Kaleidoscope Page 14

  “Sure, Jack? You sure that’s all there is to it?”

  “What do you know about Goodman?” Jack slipped his towel beneath her hands.

  “Come to my parlor,” she pulled away. “And maybe you’ll see.”

  She lived as if on the road, in a caravan, a kind of customized wagon set on truck axles for tow. Her snake had the run of the place, apparently. Jack spotted the python right away, wound sinuously on a high-hung shelf crammed with plaster bric-à-brac of erotica.

  Every possible variation of human copulation decorated the cheap and mobile interior. A mishmash of pagan relics completely unfamiliar to Romaine complemented the priapic display, a Zoroastrian barsom set between a bronzed Horus and a wooden post dedicated to the goddess Asherah.

  “Leave your dirties outside,” she said and pulled him a bathrobe off a hook.

  Jack tried to ignore the snake and the statuary. He slipped on the welcome terrycloth and within moments was installed opposite Cassandra at a small hardwood table, perfectly round, inhaling some kind of incense lit with a taper by his hostess. She had already dropped her own robe to display twin cleavages on a single chest.

  Jack found himself watching the rise and fall of her breasts. They were, all three of them, remarkably firm. Rising, falling again with the chant of some mumbled incantation. There was, naturally, a crystal ball between them. Jack wondered if he picked it up and shook it he might not see some domestic scene in miniature inside. Snow falling on a New England farm, say. Sheep grazing beside a crystal stream.

  “In all fairness,” he interrupted the prophetess’s droning meditation, “I have to tell you I think this is a crock.”

  “That is Cassandra’s Curse,” the voice seemed not her own. “To prophesize and yet not to be believed.”

  There appeared to be no resentment in that statement. Perhaps a touch of melancholy. She reached out to take the translucent ball and Jack saw an elaborate analemma, its figure-8 tattooed down the length of an arm.

  She cradled the ball with both hands. Eyes blinking wide open as a doe’s.

  Did it seem to glow brighter, the ball? What kind of trick was that?

  “I see two men,” the voice was disembodied. Remote. “You. And Good Man. But you do not touch. You do not meet.”

  Was that a smile tugging at that ripe, ripe mouth?

  “The signs say that you have never seen Alex GoodMan. That he is, for you, a mystery. But not to meeee…”

  Jack scowled contempt.

  “Better oil your ball. I already said I met the guy. At a speakeasy. In Cincinnati.”

  Cassandra appeared not to have heard a word he said.

  “You do not know him,” she contradicted calmly. “And yet you seek him. Why is that?”

  She wasn’t looking into the ball, now.

  “Aren’t I supposed to be the one asking the questions?”

  “Ask then,” she opened her arms in invitation.

  What was that stirring in his scrotum—?!! Jack jerked his hand to his crotch.

  “It’s not the snake,” Cassandra smiled. “Not mine, anyway.”

  Jack felt himself go crimson.

  “Goddamn it, cut the games! When did Alex get here? How well did you know him?”

  “He came to Kaleidoscope a year ago,” she replied directly. “Perhaps a little more.”

  A straight answer. Or…was it?

  “You had to know him, then,” Jack pressed. “He couldn’t have been a stranger.”

  “No stranger to anyone, no. In fact, in many respects I would say he was exactly like you, Jack.”

  “Like me.”

  “Unsure of himself. Uncertain. Frail in a number of ways, addicted to compulsions over which he had little control. A man starting over.”

  “So what did he do before?”

  “There is no ‘before’ for the man starting over.”

  “Not much of an ‘after’, either, apparently, ’cause by September he was dead.”

  “Dead, yes. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that.”

  “So what killed him?” Jack leaned forward to her. “What exactly? I need to know if what I’ve heard is true.”

  She gazed into her ball. He saw the three breasts rise and fall and his stomach lurched.

  “Cassandra?”

  He couldn’t tell if she was listening. If she could hear him.

  “What about Alex Goodman, Cassandra? Was Alex asking too many questions? Was he looking for something, maybe? Was he close?”

  “Close—? To what?” She wove long, gypsy fingers about the ball, the glow from inside passing through the beds of her fingernails.

