Dark Carnival (5 page)

    If anything happened, he wanted cremation. The two of them'd burn together that way. None of this graveyard burial stuff where little crawling things eat and leave nothing but unmantled bone! No, they'd burn. Damn Him! He was sick. Where could he turn? Clarisse? Burleigh? Munigant, Bone specialist? Munigant. Well?

    'Darling!' trilled Clarisse, kissing him, so he winced at the solidness of her teeth and jaw behind the passionate exchange. 'Darling,' he said, slowly, wiping his lips with his wrist, trembling.

    'You look thinner; oh, darling, the business deal — ?'

    'It went through. Yeah, it went through. I guess. Yeah, it did,' he said.

    She enthused. She kissed him again. Lord, he couldn't even enjoy kisses any more because of this obsession. They ate a slow, falsely cheerful dinner, with Clarisse laughing and encouraging him. He studied the phone, several times he picked it up indecisively, then laid it down. His wife walked in, putting on her coat and hat. 'Well, sorry, but I have to leave now,' she laughed, and pinched him lightly on the cheek. 'Come on now, cheer up! I'll be back from Red Cross in three hours. You lie around and snooze. I simply
have
to go.'

    When Clarisse was gone, Harris dialled the phone, nervously.

    'M. Munigant?'

    The explosions and the sickness in his body after he set the phone down were unbelievable. His bones were racked with every kind of pain, cold and hot, he had ever thought of or experienced in wildest nightmare. He swallowed all the aspirin he could find in an effort to stave off the assault; but when the doorbell finally rang an hour later, he could not move, he lay weak and exhausted, panting, tears streaming down his cheeks, like a man on a torture rack. Would M. Munigant go away if the door was not answered?

    'Come in!' he tried to gasp it out. 'Come in, for God's sake!'

    M. Munigant came in. Thank God the door had been unlocked.

    Oh, but Mr. Harris looked terrible. M. Munigant stood in the centre of the living-room, small and dark. Harris nodded at him. The pains rushed through him, hitting him with large iron hammers and hooks. M. Munigant's eyes glittered as he saw Harris's protuberant bones. Ah, he saw that Mr. Harris was now psychologically prepared for aid. Was it not so? Harris nodded again, feebly, sobbing. M. Munigant still whistled when he talked; something about his tongue and the whistling. No matter. Through his shimmering eyes Harris seemed to see M. Munigant shrink, get smaller. Imagination, of course. Harris sobbed out his story of the Phoenix trip. M. Munigant sympathized. This skeleton was a — a traitor! They would
fix
him for once and for all! 'Mr. Munigant,' sighed Harris, faintly. 'I — I never noticed before. You have such an odd, odd tongue. Round. Tube-like. Hollow? Guess it's my eyes. Don't mind me. Delirious. I'm ready. What do I do?'

    M. Munigant whistled softly, appreciatively, coming closer. If Mr. Harris would relax in his chair, and open his mouth? The lights were switched off. M. Munigant peered into Harris's dropped jaw. Wider, please? It had been so hard, that first visit, to help Harris, with both body and bone in rebellion. Now, he had co-operation from the flesh of the man anyway, even if the skeleton was acting up somewhat. In the darkness, M. Munigant's voice got small, small, tiny, tiny. The whistling became high and shrill. Now. Relax. Mr. Harris. NOW!

    Harris felt his jaw pressed violently in all directions, his tongue depressed as with a spoon, his throat clogged. He gasped for breath. Whistle. He couldn't breathe! He was corked. Something squirmed, cork-screwed his cheeks out, bursting his jaws. Like a hot water douche, something squirted into his sinuses, his ears clanged! 'Ahhh!' shrieked Harris, gagging. His head, its carapaces riven, shattered, hung loose. Agony shot into his lungs, around.

    Harris could breathe again, momentarily. His watery eyes sprang wide. He shouted. His ribs, like sticks picked up and bundled, were loosened in him. Pain! He fell to the floor, rocking, rolling, wheezing out his hot breath.

    Lights flickered in his senseless eyeballs, he felt his limbs swiftly cast loose and free, expertly. Through streaming eyes he saw the parlour.

    The room was empty.

    'M. Munigant? Where are you? In God's name, where are you, M. Munigant? Come help me!'

    M. Munigant was gone.

    'Help!'

    Then he heard it.

    Deep down in the subterranean fissures of his bodily well, he heard the minute, unbelievable noises; little smackings and twistings and little dry chippings and grindings and nuzzling sounds — like a tiny hungry mouse down in the red-blooded dimness, gnawing ever so earnestly and expertly at what may have been, but was not, a submerged timber. . .!

