LIZARD ON A WINDOWPANE
By the time I got to the midway, a hundred carnies were crowded around the carousel, most of whom I had yet to meet. Some wore yellow rain slickers with matching shapeless hats, and some wore black vinyl coats, a few with plastic babushkas, boots or sandals, galoshes or street shoes, and some were barefoot, and some had thrown coats on over pajamas, and about half of them carried umbrellas, which came in a variety of colors yet failed to contribute a note of gaiety to the gathering. Others had not dressed for the storm at all, rushing out in disbelief at the dreadful news, unheeding of the weather, and these now huddled in two kinds of misery—dampness and grief—soaked to the skin and spotted with mud and looking like refugees lined up at a border crossing on some war-torn frontier.
I came in T-shirt, jeans, and shoes that had not dried out from the previous night, and as I approached the crowd at the carousel, I was impressed and shaken, most of all, by their silence. No one spoke. No one. Not a word. They were doubly washed by rain and tears, and their pain was visible in their ashen faces and in their sunken eyes, but they wept without a sound. This silence was a mark of how deeply they had loved Jelly Jordan and an indication of how unthinkable it was for him to be dead; they were so stunned that they could only stand in mute contemplation of a world without him. Later, when the shock had worn off, there would be loud lamentations, uncontrollable sobbing, hysteria, mournful keening, prayers, and perhaps angry questions asked of God, but at the moment their intense grief was a perfect vacuum through which sound waves could not travel.
They knew Jelly better than I did, but I couldn’t remain discreetly at the crowd’s periphery. I shouldered slowly through the mourners, whispering “Excuse me” and “Sorry” until I reached the raised platform of the merry-go-round. Rain slanted beneath the red-and-white-striped roof, beaded on and trickled down the brass poles, and cooled the wooden horseflesh. I eased past upraised hoofs and enameled teeth bared in equine excitement, past painted flanks all of a piece with saddles and stirrups that could not be removed, wended through the herd on its never-ending journey, until I came to the place where Jelly Jordan’s journey had ended brutally amidst this eternally prancing multitude.
Jelly lay on his back, on the carousel floor, between a black stallion and a white mare, eyes open in amazement at finding himself recumbent in the middle of this trampling drove, as if he had been done in by their hoofs. His mouth was open, too, lips split, at least one tooth broken. It almost looked as if a cowboy’s red bandanna masked the lower part of his face, but it was a veil of blood.
He was dressed in an unbuttoned raincoat, white shirt, and dark gray slacks. The right leg of his trousers was bunched up around his knee, and part of his thick white calf was exposed. His right foot was shoeless, and that missing loafer was wedged in the rigidly fixed stirrup of the black stallion’s wooden saddle.
Three people were with the corpse. Luke Bendingo, who had driven us to and from Yontsdown last Friday, stood by the hindquarters of the white mare, his face the same shade as the horse, and the look he gave me—blinking eyes, twitching mouth—was a stutter of grief and rage momentarily repressed by shock. Kneeling on the floor was a man I had never seen before. He was in his sixties, quite dapper, gray-haired, with a neatly trimmed gray mustache. He was behind Jelly’s body, and he was holding the dead man’s head, as if he were a faith healer intent on restoring health to the afflicted. He was racked by unvoiced sobs, and each miserable spasm squeezed more tears out of him. The third was Joel Tuck, who stood one horse removed from the scene, his back against a pinto, one huge hand fastened to a brass pole. On that mutant face, which was a cross between a cubist portrait by Picasso and something out of one of Mary Shelley’s nightmares, the expression could not, for once, be misread: He was devastated by the loss of Jelly Jordan.
Sirens wailed in the distance, grew louder, louder, then died away with a moan. A moment later two police sedans approached along the concourse, their emergency beacons flashing through the lead-gray light and mist and rain. When they pulled up by the carousel, when I heard doors opening and closing, I looked over at them and saw that three of the four arriving Yontsdown officers were goblins.
I felt Joel’s eyes on me, and when I looked at him, I was unsettled by the unexpected suspicion both in his twisted face and in the psychic aura that enveloped him. I had expected him to be as interested in the goblin cops as I was, and he did glance at them warily, but I remained the focus of his attention and suspicion. That look—plus the arrival of the goblins, plus a cyclonic fury of terrible psychic emanations that blasted up from the corpse—was just too much to deal with, so I walked away from there.
