Dodging and Burning

by John Copenhaver

  “A real belle,” Amy said. “But after her son’s accident and husband’s decline, the queen became a hermit. Fodder for ghost stories.” She shook her head and touched her gloved hands to her heart. She wanted me to understand that it was a real tragedy.

  It was this Letitia you and I knew, Robbie. The witch in the ramshackle farmhouse, the town kook. It was this Letitia that poor Sylvester Hughes went to work for, God rest his soul.

  He told me something else that day outside Hersh’s.

  One blistering summer afternoon, only a few weeks before Letitia would fire him, he was standing outside watering the azaleas, letting the mist from the hose cool him off, when he overheard raised voices from the porch. He listened at a window, which he had cracked for ventilation earlier that day.

  “I love him, Grandma,” Jay said several times, each time louder, more forceful. “I love him.”

  Letitia wailed with desperation, “No, oh no, oh no!” as if someone had her arm twisted behind her back and was wrenching it hard. “How could you, Jay?” she groaned. “Stupid fool. You break my heart—a heart that’s already been broken so many times. Shattered in pieces so many times. Shattered.”

  Sylvester wondered if he should get help. But instead, he backed away from the porch and finished the watering on the other side of the house.

  “Better to mind my own business,” he told me.

  But during the summer of ’45, I was far from piecing Jay’s life together.

  Days after I had given him your journal and pushed him down, I could still hear him reeling in pain on the side of the hill: “Why did you do that?” It was a mean thing to do, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  So I kept to my room, passing the days reading adventure stories and flipping through detective magazines, avoiding Mama and Papa—particularly Papa, who obliged me by avoiding me, too, his conscience apparently still raw from his outburst. Along with Jay’s, his voice rang in my ears: “Why were you driving around in that fancy car with that queer boy and Princess Prescott?”

  The cut under my eye was puffy and pink. I wanted it to get infected and scar, so whenever he would look at me, he’d remember what he’d done. But it healed smooth.

  Jay guessed I’d come out from under my shell and get curious again. After all, I wasn’t angry with him, not really, just frustrated at the things I didn’t understand about you and him. One morning, about a week later, I went to the tree, hoping for a cryptogram or a clue, some attempt to communicate. As if he could read my thoughts, he had left a note on the back of a flyer for a traveling carnival called Zelkos.

  On the front of the flyer, a magician beamed with sparkles in his eyes and an exaggerated top hat on his head. Behind him was a carnival scene complete with a Ferris wheel, a carousel, and grinning cartoon circus animals. Over the top, it read, THE AMAZING ZELKOS CARNIVAL. THE BEST TRAVELING ATTRACTION ON THE EAST COAST!!! And at the bottom, AUGUST 12TH–18TH AT THE FAIRGROUND CROSSINGS, and it listed the attractions:

  HERCULEAN 50-FOOT BIG WHEEL

  MARVELOUS MERRY-GO-ROUND

  HAUNTED CASTLE FUNHOUSE

  MADAME ZEPHYR FORTUNE-TELLER

  ZELKOS PETTING ZOO

  MASSIVE MIDWAY

  AND MUCH, MUCH MORE!!!

  On the back, Jay had scrawled, “Cee—Do you want to go?” I slid the flyer into my dress pocket and set out for the Greenwood farm.

  When I arrived, Jay was lounging under a tree. His back was against the gnarled bark, his head tilted forward over a book and his cane propped beside him. A breeze stirred his blond hair, a moment right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and he looked up. I wasn’t sure what to expect. He might have lured me there for an argument or, at the very least, to demand I apologize for pushing him down. I didn’t want him to try to squeeze an apology from me. When I saw his face, all smile and goodwill, I knew he wasn’t going to try. I also knew something had changed in him.

  He snapped his book closed, a well-worn Agatha Christie novel, and said, “Well, it took you long enough.”

  “I was busy.”

  “I see.”

  “Papa and Mama needed me at home.”

  The light in his eyes dimmed. “Did they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, all right.” He grabbed his cane and hoisted himself up. “Do you want to go to the carnival? It’s only here for another day.”

  I considered it for a moment. “How will we get there?”

  “Grandma’s car. She won’t know we’re gone until we’re halfway there.”

  “Okay.”

  The station wagon’s wood paneling was gray with wear and rot, and its black paint was scored with gravel marks. The front passenger’s-side window had been shattered and removed. Jay put the car in neutral, and we pushed it a few yards to the downward slope of the driveway.

  “It hasn’t run in a while,” he said, “so it needs a little help.”

