Carny kill

by Robert Edmond Alter

  "That's real funny," Bill said. "About as funny as what you told Ferris about me."

  He showed me his other hand. Empty.

  I cut the light. I said, "Don't be nasty, Bill. It just makes us even. You've been hustling around telling everyone but Dummy Dan the Deaf Piano Player that Ferris wants to tab me with the murder."

  "And it ain't as crazy as you want to make it sound," Bill said.

  "Says who?"

  "Says Ferris. He hinted as much the last time he hauled me over the stones."

  "Which was the time when you told him about why May divorced me."

  He grunted in the dark. "Why not? Do I owe you anything besides a broken tooth?"

  "What are you doing out here, Bill? Returning to the scene of the crime?"

  "Yeah, just like you. No-I saw a light out here when I was passing the Swamp Ride dock. I got curious."

  It was a good answer, but it was still a lie. He hadn't seen any light. Not from the dock. Not in that fog with two acres of jungle in between. He had either followed me in there or he had already been there when I showed up.

  "My turn," he said. "You on a treasure hunt or what?"

  "Clues. I've turned P.I. It's a hell of a lot of fun."

  "Tell me, so I can chuckle too."

  "I had an idea that maybe the law overlooked. Ferris was getting all sweaty because he couldn't figure how somebody- maybe you-got the stiff all the way in here without using one of those swamp boats and without being seen."

  "And you've doped it all out for him."

  "I think so. Correct me if I'm wrong. You put it in one of the rowboats and scampered it across the lake and carted it over this hunk of land to the Swamp Ride."

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You really are cute, Thax. Now do tell us why I did all this?"

  "I don't know, Bill. But I can make a good guess."

  "I just can't wait to hear it. I really can't."

  "Well, somewhere along the line May dumped you just like she dumped me. Then a couple of years ago when you're down and out you read in Variety or one of the trade papers that May has become Mrs. Cochrane Enterprises. So you hustle down here and get a job off her old man. But May won't give you a second tumble and you're POed. So you knife the old gent and hang a frame on the body with May's name on it. Something like that."

  Duff made a noise-a sort of mucus snort.

  "I don't want to unhinge you or anything like that, Thax, but that same little theory also fits you like a snug overcoat."

  "Yeah, I know. Ferris has already outlined it for me."

  I could sense Duff grinning in the dark.

  "I figured he had, Thax old buddy boy. That's why you're so goddam energetically trying to bird-dog it on to me."

  I grinned in the dark too.

  "Well, it doesn't really matter, does it, Bill? As long as we're still the best of buddies?"

  "That's right, Thax. As long as we stay even." He started to slouch off to the right, adding, "That's all I care about."

  His left came out of the dark and went off in my face like a cherry bomb. I never saw it coming and I sure as hell wasn't set for it. I went right on over backwards and cradled my head in a palmetto.

  When I stumbled to my feet Bill was gone.

  First thing I did was test my eyeteeth. They still seemed fairly solid in my gum. Good old bastardly Bill. He had been saving up that punch for me for five years.

  I don't really mind an occasional belt in the mouth. The thing that frosted me was he had caught me off guard at my own game. He'd distracted my attention by making like he was walking off. I'd been wide open for his left jab.

  I found the flashlight and followed the lakeshore around to the Admiral Benbow Tearoom.

  Neverland was three-fourths nightblinded now and I didn't see a soul. Across the inky lake the rakish Hispaniola was snuggled against the black mass of Treasure Island. The stern lights were blazing festively in the schooner and I could hear the faint throb of music coming across the water.

  My lips and teeth ached like hell. When Bill was able to land one, he had a lot of heft behind it. I needed a drink. I didn't especially want to row over to the island but I didn't know where to find Gabby and his Scotch at that time of night. Anyhow, he'd probably killed it by now.

  I climbed into one of the rowboats and shoved off.

  The fog was dissipating and the moon was climbing the black back fence of the night like a great cat-goddess. Its image was in the water and it was cracked into a million pieces and tossed about carelessly by my oarblades, its light all loosened and rippling wild.

