Kaleidoscope (9 page)

Jack heard an elephant, he was sure of it!

That jungle trumpet.

And then a bolt of lightning flashed like the bulb of an overgrown camera to klieg another structure down the road, rising above a screen of pine trees, separate from the other structures.

“That a tent?”

“Yep,” Tommy offered no further explanation and then, “Okay. Pull up here. No, dummy,
my
side.”

Through his window Jack could make out a broad veranda. Then a steep shell of tin sheltering two stories of clapboard, some kind of flag on top. The truck’s window fogged with his breath; Jack wiped it off. There was another structure tacked onto the back of the building across the street, more of an afterthought than an improvement.

The entire exterior looked to be papered in garishly rendered advertisement posters splashed on randomly, fantastic scenes of burlesque or
faux
exotica. A row of bulbs sputtered above the entering door.

Jack could see a sign:

*** THE KALEIDOSCOPE COOKHOUSE & CAFE ***

—and then in smaller case beneath.

RUBES NEED NOT APPLY

“Go on in,” his diminutive guide piled out of the truck. “You’re lucky Half Track’ll still have some hash on the burner.”

Jack turned up the collar of his coat, his city shoes plunging in mud to the ankles as he dropped from the truck’s cab. By the time he had slogged across the flooded street, Tommy Speck’s Model-T was already clattering away to some unremarked destination. Jack jogged up the pine-planked steps that rose to the Kaleidoscope’s verandah. He had barely gotten beneath the bib of that porch when the front door banged open.

“What the—?!” Jack began but the challenge he intended died in his throat.

A bald, black man about seven and one half feet tall filled the door like a silo.

It was the giant. The giant from the train station.

“’Scuse me,” Jack found himself backing away. This was the same Goliath he’d seen tending the fat lady’s wagon, he was sure of it. But how in hell had he beat Jack to the café?

Did the son of a bitch fly?

The Giant brushed past with barely a glance.

Jack shook himself like a terrier, took a deep breath, and managed a single step inside the diner. And froze.

He could not move. It was as if roots had grown from the soles of his feet into the yellow heart pine beneath. His first impulse was to vomit, to purge himself. But Jack fought that sudden nausea, that sure betrayal.

This was not what he expected.

This was not what he expected at all.

It wasn’t the place itself that stopped Jack in his tracks. The interior was in most respects no different than an ordinary café—a horseshoe counter, tables and booths, hotplates and coffee pots. There were the usual photos you’d see in any eatery hung all over the walls, a mix of boxers and baseball players, and movie stars, of course, those silent sirens. In those respects the place was ordinary.

But the people inside were not.

If you could call them people. The first thing Jack saw on entering the café was what he took to be a great shaggy dog, an Airedale at first glance, until he realized that this was a man, a human whose face was reduced to a snout shoved from a shaggy mat of hair. And the Dog Man wasn’t alone. In fact, there wasn’t a human being in the place who wasn’t twisted or distorted or malformed or diseased in some unsettling fashion.

Every table served a freak of nature, every countertop, chair and stool. A limbless man stretched like a python in a faux leather booth near the Dog Man. Chatting with The Serpent was a more fortunate albeit armless creature who, as Jack stared, brought a cup of coffee to her lips with her toes. Boothed opposite The Serpent and Twinkle Toes, a human bulletin board lounged, a shirtless being of uncertain gender whose skin was raised as if in Braille to convey a variety of curses, admonitions and advertisements; ‘
TRAILER FOR SALE—SEE CHARLEY BLADE
’, Jack could read that message across the hermaphrodite’s chest from thirty feet away. And another, ‘
HE LIVES! JOHN
3:16’.

In contrast, a woman alongside the Human Slate seemed to have been flayed alive, her skin oozing lesions and injury. Siamese twins cooperated over a bowl of some kind of goulash, two grown women joined quite literally at the hip. In a variant of that anomaly, a shirtless man sat at a table with a stillborn sibling sprouted like some monstrous tumor from his chest.

