Peyton Place (43 page)

“When the fire reaches the river–” the men said, and then stopped. If the fire progressed far enough to the west, it would eventually reach the river and be stopped, but there was no river to the east to compare in size and width with the Connecticut.

“If it would rain–” and there was the answer which everyone knew to be the only answer. As the fire crept swiftly to within a mile of Peyton Place, everyone looked up at the cloudless September sky and said, “If it would rain–”

The shops and business of the town were either closed altogether or opened for two hours a day whenever the men could remain away from the fire area for that long. The Cumberland Mills were closed completely, and it was not only the lack of textile production which caused Leslie Harrington to curse senselessly and pace his floor. It was the fact that in northern New England there was a gentlemen's agreement which decreed that an employer would continue to pay his help as if they were working at their regular jobs while they were out fighting a fire. It was the prohibitive cost of the fire which enraged Leslie, plus the fact that there seemed to be nothing he could do to rectify the situation. No matter how he cursed and raged, the fire would not stop. By the end of the first week in September, Leslie was the only able-bodied man in town who had not been out into the hills.

“The fire is costing me plenty,” he said. “I've paid a hundred times over for the right to sit back and watch this show.”

Also, by the time the Labor Day week end rolled around, he had other things to do. Besides the Cumberland Mills, Leslie Harrington was the owner of a small carnival. There was a rather tired town joke concerning Leslie's carnival. The mill hands said that Leslie kept them working all summer in order to be able to take their money away from them with the penny-pitch and wheel of fortune games which were the high spots of his carnival. Leslie had come into possession of the carnival after having taken over the mortgage on it from the Citizens’ National Bank. The bank had been ready to foreclose on the carnival's original owner, a true “carny” by the name of Jesse Witcher, who liked his whisky and his women, as he put it, a helluva lot more than he enjoyed paying his bills. This attitude was not one to arouse sympathy in the hearts of bankers, especially in Peyton Place where everyone remembered the Witchers. Feast or famine, that was the Witchers. They had always been like that. The bank had been on the verge of sending Buck McCracken to serve a foreclosure notice on Jesse Witcher when Leslie Harrington had intervened.

“For God's sake, Leslie, have you gone off your rocker?” Charles Partridge had asked. “A carnival! What for? You'll get stuck with it. Witcher won't pay you any more than he paid the bank.”

“I know it,” Leslie had admitted.

“Well, then. Leave it alone, Leslie. What in hell would you do with a carnival? It's no kind of investment.”

“Don't I have the right to buy something to enjoy myself with, same as anybody else?” Leslie had shouted, angry at having to explain a senseless business venture to his lawyer who had always regarded him as practical and hardheaded. “God damn it, Charlie, I got a right to have something just for the hell of it, don't I? With some men it's electric trains or postage stamps. With me it's carnivals.”

Leslie had jutted out his chin at a belligerent angle, daring Partridge to laugh or criticize, but Partridge, a pacifist, did neither. He drew up the papers, and not too much later he instigated the foreclosure proceedings which made Leslie the sole owner of a carnival heretofore known as “The Show of 1000 Laffs.” Jesse Witcher was well pleased. He could still run his beloved carnival, as Leslie's manager, without any of the worries which besieged an owner.

The Show, as Leslie liked to refer to it casually, had played Peyton Place on every Labor Day since Leslie had become owner six years before, a fact which had shocked Witcher at first, and shocked him still.

“This ain't no place to play over Labor Day,” complained Witcher. “Labor Day's big. A long week end. We oughta be down around Manchester or someplace like that where we'd get a crowd. There ain't enough people around here to make a decent-sized crowd.”

“The mills are closed over Labor Day,” said Leslie. “So I might just as well be making a few nickels one way as another.”

“But you could be making dollars instead of nickels someplace else,” protested Witcher.

“I like to see money being made,” Leslie said, and Witcher shrugged and set up his rides and games and soft drink stands on a large empty field, also owned by Leslie Harrington, near the mills.

Witcher had not protested again after his first year as manager of The Show, but when he arrived in Peyton Place on the Friday before Labor Day, 1939, and saw the empty streets, the closed shops and the fires, he went at once to Leslie Harrington.

“This time,” he said, “it ain't only a question of making a few nickels. It's a question of losing money. There ain't nothing sadder, nor more expensive, in this world than a carnival with no people. And there won't be no people in Peyton Place this week end.”

