had probably wished the same. But they’d lost, and they hadn’t killed the man either.

“You’re lucky is what you are,” the boy said.

“Lucky they didn’t cut me open and look for the iron?” The man had stopped moving. The boy too. A drone flew by overhead at the level of the old electricity poles, sky-colored, noiseless. Higher up, an orange relief plane, an old bomber paid for when men still believed in life on Earth as unmoving allegiances to bloodland and genealogies and fought and fought only to bloody them both. It gave the man hope to know that they were still being watched.

“It only looks that way,” the man said of the tall, sweet grass, which for some reason had mesmerized the boy.

“Why?”

The man got moving again. “I don’t know. After all that hotness, we got coolness. The sun don’t burn no more. Something’s happening in the City is what I think it is.”

“You know where the City is?” the boy asked.

“I don’t. You want to bet against me again?”

“I want you to learn me how you do it.”

“I can’t do that,” the man said.

“I got five dollars in my sock.”

“Minus the two I’ve got, and the five cents for your Sadat. You shouldn’t tell anybody where you keep your money.”

“I don’t tell anybody.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“You ever seen a toy?”

The man shot the boy a glance. His one hand moved to his gut as the pain ripped through it. “Where do you get your money from?” he asked the boy.

“The circuses.”

“Kin?”

The boy shook his head.

“You really never seen a toy?” the man asked.

If the boy had said he’d never seen a man shake another man’s hand in friendship, it wouldn’t have bothered him much. But a toy? “I’m heading down old Route 50 until I find a bus,” the man said. “Soon’s I find a bus, I’m riding out to the next fair grounds. They’ve got a pageant out in Thisbe. You’re welcome to come with me that far.”

The boy looked down the road. He looked up at the sun. He didn’t know anything about directions. He didn’t even know if the man was moving east or west.

“You got to pay to ride?” he asked, but the man didn’t hear, or if he had, his only response was to pick up his pace.

*     *     *
The bus came just before dark. It was a sleek red Huanghai from a place called Saudi Arabia. Inside, soundless advertisements dropped like playing cards across the seatbacks for the travelers to wonder at, screenless optical apparitions. Products available only in the City or on the circus black markets or no longer available, available long ago. The bus smelled of Zeet.

These City-subsidized buses ran endlessly, day and night, on fuel reserves thought to run deeper than any vein in the ocean. Mad wealth controlled by men and women who had never seen the inside of a bus. There was no food sold aboard the bus and no food allowed. But for the fasting dervishes who sat in the back stinking, praying for days on end, rarely would a paying customer ride for more than four hours.

The boy paid his ten cents, then the man. The man made sure the boy was safely in his seat before he sat himself. He watched the boy watching the screens spit out their absurd luxuries.

The boy said, “What’s that? Is that a toy?”

“A hang-glider,” the man said. “It’s not a toy.”

“It looks like a toy. Where are they?”

“Israel. That’s what it says. Can’t you read English?”

The boy gave the man a blank look and said, “Is that part of the City? What’s that?”

It was a woman’s bare leg. An advertisement for a depilatory from half a century ago. “I guess you haven’t seen one of those either,” the man said. “You had a mother?”

“I don’t imagine.”

“What’s your earliest memory?”

“Soap.”

“Soap?” The man set his seat back. The boy did the same.

“I’d like to touch one of them legs though,” the boy said.

“One day you might.”

Eventually they fell asleep. Come morning they were well past Thisbe and had to backtrack on a road with no buses. They walked behind a file of loners and travelling salesmen and a large ragged family leading a camel hauling their possessions. None spoke a language recognizable to the boy or the man. They fell in lock-step up front, the protocol. The newcomers always walked up front. It was up to you to know whether you’d fallen in with cutthroats. If you yourself were one, try attacking a mob at your back.

The boy looked back once and said to the man, “That’s the crow from the dinette.”

“There were two,” said the man.

“He’s got a whole jacket now.”

“Means you don’t want to mess with him. Don’t turn around again.”

They stopped for lunch on the roadside and the man spoke of his art through gestures and sign language. But no one could afford to wait the five hours required for him to void a nail. No bets were placed. The camel caravan, Afghans or Uzbeks or Turks from the north, gestured back that they’d seen something like it before. Their women were covered from the man’s gaze.

“A whole piece of iron,” the man gestured. “I eat it and this is what comes out.” He passed around a clean nail, a nail he’d shat out and washed himself.

