Bad Things (32 page)

“Dear Rick,” it said, “I thought you were a nice person, but if you were, you wouldn't have tried to kill your own brother. Don't come to the carnival. I never want to see you again. Delia.”

Stunned, not knowing what else to do, he handed it to Carmen. After she read it she asked, “Ricky, do you know her handwriting?”

“No. I don't think I've ever seen it. Why?”

“I'm thinking this might be your brother's idea of a joke.”

Rick looked up hopefully. “Should I go to the carnival and talk to her?”

“I don't think you're in any shape to do that. Where's the carnival going next?”

“The high desert. They're stopping for a few days in Victorville, then they're going to Nevada.”

“Tomorrow night you try to call up there. If you can't get through, Hector will drive you, okay?”

“Maybe I could call tonight . . .” he began. Fear rose in his gut. “Or maybe I should wait. I was really weird tonight, Carmen. I . . . I think I went nuts for a few minutes. She probably doesn't want to see me.”

“Call, Ricky. Just see if she's there so you can stop worrying about her. I don't believe that letter.”

He was about to say he didn't either when there was a knock on the front door. Carmen opened it.

“Robin,” she said coldly.

“Hi, baby brother.”

Rick's heart skipped a beat.

Robin padded directly up to him. “I walked your girlfriend back to the carnival. She doesn't like you anymore, icky Ricky. She thinks you're a meanie.” He feigned a grab toward Rick, who gasped and backed up.

Robin laughed. “Gotcha good, didn't I, little brother? Self-defense. Hope I didn't crack your nuts. Hope you can still make babies.”

“Robin!” Carmen said angrily.

“It was self-defense,” he said smoothly.

“Did you write this?” Rick asked, brandishing the note.

Robin looked mildly surprised. “No. What is it?”

“You know what it is,” Carmen said.

Robin pushed the sleeve up on his shirt and displayed a perfect set of red tooth marks. “She told me she was sorry she did this. She said she got so scared when you tried to kill me that she didn't really know what she was doing.”

“Did you write this?” Carmen asked again.

He peered at her. “Nope. She said she was going up to Ricky's room to leave him a nice, private note. I never read it.” He slap-slapped to the bookcase and felt for the lever. A moment later, the case turned, revealing the dark, narrow stairwell. Robin turned and looked directly at Rick.

“You'll be happy to know that I'm running away with the circus, icky Ricky. Just gonna get my things.”

“You can't just leave,” Carmen began.

“Oh, now, be honest, Carmen. You don't want me here any more than he does. I'm sixteen, I'm leaving. The Masellos made me an offer I can't refuse. My own trailer, star billing, lots of bucks. I'm going.” His grin was horrifying. “Nobody's going to miss me but Jade. And she's going to miss me something awful. Dicky Ricky, maybe if your nuts heal up, you can give her what she wants. She's old, but she's got nice tits.” He made a face. “And you gotta admit, it's better than fucking a dwarf.”

Carmen advanced on him, saying things in Spanish that Rick was happy he didn't understand. Rick himself was too sore and tired to summon up anything but cold disgust. Laughing, his twin disappeared into the stairwell, the bookcase swinging closed behind him.

For fifteen minutes Rick tried to get through to Delia on the phone, but no one answered—the phone was in the office trailer, and no one was there this late at night.

Hector returned, and a moment later, Robin came back. The three watched in silence as Robin, a bulging knapsack strapped to his broad back, hummed to himself and crossed to the front door. “Give my love to Jade, Ricky,” he said, opening the door. “Give it to her
good.”

Rick didn't answer.

No one did.

The door shut.

“Good riddance,” Carmen hissed.

 

 

After midnight, Rick lay in his bed in his locked room, not quite awake, not quite asleep, always in pain. Sometime during the night, he heard Jade and Howard come home. Drunk and foulmouthed, they argued all the way to their room, their voices fading only after they slammed the door.

A long time later a pair of sonic booms rattled his windows. Soon sirens broke the silence of the night. He thought and dreamed continuously about Delia, worrying, wondering, so unsure of himself that it was yet another physical pain. As dawn approached, he made up his mind to see her before the carnival left for Victorville. He got up.

The swelling wasn't so bad now, but peeing was an exercise in torture. It took him twenty minutes to get dressed, but finally, dressed in sweats and zoris, because he found he couldn't bend over to put on shoes and socks, he slowly made his way down the stairs.

Dawn had arrived. He glanced at his bike by the back door. That was out of the question. He dreaded walking. The Zapatas weren't up yet, so he couldn't ask Hector for a ride.

