Twilight Eyes (22 page)

—and when I awoke, I could still feel her throat collapsing in my iron hands.

I sat straight up in bed, listening to the furious beat of my heart and to my ragged breathing, trying to clear my mind of the nightmare. I blinked in the morning light and desperately tried to assure myself that, as vivid and powerful as the scene had been, nevertheless it had been only a dream, not a premonition of things to come.

Not a premonition.

Please.

The show call was for eleven o'clock, which left me with a couple of hours on my hands, hours in which I might wind up contemplating the blood that was
also
on my hands if I did not, for God's sake, find something to occupy myself. The fairgrounds were on the edge of the county seat, a burg of about seven or eight thousand souls, so I walked into town and had breakfast in a coffee shop, then went next door to a men's store and bought two pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. I saw no goblins during the entire visit, and the day was so August-perfect that I gradually began to feel that everything might turn out all right—me and Rya, the week in Yontsdown—if I just kept my wits about me and did not lose hope.

I returned to the fairgrounds at ten-thirty, put the new jeans and shirts in the trailer, and was on the midway by a quarter of eleven. I had the high-striker ready for business before show call and had just sat down on the stool beside it to await the first marks when Rya appeared.

Golden girl. Bare, tanned legs. Yellow shorts. Four different shades of yellow in a horizontally striped T-shirt. She was wearing a bra on the midway because this was 1963, and bralessness in public would have been shocking to the marks, regardless of how acceptable it was in the trailer town, among carnies. Her hair was held back from her face with a knotted yellow bandanna. Radiant.

I stood, attempted to put my hands on her shoulders, tried to kiss her cheek, but she put one hand against my chest, restraining me, and said, “I don't want any misunderstanding.”

“About what?”

“Last night.”

“What could I possibly misunderstand about that?”

“What it means.”

“What
does
it mean?”

She was frowning. “It means I like you—”

“Good!”

“—and it means we can give each other pleasure—”

“You noticed!”

“—but it doesn't mean I'm your girl or anything like that.”

“You sure look like a girl to me,” I said.

“On the midway I'm still your boss.”

“Ah.”

“And you're the employee.”

“Ah,” I said.

Jesus, I thought.

She said, “And I don't want any unusual . . . familiarity on the midway.”

“God forbid. But we do still get to be unusually familiar
off
the midway?”

She was utterly unaware of the offensiveness of her approach and tone, and did not understand the humiliation that her words inflicted; therefore, she was not sure what my flippancy indicated, but she risked a smile. She said, “That's right. Off the midway I expect you to be just as unusually familiar as you want.”

“Sounds as if I've got
two
jobs, the way you put it. Did you hire me for my talent as a pitchman—or for my body too?”

Her smile faltered. “For your pitch, of course.”

“Because, boss, I wouldn't want to think you're taking advantage of this poor, lowly hired man.”

“I'm serious, Slim.”

“I noticed.”

“So why are you making jokes?”

“It's a socially acceptable alternative.”

“Huh? To what?”

“Yelling, shouting, rash insults.”

“You're mad at me.”

“Ah, you're as perceptive as you are beautiful, boss.”

“There's no reason for you to get angry.”

“No. I guess I'm just a hothead.”

“I'm only trying to get things straight between us.”

“Very businesslike. I admire that.”

“Look, Slim, all I'm saying is that whatever happens between us in private is one thing—and what happens here on the midway is another.”

“Good heavens, I would never suggest we
do
it right here on the midway,” I said.

“You're being difficult.”

“You, on the other hand, are a paragon of diplomacy.”

“See, some guys, if they got in the boss's pants, they'd figure they didn't have to pull their share of the load at work anymore.”

“Do I seem like that kind of guy?” I asked.

“I hope not.”

“That didn't exactly sound like a vote of confidence.”

“I don't want you to be angry with me,” she said.

“I'm not,” I said, although I was.

I knew that she had difficulty relating to people on a one-to-one basis. Because of my psychic perception I had a special appreciation for the sadness, loneliness, and uncertainty—and resultant defiant bravura—that shaped her character, and I was as sorry for her as I was angry.

“You are,” she said. “You're angry.”

“It's all right,” I said. “Now I got to get to work.” I pointed to the far end of the concourse. “Here come the marks.”

“Are we straight?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“See you later,” she said.

I watched her walk away, and I loved her and hated her, but mostly I loved her, this touchingly fragile Amazon. There was no point in being angry with her; she was an inevitable, elemental force; it made as much sense to be angry with the wind or the winter cold or the summer heat, for neither they nor she could be changed by anger.

