by David Black
2
Jack slammed his car into drive and hit the accelerator. His wheels spun in the mud, whined, caught, and he shot ahead through a gap between two other cars.
The Cowboy missed Jack’s door, bashed into his rear left quarter panel, and spun Jack around ninety degrees. Just in time for Bix to reverse into Jack’s front.
Jack saw Bix’s grinning face, looking across his front seat back. He smelled the haze of gasoline that was settling over the field.
Bix lurched forward. Just far enough to give him room to back up again, hard, into Jack’s engine.
Jack’s wheels couldn’t get traction. He was stuck in place.
As Bix again slammed into him in the front, another car crashed into his back.
And the Cowboy, having slewed around 360 degrees, came at Jack from nine o’clock, driving forward, gunning straight at Jack’s side door.
Jack’s wheels caught. And his car jerked back a few feet—just far enough to keep Jack from being crushed when the Cowboy hit Jack’s left front bumper instead of Jack’s left front door.
Jack jockeyed forward and back, forward and back, bashing into Bix’s car and the car behind him, trying to make enough room to turn his clunker to the right, to get away from the Cowboy’s car, which was again circling the crush, ready to make another run at Jack’s front left door.
Over the grinding of gears and the ripping of metal, Jack heard the flagmen’s whistles, saw two of them running toward him, waving red flags.
Jack shot out in the space that opened up between two cars that were backing away from each other.
He caught Bix’s attention and pointed at the Cowboy’s car.
Bix’s eyes looked blank, then puzzled, finally comprehending—as the Cowboy’s car was coming a third time at Jack broadside.
A bashed-up Ford slammed into Jack’s rear left, swinging him into a perfect side-on target for the Cowboy.
Hand over hand, Jack turned his steering wheel as he popped the gear shift into drive.
The Cowboy was leaning forward over his steering wheel. His face was composed, revealing neither glee nor anger nor sorrow nor satisfaction.
Jack’s wheels spun.
The Cowboy seemed—in that frozen moment—to be sucking on a back tooth.
Jack’s wheels kept spinning.
The Cowboy braced himself for the collision.
Jack considered diving away from the driver’s side, trying to scramble out the passenger’s window—but two cars were about to collide on his right. One was scraping his car, rocking it.
The Cowboy’s car seemed huge—like the moon in the haunted house ride.
Jack smelled his spinning tires burning.
He, too, braced himself for the collision—when Bix’s car slammed into the side of the Cowboy’s car, spinning it ten degrees off target.
Jack’s tires caught. Jack’s car leapt forward.
Flagmen were all around them, calling a temporary stop. Because the Cowboy had been illegally aiming at Jack’s driver’s door. Because Bix had illegally hit the Cowboy’s side. Because Jack’s engine exploded, sending flames thirty feet into the air.
Jack popped his seat belt and scrambled through the front windshield frame, his face and hands scorched by the flames.
He dropped to the ground as a fire engine was already hosing his car’s engine, and ran toward the Cowboy’s car, which was also burning.
But the car was empty.
The Cowboy was gone.
3
“Must of stolen some poor sap’s car,” Bix said.
“Or bought it,” Jack said.
They were walking off the field. Beside them, a tow truck was dragging Jack’s clunker into the parking lot. Another tow truck was pulling the Cowboy’s clunker. One of the field men was driving Bix’s car, which was bucking and rearing like a bronco, past them.
“Demolition derby,” Bix said. “Accidents happen all the time. If you were killed, nobody would of thought nothing.”
Jack reached into the flap pocket of his jacket, took out his cigar, and lit it with a Zippo lighter.
“A truly cool guy would have relit his cigar in the flames from the engine,” Caroline said.
She had come up behind them. From the stands where she’d watched the heat.
“That was exciting,” she said. “For a while, it looked like you were really in trouble.”
“He was,” Bix told Caroline.
“The guy who kept trying to broadside me,” Jack said, “was the Cowboy.”