  “You either know or you don’t, dammit.”

  “I…see…a man,” a sheen of sweat had broken as suddenly as if she had been doused. “I see a frightened man, but aroused. I see a woman as well, also frightened. An enormous woman. An Aphrodite.”

  “This is bullshit. You aren’t telling me anything I haven’t already heard.”

  Her eyes snapped up to meet his. Wild, feral eyes. “You have to pay.”

  Jack tried to rise from his chair and found he could not.

  “The hell do you mean, ‘pay’?”

  “Prophecy is no good unless paid for. The old oracles understood that. They were wild, those ancient women. They took their geld in sex. Our word ecstasy comes from their rituals, did you know that, Jack? From their loins, their breasts, their lips….”

  She was touching herself, her breasts, her pudenda.

  “Men were known to die in coitus,” she moaned. “Their hearts burst with pleasure! But some survived. The best. The strongest.”

  She leaned across the hard, round table. Jack tried again to stand, to withdraw, but again could not.

  She smiled, her lips beckoning ripe as poisoned apples a mere breath away from his own.

  “What about it, Jack?”

  Her tongue teasing like a snake’s.

  “Feeling lucky?”

  His erection jammed up beneath the table and the thought occurred that maybe this was the payment she really wanted, and he thought what the hell, he might as well—but then he saw her chest again.

  “Jesus!”

  He leapt from the chair.

  “The fuck you trying to do to me?!”

  “Do what people do, Jack.”

  “God-damned witch!”

  There was a sadness in her face, but also a dreadful resignation. Cassandra The Prophetess threw a shawl over her crystal seer.

  “The ball is dark.”

  “Cassandra. Please!”

  “That is all I can do.”

  The next day’s work detail did not, as Jack expected, take him back to clear the littered midway. In fact, Friday morning found the gambler unexpectedly and blissfully free of Tommy Speck’s sarcastic supervision. Instead he was told at chow to repair to Peewee’s tent in service of her elephant.

  A truck trailer piled high with hay awaited. Jack unloaded bale after bale beneath Ambassador’s reproachful inspection.

  The animal snorting on its chain tether. Those African ears stirring the moist morning air. Jack stumbled over yet another bale. Ambassador once again snorted contempt.

  “Look, yer honor, you don’t like the way I’m doing this? Do it yourself.”

  As if in response to his imprecation, the elephant’s massive head dipped, the chained tether straining taut as the bull lunged toward the trailer. Jack scrambled for safety, but there was no need. Ambassador leaned over the trailer, curled a bale of hay onto his trunk and plopped it onto the tentside stack neat as aces.

  “The hell you need me for?” Jack muttered. But he chipped in anyway, man and beast now combining their efforts to finish the task in short order. Jack was headed back to his shack feeling pretty good when a commotion from among the caravans drew his attention. Loud voices. Strident. Angry.

  Romaine jogged past the Sugar Shack and lion’s pen to find Flambé pitching a fit outside his caravan.

  “It was he
re in my truck! ALL of it! And it’s GONE!”

  A score or more of geeks and working men convening, now, from all about the camp. Jack saw Tommy Speck pushing through the milling crowd, Luna Chevreaux tall and calm in his wake.

  “It’s gone!” Flambé appealed wildly. “GONE!”

  “Easy, Flambé,” Luna commanded. “Now, what’s missing?”

  “FIFTEEN DOLLARS!”

  Fifteen clams?! The old queer was in a hussy over fifteen singles?

  But Jack cut his chuckle short when he saw the reaction of the freaks around him. A sinister silence was fallen over the misshapen community.

  Flambé turned his attention straight to Jack.

  “There’s only one man here new to us.”

  All eyes swivelled onto Romaine.

  “That’s a pretty quick call,” Luna Chevreaux cautioned calmly.

  “But Flambé’s right, he is the only one we don’t know.”

  “We know he’s not here for fifteen dollars,” Luna replied and Jack tried to keep a poker face.

  She knew what he was looking for? Is that what Luna meant?

  But Chevreaux’s attention was not at present directed to her new brodie. She was scanning the carneys, looking over the heads of everyone except The Giant.