“They'll come,” said Leslie. “Set it up.”

Witcher rubbed at eyes made sore by the smoke that seemed to be everywhere. It hung suspended over the empty field where Witcher coughed out orders for the unloading of the vans. He looked through the smoky haze to where the fires burned.

“It's like dancing at somebody's funeral,” he grumbled.

Surprisingly enough, people did turn out. It might have seemed like dancing at a funeral to Witcher, but to the fire-tired, smoke-weary residents of Peyton Place the carnival seemed like a breather, an oasis of fun in the midst of extremely uncomical surroundings. Allison MacKenzie was there because Dr. Swain had said that she should get out of her room and into a crowd. She was still pale and tired looking, but she was there, flanked by Tomas Makris and Constance. Rodney Harrington was there with a bright-lipped girl from White River who looked up at him as if she thought all the wonderful things that Rodney wanted her to think. Kathy Ellsworth was there with her crew-cut boy friend Lewis Welles. There were some in Peyton Place who did not take to Lewis. He was an open-faced boy who wore a constant grin. It was Lewis’ ambition to become the top salesman in the drug concern at White River where he now worked as a stock boy, and there were some who said that Lewis should not have a hard time in realizing his hopes. They referred, of course, to his easy smile, his penchant for practical jokes and his sorry habit of greeting people with a resounding slap across the shoulders. Where others found him insincere and loud, Kathy thought him diplomatic, gay and wonderful.

On the evening of Labor Day, the empty field near the mills was no longer empty. In fact, everybody in town was there except Norman Page. It was a shoving, laughing, raucous crowd, a crowd that made the noises of gaiety in a fiercely determined way which Seth Buswell found peculiarly terrible.

“They're goin’ to have a good time or die tryin’,” he told Tom grimly.

From the ground, it was impossible to see the top seats on the Ferris wheel. Only the bright lights which decorated the sides of the wheel were visible through the smoky haze, so that it looked as though the people in the seats were disappearing into another world as the wheel spun slowly. For some reason, Allison thought of a play she had read called
Outward Bound,
and she shivered, but the wheel was getting a heavy play.

“Take a ride on the Ferris wheel,” barked Witcher. “Get up there and breathe air again. No smoke when you get to the top in this gigantic wheel of pleasure.”

The people laughed shrilly and pushed and did not believe him, but they rode the Ferris wheel. Children rubbed red-rimmed eyes and cried for rides on the carousel through dry, itching throats, and older children screamed on the dodgem and on the whip, while grownups were taken, retching, from the loop-the-loop. Allison shivered more violently than before as she absorbed the sights and sounds all around her, and Tom said: “We had better take you home.”

“Oh, don't!” cried Kathy Ellsworth, who had had a tearful reunion with her friend Allison the week before. Kathy clung to Lewis Welles's hand and said, “Oh, don't take her home! Come with us, Allison. We haven't gone to the fun house yet. Come on!”

“The wind!” yelled someone in the crowd. “The wind's comin’ up strong. It's gonna rain!”

The crowd screamed with laughter, and Seth Buswell tipped his head back. Although he could not see the sky, he could feel a new stirring in the air.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Come on, Allison. We haven't gone to the fun house yet. Come with Lew and me!”

Someone carrying a fat cone of cotton candy pushed past Allison, and a shred of the fuzzy stuff brushed against her cheek. Once when she was a child playing hide and go seek she had run into a barn and straight into a cobweb. It had stuck to her face stickily, just like cotton candy. Allison felt as if she were in a nightmare and trying to vomit, but unable to because she could not wake.

“Soft drinks right here!”

“Ride the Ferris wheel and breathe air again!”

“Step right up, gentlemen, step right up. Three balls for a quarter.”

“Win a beautiful, genuwine French doll for your lady, mister. Try your luck.”

“Ice cream. Peanuts. Popcorn. Cotton candy.”

“The wheel of fortune goes round and round, and where she stops nobody knows!”

And over it all, the music, playing in the peculiar up-and-down, and-up-and-down-and-around rhythm of the carousel. Allison grabbed at Kathy's free hand as if she were drowning.

“Come with us, Allison. Come with us!”

“Connie, I don't think she feels well.”

