Something Wicked This Way Comes (18 page)

    After a pause, both boys exhaled at once.

    'The autumn people,' said Jim. 'That's them. Sure!'

    'Then - ' Will swallowed - 'does that make us. . .summer people?'

    'Not quite.' Charles Halloway shook his head. 'Oh, you're nearer summer than me. If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are halfandhalf. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.'

    'Not you,' Dad.

    'Not you, Mr Halloway!'

    He turned quickly to see both appraising him, paleness next to paleness, hands on knees as if to bolt.

    'It's a way of speaking. Easy, boys, I'm after the facts. Will, do you really know your Dad? Shouldn't you know me, and me you, if it's going to be us'ns against them'ns?'

    'Hey, yeah,' breathed Jim. 'Who are you?'

    'We know who he is, darn it!' Will protested.

    'Do we?' said Will's father. 'Let's see. Charles William Halloway. Nothing extraordinary about me except I'm fiftyfour, which is always extraordinary to the man inside it. Born in Sweet Water, lived in Chicago, survived in New York, brooded in Detroit, floundered in lots of places, arrived here late, after living in libraries around the country all those years because I liked being alone, liked matching up in books what I'd seen on the roads. Then in the middle of all the running away, which I called travel, in my thirtyninth year, your mother fixed me with one glance, been here ever since. Still most comfortable in the library nights, in out of the rain of people. Is this my last stop? Chances are. Why am I here at all? Right now, it seems, to help you.'

    He paused and looked at the two boys and their fine young faces.

    'Yes,' he said. 'Very late in the game. To help you.'

39

Every nightblind library window clattered with cold.

    The man, the two boys, waited for the wind to pass away.

    Then Will said: 'Dad. You've always helped.'

    'Thanks, but it's not true.' Charles Halloway examined one very empty hand. 'I'm a fool. Always looking over your shoulder to see what's coming instead of right at you to see what's here. But then, for what salve it gives me, every man's a fool. Which means you got to pitch in all your life, bail out, board over, tie rope, patch plaster, pat cheeks, kiss brows, laugh, cry, make do, against the day you're the worst fool of all and shout “Help!” Then all you need is one person's answer. I see it so clear, across the country tonight lie cities, towns and mere jerkwater stops of fools. So the carnival steams by, shakes any tree: it rains jackasses. Separate jackasses, I should say, individuals with no one, they think, or no one actual, to answer their “Help!” Unconnected fools, that's the harvest the carnival comes smiling after with its threshing machine.'

    'Oh gosh,' said Will. 'It's hopeless!'

    'No. The very fact we're here worrying about the difference between summer and autumn, makes me sure there's a way out. You don't have to stay foolish and you don't have to be wrong, evil, sinful, whatever you want to call it. There's more than three or four choices. They, that Dark fellow and his friends, don't hold all the cards, I could tell that today, at the cigar store. I'm afraid of him but, I could see, he as was afraid of me. So there's fear on both sides. Now how can we use it to advantage?'

    'How?'

    'First things first. Let's bone up on history. If men had wanted to stay bad forever, they could have, agreed? Agreed. Did we stay out in the fields with the beasts? No. In the water with the barracuda? No. Somewhere we let go of the hot gorilla's paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore's teeth and started chewing blades of grass. We been working mulch as much as blood, into our philosophy, for quite a few lifetimes. Since then we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels. It was a nice new idea and we were afraid we'd lose it, so we put it on paper and built buildings like this one around it. And we been going in and out of these buildings chewing it over, that one new sweet blade of grass, trying to figure how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different. I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night, fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them. He felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness. So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.

    'So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have no choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need. Somehow, I feel the carnival watches, to see which we're doing and how and why, and moves in on us when it feels we're ripe.

    Charles Halloway stopped, for the boys were watching him so intently he suddenly had to turn, flushing, away.

    'Boy, Mr Halloway,' cried Jim, softly. 'That's great. Go on.'

    'Dad,' said Will, amazed. 'I never knew you could talk.'

