For the rest of that evening, he made himself useful. He took over the Tilt-a-Whirl for a while and then spent some time at the Whack-a-Mole booth. But even in the short time that had passed since his altercation with Buck, he sensed something around him had changed. He walked by people he knew and they wouldn’t look him in the eye. When he offered the cotton candy girl a break, she said no. She’d never turned him down before. She wouldn’t even look at him. He began to realize that word must have spread about his run-in with Buck. It was the only explanation.
Later, as he approached the house of freaks, he didn’t hear the usual laughter coming from within. Walking into the lounge, at first none of them would look at him. Gunther appeared especially distraught. He was playing with his hands while banging his head against the wall. Wolf Boy sat in one of the metal chairs. He had his head in his hands and was quietly blowing smoke rings. The boy looked to the couch and thought he saw something like disappointment coming from Rudolph’s hooded eye. After another awkward moment, Alice looked up at him and frowned.
“You went and done it this time, boy,” she said, her voice a harsh rasp. Soon after, she began coughing from the effort of saying just those few words.
The boy went to the couch and sat beside her. He began gently tapping her back as her weak body was seized with coughs. Grabbing an empty drinking glass from the table, he held it in front of her to catch the inevitable sputum. After a while, her coughs subsided and the room went quiet.
“What can I do?” he asked.
He looked around the room. Each set of eyes turned away from him. Harold . . . Gunther . . . Lois . . . Enrique . . . Rudolph. Even Alice wouldn’t look him in the eye.
“Tell me!” he pleaded. “What can I do?”
When a moment passed and no answer came, he looked down at the floor and said, “There must be something I can do.”
From the corner of his eye, he watched Alice slowly turn her gaze toward him. He turned and noticed with alarm that her withered skin hung more loosely along her jowls than he remembered from just yesterday. When she reached out and took her hand in his, he felt the weak pulse and knew it wouldn’t be long now.
“It’s been taken care of, boy,” she said. “You are to go and meet with Big Ben tonight. Be at his trailer at three o’clock. Don’t be late, now.”
The boy nodded. He held off on asking any questions, knowing they would all be answered before long. The room remained quiet for a while. When Alice finally did look at him and their eyes met, he saw something that looked like ancient wisdom. He supposed maybe that was something you got by cramming a hundred years of life into barely fourteen. She squeezed his had tightly before she spoke again.
“Take the deal,” she said. “Take the deal.”
Her body was once again wracked by spasms. The boy gently patted her on the back and wondered just what that deal might be.
4
It was the most bittersweet time of day for the boy, that time after his friends had gone to bed but before the first lethal rays of the morning sun called him to his resting place. In these, his loneliest hours, the stark difference between what he was and what they were ripped through his soul like the thrust of a dagger.
He had taken to avoiding the kitchen tent and the all night poker game after the first incident with Buck. He started spending time off the carnival grounds and exploring the surrounding area. While walking along the dark and dusty streets of whatever small town they happened to be in, he often found himself staring into the windows of the closed shops and restaurants of the deserted downtowns. Before the night was through and the need for sleep called him home, he would climb the highest point in whatever town he was in and look down upon all those things he was no longer part of.
This evening, he was seated on a hilltop high above and about a mile away from the mostly darkened carnival grounds, biding his time before the appointment with Big Ben. He had his legs clutched tightly to his chest while his body quaked with what he could only assume was fear. The same thoughts kept swirling round and round in his head: What would he do if Big Ben kicked him out? Where would he go? What would he do?
He had no answer to that question, although he was now all but certain there were others like him in the world. He had felt their presence sometimes on the long, strange journey he had taken with his uncle. It had happened mostly as they passed through larger cities. But sometimes, even in the smallest of towns, he heard them call out to him on what could only be a kind of subsonic, sonar-like frequency.
