Kaleidoscope (22 page)

“Was enough to make anybody give up the show, but not The Little Giant, no, sir; Mr. Wortham, he wouldn’t have any of us followin’ the banner. Said if we wanted out, he’d let us go, but if we wanted to rebuild he’d back whatever loan was necessary to get us back on sawdust.

“Most of us stayed. Mr. Wortham set me up with a pair of clowns. Mike and Milly, they were. Had themselves a carney wedding, which is to say no wedding at all, but I never saw two more devoted people in my life.

“He juggled on stilts. She worked the benches. They’d do three shows a day and still take time to teach me to juggle.”

Luna scooped three oranges from the bed stand and within seconds the sweet-nectared balls were chasing each other in complicated variations that seemed to defy gravity.

She let the fruit drop with a synchronized plop to the sheets.

“Mike was strong as an ox but Milly was frail. Something with her lungs, everybody knew, but she wouldn’t quit. Wouldn’t let Mike quit, either. So next thing you know we’re on a gilly to Toledo, opening for the rubes on a Thursday night. Mike’s in the pit keeping his firesticks and balls and fake anvils in the air. Milly’s playin’ the straight. Gettin’ bellies from the marks. It was pretty hard work and I can remember at one point I told Mr. Wortham, I said, ‘Looks like Milly’s slowing down.’

“Well, she wasn’t slowing down, she was dying. She took a couple of staggering steps just after Mike got his fourth live torch in rotation and then she collapses right there in the pit. Right in front of everybody.

“Mike drops off his stilts and before you can say Jack Johnson he’s got her in his arms. She’s not moving. He’s talkin’ to her but she’s not saying anything. So there you are. Man and wife. Mike and Milly in greasepaint and clown face. You could just hear the crowd suck in their breath—‘What’s wrong?’ the marks are thinking.

“‘Or
is
anything wrong? Is it just part of the act?!’ You can just about hear ’em. So how would you play the rubes, Jack? If it was your wife in the ring, what would you do?”

She did not wait for his reply.

“Mike just puts on his funniest frown, picks Millie up and carries her for the curtains, but before he gets there—and I could see tears streaking his paint—he turns back to the stands and gives ’em a big-ass glowing smile and with Milly’s hand waves ’em a goodbye.

“Just as if there wasn’t nothin’ wrong in the world. Just so the rubes’ll think it’s part of the act.”

Luna collected the oranges and returned them to the bowl.

“Only a carney can understand the kind of love it takes to do that, the loyalty. Y’see, Jack, a carney, a real carney, always knows the real thing when he sees it.”

She placed his shaving razor beside the oranges. The moon pouring through the flimsy curtains that barred the window.

“Lie back.”

She straddled him in bed, shedding her blouse in one smooth pull over her head. The hair tumbling down black as onyx over that marvelous lunar skin.

A valley running down the middle of her abdomen. Her breasts gleaming dark in the peach moon. She reached gently for the buttons on his shirt.

Jack stopped her.

“Not yet.”

If she was offended or hurt or even puzzled she did not show it. She did not insist. She did not demand an explanation, for which Jack was grateful.

He was unsure what was real and what was not in this crazy, kaleidoscope world. And even if Jack could believe that Luna was able to see past the blisters and stitches scouring his face there was another fear, deeper, even more unsettling—

Jack knew that Luna could not trust him.

How could he trust her?

Their lovemaking, the tender care—was it the real thing? Or were Luna’s attentions no more than an act, a con, a hustle? Jack could not erase the exchange he had witnessed on the street below the apartment—were those honest earnings in that leather bag or a dip from Bladehorn’s bucket? There were too many secrets to trust, bags handed over in the dead of night, rendezvous in dark streets and bright luxury hotels. And she could be ruthless; Charlie Blade was proof of that.

Jack wanted Luna. He wanted to have the totally abandoned frenzy he had already experienced in those strong arms. once again or a hundred times or forever He wanted to feel her legs locked in a vice around his hips. But before Jack could have that, he had to trust her. He needed one additional piece of the puzzle filled in.

Within the week that piece fell into place.

It was the reply to Jack’s late-night telegram. He paid for the wire, scanned its contents, and then crossed the street to Luna’s place. A mid-morning sun filled the café with an autumnal light. The other carnies were through with breakfast and dispersed to the midway in prep for their Saturday show. Luna looked up from her coffee to see Jack negotiating the back door on a cane.

