Twilight Eyes (8 page)

“I suppose you ain’t nothing but a roughie, dime-a-dozen muscle, can’t do more than put up the Dive Bomber and the Ferris wheel and load trucks and hump equipment around on your back. Is that right? Nothing more to offer than your sweat?”

I leaned forward in my chair. “I can operate any hanky-pank there ever was,
any
winner-every-time game. I can run a mouse-in-the-hole as slick as anyone. I can barker a little, hell, better than two-thirds of the guys I’ve heard chatting up the tip in the gillies and ragbags where I’ve worked, though I don’t claim to be as good as the born pitchmen who probably wind up in the best outfits, like yours. I’m a real good Bozo for a pitch-and-dunk because I don’t mind getting wet, and because the insults I throw at the marks aren’t nasty but
funny
, and they always react to funny better. I can do lots of stuff.”

“Well, well,” Jelly Jordan said, “seems like the gods are smiling on the Sombra Brothers today, damned if they ain’t, sending us such a splendid young jack-of-all-trades. Absolutely splendid. Absolute.”

“Kid me all you want, Mr. Jordan, but please find something for me. I swear I won’t disappoint you.”

He stood up and stretched, and his belly jiggled. “Well, Slim, I think I’ll tell Rya Raines about you. She’s a concessionaire. She needs someone to run the high-striker for her. Ever done that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. If she likes you, and if you can get along with her, you’re all set. If you can’t get along with her, come back and see me, and I’ll set you up with someone else or put you on the Sombra Brothers payroll.”

I got up, too. “This Mrs. Raines—”

“Miss.”

“Since you brought it up . . . is she difficult to get along with or something?”

He smiled. “You’ll see. Now, as for sleeping arrangements, I figure you ain’t come rolling in here with your own trailer any more than your own concession, so you’ll want to bunk down in one of the show’s dormitory trailers. I’ll find out who needs another roommate, and you can pay the first week’s rent to Cash Dooley, the accountant you met in the other room.”

I fidgeted. “Uh, well, I left a backpack and sleeping bag out there, and I really prefer bunking down under the stars. Healthier.”

“Don’t allow that here,” he said. “If we did, we’d have a bunch of roughies sleeping on the ground, drinking out in the open, copulating with everything from women to stray cats, which would make us look like some absolute ragbag outfit, which we sure ain’t. We’re a class act all the way.”

“Oh.”

He cocked his head and squinted at me. “Broke?”

“Well . . .”

“Can’t pay rent?”

I shrugged.

“We’ll carry you for two weeks,” he said. “After that you pay like everybody else.”

“Gee, thanks, Mr. Jordan.”

“Call me Jelly now that you’re one of us.”

“Thanks, Jelly, but I’ll let you carry me for just
one
week. After that I’ll be on my feet. Now, should I go straight on up to the high-striker from here? I know where it is, and I know you have an eleven o’clock show call today, which means about ten minutes until the gates open.”

He was still squinting at me. The fat bunched around his eyes, and his plum nose wrinkled up as if it might turn into a prune. He said, “You have breakfast yet?”

“No, sir. Wasn’t hungry.”

“It’s almost lunchtime.”

“Still not hungry.”

“I’m
always
hungry,” he said. “You have dinner last night?”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Sure.”

He frowned skeptically, dug in his pocket, pulled out a pair of one-dollar bills, and came around the desk with his hand held toward me.

“Oh, no, Mr. Jordan—”

“Jelly—”

“—Jelly. I couldn’t accept it.”

“Just a loan,” he said, taking my hand and stuffing the money in it. “You’ll pay me back. That’s an absolute fact.”

“But I’m not
that
broke. I have some money.”

“How much?”

“Well . . . ten bucks.”

He grinned again. “Show me.”

“Huh?”

“Liar. How much, really?”

I looked down at my feet.

“Really, now? Tell the truth,” he said warningly.

“Well . . . ummm . . . twelve cents.”

“Oh, yes, I see. You’re an absolute Rockefeller. Good heavens, I am definitely mortified to think I tried to loan you money. A wealthy man at seventeen, clearly an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune!” He gave me two more bucks. “Now you listen to me, Mr. Filthy Rich Playboy, you go to Sam Trizer’s grab-joint by the merry-go-round. It’s one of the best on the lot, and he opens early to serve carnies. Get yourself a good lunch and
then
go see Rya Raines at her high-striker.”

