7
The next afternoon we passed a sign for Friendship, Wisconsin. “That’s where I was born,” I said. “Irony of ironies.”
“We’ll be in Sandhorn this time tomorrow. Do you have a plan?”
I didn’t want to think about Sandhorn. I wanted to find my dad, but not yet—not if it meant saying goodbye to Lee. “I guess I’ll start with the phone book,” I said.
Two miles after the turnoff for Friendship we passed a billboard that said MOTHER OF PEACE CARNIVAL FUNDRAISER. RIDES, GAMES, GOOD FOOD & PRIZES. JUNE 7TH–13TH, OPEN EVERY NIGHT, 5 TO 11 PM. TAKE EXIT 47 FOR GILDER, TEN MILES AHEAD.
We looked at each other and grinned, and I forgot about everything, the bad dreams and all the carnival nights I’d taken away from other people. For that one perfect second I even forgot their names.
We took exit forty-seven through more farm country before we came into Gilder, a one-street town of antiques shops and doctor’s offices perched on the crest of a narrow hill. Down again and a mile farther, a makeshift fairground came into view: a Ferris wheel turning and a Galleon going to and fro in a field beside a brick church with a bright white steeple. Lee found a parking space on the edge of a soccer field across the road and left his Stetson on the seat.
As we crossed the road and slipped into the crowd I began to feel like a little kid again. There was a woman in a glass booth turning pink and blue whirls of cotton candy on long wooden sticks, and she handed each stick down to a child as if it were some token of magic. “Like a Prayer” played on the stereo system, and a circle of twelve-year-old girls danced to it as they waited in line for the Galleon. The scents of fried dough and powdered sugar mingled with cigarette smoke and the oily mechanical smell of crunching gears. A clown skipped up to us and asked if we’d like to buy a raffle ticket. “Grand prize is a big-screen TV!” she cried as an accordion of green tickets spilled from the palm of her frilly white glove.
Lee smiled. “No, thanks.” He took my hand and pulled me onward through the crowd, and everything around me blurred a little. All I saw was the sunlight twinkling through the trees on the fringes of the fairground, splotches of color and white tennis shoes as the wave swinger whipped its riders toward the sky, and all I could think of was the warmth of his hand in mine.
I heard him say something, and it brought me to. He was pointing out the haunted house and glancing over his shoulder at me with an impish look. It was pretty clear I was going on that one whether I wanted to or not.
Mothers shepherded their children from ride to ride, doling out tickets and fending off demands for more ice cream. Past the bumper cars there was a big blue tent where fathers in their ball caps and jeans gulped from plastic cups of watery beer. My dad wasn’t like that. He loved ice cream and carnival rides, but he didn’t drink beer and he didn’t care about sports.
We got in line at a hamburger stand and Lee pulled out Barry Cook’s wallet. I picked up our tray of burgers, fries, and soda, and we found space at a picnic table under a tent near the game booths. As we ate I watched Lee watching people pass, the children either howling because they’d lost a game or fussing because they’d tired themselves out. Men strolled by with their beer cups, and women negotiated their strollers through the crowd, scanning the faces in search of their husbands. The first bars of “My Heart Will Go On” came through the loudspeaker, and when I thought of Mama I found I almost didn’t care anymore.
Lee took another bite of his burger and chewed reflectively. “Do you ever get nervous?”
I knew what he meant—pretending to be normal. I nodded. “You don’t want to leave, do you?”
“No way. We’re not going anywhere ’til we’ve gone on that thing.” He pointed over my shoulder, and I turned in my seat. A lopsided orange machine came flashing up out of the treetops and dipped again a moment later. It looked like a cross between a Ferris wheel and a rollercoaster.
“That’s the Zipper,” he said.
“We should’ve waited to eat.”
He grinned as he wiped his hands with his napkin. “Now which’ll it be first, that or the Spook House?”
I chose the Spook House. We bought a page of tickets—again, Barry Cook’s treat—and got right on. Lee pulled down the lap bar and settled into the seat with a happy sigh. “Will we pretend to be afraid?”