“Moving around pretty well, there.”

“Gotta get back to work sometime.” He offered a smile.

“Coffee?” She was already pouring a cup.

“Thanks,” as he spooned in some sugar.

“I notice you got your things packed upstairs,” she took a stool. “There’s no hurry, you know. You can take your time.”

“Thanks, but I need to get back in the swing.”

She nodded. “Be good to see you back.”

“’Course, there are a couple things I’d like to clear up first.”

“Clear what? What do you mean?”

Jack turned to face her squarely.

“It means for one thing that I know who Alex Goodman really is. That’s ‘is’, by the way, not ‘was’.”

“Do tell.”

“Did you know Doctor Snyder came here from Louisiana?” Jack spread his telegram on the counter. “See I know ’cause he told me so himself.”

“Louisiana, yes,” she kept a blank face. “So?”

“So I ran a check on his schooling. Sure enough, there’s Doc at Tulane Medical School, graduating with his M.D. in 1915.”

“I’d have been happy to tell you that myself, Jack.”

“But you haven’t told me his name, have you, Luna? Not his full name.”

“What’s in a name?” she quipped.

“A riddle,” he replied, and read from the telegram, “‘Doctor Alexander Bonham Snyder’. Now, you speak a little French, don’t you Miz Chevreaux?
N’est ce pas
? So you probably realize that ‘Bonham’, a fine, Southern name, can be traced to the French
bon homme
, isn’t that right?

“
Bon homme
can mean lots of things but one way to translate it, for sure, is literally, which would make
bon homme
a ringer for ‘good man’. Not far from there, is it, to get Alexander ‘Good Man’? Or why not Alex Goodman?”

“Must be something in your java, Jack.”

“I saw him give you his bag, Luna. The man in the straw hat, that was Doc, wasn’t it? And that was his medical bag. So what’s in the satchel, Madame Chevreaux? Was it cash? Was it certificates of stock? Little of both, maybe?”

“You’re treeing the wrong coon, Jack.”

“But not the wrong carney.”

“You sure of that?”

“I’ve know for a while that somebody’s picking up the tab for a lot of bad debt in this beddy. I know a lot more goes back and forth to Tampa than timber and The Fat Lady. I saw you at the Mirasol.”

“And what about you, Jack?” she retorted coldly. “What brought you down from the Midwest to snoop? Who are you really working for up there?”

“The hell should I trust you with that information?” he growled.

“TRUST?! You have the nerve to talk to me about
trust
? You’ve lied to me ever since you got down here! Telling us you met Alex over drinks! Just a whim got you on the train? ‘Starting over’? My ass.”

“You take property belongs to somebody else, Luna, they ain’t obliged to play straight getting it back.”

“Ah. But whose property is it, Jack? Who owned it in the first place?”

“You tell me.”

She shook her head. “I can’t, Jack. I won’t.”

Jack caught his reflection in the polished brass of the coffee pot. A distorted image, misshapen.

A freak.

“Look,” Jack took a deep breath. “The man sent me down here, he’s got my family, awright? My mother-in-law. My boy.”

She regarded him a long moment. “The man who cut you. Is he after the same thing you are?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t get in his way.”

“You think I want to? If it wasn’t for my family I wouldn’t even be down here!”

“Then go get your family. Get them as far away from Bladehorn as you can.”

“So…” he pulled up. “You do know about Bladehorn. That about tells the story, doesn’t it?”

“Half the story, Jack, and believe me half of this story is more a lie than anything you can imagine.”

“So tell me the other half.”

“I can’t.”

“Won’t.”

“Can’t. You’re not the only one with family to protect.”

Jack shifted his weight. “Then just give me some of the loot. Something I can take back to Cincinnati. Give me the cash, if there’s any left. Or the railroad notes—surely you haven’t run through a quarter million in stocks! Give me whatever’s left,
half
of what’s left, and I’ll tell Bladehorn the rest is gone, spent. He’ll never know!”

She pulled a handful of bills from her blouse.

“This should take you pretty far.”

“Not far enough.”

“I’m sorry,” her eyes were wet. “It’s all I can do.”

Chilling the Mark—
getting rid of a customer before he becomes a problem
.

A
rno Becker hummed as he held the spoon over the candle, watching the concoction bubble as wax dripped carelessly onto the hood of the sturdy Packard.

“Soup’s on.”

