by Jack Ketchum
The sky was orange-red as though a forest fire were raging, punctuated by brighter reds and blues as the Octopus whirled just out of sight behind the trees.
We knew what was out there—we had just come back from there after all, our hands still sticky from cotton candy. But somehow it was mysterious to lie listening, long past our bedtime, silent for once, envying adults and teenagers, imagining the terrors and thrills of the big rides we were too young to go on that were getting all those screams. Until the sounds and lights slowly faded away, replaced by the laughter of strangers as they made their way back to cars all up and down our block.
I swore that when I got old enough I’d be the last one to leave.
And now I was standing alone at the refreshment booth eating my third hot dog of the evening and wondering what the hell to do with myself.
I’d ridden all the rides I cared to. I’d lost money at every game and wheel of fortune the place had to offer and all I had was one tiny ceramic poodle for my mother shoved in my pocket to show for it.
I’d had my candy apple, my Sno-Cone and my slice of pizza.
I’d hung out with Kenny and Malcolm until Malcolm got sick on the Dive Bomber and then with Tony and Lou Morino and Linda and Betty Martin until they went home. It was fun, but now there was just me. It was ten o’clock.
And two hours yet to go.
I’d seen Woofer earlier. But Donny and Willie Jr. hadn’t shown and neither had Ruth or Meg or Susan. It was odd because Ruth was usually very big on Karnival. I thought of going across the street to see what was what but that would mean admitting I was bored and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.
I decided I’d wait a while.
Ten minutes later Meg arrived.
I was trying my luck on number seven red and considering a second candy apple when I saw her walk slowly through the crowd, alone, wearing jeans and a bright green blouse—and suddenly I didn’t feel so shy anymore. That I didn’t feel shy amazed me. Maybe by then I was ready for anything. I waited until I lost on the red again and went over.
And then it was as though I was interrupting something.
She was staring up at the Ferns wheel, fascinated, brushing back a lock of long red hair with her fingers. I saw something glint on her hand as it dropped to her side.
It was a pretty fast wheel. Up top the girls were squealing.
“Hi, Meg.” I said.
She looked at me and smiled and said, “Hi, David.” Then she looked back at the wheel.
You could tell she’d never been on one before. Just the way she stared. What kind of life was that? I wondered.
“Neat, huh? It’s faster than most are.”
She looked at me again, all excited. “It is?”
“Yeah. Faster than the one at Playland, anyway. Faster than Bertram’s Island.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Privately I agreed with her. There was a smooth easy glide to the wheel I’d always liked, a simplicity of purpose and design that the scary rides lacked. I couldn’t have stated it then but I’d always thought the wheel was graceful, romantic.
“Want to try?”
I heard the eagerness in my voice and wished for death. What was I doing? The girl was older than me. Maybe as much as three years older. I was crazy.
I tried to backtrack.
Maybe I’d confused her.
“I mean, I’d go on it with you if you want. If you’re scared to. I don’t mind.”
She laughed. I felt the knife point lift away from my throat.
“Come on,” she said.
She took my hand and led me over.
Somehow I bought us tickets and we stepped into a car and sat down. All I remember is the feel of her hand, warm and dry in the cool night air, the fingers slim and strong. That and my bright-red cheeks reminding me I was twelve years old on the wheel with something very much like a full-grown woman.
And then the old problem came up of what to say, while they loaded the rest of the cars and we rose to the top. I solved it by saying nothing. That seemed fine with her. She didn’t seem uncomfortable at all. Just relaxed and content to be up here looking down at the people and the whole Karnival spread around her strung with lights and up over the trees to our houses, rocking the car gently back and forth, smiling, humming a tune I didn’t know.
Then the wheel began turning and she laughed and I thought it was the happiest, nicest sound I’d ever heard and felt proud of myself for asking her, for making her happy and making her laugh the way she did.
As I say, the wheel was fast and up at the top almost completely silent, all the noise of the Karnival held down below as though enveloped there, and you plunged down into it and then back out of it again, the noise receding quickly, and at the top you were almost weightless in the cool breeze so that you wanted to hold on to the crossbar for a moment for fear of flying away entirely.
I looked down to her hands on the bar and that was when I saw the ring. In the moonlight it looked thin and pale. It sparkled.
I made a show of enjoying the view but mostly it was her smile and the excitement in her eyes I was enjoying, the way the wind pressed and fluttered the blouse across her breasts.
Then our ride was at its peak and the wheel turned faster, the airy sweeping glide at its most graceful and elegant and thrilling as I looked at her, her lovely open face rushing first through a frame of stars and then past the dark schoolhouse and then the pale brown tents of the Kiwanis, her hair blowing back and then forward over her brushed cheeks as we rose again, and I suddenly felt those first two or three years that she had lived and I hadn’t like a terrible weighted irony, like a curse, and thought for a moment, it isn’t fair. I can give her this but that’s all and it’s just not fair.
The feeling passed. By the time the ride was over and we waited near the top all that was left was the pleasure at how happy she looked. And how alive.
I could talk now.
“How’d you like it?”
“God, I loved it! You keep treating me to things, David.”
“I can’t believe you never rode before.”
