Carny kill

by Robert Edmond Alter

  Anyhow, the connubial jungle bed looked good enough to me. You Jane or no You Jane. So I hung around there until the crowd petered out.

  This Tarzan house overlooked the Swamp Ride and they had about nine nice clean kids who ran the boats through the circular swamp. One of them came by me with a polite smile and a face full of freckles.

  "All closed up for the night, sir," he said.

  I told him my name was Thax and showed him my wonderful Never Never card and that made him more polite than ever.

  "I haven't seen you around here, sir. Are you new?"

  Well, what are you going to do? If they have to call you sir how can you stop them? Beat 'em on the head with a stick? I smiled at him like foxy grandpa and admitted I was new.

  "Well gosh," he said and he actually looked distressed. "I'd show you the Swamp Ride, except that-"

  "Except that you have a tasty girl waiting." He probably had his little old grayhaired mother waiting but I wanted to make him feel good.

  "Don't worry about it," I said. "It doesn't really matter."

  I shooed him off, and when the coast was clear I went up the plank steps that curved around a phony tree like a scutellated snake, and I wobbled over the swaying bamboo footbridge to Tarzan's house.

  It was really quite something when you thought about it- the fact that all the leaves on the two trees were fake and that each one had been placed on by hand. But I didn't think too much about it right then. I was deadbeat and that steak in my stomach still needed some repose time to digest in.

  It was dark in Tarzan's house, but there were still some arc lights on down in Neverland and the bamboo and thatch walls let in light the way a sieve lets in water. I could see my way to bed.

  There was another smaller bed against the other wall. That was Cheeta's bed. The bright little highschool girl in the skimpy leopard skin who was in charge of the tree house had told us so earlier. All the Ma's and Pa's had thought it was a great one. The Pa's had chuckled and the Ma's had said Oooh in that endearing way they have.

  I didn't mind sleeping with a monkey, as long as he stayed on his side of the room. I was whipped. I even thought I dreamed that Cheeta swung in through his window and dropped into his bed in the late dark night.

  It didn't matter. At least I didn't think it did.

  I don't know how long that godawful noise had been going on before it woke me up, but when I finally consciously heard it all I could think of was a thunderstorm.

  That's what a gator sounds like when he bellows. When he plants all four stumpy legs in the mud and really let go his voice has a sort of barrr-ooom to it like distant thunder.

  It was morning. I looked at my wristwatch. Eight. Then I sat up. What else can you do when someone starts yelling for help?

  "Help! Somebody! C'mere!"

  The voice was thin and urgent and some distance off. I went out on the porch and looked down at the Swamp Ride. It was laid outin a huge figure eight but I couldn't see all of the water-ways because the jungly growth was too dense. I could see one of the little powered swamp boats scooting back to the dock though, and all the yelling seemed to be coming from it.

  I went back inside and got my pants.

  A couple of the rummy sweep-up men were wobbling toward me when I reached the Swamp Ride gate, and two or three of the guide girls were coming on the run too. I went around the closed ticket booth and stepped out on the dock.

  The powerboat was just pulling in and my friend Freckles was at the wheel. His freckles looked like measles against the ashen color of his face. He was scared witless.

  "Oh my God!" he gasped when he saw me. "It's awful! Just awful! He's dead!"

  I jumped into the boat with him, nearly scalping myself on the roof rod. They had eight or nine of those little boats and each one of them was built like the _African Queen_-with the canvas tarp for a roof.

  I got Freckles by the shoulders before he could come apart at the seams. He was pretty hysterical but I didn't slap him like they always do in the movies and on TV because it never works in real life. It just seems to jar loose more hysteria in the nut.

  "Somebody's got to do something!" Freckles yelled in my face, spit and all. "My God those gators!"

  "Yeah yeah," I yelled back at him. "But who? Who's dead? Where is he?"