    Clarisse, walking along the sidewalk, held her head high and marched straight towards her house on Saint James Place. She was thinking of the Red Cross and a thousand other things as she turned the corner and almost ran into this little dark man who smelled of iodine.

    Clarisse would have ignored him if it were not for the fact that as she passed he took something long, white and oddly familiar from his coat and proceeded to chew on it, as on a peppermint stick. Its end devoured, his extraordinary tongue darted within the white confection, sucking out the filling, making contented noises. He was still crunching his goodie as she proceeded up the sidewalk to her house, turned the doorknob and walked in.

    'Darling?' she called, smiling around. 'Darling, where are you?'

    She shut the door, walked down the hall and into the living-room.

    'Darling. . .'

    She stared at the floor for twenty seconds, trying to understand.

    She screamed.

    Outside in the sycamore darkness, the little man pierced a long white stick with intermittent holes; then, softly, sighing, lips puckered, played a little sad tune upon the improvised instrument to accompany the shrill and awful singing of Clarisse's voice as she stood in the living-room.

    Many times as a little girl Clarisse had run on the beach sands, stepped on a jelly fish and screamed. It was not so bad, finding an intact, gelatine-skinned jelly-fish in one's living-room. One could step back from it.

    It was when the jelly-fish
called you by name. . .

IT was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump like it does when you see an amputated arm in a laboratory vat.

    Charlie stared back at it for a long time.

    A long time, his big raw hands, hairy on the roofs of them, clenching the rope that kept back curious people. He had paid his dime and now he stared.

    It was getting late. The merry-go-round drowsed down to a lazy mechanical tinkle. Tentpeggers back of a canvas smoked and cursed over a poker game. Lights switched out, putting a summer gloom over the carnival. People streamed homeward in cliques and queues. Somewhere, a radio flared up, then cut, leaving Louisiana sky wide and silent with stars peppering it.

    There was nothing in the world for Charlie but that pale thing sealed in its universe of serum. Charlie's loose mouth hung open in a pink weal, teeth showing, eyes puzzled, admiring, wondering.

    Someone walked in the shadows behind him, small beside Charlie's giant tallness. 'Oh,' said the shadow, coming into the light-bulb glare. 'You still here, bud?'

    'Yeah,' said Charlie, irritated his thoughts were touched.

    The carny-boss appreciated Charlie's curiosity. He nodded at his old acquaintance in the jar. 'Everybody likes it; in a peculiar kinda way, I mean.'

    Charlie rubbed his long jaw-bone. 'You — uh — ever consider selling it?'

    The carny-boss's eyes dilated, then closed. He snorted. 'Naw. It brings customers. They like seeing stuff like that. Sure.'

    Charlie made a disappointed, 'Oh.'

    'Well,' considered the carny-boss, 'if a guy had money, maybe — '

    'How much money?'

    'If a guy had — ' the carny-boss estimated, squinting eyes, counting on fingers, watching Charlie as he tacked it out one finger after another. 'If a guy had three, four, say, maybe seven or eight — '

    Charlie nodded with each motion, expectantly. Seeing this, the carny-boss raised his total, ' — maybe ten dollars, or maybe fifteen — '

    Charlie scowled, worried. The carny-boss retreated. 'Say a guy has
twelve
dollars — ' Charlie grinned. 'Why he could buy that thing in that jar,' concluded the carny-boss.

    'Funny thing,' said Charlie, 'I got just twelve bucks in my denims. And I been reckoning how looked up to I'd be back down at Wilder's Hollow if I brung home something like this to set on my shelf over the table. The guys would sure look up to me then, I bet.'

    '
Well
, now, listen here — ' said the carny-boss.

    The sale was completed with the jar put on the back seat of Charlie's wagon. The horse skittered his hoofs when he saw the jar, and whinnied.

    The carny-boss glanced up with an expression of, almost, relief. 'I was tired of seeing the damn thing around, anyway. Don't thank me. Lately I been thinking things about it, funny things — but, don't mind me, I'm a big-mouthed so-and-so. S'long, farmer!'

    Charlie drove off. The naked blue light bulbs withdrew like dying stars, the open dark country night of Louisiana swept in around wagon and horse. The brass merry-go-round clanking faded. There was just Charlie, the horse, timing his grey hoofs, and the crickets.

    And the jar behind the high seat.

    It sloshed back and forth, back and forth. Sloshed wet. And the cold grey thing drowsily slumped against the glass, looking out, looking out, but seeing nothing, nothing, nothing.

