These were the thoughts running through her head as she sat at the bar inside the Wagon Wheel lounge at three o’clock that Saturday afternoon, a bottle of beer in front of her, a shot of Jim Beam beside it. That was what her life came down to these days. A shot and a beer in her favorite watering hole. Anything to get away from her sad and lonely house, and the memories of what had occurred there.
She downed the shot—her first of many that would come that afternoon—downed the shot and placed the glass on the bar, picked up the beer and took a swig, returned the bottle to the counter and looked across the bar, at her reflection in the mirror. There were a lot of miles on Tricia now. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge. But she wasn’t used up; she wasn’t done yet. Long blonde hair flowed across her narrow shoulders. The worry and strife, having taken her appetite from her years ago, had kept the fat off her. Her eyes may have lost a little of their spark over the years, they may have dulled a bit, but they were as blue as the sky above, and they could still captivate a man if they wanted to—if she wanted them to. Which now days, she didn’t much care one way or another. Of course, she still wanted someone in her life, that special someone who would place her up on that pedestal. If not for her, then for Mickey, who surely deserved to have a man in his life. And on a good day, before the whiskey took her, she thought maybe there was a man out there for her—for them. Someone who would come into their lives and make a difference. Someone to set things right again.
She was reaching for her beer when Ziggy Bowers leaned across the bar. Good old Ziggy, who with his light green eyes and skin the color of tea, claimed to be half Indian. But his hair gave him away, the texture of it. Everybody around Pottsboro knew that his fair-haired mother, having slept with a black man, many years ago, had been sent off to New Orleans, and then come back a year later with her light brown bundle of joy in tow. Why Ziggy kept up the charade was a mystery to Tricia. But he did, and she figured that was his business, not hers. And as long as he kept the drinks coming, that was all that mattered anyway.
“Another shot, Trish?” he said.
She was about to say yes, when from behind her came, “Yeah, Zigster. Give her another. On me.”
Tricia turned to see Jack Everett smiling over her shoulder. Long and lean, and thirty years her senior, he was a soft touch, one who figured a drink or two, a meal and a night on the town to be enough to get into Tricia’s pants. So far, he’d been right. But not tonight. Not yet, anyway.
“Well thanks, Jack,” she said, smiling as he plopped down on the stool beside her. He was tall and thin—a little too thin, maybe. His hair was grey; his sparkling eyes a darker shade of it. He owned a saw mill on the far edge of Pottsboro and several other enterprises in and around the county. A direct descendant of one of the founders of their fair town, he had a finger in damn near every pie being produced in the place. He was a man used to being listened to, a man used to getting his way.
“The usual for me, Ziggy,” he said. And to Tricia, “Why so sad, buttercup?”
“Who says I’m sad?”
“The look on your face?”
“Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving.”
“So they say.”
“Yeah,” Tricia said. “Don’t they.”
Ziggy came back carrying their drinks, a Heineken for Jack, another shot for Tricia. He set them on the bar, and said, “On the tab, Jack?”
“You betcha,” Jack told him.
Ziggy turned and walked away, and Jack said, “So… What’re you up to tonight?”
“You see it.”
“Same old same old, huh?”
“You know how it is.”
“Indeed I do.”
Jack picked up his beer, tipped back the bottle and took a nice long drink, returned the bottle to the bar, and said, “Old man still ain’t back, huh?”
“He ain’t coming back.”
“Well, he’s a goddamn fool…”
Tricia picked up her shot glass. “You got that right,” she said, and then downed the whiskey and returned the glass to the bar. It felt good going down, better when it hit bottom, and that comforting warm feeling started rippling through her. Maybe if she had enough of them, pairing off with good old Jack wouldn’t make her feel like taking a swan dive off the water tower.
