Halloween Carnival Volume 2

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  Joyce hops off the porch and crunches through a layer of leaves. Her baby-blue puff jacket covers her neck to knee in a protective quilt of padding. She tromps through the leaves, making as much noise as her frail form can manage.

  “Learning a new trick?” she asks.

  I tell her I am, and I could use the help of my beautiful assistant. Carefully, so as not to damage the perfect leaf, I rise from the ground to lead my sister inside.

  Mother sits in the living room, sewing our Halloween costumes. She affixes sparkly piping to Joyce’s princess dress with needle and thread. My magician’s cape covers the sofa cushions beside her like a deflated shadow. Halloween is still two weeks away, but we need our costumes for the Harvest Carnival, and that’s only a few days off.

  Still wearing her puff jacket zipped to her chin, Joyce sits on the edge of the bed; her brown hair hangs over her brow like wispy curtains for her eyes. She pushes the hair aside. Her feet kick the air in a rhythmic motion and then drop back to disturb the edge of my comforter. She asks if I’ve learned to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

  “No,” I say. “Nothing like that.”

  Waiting beside the magic set on my chest of drawers, there is a key. It isn’t like the house keys Joyce and I have on small rings. It is long and silver and inscribed with a number on its barrel. The head is flat and shaped like a large kidney bean. I found the key at a garage sale, one of the many Mother insisted on dragging us to. I discovered it sitting on top of an ancient television console. Even the owner couldn’t remember what the key had once unlocked. I bought it for a penny.

  I pinch the teeth between my thumb and forefinger. At the bed, I explain mesmerism to my sister. She frequently brushes the hair from her eyes as I describe the “vast and complex landscape of the human mind.” An expression of concern scrunches her brow. She’s seen hypnosis on television, in the animated programs that consume the hours between the time she gets home from school and the moment Mother returns from the fabric shop where she works. She insists the procedure never goes well.

  Rubbing the key between my fingers, I explain the way hypnotism is exaggerated in cartoons and movies. She won’t quack like a duck. She will not be entranced into believing she’s a movie star, driving her to behave like a jerk. She won’t suddenly have the urge to roll in mud like a plump, pink pig. Even so, she makes me promise I won’t embarrass her, and I promise.

  I ask her to sit back on the bed and prop herself against the pillows and the wall. Still caressing the key, I sit beside her and hold it up for her to see, and I ask her to focus on the silver, kidney-bean-shaped head. She brushes the hair from her eyes, and I see what a distraction it will be. Leaving her for a moment, I run across the hall and retrieve her white knit cap from the hook inside her bedroom door. She puts it on and tucks stray hairs up under its edges.

  Then I begin. As I speak to her of relaxation and heavy eyes, I roll the barrel of the key between my fingers, slowly, rhythmically. I notice the light reflecting off its surface; it plays over the bridge of her nose like a lazy fairy. When I’m convinced she is in a trance, I pause, because my mind suddenly goes blank. What is next? Why can’t I remember?

  Turning away, I search the room for the red book. It sits on top of the dresser, beside the magic set, not far from where the key had been waiting. I fear getting up, worried that it might break Joyce’s trance. I stare at the red spine and pretend I can read the edges of the words beyond it. And though this imagined power of X-ray vision does not allow me to read even a single word, it does shift the contents of my mind sufficiently for the answer I need to present itself. I remember what to do.

  “Raise your right arm,” I say.

  My sister complies, presenting me with a puffy blue tube and the back of her small hand.

  I tell her the arm is strong, stronger than steel. When I try to push down on the arm, it doesn’t give. My fingers sink deep into the fabric of her coat, displacing wads of stuffing in the sleeve, and I exert tremendous force on the appendage, but it remains stiff.

  My success brings a shock of excitement. I’m suddenly aware of my heart and how fast it beats. I inhale deeply, because it feels as if I haven’t drawn a breath all afternoon.

  I suggest she lower her arm, and she does. I suggest she stand in the middle of the room on one leg, and she does. I suggest she fall backward, and she topples like a sapling, into my waiting arms.

