Queen of borrowed light who guards a shrine between the pillars Night and Day.
BEYOND the flowing windshield the taillight of the truck ahead wavered ruby-red in the darkness. The windshield wiper’s tock-tock-tock was hypnotic. Sitting between the two women, Stan remembered the attic at home on a rainy day-private, shut off from prying eyes, close, steamy, intimate.
Molly sat next to the door on his right, leaning her head against the glass. Her raincoat rustled when she crossed her legs. In the driver’s seat Zeena bent forward, peering between the swipes of the wiper, following blindly the truck that held the snake box and the gear for the geek show, Bruno’s weights, and Martin’s baggage with the tattoo outfit. The geek, with his bottle, had crawled into a little cavern made by the piled gear and folded canvas.
In her own headlights, when the procession stopped at a crossing, Zeena could see Bruno’s chunky form in a slicker swing from the cab and plod around to the back to look at the gear and make sure the weights were fast. Then he came over and stepped on the running board. Zeena cranked down the window on her side. “Hi, Dutchy-wet enough for you?”
“Joost about,” he said softly. “How is things back here? How is Pete?”
“Right in back of us here having a snooze on the drapes. You reckon we’ll try putting up in this weather?”
Bruno shook his head. His attention crept past Zeena and Stan, and for a moment his eyes lingered sadly on Molly, who had not turned her head.
“I joost want to make sure everything is okay.” He turned back into the rain, crossing the streaming beam of the headlights and vanishing in the dark. The truck ahead began to move; Zeena shifted gears.
“He’s a fine boy,” she said at last. “Molly, you ought to give Bruno a chance.”
Molly said, “No, thanks. I’m doing okay. No, thanks.”
“Go on-you’re a big girl now. Time you was having some fun in this world. Bruno could treat you right, by the looks of him. When I was a kid I had a beau that was a lumberjack-he was built along the lines of Bruno. And oh, boy!”
As if suddenly aware that her thigh was pressed close to Stan’s, Molly squeezed farther into the corner. “No, thanks. I’m having fun now.”
Zeena sighed gustily. “Take your time, kid. Maybe you just ain’t met the right fella. And Stan here ought to be ashamed of himself. Why, me and Pete was married when I was seventeen. Pete wasn’t much older’n Stan. How old are you, Stan?”
“Twenty-one,” Stan said, keeping his voice low.
Approaching a curve, Zeena braced herself. Stan could feel the muscles of her thigh tighten as she worked the wheel. “Them was the days. Pete was working a crystal act in vaudeville. God, he was handsome. In a soup and fish he looked about two feet taller than in his street clothes. He wore a little black beard and a turban. I was working in the hotel when he checked in and I was that green I asked him when I brought in the towels if he’d tell my fortune. I’d never had my fortune told. He looked in my hand and told me something very exciting was going to happen to me involving a tall, dark man. I got the giggles. It was only because he was so good-looking. I wasn’t bashful around men. Never was. I couldn’t have kept that hotel job a minute if I had been. But the best I’d been hoping for was to hook some gambler or race-track man-hoping he would help me get on the stage.”
Suddenly Molly spoke. “My dad was a race-track man. He knew a lot about horses. He didn’t die broke.”
“Well, now,” Zeena said, taking her eyes from the point of ruby light ahead long enough to send Molly a warm look in the darkness. “What d’you know. Oh, the gamblers was the great sheiks in my day. Any gal who could knock herself off a gambling man was doing something. We started when we were fourteen or fifteen. Lordy, that was fifteen years ago! Seems like yesterday some ways and like a million years in others. But the gamblers were the heartbreakers. Say, honey-I’ll bet your dad was handsome, eh? Girls generally take after their fathers.”
“You bet he was handsome. Daddy was the best-looking man I ever saw. I always said I’d never get married until I found a man as good-looking as Daddy-and as sweet. He was grand.”
“Umm. Tall, dark, and handsome. Guess that lets you out, Stan. I don’t mean about being tall. You’re tall enough. But Molly likes ’em dark.”
“I could get some hair dye,” Stan said.
“Nope. Nope, never do. That might fool the public, Goldy Locks, but it would never fool a wife. Less’n you wanted to dye all over.” She threw back her head and laughed. Stan found himself laughing too, and even Molly joined in.
