Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  I led the way onto the street. Angel followed close behind. Natalie cocked her head. She thought it strange, nearly suspecting that maybe her future step-dad was somehow in on whatever was going on.

  She knew that he wasn’t forthright with her mother. It didn’t take a genius to see that. She’d been in the video store a couple of times, watching him from this aisle or that, Angel oblivious to her presence, or anyone else’s, until they approached the counter. He was boring—or predictable and stable, as her mother liked to think of him—and he spent way too much time in his own head, something she was very familiar with. She also understood why kids might not have many friends, due to all the cliquish b.s. at school, but she believed that adults who didn’t hang out with anyone were always hiding something.

  She reasoned, correctly, that Angel was hiding something. And the imaginative part of her brain wanted to discover what it was while her heart didn’t want to because she’d have to tell her mom his dirty little secret, and she’d be crushed. She still had stars in her eyes. Natalie still caught her glancing at her ring there in the foyer as I and Angel walked outside.

  The wooden sidewalk that ran along the faces of all the stores was hot beneath her shoes. The dark carousel glinted in the harsh light. The horses, up close, with her really looking at them, weren’t horses at all. The lower halves were, but the upper bodies of men grew from their shoulders. Their hands were wrapped around the pole that ran from floor to ceiling in front of each one of them. There were at least a dozen, she thought. The grip they held on the bars that ran from floor to ceiling was desperate, the cast of their faces hard and tragic.

  She knew there was some old myth about the creatures. She tried to think of the name for them and when she couldn’t turned her thoughts to why this particular carousel was the only one she’d ever heard of that had them.

  Centaurs? she wondered, intrigued. She thought that was right. They looked horrible in their plight, as if the carousel floor was quicksand, and the pole each of them held a rope.

  It wasn’t the first time she felt a strange sort of pity for an inanimate object. There were many times, when she was a small child, that she remembered feeling sorry for her stuffed animals—teddy bears, penguins, bunnies—because they had a very quiet existence. Whatever thoughts they had, they couldn’t share. Whatever dreams they had, they lacked the mobility to achieve them. Poor toys. Poor girl, then, little, helpless, piling the stuffed toys on top of her in an attempt to drown out the crying coming from her mother’s room.

  *****

  Angel was fixated by the carousel. More than anything he wanted to climb up on the platform and have his father set him on one of the horses; for the lights in the sky to dim and the lights on the carousel to dance with some old baroque tune that would fuel his young imagination. But his father wasn’t really there. Father had had an unfortunate accident at one of these carnivals. He’d been wrestling with a woman in a tent, his bare butt bouncing in the air, one, two, three, four, exercise he said, the woman beneath him laughing, and later telling him to hurry up. Angel took to humping many things, trying to imitate his father, which caused his dear old man a bit of embarrassment, and brought suspicion once they’d returned home and his mother, always a sharp woman, asked him what the hell he was doing, although she knew that boys live to mimic their fathers.

  It was too bad, she’d thought, that they never mimicked their mothers.

  Later, after a big fight, she poisoned her husband with De-Con. She filled the bathtub and climbed into icy cold water and made Angel climb in with her. He didn’t understand why his mother wanted him to get into the tub, and he refused to once he touched the water and jerked his hand away. She smiled sadly at him and pulled his father’s straight razor from the corner of the tub, down by her feet. She flicked the blade open and Angel could see his reflection in it until she drug the steel down her arm from elbow to the base of her palm. Blood tainted the water, dripped from her elbow as she took the razor to the other arm. Then she smiled at him sadly before she leaned her head back against the rim of the tub and closed her eyes.

  Whether or not that is what really happened, only his case worker knows, but what Angel knew was that his heart had beat very fast, but not painfully, upon seeing his mother kill herself. He’d had no idea his father was downstairs in the kitchen, face-first in a plate of spaghetti.

