Unraveled

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  It was once a bustling facility during World War II, training nearly 50,000 troops. By the time the carnival arrived, the army camp was only a shadow of what it had been, with a few offices and a building that most locals referred to as the powder magazine.

  Booth’s barbed-wire fence was down, and the crooked bodark posts they’d pulled from the ground were stacked a hundred yards away to provide access to the open area swarming with cars and trucks. Ned pulled off the highway and across the culvert to the impromptu parking lot already identified by cars lined up in rows.

  A wide banner stretched across the newly erected entrance read: The One and Only Patterson and Bates Dreamland Exposition!

  Tents sprouted from the grass trampled by a small army of rough-looking men and women who were putting the finishing touches on rides and game booths. Ned threaded his way through tangles of ropes and cables, passing the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Skydiver, a sign for “Oddities of the World,” and a cotton candy stand. There were already a few curious patrons drifting through the bustle.

  “Can I help you?” A long-haired young woman in patched jeans balanced a toddler on her cocked hip. A cigarette dangled from her lips and Ned noticed her sneakers were filthy. Dried mud flaked off her bell bottom cuffs.

  “I ’magine you can. Who’s running things here?”

  “Delmar Hopkins.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  She reset the snotty-nosed toddler to a more comfortable position. The little girl watched him with wide, unimpressed eyes. “I saw him by the Ring Toss a few minutes ago.”

  “Thanks.” Ned left her and walked down the growing midway that was five times larger than any traveling carnival he’d ever seen. A man with wavy gray hair curling over his collar held a clipboard and issued orders to a pair of ragged middle-aged carnies. Ned hadn’t seen anyone dressed so shabby since the Depression.

  The silver-haired man’s eyes flicked to the stranger and the small gold badge on his shirt. “Howdy Sheriff.”

  “Constable. Constable Ned Parker.”

  They shook. “Name’s Delmar Hopkins. Help you?”

  “Naw, I just dropped by to say howdy. This is my precinct and I like to keep an eye on whatever’s coming or going around here.”

  “Glad to have you.”

  “When are you firing all this up?”

  “Tonight.”

  Ned nodded like he hadn’t already known the answer to his question. “And you’ll be here how long?”

  “Until the crowds fall off. Usually a week or ten days.”

  “I’d have expected y’all to be at the fairgrounds in town.”

  Delmar’s eyes flickered. “They want too much of the gate in Chisum. We’ll make more here.”

  “Um hum.” Ned’s comment told Delmar that he didn’t believe him, and the carnie boss saw it.

  “You want a tour?”

  “Naw.” Ned paused. “Just wanted to know who was running things. You make a lot of money off these games going up here?”

  “Enough to put groceries on the table. Folks love the games.”

  “They win very much?”

  “Sure do. See all these prizes they’re unloading? We’ll go through most of ’em before we leave.”

  “I bet you will.” Ned studied the cheap dolls and even cheaper plastic toys and stuffed animals that local boys would try to win for their girlfriends and wives. A cluster of giant colored hippos hung from the game’s roof and down the sides. He pointed to shelf of transistor radios, low-end binoculars, and a tin spyglass. “Some of those look expensive.”

  “Those are the big prizes, but a lot of them will walk out the gate with the rube…the customers.”

  “Rubes. Marks. Chump. Mooch. Clems…”

  “All right.” Delmar’s face fell. “You know the lingo.”

  “I know quite a bit. I know the ring on that Basketball Toss is barely bigger’n the ball, and that it has so much air it’ll bounce to China if they throw it hard enough. I know the bottles are weighted in the Milk Bottle Toss.”

  Delmar scowled and shrugged the dingy coat back on his shoulders as the men beside him faded away.

  “Here’s the deal. Folks’ll come out to have fun, but I want them treated right. Don’t stack the milk bottles against the back wall, and don’t use them that’s weighted so heavy. I know how this works even down to the Duck Pond. I expect you mostly give more than ninety-five percent slum prizes for these…rubes, but I’ll tolerate say, sixty-five or seventy percent.”

  Delmar flinched. Slum prizes, the cheapest plastic toys cost little to give away and kept the rubes interested, because they got at least something for their money and it gave them hope, urging them to play again. But if his gamers had to increase the distribution of their better prizes like the large stuffed animals or even the transistor radios displayed at the forefront of their booths, the amount of take-home for the carnies would be dramatically less.

  Scowling, Delmar hunched his shoulders and listened as Ned continued.

  “If I hear of anything crooked, I’ll come out here with a dozen deputies and we’ll start looking real hard at the rest of the games and the folks working here. There’s a few I saw ducking around corners who’s liable to have warrants.

  “Now, I’m going home in a little bit and after supper, I intend to get out all my wanted posters and go through ’em one by one. If I see anybody that looks familiar when I come back, we’re gonna have a talk about aiding and abetting. You get me?”

  “I got you.” Delmar’s flat voice matched the look in his eyes. He reached in his pocket. “How much will it take…?”

  “Get that hand out of your pocket. I ain’t taking no bribes. You run this straight or you can pack it up and string Graham’s fence back together.”

  Delmar’s hand came out empty and he smoothed his oiled hair. “Fine, then.”

