The Great and Secret Show

  "Coffee for Mr. Grillo, Ellen," Rochelle said, inviting her guest to sit. "And water for me."

  The room they'd entered ran the full length of the house, and was two stories high, the second marked by a gallery which ran around all four walls. These, like the hallway walls, were a painted din. Invitations, seductions and warnings fought for his eye. "The Ride of a Lifetime!" one modestly promised; "All the Fun You Can Stand!" another announced, "And Then Some!"

  "This is just part of Buddy's collection," Rochelle said. "There's more in New York. I believe it's the biggest in private hands."

  "I didn't know anybody collected this stuff."

  "Buddy called it the true art of America. It may be that it is, which says something . . ." She trailed off, her distaste for this hollering parade quite plain. The expression, crossing a face so devoid of sculptural error, carried distressing force.

  "You'll break the collection up, I suppose," Grillo said.

  "That depends on the Will," she said. "It may not be mine to sell."

  "You've got no sentimental attachments to it?"

  "I think that comes under the heading of private life," she said.

  "Yes. I suppose it does."

  "But I'm sure Buddy's obsession was harmless enough." She stood up and flipped a switch between two panels from a ghost-train facade. Multicolored lights came on beyond the glass wall at the far end of the room. "Allow me to show you," she said, wandering down the length of the room, and stepping out into the soup of colors. Pieces too big to be fitted into the house were assembled here. A carved face, maybe twelve feet high, the yawning, saw-toothed mouth of which had been the entrance to a ride. A placard advertising The Wall of Death, written out in lights. A full-size, bas-relief locomotive, driven by skeletons, appearing to burst from a tunnel.

  "My God," was all Grillo could muster.

  "Now you know why I left him," Rochelle said.

  "I didn't realize," Grillo replied. "You didn't live here?"

  "I tried," she said. "But look at the place. It's like walking into Buddy's mind. He liked to make his mark on everything. Everybody. There was no room for me here. Not if I wasn't prepared to play things his way."

  She stared at the mammoth maw. "Ugly," she said. "Don't you think?"

  "I'm no judge," Grillo said.

  "It doesn't offend you?"

  "It might get to me with a hangover."

  "He used to tell me I had no sense of humor," she said. "Because I don't find this . . . stuff of his amusing. The fact is I didn't find him very amusing either. As a lover, yes . . . he was wonderful. But funny? No."

  "Is all this off the record?" Grillo wondered.

  "Does it matter if I say it is? I've had enough bad publicity in my life to know you don't give a fuck for my privacy."

  "But you're telling me anyway."

  She turned from the mouth to look at him. "Yes I am," she said. There was a pause. Then she said: "I'm cold," and stepped back inside. Ellen was pouring coffee.

  "Leave it," Rochelle instructed. "I'll do it."

  The Vietnamese woman lingered at the door a fraction of a moment too long for servility before exiting.

  "So that's the Buddy Vance story," Rochelle said. "Wives, wealth and Carnival. Nothing terribly new in it I'm afraid."

  "Do you know if he had any premonition of this?" Grillo asked as they resumed their seats.

  "Of dying? I doubt it. He wasn't exactly attuned to that kind of thinking. Cream?"

  "Yes, please. And sugar."

  "Help yourself. Is that the kind of news your readers would like to hear? That Buddy had seen his death in a dream?"

  "Stranger things have happened," Grillo said, his thoughts inevitably tripping back to the fissure and its escapees.

  "I don't think so," Rochelle replied. "I don't see much sign of miracles. Not any more." She extinguished the lights outside. "When I was a child, my grandfather taught me to influence other children."

  "How?"

  "Just by thinking about it. It was something he'd done all his life, and he passed it on to me. It was easy. I could make kids drop their ice creams. Make them laugh and not know why: I thought nothing of it. There were miracles then. Waiting round the corner. But I lost the knack. We all lose it. Everything changes for the worse."