  "_Yes! Yes!_" the kid said frantically insistent. "_He's dead!_ I'm telling you _he's dead!_ He's in the water and those gators-"

  I wasn't getting anywhere, and if I'd had any sense I would have gotten out of there because it wasn't any of my business. But who has any sense these days?

  "Okay. Okay. Show me." I gave him a shake. "Show me where."

  I could feel him shrinking in my hands.

  "I never saw a dead man before." His voice was hoarse now, gaspy. "It's terrible!"

  "Yeah. All right, kid. Get out." I didn't need a hysteric on my hands. "Where is it?"

  Freckles pointed across the bow at a jungle-arched waterway. Then he scrambled up on the dock. More and more people were gathering with question marks for faces.

  There was nothing to those little boats. Freckles had left the power on and I gave it a healthy goose and spun the wheel and went ripping down the waterway at about half a knot an hour. The governor on that boat must have been as tight as a virgin's something or other.

  There was very little about the Swamp Ride that was phony. All the palmettos and sweet gums and tupelos and the intricate network of prehensile vines were real. There's no great trick to cultivating a swamp in Florida.

  Even the gators were real. They came from a nearby gator farm. They were harmless old daddies who were used to being around people. All they wanted to do was sleep in the sun and wait for some kind man to bring them their food.

  I suppose that's why they were all riled now. They didn't know what to make of this outrageous man-size bundle of meat that had been dumped in their nice little sheltered swamp.

  The tangle of gaudy, suffering foliage spread open on either side and my laboring boat put-futted into a jungleribbed slough. The water was as opaque as green milk-glass and there was a little setback in the mudbank on one side.

  Three bewildered gators were standing there in the shallows grunting up. There wasn't much to them. The smallest was three foot and the largest six. Their manner seemed to imply that they didn't like the thing they had found in the water and why didn't someone come along and take it away because it obviously didn't belong there.

  I idled the boat toward them and they lumbered off into the water in a tail-spanking huff. I had to get out of the boat and into the gafocky water up to my knees to get the body.

  It was face down and it was a large man and when I rolled it over it was Robert Cochrane. A long knife was standing jauntily in the Irishman's chest right where people usually think the bull's-eye should be.

  It had a mother-of-pearl handle.

  4

  A fair crowd of Neverland employees had ganged around the dock and a couple of the uniformed lot guards were there making like FBI agents. They were the usual half-tough characters who always hold down jobs like that and they were having a swell time giving Freckles a pushing around when I got back with the boat and the body.

  They lost interest in the scared kid. They damn near knocked each other into the water trying to get into the boat to have first look at the body.

  "What a you know about this?" one of them growled at me.

  Tough as nails. This was his big moment. Probably the only exciting thing that had happened to him all year was manhandling some poor drunk.

  "I found him," I said.

  "Jesus. I know that, I said-"

  "That's all I know. I found him."

  I was being a big help to him. He asked his partner wasn't I a big help and then the other toughy had a go at me.

  "What the hell business was it of yours to go running in there after him?"

  "The kid wasn't making much sense," I explained. "I thought maybe the gators were doing something to him." />
  "You know who shived him?" the first one asked me.

  I shook my head and said, "Who killed Cock Robin?"

  They looked at me and one of them said Hmm?_

  "Just a crazy association of ideas," I said. "Robert Cochrane, Cochrane Robert, Cock Robin. See?"

  The one who had said Hmm said it again. The other one looked like he was getting pretty hot.

  "You some kind of nut, buster, or what?" he wanted to know.

  A broad bluff-faced man in a two hundred dollar suit pushed through the crowd and started yelling at the guards.

  "Who is it? Simpson! Who's been hurt?"

  The guard named Simpson got up and told him it was the boss and that he was dead.

  "Jesus, Mr. Franks, somebody knifed him! It's murder!"

  This Mr. Franks tucked in his mouth till it looked like a zipped purse and his eyes snapped at Simpson and at Cochrane's body and at me. He gave me a double snap.

  "Who the hell are you?" he demanded.

