The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (8 page)

No chance at all.

She didn’t bother to sigh; it wouldn’t do any
good, even when her father joined her, lighting a cigarette,
flicking the match to the yard, blowing smoke rings that didn’t,
this time, make her smile.

“Well!” He leaned against the post, looking down
at her.

His sleeves were rolled up, pale hairy arms; his
shirt was unbuttoned, a pale hairy chest made worse by an uneven V
of brown at the hollow of his throat. His hair, black without a
shine, clung to the sweat on his forehead. His face, round save for
a hooknose Fran prayed she wouldn’t get when she got that old, was
slightly red. A good red. A working red. “Man, this sure beats that
cramped old apartment, doesn’t it? Like moving to a palace.”

Not quite, she thought sourly, grunted, and
squeezed her cheeks more tightly, the tips of her fingers pressing
the flesh against her teeth.

He waved an arm toward the lawn. “Look, Fran —
real grass, real bushes, real trees that aren’t choked by fumes.
Y’know, I could hang a swing from that one by the driveway if you
want. You know, a tire on a rope.” He blew smoke, smiled. “When I
was kid — no wisecracks, please — I used to have a tire swing my
dad rigged up, even though my mother thought I’d get killed or
hanged or something on it. It was a huge tire, from a truck. It was
great. Damn, it was great. Your hands got all black, your bottom
got creases —” He laughed. “Great stuff, kiddo, great stuff.”

“Sure, Daddy,” she muttered.

So what was so great about getting dirty? Every
time she did back home, her mother always scolded her. A tire swing
would put her into orbit.

The air was still. Warmer. Insects whispered in
the shrubs and trees. The smoke from his cigarette hung too long
before drifting away.

She didn’t make room when he straddled the
railing; his right knee touched her left elbow, and felt hot. She
didn’t look at him, but she could smell him. The Daddy smell —
cigarette smoke and hot jeans and sweat and something else that
made him only him, no one else. In the dark she knew it was him;
from a zillion miles away in a strong wind she knew. Most of the
time it was a comforting thing; today it was annoying.

“You don’t like it here, huh,” he said
softly.

She shook her head.

“Scary, right?”

A slight tilt of her head so she could look
sideways at his face, show him her scorn. “C’mon, Daddy, it’s not
scary here.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

They had been through this before, more times
than she could count:

i know how it is, fran, honest to god, i do —
a new house, new school, meeting new friends, it isn’t easy, it’s
really kind of scary.

i don’t want to go.

wish i could help you.

i could stay by myself.

you’re only twelve.

that’s big enough.

not quite, honey, not quite.

“Well,” she insisted quietly, “I’m not
scared”

“Okay.” He swung his leg back over and stood,
puffed on the cigarette and crushed it out against the railing.
“You want to give your mother a hand? I’d like to get this over
with before you graduate from college.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes, you have to. The sooner we get this done,
the sooner you’ll be able to settle in.”

“I’ll be grumpy,” she warned.

He laughed, and suddenly grabbed her under the
arms and swung her off the crate. High, to the porch roof, low,
between his legs; high again and spinning slowly, and despite the
scowl she made sure he saw so he’d know he wasn’t getting away with
it, she couldn’t hold it — it slipped into a reluctant smile she
shook away as soon as he put her down and planted a loud wet kiss
on her brow.

“Go,” he said, swatted her bottom, and she
went

Turning off her brain for the rest of the
morning, not thinking about how ugly and permanent everything
looked already, just putting stuff where it was supposed to belong,
even though it didn’t belong here at all but back in Cambridge.
Then Daddy called for lunch, crawling on hands and knees into the
kitchen and begging for food, so they had cheese sandwiches on the
back porch, sitting on folding chairs around a rickety card table
with paint splatters on it watching some birds fighting, or
playing, in the overgrown yard. A large yard. A huge yard.

“That,” her father declared, “is going to take a
year to clean out. Even if I hired a gardener.”

“You’ll love it, Neal. It’ll give you something
to do in your spare time.”

“Oh, right,” he grumbled.

