The Funhouse (5 page)

She started to cry.

“Hey, baby, it’s not the end of the world.” He put an arm around her. “You’ll come through this okay. It’s not as bad as you think. Life goes on, you know.”

She didn’t want to lean on him for either emotional or physical support. Not on
him
, of all people. But she couldn’t help it. She put her head on his shoulder, despising herself for this weakness.

“Easy,” he said. “Take it easy. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

When the tears finally stopped flowing, she said, “Jerry, you’ve got to help me. You’ve
got
to, that’s all.”

“Well . . .”

“Jerry, please.”

“You know I would if I could.”

She sat up straight, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Jerry, part of the responsibility is yours. Part of—”

“I can’t,” he said firmly, taking his arm away from her.

“Just lend me the money. I’ll pay you back.”

“You can’t pay me back in just two weeks. And I’ll need every dollar I’ve got when I go to California the first of June.”

“Just a loan,” she said, not wanting to beg but having no choice.

“I can’t, can’t, can’t!” He shouted like a child throwing a tantrum. His voice was high, screechy. “Forget it! Just forget it, Amy! I need every penny I’ve got for when I get out of this stinking town.”

Oh God, I hate him!

And she hated herself, too, for what she’d let him do.

“If you don’t at least lend me the money, I’ll call your parents. I’ll tell them I’m carrying your child. I’ll put the heat on you, Jerry.” She didn’t think she really had the nerve to do something like that, but she hoped the threat of it would make him be reasonable. “God help me, I’ll even make you marry me if that’s the last resort, but I won’t go down alone.”

“What do you want from me, for Christ’s sake?”

“Just a little help. Decency. That’s all.”

“You can’t make me marry you.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted. “But I can cause you a lot of trouble, and maybe I can force you to contribute to the support of the baby.”

“You can’t force me to do anything if I’m in another state. You can’t make me pay up from California.”

“We’ll see about that,” she said, although she thought he was probably right.

“Anyway, you can’t prove I’m the father.”

“Who else?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the only one I’ve been doing it with.”

“I sure wasn’t the first,” he said.

“You bastard.”

“Eddie Talbot was the first.”

“I haven’t done anything with anyone else since I started going with you six months ago.”

“How do I know that’s true?”

“You
know
,” Amy said, loathing him. She wanted to kick him and hit him and scratch his face until it was a bloody mess, but she restrained herself, hoping she might yet gain some concession from him. “It
is
your baby, Jerry. There’s no doubt about that.”

“I never came inside you,” he argued.

“A couple of times you did. Once is all it takes.”

“If you tried to nail me in court or something like that, I’d get five or six friends to swear they’d been in your pants during the past couple of months.”

“In my whole life there’s never been anyone but Eddie and then you!”

“In court it’d be your word against theirs.”

“They’d be committing perjury.”

“I’ve got good buddies who’d do anything to protect me.”

“Even destroy my reputation?”

“What reputation?” he asked, sneering.

Amy felt sick.

It was hopeless. There was no way she could force him to do the right thing. She was alone.

“Take me home,” she said.

“Gladly,” he said.

The drive back to town took half an hour. During that time neither of them said a word.

The Harper house was on Maple Lane, a solidly middle-class neighborhood of well-manicured lawns and shrubs, fresh paint, and two-car garages. The Harpers lived in a two-story, neo-colonial house, white with green shutters flanking the windows. Lights were on downstairs, in the living room.

As Jerry pulled the Chevy to the curb and braked in front of the house, Amy said, “We’ll probably be passing each other in the halls during final exam week. And we’ll see each other at graduation two weeks from now. But I guess this is the last time we’ll be talking.”

“Bet on it,” he said coldly.

“So I wouldn’t want to miss this opportunity to tell you what a rotten son of a bitch you are,” she said as evenly as she could.

He stared at her but said nothing.

“You’re an immature little boy, Jerry. You’re not a man, and you’ll probably never be a man.”

He didn’t respond. They were parked beneath a street light, and she could see his face clearly; he was impassive.

