Dark Carnival (6 page)

    'I dropped the kitten in the water.

    'The kitten closed his eyes, opened his mouth, tryin' for air. I ‘member how the little white fangs showed, the pink tongue came out, and bubbles with it, in a line to the top of the water!

    'I know to this day the way that kitten floated after it was all over, driftin' aroun', aroun', slow and not worryin', lookin' out at me, not condemnin' me for what I done. But not likin' me, neither. Ahhh. . .'

    Hearts beat fast. Eyes shifted quickly from Juke to the shelved jar, back to him, up again; a spectators' game, like one sees at a tennis tournament, interest changing from moment to moment, apprehensively.

    A pause.

    Jahdoo, the black man from Heron Swamp, tossed his ivory eyeballs like a dusky juggler in his head. His dark knuckles knotted and flexed — grasshoppers alive.

    'You know what thet is? You know, you
know?
I tells you. That am the centre of Life, sure ‘nuff! Lord believe me, it am so!'

    Swaying in a tree-like rhythm, Jahdoo was blown by some swamp wind nobody could see, hear or feel, save himself. His eyeballs went around again, as if loosened from all mooring. His voice needled a dark thread pattern picking up each person by the lobes of their ears and sewing them into one unbreathing design:

    'From that, lyin' back in the Middibamboo Sump, all sort o' thing crawl. It put out hand, it put out feet, it put out tongue an' horn an' it grow. Little bitty amoeba, perhap. Then a frog with a bulge-throat fit ta bust! Yah!' He cracked knuckles. 'It slobber on up to its gummy joints and it — it AM A MAN! That am the centre of creation! That am Middibamboo Mama, from which we all come ten thousand year ago. Believe it!'

    'Ten thousand year ago!' reiterated Granny Carnation.

    'It am old! Looky it! It donn worra no more. It know betta. It hang like pork chop in fryin' fat. It got eye to see with, but it donn blink ‘em, they donn look fretted, does they? No, man! It know betta. It know thet we done come
from
it, and we is goin' back
to
it!'

    'What colour eyes has it got?'

    'Grey.'

    'Naw,
green!
'

    'What colour hair? Brown?'

    'Black!'

    'Red!'

    'No,
grey!
'

    Then, Charlie would give his drawling opinion. Some nights he'd say the same thing, some nights not. It didn't matter. When you said the same thing night after night in the deep summer, it always sounded different. The crickets changed it. The frogs changed it. The thing in the jar changed it. Charlie said:

    'What if an old man went back into the swamp, or maybe a young kid, and wandered aroun' for years and years lost in the drippin' trails and gullies, the wet ravines in the nights, skin a turnin' pale, and makin' cold and shrivellin' up. Bein' away from the sun he'd keep witherin' away up and up and finally sink into a muck-hole and lay in a kind of — solution — like the maggot ‘skeeters sleepin' in liquid. Why, why — for all we know, this might be someone we know. Someone we passed words with once on a time. For all we know. . .'

    A hissing from among the womenfolk back in the shadow. One woman standing, eyes shining black, fumbling for words. Her name was Mrs. Tridden. She said:

    'Lots of little kids run stark naked into the swamp ever' year. They runs around and they never comes back. I almost got lost maself. I — I lost my little boy, Foley, that way. You — you DON'T SUPPOSE!!'

    Breaths were taken in, snatched through nostrils, constricted, tightened. Mouths turned down at corners, bent by grim facial muscles. Heads turned on celery-stalk necks, and eyes read her horror and hope. It was in Mrs. Tridden's body, wire-taut, holding on to the wall back of her with straight fingers stiff.

    'My baby,' she whispered. She breathed it out. 'My baby. My Foley. Foley! Foley, is that you? Foley! Foley, tell me, baby, is that YOU!'

    Everybody held their breath, turning to see the jar.

    The thing in the jar said nothing. It just stared blind-white out upon the multitude. And deep in raw-boned bodies a secret fear juice ran like spring thaw, and the resolute ice of calm life and belief and easy humbleness was cracked down the middle by that juice and melted away in a gigantic torrent! Someone screamed.

    'It moved!'

    'No, no, it didn' move. Just your eyes playin' tricks!'

    'Hones' ta God,' cried Juke. 'I saw it shift slow like a dead kitten!'

    'Hush up, now! It's been dead a long, long time. Maybe since before you was born!'

