Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

“Somebody…” Toby said.

  “Yeah, kid. Somebody shot me. Who?”

  “Fac’ is…” Toby said, “I dunno.”

  “Shootin’ ol’ Spike. I didn’t think it was real. Never saw those guys before in my life.”

  “Shh,” Toby said. “Be quiet.”

  Through the window, Toby watched an electric patrol tricycle go up the path. Its headlight was on. The man driving it was not wearing a constable’s uniform, just blue pants and a shirt. It went over the hill.

  “When it’s really dark, I’ll bring you over to that log cabin,” Toby said. “The burning log cabin. On the island. Nobody will find us there. Come on. Let me make a tourniquet for your leg.”

  “Yeah? A tourniquet? You know about things like that?”

  “Sure,” Toby said. “I got to find the stuff first. A stick and a hunk of rope, or cloth.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Sure,” Spike said. “Sure. Only, just don’t get lost, kid.”

  Fifty

  Once inside Wild West City, Christina had not understood what was happening. Through the milling crowd on the main street she had seen three constables chasing the two men with guns. About a block and a half up a street, she saw the two men stop, face the buildings to the right, then turn and run in different directions.

  Carrying her shoes, the shoulder of her suit torn, Christina then wandered up and down the main street of Wild West City, as she had spent a day wandering in the airport, looking for she knew not what—some sign of Toby, some clue. She was only dimly aware of the fading light, dimly aware of the thinning crowd looking at her: a disheveled, distraught woman, prowling aimlessly, staring intently.

  The street was nearly empty. She heard the announcement Fantazyland was closing for the night A man came through the board fence in the middle of the block. His pale eyes looked at her expressionlessly. He turned to his left, walked up the boardwalk and around the corner.

  Leaving Wild West City, Christina went to her right. Small safety lights, inset in the path, came on. She went off the path to her left, down to a small gulley where there were bushes, and took off her torn pantyhose. She rolled them in a ball and, putting her broken pair of shoes with them, stuffed them under a bush. The ground felt cool and soothing on the stinging soles of her bare feet. She remembered the pleasant sensation from being a kid on her Uncle Toby’s farm, summertimes in Pennsylvania.

  A constable on an electric patrol tricycle trundled by her. Watching him from the bushes, Christina restrained herself from calling out, explaining everything, asking for help. Fantazyland was enormous. It was becoming dark. Toby was here somewhere. And his kidnapper now knew he was being pursued. Making its little noise, the cart disappeared around a curve to the right.

  Stumbling on bruised feet, her ankles becoming increasingly scratched, Christina spent hours wandering around Fantazyland in the dark.

  Softly: “Toby…?”

  “…Toby?”

  “Toby…”

  Occasionally, at a distance, she would see the headlight of an electric patrol vehicle jiggling along a path.

  More than once, in the dark, she would realize she had returned to an area she thought she had left far behind her. The paths went in deceptive circles. A small moon rose. She stayed away from the turn-of-the-century square just inside the main gate. She knew some administration offices were there, including the police station. The hard, white, metallic, glossy surfaces of The City of The Future aggravated her: there seemed to be no nooks or crannies, no places to peer into, no places for people to hide. The area around Uncle Whimsy’s mountainous Hat was completely fenced off and locked. She wandered again through Wild West City, trying every door, through every building that was unlocked, found the alleys, prowled them.

  “Toby…?”

  And Pirate’s Cove, and the Pirate’s Caravelle, and The Victorian Graveyard (a few hands sticking above the graves, pasty in the moonlight), and Princess Daphne’s Flower Garden.

  In The Mercantile Establishment (Notions, Novelties & Sundries) she heard something clatter to the floor behind her.

  “Toby!”

  No answer.

  “…Toby?”

  Again, standing deep in The Pirates’ Cove, she thought—she was certain—she heard someone breathing.

  “Toby…”

  The sound stopped.

  She found herself, exhausted, in topographically the lowest area of Fantazyland, The Swamp. She stood for a moment at its edge, her sore bare feet enjoying the dampness of the earth.

