The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel

by Charles L. Grant

“Hey,” Nina said softly, and placed a light hand on my knee.

  This time I did smile.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m not the one who’s dying. Tonight.” She squeezed; I covered her fingers. I looked to Deric and said, “Abe ever tell you about a guy called Casey? A carpenter named Kayman? People like that?”

  He shook his head. “Are they . . . what did you call them, Pilgrim’s Travelers?”

  “No,” I answered, dropping what was left of the ice cube back into the glass. “No, but they were there. Holding on.”

  I: Penny Tunes for a Gold Lion

  A wagon’s broad painted wheels rattled and slipped over the cobblestones that night, its team of old black geldings snorting in their traces, the driver’s voice carrying through the early morning fog, urging the horses on in a practiced monotone.

  The sound of a lazy whip.

  The rattling of a harness.

  Hooves clattering on stone, striking sparks, moving on. Another wagon, much heavier, a caravan that carried with it the tuneless, oddly melodic jangle of a dozen tin bells hanging from a brace above the locked doors in back.

  A third to make it a procession, and the soft quiet sound of a young woman laughing.

  “There’s nothing to it,” said Casey Bethune from his customary place at the door end of the bar. “The damn things are weighted.”

  “So if there’s nothing to it, what’s the trick?”

  Casey looked in wonder at the other men and women on the stools down toward the other end and not paying attention, looked in comic disbelief at the big man seated at his left hand, immediately around the bar’s squared comer. “The trick? That’s easy — you don’t even try.”

  Mayard Chase stared.

  “Think,” Casey urged gently and with a smile.

  Chase wrinkled his face, put a finger to his temple, closed his eyes.

  From behind the bar Molly Burgess stopped washing glasses and looked at Casey. “What’s Yard doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “Quiet,” Chase demanded. “I’m thinking.”

  “Drunk,” Molly said with a knowing nod.

  “Thinking,” Casey insisted. “I’ve told him a kind of joke and he still doesn’t get it”

  “Oh God save us,” she said. “We’ll be here all night”

  “Hush,” Chase commanded, opened one eye, closed it again. “There’s got to be a trick to the trick, you see. Casey wouldn’t know straight if he was whacked with a ruler.”

  Molly groaned and walked away; Casey grinned after her and took a careful sip of his drink, a small Scotch and soda, only his second that night and probably his last. He was going to Pilgrim’s Travelers later on, and he wanted his head clear, his eye keen, his arm steady. He was going to win a stuffed panda if it killed him.

  Another sip, and he looked around him, not seeing much because all of it was as familiar as the lumps in his mattress.

  The Brass Ring was long and narrow, bar on the right and small round tables on the left; the aisle between, bare hardwood and comfortably scuffed; beyond, more tables in two rows, and beyond them an open space for those who attacked the three dartboards each night, making more noise than an army in full rout Gleaming brass horse braces on the grey-wood walls, brass rail top and bottom around the bar, electric lanterns anchored on thick shelves just wide enough to hold them kept twilight inside no matter where the sun was. The only window faced Centre Street, and its lower half was veiled by a burgundy curtain hung from brass rings on a brass rod; the outside wall, along Steuben, had been painted by the owner to resemble three arched, frosted windows so realistically done that more than one evening pedestrian had paused to peer through the painted panes and abruptly walked away as if nothing had happened.

  No food was served here, just pretzels and salted peanuts.

  Casey loved it.

  The Mariner Lounge and the Chancellor Inn made him uncomfortable; the Cock’s Crow, while more his style, was sometimes just too far away, and too often too crowded. The Brass Ring, then, was a godsend. It had opened three months ago on the same site as its namesake, which had shut its doors in 1897 after less than five years’ operation. This one, he thought as he waited for Yard, was bound to last much longer. The atmosphere was amiable without forcing anyone to be friendly when they weren’t in the mood, the liquor and beer inexpensive, and Nigel Oxley, the owner and sometimes dart player, didn’t insist on his customers drinking just as long as they bought something during their stay.