  "Your life can't be that bad," Grillo said. "I know you're grieving at the—"

  "Fuck my grief," she said suddenly. "He's dead, and I'm here waiting to see what the last laugh's going to be."

  "The Will?"

  "The Will. The wives. The bastards who're going to pop up from nowhere. He's finally got me on one of his damn mystery rides." Her words were charged with feeling, but she spoke them calmly enough. "You can go home and turn all this into deathless prose."

  "I'm going to stay in town," Grillo said. "Until your husband's body is found."

  "It won't be," Rochelle replied. "They've given up the search."

  "What?"

  "That's what Spilmont came up to explain. They've already lost five men. Apparently the chances of finding him are slim anyhow. It's not worth the risk."

  "Does that upset you?"

  "Not having a body to bury? No, not really. It's better he be remembered smiling than being brought up out of a hole in the ground. So, you see, your story finishes here. There'll be a memorial service for him in Hollywood, presumably. The rest, as they say, is television history." She stood up, marking an end to the interview. Grillo had unasked questions aplenty, most of them about the one subject she'd pronounced herself willing to talk about yet hadn't touched: his professional life. There were a few loopholes Tesla couldn't plug, he knew. Rather than press the widow Vance beyond her patience he let the questions go. She'd supplied more insights than he'd expected.

  "Thank you for seeing me," he said, shaking her hand. Her fingers were as thin as twigs. "You've been most kind."

  "Ellen will see you out," she said.

  "Thanks."

  The girl was waiting in the hallway. As she opened the front door she touched Grillo's arm. He looked at her. She made a hushing face and pressed a scrap of paper into his hand. Without a word being exchanged he was ushered out on to the step and the door was closed behind him.

  He waited until he was out of video range before he looked at the scrap. It bore the woman's name—Ellen Nguyen—and an address in Deerdell Village. Buddy Vance might be staying buried but his story, it seemed, was still digging its way out. Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo's experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumor, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs. It was what people gabbled about in their cups, or between fucks, or read on a toilet wall.

  The art of the underground, like the figures he'd seen in the spurt, rising to change the world.

  II

  JO-BETH lay on her bed in darkness and watched the breeze by turn belly the curtains then draw them out into the night. She had gone to talk to Momma as soon as she returned to the house, and told her that she would not be seeing Howie again. It had been a promise made in haste, but she doubted whether Momma had even heard it. She'd had a distracted air about her, pacing her room, wringing her hands and murmuring prayers to herself. The prayers reminded Jo-Beth that she'd promised to call the Pastor and hadn't. Composing herself as best she could, she went downstairs and called the church. Pastor John was not available, however. He'd gone to comfort Angelie Datlow, whose husband Bruce had been killed in the attempt to raise Buddy Vance's body. This was the first Jo-Beth had heard of the tragedy. She curtailed the conversation, and came off the telephone, trembling. She needed no detailed description of the deaths. She'd seen them, and so had Howie. Their shared dream had been interrupted by a live report
from the shaft where Datlow and his colleagues had died.

  She sat in the kitchen, the fridge humming, the birds and bugs in the backyard making blithe music, and tried to make sense of the senseless. Maybe she'd been sold an overly optimistic vision of the world, but she'd preceded thus far believing that if she couldn't grasp things personally there were those in her vicinity who could. It gave her comfort to know that. Now she was not sure. If she told anyone from church— who made up most of her circle—what had happened at the motel (the dream of water, the dream of death) they'd take the line Momma had taken: that this was the Devil's doing. When she'd said as much to Howie he'd told her she didn't believe it and he was right. It was nonsense. And if that was nonsense, what else that she'd been taught besides?

  Unable to think her way through her confusions, and too tired to bully them, she took herself off to her room to lie down. She had no wish to sleep so soon after the trauma of her last slumber, but fatigue overcame her resistance. A string of scenes, black and white with a pearly sheen, appeared before her as she fell. Howie in Butrick's; Howie at the Mall, face to face with Tommy-Ray; his face on the pillow, when she'd thought him dead. Then the string broke and the pearls flew off. She sank into sleep.