  Behind her, to her right, was the white Riverboat at its dock. Beyond that, the bare spars and crow’s nest of The Pirate’s Caravelle rose against the sky. Ahead of her, what little moonlight there was reflecting on the river’s surface made stark the jungle tree trunks and branches.

  She walked, the mud becoming deeper, into the trees along the riverbank.

  At one point, stopped, listening, she heard a twig snap.

  “Toby!”

  There was no answer.

  The mud was up to her ankles. She went up the bank, looking for drier ground.

  She walked into a tangle of foul-smelling fur.

  She jumped back.

  Above her was the massive head of a bear. Its eyes glittered in the moonlight. The head was moving. Its upright arm descended toward her.

  Christina’s hand grabbed her mouth. She screamed.

  A mechanical voice said, “Grr.”

  Christina stumbled backward. Her hair snagged in the branches of a tree.

  She turned and scrambled up the slope.

  Fifty-One

  Billy Joe Carfer stopped the patrol vehicle at the top of the rise overlooking, to his right, the river, The Riverboat, The Pirate’s Caravelle—beyond that, the lake. To his left were the roofs and fake stone turrets of Princess Daphne’s Flower Palace. Well behind him, but still looming like a black hole in the sky, was Uncle Whimsy’s goony great Hat.

  He performed his midnight ritual.

  Other night watchmen had a break for coffee or a sandwich and soft drink. Billy Joe believed coffee made him nervous. He was seldom hungry. He had been told enough times soft drinks were bad for his teeth.

  Settling back in his seat, putting one work boot up against his handlebar, he took a cigarette box out of his shirt pocket. He did not smoke cigarettes, either. Cigarettes caused cancer.

  Billy Joe unwrapped his joint from its tinfoil, lit up and inhaled deeply. Pot caused pleasant sensations.

  Billy Joe had no feelings about his job as a Fantazyland night watchman. Fantazyland was weird. Perverted. Fantazyland’s message to the world was: rats are cute, lions are cowardly, ducks make puns; pirates are heroes, astronauts are Boy Scouts, outlaws are comic. From all the signs around Fantazyland one had to think the only threatening things in all this world were paying customers. Don’t touch this. Don’t touch that. His boss, Drew Keosian, was a turkey. He talked about Fantazyland as if it were the United States Constitution, to be protected from overt and covert aggression from all sources and at any cost.

  Fantazyland offered a world view—something in which to believe. It was a religion. A fenced-in religion.

  Billy Joe did not consider his job as work. Nothing ever happened. Being a night watchman at Fantazyland was like being a scarecrow in a cactus patch.

  The job permitted him to spend his days painting. Or so he had planned.

  His goal was thirty great canvasses. Including the few good works he had kept upon graduating from U.C.L.A., he now felt he had twelve good canvasses.

  He had never sold any, but he felt—he just knew—that if he put thirty good canvasses together, any broker, agent, gallery owner, critic would be able to perceive the certainty of his style, the consistent high level of his ability.

  Trouble was, he hadn’t painted anything in over three months. California days were full of distractions: swimming pools, beaches, movies, girls, galleries filled with other people
’s work…

  As he inhaled his midnight joint, the view of Fantazyland laid out before him took on a delightful aspect. He only smoked grass while on the grounds of Fantazyland. The irony pleased his sensibilities. The lights along the paths became softer. The amusement park objects, ships and castle turrets and the enormous Hat, took on an incredible, stark, funny reality. The fantasy became abstract. One could believe anything, believe one was seeing anything. Polonius pot.

  Tonight Billy Joe Carfer heard a woman scream. One loud, protracted, frightened scream. He heard it come from the riverbank, down to his right.

  Billy Joe chuckled.

  He knew, intellectually, he really had not heard a woman scream.

  If nothing else, the study of art had taught Billy Joe Carfer that any perception can be distorted. Reality is better perceived slightly distorted.

  After his pot break, Billy Joe Carfer started his electric patrol wagon and joggled down the path to scoot around Princess Daphne’s Flower Palace, pass The Hall of Knives, Spooky House…

  After his midnight joint, Billy Joe Carfer got a real thrill out of cornering his patrol vehicle at speeds up to twelve miles per hour.