Caroline said, “Let’s find the son of a bitch!”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
1
Jack and Caroline put their cell phones on speed dial to each other’s number. Bix didn’t have a cell phone that worked, but he said, “Don’t worry, Jackie. If I spot the Cowboy, you’ll know because of the racket.”
They split up at a stall filled with a hundred bright-orange rubber ducks with beady black eyes floating in a metal tub.
Jack headed past the Ferris wheel and started searching the cow barns. The ammonia smell of the manure tickled Jack’s nose. The cows, their rumps facing the aisles, their depleted udders swinging like empty bagpipe bags, chewed and chewed. They switched their tails to brush away flies. Kids, some as young as eight or nine, cared for the animals. A few kids lay asleep or reading or, eyes closed, listening to iPods on cots beside the stalls.
No Cowboy.
In the goat barn, Jack walked along an aisle of wicked-looking animals with black bandit face markings. As Jack passed, one of the goats, a huge hairy brute, stood up on its hind legs, propped its forelegs on the slats of the pen gate and, staring at Jack, bleated accusingly.
Jack worked his way through the sheep barn, past a pile of baled hay taller than he was, some green, some older and tan, past the display of farm equipment, huge machines painted in bright nursery colors as if farming were a child’s game, past the small theater where a swing band, all women over sixty, was singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” past the American Legion tent, past the 4-H Building, past the demonstration of antique tools, past the bookbinding exhibit, past the modular house display, and along an aisle of booths selling Harley-Davidson kerchiefs, unicorn tapestries, plastic Star Wars laser swords, and water filters.
No Cowboy.
The Cowboy had probably left the fair as soon as he bolted from the demolition derby, Jack figured. Although, Jack second-guessed himself, maybe Caroline was right. Maybe he hung around, figuring what better place to nail Jack than in such a crowd.
Jack walked through the schoolhouse, his attention snagged on the student art work: self-portraits, watercolors of farms and malls, collages of kids hanging around the renovated outdoor movie theater, a ceramic of suckling pigs in a row, a metal sculpture of a horse hit by lightning, its mouth opened in a scream.
Such talent, Jack thought; where did it all go when the kids graduated and started flipping burgers or working as sales associates at big-box stores?
Past the kiddie rides: the goose boats, the carousel—its horses with wild eyes and frenzied painted faces—the moon walk, the tiny rockets.
At one game, where kids were diving under the multicolored foam balls as if snorkeling, the woman with sunken eyes who ran the ride stopped Jack and said, “You ever sleep on foam balls, Chief? Come back after the fair’s over.”
Jack ducked into the men’s bathroom, a knocked-together wooden building painted dark green outside and cream inside. One wall held six booths with warped plywood doors. The facing wall held a metal urinal trough the length of the room.
A man standing at the near end of the urinal held his cock with one hand and his cell phone with the other. While he peed, he said into the phone, “No. No, of course, I love you.… Of course, I would.… That’s what I’m talking about.…”
A dozen or so men were lined up to the right of the cell phone lover, some eyes closed, some humming to themselves, some staring blank faced at the wall, one whistling, another talking to
himself—or rather to his penis: “Come on, Skipper. You can do it. You’ve done it before.”
Jack stood at the trough right inside the door and unzipped.
He started to pee. A strong, forked, almost dark-orange, musty-smelling stream. I must be dehydrated, Jack thought.
The man who had been encouraging his cock was finishing. “I knew you’d do it, Boss,” he said. “The Little Engine That Could.”
The cell phone lover also finished and wrapped up his call at the same time, “Got to go, Babe. Yeah, love you, too.”
As Jack urinated, out of the corner of his right eye, he caught a flicker, something familiar, the Cowboy, who was standing at the far end of the trough and who, at the same moment, noticed Jack.
Neither could stop peeing. Both struggled to finish—a race to see who would be the first to empty his bladder.
Across the dozen or so bodies—some men leaving, others taking their place in line—Jack and the Cowboy stared at each other. Still peeing.
