“I don’t need a badge,” said the fat gatekeeper. “I need a dollar.”
“Listen, this is police business,” the cop said.
“You’re shittin’ me,” the gatekeeper said. “The carnival’s police business?”
“Here,” I said, handing the gatekeeper a dollar. “Let him in for heaven’s sake. You’re holding up the line.”
The gatekeeper took the dollar. The cop eyed us the way cops do, said thanks like he didn’t mean it, and went inside. The gatekeeper said to me, “Man, look at this, two white guys back to back, ain’t that some kind of lucky omen or something?”
“Two white guys, one in an ugly leisure suit, means it’s going to rain,” I said.
“I can believe that,” the gatekeeper said, “That guy, I don’t think he’s on cop business at all. I think he’s too used to free meals and shit. That might work uptown, but not here. And where’d he get that suit? What the hell color was that anyway?”
“Orange or rust or dirty gold,” Leonard said. “Take your pick.”
We paid and went inside. We saw the cop walking toward the lot where the permitted vehicles were parked. He walked wide of the lot and onto the pea gravel, went over and leaned against the fence where the carnival lights were weak, got a cigarette out, lit it, and tried not to act as if he was looking at the bus. He wasn’t very good at it.
The bus door opened and Fitzgerald got off the bus, and a line of loud, excited kids came out behind him, followed by a pretty, middle-aged black woman. I assumed she was one of the kid’s mothers, helping the Reverend out.
The kids, mostly six to ten years in age, evenly split between girls and boys, bounced on their toes and stood in a line that gyrated like a garter snake on a hot rock. The woman and Reverend Fitzgerald chatted amiably. He smiled. She smiled. The Reverend went back to the bus and leaned inside, then leaned out. I thought maybe he had said something to someone inside. T.J. perhaps. From where we stood, no one was visible, but the plywood window replacements in the back and on the side could have hidden them.
The Reverend smiled at the woman again. They spoke. Half the kids went with her, the other half with the Reverend. Mr. Leisure Suit followed after the Reverend and his charges. T.J., the walking eclipse, did not make an appearance.
Me and Leonard were trying to decide what we were going to do next, when Hanson walked up and surprised us. “You assholes,” he said. We turned and got a look at him. He was his usual pleasant-looking self, but he no longer had his cigar. I presumed it was in his pocket. I hoped he remembered to put it out before he put it up. “Didn’t I just see you fucks? I said I’d let you know.”
“I’ll say this,” Leonard said, “you walk light for a big dude.”
“It’s my fuckin’ Indian blood. What you two doin’ here? I said you were out. You done more than you’re supposed to already.”
“And very well, I might add,” said Leonard.
“Don’t let your dicks get too hard,” Hanson said. “You did all right, but you had some luck.”
“So did you,” I said. “We came along.”
“You didn’t even know for sure you had a case before we showed up,” Leonard said.
“I still don’t know I got anything,” Hanson said.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“All right,” Hanson said, “you’re goddamn wizards of detection. Now go home or take in the carnival. I want you out of my way. I mean it now. I got men on the job, and they even know what they’re doin’. Well, they got an idea, anyway.”
We left Hanson and walked around the carnival. It was bright with lights and the sounds of voices and the cranking of machinery and the blasting of music, presumably conceived by ears of tin and played on matching instruments. There was the smell of sweat from excited children and tired adults, the butter-rich aroma of popcorn and the sugar-sick sweetness of cotton candy, the burning stench of fresh animal shit from the petting zoo.
We were over by the petting zoo when we came across Hiram. He was standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking forlorn as a man who’d just prematurely ejaculated. He was looking at a spotted goat.
We walked up beside him. I said, “Hiram.”
He turned and looked at me, but it took him a moment to know I was there.
“Oh, hi,” he said.
“Surprised to see you here,” Leonard said.
“Mama’s with my sister. She drove down.”
