Kaleidoscope (14 page)

She smiled, her lips beckoning ripe as poisoned apples a mere breath away from his own.

“What about it, Jack?”

Her tongue teasing like a snake’s.

“Feeling lucky?”

His erection jammed up beneath the table and the thought occurred that maybe this was the payment she really wanted, and he thought what the hell, he might as well—but then he saw her chest again.

“Jesus!”

He leapt from the chair.

“The fuck you trying to do to me?!”

“Do what people do, Jack.”

“God-damned witch!”

There was a sadness in her face, but also a dreadful resignation. Cassandra The Prophetess threw a shawl over her crystal seer.

“The ball is dark.”

“Cassandra. Please!”

“That is all I can do.”

The next day’s work detail did not, as Jack expected, take him back to clear the littered midway. In fact, Friday morning found the gambler unexpectedly and blissfully free of Tommy Speck’s sarcastic supervision. Instead he was told at chow to repair to Peewee’s tent in service of her elephant.

A truck trailer piled high with hay awaited. Jack unloaded bale after bale beneath Ambassador’s reproachful inspection.

The animal snorting on its chain tether. Those African ears stirring the moist morning air. Jack stumbled over yet another bale. Ambassador once again snorted contempt.

“Look, yer honor, you don’t like the way I’m doing this? Do it yourself.”

As if in response to his imprecation, the elephant’s massive head dipped, the chained tether straining taut as the bull lunged toward the trailer. Jack scrambled for safety, but there was no need. Ambassador leaned over the trailer, curled a bale of hay onto his trunk and plopped it onto the tentside stack neat as aces.

“The hell you need me for?” Jack muttered. But he chipped in anyway, man and beast now combining their efforts to finish the task in short order. Jack was headed back to his shack feeling pretty good when a commotion from among the caravans drew his attention. Loud voices. Strident. Angry.

Romaine jogged past the Sugar Shack and lion’s pen to find Flambé pitching a fit outside his caravan.

“It was here in my truck! ALL of it! And it’s GONE!”

A score or more of geeks and working men convening, now, from all about the camp. Jack saw Tommy Speck pushing through the milling crowd, Luna Chevreaux tall and calm in his wake.

“It’s gone!” Flambé appealed wildly. “GONE!”

“Easy, Flambé,” Luna commanded. “Now, what’s missing?”

“FIFTEEN DOLLARS!”

Fifteen clams?! The old queer was in a hussy over fifteen singles?

But Jack cut his chuckle short when he saw the reaction of the freaks around him. A sinister silence was fallen over the misshapen community.

Flambé turned his attention straight to Jack.

“There’s only one man here new to us.”

All eyes swivelled onto Romaine.

“That’s a pretty quick call,” Luna Chevreaux cautioned calmly.

“But Flambé’s right, he is the only one we don’t know.”

“We know he’s not here for fifteen dollars,” Luna replied and Jack tried to keep a poker face.

She knew what he was looking for? Is that what Luna meant?

But Chevreaux’s attention was not at present directed to her new brodie. She was scanning the carneys, looking over the heads of everyone except The Giant.

“Where’s Blade?”

Heads turned with a murmur of queries. Two heads in the case of Jacques & Marcel.

“Try his trailer?” Tommy suggested.

“His trailer,” Luna struck off in that direction and every single geek followed.

Charlie Blade’s trailer looked like a suitcase on wheels, posters from a hundred shows pasted on scarlet walls peppered with the impact of his throwing knives and sword. Billboards from Maine to California pasted like marquee on a rolling nightclub.

The up and comer was propped on a set of milk crates outside his rolling home, eyes glazed over a cigarette burning to the nubs of his fingers.

Luna marched straight up to Charlie’s crated stoop. Tommy Speck took one flank, The Giant her other. Other residents spreading in a large crescent behind.

Charlie smiled languidly.

“Morning, Boss Lady.”

“I need to see your trailer, Charlie.” Luna got straight to the point.

“You ain’t seein’ nuthin’,” Blade lipped over his cigarette, and a chill seemed to settle.

“Giant,” Luna’s eyes never left Charlie as she addressed the camp’s strongman.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Kick in the door.”

