Carnival of Death (4 page)

He studied the location of his rides. He’d set them up, as he always tried to, on that section of the parking lot directly in front of the stores that were likely to do the most business. In this instance, the supermarket, flanked on one side by the glass and marble facade of the branch bank and on the other side by the chain drug store outlet and a pizza palace.

Laredo was pleased with the setup. It should be a good location. Both he and Paquita liked children. It was pleasant, congenial work. If he could ever pay off his rides and his trucks, he’d have a good thing going for him.

When they reached the rides, Laredo took off his coat, then opened up the lemonade stand so Paquita could start adding water and coloring to the powdered extract and ice down the pink lemonade that would flow in endless streams down a thousand thirsty little throats.

As he did, a five-year-old Mexican girl with big black eyes and twin braids that hung down to the waist of her clean pinafore recognized Paquita from some other shopping center opening and squealed her delight.

“She is here. She is here. The pink
limonada senora
.”

Paquita was immediately surrounded by children. She picked up the big-eyed little girl and held her close and pressed her cheek to hers and smiled over the child’s head at Laredo.

“She’s cute all right,” Laredo said. “Someday we’ll have one just like her.”

Paquita’s smile turned enigmatic. She shifted the girl in her arms and held up one of her hands, extending first five fingers, then two.

In the mood he was in, the prospect wasn’t particularly pleasing. “Oh, no,” Laredo said. “Not seven of them, baby. Let’s be like General Motors. Let’s start out small and grow.”

Paquita stamped her foot, then set the child on the counter of the booth and turned her back to him. Puzzled, Laredo walked on to the carousel and shrugged into his coveralls, wondering what he’d said wrong. At times women, even the best of them, were difficult to understand.

It took him half an hour to find the bad pipe in the carousel organ and another half hour to replace it. When he had, he turned on the power and listened critically. Leonard Bernstein probably wouldn’t approve, but most of the wheeze was gone. If you used a little imagination it wasn’t too difficult to recognize “The Skater’s Waltz.”

He wiped his hands on a piece of waste, then leaving the organ playing he walked to the Ferris wheel and on his way met Jocko. As always the old man needed a shave and reeked of cheap whiskey.

“You’re an hour late,” Laredo reproached him.

“Yeah. Sure. I know, boss,” Jocko said. “But I worked until four o’clock this morning. Then I caught a few winks in one of the trucks and I guess I overslept.”

There were times when Laredo was tempted to throw the old man off the lot. There were four reasons why he never did. One, Jocko needed the job. Two, cold sober or slightly woozy, he liked children and children adored him. Three, Jocko had been the head grease monkey on the Big Show and as such was a remote link with the past. Four, Jocko was the only mechanic he’d ever found who could coax and wheedle the aging carousel and the old Ferris wheel into reasonably continuous motion.

Laredo limped on through the growing heat to the Ferris wheel, then realized what the old man had said. “What do you mean you worked until four o’clock this morning? We finished setting up here late yesterday afternoon.”

“That’s right,” the old man grinned. He unlocked the Ferris wheel and started the gasoline motor. “But turn the wheel over a few times and you’ll see what I mean.”

Laredo engaged the clutch. The grind in the main bearings was gone. The wheel was turning as smoothly as a greased pig in a fun house barrel. He let it make a full revolution, then shut off the power. “What did you do to it, Jocko?”

The old man removed his battered fedora and brushed the crown with his sleeve. “It’s a long story, boss. But after you left yesterday I just happened to hear about a same model wheel that had been in a big fire up at the other end of the Valley. So I borrowed one of the trucks and drove out and took a look see. And while the wheel is junk the bearings are still like new. So I took them out and brought them back and exchanged them for those clunkers we’ve been running on.”

“Working until four o’clock this morning.”

“We have to keep the show on the road.”

“Yes,” Laredo said quietly. “We have to keep the show on the road. But right now you’d better inflate some balloons, then get into your lion tamer’s helmet and coat.”

“Sure, Mickey. Whatever you say,” the old man said.

Laredo walked on to the miniature train. If there were a lot of s.o.b.s in the world, there were also a lot of good joes. If he could hang onto his rides, the old man had a job with him for as long as he lived.