She was angered by his refusal to react to her. She wanted to leave with the knowledge that she had hurt him as badly as he had hurt her with his comment about her reputation. But she was not very good at vituperation. She didn’t have a talent for quarreling. Ordinarily she preferred to live and let live, but in this case the injustice she had suffered at Jerry’s hands was so great that she felt an uncharacteristic urge to retaliate. She steeled herself to make one last attempt to sting him.

“One other thing I want to tell you as sort of a favor to your next girlfriend,” Amy said. “There’s another way you’re like a little boy, Jerry. You make love like a little boy. You’re immature in that department, too. I kept hoping you’d get better at it, but you never did. You know how many times you managed to make me come? Three times. Out of all those nights we made love, I climaxed only three times. You’re clumsy, rough, and quick on the trigger. A regular minuteman. Do your next girlfriend a favor and at least read a couple of books about sex. Eddie Talbot wasn’t all that great, but compared to him you’re really a lousy fuck.”

She saw his face darken and tighten as she spoke, and she knew she had finally gotten to him. Feeling a sick sort of triumph, she opened her door and started to get out.

He grabbed her wrist and held her in the car. “You know what you are? You’re a pig, that’s what.”

“Let go of me,” she said sharply, trying to pry herself loose of him. “If you don’t let go, I just might tell you how that pathetic little thing between your legs measures up to Eddie Talbot, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear that.”

She heard herself, and she didn’t like how hard and sluttish she sounded; however, at the same time, she took a fierce, primitive delight in the shock that was visible in his face.

Several times over the past six months, she had sensed his sexual insecurity, and now it was quite evident indeed. He was furious. He did not merely let go of her wrist; he flung it away from him, as if he suddenly realized he was holding on to a snake.

As she got out of the car, he said, “You bitch! I hope your old lady
does
make you keep the kid. And you know what? I hope the damned thing’s not right. Yeah. I hope it’s not right. I hope it’s not normal. You’re such a smart-mouthed bitch, I hope you’re stuck with some drooling little creep who’s not normal. Your smart mouth wouldn’t get you out of that one.”

She looked in at him and said, “You’re disgusting.” Before he could respond, she slammed the door.

He threw the Chevy in gear, stomped on the accelerator, and drove away with a protracted squeal of tires.

In the ensuing silence, a night bird shrieked.

Amy moved through a cloud of acrid blue smoke that smelled of burning rubber, and she started up the walk toward the house. After a couple of steps, she began to tremble violently.

When her father had approved of her staying out later than usual, he had said,
The senior prom is a special night in a girl’s life. It’s an event. Like a sixteenth birthday or a twenty-first. There’s really not another night quite like the night of a girl’s senior prom
.

As it turned out, there was a perverse sort of truth in what he had said. Amy had never lived through a night quite like this one. And she hoped she’d never know another one like it, either.

Prom night. Saturday, May 17, 1980.

That date would be burned in her memory forever.

When she reached the front door, she paused, her hand resting on the knob. She dreaded going into the house. She didn’t want to face her mother tonight.

Amy didn’t intend to reveal the fact that she was pregnant. Not just yet. In a few days, perhaps. In a week or two. And only if she were left with no other choice. In the meantime she would search diligently for other exits from her predicament, even though she didn’t have much hope of finding another way out.

She didn’t want to talk to her parents now because she was so nervous, so upset over Jerry’s treatment of her that she didn’t trust herself to keep the secret. She might let something slip by accident or out of a subconscious need for punishment and pity.

Her hand, damp with sweat, was still on the doorknob.

She considered just walking away, leaving town, starting a new life. But she had nowhere to go. She had no money.

The load of responsibility she had shouldered was almost too much for her. And when Jerry had lashed out in a childish attempt to hurt her, when he had wished a deformed baby on her, he had added another weight to the burden she bore. She didn’t believe that Jerry’s curse had any real power, of course. But it
was
possible that her mother would force her to have the baby, and it
was
possible that the baby would be deformed and forever dependent upon her. The chance of that happening was small, but not so small that she could put it out of her mind; misfortune of that nature befell people all the time. Crippled children were born every day. Legless and armless babies. Misshapen babies. Brain-damaged children. The list of possible birth defects was very long—and very frightening.

