“Won’t be long,” Stillwell said. His voice was deep and ragged. He held the crowbar at his side and swayed on his feet, his free hand opening and closing over the wound in his stomach, opening and closing. He knelt down by Reader, almost collapsed.
Reader thought about his gun, an easy reach, but his arms were heavy.
Stillwell looked off to the west, to where the sun was setting.
Reader swallowed the well of blood that had risen in his throat. “My wife, she—” He gulped for air. “Connie is her name. Con—” Now the blood was welling up inside his mouth, running down his chin.
“I got one last place to go,” Stillwell said, and Reader saw that he held the crumpled note that had been clipped outside the office.
Gone to fair.
Stillwell lifted the crowbar with both hands and angled it down toward Reader as though it were a harpoon and Reader a great fish that would not die, but Reader spoke only once more, and then he did.
“Monsters,” he said. “The world’s just full of monsters.”
VI
Gates of Light
In the east livestock pavilion, Annabelle and Sandy and Calhoun walked among the rabbits. All up and down the collapsible table covered with a checked cloth were every size and shape of breed. There were even more rabbits behind the table where exhibitors had come to sell. These were locked in wooden crates and wire cages, some stacked six and seven high, whites and browns and blacks and spotted, French and English, lops and dwarfs. Their owners sat proudly among them in lawn chairs. A fat brown rabbit the size of a small child had been plopped in a trough of woodshavings. Written upon the sign taped to the trough were the words For Petting.
“I like this one,” Calhoun said, putting his finger into the mesh-wire cage of a Flemish Giant.
“You’re not supposed to touch,” Sandy said.
Annabelle was standing behind the exhibitors’ table, peering into a small wooden crate where a tiny, cream-colored rabbit was hunched. The rabbit’s crate was stacked on top of several others and came breast-level to Annabelle. She leaned forward and thought how ordinary it seemed here among these other rabbits, almost like a field rabbit. Its dark eyes had a touch of the wild in them, but she knew it had never known the freedom of a meadow or the perils of a hawk circling above it. A cage is safety, she thought, but safety is a cage.
She wondered why she had slept with Billy Calhoun, after all these years, in the very bed she had shared with her husband, after she had made her choices and those choices had borne out their consequences and life had gone on. Was it love? What did it matter now, this fleeting comfort in a man’s arms? Were these nothing more than the bars of a cage and she the prisoner, a timid, cream-colored creature with its darting black eyes and furiously beating heart? She remembered her trip to the shed the night before, and she thought that the bone she had found—the bone she thought she had found—could have been her own, and if she had only dug deeper she would have found the rest of her corpse in the dirt, as dead as the turtle that was there, buried by time and men, and Jesus Christ would not be with her, nor any creature of light, and there would be no river where her late husband and boy waited for her, and that, she thought, is mere immortality: dirt and rot.
Or a bright, shimmering blue, deepening into black.
Annabelle took a step back from the rabbit cages and put one hand to her head. She felt the straw-covered concrete beneath her feet drop away, and then she fell.
The evening sky was thick with clouds, the sun setting behind them. Two grand Ferris wheels cut bright shapes against the sky. High above the carnival din of shrieking metal and laughter, from a stage somewhere across the fairgrounds, came an old country-western tune, sung by a girl whose voice was young and sad and pretty.
Travis stood before the midway gates. He wore his heavy denim jacket, fleece collar turned up to hide his torn throat, jacket buttoned over the ruin of his stomach. He wore his leather gloves to hide the blood on his hands. Before leaving the motel, he had removed his wrappings and wound his throat twice with them, and the rest of the strips he had stuffed into his shirt to plug the hole the ranger had made, though he could feel them wet and sodden now.
The gates arched above the crowd, a thousand bright bulbs burning, beneath them a woman in a glass box selling tickets. Her eyes shone behind glasses as if coined for the passage of the dead. Travis paid the woman in the box five dollars.
“Enjoy,” the woman said.