I nodded, embarrassed by my poverty because a Stanfeuss never relied on anyone but
another
Stanfeuss. Nevertheless, humbled and self-reproachful, I was also grateful for the fat man’s good-humored charity.

When I reached the door and opened it, he said, “Wait a minute.”

I looked back and saw that he was staring at me in a different way than before. He had been sizing me up to determine my character, my abilities, and my sense of responsibility, but now he was looking at me the way a handicapper might examine a horse on which he intended to place a bet. “You’re a strong youngster,” he said. “Good biceps. Good shoulders. You move well too. You look like you could take care of yourself in a tight situation.”

As some answer seemed required, I said, “Well . . . I have, yeah.”

I wondered what he would say if I told him that I had killed four goblins so far—four pig-faced, dog-fanged, serpent-tongued things with murderous red eyes and claws like rapiers.

He regarded me in silence for a moment, then at last said, “Listen, if you can get along with Rya, that’s who you’ll work for. But tomorrow I’d like you to do a special job for
me
. There probably won’t be any tough stuff, but the potential’s there. Worse comes to worst, you might have to duke it out with someone. But I suspect you’ll just have to stand around and look intimidating.”

“Whatever you want,” I said.

“You ain’t going to ask what the job is?”

“You can explain it tomorrow.”

“You don’t want a chance to turn it down?”

“Nope.”

“There’re some risks involved.”

I held up the four dollars he had given me. “You’ve bought yourself a risk taker.”

“You come cheap.”

“It wasn’t the four bucks that bought me, Jelly. It was the kindness.”

He was uncomfortable with the compliment. “Get the hell out of here, grab your lunch, and start earning your keep. We don’t like deadbeats on the lot.”

Feeling better than I had felt in months, I went out to the front office, and Cash Dooley said I could leave my gear with him until they found trailer space for me, and then I went to Sam Trizer’s grab-joint for a bite of lunch. They call these places “grab-joints” or “grab-stands” because there’s no place to sit, so you just have to grab your food and eat on the fly. I had two perfect chili dogs, French fries, a vanilla shake, and then headed up the midway.

As county fairs go, this was better than average, almost large, but not nearly as big as the important fairs in places like Milwaukee, St. Paul, Topeka, Pittsburgh, and Little Rock, where paid admissions could top a quarter of a million on a good day. Nonetheless, Thursday was getting close to the weekend. And it was summer when the kids were out of school, and a lot of people were on vacation. Besides, in rural Pennsylvania the fair was as much excitement as there ever was—people came from fifty or sixty miles around—so even though the gates had just opened, a thousand marks had come onto the midway already. All the hanky-panks and other games were ready for business, their operators beginning to pitch the passing tip, and many of the rides were running. The scent of popcorn was in the air, and diesel fuel, and cookhouse grease. The gaudy fantasy was just cranking up its engine, but in a few hours it would be running at full-tilt—a thousand exotic sounds, an all-encompassing blaze of color and motion that would eventually seem to expand until it had
become
the universe, until it was impossible to believe that anything existed beyond the carnival grounds.

I passed the Dodgem Cars, half expecting to see police and a crowd of horrified onlookers, but the ticket booth was open, and the cars were in operation, and the marks were screaming but only at one another as they crashed their rubber-bumpered vehicles together. If anyone had noticed the fresh stains on the pavilion floor, he hadn’t realized they were blood.

I wondered where my unknown helper had taken the corpse, wondered when he would finally come forward and make himself known to me. And when he did reveal himself, what would he want from me for his continued silence?

The high-striker was two-thirds of the way along the first concourse, on the outside edge of the midway, tucked between a balloon game and a fortune-teller’s small, striped tent. It was a simple device that consisted of an eighteen-inch-square striking pad mounted on springs and designed to measure impact, a backdrop shaped like a twenty-foot-high thermometer, and a bell at the top of the thermometer. Guys who wanted to impress their dates had only to pay fifty cents, take the sledgehammer provided by the operator, swing it hard, and land a blow on the striking pad. This would drive a small wooden block up the thermometer, which was divided into five sections: GRANDMA, GRANDPA, GOOD BOY, TOUGH GUY, and HE-MAN. If you were enough of a he-man to drive the block all the way to the top and ring the bell, you not only impressed your girl and had a better chance of getting in her pants before the night was over, but you also won a cheap stuffed animal.