He remembered nothing of his former life. He had long ago given up his frustrating attempts to recall exactly who and what he was before the change. In a kind of conditioned response, he had learned that every time he tried to recall his past, an ocean of pain separated his past from his present. He had occasional visions – brief snapshots, really – that he assumed were somehow associated with his former life. Sometimes, he even caught brief glimpses of faces. But whoever those people might have been to him once, they were nothing more to him now than the half-remembered faces of total strangers. More often than not, the faces he glimpsed were the faces of young people like himself.
Sometimes, he saw the face of a serious looking boy with short blond hair and a friendly smile. Other times, it was the face of a small boy who wore goofy-looking glasses and shiny metal on his teeth. For some reason, that face brought only sadness. Once or twice, he saw the face of an angel, a beautiful girl of about his own age. Each time he saw her, his stomach fluttered strangely, or whatever it was he had within him now that passed for a stomach. His insides had changed. That much he knew.
He remembered vaguely the pain he had felt during his transformation, as his insides were ripped and torn away, to be replaced — he could only guess — with organs that were more accommodating to his new diet. Those bloody chunks of himself that nature deemed no longer necessary had been expelled from his body in the usual human way. He remembered the man he called uncle was there to clean up his viscera. And when his uncle sensed his pain was unbearable, he plunged a needle into his arm connected to a bag of red fluid that brought blessed, if temporary, relief. The man had shown up somewhere in the midst of his agony, bringing with him the life-giving fluid. The boy remembered that on their journey across the country, a small supply had been kept on top of blue ice in a Styrofoam cooler. His uncle made sure he got some every day. When supplies ran low, he gave him some every other day, until one day, it was all gone. After that, the boy had to learn how to fend for himself.
But nothing he had consumed since that time — not the rats, not the cats, not even the pigs — had brought him the relief and delicious pleasure he knew instinctively could only be found in the blood of the human. He knew on some level there was also something in his newfound personality with a deep desire to bring pain and despair upon the human. Any human. He reasoned that out a while ago and figured that this new instinct was maybe just the flip side of the same coin. After all, hadn’t humans hunted him and his kind relentlessly through the eons? Weren’t they hunting him even now? Why wouldn’t his kind want to strike back. Why wouldn’t a hatred of humans not be imprinted upon them, if only as a defense mechanism. But to his shame, he knew there was more to it than that.
He remembered the face of the smiling blond man who had so obviously enjoyed his uncle’s pain on the second floor landing of the restaurant. Then he recalled his vision of Buck, on the floor of the trailer atop a frightened girl. The boy was sickened to understand implicitly that he had those same urges within him. Even more disgusting was the certain knowledge that his own thoughts were . . . darker. More disturbing. But it was time to put those things aside for the moment. From his hilltop perch, he looked up at the moon and knew it was time.
When he approached the trailer, as always, a light burned from within. He knocked once and heard a gruff voice bid him enter. Reaching for the handle, he opened the door, and when he stepped inside he was surprised to see that nothing was as he imagined it. The wa
ll opposite the door contained a series of long bookshelves filled with notebooks. The boy imagined each of them was an accounting of the year that was emblazoned alongside their spine in gold. To the right was a doorway that led to another room, probably a sleep chamber. A narrow couch occupied the side wall. Closing the door behind him, he turned to the left and saw Big Ben for the first time, and realized the man seated behind the large desk had earned his nickname.
In the green light of a banker’s lamp that reflected eerie shadows on the man’s face, the boy saw his massive head adorned with thick gray hair. He had a walrus mustache that ran in both directions beneath his large nose. The mustache disappeared somewhere beneath one of his many chins. But it wasn’t fat, it was muscle that rippled beneath the long sleeves of his striped button down shirt, threatening to burst through at any moment. The pen he held was almost lost in his ham-sized fist. The man himself was bent over the desk making entries in a ledger. Bookish half glasses hung perilously from the end of his bulbous nose. He did not raise his head at the boy’s entrance.