Travis stepped through the gates.
He held one hand over his perforated gut, some dim part of his mind still registering the pain that he knew he should be feeling. But it was all a distant din, the parts of himself that were torn and broken. Rue’s blood, the trooper’s blood, the ranger’s, the mother’s, her child’s—it kept him moving, somehow, working his limbs as if he were a monstrous thing on strings.
He passed the freak show stage where a crowd of rubes had gathered to watch a tattooed woman swallow fire. By her side on the wooden stage, wielding the fiery arrows she would slide down her gullet, was an old, wrinkled dwarf in a plaid shirt, dirty jeans, and an orange baseball cap. The woman herself wore a short, sequined black skirt and a black body stocking without sleeves. Travis stood at the rear of the crowd, mesmerized by the flames that danced at the tips of the arrows and the dark-haired woman’s thick, muscled arms stitched with strange pagan symbols. He thought of his own tattoo, gone now. That old self shed. He watched until she ate the fire and the flames were snuffed inside her and the dwarf was handed back the blackened arrows and the crowd applauded. When the fire-eater bowed to the dwarf, the dwarf put one of the arrows in his teeth and did a little jig.
Travis looked down at his shirt inside his denim coat and thought that he himself had swallowed fire of a different kind. Like a sinking boat bailing water, he had drunk his fill, and now he could feel his insides burning, struggling desperately to reknit themselves.
The boy, he thought. The boy, the woman.
He walked on, past the sea lion show and a canvas tent beneath which lay a tiger and a leopard in steel cages. The tiger opened its jaws and yawned and this, like the fire-eater, stopped him in his tracks. He had the strange feeling that he had seen this moment before, that he was walking backward in time, that he himself was a boy again. The tiger’s jaws snapped shut.
The tent he came to after the animals promised, for one dollar, an encounter with a live mermaid. Two teenage boys were on their way out, laughing their high, cracked laughter. For a second Travis thought he might seize the nearest one and bend his neck so that the bone broke and ruptured the skin, and he would drag the boy back into the darkened tent as though it were his lair, his den, and he would eat. But he did not because his strength was failing, and he kept forgetting why he had come to the fair, anyway. So he gave the carnie minding the tent a dollar, stained red, and staggered into the small, dark room, breathing hard.
Why am I here?
What am I looking for?
In front of him was a dirty pane of glass. A light came up behind the glass, illuminating a woman perched on a bench—or perhaps it was the tailgate of someone’s pickup, lowered. She was not fat or slim. She wore coconut shells over her breasts and a flesh-colored body stocking. Her fin hung off the bench and glistened with turquoise scales.
“Hello,” the mermaid said. “How are you?”
Travis did not answer. He looked down at the spreading red stain of his stomach—the movement set his neck to bleeding afresh—and back up at the mermaid.
The mermaid smoothed the wrinkles from her fin and said, brightly, “Where are you from?”
Travis wanted to answer. He wanted to be polite. But he couldn’t remember. “I’m lost,” he finally said.
The mermaid’s smile slipped at the corners.
“Where are you from?” Travis said.
“Wisconsin,” the mermaid said.
Rue walked among the midway crowd, drifting, letting the ebb and flow of bodies carry her. The
sun was gone, the only light now the tungsten reds and golds and greens of the carnival. They pulsed and spun and burned against the deepening dark, no stars in the sky, no moon. Arms of bodies, fat and slim, brushed past her, redirected her, and she relished each sensation of flesh against flesh, the gentle friction of human indifference, of dimness, none of them aware of what they had touched, only a few giving her a backward glance, puzzled at the coolness of that forearm or elbow, the strange, indescribable nudge of passing death.
Or maybe, she thought, it is my dress, all covered in red.