Jack stifled his rising bile.

“You don’t like the company, go someplace else.”

The challenge came practically at his shoulder. Jack turned to find a good looking blonde fondling a snake the size of a ladder—and three tits. Which in the latter case confirmed for Jack that it really was possible to have an embarrassment of riches.

“So what is it, Slick?”

The boa sliding over her bare shoulders.

“You goin’? Or stayin’?”

“I’m here to work,” he swallowed.

“Work with me,” she lifted her breasts for inspection. “So round, so firm, so fully packed.”

One of the midgets sighed.

“Swear to God, I had a million dollars I’d buy six acres of them tits and walk around barefoot.”

“In your dreams, Sleepy,” she snapped and returned smiling to Jack Romaine.

“But you, sailor—”

She lunged her mouth to his and held him like a leech. He tried to tear away, but something pulled him to her. Closer…closer! It was a cool noose, and smooth. And it moved.

“JESUS!”

The snake hissed in his ear and the freaks roared laughter.

“Kiss me like you like it and I’ll take him off,” she offered.

“Take him off, bitch, or you can kiss my ass.”

“Oooooo,” she cooed. “I like this bad boy.”

“Let him go, Cassandra.”

The order came with bored authority from a woman with no legs who rolled from behind the counter, lipping a cigarette atop a platter rigged with roller skates.

Cassandra hissed along with her snake.

“You want your pet? ’Cause I was just looking for somethin’ to put in my stew.”

“Mystery meat!” somebody chortled and the others joined in.

“Mystery meat, mystery meat…!”

“Shut up or you’ll be shittin’ beans and grits,” the truncated woman warned and the house settled down.

“Come on, Merlin,” Cassandra pouting as she uncoiled her constrictor from about Jack’s neck. “Looks like this Johnny’s lost his pencil.”

“Don’t mind Cassandra,” the woman shoved herself back toward the counter. “She doesn’t get laid enough.”

And then, glancing back to Jack.

“Comes to that, I don’t either.”

Clearly there were rules here that Jack was expected to learn.

He trailed his savior to a stool at the counter.

“You must be Half Track.”

“Bright boy.”

“Jack Romaine,” he leaned over to offer his hand.

She snorted. “Okay. Well, ‘Jack’, meet your neighbor; that’d be ‘Penguin’.”

A female on the stool beside him extended a hand with fingers completely webbed in flesh.

“Charlene Amethyst Bouchet. ‘The Penguin Lady’, I’m sure you’ve heard of me? I was in Jersey last week, but we got shut down, so I’m bedding early.”

“Tough break,” Jack guessed a reply.

She shrugged. “Somebody’s palm didn’t get greased.”

“Always a possibility,” the Dog Man sympathized with a heavy accent. “Unless, of course, you’re with Barnum or one of the larger shows.”

“Yeah, yeah, yer famous, Jo Jo,” the web-handed performer turned to Jack. “These circus riffraff. Always putting on airs. Not I. I’ve worked the Big Tent; I admit it. But I’m carney to the webs of my feet.”

“Hey, Cracker Jack, you gonna jaw all night?” Half Track interrupted. “Or are ya gonna eat?”

“I could use some chow,” Jack was glad to change the subject. “What you got?”

“Frog legs are always good,” Penguin suggested brightly.

“I’m sure they are.”

“What? You never had frog legs?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Should try ’em.”

Penguin reached behind the counter to fetch a jar filled with frogs.

“See?” she used her hands like flippers to capture a green-skinned entree.

“You cook him or what?’

“No. I take him with water,” she gathered a glass.

“Water?” Jack kept a poker face.

“Well, beer’s better but, what the hey,” she said and popped the frog into her mouth. A swig of water, then, and the amphibian was down the hatch.

Jack’s gills went green as the cookhouse roared laughter.