  The social worker had to put him in an orphanage since what family he did have refused to take him in. Many assumed that whatever genetic defect his parents possessed—for adultery which is as bad as murder to some, or murder which is as bad as adultery to others—they’d passed on to him. It was only a matter of time they murmured. He didn’t hear them of course. He no longer had an anchor and he missed the carnival and dreamed while lying on a lumpy mattress in a long and narrow building about running away with the circus. He thought if they fed him he could be strong. If they fed him a lot he could grow into the world’s strongest boy and the awe on people’s faces would keep him humble. But truly he went hungry, an occasional meal is only a tease that in time creates a deeper, lasting hunger, and in a boy so young, a distrust of the world and those who occupy it. He’ll take any job, no matter how mundane, to feed himself physically. People have murdered for food, which is a crime.

  And yet, in the quiet hours, he must tend his spirit.

  The carousel did that for him. He hadn’t realized what it was doing at first: giving his imagination a rebirth it so desperately needed, as well as reminding him of things both good and bad he’d forgotten. He didn’t share it with anyone else, mostly because he didn’t want to, and partly because he feared being laughed at or ridiculed, but he believed in Halloween. He believed in demons, and headless horsemen, and witches, and curses. Angel reasoned that all of the stories had to come from somewhere, that they could not just be make believe, that the world we chose to see was not the actual world right in front of us.

  And he believed the carousel was proof, or that it would be soon, and he was right. But he couldn’t share the impression it made upon him to the woman he planned to marry. Her mind was more practical, motherly, nurturing, and protective. She would remove him from temptation, and he liked being tempted with what might be, and whatever he discovered he wanted to share with Brooke. And he reasoned, who could blame him, she was special and she deserved to be part of something they could only find in Gossamer, where, truth be told, they belonged for a season.

  *****

  Brooke listened for anything obtrusive or out of place in the oppressive heat.

  She knew that it shouldn’t be this hot at the end of October. Standing on the boardwalk, she also knew that many things were wrong here but had no idea how to right them until she knew what she was dealing with.

  The dust funnels danced. The sunlight grew unrelenting and was having a profound effect both on her judgment and faith. She licked dry, chapped lips, felt sweat trickle down her spine and Natalie, with the cane, spinning it slowly, paused and glanced her way.

  Her strongest instinct, as it always was, centered on protecting her daughter.

  She said, “Angel?”

  He turned slowly. His eyes were alight with some type of amusement. It was different than any other look she’d seen on his face in the year since they’d met. It was also easy, and foolish, to dismiss his expression as something due to the ring on her finger. She turned it slowly, the cool metal calming her, the turning calming her. Angel stared at the ring and his smile broadened as he watched her turn the ring. His eyes blanked when she said, “We can’t just stand here.”

  “No,” he said.

  I wiped my face with a shaking hand. “I’m too tired to go chasing after them, my husband and grandson, when I’ve done it several times now.”

  “I think you should come with us,” Brooke said. “We need you to show us where you last saw them.”

  She dug into her pocket and found her cell. She checked for service, not optimistic, and no bars showed.

&n
bsp; Angel moved up beside her. He said, “My watch stopped working, too.”

  He glanced from her phone to his wrist, shaking his arm to show her, pressing the watch to his ear, confused, but himself for a moment, which made her feel a lot better. Brooke nodded, thinking. She glanced at Natalie who stood with a cane she’d taken from inside the motel, and she was about to reprimand her for taking something that belonged to someone else, but she said, “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. We need to find some weapons, just in case. All I have are some Maxi-pads and a can of mace in my purse.”

  I sat on the carousel. My reflection danced next to me in the polished ebony wood.

  I said, “There’s no one else here. At least not living.”

  Brooke thought of objecting, pointing out that Natalie had seen someone upstairs in the motel, but her daughter said something that made her heart feel as if it quit beating first.

  *****

  Natalie said excitedly, “The truck isn’t where we left it.”

  She took a couple steps toward her mother, more than a little frightened, her knuckles white and tiny in contrast to the cane she strangled. When she looked back toward where Angel had parked his Explorer, she noticed the whirlwinds of sand—three, she counted—that spun frantically, wobbling as if top-heavy.