She meandered through them, letting the bodies carry her, letting the rhythm of the crowd move her to the place she needed to be, just as she had let time and the currents of her own will and the kinship between her blood and his carry her here, from the darkness of the desert only moments before to the lights of the carnival now. Last night she had closed her eyes as his taillights faded and let her mind plunge into his, had surpassed the minor entity that was Travis and brushed the infinite, had seen beyond the boundaries of day and night, so great was her need, her will. She had heard and seen the sounds and lights that would be his next sundown, though he himself knew nothing of it, and in this she understood that the universe was not a place of chance or fortune but a set dial ticking toward some final end. As the sun had climbed the horizon that morning, she had stood with confidence on the roadside until the light crept closer and closer over the hills, and finally a passing Kenworth had picked her up and in its cab she had found her fated reprieve from the day. The truck driver, unlike the last, had tasted so sweet, so ripe, in her newfound knowledge that everything was bending toward her own designs.
I am bigger than you, Travis Stillwell, and I will see you hurt for what you’ve done.
She felt him. He was close. He was bleeding. Fading. Dying the death of the already dead. Shot, too, she thought. He had come looking for the woman and the boy, but he had already forgotten. He would not find them now, before the end.
But I will.
Rue leaned against a tree at the edge of a lake and closed her eyes, and she felt him moving on his own silent course, heard the slowed-up beat of his heart in time with her own. The screaming din and metal clamor of the midway fell away, and there were only the two of them, she and Travis, she beside the man-made lake that cast back the bright midway lights, and he in a dark and musty tent, a woman before him with a turquoise fin. Rue opened her eyes and laughed. She put her hand over her mouth like a little girl. She pushed away from the tree and went to the edge of the water and stood staring out at the livestock pavilions and the chair lift and the music stage across the water, the never-ending throng circulating through the pathways of the fairgrounds like slow blood through a dying body. Wisconsin, she thought and laughed again.
She saw them.
The mother and her boy, sitting on a picnic table not fifteen feet away.
Their backs to her.
A man sitting with them.
She laughed one last time, taking the edges of her blood-soaked dress between her fingers and spinning, a little pirouette for no one but herself.
They found a picnic table at the edge of the lake. They sat and watched couples and families push paddleboats beneath the fountain. They ate corn dogs and fried apple pies, and after, the boy went off with money to buy tickets for rides. Annabelle told him to stay in sight. She watched him where he waited in line at one of the plywood booths. The boy waved. She waved back.
Calhoun straddled the bench beside her, facing her, but she sat with her back against the table, watching her son. “That scared the hell out of me,” he said. “You dropping like that.”
She told him she was fine. She was sorry. She touched his hand and smiled.
He smiled back.
She let her gaze drift across the lake, where a local RV dealer had brought in a bevy of campers and parked them on the grass. A family of three made their way among them. The father, young, sunburned and paunchy. The mother, heavy-set. The child, a boy about Sandy’s age. He wore a cowboy hat and boots. They stood alongside one of the smaller campers, the father talking, the mother listening, the boy darting. Annabelle looked from this back to Calhoun and saw that he, too, saw them, and in his face she saw all the things he had ever wanted, all the reasons he had stayed in Cielo Rojo, and she knew these things were all wrapped up in his hope of one day marrying her and making a life with her and the boy who was rightfully his, the boy she had taken from him and given to another man to hide the greatest lie she had ever told.
We all want to live and die in the wide-open valley of the sun, she thought, where secrets find no purchase and wellsprings of hope are plentiful and all sturdy things grow. She closed her fingers around his. Here is my land, she thought. He looked back at her and smiled, and she remembered the future she had seen in shadow upon the kitchen wall all those years ago, a dark score in a flash of lightning, and it was not so bad anymore, that future, because it had not shape or form. It was just a promise, come to light at last.
“Will you take Sandy,” she asked, “to the funhouse?”
“Sure?” Calhoun said.
Annabelle nodded.
He got up from the bench and gently touched her shoulder and kissed the top of her head before moving off toward the ticket booth, where Sandy had just paid for a sheet of blue tickets.