  The book explained trigger phrases, a word or words that could be invoked to instantly return the subject to the trance state. I have planned for this. The phrase needed to be obscure so as not to be uttered accidentally. I drew the trigger from Poe’s story, the tale that had sent me down this path.

  “Issachar Marx.”

  —

  The doctor wore an expression of practiced sadness as he informed my mother and me that Joyce was not likely to live through the night. The damage to her brain was too severe. Even if she managed to survive, he said, she would be dependent on machines for the rest of her life.

  Mother sobbed amid desperate, muttered prayers. I felt empty and numb as if my soul had evaporated. The tears at my eyes didn’t fall. They coated the lenses with heat.

  Still, Joyce’s husband hadn’t arrived.

  They had been married for two years. He was a police officer. A handsome man.

  “He’s a good earner,” Mother often said, as if this single point could excuse anything.

  I wrapped my arm around Mother and guided her to a chair. She still prayed. The utterances of her impotent mythology exhumed a hard vein of rage, and after my mother was seated, I felt eager to be away from her.

  The accidents and injuries that had befallen Joyce in the years following her honeymoon were no mystery to me. They weren’t a mystery to Mother, either, but she opted to remain silent, to celebrate her son-in-law: the good earner. I chose to address the issue, to speak to Joyce and tell her that she didn’t need to stay in that house with that man. She could live with Larry and me. We had plenty of room. Her response was to call me “a hateful liar” and to stop speaking to me.

  In the corridor, I watched the doctor trudge slowly toward the nurses’ station. His broad back straightened, returning to its natural posture after having completed the performance of sympathy.

  —

  At midnight I am still awake. The wonders of the past few days race through me like amphetamine. Ever since first introducing Joyce to a hypnotic state, I have considered the power of true magic and imagined what I might achieve with my newfound talent.

  Mother could be mesmerized into a healthier life of exercise and proper diet. The kids at school could be influenced. I could end bullying and make the confused and frightened students understand that they will be okay. They will survive.

  These are the altruistic notions that remain after entertaining scenarios that include collecting lunch money from my entranced classmates, and achieving A-plus grades on papers I never wrote and tests I’d never completed.

  What are the boundaries of this unbelievable talent?

  Joyce screams. Her terror is particularly sharp tonight. The peals of dread fill the house, slicing through the air and the walls and my ears. I sit up and hang my legs over the side of the bed as I hear Mother’s familiar refrain: “It’s okay. I’m coming.”

  Father is home, though I haven’t seen him yet. He shouts, “What the fuck is going on?”

  Mother’s calming of Joyce takes longer than usual tonight. I sit on the edge of my bed for a full thirty minutes before the padding of my mother’s feet sounds outside my door. When the click of the lock to my parents’ room reaches my ears, I leave the bed.

  Opening the door to my sister’s room, slowly so as not to frighten her again, I watched the light from the hall fall across her bed. Joyce is soon at its center. She stares at me with tearstained eyes and a trembling lower lip. This is the way she looks when she hears Father yelling at Mother, when she hears the crack of skin on skin. I hurry to her and sit beside her on the
bed, and she springs upward for a hug.

  “Mother doesn’t believe me,” she whisper-cries. “She doesn’t know.”

  “It’s okay.” My voice is soothing. I hold her tightly. “There are no monsters, Joyce. They’re just in your imagination. I used to be afraid, too, but I’m not anymore.”

  “It is real,” she insists, grasping me so tightly I can barely breathe. “It’s in there and it hides and it wants to get me and it’s going to. It almost got me tonight.”

  Her fear gathers inside of me, turning to anxious pity. I can’t bear to witness this dread.

  “Issachar Marx,” I say.

  A tremor runs through Joyce’s body and her grip on me relaxes. I ask her to lay back on the bed, ask her to relax and listen to the sound of my voice. Once I am certain she is comfortable and attentive, I say, “There are no monsters.”

  “There are no monsters,” she responds, her voice deep and gurgling.

  “You’ll never see another monster,” I tell her. “Monsters aren’t real. You don’t believe in monsters anymore.”

  “I don’t believe in monsters anymore.”

