Kaleidoscope (16 page)

It was good duty, Jack had to admit. After a short while Luna refired the inboard. Twin cylinders pumping
pocka-pocka
with a tang of gasoline. They were not pushing the pistons to any extent; the bow of their boat barely raised off the water. Even so Jack had to lean far over to dip his hand into the water running by. Not a sound rose above the skiff’s baffled exhaust. A flight of mallards sweeping by like a squadron of aeroplanes, but silent, low to the water. They had just banked past a magnificent arbor of weeping willow when a raucous cry penetrated.

“Osprey,” Luna nodded starboard and sure enough Jack saw a predator big as a buzzard preening on the peak of a bald cypress ashore.

“They feed on fish, mostly,” Luna spoke above the engine. “But turtles, too. I’ve seen an osprey pick up a turtle and drop him from a hundred feet. Bust that shell like an egg!”

“My son would get a kick out of this,” Jack sang back

“Your son?”

She cut the engine and again they drifted.

“You have a son?”

“In Chicago. Him and my Mamere. My wife was from France. Gilette. Met her during the war. She made it past the Germans and the gas and the artillery just to die over here of the damned influenza. So Martin grows up with me. Me and his grandmother.”

“Good kid?”

“All American. Babe Ruth and baseball and every hero you can name. ’Cept for his father; I haven’t exactly made that list.”

“Fathers don’t have to be heroes for their sons.”

“Don’t they?”

“No. They just have to be fathers.”

“I strike out on both counts.”

A rib of clouds suddenly sabotaged the sun’s warming rays. The river turning dark and damp and green as jade.

“Place ahead involves a daddy, of sorts.” Luna started the engine with a turn of the flywheel. “If you’d like to see.”

“Sure.”

She leaned on the tiller and slid their shallow-drafting craft toward the far shoreline, banking again downstream for another short run. She throttled back abruptly.

“There. Over there.”

Jack capped his eyes with his hands. A strange skeleton of iron rose on a spit of land shoved like a dwarfed peninsula into the river.

“What is it, some kind of animal cage?”

“It’s a cage,” she uncoiled a line. “But not for animals.”

They tied the boat off and jumped onto land that you couldn’t call dry; Jack sank up to his ankles. The cage rose in a rough dome eight or perhaps ten feet high and approximately the same diameter, set on a perimeter of railroad ties. Vines laced with briars sharp as knives twined through the gridded bars. Palmetto had broken through the dirt floor inside. Luna dropped the lockless chain which secured the bowl’s gate, the links jangling briefly, like chimes.

“C’mon.”

Jack followed her inside.

“Fella name of MacCready had a daughter he couldn’t marry off,” she began without preamble. “She was a sweet girl. Born with lots of hair.”

“My son has a head of hair,” Jack offered, but Luna shook her head.

“No. I mean hair all over. Everywhere. Like the fur of a cat. She tortured herself at first, trying to get rid of it. Trying to look like everybody else—pitiful. And of course that didn’t work and when she got of age and none of the boys would have her and when her daddy got tired of the extra mouth to feed, he got the idea of putting her on display. Here. Right here in this cage.

“‘The Cat’s Cradle’, people called it, and MacCready put his girl on exhibit naked, like some kind of puma for people to pay and see.”

Jack saw how the cage was exposed to the river. Easy to see. He tried not to imagine.

“People threw their nickels and dimes and pennies into the cage. Then Old Man MacCready, he got the idea of dressing himself up in boots and a tunic like a damn lion tamer or some such. Got himself a whip.

“He just used it for effect, first time or two, but he found out quickly that if he lashed his girl some, the natives would go crazy. Start throwin’ quarters instead of nickels. Sometimes even silver dollars, if he lit into her good enough.

“Wasn’t long before people started comin’ from all over to see ‘The Cat Woman’. MacCready took to leaving her in the cage. Built himself a lean-to right over yonder. So he’d be close to work, I guess. Probably figured with her hair she wouldn’t mind the mosquitoes. Not any more than an animal would, anyway.

“Some of the rubes didn’t think she was genuine, so he’d force her to defecate in the cage, and if she balked or froze up or was just plain constipated, he’d beat her. She’d shit, then. That was always worth an extra buck or two.”

