And now Byrum Terwillegher, who had woken this morning with an angry chip on his shoulder, felt like he was on top of the world. He left that little prick of a dummy bleeding into the dirt, happy to have had the experience; a little disappointed, though, that it hadn’t been the real Mickey Reardon he’d been firing those balls at.
He left the booth and headed up the midway.
He was on fire, now. Everything was going his way, and when he saw the gaming table housed in a small canvas booth standing in the middle of the clearing, he knew he could beat it the same way he’d beaten that stupid-looking little dummy. So he picked up his pace, and made a beeline straight for it.
The guy manning the booth had a half-smoked stogie in his hand. He wore on his head a straw hat with a wide blue band wrapping it. The red and white striped jacket he had on didn’t fit him very well, Byrum thought. Tight in the shoulders and loose across the middle, a little too long for his short, pudgy frame.
He stood beside a wooden table, an odd-looking gaming enterprise with a four-foot by four-foot panel slanting its front, another rectangular panel rising from its rear. A series of small, round grooves cut into the panel had different colored numbers painted beneath them. Numbered one to one-hundred, they stood scattered throughout the board, waiting for a steel aggie the man held to come seek one of them out. A wooden sign above the table read: The Moment Of Truth!
“Step right up,” he said when Byrum reached him. “Step right up, my fine feathered friend. Five’ll get ya ten! Ten’ll get ya twenty! Step right up to The Moment Of Truth!”
And Byrum did. He stepped up to the man, and said, “How does this contraption work, Mr., ah… ”
“Bruno’s my name, and gambling’s my game. And this game,” he said. “Is very simple. Five’ll get ya ten, my friend. Ten’ll get ya twenty. Twenty’ll get ya fifty and fifty’ll net ya a hundred big-ones. Tally up a hundred points with three rolls of this shiny little ball, and the money’s all yours.” He showed Byrum the aggie he held in the palm of his hand. He closed his hand, opened it and the aggie was gone, repeated the move and three identical steel marbles appeared in its place.
“Huh,” Byrum said, then, “Five’ll get me ten, you say.”
“That’s right.”
“Ten’ll get me twenty.”
“You betcha!”
Several slots were numbered with a paltry one, but plenty of slots were numbered twenty-five as well, a good many thirties and forties and fifties to go along with that blood-red one-hundred point bulls-eye sitting square in the board’s middle.
For five bucks, he thought, what did he have to lose? So he dug out a five and handed it to Bruno, and the carnival huckster dropped the aggies into the palm of Byrum’s outstretched hand.
“Just hold it up here,” Bruno said, pointing at an indented track at the top of the board that wound its way in intricate patterns of swirls and crisscrosses all the way down the thing. “And then let it roll.”
And Byrum did. He placed the little steel ball on its track, released it and watched it roll down and across the board, delighted when it landed on a forty point groove. The second aggie landed on a fifty point slot, and Byrum knew for a fact that he was going to win. And that was exactly what happened. He busted a hundred. Bruno slapped a ten dollar bill in his fat little fist and Byrum handed him back a twenty. Three more balls were rolled, and Byrum found himself holding a crisp new fifty dollar bill.
His next three turns did not work out so well, totaling only seventy points when a couple of those steel balls found themselves nestling into the lower numbers. And now Byrum had a decision to make: double his investment and keep his points, roll three more times and the prize would be tripled, or stop now and lose the wager already ventured.
But Byrum was playing on house money, so he let it rip, easily breaking that hundred point barrier.
It continued that way for a while, Byrum winning and Byrum falling behind, a crowd swarming the booth as Byrum seesawed back and forth a few times before finally breaking through that hundred point finish line. And now the fever was on Byrum, who had in his hand well over a thousand dollars he’d never left the house with. He had a fistful of money and he wanted more, so he said, “What do I get if I let it ride?”
To which Bruno, pulling out a roll of hundred dollar bills large enough to clog a toilet, replied, “This… if ya got balls enough to see it through.”