  Yard relaxed with a sharp sigh. “I give up.”

  “You give up.”

  “That’s what I said. I give up. What’s the trick?”

  Casey massaged the side of his neck, the backs of his hands.

  “Yard, pay attention, boy — the bottles are weighted, you see — only a Goliath could knock them over with the spongy softballs they give you, so . . . you . . .” He waited expectantly.

  Chase nodded. Waiting.

  “Jesus,” Casey said. “Damnit, man, it’s all rigged against you so you don’t even try!”

  “Ah.”

  “Right” He grabbed a handful of peanuts from a chipped wood bowl, dropped one into his mouth. “Yard, how the hell do you make a living with that store, huh? Seems to me you’d get robbed blind in three days.”

  “Two,” said Yard. “But I’m independently wealthy.”

  Grinning, Casey shook his head, looked down at his glass, at the polished wood. His face was there in dark reflection, but he couldn’t see it clearly. Lean and leathered like the rest of him, eyes in a constant partial squint, lips in a perpetual lopsided smile, topped by a mass of combed-back hair that had begun to turn white while he was still in high school, finished its turning before he’d graduated from college. A number of dyes and colorings had been tried before he gave up — they only made him look foolish, unnatural, made him look like a stranger had claimed squatter’s rights in his bathroom mirror.

  Mayard Chase, on the other hand, was high and wide, with a carpenter’s hands and a bricklayer’s muscles, and virtually no hair at all above a face round and fleshy. The owner of the hardware store had tried, only once, a toupee. Two summers ago, to keep his pate from burning and peeling. Neither his children nor his wife had had the nerve to tell him what he looked like; not so his friends. The rug was gone in a week.

  A cry of victory from a dart game, applause and a call for a round of drinks on the losers for those at the back tables.

  The door opened to admit three men and a woman; they hesitated for a moment, listened to the noise, and left.

  Your loss, he thought, sipped, looked around again, and nodded to the two women seated at the first table by the door. Both wore their hair short and brushed back over their ears, both wore T-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes without socks. The older was near his age, a teacher at the high school; the other was a decade less, though her sharp-angled face erased the difference until she smiled. Ordinarily he wouldn’t speak to them other than a polite greeting, a polite farewell; tonight, however, Yard’s feigned obtuseness had put him in good humor.

  “You ladies going to the fair?” he asked, though he was careful to make it clear the question was no invitation.

  The teacher shook her head. “Not tonight. Summer school tomorrow. Probably Friday, if I bother.”

  Her companion didn’t answer.

  Yard swiveled around on his stool, leaned back on one elbow, paunch separating the buttons of his checkered shirt “Better watch it there, Tina. Casey’s on vacation these days, and when he’s not making love to his damn flowers, he’s hunting for human action.”

  Tina Elby raised a thick eyebrow. “Casey?”

  Casey’s smile felt strained, and he looked back to his glass.

  He wasn’t in the mood for any of Yard’s teasing, but it was his own fault for opening his big mouth in the first place.

  “It’s his job, you see,” Yard continued, deepening his voice. “He sees all you beautiful women on his rounds ev
ery morning, he saves it all up for his free days.”

  “Yard,” he said quietly, “knock it off.”

  Chase ignored him. “You don’t know him the way I do. We all know him as a superior postman, a gardener without peer, a man who paints his whole house every time it gets a spot of mud. But beneath that innocent white hair lies the cunning brain of a lustful, debauched, and I might say extraordinarily experienced, man of the world.”

  “Yard.”

  A sideways glance at the table caught Tina grinning, and at the same time the grin told him she knew what Yard was doing. It should have made him feel better. It didn’t. It only stirred a blush somewhere beneath his chin, a blush that would eventually darken his cheeks and made his hair seem all the lighter if his friend didn’t soon shut his mouth.

  “Prick,” the other woman said flatly.

  Yard blinked.

  Tina frowned. “Norma, he’s only kidding, for Pete’s sake. “Casey doesn’t mind, do you, Case?”