  Fifty-Two

  Goddamn everybody.

  Colonel Augustus Turnbull gave his suit coat, bunched under his head, a punch with his fist.

  He was lying on the bench along the inside wall of Fantazyland’s Victorian Station. The bench was made of horizontal rolls of wood. It dipped considerably before joining its back. Lying on his back or front was impossible. Lying on his side, facing forward, Colonel Turnbull was too fat to fit his hips securely into the dip. His belly hung over the edge of the bench, pulled him toward the floor.

  His three men were sprawled around the railroad station. One, on the floor, was snoring loudly.

  “Stop that snoring!” Turnbull roared.

  The snoring did not stop.

  Augustus Turnbull recalled an incident that had happened almost twenty years before, when he had come back from his years as a mercenary in Africa and rejoined the British Army.

  He had gone to London for a night on the town. He was a non-commissioned officer, nearly thirty years old. He wore his uniform because that was all he had to wear. For two or three hours he had done whiskey-beer at a pub off Fleet Street. His uniform was sweaty and crumpled. Cigarette ashes had spilled on it.

  Finally, there had been a girl to talk to. He bought her drinks and told her stories of the people he had killed. War stories, when there had been no wars she had heard of.

  She said, “Be a good laddie and get us a cab. We’ll go to my place.”

  He looked at his drink. “Now?”

  “Before it’s too late for you, sweets,” she said.

  So they stumbled out into the street, his arm around her shoulder. Taxi drivers ignored them.

  “Come on,” she said. “We can get one up at that posh hotel up there.”

  There were no taxis outside the hotel.

  There was a Rolls-Royce saloon car waiting. The uniformed chauffeur standing by the car’s back door did not even look at the soldier and the girl swaying on the sidewalk.

  He opened the back door.

  Three young women in evening gowns and furs and jewels, chatting and laughing, skipped out of the hotel and into the back seat. Two young men in black tie accompanied them. They, too, climbed into the back seat.

  “Oooo,” the girl with Turnbull said. “Look at them. The pashas.”

  The chauffeur did not close the car door. He waited. They all waited.

  One of the young men finally shouted through the back door at the hotel entrance.

  “Rinaldi! Come on!”

  Turnbull turned.

  A slim, attractive man in his early twenties, beautifully groomed, wearing black tie, ran out of the hotel. The young people in the car cheered as he jumped into the back seat, laughing. He sat among the beautiful women, the jewels, the furs.

  The chauffeur closed the door carefully, softly, then ran around to the driver’s seat. Even the car’s exhaust seemed an expensive perfume.

  As it drove off, Turnbull watched through the rear window the heads of gilded youth, chatting, laughing.

  It was the first time he had seen Teodoro Rinaldi.

  Precious Teodoro.

  An hour later, the girl threw Turnbull out of bed.

  Now, in The Victorian Railroad Station at Fantazyland, he gave the tweed suit coat bunched under his head another punch.

  “Goddamn,” he said softly.

  Fifty-Three

  Exhausted, Christina sat by the waterfall awhile. So many nights as a young girl in Pennsylvania, she had sat out, enjoying the night, dreaming of a husband, children. Children…Child…Toby…

  Now, even though she leaned against nothing, tried to keep her back straight, her breathing became deeper, more rhythmical. Her chin rested on her collarbone.

  She snapped her head awake and watched the headlight of a patrol vehicle as it came along a path, closer to her. It veered off to her left.

  It approached a dim square of light in the hillside.

  It disappeared.

  It took her a long moment to realize the vehicle had gone into the patch of light. Actually gone into it.

  It had gone into a tunnel.

  She got up and walked toward the patch of light. She was at the rear of Fantazyland, next to the Victorian Graveyard. In the dark, she went through a garden of plastic flowers. They cut the insteps of her feet badly.

  There was a chain-linked fence outside the tunnel. The sign was red, with black lettering. DANGER! EMPLOYEES ONLY—SERVICE AREA.

  The gate was open. She went through it and a few meters along the path entered the tunnel.

  She heard the hum of machinery.

  Inset into the base of the tunnel’s walls, spaced widely, were lights covered with frosted glass.

