Kaleidoscope (13 page)

Tommy was keen to see Flambé’s act.

“He’s been workin’ on somethin’ special.”

And indeed he had. The Great Flambé’s act combined his twin capacities to tame elephants and fire. Jack watched with Tommy as the veteran rode Ambassador’s tusks to take a tin of gasoline off a bunted barrel.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” the crowd cooed in anticipation.

The torches came next. Twin pillars.

“UP,” Flambé commanded, and rode the bull’s tusks a dozen feet into the air.

Jack watched Flambé balance on his ivory pedestal, fill his mouth with gasoline and without a moment’s hesitation swallow a flaming torch. Fire spewing from his elevated perch to incinerate a papier-mâché castle set twenty feet away.

The crowd roared its astonished approval and Jack with them. The son of a bitch was a pleaser, no doubt about it.

The Penguin Lady did her shtick in a sideshow down from Flambé’s act. Jack had never seen Charlotte in other than modest and ordinary attire, but here she was, hair down and stretched nearly naked on an oil-painted iceberg, dry ice wafting over the set to provide the illusion of chill in the tropics.

A wooden puppet boot-blacked to resemble a penguin cuddled between Charlotte’s webbed extremities. As the marks milled outside her pit, The Penguin Lady drew her scenario with Delphic indifference.

“…What kind of creatures are these, little ones?” The Penguin Lady regarding the natives as though they were the creatures on display. “Who are these myrmidons who stare at us as we seek to take our bed?”

The puppet answering in Charlotte’s thrown voice.

“These are the most wonderful and terrible of beings, my lady. They are called…people.”

Some nervous jitters, then, from an audience suddenly quiet.

“Tell them to be careful,” The Penguin Lady stretched lasciviously. “What they seek may not be what they neeeeeed….”

Down from The Penguin Lady, a headless woman rose from her chair to the amazement of all. Her barker really had the rubes going—

“…HEADLESS at birth HEADLESS FAYE is kept alive ONLY by a LIQUID NOURISHMENT developed by Doctor Anaximander Albatross Ethelreld, Ph.D., M.D., L.L.D. and communicator with the SPIRITS BEYOND!!!”

A coil of hoses gurgled fluids into the severed neck.

Jack leaned close to Tommy’s ear.

“Is that real?”

Tommy chortled. “The fuck, Jack! You
are
a rube!”

So it went. A troupe billed as the “Original Wild Men of Borneo” threw bananas at the crowd. Turned out there were at least a dozen troupes of Negroes claiming to be the last and cannibalistic inhabitants from that ill-defined location. On the other hand, he also saw legitimate performers like Pinhead drive nails up his nose. The Armless Man he’d first seen at Luna’s café had the rubes going when he pulled somebody from the audience and with nothing but the toes of his feet proceeded to untie the mark’s shoes and re-tie them! Then he slipped off the rube’s tie and re-knotted it!

A pair of dwarfs, friends of Tommy’s, weighed in for an incredulous circle of admirers at a
combined
weight of—

“One hundred forty-nine and a half pounds!”

And at the other extreme was Princess Peewee.

Tommy stopped Jack short at Peewee’s elevated stall. The Fat Lady sat spraddle-legged above the crowd with no pretense at royalty. A loose shift left all the folds and creases corpulent and plain to see. She wore no underthings, Jack noticed, and noticed, too, that she didn’t seem to care.

655 POUNDS—a pair of scales were rigged to exaggerate, but only slightly. Jack could see that The Princess was the largest draw of any sideshow; must have been a hundred natives jostling to get a gander. And she definitely knew how to cater to their several interests, rocking those huge breasts to and fro as she fanned herself with a faux feather of ostrich.

“Say, Peewee!” some yokel yelled from the crowd. “Will ya MARRY me?”

“Depends if yer BIG enough,” Peewee shot back, and the rubes roared laughter.

Dollar bills fluttered like pollen into a tub placed below Peewee’s rude throne. Coins were tossed onstage.

“Look at these people,” Tommy said proudly. “They eat her up.”

Not a hint more of acknowledgement from The Princess to her admirers, however. Not so much as a nod to the men and boys who filled her tub with bills and silver. She lapsed to a feigned indifference, now that she had them on her leash. Those golden curls plastered close to her skull. Royal and aloof. Quite literally above the fray.