The camel herders thought this was funny, what the man did for money. They laughed at the pantomime of the nail coming out. Then a little boy who spoke the man’s language said, “We’ve seen a man swallow fire and spit out a glass bird. We wouldn’t like to see a nail and only a nail.”

“Where did you see that?” the man asked.

“Many nights ago,” the boy said.

You people will never get there, the man thought. They’ll never let you into the City.

And yet they came from nights and nights away, flew in from everywhere that used to be, their lives behind them already dissolved like red clay in the rains. With the City providing the gas subsidies to fuel the buses and planes, where could you not go?

And yet every place was the same. Or worse. They said this used to be America. The man knew this to be true the same way he knew his art. It was the pain that told him. The City he knew less of. It might have been anywhere, on any continent, but most flocked here, to join the incessant processions, this lurking from pageant to pageant, measuring their progress against the fattening of moons they tallied and then forgot. Might be, the man thought, they were walking in circles.

They walked twenty miles that day and then camped out in the woods by the road. The man and boy paid their fifteen cents a piece and were invited to join in a meal of black-eyed peas and rank squirrel fat. Hunks of good, three-day-old sourdough bread rumored to have come from a City-subsidized bakehouse rounded out their dinner. The wayfarers passed out a ball of silk ties they’d found in a ditch along the road, which most used for napkins. The boy stuffed his in his pocket for later.

The man was feeling ornery, having lost out on the good money he’d seen in this group, and lashed out at the boy.

“What are you doing that for?” he said.

“It’s nice.”

“It’s not nice. It’s useless.”

“It’s like a toy.”

“It’s not a toy. Men used to wear these things around their necks. That’s all. You see these socks I’m wearing? Would you want to collect them?”

“What kind of men?”

“Important men.”

“They still do?”

“Maybe.”

“Where? The City?”

But honestly the man didn’t know. He’d only seen ties in the advertisements on the buses, and once on a flight to St. Louis. He said, “Yes, in the City.”

When night fell, the Uzbeks staged a shadow theater. It was an older man they watched, an infirm man. He acted out a great dust cloud, then lost himself in the cloud, then coughed his way out of it. He mimicked the great looming hull of an Army aircraft, scratching out the letters in the dirt. Then his arrival in the night in a mysterious land, his family with him. He was robbed of his money somewhere by a man with a shootable, then he killed the man who’d robbed him. Stabbed him with a primitive implement of staggering sharpness. Mimicking still, he dropped in the grass as if dead, and he didn’t get up.

In the morning the old man lay where he’d fallen in the night, across his face a purplish cast, brown ants marching in and out of his ears. None of his kin mourned the old man’s passing. They stripped him of his clothes and turned him over in the grass so that his bare buttocks faced the gentle rays of the sun.

“They take your clothes when you die? Just like that?” The boy was lying on his back on his pallet, a long green stem of wheat in his teeth. The man began to scrape together some wood for a breakfast fire.

“I don’t think it’s always like that,” the man said.

“It’s scary.”

“You didn’t wonder about it too long.”

“Even your friends?”

“Those people weren’t his friends.”

“They were his family.”

“They might not have been.”

“When I die, I won’t even have anybody to steal my clothes.”

The man thought about that and knew it to be true.

“Someone will,” he said.

Out there in the murmuring dawn, in between their fire and the other fires, the crow appeared.

The man stood quickly, as if he’d never known pain. He reached into his pocket for his guild card, held it out for the crow to see. No one shot artists. The City was dead against it, or so he’d heard. About the only thing a man could not do to another man outside on the routes.

The crow said he was just there to speak among his own. He moved closer until the man could feel his cold breath, smell it. It smelled of Zeet. The man moved aside to let the crow sit nearer the fire, watching the crow’s sleeves.

“You’re heading to Thisbe?” the man said. “You have a concession?”

“I’m not an artist,” the crow said. He tossed a rock at the fire, a sizeable one. The man bent into the heat with a thick stick to knock it out, as if he were playing some primitive version of croquet with a flaming wicket. The crow lifted his jaw and a flame jumped across it like a scar. “It wasn’t our fault,” he said.

“How could it be your fault?” the man said. “Why do you speak of fault?”

“People blame.”

The man looked at the crow.

“I could check your code for you,” the crow said. “And the boy’s.”

How many times had the man heard this line in canteens and on buses and roads in between?

“What does it matter?” he said.

“You’re on your way to the City,” the crow said. “Most artists are.”

