Applewood (Book 2): Fledge

by Myers, Brendan P.

  “What do you mean?” Emma asked.

  She looked up at him with wide eyes. He took a deep breath while thinking maybe that had been the wrong thing to say.

  “Well,” he said, “toward the end, it was getting really hard for her to walk and even breathe. And remember how much she liked talking to all the kids who came to visit and gave away candy? She hasn’t been able to do that for a while now, and that made her real sad. I think that she thinks that after she dies, she’ll be going to a place where she can be just like you again, young and free of pain. A place where she can breathe again. Maybe even get a second chance.”

  “Do you think that’s what happens when you die?” she asked. “People get a second chance?”

  Dugan hesitated only a moment. “Yup,” he answered. “That’s exactly what I think happens. We all get a second chance to do things over again, only next time, we know how to do things better, because we remember the mistakes we made the last time.”

  He watched her puzzling something else out in her mind before she finally asked the question that Dugan now knew had been on her mind all along. “Am I gonna die?” she asked quietly.

  It made sense now. Alice had played the part of a little girl just like Emma. Letting go of her hand as they neared the dumpster, he picked her up suddenly and began throwing her high into the air.

  “Not for a long . . . long . . . long . . . long . . . time,” he said, punctuating each word with an even higher heave. Her shrieks of glee let him know she had forgotten all about death and dying for the next few minutes anyway.

  When he turned to put her down, he glanced up to see that Buck was watching them from the porch of a roustabout trailer. Probably just taking a break to pass a quick bottle with the boys, he thought, though his eyes never left Dugan’s.

  “Do it again . . .” Emma said.

  Dugan tore his eyes away from Buck. Shaking his head, he grabbed her hand. “Can’t now, sweetheart,” he said. “Gotta go collect my rats! Now you wait here for me, okay? I’ll just be a second.”

  A minute later, he came out carrying a brown box beneath his arm. Gunther had devised a clever series of traps that made collecting his rats easy. He dropped Emma off at the trailer before heading off into the night.

  As it had been for a week now, Alice’s cage was dark. Someone had removed all the furniture and dolls and taken the pretty pink walls down. After placing the rats into his coffin, Dugan walked into a somber scene in the lounge. From his seat at the end of the couch, Rudy raised his head slowly to look at him with his good eye. Dugan shook his head before sitting down beside him. He grabbed a cigarette from the open pack and began to smoke. The only sounds in the room were Rudy’s strained breathing and Gunther tapping his head lightly against the wall. But the crowds were heavy that night and the show must go on.

  Although they all mostly just went through the motions, Dugan felt a special onus to put on a good show. It had become obvious to them all that he had become the draw. The crowds often just passed by the others, paying scant attention to them on their way to see him. Pimply-faced adolescents and young couples on their first date and fathers with young children all wanted to see Vampire Boy! and his gross out of an act. All of them wondered how he did it, how he could just disappear like that. And he wasn’t really eating the rats, was he?

  The crowd at the midnight show was about twenty strong. Some pressed tightly against his cage to get the best view, others were coming back for a second, third, or fourth time, to figure out how he pulled his disappearing act. This evening as the crowd approached, he began to feel a dull throbbing in his head that kept growing until it had the intensity of a chainsaw. His knees went weak. When that feeling mercifully passed, he started to feel a familiar chill. He recognized it as the same feeling he’d had on the road with his uncle when passing through a city or town where there was another one of . . . it struck him then like a bolt of thunder.

  There was another vampire in the room.

  He peered into the crowd seeing only the usual types, though the shadows were thicker now since Alice’s cage went dark. He did notice a stony faced man standing against the back wall. Dugan knew instinctively it wasn’t him. But there was something beside him that seemed to come in and out of focus. It might have been a person, or maybe just the excited crowd bending and stretching their shadows against the wall. When he extended his fangs to kill and drain the rat, he heard the usual oohs and aahs. But as he lifted his cape to pull his disappearing act, he sensed another strong emotion from at least one person in the crowd that he recognized as disgust.