“My parents … I know they always meant to take us someplace. Palisades Park or somewhere. We just never got around to it, I guess.”
“I heard about … everything. I’m sorry.”
There. It was out.
She nodded. “The worst is missing them, you know? And knowing they won’t be back again. Just knowing that. Sometimes you forget and it’s as though they’re on vacation or something and you think, gee, I wish they’d call. You miss them. You forget they’re really gone. You forget the past six months even happened. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that crazy? Then you catch yourself … and it’s real again.
“I dream about them a lot. And they’re always still alive in my dreams. We’re happy.”
I could see the tears well up. She smiled and shook her head.
“Don’t get me started,” she said.
We were on the downside now, moving, only five or six cars ahead of us. I saw the next group waiting to get on. I looked down over the bar and noticed Meg’s ring again. She saw me looking.
“My mother’s wedding band,” she said. “Ruth doesn’t like me to wear it much but my mother would have. I’m not going to lose it. I’d never lose it.”
“It’s pretty. It’s beautiful.”
She smiled. “Better than my scars?”
I flushed but that was okay, she was only kidding me. “A lot better.”
The wheel moved down again. Only two more cars to go. Time moved dreamlike for me, but even at that it moved too quickly. I hated to see it end.
“How do you like it?” I asked. “Over at the Chandler’s?”
She shrugged. “Okay I guess. Not like home. Not the way it was. Ruth’s kind of … funny sometimes. But I think she means well.” She paused and then said, “Woofer’s a little weird.”
“You can say that again.”
We laughed. Though the comment about Ruth c
onfused me. I remembered the reserve in her voice, the coldness that first day by the brook.
“We’ll see,” she said. “I suppose it takes time to get used to things, doesn’t it.”
We’d reached the bottom now. One of the carnies lifted the crossbar and held the car steady with his foot. I hardly noticed him. We stepped out.
“I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like,” she said.
She said it almost in a whisper, like maybe she expected somebody to hear and then report to someone else—and as though we were confidants, equals, co-conspirators.
I liked that a lot. I leaned in close.
“What?” I said.
“That basement,” she said. “I don’t like that at all. That shelter.”
Chapter Six
I knew what she meant.
In his day Willie Chandler Sr. had been very handy.
Handy and a little paranoid.
So that I guess when Khrushchev told the United Nations, “We will bury you,” Willie Sr. must have said something like the fuck you will and built himself a bomb shelter in the basement.
It was a room within a room, eight by ten feet wide and six feet high, modeled strictly according to government specifications. You went down the stairs from their kitchen, walked past the paint cans stacked beneath the stairs and the sink and then the washer and dryer, turned a comer and walked through a heavy metal bolted door—originally the door to a meat locker—and you were inside a concrete enclosure at least ten degrees colder than the rest of the place, musty-smelling and dark.
There were no electrical outlets and no light fixtures.
Willie had nailed girders to the kitchen floor beams and supported them with thick wooden posts. He had sandbagged the only window on the outside of the house and covered the inside with heavy half-inch wire-mesh screening. He had provided the requisite fire extinguisher, battery-operated radio, ax, crowbar, battery lantern, first-aid kit and bottles of water. Cartons of canned food lay stacked on a small heavy handmade hardwood table along with a Sterno stove, a travel alarm clock and an air pump for blowing up the mattresses rolled in the corner.
All this built and purchased on a milkman’s salary.
He even had a pick and shovel there, for digging out after the blast.
The one thing Willie omitted and that the government recommended was a chemical toilet.
They were expensive. And he’d left before getting around to that.
Now the place was sort of ratty-looking—food supplies raided for Ruth’s cooking, the extinguisher fallen off its wall mount, batteries dead in the radio and lantern, and the items themselves filthy from three solid years of grim neglect. The shelter reminded Ruth of Willie. She was not going to clean it.
We played there sometimes, but not often.
The place was scary.
It was as though he’d built a cell there—not a shelter to keep something out but a dark black hole to keep something in.
And in a way its central location informed the whole cellar. You’d be down there drinking a Coke talking with Ruth while she did her laundry and you’d look over your shoulder and see this evil-looking bunker sort of thing, this squat concrete wall, constantly sweating, dripping, cracked in places. As though the wall itself were old and sick and dying.
We’d go in there occasionally and scare each other.
That was what it was good for. Scaring each other. And nothing much else.
We used it sparingly.
Chapter Seven
“I’ll tell you, what’s missing from that goddamn Karnival’s a good old-fashioned hootchie-koo!”
It was Tuesday night, the second night of Karnival and Ruth was watching Cheyenne Bodie get deputized for the umpteenth time and the town’s chicken-shit mayor pinning the deputy’s badge to his fringed cowhide shirt. Cheyenne looked proud and determined.
Ruth held a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and sat low and tired-looking in the big overstuffed chair by the fireplace, her long legs stretched out on the hassock, barefoot.
Woofer glanced up at her from the floor. “What’s a hootchie-koo?”
“Hootchie-koo. Hootchie-kootchie. Dancin’ girls, Ralphie. That and the freak show. When I was your age we had both. I saw a man with three arms once.”