“I’m on my way to Thisbe. To the pageant.”

“It happens,” the crow continued. “You save your credits for years and you think you’re ready to be accepted and you aren’t because some sonofabitch has been stealing off your code.”

“Those codes have been dead for years,” the man said. “We collect money now. What do you take me for?”

The man knew he’d misspoken, he’d told the boy as much, but it was already too late.

“Men kill men for less,” the crow said.

They eyed each other. The crow sprang first. Went at the boy with the dire hunger of a wolf in a snow-bound month. His knife was no small thing. It was gruesome, toothed. Barbaric, the man thought. This man is nothing more than an animal, but he kills for money. He was on the crow’s back so fast the boy saw nothing, even as he burst the crow’s jugular vein with a sharpened nail and recoiled to pounce again, his elbows raised to fend off phantom attackers.

The crow choked on the hot flow of his own blood for two long minutes before gurgling out his last, the man and boy watching. When his eyes wore the glassiness of death, the man dragged the body backwards into the treeline. A boy at the next fire watched. His father, scraping together a fire of his own, kept his eyes low on the building heat.

“Let’s go,” the man said, and he grabbed the boy by the arm and they went.

A mile down the road, the boy said, “I never seen a dead body before.”

The man didn’t believe it. Couldn’t. He’d stepped over as many corpses as piles of dog shit at the circuses. He’d seen men killed before his very eyes while he was digesting iron on stage and no one thought to do a thing.

“You’ve seen death,” he told the boy. “You saw that old man die last night.”

“A dead killed body is what I mean,” the boy said.

The man slung his bag over his shoulder. Toys, women, dead bodies. What had the boy seen?

The road stretched ahead northeast. They walked the whole morning without stopping. At noon a long vehicle went by on the busless road. They were surrounded by spears of unripe wheat grown taller than a man, wheat that was green and would be for as long as the seasons refused to turn. It was a two-lane blacktop that looked narrower boxed in by the wheat.

When the vehicle had passed, the boy said, “You said there weren’t any busses on this road.”

“So you know what a bus is.”

“We got on one yesterday.”

“Not like that one.” The man adjusted the bag and pointed ahead. “They aren’t going where we’re headed anyway.”

When they were more than halfway to Thisbe by the man’s calculations, they sat for lunch. The man unpacked a tobacco pouch whose original function held no meaning for him. Inside were eight or nine lavender-colored meal chips he’d bought at the last circus, dense and unappetizing. God knew what they were made of but they could get you by a day. “Don’t ask what’s in it,” he said to the boy, handing him one of the chips. “You won’t want to chew it, but you’ve got to. You’ve got to chew it for a while to release the nutrients.”

The child’s chewing was just like the man’s, difficult, time-consuming. He was looking up at the blue oneness of sky, the wind rushing at the wheat. But the wheat would stay green, the man knew, and for all future lunches these ungodly chips. A convulsion brought the man to his elbows. He’d lain back to chew like the boy and the pain in his stomach had shot him up like a spring bent to snapping.

It was low in his stomach that he clutched, where some evil and whimsical pinhead of pain tortured him. He rocked himself where he sat, moaning. When the pain finally passed, he was wan and the oily beads of sweat on his forehead and at his temples made the boy uncomfortable. The boy spat his chip out.

“It wasn’t the chip,” the man said.

“I don’t care. I’ll get something to eat at the circus or at the next dinette.” The boy helped the man up. Once he was standing straight, the man screwed open his thermos and took a sip of water. He gave the boy a sip.

They walked five more miles up the road and around a wall of tall leaning wheat. There the man stopped. The vehicle that had passed them earlier was parked in the middle of the road just up ahead, around it a macabre team of bewigged technicians at work in suits stolen from abandoned closets, graves and worse, the bloody lump of fauna at their bare feet a dead fact, their elbows pumping and pulling, stripping like men gutting fish.

When they were finished, only a dark stain remained. Near it lay an aluminum box jumped open off its hinges. A relief drop fallen off-target. Lucky only one wayfarer had been hit. The meal chips spilled out of the busted coffer, lavender, gold, green. Others were lost in the deep wheat. Still others were crushed to powder, like amoebic dolls the stuffing had been let out of.

Their cutting instruments made strange sounds in the otherwise perfect quiet and now the silence rang out. One of their number—the man would not call them men—his eyes fathomless holes, was now looking back at where the man and boy stood. In those eyes there was nothing that lived as the man knew living. He pulled the boy back and out of sight. In a moment the vehicle’s engine began to throb. It glided off again with little coughing.