  Before dropping the lid, he stared through the narrow crack in the direction of the stony faced man. He closed it only after seeing clearly there was nobody beside him. The three remaining rats scurried around in the darkness of his coffin as he waited for Derek to hustle the crowd out. When he emerged from the box, he saw the man still stood in the shadows.

  Getting out of his coffin, Dugan walked toward the front of the cage and waited for the man to approach. A moment later, he did. The man wore an old fashioned hat and a worn trenchcoat. His nose had been busted many times over the years. His face was pockmarked and deeply scarred. While walking over, Dugan noticed he had something in his hand. He stood outside the cage a moment and looked Dugan in the eye. His voice was deep and throaty as he handed it over.

  “Boss says for when you get tired of eating rats.”

  Dugan stood there for a moment before finally reaching out for the slip of paper. As soon as he took it, the man turned and walked away. Only after the echo of his footsteps had faded did Dugan look down to see it was a gold embossed business card with an address raised in black letters. Somewhere in Colorado Springs. There was no name or phone number. Just the address. Dugan shoved it in his pocket and prepared for the next show. It was just after the last show of the evening began that Alice slipped gently from this world.

  5

  The county coroner arrived first thing the next morning to certify the death. Throughout the rest of that morning and early afternoon, Lois and the carnival women performed the grim but necessary tasks. They washed Alice’s body and fixed her hair before dressing her in her finest and favorite green silk dress. After laying her down upon clean sheets, Lois used her gift for makeup to transform Alice’s withered limbs and ancient face.

  Mary kept Emma busy helping to arrange the flowers that came all morning long, the largest arrangement from Big Ben himself. To keep them from getting underfoot, Lois sent Harold and Gunther off to collect wildflowers. When they returned, Lois placed the sprigs of delicate babies’ breath that Gunther had found growing wild in a nearby field in Alice’s hair. The line began forming in mid-afternoon.

  Not ten feet from where Dugan slept, a line a hundred strong stood outside in the late summer rain to pay their respects and say their final goodbyes. They all commented how wonderful she looked, and what a nice touch it was that she held in her hand a single American Beauty. Someone said that had been Rudy’s idea. By the time Dugan awoke, it was just her closest friends by her side: Gunther, Harold, Lois, Enrique, and Rudy. They all left the trailer to give Dugan a private moment with her before the impatient funeral director took away her body for burial. After that, the show went on.

  More so on this night than even the previous evening, Dugan felt out of sorts and just went through the motions. He didn’t stay long in the lounge after the last show. When he returned to his trailer, he gagged at the smell of flowers and recoiled at the sight of Alice’s empty bed. Throwing his costume to the floor, he put on jeans and a flannel shirt before feeling bad about mistreating the clothes. Picking them up, he removed the envelope containing that evening’s take from the pocket of his pants. Hanging up the ruffled shirt, he noticed again the carefully stitched repair made to the front. Curious, he twisted the hanger to examine the back. There was indeed another, almost invisible repair. He pressed the shirt together and was not at all surprised to see the repairs lined up perfectly.
>
  Stuffing the envelope in the pocket of his jeans, he lifted the bench seat and grabbed two more from his stash before stepping out into the night. Unsure of his intentions, only certain he could not stay in the trailer another minute, he wandered around a while before finding himself approaching the kitchen tent. From inside he heard the usual bawdy laughter and rowdy guffaws of drunken men. When he walked in and approached the table, it went silent. Some men began looking more closely at their cards. Others suddenly discovered the bottoms of their shoes were quite fascinating. Dugan waited for it. Buck didn’t let him down.

  “Yo, boy! What you doin’ here?”

  Dugan looked into the face of a cruelly smiling Buck, smelling his rank sweat from ten feet away. Glancing at the pile of chips in front of him, he knew Buck was having a real good night.

  “I asked you a question, boy? What do you want?”

  Dugan paused only a second before answering.

  “I want in.”

