by Lee Durkee
“I don’t think so. But my stepdad did. A few times, I think.”
“Your dad did?”
“Stepdad. Yeah, he was always really mad about Ross being kept alive on those machines. He used to say it was going against God, and that somebody oughta do something about it.”
She took lots of notes.
It was Noel’s inner certainty that he would be caught that allowed him to relax throughout the interview. He even asked her if the police had found any fingerprints in the hospital room.
“None worth bragging about,” she replied.
Before leaving, she promised Noel his name would not appear in the newspaper.
“You look disappointed,” she joked.
Noel was disappointed, even though it had never occurred to him that his name might be in the paper. And his disappointment would increase in the weeks to come when the national news picked up the story. Both CBS and NBC would run segments on the bizarre murder, and both reports would implicate the Altman family, who continued to refuse comment to the press.
•••
Their mother did not like rides, didn’t trust them, said they were put together by drug addicts; still, every year she ferried her boys to the state fair and read them the rules of conduct before disappearing into the green beer tent. On this night the Black Dragon was called the WidowMaker and was painted a smooth ebony with red hourglass lights on her tentacles and with hidden speakers blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd. Noel got stuck with Ben first. He guided his little brother between the light shows and ripoff booths, Noel saying, “I wasn’t scared at your age.” Saying, “Shit, Matt wasn’t either. Damn, boy, you a little pussywhip or what?”
It did not take long before Ben had agreed to board the WidowMaker. There was no line, and no one seemed to mind that Ben was two inches shy of the minimum height cutout, a faded plywood clown holding out his hand. They were the first ones aboard and had to wait ten minutes before the ride heaved a hydraulic sigh and red lights began to flicker up and down the black tentacles. A man wearing a black silver-rimmed cowboy hat and with a burn scar across his throat leapt spiderlike onto the cockpit and locked the safety bar against their thighs. Only three other cockpits had filled. The WidowMaker heaved once more then lit up from the center outward. Next she started to deflate but then suddenly spurred forward, causing Ben to bang his head against the wickered metal—he was too short to reach the torn vinyl cushion. Throughout the entire ride, his eyes remained buried, his mouth pinched inward. After five minutes, the ride slowed and halted, only to stir again in the opposite direction, stretching the neon tubes of the midway into bright banners and slinging the two brothers into the battling lead guitars of “Saturday Night Special.”
Usually while riding the Black Dragon Noel thought about his real father and those lost bones, but tonight as he held his arms over his head, in the posture of arrest, he simply allowed his mind to go blank. By the time the ride ended, Noel felt as dark and dangerous as the ride itself, as if he had somehow internalized the Black Dragon. Leaving, he made a point of walking past the man with the cowboy hat and the burn scar and staring him down hard. Ben was beside Noel, but Ben was walking funny, weaving. He staggered up to a truck trailer and propped his arms against it as if to retch. But he didn’t retch, he simply stood there. Noel began rubbing Ben’s back, asking him if he was okay. Ben said he was, he just needed to sit down is all, and so Noel led him to the grandstand area and they sat on the hard dusty grass between the bleachers and the metal stage to watch the hypnotist show.
The hypnotist was a pear-shaped man with the oily too-dark hair of a mechanic. He wore a frayed batwinged cape and a black silk shirt blackest beneath the armpits and unbuttoned low enough to reveal much chest hair and gold. Twelve volunteers sat in a line of folding chairs on stage. The hypnotist had positioned in front of the stage three small tables with a tulip vase centered on each table. Into each of these three vases he now inserted one long-stemmed rose, tightly budded. He turned to the volunteers and instructed them that they were now going to use their hitherto untapped powers of mass concentration and visualization to speed the roses into bloom.
