The Man in the Tree (18 page)

That tore it. He had never heard of a carnival keeping a night watch
before, but there they were. If he tried to get in there with four
two-by-fours, two jerrycans of gasoline and a carton full of rags, they
would catch him for sure, and even if he got away, the giant would have
had a warning.
For a moment he considered the rifle. It was in the wagon, his Winchester
.30-06, cleaned and oiled, with two boxes of soft-nosed ammo, and he could
wrap it up in brown paper or something, take it on the Ferris wheel and
wait for his chance. The range would be only about twenty-five yards, but
how would he get rid of the rifle afterward? And what if the wheel happened
to start or stop just as he squeezed the trigger?
All the excitement had drained out of him and he was suddenly tired. He
started the car, drove to the end of town, found a tourist court and
checked in. In the knotty-pine cabin, under the miserly yellow light,
he looked at his road map. Between here and Elvis, where the carnival
was going next, there were two possible routes, the four-lane state
highway he had used coming down here, and a two-lane secondary route.
Tomorrow he would see what could be done there.
Chapter Fifteen
Early the next morning Cooley drove out of town on the state highway.
Forty miles out of East Anglia he came to an underpass; it was marked,
"Clearance 11 feet 10 inches." Cooley turned off at the next exit, drove
east until he came to the secondary route, then turned back toward East
Anglia. The road was winding and hilly, with second-growth forests on
either side.
After a few miles he came to a feeder road that connected the two
highways. He drove down it to the state highway, and saw a sign, "Truck
Route," that he hadn't noticed before. The carnival caravan would turn
off here, it would have to -- eleven feet ten was not high enough for
the semis. He turned the wagon around, went back to the secondary road
and headed for Elvis again, driving slowly. He was looking for a place
where a truck and semitrailer would be sure to go off the road if you
shot out a tire. What he found was something better.
Ten miles up the secondary route, he came to a broad gravel road that
went up between cut banks into the hills. On a sudden hunch, he turned up
it. Three miles brought him to a T where another road branched off. There
was a heavy chain stretched between concrete posts, and a rusted metal
sign: "Private. No Trespassing." Cooley parked on the shoulder, got out,
and listened. The air was clear and still. He stepped over the chain and
began walking up the road. When he had gone only a few hundred yards,
he could see the black mounds rising above the treetops; then he knew
where he was.
The road made a loop that brought it back under an enormous hopper projecting
from a metal building that had once been painted green. Mammoth coal trucks
were in a parking area off the road; beyond them was a little green house
that looked like it might be a watchman's shack, but it was padlocked
and empty.
Cooley went back to his car for a flashlight and a tire iron. He used
the iron to prize open the door to the tower. He wanted to make sure
that the hopper was full, and it was; it was loaded with pea coal,
and that was perfect.
The whole thing, or anyhow the main part of it, had come into his head
as soon as he saw the coal station. What he had in mind was complicated,
and there were things that could go wrong with it at every stage, but
if it worked it would be better than a fire.
He couldn't help thinking how great it would be if Jerry was alive and
here to help him. There were a couple of places in his scheme that really
needed two people, and there was one place where he couldn't see how to do
it alone. He had it all figured out except that one part, where the semi
came around the loop. The semi would have to stop in just the right spot,
and he had thought about putting something in the road, a sawhorse, or
a sign, or maybe a bonfire, but any of those things the driver would see
from way back, and you couldn't tell where he would put on the brakes. If
somebody jumped out on the road suddenly, that would be perfect, but
Cooley couldn't do it because he had to be in the control room. That
was where Jerry would have come in. But Jerry was dead, and so was Paul,
and they couldn't help, unless maybe one of them came back as a ghost.
That was what gave him the idea, or else it was seeing the scarecrow in
the field. The scarecrow was just an old shirt and a pair of pants, and
a round head made of two pieces of cloth sewed together, the whole thing
stuffed with straw. After Cooley saw it, he drove for half a mile in a
sort of trance, then turned around and took the scarecrow off its pole.