  Caught between a gape and a laugh, he managed a quick nod, then a shake of his head, then a “No, I don’t care, let him talk, I’ll tell his wife.”

  “Screw it, he’s still a prick,” Norma Hobbs muttered darkly, shoving her empty glass stein against the wall to join several others. She turned her head. “And that one’s a creep. A so-called man who talks to stupid goddamn flowers. Nothing but goddamn weeds, plow ’em the hell under.”

  “Oh Jesus.” Tina’s expression was at once apologetic and helpless, but Yard had already turned his back, and all Casey could do was smile and shrug and tum away himself.

  He came in twice a week, usually Wednesday and Friday, nursed two drinks and left. Sometimes Tina was here, most of the time she wasn’t, and it suited him during her absence to develop conversations that would lead them from the bar to a table, and eventually to dinner. He had no illusions. She was attractive; he was plain. She was gone most of every summer, traveling around the country, seeing the world on package deals and her savings; he didn’t like flying, and spent his free time in his garden. She was friendly, but had never hinted; he was courteous, and didn’t know what to do next.

  For him the situation was perfect.

  Suddenly Norma lurched to her feet and swayed against the table. “Gotta go home,” she announced angrily. “Son of a bitch, gotta go home.”

  Tina was up just as fast, and with a mouthed sorry about this guys, followed her friend out the door.

  Another cheer from the back.

  Molly asked them loudly to keep it down, she was going deaf.

  “You know,” Yard said without turning his head, “if you try real hard, you might get to know her better in a hundred years or so.”

  “Who, Molly?”

  “The teacher, stupid.”

  Casey cupped his glass between his palms. “I like Norma better. She hates men.”

  “Nope. Only her husband, because he left her.”

  “Jesus, Yard, he didn’t leave her, for Christ’s sake. He had cancer. He died. Jesus.”

  Chase shrugged and shook his head; it was all the same to him — he wasn’t concerned with the bitch, only the teacher.

  Casey checked his watch, then, and emptied his glass. “Time to go.” He slid off the stool.

  “Already?” Chase scowled at his own timepiece. “Maybe one more.”

  “Suit yourself. But it’s almost the last night, and I’m not going to miss it”

  He dropped a bill on the bar, waved good-bye to Molly, and headed for the door. It didn’t matter if Yard joined him or not. Sooner or later they’d separate anyway, and he’d be alone. Which was just how he liked it.

  At the entrance he paused and checked back over his shoulder.

  Yard waved him on expansively. “Catch up to you later, maybe. The kids are supposed to meet me anyway. Down at the corner, not here,” he added quickly.

  “Right,” Casey said.

  Right, he thought, and hurried outside before Chase changed his mind.

  As the door hissed shut behind him, he hesitated before turning right, but the women were gone, and that was fine, just fine. Hands slipped into his pockets, shoulders rolled, first one, then the other.

  The sky was still light at just past eight o’clock, but Centre Street was dark in the building shadows that had already reached the other side. No pedestrians now, no traffic since the street had been repaved in brick, the sound of his footsteps muffled in the heat that settled on his back, a damp weight that made his throat paradoxically dry and his lungs labor. Neon too bright. Windows too dark. The trees at the curbs chattering with birds settling in until dawn.

  Day above, night below.

  The contrast made him uneasy. As if the Station, when evening crawled down from the surrounding wooded hills, slipped out of the real world and into a vast cavern where lights made monsters of simple rocks and boulders, and shadows made people out of simple dust in the air, As a postman he knew all the shops and offices, and most of the homes, could find them by touch if he had to, even by scent here and there.

  Except at night.

  When it changed.

  Well, he said to a brief image in a window, you’re in a mood tonight, aren’t you?

  Day above.

  Handing out, with the regular mail, slick color leaflets of Pilgrim’s Travelers, photographs and cartoons that promised rides and food and thrills and laughs and wonders and bright lights. It was the first time the carnival had come to the Station since he’d moved here, almost a decade ago, and all those he had spoken to swore it was something he would never forget. Not just a small-time local carny, a poor excuse for a country fair, but a kept promise of great times. When asked where it came from, some waved vaguely south, others vaguely west. It didn’t matter much, it was here again, and a place as isolated as Oxrun Station took its surprises without question.

