Everybody Scream!

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “That’s pretty great on gold-dust,” he said.

  “Are you?” Bonnie smiled, stepping slowly into her panties.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish I was.”

  “Well…why don’t you take some and go through again? My treat.”

  “Oh, excellent–where?”

  “My car? In the lot.”

  “Do you have to pay to come back into the fair?”

  “You can have them stamp your hand, I think.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “How about you?” the man smiled at Noelle, who was dressing with less luxurious slowness than Bonnie.

  Noelle didn’t want to get in the way. “I’ll pass. I’ll be around.”

  “You sure, girl?” Bonnie breathed, still exhilarated. Her nipples stretched out hard like the heads of eager little animals. “I don’t want you to get lost or bored or something. I won’t be too long.”

  “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Sure. Excuse me a sec, ahh…”

  “Moussa. Certainly–go ahead,” smiled the dark, charming young man.

  Noelle drew Bonnie aside, whispered. Moussa ducked into one of the showers, luckily. “Bonnie, be careful. Is this guy alone or with friends? If he’s alone that’s kind of funny, isn’t it?”

  “Why? He’s just looking to make new friends, like we are.”

  “Just be careful.”

  “Alright, Mom. I’m not stupid, Noelle.”

  The second bored man reappeared. “Come on, no loitering.”

  “We’re waiting for our friend to shower, okay, bumpkin?”

  “Don’t mouth off to me, little girl, just move along.”

  “Blast off, hick.”

  “Bonnie,” Noelle said.

  The man glowered, eyes bulging in their sockets like balloons filled with rage. He was tall and wide and wore an army coat. Noelle became afraid. “Move along, you fucking fish. I won’t say it again.” And then he turned and stalked away, visibly shaking with fury.

  “God,” Bonnie muttered, a little cowed, “what a psycho. I thought he was gonna kill me.”

  “See?”

  “See what, see?”

  Moussa emerged, his smile ever beaming. “Good, I was afraid you’d sneak off on me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Moose,” Bonnie smiled seductively. She addressed Noelle. “Are you sure you don’t mind, girl? Just an hour...maybe you’ll run into the guys.”

  “Maybe. Alright.” Actually, Noelle invited the opportunity to be by herself, out of Bonnie’s overpowering aura. Only a tiny bit insulted to be discarded in favor of free drugs and an unknown penis. She had quickly grown used to that from Bonnie Gross. “I’ll probably be in that mall building poking around.”

  “Great–I’ll look there first.”

  The three of them left the balloon the way they’d come in, but Bonnie and Moussa went one way and Noelle went another.

  Noelle thought she saw the glazed eye of the whale turn to follow her but after a second look dismissed it as her imagination.

  A young man fell in beside her. He wore black. Noelle’s downcast eyes took in his beautiful silver and black scaled shoes before she glanced over at his face suspiciously.

  “Hello,” he said, “I’m Bern. How was that Jonah ride?”

  “Icky. Next time I’ll just ride through the sewer system...at least that would be free.”

  Bern laughed. “I thought so–that’s why I didn’t go through. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Noelle.”

  “Noelle, you must be hungry after your harrowing ordeal.”

  “Not really. I won’t be eating for a while.”

  “Well I’d bet a nice cold beer would soothe your nerves right now.”

  “Um, no thanks.”

  “How about a snort to mellow you out, or a snort to pick you up?”

  Boy, Noelle thought, Bonnie should have waited a few minutes to meet this one; he was better looking and dressed like a male model, black lipstick and all. “No thanks, I’d really just like to be alone right now.”

  “Alone? This is a fair, Noelle, you’re supposed to be having fun!”

  Yeah, Noelle thought, fun like getting your black lipstick all over my tits and your bone in my mouth, right? “I’d really just like to be alone. Anyway, I’m meeting some friends soon...I’d like to be out where they can see me.”

  “Aww–are you sure? Just a smoke. Half an hour.”

  She looked straight ahead as she walked. “No thanks.”

