Colonel Aurelio

Owner of the Aurelio Bros. carnival — the victim

There was never a colonel and never a brother; there was only Gus Aurelio, who bought the title and the plural off a bankrupt in Ohio and wore both like a good coat. For thirty years he owned the show — the wagons, the canvas, the contracts, the last word — and he ran it the way a man runs the only thing he was ever good at: shrewdly, tightly, and with a hand that skimmed a little off everyone, because he had built the family and he believed a father is owed.

He is found dead in his locked pay-wagon on the first night of a nowhere town, the week’s take gone.

Not a monster, not a saint

The Colonel is the show’s father and its landlord both — generous and grasping, protective and possessive, genuinely loved and genuinely resented, often by the same person in the same breath. He kept people safe and he kept them owing. That doubleness is the point: his death is a tragedy because he was family, and a knot because he was the kind of family a person might need, very badly, to get free of.

His place in the story

The absent centre — the man everyone must account for, whose real character Sonora has to reconstruct from the tells the living leave when they talk about him. What he did on his last night, and why, is the case; that he was owed nothing and yet owed much is its ache.

Appears in

The Blindfold Act novelette