Charlie Blade shivered on the fenderwell of Becker’s coupe, his eyes gaunt tunnels in a face stretched tight as cowhide.

“Gimme!” The syringe in the knife-thrower’s hand had been ready for minutes.

“You must learn to delay gratification, Charlie,” Arno chided. “Pleasures taken too quickly leave one unfulfilled. Sex, for instance. You want to delay the climax as long as possible. Make them beg. Same thing for murder. Or sex and murder—there’s a term for that combination escapes me at present.”

“God damn it, I gotchu what you want!”

“The cash and bonds? Really? Then kindly place them in the car.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“And you know the deal.” Arno moved the spoon off its tapered cooker.

“Don’t do that!” Charlie begged.

Arno smiled. “There’s plenty more, Charlie. Quality, too, excellent product which you may see for yourself
if
you give me something I can actually fucking use.”

“I followed Luna to the Mirasol,” Blade gave it up in a gush.

“I know about the Mirasol. And Luna. Jack Romaine was happy to provide that information.”

“Yeah, I saw Jack. But did he tell you about Doc Snyder?”

“The doctor?”

“Doc got to the hotel ahead of Luna. I was surprised, see, ’cause I heard Doc sayin’ at the café he was goin’ into town to stock up the infirmary. I tailed him, hopin’ I could get a line on whatever pharmacy he was usin’, someplace I might could get something for my habit, see—”

“You mean steal it.”

“But anyway Doc, he didn’t go into Tampa; he went out to the Island, to the hotel. He gets out of his car dressed like a goddamn fag, some kinda boater and corsage. Wasn’t the first time, neither, I could tell ’cause the valets all knew him. Greeted him by name.”

“Did you follow him inside?”

“Take a look at me—I couldn’t get past the concierge. Romaine, now, he looks like a fucking movie star; he can get in anyplace.”

Arno smiled. “Perhaps no longer.”

Becker leaning over then to inspect the heroin cooking on the hood of his automobile.

“I believe we’re ready, Charles.”

Charlie lifting his syringe to the offered spoon.

“Don’t spill,” Arno said amused.

Charlie pulled the cloudy opiate from the bowl of the spoon into his hypo. Rolled up his sleeve. But then—

“Shit, I forgot my tourniquet!”

“Use your shirt,” Arno advised.

Charlie laid the syringe beside its candle cooker with trembling hands, ripped off his shirt, tied off his arm.

“C’mon, baby!”

He thumped a vein with a filthy thumbnail; it swelled a distended pipe in an emaciated arm. He snatched the syringe off the hood.

“You ain’t gonna regret this,” he babbled to Becker. “I can get you more!”

“We’ll see.”

The up-and-comer sucking in deeply with the first, full penetration.

“Yeah…Yeah,
man
—!”

Charlie Blade pushed the plunger to the stop. A laugh of euphoria, or relief.

“Pretty good?” Arno inquired.

“Good?! Oh, daddy, this is the
best
…the best—”

“’S’matter, Charlie?”

Blade’s head jerked back as though he were swallowing a broadsword. A croak gargled from deep inside his chest.

“Tell me, Charlie. I’d like to know what it’s like.”

“IT…! IT…!”

His head snaps down. His legs collapse. His hands claw the steel fender as Charlie Blade slides down the Packard’s chrome grille to the sand. Arno leaned over to observe the needle still pulsing in the dead man’s arm. Something like foam bubbling from that impervious throat.

“Was good though, wasn’t it, Charlie? Best you ever had.”

Once in a blue moon would a blue moon rise over the blue landscape of Luna Chevreaux’s sleeping body. The Moon Maiden never wore clothes to bed. A dulcet breeze through the window encouraged naked, sensual slumber. Pleasant dreams. But a terrified clamor stirred Luna on her bed. An elephant’s trumpet, repeated and panicked, calling like Gabriel’s horn.

“What?”

Luna raised herself up on an arm to see a red glow flickering on her window like the reflected flames of some distant fireplace.

Jack Romaine saw it, too. He was tossing between dreams by the open window of his shack when the smell of smoke jerked him from sleep. Rising to see red tongues flickering above the pines.

“FIRE!”

Jack stumbling into the street on his cane.

“TOMMY! LUNA! FIIIIIIIRE!!”