“Nope,” Zeena went on, “Pete was a real brunette all over; and, boy, could he love. We got married second season I traveled with him. He had me doing the back-of-the-house steal with the envelopes at first, in an usherette’s uniform. Then we worked out a two-person act. He worked the stage, with his crystal, and I worked the audience. We used a word code at first and he used to ring in that part of the act as a stall while another girl was copying out the questions backstage. I’d go out and have people give me articles and Pete would look into his crystal and describe them. When we started we only used about ten different things and it was simple, but half the time I would get mixed up and then Pete would do some tall ad-libbing. But I learned. You should of seen our act when we were working the Keith time. By God, we could practically send a telegram word by word, and nobody could tumble, it was that natural, what we said.”
“Why didn’t you stay in vaudeville?” Stan asked intently. Suddenly he knew he had said the wrong thing; but there was no way to recall it, so he kept quiet.
Zeena paid close attention to her driving for a moment and then she rallied. “Pete’s nerve began to go back on him.” She turned and looked back into the rear of the van at the curled, sleeping figure, covered with a raincoat. Then she went on, dropping her voice. “He began muffing the code and he always needed a few shots before going on. Booze and mentalism don’t mix. But we do as well in the carny, figuring up the net at the end of the year. And we don’t have to cut no dash-living in swell hotels and all that. Horoscopes are easy to pitch and cost you about twenty-five a thousand. And we can take it easy in the winter. Pete don’t drink much then. We got a shack down in Florida and he likes it down there. I do a little tea-leaf reading and one winter I worked a mitt camp in Miami. Palmistry always goes good in a town like Miami.”
“I like Miami,” Molly said softly. “Dad and I used to go there for the races at Hialeah and Tropical Park. It’s a grand place.”
“Any place is grand, long as you got the old do-re-mi in the grouch bag,” Zeena said. “Say, this must be it. They’re turning. I can tell you I ain’t going to sleep in the truck tonight. Little Zeena’s going to get her a room with a bathtub if they got any in this town. What say, kid?”
“Anything suits me,” Molly said. “I’d love to have a hot bath.”
Stan had a vision of what Molly would look like in the bathtub. Her body would be milk-white and long-limbed there in the water and a black triangle of shadow and her breasts with rosy tips. He would stand looking down at her and then bend over and she would reach soapy arms up but she would have to be someone else and he would have to be someone else, he thought savagely, because he had never managed to do it yet and always something held him back or the girl seemed to freeze up or suddenly he didn’t want her any more once it was within reach and besides there was never the time or the place was wrong and besides it took a lot of dough and a car and all kinds of stuff and then they would expect you to marry them right away and they would probably get a kid the first thing…
“Here we are, chillun,” Zeena said.
The rain had slackened to a drizzle. In the lights of headlamps the roughnecks were busy tearing canvas from the trucks. Stan threw his slicker over his shoulders, went around to open the rear doors of the truck. He crawled in and gently shook Pete by the ankle. “Pete, wake up. We’re here. We’ve got to put up.”
“Oh, lemme sleep five minutes more.”
“Come on, Pete. Zeena says to give us a hand putting up.”
He suddenly threw off the raincoat which covered him and sat up shivering. “Just a minute, kid. Be right with you.” He crawled stiffly from the truck and stood shaking, tall and stooped, in the cool night air. From one pocket he drew a bottle, offering it to Stan, who shook his head. Pete took a pull, then another, and corked the bottle. Then he drew the cork out, finished it, and heaved it into the night. “Dead soldier.”
The floodlights were up and the carny boss had laid out the midway with his marking stakes. Stan shouldered planks that fitted together to make Zeena’s stage and drew one bundle of them from the van.
The top of the Ten-in-One was going up. Stan gave a hand on the hoist, while watery dawn showed over the trees and in houses on the edge of the fair grounds lights began to snap on in bedrooms, then in kitchens.
In the growing lavender of daybreak the carny took shape. Booths sprang up, the cookhouse sent the perfume of coffee along the dripping air. Stan paused, his shirt stuck to him with sweat, a comfortable glow in the muscles of his arms and back. And his old man had wanted him to go into real estate!