But Jade and Howard would sleep at least till noon. They had hangovers every time they went to the Dew Drop. He took the car keys from the hook by the back door and went out to the driveway and let himself into their Bulgemobile, a monstrous Impala they'd bought a year ago. Since they'd moved into the Piper house, they'd gone through a series of Bulgemobiles, trading them in every other year for something new to slowly destroy.

This one, parked at a crazy angle, was already missing one headlight and part of a bumper. He slipped the keys into the ignition, and the car started after a couple coughs and a sputter.

He turned it around and slowly pulled out the driveway and onto the street. He'd only driven the driver's ed cars before this monstrosity, but all things considered, he thought he did all right.

He drove down through the circular maze of streets that made up his neighborhood. The air, warm already, was layered with a fine mist. There were no other cars out at five in the morning, and the huge pine trees lining the narrow road loomed ominously, watching and waiting.

Finally he made it down the hill and continued on toward the fairgrounds. A light turned red at the school corner, and he sat there and waited for no traffic, his stomach nervous, his heart beating too fast. The light changed and he glanced up and saw the low pall of smoke over the fairgrounds.

Numb, not allowing his imagination to run wild—
probably the corn dog stand, an oil fire, that's all
—he drove down the street and pulled to a stop across the street from the entrance.

He got out of the car and started across the street.

He saw nothing unusual at first, except for two police cars and a single fire engine at the inside edge of the vast field that served as the fairground parking lot. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air.

Ducking under the rope that closed the lot, he started across the field. He could see the ticket booths just beyond the police cars and then the square little carnival buildings that should have been dismantled by now.
Maybe they're just a little slow this morning.
Maybe they'd started tearing down from the other side of the carnival, near the trailers where everyone lived.

He couldn't see those from here.

Ignoring the pain, he began to run, then, ducking another set of ropes, he entered the carnival grounds, the smoke acrid and cloying in his nostrils. None of the buildings had been torn down yet, as far as he could see.

“Son?”

He looked at the yellow-coated fireman who called him. “What happened? Where is everyone?”

“Do you have friends here?”

“Yes! Where are they?” Panicked, he shot forward, but the fireman reached his arm out and caught Rick's elbow. “What's your name, son?”

“Rick.”

“Rick, do you have relatives here?”

He hesitated. “Robin!” he blurted. “Robin Piper, he's my brother. He's here. I want to go to the trailers, I have a lot of friends here—”

“Hey, Ed,” the fireman called over his shoulder.

“Yeah?” called a young cop with dirt smudged on his face.

“Stay here, Rick,” the fireman said, and went to talk to the cop. A moment later, the cop came up to him.

“I want to go to the trailers,” Rick said.

“There's been a fire.” The cop wasn't much older than him, Rick realized. He looked scared, his blue eyes sort of glazed. “There was an explosion. It's bad. There are a lot of fatalities.”

“How many?”

“We don't know yet.”

“I want to see if Delia's all right.”

The cop eyed him. “I thought you were looking for your brother.”

“Yes, he's here, but so's Delia and her family. And Clarisse and Omar and—”

The policeman's skin looked too white under the ashes smudged on his cheek. “Rick, most everyone was in their living quarters when the explosion hit. It was very sudden and the fire was so fierce and hot—”

“I thought I heard sonic booms. Was that it?”

The cop nodded. “There's not much left. They had the trailers well away from the carnival. The grounds are so big and all . . .” The young cop looked around him, and Rick thought the guy was trying not to cry.

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying the carnival wasn't blown up, the living quarters were, and you don't want to see. So far, there are no survivors. A lot of bodies.” He shook his head. “They didn't stand a chance. Is your family . . .”

“We live on Via Matanza.”

The cop looked relieved. “Maybe you'd better go tell them. We don't even know if we can identify the remains.” He pulled out a notebook. “Give me your name and number. We'll be in touch.”

Rick did. “I need to see. Just for a moment.”

The policeman studied him. “Okay, but not close up. We've got professionals losing their cookies over this.”

Rick could tell this man wasn't exaggerating by the sick look in his eyes. “Okay.”

They walked together around the rows of buildings until the trailers came into view. There was nothing but charred, blackened ruins dotted with yellow bags. More police cars, fire engines, and a bunch of ambulances sat nearby. As he watched, Rick saw another cop with a handkerchief tied over his mouth and gloves on his hands pick up something long and jointed and put it in a sack.

It was an arm.

“Go on home now,” the cop said gently.

