The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel

by Charles L. Grant

  Fran recognized her then — the girl on the carousel, the one riding with, talking to, laughing with Chip.

  “Mine,” she repeated, from behind limp bangs that nearly covered her eyes.

  Maddy snorted, jabbing an elbow into Susan’s ribs; Susan slapped the arm away, but Fran saw that she was grinning.

  “We know that, Zera,” Elly snapped. “You don’t have to keep telling us all the time.” She rolled her eyes, plucked at her skirt. “The problem is —”

  “Tell her,” Zera persisted. She looked at Fran without expression. “Tell her.”

  “Oh for god’s sake,” Maddy said, and squinted up at the sky. “Look, we gonna be here all day or what? I’m going shopping with my mom in Harley.”

  “So go,” Susan said. Maddy didn’t move.

  The bumblebee landed on the root between Fran’s legs, and she watched it turning in a slow confused circle, almost didn’t hear Elly tell her that Chip was Zera’s friend, and you didn’t share friends, that’s not the way it worked, but if Fran really wanted one they would see what they could do even if she was new. Susan said it was too hot, that she was going to fry, that she wanted to wade in the pond, and if all they were going to do was sit around and bitch, then she was leaving.

  “So go,” Maddy said with a smirk.

  Susan didn’t move.

  Fran looked up; they were watching her. Waiting. When she glanced back at the root, the bee was gone.

  “Well?” Elly asked impatiently.

  “Well what?” Fran pushed herself to her feet, dusted off her backside. This was no fun, no fun at all; if she’d wanted to listen to people talk like this, she could’ve stayed home.

  “Do you want one or not?”

  It was almost a command.

  Fran bridled. “If I want a friend, I’ll get my own, okay?” She shook her head. “You guys are nuts, you know that?”

  A quick disgusted wave to Kitt, and she walked around the tree, into the bushes. Angry at herself for getting angry at something so stupid. Angry at them for as much as telling her she couldn’t see Chip because he was Zera’s friend. What kind of a friend was that, that you only belonged to one person? And what kind of a name was Zera anyway?

  She slapped a branch aside and came out on the pond’s east bank. The ducks were still there, the rowboat gone, and she walked slowly, every few paces picking up a pebble and tossing it sideways into the water. Watching the splash. Watching the ripples die before they reached the shore. Sunlight caught and shattered on the surface.

  Beyond the evergreens she paused, indecisive, then swung to her right and walked along the field’s edge. Kicking at the grass. Watching the sunbathers. Listening to low music from radios set on the ground. Watching the ball game and answering a wave from Drake in the outfield. Passing another open stretch with the bandstand on the far side.

  Climbing the low hill.

  Where she sat when she reached the top, and looked out, looked down.

  She hated this place.

  Kids that started out okay and ended up as snotty as the kids she knew back home, the ones who snickered at her and teased her because she wasn’t quite as fast, quite as strong, quite as smart, quite as anything as anybody else. She knew the words and she knew the moves, but somehow they had never quite all fit together. She wasn’t the only one. She knew that. But it didn’t make it feel any better. And here, she could tell they didn’t think she fit either. Maddy, Elly, that weird Zera . . . they didn’t know it, any of them, but they were a club that had dumb rules just like all dubs had, and the way they talked to and about Elly made her the queen of the club.

  The Queen of the Club.

  What a joke.

  Someone sat beside her.

  She moved her eyes, not her head, and saw Chip with his legs crossed, a shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows, jeans with patches and carefully torn holes. His feet were bare. He smelled, for a moment, like cotton candy.

  “Hot,” he said, nodding toward the field.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hot up here too, but at least there’s a breeze.”

  “Yeah.”

  She could feel him looking at her, and it made her feel funny.

  He poked her thigh with a knuckle. “Been with the jerks, huh?”

  “How did you know?” Still not looking.

  “You look like you want to kill somebody.”