While the volunteers tried to do this, the hypnotist turned to the crowd and announced that anyone in the audience wishing to be hypnotized tonight should stare throughout the show at the spiraling barber pole above the stage. Immediately Noel began doing this. The hypnotist returned his attention to the volunteers and lulled them into a deep sleep, then woke them up again. He made a farmer dance the Funky Chicken. He convinced a high school quarterback he was nine months pregnant and could feel the baby kicking inside of him. It was going to be a girl, the quarterback confided to the hypnotist’s microphone. He planned to name her Melody. The quarterback, seated on the folding chair with his legs apart as if playing the cello, smiled blissfully while the hypnotist moved down the line, turning men into cheerleaders and women into farm animals. A blond woman in a black halter sprouted wings and swooped low over the stage, her freckled cleavage exposed to the crowd as she scoured the earth for mice and rabbits.
Toward the end of the show, the hypnotist put the volunteers back to sleep and told them that when he clapped three times quick—like this—they would awaken feeling refreshed and wonderful, but, he added, waggling a finger, “After you wake up, for the rest of the night, every time you hear the words Great Mississippi Fair, you will start jumping into the air like an Ole Miss cheerleader and you will commence to shout at the top of your lungs the last words of the immortal bard, who said—on his deathbed—and I quote: We are such things as dreams are made of, and our little lives are rounded by a sleep.”
He repeated the quote once more, then he clapped. The volunteers slowly returned to their seats, all except the high school quarterback, who remained in his chair staring into his palms until one of his friends came and assisted him down from the stage. The hypnotist told the audience to give the volunteers a big hand. He thanked the crowd, said his farewells, and announced a midnight show for adults only inside the French Casino. He urged everyone to have a wonderful evening and be sure to come back next year to the Great Mississippi Fair.
Noel was pondering the words for adults only when Ben exploded into the air. At this same moment, a dozen other members of the audience jumped up too, all of them pumping imaginary pom-poms and howling various high-pitched misquotes of Shakespeare up at the stars. Noel wrapped his arms around Ben, pulled him down. “Whoa!” Noel kept saying, coaxing Ben to the grass. Ben’s eyes had clouded over, and his broad smile seemed mismatched with his face. Then the smile collapsed. He sat down hard, hugging his knees to his chest. Ben’s recovery was duplicating itself throughout the audience. When Noel glanced up at the stage, a plywood replica of the hypnotist stood there, the next-show clock on his heart set at nine-thirty. The replica was much more handsome than the hypnotist himself. All three red roses were in full bloom.
•••
They wandered through the dark searching for Matt. Noel kept asking Ben what it was like to be hypnotized, but Ben didn’t want to talk about it. He seemed embarrassed and mostly he just shrugged with his mouth hung open, his crew cut plastered with sweat over the monkey shape of his skull. The last time Noel asked, Ben shrugged and pointed and said, “There he is.”
Matt was trying to dunk a clown by pitching baseballs at a bull’s-eye. Not so long ago everyone had mistaken Matt and Noel for twins, but this last year had seen Noel shoot upward while Matt shot outward at the shoulders. Because of this, Matt had more coordination and arm strength. Noel and Ben joined the small group of adults who had gathered behind Matt. The clown, sitting on the platform above the tank of dirty water, was drenched and sullen-looking. Matt leaned in with a farsighted squint. He started his windup and fluttered his eyes and fired the ball home.
He dunked the clown two times with three balls, then someone bought him another set of throws and lined up the ba
seballs at his feet. Matt accepted the free throws without taking his eyes off the clown. He knelt and set two of the balls farther to his right, near where a giant stuffed bear sat, then he scooped up some dirt and feathered it through his fingers. His first throw nailed the bull’s-eye again. The red stoplight flashed, a buzzer sounded, and two seconds later the clown cannonballed into the Plexiglas aquarium.