Again, a night bird cried. It was a mournful sound that matched her mood.

Finally she opened the door and went into the house.

2

Thin, talcum-white, with
streaming hair the color and texture of spiderwebs, dressed all in white, Ghost hurried along the busy carnival midway. He moved like a pale column of smoke, slipping effortlessly through the narrowest gaps in the crowd; he appeared to flow with the currents of the night breeze.

From the funhouse barker’s platform, four feet above the midway, Conrad Straker watched the albino. Straker had stopped in the middle of his come-on spiel the instant he had seen Ghost approaching. Behind Straker, the raucous funhouse music blared continuously. Every thirty seconds the giant clown’s face—a much larger, more sophisticated, and more animated version of the face that had topped his first funhouse, twenty-seven years ago—winked down at the passersby and let out a recorded, four-bark laugh: “
Haa, haa, haa, haaaaa
.”

As he waited for the albino, Straker lit a cigarette. His hand shook; the match bobbled.

At last Ghost reached the funhouse and pulled himself up onto the barker’s platform. “It’s done,” he said. “I gave her the free ticket.” He had a cool, feathery voice that nevertheless carried clearly above the carnival din.

“She wasn’t suspicious?”

“Of course not. She was thrilled to have her fortune told for free. She acted like she really believed that Madame Zena could see into the future.”

“I wouldn’t want her to think she’d been singled out,” Straker said worriedly.

“Relax,” Ghost said. “I gave her the usual dumb story, and she bought it. I said my job was to wander up and down the midway, giving out free tickets for this and that, just to stir up interest. Public relations.”

Frowning, Straker said, “You’re positive you approached the right girl?”

“The one you pointed out.”

Above them, the enormous clown’s face broadcast another tinny burst of laughter.

Taking small, quick, nervous drags on his cigarette, Straker said, “She was sixteen or seventeen. Very dark hair, almost black. Dark eyes. About five foot five.”

“Sure,” Ghost said. “Like the others, last season.”

“This one was wearing a blue and gray sweater. She was with a blond boy about her age.”

“That’s the one,” Ghost said, combing his lank hair with his long, slender, milky-white fingers.

“Are you sure she used the ticket?”

“Yes. I walked her straight to Zena’s tent.”

“Maybe this time . . .”

“What does Zena do with these kids you steer to her?”

“While she tells their fortunes, she finds out as much about them as she can—their names, their parents’ names, a lot of things like that.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“But why do you want to know?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Behind them, inside the enormous funhouse, several young girls screamed at something that popped out at them from the darkness. There was a phony quality to their squeals of terror; like thousands of teenage girls before them, they were pretending to be frightened witless, so that they would have an excuse to cuddle closer to the young men beside them.

Ignoring the screams behind him, Ghost stared intently at Straker; the albino’s almost colorless, semitransparent eyes were disconcerting. “Something I have to know. Have you ever . . . well . . . have you ever touched one of these kids I’ve sent to Zena?”

Straker glared at him. “If you’re asking me whether I’ve sexually molested any of the young girls and boys in whom I’ve shown an interest, the answer is no. That’s ridiculous.”

“I sure wouldn’t want to be a part of something like that,” Ghost said.

“You’ve got an ugly, dirty little mind,” Straker said, disgusted. “I’m not looking for fresh meat, for God’s sake. I’m searching for one child in particular, someone special.”

“Who?”

“That’s none of your business.” Excited, as always, by the prospect of finally, successfully concluding his long search, Conrad said, “I’ve got to get over to Zena’s tent. She’s probably just about finished with the girl. This could be the one. This could be the one I’ve been looking for.”

In the funhouse, their voices muffled by the walls, the girls screamed again.

As Straker turned toward the platform steps, anxious to hear what Zena had discovered, the albino put a hand on his arm, detaining him. “Last season, in almost every town we hit, there was a kid who caught your eye. Sometimes two or three kids. How long have you been looking?”

“Fifteen years.”

Ghost blinked. For a moment a pair of thin, translucent lids covered but did not fully conceal his strange eyes. “Fifteen years? That doesn’t make sense.”

