The Man in the Tree (17 page)

He took a deck of cards out of his pocket. "This is a more sophisticated
version." He laid three aces face up on the table, put the rest away.
"Here it's the ace of spades you're looking for, and just to make it
easier for you, I'll bend it down the middle." He did so, and turned
all three cards over; the ace of spades was slightly bowed, the other
two flat. He switched the cards hack and forth. "Where is it now?"
Gene turned over the bowed card: it was the ace of hearts. "How did you
do that?"
"Simple, you just take the bend out of one card and put in into another
one as you move them, but it takes a bit of practice."
"Let me see it again."
"Right, here we go."
Gene touched the three cards one after another, as if indecisive; he
felt them change under his fingers. Then he turned over the middle card,
the bowed one. It was the ace of spades.
Wilcox stared in disbelief. "Well, I'm damned. I must be losing my touch."
Gene reached out slowly and turned over the other two aces. They were
spades, too.
Wilcox sat back and looked at him. "My God, here I am trying to teach you,
and I'm an infant. Where did you learn that?"
"Just something I figured out myself."
Wilcox was full of enthusiasm; be wanted Gene to do a magic act in the
sideshow. "You'd be the first giant magician -- it would be tremendous.
You could go on to bigger and better things."
"I'd rather not."
"Don't you want to be famous?"
"No, obscure."
Gene discovered that he had taken a dislike to the new juggler, whether
it was because his practice sessions with Irma disturbed the quiet of the
back yard, or because of Hartz's exaggerated deference, or because he felt
sorry for Ted LeFever. It had been obvious all along that Ted knew Irma
slept with other men, but it had never seemed to make any difference in
their affection for each other. Now there was a new sadness in his face
when he looked at Irma and Ray Hartz.
Irma still came to Gene every now and then, not as often as before. One
night she seemed moody. "I don't know what to do. Ray wants to blow
the show and take me with him. He has an offer from Circus Vargas for
a double act. He had a partner before -- she got married and moved to
Canada, that's why he came here, but now he says I'm already good enough
to start, and with him teaching me I'll get better and better."
After a moment Gene asked, "What about Ted?"
"He says it ~ all right, but I know it will hurt him."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
Later she told him she had decided to stay with the show, and Gene was
relieved. But a week later, rising early in the morning, he saw her
coming tousled out of Hartz's trailer. She gave him a mournful glance,
and he knew she was wavering again.
He told himself that it was absurd to feel abandoned hy somebody else's
wife.
Somewhere along the line, something had gone terribly wrong. When he was
a child, the world had been a big juicy apple that he was not tall enough
to pluck. The boy-heroes in novels always had a series of tribulations to
get through, and then they became men and everything was all right. Now
he was twenty-one, legally adult, and it was not like that at all.
The worst of it was that the same thing seemed to happen to most people:
not only the freaks in the sideshow, like Ed Parlow, but the ordinary
people living their ordinary lives. Only Avila, of all the people he
had known in New York, had seemed to have a sense of purpose that gave
meaning to everything he did; the rest were drifting in sluggish channels.
He thought now of his childhood more often and with bitter regret. It
was a cruel joke that you grew so eagerly, reaching for the sun, and
then all the brighness went away.
At long last, he thought he had penetrated the secret of the grownups; it
was something they could never tell a child, because it was emptiness and
despair. He wrote a poem about this; it was very bad, and he tore it up.
The carnival people had their own names for some of the places they passed
through. Two months into the season, they came to a West Virginia town they
called "East Asshole."
"Is it that bad?" Gene asked.
"Oh, well, it's a hole," said Wilcox, "but that's not the reason. Two
years ago there was some trouble here -- local toughs got into an
argument with a couple of the butchers, and there was a 'Hey, rube,'
the only one I've ever seen. The constabulary came and cleared them off,
but they arrested some of our people too and Ducklin had to go down and
bail them out. Then the next night the local boys came back after dark
and set fire to the Ferris wheel -- did about fifteen hundred dollars'
worth of damage. Ducklin wouldn't show here last season, but I suppose
he thinks two years is enough to forgive and forget. I'd have given
the place a wide berth for the next century if it was up to me, but it
isn't. Anyhow, we're keeping an eye out, so don't worry."