Inside the Ten-in-One tent Stan and Pete set up the stage for the mental act. They got the curtains hung, moved the bridge table and a chair under the stage, and stowed away the cartons of horoscopes.
Zeena returned. In the watery gold light of morning lines showed around her eyes, but she held herself as straight as a tent pole. “Got me a whole damn bridal suite-two rooms and bawth. C’mon over, both of you, and have a good soak.”
Pete needed a shave, and his gaunt, angular face seemed stretched tighter over his bones. “I’d like to, sugar. Only I got to do a few little chores first in town. I’ll see you later on.”
“It’s 28 Locust Lane. You got enough dough?”
“You might let me have a couple of dollars from the treasury.”
“Okay, honey. But get some coffee into you first. Promise Zeena you’ll have breakfast.”
Pete took the money and put it carefully away in a billfold. “I shall probably have a small glass of iced orange juice, two three-minute eggs, melba toast and coffee,” he said, his voice suddenly vibrant. Then he seemed to fade. He took out the billfold and looked in it. “Must make sure I got my money safe,” he said in an off-key, strangely childish tone. He started off across the lot toward a shack at the edge of the village. Zeena watched him go.
“I’ll bet that joint is a blind pig,” she said to Stan. “Pete’s sure a real clairvoyant when it comes to locating hidden treasure- long as it gurgles when you shake it. Well, you coming back and clean up? Look at you! Your shirt’s sticking to you with sweat!”
As they walked, Stan breathed in the morning. Mist hung over the hills beyond the town, and from a slope rising from the other side of the road came the gentle tonk of a cowbell. Stan stopped and stretched his arms.
Zeena stopped too. “Never get nothing like this working the two-a-day. Honest, you know, Stan, I’d get homesick just to hear a cow moo.”
The sun, breaking through, sparkled in wagon ruts still deep with rain. Stan took her arm to help her across the puddles. Under the warm, smooth rubber of the raincoat he pressed the soft bulge of her breast. He could feel the heat steaming up over his face where the cool wind struck it.
“You’re awful nice to have around, Stan. You know that?”
He stopped walking. They were out of sight of the carnival grounds. Zeena was smiling at something inside herself. Awkwardly his arm went around her and he kissed her. It was lots different from kissing high-school girls. The warm, intimate searching of her mouth left him weak and dizzy. They broke apart and Stan said, “Wow.”
Zeena let her hand stay for an instant pressed against his cheek; then she turned and they walked on, hand in hand.
“Where’s Molly?” he asked after a while.
“Pounding her ear. I talked the old gal that has the house into giving us the two rooms for the price of one. While I was waiting for her to put up her husband’s lunch I took a quick peek in the family Bible and got all their birth dates down pat. I told her right off that she was Aries-March 29th. Then I gave her a reading that just set her back on her heels. We got a real nice room. Always pays to keep your eyes open, I always say. The kid had her a good soak and hit the hay. She’ll be pounding her ear. She’s a fine kid, if she could only grow up some and stop yelping for her daddy every time she has a hangnail. But she’ll get over it, I reckon. Wait till you see the size of these rooms.”
The room reminded Stan of home. The old house on Linden Street and the big brass bedstead in his parents’ room, where it was all tumbled and smelling of perfume on Mother’s pillow and of hair restorer on his father’s side.
Zeena threw off her raincoat, rolled a newspaper into a tight bar, tied it with string in the middle and hung the coat up on a hook in the closet. She pulled off her shoes and stretched out on the bed, reaching her arms wide. Then she drew out her hairpins and the brassy hair which had been in a neat double roll around her head fell in pigtails. Swiftly she unbraided them and let the hair flow around her on the pillow.
Stan said, “I guess I’d better get that bath. I’ll see if there’s any hot water left. He hung his coat and vest on a chairback. When he looked up he saw that Zeena had her eyes on him. Her lids were partly closed. One arm was bent under her head and she was smiling, a sweet, possessive smile.
He came over to her and sat beside her on the edge of the bed. Zeena covered his hand with hers and suddenly he bent and kissed her. This time there was no need for them to stop and they didn’t. Her hand slid inside his shirt and felt the smooth warmth of his back tenderly.
“Wait, honey. Not yet. Kiss me some more.”
“What if Molly should wake up?”
