“Two Cokes and two candy bars,” Kreigle said. He punched the buttons on his cash register and the drawer slid open. Change was scooped up and handed to Mickey, who proceeded to stuff the bills and loose coins into one of his pockets while Kreigle slammed the drawer shut.
A moment went by before Kreigle said, “Nice day, huh?”
“Sure is,” Justin said, then, “You know anything about a carnival setting up out at Godby’s field?”
“Carnival? Carnival’s next week, down by the schoolyard, far as I know.”
“I saw a Ferris wheel out at Godby’s field this morning,” Mickey said.
“That don’t make no sense. No sense at all.”
“It’s out there, all right, big as life.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah,” Justin again: “That’s just what I said.”
Mickey took another drink. He handed Justin a candy bar, and the two of them turned to leave.
“See you, boys,” Kreigle said.
“Yes sir,” Justin called over his shoulder, turning and looking at Kreigle as Mickey pushed the screen door open, turning back to see somebody grab Mickey by the throat—Bo Johnson, of course. Who else could it have been? Then came a thump, a surprised yelp and a series of thuds as Mickey was dragged stumbling across the wooden planks.
Justin ran onto the porch and, yep, there stood Bo Johnson, towering over Mickey, his face red, his eyes wide, one hand around Mickey’s throat, the other tight on his arm. “Well,” he said. “If it ain’t the pizza-faced artist.” He slammed Mickey against the wall, pulled him back and slammed him again. “What, didn’t think I’d find you? Thought if you laid low long enough I’d forget about your dumb ass?”
Mickey opened his mouth to speak, but managed nothing more than a rasping croak. His eyes were frantic, his face stricken with pain. “Please,” he said.
“Let him go, Bo!” Justin cried out.
“What, you want some of this?”
“Let him go, you’re hurting him bad!”
Footsteps thudded inside the store. The door flew open and out popped Jim Kreigle with a sawed off piece of a baseball bat in his hand. He looked at Justin, then at Mickey Reardon, whose face had now grown a deep shade of red—deeper even than the shade on the angry bull of a kid menacing him. “Let him go, Bo,” he said. “Let him go or so help me I’ll brain you with this.”
Bo loosened his grip, but didn’t let go. Loosened his grip and Mickey began breathing again, the color creeping back into his face. “You don’t know what he did.”
“I don’t care what he did. Let him go. You want to beat up on somebody, find somebody your own size.”
“We’re in the same grade.”
“You’ve been in the same grade three years now. These boys are too little for you to be messing with.”
Mickey, whose coloring had returned to normal, huffed out a chortling laugh.
And that was all it took. Bo Johnson, who indeed should have been long gone from junior high school, blew a gasket. He landed a savage blow to Mickey’s stomach and one to his side, stepped back and watched him drop to the floor, and then lie there, writhing and hugging his gut.
He stood for a moment, muscles bulging, hands clenched by his sides. Finally, he said, “This ain’t over, prick. Not by a long shot. Then he turned and stomped off the porch and onto the sidewalk, kicking Mickey’s bike into the road as he went.
Chapter Three
There were several things Fred Hagen could have counted on when he climbed out of bed this morning. His back would ache, so would his head. The cool and refreshing well water washing the Advil down his throat would feel great, the starched shirt itching the back of his neck, not so great. Once behind the wheel of his four-year-old patrol car, the engine would stutter and cough when he turned the ignition, and then rumble to a start. The coffee at the cafe would be hot, the glazed doughnuts cold.
Damn near every trucker wandering the byways traveled just at the posted speed limit on their way past Pottsboro, South Carolina, and then hauled ass the second they left Fred Hagen’s jurisdiction. This was a true and solid fact Fred had learned these past seven years, one he’d had plenty of time to contemplate sitting in his hiding spot beneath the billboard on I-25. Most folks, as late as they might have been running, knew better than to hurry past this stretch of highway; they’d bite the bullet and slow their asses down rather than take a chance on a speeding ticket. But sure as the sun would rise, at least one poor bastard would come flying by Fred’s little corner of the world, unaware of the speed trap that lay waiting on this three mile expanse of Carolina flatland. Today’s candidate turned out to be David Tripp, an insurance executive from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who, much to his chagrin, found himself carting his own personalized traffic citation back to the sleek little BMW he seemed so proud of, amazed and, somewhat irritated by the small town policeman who had just pulled him to the side of the road for going a whopping three miles per hour over the speed limit.
