Sunrise; nothing moved.
A horse whickered.
A donkey brayed.
Dust in a brown cloud sifted down the midway.
Casey lay on his bed and connected the cracks in the plaster ceiling into images of planets, galaxies, railroad tracks snaking through mountains, arroyos cutting through a drought-ridden desert He didn’t want to get up. Vacations were for sleeping late, eating poorly, and sooner or later getting down on his knees in the garden. But today, although it was already close to noon and his stomach had begun to growl, he couldn’t bring himself to move.
The woman.
He saw her when he closed his eyes, saw her when he rolled over, saw her ghostlike in the corner when he got up in the middle of the night to quench a sudden rasping thirst.
He didn’t know her name.
An hour ago the telephone had rung a dozen times before stopping. It hadn’t been her. He knew it. She wasn’t the type to call. He knew that too. But neither did he believe she was the type who picked strange men out of a crowd and asked them to dance, on a whim. He didn’t know why he felt that. She could easily be a Travelers shill, a calculating temptress designed to lure him back to the fair each night, promising without promising while he emptied his pockets and filled his dreams. She could also be a thief setting up a mark. Or nothing more than a tease who fed on the lonely and moved on, not thinking about what moving on left behind.
Funny, he thought, hands rubbing his bare chest; he hadn’t really considered himself very lonely until last night. First Tina and her bitchy friend, then all the music and lights and Fran and the rest . . . It wasn’t that he felt sorry for himself, though god knows he went through that particular nonsense from time to time. It was just that he hadn’t quite counted, in his youth, on spending his thirties marking time alone.
Molly said midlife crisis.
Hell, maybe she was right.
Hell, maybe he was going through some kind of change, something biological maybe, or something cooking along unknown up in his brain.
Hell, maybe so.
And if that was true, so what if he wasn’t a millionaire by now, surrounded by family and family retainers; so what if he wasn’t ensconced in a home with traditional ivy and roses, bouncing babies on his knees; so what?
Did that mean he was a failure?
His pillow was punched twice and finally tossed aside.
He didn’t know.
The hell of it was, he just didn’t know.
The telephone again; he sighed and sat up, scratched chest and belly and took his time getting into the living room, dropping onto the couch, picking up the receiver.
It was Tina, barely giving him a hello before launching into an effusive apology for the way her friend had acted in the bar. Still not fully awake, and slightly embarrassed that he was practically naked, he allowed her to continue while he wondered why she cared. He certainly didn’t give a damn. It was a truly sad thing about Norma’s husband dying the way he had, but he hadn’t liked her when the poor guy was alive, why should that change now?
“So,” Tina said breathlessly, “I hope you’re not mad.”
“Not me.” He picked at something on his knee.
“Good.” She actually sounded relieved.
“Yeah.” He looked at his feet, wriggled his toes. “You at school?”
“On break. You get them a lot in summer school. We can only stand so much, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Voices in the background; the muffled clang of a bell.
“Oh hell,” she said. “Fire drill. I hate these damn things. Hey, maybe I’ll see you tonight, huh? You going to the fair?”
“Yes,” he answered before he could stop himself.
“Great,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you.”
“Sure,” he said, but she’d already gone, and he sat for a while, listening to the house, before deciding it was time to take a shower and join the living. Then lunch while he was still wrapped in his towel, rinsed the dishes and dressed in shorts cut from an old pair of chinos. A baseball cap for the sun. Gloves caked with old dirt. A metal pail on the back stoop that held his hand tools.
His home was small, a single-story clapboard cottage blocked against his neighbors by a screen of closely spaced poplars. A private world to protect his ladies, his flowers. He didn’t name them, but he talked to them, and by killing them and crippling them and nursing them and feeding them, he learned that time would pass, and he could mark it by their blossoms.
He decided to work in the garden first, a large rectangle he had cleared in the center of the yard. A bitch of a job because there had been more stones under the surface than in any quarry he had seen. It had taken him one entire summer, but by god it had been worth it.
The procedure was all automatic: Plop the pail down, tum on the hose and drag it out with the nozzle shut to a dripping, smooth the grass and kneel, check the sky, crack his knuckles, then examine the flower bed to give him his first chore.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “God damn son of a bitch.”
The flowers — marigolds and snapdragons, peonies and pansies, irises in the center — were all dead.
“No,” he whispered, looked away and looked back, but nothing had changed. The blossoms had wilted, the stems drying to brown stalks, and the rich black earth so carefully mixed and loosened was dry and cracked.
“I . . . what . . .”
On hands and knees he circled the bed, testing the ground outside the rim, rapping the ground inside, finally rocking back on his heels and covering his mouth with one hand.
There was nothing wrong with the lawn; only the garden had died.
“How?”
He stood, dropped the gloves, checked all the shrubs planted near the trees and along the back; checked the foundation rose garden on the left side of the house, checked the garden in front, the one that framed the narrow porch, and saw nothing wrong, nothing to alarm him.
“How?”
He knew he hadn’t neglected anything, especially not the watering, and though he might miss a day or two weeding and put off a transplanting here and there, it had never been long enough to create such a disaster. He would have had to have left it alone all season, even covering it from the rain.