The desk was neat and tidy with plastic “in” and “out” boxes off to one side. Atop the desk was an ancient metal lockbox beside a stack of what the boy recognized as register receipts. Piled high on the credenza behind Ben were loose rolls of bright orange tickets that the boy knew were stamped “Steinhoffer Amusements.” They were stacked atop piles of boxes that the boy suspected contained rolls and rolls more, creating the illusion that if you wanted a ticket to this carnival, you had to go through the man behind the desk. The boy knew intuitively that this was exactly the effect the man was going for.
He stood there a while waiting for the man to acknowledge him. After he finished making the current entry in his logbook, the man put down his pen and raised his head. His face remained impassive and noncommittal as it looked the boy up and down. Another moment passed before he motioned with his chin for the boy to take one of the seats in front of the desk. After he sat down, the man leaned back in his chair and locked his hands over his massive belly.
“What am I to do with you, boy?” he asked in a voice that did not match its owner. A high-pitched tenor, it was somehow musical. Almost sweet. But because he had no good answer to the question, the boy remained silent. “What’s your name, son?” Ben asked.
The boy had to think a moment before answering. He hadn’t answered that question in a while.
“My uncle calls me Scott,” he answered, though the name had never felt right to him. But for some reason, the man almost smiled.
“Well boy, whose uncle calls him Scott, here’s the deal. Buck wants you gone, but you already know that. Thing is, everyone else kind of likes you. Now, I know I should probably apologize to you for Buck, but that ain’t the way things work. He just ain’t never had a mother who showed him how to treat people. And I promised her before she passed that I would always care for him and protect him with my life. Anyhow, I know you make yourself useful ‘round here. I been watchin’. More important than that, I know the receipts always seem to go up any time you take over one of them booths. Why do you think that is, boy?”
Ben looked him in the eye after asking the question. They were kind eyes that looked like they’d seen just about everything there was to see. But the boy also knew they didn’t miss a trick. When he looked away, the man chuckled before speaking again.
“Anyway,” he laughed, “how you do it ain’t at all important to me, boy. Then again, you’re not a boy now, are you? Not quite a man yet neither.” He paused a moment and seemed to choose his next words carefully before going on. “Son, I have to ask you this next thing, so listen carefully. I am given to understand you are suffering from the curse. Is that true? Do you have the curse on you, boy?”
The boy felt his face burn red after the man asked the question. He was still looking at the floor when he surprised himself by nodding his head anyway. The man’s voice was kind when he went on.
“That’s okay with me, boy,” he said. “As you have no doubt done already figured out for yourself, it takes all kinds to keep this place goin’. I’m also aware you have made yourself some special friends here . . . your own kind of friends, is what I mean. Matter of fact, that’s what I’m here to talk to you about. But before I go any further, I got to ask you another question.” The boy waited for it. The man went on. “And I need for you to be lookin’ at me when I ask it.”
The boy slowly raised his head. The man waited to capture his eye before he continued. “What I need to know is, can you control yourself, boy?”
The boy puzzled over that question a moment before understanding its deeper meaning. It was the same question he asked himself all the time. It was the question he had been asking himself up on the hill earlier tonight. And whether or not the answer he was about to give was the truth, he knew there was only one acceptable answer as far as Big Ben and his future here at the carnival was concerned. He looked the man in the eye when he answered.
“Yes,” he said. His voice was firm. He almost believed it himself.
The man stayed glued to his eyes searching for the merest twitch or blink, but the boy kept his eyes focused. He did not blink. After a while, the man nodded and the moment was over.
Leaning forward again, Ben picked up his pen and began writing in the account journal. The boy sat and watched him as he picked up a receipt to his left, made an entry, and set the receipt aside. He picked up another receipt, examined it closely through his glasses, made an entry, and set that aside. Knowing he had been dismissed, he stood up and moved toward the door. As he reached for the handle, the man spoke again.
“That’s your costume on the back there,” he said. “Take it with you, make sure it fits. If it doesn’t or needs some taking in, bring it on over to Mary in the kitchen. She’s a wizard with a needle and thread.”
The boy saw it then, a black garment bag hanging from a hook on the back of the door. He reached up and took it down, slung it over his shoulder, and once again reached for the door handle.
