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The Dog-Faced Boy

As an adolescent, the poet Bertaigne was the ugliest child in Philadelphia. In addition to bulging eyes and a grotesque proboscis, at the age of thirteen Bertaigne's beard grew so thick that the neighborhood boys, and even some of the adults, called him Carpet Face. The hairs were like flexible needles. When he tried to shave, they left notches in his father's precious straight razor.

One gray afternoon in autumn, Bertaigne's father caught the boy dragging the long, shiny blade through his whiskers. Bertaigne thought he was home alone until, in the corner of the greasy mirror, he glimpsed a fist flying toward his head.

Bertaigne ducked, but too late. The blow struck his ear with a thud and propelled him sideways into the fetid bathing barrel.

As Bertaigne raised his arm to defend himself, the straight razor flew from his hand. It arced through the air, flipped once, and clattered into the piss bucket.

"Godammit, Bert!" His father's breath reeked of cheap whiskey and the local butcher's version of sausage-undercooked scraps of pork, garlic and sage. "How many times must I tell you?"

"But, Papa, I need a shave!"

"Then get a job and buy your own razor, you stinking kid!"

"No, Papa, I do not stink." Bertaigne pointed a trembling finger at his father's chest. "You stink!"

His father's eyes widened around their yellow irises. His chest swelled to the size of the Liberty Bell. "Shut up, you boy with the face of a dog, and get out of my house!"

"I will!" Bertaigne pulled himself upright in the barrel. "I will go far from here to seek my fortune. But be warned. Someday I will return to dump a sack full of expensive razors in your bed and use them to slice you to bits!"

Bertaigne's father reached into the mahogany-colored piss water, grabbed the straight razor and inspected its edge.

The fat man's eyes widened. He roared, "You've nicked my blade, you filthy dog! Out! Out! Out of my house! And don't come back!"

He hurled the boy from the bathtub, booted him in the rump, and shoved him out of the house, onto the porch, into the filthy street.

Bertaigne crawled to the gutter. He dusted himself off with his hands, which were still moist with water and shaving soap. He glanced back at the ramshackle cottage as the front door slammed and sent a cloud of dust into the air.

At that moment, a radiant angel descended from the clouds and swooped over to the spot where Bertaigne cowered in the dirt.

The angel had pale emerald skin and gray hair in long curls about his shoulders. His magnificent white wings blocked out the sun.

Bertaigne shielded his eyes and waited to be gathered up and taken to Hell. When nothing happen, he looked again at the angel, who stood with his arms crossed, tapping his fingers on his robed biceps.

The angel spoke. His thunderous voice echoed in every language, though it also sounded as soft as a breeze blowing through reeds. He uttered a single word: "Here."

The angel extended his hand. Between two of his fingers -- which had chipped, silver-painted nails -- he held out a small paper card with the words "FREAK SHOW" printed in bold capital letters.

Bertaigne took the card. The angel ascended straight into the sky like a balloon shot from a cannon. As he rose, he grew smaller and smaller until he became a glittering speck against the clouds. When that speck vanished, Bertaigne read and reread the small paper card.

It was then, as the young poet slumped in the gutter with muddy hands and gazed at an empty sky, that Bertaigne suddenly knew -- as clearly as he knew, say, his own name or the proper sequence of lines in a Villanelle -- precisely how he would earn his living. Sadly, his career would have nothing to do with poetry.

Years later, not long after a traveling freak show departed from Philadelphia to places unknown, Bertaigne's old father was found dead in his bed. He had been slashed and dissected, and his body atop a pile of gleaming straight razors in a pool of blood. The Constable's only clue was a tattered piece of paper pinned to the wall with a razor. The yellowed page held nineteen hand-printed lines in six stanzas with the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the ends of other tercets, and with both lines repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain. While the Constable considered the work to be mostly mediocre, he had to admit that it revealed flashes of brilliance.

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