“That box hit a wild hog,” the boy said, sniffing at the burnt diesel in the air.

But it wasn’t a hog that the air drop had hit and the man made sure they waited another hour before walking again.

*     *     *
The girl allotting concessions in Thisbe had been born to a methanol eater and had two thumbs but no fingers. They’d come from the steppes of Russia early into the wandering, alcohol-poisoned, delirious, obstinate, their drunkenness akin to a religious ecstasy. They would gladly drink what an automobile wouldn’t.

Her eyes were high and wide-set, her nose had no septum. She would reproduce too, the man knew; her body was ripe and desirable. She had no trouble taking the man’s money or giving him his lot and section number, a feat for many of them.

The man led the boy to where he would sit for the next six days on a wooden platform above his audience, in between Princess Devadi, a hermaphrodite, and a dervish who could channel the dead. He would sit there filling his stomach with iron and then voiding it. There was no reason to put his sign up tonight, they’d walked too far. He led the boy to the tent so they could eat.

In the tents you couldn’t guess at what you were eating even by analogy. You were told only how many parts protein you consumed so you wouldn’t starve. There were labels, names, but these were only transliterations, the optical residue of dialects and languages whose only record upon the earth was kept by living speaking voices. At the pageants and circuses the Tower of Babel was slowly being rebuilt.

The man found his meal sweet. He sipped at his wheat milk to kill the taste of what he ate. The boy too. When they finished with their plates, they ate wheat cakes fried in buffalo lard.

“Are those people coming to the pageant?” the boy asked, his mouth full of the tough new wheat he was trying to grind down and swallow.

“What people?”

“Those people that butchered the hog.”

The man regarded the boy. For whose sake was he pretending now?

“That wasn’t a hog.”

The boy stopped chewing.

“They don’t kill what they eat either,” the man said. “They’re scavengers. They never kill.”

“You’ve seen them before?”

“I have.”

“They ever bother you?”

“I don’t let them.”

“Why do they care if you’re alive or dead?”

“Why do vultures?” the man said. “We’ve all become animals.” He wasn’t used to talking while he ate, and had no convenient explanation for how the boy had come to be alive at all these past eleven years either, he not knowing so many things. The man collected the remaining wheat cakes. He put two in his coat pocket and gave four to the boy.

“Are you going to learn me that trick?” the boy asked.

“It’s not a trick,” the man said. “It’s biology.” He took the boy’s hand with the wheat cakes still in it, drew it to his chest, led it down. “I was born with two stomachs just like Princess Devadi was born with two sexes.”

“That’s why you’re sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve got two whole stomachs?”

“One of them,” the man said, “it’s smaller, like an appendage. Lower down. It’s tough like an old piece of leather. Empties right out into my garbage shoot.”

“But you turn that iron into nails.”

The man didn’t say whether he did or didn’t. “I have to guide that piece of iron into the right stomach,” he said. “Else I’m in trouble. After that—” But why was he telling the boy any of this? It wasn’t anything he could understand or profit from. All the talking did was revive the pain. He laid both his palms flat on the table and braced himself for it to come.

“You must have got that extra stomach of yours from your daddy,” the boy said.

“That’s what a doctor told me.”

“I didn’t get nothing.”

“You got your goodness from your daddy,” the man said. “He must have been a good man.” He finished his wheat milk standing and waited for the boy to do the same. “Come,” he said. “I’ll buy you a carob sweet for dessert.”

In the morning the man went out to look for scrap metal. On his way back to the concession, he bought a woolen sweater for the boy. Crouching over the same table, he found a Mattel View-Master hidden among the rags. It held a single reel.

Modern Conveniences: Marvels of the 21st Century.

The woman behind the table didn’t speak the man’s language and they bargained with sticks in the dirt. Her face was swollen and stolid and the man wondered if she’d ever in her life known physical love. The man paid two dollars for both the machine and the stereogram.

He searched the pageant grounds for the rest of the morning for a guild-certified homeopath, but only found a Swede with a medicine for stomach cramps.

“I’ve seen you here before,” the Swede said, handing the man a small bottle of a corrupt-looking dark green liquid. “You swallow what you’ve got in that bag of yours.”

“I always sterilize first,” the man said.

The Swede laughed.

The man did not.