“Billy,” she said, but she did not say it loudly. She watched him go. Watched him drift away like a balloon she had let slip from a bunch, one whose color and shape she very much admired.
Sandy stood outside the funhouse with Calhoun, the midway crowding past them like a giant snake. Staring up at the metal facade and the balconies where mechanical clowns stood waving their gloved hands and grinning their red grins, the boy thought to himself that funhouses were anything but fun. Calhoun had put a hand on Sandy’s shoulder at the ticket booth and brought him here, to this maze where tunnels spun and rooms of mirrors went on forever and laughter played on an endless, hysterical loop.
Calhoun tried to hold Sandy’s hand, but the boy said, “I’m a little old for that,” and Calhoun dropped the boy’s hand at once.
“Sorry,” he said.
Sandy studied the sheet of blue tickets he had paid five dollars for.
“How many tickets does this take?”
“Looks like three,” Calhoun said.
“Momma’s okay?”
“She’s fine, Sandman. What do you say?”
Sandy tore three tickets for Calhoun and three for himself.
They gave their tickets to a girl with pigtails sitting on a stool at the top of the steps and passed into the first room through a beaded curtain. The walls were made of metal, painted black. Sandy knew they were in a trailer now, one of the metal double-wides the carnival had trucked in and set up to look like something it wasn’t. He imagined the space beneath the funhouse, the grass where the wheels were chocked, where hydraulics hissed and pistons and levers and cogs turned and pumped and made things happen. On the floor, there were red footprints in the shape of clown shoes. They looked to the boy like blood. He and Calhoun followed them down a narrow hallway and through a door marked Enter. This door led to a smaller room and two more doors, side by side, each painted with a number. The doors were yellow.
“Which one?” Sandy said.
“Your call, Sandman.”
The boy thought about it. “Let’s split up. If we pick the wrong door, we can, what do you call it, double back.”
“Maybe they all lead to the same place,” Calhoun said.
Sandy shrugged.
They each opened their doors and went through.
Sandy’s door led to a narrow hallway where a strange spiral pattern of light was shining from a projector at the far end of the hall. It gave the impression he was walking into a spinning tunnel, though the floor itself was not moving. Ahead of him were two young girls, not much older than he. One was tall and thin and wore her hair in a long single braid, her jeans rolled up in cuffs at her
ankles, and she looked back over her shoulder and saw him come into the hall. She tapped the other girl on the shoulder and whispered something, and the two of them laughed and disappeared quickly through the door at the far end, beneath the projector. The door opened and Sandy caught a swell of music and the flash of a strobe light. When the door closed, he was alone again, the sounds ahead muffled. The motion of the spiral made him queasy, so he shut his eyes and felt his way along the brief corridor, both hands extended so the tips of his fingers just brushed the edges of the walls.
He pushed through the door at the end and found himself in a narrow room where the music was deafening and the lights flickered in a frenzy and strange people-shapes pitched back and forth in the dark. One of these leapt into Sandy’s path and he almost screamed. It was the silhouette of a clown cut from tin, its features painted in a ludicrous laugh, eyes wide and gleaming as it bobbed to and fro in the strobing light.
He fought his way through this madness to a door marked with a bright red arrow.
The metal door clanged shut behind him.
The music faded.
Sandy stood in a fluorescent-lit maze of mirrors, his own face staring back at him in a dozen different ways: longer, fatter, thinner. Smashed together like a piece of fruit beneath a shoe. He moved slowly into this room, aware that he was walking into a labyrinth, like the one he had read about in Greek myth at school. In that maze, a monster had lurked at the center.
Each step a caution, he turned a corner.
He was met with two branching paths, one left and one right, dividing them a wall of glass in which he saw himself not distorted but receding into infinity, a hundred, a thousand, a million Sandy Gaskins. A never-ending same-chain of boys.
Sandy.
He whirled.
The voice—her voice—had come from behind.
No, not her, no, it can’t be, he took her away—
In Valley of the Sun Page 27