The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (3 page)

“Prick,” the other woman said flatly.

Yard blinked.

Tina frowned. “Norma, he’s only kidding, for
Pete’s sake. “Casey doesn’t mind, do you, Case?”

Caught between a gape and a laugh, he managed a
quick nod, then a shake of his head, then a “No, I don’t care, let
him talk, I’ll tell his wife.”

“Screw it, he’s still a prick,” Norma Hobbs
muttered darkly, shoving her empty glass stein against the wall to
join several others. She turned her head. “And that one’s a creep.
A so-called man who talks to stupid goddamn flowers. Nothing but
goddamn weeds, plow ’em the hell under.”

“Oh Jesus.” Tina’s expression was at once
apologetic and helpless, but Yard had already turned his back, and
all Casey could do was smile and shrug and tum away himself.

He came in twice a week, usually Wednesday and
Friday, nursed two drinks and left. Sometimes Tina was here, most
of the time she wasn’t, and it suited him during her absence to
develop conversations that would lead them from the bar to a table,
and eventually to dinner. He had no illusions. She was attractive;
he was plain. She was gone most of every summer, traveling around
the country, seeing the world on package deals and her savings; he
didn’t like flying, and spent his free time in his garden. She was
friendly, but had never hinted; he was courteous, and didn’t know
what to do next.

For him the situation was perfect.

Suddenly Norma lurched to her feet and swayed
against the table. “Gotta go home,” she announced angrily. “Son of
a bitch, gotta go home.”

Tina was up just as fast, and with a mouthed
sorry about this guys,
followed her friend out the door.

Another cheer from the back.

Molly asked them loudly to keep it down, she was
going deaf.

“You know,” Yard said without turning his head,
“if you try real hard, you might get to know her better in a
hundred years or so.”

“Who, Molly?”

“The teacher, stupid.”

Casey cupped his glass between his palms. “I
like Norma better. She hates men.”

“Nope. Only her husband, because he left
her.”

“Jesus, Yard, he didn’t leave her, for Christ’s
sake. He had cancer. He died. Jesus.”

Chase shrugged and shook his head; it was all
the same to him — he wasn’t concerned with the bitch, only the
teacher.

Casey checked his watch, then, and emptied his
glass. “Time to go.” He slid off the stool.

“Already?” Chase scowled at his own timepiece.
“Maybe one more.”

“Suit yourself. But it’s almost the last night,
and I’m not going to miss it”

He dropped a bill on the bar, waved good-bye to
Molly, and headed for the door. It didn’t matter if Yard joined him
or not. Sooner or later they’d separate anyway, and he’d be alone.
Which was just how he liked it.

At the entrance he paused and checked back over
his shoulder.

Yard waved him on expansively. “Catch up to you
later, maybe. The kids are supposed to meet me anyway. Down at the
corner, not here,” he added quickly.

“Right,” Casey said.

Right, he thought, and hurried outside before
Chase changed his mind.

As the door hissed shut behind him, he hesitated
before turning right, but the women were gone, and that was fine,
just fine. Hands slipped into his pockets, shoulders rolled, first
one, then the other.

The sky was still light at just past eight
o’clock, but Centre Street was dark in the building shadows that
had already reached the other side. No pedestrians now, no traffic
since the street had been repaved in brick, the sound of his
footsteps muffled in the heat that settled on his back, a damp
weight that made his throat paradoxically dry and his lungs labor.
Neon too bright. Windows too dark. The trees at the curbs
chattering with birds settling in until dawn.

Day above, night below.

The contrast made him uneasy. As if the Station,
when evening crawled down from the surrounding wooded hills,
slipped out of the real world and into a vast cavern where lights
made monsters of simple rocks and boulders, and shadows made people
out of simple dust in the air, As a postman he knew all the shops
and offices, and most of the homes, could find them by touch if he
had to, even by scent here and there.

Except at night.

When it changed.

Well, he said to a brief image in a window,
you’re in a mood tonight, aren’t you?

Day above.