The Swede said, “You say you’re having stomach pain. Have you ever heard of a vacuum cleaner? No? Look at this.” The Swede drew an approximation of a vacuum cleaner on the flyleaf of a book he kept on his table, its pages yellowed and brittle to the point of cracking. The man was more interested in their viability as reading matter than in what the Swede was sketching for him. It had been nights and nights since he’d last seen a book.

“Once this bag rips,” the Swede said, “all the dust seeps out. Yours is a species of charlatanry I have never before encountered, but I have seen you swallow iron and I have seen the nails come out. Think of this bag the next time you open your mouth for money.”

The man was supposed to mix five to ten drops of the Swede’s liquid into his wheat milk three times a day for a month. He consumed the entire vial at lunch and then went to find the boy at the concession. He waited until late evening, seven o’clock by the sun.

The boy was light-headed and there was rancid lipstick smeared across his cheek when he finally returned. His pockets bulged with small coins. The man laid his gifts aside. “You’ve been drinking boza.”

The boy collapsed on his rented foam pallet next to the man, his eyes glassy with the hidden places he’d almost seen. “She kissed me on the cheek.”

“When a girl kisses you on the cheek, watch out,” the man said. “It means she can see what’s happening behind your back. I figure you keep your money in your socks. Most do. Better you keep it in your pockets like this so they won’t have to take off your shoes to rob you.”

“She told me to come back tonight.”

“It’s her job.”

“You ever touched a woman’s naked leg?”

The man turned on his pallet to face the boy.

“Boy, do you think I was never young? What’s this?” It was a puckered scar on the man’s neck beneath the ear cut not as expertly as the man’s work on the crow. A serrated blade wielded by a drunkard.

“I saw her leg,” the boy said.

The man wondered if it had made him happy to finally see something.

They were quiet a moment. Then the man said, “I’ve been walking the pageant routes for years by myself. No one bothers me because I don’t walk around with my pockets leaking silver.”

“You’re little,” the boy said. “Maybe they don’t bother little people.”

“I’m an artist.”

“You won’t get into the City without money.”

“You make me one promise,” the man said. “Don’t drink boza past seven in the evening. You need to be quick on your toes if you want to collect money for me.”

The man found the sweater and the View-Master and he gave them to the boy.

“This is a toy.”

*     *     *
For two whole hours before his performance the man writhed in terrible pain. Beyond the tents, the prairie had grown lush in the winterless years of the wandering. He lay on his side watching the lake, and beyond it the great fence unbuilt, a stitch of it having survived and gathered a beachhead of trash blown in from how far no one knew.

For those two hours he shook like an epileptic. He cursed his Creator well, and when it was over and he’d almost shat out his spine and innards into the dark crawling grass, he vowed he would not go back to the Swede ever again.

Princess Devadi had drawn numbers tonight, her barker a Somali pirate, a double-amputee with fanged coffee cans cupping his leg stumps. Try getting close to that man’s silver. The rims of his cans, upon which he hobbled, were fitted with the incisors of such marine life as had washed inland when the oceans baked, or so he shouted at the crowd. The man had seen this show before, years ago. The dervish, wallowing upon his silken pillows, aroused less curiosity.

The man mounted the steps to his platform, noticing a loose bracket here, a stripped screw there that would have to be replaced. He tested his weight as he went. When he was seated upon his chair, he gestured at the boy.

The boy’s breath was bad but betrayed no fresh boza. Behind them the man’s sign was in place. No words, just a painting of the man’s head in profile ingesting a series of metal objects. Bullets, fingerprint scanners, hub caps, chicken wire. Beneath it, a mason jar filled with sparkling iron nails.

“This will take a while,” the man told the boy. “Most of them will fall asleep. Some won’t. You just make sure all the money goes into this jar and that none goes out.”

They’d taken in forty-five dollars when the man was finished late in the night. It was a mythical fortune for the boy, enough to live well on for over a year. Six nights of that and how could the man not get into the City? The Somali pirate hadn’t collected much more. The boy lay on his back with the voided screw in his pants pocket, goggling at the View-Master.

“What’s this say?”

The man had forgotten the boy couldn’t read. It was difficult for him to get to his elbows.

“Convenience.”

His whole left side was numb. He’d eaten three meal chips to correct the misfortunes visited upon him by the Swede. Somehow they’d stayed down. The boy clicked the machine again.

“This?”

“A toaster.”

The boy stared blankly at the toaster.