Beside this high-striker stood a rack of furry teddy bears that didn’t look half as cheap as the usual prizes in a game of this sort, and on a stool beside the teddy bears sat the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was wearing brown corduroy jeans and a brown-and-red-checkered blouse, and I vaguely noticed that her body was lean and excitingly proportioned, but truthfully I did not pay much attention to the way she was built—not then, later—for initially my attention was entirely captured by her hair and face. Thick, soft, silky, shimmering hair, too blond to be called auburn, too auburn to be blond, was combed across one side of her face, half obscuring one eye, reminding me of Veronica Lake, that movie star of an earlier era. If there was any fault at all in her exquisite face, it was that the very perfection of her features also gave her a slightly cool, distant, and unattainable look. Her eyes were large, blue, and limpid. The hot August sun streamed over her as if she were on a stage instead of perched on a battered wooden stool, and it didn’t illuminate her the same way it did everyone else on the midway; the sun seemed to favor her, beaming upon her the way a father might look upon a favorite daughter, accenting the natural luster of her hair, proudly revealing the porcelain smoothness of her complexion, lovingly molding itself to her sculpted cheekbones and artfully chiseled nose, suggesting but not fully illuminating great depth and many mysteries in her entrancing eyes.

I stood, dumbstruck, and watched her for a minute or two while she went through her spiel. She teased a mark out of the onlookers, took his fifty cents, sympathized with his inability to drive the wooden block above GOOD BOY, and smoothly enticed him into shelling out a buck for three more whacks at it. She broke all the rules for ballying an attraction: She never taunted the marks, not even a little; she hardly ever raised her voice to a shout, yet somehow her message carried above the music from the gypsy fortune-teller’s tent, the competing spiel of the balloon game pitchman next door, and the ever-growing roar of the waking midway. Most unusual of all, she never got off the stool, did not attempt to draw the marks to her with an energetic display of pitchmanship, did not employ dramatic gestures, comic dance steps, loud jokes, sexual innuendo, double entendres, or any of the standard techniques. Her patter was slyly amusing, and she was gorgeous; that was enough, and she was smart enough to
know
it was enough.

She took my breath away.

With a self-conscious shuffle that I sometimes had around pretty girls, I finally approached her, and she thought I was a mark who wanted to swing the hammer, but I said, “No, I’m looking for Miss Raines.”

“Why?”

“Jelly Jordan sent me.”

“You’re Slim? I’m Rya Raines.”

“Oh,” I said, startled, because she seemed like just a girl, hardly older than me, not the kind of canny and aggressive concessionaire for whom I expected to be working.

A faint frown reshaped her face slightly, but it did not detract from her beauty. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“You look younger.”

“Going on eighteen,” I said defensively.

“That’s the usual progression.”

“What?”

“After that it’ll be nineteen, then twenty, and then there’ll be no stopping you,” she said, a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice.

Sensing that she was the type most likely to respond better to spunk than to subservience, I smiled and said, “I guess it wasn’t like that with you. Looks to me like you jumped straight from twelve to ninety.”

She didn’t smile back at me, and the coolness didn’t go out of her, but she gave up the frown. “You can talk?”

“Aren’t I talking?”

“You know what I mean.”

By way of an answer, I picked up the sledgehammer, swung it at the striking pad hard enough to ring the bell and attract the attention of the nearest marks, turned toward the concourse, and launched into a spiel. In a few minutes I brought in three bucks.

“You’ll do,” Rya Raines said. When she talked to me, she stared straight into my eyes, and her gaze made me hotter than the August sun. “All you have to know is that the game isn’t gaffed, which you’ve already proved, and I don’t want you being an alibi agent. Gaffed games and alibi agents aren’t allowed on the Sombra Brothers’ lot, and I wouldn’t have them even if they were allowed. It’s not
easy
to ring that bell; pretty damned hard, in fact; but the mark gets a fair shot at winning, and when he does win, he gets the prize, no alibis.”