Jack nodded to the half-filled tub.

“Want me to sack the money?”

“Not tonight. Tonight you’re the bruno.”

“Okay, I give up, what’s a bruno?”

“From the mines, dickhead. Coal mines? The fella that shovels coal into the cart.”

“Don’t see any coal mines here.”

“Well, you ain’t workin’ for a mine, are ya?”

“So what am I shoveling?”

“You’re shoveling her shit.”

“…
Hers
?”

“That’s right. Doniker’s built right under.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

“No, but she will. Dump a loaf on yer basket, she thinks yer takin’ advantage.”

Jack swallowed a surge of bile; Tommy smiled.

“There’s a wheelbarrow behind the stall. Got a ditch out back for the leavings.”

“I’m not gonna do it.”

Jack dropped his shovel. Tommy glanced down at the abandoned tool.

“What was that?”

“I’m not gonna do it,” Jack repeated. “I’m not gonna shovel some fat lady’s shit.”

“Then pack yours and leave,” the dwarf replied calmly. “I’ll tell Luna to draw yer pay. I could care less, one way or the other.”

“I’m a performer.”

“Not yet.”

Jack knew there was no appeal. It was take it or leave it and he couldn’t afford to leave.

Tommy kicked the blade end of the shovel and its handle popped into his hand.

“Here.”

He handed Jack the implement.

“There’s a shower set up behind the grabjoint when yer done.”

By the time Jack finished clearing Peewee’s latrine he was dryheaving and filthy and frustrated. By the time he had finished spreading the last of Peewee’s offal, the midway was shut down. Nothing remained but a flotsam of paper wrappers and peanut bags, the detritus of natives returned to town that would, Jack was sure, be his first task to clear the next morning.

The sing-song of the calliope was long silent, the rides still. The calls of frogs had taken over, now, and the infernal buzz of insects. Jack scrubbed down in cold water fallen from a barrel rigged for an outdoor shower. He scrubbed a bar of lye soap down to a nub. His hair was stiff as a board and his skin raw, but he was clean. Which fact drew the unwanted attention of mosquitoes.

He cursed defecation, insects, and gangsters. He cursed Oliver Bladehorn. Most of all he cursed his own cursed luck. There could be a pile of gold buried under Peewee’s bench and he’d spread shit for a century before he found it.

And there was no help in the offing, no ally, no confidant. The freaks down here were not about to trust him, no matter how much fire or crap he swallowed. He was a fool to think he could con a carney.

“God DAMMIT!”

He could not reach a skeeter sinking its probe between his shoulder blades.

“Let me.” Cassandra appeared from nowhere.

And before he could decline she stepped quickly to his flank and slapped the offending insect dead.

“We should put some netting up,” she traced the line of his spine with her finger. “Better than a smudge pot.”

Jack scratched a bite furiously.

“I have some citronella oil in my trailer, you know. Will take out the itch.”

“I just wanta sleep,” Jack grabbed a towel.

“Sleep with me, then.”

“Take a raincheck, Cassandra, all right?”

He was reaching overhead to kill the spigot when she asked him, “Why are you interested in Alex Goodman?”

Goosebumps on his back along with a sudden stir of tropical breeze.

“Got no interest,” he mumbled. “Nothing special, anyway.”

She circled her arms around his naked waist. She wore a translucent shift of some sort, a kind of peignoir pulled high around her multiple breasts. A narrow waist, he had not expected that and could not help but feel her legs, long and hairless and apparently impervious to the insults of mosquitoes. Her hair caught in the moon like a basket of pearls.

She smelled of jasmine.

“Alex Goodman,” she pressed her hands flat on his butt. “What’s Alex to you?”

“I met him. Had a couple of drinks. That’s all.”

“Sure, Jack? You sure that’s all there is to it?”

“What do you know about Goodman?” Jack slipped his towel beneath her hands.

“Come to my parlor,” she pulled away. “And maybe you’ll see.”

She lived as if on the road, in a caravan, a kind of customized wagon set on truck axles for tow. Her snake had the run of the place, apparently. Jack spotted the python right away, wound sinuously on a high-hung shelf crammed with plaster bric-à-brac of erotica.

Every possible variation of human copulation decorated the cheap and mobile interior. A mishmash of pagan relics completely unfamiliar to Romaine complemented the priapic display, a Zoroastrian barsom set between a bronzed Horus and a wooden post dedicated to the goddess Asherah.