The Cowboy was the first to smile at the absurdity of the situation.
Jack smiled back.
The Cowboy shrugged at Jack.
Ruefully, Jack nodded.
The Cowboy shook his cock, tucked it away, and zipped up. As he strode past, he clapped Jack on the back.
Jack squeezed out the last stream of urine, stuffed his cock inside his pants, and headed out after the Cowboy.
On the other side of Settembrini’s House of Horror, Jack spotted the Cowboy. Jack started around the horror house.
The Cowboy tried to blend into a crowd, a dozen people of various ages who all had the same piggy faces. A family.
Jack started to run. He vaulted over a raised black electric cable and ducked under a fence.
The Cowboy was gone.
Jack stood on the midway looking around.
The sky went green. Thunder cracked. The almost instantaneous lightning flash lit up the fair, which for a moment looked frozen like a black-and-white postcard. The heavens opened. Rain slammed down.
People ran for cover. Or ignored the rain. Or turned their faces up to the rain.
Jack held up his wrist to show the guy who ran the ride that he had bought an all-day, all-ride plastic bracelet. While waiting to get on his gondola, Jack called Caroline.
“I’m going on the Big Wheel,” Jack said. “I’ll see if I can spot the Cowboy from up there.”
There was another crack of thunder and a flash of lightning as Jack settled into his seat and felt himself being lifted backward, up away from the fairgrounds. Below, he could see a few of the rides, mostly for children, were being shut down.
Jack scanned the fairgrounds for the Cowboy.
Impossible, Jack thought—just as he spotted the Cowboy in another gondola just over the crest of the turning wheel.
The Cowboy must have seen Jack get on and followed.
A third crack of thunder made the Ferris wheel shudder. Lightning illuminated the Catskill range across the river and the legendary outline of the sleeping Rip Van Winkle; a giant Rip Van Winkle, hundreds of miles long, his forehead and shoulder and hip towering crags, like an angel fallen to the Earth.
The guy running the ride was trying to get people off. Someone said, “They should have closed the fair down when they got the weather report.”
Jack felt the fourth crack—right above them—in his chest and belly.
Lightning forked out of the sky and hit something on the ground below and to the right of Jack, who caught a flash out of the corner of his eye. All over the fair, lights went out. Jack smelled burned metal.
The main generator was blazing, casting the surrounding fair booths—selling the fried dough, roast beef sandwiches, fresh lemonade, blooming onions—in a hellish glow.
The Ferris wheel stopped.
2
Sliding sideways, Jack squeezed himself from under the safety bar, stood and grabbed a metal strut, which was cold and wet. He stepped out of his gondola and, clutching one wire support after another, edged up and across the Ferris wheel in the direction he figured the Cowboy to be.
He felt as if he were climbing a huge, industrial spiderweb, the spider a mechanical horror waiting at the center with furnaces for eyes and a coal-fed maw.
Another clap of thunder was instantly followed by a flash of lightning.
Jack saw the Cowboy thirty feet away, climbing out of his gondola, making his way toward Jack.
The ground sixty or so feet below looked far away. The people, small, insignificant.
No one looked up. No one knew Jack and the Cowboy were edging toward each other in the stinging rain, their feet unsteady on the slick struts, coming closer and closer, hand over hand—until they faced each other across a two foot gap.
With one hand, the Cowboy let go of a cable and punched Jack in the face.
Jack staggered back. His left foot slid off the cross beam on which he was balanced. His left hand slipped from a cable. Jack fell backward, suspended by his right hand and right foot.
Thunder, lightning.
The Ferris wheel shuddered.
In the sudden glare, the Cowboy, arms outstretched, gripping cables, swung up his legs and with two feet kicked Jack in the chest.
Jack fell. Dropping three feet and landing on his back on top of a gondola.
“What the fuck!” Jack heard someone in the gondola below him say.
Jack scrambled to his feet, rain blinding him, as the Cowboy landed, crouched, on the gondola canopy.
Scrabbling crabwise, Jack knocked into the Cowboy’s left calf with his right shoulder.
