The Extinction Event (29 page)

Jack ducked into the men's bathroom, a knocked-together wooden building painted dark green outside and cream inside. One wall held six booths with warped plywood doors. The facing wall held a metal urinal trough the length of the room.

A man standing at the near end of the urinal held his cock with one hand and his cell phone with the other. While he peed, he said into the phone, “No. No, of course, I love you.… Of course, I would.… That's what I'm talking about.…”

A dozen or so men were lined up to the right of the cell phone lover, some eyes closed, some humming to themselves, some staring blank faced at the wall, one whistling, another talking to himself—or rather to his penis: “Come on, Skipper. You can do it. You've done it before.”

Jack stood at the trough right inside the door and unzipped.

He started to pee. A strong, forked, almost dark-orange, musty-smelling stream.
I must be dehydrated
, Jack thought.

The man who had been encouraging his cock was finishing. “I knew you'd do it, Boss,” he said. “The Little Engine That Could.”

The cell phone lover also finished and wrapped up his call at the same time, “Got to go, Babe. Yeah, love you, too.”

As Jack urinated, out of the corner of his right eye, he caught a flicker, something familiar, the Cowboy, who was standing at the far end of the trough and who, at the same moment, noticed Jack.

Neither could stop peeing. Both struggled to finish—a race to see who would be the first to empty his bladder.

Across the dozen or so bodies—some men leaving, others taking their place in line—Jack and the Cowboy stared at each other. Still peeing.

The Cowboy was the first to smile at the absurdity of the situation.

Jack smiled back.

The Cowboy shrugged at Jack.

Ruefully, Jack nodded.

The Cowboy shook his cock, tucked it away, and zipped up. As he strode past, he clapped Jack on the back.

Jack squeezed out the last stream of urine, stuffed his cock inside his pants, and headed out after the Cowboy.

On the other side of
Settembrini's House of Horror
, Jack spotted the Cowboy. Jack started around the horror house.

The Cowboy tried to blend into a crowd, a dozen people of various ages who all had the same piggy faces. A family.

Jack started to run. He vaulted over a raised black electric cable and ducked under a fence.

The Cowboy was gone.

Jack stood on the midway looking around.

The sky went green. Thunder cracked. The almost instantaneous lightning flash lit up the fair, which for a moment looked frozen like a black-and-white postcard. The heavens opened. Rain slammed down.

People ran for cover. Or ignored the rain. Or turned their faces up to the rain.

Jack held up his wrist to show the guy who ran the ride that he had bought an all-day, all-ride plastic bracelet. While waiting to get on his gondola, Jack called Caroline.

“I'm going on the Big Wheel,” Jack said. “I'll see if I can spot the Cowboy from up there.”

There was another crack of thunder and a flash of lightning as Jack settled into his seat and felt himself being lifted backward, up away from the fairgrounds. Below, he could see a few of the rides, mostly for children, were being shut down.

Jack scanned the fairgrounds for the Cowboy.

Impossible, Jack thought—just as he spotted the Cowboy in another gondola just over the crest of the turning wheel.

The Cowboy must have seen Jack get on and followed.

A third crack of thunder made the Ferris wheel shudder. Lightning illuminated the Catskill range across the river and the legendary outline of the sleeping Rip Van Winkle; a giant Rip Van Winkle, hundreds of miles long, his forehead and shoulder and hip towering crags, like an angel fallen to the Earth.

The guy running the ride was trying to get people off. Someone said, “They should have closed the fair down when they got the weather report.”

Jack felt the fourth crack—right above them—in his chest and belly.

Lightning forked out of the sky and hit something on the ground below and to the right of Jack, who caught a flash out of the corner of his eye. All over the fair, lights went out. Jack smelled burned metal.

The main generator was blazing, casting the surrounding fair booths—selling the fried dough, roast beef sandwiches, fresh lemonade, blooming onions—in a hellish glow.

The Ferris wheel stopped.

2

Sliding sideways, Jack squeezed himself from under the safety bar, stood and grabbed a metal strut, which was cold and wet. He stepped out of his gondola and, clutching one wire support after another, edged up and across the Ferris wheel in the direction he figured the Cowboy to be.