“Nice trick,” he managed, finally.

And then came a squeaky voice apparently from somewhere inside The Penguin Lady’s bulging throat.

“‘Let me out! Let me out!’”

She heaved once and the frog spilled from her mouth alive and well and hopping for freedom off the counter.

The freaks cheered. Jack felt suddenly dizzy. Disoriented.

“Here,” Half Track shoved a steaming bowl beneath his face. “This’ll put some hair on your feet.”

“Maybe I’ll just go with some coffee.”

“’S’matter, Jack?” a new voice challenged. “Something kill your appetite?”

Luna Chevreaux had shed her rain-soaked shift for a dry change of cotton. She strolled across the café, bare-shouldered and tall. Jack could not miss the high mound of breasts, the curve of belly beneath. Raven hair falling straight as a Seminole’s down that long, long back.

But there was something about Luna which Jack had been unable to see when he first saw her at the train station, a detail that in the mix of elements and distance was camouflaged. It was her skin. Luna’s skin was not tanned as might be expected from years in the sun. But she was not white, either. And she was not black.

Her skin was blue.

Not the blue of bannered flags nor of robin’s eggs or summer skies. Something like a muddled bruise stained the lady’s skin from the tips of her sandaled feet to the roots of her jet-black hair.

“What? Got a rip in your knickers?”

“No,” his mouth was dry. “It’s nothing.”

“Liar,” she said and a hiss rising from one counter spread like steam around the knotted interior.

Even leaning on the counter Luna looked down on Romaine.

“You don’t really think anybody buys your little come-along, do you, Jack?”

“Come along?”

“You’re no carney.”

Hisssss…. Jack measured the distance to the door.

“Why’d you come here?” she pulled a stool over.

“I’m…s…tarting over.”

Her smile was brittle. “Everyone here starts over.”

“Then I’m no different than anyone else.”

Luna shook her head.

“Where you’re wrong, mister. See, in this place
we
are the normal people. We live here. We eat and drink and shit and screw along this little stretch of water and sand and nobody,
nobody
looks at us like we’re odd or retarded or cursed.

“
We
are the everyday folk at Kaleidoscope and you, Jack, or whatever your name is, are the freak.”

Jack met her agate eyes.

“Fine. I’m the freak. Now, what about a job?”

She reached out to examine the wartime souvenir pinned to the lapel of his suit.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I stole it,” he answered shortly, and she almost smiled.

“Half Track—”

“Yes, boss?”

“Have Tommy get him a room. But no credit.”

Her moon-blue hand journeyed from his lapel to linger over the knot of his tie.

“This one pays cash.”

First-of-Mayer—
a newcomer on the show.

J
ack emerged from the café to distant thunder, like a bowling ball striking faraway pins. No lightning remained to strobe the sandy street, but large, solitary drops of rain slid in silver balls off tin roofs or needles of pine. The single road that connected the various vehicles, wagons and shacks of the settlement was by now a muddy quagmire. If this was the place that had been Alex Goodman’s hideout, Jack was not impressed. Anybody slick enough to steal a quarter million in bonds shoulda been able to find a better stash than this motleyed hole.

He dodged puddles crossing the sandy rut separating the café from a shack across the street. “The Sugar Shack” Half Track had sent him to, not much more than a lean-to propped as first among equals to a handful of other shelters of rough timber and tin. A screen door wobbled on flimsy hinges to let him enter what passed for an office. An abbreviated counter and cigar box fronted a pegboard draped with a dozen brightly tagged keys.

Tommy Speck climbed off an orange crate to give a key to an odd couple waiting at the counter.

“I never know what to do with these guys,” Tommy declared cheerfully as Jack scraped the mud off his cityslickers.

Two heads turreted to acknowledge Romaine’s arrival. Two identical faces. But only one body.

Jack found himself once again staring.

“Jacques and Marcel DuBois,” the dominant male introduced his genial twin.

