Kaleidoscope Read online

  “Holy Mack.”

  She filled the wagon, an enormous, folded aggregate of flesh. The rain plastered dishwater blond curls to a forehead as broad as the belly of a tub. You could put a row of silver dollars in the creases of her arms, her neck. She turned imperiously in the downpour to gaze down the tracks. It seemed, distant as she was, that she looked straight into Jack’s eyes.

  “Princess Peewee,” Tommy anticipated his question.

  “‘Princess Peewee’? ‘Tommy Speck’? Christ, does anybody have a real name down here?”

  Speck snorted disdain for that convention.

  Seven men with ropes strained to retard the wagon’s descent down its rain-slick incline. Once that oversized cart was safely onto the loading dock, a heavy truck pulled up, its sideboards clapping inside their vertical restraints. A giant stepped out of the passenger side of the Ford, a no-shit Negro giant. Jack could not guess his size except to realize that the giant’s head and shoulders towered over the far side of the truck’s battered cab.

  The giant strolled to the rear of the truck’s bed, a massive length of chain draped over his shoulder. In a matter of seconds the links were secured from the wagon’s yoke to an anchor jerry-rigged in the Ford’s bed. Then the giant spread a tarpaulin as gently as a blanket over the reclining royal. A tender, almost reverent ministration.

  Jack spilled water in a silver spout from the lid of his hat.

  “You know these people?”

  “That’s a question either dumb or dangerous.”

  Dangerous?

  And then the lady-in-waiting leapt light as a doe from the dock into the truck bed. She leaned over the reclining Princess, restraining a fall of long, raven hair to leave a kiss on that wide forehead.

  “She a switch hitter? The looker?”

  “None of my business.”

  “She got a handle?” Jack tried another tack.

  “Luna. Luna Chevreaux.”

  “Mon chere la lune.”

  “She’ll be your boss,” Speck said.

  “Boss? How you know I’m looking for work?”

  “Everybody comes to Kaleidoscope works, Jack. Or whatever your name is. And we all work for Luna. If you ain’t willing to do that—train pulls out in six minutes.”

  Jack scanned the track. Except for these freaks the concourse was deserted.

  “Fine, then,” Romaine spilled water from his hat. “But I’m driving.”

  Tommy’s Model-T was rigged with a hand-operated clutch and brake whose function the dwarf left Jack to divine on his own. They drove due east from Tampa before turning south. The lightning and thunder had abated, but not the downpour, water falling in buckets to inundate two wide lanes of a modern asphalt highway.

  “Just finished last year,” Tommy was once more chatting away as if he’d known Jack all his life. “Before the highway—? Rain like this—? You’d be up to your axles.”

  The car swayed on narrow tires in a brutal crosswind. Jack struggling to keep the vehicle centered on what looked to be the silver belly of a snake.

  “Goes all the way to Miami,” Tommy informed him. “That’s why they call it the Tammy Ammy. Tampa-Miami. Get it?”

  “Got it,” Jack replied shortly and the dwarf howled laughter as if some hugely ingenious joke had just been passed between them.

  “How long are we gonna be on this thing?” Jack asked when his passenger settled down.

  “All the way,” Speck replied brightly. “I coulda taken a shortcut over McKay Bay, but with this rain—”

  “Gotcha,” Jack replied. “And ’bout how far’s the Kaleidoscope?”

  Tommy regarded him with some humor.

  “You don’t know nuthin’, do ya?”

  “Just took a gamble,” Jack replied coolly.

  “Well, we’ve only got ten, maybe twelve miles to go.” Tommy propped a child-sized shoe on the dashboard.

  “And exactly who are ‘we’?”

  “Oh, that’s sharp,” Tommy chortled evilly, and something about his thwarted torso sent a crawl up the back of Jack’s neck. “Very sharp.”

  Twenty minutes later Tommy directed Jack off the hard pavement to a series of ruts gleaming silver with water. A river coursed along one side.

  “The Alafia,” Tommy informed him. “The Little Alafia, actually.”

  “Where’s the Big Alafia?”