“For wheat cakes,” the man said. “Some time ago, I don’t know when, when there were cities all over the world, not just one, men lived in between walls.” The words sounded strange to the man, and tragic. He said, “Instead of frying wheat in a pan, they got their bread readymade from some place and this is how they cooked it.”

But the boy had already flipped to a thermostat.

“A toy?”

The man had never seen one.

“Yes.”

The next day the man found an old friend of his, Fresno Long, haggling over a stretched alligator hide at a skinner’s booth. When their meeting was over, the seller lay dead upon his wares, his common law wife struggling to release the salvageable merchandise from beneath the corpse and its leaking blood. The two old friends sat for a boza at a Weigur’s stall.

Long’s father had been a methanol eater and Long had been born with shins no taller than squatting ducks. His torso, by comparison, was normal-sized and so ungainly. To compensate, Long walked on stilts fashioned from sturdy kumquat root, in long pants year-round. Long had once saved the man’s life, sabering open a greedy pimp’s belly and kicking out the intestines like stubborn mandarins hanging from a branch, the very pimp who had given the man his scar.

“I killed a crow twenty miles south towards the bus,” the man said.

Long was sitting facing the direction of the skinner’s booth. Perhaps the woman had a lover who would come for him wielding a gutting knife.

“Are you coming from the east?” Long said. “There’s a camp, a town, west of here two days with the bus. North and west beyond the wheat.”

“The desert,” the man said.

“Beyond the desert,” Long said. “Clean water. Lakes. You leave your shootables at the fence. Knives are collected. Have you ever seen a room with a roof over it? They make them out of silicone and mud brick.”

“I’ve heard of this place,” the man said.

“It’s not the City,” Fresno Long said.

“To you maybe not, to others yes.”

Long shrugged.

“The pageants are getting dangerous.”

“You just murdered a man over an alligator hide.”

“This is what I mean.”

They drank their boza and then Long ordered another round, emptied his mug and set off the way they’d come to see what had become of the dead skinner’s possessions.

The man wandered off into the thick midday traffic of bodies and carts and motor engines and other less explicable machines of transit, bumping into holograms as into blood-and-bone wayfarers, the women covered, the men dressed in what they could find. The advertisements flared at the strolling traffic, soundless, pleasing, pantomiming goods and services that showed the tables upon which they resided to be the travesties of commerce they were. These men, Turks and Levantines and North Africans, sat behind their counters in shiny suits worn thin, their hard black shoes shiny too, as if they hadn’t gotten them off dead men and licked them to a shine.

Vacations in Cuba Town here, spent electrical equipment there, virgin brides, lottery tickets promising entry to the City, assisted suicide. This was one avenue among hundreds, the whole stretching too far for the eye to comprehend. The man had been told, and sometimes believed, that like the Great Wall of China, the Thisbe Pageant could be seen from outer space.

It was early evening when he was back at the concession. The boy hadn’t returned yet. When he did, much later, the man was already seated on his chair, an hour into his digesting. The boy was drunk on boza and shoeless, accosting spectators with the jar he hadn’t remembered to fill.

Most sat on rugs they’d brought themselves, some stood. The near constant noise of shootables spitting at the night should have been enough for the boy to know not to push these people who had already been driven mad generations ago by the New World. The man couldn’t speak while the iron was inside him, but he seethed quietly.

Later that night when he was done and the crowds dispersed, he stood over the boy, who had fallen asleep clutching the money jar to his chest. The anger in him said he should slit the boy’s throat quickly so that he wouldn’t suffer worse when he was on his own again. There was always activity at the pageant, at all hours of the night and day, but where the man was the concessions were all closed. Likely no one would see or hear him.

And so he stood, until his senses returned. Instead of killing the boy, he covered his emaciated body with an extra blanket he’d brought back that day, a fine derclon quilt that would have fed them both for a month.

*     *     *
They were up early folding their pallets in silence. At breakfast the man plied the boy with wheat cakes. He moved four egg rations onto the boy’s plate and saw that he swallowed a pint of goat’s milk. Still the boy wouldn’t speak.

“I told you not to trust a girl who kissed you on the cheek.” The man put his finger to the scar on his neck. He stretched it out for the boy to see how it stayed white and how close it was to the vein that pumped life from the heart. “You promised me you wouldn’t get drunk,” he said.

“He put a blade to my throat.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t cut it.”

“I didn’t do anything but kiss her.”

“He shouldn’t have taken your shoes,” the man said. “We’ll have a new pair made today, this morning.”