The Cowboy’s feet slipped out from under him. Holding on to a cable with just one hand, the other waving free as if he were doing a Highland fling, his legs dancing in air, the Cowboy dangled over the sixty foot drop.
Jack scrambled up. Supporting himself with one hand clutching a cable, Jack hammered with his free fist on the Cowboy’s knuckles until the Cowboy let go and dropped a few feet to the canopy of the gondola below.
Faces—like paste masks dripping, streaked with paint—gazed at Jack and the Cowboy. The couple in the gondola across the wheel from them. Three teenaged girls, agog, in the gondola above the couple. In the gondola below, a mother covered her six-year-old son’s eyes while her husband shouted something lost in the sound of the storm, a humming and hissing that could have been the racket of the Ferris wheel’s engine.
Jack jumped, unsteadily, down beside the Cowboy, who lashed out at him.
Jack ducked and head butted the Cowboy in the lower back.
The Cowboy went down. Jack drove his right knee into the muscle of the Cowboy’s left arm.
The Cowboy twisted one way, the other.
Jack punched the Cowboy in the face, felt something give.
Thunder and lightning.
In the flash, Jack saw the Cowboy grinning as blood spurted from his broken nose.
Jack hammered on the Cowboy’s windpipe as if he were pounding on a table at a drunken dinner.
Again, he felt something give.
Jack heaved the Cowboy over the side of the gondola canopy. The Cowboy fell, bouncing and ricocheting from one strut to another, from one gondola to another, a human pinball in an indifferent pinball machine. The Cowboy landed, his back broken on the lever that made the machine go. The Cowboy was dead.
3
The squad car’s lights flashed garish red and blue on the faces of the men and women and children, eyes hollow, mouths agape, skull-like, pressing forward to watch as the cops tried to handcuff Jack with old-fashioned metal restraints.
“Son of a bitch’s wrists are too big,” said a young officer Jack didn’t recognize. “Jesus, this guy’s massive.”
“You got the plastic doohickeys?” said the other young cop, equally unfamiliar to Jack.
“You got plastic?” the first young cop shouted to a third young cop, sounding like a checkout clerk at the Price Chopper.
The rain was letting up. The fair’s generator ga
ve a great gasp and started running. Lights snapped on.
The faces lost their hollow-eyed, gaping-mouth, skull-like look and once again became merely human.
The Cowboy’s body, in a zip-up bag, leftover meat, was dumped into the back of a van, which cranked up its siren as it crept through the watching crowd.
The first cop was binding Jack’s wrists behind his back, too tight, with zip ties, when Jack spotted Caroline in the crowd—shocked, the power of the emotions draining her cheeks of color, the only skull-like face left.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
1
Kipp, the Pakistani from the haunted motel, sat up on the metal cot when Jack was shoved into the jail cell.
“I know you’re not coming to see me,” Kipp said. “They took your belt and shoelaces.”
He had a yellow bruise below one eye.
Unconsciously, Jack touched his own face.
The cell reeked of disinfectant.
“What’s the charge?” Kipp asked. “Drunk and disorderly?”
“Murder,” Jack said.
“No shit,” Kipp said. “You do it?”
“Couple of hundred witnesses watched,” Jack said.
“The guy deserve it?” Kipp asked.
“He was trying to kill me,” Jack said.
“Self-defense,” Kipp said.
From another part of the jail came a radio call: 10-33—toll collector requires assistance.
Through the doorway leading to the bull pen, Jack saw a woman—a girl? She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, dressed in a wig the color of cotton candy, a tight metallic-blue skirt made out of what looked like fish scales, and a gauzy, translucent halter that revealed her nipples.
“I was dancing,” the girl whined. “I’m a ballet dancer.”
She twirled.
“What’ch’you looking at?” the girl asked a male cop.
Another call came over the radio: 10-34—defective sprinkler system.
“Can you believe the shit we have to deal with?” a cop, unseen in the hallway, said.