  “Other side of the Little Alafia. Dumbass.”

  A soft sand road carried them through a sprawl of trailers and trucks occupying spits of sand that spidered at random on lots spiked with pine trees and puddles of rain. Every manner of portable transportation littered those small squares of loam: trucks, caravans, wagons.

  The hell was this place? A camp for gypsies?

  “Turn here.”

  Jack turned onto a sandy boulevard leading to more permanent structures. A few cottages on one side of the flooded ruts, shacks actually. And then Jack saw a tin roof rising beyond. And then he saw something else.

  “God Almighty.”

  A tiger pacing a cage not ten feet off the road. Jack jerked the wheel on instinct. Tommy grabbed his arm. A surprising grip. Like a goddamn vice.

  “’S’matter, Jack?” the little man regarded him coolly. “Ain’t you been around animals?”

  Speck released his arm and Jack geared down, centering the truck on its sandy boulevard. There were more animals to be seen on either side of the loam. Horses and llamas corralled behind a fence. A cage of monkeys, their simian stares impenetrable. A flamboyance of flamingoes. A single lion, indifferent to his captured kingdom, the rain, or anything else.

  Jack heard an elephant, he was sure of it!

  That jungle trumpet.

  And then a bolt of lightning flashed like the bulb of an overgrown camera to klieg another structure down the road, rising above a screen of pine trees, separate from the other structures.

  “That a tent?”

  “Yep,” Tommy offered no further explanation and then, “Okay. Pull up here. No, dummy, my side.”

  Through his window Jack could make out a broad veranda. Then a steep shell of tin sheltering two stories of clapboard, some kind of flag on top. The truck’s window fogged with his breath; Jack wiped it off. There was another structure tacked onto the back of the building across the street, more of an afterthought than an improvement.

  The entire exterior looked to be papered in garishly rendered advertisement posters splashed on randomly, fantastic scenes of burlesque or faux exotica. A row of bulbs sputtered above the entering door.

  Jack could see a sign:

  *** THE KALEIDOSCOPE COOKHOUSE & CAFE ***

  —and then in smaller case beneath.

  RUBES NEED NOT APPLY

  “Go on in,” his diminutive guide piled out of the truck. “You’re lucky Half Track’ll still have some hash on the burner.”

  Jack turned up the collar of his coat, his city shoes plunging in mud to the ankles as he dropped from the truck’s cab. By the time he had slogged across the flooded street, Tommy Speck’s Model-T was already clattering away to some unremarked destination. Jack jogged up the pine-planked steps that rose to the Kaleidoscope’s verandah. He had barely gotten beneath the bib of that porch when the front door banged open.

  “What the—?!” Jack began but the challenge he intended died in his throat.

  A bald, black man about seven and one half feet tall filled the door like a silo.

  It was the giant. The giant from the train station.

  “’Scuse me,” Jack found himself backing away. This was the same Goliath he’d seen tending the fat lady’s wagon, he was sure of it. But how in hell had he beat Jack to the café?

  Did the son of a bitch fly?

  The Giant brushed past with barely a glance.

  Jack shook himself like a terrier, took a deep breath, and managed a single step inside the diner. And froze.

  He could not move. It was as if roots had grown from the soles of his feet into the yellow heart pine beneath. H
is first impulse was to vomit, to purge himself. But Jack fought that sudden nausea, that sure betrayal.

  This was not what he expected.

  This was not what he expected at all.

  It wasn’t the place itself that stopped Jack in his tracks. The interior was in most respects no different than an ordinary café—a horseshoe counter, tables and booths, hotplates and coffee pots. There were the usual photos you’d see in any eatery hung all over the walls, a mix of boxers and baseball players, and movie stars, of course, those silent sirens. In those respects the place was ordinary.

  But the people inside were not.

  If you could call them people. The first thing Jack saw on entering the café was what he took to be a great shaggy dog, an Airedale at first glance, until he realized that this was a man, a human whose face was reduced to a snout shoved from a shaggy mat of hair. And the Dog Man wasn’t alone. In fact, there wasn’t a human being in the place who wasn’t twisted or distorted or malformed or diseased in some unsettling fashion.

