In my usual cool, danger-be-damned demeanor, I think I said something akin to “Gleck!” James Bond, eat your heart out.
His smile wavered slightly, probably because he wasn’t sure what I might do or what gleck meant. He probably wrote it off as some New York City phrase like schmear or oy vey.
“I think,” he rasped, “you’n me got somethin’ to discuss.”
I stepped out of the room and closed the door, composing myself.
“Like about the crow?”
He looked mildly puzzled and hitched his pants up a notch.
“The white raven, remember? You and MacTeague and Bret Fletcher stealing all my best stuff just to get at that lousy crow. It’s a crow, by the way, not a raven.”
His smile remained fixed, but his eyes tightened when I said MacTeague’s name. His toothpick waggled, which prompted me to walk out toward the parking lot, into the waning sunlight. I leaned on the hood of a car and waited for him to catch up. Slim checked the perimeter nervously and smiled harder.
“S’at all?”
“No, that’s not all. Then you send Fletcher to kill me, and when he fouls up, you run him down with a truck.”
“Pretty story, mister,” he snorted, spitting a black pearl of tobacco juice to his left. “Kinda hard t’ substantiate, don’tcha think?”
“Mister?” I scowled. “Where do you get off calling me mister? Do I look like a mister to you?”
He froze, his eyes darting in confusion.
“Forget it. Look, what do you want, Slim?”
His shoulders hunched. I don’t think he cottoned to the moniker Slim. He reached a hand up to his mouth, plucked the toothpick from his teeth, and pointed it at me.
“Dang, Scarecrow, what’s all this got to do with you anyhow? I mean, there’s a world of trouble in this rodeo, if that’s what you’re lookin’ for. Already seen some of it. Think you’d best cut n’ run.” Slim winked.
Well, at least he didn’t call me mister.
“No can do. The police want to know what I have to do with Bret Fletcher’s murder.”
With the tip of his pointy boot, Slim stirred some dirt around a moment and drew a fresh smile from the deck. “Sometimes these things are never solved.” He squinted. “Carson, you got your stuff back. You don’t give a damn about that ol’ crow. The rest—well, it’s none of your bidness, is all.”
Slim winked again, turned. “Be a shame to see that purdy woman of yours get hurt,” he chuckled. “You know, on accident.”
“On accident?” What was it with Westerners and the word by?
I was suddenly very itchy, and it was all I could do not to jump on that son of a bitch and beat him senseless. Of course, I’ve no doubt I would have tangled with the business end of a boot razor for my trouble.
He ambled over to a green Escort rust bucket with a license plate sporting a big red lobster. He pulled a screwdriver from his pocket, got in, started her up, and chugged off.
I dashed for my glove compartment, scrounged a pen, and jotted the Maine license number on my hand. Halfway to my room I was stopped by a sudden realization. Slim had started his car with a screwdriver—the tool of choice for hot-wiring cars—instead of a key. His plate number would be a dead end, and once again I’d be stuck with what sounded like so many more cowboy fantasies.
I cranked up the Lincoln and roared out after Slim. Happy Jim would be disappointed, but clearly he wasn’t as on top of things as he claimed. One thing was for sure: If he and Slim were in cahoots, Slim wouldn’t have dropped by to give me a second threat on the same day. And if he couldn’t control Slim, could Kim really influence the DA’s office?
I guess my idea was to follow Slim, though the Lincoln would be pretty obvious in his rearview mirror. But he didn’t know that I drove a Lincoln, did he? Unless, of course, Bret had happened to mention that it was some guy in a Lincoln with New York plates who had stolen the bird. But at that particular moment of pursuit, I was fixated, determined to prove to Public Defender Phil that I wasn’t loco. I had zero intention of bringing Slim in myself. No way. I just figured if I saw where he went, or maybe even where he was holed up, I could direct the cops there. Once they had him, I’d be in the clear.
Flying over a rise a couple miles down the road, I caught sight of the green Escort making a hairpin turn off the main road and up a hill on the right. After maneuvering the Lincoln in a four-point turn, I followed the dust trail up the narrow dirt road.