    'He made a sign!' screamed Mrs. Tridden, the mother woman. 'That's my baby, my Foley! My baby you got there! Three year old he was! My baby lost and white in the swamp!'

    The sobbing broke out of her.

    'Now, now, there now, Mrs. Tridden. There now. Set yourself down and stop shakin'. Ain't no more your child'n mine. There, there.'

    One of the womenfolk held her and faded out the sobbing into jerked breathing and a fluttering of her lips in butterfly quickness as the breath stroked over them, afraid.

    When all was quiet again, Granny Carnation, with a withered pink flower in her shoulder-length grey hair, sucked the pipe in her trap mouth and talked around it, shaking her head to make the hair dance in the light:

    'All this talking and shoving words. Like as not we'll never find out, never know what it is. Like as not if we could find out we wouldn't
want
to know. It's like them magic tricks them magicians do at the show. Once you find the fake, it ain't no more fun ‘n the innards of a jackbob. We come collecting around here every ten nights or so, talking, social-like, with something, always something, to talk about. Stands to reason if we found out what the damn thing is there'd be nothing to talk about, so there!'

    'Well, damn it to hell!' rumbled a bull voice. 'I don't think it's nothin'!'

    Tom Carmody.

    Tom Carmody standing, as always, in shadow. Out on the porch, just his eyes staring in, his lips laughing at you dimly, mocking. His laughter got inside Charlie like a hornet sting. Thedy had put him up to it, Thedy was trying to undermine Charlie's social life, she was!

    'Nothin',' repeated Carmody, harshly, 'in that jar but a bunch of old jelly-fish from Sea Cove, a rottin' and stinkin' fit to whelp!'

    'You mightn't be jealous, Cousin Carmody?' asked Charlie, slow.

    'Haw!' snorted Carmody. 'I just come aroun' ta watch you dumb cyppers jaw about nuthin'. I gits a kick outa it. You notice I never set foot inside or took part. I'm goin' home right now. Anybody wanna come along with me?'

    He got no offer of company. He laughed again, as if this were a bigger joke, how so many people could be so dumb, and Thedy was raking her palms with angry nails back of the room. Charlie felt a twinge of unexpected fear at this.

    Carmody, still laughing, rapped off the porch with his high-heeled boots and the sound of crickets took him away.

    Granny Carnation gummed her pipe. 'Like I was saying before the storm: that thing on the shelf, why couldn't it be sort of — all things? Lots of things. What they call a — gimmle — '

    'Symbol?'

    'That's it. Symbol. Symbol of all the nights and days in the dead canebrake. Why's it have to be
one
thing? Maybe it's
lots
.'

    And the talking went on for another hour, and Thedy slipped away into the night on the track of Tom Carmody, and Charlie began to sweat. They were up to something, those two. They were planning something. Charlie sweated warm all the rest of the evening. . .

    The meeting broke up late, and Charlie bedded down with mixed emotions. The meeting had gone off well, but what about Thedy and Tom Carmody?

    Very late, with certain star coveys shuttled down the sky marking the time as after midnight, Charlie heard the shushing of the tall grass parted by her penduluming hips. Her heels tacked soft across the porch, into the house, into the bedroom.

    She lay soundlessly in bed, cat eyes staring at him. He couldn't see them, but he could feel them staring.

    'Charlie?'

    He waited.

    Then he said, 'I'm awake.'

    Then she waited.

    'Charlie?'

    'What?'

    'Bet you don't know where I been, bet you don't know where I been.' It was a faint, derisive sing-song in the night.

    He waited.

    She waited again. She couldn't bear waiting long, though, and continued:

    'I been to the carnival over in Cape City. Tom Carmody drove me. We — we talked to the carny-boss, Charlie, we did, we did, we
sure
did.' And she sort of giggled to herself, secretly.

    Charlie was ice cold. He stirred upright on an elbow.

    She said, 'We found out what it is in your jar, Charlie — ' insinuatingly.

    Charlie flumped over, hands to ears. 'I don't wanna hear!'

    'Oh, but you gotta hear, Charlie. It's a good joke. Oh, it's rare, Charlie,' she hissed.

    'Go — away,' he said.

    'Unh-unh! No. No, sir, Charlie. Why, no, Charlie-Honey. Not until I tell!'

    'Go,' he said in a low, firm voice, 'away.'

