Kaleidoscope (17 page)

The Fix—
the grease, the patch, the bribe
.

N
ight had fallen with a harvest moon by the time Tommy Speck wiped his feet on the horsehair mat just inside Kaleidoscope’s Western Union.

“Hiya, HighWire.”

Addressing himself to the withered old coot whose fingers tapped code, apparently, even when he was asleep.

The old man rousing from a stolen slumber.

“Anything snappin’?” Speck climbed a stool.

“Deader than a drunk’s dick,” the operator replied sourly.

“Just got back from Tampa myself,” Tommy confided, as though it were the greatest trick since Lindy’s crossing. “Some of the acts’re beddin’ early. Guess who I saw?”

“Couldn’t hazard.”

“Mel Dodson—remember Mel?”

“Worked for the man,” the Union man affirmed. “Took a mile of railroad cars to pack in all the acts. A walkin’ mile.”

“Some show,” Tommy whistled admiration.

“‘Dodson’s World Fair Shows’.” The old trouper suppressed a smile. “Class act, all the way around.”

“Boy a’howdy.”

“Never used a net, neither.”

“Hell, no!” Tommy bristled. “Not you, Wire.”

“Not anybody on that show,” the old-timer amended gruffly. “So how are things with ol’ Mel?”

“They finally made him full partner,” Tommy reported.

“Sumbitch.”

“Yep. Fair payback fer bein’ a general agent all these years.”

“Then again life’s hard and you die.”

“I heard that,” Tommy dropped from the ledge of his stool. “Well, if you don’t have anything fer me to deliver, I reckon I’ll be—”

About that time the telegraph chattered its salutation.

CQCQCQCQ
….

“Hold up,” HighWire swiveled back to key a go-ahead and Morse chattered like firecrackers over the wire.

Harry scrawled the message, double-checked his tape.

“Anybody we know?”

“The new fella. Brodie.” HighWire was reaching for an envelope.

“Ya mean Jack? Jack Romaine?”

“That’s the one.”

“I can get it to him,” Tommy offered brightly.

“It’s marked ‘Personal’.”

“He’s laid up. Got the squirts.”

Harry frowned over the telegram.

“Does say immediate delivery.”

“Harry, I take people their wires alla time.”

“I shouldn’t.”

“How much is the damage?”

“Pretty steep, three fifty.”

Tommy produced a Jackson.

“He can pay me back.”

“All right, then. If yer sure it’s copasetic.”

“I’ll run ’er over right now.”

Tommy sneaked the message from the old man’s hand like a pickpocket and skipped for the door. He was barely outside the telegrapher’s tin shed when a pair of headlights speared him from behind. The dwarf turned to face the glare. A touring car had him crosshaired and he could tell it wasn’t Doc’s.

Tommy shielded his eyes against the running lights.

“This Kaleidoscope?” a disembodied voice floated from somewhere behind the wheel.

“Who’s askin’?” Tommy stepped out of the spotlight.

Stars swam before his eyes. He didn’t see the driver leave the car, but he heard the door open, all right. Shoes digging into soft sand.

Tommy backed away instinctively. A man emerged finally from silhouette. As Tommy’s eyes adjusted he could make out a few details. A cityslicker suit. Shirt open at the collar. A flat-brimmed fedora. He was taller than your average rube. Hair and face looked white as chalk, but that could be the light.

A cigarette glowed briefly in the visitor’s hand. A casual inhalation before he flicked it hissing to the sand. Embers following that flight like a miniature comet.

“I’m looking for a man,” Arno Becker looked down on Tommy.

“Don’t think I’m yer type,” Speck replied.

“Movie star looks but cheap threads,” Becker went on as if Tommy had not said a word. “Low quarter shoes. Dark hair, early thirties. His real name’s Jack Romaine; I don’t know what he’s using down here.”

The Packard purring like a tiger.

“Sorry,” Tommy shook his head. “Dudn’t ring a bell.”

“That a fact?” Arno reached into his pocket-—

And pulled out a five dollar bill.

“Hey, buddy,” Tommy waved him off. “I don’t know any movie stars and I don’t know this Romanian or whoever the fuck he is.”

Becker leaned down to stuff the bill inside Tommy’s shirt.

“More where this came from. You see Mr. Romaine, or your memory improves, let me know.”

