Totentanz (8 page)

He found himself among a maze of small, newly
painted buildings, shut tight, green tarp across their fronts.
Feeling ill at ease, glancing behind before he did so, Barney
pulled the edge of one canvas back to see a hollow room. Along the
back wall were shelves filled with new-looking, fat stuffed dolls
decorated with long feathers. A bucket of baseballs to throw at
them was pushed against one wall. The sides of the room were
covered with shelves too; and these were filled with cheap toys and
stuffed animals—pigs, dogs, cats, rabbits and something that looked
like a kewpie doll with big wide eyes and fangs. There were also,
Barney saw, a couple of big boxes filled with the usual plastic
Hawaiian leis.

"Jeez," Barney said, dropping the flap and
turning around quickly. He could have sworn that someone was
standing right behind him. It was almost like he had felt a touch
on his shoulder, a cold breath on his neck. But no one was there,
and the preternaturally quiet row of games huts, all tarped,
stretched nearly as far as he could see until it was abruptly cut
off by a low chain-link fence surrounding a gaudily painted ride
consisting of large cups attached to a central hub.

"Fucking Poundridge," he muttered. His hand
brushed involuntarily at the .32-caliber handgun stuck in his belt
under his sweat shirt.

Getting a sudden inspiration, he abandoned
the line of games and made his way back to the midway. To his
thinking, the midway might lead to the main office. Why wander
around this spook land if he could get his business over with and
then get out?

But wander he did. Instead of leading him
anywhere direct, the path he chose drew him through most of the
amusement park. He passed numerous shuttered, antique-looking
custard stands and cotton-candy setups, all in spanking new paint
jobs. There wasn't a spot of rust or use marks on anything, not
even on the old-time hot dog carts that stood sentinel at every
corner. He passed another long street of booths bigger than the
others. When he peeked behind one tarpaulin, he found a shooting
gallery with red-and-white wheels with bull's-eyes painted on them,
along with a double row of conveyor-belted ducks and bears.
Overhead there was a complicated gizmo that seemed to bring into
life a couple of large dirigibles; painted on each was a face with
its tongue sticking out.

Again he had that feeling that someone was
just about to touch him, and he felt a drop in the temperature.
There was nobody there; but when he turned back to his inspection
of the shooting gallery, the feeling immediately returned. This
time he resisted it, and his heart nearly climbed into his throat
when a cold hand took hold of his elbow.

"Jumping Jesus!" he cried out, whipping
around. There was no one there.

He felt for his handgun. A thin, cold sheen
of sweat covered him now, and he thought of making his way back to
the front gate as fast as he could. But that frightened him as much
as the thought of continuing his search. There were probably
eyeholes in most of the buildings he was passing, just like the
ones in those movies about haunted houses.

"I know you're out there," he said, and was
surprised to find that his voice came out weaker than he had
wanted it to.

He continued walking. The shooting galleries
gave way to a clearing peppered with kiddie rides, each corralled
by a low white fence stenciled with circus clowns. A faint breeze
had risen, and a few of the rides—a caterpillar with a long canvas
shell that would cover it when the ride was in motion, and a ride
consisting of rockets hung from wires attached to a spoked overhead
wheel—were creaking gently. Barney looked at the sky; with the
breeze, the day had clouded over; a high sheet of grim clouds was
sliding across the faded blueness and making the day nearly as
chilly as September.

Barney shivered in the gray sweat shirt and
sat down on the rim of the merry-go-round, hugging himself. He felt
very alone all of a sudden. Someone was following him, and he
dreaded the moment when whoever it was would appear. It was like
putting on a Sunday shirt and then having someone tell you there
was a spider on it but not telling you where. The spider was there,
all right, and would appear.

"Why don't you come out?" he said. His voice
was like a little child's. He couldn't help it. He wanted to run,
but his legs would not carry him if he tried. A change had come
over him. He was a veteran of the Korean War, and if anyone had
ever told him he would act this way under any circumstances, he
would have laughed or hit him. He was not a big man and had kept
his leanness over the years, but he had always thought himself big
in spirit. He was tough but had only demanded his due, and he knew
that though he had no close friends, he had no enemies either. And
here he was, wanting to bawl like a baby.