  The tunnel was cement floored, walled and roofed, of good dimensions, about four meters high. It was wide enough for two patrol vehicles to pass each other. Ahead twenty meters the tunnel curved, dipped smoothly to the left, went back deeper, under the ground level of Fantazyland.

  Half awake but fascinated, Christina padded along. After she passed the curve, the tunnel flattened out.

  She passed double steel doors to her left. DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE AREA. GREEN CARD EMPLOYEES ONLY. There were more such doors to her right. She heard voices. A radio playing. Light spilled into the tunnel from her right. On tiptoes she approached the door and peeked through its small, round window.

  A bake shop. She could smell the bread and pastry. There were bakers baking. One, whose elbow had been dipped in flour, was saying, “…massage parlors that don’t do nothin’ for you are a crock a shit. I mean, they know you can’t complain to no Chamber of Commerce or…”

  She crossed the tunnel to the far wall and continued. Shortly, the tunnel widened. There were sidewalks on both sides. Christina began passing many closed doors. They were the sort you’d see in any office building. Stenciled on them were signs which read, CREDIT UNION, Ms. Jameson; HEALTH; COSTUMES, Mr. Roark.

  Elevators were between some of the office doors. They were marked: Area 12, BLUE MUSHROOM; Area 9, OUTHOUSE; Area 9, SALOON KITCHEN. Wide corridors went off to the right and left. Yellow lights blinked at the intersections. There were sidewalks and doors in these corridors as well. In the roof of the tunnel, behind grilles, air conditioners whirred.

  More doors: Maintenance SPEED TUNNEL Red Card Employees; Maintenance HALL OF KNIVES Red Card Employees; Maintenance SPOOKY HOUSE LIFTS Red Card Employees…

  She went by two lit locker rooms. From one she could hear a shower running and a man singing Blue Moon.

  From across the corridor, Christina looked into a small, lit lounge area. A man in blue shirt and slacks sat doubled over in a chair, changing his boot laces. He did not look up as she glided by.

  A ramp swooped down on her right. REPAIR VEHICLES ONLY.

  More doors: POST OFFICE; SECRET
ARIAL, Mr. Tanney; ACCOUNTING, Ms. Engel.

  Christina came to a large, semidark room. Its entrance was wide and doorless.

  Peering into it, her eyes adjusted. It was a large lounge, comfortable chairs, divans, big tables with lamps and magazines neatly on them. There was a television against each of the three walls. Crepe paper streamers dangled from the walls. A homemade sign read: so LONG, MARTY! Another read: MAINTENANCE DEPT WILL MISS YOU, MARTY! There were paper cups on some of the tables, and depleted hors d’oeuvre trays.

  In the light from the corridor, Christina found a hunk of cheese on one tray. She sat on a divan in the back of the room and dryswallowed the cheese.

  Her feet were stinging.

  Am I just going on instinct? Why can’t I figure out where Toby is rationally…?

  Sitting on the divan in the back of the semidark lounge, feeling her feet sting, Christina realized that if she had not been having a drug reaction from Turnbull’s shot, she probably would not have reacted to Mrs. Brown’s dream and looked for the car at Fantazyland. In the condition she was in when Mrs. Brown called, sitting on the floor in her robe, her cheekbone throbbing, her neck aching, her arm sore, her housekeeper’s voice over the phone appeared to Christina to have the certainty of God. Toby is at Fantazyland. Christina was off the floor, dressed, and had her foot jammed on the accelerator, headed for Fantazyland, before she knew what she was doing.

  Of course, she had had nothing else to do. She had spent all Friday wandering around the airport for no rational reason.

  At least she had caught a glimpse of Toby. And he was dressed in white shorts and a blue jersey….

  Christina curled up on the divan. But, she told herself, for only a moment, a short moment….

  * * *

  Something awoke her. Some noise. She glanced toward the dim light from the corridor. Again, Christina was certain she heard breathing. Someone sniffed.

  Quietly, she got up and padded across the room.

  Between the divan and the door was a tall-backed Naugahyde chair. Asleep in it was the man she had seen before. The gray-eyed man who had come through the fence in Wild West City and looked at her.