Byrum had balls, all right, plenty of them. Besides, he’d been behind the eight-ball enough times to know if he hung with it, sooner or later he’d come back. Eventually those points would add up. They’d have to—because there weren’t any zeroes on the board, and the point total damn sure couldn’t be subtracted.
Luckily for Byrum, the first three rolls netted him sixty-five points, which wasn’t good, but wasn’t really that bad. Wouldn’t have been bad at all if he’d have stopped then. He didn’t have anymore house money, but he wasn’t in the hole, either. He could have quit and walked away—no richer, but no poorer, either. But he didn’t. He doubled his investment—which at this time happened to be thirty-six hundred dollars—and set those steel aggies to spinning, netting a measly fifteen points.
“You’re a cheat!” he said.
“Be cheatin’ yourself if you give up now,” Bruno told him.
“Fuck it,” Byrum said. “Let it ride.”
“You’re sure about that?” Bruno said,
“Damn right.”
“Sure you got fourteen-thousand, four hundred dollars to slap in my hand if you don’t get the twenty points you need?”
“I won’t need it.”
“But if you do.”
“Then you’ll get it.”
“Just so you understand. You can’t simply sit there and roll those balls ‘til the cows come home… ‘til you get even. It doesn’t work that way. Get even now or pay up. That’s how it works.”
“I understand,” Byrum said. What else was he going to say? He didn’t have the fourteen grand to pay this prick off. He didn’t have the seventy-two hundred he already owed him.
“Well,” Bruno said. “Here you go then.”
He dropped the aggies into Byrum’s sweaty palm, and then stepped back, smiling as Byrum plucked one of those steel balls from his hand and gently kissed it, silently praying for someone to get him the hell out of this mess. His hand was shaking when he reached for the board, his wide eyes watching in horror as the marble dropped, the crowd cheered, and Bruno cried out, “Ladies and gentleman, the moment of truth is upon us! Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows!”
He stood there, panic-stricken, sweat beading along his brow as the aggie circled a measly little one point slot, and then cried out, “Yes, goddamn you, yes!” as the crowd roared and the aggie dropped right into that 100 point red bulls-eye, and Hannibal Cobb suddenly appeared beside him.
He was smiling, his black eyes twinkling.
“You don’t really think you just won all that money, do you?” he said.
“Goddamn right I do,” said Byrum, as Cobb snapped his fingers, and everything went away, the white canvas tents and those fine southern belles, all the sights and sounds that had so recently surrounded him. All of it gone, leaving Byrum standing in the middle of an overgrown field he had no business being in.
“The hell is going on here?” he said, as another snapping finger put him not in the middle of an old broken down country carnival, but at the rear of a canvas-covered stall as long as a bowling alley, staring out at every insolent, snotty-nosed brat who had ever tormented him. They stood before him, laughing and pointing, clutching baseballs in their tight little fists, as Hannibal Cobb snapped his fingers one last time, leaving Byrum Terwillegher staring wide-eyed at something that just couldn’t be.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bo clicked the shotgun’s safety into place, and slid Rusty Piersol’s gun back across the floor to Reardon. “You know how to use that?” he asked him.
“I think I c
an figure it out,” Reardon said, as he knelt down to pick the gun up.
“Maybe we should call 911,” Justin said.
“What do I look like,” Bo said, “a moron? That’s the first thing I tried.”
Justin walked over to the cash register and grabbed the telephone sitting beside it, held the receiver to his ear and a steady screech of static erupted from it.
“Told ya,” Bo said, as Justin returned the beige plastic receiver to its cradle.
“What?” Reardon said.
“It’s outa whack,” Justin said. “Just a bunch of noise.”
“Just like mine,” Bo said. “And the pay phone outside the gas station.”
Just like every phone in the county, Justin thought. Just the way Hannibal Cobb wants it.
“Those your wheels out there?” Bo said.
“Yeah,” Reardon said.
“Let’s go.”