  Every table served a freak of nature, every countertop, chair and stool. A limbless man stretched like a python in a faux leather booth near the Dog Man. Chatting with The Serpent was a more fortunate albeit armless creature who, as Jack stared, brought a cup of coffee to her lips with her toes. Boothed opposite The Serpent and Twinkle Toes, a human bulletin board lounged, a shirtless being of uncertain gender whose skin was raised as if in Braille to convey a variety of curses, admonitions and advertisements; ‘TRAILER FOR SALE—SEE CHARLEY BLADE’, Jack could read that message across the hermaphrodite’s chest from thirty feet away. And another, ‘HE LIVES! JOHN 3:16’.

  In contrast, a woman alongside the Human Slate seemed to have been flayed alive, her skin oozing lesions and injury. Siamese twins cooperated over a bowl of some kind of goulash, two grown women joined quite literally at the hip. In a variant of that anomaly, a shirtless man sat at a table with a stillborn sibling sprouted like some monstrous tumor from his chest.

  Jack stifled his rising bile.

  “You don’t like the company, go someplace else.”

  The challenge came practically at his shoulder. Jack turned to find a good looking blonde fondling a snake the size of a ladder—and three tits. Which in the latter case confirmed for Jack that it really was possible to have an embarrassment of riches.

  “So what is it, Slick?”

  The boa sliding over her bare shoulders.

  “You goin’? Or stayin’?”

  “I’m here to work,” he swallowed.

  “Work with me,” she lifted her breasts for inspection. “So round, so firm, so fully packed.”

  One of the midgets sighed.

  “Swear to God, I had a million dollars I’d buy six acres of them tits and walk around barefoot.”

  “In your dreams, Sleepy,” she snapped and returned smiling to Jack Romaine.

  “But you, sailor—”

  She lunged her mouth to his and held him like a leech. He tried to tear away, but something pulled him to her. Closer…closer! It was a cool noose, and smooth. And it moved.

  “JESUS!”

  The snake hissed in his ear and the freaks roared laughter.

  “Kiss me like you like it and I’ll take him off,” she offered.

  “Take him off, bitch, or you can kiss my ass.”

  “Oooooo,” she cooed. “I like this bad boy.”

  “Let him go, Cassandra.”

  The order came with bored authority from a woman with no legs who rolled from behind the counter, lipping a cigarette atop a platter rigged with roller skates.

  Cassandra hissed along with her snake.

  “You want your pet? ’Cause I was just looking for somethin’ to put in my stew.”

  “Mystery meat!” somebody chortled and the others joined in.

  “Mystery meat, mystery meat…!”

  “Shut up or you’ll be shittin’ beans and grits,” the truncated woman warned and the house settled down.

  “Come on, Merlin,” Cassandra pouting as she uncoiled her constrictor from about Jack’s neck. “Looks like this Johnny’s lost his pencil.”

  “Don’t mind Cassandra,” the woman shoved herself back toward the counter. “She doesn’t get laid enough.”

  And then, glancing back to Jack.

  “Comes to that, I don’t either.”

  Clearly there were rules here that Jack was expected to learn.

  He trailed his savior to a stool at the counter.

  “You must be Half Track.”

  “Bright boy.”

  “Jack Romaine,” he leaned over to offer his hand.

  She snorted. “Okay. Well, ‘Jack’, meet your neighbor; that’d be ‘Penguin’.”

  A female on the stool beside him extended a hand with fingers completely webbed in flesh.

  “Charlene Amethyst Bouchet. ‘The Penguin Lady’, I’m sure you’ve heard of me? I was in Jersey last week, but we got shut down, so I’m bedding early.”

  “Tough break,” Jack guessed a reply.

  She shrugged. “Somebody’s palm didn’t get greased.”

  “Always a possibility,” the Dog Man sympathized with a heavy accent. “Unless, of course, you’re with Barnum or one of the larger shows.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yer famous, Jo Jo,” the web-handed performer turned to Jack. “These circus riffraff. Always putting on airs. Not I. I’ve worked the Big Tent; I admit it. But I’m carney to the webs of my feet.”