“You’re not serious,” he’d said.
“As a heart attack,” Fred told him.
“Thanks for the southern hospitality,” Tripp had called out to the smirking deputy as he pulled back onto the highway, leaving Fred Hagen walking back to his police cruiser, thinking, y’all come back now!
He was back on the highway, cruising parallel with the old dirt road that wound its way back to Godby’s field when he noticed the top of a Ferris wheel looming high above the tree line, a sight which caught him by surprise, since there had never been a Ferris wheel or any other kind of carnival equipment on that site before. Hell, there’d never been a carnival or anything of the sort anywhere near the old grown-over field. Of course, years ago, back when Old Dixie ruled and slaves were the order of the day, there’d been cross burnings and whippings out there, sure there had; persecutions and beatings, too, plenty of which Fred’s grandfather had been front and center for his very own self. Probably had taken a personal hand in a lynching or two, Fred’s rickety old grandfather—no probably to it, according to Fred’s dad, who on more than one occasion before his untimely passing, had regaled his young son with stories of what happened to uppity niggers back in Granddaddy Al’s day. First a stare, then a hard slap across the face. Next would come the whip, a stout cane, boiling water, the tar and the feathers. After that, the rope would find them, and one way or another, that would be that.
Case closed, problem solved.
But that was a different day, a different era, one Fred was glad to see behind his little corner of South Carolina. In this day and age, things had changed, as they damn well should have. No longer did a black man have to worry about being strung from a tree for disrespecting his white neighbor. Hell, now days he could pretty much tell his neighbor to go fuck himself. And if the guy’s daughter allowed that black neighbor to bed her down—so what? Try that shit back in Al’s day and see where it got you. A nice, sturdy length of rope? The snap of the whip? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
Fred took the next exit onto a two-lane stretch of blacktop asphalt, doubling back until he found himself traveling up the old dirt road. He could hardly believe what he was seeing through the treetops as he negotiated his way deeper into the woods. Then he broke through the tree line and, there it was, all right, a Ferris wheel, spinning in the middle of the day, in a spot a Ferris wheel had no earthly reason for being. Pick up trucks and trailers were arranged in a circle in front of the thing, a couple of flatbed rigs. Tents, some fully erect, others being offloaded from trucks by a handful of grimy looking workers. In the middle of all this activity stood a man. He was tall, and thin as a rail. Wiry, Fred’s old man would’ve called him, had he been out there to get a gander at the guy. He wore a long black overcoat, a formal-looking thing that draped two rectangular tails down the backs of his thin legs. A stovepipe hat sat upon his head, obscuring the stiff grey hair hanging down across his shoulders. He stood before one of the flatbed trucks, looking up at the black tarpaulin covering it.
>
Fred pulled through the clearing. Braking to a stop several feet away from the truck, he killed the ignition, got out of the car and slammed the door shut behind him.
No one seemed to notice as he walked up to the man. Not the workers unloading the tents, nor even the man himself. Not until Fred stood directly beside him did he acknowledge Fred’s presence with a curt, “Howdy, neighbor.”
“What’s all this?” Fred asked him.
“This, my friend, is Hannibal Cobb’s Kansas City Carnival.”
“Kansas City, huh? In the middle of South Carolina?”
“Bringing fun and games to the heartland, spreading good cheer wherever I roam.”
“And you would be?”
The guy turned. He stuck out his hand and Fred grasped it.
“Hannibal Cobb, at your service. Owner and proprietor of the fine establishment you see before you.”
Fred, pumping the guy’s hand, looked up at the much taller man.