When they finished their breakfast, the man told the boy to wait and he went off into the dirt lot behind the kitchens and fell to his knees and retched. His food came back up, bile but no blood that he could see. He poured over the mess like a man examining his stools for parasites.

When he stood again, the boy was there. The boy untwisted the cap to the man’s thermos. The man sipped and they left the canteen. “If you get drunk again when you’re supposed to be collecting my money,” the man said, “I’ll sell you to a Tuareg for a dollar.”

As they rounded the corner of the avenue, the man recognized the Weigur boza seller from the day before and he bought the boy a fresh wheat milk. He thought the boy looked healthier, stouter, after his breakfast, and at the same time he knew this to be impossible. The boy was having just the opposite thoughts about the man.

“You’re sick,” the boy said.

“You knew that.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“I don’t know.”

“You need medicine.”

“I had some.”

“You need more. I see doctors everywhere I look.”

“Which is why I stay clear of them,” the man said.

The boy pointed up ahead at the skinner’s stall. Hanging from a hook where Fresno Long’s alligator hide had been the day before was Fresno Long’s head. Long’s own hide hung nearby, cured but not painted. The skinner woman stood behind the stall in her greasy apron, offering cured and uncured leather that had been stained not a day ago by her husband’s blood. Her eyes narrowed. She recognized him.

The man looked around for whoever had done this to his friend Fresno Long. He didn’t see anyone else he could kill, if not the woman. He passed the stall without returning the skinner woman’s gaze, then lost himself with the boy in the pageant traffic.

*     *     *
The man repeated himself so the boy wouldn’t misunderstand him.

“But we’ve got four nights left,” the boy said. “The City.” He was near to tears.

The man looked over at the sleeping dervish and lowered his voice. Princess Devadi he knew he couldn’t trust, her Somali bandit even less. Both were off the lot at five in the evening, the princess drinking boza, the black cripple likely having his half a body serviced.

“You can’t walk the way you are,” the boy tried again.

“There’s a bus closer ahead than behind.”

“The hogs.”

“I told you.”

“That other bus.”

The boy was still frightened by what he’d seen walking just seventy-two hours with the man. The man thought for a moment that the blame might be his. Violence was never a singularity but two events drawing towards each other for the ruin of both over time. The passing years had done nothing to mellow his idiocy then. Only the joy of the spectacle had faded. He felt his scar, then fell to the ground on his side, his knees raised tight to his chest.

When the pain released him, he lay on his back in the dirt panting. He would spend just one more night here, collect a bit more to make up for what they’d lost the night before, then leave. He didn’t want his own hide to be the next one hanging from the skinner woman’s hooks. He crawled to his pallet and lay there.

“You were raised at the circus. You never left,” he said to the boy.

“My daddy left me with an old lady,” the boy said.

“One of ours?”

The boy nodded.

“My earliest memory is of walking,” the man said. “I held my father’s hand. I shouldn’t have.”

“I remember seeing snow once.”

“An advertisement,” the man said. “There is no snow. Not anymore.”

“In the mountains there’s snow.”

The man looked at the boy.

“The rowan pines were covered two foot in it,” the boy said.

The man owed his life to his wits and his gift, and yet somehow he hadn’t seen this coming. He looked more closely at the boy. The throbbing in his gut was constant now, his jaw held shut by it.

“They brought you from across the sea,” he said.

“You remember the snow too?” the boy asked.

“No.”

“Anything?”

“I told you,” the man said.

“You remember the routes.”

“Bears remember routes. Their feet walk. Dogs.”

“Why did your daddy leave you?” the boy asked.

Because there is no love left in this world, the man thought, only pain.

“You’re not going to die,” the boy said.

“I don’t want to die,” the man said.

*     *     *
The man sat six hours and the nail wouldn’t come. Seven hours. Eight. Instead of writhing or falling to the dirt from the pain, he’d become the midnight sun completing its journey from death into life.

Already daylight sat crisp on the horizon. The pain was lord, God’s punishment for hope. The wheat moaned, life under the tent began to rise again to its sacred futility. The crowd camped out at the man’s concession had begun to call for money. Soon they would be calling for blood.

A gas blower was the first to agitate, the skin around his mouth no prettier than a rust-stained pipe from a lifetime of tapping the shale beds with just his lips. No hair left on his face or head either, just patches of it. A pitiable sight anywhere else, but here, now, dangerous as the gas he sucked from the ground.