“Maybe I won’t be pretending.”
“Funny to think of you being afraid of anything,” he said as the car jerked forward and we swung around a corner into total darkness. A set of doors swung open, and the next room was lit with blue fluorescent bulbs that buzzed and flickered. A patient lay on an operating table with his guts spilling out onto a filthy linoleum floor, and above him a demonic nurse brandished a bloody surgical instrument in each hand. She leered at us, then winked at Lee.
“Help me!” cried the man on the table. “For the love of God!”
“This is good,” Lee murmured. “Definitely worth eight tickets.”
We passed out of the hospital of horrors back into the dark, and fumbled through a curtain of phony cobwebs as the theme music from Halloween started up. A hearse was parked around the next corner. The back door was open, and so was the coffin lid. A man in a moth-eaten suit stood beside the car with his arm extended, inviting us to lie down inside it. His teeth glowed purple in the lurid spotlight. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Cut it out.”
“It wasn’t me,” Lee said, and a hiss in my ear confirmed it as we lurched ahead into the next room.
The horror movie theme music faded into the sound of crickets and the hooting of an owl. It was a graveyard scene, with a crescent moon in glow-in-the-dark paint above another coffin. This one was closed, but tilted toward us so we could see it was only half buried. There was a pair of shovels stuck in a mound of dirt beside it, like the gravediggers had wandered off before finishing the job. After a moment of silence the coffin lid strained against its hinges as someone pounded on it from inside. A woman screamed and pleaded, and I could tell it wasn’t a recording.
We shuttled along a corridor in the dark. Someone laughed in my ear, low and menacing, and Lee put his arm around me. Or did he? It was more across the backrest than on my shoulders. I inched away from him as we entered the next room.
A wild-haired, wild-eyed man sat at a table with a napkin tucked in the collar of his shirt, sleeves rolled up, a carving fork in one hand and a severed arm in the other. On the table was a head on a platter, so mangled I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be male or female. A second plate was partially shrouded by a red dish towel, but we could see fingers and toes peeking out. There was a glass pitcher full of what was meant to be blood, and two pale eyeballs stared at us from the bottom of an empty drinking glass.
“Heh heh heh heh heh,” piped a voice through the loudspeaker. “You’re next.” There were words scrawled in blood on the wallpaper above his head, but I didn’t have the chance to read them before the car swung around the final corner.
* * *
We came back out into the sunshine of the early evening. Lee was in fine form. “Now for the Zipper!”
“The Ferris wheel,” I said. “Then the Zipper.” If I couldn’t get out of going on the scary one, at least I wanted to have fully digested.
I’d only been to a carnival a couple of times before, but the Ferris wheel was my favorite ride. I loved rising up over the tops of the trees, slowly, so that as you came down again you could look out and watch everyone milling around beneath your feet.
When we got to the top Lee looked down and frowned, and as we began to descend he turned his head so he could keep on looking at whatever it was that had caught his attention. “What is it?” I asked.
“Some guy,” he said as he craned his neck. “I think he’s waving to us.”
I followed the line of Lee’s outstretched finger. There he was, just as he’d been the day I first saw him: standing still, smiling and waving, while the rest of the world hurried on its merry way around him. “It’s Sully!” I cri
ed, waving back, even as a little voice said, How did he get here? How did he find me?
Lee frowned. “What’s he doing here?”
I shrugged as we went up for one more turn. “Guess we’ll find out in a minute.”
He was waiting at the Ferris wheel exit with a whirl of blue cotton candy. “Hey there, Missy!”
“Sully!” I said as he shook my hand and offered me a pinch of sugar. “I can’t believe you’re here! How did you find us?”
“Knew you were comin’ through this way to look for your daddy and thought you might need someone to talk to, case it didn’t go too well.” Sully nodded to Lee. “But I should’ve known, a nice girl like you don’t have trouble makin’ new friends.”