The black man had barely started for the trailer when Charlie pulled a sword from a crate.

Jack saw it coming. He leapt between the black man and Blade, caught the edge of the sword on his brass knuckles and then stepped inside to kick Charlie hard in the balls.

Blade went down swallowing his privates on the sandy street.

“…Fuggin’…bitch!”

“The door, Giant.”

Took one size eighteen boot to kick the door off its flimsy hinges. Luna ducked her head to enter.

For a few seconds there was nothing to be discerned other than the sword-swallower’s mumbled curses, the gentle rocking of the trailer on balding tires, the chassis squeaking in accommodation of Luna’s shifting inspection. But then the
thud
of something substantial could be heard as it was dumped to the trailer’s wooden floor and moments later Luna emerged.

The lunar lady raised one hand to display a syringe to the gathered carneys. In the other hand she displayed a sheaf of green-backs and a bindle.

“Ten bucks for the smack would leave…” she counted the one-dollar bills remaining. “…five bucks change. Give this to Flambé, would you, Tommy? Tell him I’ll make good for the rest.”

“How ’bout the snow?”

She did not reply. Instead she handed the stash to Giant.

“Put it back inside.”

“No!” Blade pulled himself to his knees. “You can’t! You got no goddamn right!”

“You know the rule, Charlie.”

A low, feral growl rippled through the gathered congregation. It rose a pitch higher as Charlie crawled back to reach the cover of his trailer. Higher it rose!

Jack felt his skin crawl.

Charlie Blade blubbering now like a baby.

“Please don’t! PLEASE!!”

It happened in seconds. The freaks rushed Charlie’s trailer like piranha onto a mired cow. Charlotte and Jenny and Jacques & Marcel and Frankie and Cassandra and all the rest, all the other half-men and bearded women, the limbless and deformed who removed from the midway seemed immune to violent activity of any kind, snapped in a fraction of a second to become a pack of jackals.

They ripped the shutters off the trailer’s windows as though they were eyelids. They tore into the flimsy walls as if they were flesh. They gutted the interior as Charlie wailed from the ground, hauling out the entrails of the young performer’s life, ripping it to shreds as he watched.

A saturnalia of destruction.

Only Luna standing above the fray. And Jack outside of it.

“What’s ‘the rule’?” Jack shouted above the frenzy.

“You don’t steal from another carney, Jack. Not even a penny.”

“But he’s on heroin, for Christ’s sake!”

“He can ride any high he wants,” Luna replied, pitiless. “But not on a carney’s back.”

Flambé arrived finally with a nozzled metal can. Charlotte, sweet Charlotte, struck a match with her webbed hands to the torch soaked in that fuel, handing it to The Giant.

“FIRE IN THE HOLE,” the black man bellowed.

The freaks scattering from the trailer like evil children, their anatomic digressions making for a cruel discoordination of effort, an unnatural swarm. They came crawling or staggering or waddling away from Charlie Blade’s trailer carrying everything he ever valued out with them. Props, clocks, silverware. Clothes and photos and memorabilia. Swords, of course.

Charlie’s property redistributed in an instant among the performers of Kaleidoscope.

“DON’ LET THEM, LUNA!!”

Charlie begging, now.

“LUNA, DON’T!!”

She nodded once to The Giant. He tossed the gasoline inside. Then the torch.

“NOOOOOOOOO….!”

An inhalation of flame, then, as if the trailer itself were swallowing a fiery sword. Then an orange ball billowed, rising like an orchid. Black, black smoke. Blade staggered briefly toward the ruins of his home, his life, but the heat beat him back. He fell to the sand, sobbing. The carneys jeering. Whistling derision.

“Jesus, Tommy—?” Jack turned to Speck. “Tommy?” Tommy Speck collected a vile wad from his cheek and spat it to the earth.

“Fuck him. Serves the chump right.”

A Brodie—
the carnies’ laborer, a mule, muscle.

T
he moon seeped through a scud of clouds that night to provide a capricious illumination. A pall of tar and timber smothered the usual aroma of pine needles and damp earth. Jack was nursing his first beer since coming to this godless place, the first alcohol of any kind that he’d seen since the beginning of his indenturement.

