Twilight Eyes (10 page)

The rest of modern America seems bent upon fragmentation: Year by year there is less coherence in every ethnic group; churches and other institutions, once the glue of society, are frequently said to be worthless and even oppressive, as if our countrymen see a perversely appealing chaos in the mechanism of the universe and wish to emulate it, even if emulation leads to obliteration. Among carnies, however, there is a strong and treasured sense of community that, year by year, never diminishes.

As I came down the hillside path, into the summer-warm meadow, with all the sounds of the midway stilled, with crickets singing in the dark, the amber lights at all those trailer windows had a ghostly quality. They appeared to shimmer in the humid air, not much like electric illumination but rather like the camp fires and oil lamps in a primitive settlement of an earlier era. In fact, with its modern details draped in darkness and distorted by strange patterns of curtain- and blind-filtered light, Gibsonton-on-Wheels had the look and feel of an assemblage of gypsy wagons drawn up against the disapproval of the surrounding natives in a rural nineteenth-century European landscape. As I approached and then walked in among the first trailers, lights were extinguished here and there as weary carnies went to bed.

The meadow was marked by a quietude born of the carnies’ universal respect for their neighbors: There were no loud radios or TVs, no crying babies left unattended, no noisy arguments, no barking dogs, all of which you might expect to find in a so-called respectable neighborhood out in the straight world. Also, daylight would have shown that the avenues between the trailers were free of litter.

Earlier, during my break, I had brought my gear down to the rental trailer that three other guys were sharing with me, and while I had been in the meadow I had wandered around until I had found the Airstream that belonged to Rya Raines. Now, laden with coins and with a thick sheaf of dollar bills in one pouch of my change apron, I went directly to her place.

The door was open, and I saw Rya sitting in an armchair, in a fall of buttery light from a reading lamp. She was talking to a dwarf.

I rapped on the open door, and she said, “Come on in, Slim.”

I went up the three metal steps and in, and the dwarf, a woman, turned to look at me. She was of indeterminate age—twenty or fifty, hard to tell—about forty inches tall, with a normal trunk, shortened extremities, and a large head. We were introduced; the little woman’s name was Irma Lorus, and she ran the bottle-pitch for Rya. She wore a pair of children’s tennis shoes, black pants, and a loose peach-colored blouse with short sleeves. Her black hair was thick and glossy and, like ravens’ wings, it had deep blue highlights; it was lovely, and she was evidently proud of it, for much thought had gone into the way it was cut and shaped around her oversize face.

“Ah, yes,” Irma said, offering her small hand, shaking. “I’ve heard about you, Slim MacKenzie. Mrs. Frazelli, who owns the Bingo Palace with her husband, Tony, says you’re too young to be on your own, says you’re in desperate need of a home-cooked meal and a mother’s attention. Harv Seveen, who has one of the kootch shows, says you look like you’re either dodging the draftboard or maybe running from the cops because they caught you at some small diddle . . . like maybe joyriding in somebody else’s car; either way, he figures you’re a right type. The pitchmen say you know how to draw the marks, and with a few more years under your belt, you might even become the best talker on the lot. Now, Bob Weyland, who has the carousel, is a mite worried ’cause his daughter thinks you’re a dreamboat and says she’ll just die if you don’t notice her; she’s sixteen, and her name’s Tina, and she’s worth noticing too. And Madame Zena, otherwise known as Mrs. Pearl Yarnell from the Bronx, our gypsy fortune-teller, says you’re a Taurus, five years older than you look, and that you’re running from a tragic love affair.”

I was not surprised that a number of carnies had drifted by the high-striker to have a look at me. It was a tight community, and I was a newcomer, and their curiosity was to be expected. I was, however, embarrassed by the report of Tina Weyland’s infatuation and amused to hear Madame Zena’s “psychic” impressions of me. “Well, Irma,” I said, “I’m actually a Taurus, seventeen years old, never had a girl even give me the
chance
to have my heart broken—and if Mrs. Frazelli is any good in the kitchen, you can tell her that I cry myself to sleep each and every night, just thinking about home-cooked meals.”