“She won’t. She’s young. You couldn’t wake that kid up. Don’t worry about things, honey. Just take it easy and slow.”
All the things Stan had imagined himself saying and doing at such a time did not fit. It was thrilling and dangerous and his heart beat so hard he felt it would choke him.
“Take all your things off, honey, and hang ’em on the chair, neat.”
Stan wondered that he didn’t feel in the least ashamed now that this was it. Zeena stripped off her stockings, unhooked her dress and drew it leisurely over her head. Her slip followed.
At last she lay back, her bent arm under her head, and beckoned him to come to her. “Now then, Stan honey, you can let yourself go.”
“It’s getting late.”
“Sure is. You got to get your bath and get back. Folks’ll think Zeena’s gone and seduced you.”
“They’d be right.”
“Damned if they wouldn’t.” She raised herself on her elbows and let her hair fall down on each side of his face and kissed him lightly. “Get along with you. Skat, now.”
“Can’t. You’re holding me pinned down.”
“Try’n get away.”
“Can’t. Too heavy.”
“See’f you can wiggle loose.”
There was a knock at the door, a gentle, timid tapping. Zeena threw her hair out of her eyes. Stan started but she laid one finger on his lips. She swung off the bed gracefully and pulled Stan up by one hand. Then she handed him his trousers, underwear, and socks and pushed him into the bathroom.
Behind the bathroom door Stan crouched, his ear to the panel, his heart hammering with alarm. He heard Zeena get her robe out of a bag and take her time about answering the tap. Then the hall door opened. Pete’s voice.
“Sorry t’wake you, sugar. Only-” His voice sounded thicker. “Only, had little shopping to do. I sorta forgot ’bout getting breakfast.”
There was the snap of a pocketbook opening. “Here’s a buck, honey. Now make sure it’s breakfast.”
“Cross my heart, hope die.”
Stan heard Zeena’s bare feet approach the bathroom. “Stan,” she called, “hurry up in there. I want to get some sleep. Get out of that tub and fall into your pants.” To Pete she said, “The kid’s had a hard night, tearing down and putting up in all that rain. I expect he’s fallen asleep in the tub. Maybe you better not wait for him.”
The door closed. Stan straightened up. She had never turned a hair, lying to Pete about him being in the bathtub. It comes natural in women, he thought. That’s the way they all do when they have guts enough. That’s the way they would all like to do. He found himself trembling. Quietly he drew a tub of hot water.
When it was half full he lay in it and closed his eyes. Well, now he knew. This was what all the love-nest murderers killed over and what people got married to get. This was why men left home and why women got themselves dirty reputations. This was the big secret. Now I know. But there’s nothing disappointing about the feeling. It’s okay.
He let his hands trail in the hot water and splashed little ripples over his chest. He opened his eyes. Drawing his hand out of the steamy warmth he gazed at it a moment and then carefully took from the back of it a hair that gleamed brassy-gold, like a tiny, crinkled wire. Zeena was a natural blonde.
The weeks went by. The Ackerman-Zorbaugh Monster Shows crawled from town to town, the outline of the sky’s edge around the fair grounds changing but the sea of upturned faces always the same.
The first season is always the best and the worst for a carny. Stan’s muscles hardened and his fingers developed great surety, his voice greater volume. He put a couple of coin sleights in the act that he would never have had the nerve to try in public before.
Zeena taught him many things, some of them about magic. “Misdirection is the whole works, honey. You don’t need no fancy production boxes and trap doors and trick tables. I’ve always let on that a man that will spend his time learning misdirection can just reach in his pocket and put something in a hat and then go ahead and take it out again and everybody will sit back and gasp, wondering where it came from.”
“Did you ever do magic?” he asked her.
Zeena laughed. “Not on your sweet life. There’s very few girls goes in for magic. And that’s the reason. A gal spends all her time learning how to attract attention to herself. Then in magic she has to unlearn all that and learn how to get the audience to look at something else. Strain’s too great. The dolls can never make it. I couldn’t. I’ve always stuck to the mental business. It don’t hurt anybody-makes plenty of friends for you wherever you go. Folks are always crazy to have their fortunes told, and what the hell- You cheer ’em up, give ’em something to wish and hope for. That’s all the preacher does every Sunday. Not much different, being a fortuneteller and a preacher, way I look at it. Everybody hopes for the best and fears the worst and the worst is generally what happens but that don’t stop us from hoping. When you stop hoping you’re in a bad way.”
