Kaleidoscope Read online

  “Wharton, you know her?”

  “Ah, no. No, Princess, who is she?”

  “Writer. Free thinker. Henry James calls her his angel of destruction which makes me think he needs her a hell of a lot more than she needs him.”

  Peewee broke off a drumstick.

  “Well, you gonna gawk or you gonna work?”

  “Don’t mind me,” Jack apologized, and hurried over to the stack of eye-bolted stakes that were to become the puny restraint for Peewee’s guardian.

  He stripped to the waist and got to it. There were a dozen bars which had to be pounded into place with their dozen or more tethers. Tommy had arranged the stakes to allow Ambassador a range through his normal circuit. Beyond her initial remarks, The Fat Lady appeared to ignore him entirely, returning to her competing appetites with a relish that was audible from yards away.

  Within minutes he was pouring sweat, but Jack was determined not to beg for either water or rest. He tapped a spike gently to stand, then swung the sledge back and rode it down. The impact of steel on steel was lost in the vast interior, a mere tink, like a distant hammer on a ten-penny nail.

  Over and over he drove the heavy sledge, one iron stake after another coaxed inches at a time into the yielding earth. Then to thread a chain heavy enough to hold a barge through those waiting eyes. Rounding the circuit until after some interminable interval he was returned again to the side of The Fat Lady’s bed.

  Jack grabbed his back as he straightened from his labor and found Peewee regarding him in unabashed inspection. Two small, bright eyes pressed like berries into that pie face.

  “Should keep the big fella on campus,” Jack gestured awkwardly in the general direction of the elephant. “If he’s rigged right.”

  “That’s what they said last time.” Peewee closed her book.

  “I’m not the man actually tying the tether.”

  “Never imagined you were. AMBASSADOR—”

  The beast turned to her voice. You could feel a sudden stir of air with the movement of the animal’s enormous ears.

  “Time to train, baby.”

  She raised a hand, extended it straight from her shoulder.

  “OUTSIDE.”

  The elephant snorted once, the explosion from that long trunk scattering peanut shells and sawdust. The impact of padded hooves, then, and Jack found himself backing away as the bull ambled past to find the iron track that would lead him out of the tent.

  “Impressive,” Jack reached down to collect his shirt.

  “Leave it off.”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Your shirt. Leave it off.”

  Jack dropped his uppers to the floor.

  “Turn around,” she said. “Well, go on, face me.”

  He hesitated a fraction before he complied.

  “That’s enough. Now stand a minute.”

  He stood with sweat pouring down his face and torso, pooling in crevices along his collarbone and belly. For a long time she didn’t say anything. Just lay there Roman fashion, examining him as though he were a piece of meat. Occasionally Jack imagined that he heard a grunt of satisfaction. Or a sigh of indifference.

  It didn’t stop her meal. She finished off a prime rib as though it was an appetizer. Those jaws working like a cow chewing its cud, the grease crushed from the fat coursing down her face.

  Jack thought she had to be the most repulsive thing he had ever seen. And yet something was stirring that he could not stop.

  To hell with this. His job was done, it was stifling hot (how did she stand it in here, anyhow?) and he was getting the fuck out.

  But then she spoke and he knew he could not go.

  “You’re not the rube knew my Alex, are ya?” she inquired through a mash of potatoes.

  Jack froze.

  “Cat got your tongue, Pretty Boy?”

  He flushed. “Never claimed to know the man. Just ran into him, is all. Had a couple of beers, got talking, he said I might could get work down here. Why? He mention me?”

  Her smile was lascivious and Jack felt something crawling at the nape of his neck. But there was an erection, too. A hard bone growing in his trousers. He shifted to conceal that embarrassment.

  Her eyes twinkled.

  “We were real pals, y’know. Alex and me. Intimate, ya might say.”

  A man? With this pile of flesh? Jack didn’t want to think about it. But his dick seemed to have a mind of its own.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, sailor. Happens all the time.”

  “What do you care what Alex said?” Jack tried to steer her attention away from his crotch.

  She shrugged. “Only natural to ask. When you have a lover you wonder what he says to his friends, his buddies.”