  “Hey, Cracker Jack, you gonna jaw all night?” Half Track interrupted. “Or are ya gonna eat?”

  “I could use some chow,” Jack was glad to change the subject. “What you got?”

  “Frog legs are always good,” Penguin suggested brightly.

  “I’m sure they are.”

  “What? You never had frog legs?”

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  “Should try ’em.”

  Penguin reached behind the counter to fetch a jar filled with frogs.

  “See?” she used her hands like flippers to capture a green-skinned entree.

  “You cook him or what?’

  “No. I take him with water,” she gathered a glass.

  “Water?” Jack kept a poker face.

  “Well, beer’s better but, what the hey,” she said and popped the frog into her mouth. A swig of water, then, and the amphibian was down the hatch.

  Jack’s gills went green as the cookhouse roared laughter.

  “Nice trick,” he managed, finally.

  And then came a squeaky voice apparently from somewhere inside The Penguin Lady’s bulging throat.

  “‘Let me out! Let me out!’”

  She heaved once and the frog spilled from her mouth alive and well and hopping for freedom off the counter.

  The freaks cheered. Jack felt suddenly dizzy. Disoriented.

  “Here,” Half Track shoved a steaming bowl beneath his face. “This’ll put some hair on your feet.”

  “Maybe I’ll just go with some coffee.”

  “’S’matter, Jack?” a new voice challenged. “Something kill your appetite?”

  Luna Chevreaux had shed her rain-soaked shift for a dry change of cotton. She strolled across the café, bare-shouldered and tall. Jack could not miss the high mound of breasts, the curve of belly beneath. Raven hair falling straight as a Seminole’s down that long, long back.

  But there was something about Luna which Jack had been unable to see when he first saw her at the train station, a detail that in the mix of elements and distance was camouflaged. It was her skin. Luna’s skin was not tanned as might be expected from years in the sun. But she was not white, either. And she was not black.

  Her skin was blue.

  Not the blue of bannered flags nor of robin’s eggs or summer skies. Something like a muddled bruise stained the lady’s skin from the tips of her sandaled feet to the roots of her jet-black hair.

  “What? Got a rip in your knickers?”

  “No,” his mouth was dry. “It�
��s nothing.”

  “Liar,” she said and a hiss rising from one counter spread like steam around the knotted interior.

  Even leaning on the counter Luna looked down on Romaine.

  “You don’t really think anybody buys your little come-along, do you, Jack?”

  “Come along?”

  “You’re no carney.”

  Hisssss…. Jack measured the distance to the door.

  “Why’d you come here?” she pulled a stool over.

  “I’m…s…tarting over.”

  Her smile was brittle. “Everyone here starts over.”

  “Then I’m no different than anyone else.”

  Luna shook her head.

  “Where you’re wrong, mister. See, in this place we are the normal people. We live here. We eat and drink and shit and screw along this little stretch of water and sand and nobody, nobody looks at us like we’re odd or retarded or cursed.

  “We are the everyday folk at Kaleidoscope and you, Jack, or whatever your name is, are the freak.”

  Jack met her agate eyes.

  “Fine. I’m the freak. Now, what about a job?”

  She reached out to examine the wartime souvenir pinned to the lapel of his suit.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “I stole it,” he answered shortly, and she almost smiled.

  “Half Track—”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Have Tommy get him a room. But no credit.”

  Her moon-blue hand journeyed from his lapel to linger over the knot of his tie.

  “This one pays cash.”

  Chapter seven

  First-of-Mayer—a newcomer on the show.

  Jack emerged from the café to distant thunder, like a bowling ball striking faraway pins. No lightning remained to strobe the sandy street, but large, solitary drops of rain slid in silver balls off tin roofs or needles of pine. The single road that connected the various vehicles, wagons and shacks of the settlement was by now a muddy quagmire. If this was the place that had been Alex Goodman’s hideout, Jack was not impressed. Anybody slick enough to steal a quarter million in bonds shoulda been able to find a better stash than this motleyed hole.