Stan nodded. “Has Pete stopped hoping?”
Zeena was silent and her childish blue eyes were bright. “Sometimes I think he has. Pete’s scared of something-I think he got good and scared of himself a long time ago. That’s what made him such a wiz as a crystal-reader-for a few years. He wished like all get out that he really could read the future in the ball. And when he was up there in front of them he really believed he was doing it. And then all of a sudden he began to see that there wasn’t no magic anywhere to lean on and he had nobody to lean on in the end but himself-not me, not his friends, not Lady Luck-just himself. And he was scared he would let himself down.”
“So he did?”
“Yeah. He did.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
Zeena bristled. “Nothing’s going to happen to him. He is a sweet man, down deep. Long as he lasts I’ll stick to him. If it hadn’t been for Pete I’d of probably ended up in a crib house. Now I got a nice trade that’ll always be in demand as long as there’s a soul in the world worried about where next month’s rent is coming from. I can always get along. And take Pete right along with me.”
Across the tent the talker, Clem Hoately, had mounted the platform of Major Mosquito and started his lecture. The Major drew back one tiny foot and aimed a kick with deadly accuracy at Hoately’s shin. It made the talker stammer for a moment. The midget was snarling like an angry kitten.
“The Major is a nasty little guy,” Stan said.
“Sure he is. How’d you like to be shut up in a kid’s body that way? With the marks all yawping at you. It’s different in our racket. We’re up head and shoulders above the marks. We’re better’n they are and they know it. But the Major’s a freak born.”
“How about Sailor Martin? He’s a made freak.”
Zeena snorted. “He’s just a pecker carrying a man around with it. He started by having a lot of anchors and nude women tattooed on his arms to show the girls how tough he was or something. Then he got that battleship put on his chest and he was off. He was like a funny paper, with his shirt off, and he figured he might as well make his skin work for him. If he was ever in the Navy, I was born in a convent.”
“He doesn’t seem to be making much time with your Electric Chair pal.”
Zeena’s eyes flashed. “He better not. That kid’s not going to get it until she runs into some guy that’ll treat her right. I’ll see to that. I’d beat the be-Jesus out of any snot-nose that went monkeying around Molly.”
“You and who else?”
“Me and Bruno.”
Evansburg, Morristown, Linklater, Cooley Mills, Ocheketawney, Bale City, Boeotia, Sanders Falls, Newbridge.
Coming: Ackerman-Zorbaugh Monster Shows. Auspices Tall Cedars of Zion, Caldwell Community Chest, Pioneer Daughters of Clay County, Kallakie Volunteer Fire Department, Loyal Order of Bison.
Dust when it was dry. Mud when it was rainy. Swearing, steaming, sweating, scheming, bribing, bellowing, cheating, the carny went its way. It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns-lights and noise and the chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the ferris wheel, to see the wild man who fondles those rep-tiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.
Stan was surprised, and gnawed by frustration. He had had Zeena-but how few chances ever came his way for him to have her again. She was the wise one, who knew all the ropes of the carny and everywhere else. She knew. And yet, in the tight world of the carnival, she could find very few opportunities to do what her eyes told Stan a dozen times a day that she would take pleasure in doing.
Pete was always there, always hanging around, apologetic, crestfallen, hands trembling, perfumed with bootleg, always a reminder of what he had been.
Zeena would beg off from a rendezvous with Stan to sew a button on Pete’s shirt. Stan couldn’t understand it; the more he thought about it the more confused and bitter he got. Zeena was using him to satisfy herself, he kept repeating. Then the thought struck him that maybe Zeena played a game of make-believe with him, and actually saw over his shoulder a shadow of Pete as he had been-handsome and straight and wearing his little black beard.
The thought would strike him right in the middle of his act and his patter would turn into a snarl.
One day Clem Hoately was waiting beside the platform when he came down after the last show. “Whatever’s eating you, kid, you better turn it off while you’re on the box. If you can’t be a trouper, pack up your junk and beat it. Magicians come two for a nickel.”
