Everybody Scream! (19 page)

“No.”

“Get her one in case, Sneeze. You should Sophi...you’re more sociable when you’ve loosened up a little. You’re a tense person.”

“Quit fucking with me, Leng.” Sophi watched Tightrope head to the counter. “I mean it.”

“I have quit fucking with you–that’s why I’ve been so blue. What’s the problem, hon? Did your hubby start sniffing us out?”

“No. I just don’t want anything to do with you, can your pathetic bloated ego handle that concept?”

“But where did our love go wrong?” Leng cracked. “What happened, what changed?”

“I sobered up. You must have sobered up before and found out you did something stupid and disgusting like vomiting on the rug, right?”

“It’s been my experience and observation that when you’re drunk you do things you want to do but are too inhibited to carry out otherwise.”

“Look, I was depressed and drinking and I just wanted to be fucked by a mindless animal such as you. It was primal lust, pal, that’s it. It was an escape, like drinking. I’m capable of such regretful overindulgence.”

“Twice?”

“So I’m a slow learner. There won’t be a third.”

“Oh, so your depression is all cleared up then, is it?”

“My feelings and personal life are none of your business, ass-wipe.”

“Are you guilty? When your husband is out here fishing every night right under your nose?”

“Mind your own business, Leng, I won’t say it again.”

“Let him go on making a fool of you. For a couple minutes there you had some guts, you were looking after yourself. What are you, a masochist or something? He doesn’t respect you, he doesn’t know a good thing when he has it in his hand.”

“Oh, but you’d appreciate me, huh? You’d be a wonderful husband to me, Leng, and never be unfaithful, right? Let me up. What happened to that pretty little girl I saw you with at the start of the season, where’d she go? I heard tell she was sporting a swollen upper lip with a cut in it, at the end. Did you appreciate her a little too hard?”

Johnny Leng was not a gentle-looking man. Short, muscular, he was deeply tanned a reddish color from the sun rather than tan booths, with an outdoorsy roughness to his features. His mouth was broad and thick-lipped, his eyes narrow with an almost oriental fold, his black hair short and mussed. White t-shirt and jeans. He was brutish, primal. The sun, hard work as a young man, time spent in the military, time spent in prison had squeezed the weak milk of sensitivity out of him. He was looking even less gentle by the second. The tight compressed sneer to his lips finally let words past, having held them long enough to drug them into calmness.

“You’re mad at me because you’re mad at yourself and you can’t face it. It’s you you’re disgusted at. Be a bitch to me. But what I did with you wasn’t a fraction of what your husband is out there doing, right now probably. How disgusted are you at him?”

Sophi glanced past Leng at Sneezy, still in line. His eyes were on her and he was smirking. Pot-bellied inside his tropically flowered shirt, tails hanging out over his baggy white shorts, he was short and tanned but the too-dark shade popular among tan fanatics, with his high, balding forehead an unhealthy shiny red in patches. A little black mustache and a series of chinless jowls gave his smug little smirk more of an irritating self-amused quality, to Sophi. His eyes echoed the smirk, which in turn echoed the sly, smug expression so often worn by both LaKarnafeaux and Walpole. It was uncanny, the exactness in tone. Of the friends, only Leng ever appeared to show naked anger. But it was Sneezy Sophi felt the most disturbed by, in light of the rumors about his alleged extrasensory abilities. Some said he only picked up on general moods, emotions. Others said he could read your mind like a book, delve into your past, dissect your present, forecast your future. That big, burned forehead looked so heavy that it was this perhaps which bunched up his jowls.

Sophi folded her paper shut, polished off her mead. As she set down her mug and her rear left her seat Leng clamped a hand over her wrist. Sophi flared her eyes into his. “Let go of me, scum.”

“Is your husband scum?”

“Leave my husband out of it. Husband or not, I wouldn’t want you to touch me again.”