    'You should hear me here late nights, nothing but talk! Charles Halloway shook his head. 'Yes, you should've heard. I should've said more to you any day you name in the past. Hell. Where was I? Leading up to love, I think. Yes. . .love.'

    Will looked bored, Jim looked wary of the word.

    And these looks gave Charles Halloway pause.

    What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was above all, common cause, shared experience?

    That was the vital cement, wasn't it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billonmileanhour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

    But. . .how to say it?

    'Look,' he tried, 'put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell longdistance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory. So, all men have one business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell.'

    Charles Halloway stopped, flushed, selfconscious again, knowing vaguely there was a target up ahead but not quite how to get there. He chewed his lips.

    Dad, don't stop, thought Will. When you talk, it's swell in here. You'll save us. Go on.

    The man read his son's eyes, saw the same look in Jim, and walked slowly around the table, touching a night beast here, a clutch of ragged crones there, a star, a crescent moon, an antique sun, an hourglass that told time with bone dust instead of sand.

    'Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don't know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff. God, God, you must think I'm crazy, this talk. Probably think we should be out duckshooting, elephantgunning balloons, like you did, Will, but we got to know all there is to know about those freaks and that man heading them up. We can't be good unless we know what bad is, and it's a shame we're working against time. Show'll close and the crowds go home early on a Sunday night. I feel we'll have a visit from the autumn people, then. That gives us maybe two hours.'

    Jim was at the window now, looking out across the town to the far black tents and the calliope that played by the turning of the world in the night.

    'Is it bad?' he asked.

    'Bad?' cried Will, angrily. 'Bad. You ask that!?'

    'Calmly,' said Will's father. 'A good question. Part of that show looks just great. But the old saying really applies: you can't get something for nothing. Fact is, from them, you get nothing for something. They make you empty promises, you stick our your neck and -  wham!'

    'Where'd they come from?' asked Jim. 'Who are they?'

    Will went to the window with his father and they both looked out and Charles Halloway said, to those far tents:

    'Maybe once it was just one man walking across Europe, jingling his ankle bells, a lute on his shoulder making a hunchbacked shadow, before Columbus. Maybe a man walked around in a monkey skin a million years ago, stuffing himself with other people's unhappiness, chewed their pain all day like spearmint gum, for the sweet savour., and trotted faster, revivified by personal disaster. Maybe this son after him refined his father's deadfalls, mantraps, bonecrunchers, headachers, fleshtwitchers, soulskinners. These laid the scum on lonely ponds from which came vinegar gnats to snuff up noses, mosquitoes to ride summernight flesh and sting forth those bumps that carnival phrenologists dearly love to fondle and prophesy upon. So from one man here, one man there, walking as swift as his oily glances, it became scuttles of dogmen begging gifts of trouble, pandering misery, seeking under carpets for centipede treads, watchful of night sweats, harkening by all bedroom doors to hear men twist basting themselves with remorse and warmwater dreams.

    'The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leatherribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horse of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at halfprice in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the long road out of the Gothic and Baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.'

    'All those years.' Jim's voice swallowed itself. The same people? You think Mr Cooger, Mr Dark are both a couple hundred years old?'

    'Riding that merrygoround they can shave off a year or two, any time they want, right?'

    'Why, then - ' The abyss opened at Will's feet - 'they could live forever!'

    'And hurt people.' Jim turned it over, again and again. 'But why, why all the hurt?'

    'Because,' said Mr Halloway. 'You need fuel, gas, something to run a carnival on, don't you? Women live off gossip, and what's gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones,  ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn't have something             juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast, obituaries, add all the catfight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread., square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival.

    'All the meannesses we harbour, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapour that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the screams from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.'

    Charles Halloway took a breath, shut his eyes, and said:

    'How do I know this? I don't! I feel it. I taste it. It was like old leaves burning on the wind two nights ago. It was a smell like mortuary flowers. I hear that music. I hear what you tell me, and half what you don't tell me. Maybe I've always dreamt about such carnivals, and was just waiting for it to come sols to see it once, and nod. Now, that tent show plays my bones like a marimba.