  “Good. Let these folks have a good time and win some.”

  They stood in silence for a long moment while Delmar waited for more. When nothing else came, he sighed loud and long. “Were you a carney?”

  “Nope, but I’ve been at this a long time.”

  “I expect you’ll be here every night?”

  “Most likely.”

  The carney studied his worn out shoes. “You want some tickets?”

  “Naw. I won’t need a ticket to get in.”

  The man’s faint smile faded.

  “Oh, by the way, make sure them rides are safe, too. I don’t want nobody hurt around here.”

  Ned left, passing the young woman with the baby. His demeanor changed and he stopped to let the toddler grab his finger. He handed the woman a folded bill with his other hand. “This is for you to get this baby some clothes. She looks like she could use some shoes and something for that runny nose. What’s her name?”

  She spoke around the cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth. “Amanda.”

  “Yours?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You asking for professional reasons, or personal?”

  “I like to know who’s in my county.”

  “Did you ask the rest of these carneys around here?”

  “Nope, but none of them others’ got a baby on their hip, neither.”

  She studied on his answer for a second. “Connie.”

  “Howdy Connie. Don’t you blow that money on cigarettes. They’re gonna kill you, you know.”

  “If they don’t something else will.” The woman blew smoke from her nostrils without taking the toonie from her lips. “Thanks Sheriff.”

  Ned sighed, “Constable,” and left.

  Chapter Nine

  A wheezing International pickup pulled off the highway and up our drive, trailing a cloud of blue smoke. It was after breakfast on Sunday and I was in the hay barn with Grandpa, helping him put out some nuggets fo
r the cows. Neither he nor Miss Becky considered that work, no more’n her cooking breakfast or the dinner already simmering on the stove.

  He slapped a lid on the 55-gallon barrel and walked to the front of the truck backed halfway into the pole barn’s hall. “You recognize that truck?”

  I hopped into the bed and leaned over the top of the cab. The pickup pulled up the slight incline and parked behind Grandpa’s Plymouth. “Nossir.”

  Half a dozen black-haired kids rode in the back, and the cab looked to be full of people. You could squeeze four folks into those Internationals, if they were kinfolk and didn’t mind rubbing shoulders, but it looked to me like they’d packed in at least seven, four adults with little kids on their laps. That explained why the driver’s whole arm and shoulder was out the window.

  I could tell he was Indian right off, most likely Choctaw, ’cause that’s what we had the most of around our part of the state. The truck idled while Hootie gave it a good barkin’. Miss Becky came out on the porch. We couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she talked to someone through the window. Grandpa left the front fender and took a step toward the house.

  The passenger door opened. My breath caught when Miss Becky threw up her hands, the dish towel flying overhead.

  Grandpa jolted when her scream drug us. He reached in the front pocket of his overalls, pulled out his pistol, and started downhill. “Mama!”

  I jumped up on the cab. The biggest kid in the back threw something over the side of the truck. I’d been watching The Rat Patrol on TV the night before and expected it to blow up like one of those satchel charges. He followed it and run at Miss Becky. I shouted and waved my hands, hoping to attract their attention so she could get away.

  The guy’s long black hair was flying every which-a-way as he charged up on the porch and grabbed Miss Becky. She shrieked and started beating him on the back.

  Grandpa raised his pistol, but couldn’t shoot because the truck was directly in line between him and the front porch.

  I came off the cab, running downhill until my momentum threw me off balance and I knew I was gonna fall. Instead of landing flat on my face, I tucked a shoulder and rolled with it, coming back onto my feet and passing Grandpa in an instant.

  He had his pistol pointed and was hollerin’ for Miss Becky to run. “Top! Stay out of the way!” I heard his feet pounding behind me, but much slower and heavier.

  I was through the open gate when Miss Becky shoved the guy away, but she didn’t run, and she didn’t let go, neither. That’s when I saw she wasn’t fighting, but hugging somebody. I slid to a stop and waved my hands. “Grandpa! Don’t shoot!”

  He heard me and lowered the .38, his face was white as a sheet. “What?”

  “They ain’t fighting! They’re huggin’!”

  “Well, who is it then?”

  The guy looked our way and I started hollering too.

  It was my best friend, Mark Lightfoot.

  Chapter Ten

  The Wraith couldn’t help it. It was dangerous, but he rode past Ned Parker’s house and glanced up the drive to see a truck backed into the barn and a ratty-assed International pickup parked near the house. The glimpse didn’t last long and he was past. Less than a hundred yards down the road, he squinted toward Cody Parker’s house and felt a familiar ache.

  ***

  One day Mark Lightfoot was living in an unpainted house tucked in the woods not far from Grant, Oklahoma, eating beans and greens when they had them, and sleeping in the same full-size bed with four other cousins. The next day he found himself standing in front of Ned Parker’s house.

  He’d lived there before. Ned and Miss Becky took him in after his mother, brothers, and sisters were murdered in a sharecropper’s shack not far from the Parkers’ farmhouse. Until that night when his crazy daddy burst in with an axe, his life had been one bad patch after the other.