Stan had acquired enough carny to reach over, take a half dollar from Hoately’s lapel, and vanish it in his other hand before walking away. But the call-down by the older man burnt into him. No woman or man his own age could drive the gall into his system like that. It took an old bastard, particularly when the stubble on his face looked silvery like fungus growing on a corpse. The bastard.
Stan went to sleep that night on his cot in the Ten-in-One tent with fantasies of slowly roasting Hoately over a fire, inquisition fashion.
Next day, just as they were about to open, Hoately stopped by his platform while Stan was opening a carton of pitch books.
“Keep them half-dollar tricks in the act, son. They got a nice flash. The marks love it.”
Stan grinned and said, “You bet.” When the first tip came wandering in he gave them all he had. His sale of the magic books almost doubled. He was on top of the world all day. But then came night.
By night Zeena’s body plagued his dreams and he lay under the blanket, worn out and with his eyes burning for sleep, thinking back and having her over and over in memory.
Then he waited until closing one night. He stepped back of the curtains on her miniature stage. Zeena had taken off the white silk robe and was putting her hair up, her shoulders white and round and tantalizing over her slip. He took her roughly in his arms and kissed her and she pushed him away. “You beat it out of here. I got to get dressed.”
“All right. You mean we’re washed up?” he said.
Her face softened and she laid her palm gently against his cheek. “Got to learn to call your shots, honey. We ain’t married folks. We got to be careful. Only one person I’m married to and that’s Pete. You’re a sweet boy and I’m fond as all hell of you. Maybe a little too fond of you. But we got to have some sense. Now you be good. We’ll get together one of these days-or nights. And we’ll have fun. That’s a promise. I’ll lay it on the line just as soon as ever we can.”
“I wish I could believe it.”
She slid her cool arms around his neck and gave him the promise between his lips, warm, sweet, and searching. His heart began to pound.
“Tonight?”
“We’ll see.”
“Make it tonight.”
She shook her head. “I got to make Pete write some letters. He can’t if he gets too loaded and he’s got some that need answering. You can’t let your friends down in show business. You find that out when you get on your uppers and have to hit ’em for a loan. Maybe tomorrow night.”
Stan turned away, rebellious and savage, feeling as if the whole surface of his mind had been rubbed the wrong way. He hated Zeena and her Pete.
On his way over to the cookhouse for his supper he passed Pete. Pete was sober and shaky and profane. Zeena would have hidden his bottle in view of the letter-writing session. His eyes had begun to pop.
“Got a spare dollar on you, kid?” Pete whispered.
Zeena came up behind them. “You two boys stay right here and have your supper,” she said, pushing them toward the cookhouse. “I’ve got to find a drugstore in this burg that keeps open late. Nothing like a girl’s being careful of her beauty, huh? I’ll be right back, honey,” she said to Pete, fastening a loose button of his shirt. “We got to catch up on our correspondence.”
Stan ate quickly, but Pete pushed the food around, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and wiped his hand carefully with his napkin.
He crushed the napkin into a hard, paper wad and aimed it at the cook’s back with a curse.
“You got a spare fin, kid?”
“No. Let’s get on back to the tent. You got the new Billboard to read. Zeena left it under the stage.”
They walked back in silence.
Stan put up his cot and watched the Ten-in-One settle down for the night. Under the astrology stage a single light burned, winking through the cracks of the boards. Inside Pete was sitting at the table, trying to read the Billboard and going over and over the same paragraph.
Why couldn’t Zeena have let him accompany her to the store, Stan asked himself. Then, on the way, maybe they could have warmed up and she would have forgotten about Pete and writing letters.
Zeena had slipped the bottle under the seat of Major Mosquito’s chair. Stan jumped down from his own platform and crossed the tent softly. The Major’s tiny cot was just above his head; he could hear above him the quick breathing which sounded soprano. His hand found the bottle, drew it out.
There was only an inch or two left in it. Stan turned back and crept up the steps of Zeena’s theater. A few moments later he came down and squeezed into the understage compartment. The bottle, more than half full now, was in his hand.
“How about a drink, Pete?”
“Glory be to God!” The flask was nearly snatched from his hand. Pete jerked the cork, holding it out to Stan automatically. The next instant he had it in his mouth and his Adam’s apple was working. He drained it and handed it back. “God almighty. A friend in need as the saying goes. I’m afraid I didn’t leave much for you, Stan.”