The clown was climbing back onto his perch when Matt nailed the target again. This time the clown went over backward and walloped his head against the tank. The applause slowed when there appeared to be some doubt as to whether or not the clown was drowning. But the clown rallied, and while everyone applauded and hooted, somewhat for the clown’s tenacity now, Noel came up behind Matt and asked if he could throw the last one. Matt shook his head no, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s sign, and told Noel to go buy his own balls, which Noel did. Meanwhile, Matt nicked the target with his last throw, but the buzzer did not sound. The crowd was booing the mechanism as Noel stepped up and, pitching wild and hard, missed on all three balls. The clown stuck his thumbs in his ears and waggled his fingers at Noel, who cashed in another dollar and popped three more balls against the canvas. The clown blew Noel a kiss, then dangled his hand from his wrist. Noel shot him the bird then turned to answer a question.
Matt had asked if it was true about Ben being hypnotized. Noel shrugged and said, “Hell, I dunno,” but then he got an idea and added, “It’s all just part of the fun here at the Great Mississippi Fair.”
Ben vaulted into the air wielding his pom-poms.
“We are such dreams as things are made of!” he shrieked. “And our lives are rounded by a little sleep.”
The gleeful smile caved in much sooner this time. He dropped to one knee and pressed his fingertips to both temples, as if halving his skull back together. Matt studied his younger brother with outright disapproval. Finally he whistled and rubbed his own crew cut backward and said, “Ben, don’t ever do that again.”
Noel picked up the stuffed bear by one ear. It was a shaggy brown creature, nearly as tall as Ben, with a yellow bow around its neck. Noel asked where he had gotten it, and Matt spat and replied, “They gave it to me.”
“Gave it to you?”
“For sinking the clown.”
“Well, how many times did you sink him?”
“I dunno. Ten or so, I guess. Twelve.”
“Twelve?” Noel stared at the target then back at Matt. “You spent twelve bucks sinking a damn clown?”
Matt said no, he didn’t spend any but the first two dollars—the rest other people paid for. He asked if Noel wanted the bear, and Noel gave him a jaded look. Matt offered it to Ben, but Ben would not admit to wanting a stuffed bear in front of his older brothers.
It was at this moment that Noel spotted the berserk clown. He had scaled the ladder out of the aquarium and was striding toward them. He was soaked through, his head bald, the red sadness still painted onto his face, and clenched low in his right fist was an orange wig and a billy club.
“You done flipped off the wrong damn clown!” he shouted at Noel.
•••
They left the clown and the stuffed bear in the dust and took off across the midway. Later, after Noel had set Ben atop a white gold-saddled pony on the merry-go-round, Matt said, “You know Mom’s in that green tent over there drinking beer?”
“Is that the French Casino?” Noel wanted to know.
Matt didn’t answer; instead he started telling Noel about the sideshow where he had seen the tattooed lady. The tattooed lady was this real tall Chinese-looking woman, he said. She was real pretty, with long black hair. “Like pure silk,” he added after a moment’s consideration. “And she had all these tattoos. All over her.”
“All over where?”
“All over everywhere. She was wearing this red bikini, but some of them went down underneath it. She started talking to me too. I was the only person in there.”
“You’re lying.”
Saying that was a mistake because now Matt refused to continue his story until Noel apologized. Then Matt explained that the woman had this butterfly tattooed on her neck. “Right here.” He clapped his palm under his ear like slapping a mosquito. “And she told me it was her first tattoo ever and that how she got it was that one time a real butterfly landed on her neck just when lightning struck. And it’d been stuck there ever since. Then she asked me if I wanted to touch it. She said it was good luck to.”
“Did you?”
“What?”
“Touch her damn butterfly.”
“Wouldn’t you have?”
“Hell yes, I’d have touched more than that. Was it just you and her?”
Matt pointed back to the green tent and said, “Afterwards I went in there to borrow some money from Mom. You know what she was doing? She was swiggin’ beer and lighting a cigarette off somebody else’s—off some ol’ cowboy’s. She caught me spying in on her too.”
“What’d she do?”
“Nothing. Just stared me down flat, like she didn’t even know who I was, then she blew out all this smoke and picked up her chair and set it down on the other side of the table.”