  “We weren’t friends.”

  “I bet you weren’t,” she replied, and the menace was unmistakable.

  She shoved the cart aside as easily as a tray.

  “You feel sooooo dirty, don’tcha? And sooooo superior. Five’ll get you ten you’ll wash yer horn first time you get the chance. And then you’ll laugh behind my back.”

  “Nobody’s laughing,” Jack retorted.

  “Bullshit, all rubes laugh.”

  “I’m a brodie.”

  “You’re a rube.”

  “Makes you think so?”

  “I can read your mind.”

  “I thought that was Cassandra’s gig,” Jack retorted.

  She smiled. “Why don’t we see for ourselves, then?”

  Peewee used her sheet to wipe the grease from her hands. Then she hauled herself erect, the timbers beneath her bed complaining from that effort. Breasts falling like sacks of meal into her lap. Then she closed her eyes. Pressed dimpled fingers to her temples and then, sotto voce—

  “‘How could anybody want to fuck her?’”

  Opening her eyes. That menacing smile.

  “Is that about right, ‘Jack’? That pretty much what’s in your head? ’Course, I notice your dick’s saying something different.”

  She lowered her massive arms.

  “You come here swinging a sledge like you never used one before, doing everything you can to keep your eyes off me. ‘That bitch,’ you’re thinking, ‘Eating like a hog. How could Alex want HER? Was he drunk?’”

  “Was he?” Jack snatched his shirt off the ground.

  “Not too drunk to get a stiff on.”

  “Man had passion.”

  “He had passion for me, you prick, and that’s the part makes you itch, doesn’t it? That’s what’s got the sweat rolling off your balls.”

  “You’re painting me in a corner here, Princess.”

  “Oh, so I’m supposed to just bare my soul, tell you about my kinky sex life, my diet and my lovers and you can sit there with a straight face and a hard on and lie your ass off, and I’m not supposed to care?! Let me tell you something—”

  She lurched forward and Jack jerked on instinct to retreat.

  “Alex was good to me! He gave me what I wanted and I gave him what he wanted and anything else, anything, is nobody’s business.”

  “So you get to keep your secrets, is that it? But I don’t?”

  The smile on her painted lips spread like a gash across her face.

  “You’re in Kaleidoscope, Mr. Jack Romaine. Nobody keeps secrets from me. Not in the end.”

  Jack emerged from Peewee’s tent shaken and unsure and wary of encountering her unsupervised elephant. But, as Peewee had indicated, Ambassador was being trained. Jack was surprised to see that the same queer who swallowed fire was also a mahout. The silver-haired fire-swallower was standing before the bull elephant beneath the stand of pines which separated Peewee’s palace from the carnival proper. The same barrels Jack saw on approaching the tent were apparently on tap for Ambassador’s routine.

  “Flambé.”

  “Si, senor. I would invite you once again to enjoy my hospitality, but as you can see I am occupied. And to be honest you should take the opportunity for a bath.”


  Flambé tapped the enormous animal gently on the trunk—“Salute, Ambassador.”

  —and a padded hoof raised to extend as gracefully as any ballerina’s.

  “So you are a trainer, too?”

  Flambé tapped the trunk again and Ambassador went back to all-fours.

  “I started with elephants. I am not the best, but this one is easy. Well trained.

  “AMBASSADOR. LIFT.”

  The bull offered his trunk. Flambé stepped aboard like the damn thing was an elevator and within seconds was high above the earth.

  “Man of many talents, isn’t he?”

  Jack turned to the unfamiliar voice and found a new face at his shoulder. A new and unremarkable face smiling pleasantly from beneath a felt derby. Jack looked for missing or extra body parts and found none. So. An abnormally normal man. In his thirties, probably. Jack’s age. His hair was shaggy about his ears. He was a couple of inches shorter than Jack, very slender. Dressed for the heat in khaki tans. He carried a leather satchel.

  “Talents?” Jack tried to remain aloof.

  “Flambé, I mean,” the newcomer had a smile that pulled crows’ feet from his eyes. “The man swallows fire, tames elephants. Fashions castles from newsprint and flour.”