“People’s hungers don’t change. And your husband’s never will, so stop hoping for it.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s not what Sneezy tells me.”

Horrified, Sophi flicked her eyes to the line at the counter. Tightrope’s eyes and smirk were still trained on her. She jerked at her arm but Leng held it pinned. “Let me go.”

“You don’t have to love me, bitch...I’m not naïve enough to hope for that...and even though I’d love like hell to nail ya to the mattress again I can live without it–” he squeezed her wrist harder “– but don’t ever call me scum again, unless you’re willing to call yourself scum...and your husband, too.”

“It isn’t that you fucked me that makes you scum. You’re scum anyway. For the last time, let me go.”

Johnny Leng cocked his head and tried on a broad, leathery smirk in the general character of LaKarnafeaux’s, but less whimsical. “I want one more fuck or else I’ll leak it to your husband about us. I’m sure not afraid of him, so what have I got to lose?”

“Do it. He knows I’ve cheated on him before. Now let me go.” There was a tin ashtray near her plate of dilkies, her cigarette smoldering in it. Sophi took up her cigarette and poised the orange tip over Leng’s hairy wrist.

He didn’t let up the pressure or the smirk. “You don’t hate me as much as you think. You still want me. Lust and hate go hand in hand.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong, Leng–next time ask Sneezy for a more thorough analysis.” Sophi pressed the cigarette tip into his flesh.

Leng looked down at his arm, pouted, released her wrist. He rubbed the spot calmly. “Next time don’t stub the thing out; you hold it to the skin
lightly
, so it keeps on burning.” Still smiling. “I know–I’ve done it before.”

“Stay away from me. One more word to me about this subject, any trouble whatsoever, and you and your fellow pigs are out of my carnival for good. Understand–
scum?
” Sophi flicked the cigarette butt at Leng’s face and whooshed out of the screened-in tent even as Tightrope finally made it to the table with a tray of drinks.

Sneezy said, “She’s afraid of me. It’s strong. More so than she is of you. Can you imagine? I never killed anybody in my life.” He snorted-chuckled, beer foam on his mustache.

Sipping his own beer, Leng wagged his head, amused. Sophi would have been a lot more afraid of him if she’d known that his swollen-lipped girlfriend who had stopped coming around was right now an unidentified corpse at Paxton police headquarters’ morgue with both her eyes shot out.

As the afternoon sun further receded the carnival increasingly made up for the loss with colorful lights, encrusting the rides like jewels, and drawing more and more people, more people than in the day, like mesmerized moths. Heather Buffatoni’s father had dropped her, Cookie Zalkind and Fawn Horowitz off in the parking lot, to return and pick them up at eleven. At the sight of magical, multifarious colors against the lowering sky, at the crest of the hill like a mystical city, Fawn’s spirits lightened and she put behind her the fight with her mother, her mother’s refusal to give her any more than twenty munits, and ten of that to be her allowance for next week, in advance! She had borrowed ten more from Heather’s sister’s fiancé, a softy.

Though most of her friends were of primarily Jewish heritage, Heather was Fawn’s best friend and she had other primarily Italian friends, because when their station in life was high enough to minimize what Fawn considered to be an innate crudeness, they were of a like nature in ways to her Jewish friends…aggressive, strong, determined to succeed in life. Heather and Fawn had met last year in the same high school Modeling and Beauty class, in which nine out of the thirty-five girls had been of mostly Italian blood, a high percentage considering the heterogenous nature and endless mixed-breeding of society. None of the nine were in any sense beauties and only two or three were by a conventional standard truly pretty, Heather being one. She had a round and pleasant face, with short curly hair dyed blonde and a sexy figure destined for plumpness if future diligence wasn’t maintained. Oddly, perhaps out of relaxed confidence, it was Heather who was the least egocentric of the nine Italian girls, and the quietest. The greatest two differences between Heather and Fawn was that Fawn had only tried smoking seaweed, whereas Heather had embraced it (and maintained a separate group of friends to share this pursuit with), and Fawn had necked with a few boys but was a virgin (except for her pet bug Herbie), while Heather had many exciting stories to tell.

