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

had flunked out of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, she was the most beautiful horse the former farm-boy Honeyman had ever seen.
    Lispenard had disappeared. A clown led the Baroness willingly into the elevator. She rode it calmly to the top. She trotted out onto the platform. She paused a moment. She jumped off.
    It was like watching Pegasus. Honeyman couldn’t breathe.
    When she landed, the impact, as planned, flattened the tub, spraying water in a circle twenty feet out, drenching the first three rows of seats.
    Honeyman didn’t care. He vaulted into the ring, ran past the Baroness, and found Lispenard in among the trapeze girls and dog-trainers.
    Buttonholing the owner, Honeyman declared, “Mister, I can ride that horse.”
    Lispenard replied, “Why, so can I, boy.”
    “No, no, you don’t understand. I mean going down.”
    Honeyman explained a little about himself. Lispenard still appeared dubious.
    “Listen, just give me a chance. Tomorrow night. C’mon. Please?”
    “And what if you break your fool neck?”
    “I’ll sign a waiver. Anything. Just let me ride her.”
    Lispenard, sensing novelty, a circus’s lifeblood, finally agreed.
    The next night, Honeyman, attired in borrowed yellow tights, found himself standing beside the Baroness as the elevator made its grumbling ascent. He didn’t even see the crowd or hear Lispenard’s spiel. All he felt was the horse’s shoulder muscles beneath his hand. All he smelled was her clean animal scent.
    On the lofty platform, Honeyman boosted himself astride her. The horse never balked. She seemed to sense Honeyman’s devotion and admiration. She waited till he was settled. Then she took off.
    Honeyman contributed nothing. He was just along for the ride.
    And what a hell of a ride it was. Honeyman had no sensation of falling. Instead, he felt he was going up, up, up, straight to the empyrean. In a splash and geyser, it was too soon over.
    Honeyman was addicted. Lispenard was convinced. The deal was struck.
    The next seven years were an uncomplicated, almost bucolic period for Honeyman. He slept late each day, rising for a communal lunch with the other performers. He groomed the Baroness, perhaps went to explore whatever town they were playing, ate a light supper. All day long the excitement would be building quietly but steadily inside him, until it reached its pitch just prior to the dive. Then he would feel drained, almost post-orgasmic, and the whole cycle would start again.
    One day in November 1976, the trailer carrying the Baroness to winter pasture was broadsided on the highway by a truck. Honeyman was vomiting by the shoulder of the road when he heard the shot from the policeman’s revolver.
    Lispenard, genuinely sympathetic, kept Honeyman on for another year, as part of the tightrope act. Honeyman had picked up the skill in his spare time, accustomed to heights as he was and gifted with an infallible inner balance.
    But Honeyman’s heart wasn’t in it. His life seemed empty without the nightly flight. Sometimes he swore he still felt the warm barrel shape of the horse’s body between his legs.
    When Jimmy Carter announced amnesty for draft dodgers in 1977, Honeyman claimed his savings from Lispenard’s squat old safe—more than once Honeyman had thought how that depository resembled its owner—and returned to the land of his birth. After an uncomfortable reunion with his parents, he headed east, ending up somehow in Hoboken, owner of an eponymous sandwich shop.
    His life for the next decade was basically eventless. A smattering of love affairs, most recently with Netsuke, the demands of a small business, the pleasure of the spectator at sporting events. Nothing loomed large in his life; his psychic landscape was flat; his horizons untroubled by mirages, destinations real or unreal.
    Until, that is, he invented spondulix.
     
    3.
    Higher Economics
     
    Nerfball’s fingers moved like a maestro’s. Fluid, knowing, commanding, they flew through their