  Ransome had another semi-longhair piece going on his hi-fi and it pulsed a moody sensation through the moony night. Duff's punch must have addled my brainbox more than I had realized because for an absurd moment I half expected Mike Ransome to come dashing out on the schooner's deck, waving, gesturing, posturing, to stand unnaturally tall in that eerie light, facing the curtain of the stars and moon like some actor, some tragedian of the universe, addressing a great diatribe to the night.

  I was a little punchy.

  When I started up the gangplank I remembered what Stevenson once wrote to a friend regarding the use of the Hispaniola in his immortal novel: "I was unable to handle a brig (which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame."

  Just shows you that the best of us have our limitations.

  "Hey, Thax!" Mike cried. "C'mon in, man. My God, it's good to see you! You can help me pass the long night. I'm the king of the insomniacs, you know, now that Dashiell Hammett is dead."

  I didn't doubt it, with his nerves and the way he slurped up black coffee. I noticed the pot was perking on the hotplate again. I nodded toward it and quoted Israel Hands: "Don't you get sucking of. that bilge, John. Let's have a go at the rum."

  "A drink?" Mike looked at me brightly. "You want a drink?"

  "Do you have anything aboard this scow, Mike? I could stand it. I just lost a decision to your old sparring partner." I tapped my mouth.

  Mike looked at me with an expectant smile. "Who's that, Thax?"

  "Bill Duff. He landed one in the dark when I wasn't looking. My own fault though. I should have known better."

  "Duff!" He grinned delightedly. "No kidding? My God, Thax, you could take three like him."

  "Not in the dark," I said. "How about that drink?"

  Mike clapped his hands and looked around the cabin.

  "Well, let's see. I'm a coffee man myself, but I did have something around here. Ah!" He went away energetically and started rummaging a locker under his bunk.

  I sat down at the table. My goddam head was starting to hurt now.

  "Ho-_ho!_" Mike waved a half empty quart of gin at me. "Knew I had something left over from the last shindig we threw out here." He fetched the jug over to the table and went away to find a clean glass.

  "A pannikin to wet your pipe like," he said, misquoting Long John Silver.

  As a rule I can't hack gin straight. But it was better than nothing, and right then nothing was what I didn't need. I picked up the jug and looked at it.

  "Squareface," I said. "Remember London's South Seas stories?"

  "Do I ever! And how about John Russell?"

  "_Where the Pavement Ends?_" I said. "_The Lost God?_"

  "That's it! Honest to God, Thax, for sheer mystery, suspense, exotic adventure-I don't think anything can beat _The Lost God_. In the short-story field, I mean."

  "Um. You ever read Morgan Robertson's _The Grain Ship?_"

  "With the diseased rats? Good Lord yes! Beautiful! Both of those tales have that _The Lady Or The Tiger_ ending, you know?"

  "Yeah. Just like a murder mystery in real life. After all, who really gave Lizzie Borden's parents forty whacks with an ax? It's been seventy-some years and we still don't know."

  "Or what about the Pig Woman case?" Mike said. "That was another one, wasn't it? Or was it called the Hall-Mills case? I can't rem
ember."

  Neither could I. All I could vaguely remember about it was that some preacher had been misbehaving with the young church organist. Something like that. I fed myself a shot of gin and it went down like a jackhammer. The trouble with gin is it tastes like cheap perfume. But I had another. It helped anesthetize my mouth.

  "So what happened between you and Bill Duff?" Mike asked.

  "It's an old beef. We used to work in carny years ago. Just a hangover grudge"

  He grinned and got up and said, "Well, it's your business. Listen, I've got to run ashore. Late date."

  I glanced at my wrist watch. It was after 2 AM.

  "Barmaid, I take it," I said.

  He was busy putting himself into a bright, severely-cut sports jacket that was a trifle fruity for my taste. He winked at me.

  "I like 'em at this time of night. The longer they wait the hornier they are. Right?"

  I don't like people to ask me to agree to a questionable decision just because they want to pretend they have the answer. I said um and let it go at that.

  "Make yourself at home, mate," Mike told me. "Finish the gin and flop, if you want to."

  I didn't want to. Not as long as someone else was living aboard the Hispaniola. But all I said was, "Thanks."