  Bern sighed. “Alright, Noelle. It was nice talking to you. Hope to see you around.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Bern stopped walking beside her, watched her walk away. Damn–she was a sweet one. She submerged into waves of people, out of sight. Oh well. Bern turned, eyes moving in a sweep, flicking from one female to another as if he were changing VT channels in search of one to settle on. Plenty of time, but he still felt a bit stung, discouraged, finally. Two offers of drugs, and nothing. What were things coming to?

  Sophi sat at a battered plastic table in the screened-in beer garden, a mug of mead and paper plate of dilkies at her elbow, a newspaper spread before her on the sticky table top. There was a two page spread of photos of the fair, a visual summing-up of the season. Happy-faced children behind bushes of candyfloss, screaming teenage girls on the Double Helix, a prize-winning cow gazing uncomprehendingly into the camera. Pearl on stage passionately singing, her narrowed eyes mournful, mic in hand like the painting of Del on the Screamer, her twin wearing a special sling inside her maternity dress to hold the three limbs close to the buttocks, which made for a more rounded and less conspicuous kind of bulge.

  Idly Sophi paged more toward the paper’s front. An odd story caught her attention. Last night some strange creature of monstrous proportions had been sighted clinging to The Head, an orbital asteroid sculpture created three decades ago by the artist Cyrex Rendiploom, portraying on one side a human man’s face (howling in outrage or dismay down at the planet Oasis, like the man in the moon with a missile in his eye in that silent film by George Méliès) and on the other side a corresponding gape-mouthed skull visage. Scientists were investigating. A photograph showed a spider-like animal, many-legged, barbed, black, clinging to the globe’s skull side, its legs spanning the entire skull surface. My God, it must be gigantic! Sophi marveled. The Head could be plainly seen at night when it was fully catching the sun’s rays...and tonight it would be full. And the skull side would be in view, the paper further related. So it was that the mysterious giant animal would be visible to the naked eye tonight as The Head climbed the sky, to reach its apex around eleven.

  Had it been hurled through space by some distant exploding ship or planet, grabbing hold of the first object that came within reach, or had it placidly swum through space to this inviting resting spot, or materialized there from another dimension? Even before she read it in the article, Sophi remembered last year around the end of summer hearing about a strange secret colony which officials had broken up on that skull side of The Head. The camp belonged to a group of several dozen Bedbugs, as they were nicknamed scornfully, scorned because they had this aura about them that made people nervous. They were an extra-dimensional beetle-like race, which used a strange sort of vehicle on an odd track to move from one dimension to another, the dimension determined by the speed of the vehicle and the pattern of the track chosen amongst the many variations offered by their large train beds. They had one train bed here in town. Whether this secret group had come from Punktown or directly from their own dimension they never revealed, nor their purpose for beginning construction of a bizarre mechanical temple inside a cave burrowed on The Head’s skull side.

  Since then officials had twice arrested groups of affluent teenage humans who had had themselves illegally teleported to the cave, where they held wild parties and odd rituals. A security team on rotating shifts was ever present on the asteroid sculpture now. Except that since last nigh
t, all contact with them had been lost.

  Sophi also thought of the mysterious giant leg which had appeared right out of the air here at the fairgrounds two years ago. It was somewhat similar to the legs of the spider thing; insect-like and jointed. It had remained hovering and unmoving in that spot through carnival season and empty cold season, and had become one of the carnival’s attractions, the first year having materialized behind the Dreidel but later given more room to be viewed and wondered at.

  A hand touched the back of her head, stroked her hair. Sophi started a bit and twisted around at the waist. Disgust filled her, and resentful anxiety, like the immediate opening and spreading of a parachute. Johnny Leng withdrew his hand as if warned by her expression, but his smile didn’t falter. “Hi, doll.”

  “Hi, scum. Would you mind not doing that?”

  “Doing what? Breathing? Speaking? Existing?”

  “Touching me. But you can stop existing, too, if you want.”

  “Can we join ya?” With Johnny Leng was Sneezy Tightrope.

  “You can, but I won’t enjoy it.”

