To Make Death Love Us (20 page)

The rain stopped
suddenly. The air was still filled with spray but the weight of the rain was past. The Colonel
smiled, for he took the cessation of the rain as a sign.

He jumped back,
releasing the pin and the tailgate fell with a bang. A box of light bulbs tumbled out, smashing
on the rocks. They burst with small explosions. Nothing else in the welter of goods jammed
against the tailgate moved.

He examined the
complexity and chose a carton that might be safely removed. He uttered small prayers as he
slipped it from its place in the general tumble. A few things slipped and slid but one motion
counterbalanced another and the truck remained secure upon it's split ledge.

"Is it you,
Colonel?" Pepino shouted. "I saw something move at the back. Is it you?"

"It's me. It's me,"
the Colonel shouted back, with laugh­ter and hope rich in his voice.

Suddenly, almost
without warning, the mountain shifted, freeing a great slab of earth and rock. Inside the van,
Serena threw her arms up toward a dream that was no longer there as she felt the truck move
crazily, settling itself for its death plunge.

"Oh yes,
my
GoJ/"Paulette shouted, as though witness­ing for Christ at a tent meeting.

Pepino turned to
face the two women and stretched out his arms as though to embrace them and keep them
safe.

In the cab, Will
Carney let out a scream that would have wakened all the spirits of the mountain had there been
any left there, sheltered from the storm in her caves and hidey-holes.

That part of the
road upon which the front wheel so precariously clung rose up as the ledge was split in two. The
mountain stirred like an old, malevolent beast shift­ing from one leg to another, seeking
rest.

Boxes, bales,
bundles of cloth, rods and ropes and pul­leys and show banners came tumbling out the tailgate in
a rush. Several struck the Colonel but, in the first moment of the mountain's heaving, the little
man had leapt back, as though hoping to make it seem that his own death fall was deliberate, that
he was not—small as he was—victim of a power greater than he. He lay bruised on the wet, muddy
earth and was struck with the awe of yet another miracle. Not only did the van still cling
marvelously to the mountainside, but the rise of the forward ground, the tumbling of the
packages, had done much of his work for him.

He could see
through the welter of goods deep into the interior of the van where the glow of the worklamp
cre­ated a yellow pool of light in the dark.

He scrambled to his
feet and went to the tailgate, peer­ing through the tunnel created by the variety of
things.

"Everyone all right
in there?"

"Yes, everyone's
fine, Colonel," Pepino answered.

Will's initial
scream had settled into a mad, high-pitched keening.

"Perhaps not,"
Pepino amended.

"Can you make it
through the space?" the Colonel asked.

Pepino's face
suddenly appeared at the other end of the short tunnel. He tried to force his shoulders through
the beginning of the passageway.

"I might make it
through but I doubt it."   ,

"Stay back. I'm
coming inside again," the Colonel or­dered.

"Wait," Pepino said
softly. "Do you think that's wise?"

"We've got to widen
the space. I think it can be done more easily from inside than out."

"You'd do better to
take yourself away," Pepino ad­vised.

But the Colonel was
already up on the tailgate and down on his knees. He crawled back through to them, feeling the
trembling of the mountain through the palms of his hands. He wondered if his nerves were making
him as sensitive to things as Serena was.

"It won't be long
now. Just a little more work, then we'll all be out," he assured them.

Serena, totally
spent, was beginning to doubt even her dreams. Then, too, she was steadily feeling increasing
tremors from the mountain, an indication that the end was very near.

"The ledge on which
the truck is resting is ready to give at any moment," said Serena. "We've run out of
time."

"Go back, Colonel,
and save yourself. Go back," Pepino added.

Paulette nodded and
a small sob caught in her throat.

The Colonel came
all the way into the van and stood up.

"I need your
wonderful hands again, Serena."

"The mountain's
going to collapse any minute," she said, and her voice rose to the edge of breaking. Will's
keening stopped abruptly as though sensitive to her fear, as though waiting to hear the oracle
give expression to the certainty of their doom.

The Colonel hurried
over to her and took her ghostly head in his arms. He pulled her to him so that her cheek lay
upon his chest. He rumbled soothingly.

"Whatever,
whatever. We're together, aren't we? I can't imagine things being any other way. Come on, now.
We'U try."

Serena smiled. In
some way, she understood that no dream of hers could have made John do as he had done. If she had
made him a giant in a dream, he had already made himself a giant of the human heart. She
understood that Colonel John was a fighter and that he loved them all and fought all the harder.
Perhaps she had only made him aware of what he was.

With great care,
the Colonel and Pepino rearranged the Moon Child close beside the remaining barrier to freedom.
Serena shivered at the chill column of air that came into the space and smiled.

"How good and clean
it feels," she said. She placed her hands upon the faces of boxes and bales.

The Midget and the
Rubber Man placed their hands and their strength where she bade them.

"What are you
doing? What are you doing?" Will very nearly screamed, and started to turn about in the cab,
fearing that they had already managed their escape and left him behind. His flailing arm struck
the taut extension cord of the worklamp and tore it from the cigarette lighter.

Darkness descended,
more startling than lightning.

Pepino and the
Colonel froze with a large carton held between them.

The mountain
shrugged at the foolishness of small crea­tures.

The dark was as
thick and cold and bone chilling as sea water. And like the sea that drowns, it recalled, in
flashes, scenes of Will Carney's sorry life, unwinding before his eyes in little acts without
beginnings or endings.