For a while I wandered along the back of the midway, as far from the carousel as I could get, through rain that was sometimes a heavy drizzle and sometimes a flooding cloudburst, though I was drowning not in water but in guilt. Joel had seen me kill the man in the Dodgem Car pavilion and had assumed that I had committed that murder because, like him, I saw the goblin beyond the human glaze. But now Jelly was dead, and there had been no goblin in poor Timothy Jordan, and Joel was wondering if he had misunderstood me. He was probably beginning to think that perhaps I had not been aware of the goblin residing in my first victim, that I was just a killer, pure and simple, and that now I had claimed a second victim, this one innocent. But I had not harmed Jelly, and it was not Joel Tuck’s suspicion that burdened me with guilt. I felt guilty because I had known Jelly was in danger, had seen the vision of his face smeared with blood, and I had not alerted him.
I should have been able to foresee the precise moment of his crisis, should have been able to predict exactly where and when and how he would meet his death, and I should have been there to prevent it. Never mind that my psychic powers are limited, that the clairvoyant images and impressions they bring me are often vague or confusing, and that I have little—and frequently no—control over them. Never mind that he would not have believed me even if I had tried to warn him of the nameless danger that I had sensed. Never mind that I am not—and cannot be—the savior of the whole damned world and every damned sorry soul in it. Never mind. I still should have been able to prevent it. I should have saved him.
I should have.
I should have.
The card games, knitting circles, and other gatherings in Gibtown-on-Wheels had become knots of mourners. The carnies tried to help one another accept Jelly’s death. Some of them still wept. A few prayed. But most of them swapped stories about Jelly because memories were a way of keeping him alive. They sat in circles in the living rooms of the trailers, and when one finished an anecdote about their chubby, toy-loving patch, the next in the circle would make a contribution, and then the next, around and around, and there was even laughter because Jelly Jordan had been an amusing and exceptional man, and gradually the terrible bleakness gave way to a bittersweet sadness that was more easily borne. The subtle formality of these proceedings, the almost unconscious ritual according to which they were conducted, made them seem remarkably like the Jewish tradition of sitting shivah; if I had been required to hold my hands above a basin and have water poured over them before being permitted to enter, and if I had been provided with a black yarmulke to cover my head, and if I had found everyone sitting on mourning stools instead of on chairs and sofas, I would not have been surprised.
I spent a few hours walking in the rain, and periodically I stopped at one trailer or another, participated in one shivah or another, and at each place I picked up another bit of news. First I learned that the dapper gray-haired man who had been weeping over Jelly’s body was Arturo Sombra, the only living Sombra brother, owner of the carnival. Jelly Jordan had been his surrogate son and had been in line to inherit the carnival when the old man passed on. The cops were making it even harder on Mr. Sombra by proceeding under the assumption that foul play was involved and that the murderer was a carny. To everyone’s absolute astonishment the cops were even insinuating that Jelly might have been eliminated
because his position with the company gave him plenty of opportunity to dip his hand in the till and because maybe he had taken advantage of that opportunity. They were suggesting that the murderer could even be Mr. Sombra himself, although there was no good reason to entertain such suspicions—and considerable reason to reject them out of hand. They were grilling the old man and Cash Dooley and anyone else who might have known if Jelly was skimming, and they were as thoroughly rude and nasty in their interrogations as they knew how to be. Everyone in the trailer town was outraged.
I was not surprised. I was certain the cops could not seriously be contemplating accusations of murder against anyone. But three of them were goblins. They had seen the numbing grief of those hundred mourners clustered around the carousel; that anguish had not only delighted them but had whetted their appetite for more human misery. They would not be able to resist adding to our pain, milking it, squeezing the last drop of agony from Arturo Sombra and the rest of us.
Later, the word was that the county coroner had arrived, had examined the body in situ, had asked a few questions of Arturo Sombra, and had rejected the possibility of foul play. To everyone’s relief, the official determination was “death by misadventure.” Apparently, it was widely known that when he could not sleep, Jelly sometimes went to the midway, started the carousel (though not the calliope music), and went for a long ride all by himself. He loved the merry-go-round. The merry-go-round was the biggest windup toy of them all, much too big to be kept on a shelf in his office. Usually, because of his size, Jelly sat on one of the elaborately carved and intricately painted benches that boasted arms in the form of mermaids or sea horses. But once in a while he climbed onto one of the horses, which must have been what he did last night. Perhaps worrying about the revenue that would be lost because of the bad weather, perhaps concerned about trouble that Chief Lisle Kelsko might stir up, sleepless and searching for a way to soothe his nerves, Jelly mounted the black stallion while it was moving, sat in the wooden saddle, one hand on the brass pole, the summery wind ruffling his hair, gliding around in the darkness, with no sound but the thunder and pouring rain, most likely grinning with the unselfconscious pleasure of a child, maybe whistling, happily ensconced aboard a magic centrifuge that flung away the years as it whirled, flung away years and worries while it gathered in dreams, and after a while he began to feel better and decided to return to bed—but as he dismounted from the stallion, his right shoe wedged tight in the stirrup, and although his foot pulled free of the loafer, he fell. In the fall, even as short as it was, he split his lips and knocked out two teeth and broke his neck.