His most recent employee, a nineteen-year-old youth named Tommy Banks, whom he had engaged to run the miniature train, still hadn’t shown up. It being as late as it was, Laredo doubted if he would. It didn’t matter. He had combined clowning with running the train before. He could do it again and save the twenty dollars he would have had to pay the punk.

His run of good luck continued. All that was the matter with the sticking throttle was a worn bushing. Laredo replaced it. Then, after tooting the whistle three times, he invited the children watching him to take a free ride as he made a trial run down the narrow gauge rails that he and Banks and Jocko had laid the afternoon before.

Her brief pique over, Paquita waved to them as they passed the pink lemonade stand. So did a number of the adults who were beginning to crowd the parking lot for the announced ten o’clock opening.

Laredo enjoyed the ride as much as the children, but he still wished he knew why Paquita had been angry with him. He didn’t know how he could possibly feed them, but if Paquita wanted seven children it was all right with him.

At twenty minutes of ten, he took his clown costume and makeup kit from the catchall box and dressed and made up in the men’s room of the service station. There were dozens of characters he could have chosen. Every clown in the business had his own idea of what was funny. In his own case he’d found that he did best with a modified version of a sad-eyed, white-faced, classical Pierrot.

He made up carefully, taking special pains with his sad smile and the two painted teardrops on one cheek.

In the few minutes it had taken him to make up and don his clown costume, most of the marked spaces in the parking lot had filled with cars. People in search of the advertised opening day bargains, and with hopes of winning the Ford station wagon or one of the other major prizes being offered by the stores, were swarming onto the lot.

It looked like a good weekend. Carrying his street clothes under one arm and an inflated bladder on a flexible stick in his other hand, followed by a score of laughing children, Laredo pranced and bobbled and pretended to trip over the bladder as he limped painfully back through the heat toward his rides.

Seen from a short distance, in the full glow of the mid-morning sun, they looked rather attractive. From a distance, the gilded fake smokestack of the miniature locomotive looked like gold. With a swarm of children waiting to board it, as soon as the stores started passing out tickets, the carousel was struggling bravely through a rather tinny version of “Beautiful Ohio.” Jocko had put on his white pith helmet and green and gold lion tamer’s coat and had turned on the Ferris wheel; the revolving wheel was framed in the bobbing cluster of balloons he was holding in one hand.

As Laredo watched, a balloon escaped from the cluster and much to the children’s delight, trailing its string behind it, floated lazily up toward the cloudless sky.

One corner of Laredo’s painted mouth turned down. If balloons had feelings, he knew how it must feel. Now it was in its proper element and no longer earthbound. He’d felt the same way once.

As he watched the balloon, a car horn sounded sharply behind him. Worried about the children following him, Laredo turned to shoo them out of harm’s way. He turned too quickly, his artificial leg gave way under him and he lost his balance and fell.

Looking up angrily, Laredo saw it wasn’t a private car that had caused his accident. It was the Ramsdale armored truck, presumably carrying money to the new branch bank and an ample supply of currency and change to the forty stores about to open their doors.

He’d encountered the truck and its crew on other shopping center lots he’d played. The driver, an older man by the name of Jim Quinlan, wasn’t a bad sort. But he couldn’t stomach either of the two Kellys. The younger of the two brothers was an arrogant punk who had allowed his uniform and the fact that he carried a gun to go to his head. And anything Tim did was fine with his older brother, Mike.

Laredo continued to scowl at the truck. Only the week before, on a shopping center parking lot in Burbank, the younger of the two Kellys had made a deliberate pass at Paquita. Nor had the pass been purely oral. After she’d served him a cup of pink lemonade, the younger Kelly had leaned over the counter and had slipped his hand into the bodice of Paquita’s dress as he’d pulled her to him and tried to kiss her. Kelly would have succeeded if Laredo hadn’t spun him around and warned him that he would beat in his goddamn brains if he ever tried a thing like that again.

The driver of the truck looked out the window. “Sorry, Mickey,” he apologized. “It wasn’t me who honked. It was Tim, before I could stop him.”

The big youth sitting beside him grinned. “What’s to be sorry about?” He leaned over the other man and looked out and down. “Well, if it isn’t the pale-faced hero of the Bay of Pigs.”