“How is MeMaw?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Same. Doctor said she could stay like that awhile. A day, six months.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” Leonard said.
“I had to get out, you know?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that. There’s not a lot you can do.”
“I just needed a break,” he said. “Even if I just end up watching a goat.”
Hiram turned back to watch the goat, and a little boy came up and started petting it. We stood there in awkward silence for a time, then said good-bye and slipped away.
“Too bad,” Leonard said as we bought cotton candy. “I like MeMaw and Hiram.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but she lived a full life. We all got to check out sometime.”
“It’s not dying I hate for her,” Leonard said. “It’s lingering. I think we embarrassed Hiram.”
“Yeah, he feels guilty. Like he ought to be with her, but there’s just so much of the deathwatch a person can take.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“This cotton candy is making me sick.”
I guess we wandered around for a couple of hours. We saw the Reverend and his kids and their leisure-suited shadow a few times, but the Reverend didn’t see us. We saw Melton, aka Mohawk, walking with a young black girl who looked as if she had not long back abandoned her training bra and dolls. They went around behind a hot dog stand and we lost sight of them. We saw Hanson a few times. He looked as sullen as ever, as if the sight of us was causing his nuts to shrink.
As we strolled, a lot of blacks looked at me like I was an exotic animal, maybe belonged in the petting zoo. And in a way, I suppose I was exotic, least here and on this night. There were only a handful of white people at the carnival, and some of them were cops.
Another hour passed, and you could smell the storm on the warm night wind. It mixed with the other aromas and became a heady cocktail. You could taste electricity in the air. The machinery that wound around and around and took the children up into the sky and back down again, creaked and whined and groaned and squeaked and rattled bolts in its metal joints and made me nervous. Off in the distance, amid that swirling darkness, was the occasional flash of lightning, like a liquid tuning fork thrown against the sky.
Not long after the lightning flashes, the machineries stopped and the rides got canceled. All that was left was the petting zoo and the booths where you lost your money trying to throw softballs into bushel baskets or baseballs through hoops.
A half-hour later they canceled the whole thing and disgruntled patrons were moving toward the gate. Before we got out of there, the rain blew in, came faster and harder than anyone would have expected. Through the sheets of aluminum-colored rain, the lights of the carnival were like winking gold coins at the bottom of a fountain, and now there was nothing to smell but the rain, and the rain was cold, and within seconds Leonard and I were soaking wet.
We made our way through the crowd and out to the car. We sat there and watched as people rushed out and cars pulled away. We watched as the short church bus came through the gate and drove off. We drove off after it.
The deluge was intense, and the bus drove slowly, and so did we, and so did Leisure Suit. He was following behind us. After a little bit, we decided to beat the bus back to the church, get our parking place. As we passed, Leonard said, “Hap, the Reverend ain’t driving. It’s that woman. I don’t see him at all.”
I drove on around, tires sloshing and tos
sing water. “Don’t mean he isn’t there. I didn’t see the woman when they left the church. He could be in back.”
“Yeah, but . . . I don’t know. Something sucks the big ole donkey dick here.”
We beat the bus, got our parking place, turned off the lights, and sat there and ate from a box of M&Ms Leonard had left in the glove box. They had melted into a colorful mess, but we ate them anyway. We were licking our fingers when the bus drove up to the church and stopped in the driveway.
“Reckon they’re staying close to the curb to help the parents out,” Leonard said. “Kids are already soaked to the bone.”
Leisure Suit drove over to the curb opposite the church and parked facing the wrong way.
“Cop is less smart now than he was earlier,” Leonard said. “I don’t think he’s even made us yet, ain’t figured we been riding around behind him and paying his way into the carnival. Mr. Sneaky, he don’t see any connection between us and him and the bus.”
“As the day wears on,” I said, “a cop’s brain settles. It’s kind of like sediment.”
“And he ain’t fueled by the magic of melted M&Ms.”
“There’s that too.”