He felt as if he were climbing a huge, industrial spiderweb, the spider a mechanical horror waiting at the center with furnaces for eyes and a coal-fed maw.

Another clap of thunder was instantly followed by a flash of lightning.

Jack saw the Cowboy thirty feet away, climbing out of his gondola, making his way toward Jack.

The ground sixty or so feet below looked far away. The people, small, insignificant.

No one looked up. No one knew Jack and the Cowboy were edging toward each other in the stinging rain, their feet unsteady on the slick struts, coming closer and closer, hand over hand—until they faced each other across a two foot gap.

With one hand, the Cowboy let go of a cable and punched Jack in the face.

Jack staggered back. His left foot slid off the cross beam on which he was balanced. His left hand slipped from a cable. Jack fell backward, suspended by his right hand and right foot.

Thunder, lightning.

The Ferris wheel shuddered.

In the sudden glare, the Cowboy, arms outstretched, gripping cables, swung up his legs and with two feet kicked Jack in the chest.

Jack fell. Dropping three feet and landing on his back on top of a gondola.

“What the fuck!” Jack heard someone in the gondola below him say.

Jack scrambled to his feet, rain blinding him, as the Cowboy landed, crouched, on the gondola canopy.

Scrabbling crabwise, Jack knocked into the Cowboy's left calf with his right shoulder.

The Cowboy's feet slipped out from under him. Holding on to a cable with just one hand, the other waving free as if he were doing a Highland fling, his legs dancing in air, the Cowboy dangled over the sixty foot drop.

Jack scrambled up. Supporting himself with one hand clutching a cable, Jack hammered with his free fist on the Cowboy's knuckles until the Cowboy let go and dropped a few feet to the canopy of the gondola below.

Faces—like paste masks dripping, streaked with paint—gazed at Jack and the Cowboy. The couple in the gondola across the wheel from them. Three teenaged girls, agog, in the gondola above the couple. In the gondola below, a mother covered her six-year-old son's eyes while her husband shouted something lost in the sound of the storm, a humming and hissing that could have been the racket of the Ferris wheel's engine.

Jack jumped, unsteadily, down beside the Cowboy, who lashed out at him.

Jack ducked and head butted the Cowboy in the lower back.

The Cowboy went down. Jack drove his right knee into the muscle of the Cowboy's left arm.

The Cowboy twisted one way, the other.

Jack punched the Cowboy in the face, felt something give.

Thunder and lightning.

In the flash, Jack saw the Cowboy grinning as blood spurted from his broken nose.

Jack hammered on the Cowboy's windpipe as if he were pounding on a table at a drunken dinner.

Again, he felt something give.

Jack heaved the Cowboy over the side of the gondola canopy. The Cowboy fell, bouncing and ricocheting from one strut to another, from one gondola to another, a human pinball in an indifferent pinball machine. The Cowboy landed, his back broken on the lever that made the machine go. The Cowboy was dead.

3

The squad car's lights flashed garish red and blue on the faces of the men and women and children, eyes hollow, mouths agape, skull-like, pressing forward to watch as the cops tried to handcuff Jack with old-fashioned metal restraints.

“Son of a bitch's wrists are too big,” said a young officer Jack didn't recognize. “Jesus, this guy's massive.”

“You got the plastic doohickeys?” said the other young cop, equally unfamiliar to Jack.

“You got plastic?” the first young cop shouted to a third young cop, sounding like a checkout clerk at the Price Chopper.

The rain was letting up. The fair's generator gave a great gasp and started running. Lights snapped on.

The faces lost their hollow-eyed, gaping-mouth, skull-like look and once again became merely human.

The Cowboy's body, in a zip-up bag, leftover meat, was dumped into the back of a van, which cranked up its siren as it crept through the watching crowd.

The first cop was binding Jack's wrists behind his back, too tight, with zip ties, when Jack spotted Caroline in the crowd—shocked, the power of the emotions draining her cheeks of color, the only skull-like face left.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

1

Kipp, the Pakistani from the haunted motel, sat up on the metal cot when Jack was shoved into the jail cell.