In the summer of 1965, Cooley bought a Chevy station wagon and made a
swing south into West Virginia. South of Parkersburg, in a little town
called Elvis, he saw a carnival poster on a light pole: COMING JUNE 3,
DUCKLIN & RIPLEY ATTRACTIONS -- 7 RIDES 7 -- SEE THE TALLEST MAN IN THE
WORLD! At the bottom was a line, SPONSORED BY EAGLES LODGE.
Cooley went to a pay phone, looked up the Eagles, dialed the number. A
woman's voice answered.
"Ma'am, you folks have a carnival coming to town next week?"
"Yes, we sure do."
"Well, I hate to bother you, but I'm just in town for the day, and my
kids are after me -- I wonder if you could tell me where the carnival's
playing at now?"
"Well, let me see. I believe -- let me look it up. Would you hold the
phone just a second?" A pause. "Yes, here it is -- they're playing this
week in East Anglia, do you know where that is?"
"No, ma'am, I don't."
"Well, it's just about sixty miles from here. You head south on the
state highway, and you can't miss it."
An hour and a half later he was in East Anglia, an uninspiring clapboard
town with a railroad through the middle of it. He found the carnival on a
lot near the tracks. He watched the talker gather a tip for the sideshow,
admired the shape of the sword-swallower and the skill of the juggler;
then he bought a candy apple from a sad-faced vendor and stood eating
it while he waited.
After so many years, he did not expect to be able to recognize Gene
Anderson. By the same token, maybe Anderson wouldn't recognize him, but
Cooley believed himself to be distinctive in appearance, and he didn't
want to take the risk. After fifteen minutes or so the little crowd
emerged from the other end of the tent. Cooley strolled over and fell
in beside a ten-year-old kid who was carrying a glossy photograph. "Is
that the giant's picture?" he asked.
The kid glanced up. "Yessir. He's really big."
"Did he give it to you hisself?"
"He sold it to me. For a dollar."
"No, I mean did he hand it to you when you bought it?"
"Yessir." The kid started edging away.
"Listen," Cooley said confidentially, "I've got a boy at home that really
wants a picture like that. Would you sell it to me for five bucks?"
"I want to keep it."
"Sure, but with five bucks you can go back and get another one. See,
I haven't got time to go in there myself. I'll make it six bucks --
what do you say?" He held out the money.
"Well -- all right."
The photograph showed a clean-shaven young man dressed in a business
suit; standing beside him was another man, the top of whose head was
level with the handkerchief in the giant's breast pocket. The photograph
was inscribed, "Best wishes, Big John Kimberley." Cooley took it back
to his station wagon, got out his fingerprint kit and dusted it. It was
easy to pick out the giant's prints from the rest -- the thumbprint was
over two inches long. He took the old Dog River flyer from its envelope
in the glove compartment and compared the prints under a magnifying
glass. They were the same.
Cooley went back to the carnival, bought a strip of tickets for the Ferris
wheel, and waited in line. When his turn came, the young attendant threw
out the clutch of his putt-putting engine, steadied the car, helped Cooley
in, fastened the metal rod over his lap. The car lurched as he started
the wheel and stopped it again almost immediately; Cooley hung a few feet
in the air, looking down at the next car as the attendant settled a woman
and two children in it. Up they went again, the car swaying, and Cooley
clutched the lap rod; he hadn't been in one of these things since Paul
was eight, that time in Portland, and he never had liked them. He knew
the car was suspended on gimbals so that it always hung level, but it
felt
as if it was going to tip over, and what if the gimbals seized up?
If Paul was here he would enjoy this; he had always been crazy about rides
of any kind. He would grin with pleasure and his face would get flushed,
and he would be grabbing Cooley's sleeve, "Dad, do it again! Do it again!"
There was no front to the car; it was really nothing but a seat and a back
and a footrest, and he could look down past the tips of his shoes at the
car below where the woman and her two daughters were squeezed together
with the metal rod over their laps, and then below them, as the great
wheel revolved, to the empty car and then the one after that, and the
next one where a young man and his girl had their arms around each other,
each car smaller and farther away, each one hanging and swaying from the
framework of the wheel as it turned. The cars were hung like baskets,
the seat part was the basket and the footrest stuck out, and he could see
that if it wasn't for the lap rod, if he could stand up on the footrest,
the car would tip then, it would have to, and out he would go, like Paul,
into air and distance.