    'Let me tell! We talked to that carny-boss, and he — he liked to die laughin', he said he sold that jar and what was in it to some, some — hick — for twelve bucks. And it ain't worth more'n two bucks at most!'

    Laughter bloomed in the dark, right out of her mouth, an awful kind of laughter.

    She finished it, snapping, quick:

    'It's just junk, Charlie! Liquid rubber, papier-mâché, silk cotton, chemicals! That's all! Got a metal frame inside it! That's all! That's all it is, Charlie! That's all!' she shrilled in triumph.

    'No, no!'

    He sat up swiftly, ripping sheets apart in big fingers, roaring, tears coming bright on his cheeks.

    'I don't wanna hear! Don't wanna hear!' he bellowed over and over.

    She teased. 'Wait'll everyone hears how fake it is! Won't they laugh! Won't they flap their lungs!'

    He caught her wrists. 'You ain't — gonna tell them?'

    'Ouch! You hurt me!'

    'You
ain't
gonna tell them.'

    'Wouldn't want me known as a liar, would you, Charles?'

    He flung her wrists like white sticks into a well:

    'Whyncha leave me alone? You dirty! Dirty jealous mean of ever'thing I do. I took shine off your nose when I brung the jar home. You didn' sleep right ‘til you ruined things!'

    She laughed nastily. 'Then I
won't
tell anybody,' she said.

    He caught on to her. 'You spoiled
my
fun. That's all that counted. It don't matter if you tell the rest.
I
know. And I'll never have no more fun. You and that Tom Carmody. Him laughin'. I wish I could stop him laughin'. He's been laughin' for years at me! Well, you just go tell the rest, the other people, now — might as well have your fun — !'

    He strode angrily, grabbed the jar so it sloshed, and would have flung it on the floor, but he stopped, trembling, and let it down softly on the spindly table. He leaned over it, sobbing. If he lost this, the world was gone. And he was losing Thedy, too. Every month that passed she danced further away, sneering at him, funning him. For too many years her hips had been the pendulum by which he reckoned the time of his living. But other men, Tom Carmody, for one, were reckoning time from the same source.

    Theyd was standing, waiting for him to smash the jar. Instead, he petted and stroked and gradually quieted himself over it. He thought of the long good evenings in the past month, those rich evenings of camaraderie, conversation moving about the room. That, at least, was good, if nothing else.

    He turned slowly to Thedy. She was lost forever to him.

    'Theyd, you didn't go to the carnival.'

    'Yes, I did.'

    'You're lyin',' he said, quietly.

    'No, I'm not!'

    'This — this jar
has
to have somethin' in it. Somethin' besides the junk you say. Too many people believe there's somethin' in it. Thedy. You can't change that. The carny-boss, if you talked with him, he lied.' Charlie took a deep breath and then said, 'Come here, Thedy.'

    'What you want?' she asked, sullenly.

    'Come over here.'

    'No, I won't.'

    He took a step towards her. 'Come here.'

    'Keep away from me, Charlie.'

    'Just want to show you something, Thedy.' His voice was soft, low and insistent. 'Here, kittie. Here kittie, kittie, kittie — HERE KITTIE!'

    It was another night, about a week later. Gramps Medknowe and Granny Carnation came, followed by young Juke and Mrs. Tridden and Jahdoo the coloured man. Followed by all the others, young and old, sweet and sour, creaking into chairs, each with his or her thought, hope, fear and wonder in mind. Each not looking at the shrine, but saying hello softly to Charlie.

    They waited for the others to gather. From the shine of their eyes one could see that each saw something different in the jar, something of the life and the pale life after life, and the life in death and the death in life, each with his story, his cue, his lines, familiar, old but new.

    Charlie sat alone.

    'Hello, Charlie.' Somebody glanced around, into the empty bedroom. 'Where's your wife? Gone off again to visit her folks?'

    'Yeah, she run off again to Tennessee. Be back in a couple weeks. She's the darndest one for runnin'. You know Thedy.'

    'Great one for ganntin' around, that woman.'

    Soft voices talking, getting settled, and then, quite suddenly, walking into the dark porch and shining his eyes in at the people — Tom Carmody.

    Tom Carmody standing outside the door, knees sagging and trembling, arms hanging and shaking at his side, staring into the room. Tom Carmody not daring to enter. Tom Carmody with his mouth open, but not smiling. His lips wet and slack, not smiling. His face pale as chalk, as if it had been kicked with a boot.