“… leaving a fine-looking woman like you. Not to mention poor old Mick—”
“Jack, really… ” Tricia smiled. Jack was an important man around these parts, a good friend to have if you needed one, and God only knew with Rick gone, Tricia needed all the friends she could get. But the last thing she wanted to talk about right now was the worthless jackass who had so completely ruined her life. “Let’s just have a good time.”
“Now you’re talking,” Jack said, then, “I was thinking: why don’t I grab a bottle and meet up with you back here a little later on tonight? Or I could come by your house.”
“And what, exactly, would I tell my son, Jack?”
“What, you’re supposed to be a member of the Order now that your old man’s took off? What do you tell him now?”
Tricia picked up her beer, tipped back the bottle and took a good long swig. Holding the bottle against her thigh, she said, “He’s thirteen years old, and Rick’s all he thinks about. I tell him his daddy and I had a falling out. I don’t know where he went, but I’m sure he’ll get in touch with him sooner or later.”
“Maybe he will.”
Tricia, snorting out a laugh, said, “Yeah, well, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“In the meantime, why don’t I swing by your place, pick you up and show you a sweet old time?”
“What’s all this my place bullshit, you afraid Velma’s gonna find out you’re down here sniffin’ out somebody else’s scent?”
“Velma don’t run me. I run me, go where I want and do what I wanta do, and go home when I please. Or not at all, if I don’t feel like it.”
She turned away from Jack, holding her nearly empty bottle up to Ziggy, who was wiping down a spot at the opposite end of the bar.
“So what do you think?” Jack said. “Wanta get together and… ”
“What?” Tricia said, turning back to Jack, who had stopped midway through his sentence, and was now sitting slack-jawed on his stool, staring up at the ceiling; nothing, absolutely nothing in those cold, grey eyes of his. Nothing behind them either, as far as Tricia could tell. He mumbled something, but Tricia didn’t understand what he’d said.
Then he got off his stool and started slowly toward the door.
“What the hell?”
Tricia turned to see Ziggy staring across the barroom in utter disbelief, as one by one every male patron filed out into the street.
She swiveled around on her stool. Across the dimly lit room, Sheila McCrea sat alone at her table, hands held in front of her in a questioning pose, palms up, shaking her head as if she—like Ziggy and Tricia—didn’t understand what was going on. She’d been sitting with her husband when Tricia first stepped into the Wagon Wheel. Tricia wondered if Jerry McCrea had, like Jack Everett and everybody else, just shuffled off like a bunch of stoned-out zombies, across the bar and out the door. A few stools down was Becka Turner. Tricia hadn’t noticed her before because several guys had occupied the stools between them, one of them being Jack Everett. Now those stools were empty.
The door to the Ladies room popped open and out stepped Liz Fennel. “The fuck?” she said. “Somebody fart?” She stood there, staring at the door as Tricia hopped off her stool and Ziggy stepped around the bar and followed her across the room, where she opened the door and stepped outside, stumbling sideways when she tripped over an old discarded beer bottle.
Quickly righting herself, she looked over at Jack Everett and a whole host of others, all of them lined up in the middle of the street, staring up at the sky. Above them, a dark cloud, black as the Ace of spades, sat perfectly still, while another set of fluffy white clouds rolled slowly across the horizon. Shaped like a perfectly constr
ucted top hat, this cloud—this dark abnormality—stood framed on all sides by the clear blue sky. The sun, like the unblinking bright eye of some mysterious tribal god, sat directly above it.
“The hell is that?” Tricia said.
“Fuck if I know,” said Ziggy, as Sheila McCrea came up behind them, and said, “Look, over there.”
Across the street, Jim Kreigle and another man stood in front of the general store, eyes locked on the skyline. Up the block a car sat in the middle of the road, the driver’s door left wide open while the owner stood still as a tombstone beside it.
“Jack?” Tricia said.
She punched his shoulder.
“Jack,” she said. “Jack!”
But he didn’t answer, just stared up at the sky as if he were standing alone in the middle of an alien landscape, oblivious to all around him.