  Jack nodded. “He’s an article, all right. A fool, too, in my opinion. I can’t believe anybody’d trust that elephant.”

  “You mean Ambassador? Oh, he’s gentle enough.”

  “Gentle enough to stomp a fella to death.”

  “That was an extreme circumstance.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Jack replied laconically.

  The bull lowering his silver-haired trainer gently to earth.

  “You’re new to the beddy?”

  “If you don’t know that, you’re the only one around here doesn’t.”

  The man laughed easily. “Unfortunately, I am normally the last to hear anything.”

  He took off his hat to offer his hand.

  “Doctor Bernard Snyder. Please call me Doc.”

  “Doc it’ll be, then. I’m Jack Romaine.”

  The doctor took Jack’s offered hand—

  “What’s this? A brodie with blisters?”

  “I’m new to the carney, actually. Kind of starting over.”

  “Same for me,” Snyder examined the hand with the appearance of serious concern. “Left my first practice in Louisiana to start another here. You need to clean these. Infection down here can get ugly.”

  Jack took back his hand. “I was a corpsman.”

  “Ah. Military.”

  “The war, right. One nobody talks about. Are you the only medic here?”

  “Pretty much,” Snyder replaced his derby.

  “See some interesting stuff, I ’magine.”

  The physician stiffened a fraction. “I wouldn’t know what you mean by ‘interesting’. These people are my friends. Family, even. I don’t view them as artifacts.”

  Of course not, Jack thought. You’re the one regular around here they have to talk to. The guy they have to trust.

  “I didn’t mean the performers,” he lied. “I just meant that the carney’s interesting. And dangerous, too. Must be a million ways a man can get crushed or burned or cut. That’s all. Really.”

  Doc Snyder’s smile spelled relief at that qualification.

  “I got you, sure. And you’re right; I see more than the usual trauma. Have to be at a lumber camp to compare, I think.”

  Jack smiled encouragement. “Take that guy got killed by the elephant—”

  “Alex Goodman,” Snyder nodded gravely. “Sad case.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not well,” the doc shook his head.

  “You see him? I mean, after he was killed?”

  “Certainly. I’m the coroner for the county as well as the resident physician.”

  “Jesus,” Jack turned his attention pointedly to the elephant before them. “Is there anyway to know what set the damn thing off? Was Goodman cruel to him? Provoke him, somehow?”

  Doc shrugged, “Only one near enough to see anything was Peewee. She was pretty traumatized, as you can imagine.”

  “Seems like she’s pretty tight with the elephant, though.”

  “Unfortunately a bull can turn, even on a longtime trainer. It’s tragic, but the animals do go rogue, especially the older ones. When they do they can become very dangerous.”

  “Kneel.” Flambé’s command floated through the pines and Ambassador sank gently to his forelegs, his silver-haired trainer offering a snack to the beast’s exquisitely discerning trunk.

  “If he’s a rogue, shouldn’t he be put down?” Jack wondered aloud.

  “Beg your pardon?” Doc turned around.

  Jack jerked a finger toward Ambassador. “Well, once an elephant goes rogue, he stays rogue, right? He becomes unpredictable. Happy as a clam one minute. Spooked the next.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to characterize it.”

  “Then why hasn’t Luna destroyed the thing? Why would she risk having a rogue bull kill somebody else?”

  Doctor Snyder did not reply.

  Jack slipped on his shirt. “’Course, what do I know?” He presented a movie star’s smile. “I’m just a working man.”

  Chapter eight

  The Doniker—a toilet.

  Saturday brought the rubes from Tampa and surrounding burgs to the exotic pleasures rumored to be available in the freak town of Kaleidoscope. The Hillsborough County Sheriff hovered over the midway as though it were a whorehouse that he had half a mind to shut down, but apparently Luna had the fix in. The local John Q kept their distance and the show opened without incident and ‘under the stars’, the midway raucous with grinders and pitchmen luring natives to part with their cash in return for thrills, chills, or cotton candy.