“Follow, Garth, not catch,” I reminded myself aloud, and eased up on the accelerator. The road was cut out of a rocky hillside, and a cliff grew on the left as a chasm deepened on my right. The hill’s rocky wall glowed orange with the setting sun and made the dust trail even more blinding. I slowed down, conscious that I might just drive off the embankment if I wasn’t careful. Surprised by an abrupt jog to the left at the hill’s summit, I jerked the steering wheel and swerved the Lincoln into a shadowy alley through the rock at the hill’s crest. I paused to let the dust clear, and when it did I saw the road dip steeply away into a hillside hollow.
I was suddenly aware of how confining the road was. If confronted, I’d have to back all the way to the paved road. Not a good way to make a hasty retreat should I need to hightail it outta there. However, there was some room to one side of the rock cleft for me to stash the Lincoln pointing back toward the road. So I crammed my boat there and started down the road into the mountain hollow.
All I needed to see was the kelly-green Escort parked next to a shanty, a whiff of smoke from the shack’s stovepipe, and I’d be out of there and at the police station lickety-split.
The road was a switchback, and it wasn’t long before I made out some bright colors down in the hollow. Descending further, I decided staying off the road would be best and walked directly downhill among the trees for better camouflage. I stopped and listened every now and then and heard nothing but a gentle whistle of the breeze through the tree buds.
As I approached the clearing, the colors took the form of large pictures, cartoons. I could see an alligator’s head, a woman’s body with lighting coming out of her head, a car in flames, a hand holding a sword. There were words, slogan fragments. Gavoona the . . . Darkest Africa . . . Spiders and . . . Old tires, trailer wheels, and multicolored plastic flag bunting, the kind you see at used-car lots, littered the ground. What the hell was I looking at?
When I was perhaps fifty feet from the clearing, I recognized it for what it was: a sideshow. But that didn’t keep me from rubbing my eyes and giving myself a good pinch. Yup, the sideshow was still there.
It was the kind I used to see as a kid at the county fair with my little brother, Nicholas, the air thick with diesel fumes, the spike of cotton candy, and a child’s wonder. A dream’s echo, I could almost feel the bustle of the midway and touch the edgy glare of carnies eyeing their prey. Goose bumps chilled me, the lurid, intense curiosity of the freak-show spectacle rippling under my skin. Both alluring and repugnant, it was a false reality, a dimension of lost innocence and prickly memories. A specter. A hallucination. A nightmare.
There were two rows of trailers, four on one side, three on the other, the front of each rigged with a large canvas touting the spectacle within.
Electra, the 100,000 Volt Woman! SEE her IN PERSON. Lightbulbs! Fans! Appliances! JUMP STARTS A CAR! SHOCKING. Accompanying the red and green text were pictures of a buxom woman in a bathing suit and cape (strikingly similar to Wonder Woman) standing before a sky of blue thunderbolts and demonstrating her miraculous talents by putting things in her mouth.
GATOR MAN. Half-Reptile half “HUMAN”? $100,000 if you can prove he’s not real! The Bayou’s Most Hideous Secret!!! ALIVE.
PYGMY WARRIORS! ARMY ANTS! SHRUNKEN HEADS! GIANT SERPENTS! 100 lb. GUINEA PIGS! Fear for your life—The Amazon’s Ungodly Hell! SEE IT NOW.
Goonah the “Ape” A-Go-Go! ROCK AND ROLL SENDS HER BACK IN TIME. Behold the Result of our Sinful Age. Must be 18 to Enter!!! SEE NOW—NEVER FORGET.
FONJON—Human Pincushion. NAILS—KNIVES—SHOOTS HIMSELF IN THE HEAD!!! The Cursed Mongolian. CANNOT DIE.
Science Gone Mad? TWO-HEADED COW—POLLYWOG BABY—DOG CAT—EAGLE FISH—CLAM RAT. What Hope is there for Us? Dr. Abdul Reveals Shocking Truth. AUTHENTIC.
There is nothing wrong with your television set. . . . We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. . . . You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind . . . to the Outer Limits.
A clam rat?
The last trailer’s canvas was half torn down, the shabby white carny trailer behind it partially exposed. On one side, the canvas rolled back and forth in the breeze, and the image of two beady blue eyes on a bald head—part of an illustration—stared at me, vanished, stared again, vanished. . . . It was as if this figure was lurking behind the trailer, peeking, taunting.