“And boy?” He turned to see the man had again raised his head to look at him. “You’re looking a little too . . . healthy for the part, if you know what I mean. Gunther’s been takin’ care of you, I see?”
The boy smiled and nodded his head.
“Well . . . do whatever you need to do to make it work, alright?”
He nodded again. The man returned the nod and went back to his ledger. The boy went out the door and into the night.
5
The ten A.M. flight from Dulles into Boston’s Logan Airport arrived at the gate about half past eleven. An empty car awaited him just outside the terminal, a late model Grand Prix with a full tank of gas and a map marked with directions sitting atop the passenger seat. He could have arranged both car and driver, but was uncertain himself exactly what he expected out of this visit and wanted the freedom to operate alone.
He hit some heavy lunchtime traffic coming out of the tunnel, but beyond that it was a quick dash beneath the expressway and onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. The man fiddled with the radio a while before ultimately settling on alternative rock. With the dulcet voice of Van Morrison coming out of the speakers, he sat back and marveled at the almost perfect beauty of this mid-July day. The sun was shining. Humidity was low. High wispy clouds contrasted starkly with the deep blue of the sky. It was a nice day for a drive. He began singing along with the radio in a not unpleasant high-pitched falsetto.
Ninety minutes later, he paid his toll at the Auburn exit and got off the Turnpike onto 395 south. Two exits later, he slowed down and got off at the one labeled, “Route 135 Grantham — Oxford.” After coming to the end of a long, looping off-ramp, he took a right and saw on his right what appeared to be an abandoned gas station. Its windows had been replaced with plywood. A crude though accurate drawing of male genitalia was painted in dark red on the plywood where the door used to be. The words “Ha Ha!” had been scrawled underneath in a childlike hand. Just beyond the service station, he saw t
he first of the abandoned houses.
Though he’d been expecting them, he still found it unsettling. Slowing, he passed house after house with unmowed lawns and untrimmed shrubbery and broken windows. Turning his head, he saw on the corner of one house a metal gutter had become detached from the main structure. Hanging now at a forty-five degree angle, it looked for all the world like it was giving passers by the finger.
He saw only an occasional car parked in a driveway here and there, but no people out enjoying the fine weather. Those houses that still looked occupied had all their curtains drawn tightly. About a half mile beyond the service station, he came upon a newly paved section of roadway, evidence of the horrific blast that occurred there. To the right of this new section of road, a gleaming new chain link fence surrounded an imprisoned and abandoned neighborhood.
Coming upon the section of fence with a padlocked steel gate, he pulled over to take a closer look. Signs bearing the international symbols for all sorts of ills were mounted upon the gate: “Danger! Environmental Hazard! Trespassers will be Prosecuted!” In the field opposite this now forbidden territory were trailers that bore the logo of the EPA. In its well-worn dirt parking lot were a handful of what he recognized as no-frills government vehicles. Signs in front of the trailers nearest him read “Incident Response Team” and “Claims Center.”
Turning his head again, he noticed a less official sign mounted just beyond the forbidding steel gate. A hanging board whose faded green letters read: Applewood. Plump stemmed apples were raised in each corner. Beyond the sign, he could glimpse only one or two houses at the top of the street. He wondered for a moment if one of them was where the Dugan boy had lived. He turned away from the scene a moment later, put his car in gear, and pulled back onto the roadway. He hadn’t come to sightsee.
A few miles further along, he began to see signs of life. The houses he drove by were well tended. A car passed going in the other direction. He watched a man leave his front door to walk down the driveway for his mail. He drove by a sprawling town green with a statue in the middle, a war memorial of some sort of a man on horseback with his sword raised. Entering the narrow downtown, he noticed that many of the buildings were made of granite, the largest an ornate structure with a sign out front reading “Grantham Historical Society.” Still, half the shops along the main street were closed. Signs in some windows read “For Rent.” Other, yellowed signs read, “Going out of Business.” A few miles beyond the town center, he drove past a cemetery.
Applewood (Book 2): Fledge Page 9