“Leave your dirties outside,” she said and pulled him a bathrobe off a hook.

Jack tried to ignore the snake and the statuary. He slipped on the welcome terrycloth and within moments was installed opposite Cassandra at a small hardwood table, perfectly round, inhaling some kind of incense lit with a taper by his hostess. She had already dropped her own robe to display twin cleavages on a single chest.

Jack found himself watching the rise and fall of her breasts. They were, all three of them, remarkably firm. Rising, falling again with the chant of some mumbled incantation. There was, naturally, a crystal ball between them. Jack wondered if he picked it up and shook it he might not see some domestic scene in miniature inside. Snow falling on a New England farm, say. Sheep grazing beside a crystal stream.

“In all fairness,” he interrupted the prophetess’s droning meditation, “I have to tell you I think this is a crock.”

“That is Cassandra’s Curse,” the voice seemed not her own. “To prophesize and yet not to be believed.”

There appeared to be no resentment in that statement. Perhaps a touch of melancholy. She reached out to take the translucent ball and Jack saw an elaborate analemma, its figure-8 tattooed down the length of an arm.

She cradled the ball with both hands. Eyes blinking wide open as a doe’s.

Did it seem to glow brighter, the ball? What kind of trick was that?

“I see two men,” the voice was disembodied. Remote. “You. And Good Man. But you do not touch. You do not meet.”

Was that a smile tugging at that ripe, ripe mouth?

“The signs say that you have never seen Alex GoodMan. That he is, for you, a mystery. But not to meeee…”

Jack scowled contempt.

“Better oil your ball. I already said I met the guy. At a speakeasy. In Cincinnati.”

Cassandra appeared not to have heard a word he said.

“You do not know him,” she contradicted calmly. “And yet you seek him. Why is that?”

She wasn’t looking into the ball, now.

“Aren’t I supposed to be the one asking the questions?”

“Ask then,” she opened her arms in invitation.

What was that stirring in his scrotum—?!! Jack jerked his hand to his crotch.

“It’s not the snake,” Cassandra smiled. “Not mine, anyway.”

Jack felt himself go crimson.

“Goddamn it, cut the games! When did Alex get here? How well did
you
know him?”

“He came to Kaleidoscope a year ago,” she replied directly. “Perhaps a little more.”

A straight answer. Or…was it?

“You had to know him, then,” Jack pressed. “He couldn’t have been a stranger.”

“No stranger to anyone, no. In fact, in many respects I would say he was exactly like you, Jack.”

“Like me.”

“Unsure of himself. Uncertain. Frail in a number of ways, addicted to compulsions over which he had little control. A man starting over.”

“So what did he do before?”

“There is no ‘before’ for the man starting over.”

“Not much of an ‘after’, either, apparently, ’cause by September he was dead.”

“Dead, yes. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that.”

“So what killed him?” Jack leaned forward to her. “What exactly? I need to know if what I’ve heard is true.”

She gazed into her ball. He saw the three breasts rise and fall and his stomach lurched.

“Cassandra?”

He couldn’t tell if she was listening. If she could hear him.

“What about Alex Goodman, Cassandra? Was Alex asking too many questions? Was he looking for something, maybe? Was he close?”

“Close—? To what?” She wove long, gypsy fingers about the ball, the glow from inside passing through the beds of her fingernails.

“You either know or you don’t, dammit.”

“I…see…a man,” a sheen of sweat had broken as suddenly as if she had been doused. “I see a frightened man, but aroused. I see a woman as well, also frightened. An enormous woman. An Aphrodite.”

“This is bullshit. You aren’t telling me anything I haven’t already heard.”

Her eyes snapped up to meet his. Wild, feral eyes. “You have to pay.”

Jack tried to rise from his chair and found he could not.

“The hell do you mean, ‘pay’?”

“Prophecy is no good unless paid for. The old oracles understood that. They were wild, those ancient women. They took their geld in sex. Our word ecstasy comes from their rituals, did you know that, Jack? From their loins, their breasts, their lips….”

She was touching herself, her breasts, her pudenda.

“Men were known to die in coitus,” she moaned. “Their hearts burst with pleasure! But some survived. The best. The strongest.”

She leaned across the hard, round table. Jack tried again to stand, to withdraw, but again could not.