In East Anglia that afternoon he bought a hacksaw, a can of medium-weight
machine oil, a long-handled screwdriver, a staple gun, a reel of copper
wire, some sash weights, a pair of wire cutters, and fresh batteries for
his flashlight. At the five and dime down the street, he bought scissors,
needles, and carpet thread. Nobody was around when he got back to his
cabin. He attached the sash weights to one end of a length of wire,
opened the scarecrow's body, and inserted the weights. He threaded the
wire up through the top of the scarecrow's head, wishing it had brown
hair, and formed the end into a ring. Then he went back to the car for
Paul's photograph, the one he had meant to tape on the giant's window. It
was an enlargement of an old snapshot; the face was almost life size.
He cut the face out with scissors and sewed it onto the scarecrow's face.
At six o'clock he ate a slice of ham with red-eye gravy in the greasy
spoon, then drove out of town. It took him a little over an hour to get
to the coal station turnoff. The chain across the entrance was heavy;
it took him half an hour to cut through one link. When he was finished,
he pulled the chain out of the way, got into his wagon, and drove up
the road to the coal-station. He went all the way around the loop and
parked just behind the hopper.
The next thing was the scarecrow. Cooley fastened the end of his copper
wire to the loop at the top of the figure's head. Then he carded the
reel up the outside stairway of the hopper, hoisted the figure until
it hung a foot or two off the ground, cut the wire and fastened it to
a rung of the stairway. The figure hung below, rotating gently. Cooley
went down to look at it. He got into his car, turned on the headlights,
and drove slowly under the hopper. The figure ahead was ghostly against
the twilight. Cooley pictured how it would look if it suddenly appeared
ahead of him; he jammed on the brakes, and now, in his mind, he heard
the rattle and roar of coal falling from the hopper.
He backed up a few yards and turned off the headlights. He left the car
there, climbed the stairway again and hoisted the scarecrow. He fastened
another length of wire to the ring in the figure's head, passed the wire
through a rung, and went down again, unreeling the wire behind him. He
opened a window in the control booth, passed the wire inside, and reeled
it in until the figure hung just above the bottom of the hopper. He cut
the wire, secured it to a desk-leg. He studied the control board until
he was sure he understood it. Then he picked up his tools and the rest
of the wire, put them in the wagon, and drove back toward East Anglia on
the secondary road. Before long he saw what he was looking for: a piece
of white cardboard with a red arrow on it, stapled to a tree. The route
man had been through here sometime in the evening, "arrowing the route"
for the caravan.
Cooley stopped and got out long enough to pry loose the marker with his
screwdriver. Most of these arrows were just for reassurance; there was
no place to turn here anyhow. At the turnoff to the feeder road he found
a cluster of three red arrows, and took one; at the state road there was
another cluster, and he got one there. That made three, and he needed one
more. He drove back past the coal station road until be found another one,
and took it.
He stapled one of his arrows to a tree half a mile up the gravel road,
then two more to indicate the turn between the concrete posts where he
had cut the chain. He uprooted the "No Trespassing" sign and threw it
into a bush. He put up his last arrow pointing straight ahead where
the road looped back to form a Y. Then he drove back to East Anglia,
parked on the street in front of the carnival, and waited. Only a few
people were on the midway; the white lights of the Ferris wheel were
revolving lonely in the darkness.
At midnight he heard the loudspeakers announcing that the carnival was
over; half an hour later he saw the workmen swarming over the rides and
booths, disassembling them to be loaded into trucks. About three o'clock
he saw the caravan forming up. Three semis marked in the carnival's purple
and orange pulled out first, then three cars with house trailers, then the
semi with the yellow cab, the one that was Gene Anderson's. Cooley started
his engine, turned a corner to get off the main street, and headed for
the secondary road. He believed he had time enough to get where he was
going ahead of the caravan, because it would take a while for them all
to get onto the state highway, but he kept the speedometer at seventy
and hurtled over the winding road behind the beams of his headlights.