Jack had crashed early into his kip. The first real hint of autumn poured through the shack’s single and open window, a welcome breeze entering with the flood of an ochre moon. Something came between Jack’s bed and that fallen illumination. A shadow rippling over the cot.

A hand reaching out to close on Jack’s curled arm.

“The hell?!”

Jack jerked away to find Charlie Blade shivering beside his bed.

“I need a fix!”

He was coming down, Jack knew the signs, the sword-swallower trembling like a colt in a thin, puke-stained shirt. Smelling otherwise of urine and beer.

“Get outta here,” Jack ordered.

“I need some candy.
You
know!”

“I know what I’m gonna do if you don’t get your ass out of my crib,” Jack pulled the brass knuckles from beneath his pillow.

The young man retreated a notch. But then—

“You wanna know about Alex Goodman?”

Jack felt ice water run down his spine.

“What was that?”

“Goodman,” Blade repeated. “You don’t think you got the skinny from these freaks, do ya?”

Jack curled the brass bangers into his hand.

“Just get me a fix,” Charlie scrambled back. “Get me straight I’ll tell you about Alex.”

Jack considered a moment.

“Not here,” he put the knuckles into his trousers. “We’re gonna talk, I want to make sure its private.”

The midway’s Ferris Wheel framed a waxing moon in a motionless spider of iron. You would have to look hard to see the two men installed in the lowest seat of that ride. Jack rolled a cigarette of Prince Albert for Charlie Blade. The small, white cylinder of tobacco weaving in the young addict’s hand.

“Thanks,” Blade inhaling greedily.

Jack followed the smoke with a ten-spot.

“Should get you fixed.”

Charlie tried to snatch a grab, but Jack held back.

“Not ’till you spill.”

“Awright, awright…Few years ago I got in some trouble. Was in Tampa, I needed a patch, a lawyer. Somebody gave me a number, some mouth name of Dobbs. Terrence Francis Dobbs.

“Never heard of him.”

“Yeah, you have. He got stomped to death by Peewee’s elephant.”

Jack worked to keep a poker face.

“Alex Goodman? You saying this lawyer Dobbs is Alex Goodman?”

“Goodman was his carney name,” Charlie sucked on his butt as though it were the last tit giving the last milk ever to be had in the world. “But he was a lawyer in Tampa ’way before he started callin’ himself Alex Goodman.”

“And how do you know that?”

“’Cause, I worked for him. Sort of a sideline; this was three years back, and he had it made. Had his practice in town, real estate, stocks. Got short of cash—that’s when he started bringing in merchandise from Cuba. You could say I was one of his retailers.”

“Not talkin’ about you,” Jack warned. “So why’d this Gatsby leave the good life?”

“He was playin’ the market on the margins and got behind. Tried to make it up with bolita and rum and cigars, which left him owing some pretty nasty partners, so he changed his name and hit the road as a fixer.”

“Fixing what, exactly?”

“If you’d ever worked an opera you’d know there’s somebody in every berg, town and pigtrail that’s gotta be paid off. Might be the local sheriff, an alderman, a mayor. Somebody always gets greased. That’s what Dobbs did, only, on the show he didn’t call himself Dobbs, he called himself Goodman. Alex Goodman.

“Didn’t work out that well, though. He only worked one, maybe two seasons. Made his bed in Kaleidoscope a year ago, maybe a little more. Pitiful fuckin’ case by then. Drunk on gin half the fuckin’ time…”

This judgment rendered without irony.

“’Magine a guy like that humping The Fat Lady!!”

Charlie wheezing laughter as his cigarette burned down to his fingers.

Jack pulled out a paper for himself.

“I got questions.”

“My meter just ran out,” Charlie smiled crookedly.

Jack displayed the tenner and this time Charlie snatched it clean.

“First question I got isn’t about Alex,” Jack leaned into Charlie’s fetid face. “It’s about Kaleidoscope. This beddy. This place.”

“Your dime.”

“The hell does Luna pay for this operation? One show, one night a week? Can’t possibly pay the bills. And half the geeks eating at the café never pay anything. Who’s picking up the tab?”

Charlie was ironing the ten-dollar smooth on his thigh.

“All I can tell ya is couple of winters back, the whole shooting match was goin’ under. The café, the carnival—everything. Some bank in Tampa was set to foreclose, what I heard, then a year later the bank gets its money. How? I don’t know; I don’t have the books. But I can tell ya that until a few months ago I could walk up to Luna and ask her to spot me a hundred, two hundred clams and I’d get it no questions asked.