“What happened to her?” Jack asked.

“One day MacCready’s out here, all set for business as usual, only by now some palmetto had grown into the cage. Just like you see here. And the daughter had gnawed herself off a length. He had her eating everything from squirrels to fish guts for the crowd’s pleasure, so gnawing a palmetto frond would have fit right in.

“There was a good crowd, apparently. And like any good barker MacCready took his time buildin’ ’em up. Teasing them to a frenzy. Finally it was time for the real thing. The old man turned to show the rubes the whip and she jumped him from behind and drove a palmetto frond right through his eye.

“Of course, that happens you naturally jerk up on instinct to pull it out. That’s what old MacCready did, and when he did she reached around with those nails grown long as a panther’s and gouged out the other eye.

“Now he’s blinded. She took his whip and beat him ’till he begged. Beat his sorry ass to rags. Wasn’t anything the natives could do—they were locked out. Time somebody finally got the sheriff out here she’d bullwhipped Old Man MacCready to his death.”

The river burbled by, smooth and serene.

“Christ,” Jack shivered.

“Think you’re a shit father? Just remember MacCready. Now, come on,” she ducked out of the cage. “I know a happier place.”

The morning’s mist survived only in isolated wraiths now, tendrils of vapor coiled beneath a limb of willow or cypress. Luna trolled her boat off the river into a narrow creek, the boat’s bottom scraping past a sandbar, but then the channel deepened and widened to reach a crater that appeared to be boiling water.

“This some kinda hot spring?”

“Artesian, at least. Ever seen one?”

“Can’t say I have.”

She was unbuttoning her boy’s shirt.

“Swim with me.”

She dropped her top, her shorts. Jack had never seen a woman so large or muscular except, he realized, in a circus. Lately he had been noticing that, her thighs, her back. The skin was just skin, seemed like.

“Time’s a wastin’,” she dove naked into the spring’s cobalt boil.

Jack followed gamely. He stripped and dove in and his heart threatened arrest before he could break the surface.

“JAZSUS—!”

She hooted laughter.

“JAZSUS CHRIST!”

The water was cold as ice! It was arctic cold. It closed on his chest like a glacier. So cold his hands ached, his feet. Jack was startled to see that his fingernails were already turning blue and as for his balls—? He couldn’t goddamn find ’em.

“Mother
ffff ffff
ucker!” he stuttered.

“You’ll get used to it.”

She rolled onto her back. The water coursed between her breasts and lapped into the bowl of her belly.

“I love this place,” she padded over to the boil and Jack was amazed to see her body lift with the force of the aquifer’s flow.

“Move around, Jack, or you’ll freeze.”

He kicked into a crawl to reach her, the water coming from below, like some great giant hand lifting.

“You don’t even have to work!” he marveled.

She stroked over to meet him, that cold hand below, supporting them both. It was impossible to sink, perhaps even to dive, in the face of that artesian pump.

They kissed over the heart of the spring, deep and long. Her skin was not rough at all, Jack was surprised to discover. It was smooth and warm and toned as a trapeze artist’s.

“You still chilled?”

“Yes,” he had to admit.

“Let’s get warm.”

She must have felt his erection, Jack figured, and so when she broke free he did not know at first whether to follow. But when she reached the shallows and turned to him waist-deep and looked at him, he knew.

They coupled in the water like a pair of otters, her hair black and sleek down that marvelous spine. Two lovers at the spring’s edge, the water boiling cold around them. Slowly, at first. Then more urgently.

“Hold on!”

She kept the lobe of his ear between her teeth.

“Hold it!”

But finally he could not. An osprey cried out with their climax. Jack felt the welcome sun on his back.

They swam afterward, briefly, leisurely, and dressed. Then back to the boat and the river, her breasts pressing through the khaki of her damp shirt to fill the hollow beneath his chest.

It had been so long since he had felt anything like this. Anything at all like it. The water sailed by, the bow lifting now with the throaty labor of its inboard.

“Is there anyone else like you, Luna?”

“You mean with my skin?” Her response was matter of fact.

“Yes.”

She smiled.

“There are whole families of us. Doesn’t hit everyone, but often enough so that where I grew up we weren’t thought of as being particularly different than anyone else.”