  The clock said eight-thirty-five when she woke. The house was completely hushed. She got up, moving as silently as she could to avoid a summons from Momma. Downstairs she fixed herself a sandwich and brought it back up to her room, where now—sandwich consumed—she lay, watching the curtains do the wind's will.

  The evening light had been smooth as apricot cream, but it had gone now. Darkness was very close. She could feel its approach—cancelling distance, silencing life—and it distressed her as it never had before. In homes not so far from here families would be in mourning. Husbandless wives, fatherless children, facing their first night of grief. In others, sadnesses which had been put away would be brought out; studied; wept over. She had something of her own now, that made her part of that greater sorrow. Loss had touched her, and the darkness—which took so much away from the world and gave so little back—would never be the same again.

  Tommy-Ray was woken by the window rattling. He sat up in bed. The day had passed in a self-created fever. Morning seemed more than a dozen hours away, yet what had he done in the intervening time? Just slept, and sweated, and waited for a sign.

  Was that what he was hearing now; the chatter of the window, like a dying man's teeth? He threw off the covers. At some stage he'd stripped to his underwear. The body he caught sight of in the mirror was lean and shiny; like a healthy snake. Distracted by admiration, he stumbled, and in attempting to stand up realized he'd lost all grasp of the room. It was suddenly strange to him—and he to it. The floor sloped as it never had before; the wardrobe had shrunk to the size of a suitcase, or else he'd grown grotesquely large. Nauseated, he reached out for something solid to orient himself. He intended the door but either his hand or the room undid his intention and it was the window frame he grasped. He stood still, clinging to the wood until the queasiness passed. As he waited he felt the all but imperceptible motion of the frame move up through the bones in his fingers into his wrists and arms, and thence across his shoulders to his spine. Its progress was a jittering dance in his marrow, which made no sense until it climbed his last few vertebrae and struck his skull. There the motion, which had been a chatter in the glass, became sound again: a loop of clicks and rattles which spoke a summons to him.

  He didn't need to be called twice. Letting the window frame go, he turned giddily towards the door. His feet kicked the clothes he'd discarded in his sleep. He picked up his T-shirt and jeans, vaguely thinking that he should dress before leaving the house but not getting beyond dragging his clothes after him as he went, down the stairs and out into the blackness at the back of the house.

  The yard was large, and chaotic, having been neglected over many years. The fencing had fallen into disrepair, and the shrubbery which had been planted to shield the yard from the road had grown into a solid wall of foliage. It was towards that little jungle he went now, drawn by the Geiger counter in his skull, which was getting louder with every step he took.

  Jo-Beth rose from her pillow with an ache in her teeth. Tentatively she touched the side of her face. It felt tender; almost as though bruised. She got up and slipped down the hall to the bathroom. Tommy-Ray's bedroom door was open, she noticed, which it hadn't previously been. If he was there, she couldn't see him. The curtains were drawn, the interior pitch black.

  A brief perusal of her face in the bathroom mirror reassured her that though her crying had taken its toll she was otherwise unmarked. The ache, however, continued in her jaw, creeping around to the base of her skull. She'd never felt anything like it before. The pressure was not consistent but rhythmic, like a pulse that was not her heart's doing, but had come into her from somewhere other.

  "Stop," she murmured, clenching her teeth against the percussion. But it wouldn't be controlled. It simply tightened its hold on her head, as if to squeeze her thoughts out altogether.

  In desperation she found herself conjuring Howie; an image of light and laughter to set against this mindless beat that had come out of the dark. It was a forbidden image— one she had promised Momma she'd not dwell on—but she was weaponless otherwise. If she didn't fight back the beat in her head would pulp her thoughts with its insistence; make her move to its rhythm and its alone.

  Howie . . .