Larry Scanlon unlocked the cab, swung himself up, and closed the door. He
took a sip of the Coke he was carrying and set it down in the snack
box. The yellow tag was hanging from the mirror, the signal they used to
let Larry know that the giant was back in the trailer. He removed it and
tossed it into the glove compartment. He had spent the last three hours
helping to take down and load the loop-the-loop. A shower would have
been good, but he would just get sweaty again, unloading and setting
up in Elvis. The house trailer ahead of him was just pulling out; he
started the engine, turned on the headlights and followed.
Once they were on the highway there was nothing to do but follow
the taillights of the driver ahead. He finished the Coke and lit a
cigarette. This was part of what he liked about carnival life -- pulling
out of town in the dead of night, heading for somewhere else, being awake
and moving when the rest of the world was asleep. Back in Cleveland,
the kids he had gone to school with were probably pounding their ears,
with alarm clocks beside them to wake them for one more day at their
boring jobs; or else they were in Viet Nam getting their butts shot off.
The four-lane was almost deserted at this time of night. Every now and
then, when the road curved just enough but not too much, he could see the
lights of the caravan strung out in the darkness, but most of the time his
view was blocked by the house trailer ahead. After about three-quarters of
an hour he saw the trailer's turn signals flash three times. He flicked
the lever, passing the signal along, and reduced his speed.
The caravan turned off the highway onto a feeder road that led to a
two-lane rising and dipping through the hills. There were so many sharp
curves now that he frequently lost sight of the trailer ahead and the
car behind him. As he came around one curve, he saw a moving light,
and hit the brake. Someone was standing on the shoulder, swinging a
flashlight with a red rim, and he saw that the flash was pointing up
a steep gravel road. As he slowed to make the turn, he glimpsed the
figure in the headlights; it was a short, heavy-set man, but his hat
brim shadowed his face and Larry couldn't see who it was.
The semi had lurched a little as he made the turnoff and shifted
down. After a minute the intercom hissed and crackled. "Larry?"
"Yeah, Mr. Kimberley. I wake you up?"
"Guess so. Where are we, anyway?"
"Beats me. There was a guy back there with a flashlight, so I turned off."
"With a flashlight? That's funny."
"Yeah." There was nothing in sight in the gravel road ahead, and nothing
behind but the cloud of dust they were making. "This doesn't look right,"
Larry said. "Oh, wait a minute -- " The headlights lit up a tree on
his right; a red arrow was stapled to the trunk of the tree. "There's
an arrow."
Headlights came up behind. "Guess it's all right," Larry said. "Here
comes somebody behind us." The lights kept coming, drew up, and swung
out to pass. In the dust cloud as it pulled ahead, Larry could tell only
that it was a brown station wagon, not hauling anything, just a car.~
"What about the guy with the light, could you tell who it was?"
"No."
The pale road unwound before them out of the darkness. The taillights of
the car that had passed were nowhere to be seen, and there was still no
one behind them. "There's another arrow," said Larry, with relief. On a
tree ahead, two red arrows marked a turn. Larry swung the wheel. "Maybe
this'll take us back to the highway."
Ahead, tall shapes were looming against the sky. The road made a Y;
another red arrow showed him which way to go. The other road ran past
a cluster of tall buildings with skeletal stairways going up and down;
beyond them were black mounds, taller than the buildings. "Coal," said
Larry. "This can't be right. Oh, hell." In the headlights, he could
see that the road curved into a loop -- it was going to lead them back
to the Y again. He stopped the truck. "This is a mine or something,"
he said. "I don't get it. Some kind of a joke?"
"I'm coming up," the giant's voice said. The hiss from the intercom
stopped.
In the side mirror, he saw the trailer door open. The giant came out,
wearing his brown and white robe. He walked past the cab, crossed in the
glare of the headlights, and after a moment rapped on the window. Larry
leaned over to unlock the door for him, and he climbed in, ducking under
the ceiling of the cab. He rummaged in the glove compartment, pulled
out a road map, and spread it between them in the glow of the dome light.
Larry studied it a moment. "Here's the state road," he said. "This must
be where we turned off, and then here's where we went north again on the
two-lane.
This
road doesn't even show on the map." He looked up. "What
do you think?"