  —

  Beside Joyce’s bed, Mother ended a phone call and exhaled loudly. “They’re not letting him leave the station.”

  “You mean they’re pressing charges?”

  “It was an accident, David. He said so.”

  “But his buddies on the force don’t believe him. No rational person would.”

  “David!”

  “You know what he did,” I said. “You know damn well. Why can’t you just say it?”

  “He wouldn’t,” she said, fresh tears running over her thin cheeks. “He’s a good man. He’s done well by his family.”

  “He’s a good earner,” I said. The bitterness on my tongue nearly gags me.

  She can’t believe the man would hurt her daughter, not because of the components of his character but because she had denied his cruelty for so long. If she accepted him for the bastard he was, then she would have to accept her complicity in my sister’s abuse. Part of the blame would fall to her, and she simply couldn’t bear its weight.

  “Leave us alone,” I said, unable to endure Mother’s scrunched expression any longer.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I need a few minutes to say goodbye to my sister.”

  —

  A cloud of balloons, red and white and blue, float above the small wooden cart from which the smell of roasted peanuts rises into the autumn afternoon. Ahead, the Ferris wheel turns lazily to the thrill of its riders. Children shriek and giggle as the Whirl-a-Way spins them like laundry, round and round. Lights blink and blaze. The crowds wander up and down the narrow dirt paths between food vendors and rides and booths that promise the skilled and/or lucky immense stuffed animals. Mother has Joyce’s hand. Joyce wears her princess costume beneath her puffy blue coat. The tiara is wedged tightly around the white knit cap she all but refuses to take off these days. Despite the crisp afternoon, sweat dapples Mother’s brow and cheeks. We are on our way to the center of the fairgrounds. The cheap map shows this as the location of the petting zoo. Joyce wants to visit the zoo to see the baby pigs.

  Mother says she needs to rest. She sits on a wooden bench and tells us to be patient while she catches her breath. Joyce protests, invoking Mother’s promise to take us to the petting zoo.

  The rest of the carnival goers are in motion, moving past us, and I am as eager to move as my uncharacteristically demanding sister is. I grasp the edges of my magician’s cape and swing back and forth at the waist. There are so many things to see. It’s as if we’ve been given a treasure map, the same map as a thousand other people, but we’re being restrained, forced to watch others pursuing the gold, absolutely certain they will find it all before we’re released.

  Joyce’s insistence borders on shrill, and Mother shakes her head. She turns to me and says, “Would you please take your sister to see those pigs?”

  I am ecstatic at being set free. Joyce jumps up and down as if she’s won a prize.

  “You hold your sister’s hand,” Mother insists. “Don’t let go.”

  At the center of the carnival, away from the noise and lights of the biggest rides, we come upon the petting zoo. Pens made of splintering wood rail and chicken wire occupy a wide section of fairground and run to a line of trees a hundred and fifty feet from the main path. Joyce sees friends from school and tears out of my grip. She races between two pens, one holding baby goats and the other serving as a temporary home for an exhausted donkey. She meets the group of four girls with sparkling giggles and quick embraces.

  I have little interest in barnyard animals, and less in shrieking girls. I turn. Between a shack that offers cotton candy and another selling “Red Hot Sausages! Tasty!” I see a curtained booth. A piece of plywood stretches over two pillars made of four-by-fours. It reads county’s largest pumpkin in bright orange letters. Next to this claim in smaller black letters: “180-pounder!”

  As I consider what a pumpkin of that size might look like, I’m sent off balance by a hard shove. Laughter erupts around me, and I regain my senses to find my own friends at my side.

  Chester is there, with his carrot-red hair, and the amused grin that accompanies nearly every moment of his life. Ralph is there, too. Ralph is my height but very thin. “A string bean,” Mother calls him. Mother doesn’t like Ralph. He spends his days eating, constantly eating, but his body remains a barely clothed skeleton. Mother is certain he’s got worms.

  Neither of the boys is wearing his Halloween costume, and they tease me for wearing mine. They think magic is goofy, and they remind me I wore the same costume last year; they don’t notice the cape is new.