Handing out, with the regular mail, slick color
leaflets of Pilgrim’s Travelers, photographs and cartoons that
promised rides and food and thrills and laughs and wonders and
bright lights. It was the first time the carnival had come to the
Station since he’d moved here, almost a decade ago, and all those
he had spoken to swore it was something he would never forget. Not
just a small-time local carny, a poor excuse for a country fair,
but a kept promise of great times. When asked where it came from,
some waved vaguely south, others vaguely west. It didn’t matter
much, it was here again, and a place as isolated as Oxrun Station
took its surprises without question.

Night below.

He didn’t much like the circus, and after
childhood had been buried, he discovered that he didn’t much like
fairs either. It was too easy to see the ragged patches in the
tents, the bored eyes of the barkers, the faded paint, the rigged
games, the weary animals, the prices too high and the food too
greasy and the nicotine stains on the fingers of the dancers who
were supposed to boil his blood. Something had gone missing. He had
once supposed it was the unquestioning joy of the child no longer
in him, but he knew that wasn’t strictly true; he guessed a growing
cynicism the older he became and reality became too real, but that
wasn’t it either.

Hell, he just didn’t know.

And he didn’t know, really, why he was going
tonight, except that all the people on his route before his
vacation began had spoken of nothing else, not even the miserable
weather, the lack of rain. And since the Travelers was, after all,
clearly a rare beast, he decided he owed it to them and their
morning conversations to at least have a look.

Maybe he’d be lucky and see Norma get squashed
by a rogue elephant or eaten by a gorilla.

He chuckled, chided himself for such an
uncharitable thought, and chuckled again.

A right on Chancellor Avenue slapped the setting
sun into his eyes. He shaded them with one hand and nearly tripped
over the police station’s wide bottom step. A curse, a glance
around to be sure no one had seen him, and he walked on. Joined by
the end of the block by a few others, families and couples, a
handful of loners like himself, heading toward Mainland Road and
all in high humor, though none seemed in a great hurry. They called
to him, children danced up to and away from him, and it wasn’t long
before he felt himself smiling.

This, he decided, is a pretty good idea. A kind
of kick in the ass to get him out of the doldrums he’d sunk into
lately. Nothing he could put his finger on, nothing he could trace
from a specific source — just a feeling that getting up in the
morning was too much a chore, that going home to an empty house
each night was too much like lowering himself into a well-tended
grave. The Brass Ring had been a way to put off the latter.

Molly, all blond ringlets and huge brown eyes,
told him last week it was his midlife crisis.

What crisis? he had answered with an explosive
forced laugh; I’m thirty-seven, unmarried, no children, no
promotion in sight, just enough money in the bank to keep me from
starving. That’s no crisis, that’s a goddamn fact of life.

Poor baby, she had cooed, and kissed him on the
cheek.

Poor baby, he had thought, and wanted to tear
out her lovely throat.

* * *

A rake with a broken handle bound together by
fraying twine drawn over the ground; weeds and small stones filled
straw baskets that were carried to the field’s edge and dumped into
a pit; several men with ball peen hammers pounding stakes, raising
tents, singing without words to a mouth organ’s lead.

A corral enclosed by four thick strands of rope,
the horses inside grazing, eating hay, running along the perimeter
and kicking their heels; another corral, this one for pigs, a few
sheep, a few goats — grazing, eating hay, gnawing at the ropes
until a small boy with a whip-branch snapped a nose, snapped a
brow.

A trained bear, a dying tiger, ponies that gave
rides in the afternoon and were trick-ridden by a hooded dwarf when
the sun went down; several young women, and one not so young,
dancing on a stage that sagged in the middle, enticing the crowd,
promising with veils and winks and colored gauze and soft moans,
that inside, behind the flap, the devil waited with more; a caravan
with a sign that marked a fortune-teller, others that suggested
fair games of chance, still others whose sides had been lifted up
and propped open, the sweet and sour and bitter aromas of foreign
cooking drifting with steam.