On the other half of the canvas there was a blue arctic landscape against an orange sky emblazoned with the words THE PENGUIN BOY and A Living Legend!
No blinking lights stung my eyes, no barkers garbled in my ears, and no throngs blocked my view. This memory incarnate was barren, stripped of the animate like an old photograph, people long dead, places long gone.
Canvases were torn, mildewed, and faded. Bunting was loosely piled in shopping carts. The ground was strewn with cans, cups, bottles, and plastic bags. The trailers were up on blocks, the wheels piled to one side with dead grass grown between them. Ghost town.
As you might extrapolate from my boyhood fascination with bug collecting, taxidermy, and horror movies, my attention at county fairs was drawn toward the freak shows. Now seen as exploitive, the traveling “back end” shows are all but gone, the community of the disfigured in retirement. “Back end” referred to where the freak shows were relegated on the midway. For me as a kid, you could keep your fat men, blockheads, lobster guys, and bearded women. What I wanted to see was the Bimini Mermaid, Vampire Frog, Double-Bodied Duck, Horned Skull, Pygmy Rock Man, Macedonian Crocodile Mummy, Saber-Toothed Flounder, or Fossilized Elf. Or the Clam Rat, if only they’d had one back then. (Okay, I’ll admit I had a weakness for Gila the Gorilla Girl, but that was as much to ogle the bikini-clad woman as to see her turn into a gorilla.)
I have a fair knowledge of these oddities because I see some of them come up for sale among traditional taxidermy at auctions and estate sales. Carnies and showmen refer to these as gaffs. I don’t buy gaffs, which I can tell you on authority are all one hundred percent completely and utterly fake. Not that there aren’t some talented people out there who made Bimini mermaids out of old fish mounts, roadkill deer, PoxieSculp, and horse tails. There are even some contemporary artists in Minnesota who sell gaffs as art, or “cryptozoological creations.” And you’d be surprised how realistic they can be. They are all mixtures of taxidermy craft and/or the sculptor’s keen eye for the bizarre. I’ve heard there’s a guy in Fresno who used to make ends meet by sculpting alien fetuses for sideshows.
I can’t help but appreciate the imagination and craftsmanship that go into the better gaffs, but I don’t own any—mainly because I have no market for them. Show people usually bought them directly from the artists. And while I still appreciate their bizarre charms, gaffs aren’t something I necessarily want around the house. Let’s face it: Were I to bring home a vampire mummy, no matter how fake, Angie would freak. Most people would.
I did once supply some parts to a guy who made gaffs. I was told carnies called him King of Gaff because his creations were so realistic. I remembered he was in the market for goat hides and skulls, and when I asked what kind of goat (ask the 4-H, there are many), he said it didn’t matter because he was making centaurs. That took me back a bit, but it made filling his order a lot easier. He offered to barter one of his “creations” for the goat products, and I think he was offended when I demurred in favor of cash. Never heard from him again. Artists can be so temperamental.
Memories of those wonderfully creepy displays didn’t help my unease as I looked down at this derelict freak-o-rama. Sideshows have to go somewhere to die, I guessed.
The clearing had a Porta-Head at one end, and nothing else. The green Escort was nowhere to be seen. A dirt road led out the other side of the clearing—if he went down there, I wasn’t going to follow. Too isolated. It didn’t help that the light was still fading and I was getting chilly. I turned to go.
“Hello?”
Startled? It was as if Electra the 100,000 Volt Woman had hit me with her jumper cables.
I wheeled around, but there was nobody there. My skin rippled with fresh goose bumps, and I willed my heart and lungs to start functioning again. I was going to start running and I needed their help.
“Please, help me, please!”
It was a girl’s voice, very weak, and it was coming from one of the trailers. Chivalry was dead as far as I was concerned—the needle on the strange meter was pinned in the red zone. I’d get the cops and they could save her.
“They’ll be back soon. . . . I want to go home.” I detected faint sobs.
One part of my mind had me halfway up that hill to the safety of the Lincoln, smoke pouring out of my running shoes, Speedy Gonzales put to shame.
Another part of my mind was becoming fixated on the plight of this girl.
And still another part of my mind said, IT’S A TRAP, YOU IDIOT. FLEE! It was like I was watching myself in a drive-in horror show.