“That’s all right. I don’t care for any right now.”
Pete shook his head and seemed to pull himself together. “You’re a good kid, Stan. You got a fine act. Don’t let anything ever keep you out of the big time. You can go places, Stan, if you don’t get bogged down. You should have seen us when we were on top. Used to pack ’em in. They’d sit through four other acts just to see us. Boy, I can remember all the times we had our names on the marquee in letters a foot high-top billing -everywhere we went. We had plenty fun, too.
“But you- Why, kid, the greatest names in the business started right where you are now. You’re the luckiest kid in the world. You got a good front-you’re a damn good-looking kid and I wouldn’t crap you up. You can talk. You can do sleights. You got everything. Great magician someday. Only don’t let the carny…” His eyes were glazing over. He stopped speaking and sat rigid.
“Why don’t you turn out the light and take it easy until Zeena gets back?” Stan suggested.
A grunt was his only answer. Then the man stood up and threw back his shoulders. “Kid, you should have seen us when we played the Keith time!”
Good God, is this idiot never going to pass out, Stan thought. Beyond the wooden walls of the understage compartment and the canvas of the tent was the sound of a car’s engine starting, the whirr of the starter rising through the night as the nameless driver pressed it. The motor caught and Stan heard the gears.
“You know, kid-” Pete drew himself up until his head nearly touched the boards of the ceiling. The alcohol seemed to stiffen his back. His chin came up commandingly. “Stan, lad like you could be a great mentalist. Study human nature!” He took a long, last pull at the bottle and finished it. Barely swaying, he opened his eyes wide and swallowed.
“Here-chord from the orchestra, amber spot-and I’m on. Make my spiel, give ’em one laugh, plenty mystery. Then I jump right into the reading. Here’s m’crystal.” He focused his eyes on the empty whisky bottle and Stan watched him with an uneasy twinge. Pete seemed to be coming alive. His eyes became hot and intent.
Then his voice altered and took on depth and power. He passed his left hand slowly over the bottle’s surface. “Since the dawn of history,” he began, his words booming in the wooden box-room, “mankind has sought to see behind the veil which hides him from tomorrow. And through the ages certain men have gazed into the polished crystal and seen. Is it some property of the crystal itself? Or does the gazer use it merely to turn his eyes inward? Who can tell? But visions come. Slowly, shifting their form, visions come…”
Stan found himself watching the empty bottle in which a single pale drop slanted across the bottom. He could not take his eyes away, so contagious was the other’s absorption.
“Wait! The shifting shapes begin to clear. I see fields of grass and rolling hills. And a boy-a boy is running on bare feet through the fields. A dog is with him.”
Too swiftly for his wary mind to check him, Stan whispered the words, “Yes. Gyp.”
Pete’s eyes burned down into the glass. “Happiness then… but for a little while. Now dark mists… sorrow. I see people moving… one man stands out… evil… the boy hates him. Death and the wish of death…”
Stan moved like an explosion. He snatched for the bottle; it slipped and fell to the ground. He kicked it into a corner, his breath coming quick and rapid.
Pete stood for a moment, gazing at his empty hand, then dropped his arm. His shoulders sagged. He crumpled into the folding chair, resting his elbows on the card table. When he raised his face to Stan the eyes were glazed, the mouth slack. “I didn’t mean nothing, boy. You ain’t mad at me, are ya? Just fooling around. Stock reading-fits everybody. Only you got to dress it up.” His tongue had thickened and he paused, his head drooping, then snapping up again. “Everybody had some trouble. Somebody they wanted to kill. Usually for a boy it’s the old man. What’s childhood? Happy one minute, heartbroke the next. Every boy had a dog. Or neighbor’s dog-”
His head fell forward on his forearms. “Just old drunk. Just lush. Lord… Zeena be mad. Don’t you let on, son, you gimme that little drink. She be mad at you, too.” He began to cry softly.
Stan felt his stomach heave with disgust. He turned without a word and left the steaming compartment. In comparison, the air of the Ten-in-One tent, darkened now and still, felt cool.
It seemed as if half the night had worn away before Zeena did come back. Stan met her, talking in whispers so as not to disturb the others in the tent, now snoring heavily in their bunks.