All the new passengers were on the wheel now, and as it majestically
turned, Cooley rose higher and higher, while the sunlit people below grew
tiny and foreshortened until it looked like, if his legs were just long
enough, he could step on them like ants. He could see the dirty canvas
tops of the concession booths, and now, as he reached the apex of the
wheel, he could look diagonally down over the sideshow tent and see the
rear ends of a dozen house trailers and semis lined up there like patient
elephants. One of those trailers must be the giant's, but which one? That
was what he had to know, and it was worth coming up here to find out.
The Ferris wheel revolved and Cooley pursued his slow orbit, now backward
and down, now forward and upward. After a long time the wheel stopped
when Cooley reached the bottom; the attendant came over, and Cooley
handed him another ticket. Up he went again. This time, as he approached
the dizzy height of the wheel, he saw a flash of, color down there
beyond the freak tent. It was the top of a brown-haired man's head,
coming into view as if he had been sitting there, hidden by the tent,
and had just now stood up. The head moved toward the tent and vanished.
There was the evil thing, that brown oval in the sunlight, and it gave
Cooley a jolt to realize that he had seen his enemy, that there had been
a connection between them just for that moment across eighty feet of air.
He had used up three more tickets before the moment came that he was
waiting for. From the height of the wheel, down there in the area behind
the freak tent, he saw the brown head appear again. This time it was
moving the other way. The man's torso came into view, then his legs;
he was wearing a brown suit, moving with long strides, and even at this
distance Cooley could see that he was unnaturally tall. The man walked
around the end of the last semi in the row, the one with the bright
yellow cab. That one had to be his; the vehicle on the far side of it
was a house trailer.
When the wheel stopped again, Cooley got off and handed his unused
tickets to the first kid he saw.
"Gee, thanks."
"That's okay, son," Cooley said. He lit a cigar with a wooden match,
looking at the flame bright and pale in the sunshine.
It was too bad that the giant was living in a converted semi, not a
house trailer, because that meant no windows. One of his ideas, the one
he had spent the most time thinking about, was to tape up a photo of
Paul on a window, and then knock, and then light the match.
Along the ratty main street, a couple of blocks away from the carnival,
there was a bank, a five and dime, a greasy spoon, a hardware store,
and a decayed movie theater advertising a Glenn Ford double bill. Cooley
bought two ten-gallon jerrycans at the hardware store, had them filled at
a gas station, and asked directions to a lumber yard. It was out at the
other end of town; Cooley went there and bought four two-by-fours. He paid
the man in the shop a few dollars to cut them to five and a half feet,
with a forty-five-degree bevel cut on the flat side. "It's for my kid,"
he explained, "he's building some damn thing, I don't even know what it
is, and he don't know how to use a miter box."
"Well, sometimes the old man's got to help out the young ones," said
the man, with a wink.
"That's right."
He stowed the two-by-fours in the wagon, parked it on a side street,
and went into the greasy spoon for dinner. He was too wound up to eat
much, but he bought a couple of sandwiches to go.
He already knew that the rear door of the semi had been replaced; that
was standard in a semi conversion. The chances were that the doors on one
side had been replaced too; there might be only one door, or depending
on how the trailer had been made in the first place, there might be as
many as four -- double doors on each side. The door handles were probably
about five feet off the ground, not any more than that, even for a giant,
which meant that five and a half would be about right to wedge them shut,
with the beveled ends of the two-by-fours jammed into the ground. Then
the rags piled underneath, and the match. Gasoline made a hot fire;
long before those two-by-fours burned through, the metal doors would be
too hot to touch.
He parked on the deserted street back of the carnival lot and ate his
sandwiches while he waited. A little after midnight the carnival closed
down; the white lights on the Ferris wheel and the other rides went
dark. Cooley was getting out of the wagon when he saw something that
made him sit down and swear. In the dark lot there were two or three pale
glimmers moving. Cooley took his binoculars out of the glove compartment
and managed to get one of them in the field of view: it was a man with
a flashlight.