    Charlie leaned back to pet the lid. Smelling of strange liquor his hand returned, changed and cold and trembling, excited. He was bright scarlet happy about this.
Yes, sir!

   
Slosh, slosh, slosh. . .

    In the Hollow numerous grass-green and blood-red lanterns tossed dusty light over men huddled, chanting, spitting, sitting on General Store property.

    They knew the creak-bumble of Charlie's vehicle and did not shift their raw, drab-haired skulls as he rocked to a halt. Their cigars were nicotine glow-worms, their voices were frog mutterings in summer nights.

    Charlie leaned down at an eager angle. 'Hi, Clem! Hi, Milt!'

    'Lo, Charlie. Lo, Charlie,' they murmured. The political conflict continued. Charlie cut it down the seam:

    'I got somethin' here. I got somethin' you might wanna see!'

    Tom Carmody's eyes glinted, green in the lamp-light, from the General Store porch. It seemed to Charlie that Tom Carmody was forever installed under porches in shadow, or under trees in shadow, or if in a room then in the farthest niche shining his eyes out at you from his dark. You never knew what his face was doing, and his eyes were always funning you. And every time they looked at you they laughed a different way:

    'You ain't got nothin' we wants ta see, you dumb sheebaw!'

    Charlie made a fist with a blunt knuckle fringe. 'Somethin' in a jar,' he went on. 'Looks kine a like a brain, kine a like a pickled wolf, kine a like — well, come look yourself!'

    Somebody snicked their cigar into a fall of pink ash and ambled over to look. Charlie grandly elevated the jar lid, and in the uncertain lantern light the man's face changed. 'Hey, now, what in hell
is
this — ?'

    It was the first thaw of the night. Others shifted lazily upright, leaned forward; gravity pulled them into walking. They made no effort, except to keep one shoe afore the other to keep from collapsing upon their unusual faces. They circled the jar and contents. And Charlie, first time in his life, seized upon some strategy and clapped the lid down with a glass clatter:

    'You want to see more, drop aroun' my house! It'll be there,' he declared, generously.

    Tom Carmody spat from out his porch eyrie, 'Ha!'

    'Lemme see that again!' cried Gramps Medknowe. 'Is it a brain?'

    Charlie flapped the reins and the horse stumbled into action.

    'Come on aroun'! You're welcome!'

    'What'll your wife say?'

    'She'll kick the tar off'n our heels!'

    But Charlie and wagon were gone over the hill. They stood around, all of them, chewing tongues, squinting after. Tom Carmody swore softly from the porch. . .

    As Charlie climbed the steps of his shack, carrying the jar to its throne in the living-room, he thought that from now on the place would be a palace. The incumbent king swam without moving in his private pool, raised, elevated upon his shelf over the skinny table.

    This jar was the one thing that dispelled the grey sameness that hung over the place on the swamp-rim.

    'What've you got there?'

    Thedy's thin soprano turned him from his admiration. She stood in the bedroom door glaring out, her thin body clothed in faded blue gingham, her hair drawn to a drab knot behind red ears. Her eyes were faded like the gingham. 'Well,' she repeated. 'What is it?'

    'What's it look like to you, Thedy?'

    She took a thin step forward, making a slow indolent pendulum of hips. Her eyes were intent upon the jar, her lips drawing back to show feline milk teeth.

    The dead pale thing hung in its serum.

    Thedy snapped a dull-blue glance at Charlie, then back to the jar, once more at Charlie, once more to the jar, then she whirled quickly to clutch the wall.

    'It — it looks. It — looks just like —
you
— Charlie!' she shouted hoarsely.

    The bedroom door slammed behind her.

    The reverberation did not disturb the jar's contents. But Charlie stood there, longing after her, neck muscles long, taut, heart pounding frantically, and then after his heart slowed a bit, he talked to the thing in the jar:

    'I work the bottom land to the buttbone ever' year, and she takes the money and rushes off down home visitin' her folks nine weeks at a stretch. I can't keep holt of her. She and the men from the store they make fun of me. I can't help it if I don't know the ways to hold or touch or work her. Damn, but I
try!
'

    Philosophically, the contents of the jar gave no advice.

    'Charlie?'

    Someone stood in the front-yard door.

    Charlie turned, startled, then broke out a grin.

    It was some of the men from the General Store.

    'Uh — Charlie — we — that is — we thought — well — we came up to have a look at that — stuff — you got in that there jar — '

    July passed warm and it was August.