He hunkered over a mason jar of homebrew, sitting at the base of an enormous tidewater cypress that sentineled the railway leading to Peewee’s tent. The Princess’s fabric palace glowed in the near distance like a child’s magic lantern. Jack could see silhouettes cast onto the canvas by the lamps inside. He could see Ambassador’s thrown shadow, the trunk dipping for water into the tank at the foot of Peewee’s bed. He could see The Fat Lady, too, her ample figure distorted by the play of screen and shadow and sultry breeze. Propped in her bed reading—what? What tale of romance could compete with
this
life?

He would like to believe that Cassandra’s sexually charged prophecy was simply a ploy, an attempt to pump him for information, find a hole in his story. The whole business with the lights and ball was just hooey, wasn’t it? Not worth two minutes’ thought. On the other hand…? Something about the encounter in the gypsy’s caravan lingered. How could Cassandra know with such perfect conviction that Jack had never set eyes on Alex Goodman? He hadn’t, of course—but how could Cassandra know that fact for sure? Prob’ly she didn’t know, he told himself. It was just part of her act. On the other hand…?

Could there have been some genuine witchcraft at work in the sibyl’s warren? Some revelation that he had missed, or cut short? Jack took a long swig of homebrew. Must be going native to be thinking like this! Crystal balls? Prophecies?

Still…Jack set his jar of beer aside. What if there was something he was missing?

He made sure he wasn’t seen on his way to Peewee’s pavilion. He entered the tent and ran the maze of clotheslines leading to her boudoir in total darkness, emerging to see Ambassador content on his chain at the tank beside Peewee’s massively reinforced bed. An electric fan was propped on a stack of books at her side.

Jack tapped on a quarter pole.

“Princess? May I come in?”

She smiled over her book.

“Now, that was nice. The way you asked.”

“Figured I had to improve over my last attempt,” Jack said and stepped inside.

She put her text aside.
Candide
. Jack recognised the French etiology if not the work itself.

Did Peewee
parlez francais
?

“You been here, what—a week?”

“Eight days,” he replied. “Or all my life, depending how you look at it.”

She had enormous dimples when she smiled, Jack noticed. Dimples an inch deep.

“A week and a day for the man starting over,” she sighed. “And have you found what you’re looking for?”

“No,” Jack looked her straight in the eyes. “No, I haven’t. I guess that’s why I came to see you.”

“Me?” she brushed a corn-silk curl from her eyes. “I hate to tell ya, Jack, but I ain’t exactly the fount of all wisdom. Fount of some things, maybe, but I ain’t got the book of life in here anyplace.”

“I don’t need anything that complicated, Princess, but there’s something I gotta locate, it’s important, and I’m pretty sure Alex Goodman had what I needed. Or at least, I think he knew enough to steer me in the right direction. And I know there’s at least one other person down here knows, too—”

“Know for sure?”

“I guess more like hope. Got no choice, really; I have no other place to go.”

“Sometimes you can’t find somethin’, you gotta just let it go, Jack.”

“Wish to hell I could. It’s not for me. I don’t find what I’m looking for, me and my family, well—let’s just say we’re gonna be looking over our shoulders for a long, long time. If you get what I mean.”

The massive head dropped ever so slightly.

“I know that feeling. I do.”

“No grins, is it?”

“Come up here,” she commanded. “Stool over there, pull it up.”

He gathered up a low-back beside the supporting pole and complied.

“Gonna tell you a story, Jack. About a little girl. She was a petite little thing, at first. Charming. Precocious, even. She wanted to play the violin—oh, yes! But Daddy said, no. And then her fingers got too fat and her joints riddled with gout. Her mother wanted her to play. Her mother said she had the soul of an artist. Her mother was never ashamed. Never distant. She could play like an angel. And this little girl was educated, too.

“But her daddy was a cold man. Distant. And when the little girl got fat she became an embarrassment to her father, and on her nineteenth birthday he committed her to a sanatorium. You ever been to a mental ward, Mr. Romaine? It’s hell. It is a living hell even if you are insane, but his girl was not insane, Jack. No, no. She wasn’t loony. She was just fat.”

Jack cleared his throat.

“How’d you get out?”