They both stared at the green tent.
“Damn,” Noel said.
“Noel, you didn’t have nothing to do with that catcher kid dying, did you?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I heard Mom and Rog talking.”
“Do they think I had something to do with it?”
“I dunno. Did you?”
“Did I murder him, you mean?”
“Yeah, did you?”
“Hell yes, I did.”
“You’re full of shit.”
•••
The station wagon straddled the center line and only veered into the proper lane under the approach of headlights. Cars flashed, blinked, honked, but under no circumstances did the Rambler dim its brights. When these cars had passed, and the Doppler effect of their horns had faded, the station wagon lurched back into the middle of the road. During this ride, which was not unlike another fairground attraction, Noel imagined himself to be hypnotizing Miss Weiss. He had already made plans to go to the new mall and shoplift some books on the subject. When the car swerved into the driveway, their house was dark and only the porch light had been left on. Their mother made them remove their shoes then led them into the house like a team of cat burglars.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN NOEL ARRIVED for the sleepover, Tim was in his bedroom reciting Hebrew to truckers over the CB radio. Noel sat on the floor and started paging through an old Hustler. Dinner was a frozen pizza Miss Weiss had heated up. Her eyes were big and deeply brown, just like Tim’s. As soon as they had finished eating, she smiled brightly across the card table and said, “Noel, I want to try some of your pot. What do you think of that?” She stood, wiped her hands on her white jeans, and started piling plates into the sink. “I always told Tim if he was going to experiment with drugs I’d rather we tried them together. I know both y’all smoke and that you’re supposed to have some good stuff with you tonight. I’m not mad, but I am curious. I’ve only smoked once, a very long time ago, and I never felt anything.” She squirted yellow soap over the plates and filled the sink with hot water. “Will I feel anything off this stuff you’ve got, Noel?”
Tim was grinning at him.
“It’s redweed,” Noel said weakly, more to Tim than to his mom.
“Is that good? Do we want it to be redweed?”
“Yeah. It means Colombian.”
“And where did we get it?”
He hesitated before saying, “At work.”
“That pizza place?”
“Yeah.” Noel wiped his mouth and added, “My stepdad makes me work there. He keeps half my paycheck too.”
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“For college?”
“That’s what he says. But the government’s gonna pay for most of my college, because of my dad. Anyway I don’t even wanna go to college. You don’t need college to be a photographer.”
“A photographer? What kind of photographer?”
Noel instantly regretted having brought up photography, especially since he had the Polaroid folded into his wallet. He wondered if she had noticed the missing Polaroid yet. And, if so, did she suspect him?
“The kind that takes pictures of sports,” he lied.
Hearing that, she seemed to lose interest. “I guess I should have fed you something besides pizza tonight, huh?” she said. “What do you do at Pasquale’s?”
“Wash dishes. But they’re gonna train me on sandwich board soon as someone quits.”
“Well, let’s see the goods.”
He reached into his sock. With Miss Weiss intent on his every move, he deftly rolled a joint, lit it, then passed the joint to her upright, a small torch.
“Hold the smoke in and count eight Mississippi,” he advised her.
They smoked two joints. Afterward Miss Weiss poured herself the last glass of red wine from a bottle. She held the upturned bottle over the glass and watched it drip.
“Hey, what about us?” Tim asked.
“What about you?” she replied, still watching the wine drip. Noel had started rolling another joint, but she touched his wrist and said, “That’s quite enough, Noel. That’ll do.”
“You feeling something?”
“Oh yes.”
“If we’re supplying the pot, what are you supplying?”
“Tim, you’re not supplying anything. Noel is. And if Noel wants anything, I’m sure he’s capable of asking for it.”
“I think Noel wants some Southern Comfort,” Tim decided.
She tasted her wine, made a disparaging face. “Is that true, Noel? Do you want some Southern Comfort?”
“If it’s okay with you, sure.”
