The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (5 page)

A lone man on the carousel, rag in hand,
cleaning the wood, the mirrors, the brass, the iron stirrups; a
woman in a windbreaker checking each animal’s eyes, legs, necks,
hooves, stroking manes and flanks, whispering, moving on; a dark
figure on the roof, changing all the lights to blue.

Sunrise; nothing moved.

A horse whickered.

A donkey brayed.

Dust in a brown cloud sifted down the
midway.

Casey lay on his bed and connected the cracks in
the plaster ceiling into images of planets, galaxies, railroad
tracks snaking through mountains, arroyos cutting through a
drought-ridden desert He didn’t want to get up. Vacations were for
sleeping late, eating poorly, and sooner or later getting down on
his knees in the garden. But today, although it was already close
to noon and his stomach had begun to growl, he couldn’t bring
himself to move.

The woman.

He saw her when he closed his eyes, saw her when
he rolled over, saw her ghostlike in the corner when he got up in
the middle of the night to quench a sudden rasping thirst.

He didn’t know her name.

An hour ago the telephone had rung a dozen times
before stopping. It hadn’t been her. He knew it. She wasn’t the
type to call. He knew that too. But neither did he believe she was
the type who picked strange men out of a crowd and asked them to
dance, on a whim. He didn’t know why he felt that. She could easily
be a Travelers shill, a calculating temptress designed to lure him
back to the fair each night, promising without promising while he
emptied his pockets and filled his dreams. She could also be a
thief setting up a mark. Or nothing more than a tease who fed on
the lonely and moved on, not thinking about what moving on left
behind.

Funny, he thought, hands rubbing his bare chest;
he hadn’t really considered himself very lonely until last night.
First Tina and her bitchy friend, then all the music and lights and
Fran and the rest . . . It wasn’t that he felt sorry for himself,
though god knows he went through that particular nonsense from time
to time. It was just that he hadn’t quite counted, in his youth, on
spending his thirties marking time alone.

Molly said midlife crisis.

Hell, maybe she was right.

Hell, maybe he was going through some kind of
change, something biological maybe, or something cooking along
unknown up in his brain.

Hell, maybe so.

And if that was true, so what if he wasn’t a
millionaire by now, surrounded by family and family retainers; so
what if he wasn’t ensconced in a home with traditional ivy and
roses, bouncing babies on his knees; so what?

Did that mean he was a failure?

His pillow was punched twice and finally tossed
aside.

He didn’t know.

The hell of it was, he just didn’t know.

The telephone again; he sighed and sat up,
scratched chest and belly and took his time getting into the living
room, dropping onto the couch, picking up the receiver.

It was Tina, barely giving him a hello before
launching into an effusive apology for the way her friend had acted
in the bar. Still not fully awake, and slightly embarrassed that he
was practically naked, he allowed her to continue while he wondered
why she cared. He certainly didn’t give a damn. It was a truly sad
thing about Norma’s husband dying the way he had, but he hadn’t
liked her when the poor guy was alive, why should that change
now?

“So,” Tina said breathlessly, “I hope you’re not
mad.”

“Not me.” He picked at something on his
knee.

“Good.” She actually sounded relieved.

“Yeah.” He looked at his feet, wriggled his
toes. “You at school?”

“On break. You get them a lot in summer school.
We can only stand so much, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Voices in the background; the muffled clang of a
bell.

“Oh hell,” she said. “Fire drill. I hate these
damn things. Hey, maybe I’ll see you tonight, huh? You going to the
fair?”

“Yes,” he answered before he could stop
himself.

“Great,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you.”

“Sure,” he said, but she’d already gone, and he
sat for a while, listening to the house, before deciding it was
time to take a shower and join the living. Then lunch while he was
still wrapped in his towel, rinsed the dishes and dressed in shorts
cut from an old pair of chinos. A baseball cap for the sun. Gloves
caked with old dirt. A metal pail on the back stoop that held his
hand tools.