That was the official determination.
Death by misadventure.
An accident.
A stupid, ridiculous, pointless way to die, but nothing more than a tragic accident.
Bullshit.
I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Jelly Jordan, but I did know a goblin had murdered him in cold blood. Earlier, standing over his body, I’d been able to sort three facts from the kaleidoscopically fragmented images and sensations that had assaulted me: first, that he had not died on the carousel but, instead, in the shadow of the Ferris wheel; second, that a goblin had struck him at least three times, had broken his neck, and had carried him to the merry-go-round with the assistance of other goblins. The accident had been staged.
Some assumptions could be made without much fear of error. Unable to sleep, Jelly had evidently gone for a walk on the midway, in the dark, in the storm, and he had seen something he should not have seen. What? He must have glimpsed strangers, not carnies, who had undertaken suspicious work at the Ferris wheel, and he must have shouted at them, unaware that they were not ordinary men. Instead of running, they had attacked him.
I said that I had clearly sensed three things while standing in the carousel, looking down at the fat man’s uninhabited mortal shell. The third was the one with which I had the most difficulty dealing, for it was an intensely personal moment of contact with Jelly, a glimpse inside his mind that made the loss of him even more poignant. Clairvoyantly I had perceived his dying thought. It lingered there with the corpse, waiting to be read by someone like me, a scrap of psychic energy like a rag caught on a barbed-wire fence that marked the boundary between here and eternity. As his life was extinguished, his last thought was of a set of small, fur-covered mechanical bears—Papa, Mama, Baby—that his mother had given him for his seventh birthday. He had loved those toys so much. They had been special, the perfect gift at the perfect time, for that birthday had come only two months after his father had been killed in front of his eyes, struck by a runaway city bus in Baltimore, and it had been the windup bears that had at last provided much-needed fantasy and a temporary refuge from a world that had suddenly seemed too cold, too cruel, too arbitrary to be endured. Now, dying, Jelly had wondered if he, himself, were Baby Bear and if, where he was going, he would be reunited with Mama and Papa. And he was afraid of winding up somewhere dark and empty, alone.
I cannot control my psychic powers. I cannot shut my Twilight Eyes to these images. If I could, dear God, I never would have tuned in on the soul-shattering terror of loneliness that had filled Jelly Jordan as he had dropped into the abyss. It haunted me that day, as I walked in the rain, as I went to the trailers where they talked of our patch and mourned him, as I stood by the Ferris wheel and cursed the demonkind. It haunted me for years after. In fact, to this day, when sleep eludes me and I am in a particularly bleak mood, I sometimes involuntarily recall Jelly’s emotions at death, and they are so vivid that they might as well be my own emotions. I can handle it now. I can handle almost anything these days, after what I have been through and all that I have seen. But that day on the Yontsdown County Fairgrounds . . . I was only seventeen.
By three o’clock Monday afternoon, the word in the trailer town was that Jelly’s body had been taken to a Yontsdown mortuary, where it was to be cremated. An urn full of ashes would be returned to Arturo Sombra either tomorrow or Wednesday, and on Wednesday night, after the midway shut down, there would be a funeral. The service would be held at the carousel because Jelly had liked it so much and because, supposedly, it was there that he had found a way out of this world.
That night Rya Raines and I had dinner together in her trailer. I made crisp green salads, and she made excellent cheese omelets, but neither of us ate much. We were not very hungry.
We spent the evening in bed, but we did not make love. We sat up, braced by pillows, and held hands, drank a little, kissed a little, talked a little.
More than once, Rya wept for Jelly Jordan, and her tears were a surprise to me. Although I had no doubt that she was capable of grief, I had thus far seen her cry only in contemplation of her own mysterious burden or affliction, and even then she had seemed to release the tears grudgingly, as if a tremendous inner pressure were forcing them from her against her will. At all other times—except, of course, in the naked grip of passion—she took refuge in her cool, hard-bitten, tight-lipped persona, pretending that the world could not touch her. I had sensed that her attachments to other carnies were far stronger and deeper than she was willing to admit even to herself. Now, her sorrow at the death of the patch seemed proof of my perception.