“Money. Orderlies at mental institutions are chronically underpaid, which makes them easy to bribe, and cheap. My mother managed it. One graveyard night a pair of orderlies wheeled me down to the infirmary. But instead of putting the juice to me, or dropping me in the cold tank, they had an ambulance waiting.”

“And you came down here with your mother.”

“I came down here, eventually,” she corrected him. “But Mother—”

A single tear ran down the bowl of her face.

“I think Daddy must have killed her.”

“Jesus. And your old man, does he have any idea where you are?”

“If he did he’d come for me, I’m certain,” she sniffed. “And I would most certainly be trapped again in a living torment until I died…

“Have you ever met a man who would put his own child in hell, Mr. Romaine?”

“I know a candidate, believe me.”

She drew in a long, soughing breath.

“Then you know the only thing you can do is to stay far away. Stay far away. Far. Far!”

Ambassador stirred at the tank.

“It’s all right, Ambassador,” she smiled. “We’re all right, baby.”

Jack lifted the corner of her sheet.

“Take it easy, Princess.”

He wiped her face gently. Probably the first time he ever actually looked at her face properly.

“Thank you,” she smiled and dimpled.

He started to retreat.

“No, wait. Wait.”

She gathered his hand into her own. Was like putting a walnut inside a glove.

“I don’t think anyone down here knew Alex, really, except me. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I can tell you Alex didn’t have anything of value. Anyway, if he did, he never mentioned it.”

“I don’t think it’s the kind of thing he’d likely talk about,” Jack squeezed her hand. “Did he mention any kind of, say, investments? Anything like that?”

She snorted.

“The only thing Alex took stock in was a bottle.”

Jack took back his hand and Ambassador jerked his trunk to challenge.

“Shit, what’d I do?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Peewee patted him on the arm. “He’s just reminding me.”

“Of what?”

“My bathtime.”

She swept her bedsheet aside.

“I’m ready, Ambassador.”

His trunk uncoiled to wrap beneath her lap as though she were a log.

“The hell’s he doing?!” Jack scrambled off his stool.

“Taking me to my tub,” she smiled coyly.

The massive bull draping his Princess gently over his twin tusks as gently as a towel. Hefting her like a forklift from her bed.

Jack retreated another yard.

“You sure this is smart, Princess? After what happened to Alex?”

“How else am I to get to my bath?” she seemed amused.

The ground trembling as the rogue bull swiveled to the water tank. Ambassador lowered Peewee still wrapped in her shift into the cool water. She slid off his tusks with a delighted squeal. Then a long, luxurious sigh.

“Only place where I can move, really,” she said slipping out of her nightgown.

Jack found himself tempted to look. But Ambassador stood guard over his lady’s balneation like a palace eunuch.

“The water! Marvelous!”

She leaned back and her breasts bobbed to the surface like kegs.

“I wouldn’t mind your staying, Jack. But we don’t know each other well enough. Yet.”

Running her hands to her crotch.

“I’ll just show myself out.” Jack found the railway.

“Sweet of you to drop by,” she called after him.

Jack turned back, briefly.

“One thing, Princess: You don’t have to look over your shoulder here. Nobody’s gonna let anybody take you from this place. Nobody.”

She smiled sadly.

“
Merci, monsieur. Bon nuit
.”

Jack was long asleep when a Packard coupe pulled away from the apartment attached to the Kaleidoscope Café, heading west for a drive to Tampa. He was not there to see Tampa’s midnight train hoot its imminent departure. A thick fog shrouded the man and woman who waited at a bench that was gathering dew beneath the station’s shallow-peaked shelter. Could you have penetrated the fog you might notice that the woman was unusually tall, a head taller than her companion even while seated. The couple, though closely seated, did not appear intimate. Were Jack present he would have noticed the worn medical bag placed like a border between that pair of mismatched thighs.

“All aboard for ALBANY, ATLANTA…CINCINNATTI!….”

The porter’s baritone summons nearly swallowed by the fog.

“Don’t forget your hat.” Luna Chevreaux handed Doc Snyder a boater.

It was not Doc’s usual derby, this headpiece. It was a summer hat, gaily ribboned and flat-brimmed. Made of straw.

“Be careful, Doc.”

“And yourself.”