  I got out of the boat and joined him on the dock.

  "I found him," I said. "After the kid started to unhinge."

  "But who are you?"

  "Thaxton."

  "Thaxton-shmaxton!" he said furiously. "What the hell are you doing here? I don't know you."

  "Makes us even. Who the hell are you?" I didn't need any more emotion blown in my face that morning.

  He gave me a look that should have stuck four inches out my back.

  "I'm Franks," he said. "Mr. Cochrane's business manager."

  "I'm Thaxton," I said. "Mr. Cochrane's prestidigitator. He hired me yesterday."

  "Thanks loads for the news," he said in a sour voice. He brushed by me like I wasn't somewhat in his way and got into the boat to have a look for himself.

  Neverland didn't open till ten in the morning and it was now about eight-forty. I wondered if they would open at all that day, and then I figured yes they would if May had her say. She could no more turn back a mark with a buck than a wolverine could refuse a dead rabbit.

  I looked at the press of faces in front of me. I knew one of them. Billie. She was staring into the boat with a sort of entranced expression. I thought she was turning sick without realizing it. You could see that good-god knife in Cochrane real easy when one of the guards or Franks wasn't hunkering in front of him.

  The law would arrive shortly and that would mean more tough talk in my face. I was in no hurry for it. I went over and got Billie by the elbow and said let's take a walk.

  She looked up at me with a start and for a moment I don't think she knew who I was. Then she said Oh and bobbed her head. We pushed out of the goggling employees and started to walk, anywhere. It didn't matter what direction we took.

  I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland. That's the way Neverland struck me when there weren't any people around. And right now there wasn't a soul. The marks wouldn't mob in till ten and the earlybird employees who were already on the lot were all over at the Swamp Ride or making for there as fast as their little feet could carry them.

  "How did you happen to be there?" Billie asked me.

  "I spent the night in Tarzan's hut," I told her. "But damned if Jane ever showed up. I think Cheeta did, though."

  I glanced back at the looming, joined trees. Then I looked again. There was something monkey- or ape-like away up there in the midbranches. It stood out against the sky like a fly caught in a web.

  "Look," I said. "Am I seeing things?"

  She looked up over her shoulder and smiled.

  "It's Terry Orme. He's Cheeta."

  I said, "Huh?"

  "He's a midget," Billie explained. "Rob Cochrane hired him to dress up in an apesuit and make like Cheeta. Until you get real close to him you'd swear it was an ape. The suit is a work of art and Terry acts more ape than human. I mean he can really climb."

  I thought about it for a moment.

  "Does he sleep up there at night?" I asked.

  "Uh-huh. Funny little guy. He shies away from people."

  Then I hadn't dreamed up Cheeta last night. I looked back at the tree again. The little apeman was still hanging there in the sky, staring down at the employees and at the boat that contained the employees' dead boss. He reminded me of Quasimodo brooding over the stupid populace of Paris from the high, gargoyled ramparts of Notre Dame.

  We strolled through Pioneer Town and without people around the place was like an old frontier ghost town, only it was in better shape than most ghost towns. I liked it that way. I could do without the people. I put my arm through Billie's arm. We hadn't said anything for a while.

  We strolled down to a manmade lake complete with ducks and gliding swans. An island with real pine trees was out in the middle of it and an old- fashioned highpooped schooner was moored alongside the island. A big sign over the dock on the mainland said TREASURE ISLAND. The ticket-seller's stand was a window set in the side of a small old English structure that looked like a seaman's tavern. The warped signboard over the door said ADMIRAL BENBOW TEAROOM.

  My interest perked up.

  "Does that ship happen to be called the Hispaniola?" I asked.

  "Yes. How did you know?"

  "I'm a nut on _Treasure Island_. It was the first book I ever read and for year nothing could convince me that a better book had ever been written. Let's go over, huh?"

  Billie gave me a funny little look.