The feeling of helplessness was oppressive.
He fought to overcome it. He got to his feet, noticing now the
grotesque faces of the horses on the carousel. Half of them looked
not to be horses at all, but other creatures: half-lion and
half-bird: goats: a giant hare with eyes as big as hubcaps. "Eyes
as big as saucers," he suddenly thought, remembering a story a
buddy of his had told him the day before he left for Korea. Who had
written it? Whoever it was, Danny Kaye had played the star role in
the movie. It was about a soldier who met a witch who told him
about three treasures, each guarded by a dog. The soldier went
underground and found the three dogs, each in its own room, and
each dog had eyes bigger than the one before. The last dog had eyes
as big as saucers, and that had always stuck in Barney's mind,
though he had never been able to visualize what that would look
like. This hare had eyes as big as that, bigger. He thought the
soldier got the treasure at the end of the story and killed the
witch, but he couldn't re-member. He and his buddy were real drunk
at the time, and his buddy had told him, "Go kill some gooks and
bring back the treasure!" Those hare's eyes were staring at him,
watching . . . .

"Eyes as big as saucers," he said, using it
as a litany to break the oppressed feeling in his head. He moved
away from the merry-go-round, down the path he had been following.
Nothing was quite in focus anymore. He felt feverish. He passed a
sherbet stand in the shape of a monkey, and a Guess Your Weight
cart. He bumped into something solid and thought someone had
grabbed him by both arms, but when he pushed away, he saw that he
had run into a strength tester—a long pole with a bell at the top
and a pad at the bottom to hit with a sledge hammer. The pole bore
gradations all the way up, from a caricature of a man having sand
kicked in his face near the bottom, through a series of muscled
animals, to the top—a huge, grinning beast that looked like a bear
but had a horn in the middle of its forehead and flame issuing from
its long-toothed mouth.

He went on, feeling now as though he had been
drugged. He fell down once; when he arose, he saw that it had grown
dark. A string of bulbs hung above him, leading ahead, and when it
lit, he felt compelled to follow it. There was darkness all around
him. He looked to one side and thought he saw in the dimness the
face of another hare with enormous eyes, and as he stumbled past
it, it seemed that the eyes followed him until the creature was
swallowed by darkness.

The bulbs, clear glass that showed the
filament, threw scant illumination on the ground. Blinking against
the night blindness that had come upon him, he looked off to the
other side to see vague, dinosaur-like outlines against a darkening
sky: a long spire with a cage at the top, its gate swinging open;
the bony grid of the roller coaster, a tiny string of cars
precariously perched at the summit of its first drop; and, seeming
to dominate, the huge erector-set Ferris wheel, its hinged seats
swaying like eyelashes around its perimeter. "Eyes as big as
saucers," he muttered once more, but now he couldn't tell if he had
really said it or not.

He was drunk; he didn't
know where he was. He didn't remember getting drunk. He had done it
often enough, at home in front of the television or occasionally,
when the loneliness of cabin fever had gathered inside him to the
point that he would burst, at one of the old-man bars in town where
they'd leave you alone with your beer if you wanted, letting you
get as rowdy as you liked and always providing companionship
(pointing to the television: "Some ball game, eh?"), if not
friendship. But now he was drunk on the street. He hadn't done that
in a long time—got sick with the DTs and awakened in jail. And what
a strange street—dark and darker still, with only a faint string of
overhead lights to show the way. Where was he? How did he get here?
No matter how many times he blinked his eyes and shook his head, he
couldn't clear his mind; his head was so confused and reeling that
he didn't know if he was on his feet or on the ground. He was hot,
so warm that he felt he must remove his sweat shirt. He fumbled
with it, found that he was indeed on the ground and that his sweat
shirt was soaked. His pants were soaked too. Had he wet
himself?
Where am I?