  She gripped the cane tighter, her mind going very still and her ears attuned for the sound of the Explorer’s motor. No one spoke for a time and it seemed she could hear the world itself, the crust of the Earth, creaking as some hidden doorway slammed shut. A tingle of trepidation rode her spine. A sputter of dancing legs, as if she had to pee, overpowered her.

  Her mother wrapped an arm around her waist, and her touch brought small comfort but not nearly enough because she knew they were being setup though normally she was quite optimistic about new experiences.

  Natalie said, “Someone else is here with us. This is all some kind of sick game or something.”

  “Or something,” Brooke said. She turned both of them toward the carousel where I sat, perched on the edge like a starving buzzard, and Angel perused the perimeter, running his fingers over the smooth, shiny wood off to my right, near the three steps that led onto the platform.

  A soft breeze began blowing. It cooled the sweat on Natalie’s skin and dried the perspiration on her mother’s forehead.

  Brooke said, “Honey?”

  Angel’s hand stopped moving.

  I frowned.

  “Angel.”

  He stood straight, wiped his hands together. He said, “What?”

  “Your truck is gone.”

  He looked past them, his brow knitted. “Where is it?”

  “We don’t know,” Brooke said.

  Natalie asked him, “Are you feeling all right?” He looked extremely pale, though she thought it might be just the contrast of the black carousel he now leaned against, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Are you sure that’s the place we parked?” he said.

  Natalie looked up at her mom. She whispered, “He’s joking right?”

  “He better be,” Brooke said. “Come on.”

  Her mother took her hand, held it a little too tightly as they walked toward the edge of downtown, to where the houses rested in identical plots of land, all of them the same style, the same faded gray, and reminding Natalie of a graveyard. The whole place reminded her of a graveyard.

  She thought, This is where things come to die… the sign was a lie.

  Her skin itched. Her eyes felt damp. They stood at the edge of the downtown, an equal distance from the first house on the side street and the carousel.

  She said, her tone thin and reedy, “We need to get out of here.”

  Her mom shook her head, which was the last thing Nat wanted her to do, because like most children she had the delusion that her mother was some kind of super hero. Brooke sighed. She said, “We can’t get far until we find the truck. It’s too far to walk back to the highway. We’ll die of a heat stroke. And I don’t want to drink the water here.”

  “Someone took it for a reason,” Natalie said. “Maybe to stop us from leaving, or maybe as a joke, but it’s not funny. And Angel is acting weird.”

  “I know,” Brooke said. “If Dorothy is playing some game then she has someone helping her.”

  “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “We shouldn’t stay and try to help that lady if she’s not going to help us look for them, if she’s even telling us the truth.”

  “Let me see that,” Brooke said, holding her hand out between them. Natalie reluctantly passed her the cane. Her mother lifted it, seemed satisfied with its weight, or maybe just its realness, the child couldn’t know for sure, all that Natalie knew was she felt naked without it.

  But she felt better a moment later, at least a little. Her mom could handle the cane as a weapon effectively where she, being so small, could not.

  She said, “You said you have your mace?” Her mother nodded, patted the purse hanging next to her ribs. Natalie blushed a little and said, “And the Maxi-pads?”

  Brooke drove the tip of the cane into the dirt. “I have some. Do you need them right now?”

  “I’m not sure,” Natalie said. “Maybe I just peed myself a little.”

  So shameful, that’s how it felt to her. She was afraid to look between her legs. She was afraid of anymore excitement. She was afraid they’d never find Angel’s truck, or that if they did it would have a bunch of mountain men cannibals surrounding it.

  Brooke said, “Do you need one or not?” A little aggressively, perhaps because of the heat, perhaps because their periods were synced and she knew that soon her own would be coming on.

  Natalie nodded.

  She whispered, “Yes.”