  Howls of laughter erupted. Buck kept his half-smirking gaze fixed on Dugan. When the men realized Buck didn’t share in their humor, the laughter cut off mid-chuckle. By now, Dugan knew all the men at the table, if only by sight. The man to his right was Ed Riley. He was a juice man, one of the guys who ran the generators that powered the carnival. To his right was Nelson, who ran the mug joint where customers could get their pictures taken. Beside him was Bill Fulton, the patch, a position Dugan had learned was vital to any carnival. He was the crooked lawyer who made payoffs to local cops, and kept nosy licensing boards at bay if the marks who were swindled got too upset. There were a few others, but only Buck and Bill Fulton would look his way.

  “This is a man’s game, boy,” Buck said.

  Dugan reached into his pocket and removed three envelopes, throwing one of them onto the table. “A thousand bucks buy me in?”

  Their eyes widened. Buck’s gaze shifted from Dugan, to the thick envelope, and back again. Not waiting for an answer, Dugan walked to a stack of chairs off to the side and grabbed one, then elbowed aside two larger men as he pushed the chair between them.

  “It’s his funeral, Buck,” someone said.

  Dugan looked over and saw it was Hutch, one of the riggers who set up and broke down the carnival. Buck tried to maintain his disdain, but greed overcame hatred. He nodded slightly. Fulton reached for the envelope and counted it out before pushing five stacks of multicolored chips across the table, then stuffed the envelope into his breast pocket. Dugan’s pile was smaller than Buck’s, but that was alright with him. He was in the game. Now, all he had to do was learn how to play. He had never played poker in his life.

  Hutch dealt, announcing the game was five-card stud with a maximum bet of five dollars. After picking up his cards, Dugan watched each man examine their cards closely before exchanging one, two, or three, and getting new ones in return. Those first few hands, Dugan chose cards at random from what he’d been dealt and traded them in, managing to bluff his way through without looking too stupid. Before long, the men returned to their raunchy jokes and drink and forgot he was even there.

  Dugan soon learned how much to call and how much to raise, watched what hands won the early rounds and figured out what went into a winning hand. More importantly, he watched the men. The one thing he had known about poker before sitting down was that sometimes, a man would tip his hand. He figured he’d probably be good at that part, and he was right. It took Dugan only about a quarter of his stake to see exactly how each man around the table tipped theirs.

  For Ed Riley, it was an almost imperceptible eye twitch. Nelson scratched the back of his ears. Bill Fulton’s voice was his tell, while Hutch’s forehead went up or down with the fortune of his cards. It came as no surprise to Dugan that Buck was hardest to read, and he lost half his stake before finally figuring out his tell. He almost smiled to think that he was probably the only one who would notice a slight fluctuation in a man’s jugular vein. He had stared longingly at enough of them to recognize when the flow of blood expands or decreases. Inwardly, he reveled in the irony that it would be the man’s own blood that would be his downfall.

  By the time it came his turn to deal, Dugan had already reached into his second envelope to cash in another five hundred. Most of his chips were now in front of Buck, who sat smirking behind his pile. He was having himself a very good night. The rest took his money as well. Looking at his small pile, Dugan saw he was down to about a hundred and fifty bucks.

  “How about raising the stakes a little?” he asked. “Gimme a chance to win some of my money back?”

  “Why don’t you quit while you’re behind, boy?” Riley said, not unkindly. “It just ain’t your game.”

  “Mind your business, Ed,” Buck said. By his math, with three envelopes, there was at least another fifteen hundred bucks that needed liberating from the kid.

  “Twenty dollar minimum,” Dugan said, dealing the cards and anteing up his own twenty. Riley raised him and swapped out two cards. Nelson went in for three and called. Buck took two and then raised again. Dugan threw down one card and looked at his new hand.

  When he saw Nelson scratch behind his ears, he raised another one hundred. Nelson folded. Riley was still in. He matched and raised another hundred. Hutch did the same. It went round and round like that for the next few hands.

  Dugan looked at Buck and saw him eye lustfully the growing pot in the middle of the table. When he saw the telltale jugular quiver, he raised his bet to five hundred. Hutch and Fulton folded. Riley called and raised again. Buck stared at Dugan, who remained as impassive as a dead man.