Rick leaned on a shovel and listened to the pump gurgle. A week after the explosion, they'd held Robin's funeral, and Jade had sobbed histrionically, the poodle in her lap whining along with her. Howard and the Zapatas were there, and some kids from school showed up, but that was all. When they laid the tiny coffin containing a few charred bones in the ground, only Jade cried.

Rick had been glad that his brother was dead, but the loss of Delia hurt him terribly. It still hurt, as did the knowledge that he could never know if Delia really hated him, or if Robin had made it all up. He was sixteen years old and he hated Santo Verde more than ever. He had already started planning to graduate high school a year early and go to UNLV, where he would be surrounded by nothing but sand for four years. There was nothing left in Santo Verde for him. Nothing at all.

The papers, he recalled, had said that police had reason to believe the explosion had been set intentionally, but the perpetrators were never caught.

Rick watched Hector readjust the pump. The only other thing that happened before he left home was Howard's death on Halloween night. Officially it was a heart attack, and the coroner said cirrhosis of the liver would have got him if his heart hadn't.

Evidently he'd been sitting out on the porch as usual, nursing his Jack Daniels and smoking his Tiparillo, when he decided to take a walk, probably to pee in the pond.

That night, for a reason attributed only to drunkenness, Howard had missed the pond by twenty yards and wandered into the deep front grounds. Hector found him there the next morning, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a rictus of a scream. A cop commented that he looked like he'd been scared to death. The cop wondered about all the grass stains on the clothes and skin, and the leaves in his mouth, and the coroner said he must have thrashed around in the foliage before he died.

What the coroner said was true, Rick had known as he stood there staring coolly at his dead uncle. It was truer than he'd ever know. Uncle Howard had had a little run-in with Big Jack himself.

“Rick?”

Hector's voice startled him out of his reverie. “Yeah?”

“I think we're ready for the dirty work. We can't siphon any more out.”

Oh, joy,
Rick thought, looking at the greenish black mounds of glop and garbage at the bottom of the pool.

“I'm going to get a couple masks out of the toolshed,” Hector announced, pulling off his rubber gloves.

“I guess I should have hired this job out,” Rick said.

“It's bad, but we can do it.” Hector's lip curled as he studied the muck. “We don't want to get that stuff on us. I'm gonna get some thicker gloves for us, and I think there are a couple pairs of hip boots hanging in the garage. Your grandfather left them here.”

“Thanks,” Rick called as the other man trudged away. Hector was right—they couldn't climb into that mire unprotected. If they did, they'd both end up on antibiotics from staph infections.

Hector returned a few moments later with the masks, gloves, and dusty but intact waders. They put them on, took garbage sacks and shovels, and climbed down the steps at the shallow end of the pool.

Rick picked his way into the deepest part of the pool, where the muck reached almost to his knees, and, resigned to his task, began shoveling.

The sludge was mainly liquid compost, probably years-old leaves and grass, and dissolved fish and frogs, though he occasionally found tree limbs, dishes, liquor bottles, and beer cans. There were two oil filters and what might have once been a cowboy hat, all in one corner of the pool. Glancing behind him at Don Quixote, glinting in the midday sun, he wondered what the knight would have pretended this slimy enemy to be.

He moved to the other side of the deep end and began working once more. A few minutes later, his shovel ran into something solid. He pulled back and tried again, and again met resistance.
It's big, whatever it is.
The goop sucked against the shovel, not wanting to give up its prize, but finally he pulled it partway out before it slipped off the shovel and disappeared again.

“Damn.” Rick leaned the shovel against the wall and bent over, digging his gloved hands into the mess. He pulled the object out and held it up, trying to see what it was under the dripping goo.

“It's a bone,” Hector said, slogging over.

“My God.” Hector was right. It was too big to be an animal bone, but it was odd-looking, too. Hector took the bone and set it on the cement edging the pool. Rick dug in again, this time pulling out an oddly shaped rib cage.

“Mother of God,” Hector breathed. “It's human.”

He didn't offer to take the ribs, so Rick set them aside himself, then grimly he went back to work, pulling more bones from the mire. Finally he extracted the skull, and moaned, his suspicions confirmed by the uniquely ridged brow. “Dear God,” he moaned. “It's Delia.”

“I'll get Carmen,” Hector said.

Numbly Rick nodded and climbed from the pool. He set the skull next to the other bones that dried in the sun, and took the time to study the stunted leg bones. “My God, Delia.” Tears ran down his face.

They weren't so much for Delia—he was long used to the idea of her death—but for himself. Now he knew that his brother was behind the note, behind the death. They were tears of relief.