“Ain’t the green M&Ms supposed to do something to you?” Leonard said. “I always heard you had to watch the green ones.”
“The guy at the factory, he jacks off in the juice makes the green ones, that’s what I heard.”
“No,” Leonard said, “that’s the mayonnaise at McDonald’s, or Burger King, or one of those places. It’s supposed to be a black man does it. That way it scares the shit out of the peckerwoods, ’cause the black customers, they’re in on it, it’s a conspiracy-type thing. They know to hold the mayonnaise. The white folks, they don’t all know about it, so some of ’em eat it. Oh, and the black guy, he’s got AIDS.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Ain’t that awful, a nigger with AIDS jacking off in the poor honkie folks’ mayonnaise?”
“A queer nigger, of course?”
“Without question. And he’s ugly too.”
38.
We sat there until our asses and the seatcovers seemed one and the same, then the cars started to arrive and park at the curb, beating their wipers against the rain.
It was hard to see with the rain the way it was, but we could see kids come off the bus and rush into cars, and those cars would go away, then more would show up, and a new flock of kids would come off the bus, and pretty soon all the cars were gone, and no more came. The bus cranked up, turned on its lights, drove to the back of the church.
“What now?” Leonard said.
Before I could answer, the tan Volkswagen, which I had forgotten about, came out from behind the church and turned left. The church lights gave me enough of a view to tell the driver was the woman who had been driving the bus, and she had a little girl with her. Mom, having done her duty, was on her way home with her own child.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t think the Reverend was on the bus when it came back. He could have got off out back just now, but I don’t think so. I think he stayed at the carnival.”
“We’ve been hoodwinked, and not on purpose,” Leonard said. “I can’t figure how Fitzgerald did it exactly, but he had prearranged plans with the woman. I don’t mean she was in on it—”
“I know what you mean. He had her drive the kids back, but he had a kid in mind wasn’t on the bus.”
“Someone won’t be missed. Some kid he gave a free pass to. And he had another way of leaving the carnival other than the bus.”
“If we’re right,” I said, “where does that leave us?”
“With the clock ticking,” Leonard said.
We sat silent for a moment, then almost in unison said: “The Hampstead place.”
Leonard drove us by the cop in the leisure suit. He was still watching the church. He didn’t even blink as we went by.
* * *
We made our way to the Hampstead place from Uncle Chester’s. Up through the woods on foot. The rain hadn’t slacked, and it was slow going. The wind had picked up and turned surprisingly cool, and it tossed the rain hard as gravel. Tree branches whipped and cut us, and our single flashlight did little to punch a hole in the darkness. We hadn’t taken the time to get rain slickers, so we were soaked to the skin. I wished now we’d bothered to get guns. But all we’d brought were ourselves and the flashlight in Leonard’s car.
When we got to the Hampstead place, we were exhausted. We didn’t want Fitzgerald and his brother to see us coming, so I turned off the flashlight just before we broke out of the woods, into the partial clearing.
Out there, with no light, pitch dark without moon or starlight, the rain hammering us like ball bearings, we only had our instincts to guide us. It was rough going. We could hear the boards in the old house creaking, begging the wind to leave it alone, and we linked arms and let those sounds guide us. I barked a shin on a porch step, and Leonard followed suit. We climbed onto the porch, trying to be as quiet as possible, which was difficult when you felt like your leg was broken. We found our way along the porch to the busted-out window we had used before, cautiously crawled inside.
Rain was driving into the house from the hole in the ceiling and the hole in the roof above. It was so dark inside we couldn’t see the rain, but we could hear it and feel it. We listened for other sounds, the sounds of movement, but there was only the wind and the expected creaking of lumber.
We had no recourse but to turn on the flash, and we used it to avoid the breaks in the boards, but still they squeaked as we walked. We went through the room with the chifforobe and into the kitchen, and it was dry there, and I realized suddenly that my nerves were starting to settle. The pounding rain had been like a severe case of Chinese water torture.