I had shed tears earlier, but now I was dry-eyed, beyond grief, immersed in a cold rage. I still mourned Jelly, but more than that, I wanted to avenge him. And I would. Sooner or later I would kill a few goblins for no reason other than to even the score, and if I was lucky, I might be able to get my hands on the very same creatures that had broken Jelly’s neck.
Besides, my concern had shifted from the dead to the living, and I was acutely aware that my vision of Rya’s death might be fulfilled as unexpectedly as had been the prophecy of Jelly’s demise. And that possibility was intolerable. I could not—must not, would not, dare not—allow any harm to come to her. In a circumspect manner that was decidedly peculiar for a pair of lovers, we were forming a bond unlike any I had ever known, nor could I imagine ano
ther relationship like it in the future. If Rya Raines died, a part of me would die, too, and there would be burned-out rooms within me that could never again be entered.
Preventive measures must be taken. On those nights that I did not sleep in her trailer, I would post myself, without her knowledge, just outside her door. I could suffer from insomnia there as well as anywhere. Furthermore I would probe more relentlessly with my sixth sense, in search of additional details about the as yet vaguely defined threat the future held in store for her. If I could predict the precise moment of her crisis and could pinpoint the source of the danger, I could protect her. I must not fail her as I had failed Jelly Jordan.
Perhaps Rya was instinctively aware that she required protection, and perhaps she was also aware that I intended to be there when she needed help, for as the evening wore on, she began to share some secrets about herself, and I sensed that she was telling me things she had told no one else in the Sombra Brothers Carnival. She was drinking more than usual. Although she was not drunk by any definition, I suspected that she was trying to establish an alibi of inebriation, which would be convenient when, in the morning, she found herself full of self-reproach and regret for having told me so much about her past.
“My parents weren’t carnies,” she said in such a way that it was clear she wanted to be encouraged in her revelations.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“West Virginia. My people were hill people in West Virginia. We lived in a ramshackle dump in a hollow up in the hills, probably half a mile from the nearest other ramshackle dump. Do you know what hill people are like?”
“Not really.”
“Poor,” she said scathingly.
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Poor, uneducated, unwilling to be educated, ignorant. Secretive, withdrawn, suspicious. Set in their ways, stubborn, close-minded. And some of them . . . a lot of them, maybe—are too inbred. Cousin marries cousin pretty frequently up in those hills. And worse than that. Worse than that.”
Gradually, with steadily less coaxing, she told me about her mother, Maralee Sween. Maralee was the fourth of seven children born to first cousins whose marriage had not been blessed by either minister or state but existed only by virtue of common law. All of the Sween children were good-looking kids, but one of the seven was retarded, and five of the other six were more dull-witted than not. Maralee was not the bright one, though she was the best-looking of the seven, a radiant blonde with luminous green eyes and a lush figure that had every hill boy sniffing after her from the time she was thirteen. Long before her ample charms had matured, Maralee had considerable sexual—one could certainly not say romantic—experience. At an age when many girls are having their first date and are still unsure of the exact meaning of “going all the way,” Maralee had stopped counting the number of hill boys who had spread her legs on various grassy beds, in leaf-carpeted glens, in the haylofts of decaying old barns, on a moldering mattress discarded at the edge of the makeshift dump that the hill people had started in Harmon’s Hollow, and in the musty backseats of different automobiles in one of the many collections of junked cars of which hillbillies seemed so fond. Sometimes she’d been a willing participant in the sex, and sometimes she had not, and most of the time she had not cared one way or the other. In the hills, her fall from innocence at such a tender age was not unusual. The only surprise was that she managed to avoid pregnancy until well past her fourteenth birthday.
In that region of the Appalachians, among those hillbillies, the rule of law and the morality of polite society were disdained, generally ignored; however, unlike carnies, the denizens of those remote hollows did not create their own rules and codes to replace those they rejected. There is in American literature a tradition of tales about the “noble savage,” and our culture at least pretends to believe that a life lived close to nature and far from the evils of civilization is somehow healthier and wiser than the lives that most of us lead. In fact, the opposite is often true. As men retreat from civilization they quickly shed the inessential trappings of modern society—luxury cars, fancy houses, designer clothes, nights at the theater, concert tickets—and perhaps an argument can be made for the virtues of a simpler life, but if they go far enough away and stay long enough, they also shed too many inhibitions. Inhibitions implanted by religion and society are not generally foolish or pointless or narrow-minded, as it has recently become fashionable to claim; instead, many of those inhibitions are highly desirable survival traits that in the long run contribute to a better-educated, better-fed, more prosperous populace. The wilderness is wild and encourages wildness; it is the breeding ground of savagery.