  The talkers were in their pits, pitching varied come-ons for the alibi games, sideshows and of course the carney’s piece de resistance, the ten-in-one where Peewee took her place of honor with the other geeks on display.

  “Romaine. Get the lead out.”

  Tommy Speck was harder to shed than a flea, but Jack had managed to break free of his diminutive chaperone long enough to send Bladehorn a telegram. There was actually one telephone in Kaleidoscope, in the cookhouse, but Jack did not want to risk using that contraption, not only because he knew the carneys would be listening, but also because he wanted to avoid any kind of conversation with Oliver Bladehorn. His plan, after all, was to stall for time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to lie by wire than over a telephone.

  Western Union kept an office just across the sandy street from the apartment propped on top of Luna’s café. The agent who now tapped out Morse code in the Union office used to be a circus performer before a night on the high-wire put him in a wheelchair. Jack didn’t trust HighWire entirely; no matter what animus existed between carneys and sawdust-eaters, Jack was pretty sure that HighWire would not cross Luna for his sake. But Jack didn’t have much choice in the matter. A letter would be too slow and too easy to intercept, so Jack settled on HighWire and Western Union as his best means to communicate with Mr. Bladehorn.

  Trying his best to be discreet, Jack almost ran into Luna Chevreaux on his way to the telegraph office. He spotted Luna’s long blue figure huddled with Doc Snyder, the two of them just emerging from the cash wagon which of course was not a wagon at all, but an earthbound office of tin and timber that housed the steel vault that secured every nickel and dime earned by the carnival.

  They were deep in conversation, Luna and Doc. Probably about money, Jack reasoned. Most of the big acts and their performers wouldn’t be coming to Kaleidoscope until some time in November, and many of those would not interrupt their bed to work at all. Luna’s once-a-week stand was more a hedge against expenses than a bid for serious income. Nobody was going to get rich at a beddy, that much was clear. Not from the carnival, anyway.

  Jack ducked from sight as Luna escorted Doc Snyder across the street to the big truck, the
Ford that Jack had first observed trailering Peewee in from the Tampa railroad station. Jack had no idea who owned the truck, or even if it was actually owned. It was used to haul in staples from the Tampa market and for the transport of much heavier materials related to construction or plumbing essential for the beddy’s maintenance.

  Could be any number of reasons for Doc to need a ride to Tampa, Jack mused, but somehow he doubted that a run for lumber was among them.

  Was Doc taking the community’s cash for deposit? Was there a bank somewhere in Tampa connected to an account in Luna’s name? Or, perhaps, in Alex Goodman’s name?

  Luna was still engaged with Doc as Jack slipped unobserved into the telegraph office. Cost four bits to send his carefully calibrated message to Oliver Bladehorn:

  HAVE REACHED TOWN OF KALEIDOSCOPE STOP SOUTH OF TAMPA STOP OUR MAN HAS BEEN SPOTTED HERE STOP NO WORD OF PROPERTY STOP WILL WIRE WHEN I FIND MORE STOP

  It wasn’t going to make Bladehorn happy; Jack knew that. But it would buy some time.

  Jack made sure his circuit back to the midway was inconspicuous. He was passing the young and talented sword swallower when The Great Flambé waved him over.

  “Greetings, Mr. Romaine.”

  The older man was stripped to the waist. Not in bad shape, Jack had to admit.

  “Have a proposition for you.”

  He chuckled at Jack’s reaction.

  “Nothing like that. It’s about your career.”

  “I got no career,” Jack said flatly.

  “Precisely. Do you recall Mr. Earl’s admonition? If you intend to fit in this society, you are going to need to perform.”

  “I can’t even juggle,” Jack replied.

  “Ah, but you have a natural presence,” Flambé assured him. “I can see it. You may not be in the movies, Jack, but you are on-camera, I can see that. You are performing all the time. Quite the actor, actually.”

  Was the old homo offering a compliment? Or a threat?

  “What’d you have in mind?” Jack glanced up and down the row of festive tents and stalls.

  “I think you should swallow fire,” Flambé replied, and pulled a pair of iron rods from a basin of water.