  Night below.

  He didn’t much like the circus, and after childhood had been buried, he discovered that he didn’t much like fairs either. It was too easy to see the ragged patches in the tents, the bored eyes of the barkers, the faded paint, the rigged games, the weary animals, the prices too high and the food too greasy and the nicotine stains on the fingers of the dancers who were supposed to boil his blood. Something had gone missing. He had once supposed it was the unquestioning joy of the child no longer in him, but he knew that wasn’t strictly true; he guessed a growing cynicism the older he became and reality became too real, but that wasn’t it either.

  Hell, he just didn’t know.

  And he didn’t know, really, why he was going tonight, except that all the people on his route before his vacation began had spoken of nothing else, not even the miserable weather, the lack of rain. And since the Travelers was, after all, clearly a rare beast, he decided he owed it to them and their morning conversations to at least have a look.

  Maybe he’d be lucky and see Norma get squashed by a rogue elephant or eaten by a gorilla.

  He chuckled, chided himself for such an uncharitable thought, and chuckled again.

  A right on Chancellor Avenue slapped the setting sun into his eyes. He shaded them with one hand and nearly tripped over the police station’s wide bottom step. A curse, a glance around to be sure no one had seen him, and he walked on. Joined by the end of the block by a few others, families and couples, a handful of loners like himself, heading toward Mainland Road and all in high humor, though none seemed in a great hurry. They called to him, children danced up to and away from him, and it wasn’t long before he felt himself smiling.

  This, he decided, is a pretty good idea. A kind of kick in the ass to get him out of the doldrums he’d sunk into lately. Nothing he could put his finger on, nothing he could trace from a specific source — just a feeling that getting up in the morning was too much a chore, that going home to an empty house each night was too much like lowering himself into a well-tended grave. The Brass Ring had been a way to put off the latter.

  Molly, all blond ringlets and huge brown eyes,
told him last week it was his midlife crisis.

  What crisis? he had answered with an explosive forced laugh; I’m thirty-seven, unmarried, no children, no promotion in sight, just enough money in the bank to keep me from starving. That’s no crisis, that’s a goddamn fact of life.

  Poor baby, she had cooed, and kissed him on the cheek.

  Poor baby, he had thought, and wanted to tear out her lovely throat.

  * * *

  A rake with a broken handle bound together by fraying twine drawn over the ground; weeds and small stones filled straw baskets that were carried to the field’s edge and dumped into a pit; several men with ball peen hammers pounding stakes, raising tents, singing without words to a mouth organ’s lead.

  A corral enclosed by four thick strands of rope, the horses inside grazing, eating hay, running along the perimeter and kicking their heels; another corral, this one for pigs, a few sheep, a few goats — grazing, eating hay, gnawing at the ropes until a small boy with a whip-branch snapped a nose, snapped a brow.

  A trained bear, a dying tiger, ponies that gave rides in the afternoon and were trick-ridden by a hooded dwarf when the sun went down; several young women, and one not so young, dancing on a stage that sagged in the middle, enticing the crowd, promising with veils and winks and colored gauze and soft moans, that inside, behind the flap, the devil waited with more; a caravan with a sign that marked a fortune-teller, others that suggested fair games of chance, still others whose sides had been lifted up and propped open, the sweet and sour and bitter aromas of foreign cooking drifting with steam.

  A tall woman at the entrance in the garb of a Great White Hunter, pistol strapped to her side, greeting the families and the couples and the loners who came from the carriages and traps parked at the side of the road, from the automobiles and buses parked on the verge. She answered all questions with a joke, flirted with all the men and told all the women with a look that their men were safe here, thrust a hip at the boys and showed the girls how to do it.

  Harps and harmonicas and violins and horns and a piano and a tambourine and a calliope and an organ.