  “Life isn’t always enjoyment.” Johnny took a chair opposite Sophi and Sneezy sat at a table end. “Sneeze, before you get comfy wanna grab us some beers? Another mead, gorgeous?”

  “No.”

  “Get her one in case, Sneeze. You should Sophi...you’re more sociable when you’ve loosened up a little. You’re a tense person.”

  “Quit fucking with me, Leng.” Sophi watched Tightrope head to the counter. “I mean it.”

  “I have quit fucking with you–that’s why I’ve been so blue. What’s the problem, hon? Did your hubby start sniffing us out?”

  “No. I just don’t want anything to do with you, can your pathetic bloated ego handle that concept?”

  “But where did our love go wrong?” Leng cracked. “What happened, what changed?”

  “I sobered up. You must have sobered up before and found out you did something stupid and disgusting like vomiting on the rug, right?”

  “It’s been my experience and observation that when you’re drunk you do things you want to do but are too inhibited to carry out otherwise.”

  “Look, I was depressed and drinking and I just wanted to be fucked by a mindless animal such as you. It was primal lust, pal, that’s it. It was an escape, like drinking. I’m capable of such regretful overindulgence.”

  “Twice?”

  “So I’m a slow learner. There won’t be a third.”

  “Oh, so your depression is all cleared up then, is it?”

  “My feelings and personal life are none of your business, ass-wipe.”

  “Are you guilty? When your husband is out here fishing every night right under your nose?”

  “Mind your own business, Leng, I won’t say it again.”

  “Let him go on making a fool of you. For a couple minutes there you had some guts, you were looking after yourself. What are you, a masochist or something? He doesn’t respect you, he doesn’t know a good thing when he has it in his hand.”

  “Oh, but you’d appreciate me, huh? You’d be a wonderful husband to me, Leng, and never be unfaithful, right? Let me up. What happened to that pretty little girl I saw you with at the start of the season, where’d she go? I heard tell she was sporting a swollen upper lip with a cut in it, at the end. Did you appreciate her a little too hard?”

  Johnny Leng was not a gentle-looking man. Short, muscular, he was deeply tanned a reddish color from the sun rather than tan booths, with an outdoorsy roughness to his features. His mouth was broad and thick-lipped, his eyes narrow with an almost oriental fold, his black hair short and mussed. White t-shirt and jeans. He was brutish, primal. The sun, hard work as a young man, time spent in the military, time spent in prison had squeezed the weak milk of sensitivity out of him. He was looking even less gentle by the second. The tight compressed sneer to his lips finally let words past, having held them long enough to drug them into calmness.

  “You’re mad at me because you’re mad at yourself and you can’t face it. It’s you you’re disgusted at. Be a bitch to me. But what I did with you wasn’t a fraction of what your husband is out there doing, right now probably. How disgusted are you at him?”

  Sophi glanced past Leng at Sneezy, still in line. His eyes were on her and he was smirking. Pot-bellied inside his tropically flowered shirt, tails hanging out over his baggy white shorts, he was short and tanned but the too-dark shade popular among tan fanatics, with his high, balding forehead an unhealthy shiny red in patches. A little black mustache and a series of chinless jowls gave his smug little smirk more of an irritating self-amused quality, to Sophi. His eyes echoed the smirk, which in turn echoed the sly, smug expression so often worn by both LaKarnafeaux and Walpole. It was uncanny, the exactness in tone. Of the friends, only Leng ever appeared to show naked anger. But it was Sneezy Sophi felt the most disturbed by, in light of the rumors about his alleged extrasensory abilities. Some said he only picked up on general moods, emotions. Others said he could read your mind like a book, delve into your past, dissect your present, forecast your future. That big, burned forehead looked so heavy that it was this perhaps which bunched up his jowls.

  Sophi folded her paper shut, polished off her mead. As she set down her mug and her rear left her seat Leng clamped a hand over her wrist. Sophi flared her eyes into his. “Let go of me, scum.”

  “Is your husband scum?”

  “Leave my husband out of it. Husband or not, I wouldn’t want you to touch me again.”

  “People’s hungers don’t change. And your husband’s never will, so stop hoping for it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s not what Sneezy tells me.”