  Dugan let a few more moments pass before saying, “Bet the pot.”

  The men had joked about it earlier. It meant you were raising your bet to the total value of what was already on the table, in this case, about five thousand dollars. Buck looked at him with a smile, but there was something more than hatred in his eyes. The rest of the men sat frozen in place.

  “You ain’t got that kind of money, boy,” Buck said.

  “Don’t I?” Dugan replied.

  Buck stared long and hard before pushing all his chips into the middle of the table. “All in,” he said. He waited another moment before flipping over his cards. “Two pair. Kings over Queens.”

  Dugan was dumbfounded. His face fell. Buck started giggling and let out a hoot.

  Standing up from his chair, Buck reached across the table and ran his fingers through the chips. Riley looked at Dugan with something like pity in his eyes. “What you got, boy?” he asked.

  Crestfallen, Dugan shook his head and threw his cards on the table. Buck’s hands were still buried in his booty when he heard gasps from the other men. He turned his gaze slowly toward Dugan’s upturned cards and his smile froze in place. One by one, the other men began laughing and then pounding the table. They started letting out their own hoots and hollers. Dugan had no idea what was going on. Nelson left his chair to walk over and pound him on the back. Bringing his whiskey breath close to the boy’s ear, he shouted to be heard above the clamor.

  “You know what you got there boy?” he asked. “The dead man’s hand! That’s what you got!”

  Dugan looked again at his cards. He had a pair of Aces and a pair of Eights. Did that beat Kings and Queens? He raised his head to look over at Buck and then knew that it did. Looking in the man’s eyes, he also understood at that moment at least one reason why they called it the dead man’s hand.

  Buck muttered beneath his breath. As the celebration over Dugan’s victory subsided, his mutters grew louder. One by one, the men went quiet as they looked over at Buck and saw him shaking his head.

  “No way, boy,” he said. “Uh uh. You ain’t takin’ this money. This here’s my money. You must have cheated or used some kind of freak voodoo or something. There’s no way you could have won. You ain’t takin’ this money.”

  One of the men spoke up. “Buck, you can’t rightly—”

  “Don’t you start with me Hutch, unless you don’t recall wh
o’s butterin’ your bread.”

  Hutch looked down and clammed up. Buck began pulling the pot across to his side of the table. Another man spoke up. It was Fulton.

  “Can’t let you do that, Buck,” he said. His voice was calm but his face was deadly serious. Buck looked at him crazily.

  “Who’s gonna stop me?”

  Fulton smiled peaceably and answered. “The banker, that’s who. Me. And I am telling you, you are not walking out of here with that boy’s money.”

  It was then they all noticed Fulton had his right hand tucked beneath the left side of his jacket. He was slowly fingering something they all knew he kept there, a tool of the crooked carny lawyer’s trade.

  Buck froze. Hutch and Nelson backed away from the table. Dugan watched the scene play out and tried to keep the smile off his face. However it turned out, the evening could not have gone better if he’d planned it.

  “You gonna shoot me, Bill?” Buck asked.

  Fulton’s face remained an enigma.

  “Only if I have to,” was his bored response.

  The two stared each other down another moment before Buck pulled his hands from the pot and turned away from the table. In the next instant, he turned again, and in a fit of rage, lifted the table off the ground and tipped it onto its side. Dozens of drink glasses and overflowing ashtrays clattered to the ground.

  Caught off guard, the men turned their stares to a still glaring Buck. Though some of his anger appeared sated for the moment, he looked at Dugan and pointed. “This ain’t over boy,” he said. “Not by a long shot is this over.” Turning again, he began walking away. Before leaving the tent, they all heard him shout over his shoulder. “I know where you SLEEP, boy!”

  The men who remained didn’t move for a while. Nelson was the first to get up. Bending over, he lifted the table from the ground and pushed it upright. Hutch began collecting the fallen glasses and ashtrays and brought them to the dish station. Riley folded up the tablecloth and threw it on the table, afterward bending down to collect any stray chips that had rolled away. As Fulton began to stack the chips for counting, he shook his head and smiled.