“To me, it makes perfect sense,” Straker said coldly.

“Look, last year was my first season working for you, and I didn’t want to complain about anything until I understood your routines better. But that business with the kids really bugged me. There’s something creepy about it. And now it’s starting all over again this year. I just don’t like being a part of it.”

“Then quit,” Straker said sharply. “Go to work for someone else.”

“But, except for this one thing, I like the job. It’s good work and good pay.”

“Then do what you’re told, take your paycheck, and shut up,” Straker said. “Or get the hell out. It’s your choice.”

Straker tried to pull away from the albino, but Ghost would not relinquish his hold on the larger man’s arm. His bony, clammy, death-white hand had a surprisingly strong grip. “Tell me one thing. Just to set my mind at ease.”

“What is it?” Straker asked impatiently.

“If you ever find who you’re looking for, do you intend to hurt him . . . or her?”

“Of course not,” Straker lied. “Why would I hurt him?”

“Well, I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with this search, unless—”

“Look,” Straker said, “there’s a woman to whom I’m deeply indebted. I’ve lost track of her over the years. I know she has children by now, and every time I see a kid who resembles her, I check it out. I figure I might be lucky enough to stumble across her daughter or son, find her, and repay the debt.”

Ghost frowned. “You’re going to an awful lot of trouble just to—”

“It’s an awfully big debt,” Straker said, interrupting him. “It’s on my conscience. I won’t rest easy until I repay it.”

“But the chance that she’d have a kid that looks like her, the chance that her kid will come wandering past your funhouse some day . . . Do you realize what a long shot that is?”

“I know it’s unlikely,” Straker said. “But it doesn’t cost me anything to keep an eye out for kids who resemble her. And crazier things happen.”

The albino looked into Straker’s eyes, searching for signs of deception or truth.

Straker was not able to read anything in Ghost’s eyes, for they were too strange to be interpreted. Because they were without color, they were also without character. White and faded pink. Watery. Bottomless eyes. The albino’s gaze was piercing but cold, emotionless.

At last Ghost said, “All right. I guess if you’re just trying to find someone to repay an old debt . . . there’s nothing wrong with me helping you.”

“Good. It’s settled. Now I’ve got to talk to Gunther for a minute, and then I’m going over to Zena’s. You take over the pitchman’s roost for me,” Straker said, finally managing to pull free of the albino’s moist hand.

Inside the funhouse a new chorus of girlish voices wailed in a shrill imitation of horror.

As the huge clown’s face spat out another mechanical laugh, Straker hurried across the barker’s platform, beneath a banner that proclaimed
THE BIGGEST FUNHOUSE IN THE WORLD
! He descended the wooden steps, went past the red-and-black ticket booth, and paused for a moment near the boarding gate where several ticket holders were stepping down into the brightly painted gondolas that would carry them through the funhouse.

Conrad looked up at Gunther, who was standing on a six-foot-square platform to the left of the boarding gate and four feet above it. Gunther was waving his long arms and growling at the marks below him, pretending to threaten them. He was an impressive figure, better than six and a half feet tall, more than two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle. His shoulders were enormous. He was dressed all in black, and his entire head was covered by a Hollywood-quality Frankenstein monster mask that disappeared under his collar. He was also wearing monster gloves—big, green rubber hands streaked with fake blood—that extended beneath the cuffs of his jacket. Suddenly Gunther noticed Conrad looking up at him, and he turned, favoring him with an especially fierce growl.

Straker grinned. He made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, giving Gunther a sign of approval.

Gunther capered around the platform in a clumsy monster dance of delight.

The people waiting to board the gondolas laughed and applauded the monster’s performance.

With a fine sense of theater, Gunther abruptly turned vicious once more and roared at his audience. A couple of girls screamed.

Gunther bellowed and shook his head and snarled and stamped his foot and hissed and waved his arms. He enjoyed his work.