A growing firestorm fed by the breeze and fueled by hay and timber and tar had already swept from the midway into the surrounding pine trees and tents and trailers. You could see the Ferris Wheel lit up like a giant, burning pinwheel. Jack broke into a painful hobble behind Tommy Speck and a score of other performers scrambling for buckets.

“THE ANIMALS!” Tommy shouted. “GET ’EM OUT!!”

The roar of tigers and the whine of horses now adding to the general panic. Flames billowing like sails on an awful wind as carnies scrambled to bring thimbles of water to the conflagration. Jack saw Penguin and Flambé brave a burning haystack to free the big cats from their cages. Lions and tigers turned out to meet the bears native to Florida lowlands, the cats’ primal screams rising with the snap of resin and wood.

And then came the familiar trumpet, high and long, rising above the rest. Even in that din Jack recognized Ambassador’s call and knew as well its source—

Peewee’s tent.

“Oh, Jesus!”

He saw it right away, the Big Top sheeted in fire. A giant light for some giant moth.

“PEEWEE!” Jack forced himself to a run. “TOMMY, IT’S PEEWEE!!”

By the time Jack covered the fifty yards remaining between him and the Princess’s tent a score of carnies had converged. The pavilion was combed in fire, sparks spiraling to heaven from its canvas roof, and worse, a separate fire raging inside.

“PEEWEEE!” The Giant bellowed. “PEEWEEE!!”

Peewee could not hear the calls from outside her tent. Nothing to hear above the fire’s angry roar but the trumpet of an elephant going berserk. The Princess was trapped on three sides by a sheet of fire, only the tent’s high wall saving her from suffocation, the smoke coiling black and noxious.

Peewee was screaming, sparks dancing like evil clowns on the tinder of her books, her bedsheets. There was one route to escape, but Peewee could not see it. A single, narrow section of canvas that had been soaked with Ambassador’s afternoon bath was steaming but not yet afire. The rails which brought her meal cart led to that narrow exit. But even if Peewee had seen that escape, she could not take advantage. Any other woman would simply drop to the sawdust floor and follow the iron to freedom. Even a panicked woman or man might scramble on hands and knees from the bed’s location to that steaming door. Either that or dive into the tank. Better to suffocate than to burn.

But Peewee could not crawl. She could not leave her bed unaided, anchored by six hundred and fifty pounds of unwieldy flesh to a linen box surrounded by tinder and tar and fire.

“AMBASSADOR!!” she screamed.

But her guardian paid no attention. He was a bull elephant filled with fear and blinded by smoke and the smell of death. The only voice speaking to the beast now was telling him to run! To flee!

Ambassador lunged in a rage against the chains and stobs that tied him to the ground. But then he used his tusks, lowering the massive head to pry beneath a length of that hated perimeter. Another gut-wrenching trumpet of fear and rage and then—

Peewee heard the chain break even if she could not see it.

“AMBASSADOR—!”

But the only thing speaking to Ambassador was the call to survive. Jack saw the bull come charging from the tent in a boil of smoke, dragging half a ton of chain like straw. Carnies scattering like quail before that mad rogue.

Jack whirling to find someone, anyone!

“GIANT.”

The black man lumbered up, an axe loose in his hand.

“PEEWEE. WE GOTTA TRY.”

The Giant visored his eyes with a raised hand.

“How we gonna move her?”

“
You
move her!”

The huge black man shook his head.

“Cain’t. Hell, I couldn’ drag her out.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack stumbled to the railway. “Wait a minute, what about the feeding cart? The cart, Giant! THERE!”

Peewee’s meal cart was chocked in plain sight on the narrow rails and within seconds Jack and The Giant had their shoulders to the wheel. They had to get the cart inside. There was carnage all around, performers and workers scrambling in desperate efforts to save loved ones or belongings. Animals screaming at odd intervals. Some would not make it out of their cages.

Jack thought of the trenches, during a shelling. Or the machine-guns, whistles and spades and bayonets. Men screaming. How the hoot of gas or the crash of artillery numbed you, kept you from doing what needed to be done. He had to remind himself that there were no shells here. No machine guns. No barbed wire. But the smell of death was the same, that acrid aroma of fire and smoke and men pissing in their pants.

The heat from Peewee’s tent hit them like a blast furnace. The rails picking up heat as they disappeared into the interior.

“KEEP IT UP!” Jack and The Giant were running, now, accelerating the iron cart like a ram aimed at a medieval keep. Faster—Faster! Jack latched on with both arms, kicking back with the heel of his good foot. Kicking hard!