They looked to be joined side by side about the chest, some Frog version of Chang and Cheng. Not youngsters, these two, Jack would guess somewhere into their forties, though it was impossible to say for sure.

They were dressed ludicrously for the climate, twin collars stiff above some bastardized version of a black wool suit. Twin cravats winked diamonds Jack was sure were paste. It was easy to see that they shared a single pair of arms and legs.

Jack wondered what else they shared.

He nodded politely. “Jack Romaine.”

Two heads bowed in unison.

“Some pair, ain’t they?” Tommy grinned from his crate. “Musicians, too, both of ’em. Violin. They take turns with the bow, ‘The Siamese Svengalis’. Class act. Thing is—I never know when they come in here. Do I charge ’em for a single? Or a double?”

The midget burst into a cackle of laughter, slapping his bowed leg. Hooting at the top of his toy-sized lungs.

“Glad you’re so pleased with yourself, Speck.”

But the little man was unfazed. “‘Single or double’! That’s pretty good. Gotta work that inta my gig.”

Tommy shuffled over to the cigar box that functioned, apparently, as a cash register.

“Two bits,” Speck informed them.

Marcel turned his head nervously to his twin.

“(But we cannot pay!?)” That lament murmured
en Francais
. “(We have no money?!)”

“(You are ill, brother. We need a room.)”

“(Still. What can we tell him?)”

“You two can moonshine later,” Speck growled. “Right now I need two bits for the night.”

Which got no response from the twins.

“Fifty cents?” Tommy tried again. “Half-a-Washington? Can’t you guys parley voo English?”

“I’ll cover it,” Jack spoke up. “Go ahead and make it for two nights. For them and me.”

Jacques and Marcel looked up startled.

“
Parlez vous francais, monsieur?
”

“(My wife was French. She taught me a little. And I have a mother-in-law from Normandy—)”

“(Poor man!)”

“(—she taught me a lot.)”

The twins’ laughter was light as a pair of starlings.

Tommy scowled. “You bastards yakking it over me?”

“(There is…nothing at your expense, monsieur.)”

Tommy turned to Jack.

“The joke’s not on you, little man.”

“Better goddamn well not be,” Speck took Jack’s money. “And the next time you call me little, yer gonna be sleeping in the shitter.”

Jacques and Marcel received their key graciously. “We heard performers could find respite here,” Jacques bowed to Jack.

“Really? Where’d you hear that?”

“Monsieur is too modest,” Marcel blushed.

It was odd to see one face blushing while on the same set of shoulders the other face remained composed.

“We heard a benefactor inhabited this place,” Jacques took up his brother’s thread. “But we did not expect such generosity so soon.
Merci. Merci beaucoup
.”

“My pleasure.”

Jack stood aside as the twins took a bag each to crab out of Tommy Speck’s miniature office. Looked like a pair of Chaplins, the twins did, waddling out into the rain.

Jack tapped a cigarette from a pack of Chesterfields.

“What was all that about a benefactor?”

“No idea,” Speck got busy at his board of pegs.

“Seemed pretty sure they’d find somebody willing to help.”

“Work the midway long enough, you’re bound to find a sucker someplace. Here—”

Speck tossed Jack a towel.

“One per room. You don’t like the sheets, laundry ’em yourself. There’s a pot under the bed if you need it. Outhouse out back.”

“Anyplace I can wash up?”

“Fuckin’ rainin’, ain’t it? Or you can use the stock tank.”

Romaine spent the rest of the night in his shorts on a litter that might have been rescued from the trenches. An east-facing window and a blistering sun the next morning were not enough to rouse him from that rude cot. He had dumped his wallet and watch beside an alarm clock on the orange crate that served as a nightstand, stripped to his shorts and collapsed on sheets that needed to be boiled in lye.