Allison ran with Kathy and Lewis, and Tom's voice calling her disappeared like a shadow in a thunderstorm.

The fun house of “The Show of 1000 Laffs” was the regulation building of horrors common to all carnivals. Parents who knew from experience that their young would be carried from it, screaming, if allowed to enter, avoided it, but it was doing a big business with the youngsters of high school age and older. The fun house, it was said, was guaranteed to have a fellow's girl clinging to him within seconds, or your money back. Jesse Witcher was justly proud of his fun house. It had helped to bankrupt him. It had everything–evil faces which jumped up in front of the patrons at unexpected moments, distorting mirrors, slanted floors, intricate mazes of dimly lit passages, and a laugh-getting, blush-producing wind machine. Witcher loved the fun house. Usually he presided over it himself, and always he saw to it personally that the machinery to operate his horribly funny effects was well oiled and in perfect running order.

“There's nothing falls flatter,” he had told Leslie Harrington, “than a scary effect that happens a second too late, or the bat of an eyelash too soon.”

But this Labor Day week end had been a hectic one. The local labor on which Jesse Witcher depended to help with the setting up of the carnival had been nonexistent this year. All the men and boys old enough and strong enough to be of any use were off fighting the fire. Witcher had been everywhere, “like a goddamned mosquito,” as he later explained to Leslie, trying to get the carnival going. He had seen to it that the fun house was erected, and the machinery in operation. Then he had entrusted the final details to a performer who threw knives at his mistress in the show, and to a thin-shouldered boy of sixteen from White River, whose ambition it was to be a mechanic with a traveling carnival. Witcher had not regretted hiring the boy. The fun house was drawing a crowd, and from the shrieks that came from the exit, where the wind grate was, the boy must certainly be pushing the right buttons at the right time. At four o'clock, Witcher had set out to take a look at the fun house, to make sure that everything was as it should be. He had not had a chance to check it over all week end, but as he was walking toward it, someone had called to him and he had gone to help fix the wheel of fortune which was Leslie Harrington's favorite, and with which something had gone momentarily wrong. As he later explained, the crowd had begun to come then, and he had not had a chance to check the fun house at all.

It was after nine o'clock in the evening when Allison, dragged along by Kathy and Lewis, passed through the entrance of the fun house. The three made their way, single file, with Lewis leading them through the dim, purple-lighted maze of corridors. Kathy giggled nervously and clung to the back of Lewis’ shirt, while Allison, feeling the sweat on her that all small, tight places brought, clung to the back of the waistband on Kathy's skirt. It was crowded and hot in the narrow passages, and when they reached the room full of distorting mirrors, Kathy stretched and jumped happily.

“Look at me!” she cried, as she ran from one mirror to the next. “I'm two feet tall and big as a barn!”

“Look at me! I'm a bean pole. Look! I've got a triangle-shaped head!”

“Oh, look! This must be the machinery that run everything. Look at the way all those wheels go round and round. Oh! Look at that huge fan. It must be what makes the wind blow at the exit!”

The machinery was on the ground, under the floor, but visible through a square cut in the floor boards. The square was large enough to allow a man to get down to work on the machinery once the fun house had been erected, and it was in a far corner of the room which housed the distorting mirrors. There was nothing near the square opening, and perhaps Kathy would never have noticed it if she had not been dancing around delightedly in front of the tall, wavy series of distorting mirrors. Afterward, neither Lewis nor Allison could say what it had been that attracted Kathy to the far corner of the room. It could not have been a sound from the machinery, as Jesse Witcher later testified, for the machinery was well oiled, in good condition and fairly silent. Besides, he said, the fun house was made of plywood, certainly not soundproofed, and the noise of the carnival outside would penetrate into the building to the point where the sound of well-oiled machinery would never be heard. In addition to that, the wind had come up and it had begun to thunder, so Kathy could not have been attracted to the square opening by a sound. She was plain nosy and careless, and that was what had caused the accident. Oh, yes, it was true that the square opening should have been covered. It usually was. If one looked, one could see the holes where the hinges that held the cover had been made. But after all, Witcher was only one man, and he couldn't be everywhere at once seeing that everything was as it should be. Now could he? The kid should never have gone near the opening. She had had no business there. She was in a fun house, wasn't she? She should have been busy having fun, and not gone poking her nose in where it didn't belong.