  He smiled at her out of the past. She held on to the brightness of his memory, and bent to the sink to splash cold water on her face. Water and memory subdued the assault. Unsteady on her feet she stepped out of the bathroom and headed towards Tommy-Ray's room. Whatever this sickness was it would surely have afflicted him too. From their earliest childhood they'd caught every virus, and suffered it, together. Perhaps this new, strange affliction had caught him earlier than she, and his behavior at the Mall had been a consequence of it. The thought brought hope. If he was sick then he could be healed. Both of them, healed together.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when she stepped through the door. It smelt like a sickroom; unbearably hot, and stale.

  "Tommy-Ray? Are you there?"

  She pushed the door open to throw a better light inside. The room was empty, the bed heaped with bedclothes, the carpet rucked up as though he'd danced a tarantella upon it. She crossed to the window, intending to open it, but she got no further than drawing the curtains aside. The sight she was presented with was enough to take her down the stairs fast, calling Tommy-Ray's name. By the light from the kitchen door she saw him staggering across the yard, dragging his jeans after him.

  The thicket at the end of the garden was moving; and there was more than the wind in it.

  "My son, " said the man in the trees. "We meet at last "

  Tommy-Ray could not see his summoner clearly, but there was no doubt that this was the man. The chatter in his head grew softer at the sight of him.

  "Come closer," he instructed. There was something of the stranger with candy about his voice, and his half-concealment. That my son could not be literally true, could it? Wouldn't it be fine if it were? After giving up all hope of meeting that man, after the childhood taunts and the hours wasted trying to imagine him, to have his lost father here at last, calling him from the house with a code known only to fathers and sons. So fine, so very fine.

  "Where's my daughter?" the man said. "Where's Jo-Beth?"

  "I think she's in the house."

  "Go fetch her for me, will you?"

  "In a minute."

  "Now!"

  "I want to see you first. I want to know this isn't a trick." The stranger laughed.

  "Already I hear my voice in you, "he said. "I've had tricks played on me, too. It makes us cautious, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "Of course you must see me," he said, stepping out of the trees. "I am your father. I am the Jaff. "

  As Jo-Beth reached the bottom of the stairs she heard Momma call from her ro
om.

  "Jo-Beth? What's happening?"

  "It's all right, Momma."

  "Come here! Something terrible . . . in my sleep . . ."

  "A moment, Momma. Stay in bed."

  "Terrible—"

  "I'll be back in a while. Just stay where you are."

  He was here, in the flesh: the father Tommy-Ray had dreamed of in a thousand forms since he'd realized that other boys had a second parent, a parent whose sex they shared, who knew men's stuff, and passed it down to their sons. Sometimes he'd fantasized that he was some movie star's bastard, and that one day a limo would glide up the street and a famous smile step out and say exactly what the Jaff had just said. But this man was better than any movie star. He didn't look like much, but he shared with the faces the world idolized an eerie poise, as though he was beyond needing to demonstrate his power. Where that authority came from Tommy-Ray didn't yet know, but its signs were perfectly visible.

  "I'm your father," the Jaff said again. "Do you believe me?"

  Of course he did. He'd be a fool to deny a father like this.

  "Yes," he said, "I believe you."

  "And you'll obey me like a loving son?"

  "Yes, I will."

  "Good," the Jaff said, "so now, please fetch me my daughter. I called her but she refuses to come. You know why . . ."

  "No."

  "Think."

  Tommy-Ray thought, but no answer immediately sprang to mind.

  "My enemy, " the Jaff said, "has touched her. "

  Katz, Tommy-Ray thought: he means that fuckwit Katz.

  "I made you, and Jo-Beth, to be my agents. My enemy did the same. He made a child. "

  "Katz isn't your enemy?" Tommy-Ray said, struggling to put this together, "he's your enemy's son?"

  "And now he's touched your sister. That's what keeps her from me. That taint. "

  "Not for long."

  So saying Tommy-Ray turned and ran back to the house, calling Jo-Beth's name in a light, easy voice.