The room was not much more than a closet, a perfect square roughed in. Already the shack was heating up, the tin walls and roof an oven in the sun. One large, unscreened window faced east onto the boulevard outside. A curtain rigged from a flour sack bent the slender dowel nailed into that pine frame. Jack stirred damply in his skivvies, deep in some lunar dream.

But then something like the trumpet of Gabriel blasted the tin walls.

“Jesus!”

He tumbled or was spilled from bed.

Another blast shook the timbers.

“Fucking Christ!!”

He staggered to the window to see an enormous bull elephant on the street outside. An African behemoth. The beast raised its trunk for another trumpet and Jack could swear his hair blew back.

“Up and at ’em, bright boy!”

There was Tommy Speck, about the size of a bucket, leading a beast the size of a small house down the street.

“The hell—?” Jack groped for his watch.

“You got thirty minutes if ya want breakfast, Buster Brown,” Tommy informed him loudly. “After that it ain’t nuthin’ but the sweat off yer balls.”

Jack slipped on his travel slacks and a clean undershirt and hustled across to the Kaleidoscope. He steeled himself against any fresh surprise he might encounter on entering the carney’s café. No matter what he saw, Jack told himself, he would not react. He needed information from these people and he wasn’t going to get it if he acted like a chump.

Jack entered the cookhouse and immediately spotted Half Track negotiating one of the several ramps that allowed her to tend the counter and grille. The sight of an ordinary-looking man nursing a smoke and coffee at a neighboring booth was reassuring, though the purpose of the wheelbarrow next to him was not immediately obvious. And then Jack saw a snout centered in a mane of shaggy hair rising from behind the counter.

“Morning, Jo Jo.”

A low growl answered, the head dipped from sight and it took the scratch-scratch-scratch of paws on a pine floor before Jack realized his mistake.

“Easy, fella!” he backed away from around a hundred pounds of half-bred mutt.

“Off, Boomer,” Half Track commanded and the dog plopped like a rug to the floor.

“Sorry,” Jack offered as he found his stool.

“Fucking rube,” she shook her head.

Jack decided he might as well take this one head-on.

“Got a thing against rubes, Half Track?”

Half Track pushed him a cup of coffee.

“A rube is a mark, lot lice, whale shit. He’s anyone who’s not a carney. He’s a tag, a meal, a cheap trick. He sure as hell ain’t one of us.”

“Long as we’re clear,” Jack raised the scalding caffeine to his mouth. “So what’s for breakfast?”

“Cash only.”

“I’ve got cash.”

“In advance, no circus terms for you.”

Jack forked over two bits.

“Everything comes with grits.” She hauled herself up to a griddle big enough for Paul Bunyan. “So don’t bitch.”

Turning then to her other customer.

“Freddie? Coffee?”

“Nah, I’m ’bout jazzed out.”

The man took a last sip of java, stubbed out his cig. Jack offered his best marquee smile.

“So. You off work for the season, too?”

The man regarded him coolly. “First off, I ain’t a working man. As any carney would know. Second, if I want conversation, I’ll ask for it.”

With that the fella dragged himself out from behind his table and revealed the purpose of the wheelbarrow.

“You lookin’ at, dickhead?” Freddie grunted as he squatted to heft his load.

What Freddie loaded into the wheelbarrow was his own scrotum. Jack could not help watching as the slender man lugged a set of balls the size of a bale of hay into the barrow’s shallow bowl. Jack had heard of elephantiasis, and who hadn’t slipped into a sideshow to see the usual distensions of arms or fingers or clits or dicks, most of which he had assumed were faked. But there was nothing phony here. With his own eyes Jack was watching Freddie load fifty pounds of his own testicles into a wheelbarrow.

“See ya, Half Track,” the freak offered over his shoulder and followed his gonads out the door.

“Now there,” Half Track paused in admiration, “is a real performer.”

She slid a platter piled with eggs and grits and bacon and pancakes down the counter.

“Five cents,” she said before Jack could touch his coffee.