  A hesitation before she nodded.

  “Bet Zera told you to keep your hands off me, I’m hers, private property, keep out, no trespassing, right?”

  Fran almost laughed. She nodded instead.

  “You gonna let them boss you around?”

  She did look this time. He smiled. She smiled back. “Not me. I told them to go jump.”

  “That’s good.” He picked up a pebble, flicked it away. “You let them boss you around like they were your mother or something, they’ll do it in school too, they’ll even do it in high school, you’ll end up so miserable you’ll want to kill yourself.” He watched the game for a while. “You know Susan? Dumont?”

  “Yes. Her sister died or something.”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “She was a friend of mine. For a longtime.”

  Fran didn’t know what to say, followed a crow instead that chased a dozen sparrows away from something in the grass.

  “You know, Fran, there are other kids to hang out with around here. Not a lot, but others.”

  “You gonna be my friend?” she asked before she could think.

  His head swiveled toward her slowly.

  Bat and ball; children yelling.

  “You mean that?”

  A shrug, a nod, a shrug again. “Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.”

  She stared then at his profile, saw skin jump as muscles twitched, saw what might have been a grin pull back the corner of his mouth.

  “Maybe,” he said at last.

  Her scowl didn’t make him turn, and she looked back at the game, where Drake had just dropped a fly ball. “Maybe? What do you mean, maybe? I gotta do something first, huh? Some kind of test?”

  “Not you,” he answered. “Me.”

  “Well, forget it,” she said angrily. “You don’t have to take a test to be a friend, y’know. Not where I came from, anyway. That’s stupid. Is that the way they do it here? God. That’s so dumb I can’t believe it”

  He didn’t answer.

  She grabbed a clump of grass and yanked it out, threw it down the slope.

  “I don’t pass any tests,” she muttered.

  It didn’t matter.

  He was gone.

  She didn’t wait for Drake; she started home alone, sometimes praying that Kitt would show up so she could ignore her, sometimes hoping she’d meet her father along the way so he could take her someplace for an ice cream.

  A man was cleaning the hardware-store window as she passed, the sidewalk dark with splashed water. She knew him. Mayard Chase. Besides taking her to the Travelers, he’d come to the house a couple of other rimes to talk with her father about building and stuff. He wasn’t very tall, but he was big. Muscle big. And not much hair except for a red fringe above his ears.

  He smiled at her.

  She smiled back.

  “You settling in?” he asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Pain in the neck, isn’t it?”

  She slowed, watching him hunker down to scrub a low corner of the glass. “What is?”

  “Trying to decide if you want to stick around or run away.”

  An automatic protest choked her, and all she could do was shake her head.

  He rose with a loud groan, a hand on his lower back. He stepped back to the curb and examined the window. “What do you think?”

  She looked. “It’s clean, I guess.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded, hands on his hips now. “Nobody ever notices when it’s clean, you know. Only when it’s dirty.” _ A laugh just shy of being too high-pitched. “I’ve got three boys and two girls, and they do
n’t even know it’s there at all.” Another laugh, deep in his throat. “Tell your dad I said hello, okay? I’ll call him this week.”

  She nodded, and headed for the corner. As she crossed the empty street she looked back, and he was back down again, scrubbing at the corner. Weird, she thought, and giggled when she realized that Mr. Chase fit. If the place was weird, and Mr. Chase was weird, then they belonged here.

  God, she hoped she’d never get weird.

  The house was empty when she got there.

  She didn’t have to call out; she could feel it.

  The car was gone from the driveway, the garage was empty.

  In a brief panic she ran up the stairs and checked the bedrooms just to be sure they hadn’t changed their minds and went back home without her. But all the clothes were there, the beds unmade, and there was the smell of her mother’s soap in the bathroom, the kind she used when she took a shower. So she took a can of soda from the refrigerator and sat on the porch railing, not caring how the sweat rolled in iceballs down her spine, how the soda almost gave her a cramp. She sat for over an hour, listening to how the Station sounded.