Hannibal Cobb had a face much like his namesake. Deep wrinkles and rough creases lined skin as dry and rugged as an old corncob found in a plowed-over field. A stubbled growth of salt and pepper whiskers covered his face and chin, much like, Fred thought, any number of drunks who might be seen staggering away from The Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill on any given evening or afternoon. But his eyes told a different story. They were dark, those eyes… black, maybe; two piercing orbs that gave the appearance of polished onyx marbles sunk deep within a pair of hollow sockets. And there was fire behind them, as if a bright halogen light shone there. And wisdom, that was back there, too. Wisdom and knowledge, of things a man such as Fred could never know. Should never know, lest he run screaming off to the insane asylum. Indescribable things seen only in nightmares and dreams, flitting around the darkest corners of a fevered mind.
These were the thoughts bubbling up to the surface of Fred’s troubled mind as he looked into those eyes, and said, “Just what in the hell is going on here?”
“Same thing that went on in a little burg on the outskirts of Augusta, Georgia a little while ago. Calistes, Alabama a while before that.”
“And just what would that be, Mr. Cobb?”
Cobb’s dark eyes sparkled as he said, “Fun and games, son. Fun and games.”
Behind them came the clank and hammering of workers busying themselves with one task or another. High above them spun the Ferris wheel, which hadn’t, Fred noticed, stopped spinning since he’d first seen it peeking out over the treetops. And even though lights burned up and down and all around the thing, he couldn’t see any electrical wires running away from it. Nor could he see a generator or any other device that might be powering it. And last, but certainly not least: no one was anywhere near the thing. None of the levers or any other type of controls were being manned.
He turned to Cobb, with his stovepipe hat and tails, who once again was facing the flatbed truck, hands now raised high above his head. His fingers suddenly began to wriggle. Then his hands swept down level with his waist, several feet apart. Dropping his hands also seemed to drop the tarp to the ground, revealing a series of cages resting in the bed of the truck. There was a woman in one cage, a man in another, a young boy in yet another. The last cage housed an armless and legless man, who sat on a pile of straw in the corner of his confines. There was a diaper around his waist, a diaper and nothing else.
Odd that tarpaulin should have dropped the way it did, as Fred saw no one standing in front of the truck, nor behind it as the tarp fell like a magician’s curtain let suddenly loose. But Fred was quite sure it had happened—after all, he’d seen it with his own eyes, hadn’t he? Down came the hands and down came the tarp. As simple as that. If such a thing could be considered simple.
“How’d you do that?”
Cobb turned. Smiling down at the deputy, he said, “How does anybody do anything? Hard work and perseverance, I’d imagine.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Mr. Cobb. But I do know carting people around like livestock don’t set too well with the great state of South Carolina. And, by the way, Mister Cobb, nothing was said to me about any carnival setting up shop out here. You are aware that certain permits need to be acquired for this sort of thing, aren’t you? Do you have a permit?”
“Permit?” Cobb chortled. “Hell, I don’t need no permit. I’ve got carte blanche around these here parts, same way you had carte blanche sending that poor bastard running home to Minnesota with his hundred and thirteen dollar speeding ticket wrapped in his fat little fist.”
Fred actually felt his jaw drop, the hairs on the back of his neck, tingling now, and not from that goddamn starched collar. Nothing powering that big-assed Ferris wheel, no sign even as to what had been used to haul it back here? No one standing around the flatbed manipulating the tarp when it magically dropped away from the truck? Revealing what, caged people? And now this? His hand, shaking now, crept slowly toward his gun.
“Now, deputy,” Cobb said, his words seeming to halt Fred’s hand, while his own hand pulled a corncob pipe from his jacket pocket and clamped it between his teeth. Fire blossomed from his index finger as he rubbed it against the flat pad of his thumb. Smiling—leering, really, he touched the flaming finger to the bowl of his pipe. Whatever was in it began to crackle and pop—tobacco, Fred guessed, but who could know, really? Who could know anything about any of what was happening out here today? Soon, smoke was spiraling up from the bowl, flowing from Cobb’s mouth as he snapped his finger forward as if shaking a matchstick, and the flame went out.