He remembered wetting himself once, when he
was five years old. He was sitting in class, and Sister Margaret
was talking, and he wanted so desperately to raise his hand, to beg
to leave, but he did not dare. No one was allowed to leave before
the end of class. Sister Margaret had made that clear on the first
day. There was snow outside, the first snowfall of November, a
white dusting that was already melting.

Christmas was coming, and he could almost
smell it. But he had to go to the bathroom so bad that he raised
his hand anyway. He was squirming in his seat now. "No," he wanted
to say. "No, Sister. I promise I'm not going to the bathroom to
smoke. My father smoked and he's dead now. I'll never smoke
cigarettes. Please let me go to the bathroom!"

But Sister Margaret had her face turned from
him. She was printing on the blackboard, her tall, straight back
moving up in down in rhythm with her arm. In chalk she wrote The
Capital of Bolivia is La Paz. She underlined La Paz. He thought she
would turn around then, but she didn't. He dared not cry out
because if he did, he would not be able to face his friends at
recess. He didn't know if he could face them any-way: although if
Sister Margaret turned around and saw his weak, waving hand, she
might let him go to the bathroom and then he would be a hero. He
would go to the bathroom and his friends would think he had gone
for a smoke and he wouldn't say he hadn't. He wouldn't say anything
at all, which couldn't be a sin because if they thought he had gone
for a smoke, it would be their business and not his.

"Sister!" he finally
blurted out, and she turned around. She was in the middle of
writing
The Capital of Brazil is
. . . , and by the look on her face, he knew she
would not let him go to the bathroom. And then it was too late.
When she turned around and glared at him, his bladder emptied, and
as he sat there with the half-finished sentence of "Please may . .
." he felt a warm flush around his crotch and a spreading wet
warmth down around the inside of his thighs. He wanted to cry,
wanted to pull his hand back down and sit till the end of class,
till they were all gone, Sister Margaret and his friends and all
the girls to his right and left, and then he would clean up his
mess and make his way to the bathroom. But it was too late for
that. Sister Margaret saw the look on his face; then she saw the
darkness on his navy-blue pants and the small, wet pool by his
shoe, and she made an "Oh" sound with her lips. She said, "Barney,
I think you should go to the bathroom."

And here he was, and he had done the same
thing. He was on the ground in the dark, and he wanted to say,
"Please, Sister, may I go to the bathroom?" but he knew that
whoever might be near him would not say, "Barney, I think you
should go to the bathroom," and then call the janitor to help
clean up his mess. He struggled to his feet. His sweat shirt was
off, and his pants, and he felt the cold of a chilled wind around
him. The bulbs above, clacking against their braided wire, were
gone. There was darkness around him, and he shivered.

He stumbled ahead. A light—dim and sickly
yellow—came into focus. He made his way toward it. Something
crossed the light for a moment, moving over it like a cloud, and
then he saw it clearly again. The cloud moved across it once more,
and he realized it was smoke.

“Barney Bates," a voice said. It sounded like
Sister Margaret's voice, but it couldn't be. Like hers, it was
smooth and sure but brooked no opposition. It could help or hurt
him. He almost said. "Yes. Sister?" and then realized he had
already said it as the voice broke into a low, even laugh.

"You wanted to speak with me?" the voice
said.

Barney was on the ground
again.
How did I get here?
He pushed his body up into a half-standing
position and tried to see who the voice belonged to. But he saw
only that weak amber light behind a grille and that momentary
passing of smoke.

"Yes," he said.

"Well?" Again that laugh,
hidden in an in-sucked breath that Barney realized was a pull on a
cigarette.
Cigarettes killed my
father.
He was shivering badly now. He
realized that he was only in his underwear and socks.

"My house,” he managed to get out. You . . ."
and then suddenly he wet himself again, feeling warmth run down his
leg to his sock, and he found that he was bent over. "I'm sorry. .
.”

"Don't worry about it," the voice said.
Barney saw something, a thin shape, pass in front of the light, and
then the light was gone and he was crouched on a set of steps
leading downward. He slipped and regained his footing. He looked
back to see a weaker, dark-gray light shut off as a doorway closed
from the outside world. He was on a flat surface, cold in his wet
socks. He could not stop trembling.