You’d think those two parts sandwiching the middle one would have won hands down, and they were very near to quashing my burgeoning guilt for being a heartless bastard. I’ll admit there was still another part of me that imagined a zombie girl like from Night of the Living Dead, her arms clawing the air, her bloody fangs bared. Sure, she was saying “Help me!” now, but when I was within arm’s reach it’d be “MORE BRAINS. NEED MORE BRAINS!” Perhaps the lingering, grisly image of Bret Fletcher’s crushed body and wriggly fingers had left me more squeamish than I might have been otherwise.
I scanned my surroundings. Nothing stirred. I stepped out from behind my tree, took a step toward the clearing, and a piece of the tree exploded.
An arrow hummed, vibrating where it protruded from the tree, which only seconds earlier had been protected by my head. The arrow was a tiny thing, like a large toothpick, fletched with leaves instead of feathers.
A shriek bounced across the hollow. I’m pretty sure it was mine.
My next conscious sensation was pounding. My heart, my feet, my ears.
By the time I had visual to go with my audio, I found that I was doing an admirable Speedy Gonzales imitation on the switchback road. I now know why all that smoke comes out from behind the Road Runner and Speedy. It’s not the friction from their feet on the dusty southwestern roads. It’s burning calf muscles. Mine felt like Kingsford briquettes ready for the chops.
I heard another arrow whistle by my ear, thwack a tree. I veered off the road and ran directly up hill through the woods. I was beelining for the top of the hill and the Lincoln.
Flight instinct was fully engaged; there was no stopping. For all I knew I was running toward the archer. Believe me, I’m no athlete, but under those kinds of circumstances you’d be surprised what you can do. My legs were about to leave my torso behind.
MANLESS LEGS. Behold World’s Fastest Feet that Left Their Master Behind! Free Deodorizing Insole if You Can Prove They’re Not Real! ALIVE and KICKING!
I could see the hill’s rocky summit, trees silhouetted against the growing twilight. The niche where the Lincoln would be, it was up there, to the left. I saw a glint of the chrome bumper.
Voices, squeaky voices behind me, cursed, as I closed in on the Lincoln.
Unable to resist, I looked back down the hill. I wish I hadn’t.
Charging up behind me was a squad of . . . well, pygmies. I don’t know, they could have just been black midgets or dwarfs, but they were small dark men carrying bows and arrows, and they were screaming at me.
I vaulted over the pass
enger-side door. My knee slammed the steering wheel but I cranked the key, pushed the pedal to the floor, and shoved the gearshift down in one smooth motion.
An arrow hit the inside of my windshield, bounced back out of the car.
My tires churned, shuddered, looking for good traction. The Lincoln lurched forward.
Looming just ahead was the rock cleft.
Something moved.
I looked up.
It was the second time in two days that I saw something that made absolutely no sense. There was a silhouette against the sky, atop the rocks, that was too smooth to be part of the stone. It was like some oddball bedevilment from Zeus, a Colossus, Harpy, or Cyclops—or even Symplegades of the Clashing Rocks. It looked vaguely human at first, and then part of it detached and spun end over end down at me. What was left atop the rocks had no arms or legs, was rounded and slightly bulbous. A giant thumb?
I ducked, pedal to the metal.
Something slammed the Lincoln. Hard. From what direction I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that the impact tossed me into the air. I landed sideways across the seats and struggled to right myself as the Lincoln swerved for the embankment.
I wrenched the wheel right and plowed the Lincoln into the dead weeds and saplings on the uphill side. As the car fishtailed, I reached my feet back to the pedals, righted myself, and tapped the brakes. The Lincoln came to, gravel churning in my wheel wells.
I shot right out onto the highway without looking—knock wood, nobody was coming.
Back on pavement, my exhaust system started to rattle. So I pulled on the headlights and saw I was doing a hundred miles an hour away from Brattleboro. The dashed roadway stripes looked like a solid line. Next to me, on the driver’s seat, were a bunch of twigs and leaves I’d picked up when I scraped the hillside. I glanced in the rearview mirror—no lights following. I took my foot off the accelerator and tapped the brakes. The exhaust system quieted. My knee throbbed where it had hit the steering wheel.
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