Her mother winked at Fran and pointed with half
a pickle. “It really won’t be all that bad, will it? It’ll just
take a little planning. We can put the new roses over there, see?
and transplant some of that lilac to the side of the house, maybe
—”

“What did I tell you,” he said to Fran. “A year,
at least.”

She didn’t care and wished he’d stop acting as
if she did. Roses and lilacs didn’t mean a thing. All she saw was a
jungle that would probably eat her alive before the summer was
over. Prickly old bushes crawling all over a wood fence that looked
like a sneeze would bring it down, a couple of big old trees with
hardly any leaves, and grass that even from here she could tell
would reach up to her knees. With bugs in it. Tons of them. She
could see them flying around — gnats and bees and probably monster
spiders hiding down by the ground that would gobble her up without
bothering to spin a web.

“Lanette, I think our child is plotting an
escape.”

Fran gaped at him.

Her mother laughed quietly, touched her bare
arm.

“You’ve done enough for one day, I think. You
want to go exploring?”

She didn’t. But she nodded anyway because she
didn’t want to work either, and stood patiently by her chair while
her mother gently wiped her mouth with a napkin.

“Not far, honey. You don’t know all the streets
yet.”

“I know,” she said, and ran through the house,
down the front steps, and stopped at the foot of the walk, whose
concrete had been shoved up and cracked and split by last winter;
something else, her father had said, he’d have to take care of
pretty soon, before somebody tripped and broke a leg and sued him
to death. Like the bushes along the front, nearly as high as she
was and tangled together almost like a hedge. Large leaves and
bright berries mixed with tiny leaves on long branches with tiny
yellow flowers. It was ugly; it was all ugly and horrible, and
before her parents changed their minds, she raced up the street,
not looking at the other houses, not looking at the other yards,
not looking at anything until she reached the corner.

When she looked back, the new house was
gone.

The block twice as long as any she’d ever known
had swallowed it in every shade of green she had ever seen in her
life.

She grinned, snapped her fingers and whispered,
“Yeah!”

She crossed the street and walked this time,
picked up a long whip of a branch and lashed viciously at her
shadow, at bugs that flew too near, at every bole she passed. She
paid no attention to the numbers on the doors or the street signs;
she wasn’t curious about the voices she heard, either way off in
the distance where Daddy said there was a park, or behind some
house that looked like the one where the witch caught Hansel and
Gretel, only bigger. She turned. She walked. She turned again.
Patiently, not bothering to worry about the time. Because sooner or
later a policeman would stop her, ask her her name, and when she
had to give her address she would give him the one in Cambridge and
get all weepy and tell him she was lost and missed her mommy. The
policeman would take her home. Not here. There. She would drive all
the way across Connecticut in a police car and pull up in front of
her apartment building to the cheers of her friends. Her parents
would worry for a while, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d
figure it out. They would follow, they would find her sitting on
the steps, waiting, and they would know that they had made the
worst mistake in their lives.

She whipped her shadow again, caught herself on
the shin, and yelped.

It would never happen.

There wasn’t a policeman that dumb in the whole
world. Maybe there was a bus she could take. God, this place had to
have a bus, didn’t it? She searched her pockets and found nothing
but lint.

She was stuck.

No chance at all.

At last the first tear — the one she had beaten
back a dozen times since getting out of the motel bed that morning
— made its way to her cheek. And once it had been freed, the others
followed before she could stop them. She walked, crying without a
sound, not wiping her face, just letting the tears drip from her
jaw, the tip of her chin, letting her nose run, letting whatever
clung to her chest cling tighter, harder, with barbs like thorns,
until she sagged against a tree in the middle of a block and
covered her face with her arms. The whip dangled between her
fingers. The bark scratched her spine. Her legs bent until she
settled on a great knee of a root, pulled her own knees up and
pressed her eyes into them until there were sparks and pinwheels
and a muffled, lonely sobbing.

Forever.

Nothing else.

“You hurt?”

Her head snapped up so sharply she yanked the
muscles in her neck, and that made her angry. “No!” she said,
rubbing her nape, burying a wince with a frown.