  *****

  Angel listened to me say…

  There once was a beautiful girl who held sway over the people of a nowhere desert town. They admired her beauty, the incantations she whispered in the light of the full moon, and the treasures she gave them in exchange for their loyalty. She kept them eternally young, this goddess, this seer of exquisite nighttime mystery. They loved her so deeply they would do awful things to protect her, and to protect the gift given.

  It went on for centuries, until a cool October night when a strange young man walked in from the cold desert. His face shown white beneath the stars, these same stars reflected in his black orb eyes, moonlight and building mating, spewing shadows about his shoulders like a cape. He wore a shirt of chainmail like a knight of old. His boots were dusty. The cross around his neck was silver and a blue eye grew from the center of it. He moved with precision.

  He seduced the young beauty who the town worshipped, his hands gentle, his lips warm and tickling her neck. He never spoke and he rarely smiled but he was so gorgeous to her that he didn’t have to.

  His touch said it all, aggressive, obsessive, insatiable, as he nipped at her neck, his teeth drawing blood, him filling her, ramming, panting, licking the sweat from the hollow of her throat.

  He loved her like the town never could. He loved her without being gifted anything, though it would be much later, after much blood was spilled, that she discovered the pleasure and security she’d blessed Gossamer with, he had possessed before he came in dusty of cloth and gleaming of eye, into their lives…

  Angel shuddered. He didn’t like the tone of my voice. It was too depressing, too filled with wistful could-have-beens. The imagery too dark when what he wanted was not darkness, but mystery and revelations. Most of all he simply wanted to climb onto the carousel and find the switch that would turn it on.

  He faced it, placed his warm palms flat against the polished wood, gazed at the pale reflection staring out at him as if from another world, him but not him, or maybe only a part of himself that he’d subdued to fit in, to survive.

  But he knew no one really survived in the end. His mother and stepfather taught him that.

  He lifted his head
, forced them from his thoughts, wanting to be happy again. The carousel could chase the blues away. He knew it. And he also knew that Brooke was angry with him and he should run and find her since she and her daughter had rounded the corner and were no longer visible, but he didn’t care. He wanted something for himself. Just this once, and for her to trust his instincts that what he wanted for himself was special, and that he’d share it with her.

  Behind him I said, “Have Brooke ride with you.”

  “She doesn’t like stuff like this.”

  “Make her. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. She’ll thank you later, after the thrills.”

  Angel shook his head. Brooke was pretty headstrong. She wouldn’t just give in to something she didn’t want to do. Most of the time he admired her for her certainty, and he could relate: sticking to what you like is easy. It’s why he didn’t ever see himself leaving his job at Block Buster unless the company completely folded, and even if that happened, he’d find another job doing the same thing with another company regardless of the pay.

  “Maybe later,” he said, kneeling to tie one of his shoe laces that had come undone. My shadow falling over him felt cool, refreshing. He finished and stood, saw Brooke and Natalie walking back toward us. Seeing them holding hands like they were, walking so casually here in the middle of nowhere, caused him to start at the sound of the my voice.

  I said, “Thank you for helping me.”

  He nodded absently. They hadn’t helped me yet, he knew, but whatever.

  If nothing else, they’d get someone who could, and then he could ride the carousel.

  *****

  Brooke thought, I’d give anything to have my service pistol right now…

  The cane had some weight to it. Some type of hardwood, ash maybe, or oak. She didn’t know their grains or colors well enough to figure it out, and it was unimportant. What was important was discovering where the Explorer was and getting out of there before things came to a head.

  She didn’t trust me at all.

  Even from a distance, she could see that I was smiling.

  The small hairs on the back of her neck rose. She had never been a good cop, nor a bad one, just did her job, most of it boring, most of it involving paperwork like the clerical work she’d done at a law firm when she’d first married Bill. It wasn’t that she needed excitement, just that she knew she didn’t have the talent or drive to pursue something more ambitious. Natalie’s security was her prime concern, and she believed it always would be, despite the moments when she desperately wanted to put her own needs first.