Drunk on boza, he approached the platform with arms raised, stumbling, foolish. The man called down to the boy from his platform. He told him to give the gas blower his money.

“You’ll need more than that,” the gas blower growled back.

It was true, and the man had it, but he would need the morning to collect it. He stood, and immediately was bent in two by the pain. Such an impulsive and consistent force living within his body was still a mystery to the man. In between waves of nausea he took note of the crowd. There were six others awake besides the gas blower.

The man hobbled down from the platform to show the gas blower his guild card. The gas blower shoved it aside. The man gestured at the jar. At his sign. He made the man understand that he would leave the boy here while he went to find the rest of what he owed.

But still the man wouldn’t listen. He grabbed at the boy’s balled fists petulantly, like a child. The man shook his head.

“One hour,” he told the gas blower.

The gas blower reached for his belt where he kept a paring knife, and the man could only wonder at the inscrutable greed that had drawn them together in bloodshed from across the routes of the wandering, where man’s only ambition, his only function left, was a day’s more walking. His right fist rose and a ragged edge of unworked metal flew against the grain of the new day. He unloosened the gas blower’s vocal chords first. Then swinging downwards he opened his trachea so that the flaps of his gullet gaped.

The man’s wiry arms pulsed with a dire violence he hated even more than walking itself, the saddest thing he knew among days and days of sadness.

The pain in his stomach swam in it, got lost. He pantomimed wildly at the mostly sleeping crowd, blood-soaked, raving. He pointed up at the sky, new as the man’s slit throat, and laughed in its face when it could produce no snow. Then he ripped the money jar from the boy’s hands and showered the wayfarers with coins. If they were awake, they scrambled at what had fallen, stepping upon the sleeping.

The boy was afraid when the man took him by the hand and led him to the edge of the concession. Two blows from the man’s jagged metal cut a triangle of canvas out of the tent. They pushed through it. On the other side an emptiness the man hadn’t expected. Nothing there. Just a line of untrodden grass waist-high.

It was an hour before they cleared the tent city, another hour before they stopped looking back over their shoulders. The man could walk no further. He had the boy help him into the concealing wheat.

They went in slowly, listening for wild hogs. They kept going until they couldn’t see the road anymore. Thirsty, the man reached for the bag at his shoulder, realizing as the pain brought him low that he’d left it at the concession. He closed his eyes and didn’t open them again for two days.

*     *     *
He woke with the gas blower’s bad breath in his nostrils. His dreams had been steeped in the gas blower’s blood. He got to his elbows, then his knees. Soon he was walking in tight circles. In his gut an emptiness like the deserted area behind the tent. A place that didn’t exist.

It was twenty miles to the bus and the boy would need more help than he would. He gathered some heads of new wheat and began to grind them down into something he could paste together with his saliva. His pants and shirt felt loose on his frame as he worked his jaw.

The boy woke to the sound of the man’s grinding. He contemplated the man as if he were a machine like the View-Master he’d left behind in the dirt.

“Bad chicken,” the man said.

It meant nothing to the boy.

“A bird,” the man explained. “Like a vulture but smaller.”

“You ate one?”

“Might have. Whatever it was, it poisoned me. Eat this.”

The boy took the wheat. He put it in his mouth.

“Chew,” the man said.

“I can’t.”

“Try. We have twenty miles left us before the bus.”

The boy began to chew.

“How far to the City?” he asked.

The man looked up at the sun. There was warmth, but he had no doubt it was sinking away from them. “There is no city as far as I know,” he said.

The boy wasn’t troubled by the man’s news. He looked where the man was looking and said, “We don’t have any money.”

“All along the routes I’ve got money buried.”

“The hogs’ll dig it up.”

“Places where there are no hogs.”

“The people.”

“I bury it good.”

“One day you won’t remember.”

“I won’t need to,” the man said. “Watch good and put it in your head where I show you. You think of how many years I was eating iron and imagine what I’ve buried.”

The man took the boy’s hand and they left the wheat for the road. When they found the bus towards the end of the day, the driver was one who spoke their language, one of their own. Today they rode for free.

As the bus pulled west to Fresno Long’s camp of silicone and mud brick, the man told the bus driver the boy’s story of seeing snow on the rowan pines in the mountains across the sea.

The driver nodded. Many wayfarers from the home country told the same story.

And so they rode, sharing the driver’s meal chips, far into the afternoon and through the night. The bus filled and emptied and by the next dawn the man and boy were alone again.