  “Where’s Blade?”

  Heads turned with a murmur of queries. Two heads in the case of Jacques & Marcel.

  “Try his trailer?” Tommy suggested.

  “His trailer,” Luna struck off in that direction and every single geek followed.

  Charlie Blade’s trailer looked like a suitcase on wheels, posters from a hundred shows pasted on scarlet walls peppered with the impact of his throwing knives and sword. Billboards from Maine to California pasted like marquee on a rolling nightclub.

  The up and comer was propped on a set of milk crates outside his rolling home, eyes glazed over a cigarette burning to the nubs of his fingers.

  Luna marched straight up to Charlie’s crated stoop. Tommy Speck took one flank, The Giant her other. Other residents spreading in a large crescent behind.

  Charlie smiled languidly.

  “Morning, Boss Lady.”

  “I need to see your trailer, Charlie.” Luna got straight to the point.

  “You ain’t seein’ nuthin’,” Blade lipped over his cigarette, and a chill seemed to settle.

  “Giant,” Luna’s eyes never left Charlie as she addressed the camp’s strongman.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Kick in the door.”

  The black man had barely started for the trailer when Charlie pulled a sword from a crate.

  Jack saw it coming. He leapt between the black man and Blade, caught the edge of the sword on his brass knuckles and then stepped inside to kick Charlie hard in the balls.

  Blade went down swallowing his privates on the sandy street.

  “…Fuggin’…bitch!”

  “The door, Giant.”

  Took one size eighteen boot to kick the door off its flimsy hinges. Luna ducked her head to enter.

  For a few seconds there was nothing to be discerned other than the sword-swallower’s mumbled curses, the gentle rocking of the trailer on balding tires, the chassis squeaking in accommodation of Luna’s shifting inspection. But then the thud of something substantial could be heard as it was dumped to the trailer’s wooden floor and moments later Luna emerged.

  The lunar lady raised one hand to display a syringe to the gathered carneys. In the other hand she displayed a sheaf of green-backs and a bindle.

  “Ten bucks for the smack would leave…” she counted the one-dollar bills remaining. “…five bucks change. Give this to Flambé, would you, Tommy? Tell him I’ll make good for the rest.”

  “How ’bout the snow?”

  She did not reply. Instead she handed the stash to Giant.

  “Put it back inside.”

  “No!” Blade pulled himself to his knees. “You can’t! You got no goddamn right!”

  “You know the rule, Charlie.”

  A low, feral growl rippled through the gathered congregation. It rose a pitch higher as Charlie crawled back to reach the cover of his trailer. Higher it rose!

  Jack felt his skin crawl.

  Charlie Blade blubbering now like a baby.

  “Please don’t! PLEASE!!”

  It happened in seconds. The freaks rushed Charlie’s trailer like piranha onto a mired cow. Charlotte and Jenny and Jacques & Marcel and Frankie and Cassandra and all the rest, all the other half-men and bearded women, the limbless and deformed who removed from the midway seemed immune to violent activity of any kind, snapped in a fraction of a second to become a pack of jackals.

  They ripped the shutters off the trailer’s windows as though they were eyelids. They tore into the flimsy walls as if they were flesh. They gutted the interior as Charlie wailed from the ground, hauling out the entrails of the young performer’s life, ripping it to shreds as he watched.

  A saturnalia of destruction.

  Only Luna standing above the fray. And Jack outside of it.

  “What’s ‘the rule’?” Jack shouted above the frenzy.

  “You don’t steal from another carney, Jack. Not even a penny.”

  “But he’s on heroin, for Christ’s sake!”

  “He can ride any high he wants,” Luna replied, pitiless. “But not on a carney’s back.”

  Flambé arrived finally with a nozzled metal can. Charlotte, sweet Charlotte, struck a match with her webbed hands to the torch soaked in that fuel, handing it to The Giant.

  “FIRE IN THE HOLE,” the black man bellowed.

  The freaks scattering from the trailer like evil children, their anatomic digressions making for a cruel discoordination of effort, an unnatural swarm. They came crawling or staggering or waddling away from Charlie Blade’s trailer carrying everything he ever valued out with them. Props, clocks, silverware. Clothes and photos and memorabilia. Swords, of course.

  Charlie’s property redistributed in an instant among the performers of Kaleidoscope.

  “DON’ LET THEM, LUNA!!”

  Charlie begging, now.

  “LUNA, DON’T!!”

  She nodded once to The Giant. He tossed the gasoline inside. Then the torch.

  “NOOOOOOOOO….!”

  An inhalation of flame, then, as if the trailer itself were swallowing a fiery sword. Then an orange ball billowed, rising like an orchid. Black, black smoke. Blade staggered briefly toward the ruins of his home, his life, but the heat beat him back. He fell to the sand, sobbing. The carneys jeering. Whistling derision.

  “Jesus, Tommy—?” Jack turned to Speck. “Tommy?” Tommy Speck collected a vile wad from his cheek and spat it to the earth.

  “Fuck him. Serves the chump right.”

  Chapter nine

  A Brodie—the carnies’ laborer, a mule, muscle.

  The moon seeped through a scud of clouds that night to provide a capricious illumination. A pall of tar and timber smothered the usual aroma of pine needles and damp earth. Jack was nursing his first beer since coming to this godless place, the first alcohol of any kind that he’d seen since the beginning of his indenturement.

  He hunkered over a mason jar of homebrew, sitting at the base of an enormous tidewater cypress that sentineled the railway leading to Peewee’s tent. The Princess’s fabric palace glowed in the near distance like a child’s magic lantern. Jack could see silhouettes cast onto the canvas by the lamps inside. He could see Ambassador’s thrown shadow, the trunk dipping for water into the tank at the foot of Peewee’s bed. He could see The Fat Lady, too, her ample figure distorted by the play of screen and shadow and sultry breeze. Propped in her bed reading—what? What tale of romance could compete with this life?

  He would like to believe that Cassandra’s sexually charged prophecy was simply a ploy, an attempt to pump him for information, find a hole in his story. The whole business with the lights and ball was just hooey, wasn’t it? Not worth two minutes’ thought. On the other
hand…? Something about the encounter in the gypsy’s caravan lingered. How could Cassandra know with such perfect conviction that Jack had never set eyes on Alex Goodman? He hadn’t, of course—but how could Cassandra know that fact for sure? Prob’ly she didn’t know, he told himself. It was just part of her act. On the other hand…?

  Could there have been some genuine witchcraft at work in the sibyl’s warren? Some revelation that he had missed, or cut short? Jack took a long swig of homebrew. Must be going native to be thinking like this! Crystal balls? Prophecies?

  Still…Jack set his jar of beer aside. What if there was something he was missing?

  He made sure he wasn’t seen on his way to Peewee’s pavilion. He entered the tent and ran the maze of clotheslines leading to her boudoir in total darkness, emerging to see Ambassador content on his chain at the tank beside Peewee’s massively reinforced bed. An electric fan was propped on a stack of books at her side.

  Jack tapped on a quarter pole.

  “Princess? May I come in?”

  She smiled over her book.

  “Now, that was nice. The way you asked.”

  “Figured I had to improve over my last attempt,” Jack said and stepped inside.

  She put her text aside. Candide. Jack recognised the French etiology if not the work itself.

  Did Peewee parlez francais?

  “You been here, what—a week?”

  “Eight days,” he replied. “Or all my life, depending how you look at it.”

  She had enormous dimples when she smiled, Jack noticed. Dimples an inch deep.

  “A week and a day for the man starting over,” she sighed. “And have you found what you’re looking for?”

  “No,” Jack looked her straight in the eyes. “No, I haven’t. I guess that’s why I came to see you.”

  “Me?” she brushed a corn-silk curl from her eyes. “I hate to tell ya, Jack, but I ain’t exactly the fount of all wisdom. Fount of some things, maybe, but I ain’t got the book of life in here anyplace.”

  “I don’t need anything that complicated, Princess, but there’s something I gotta locate, it’s important, and I’m pretty sure Alex Goodman had what I needed. Or at least, I think he knew enough to steer me in the right direction. And I know there’s at least one other person down here knows, too—”