“That’s good,” he said.

“Good, how?”

“It’s just I’d hate to think you were like that woman in the cage.”

“I am the woman in the cage, Jack. Every geek ever born is. Difference between me and that poor girl—? I choose my cage. And I keep the take.”

Luna seemed perfectly at peace on the silent way back. Jack was torn with warring emotions. He had never made love to anyone that he intended to use. Or to betray. Could he have Luna, or anyone like her ever again? Had something twisted in the years of cards and cheating and sad, speakeasy cons?

Jack dropped his hand into the silver river. Maybe this place was different, he told himself. Maybe down here, with these people, a man could really and truly start over.

Jack held onto that thought or hope or fantasy, the very possibility of a new life rising like the water from the spring, bearing him up. You didn’t need a lot to live down here. You could make do. Martin would love it, he was sure. Clean air and fishing. And baseball, too, you bet. You could always find a ball and bat, but first—

First he had to find something else.

Heat—
trouble with people who are not carnies
.

F
ist Carlton’s dark mood fit the sky which hung heavy and filled with soot over Cincinnati’s malarial basin. A number of things had conspired to put Bladehorn’s legbreaker out of sorts. The Duesenberg, for one, had a punctured tire, which meant that Fist was reduced to manual labor under the scathing indictment of his boss’s inspection. When Mr. Bladehorn wasn’t happy, no one was happy. Oliver Bladehorn had only just received the second telegraph from his butterfly-in-the-making, Jack Romaine, hinting at unspecified information related to Alex Goodman that, surely, was bound to be solid.

“‘Solid’? Bullshit!” Bladehorn raged. “Who the hell does that son of a bitch think he’s fooling?”

“Let me at him,” Fist offered. “I’ll show him what’s solid.”

“D’you need reminding that it was your responsibility to keep my wife on a leash to begin with?”

“No, sir.”

“Cretin. You’d done your job, I wouldn’t have had my property stolen to begin with!”

The more frustrated Bladehorn got, the more he harassed, belittled and pestered his thug
cum
chauffeur. So Fist had more than his usual store of reasons for wanting a reunion with Jack Romaine.

Finally, Bladehorn had dismissed him for the day. Fist was grateful to be on his way home. He’d taken a pullcar down from the Hills, switching to another streetcar crowded with merchants, tradesman and stevedores on passage through the Basin’s filth before reaching the always-clean markets of Over the Rhine. His own people lived here, solid German stock who since the war had become suspicious of outsiders, insulating themselves in neat little apartments and tidy communal quadrangles.

No guinea would get to you, here.

Fist passed a streetside cheese vendor and walked another block to turn between two buildings whose facing walls rose nearly windowless for four red-bricked stories on either side of a narrow alley.

The alley ran to a dead end at a solitary fire escape which was where Fist was headed. His apartment was at the rear of the tenement, up four flights and down a shotgun hall, its solitary window offering the only view of the bounding alley, but Fist would probably have been unable to recall the last occasion on which he entered his apartment by its street-facing door. For years he instead unlocked the heavy gate barring entry to the alley, relocked the gate, and then climbed the fire escape four stories to reach a landing at the heavy and double-locked door allowing entry to his modest apartment.

There was a serious purpose behind the unorthodox entry. Fist Carlton had no friends; anyone approaching him from an interior door or hallway he regarded as a potential enemy. By using the fire-escape and by gating the alley, Fist was not required to meet anyone. Carlton did not want neighbors to know his comings or goings. He never spoke to anyone from the tenement. If he met someone loitering beside the alley he simply broke a face or an arm and they invariably failed to return.

In earlier years, kids would scale the locked fence to throw catcalls or sometimes bottles at Carlton’s landing. Fist tolerated those indignities stoically. Kids at play were more valuable than canaries in a coal mine. You didn’t get ambushed with kids around. Not even in Cincinnati.

Fist had barely entered the alley when he heard a cat yowl from the fire escape. It was not a housecat, or at least this tom had never entered Fist’s home. In fact, it had taken him weeks just to coax the animal to his landing, each evening after work teasing the cat with some snack or another until it was hooked.

“Can’t wait, can ya?” the big man smiled.