They paid their way inside, and immediately met another group of girls from school: Colleen Narcisi from Modeling class, and Rena Tushkin and Diana Talmud. These girls had already attracted a few boys from school who’d been roaming in a separate group, shaven-headed hulking sportsters. One of them whom Fawn had told Heather she liked smiled at her and she cringed against Heather’s arm in pleasure, squealing softly in her friend’s ear. But minutes later as they noisily, excitedly chattered Fawn grew bitter at the way Colleen kept punching the boy on the arm and wrestling with him, tickling him, making contact in every childish way to secure his attentions. Fawn was also jealous of Colleen’s white leotard-tight sweat pants with the rear flap fully open. Her mother forbade her from wearing such pants even with panties on under the open or partly-opened flap. Rena wore red pants, also with the flap open and without underwear. Diana, prettier, was also more reserved. These three were too attractive, too much competition…Fawn wanted to get away from them now that Colleen had staked her claim on the cute sportster.

Fawn urged Heather to buy tickets with her so they could begin right away on the rides, and Heather accompanied her to one of the ticket booths near the entrance while small hyperactive Cookie lingered to chat animatedly with the others.

Mitch jogged his way to the front gate. One of his people, Dingo Rubydawn, a Choom, had bleeped him that there was a potential problem with a group of Red Jihad who wouldn’t give up their arsenal.

There were fourteen of them, only three being females. The only obvious difference between the females, veiled and black-garbed like ancient nuns, was their height. Two were children, but from the age of four they were required to hide their hair; at five females were considered adult and at nine could marry...so these might have been wives taken out for a night’s entertainment on the kiddie rides.

The boys, ranging from sixteen (when a man could take a wife) to about twenty, were not, Mitch was relieved to see, the army-uniformed bearded clones who wore the red martyr bandanas of the considerable warrior caste. The huge posters they left around town showed a mass of these types approaching the camera in waves, their faces turned in profile to look at something. At first glance this poster seemed to show the same man reproduced over and over again, until you saw slight variations such as the height of the gun barrel held in front of their chests. Mitch had seen more variation in the personality of cats, easily, and even in simple-minded cows, than he had in his experiences with the Red Jihad cult. This, he’d said as a policeman after a few dangerous near-confrontations, was what would happen if you gave insects a religion.

The boys were starting beards, all wearing white shirts and dark pants. The shirts, never washed, were thickly crusted brown with dried blood–their own. The Red Jihad had a religious ritual by which a wound was opened in the top of a boy’s head at sixteen and the bleeding was a purification, a cleansing shower. “Miscreants,” “unbelievers” and “infidels” jokingly referred to this as a holy hole, and it was reopened every year on the man’s birthday. A complex machine which judged the man’s height in order to safely deliver the automatic gashing had been developed to keep up with each day’s steady flow. Herds of men poured through like cattle to be slaughtered, the smell of blood adding to the analogy. Islam was the fastest growing Earth-oriented religion, and Moslems numbered in the billions on Earth, but many of them disowned the extremist Red Jihad schism–which despite this fact was growing steadily itself. No one but Red Jihad members inhabited the harsh planet called the World of Faith. The governors of Oasis, both Earth colonials and Chooms, were becoming restless with the growing hordes of Red Jihad and feared that one day they would overwhelm Oasis as they had their World of Faith, or at least grow numerous enough to present the constant problem they presented on far Earth. There had already been acts of terrorism here, thus far mostly directed at extensions of the Canon, rather than political targets, over the past few decades. There had been a group of Red Jihad students occupying a tenement building on Forma Street, and although they had been fairly well behaved Mitch had learned to treat them as if they all wore explosives strapped to their bodies even when they didn’t.