“For what?”

“For refills.”

“I haven’t had a refill.”

“Not yet, but you will. That’s what ‘advance’ means, ain’t it?”

“Any other rules I should know?”

“I imagine, yes.” The answer came from the front door. Jack swiveled his stool to see Luna Chevreaux strolling over.

She was dressed like a dyke. Trousers and brogans. Khaki shirt cinched in on that insect waist.

“Any coffee left, Half Track?”

“On the way.”

Luna slipped a folding knife from her trousers.

“We were speaking of rules.”

“I was, at least,” Jack nodded.

She stretched over the counter, speared an orange from a bowl.

“Well, there are rules in any society, aren’t there? For instance, you might have figured out that in Kaleidoscope you’re either a working man or a performer. If you last, which I doubt, you’ll be a working man. Important not to forget your place.”

“Okay,” Jack nodded.

“Another rule. Do not for any reason bullshit me. I don’t care if you robbed a bank, fucked somebody’s wife or killed a copper, but do not piss on my leg and tell me it’s fucking dewdrops.”

One long peel unwinding the whole time from the peeling orange. Jack swallowed his coffee. “Fair enough.”

“Now. What do you have to offer us, Mr. Romaine?”

“Hard to say. I’ve never worked at a beddy before.”

“You bed down when you aren’t working’,” Luna corrected him. “Winters the shows close up, people have to go someplace. Circus tramps, they usually winter over in Sarasota. That’s fine if you work the wire or throw a knife but nobody wants freaks around. Most natives see you outside a tent they shit themselves. Half of them think we’re cursed or subhuman or spawned from the devil. Hypocrites, all of ’em. It’s jake getting your jollies watching Jo Jo’s mug or Frankie’s balls, but, hey! don’t bed down in my neighborhood!

“Till this place we had no place. I first came down here it was no more than a fishing camp. Back then we just had tents. Giant was the first one to put down a shack. Then Tommy and his wife. First thing you know freaks from all over the country started bedding down here.

“Won’t be long before Kaleidoscope is an honest-to-God town. Maybe one day even have a mayor and cops! A fire department. And nothing but carneys running the joint.”

“‘Kaleidoscope Fire Department’? Too much.”

“What—you think this is a joke?”

“I didn’t say that.

“Hell, you didn’t,” Half Track sniffed.

“Every seen a kaleidoscope, Jack?” Luna dropped the perfect peel of her orange onto the counter. “Every looked through a kaleidoscope?”

“When I was a kid, maybe.”

“All those shapes and colors look mismatched, at first, don’t they? Out of place. But then you put ’em in a barrel and turn ’em and you get something beautiful. That’s what we are. That’s what we want Kaleidoscope to be.”

She pulled her stool close to him. He could smell the nectar of orange in her gypsy hair.

“So how’d you find us, Jack? Who told you about Kaleidoscope?”

Jack stirred his sunnyside into the grits. “Ran into a guy at a speakeasy said he used to travel with the circus. Went on and on about this place near Tampa. Place to beddy when work dried up.”

“You could have picked up that much anyplace.”

“Tellin’ ya, I got it from this guy.”

“This Doe have a name?”

“Well, like I said I only met him the one time and we were both hitting it pretty hard,” Jack squinted as if trying to recall some distant memory. “But seems like he told me his name was ‘Alec’. Or maybe it was Alex. Yeah, that was it, Alex. Alex Goodman.”

Jack was sure he saw something ripple across that blue skin.

“And how well did you know this Alex?” Luna’s voice was casual.

“I just ran into him, that’s all. I don’t even know if he’s a carney.”

“What he is, is dead,” Luna declared.

“…Run that by again?”

“Alex Goodman is dead.”

A cold fist reached into Jack’s entrails and twisted them.

“You sure?” he asked like an idiot.

“Oh, yeah,” Half Track affirmed. “Ambassador killed ’im just this Monday past.”