  Quiet.

  Dead.

  Until she realized that she’d been listening for those blaring horns and screaming kids and shrieking brakes and sirens calling and doors slamming and airplane engines rumbling overhead.

  She blinked.

  And it wasn’t quiet after all.

  Leaves moved, air moved, birds and insects and dogs and things she didn’t know about yet but would.

  She leaned back against a post, one leg up, and scratched her nose.

  Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. Not too terrible. Not as if she would kill herself or anything. Mr. Chase was pretty okay, the postman who wore a hat the way they did in the jungle was cranky-funny and, like Chip had said, there were other kids. Elly may be Queen of the Club, but she wasn’t queen of everything. She grinned, took a drink. Maybe she would get to be queen of something. Have her own kingdom, boss all the peasants, tell Elly to take her dress and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

  And there wouldn’t be any rules about how to have a friend.

  The storm woke her.

  It had been muggy all evening, and she had heard, just after supper, the old man stomping around the valley again. Not as angrily this time. Just cranky, that’s all — stomping and muttering and once in a while whacking a hill with his cane to get out the lightning.

  She told her mother about the Queen of the Club, angry, and hurt, and finally hating them aloud. Her mother had laughed at first at the rules and the way Fran described how the girls listened to Elly, then she sobered and told her that grown-ups are that way too, and sometimes you joined and sometimes you didn’t. It didn’t help. Fran already knew about grown-ups. What she wanted to know was if she should be friends with Chip anyway, even if the others didn’t like it.

  Do you like him, Lanette asked.

  Yeah. Sure. He’s okay. He’s funny.

  Then why should you let someone else tell you what friends you can have and what friends you can’t?

  The storm woke her.

  Daddy spent most of the day in the backyard, beating the grass down, cutting it, hauling it away in plastic bags to the curb. Cursing. Sometimes yelling. It wasn’t like him at all, and for a while Fran thought Elly had snuck in one night and exchanged him for someone else. Someone Elly could add to the club and boss around.

  When she told him about talking to Mr. Chase the day before, he only grunted and wished amid curses that the guy would mind his own damn business.

  The storm woke her, and she sat up, rubbed her arms, knocked her hair away from her eyes; she hurried to the window and leaned against the sill, blinking against the glaring blue-white.

  Looking for the lights of the carnival over the houses.

  Looking for Chip.

  Thunder, and lightning, but this time it was the wind that had all the fury, branches scraping against the house as if the trees wanted to get in, the rain on a hard slant, the house itself moaning, shifting, trembling, letting bits of the wind inside to keep the temperature down.

  A throat cleared behind her.

  She turned and saw her mother in the doorway, a ghost in a white nightgown, her hair loose and falling over her chest. She came in while Fran stared, swallowed, and looked outside again.

  Lanette knelt on the floor, put her elbows on the sill. “It woke me up,” she whispered, pointing to the rain that suddenly slashed against the window. “Are you all right, honey?”

  “Yeah.”

  Shadows jumped — one second here, the next second over there.

  “Mom, are you and Daddy going to get divorced?” Lightning; she saw their faces in the pane, pale and long and twins.

  “No, honey, I don’t think so.”

  “Then why are you fighting all the time?”

  A sigh the wind took and turned into a groan.

  “It’s not your daddy’s fault. He was supposed to get a better position at the firm than he was promised, that’s all.” A hand on Fran’s arm, a quick squeeze and it was gone. “It took about all we had to get here, move, fix the place, things like that. I don’t like it when we don’t have something in the bank.” She smiled; it was killed by the lightning. “I get scared and I take it out on him sometimes.”

  Fran shivered. “Are we poor?”

  “No, dear, we’re not poor. It’s what’s called being a little tight for a while.”

  Shadow by the tree.

  Fran squinted and strained.