He saw his father
at the picnic of his death. Willy had been ten and his father seemed tall as a tree and stronger
than any man alive. He had red hair and a wide mouth filled with big, dead-white teeth like
cheap, broken crock­ery. He liked to tell everybody what a great fellow he was when he had enough
beer or whiskey in him. That hot day he had more than enough. Drunkenly, he boasted of his
strength and his boxing skills. He stuck out his chest, strut­ted like a rooster, and told one
and all that he had bedded every pretty girl in the county. It was the whiskey talking and almost
everyone knew it.

Hiram Weeks, just
married to a girl of the county—at the unrefusable request of her father and his shotgun—in his
own drunken state, reckoned that Big Red Carney was insulting his own fair bride. Thinking that,
he stepped up behind Big Red and punched him in the back of the neck.

Will's father fell
forward like a steer hammered between the eyes with a sledge.

The hoop of a beer
keg caught him squarely across the forehead. He was dead before he hit the ground.

That left young
Will alone since his ma had left Big Red's bed and board—such as it was—along with his drunken
anger and heavy hand, half a dozen years before.

There was one hell
of a lot of commotion about the death. There was a coroner's inquest. The killing was deemed
accidental. Moments after—since all the town officials were gathered for the hearing anyway—the
peo­ple took up the matter of the recently orphaned boy.

Hiram Weeks, found
innocent of any murder or wrong­doing—except perhaps an excess of Fourth of July zeal— felt
himself responsible for losing Will his father. He chari­tably offered to take the boy in. To
feed, clothe, school, and teach him a trade at his own expense.

Within a week,
young Will, who recognized slavery when he saw it, ran off to live in and around town, catch as
catch can.

And then Abner
Wesker and the wonders of juggling.

And then sixteen
and Abner, falling on Will's knife for nothing, for a girl who belonged to no one, for an
unown-able nothing. And then off on his own. An endless, unend­ing tumble through cheap hotels
and boarding houses. Painted faces and eyes too artfully wide to be innocent, nameless
joinings.

Sometimes one step
ahead of the law, that was carnival. Sometimes one step ahead of a jealous husband or irate
boyfriend, that was Will's lot. Nothing held him for long, no faces in the dark, no hearth or
home in anybody's face he ever met.

The pictures kept
going faster before his eyes, a nickelodeon gone mad. In the dark on the black mountain, Will put
up his hand to turn off the crazy projector. This was no way to look at a life, swift and in
pieces. A life should be looked at in a leather-bound picture book. One remem­bered moment at a
time. Tasting and savoring each pho­tograph for the good and the wonder and the glory that was in
it. But the machine kept rolling his life past him and the people ran in and out so fast he
couldn't remem­ber their faces or the touch of them. He couldn't remem­ber their names. He could
barely remember his own small hopes.

Someplace along the
way, he learned to read fairly well. Mostly comic books with the adventures of Captain Mar­vel
and Plastic Man described within the multicolored covers.

He graduated from
comic books to little dirty books, badly illustrated pornography that featured inept paro­dies of
Maggie and Jiggs and Moon Mullins—still around after all those years. He also read proper books
from time to time, and once came across a life of P. T. Barnum.

From that moment
on, he no longer saw himself as a rag-tag, wandering juggler, a knight without armor walk­ing
down the long, dusty highway. Where once he had considered himself rich if two coins clinked
together in his pocket, he now clothed himself a much more expen­sive and ambitious dream. From
that day on, he aspired to, once and for all, to be an impresario, an entrepreneur. He looked up
both words in a dictionary and found them pleasing and accurate to the naming of his
desires.

The book was read
and the ambition formed about the time that Will was quartering the Southwest in an old '59 panel
truck, selling what junk he could, enjoying what beds became available to him and juggling in his
fairly
sorry way. It became the
commandment of his dreams and shone there before his eyes when he took Paulette under his
management and set out on the road to bigger things.

He quickly gathered
up Pepino where he'd dropped him in Wilmington, Pennsylvania, after a quarrel over the sharing
out of a windfall won in a poker game, and sketched out the picture of the future he'd already
come to treasure. Truth was, the quarrel had been all one-sided. Greedily, Will had decided to
cheat Pepino and use the winnings to buy the truck and the merchandise to set himself off on a
career as a merchant prince. Now, Pepino and his quiet willingness were needed. His freakish
talent to dislocate his bone joints was useful to the creation of a proper sideshow.

He found Pepino
working for a greengrocer not half a dozen doors away from the saloon where they'd had their
parting of the ways. Will had known he would be close by, for Pepino had no ambitions, goals, or
any place to go. He found the sad-eyed philosopher picking through a crate of bruised tomatoes as
though he were an archeologist sort­ing the shards of some ancient civilization's
pottery.

"Come along, come
along, Pepino." Will smiled as he chose three tomatoes and sent them bounding about through the
air in clever rhythmic patterns.

"I think not," said
Pepino. "I've had enough of the open roads and doubtful rooming houses and. ..." Pepino hesitated
for a second, before completing the thought. "And enough of you, as well, Will
Carney."

"But what will you
do?" asked Will, his eyes on the tomatoes in the air.

Pepino stared at
the speeding objects as a snake stares at a charmer's moving flute. "I'll get by."

"Will you? Ah, no,
Pepino, old friend. You need something to suffer for, something to be forbearing about, some pain
to endure."

"No."

"And someone to
care about," added Will. "In your patient and saintly and forgiving way."

"Well, then, I must
find someone else, for I surely can't care for a bully and a cheat like you."

Will laughed and
knew in his heart he already had Pepino in his pocket. "You can suffer my faults and forgive me
often for the good of your own soul. Come along and be part of my great Carnival and Sideshow.
Come along and meet the Fabulous Fat Girl, Paulette!"