“Where’s Pete?”
“Passed out.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“I-I don’t know. He was over by the geek’s layout.”
“God damn it, Stan, I told you to watch him. Oh, well, I’m tuckered out myself. Might as well let him sleep it off. Tomorrow’s another day.”
“Zeena.”
“What is it, honey?”
“Let me walk you home.”
“It ain’t far and I don’t want you getting ideas. The landlady of this dump has a face like a snapping turtle. We don’t want to start no trouble in this burg. We’ve had enough trouble with the wheels pretty near getting shut down for gambling. This is bluenose.”
They had left the tent and the darkened midway stretched out ahead of them, light still streaming from the cookhouse. “I’ll walk you over,” Stan said. There was a leaden feeling in his chest and he fought to throw it off. He laced his fingers in hers and she did not draw her hand away.
In the shadow of the first trees on the edge of the lot they stopped and kissed and Zeena clung to him. “Gosh, honey, I’ve missed you something awful. I guess I need more loving than I thought. But not in the room. That old battle-ax is on the prowl.”
Stan took her arm and started along the road. The moon had set. They passed a field on a little rise and then the road dipped between clay banks with fields above road level. “Let’s go up there,” Stan whispered.
They climbed the bank and spread their coats out on the grass.
Stan reached the Ten-in-One tent just before light. He crept into his bunk and was out like a shot. Then something was chirping in his ear and tugging at his shoulder. A voice like a fiddle’s E string was cutting through the layers of fatigue and the void which was in him from having emptied his nerves.
“Kid, wake up! Wake up, you big lump!” The shrill piping got louder.
Stan growled and opened his eyes. The tent was tawny gold with sun on the outside of it above him. The pestiferous force at his shoulder was Major Mosquito, his blond hair carefully dampened and brushed over his bulging baby forehead.
“Stan, get up! Pete’s dead!”
“What?”
Stan shot off the bunk and felt for his shoes. “What happened to him?”
“Just croaked-the stinking old rum-pot. Got into that bottle of wood alcohol Zeena keeps to burn the phoney questions. It was all gone or pretty near. And Pete’s dead as a herring. His mouth’s hanging open like the Mammoth Cave. Come on, take a look. I kicked him in the ribs a dozen times and he never moved. Come and look at him.”
Without speaking Stan laced up his shoes, carefully, correctly, taking great pains with them. He kept fighting back the thought that wouldn’t stay out of his mind. Then it broke over him like a thunder storm: They’ll hang me. They’ll hang me. They’ll hang me. Only I didn’t mean it. I only wanted to pass him out. I didn’t know it was wood- They’ll hang me. I didn’t mean it. They’ll-”
He leaped from the platform and pressed through the knot of show people around the seeress’s stage. Zeena stepped out and stood facing them, tall and straight and dry-eyed.
“He’s gone all right. He was a good guy and a swell trouper. I told him that alky was bad. Only last night I hid his bottle on him-” She stopped and suddenly ducked back through the curtains.
Stan turned and pushed through the crowd. He walked out of the tent into the early sun and kept on to the edge of the grounds where the telephone poles beside the road carried their looping strands off into the distance.
His foot clinked against something bright and he picked up a burned-out electric bulb which lay in the ashes of a long-dead fire. It was iridescent and smoky inside, dark as a crystal ball on a piece of black velvet. Stan kept it in his hand, looking for a rock or a fence post. His diaphragm seemed to be pressing up around his lungs and keeping him from drawing his breath. On one of the telephone poles was a streaked election poster, carrying the gaunt face of the candidate, white hair falling dankly over one eyebrow, lines of craft and rapacity around the mouth that the photographer couldn’t quite hide.
“Elect MACKINSEN for SHERIFF. HONEST-INCORRUPTIBLE-FEARLESS.”
Stan drew back his arm and let the bulb fly. “You son-of-a-bitch whoremonger!” Slowly, as if by the very intensity of his attention he had slowed down time itself, the bulb struck the printed face and shattered, the sparkling fragments sailing high in the air and glittering as they fell.
As if an abscess inside him had broken, Stan could breathe again and the knot of fear loosened. He could never fear again with the same agony. He knew it. It would never come again as bad as that. His mind, clear as the bright air around him, took over, and he began to think.