“Take it easy, Tim,” Quinlan said.

The younger man sat back. “Sure. Why not? Drive on, James. Now that that one-legged clown is out of my way, I want to cop another feel from that pretty little dumb Spanish broad and get me a couple of glasses of pink lemonade before I start toting all this money.”

L
AREDO GOT
to his feet, heavily, as the armored truck drove on. He’d wrenched his stump. The heavy straps that supported his artificial limb were chafing him. There was a sour taste in his mouth as he stared after the truck.

He realized that a tiny hand was tugging at his clown costume and looked down to see the big-eyed little Mexican-American child who had called Paquita “the pink
limonada senora
” looking up at him.

“Did the funny man hurt himself when he fell down?” the child asked soberly.

Laredo laid his hand on her head. “No. All he hurt was his pride.”

To get rid of the children, he took a handful of passes from his pocket and distributed them, telling them to go on ahead. Then, no longer prancing or bobbing, or pretending to trip over the inflated bladder, he limped rapidly in their wake. He’d meant what he’d said on the parking lot in Burbank. If the big, good-looking black Irishman as much as touched Paquita again, he’d kill him. He’d shoot him dead.

Because of the constant stream of cars being driven onto the parking lot by drivers looking for nonexistent parking places and the hundreds of adults and children whose cars were already parked and who were jostling their way toward the U-shaped group of stores, it was heavy going for a man with an artificial leg.

Laredo limped on doggedly. The entire character of the crowd had changed. There were still plenty of children, but there were also hundreds of young and middle-aged couples and older teen-agers, the first two groups intent on something they wanted to buy or price, the teen-agers looking for kicks, or for suitable opposite numbers who appealed to them.

They were noisy, boisterous, young. As Laredo limped past a parked convertible with its top down, three young colored couples in it, and the car radio blaring the latest in teen-age “sound,” one of the boys called good naturedly:

“Hey there, Mister Clown, where are you going so fast? Come on back and make us laugh.”

“Get hip,” one of the girls in the car said. “Make the scene, man. Don’t you dig? He’s supposed to be sad. He’s even got tears on his cheek.”

“What’s he so sad about?” one of the other youths wanted to know.

“That’s easy,” a girl in the back seat said. “Ben Casey cut out his Pagliacci and now all he can sing is tenor.”

It wasn’t that funny but the young people in the car laughed uproariously. The ribbing was friendly and Laredo turned his painted sad smile on them as he went on. It would be wonderful, he thought, to be that young again. He doubted if he ever had been.

It was normal procedure for the armored truck to park as close as it could to the bank or stores, or group of stores, it had come to service. This morning, because a number of the huge semitrailers and smaller delivery trucks were still unloading supplies on the walk, Quinlan had pulled the money truck into the walkway between the pink lemonade stand and the slowly revolving carousel.

The procedure was almost military. Quinlan set his hand brake, then he and the younger Kelly got out on opposite sides of the cab and drew their revolvers from their holsters as they walked to the back of the truck where Quinlan knocked on the door of the money compartment.

The door opened immediately, revealing the elder Kelly holding two canvas sacks. Then, with Quinlan watching alertly, the younger Kelly holstered his gun and took the sacks from his brother, the steel door closed again and the two outside guards made their way through the crowd toward the bank.

Laredo had veered toward the catchall box to pick up the revolver he’d purchased for Paquita’s protection when he had to be away nights. The butt of the gun felt familiar in his hand, but he hoped he didn’t have to use it. He didn’t want to be forced to fight or shoot Kelly. All he wanted was to be left alone. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.

He limped a few steps toward the lemonade stand and stopped, waiting to see what Kelly intended to do. If the guard didn’t stop at the stand, fine. If he did stop at the stand and behaved like a gentleman, that was all right, too.

As Laredo watched, the younger Kelly stopped at the stand, his fellow guard pausing a few feet away, alert eyes continuously scanning the crowd. Kelly asked for and was served a paper cup of the free pink lemonade that Paquita was dispensing. But there was no hanky-panky today. The big youth made no attempt to molest Paquita. All he did was drink the drink he’d been served, toss the empty cup into the waste container, make an elaborate bow to the black-haired girl and walk on carrying both money sacks in one hand.