Twilight Eyes (70 page)

Thursday, on the beach, as sandpipers worked the foaming edge of the surf for their lunch, Rya said, “Did you mean it?”

“What?”

“What you told Horton about giving up the battle.”

“Yes. I won’t risk losing you again. From here on, we keep our heads down. Our world is just us, you and me, and our friends here in Gibtown. It can be a good world. Narrow but good.”

The sky was high and blue.

The sun was hot.

The breeze off the Gulf was refreshing.

In time she said, “What about Kitty Genovese back there in New York with no one to help her?”

Without hesitation I said coldly, “Kitty Genovese is dead.”

I did not like the sound of those words or the resignation that they implied, but I did not recant them.

Far out on the sea a tanker was headed north.

Palm trees rustled behind us.

Two young boys in swimsuits raced past, laughing.

Later, though Rya did not pursue that line of conversation, I repeated what I had said, “Kitty Genovese is dead.”

That night, sleepless beside Rya in our own bed, I thought about some things that made no sense to me.

For one thing: the goblin freaks in the basement cage of the Havendahl house.

Why did the goblins keep their deformed children alive? Given their kind’s hivelike behavior and their inclination for brutally violent solutions, it would have been natural for them to kill their malformed young at birth. Indeed they had been engineered to have no emotions other than hate and sufficient fear to support a survival instinct. And, damn it, their maker—mankind—had not given them the capacity for love or compassion or parental responsibility. Their effort to keep their mutant offspring alive, even in the squalid conditions of that cage, was inexplicable.

For another thing: why was the powerhouse in that underground installation so large, producing a hundred times more energy than they would ever require?

When we had interrogated the goblin with pentothal, perhaps it had not told us the
entire
truth about the purpose of the haven and had not divulged the true long-range plans of the demons. Certainly they were stockpiling everything they would need to survive a nuclear war. But maybe they didn’t intend merely to stalk the post-holocaust ruins, obliterate surviving humans, and then kill themselves. Maybe they dared to dream of eradicating us, thereafter taking possession of the earth, supplanting their creators. Or their intentions might be too strange for me to grasp, as alien in scope and purpose as their thought processes were alien to ours.

All night I wrestled with the sheets.

Two days later, basking on the beach again, we heard the usual array of bad-news stories between the rock and roll. In Zanzibar the new Communist government was claiming it had not tortured and killed over a thousand political prisoners but had, in fact, turned them loose and told them they were free to go; somehow all one thousand seemed to have gotten lost on their way home. The crisis in Vietnam was growing worse, and some were mumbling about the need to send U.S. troops to stabilize the situation. Somewhere in Iowa a man had shot his wife, three kids, two neighbors; police were looking for him throughout the Midwest. In New York there had been another gangland slaying. In Philadelphia (or maybe Baltimore) twelve had died in a tenement fire.

Finally the news ended and the radio brought us the Beatles, the Supremes, the Beach Boys, Mary Wells, Roy Orbison, the Dixie Cups, J. Frank Wilson, Inez Fox, Elvis, Jan and Dean, the Ronettes, the Shirelles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Ballard—all the right stuff, all the real stuff, the magic. But somehow I could not get into the music as I usually did. In my mind, laid under the tunes, was the voice of the newscaster reciting a litany of murder and mayhem and disaster and war, sort of like that version of “Silent Night” that Simon and Garfunkel would record a few years later.

The sky was as blue as it had ever been. Neither had the sun ever been warmer nor the Gulf breeze sweeter. Yet I could not squeeze any joy from the pleasures of the day.

That damn newscaster’s voice kept echoing in my mind. I could not find a knob to click it off.

We had dinner that night in a great little Italian restaurant. Rya said the food was wonderful. We drank too much good wine.

Later, in bed, we made love. We climaxed. It should have been fulfilling.

In the morning the sky was blue again, the sun warm, the breeze sweet—and again it was somehow all flat, without a pleasing texture.

Over a picnic lunch on the beach I said, “She may be dead, but she shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Playing innocent, Rya looked up from a small bag of potato chips and said, “Who?”

“You know who.”

“Kitty Genovese,” she said.

“Damn,” I said. “I really just
want
to pull my horns in, to wrap us in the safety of the carnival and live out our lives together.”

“But we can’t?”

I shook my head and sighed. “We’re a funny breed, you know. Not admirable most of the time. Not half what God hoped we’d be when He dipped His hands in the mud and started to sculpt us. But we have two great virtues. Love, of course. Love. Which includes compassion and empathy. But, damn it, the second virtue is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Call it conscience.”

Rya smiled, leaned over our picnic lunch, and kissed me. “I love you, Slim.”

“I love you too.”

The sun felt good.