  "Jesus, I hate to run off like this." He seemed quite sincere about it. "But she won't keep. You know what I mean?"

  I was glad he had said She. I nodded.

  "Go ahead, Mike. I know the rules."

  He flashed another grin at me and made for the door.

  "Next time, Thax, we'll have a real talk. That's a promise. There's so damn much literature I want to hash over with you. Thomas Mann, for instance." He pronounced it Thomas Mon.

  "Would you mind awfully if we held it down to Kenneth Roberts and P. C. Wren?" I said. "I know my limitations."

  Mike laughed and raised a hand, dramatically.

  "_Aux armes! Les Arbis!_" he cried-which was a quote from Wren's _Beau Geste_. He slammed the door after himself with a laugh.

  In a way I was kind of glad he was gone. He made me nervous. His youthful exuberance was a little too much for my weary thirty-two years.

  That's a funny thing. I felt more or less like Mike Ransome did right up till two years ago. But the day I turned thirty they pulled the energy rug out from under me. No warning. One day bouncing along like a rubber ball-the next day Blaugh! Flat on my face.

  "Well, well," I said. "Here's to the young and hard."

  I hammered down another jolt of the pneumatic drill. Then I thought to hell with the glass and I took it straight from the bottle. And then I had to laugh. The young and hard! That was a good one. Dirty but good.

  Could I, if I had it to do again tonight? I asked myself. With Billie? Hell yes! I wasn't that old.

  "Here's to the thirty-two and hard!" I toasted the bulkhead.

  "Here's to Thomas Mung!" That gave me another laugh. Thomas Mung! By damn, I had a million of them.

  "Here's to Long John and why they called him Long!"

  Ho-ho, Christ I was murder.

  I finished off the gin and got up and started stumbling about the cabin.

  "And to Billy Bones who pulled the boner of all!"

  I threw open the door and staggered out on deck. The fog was completely gone and the moon waited in the rigging, fat and proud.

  "-- the world!" I announced irrelevantly. "And the moon too. I smashed you in the water, you bastard moon. See how white your face is? You're a coward! You can't face the image of your final dish-dissolution in the water."

  Then it all came to a roaring halt. I felt sick. Godawful sick. I wanted to go to bed.

  I reeled down the gangplank and across the beach and bumbled into the boat. How I got those goddam oars shipped and managed to row myself across the lake will always remain a wonderful mystery.

  The next thing I knew Jerry had me under the armpits and he was saying, "Thax-you all right, Thax?"

  That peroxided stripper Bev was with him, and when I again made my grand announcement about doing it to the world, she threw back her head to laugh and her mouth looked like a big red fine bucket and that made me sicker than ever.

  "Me and the water dish-olutioned the moon," I told them. "The water is the moon's slave but the moon is ashamed. I'm sick."

  I threw up right where I stood.

  "Jesus God my nylons!" Bev cried.

  "Okay, okay, so I'll buy you another pair," Jerry said "Now shut up, huh? We gotta find him a bed."

  "Let him lay in it, the filthy bastard," Bev said.

  "Tree house," I told them. "Live in tree house with Cheeta, away away up in the rockyby blue. No You Jane in the bed. Just an ape. Like sodomy."

  "What's he talking about for crysake?" Bev wanted to know.

  "About diddling an ape."

  "_Diddling an ape?_ Is he some kind of a nut or what?"

  "Yeah, something like that. A dead drunk one. C'mon, Thax! Pull yourself together. You can't sleep in a tree."

  I had decided to be a stubborn drunk. The tree house was my home and that's where I was going to sleep.

  "Hell I can't. Always sleep there. Get out a my way. Going up by myself. Going up!"

  "Jesus H. Mahogany Christ," Jerry said. "C'mon, Bev, get a grip on his other side. We'll have to take him up there."

  "Why the initial?" I wondered.

  "Well, he can fall out and break his goddam neck for all I care. I don't like mean drunks. Getting that crap on my nylons"

  "He's not mean, just bullheaded. C'mon now."

  "Why's Jesus need the initial?" I wanted to know.