“What a coincidence,” Lee said as he shook Sully’s hand. “Maren told me she met you all the way back in Pennsylvania.”
Sully shrugged. “Only so many roads you could take, and I was comin’ this way anyhow.”
Lee crossed his arms and shifted from foot to foot. “Oh, really?”
“Yes indeed. Got me a cabin up by the lakes. Nice and peaceful up there. Only an hour from here, give or take.” Sully glanced over my shoulder at the hot dog stand. “You kids get somethin’ to eat?”
“Yeah, we just had some burgers.”
Lee turned to me. “Now how about the Zipper?”
I handed him my tickets. “Do you mind going by yourself? I’ll just wait here and talk to Sully.”
He looked skeptical. “Where will you be?”
I pointed to the nearest bench, where a bunch of boys were just getting up to leave, and Lee cast one more cautious look at Sully. “Just don’t go disappearing on me, all right?”
I suppressed a smile. “I won’t.”
Lee melted into the crowd as Sully and I sat down on the bench. “Cotton candy?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” I took another pinch.
There was a twinkle in Sully’s eyes. “See you got yourself a boyfriend.”
I sighed. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
The old man took another bite of cotton candy. “Maybe he didn’t get the telegram.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering the lady acrobat. “Thanks for the circus book.”
He smiled. “You know sometimes you find somethin’ nice, and you just don’t know yet who it’s gonna belong to?”
I smiled. “I wanted to take you up on your offer. I just really need to find my dad.”
“You think you need to find your daddy,” Sully corrected. His tongue was bright blue. “I should’ve known when I wrote that note that you weren’t comin’ with me.” The Zipper came whipping up out of the trees again, and Sully said, “How’d you meet up with your what’s-his-name?”
“Lee,” I said. “I was hitchhiking from St. Louis, but this girl left me at a Walmart in Iowa.…”
“San Loo! Missy, you’ve been all over since I saw you last!”
I smiled. “Anyway, I got into a bit of trouble at the Walmart, and Lee showed up just in time.” I paused. “He’s an eater too.”
“Yeah,” said Sully. “I figured.”
“You’re only the second one he’s met, after me.”
“That so? Well, now.” There was no more cotton candy on the stick in his hand, so he tossed it in the trash and licked his dirty fingers. “Listen, you kids got a place to stay tonight?”
I shook my head. “I mean, we’ve been camping.”
“Well, I got two nice clean beds for you, if you want ’em.”
“At your cabin? Really?”
“Sure. I even got some hobo stew waitin’ in the coals.”
My stomach rumbled at the thought of another helping of melted-cheesy mashed-up hamburger goodness. A shadow fell across my lap and I looked up. “How was the ride?” I asked.
Lee stood with his arms crossed again. “Pretty awesome. But you were right. You might’ve lost your burger.”
“Sully was just saying we’re welcome to stay at his cabin tonight. He’s got a late dinner cooking and everything.”
Lee opened his mouth, and given how suspicious he’d been acting I was surprised when he took a breath and said, “Okay. Thanks.”
“Alrighty then.” The old man stood up and scratched his missing ear with his missing finger. “I’ll just leave you kids to your rides and games, and meet up with you at the end of the night.”
“Look,” I said as Sully rounded the corner on the Galleon and vanished from sight, “it’s pretty obvious you don’t like the guy, but do you have to be that obvious about it?”
“Come on. You mean to tell me he came halfway across the country to offer you moral support?”
“I’ve heard of unlikelier things,” I said. “Like, oh, I don’t know … trolls under railway bridges feasting on babies? Tomato sauce made out of drunken rednecks?”
Lee shoved his fists in his pockets and kicked at a cigarette butt in the grass. “I’m not kidding around, Maren.”
“Okay. Seriously, then. If he were up to something, he’d have done it the first time I saw him. Right?”
Lee cocked his head, still eyeing me with that doubtful look. He wasn’t going to concede that easily. “This wasn’t a coincidence,” he said. “There’s something about him, Maren. Like he knows you.”