The girl in front of her leaned over, hands on
her knees, blond pigtails — oh
god,
pigtails — flapping over
her shoulders. “So how come you’re crying?”

“I’m not,” she insisted, getting the backs of
her hands to work across her eyes, under her nose. “I got
allergies, okay? That all right with you?”

The girl shrugged. T-shirt and shorts and
sneakers without socks. “I don’t care. I just thought you were
hurt, that’s all.” She looked up and down the street. “So, you
visiting or what?”

“I live here.”

“No kidding?” Another look, this time searching.
“Where?”

Fran waved her right hand. “That way, I think. I
don’t know. Someplace.”

The girl seemed puzzled.

Fran didn’t feel like helping.

“Oh. You’re lost, huh. My name is Kitt.”

Fran’s disgusted look took care of the lost
question but, as she pushed herself to her feet, she said,
“Kitt?”

“Yeah. Kirt Weatherall. Kitt’s short for kitten.
That’s what my father calls me.” She glanced hopelessly at the sky.
“Now everybody calls me that.”

“Kitten?”

“No! Kitt. I don’t want to be called kitten all
my life. God.” A final swipe across her face. “My father calls me
‘pal’ sometimes.”

“Ugh,” Kitt said. “Like you were a boy or
something.”

“Yeah. Ugh.”

They walked, and the day’s heat cooled in the
shifting speckled shade.

“So you’re new?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You going in sixth grade?”

Fran nodded.

“Me too.”

They both aimed for a spider scurrying over the
pavement, nearly stepped on each other’s foot, and giggled.

“You got any brothers or anything?”

Fran used her whip to decapitate a low weed.
“Nope.”

“Me neither. If I had a brother, I’d probably
kill him.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They reached a broad street, a large church on
the corner, its greystone walls stained with faint green age. A
steeple that didn’t impress her with its height. A signboard in the
shape of a crest near the entrance proclaimed it to be Anglican;
Fran wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t want to ask.

Kitt pointed to the left. “That way’s Mainland
Road. It’s the only road to get here from wherever unless you take
the train.” To the right. “Up the Pike — this is Williamston Pike —
there are some really neat houses. Monsters. I mean, people live
out there who are richer than God.”

Fran stared down toward the Road. She could see
a blinking amber light and not much traffic. The only way out. What
kind of a place was this that only had one way out?

She wasn’t stuck; she was trapped.

“Hey,” said Kitt, a quick touch, a drop of the
hand. “It isn’t that bad.”

Fran shook her head quickly.

“No, really. I mean, it’s not like we’ve got a
zoo or Disneyland or anything, but there’s the park and the pond, a
whole bunch of ducks live there all summer, and we can ride horses
out in the valley sometimes, and the woods and all and . . .” She
wrinkled her face until Fran thought it would disappear. “And the
Pilgrim’s Travelers are here.” She gestured vaguely. “On the other
side of the Road.”

“Travelers? What’s that.”

“It’s a carnival thing, like a circus kind of.
You know, rides and food and stuff. Sometimes they stay just for a
little while, sometimes it’s like they’re around for practically
the whole summer.”

“Oh.” No excitement, no anticipation. She could
just imagine what a circus would be like in a dump like this,
especially one that had no place else to go. “So that’s it?”

Kitt shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But it’s better
than living in the city, that’s for sure.”

“How would you know?” She felt heat in her
cheeks and the heated tears gathering for another charge. “I lived
in Cambridge. That’s pretty neat.”

Kitt wasn’t impressed. “I used to live in New
York, when I was a kid.”

Fran glanced at the church again and thought
about how old it must be to look that old. Like the fence in her
backyard, it looked old enough to fall down any minute, yet the
stones it was made of looked thick and big enough to last forever.
She frowned. That wasn’t right. How could something look weak and
strong at the same time? That was dumb. She was dumb. This whole
place was dumb.

“Shit,” she said disgustedly.

Kitt’s eyes widened.

Fran grinned. “Hey, I thought you lived in New
York.”