At one o'clock Marco relieved me for thirty minutes, then for a three-hour break starting at five. Both times I thought about paying a visit to Shockville and having a word with the enigmatic Joel Tuck, and both times I decided against rash action. This was the biggest day of the engagement, and the crowd was three or four times as large as it had been during the week, and what I had to say to Joel was nothing that could be said in front of marks. Besides, I was afraid—in fact, certain—that he would clam up if I pressed him too hard or fast. He might deny any knowledge of goblins and secret burials in the dead of night, and then I would not know how to proceed. I believed I had a valuable potential ally in the freak—ally and friend and, strangely, father figure—and I was concerned that a premature confrontation would drive him away from me. I sensed that it was wiser to let him get to know me better, give him more time to make up his mind about me. I was probably the first person he had ever met who could see the goblins that he saw, just as he was the first
I
had ever met with that same thankless ability, so sooner or later his curiosity would overcome his reticence. Until then I would have to be patient.

Therefore, after a bite of supper, I went down to the meadow, to the trailer where I had my room, and sacked out for two hours. This time there were no nightmares. I was too tired to dream.

I was back at the high-striker before eight o'clock. The last five hours of the engagement passed quickly and profitably in a dry rain of many-colored light that splashed and drizzled over everything, including the thundering amusement rides, and was punctuated by peals of brassy laughter. Pointing, chattering, gaping marks surged past the high-striker, like water overflowing gutters, and in that flood was a swept-along litter of paper money and coins, some of which I strained out and kept for Rya Raines. Finally, by one o'clock in the morning, the midway began to shut down.

To carnies the last night of a stand is “slough night,” and they look forward to it because there is an irrepressible Gypsy spirit in all of them. The carnival sheds the town much like a snake sloughs off its old skin, and as the snake is renewed by the mere act of change, so is the carny and carnival reborn through the promise of new places and new pockets to be relieved of new money.

Marco came around to collect the day's take so I could start dismantling the high-striker without delay. While I attended to that job, a few hundred other carnies—concessionaires, jointees, jam auctioneers, animal trainers, stunt acts, wheelmen, pitchmen, midgets, dwarves, strippers, short-order cooks, roughies, everyone but the children (who were in bed) and those watching over the children—were at work, too, tearing down and packing the rides and hanky-panks and sideshows and grab-stands and other joints, illuminated by the giant generator-powered midway lights. The small roller coaster, a rarity in traveling carnivals, constructed entirely of steel pipes, came apart with a ceaseless
clank-pong-clink-spang!
that was initially irritating but that soon seemed like a strange atonal music, not entirely unpleasant, and eventually became such a part of the background noise that it ceased to be noticeable. At the fun house the clown's face fractured and came down in four parts, the fourth being the huge yellow nose, which hung for a while alone in the night as if it were the proboscis of a gargantuan, mocking Cheshire cat, as given to bizarre vanishing acts as its cousin who had taunted Alice. Something of dinosaurian proportions, with an appetite to match, had taken a bite out of the Ferris wheel. At Shockville they lowered the fifteen-foot-high canvases portraying the twisted forms and faces of the human oddities; as those billowing and curling banners slid down their mooring poles with a creak of pulley wheels, the painted two-dimensional portraits acquired the illusion of three-dimensional life, winking-grinning-leering-snarling-laughing at the laboring carnies below, then folding up with a kiss of canvas lips to painted foreheads, their depthless eyes now contemplating nothing more than their own noses, two-dimensional reality swiftly replacing the brief imitation of life. Two bites were gone from the Ferris wheel. When I finished at the high-striker, I helped pack up Rya Raines's other concessions, then moved around the collapsing midway, pitching in wherever I was needed. We unbolted wooden wall panels, folded tents into parachute bundles for the drop to Yontsdown, disassembled beams and braces, told jokes as we worked, skinned knuckles, strained muscles, cut fingers, nailed shut the lids of crates, hefted crates into trucks, tore up the plank floor of the Dodgem Car pavilion, grunted, sweated, cursed, laughed, guzzled soda, poured down cold beers, dodged the two elephants that were rolling the larger beams to the trucks, sang a few songs (including some that had been written by Buddy Holly, already dead four and a half years, his body compacted with that of a Beechcraft Bonanza on the lonely frozen field of a farm between Clear Lake, Iowa, and Fargo, North Dakota), and we unscrewed screws, unnailed nails, untied ropes, coiled up a few miles of electric cables, and the next time I looked toward the Ferris wheel, I discovered that it had been eaten up entirely, not even one small bone remaining.

Rudy “Red” Morton, the Sombra Brothers' chief mechanic, whom I had met at the Whip that first morning on the lot, directed a platoon of men, and he was in turn guided by Gordon Alwein, who was our bald and bearded superintendent of transportation. Gordy was responsible for the final loading of the enormous midway, and since Sombra Brothers traveled in forty-six railroad cars and ninety huge trucks, his job was very demanding.

Gradually the midway, like an enormous lamp of many flames, was extinguished.

Weary, but with an enormously pleasant feeling of community spirit, I returned to the trailer town in the meadow. Many had already left for Yontsdown; others would not leave until tomorrow.

I did not go to my own trailer.

I went, instead, to Rya's Airstream.

She was waiting for me.

“I hoped you'd come,” she said.

“You knew I would.”