I shrugged. “Of course he knows me. We talked for hours.”
“You’re not putting this together. How did he know you were going to be here?”
I rolled my eyes. “He didn’t, Lee. Come on. I want a home-cooked meal and a nice soft bed, all right?” Until I said it I hadn’t known how much I needed it. “We’ll lock the bedroom door. It’ll be fine, I promise. Now what do you want to do next?”
He let out a defeated sigh. “How about some snow cones?”
“Why did you say yes if you didn’t want to go to the cabin?” I asked as we got in line at the snow cone stand.
“Just to buy us the time to talk about it.”
I rolled my eyes.
“And here’s another thing, Maren. What’s with the chewed-up ear and the missing fingers?”
“He’s only missing one finger. What, you think you can judge someone for having missing pieces?”
“It depends on how it happened, doesn’t it?” He shot me a pointed look. “Did he lose it in a farming accident?”
The little boy in front of us in line turned around and looked up at me with an air of childish curiosity, walleyed behind a pair of Coke-bottle eyeglasses. What boy’s ears don’t perk up at the mention of severed fingers? I tried to smile at him, but I probably wound up looking like I had a toothache. “We’d better talk about something else,” I said.
We ate our root-beer snow cones over by the game booths watching kids waste their parents’ money on balloon darts or the Wheel of Fortune, which never, ever landed on the number where they’d stacked their chips. A few feet away we found a Lucky Toss booth, where you had to lob a baseball into a grid of milk cans and hope it didn’t bounce off the rims. There were shelves all around the booth, and only one sort of toy you could win: an ET softie.
No one was playing. The girl working the booth sat on a stool reading a magazine, looking so bored her expression seemed almost angry. The boy who’d been in front of us in line for snow cones tossed his paper cone into a trashcan and went marching up to the Lucky Toss booth. “How much?” he asked.
“Three tickets, three tries,” the girl replied. “You feeling lucky today, goggle-eyes?” She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, but there was too much experience written on her face. It wasn’t the eyeliner. Someone had been very cruel to her, not just once but over a period of years, and now she was going to pay it forward.
The boy didn’t answer her, just pulled three tickets out of his jeans pocket and laid them on the counter. “You’re wasting your money,” she said as she tossed him the first ball. It skimmed over his fingertips and he went scrambling over the pavement after it.
A moment later Lee dipped his toe under the moving ball so it came
up gently into the air and landed in the boy’s hands. He gave Lee a grateful look—which fell on me instead—and hurried back to the booth.
The first shot went awry, and so did the second. I felt Lee cringing beside me. We wanted him to win. Come on, kid. You can do it.
He tried a different tack on his final toss, underhanding the ball so it nearly touched the roof of the booth before it landed with a satisfying thunk at the bottom of a can in the center of the grid. He jumped and whooped and clapped his hands. “I won! I won!”
The girl folded her arms and glared down at him. “You couldn’t have.”
“But it’s in that can over there, see?” It was a little bit heartbreaking to hear him say this, still believing she would play fair with him. “I made it. I won.”
“No, you didn’t,” sneered the Lucky Toss girl. “Touch your nose and see if you don’t miss.”
I could see on the boy’s face that he’d been taunted like this every single day at school, and also that he’d never get used to it. He reached for an ET doll on a low shelf along the side and clasped it to his chest. “I won it fair and square.”
“No.” She snatched the toy out of the boy’s hands and put it on a shelf high above his head. “You cheated.”
“I didn’t!” he cried.
She made a face at him, turned and leaned over the grid of milk cans, plucked out the winning baseball, and dropped it in a bucket. “What’re you gonna do about it, huh? That’s it. Go and cry to your mommy,” she said as the boy hurried away from the booth.
Lee threw his paper cone in the trash. “Keep an eye on that kid,” he said. “I’m gonna win that toy for him.” He went up to the counter and the girl flashed him a smile that turned my stomach. She hadn’t noticed us watching her. I wondered how she’d have treated that little boy if she had.
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