A four-storey climb with his heavy coat and implements reminded Fist daily of his limitations. It was getting hard to mount those improvised stairs, but he managed, finally reaching the fourth floor’s landing and the door that opened directly into his kitchen. The cat was waiting.

“Git,” Fist kicked but the cat was already scampering from range.

The landing’s door was set in a metal frame, secured top and bottom with deadbolts and an interior drawbar. Took two more keys to throw the bolts before Fist stepped into his kitchen. He immediately reset the door’s deadbolts and threw down the interior drawbar. The cat complaining steadily outside as Fist made sure his home was safe. This was his habit. His routine.

There wasn’t much to check—the kitchen opened onto a single room which doubled as bedroom and parlor. Nothing disturbed there. He inspected the loo briefly. A real bathroom, with facilities. No invasion to be discerned in the shitter.

Carlton then lumbered on squeaking shoes to peer through the peephole augered into the apartment’s also-reinforced front door. No threat apparent in the immediate hallway. Fist released another pair of deadbolts, keeping the safety chain engaged as he cracked the door open for a view down the corridor. Nothing to see but a shotgun of peeling wallpaper and unwashed floor.

A gentle release of tension on the chain as Fist released the safety. The door swinging open to reveal an empty milk bottle perched on the frontier between his apartment and the hallway. Fist did not touch the bottle; instead he stooped to ensure that the ring of dust gathered at its base was undisturbed. Satisfied, Bladehorn’s feared henchman then closed the parlor door, secured the locks and safety chain and only then discarded his coat, hat, truncheons and revolver in favor of the more domestic routines at day’s end.

The cat by now pawing at the kitchen door.

“I know, I know.”

Fist rolled up shirtsleeves to expose forearms the size of logs. He lumbered back to the kitchen, bent over an icebox to retrieve a package butcher-wrapped inside. It was Fist’s habit to feed the cat on the landing outside his kitchen door. Once inside Fist did not like to unlock the kitchen door. More secure to tempt the cat from the window.

Fist had armored the window even more exotically than the door. The window itself was ordinary; a pair of bright brass keeps released the glass. The real protection came from a grate of steel mounted outside the window, a moveable grid set in a heavy iron frame welded directly to the fire-escape. The grate itself was a quiver of steel-pointed bars made to raise or lower in sleeves set into the window’s sill so that it functioned like a portcullis protecting a castle’s gate. No intruder could force his way through Fist’s armored window, but he could easily raise it to defend the landing against any intruder.

Or just to be entertained by the cat.

Fist raised the window first and a stir of air wafted through the grating. A padlock and bar secured the grate’s vertical bars in their iron sleeves. Fist knelt at the window to release the lock, the ungrateful kitty jabbing a tentative paw through those iron spikes in an attempt to reach the food now maddeningly displayed on the sill.

Fist raked a ring of keys viciously across the grate; the cat spit and backed off. Carlton released the padlock’s hasp with a chuckle and pulled the bar free.

“Not long, now,” Fist promised and took a grip of the grate’s iron frame.

Even for a big man it took a shove to raise the portcullis clear of the window. A sawed off broomstick propped beneath to keep the grid raised.

“Here y’are,” Fist displayed the goodies inside the butcher’s paper.

The cat snarling frustration with the scent of salmon.

“You want it, you gotta come to the sill.”

A short leap took the cat from the landing to the window’s wide sill. Fist swatted the cat with a huge scarred fist. Just slapped the tom off the sill and back onto the fire escape.

A howl, then, the cat impotent and spitting. Fist laughing from his redoubt. Pleased with his entertainment.

“Stupid kitty.”

Carlton played the game a while longer, tease and swat, tease and swat, frustrating the tomcat with the salmon. Fist was enjoying himself, really he was. He would not have been pleased to know that his recreation was being observed.

A rope anchored on a vent atop the building’s roof supported Arno Becker as he hung flat against the building’s brick face directly above Fist’s now-open window. Becker could see the cat and mouse game below, the cat leaping to reach the salmon, Fist’s arm emerging to swat the animal off the sill. It was not the first time that Arno had seen this game.