“You’re welcome at my place too,” Irma said, smiling. “Come meet Paulie, my husband. Fact is, why don’t you stop over about eight o’clock Sunday night, once we’ve set up at the next stop on the tour. I’ll fix you chicken chili and my famous Black Forest cake for dessert.”

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

In my experience, of all carnies, dwarves were the quickest to accept a stranger, to open up, the first to trust and smile and laugh. Initially I had attributed their apparently universal friendliness to the combative disadvantage of their size, figuring that when you were that small, you
had
to be friendly in order to avoid becoming an easy target for bullies, drunks, and muggers. However, as I had become better acquainted with a couple of the little people, I had gradually realized that my simplistic analysis of their extroverted personalities was ungenerous. As a group—and almost to an individual—dwarves were strong-willed, self-assured, and self-reliant. They are no more afraid of life than are people of ordinary stature. Their extroversion springs from other causes, not least of all from a compassion born of suffering. But that night, in Rya Raines’s Airstream trailer, still young and learning, I had not yet attained an understanding of their psychology.

That night I didn’t understand Rya, either, but I was struck by the radically different temperaments of these two women. Irma was warm and outgoing, but Rya Raines remained cool and introverted. Irma had a lovely smile and made full use of it, but Rya studied me with those crystalline blue eyes that took in everything and gave back nothing, and she remained expressionless.

Sitting in the armchair, barefoot, one leg straight out in front of her and the other bent, Rya was the essence of a young man’s dreams. She wore white shorts and a pale yellow T-shirt. Her bare legs were well tanned, with slender ankles, lovely calves, smooth brown knees, and taut thighs. I wanted to slide my hands up those legs and feel the firm musculature of those thighs. Instead I put my hands in the change apron, so she wouldn’t see them shaking. Her T-shirt, slightly damp in the August heat, clung alluringly to her full breasts, and I could see her nipples through the thin cotton.

Rya and Irma made quite a contrast, genetic glory and genetic chaos, opposite end-rungs on the ladder of biological fantasy. Rya Raines was the epitome of human female physicality, perfection of line and form, the dream made real, nature’s promise and intention fulfilled. But Irma was a reminder that, for all its intricate mechanisms and millennia of practice, nature seldom succeeded in the task that God had given it:
Bring them forth in
my
image
. If nature was a divine invention, a God-inspired mechanism, as my grandma used to say it was, then why didn’t He come back and repair the damned thing? Obviously it was a machine with real potential, as witness Rya Raines.

“You look seventeen,” the dwarf woman said, “but damned if you act or feel like it.”

Not knowing what to say, I said only, “Well...”

“You may be seventeen, but you’re a man, all right. I think I’ll tell Bob Weyland you’re too much a man for Tina, for sure. There’s a toughness in you.”

“Something . . . dark,” Rya said.

“Yes,” Irma said. “Something dark. That too.”

They were curious, but they were also carnies, and while they didn’t mind
telling
me what I was like, they could never bring themselves to
ask
about me without my invitation.

Irma left, and at the kitchen table I counted out the receipts for Rya. She said the take was twenty percent higher than average, paid me a day’s wages in cash, and gave me thirty percent of the twenty percent increase, which seemed more than fair to me, since I had not expected to share in the improved profits until I had been around a couple weeks.

By the time we finished the accounting, I took off the change apron without embarrassment, for the erection it had been concealing was now gone. She was standing right beside me at the table, and I could still see the inadequately draped contours of her beautiful breasts, and her face still took my breath away, but the racing engine of my libido had decelerated to a sluggish idle in response to her businesslike attitude and her intransigent coolness.

I told her that Jelly Jordan had asked me to do a job for him tomorrow, that I didn’t know when I’d be available to run the high-striker, but she already knew that.

She said, “When you’ve done whatever Jelly needs you for, go to the high-striker and relieve Marco, the fella who handled it during your break today. He’ll be running it while you’re away.”

I thanked her for my pay, for the opportunity to prove myself, and she made no response whatsoever, so I turned and went awkwardly to the door.

Then: “Slim?”

I stopped, turned to her again. “Yeah?”