    For the first time in years, Charlie was happy as tall corn growing after a drought. It was gratifying of an evening to hear boots shushing through the tall grass, the sound of men spitting into the ditch prior to setting foot on the porch, the sound of heavy bodies creaking across it, and the groan of the house as yet another shoulder leaned against its frame door and another voice said, as a hairy wrist wiped clean the questioning mouth:

    'Kin I come in?'

    With elaborate casualness, Charlie'd invite the arrivals in. There'd be chairs, soap-boxes for all, or at least carpets to squat on. And by the time crickets were itching their legs into a summertime humming and frogs were throat-swollen like ladies with goitres shouting in the great night, the room would be full to bursting with people from all the bottom lands.

    At first nobody would say nothing. The first half-hour of such an evening, while people came in and got settled, was spent in carefully rolling cigarettes. Putting tobacco neatly into the rut of brown paper, loading it, tamping it, as they loaded and tamped and rolled their thoughts and fears and amazement for the evening. It gave them time to think. You could see their brains working behind their eyes as they fingered the cigarettes into smoking order.

    It was kind of a rude church gathering. They sat, squatted, leaned on plaster walls, and one by one, with reverent awe, they stared at the jar upon its shelf.

    They wouldn't stare sudden like. That would've been irreverent. No, they kind of did it slow, casual, as if they were glancing around the room — letting eyes fumble over just
any
old object that happened into their consciousness.

    And — just by accident, of course — the focus of their wandering eyes would occur always at the same place. After a while all eyes in the room would be fastened to it, like pins stuck in some incredible pin-cushion. And the only sound would be someone sucking a corn-cob. Or the children's barefooted scurry on the porch planks outside. Maybe some woman's voice would come, 'You kids git away, now! Git!' And with a giggle like soft, quick water, the bare feet would rush off to scare the bull-frogs.

    Charlie would be up front, naturally, on his rocking chair, a plaid pillow under his lean rump, rocking slow, enjoying the fame and looked-up-toness that came with keeping the jar.

    Thedy, she'd be seen way back of the room with the womenfolk in a bunch like grey grapes, abiding their menfolk.

    Thedy looked like she was ripe for jealous screaming. But she said nothing, just watched men tromp into her living-room and sit at the feet of Charlie staring at this here Holy Grail-like thing, and her lips were set as seven-day concrete and she spoke not a civil word to nobody.

    After a period of proper silence, someone, maybe old Gramps Medknowe from Crick Road, would clear the phlegm from his old throat's cavern, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips, maybe, and there'd be a curious tremble in his calloused fingers.

    This would cue everyone to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. People settled much as sows in warm mud after the rain.

    Gramps looked a long while, measured his lips with a lizard tongue, then settled back and said, like always, in a high thin old man's tenor:

    'Wonder what
it
is? Wonder if it's a he or a she or just a plain old
it?
Sometimes I wake up nights, twist on my corn-matting, think about that jar settin' here in the long dark. Think about
it
hangin' in liquid, peaceful and pale like an animal oyster. Sometimes I wake Maw and we both think of it. . .'

    While talking, Gramps moved his fingers in a quavering pantomime. Everybody watched his thick thumb weave, and the other heavy-nailed fingers undulate.

    '. . . we both lay there, thinkin'. And we shivers. Maybe a hot night, trees sweatin', mosquitoes too hot to fly, but we shivers jest the same, and turn over, tryin' to sleep. . .'

    Gramps lapsed back into silence, as if his speech was enough from him, let some other voice talk the wonder, awe and strangeness.

    Juke Marmer, from Willow Sump, wiped sweat off his palms on the round of his knees and softly said:

    'I remember when I was a runnel-nosed kid. We had a cat who was all the time makin' kittens. Lordamighty, she'd a litter ever time she turned around and skipped a fence — ' Juke spoke in a kind of holy softness, benevolent. 'Well, we usually gave the kittens away, but when this one particular litter busted out, everybody within walkin' distance had one-two our cats by gift, already.

    ' — So Ma busied on the back porch with a big two-gallon glass jar, fillin' it to the top with water. It slopped in the sunlight. Ma said, ‘Juke, you drown them kittens!' I ‘member I stood there, the kittens mewed, runnin' ‘round, blind, small, helpless and snuggly. Just beginnin' to get their eyes open. I looked at Ma, I said, ‘Not
me
, Ma!
You
do it!' But Ma turned pale and said it had to be done and I was the only one handy. And she went off to stir gravy and fix chicken. I — I picked up one — kitten. I held it. It was warm. It made a mewin' sound. I felt like runnin' away, not ever comin' back.'

    Juke nodded his head now, eyes bright, young, seeing into the past making it stark, chiselling it out with hammer and knife of words, smoothing it with his tongue: