Kaleidoscope Page 16

  Jack reached for a Pall Mall and a match.

  “I think we’ve over the hump.”

  Luna rose from her ottoman.

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  Tommy Speck was grinning ear to ear.

  “I never saw a brodie do anything like this!”

  A brodie! Speck called him a brodie!

  An unfamiliar emotion filled his chest.

  “We still need Doc to check them out,” he cautioned. “But everything I can see looks copasetic.”

  “Wouldn’t have made it at all without you, Jack.” Tommy squeezing his arm like a familiar.

  Jacques stirred awake to see his visitors.

  “(How is Marcel?)”

  “(He’s fine,)” Jack assured him. “(You’re both fine.)”

  “(You saved two lives this week, mon ami.)”

  “(Can’t afford to lose our musicians, can we? Especially two such distinguished performers.)”

  “(We do not play that well.)”

  “(Better than any Siamese I ever saw.)”

  Luna’s smile lit Jack up from the inside. Something warm, there, that he had not felt in a long, long time.

  “Why don’t you grab some chow?” she suggested to Jack. “See me when you’re done.”

  Was still early in the morning when Jack approached Luna’s café, and even in the short walk across the street he sensed a change in atmosphere that had nothing to do with climate. Veteran performers who normally disdained even to acknowledge his presence met Jack’s eye squarely as he crossed the street. Some dipped a chin briefly. Jo Jo, “The Russian Dog-Faced Man”, even spoke.

  “Mornink to voo, Jock.”

  There were a score or more of geeks waiting inside Luna’s café, obviously lingering late over coffees or orange juice. Gregory Lagopolus, the performer who kept the dead-born twin growing out of his chest always fully dressed, greeted Jack from a table he shared with two ordinary boys. Had never even occurred to Romaine that the geek might have sons of his own.

  “Bonjour, Jack. Bravo.”

  Nods and smiles from every booth and table seconded Lagopolus’s voiced sentiment.

  Jack was not accustomed to ever feeling embarrassed, so why, now, in this company, was the color rising?

  “We are proud to be associated with you, my boy,” Flambé crossed over to slap him on the back and with that the other performers rose like deacons to lay hands or flippers or some other sort of truncated member on their now-accepted brodie.

  “Set yerself down, Jack.” The command came from Half Track.

  Jack produced his required two bits.

  She pushed the coins back.

  “Not this morning.”

  For a brief tour of moments Jack gave himself over to the cookhouse bonhomie. The carneys wanted every detail of the twins’ ordeal and Jack’s role in it. Now and then Tommy Speck would take over and you’d think a change of bandage or bedpan was brain surgery. In those moments, Jack could almost forget about Oliver Bladehorn and Arno Becker. He could almost dispel the fear for his family, that cloud hanging over his son and Mamere. He even managed, for a short while, to suppress the plain truth that while he accepted these people’s trust and basked in their praise, he was in truth no more than a confidence man, a thief.

  Whatever joy he felt could not last.

  And sure enough as Jack devoured his free bacon and eggs and grits and got through his second or third mug of coffee, the feeling grew that his sins were too deep to be sponged away in any baptism. Because no matter what the carneys had come to believe, Jack knew that he was a Judas. He knew that he had been sent with forty pieces of silver not to save these people but to exploit them, to use them.

  For a second, he had the overwhelming impulse to come clean, to tell all the gathered citizens that he was here to rat, to steal. That he was here to con the carneys on behalf of a bloodless gangster in Cincinnati.

  But suppose he did confess? Suppose Jack threw himself on the mercy of Luna and her fellows—what then? Surely betrayal outranked petty theft on the geek scale of offenses. Wouldn’t the carneys visit an even worse vengeance on Jack than they had on Charlie Blade? And why should Jack expect any mercy?

  Jack left the café trying to ignore the knot in his gut. He had already decided to avoid Luna Chevreaux. Better to be shoveling shit than risk unmasking himself in a vulnerable moment. But that decision was taken from his hands when Luna turned from a conversation she was having with The Giant, standing outside her apartment, to greet Jack on the street.

  “Jack, you eaten?”

  “Ah, yeah. Just.”

  “Hold up, I’ll join you.”

  The Giant bundled off on some chore and Luna strolled over.

  “Thought I might go to the river. Wanta come?”

  “I prob’ly should check with Tommy.”

  “Tommy’s off today. So are you.”

  They followed a sandy rut leading away from the café and apartment, past the sagging awning of the telegraph office.

  She gave no hint of her intentions. No explanation. They left the familiar road in short order to reach a winding, single-file path crowded with brambles and blackberry vines beneath walls of cypress and pine. The morning was quiet, except for the fitful breeze. Jack watched the play of Luna’s back as she led the way. The sway of her hips inside those cut-off trousers.

  The stride of her legs seemed to pull wires from every other part of body. He watched the small muscles of her spine relax and contract with each step, the cerulean skin softer in the forest-filtered light. Her hair swaying coal black and uncombed.

  She scooped a handful of berries off a low-hanging vine without pausing. He followed suit and picked up a swipe of thorns and she laughed. The path terminated at a rotting conglomerate of timber that used to be a pier. A boat badly needing paint was tied off. A motorboat, Jack realized.

  “Check the fuel.” She checked a gallon tank and primed the aging Gebhardt’s carburettor, and within moments they were gliding down the Alafia River.

  Luna settled at the tiller. Jack sprawled against a bait box amidships. The Moon Lady cut the inboard as soon as the current allowed, so that their boat drifted in silence. A slender mist clung like an orphan to water smooth as glass. Heron and egret plied the tributary for their morning feed. “Over there,” Luna pointed, and Jack saw the v’d wake of an alligator trolling for bass or perch or unwary birds.

  Even with the mist it was easy to see that the river was crystal clear, and pristine. There were no signs of human society on the water or riverbank, no homes, no houses, no buildings or camps of any sort. There were not even any fisherman out that morning. Plenty of fish, though, largemouth hiding beneath fallen cypress or in the roots of water oak. Waiting in that ample shade for a waterbug or moth to dimple the surface. Or some other insect. As they idled, Jack lit a cigarette, needing the glow of tobacco. He inhaled. And then a straw of water spat from the river to douse his fire and face.

  “The hell was that?” Jack stared at the limp butt in his hand.

  “An archer fish.” Luna smiled as she tossed him a rag. “They can take down insects five, six feet above the water. Or cigarettes, apparently.”

  Apart from spitting fish and gators there were other hazards. Luna grabbed an oar to push off a cypress knee that ranged like the tusk of a rhinoceros just below the surface. Tear hell out of a boat, he was told. Keep an eye out.

  It was good duty, Jack had to admit. After a short while Luna refired the inboard. Twin cylinders pumping pocka-pocka with a tang of gasoline. They were not pushing the pistons to any extent; the bow of their boat barely raised off the water. Even so Jack had to lean far over to dip his hand into the water running by. Not a sound rose above the skiff’s baffled exhaust. A flight of mallards sweeping by like a squadron of aeroplanes, but silent, low to the water. They had just banked past a magnificent arbor of weeping willow when a raucous cry penetrated.

  “Osprey,” Luna nodded starboard and sure enough Jack saw a
predator big as a buzzard preening on the peak of a bald cypress ashore.

  “They feed on fish, mostly,” Luna spoke above the engine. “But turtles, too. I’ve seen an osprey pick up a turtle and drop him from a hundred feet. Bust that shell like an egg!”

  “My son would get a kick out of this,” Jack sang back

  “Your son?”

  She cut the engine and again they drifted.

  “You have a son?”

  “In Chicago. Him and my Mamere. My wife was from France. Gilette. Met her during the war. She made it past the Germans and the gas and the artillery just to die over here of the damned influenza. So Martin grows up with me. Me and his grandmother.”

  “Good kid?”

  “All American. Babe Ruth and baseball and every hero you can name. ’Cept for his father; I haven’t exactly made that list.”

  “Fathers don’t have to be heroes for their sons.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “No. They just have to be fathers.”

  “I strike out on both counts.”

  A rib of clouds suddenly sabotaged the sun’s warming rays. The river turning dark and damp and green as jade.

  “Place ahead involves a daddy, of sorts.” Luna started the engine with a turn of the flywheel. “If you’d like to see.”

  “Sure.”

  She leaned on the tiller and slid their shallow-drafting craft toward the far shoreline, banking again downstream for another short run. She throttled back abruptly.

  “There. Over there.”

  Jack capped his eyes with his hands. A strange skeleton of iron rose on a spit of land shoved like a dwarfed peninsula into the river.

  “What is it, some kind of animal cage?”

  “It’s a cage,” she uncoiled a line. “But not for animals.”

  They tied the boat off and jumped onto land that you couldn’t call dry; Jack sank up to his ankles. The cage rose in a rough dome eight or perhaps ten feet high and approximately the same diameter, set on a perimeter of railroad ties. Vines laced with briars sharp as knives twined through the gridded bars. Palmetto had broken through the dirt floor inside. Luna dropped the lockless chain which secured the bowl’s gate, the links jangling briefly, like chimes.

  “C’mon.”

  Jack followed her inside.

  “Fella name of MacCready had a daughter he couldn’t marry off,” she began without preamble. “She was a sweet girl. Born with lots of hair.”

  “My son has a head of hair,” Jack offered, but Luna shook her head.

  “No. I mean hair all over. Everywhere. Like the fur of a cat. She tortured herself at first, trying to get rid of it. Trying to look like everybody else—pitiful. And of course that didn’t work and when she got of age and none of the boys would have her and when her daddy got tired of the extra mouth to feed, he got the idea of putting her on display. Here. Right here in this cage.

  “‘The Cat’s Cradle’, people called it, and MacCready put his girl on exhibit naked, like some kind of puma for people to pay and see.”

  Jack saw how the cage was exposed to the river. Easy to see. He tried not to imagine.

  “People threw their nickels and dimes and pennies into the cage. Then Old Man MacCready, he got the idea of dressing himself up in boots and a tunic like a damn lion tamer or some such. Got himself a whip.

  “He just used it for effect, first time or two, but he found out quickly that if he lashed his girl some, the natives would go crazy. Start throwin’ quarters instead of nickels. Sometimes even silver dollars, if he lit into her good enough.

  “Wasn’t long before people started comin’ from all over to see ‘The Cat Woman’. MacCready took to leaving her in the cage. Built himself a lean-to right over yonder. So he’d be close to work, I guess. Probably figured with her hair she wouldn’t mind the mosquitoes. Not any more than an animal would, anyway.

  “Some of the rubes didn’t think she was genuine, so he’d force her to defecate in the cage, and if she balked or froze up or was just plain constipated, he’d beat her. She’d shit, then. That was always worth an extra buck or two.”

  “What happened to her?” Jack asked.

  “One day MacCready’s out here, all set for business as usual, only by now some palmetto had grown into the cage. Just like you see here. And the daughter had gnawed herself off a length. He had her eating everything from squirrels to fish guts for the crowd’s pleasure, so gnawing a palmetto frond would have fit right in.

  “There was a good crowd, apparently. And like any good barker MacCready took his time buildin’ ’em up. Teasing them to a frenzy. Finally it was time for the real thing. The old man turned to show the rubes the whip and she jumped him from behind and drove a palmetto frond right through his eye.

  “Of course, that happens you naturally jerk up on instinct to pull it out. That’s what old MacCready did, and when he did she reached around with those nails grown long as a panther’s and gouged out the other eye.

  “Now he’s blinded. She took his whip and beat him ’till he begged. Beat his sorry ass to rags. Wasn’t anything the natives could do—they were locked out. Time somebody finally got the sheriff out here she’d bullwhipped Old Man MacCready to his death.”

  The river burbled by, smooth and serene.

  “Christ,” Jack shivered.

  “Think you’re a shit father? Just remember MacCready. Now, come on,” she ducked out of the cage. “I know a happier place.”

  The morning’s mist survived only in isolated wraiths now, tendrils of vapor coiled beneath a limb of willow or cypress. Luna trolled her boat off the river into a narrow creek, the boat’s bottom scraping past a sandbar, but then the channel deepened and widened to reach a crater that appeared to be boiling water.

  “This some kinda hot spring?”

  “Artesian, at least. Ever seen one?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  She was unbuttoning her boy’s shirt.

  “Swim with me.”

  She dropped her top, her shorts. Jack had never seen a woman so large or muscular except, he realized, in a circus. Lately he had been noticing that, her thighs, her back. The skin was just skin, seemed like.

  “Time’s a wastin’,” she dove naked into the spring’s cobalt boil.

  Jack followed gamely. He stripped and dove in and his heart threatened arrest before he could break the surface.

  “JAZSUS—!”

  She hooted laughter.

  “JAZSUS CHRIST!”

  The water was cold as ice! It was arctic cold. It closed on his chest like a glacier. So cold his hands ached, his feet. Jack was startled to see that his fingernails were already turning blue and as for his balls—? He couldn’t goddamn find ’em.

  “Mother ffff ffff ucker!” he stuttered.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  She rolled onto her back. The water coursed between her breasts and lapped into the bowl of her belly.

  “I love this place,” she padded over to the boil and Jack was amazed to see her body lift with the force of the aquifer’s flow.

  “Move around, Jack, or you’ll freeze.”

  He kicked into a crawl to reach her, the water coming from below, like some great giant hand lifting.

  “You don’t even have to work!” he marveled.

  She stroked over to meet him, that cold hand below, supporting them both. It was impossible to sink, perhaps even to dive, in the face of that artesian pump.

  They kissed over the heart of the spring, deep and long. Her skin was not rough at all, Jack was surprised to discover. It was smooth and warm and toned as a trapeze artist’s.

  “You still chilled?”

  “Yes,” he had to admit.

  “Let’s get warm.”

  She must have felt his erection, Jack figured, and so when she broke free he did not know at first whether to follow. But when she reached the shallows and turned to him waist-deep and looked at him, he knew.

  They coupled in the water like a
pair of otters, her hair black and sleek down that marvelous spine. Two lovers at the spring’s edge, the water boiling cold around them. Slowly, at first. Then more urgently.

  “Hold on!”

  She kept the lobe of his ear between her teeth.

  “Hold it!”

  But finally he could not. An osprey cried out with their climax. Jack felt the welcome sun on his back.

  They swam afterward, briefly, leisurely, and dressed. Then back to the boat and the river, her breasts pressing through the khaki of her damp shirt to fill the hollow beneath his chest.

  It had been so long since he had felt anything like this. Anything at all like it. The water sailed by, the bow lifting now with the throaty labor of its inboard.

  “Is there anyone else like you, Luna?”

  “You mean with my skin?” Her response was matter of fact.

  “Yes.”

  She smiled.

  “There are whole families of us. Doesn’t hit everyone, but often enough so that where I grew up we weren’t thought of as being particularly different than anyone else.”

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “Good, how?”

  “It’s just I’d hate to think you were like that woman in the cage.”

  “I am the woman in the cage, Jack. Every geek ever born is. Difference between me and that poor girl—? I choose my cage. And I keep the take.”

  Luna seemed perfectly at peace on the silent way back. Jack was torn with warring emotions. He had never made love to anyone that he intended to use. Or to betray. Could he have Luna, or anyone like her ever again? Had something twisted in the years of cards and cheating and sad, speakeasy cons?

  Jack dropped his hand into the silver river. Maybe this place was different, he told himself. Maybe down here, with these people, a man could really and truly start over.

  Jack held onto that thought or hope or fantasy, the very possibility of a new life rising like the water from the spring, bearing him up. You didn’t need a lot to live down here. You could make do. Martin would love it, he was sure. Clean air and fishing. And baseball, too, you bet. You could always find a ball and bat, but first—