Smiling, Straker turned away from the funhouse and walked into the river of people that flowed along the midway. But as he drew nearer to Zena’s tent, his smile faded. He thought of the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl he’d seen from the barker’s platform a short while ago. Maybe this was the one. Maybe this was Ellen’s child. After all these years, the thought of what she’d done to his little boy still filled him with a fiery rage, and the possibility of revenge still made his heart beat faster, still caused his blood to race with excitement. Long before he reached Zena’s tent, his smile had metamorphosed into a scowl.

* * *

Dressed in red
and black and gold, wearing a spangled scarf and a lot of rings and too much mascara, Zena sat alone in the dimly lighted tent, waiting for Conrad. Four candles burned steadily inside four separate glass chimneys, casting an orange glow that did not reach into the corners. The only other light was from the illuminated crystal ball that stood in the center of the table.

Music, excited voices, the spiels of pitchmen, and the clatter of the thrill rides filtered through the canvas walls from the midway.

To the left of the table, a raven stood in a large cage, head cocked, one shiny black eye focused on the crystal ball.

Zena, who called herself Madame Zena and pretended to be a Gypsy with psychic powers, had not a drop of Romany blood in her and actually couldn’t see anything in the future other than the fact that tomorrow the sun would rise and subsequently set. She was of Polish extraction. Her full name was Zena Anna Penetsky.

She had been a carny for twenty-eight years, since she was just fifteen, and she had never longed for another life. She liked the travel, the freedom, and the carnival people.

Once in a while, however, she grew weary of telling fortunes, and she was disturbed by the endless gullibility of the marks. She knew a thousand ways to con a mark, a thousand ways to convince him (after he had already paid for a palm reading) to shell out a few more dollars for a purportedly more complete look into his future. The ease with which she manipulated people embarrassed her. She told herself that what she did was all right because they were only marks, not carnies, and therefore not
real
people. That was the traditional carny attitude, but Zena could not be that hard all the time. Now and then she was troubled by guilt.

Occasionally she considered giving up fortune-telling. She could take a partner, someone who had done the palm-reading scam before. It meant sharing the profits, but that didn’t worry Zena. She also owned a bottle-pitch joint and a very profitable grab joint, and after overhead she netted more each year than any half dozen marks earned at their boring jobs in the straight world. But she continued to play Gypsy fortune-teller because she had to do
something
; she wasn’t the kind of person who could just sit back and take it easy.

By the age of fifteen, she had been a well-developed woman, and she had begun her carnival career as a kootch dancer. These days, as she became increasingly dissatisfied with her role as Madame Zena, she frequently considered opening a girl show of her own. She even toyed with the idea of performing again. It might be a kick.

She was forty-three, but she knew she could still excite a tentful of horny marks. She looked ten years younger than she was. Her hair was chestnut-brown and thick, untouched by gray; it framed a strong, pleasing, unlined face. Her eyes were a rare shade of violet—warm, kind eyes. Years ago, when she’d first worked as a kootch dancer, she’d been voluptuous. She still was. Through diet and exercise, she had maintained her splendid figure, and nature had even cooperated by miraculously sparing her large breasts from the downward drag of gravity.

But even as she fantasized about returning to the stage, she knew the hootchie-kootchie was not in her future. The kootch was just another way of manipulating the marks, no different from fortune-telling; in essence it was the very thing that she needed to get away from for a while. She would have to think of something else she could do.

The raven stirred on its perch and flapped its wings, interrupting her thoughts.

An instant later Conrad Straker entered the tent. He sat in the chair where the marks always sat, across the table from Zena. He leaned forward, anxious, tense. “Well?”

“No luck,” Zena said.

He leaned even closer. “Are you positive we’re talking about the same girl?”

“Yes.”

“She was wearing a blue and gray sweater.”

“Yes, yes,” Zena said impatiently. “She had the ticket that Ghost had given her.”

“What was her name? Did you find out her name?”

“Of course. Laura Alwine.”

“Her mother’s name?”

“Sandra. Not Ellen. Sandra. And Sandra is a natural blonde, not a brunette like Ellen was. Laura gets her dark hair and eyes from her father, she says. I’m sorry, Conrad. I pumped the girl for a lot of information while I was telling her fortune, but none of it matches what you’re looking for. Not a single detail of it.”