He took another drag, long and deep, holding it a moment before forming a perfect O with his mouth, and then slowly releasing an ever widening circle of smoke that hung frozen in the air like a window frame between he and Fred. Wider and wider it grew, impossibly large. A wave of a hand and a picture appeared within the circle, flickering images of the type that had once circulated in movie theaters across the land, back when black and white newsreel footage pictured the headlines of the day. These images, though, seen through this devil’s lens, were not of current events, but rather of the clearing Fred now stood in. Withered corpses of men and women swung from branches of the trees surrounding them. Children too, some of them no more than toddlers. The image, wavering in and out of existence, now showed swollen and misshapen bodies; bloated, worm-infested sacks of flesh scattered throughout the clearing, drenched for days on end by the scorching South Carolina sun. Another flicker and the bodies were gone, replaced by a young black man tied to a post in the middle of the clearing, surrounded by a group of laughing rednecks, the bloody and tattered rags on his back indistinguishable from the raw and ragged strips of flesh hanging from his flayed torso. In the middle of the country bumpkins, front and center and gripping his blood-soaked whip, stood good old Granddaddy Al, who looked an awful lot like his grandson in that impossibly wide circle of smoke.
“What the hell’s going on here?”
“Just paying the bills, son,” Cobb said. “Collecting what’s finally come due… the question is, Freddy boy, what’s due from you?”
Another wave of Cobb’s hand and the circle of smoke drifted into Fred’s face. His eyes glazed over, his hands dropped to his sides as the smoke ring passed over him like an unholy cloud. Then, slowly, like a helium-filled balloon, it began to lift away, higher and higher, past the tall man’s stovepipe hat, changing shape as it rose.
Up, up, and up it went, much like the Ferris wheel Mickey Reardon had watched climb out of the ground like Jack’s magical beanstalk, leaving Fred Hagen standing motionless beneath it.
Chapter Four
They left Jim Kreigle’s general store behind them, peddling their way through town, up the old highway road that would take them to the outskirts of Pottsboro. Justin’s parents wouldn’t approve of him going to Godby’s field—it was no secret what had taken place there all those years ago. Justin had heard the stories, all kinds of stories. He, as well as darn near every other kid in Pottsboro, had heard them. Many a time he’d sat
on a front porch listening to somebody’s aunt or uncle, or maybe a grandfather go on about somebody who’d been strung up out there. The stories he’d sat through, of misbehaving slaves who’d been summarily punished, runaways who’d been dragged kicking and screaming back to the place. Beatings and hangings, and worse: mutilations, castrations… worse than that, even. And these stories were not just of slaves. It just started with them, and stretched up through the ages. But always with the same theme: misbehaving darkies who dared speak up against their white neighbor, or go against the political machinery of the day. Slavery had been abolished a long time ago, but those archaic practices borne from seeds of ignorance lived on, passed down through generations ruled by cruelty and intolerance. Practices now lurking just beneath a thin sheen of barely disguised racism.
Of course, Justin’s thoughts did not run so deep. He knew only that his parents did not allow such stories to be passed around their house—even if Justin and his friends did think the old tales were kind of neat (in a horror movie kind of way). Nor did they allow such things to be imparted to Justin in their presence. They wouldn’t be happy knowing Justin was out here, but here he was, and there was the Ferris wheel just where Reardon said it would be, spinning high above the treetops bordering Godby’s field.
They made their way up the old dirt road, but stopped short of entering the clearing when they saw a patrol car parked by one of the flatbed trucks. They wanted to see what was going on, so they laid their bikes in the underbrush and crept forward. By the time they got to the edge of the tree line, Fred Hagen was walking up to some guy who had his back turned to him, a curious-looking guy with long grey hair. He had on a top hat, and a long black coat with tails, like a ballroom dancer or something. Only Justin was pretty sure this guy wasn’t a dancer, not with those legs—so long and spindly they were that they looked like stilts. And that hat, like something Honest Abe Lincoln might’ve been running around the countryside freeing the slaves in. Before them was a flatbed truck. Behind them, a couple of workers were laying what looked to be an old canvas tent across a patch of ground. And overshadowing everything: that ever-spinning Ferris wheel, its empty carriages swinging back and forth as it turned.
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