  We had a circus trying to get me up those spiral steps. And wobbling across that suspension bridge was a million laughs too-my rubbery legs moving at cross-purposes, and Jerry trying to hold me up on one side and keep on his own feet, and Bev straining her girdle on my other side, and all of us stumbling and lurching and me still worrying about the H in Christ's name, and when I gave Bev a friendly little pat on the behind she yelped, "Oh my God! Now he wants to make me. Like we didn't have enough trouble!"

  "Well," Jerry grunted, "you've done it in worse places."

  They reeled me into Tarzan's hut and aimed me at the bed with a good push. I collapsed like a bag of nails. Everything was going around like a fiery Catherine wheel and my stomach wanted to send up a rocket. The last thing I heard was Bev's voice.

  "Hey, this is a cute little layout. We'll have to borrow it from him some night, hon."

  I don't know when it was I had the feeling that little mice were playing on my shoulder blades, but it was still dark. I knew that without opening my eyes.

  I didn't like the mice on my back. I wanted them to go away. I squirmed and muttered uh-uh at them. But they wouldn't go away. They kept scrabbling at me. Then I realized they were talking to me.

  "Thax. Hey, Thax. Wake up, will you? I gotta talk to you. Listen to me, can't you? I got trouble."

  They weren't little mice. They were little hands. That didn't make me like them any better. I pushed my face deeper into the leopardskin pillow and said uh-uh again. I felt bad. I wanted to die. I didn't want to talk to anybody.

  But I wish I had. Maybe I could have helped the little guy. Maybe he wouldn't have had to die that night.

  11

  The scream belonged in Dracula's Castle. It definitely did not belong in Tarzan's tree house because it wasn't a fun scream. It was pure terror.

  It seemed to go off right under me and it went down down down, like somebody had pulled a ripcord inside my bed. It stopped.

  I sat up. My head didn't. It was in limbo. My equilibrium went weeeeee and I sagged into tilt.

  "Sick," I said in a piteous voice. "Sick sick sick."

  I opened my eyes and they swam around like a couple of punchy goldfish in little puddles of pain. It was still dark but some erratic blades of light were slicing through the bamboo struts of the tree house.

  What idiot is doing that? I wondered. Go away, idiot. Sick.


  I became cognizant of a mutter of voices rolling up under me like a restless wave and I got all panicky. What if my sick eyes were playing me a trick? Maybe it was really daylight and the marks were rushing up to the tree house to marvel at me drunk in bed in my own mess.

  I stood up carefully. I didn't fall on my face. Good boy. Now-first the right foot, then the left. I walked toward the open door and it was like wading through a room made of gelatin. My eyes were all right though. It really was night.

  A gang of people were milling around on the ground. Most of them were standing over something just to the left of the base of the other tree. I couldn't see what it was they were looking at. About five of them had flashlights and were chopping up the night with white light. One of the damn fools hit me in the eyes with a stab of it.

  "Hey, somebody's up there!"

  Big news. I started across the suspension bridge but it wasn't as easy as it looked. It and my wishy-washy equilibrium didn't get along too well. I got sick halfway across and you would have thought I'd dropped a hand grenade among them the way they yelled and scattered.

  "Sorry," I mumbled.

  I made it to the other tree and gave the trunk a loving hug. Somebody heavy and in a hurry was pounding up the steps. It was the storm trooper with the notebook and he'd caught some of the curdled booze on his fresh tan uniform shirt and he didn't seem to think it was such a hell of a big joke.

  He threw his flash right on me and it was like being hit in the face with a baseball.

  "The smart bastard again," he said. He put a grappling hook for a hand around my arm and gave me a jerk.

  "All right, stupid, down them stairs!"

  "Take it easy," I said. "I'm not myself."

  "You never have been, smart bastard."

  He gave me a shove and I slammed into the rail and reeled to the left and bumble-footed down three steps and each spine-jarring jolt did something unpleasant in my stomach. He came right after me, laying the crystalline glare of his flash in my eyes again. Stupidly, I tried to take a blind, off-balance swing at him.

  He gave me a quick short one in the gut and I folded over like a newspaper. But the people below were safe this time-I didn't have anything left in me. The storm trooper gave me another sickening shove.