That was the year the incomparable Mr. Louis Armstrong recorded “Hello, Dolly.” The number-one song of the year was the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and Barbra Streisand opened in
Funny Girl
on Broadway. Thomas Berger published
Little Big Man
, while Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison starred in
My Fair Lady
on the silver screen. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil-rights movement were big news. A San Francisco bar introduced the first topless dancer. That was the year they arrested the Boston Strangler, the year Kellogg’s introduced Pop-Tart pastries for your toaster, and the year the Ford Motor Company sold the first Mustang. That was the year the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series from the Yankees, and it was the year that Colonel Sanders sold his restaurant chain, but it was
not
the year that our secret war with the goblins ended.

The cowboy movie star Roy Rogers and his cowgirl wife, Dale Evans, were perhaps the first husband and wife in the American public eye to have different last names.

Roy’s horse, Trigger, had
no
last name because he didn’t want to alienate either Roy or Dale by taking the other’s surname. If you remember rightly, Roy and Dale were basically gentle Christian cowfolk, so Trigger didn’t fear that either of them would beat him or deny him oats were he to take the other’s name. He was just a thoughtful and kind horse; he desperately wished to avoid hurting
anyone’s
feelings, which is why he could never turn down an offered apple from one of Roy or Dale’s fans, even if he’d had his fill of apples hours before. This led to a recurring weight problem, eventually to a tragic apple addiction, and finally to adult-onset diabetes.

Buttermilk, Dale’s horse, had no last name, either, but knew better than Trigger how to finesse Roy and Dale’s fans. When she’d had enough apples, Buttermilk had a way of letting fans know that she preferred money to fruit—a dollar, half dollar, or even a quarter. Buttermilk was also a canny investor; when she died in a freak accident—the collapse of a grandstand from which, with other horse friends, she was watching a greyhound race—her estate was bigger than that of Roy and Dale combined.

Roy and Dale’s dog, Bullet, had a last name, Pettiwinkel, but he was ahead of his time in the recognition that one day some of the very biggest stars would be known by one name. He successfully dropped Pettiwinkel, but he could not persuade Roy and Dale to change his first name to either “Cher” or “Madonna.”

In my day, many kids wanted to run away from home and be cowboys. Not me. Horses always seemed a little psychotic to me. Besides, there were all the stubborn cows and the raging bulls, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, weird sidekicks spitting tobacco juice on everyone, shooting your way out of a box canyon every other week, cattle barons killing sheep sultans, sheep themselves retaliating against cattle. No thanks.

I wanted to run away and join the carnival.

My childhood was dark because of poverty and because of a violent, alcoholic father—although it was not without moments of light because my mother was a wonderful person and because my imagination offered many routes of escape, not least of all through books. I have always been an optimist even in dark times, even as a child, yet I wanted to run away.

We lived across the highway from the county fairground, to which, each August, came a carnival that flooded “the largest midway in Pennsylvania” with amusements of many kinds: thrill rides, games, fortune-tellers, freak shows (which I was too young to enter), girly shows (which I was too young and shy to enter), and livestock exhibits (in which the giant hogs fascinated me). Because I knew numerous ways to sneak through or under the fairground fence, I virtually lived on the midway during that week. I saved up gift money and odd-job money all year for the carnival; so I had a few bucks to spend, but mostly I just hung around because the carnies and their colorful life fascinated me.

I never ran away with the carnival, but for many years I pursued an interest in it, collecting everything I could find on the subject. Inevitably, I would write a book set within a carnival.

A publisher of limited editions suggested I write something for him that could be heavily illustrated. The illustrator he wanted to use was Phil Parks, an extremely talented guy whose work I admired. When I learned that Phil also had a horse named Buttermilk and a dog named Cher, I knew this was kismet. All right, Phil didn’t have a horse, and his dog was not named Cher, but I was nonetheless excited about working with him.

The publisher asked me to write a forty thousand-word novella, and I delivered a one hundred thousand-word novel. I am sometimes a bad boy. Because the publisher liked the story, he went ahead with the project even though he swallowed hard as he considered the additional production costs. Phil produced more than thirty brilliant illustrations, and
Twilight Eyes
was released in both a trade edition and a limited, signed, and numbered edition. It contained the material in Part One of the book you currently hold in your hands, except for the last two words: “Which follows.”

Although the book was finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about Slim, Rya, the carnies, and their war with the goblins. Subsequent to the publication of the hardcover, but before the Berkley paperback, I continued the story with another eighty thousand words.

Twilight Eyes
has been in print continuously since its first publication, which is gratifying; and it would be a source of nothing but happy memories if I had not, idiot that I am, agreed to fashion a TV series based upon it. If you have read a few of the other afterwords in these new Berkley editions of my books, you know that Hollywood is, for me, a steaming tar pit, and I am a lumbering brontosaurus that wanders witlessly and repeatedly into the reeking slough.