  Horrified, Sophi flicked her eyes to the line at the counter. Tightrope’s eyes and smirk were still trained on her. She jerked at her arm but Leng held it pinned. “Let me go.”

  “You don’t have to love me, bitch...I’m not naïve enough to hope for that...and even though I’d love like hell to nail ya to the mattress again I can live without it–” he squeezed her wrist harder “– but don’t ever call me scum again, unless you’re willing to call yourself scum...and your husband, too.”

  “It isn’t that you fucked me that makes you scum. You’re scum anyway. For the last time, let me go.”

  Johnny Leng cocked his head and tried on a broad, leathery smirk in the general character of LaKarnafeaux’s, but less whimsical. “I want one more fuck or else I’ll leak it to your husband about us. I’m sure not afraid of him, so what have I got to lose?”

  “Do it. He knows I’ve cheated on him before. Now let me go.” There was a tin ashtray near her plate of dilkies, her cigarette smoldering in it. Sophi took up her cigarette and poised the orange tip over Leng’s hairy wrist.

  He didn’t let up the pressure or the smirk. “You don’t hate me as much as you think. You still want me. Lust and hate go hand in hand.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong, Leng–next time ask Sneezy for a more thorough analysis.” Sophi pressed the cigarette tip into his flesh.

  Leng looked down at his arm, pouted, released her wrist. He rubbed the spot calmly. “Next time don’t stub the thing out; you hold it to the skin lightly, so it keeps on burning.” Still smiling. “I know–I’ve done it before.”

  “Stay away from me. One more word to me about this subject, any trouble whatsoever, and you and your fellow pigs are out of my carnival for good. Understand–scum?” Sophi flicked the cigarette butt at Leng’s face and whooshed out of the screened-in tent even as Tightrope finally made it to the table with a tray of drinks.

  Sneezy said, “She’s afraid of me. It’s strong. More so than she is of you. Can you imagine? I never killed anybody in my life.” He snorted-chuckled, beer foam on his mustache.

  Sipping his own beer, Leng wagged his head, amused. Sophi would have been a lot more afraid of him if she’d known that his swollen-lipped girlfriend who had stopped coming around was right now an unidentified corp
se at Paxton police headquarters’ morgue with both her eyes shot out.

  As the afternoon sun further receded the carnival increasingly made up for the loss with colorful lights, encrusting the rides like jewels, and drawing more and more people, more people than in the day, like mesmerized moths. Heather Buffatoni’s father had dropped her, Cookie Zalkind and Fawn Horowitz off in the parking lot, to return and pick them up at eleven. At the sight of magical, multifarious colors against the lowering sky, at the crest of the hill like a mystical city, Fawn’s spirits lightened and she put behind her the fight with her mother, her mother’s refusal to give her any more than twenty munits, and ten of that to be her allowance for next week, in advance! She had borrowed ten more from Heather’s sister’s fiancé, a softy.

  Though most of her friends were of primarily Jewish heritage, Heather was Fawn’s best friend and she had other primarily Italian friends, because when their station in life was high enough to minimize what Fawn considered to be an innate crudeness, they were of a like nature in ways to her Jewish friends…aggressive, strong, determined to succeed in life. Heather and Fawn had met last year in the same high school Modeling and Beauty class, in which nine out of the thirty-five girls had been of mostly Italian blood, a high percentage considering the heterogenous nature and endless mixed-breeding of society. None of the nine were in any sense beauties and only two or three were by a conventional standard truly pretty, Heather being one. She had a round and pleasant face, with short curly hair dyed blonde and a sexy figure destined for plumpness if future diligence wasn’t maintained. Oddly, perhaps out of relaxed confidence, it was Heather who was the least egocentric of the nine Italian girls, and the quietest. The greatest two differences between Heather and Fawn was that Fawn had only tried smoking seaweed, whereas Heather had embraced it (and maintained a separate group of friends to share this pursuit with), and Fawn had necked with a few boys but was a virgin (except for her pet bug Herbie), while Heather had many exciting stories to tell.