Justin and Reardon followed Bo Johnson out to the car, which had been idling by the curb the whole time they were inside the general store. They climbed into Tricia Reardon’s dark blue Hyundai, Justin in back, Bo under the wheel and Mickey in the passenger’s seat.
Bo propped his shotgun against Mickey’s seat, the wooden stock on the floor, the barrel pointed at the roof. “Hold it in place,” he said. “So we don’t hit a pothole and splatter your pal there all over the back seat.”
Mickey held the barrel and Bo slipped the car into gear. Then he pulled away from the curb, past the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, the windows down and the wind in their hair, heading for a showdown Justin wasn’t sure they’d survive.
On the way through town, they told Bo everything they knew, how Mickey had shown up at Justin’s this morning, ranting and raving about a Ferris wheel sprouting up from the ground like a runaway vine, a crazy trick of the eye seen only in movies and cartoons. How after Bo had kicked Reardon’s bike over outside Jim Kreigle’s general store, he and Justin had ridden out to Godby’s field to see things that couldn’t have been real, but somehow were as real as the sky above them: the tall man, with his long arms and wiggling fingers, making a flatbed truck magically shed its tarp, although no one stood around the thing to help remove it.
“Just threw those long arms of his high into the air,” Reardon said. “Lowered them and that tarp slid off like a crew of men had pulled it off.”
They told him about Fred Hagen, how angry he’d looked when the tarp slid down, revealing those men and women locked inside their cages, the armless and legless man beside them. How that look of anger had turned to one of stark-raving fear when the tall man’s impossibly wide smoke ring hung suspended in front of his face, revealing some kind of image inside it Justin and Mickey couldn’t make out, but seemed to have had the Deputy shaking in his boots.
“Rubbed his fingers together and fire sprouted off ‘em,” Justin said.
“Bullshit,” said Bo, and Reardon said, “It happened.”
They told him about flat sheets of canvas rising from the ground, about all the strange people who had come streaming from the weather-beaten tents those sheets of canvas had grown into.
How the smoke ring changed shape as it rose, turning an average every day cloud into a carbon copy image of the black top hat Hannibal Cobb wore, how that cloud, or whatever it was, hung frozen in place in the sky above them, and hung there still yet. The men lined up like zombies in front of Ziggy Bower’s Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill; old man Terwillegher and Fred Hagen’s crazy old grandfather, staring up at that cloud as if it were talking to them.
“Ran across his yard hollering something about the carnival,” Reardon said.
They told him about Hannibal Cobb’s Kansas City Carnival, about the cars in the clearing, all the people they’d seen walking the midway, and how the same people were walking it when they left four hours later. The exact same people, from the men and women to Cindi (with an I) Stewart, down to those boys squirting water into the same two holes they’d been firing at when Justin and Mickey’d first walked into the place.
“That’s funny,” Bo said. “’Cause I saw Cindi Stewart sitting on her front porch with her parents about eight o’clock tonight.”
“No shit,” Reardon said.
“No shit,” said Bo.
They told Bo Johnson everything that had happened tonight, from the Alligator Boy and The Amazing Rubber Woman, right down to what they’d just witnessed over at Danny Roebuck’s house.
They didn’t tell him about impossible wishes and dead men rising up from the grave, though. Justin didn’t think they would ever tell anyone about that.
They were on the outskirts of town now, on a tree-lined lane heading for the old dirt road that would take them out to Godby’s field.
“My old man came home ranting and raving about a carnival this afternoon,” Bo said. “All wide-eyed and crazy-looking, babbling his bullshit all over the place like he’d dropped acid or something. All fired up about the damn thing. The hell’d I care? I wasn’t going to no kiddie carnival like some kind of moron. Got my brothers and sisters all worked up, though, all of ‘em yelling back and forth, old man telling ‘em they couldn’t go and the lot of ‘em screaming and hollering ‘hell yes they were going’ right back at him. Mom calling him a goddamn fool for the way he was acting, while he ran around the house looking for this and looking for that. Got my ass the fuck out of there. The fuck would I wanta hang around something like that for?