His home was small, a single-story clapboard
cottage blocked against his neighbors by a screen of closely spaced
poplars. A private world to protect his ladies, his flowers. He
didn’t name them, but he talked to them, and by killing them and
crippling them and nursing them and feeding them, he learned that
time would pass, and he could mark it by their blossoms.

He decided to work in the garden first, a large
rectangle he had cleared in the center of the yard. A bitch of a
job because there had been more stones under the surface than in
any quarry he had seen. It had taken him one entire summer, but by
god it had been worth it.

The procedure was all automatic: Plop the pail
down, tum on the hose and drag it out with the nozzle shut to a
dripping, smooth the grass and kneel, check the sky, crack his
knuckles, then examine the flower bed to give him his first
chore.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “God damn son of a
bitch.”

The flowers — marigolds and snapdragons, peonies
and pansies, irises in the center — were all dead.

“No,” he whispered, looked away and looked back,
but nothing had changed. The blossoms had wilted, the stems drying
to brown stalks, and the rich black earth so carefully mixed and
loosened was dry and cracked.

“I . . . what . . .”

On hands and knees he circled the bed, testing
the ground outside the rim, rapping the ground inside, finally
rocking back on his heels and covering his mouth with one hand.

There was nothing wrong with the lawn; only the
garden had died.

“How?”

He stood, dropped the gloves, checked all the
shrubs planted near the trees and along the back; checked the
foundation rose garden on the left side of the house, checked the
garden in front, the one that framed the narrow porch, and saw
nothing wrong, nothing to alarm him.

“How?”

He knew he hadn’t neglected anything, especially
not the watering, and though he might miss a day or two weeding and
put off a transplanting here and there, it had never been long
enough to create such a disaster. He would have had to have left it
alone all season, even covering it from the rain.

“How? God damn, how?”

In a near panic then, he set up all his
sprinklers and let them spin, checking to make sure every corner,
every inch, every blade and leaf was touched by the mist. Then he
took a trowel to the back garden, turned the earth over, holding it
close to his eyes, sifting it between his fingers, once even going
so far as to bring some to his tongue. The roots were brittle,
there were no signs of grubs or worms, beetles or ants.

The ground was dead.

He called a nursery out on Mainland Road, down
the hill near Harley, but they couldn’t tell him a thing from just
his descriptions; he called Yard at the hardware store, but Chase
wasn’t much of a gardener — his sympathies were genuine, but his
mind was on business; and with no one else to talk to, he dumped a
handful of the dirt into a paper bag and brought it to Adelle
Vanders at The Florist, on Centre Street.

“Amazing,” she said, emptying the bag onto a
worktable in her back room. “Casey, how the hell did you manage
this?”

“I didn’t,” he answered sharply. “Damnit, you
know me better than that”

The portly white-haired woman slipped on a pair
of half glasses and leaned over the table as far as her
smock-dressed bulk would allow. Poked thoughtfully at the dirt,
dribbled some water on it from a small can, and finally shook her
head in defeat. “This is the deadest stuff I’ve ever seen outside a
desert, and even that has some life. Case, you must have done
something. A pesticide, maybe?”

His hands clenched at his sides. “Adelle, that
dirt there, it was fine only two days ago. Mulch, loam, everything,
and —”

“Impossible.” She straightened and took off her
glasses. “Casey, you know as well as I do that nothing like this
could happen in that short a time.”

He opened his mouth to brand her a liar, saw the
hurt in her expression, and practically ran out of the shop. She
didn’t call him back; he didn’t have the nerve to return. Instead
he walked, nearly ran, back to the house and turned off the
sprinklers. Went in through the front door and stood in the
kitchen, stared out the window.

The grass glinted, droplets clung to some of the
trees’ lower branches, a robin hopped from shade to shade, cocking
its head as if it were listening for its prey.

The garden was barren, a scorch mark on the
lawn.

All right, he thought; all right, so Adelle
doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean she knows everything. You put some
more in a bag and you take it to the college. One of the professors
there will tell you, they can check it in their lab.