A carbon copy of the men beside him, the men beside them, and every other guy lining the streets of Pottsboro, South Carolina.
Chapter Seven
Justin Henry and Mickey Reardon, still hidden in the tree line, stood quietly by as another tent went up and another line of people sauntered from it. Two men emerged pushing an old battered cart. They had on white t-shirts and faded jeans, smiles on their faces and a mischievous gleam in their eyes. A sign hanging on the cart said: Corn Dogs and Cotton Candy! Behind them came another man with a large wooden box that put Justin in mind of a gigantic coffin. It had wheels on it, and he pushed it into the middle of the clearing. The sides came down and the back folded out and up, revealing what looked to be some sort of gaming table.
“So,” Justin said. “You still wanta walk right up and see what’s going on over there?”
“Huh uh.”
“Me neither.” Justin paused for a moment, and then said, “Know what I think we should do?”
“Get the heck outa here before that crazy-looking sucker starts waving his hands at us?”
“You know something, Mickey; you’re smarter than you look.”
“Yeah, and you’re—How’d that get there?”
“What?”
“That,” Reardon said, pointing up at a line of multicolored pennants strung across a series of wooden poles that had somehow magically circled the clearing while they’d been staring up at the cloud.
“Mickey, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Only if you’re thinking about getting the heck outa here.”
“Bingo!” Justin said, and then led Reardon back through the underbrush, to the bikes they’d laid over in it. They stood the bikes up and pushed them out of the woods. Soon they were side by side on the old country road, pedaling away from the place. Justin didn’t say anything as they made their way down the old dirt byway—neither boy said anything. Every once in a while they would look over their shoulders, each breathing a great sigh of relief to see that nothing was coming after them.
Finally, when they had reached the two-lane blacktop and started back toward town, Justin said, “I was scared to say anything. Almost too scared to breathe.”
“Me too,” Reardon said. “I was afraid somebody might hear me and haul ass after us.”
“That midget!”
“Pretty crazy, huh?”
Justin jabbed a finger at the sky. “That’s crazy,” he said.
“No kidding!”
A good ways down the road, Godby’s field now far behind them, they slowed their pace and began rolling leisurely along the asphalt. A cool breeze blew across them as the sun faded slowly to the west. Dusk was coming, darkness soon would follow.
What then? Justin wondered as he glanced up at that black cloud, awed—and a little frightened—by the mere presence of it.
“What do you think that guy is?” Reardon said. “A magician or something?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re still going tonight, though… right?”
“Back there? After what we’ve just seen?”
“Especially after that. Don’t you wanta see that place at night, all the cool stuff they’re gonna have? Man, I can’t wait!”
Justin wasn’t sure he wanted to go back tonight. Sure, there could be cool stuff. After all, look at what they’d just witnessed. A guy dropping a tarp with a wave of his hand, erecting a tent with a wave of another? The pennants—how did they get there? And the poles they were strung up on, they just magically appeared? Sure they did, just like that impossibly wide ring of smoke that changed shape as it climbed into the sky, turning a perfectly harmless cloud into a dead-ringer of the hat the tall man was wearing.
Yes, all that was neat—cool, even. But something about it wasn’t quite right: the fearful look frozen on Freddy Hagen’s face as he stared into that unmoving smoke ring; the black cloud, that even now hung like a sign in the late afternoon sky. A dark entity looking down at Justin and Mickey Reardon, watching them peddle their bikes beneath it. Could it hear what they were saying? What they were thinking? Or had Justin been reading too many comic books, watching too many horror movies. Maybe the guy was a magician. Maybe he was all misdirection and sleight of hand. After all, David Copperfield made an entire airplane disappear. This guy just blew a giant smoke ring… that rose higher and higher, and changed shape as it rose? Until it touched a cloud and turned it into a…
“I don’t know, Mickey.”
“You don’t know what?”
“About going out there tonight?”
“What’re you, kidding? It’ll be a blast. Better’n last year, I’ll bet you.”