Willie Jr. looked at her. “Nah,” he said.
But you could see she had him going.
“Don’t contradict your mother. I did. I saw a man with three arms—one of ’em just a little bitty thing coming out of here.”
She raised her arm and pointed to her armpit neatly shaved and smooth inside the dress.
“The other two were normal just like yours. I saw a two-headed cow as well, same show. ’Course that was dead.”
We sat around the Zenith in an irregular circle, Woofer on the carpet next to Ruth, me and Willie and Donny on the couch, and Eddie squatting directly in front of the television so that Woofer had to shift to see around him.
Times like this you didn’t have to worry about Eddie. In his house they didn’t have television. He was glued to it. And if anybody could control him Ruth could.
“What else?” asked Willie Jr. “What other stuff’d you see?”
He ran his hand over his blond flattop. He was always doing that. I guess he enjoyed the feel of it though I couldn’t see how he’d like the greasy waxed part up front.
“Mostly things in bottles. Stillborns. You know stillborns? In formaldehyde. Little shrunken tungs—goats, cats. All kinds of stuff. That’s going back a long time. I don’t remember. I do remember a man must have weighed five, six hundred pounds, though. Took three other fellas to haul him up. Fattest damn thing I ever saw or ever want to see.”
We laughed, picturing the three guys having to help him up.
We all knew Ruth was careful of her weight.
“I tell you, carnivals were something when I was a girl.”
She sighed.
You could see her face go calm and dreamy-looking then the way it did sometimes when she was looking back—way back. Not to Willie but all the way back to her childhood. I always liked watching her then. I think we all did. The lines and angles seemed to soften and for somebody’s mother, she was almost beautiful.
“Ready yet?” asked Woofer. It was a big thing for him tonight, being able to go out to the Karnival this late. He was eager to get going.
“Not yet. Finish your sodas. Let me finish my beer.”
She took a long deep pull on the cigarette, holding the smoke in and then letting it out all in a rush.
The only other person I knew who smoked a cigarette as hard as Ruth did was Eddie’s dad. She tilted the beer can and drank.
“I wanna know about this hootchie-koo,” said Willie. He leaned forward next to me on the couch, his shoulders turned inward, rounded.
As Willie got older and taller his slouch got more pronounced. Ruth said that if he kept on growing and slouching at this rate he was going to be a hunchback. A six-footer.
“Yeah,” said Woofer. “What’s it supposed to be? I don’t get it.”
Ruth laughed. “It’s dancing girls, I told you. Doncha know anything? Half naked too, some of them.”
She pulled the faded print dress back up to halfway over her thighs, held it there a moment, fluttered it at us, and then flapped it down again.
“Skirts up to here,” she said. “And little teeny brassieres and that’s all. Maybe a ruby in the belly button or something. With little dark red circles painted here, and here.” She indicated her nipples, making slow circles with her fingers. Then she looked at us.
“What’d you think of that?”
I felt myself flush.
Woofer laughed.
Willie and Donny were watching her intently.
Eddie remained fixed on Cheyenne Bodie.
She laughed. “Well, I guess nothing like that’s gonna be sponsored by the good old Kiwanis, though, is it? Not those boys. Hell, they’d like to. They’d love to! But they’ve all g
ot wives. Damn hypocrites.”
Ruth was always going on about the Kiwanis or the Rotary or something.
She was not a joiner.
We were used to it.
She drained her beer and stubbed out the cigarette.
She got up.
“Finish your drinks, boys,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Meg? Meg Loughlin!”
She walked into the kitchen and dropped her empty beer can in the garbage pail.
Down the hall the door to her room opened and Meg stepped out, looking a little wary at first, I thought guessed it was Ruth’s shouting. Then her eyes settled on me and she smiled.
So that was how they were working it, I thought. Meg and Susan were in Ruth’s old room. It was logical because that was the smaller of the two. But it also meant that either Ruth was bunking on the convertible sofa or with Donny and Woofer and Willie Jr. I wondered what my parents would say to that.
“I’m taking these boys out for a Mister Softee over at the fair, Meggie. You take care of your sister and keep yourself out of the icebox. Don’t want you getting fat on us.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ruth turned to me.
“David,” she said, “you know what you ought to do? You ought to go say hi to Susan. You never met and it’s not polite.”
“Sure. Okay.”
Meg led the way down the hallway ahead of me.
Their door was to the left opposite the bathroom, the boys’ room straight on. I could hear soft radio music coming from behind the door. Tommy Edwards singing “It’s All In the Game.” Meg opened the door and we went inside.
When you’re twelve, little kids are little kids and that’s about it. You’re not even supposed to notice them, really. They’re like bugs or birds or squirrels or somebody’s roving housecat—part of the landscape but so what. Unless of course it’s somebody like Woofer you can’t help but notice.
I’d have noticed Susan though.
I knew that the girl on the bed looking up at me from her copy of Screen Stories was nine years old—Meg had told me that—but she looked a whole lot younger. I was glad she had the covers up so I couldn’t see the casts on her hips and legs. She seemed frail enough as it was without my having to think about all those broken bones. I was aware of her wrists, though, and the long thin fingers holding the magazine.