They rode the cart through the break in Peewee’s tent and into a theater of flame. Nothing to see but black, black smoke and then—

BAM! The cart slammed squarely into the side of Peewee’s bed.

“PEEWEE!!” Jack called out. “He…help!” she answered listlessly.

Her ragdoll nearly invisible in that valley of breast. “GET ON THE CART, PRINCESS!”

“I…I can’t.”

“Yes, you can! Giant, help me.”

The black man was already reaching beneath Peewee’s shoulders.

“Awright, Peewee, you need to help us. Just roll over to the cart. Got it? Just roll over, baby, and we’ll do the rest.”

Her whimpered reply lost in the firestorm.

“ONE, TWO, HEAVE!”

Jack straining with the giant carney to roll more than six hundred frightened pounds onto the cart.

She barely budged.

The tent’s center pole cracking ominously. Like a mast in a storm.

“Oh, GOD!” Peewee pulled a pillow over her face and Jack snatched it away.

“NO!”

He was choking himself as he leapt onto her bed and took her terrified face into his hands.

“LISTEN TO ME PRINCESS! I am
not
going to die in this place because
you
give up, you hear me? You
can do
this, Princess. Just rock with me, honey.”

“Rock a bye?” she asked in refrain.

“Rock when we push, Princess. Back and forth! Hard as you can, baby!”

“I’ll try.”

“NO,” and Jack slapped her hard across the face. “Trying’s for losers! There’s no trying, here, Peewee. Now GET READY. GIANT—?”

“READY, BOSS.”

“ONE—TWO—!”

Peewee moving, now, back and forth, once…twice…

“NOW.”

They heeeeaved together. The Princess rolled to the edge of her bed, teetered. That’s when Giant planted his paddle-sized boot on her butt and kicked Peewee onto the cart.

“WE’RE ON.”

Jack threw a blanket over Peewee and was back to the cart, but now all four walls of the tent were wrapped in fire and, worse, a raging ring of flame inside closed to block any escape. There was no way out except through the blaze and the smoke was so thick Jack could barely see his hand. He dropped to his knees by the cart and found Giant.

“WE…WE TRAPPED?” the big man was near panic himself.

What could they do? Jack felt his back on the side of the water tank.

“THE TANK, GIANT!”

“TANK?”

“THE WATER TANK. USE YOUR AXE!”

The Giant snatched up his tool. Two strides took him to the recently repaired tank. His arms bulged like Hephaestus as he swung the head true along the seam. Sparks flying with that awful blow.

“Hurry!” Peewee wracked. “Hurry!”

The Giant ripped the head free and swung again. And again. A boy’s pee of water sprang along the riveted zipper.

“KEEP IT UP!” Jack urged. “KEEP IT UP, YOU BIG SON OF A BITCH!”

Another stroke drew sparks, and another. A wrench of metal groaning, groaning, the black man swinging still in a spill of water.

“GET BACK, GIANT!”

The big man leaped aside and as he did a thousand gallons of water split the tank like a gourd.

“GRAB HOLD!” Jack threw himself onto the cart with Giant as a wall of water slapped into them.

A small tsunami carried them along the rails. Princess Peewee rode that wave, breaching hell on the top of her iron cart. Jack and The Giant hung on ’till the wave washed out, legs pumping, pumping like pistons until they were free and clear, free and clear.

Free and clear.

All night the carnies groped to contain the fire, those without arms or legs laboring beside their neighbors. By the time the sun rose over the sultry Alafia the only structure standing was Luna’s café. The late October breeze shifted by midmorning to stir flames and raise ashes in dervishes from the scoria that remained. Stumps of lumber and tires smoked like smudgepots. Trailers and caravanserai slumped on their chassis in black heaps. Kaleidoscope’s misshapen survivors scoured the terrain like alien beings on an alien planet.

A charnel house steamed all about, the smell of flesh—animals roasted in their cages. And not just animals, Jack learned.

“Not Flambé!”

The man who trained fire-swallowers and elephants for decades found dead in his bed.

Half Track rustled up a late breakfast for the survivors. The Giant squatted over a plate of biscuits and syrup implacable as any Oriental. Doc Snyder was there, tending the wounded. Tommy had been badly burned when he gripped the scalding bars on the tiger’s cage; Doc was advising the dwarf’s wife to keep Speck’s wounds open to the air.