  "I'm beginning to understand you for the first time,Thax," she said. "And I think I like you better for it."

  "Me? What do you understand about me now that you didn't understand yesterday?"

  "That your pseudo-tough don't-give-a-damn manner is an act. You're just a big-boned man who never quite grew up."

  "Sure," I said. "Me and Peter Pan. That's how come I ended up in Neverland."

  I didn't want to talk about the side of me that had never grown up. Embarrassed by being caught out, I guess. But it was true, in a way. Ever since I was a kid it has amazed me how most people in this godawful world think there is enough in their puny little mundane lives that they don't have to enhance it by escaping the brown-drab boredom of the present through books.

  Life was a monotonous pain in the ass to me. And so were most of the people who comprised that life. Give me a good book by Kenneth Roberts or Walter D. Edmonds or Nordhoff and Hall and I can get to hell away from it. From the people too. I was a Then person. I didn't belong to the Now people.

  What worried me right at that moment was the feeling that Billie was in the Nows' camp.

  A school of rowboats was tied to the dock for the marks to rent and I handed Billie into one of them and shoved off and shipped the oar. She was still watching me with that funny little look.

  "Cut it out," I said. "Every one of us is a nut some way or another."

  "But you're a very special kind of nut, Thax. Because you don't fit in."

  "Sure I do. Well enough to get by on."

  Billie looked at the green duck-dirtied water overboard.

  "Do you know what I was willing to do to get my first job in a carny?" she said. Her voice was very quiet.

  "Cut it out."

  "The owner was a Greek. A very fat, greasy Greek of fifty."

  "I said cut it out."

  She looked at me.

  "But I wanted the job-a start-that bad," she said.

  "All right," I said and I was goddam mad about it. "Now you've told me how you had to lay with a sweaty Greek who was old enough to be your grandpa in order to get your start. So now you're happy."

  "I didn't say I was happy."

  "Well it doesn't really matter, does it?"

  She sighed. "That's my whole point. That's what you said yesterday when I said I hoped you'd get this job. It didn't really matter. That's the exact difference between us. It does matter."

  "How?" I wanted to know. "Look. A hundred years from now there's going to be another poor mixed up sonofabitch just like me bumbling around on this earth. What am I going to mean to him then-or to anybody or
anything?"

  "I don't give a damn about a hundred years from now or ten thousand years!" she said urgently. "We're here now. You and I. It's our turn. And they're never going to give us a second shot at it."

  I said nothing. I rowed the boat.

  "Don't you see?" she said. "We've got to make the most of it. They start our kind out with nothing and if we slob around saying it doesn't really matter, then that's what we end up with. Nothing. Nowhere. I can't settle for that."

  I beached the boat on Treasure Island and I got out and gave her a hand out. Then, as long as I had ahold of her and there was nobody else around and because I still didn't know what to say, I started to pull her in to me.

  "No, Thax," she said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm not sure yet. And I'm getting to an age where I've got to be sure."

  "Because you're afraid of wasting your time on a bum huh?"

  "Something like that," she said levelly. "And right, say it. I'm a bitch. A stupid little bitch with a dollar sign for a brain."

  "I don't believe that any more than you do."

  "Well," she said, "I don't like myself much when I talk like that, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I have a dream."

  "Of what?"

  "Of a better way to live. A very much better way."

  I started to say it didn't really matter, but I didn't. I drew her in and I kissed her and her response was good but I didn't make with the hungry hands. I let her go.

  She didn't say anything for a moment. She didn't look at me. Then she said, "We'd better get back."

  I didn't like the idea at all but unless I resorted to rape what could I do? I said, "All right."

  We didn't talk as I rowed us back to the dock.

  5

  The luckboy who had sicked Eddy the pickpocket on me last night was strolling by the Admiral Benbow when we arrived at the dock. He grinned at me and called:

  "How was it on the island?"

  "The same as it is anywhere." I wasn't in the mood for fun and games and I guess it showed in my face or in my voice.