“Have you seen that black thing up there?”
“Yeah, I saw it. Neatest damn thing I ever saw in my life that wasn’t in a movie. Going back there tonight? You bet your sweet ass we are.”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Justin said. “It just doesn’t feel right.”
“You’re still spending the night, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What’re you gonna do, read that X-Men comic for the ten-thousandth time while I go to the carnival? ‘Cause I’m going. You can bet your—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard you the first time.”
Reardon smiled. “You’ll go,” he said. “Night’ll roll around and you’ll get fired up just like me. Next thing you know it’ll be cotton candy and corn dogs, and all kinds of neat shit. Unless you pussy out. I guess that could always happen—with you, I mean.”
“Screw you, Reardon,” Justin said, and knew he’d been had. He’d go tonight or never hear the end of it. Especially when Mickey spread it all over town how he was too scared to go to the carnival. Too scared to go out and have a good time, for chrissakes. He’d go, all right, or every kid in school would be riding his ass about it every time they saw him coming down the hallway.
They were on a two lane street leading back into town when they noticed a man standing by his mailbox, staring up at the sky. His eyes, though wide, were quite dull, his expression blank. His hands motionless by his pants pockets. Neither boy bothered looking up to see what had captured his attention—they already knew what he was looking at.
They ventured further down the street, turned the corner and stopped dead in their tracks. People were lined up all along the street in front of the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, a bunch of men. Just like the man at the mailbox, they stood silently by, staring up at the sky like those people in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, as if awaiting the arrival of some alien spacecraft.
Justin and Mickey sat there, feet on the ground, hands grasping their handle grips.
Justin looked up at the sky, at Reardon, then back up the street. “What’re they doing?” he said.
“What do you think they’re doing? Checking out that cloud. Wouldn’t you?”
“But look at ‘em. They’re like… frozen… like statues or something.”
“Yeah, right… Statues.” It was meant to be a cut, a dig, some kind of rebuke. But something in Reardon’s voice, the timbre, the tone of it, said ‘Something isn’t quite right here, is it
?’ Then he seemed to gather himself, to shrug off the vibe that had clamped a firm grip on his psyche, long enough to say, “They’re just surprised, is all. Wouldn’t you be?”
“I’m surprised, all right,” Justin said. “Surprised we’re not running straight to the sheriff to tell him what happened out there.”
“What, that we saw a magician out at the carnival grounds?”
“Those aren’t the carnival grounds. Not supposed to be, anyway.”
“Besides,” Reardon said. “Freddie Hagen’s probably already told Rusty Piersol all about the place.”
“Probably already knew about it anyway,” Justin said. “Can’t bring a carnival to town without getting permits for it. Everybody knows that.”
At least that was the way Justin figured it. In the back of his mind, that was what he hoped. Because if they had a permit, that would mean they had gone through the proper channels to get it. Sure, that was it—had to be. The sheriff already knew about it, the mayor too, probably. Freddy Hagen was just out there checking the place out. The Ferris wheel didn’t sprout up out of the ground, neither did those poles. The tents didn’t rise up all on their own and those people didn’t magically appear. Nor did an unbearably wide smoke ring turn a perfectly innocent cloud into a dark, oppressive entity that held an entire street full of people in its ironclad grasp.
Except Justin knew that it did.
Chapter Eight
“Oh, man,” Reardon said, and then hung his head forward.
“What,” said Justin, turning just in time to see Mickey’s mother come stumbling out of the Wagon Wheel. He looked back at his friend, who was staring down at the ground, shaking his head. He wanted to offer an encouraging word or two, something to ease Mickey’s pain. But he had neither the words nor the wherewithal with which to use them. Here was his best friend’s mother, staggering out of a bar in the middle of the afternoon—couldn’t even wait until nightfall to get started on the booze. And look at the old coot she was going after, someone old enough to be her father. Though Reardon would never in a million years have said it out loud, it was killing him to see her like this.
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