“How? God damn, how?”
In a near panic then, he set up all his sprinklers and let them spin, checking to make sure every corner, every inch, every blade and leaf was touched by the mist. Then he took a trowel to the back garden, turned the earth over, holding it close to his eyes, sifting it between his fingers, once even going so far as to bring some to his tongue. The roots were brittle, there were no signs of grubs or worms, beetles or ants.
The ground was dead.
He called a nursery out on Mainland Road, down the hill near Harley, but they couldn’t tell him a thing from just his descriptions; he called Yard at the hardware store, but Chase wasn’t much of a gardener — his sympathies were genuine, but his mind was on business; and with no one else to talk to, he dumped a handful of the dirt into a paper bag and brought it to Adelle Vanders at The Florist, on Centre Street.
“Amazing,” she said, emptying the bag onto a worktable in her back room. “Casey, how the hell did you manage this?”
“I didn’t,” he answered sharply. “Damnit, you know me better than that”
The portly white-haired woman slipped on a pair of half glasses and leaned over the table as far as her smock-dressed bulk would allow. Poked thoughtfully at the dirt, dribbled some water on it from a small can, and finally shook her head in defeat. “This is the deadest stuff I’ve ever seen outside a desert, and even that has some life. Case, you must have done something. A pesticide, maybe?”
His hands clenched at his sides. “Adelle, that dirt there, it was fine only two days ago. Mulch, loam, everything, and —”
“Impossible.” She straightened and took off her glasses. “Casey, you know as well as I do that nothing like this could
happen in that short a time.”
He opened his mouth to brand her a liar, saw the hurt in her expression, and practically ran out of the shop. She didn’t call him back; he didn’t have the nerve to return. Instead he walked, nearly ran, back to the house and turned off the sprinklers. Went in through the front door and stood in the kitchen, stared out the window.
The grass glinted, droplets clung to some of the trees’ lower branches, a robin hopped from shade to shade, cocking its head as if it were listening for its prey.
The garden was barren, a scorch mark on the lawn.
All right, he thought; all right, so Adelle doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean she knows everything. You put some more in a bag and you take it to the college. One of the professors there will tell you, they can check it in their lab.
He nodded.
He didn’t move.
He watched the robin fly away without going near the bare earth, watched shade become shadow, remembered all the work he had done to give the yard color.
Casey, oh Casey, how does your garden grow?
He looked at his hands, at the dirt beneath the nails and in the cracks of his knuckles. Poisoned, he thought suddenly; dear god, it had been poisoned. He ran for the bathroom, stripped and threw his clothes into the wastebasket under the sink, stood under the hot water and scrubbed his flesh scarlet. Then he shoved the shower curtain aside and sat on the edge of the tub, taking deep breaths until he knew he wouldn’t die.
Clean clothes made him feel better. A can of soup stopped his stomach from complaining before it started. And as he stacked the dishes in the sink, he heard himself whistling the song he’d heard the night before.
“Casey would waltz,” he sang, “with the strawberry blonde . . .”
God, he was terrible.
“. . . and the band played on.”
He was truly horrible.
“He waltzed ’cross the floor with the girl he adored . . .”
Jesus.
He couldn’t hold a tune in an iron bucket, but he laughed as he left the kitchen, sobered for an instant when he thought of the dead flowers, then laughed again and decided that another night at the fair would clear his head, help him think, and first thing in the morning he’d go out to the college.
He laughed again as he locked the front door.
“Clear your head?” he said to the twilight. “Christ, Bethune, who the hell do you think you’re kidding?”
She wasn’t there.
He walked the length of the crowded midway and its side streets several times, ate more than he should have to give his hands something to do, ended up at the carousel and called himself ten kinds of a fool and a hundred kinds of an idiot who ought to be old enough to know better.
She wasn’t there.
He rode on a dolphin and a ram, watched the bears play their tunes, tried to catch himself in the mirrors; he stood by the dance floor and tapped his foot, nodded his head, snapped his fingers, turned and watched the thrill-rides until a threatened headache closed his eyes.
She wasn’t there.
He drifted past a Ferris wheel that seemed to wobble on its braces; he listened to a jovial barker try to convince passersby that inside his tent, and nowhere else in the world, was the only living survivor of a mysterious tribe of African pygmies, who ate only roots and berries and a pound of human flesh a day; on the midway he tried to knock down a three-level pyramid of milk bottles until he gave up in disgust; he spotted Tina Elby with some friends at a hamburger stand and made an abrupt about-face into a wide lane that boasted farm and jungle animal exhibits, with a small arena at the far end where the acts for an hourly show were posted.
Twice, he started to leave, disgusted with himself for acting like an adolescent, and twice changed his mind. Just in case.
He returned to the carousel and rode the llama four times. No one rode the gold lion.
He headed for the exit, ignoring the crowds, ignoring the music, ripping the ticket from his shirt and tearing it in half, tossing it over his shoulder and not caring when someone behind him complained about the slob.
She didn’t promise, you know, he said to the toes of his dust-covered shoes; she only said maybe.
Shit.
Damn.