“Word got out that if you needed a hand this was the place to come. Carneys drifted in from all over. Freaks. Juiced-out acts going nowhere. Even a couple of circus performers. How you think HighWire got his job?

“Way it’s set up, when you got money you pay. When you get more money, you pay back, an’ in a bind you eat free. Get a roof over yer head. See the doc, you need to.

“There was no loans signed, no ious. But then I never seen any cash, neither, and with my particular problem—”

“You need the green.”

“Dollars for doughnuts.”

Jack displayed another ten-dollar bill; Charlie reached out greedily—

“Ah ah,” Jack chided. “This one you gotta earn. Find out anything you can on your man Dobbs. Tell me anytime
anybody
goes to Tampa. And if you see anyone new in town—”

Blade gathered his slim green salvation.

“Don’t worry. I’ll let ya know.”

Jack tossed about in his cot worrying over Charlie Blade’s credibility. He did not doubt that a lawyer out of work was the ideal hire for a carnival’s fixer. Jack had always known that carnival operators employed go-betweens to grease the natives in whatever towns they staked a lot. There was always some minister or misanthrope clamoring for a spotlight to accuse the carneys of peddling pornography along with popcorn. More strident voices saw in the freaks, particularly, darker signs of Satan and his works, and these voices could run a show out of town. Of course, the more the righteous or self-righteous clamored to banish the forbidden fruit, the more their community was enticed to sample it. Tommy Speck often chuckled that a preacher was worth a hundred billboards.

But you paid for advertising, no matter how you got it, the printer getting his geld for posters and handbills, the councilman or clergy getting silver for silence. It was not hard to imagine Terrence Dobbs,
AKA
Alex Goodman, employed in that role. Was easy as well to understand how a disbarred lawyer hoping, perhaps, to re-establish his practice in some other state would change his name in association with the interim employment. It was not the accuracy of this information that kept Jack awake in his cot. What worried Jack was that the only thing he knew of Alex Goodman came from Charlie Blade.

Surely the disgraced sword-swallower was not the only carney in the beddy who was familiar with Alex Goodman’s other life in Tampa? Surely the freaks and performers with whom Jack worked every day knew Terrence Dobb’s history; like Cassandra said, there were no secrets in Kaleidoscope.

“Except mine,” Jack amended aloud and suppressed the guilt that stirred.

Clearly, Luna and the other carneys in the community had decided to keep Jack in the dark about Alex Goodman’s real identity and purpose. But why? Was it simply the freaks’ tendency to distrust outsiders that made Luna and her fellows loathe to speak of Goodman? Were they protecting Goodman’s identity? That was easy enough to swallow, and Jack would be happy enough to buy it, except for a couple of salient points—

First of all, this community was clearly getting revenue from someplace other than candy and hootchy-kootch. Secondly, Alex Goodman was connected to Sally Price and Bladehorn’s stolen money. It was possible, of course, that the carneys kept silent simply out of loyalty to Goodman, but was there a less noble reason for silence? Jack was convinced that the carneys knew something about Goodman’s role in their community that they were not going to reveal to a mere brodie.

But was this distrust directed at all outsiders coming to Kaleidoscope, or was Jack its specific target? Jack swung from his cot and reached for a cigarette. “Don’t get loony,” he muttered to himself. After all, it was natural the geeks wouldn’t open their souls to a newcomer. And Jack had to admit that since he had saved Marcel & Jacques, he seemed to be entirely assimilated into Kaleidoscope’s odd assortment of parts. Everybody from The Bearded Lady to The Alligator Man greeted him warmly. He hadn’t paid for his coffee in a week. And then there was Luna.

He could still feel her skin, smell her hair in that cold, spring-fed water. Her legs around his waist. Coupling like a pair of goddamn otters. Warming after. That alone was enough to assure Jack that he had turned the corner, wasn’t it? That he had gained Luna’s trust, and Tommy’s, and the others?

He had swallowed fire, hadn’t he? He was one of their own.

Jack had not anticipated being embraced so suddenly by the mercurial family of freaks, or so warmly. And Jack was surprised at the changes in his own perception. Only the day before he was gabbing with Friederich over a wheelbarrow of the man’s completely exposed testicles with no feeling of revulsion or fascination. He enjoyed playing cards with Charlotte and Jo Jo and Jacques & Marcel. And making love to Luna he never once thought of the color of her skin.