The Man in the Tree

by Damon Knight

  Angry and confused, he got out of bed. "Stay there," Irma said. She squirmed around on her back until her head hung over the edge. "Now I'm going to show you about sword-swallowers and giants, honey. Come on. Don't worry, it's all right. Come on."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Armed with his letter of recommendation from the mayor of Dog River, Tom Cooley went to Amherst, Massachusetts, and got a job on the police force. He chose the east because he was convinced the kid had gone that way. A deer might double back to avoid pursuit, but not a kid. He wouldn't go in the same direction twice, and, he wouldn't go back to places where he had almost been trapped. He would go east.

  Cooley had no illusions about his chances of finding him there. Young as he was, the kid would be smart enough to know that Cooley had tracked him down in San Francisco by going to art schools, and he wouldn't be caught that way again. Cooley had another idea, and he was willing to wait.

  It was funny how the thing had grown on him. In the beginning it had just been a thing about evening the score, like when somebody cheats you at cards and takes your money, you don't let them get away with that, you get even and more than even. Only later had he begun to realize that Gene Anderson was really the devil. What kind of a kid could kill his son, throw him out a window, and then live in the woods all by himself for two years, and grow up to be a giant? That wasn't natural; it wasn't even human.

  Cooley liked Amherst well enough, and he found some congenial friends, including an ex-Marine named Jacobs whose hobby was incendiary and explosive devices. In 1957 he married a widow who had a half-interest in a bar and grill, and moved into her house on Third Street. After six months they began to quarrel frequently, and in 1959 they were divorced. Cooley was disciplined in the same year for drinking on duty, owing to an unfortunate falling-out with his superior. In 1960 he left the Amherst police force and moved to Pittsburgh, where he went to work for an armored car company. The work was undemanding and the pay was fair. In 1962 he began using his vacation time to visit circuses and carnivals in the east.

  His reasoning was simple: if the kid kept on growing at the same rate, by the time he was twenty he would be nearly eight feet tall. He wouldn't be able to get an ordinary job anywhere; he couldn't even join the army. Sooner or later he would turn up in a sideshow.

  Cooley struck up acquaintances with circus people whenever he got a chance, and discovered that the bible of the industry was a magazine called "Amusement Business," published in Nashville. He subscribed to it, and read every issue from cover to cover.

  Through the summer the carnival worked its way into Ohio and Indiana, turned north briefly into Wisconsin, then back into Ohio again, and from there to Pennsylvania and Maryland, then southward down the coast through New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and so back to Florida. There were tearful good-byes, and the women kissed Gene. "See you next season," they all said.

  Gene went back to his A-frame on Lake Brantley. At first he liked the solitude and freedom, the time to think. He finished a large wood carving and several smaller pieces; he made a few tentative experiments in poetry. But the winter was long; when the end of March came, he went back to the carnival with a sense of relief.

  Some of the old faces were missing, and there were some new ones, even in the sideshow. The Fat Lady was gone; she had had a stroke during the winter. In her place there was a young juggler, a wiry dark-skinned man named Ray Hartz. He joined Irma in the bally, where he did a spectacular act with five whirling daggers. He could not use knives in the tent, where he worked so close to the marks, but he juggled apples, oranges, milk bottles. "He won't stay long," Wilcox predicted, "but he'll do to fill in until Ducklin can find another Fat Lady, or a morphodite."

  Early in the season Hartz began teaching Irma to juggle; she picked it up readily, and within a few weeks they were practicing together in the back yard between performances, disturbing Gene's Scrabble games with Ed Parlow. Irma's husband, Ted LeFever, looked more and more tired every time Gene saw him; he was running the candy-apple stand all by himself.

  One evening in Gene's trailer, Wilcox showed him what he called "the grift."

  "All this more or less stopped about nineteen forty-eight, when carnivals became respectable, but I've run into oldtimers who used to do it. The classic way is with three walnut shells and a pea, like this." He showed Gene the "pea" -- a little dark sphere of rubber. He put it under one of the shells and began to move them back and forth, changing their positions rapidly. "The idea is, I bet you a dollar you can't tell me which shell the pea's under. Where is it now?"

  Gene pointed to the shell in the middle. Wilcox lifted it. "Right, and you've won a dollar. Care to try again?"

  Next time Gene picked the wrong shell. "Bad luck, you've got to watch closer. Now don't take your eye off the shell with the pea." Gene picked the wrong one again.

  "You see how it goes," Wilcox said. "You let the mark win just often enough to keep him enthusiastic, and he always thinks if he pays more attention he'll win next time. Then you begin doubling the bet, and so on, and a good grifter can take all his money away. You see, the pea is compressible: you can squirt it out under the shell and palm it, like this." He showed Gene the pea between his fingers.

  "Then you squirt it back in under another shell the same way, and the mark never sees it because you do it so fast."

  "So 'the grift' is another word for cheating?"

  "Sure. In the old days, the idea was to separate the mark from his money, never mind how. Game of chance, pick his pocket, anything. You had to pay off the law, of course, and so it was really a sort of vicious cycle, I mean, without the grift you couldn't make the payments."

  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 bet
ter."

  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.