Iron valves hissing, a brakeman waving his flag, the plaintive complaint of a steam-driven whippoorwill, and Kaleidoscope’s physician was swallowed into the morning mist. Luna remaining behind, tall and silent and alone.

Was a good hour after midnight when Jack Romaine was jerked from a fitful sleep.

“Get up, dammit! Get yer ass up!”

Tommy Speck jumping up and down on his goddamn bed.

“The fuck, izzit five awready?”

“It’s the twins!”

A scramble of brogans and trousers and suspenders, then, Jack stumbling after Tommy to reach the Siamese brothers’ neighboring cottage.

Cassandra was ahead of him, flat against the corrugated wall.

“They’re sick,” she offered that prediction. “I tried to ask them, I speak a little, but—”

“Let me take a look.”

Jack raised Tommy’s lantern to inspect the twin faces, rigid as logs on their rude bed. Both of the twins were pale, lips going blue. Marcel appeared to be the worst of the two; his face was clammy to the touch, his neck and shoulder swollen to the size of a gourd.

Jack took a hand. Cold. He leaned close to inspect the fingernails.

“What is it?” Tommy prodded.

“The fuck would I know?” Jack leaned down to Jacques.

“(Jacque. Jacques, my friend. Can you hear me?)”

“Jack?
Oui
.”

“(How long have you been like this?)”

“(Minutes. It started with Marcel. He said he could not breathe. We—! Cannot…breathe!)”

“(Is Marcel choked? Did he swallow something?)”

“(No. A bee.)”

“What was that?” Tommy asked.

“Bee stung him.”

Jack verified the welt swelling over Marcel’s shoulder.

“We need Doc,” Jack declared.

“He’s out of town.” Cassandra reported that fact as if she were to blame.

Jacques gasped violently.

“(Oh, God!)”

Marcel’s head rolling back.

“GIVE ME SOME ROOM,” Jack fumbled for the knife in his trousers.

“What in God’s name—?” Tommy trapped his fist.

“Lemme go, Tommy, he’s gotta breathe.”

“Have you done this before?” Speck did not let him go.

“Couple times. I was a corpsman.”

“Let him go, Tommy!”

“…awright, awright.”

“Cassandra, take the globe off the lantern. Use the oilcloth, you have to, but get it off.”

Jack took the naked lantern and ran the blade of his knife back and forth through that white-hot flame.

“(Jacques, listen to me. I have to open your brother’s throat. His
throat
, do you understand?)”

“
Oui
.”

“Tommy, Cassandra—hold their hands.”

Cassandra and Speck rushed to either side of the bed. Jack allowed his crude instrument to cool a moment.

“(Mary, Mother of God,)” Jacques croaked. “(In our hour of need we beseech thee—)”

“Hail Mary, Mother of Grace,” Cassandra joined in.

“Good luck,” Tommy added his own benediction as Jack probed gently with his fingers to find the spot. There it was, the cricothyroid, just a notch in the voice box. Couldn’t go too far, though. Or too deep.

Jack plunged his knife into the gap.

Jacques’ protest was no more than the cry of a kitten. Marcel was past pain.

“Did it work?”

“Depends. They’ve got separate airways, but my guess is they’re sharing a lung or lungs. Anyway, it’s all I can think of.. Only thing I can do.”

A small geyser of sputum and you could hear it, the whistle of air through the gash in Marcel’s throat. Jacques swallowing air like a goldfish moments later with the shared ventilation.

“C’mon, Marcel. C’mon, buddy.”

A whistle of air and then his eyelids flicker and then Marcel was back.

“(Don’t try to talk,)” Jack directed. “(I cut a hole for you to breathe, I’m gonna put in a tube so it stays open, so just stay still, Marcel. Let your brother do the talking.)”

“I need some kinda tube,” Jack turned to Cassandra. “Something that’ll hold pressure, doesn’t have to be big.”

“I’ve got a fountain pen,” she offered.

“That all you got?”

“Only thing close.”

“Go get it. Tommy, use the cap. Cut off the tip. We got any alcohol?”

“We’re a beddy, ain’t we?”

“Douche the cap with whatever you got. Burn it. Pour on some more. We’ll worry about the wound later.”