Strange Trades by Paul di Filippo Read Free Book Online Page A

There is, like, injustice in the world. We are all brothers and sisters. I must protest.
    Listening that night to the talk of the other Bloods in the Olympic dorms, Honeyman was confirmed in his initial decision. He said nothing to anyone, though, being of a retiring nature.
    The next morning Honeyman felt filled with spiritual vigor. He went to his events. He won the silver. On the stand, he raised his ungloved fist in protest and bowed his head. The crowd seemed stunned. There was a silence as big as Mexico. Honeyman was the only White who had elected to register his solidarity with the Blacks.
    Unfortunately, there were no television cameras present to broadcast his personal statement. (His hometown paper was the only one to print a photo, a blurred long-distance shot which made Honeyman look as if he were sniffing his own armpit.) Brundage, the media focus, was elsewhere, and at the same time three Black men named Lee Evans, Larry James and Ron Freeman were also protesting.
    Honeyman’s actions did not go entirely unnoticed, however.
    When he returned home, a changed person, all the familiar sights of his childhood looking transmogrified, his draft notice was waiting for him. Nothing too unusual there—except that he had previously been granted a deferment.
    (Eleven years later, talking in a Hoboken bar to a stranger who happened to be a retired Army Colonel, Honeyman learned that those members of the ’68 U.S. team who had belonged to ROTC had received phone calls warning them not to join the protest.)
    Life in Canada was not that bad at first. Honeyman was a little sad, naturally, thinking of his vanished career in international diving competition. But, possessing a naturally cheerful disposition and being still young, he made the best of this strange twist of fate.
    Life only became a bummer when his money ran out. His parents, feeling betrayed and disappointed by their son, refused to send him any more. Soon, Honeyman was desperate for a job.
    That was when he met Leonard Lispenard.
    Lispenard was the sole owner, chief roustabout, ringmaster and occasional marriage counselor in Lispenard’s Pantechnicon, a two-bit, vest-pocket, circus-cum-carny that made a circuit of Canada’s north in the summer months, and headed south in the autumn. Lispenard himself was a short fat man with bad skin, who, in his ringmaster garb, looked to Honeyman remarkably like the Penguin, Batman’s archenemy.
    It was June of 1969 in Calgary, and summer was already waning, when Honeyman approached Lispenard, reasoning that such an outfit would offer a lower-profile job than most other concerns, an essential attraction for an illegal interloper in a country not his own. Inquiring for the owner, he was informed that Lispenard would not be available until that night’s show was over. Honeyman purchased a ticket and resigned himself to waiting.
    The tent was only half-full. Curiously, no one was sitting in the front rows. Honeyman went and took a seat right up against the ring, determined to get his money’s worth.
    During the finale of the show, when Honeyman was simultaneously growing impatient and feeling sleepy, he was galvanized by the sight of the first real love of his life, the performer with whom he would daily be associated for the next seven years.
    The Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall.
    There was a twenty-foot tower in the middle of the tent, with a large platform at the top. No ladder ran up the tower, but rather a kind of open elevator cage, powered by a fitfully chugging engine, stood ready. At the base of the tower was a big square collapsible container, metal-sided, plastic-lined. It had taken half an hour to fill it with water out of a fire hose.
    Lispenard waddled to the center of the ring. “Ladies, and Gentlemen, without further ado or needless puffery, may I present, for your edification, the Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall— Canada’s only diving equine!”
    The Baroness was led out. A gleaming white Lipizzan mare who