  “I’m sorry if we hurt you.”

  The storm, for a moment, gave the shadow a grinning face.

  “It’s okay.”

  Her mother kissed her cheek, hugged her shoulders, gently hustled her back to bed and kissed her again and whispered, “Everything’s going to be all right, don’t you worry.”

  “Okay.”

  Her mother hesitated. “Look, honey, I know it gets lonely when you don’t have many friends. I’ll find some. So will you. Get some sleep, now. See you in the morning.”

  Which came, and went.

  As did the rest of the week, and the week after that.

  She went to the park sometimes, all by herself because her mother got a job and wasn’t home much anymore; once she went to the glade and found it empty, waited for a while and left. She watched ball games and once in a while played with kids she didn’t know who didn’t ask her to play again unless she asked first. They didn’t say no; they didn’t invite her either.

  She didn’t see Chip.

  She walked by Kitt’s house a couple of times, saw Drake once, mowing his lawn, and he grinned and waved and called that Kitt was probably at the park. Fran couldn’t find her.

  One Saturday morning, all morning, her mother sat on the porch with red eyes and puffy cheeks and blew her nose a lot.

  That night, they went to the carnival, but it wasn’t much fun because her father kept saying how shoddy everything looked and her mother kept telling her to stay close, not to get lost, you never knew what kind of people worked at places like this.

  Finally she managed to get them to the carousel.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” her mother said, shaking her head. “Neal, you know how I am. It’ll make me sick.”

  Her father only frowned, but he let Fran go ahead and she raced on when it stopped, found her ostrich and grabbed the pole with both hands. On the first pass, her parents waved; they were gone the next time around, and the time after that, and she began to feel strange, a little scared, until Chip suddenly walked up beside her and put his hand on the bird’s skinny neck.

  She grinned.

  He winked.

  She said, “So, are we friends or what?”

  “Soon,” he told her, pinched her leg playfully as he darted away between the plunging animals.

  Rules again, she thought; stupid dumb rules.

  Three days later, Mr. Chase and two of his sons came over to visit, and they spen
t an hour on the porch, arguing with Daddy. Quietly, but she was up in her room and she could hear them anyway, and she finally decided to get out of the house so she couldn’t hear anymore. Decided to find Chip, but he wasn’t in the park, and the carnival was closed, and when she returned home, just before supper, her father was on the porch, reading the newspaper, and he said he was sorry about Zera Rainer.

  Fran stared. “What?”

  He beckoned, and she stood beside him, and saw on an inside page that Zera had died the night before in the hospital, from leukemia. He explained what it was, and said he was sorry again — wasn’t she one of her friends? and she shrugged and went inside and stood in the middle of the living room and stared out the window, at the back of her father’s head.

  Waiting for the tears.

  One finally came. Just one. Just as her mother came home, saw her, and hugged her, and asked her if she wanted to go to the funeral.

  Fran shook her head.

  Did she want to talk about it?

  She shook her head again. Waiting for the tears.

  Going for a walk after a supper she knew she had eaten though she couldn’t remember how it tasted, finding another branch-whip and dragging it behind her until she finally just let it drop.

  In the park she started for the glade. They would be there.

  She knew it. But when she reached the trees she veered away and walked up the low hill, kicking the heads of grey-haired dandelions.

  When she reached the top, she turned in a slow circle, sighed, and sat.

  Waiting for the tears.

  Chip came instead.

  “Pretty bad, huh?” he said, grabbing at grass and tossing it into the air.

  “Yeah.”

  He wore the same clothes, his feet were still bare.

  “I didn’t know,” she said at last. “I didn’t know she was so sick.”

  “She didn’t either,” he told her.

  His voice made her look at him, made her frown because she couldn’t understand how he could sound so . . . not uncaring . . . so normal. If Zera had been such a good friend, Fran would have been screaming her head off. She knew that. But Chip, from his eyes, hadn’t been crying at all.