At fourteen Maralee was pregnant, illiterate, uneducated, and virtually uneducable, without prospects, with too little imagination to be terrified for herself, too slow-thinking to fully appreciate the fact that the rest of her life was destined to be a long, cruel slope into a terrible abyss. With bovine calm she was sure that someone would come along to take care of her and the baby. The baby was Rya, and before Rya was even born, someone did offer to make an honest woman of Maralee Sween, perhaps proving that God watches over pregnant hillbilly girls about as well as He looks out for drunks. The chivalrous gentleman in pursuit of Maralee’s hand was Abner Kady, thirty-eight, twenty-four years her senior, six-five, two hundred and forty pounds, with a neck almost as thick as his head, the most feared man in a county where dangerous rustics were not exactly in short supply.
Abner Kady made a sort of living by brewing moonshine, raising coon dogs, and engaging in petty theft and occasional grand larceny. Once or twice a year he would get together with some buddies and hijack a truck off the state highway, preferably one loaded with cigarettes or whiskey or some other cargo that could be disposed of at top dollar. They traded the booty to a fence they knew in Clarksburg, and either they would have become halfway rich or wound up in prison if they had worked harder at it, but their ambition was no greater than their scruples. Kady was not only a moonshiner, brawler, bully, and thief, but he was a casual rapist as well, taking a woman by force when he was in the mood for spicing his sex with a bit of danger, but he never had to take a ride on the prison train because nobody had the guts to testify against him.
To Maralee Sween, Abner Kady looked like a real catch. He had a four-room house—hardly more than a shack but with indoor plumbing—and no one in his family would ever want for whiskey, food, or clothes. If Abner could not steal what he needed one way, he would steal it another, and in the hills that was the mark of a good provider.
He was good to Maralee, too, or at least as good as he was to anyone. He did not love her. He was not capable of love. Still, though he browbeat her, he never actually laid a hand on her, mostly because he was proud of her beauty and endlessly excited by her body, and he could not have been proud of—or aroused by—damaged merchandise.
“Besides,” Rya said in a voice that now fell to a haunted whisper, “he didn’t want to damage his little fun machine. That’s what he called her—his ‘little fun machine.’”
By “fun machine,” I sensed that Abner Kady had not meant that he had good sex with Maralee. It was something else, something dark. Whatever it was, Rya was unable to speak of it without encouragement, even though I knew that she desperately wanted to unburden herself. Therefore I poured another drink for her, held her hand, and with gentle words I eased her through that minefield of memory.
Tears shimmered in her eyes again, and this time they were not for Jelly but for herself. She was harder on herself than she was on anyone else, and she did not allow herself ordinary human weaknesses like self-pity, so she blinked the tears back regardless of the emotional stress and turmoil that might have been washed away with them if she had only allowed them to flow. Haltingly, in a voice that broke every few words, she said, “He meant that . . . she was . . . his baby machine . . . and that . . . babies . . . could be fun. Especially . . . especially . . . girl babies.”
I kne
w then that she was not merely taking me on a Hansel and Gretel journey into the spooky witch-woods but into a far more frightening place, into a monstrous memory of a childhood under siege, and I was not sure that I wanted to go with her. I loved her. I knew that Jelly’s death had not only sorrowed but frightened her, had reminded her of her own mortality, and had birthed in her a need for intimate human contact, a contact she could not fully achieve until she had broken down the barrier that she had erected between herself and the rest of the world. She needed me to listen, to draw her out, to understand. I wanted to be there for her. But I was afraid that her secrets were . . . well, alive and hungry, and that they would reveal themselves only in return for a piece of my own soul.
I said, “Ah . . . Jesus . . . no.”
“Girl babies,” she repeated, looking neither at me nor at anything else in the room, peering back along the spiral of time with obvious dread and loathing. “Not that he ignored my half brothers. He had uses for them, too. But he preferred girls. My mother gave him four kids by the time I was eleven, two girls and two boys. As far back as I can remember . . . I guess since I was at least three . . . he was...”
“Touching you,” I said thickly.
“Using me,” she said.
In a dead voice she recounted those years of fear, violence, and the foulest abuse. Her story left me cold and black inside.
“It was all I knew from the time I was a baby . . . being with him . . . doing what he wanted . . . touching him . . . and being in bed with both of them . . . my mother and him . . . when they were doing it. I should’ve thought it was