He stood under the arch and glared across the Road at the Station, daring someone, anyone, to say the wrong thing so he could smash in a face, kick in a few ribs, spend the night in jail and it would serve them all right.
She called his name.
He turned abruptly and tripped over his own feet, stumbled backward and tried to wave as she rode by on a palomino pony, a gang of kids in cowboy suits running behind and cheering.
“Tomorrow!” she called as she veered into the midway. “After sunset!”
He grinned; he waved. He nodded; he grinned.
He hummed all the way home and fell asleep on the couch, woke up with a stiff neck and hummed in the shower, got into fresh working clothes and slapped his thighs as ifhe were slapping leather.
“All right, boys,” he said to his tools in a cowboy drawl, “there’s some heavy work on the south forty gotta be done before sunset.” He stepped out onto the front porch. “Head ’em up, move ’em out.”
All the shrubbery was brown, all the flowers shriveled.
A stout bar across the entrance, a quintet of crows perched on the weathered black wood, facing the road, every few minutes fluffing feathers, stretching wings, pecking at drying strings of red meat draped over the barrier.
Hammering inside, the whine of a saw.
Sun bright, heat strong, no one to take tickets because no one had come and no one would come, though there was no sign on the arch that declared the fair closed; later, much later, but for now just the crows.
And from somewhere inside, the soft quiet sound of a young woman laughing.
He stood on the front walk, hands first in his hip pockets, then on his hips, then clasped, clenched, back in his pockets, tangled behind his back, shredding blades of grass, adjusting his belt. He didn’t know what to do and so did and said nothing as a uniformed woman knelt beside the porch steps and scraped something into a clear plastic bag. It was the fifth time she’d done it. Maybe the sixth. He’d lost count. And he had stopped trying to talk to her because all he had received thus far for his efforts had been grunts and a maddeningly professional, don’t worry-about-it smile.
She said her name was Trudy. Officer Iverson. Fair hair in a thick braid at the back of her head, a minimum of makeup, not much of a figure though he’d fought not to wince when she’d shaken his hand.
A footstep behind him, but he didn’t turn. If it was one more goddamn neighbor asking one more damn fool question, he would scream; he would tear off someone’s head; he would print up flyers and pass them around so they’d leave him the hell alone while his land died around him.
The footstep passed on.
Iverson rose, dusted her knees, tucked the bag into a pocket of her tunic. “That should do it.”
He waited.
She glanced around, shaking her head helplessly. “Tell you the truth, Mr. Bethune, I haven’t the slightest idea what this is all about.”
“Well, it has to be some kind of poison,” he insisted, as he had when she’d first arrived, not ten minutes after he’d called the station. “Things — plants, I mean — just don’t die like that, not that fast, not practically overnight, for god’s sake.” He looked for sympathy; she gave him a shrug. “Somebody did it. It didn’t happen by itself.”
Lips pulled, almost a smile. “We’ll let you know as soon as we can.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. We’ll call.”
Hands waved impotently. “And what am I supposed to do now?”
She passed him, paused, bowed her head for a moment before patting the place where the bag had disappeared. “Mr. Bethune, all I can say is, don’t try to plant anything new in any of those places until we can find out what was used to destroy your flowers.” He
r tone told him she didn’t think this was a police matter at all; his expression told her that this many plants cost one hell of a lot of money, which postmen don’t have to throw around, in case she hadn’t noticed. “Give us a call on Monday —”
“Monday!”
“— and maybe we’ll have your answer. Take it easy.” A last look. “Good thing nobody’s pet was around.”
Right, he thought; it’s only a damn flower, hell, at least it’s not a dog, god forbid.
After she disappeared around the corner, he went inside and sat in the kitchen until he couldn’t stand it anymore, walked through every room until he wanted to scream, grabbed his wallet from the dresser and walked to the Brass Ring just after it opened. Molly wasn’t on duty yet, and for that he was grateful. He didn’t think he could stand her commiseration, her sad smiles, or her off-the-cuff psychology lectures.
He drank slowly until supper, walked extra carefully across the street to the Luncheonette, had a sandwich and strong coffee, waited until he was sure he wouldn’t fall, then returned to the bar.
Drank while he listened to Oxley explain to a newcomer the finer points of playing darts without putting a hole or two in one’s foot.
Stared at the walls, the ceiling, swiveled around and looked out at the street. But the faces passing by were indistinct, grey, and he turned away to watch the bartender wipe off the tables.
He blinked several times, quite slowly, and tried to release his breath, suddenly caught in his lungs.
“Hey,” he said quietly to the glass in his hand.
and he’s a creep, a so-called man who talks to stupid goddamn flowers
“Hey.”
nothing but goddamn weeds
In order to keep from bolting, and screaming, he placed money and glass on the bar with exaggerated deliberation, waved his usual farewell and strolled outside, where he leaned immediately and heavily against the wall when the sun blared in his eyes and set a painfully slow dervish working in his head. Not good. This wouldn’t do. Wouldn’t do at all. He had to be sober when he . . . no, maybe he wouldn’t go to the police. To Iverson the Iron Bitch, who would most likely tell him that words don’t mean much when they’re grumbled in a bar, and they certainly weren’t a threat.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel Page 4