He nodded.

He didn’t move.

He watched the robin fly away without going near
the bare earth, watched shade become shadow, remembered all the
work he had done to give the yard color.

Casey, oh Casey, how does your garden grow?

He looked at his hands, at the dirt beneath the
nails and in the cracks of his knuckles. Poisoned, he thought
suddenly; dear god, it had been poisoned. He ran for the bathroom,
stripped and threw his clothes into the wastebasket under the sink,
stood under the hot water and scrubbed his flesh scarlet. Then he
shoved the shower curtain aside and sat on the edge of the tub,
taking deep breaths until he knew he wouldn’t die.

Clean clothes made him feel better. A can of
soup stopped his stomach from complaining before it started. And as
he stacked the dishes in the sink, he heard himself whistling the
song he’d heard the night before.

“Casey would waltz,” he sang, “with the
strawberry blonde . . .”

God, he was terrible.

“. . . and the band played on.”

He was truly horrible.

“He waltzed ’cross the floor with the girl he
adored . . .”

Jesus.

He couldn’t hold a tune in an iron bucket, but
he laughed as he left the kitchen, sobered for an instant when he
thought of the dead flowers, then laughed again and decided that
another night at the fair would clear his head, help him think, and
first thing in the morning he’d go out to the college.

He laughed again as he locked the front
door.

“Clear your head?” he said to the twilight.
“Christ, Bethune, who the hell do you think you’re kidding?”

She wasn’t there.

He walked the length of the crowded midway and
its side streets several times, ate more than he should have to
give his hands something to do, ended up at the carousel and called
himself ten kinds of a fool and a hundred kinds of an idiot who
ought to be old enough to know better.

She wasn’t there.

He rode on a dolphin and a ram, watched the
bears play their tunes, tried to catch himself in the mirrors; he
stood by the dance floor and tapped his foot, nodded his head,
snapped his fingers, turned and watched the thrill-rides until a
threatened headache closed his eyes.

She wasn’t there.

He drifted past a Ferris wheel that seemed to
wobble on its braces; he listened to a jovial barker try to
convince passersby that inside his tent, and nowhere else in the
world, was the only living survivor of a mysterious tribe of
African pygmies, who ate only roots and berries and a pound of
human flesh a day; on the midway he tried to knock down a
three-level pyramid of milk bottles until he gave up in disgust; he
spotted Tina Elby with some friends at a hamburger stand and made
an abrupt about-face into a wide lane that boasted farm and jungle
animal exhibits, with a small arena at the far end where the acts
for an hourly show were posted.

Twice, he started to leave, disgusted with
himself for acting like an adolescent, and twice changed his mind.
Just in case.

He returned to the carousel and rode the llama
four times. No one rode the gold lion.

He headed for the exit, ignoring the crowds,
ignoring the music, ripping the ticket from his shirt and tearing
it in half, tossing it over his shoulder and not caring when
someone behind him complained about the slob.

She didn’t promise, you know, he said to the
toes of his dust-covered shoes; she only said maybe.

Shit.

Damn.

He stood under the arch and glared across the
Road at the Station, daring someone, anyone, to say the wrong thing
so he could smash in a face, kick in a few ribs, spend the night in
jail and it would serve them all right.

She called his name.

He turned abruptly and tripped over his own
feet, stumbled backward and tried to wave as she rode by on a
palomino pony, a gang of kids in cowboy suits running behind and
cheering.

“Tomorrow!” she called as she veered into the
midway. “After sunset!”

He grinned; he waved. He nodded; he grinned.

He hummed all the way home and fell asleep on
the couch, woke up with a stiff neck and hummed in the shower, got
into fresh working clothes and slapped his thighs as ifhe were
slapping leather.

“All right, boys,” he said to his tools in a
cowboy drawl, “there’s some heavy work on the south forty gotta be
done before sunset.” He stepped out onto the front porch. “Head ’em
up, move ’em out.”

All the shrubbery was brown, all the flowers
shriveled.