But as soon as we were both inside the kitchen, not really expecting to find anyone since we’d heard neither movement or seen illumination, my flashlight caught a shadow on my left, and I whipped the light that way, and the shadow came at me. I swung the flashlight, and there was a grunt and a shattering of bulb, and the light went out. Then I felt hands on me. I shifted my body and jabbed with an elbow and then there was light on the right of me and I saw Leonard out of the corner of my eye, and he was planting a side kick in a man’s mid-section, and in that same instant my hands felt their way around my injured attacker’s body, and I hip-threw him hard against the floor. Then a light shot up at me from the floor, and behind the light the shadow shape said, “Goddamn you, Hap.”
It was Charlie.
* * *
The cop Leonard kicked was named Gleason. I had seen him the day they tore Uncle Chester’s flooring up. He was the fat cop with the bad toupee Mohawk had yelled at. He wasn’t any slimmer, and now his bad toupee was wet and in the light of his and Charlie’s flashlight, it looked like some kind of strange tribal skullcap.
Leonard had really planted that kick. Gleason took a long time to start breathing naturally, but the guy had enough fat nothing got broken. Charlie wasn’t feeling that good either. He had a knot on the side of his head where I had connected with the flashlight.
“Man, that flashlight hurt,” Charlie said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Goddamn, you motherfuckers are quick.”
“How’s the head?” I said.
“It hurts, what’ya think?” Charlie rubbed the knot on his head. “Goddamn.”
“Sorry, Charlie. If it’s any consolation, I think you broke Leonard’s flashlight.”
“Yeah, well, buy another. My head, I just got this one. What the fuck you two doing here?”
We told him.
“You think Hanson didn’t think of covering this place?” Charlie said. “Jesus, we may not be the incredibly clever sleuths you boys are, but we think of a few things. We even brought along a lunch.”
“Charlie forgot the chips, though,” Gleason said. “I told him twicet about the chips, and he still forgot ’em. A sandwich without chips ain’t no good
.”
“Would you lose the chips, Gleason?” Charlie said.
“I just said you forgot is all,” Gleason said.
“The point here is not that I forgot the chips out of our lunch,” Charlie said, “it’s that you two morons are screwing stuff up.”
“I told you we’re sorry,” I said. “Jesus, what you want us to do, shoot ourselves?”
“You could have fucked up an investigation.”
“Considering Fitzgerald hasn’t showed yet,” Leonard said, “I think things are already fucked.”
“Man,” Gleason said, “I think this guy busted something inside.”
Charlie put the light on Gleason. “You’re all right. Lose some fuckin’ weight. And take off that stupid toup.”
“He ought to leave it,” Leonard said. “The bad guys show up, he can scare ’em with it.”
“Yeah, well, you guys laugh,” Gleason said. “I had this special fitted.”
“Fitted for what?” Leonard said. “A fence post? You got more head than you got hair there. You need to shoot and field-dress another mop, pal.”
“Right, you’re Vidal Sassoon,” Gleason said.
And that’s when we heard someone coming through the woods from the back of the house.
“The lights,” Charlie said, and he killed the flash and Gleason killed his. We listened as the tromping came closer.
Charlie whispered, “Spread out, here’s you guys’ chance to use that karate shit on someone deserves it.”
We spread out. I took position by the door that led into the kitchen. I knew Charlie was somewhere to the left of me, and Leonard and Gleason were across the way.
We waited and the tromping went on around the side of the house and onto the front porch, then we heard the porch boards squeak, and not long after, the inside boards squeaked louder. The squeaking came our way. I felt the hair on the back of my neck bristle and there was a tightening of the groin and a loosening of the bowels. A light came from the room with the chifforobe, and the light bobbed into the kitchen, and a man came after it. Then the light swung to the right and its beam fell square and solid on Gleason, standing there like a stuffed bear, his toupee dangling off his skull like an otter clinging to a rock.