  Ralph sees the sign for the county’s largest pumpkin and decides we should check it out. Chester says, “That’s dumb.” I echo Chester’s assessment, but Ralph insists. Chester bumps his shoulder against Ralph’s, and then shakes his head. “Dumb.”

  Even so, the decision is made.

  I check on Joyce, who passes a dollar to Mrs. Braxton for the privilege of petting dirty farm animals. Then she quickly falls back into conversation with her friends.

  Her best friend, Annie Presley, hooks arms with Joyce. Behind them, Mrs. Presley smiles and gathers the girls close. She spares me a glance and nods, all but saying, “I got this. You go check out that pumpkin. It’s amazing!”

  As Mrs. Presley leads the girls into a pen with three mottled calves, I follow Chester, who is following Ralph toward the tent.

  Chester and Ralph shove each other as they pass beneath the sign. The curtains, two long strips of burlap, were perfunctory. We didn’t enter a tent but rather stepped through to a cleared bit of ground, fenced in by more rough split rails. The area was decorated with three neatly stacked bales of hay on the right, and the star of the attraction, the pumpkin, waited at the center, cradled in a nest of loose straw.

  As my friends roughhouse near the entrance, I walk forward, my mind already filling with images of myself and this grand squash on a stage. There I introduce the audience to a wonder of the natural world. The pumpkin is seated on a spinning platform so the spectators know its magnificence is three dimensional. I invite an audience member onto the stage to thump the hard shell to prove its solidity to the audience, and then I begin the magic. I cover the thing with a silky white cloth. Grabbing the edges of the sheet, I lift it slightly and rustle it, shake it gently so that calm waves spread through the fabric. My gesture intensifies, shaking the fabric until it whips over the pumpkin. Then, with a final flourish, I pull the sheet away to reveal the pumpkin has vanished or transformed into Joyce, my constant assistant.

  Chester bumps me again and talks about pushing the pumpkin off the roof of our school just to see how big a splash it would make. Ralph considers the number of pies his mother could bake. We all run our hands over the smooth, tough hide, and then our conversation turns to school, to our teachers, to the latest episodes of television programs. Ti
me folds in on itself. We have only spoken for a handful of seconds, but too many minutes have passed in the company of the great pumpkin.

  My friends invite me to join their quest for new wonders, but I explain about Joyce. We all jostle out of the exhibition area, and they say goodbye, leaving me to the task my mother had assigned.

  Mrs. Presley leans with her hip against the outer corner of the goat pen. She is smoking and chatting with Mr. Havish, the high school gym teacher. He tries to pluck the cigarette from between her fingers, but Mrs. Presley is quick. She yanks her hand away and laughs while pressing the other hand against the teacher’s chest.

  I walk between pens to the place where I last saw Joyce. Mrs. Braxton hurries toward me and announces that it’ll cost me a dollar to caress her livestock.

  “I’m just looking for my sister,” I say. “She wanted to pet the piglets.”

  Though visibly annoyed, Mrs. Braxton forces a smile. She makes a show of searching the pens, and though many children are ecstatically touching the animals, Joyce is not among them.

  “She went to get cotton candy with Annie,” Mrs. Presley says, barely turning away from Mr. Havish’s white smile.

  Though I see Annie and two of her other friends at the corner of the spun sugar vendor, holding cones of pink froth, none of these children wears a powder-blue puff coat, a white knit cap, or a tiara. I hurry across to the shack and ask the little girls where Joyce has gone. Annie turns red before she points with her cotton candy to the north and says, “ladies’ room.”

  People crowd the carnival. Children in their costumes and exhausted parents, trying to keep up with them. I’m furious that Joyce’s friends have abandoned her, that Annie’s mother would rather giggle with Mr. Havish than protect my sister.

  “Do you know where the bathrooms are?” I ask. It becomes a mantra, as I stop every adult I come to. “Do you know where the bathrooms are?”

  Finally, a short man with a black beard nods to his left. His amused smile confuses me, until I realize he has misinterpreted my desperation. “You’re almost there, buddy.” He points across the midway toward a family of five, huddled together as the father leans over to point at a thing of interest on the map his son is holding. “They’re behind the candlemaker’s tent. A whole row of ’em.”