“I know you're not coming to see me,” Kipp said. “They took your belt and shoelaces.”

He had a yellow bruise below one eye.

Unconsciously, Jack touched his own face.

The cell reeked of disinfectant.

“What's the charge?” Kipp asked. “Drunk and disorderly?”

“Murder,” Jack said.

“No shit,” Kipp said. “You do it?”

“Couple of hundred witnesses watched,” Jack said.

“The guy deserve it?” Kipp asked.

“He was trying to kill me,” Jack said.

“Self-defense,” Kipp said.

From another part of the jail came a radio call:
10-33—toll collector requires assistance
.

Through the doorway leading to the bull pen, Jack saw a woman—a girl? She couldn't have been more than sixteen, dressed in a wig the color of cotton candy, a tight metallic-blue skirt made out of what looked like fish scales, and a gauzy, translucent halter that revealed her nipples.

“I was dancing,” the girl whined. “I'm a ballet dancer.”

She twirled.

“What'ch'you looking at?” the girl asked a male cop.

Another call came over the radio:
10-34—defective sprinkler system
.

“Can you believe the shit we have to deal with?” a cop, unseen in the hallway, said.

“You sure that's what it means?” the female cop asked.

“How long you been on the job, Provenzano?” the unseen cop said.

“She got hooks,” a second unseen cop said. “Didn't have to study the Patrol Manual to get her job.”

“The house mouse puts in his two cents,” the female cop said.

“They should stick you back on DV,” the second unseen cop said.

“You want to see domestic violence?” the female cop said. “Come here, Mouse. After all, compliance says we're one happy family.”

“If you was my daughter,” the second unseen cop said, “I'd take you across my knee.”

“As if,” the female cop said. “Like all old guys, you're just searching for TLGF. The Last Great Fuck.”

“Which ain't you, babe,” the second unseen cop said.

“Amen,” the female cop said.

“Last Thursday,” the second unseen cop said, “at Mitch's poker game, Paris Hilton here keeps spreading her knees and giving us all a peek at her
kapak
, we lower our cards while we're looking, she sees what we're holding.”

The female cop's laugh was low, lovely.

“If you wasn't half a fag,” the female cop said, “I would've taken more than your money.”

“Excuse me,” the girl in the cotton-candy wig said. “Cell me already. My feet hurt.”

“What happened to you?” Jack asked Kipp.

“You don't read the newspapers?” Kipp asked.

“Not lately,” Jack said.

“Yeah,” Kipp said. “Killing. Being killed. It's a time-consuming hobby. Any of this got to do with Hussein? His dead girlfriend?”

“Somewhat,” Jack said.

He sat on the cot across the room from Kipp. The mattress was so thin Jack felt the metal strips supporting it. From somewhere in the building, someone was singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

“What did I miss in the papers?” Jack asked.

“Motel burned down,” Kipp said.

“Electrical fire?” Jack asked.

“More like cotton balls smeared with Vaseline,” Kipp said. “Who the fuck knows? My take: Anything but an accident.”

“Anyone hurt?” Jack asked.

“Some bad burns,” Kipp said, “but nobody killed. We're all in our skivvies, standing around, don't know what to do, watching the fire burn everything we own when the red-white-and-blues show up—”

“Red-white-and-blues?” Jack asked.

“Immigration,” Kipp said.

“Convenient,” Jack said.

“Ain't it?” Kipp said. “With three big, yellow school buses. They load everyone on board. Everyone's illegal, right? Even if they're not. I got a green card. One of the feebs pushes me toward the bus. I say,
You pushed the wrong guy
. He says,
Join the party, Osama
and pushes me again harder. I take a swing. Deck him. He starts to cry—imagine that—big, bad government man, sitting on his ass in the motel parking lot, fire burning behind him, big, black billows of nasty-smelling smoke rolling around him, just his head showing above the smoke like it's a balloon, floating there, his body covered in this black—wasn't even smoke. It was, like, oily. You could feel it on your skin. Taste it. Then, the smoke kind of settles, you know, around our ankles. I'm thinking
What kind of fire is this?
”