She stood with her hands on her hips, a scowl on her face, eyes narrowed, forbiddingly defiant, and I thought she was going to chew me out about something, but she said, “Welcome aboard.” I don’t think that she even knew how defiant she looked—or that she knew how to look any other way.

“Thanks,” I said. “Feels good to have a ship under me.”

Clairvoyantly, I sensed an appealing tenderness in her, a special vulnerability beneath the armor that she had evolved as protection from the world. What I had told Jelly was true; I did indeed feel there was a sensitive woman beyond the hard-bitten Amazon image in which she hid. But as I stood in the doorway and looked back at her, where she posed defiantly beside the dining table that was piled with money, I sensed something else as well, a sadness that I had not been aware of before. It was a profound, well-concealed, and abiding melancholy. Even as vague and undefined as those psychic emanations were, they moved me deeply, and I wanted to return to her and put my arms around her, not with the slightest sexual intent but to comfort her and perhaps to draw off some of her mysterious anguish.

I did not go to her, did not take her in my arms, for I knew my motives would be misunderstood. Hell, I figured she would knee me in the crotch, give me the bum’s rush out the door, push me down the metal steps, send me sprawling on the ground, and fire me.

“You keep doing this well at the high-striker,” she said, “you won’t be stuck there long. I’ll move you up to something better.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Moving toward the armchair, where she’d been when I first entered, she said, “I’ll be buying another concession or two during the next year. Big concessions. I’ll need reliable people to help me run them.”

I realized she did not want me to go. Not that she was attracted to me; not that I was irresistible or anything like that. Rya Raines simply did not want to be alone right now. Usually, yes. But not right now. She would have tried to hold on to her guest no matter who it had been. I did not act upon my perception of her loneliness, for I also sensed that she was not aware of how obvious it was; if she realized that her carefully drawn mask of tough self-reliance was temporarily transparent, she would be embarrassed. And angry. And, of course, she would take her anger out on me.

So all I said was, “Well, I hope I’ll never disappoint.” And I smiled, nodded, and said, “See you tomorrow.” And I went out the door.

She did not call to me. In my postadolescent, always horny, immature, unabashedly romantic heart of hearts, I hoped that she would speak, that when I turned I would find her there in the trailer doorway, breathtakingly backlit, that she would say—softly, softly—something unimaginably seductive, and that I would take her to bed for a night of unrestrained passion. In real life nothing ever works out that way.

At the bottom of the steps, I
did
turn and look back, and I
did
see her, and she
was
looking after me, but she was still inside, where she had settled again into the armchair. She presented such a stunningly erotic picture that for a moment I could not have moved even if I had known a goblin was bearing down on me with murder in its eyes. Her bare legs were stretched out in front of her and slightly spread, and the light from the reading lamp gave her supple skin an oiled sheen. The downfall of light left shadows beneath her breasts, which emphasized the enticing shape of them. Her slender arms, her delicate throat, her faultless face, her auburn-blond hair—all glowed, glorious and golden. She was not merely revealed and lovingly caressed by the light; rather she seemed to be the
source
of the light, as if she—instead of the lamp—were the radiant object. Night had come, but the sun had not left her.

I turned away from the open door and, heart pounding, took three steps into the night, along the avenue between the trailers, but stopped in shock as I saw Rya Raines appear in the darkness before me.
This
Rya was dressed in jeans and a soiled blouse. She was at first a wavery, watery image, colorless, like a film projected on a rippling black sheet. Within a second or two, however, she acquired a solidity indistinguishable from reality, though she was most definitely not real.
This
Rya was not erotic, either; her face was ghastly pale, and blood trickled from one corner of her voluptuous mouth. I saw that her blouse was not dirty but bloodstained. Her neck, shoulders, chest, and belly were dark with blood. In a moth-wing voice, each word fluttering softly from her blood-damp lips, she said, “
Dying, dying . . . don’t let me die
...”

“No,” I said, speaking even more quietly than the apparition, and I stupidly stepped forward to embrace and comfort the vision of Rya with a grace and swift responsiveness that had eluded me when it had been the
real
woman seeking comfort. “No. I won’t let you die.”