  His dad was eventually captured, charged, and convicted of the horrific murders. Mark stayed with the family for the next several weeks and came to understand the Parkers were his dream family. When Ned and Miss Becky offered to let him live with them, he thought his life had finally taken a turn for the better.

  It was the time of the Skinner, when folks locked their doors at night and slept with guns next to the bed in case the lunatic that roamed the darkness decided it was their time to bleed. Even then, Mark felt safe, because his informally adopted grandfather, Constable Ned Parker, could take care of anything.

  The dream disappeared in an instant when relatives Mark didn’t know he had, showed up one day in a ragged sedan to tell him who they were and that he was going to live with them in Oklahoma. There wasn’t anything Ned and Miss Becky could do about it. The law was on his Aunt Tillie’s side.

  She looked like his mama, but of course sisters always favored. She lived with a shiftless sharecropper named Grover and it was like living with his mother all over again. Grover didn’t do much more than loaf around the house smoking or chewing cotton bowl twist, and working only when Tillie drove him away from their leaning shack of a house to earn a few dollars for beans, beer, and more cigarettes.

  Eleven kids lived under one roof and Mark fell exactly in the middle of his new family. They pretty much ignored the youngster most of the time. Every child had a job. The older kids worked the fields in season, or hauled hay, or did odd jobs whenever they came available. The younger kids had chores around the hardscrabble farm, from hoeing, to feeding chickens and gathering eggs, to cutting wood for the stove. There was no electricity in the house, and the only light at night came from coal oil lamps.

  Mark found he had a knack for milking. It was their sharp-boned Guernsey cow that kept the least ones alive. The older kids had already grown tired of getting up first thing in the morning, rain or shine, cold or hot, to milk. It had to be done again in the evening. Even though he couldn’t stand the taste, Grover went into a rage and beat anyone who spilled the milk on the way back to the house for straining, so they gladly gave the chore to Mark.

  It was the only time he had to himself and the boy grew to enjoy it. That confounded cow and those younger kids became his life. He’d lost count of how many times there wasn’t any food in the house and it became a source of pride that at least they had milk.

  Through necessity, he gained experience at sneaking into other folks’ corn cribs, smokehouses, or barns, and filling a ’toe sack with whatever food he could steal. Sometimes it was only potatoes and onions from cribs. On a chilly night after a nearby family killed hogs, he got away with a few hocks and the cheeks, because those parts tended to be overlooked and their disappearance blamed on dogs or rats.

  One winter he was able to steal a few ears of feed corn from a barn on a weekly basis without getting caught. The yellow dent was so hard it had to be soaked for a day before they could cook it. They lived on mostly boiled corn and hand-ground cornbread for months.

  The Oklahoma law came by the house a time or two, sniffing around to see what they could find out about petty theft reports, but Grover always convinced them he knew nothing of the pilfering. The gaunt looks of the Choctaw family usually told the sheriff or constable that the folks were barely alive as it was, and even if someone did bring home a few ears of corn intended as chicken feed, it wasn’t much of a crime.

  He went to school, though. That was the one thing he insisted on, and it was there he excelled. The small rural schoolhouse built by the WPA housed both Indian and white kids from their part of rural southeast Oklahoma. Mark stood out, making good grades and showing he had an aptitude for numbers.

  Then one morning three-and-a-half years after his Aunt Tillie and Grover showed up out of nowhere, she called him off the porch. “Mark, you need to get in the truck.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Grover came out of the house with a rat-chewed cardboard suitcase. He pitched it into the truck bed amid a collection of h
oes, bailing wire, loose hay, and empty feed sacks. “Get in, like she said.”

  “I’ve told you you ain’t my daddy. You’re not the boss of me.”

  Grover shrugged. “Don’t make no difference nohow. You’re going and good riddance.”

  “Where?”

  “Where Tillie told me.”

  Mark watched the kids scramble into the bed over the sides and tailgate, excited to go somewhere. Martha and Brock, two other kinfolk who weren’t blood but insisted on being called aunt and uncle climbed in the cab, setting the smallest kids on their laps.

  Mark shrugged and joined them, hoping they were heading to Hugo and he could loaf around town for a while. At least it was something to do besides work.

  He was shocked when they passed over the bridge and into Texas. He hadn’t been across the Red River since Tillie and Grover came to get him. He knew for sure where they were going when Grover steered right and onto westbound 197.

  They weren’t going to the fields, because it was too early to work. There were no crops yet.

  Mark watched the woods flash by as they cruised down the two-lane highway with excitement growing in his chest. One of the boys, Carl, rode with his arm over the edge of the truck bed. The wind blew his shaggy hair into his face. “Where we going, Mark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We don’t never work this side of the river. They don’t much like Indians over here.”

  “Some folks do.”

  “I want to pick next to you.”

  “It’s too early in the year. We ain’t picking nothin’.”

  “Then what?”

  They crossed the Sanders Creek bridge and Mark instinctively knew what was happening. “I think I’m going somewhere for a while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mark pulled his whipping hair back. “I’m going to be gone for a while, so you need to take over my chores for me.”

  Carl looked down at his ragged tennis shoes. He was only one year younger than Mark. “I don’t like to milk.”