Becker was close enough to taste the brass smell of fish on his tongue, but even though his feet were now on top of the metal tongue which framed Carlton’s grating, Arno maintained a tight grip on the rope which, still, supported his weight.

You had to be patient.

Finally, Fist Carlton decided he’d played enough.

“Supper for kitty,” he abdicated abruptly and extended a meaty arm to drop the salmon on the landing outside.

That’s when Becker let go the rope, his body’s weight snapping the slender stick below and driving the portcullis like a guillotine into the windowsill.

A violent concussion slammed Fist to his knees. He felt nothing, at first. Something had jerked him back from the window and his head, he realized, had slammed into the sill. There was the taste of pennies in his mouth, that was all. At first.

But then he tried to pull back into the protection of his fortress apartment—

“WHHHAAAAAA?!!”

That’s when Fist realized that his arm was crucified onto his windowsill.

He screamed. The tomcat screamed.

A thump of feet and a body swung into view at the still-open window. Suspended in midair outside.

“’Lo, Fist.”

Arno Becker smiling from the other side of the guillotine.

“BASTARD!!”

Fist lunging with his unbroken arm for Becker’s throat. Arno trapped that arm easily. Snapped a handcuff over the thick wrist and then secured the other side of the bracelet to the landing’s railing.

Both of Carlton’s arms were now trapped, stretched, and exposed.

Fist screamed again. Pain, this time, as tendons and connective tissue to the brain and back overcame nature’s first, insulating provision against trauma.

Then he was cursing. Cursing Becker, God, Bladehorn. Cursing his mother.

Arno smiling. Patiently. Waiting for a pause. Finally, when his victim was merely sobbing—

“Where is Alex Goodman, Fist?”

“Wha—? Who?!”

Becker snapped a sap down hard over the pinioned arm.

“AAAAAGHHHHHH!!!”

Another string of blasphemy. Then he was begging. Begging and threatening, alternately.

“Lemme go…I’LL KILL YOU, BECKER!! Lemme go! GOD!”

Arno inhaling the aroma of the salmon pinioned along with Carlton’s shattered arm.

“Alex Goodman. Where is he?”

“I…I don’ know. Nobody knows!”

“Not what I want to hear,” Becker chided.

“I can’t tell ya what I don’ FUGGIN’ KNOW!”

“Then were is Jack Romaine? Hmm? Master Jack, don’t tell me he’s off on his own. Bladehorn must have sent him someplace.”

Fist shook his head.

“No…NO!”

Arno stuffed the blackjack back into his jacket and came out with his knife.

“What you want left hanging, Fist?”

“You
know
what Bladehorn’ll do duh me! You KNOW!”

“I know what I will do, and I gotta tell you, Fist, nobody’s gonna hire a mutt without mitts, you follow me? And I’d love to have these fists, really I would. Mount the pair of ’em over my fireplace. If I had a fireplace.”

“Oh, God….”

Arno placing his blade on the handcuffed arm.

“Awright, awright!”

Fist’s forehead collapsed briefly in the blood now pooling at his window.

“…Boss gave him a train ticket, that’s all I know. Someplace near Tampa.”

Becker took a slice out of flesh.

“OH GOD!!”

“WHERE?” Arno demanded.

“Jesus, ‘Kaleidoscope’! Yeah, that’s it—Kaleidoscope, that’s the place. South of Tampa, that’s all I know, swear to Christ!”

“You don’t have to swear, Fist—”

Arno smiled.

“I always know when a man’s telling me the truth.”

The tomcat hissing now from the fire escape.

“How hungry you ’spose he really is?” Arno wondered aloud and leaned over to slice a piece off the salmon.

“Wh—what?” Fist tried to pull away as Arno smeared the salmon over his shattered arm.

“The fuck—? Fuck, you doin’?”

And then more choice cuts taken from the kitty’s meal to smear on Fist’s handcuffed arm.

“You don’ hafta do this!”

Fist’s breathing becoming labored, sporadic.

“You don’t!”

Becker wiped his blade on his corduroys.

“Once an alley cat gets a taste, what I hear—? He just keeps on gnawing.”

Arno Becker lowered himself to the fire escape below. Fist Carlton howling curses and imprecations from above, but there was no one to hear.

There were no children in the alley.