A tall woman at the entrance in the garb of a
Great White Hunter, pistol strapped to her side, greeting the
families and the couples and the loners who came from the carriages
and traps parked at the side of the road, from the automobiles and
buses parked on the verge. She answered all questions with a joke,
flirted with all the men and told all the women with a look that
their men were safe here, thrust a hip at the boys and showed the
girls how to do it.

Harps and harmonicas and violins and horns and a
piano and a tambourine and a calliope and an organ.

And in the alleys between the tents and the
concession stands and the caravans and the trucks and the wagons,
the soft quiet sound of a young woman laughing.

Casey crossed Mainland Road and angled to his
left, toward one of four broad wood ramps that had been placed
across the drainage ditch on the other side. A thorn hedge had been
cut down here, and he climbed the slope on another ramp and stood
to one side, hands on his hips, doubt his expression.

It was all ebony and silhouette because of the
lowering sun. Cutouts they were, unreal, that swallowed the people
who walked under the high filigree wood arch, reaching up to a man
on a high stool on either side who exchanged money for tickets,
jokes for jokes, questions for directions.

It was huge.

There were lights strung on wire through the
air, hanging from wire along the fence that marked the fair’s
boundary; from somewhere in the back was a spotlight that still
hadn’t the strength to quite match the light still lingering in the
sky.

It amazed him.

What he had expected was something on the far
side of tacky, something dusty and run-down and showing its age,
something he could move through in an hour and still have time for
another drink with Molly; what he saw as he moved forward and could
see through the arch gate was enough to keep him busy for this
night and ten others.

I’ll be damned, he thought; I’ll be damned.

The entrance fee was ten dollars, and the ticket
man assured him that he wouldn’t have to pay for anything else,
unless he got hungry.

He nodded, clumsily pinned the ticket to his
breast pocket as he’d been instructed, and stepped inside, onto a
wide, bare earth midway lined with game booths and food stands so
brightly painted, so individually done, that if someone had said
I’ll meet you in an hour by the purple dragon,
he would have
known exactly where to be.

Incredible.

He strolled on.

Unbelievable.

A short distance in was an intersection, the
games and food continuing left and right; straight ahead, amusement
tents and caravans — dancers, singers, a variety show, a sword
swallower, a magician, much more.

He stood in the center and couldn’t make up his
mind, was angry that he couldn’t because this wasn’t supposed to
be. He had been ready to starve, not be given a feast.

“Hey, Mr. Bethune!”

He spun around, then sidestepped deftly when a
gang of kids charged past him. One, a young girl he recognized as
being new to the Station, skidded to a halt and would have fallen
if he hadn’t grabbed her arm.

“Easy does it, Fran,” he cautioned, grinning as
she panted, and thumped at her chest. “You’re going to kill
yourself before the fireworks.”

“Fireworks?” Eyes under dark hair widened in
delight “Really? Fireworks?” She looked around anxiously. “Where?
Where will they be?”

He laughed. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know if
there’ll even be any. I just got here myself.” Her clear
disappointment made him feel like a rat, and he tapped her shoulder
lightly. “But look, this is a fair, right? So you have to have
fireworks. I mean, what would a fair be without them?”

Peering after her friends, Fran shrugged. “I
don’t know. I’ve never seen one.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head, crossed her heart. “They
don’t have fairs in Cambridge, Mr. Bethune. Not like this; I
mean.”

He almost laughed again because he knew the girl
wasn’t happy with the move from her old home. Every morning,
bringing the mail, he had the distinct feeling she was waiting for
news that her father had somehow, miraculously, been fired and
they’d have to return to the city. Where they didn’t have
fairs.

He knew how she felt

As beautiful as it was with its old homes and
older hills, the valley farms and shallow creeks, the Station did
that to some people. As if it were alive and, walking home at
night, it watched, it waited, like a dark patient beast in the
mouth of a monstrous cave. Nothing threatening, nothing dangerous.
Just watching. Waiting. For something to go wrong.

A shrill call above the music that had suddenly
sprung up from a dozen, a hundred directions at once. Fran turned
and waved wildly, looked up at him and said, “Elly says there’s a
real neat merry-go-round over there someplace. All kinds of animals
and things. You wanna come?”