“Hooked up with Johnny Lee and we drove over to Columbia. Fucked around over there for a few hours and he dropped me back in front of the house. Walked inside to find the whole lot of ‘em butchered up like a bunch of hogs. Mom’s head cut nearly completely off.
“Do I believe this shit about a magic carnival? Something fucked up happened here today. My old man doesn’t get all jacked up about a carnival—beer and liquor and stray young pussy, maybe. But not no carnival. No sir, my old man don’t care nothing about no carnival, but he damn sure came through the door ranting and raving about one this afternoon. And if I find that cocksucker out at Godby’s field, I’ll blow him straight to hell. Him and any long, tall son of a bitch that tries to stop me.”
They were on the last paved road now, the final leg of their trek before they’d hit the old country road marking their journey’s end. They could see it now, that gigantic Ferris wheel spinning high above the tree tops surrounding Godby’s field.
“I’ll be damned,” Bo said, as they swung onto the dirt road, dust flying as the speeding car fishtailed back and forth a couple of times before righting itself and barreling down the road.
They slowed to a stop when they broke through the tree line, and then sat there with the engine idling, the headlights casting light on the cars and trucks and old jalopies parked in the clearing. They could see it now, the tents and carts, the booths and the stalls, all laid out in an overgrown field many of the town’s forefathers had beaten and raped in, tortured and tormented in, murdered and mutilated in.
“That’s your grand fucking carnival?” Bo said. “Those beat to hell tents? Those rickety old booths?”
“It’s different,” Justin said. “Isn’t it, Mickey?”
“Damn sure is,” he said.
And it was different. Gone were the fancy tents and gleaming sheet metal food wagons, all the crisp new stalls and booths, replaced by crimped metal, worn canvas and weathered boards. There before them were the same weather-beaten tents from this morning, the flatbed trucks and the pickup truck they’d spied from their spot in the tree line. And now Justin knew that everything he’d thought was true. Somehow Hannibal Cobb had shown to them a wondrous and magical carnival that didn’t really exist. The sights and sounds were all wrong—they weren’t even real.
Nothing they had seen down there tonight had been real.
“Shit, Justin,” Reardon said. “What did we eat?”
“Oh, man,” Justin said, and Bo said, “The fuck’re you talking about?”
“Who’s that?” Justin said, as a group of
young boys stepped out of the deep brush on either side of the road. There were five of them, all of them black, and as they approached the car, Justin could see that it was some kids from school, Marvin Jones, his brother Ricky and some of their friends. They stepped out of the tree line, into the moonlight, waving as they walked toward them.
“The fuck’re you guys doing out here?” Bo said.
“Saw that Ferris wheel a little while back,” Marvin said. “Come out here to see what’s what and been out here ever since.”
Marvin stood for a moment, his brother beside him, their friends on the other side of the narrow dirt road, beside Mickey Reardon’s open window. A minute passed, maybe another. Finally, Justin said, “How long’ve you been here?”
“Few hours now.”
“Were you here when we were here?”
“Got here just in time to see you and Reardon leave and old man Terwillegher walk his crazy ass in there.” Marvin said, then, “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”
“Why’s that?” Bo said.
“Some bad shit happening in there tonight. Crazy, what them rednecks are doing.”
“No shit it’s crazy,” Marvin’s brother said. “Danny Roebuck’s daddy just climbed the biggest tree in Godby’s field, climbed all the way to the top and dove head-first to the ground. Splattered his ass all over the place.”
“Crazy shit,” Marvin said, while his brother nodded his agreement.
“Old man Kreigle spinning around like a lunatic in the middle of the field, half the rednecks in town running around those beat-up tents and booths like a bunch of children at the fair, whooping and hollering… skipping. Those crazy rednecks are skipping down there.’
“You seen my daddy down there?” Bo asked him.
“Don’t know what he looks like.”
“You’ll know if I find him,” Bo said. “You’ll hear my shotgun go off.”
Sideshow Page 22