  It began rolling slowly, its wheels crunching the gravel, and we hopped in. Jay jiggled the key in the ignition and, after several tries, the engine roared to life. A thrill passed through me. I was with Jay, and the adventure was back on. I wondered if Letitia would hear us and tear out of the house waving a gun like a maniac. But she didn’t. Jay shifted gears, which squealed and popped into place, and we were on our way, letting the dust spin little tornadoes behind us.

  As we reached the ridge above the Fairground Crossings, we saw rows and rows of parked cars to the east, bumpers and headlights winking at us in the morning sun. The midway stretched out past the parking lot in that large field situated smack-dab between the north and south forks of the river. Bunches of bright helium balloons yanked at the corners of the booths, as if any minute, the midway might detach from the ground and float away. Two billowy yellow-and-white tents were pitched at the back of the field, one housing the petting zoo and the other the funhouse and hall of mirrors. At the center, just behind the blur of a spinning merry-go-round, the Ferris wheel rotated slowly, offering its passengers to the sky and then, with an unwilling lurch, bringing them to the ground again.

  We walked down into the crowd and weaved our way to the ticket booth. On the wooden fence beside the entrance, the carnies had pasted war posters—“Buy War Bonds!” “Rub Out the Axis!” “Let ’em Have It!” “Give ’em Both Barrels!” “YOU Back the Attack,” and “Food is a Weapon, Don’t Waste It!” I thought of you, Robbie. But one poster in particular stopped me. It was of a dead American airborne soldier strapped into a parachute, his body limp, arms at his sides, head forward, floating toward the ground through a night sky full of yellow parachutes, and lit up by bursts of artillery fire. His rifle was pointed toward the ground, emphasizing the pointlessness of the mission. Across the top of the poster, in a banner of bold black letters, it said, “CARELESS TALK … got there first.”

  I wanted Jay’s arm around me, my head close to his chest. I wanted to pretend he was you. I wanted him to tell me that being with him and disobeying Papa’s wishes wasn’t wrong. He gently put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the window of the ticket booth, where a leathery old woman with white hair on her chin sold us tickets. She smiled and asked if I was his kid sister. Jay said I was.

  The midway was a river of excited boys and girls and their bothered parents, who were steering the kids to and from a confusion of smells—popcorn, hay, fried bread, grease, manure. The crowd parted for a second, and the shine of chrome from a cotton candy machine caught my eye. Inside it, a perfect cone of pink sugar spun like a ballerina in a music box. My mouth fell open.

  “I had you pegged for more of a caramel apple kid,” Jay said.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  He bought me a small spindle of “Strawberry Heaven,” and as soon as he handed it to me, I tore off a piece and gobbled it up. The flavoring reminded me of the Jell-O salad Mama made every Christmas. Do you remember you told me Jell-O was made from jellyfish that were raised and bred in big vats of strawberry juice? You were so full
of it, Robbie. I was never that gullible. Of course, when you told me it was actually made of cow and pig bones, I didn’t believe you, either.

  “Let’s go to the funhouse,” Jay said.

  “Is it scary?”

  “Nah, not really.”

  A large, sickle-shaped mouth with two jewel-green cat’s eyes leered at us from over the entrance to the funhouse. The entrance was manned by an old guy with droopy, watery eyes and a nose purple with a web of burst blood vessels. As we presented our pass, he grinned, flashing us his rotten teeth, and said, “Have fun, you two.”

  I gasped a little but pretended it was a burp. Jay didn’t seem to notice. We stepped through the cat’s mouth, and it was nearly dark inside. In front of us, framed by the dim glow of low-wattage bulbs, was a sign that read THE HAUNTED CASTLE, 13 METERS A HEAD in bloody letters. We heard a scream and then nervous laughter echoing back through the tunnel. I grabbed Jay’s arm.

  “Is this okay?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  And we entered.

  My best defense was—and still is—to explain horror away, to break it into its parts, to drag it out into the open. So I thought about how the Amazing Zelkos Carnival created the illusion. For instance, the mist that snaked across our path, I just knew, was evaporating from a trough of dry ice backstage, blown our way by a system of fans. I’d read about dry ice in a Weird Stories article called “How to Make Your Own Haunted House: Ten Terrifying Effects.” The howls, screams, and moans sounded hollow, tinny, and if you listened closely, you could tell they were on a prerecorded loop. The flying bats were rubber, and the dancing skeletons were papier-mâché. Both bounced on thin elastic cords suspended from the ceiling.

  When Dracula popped up from his coffin and the Mummy sprung out of his sarcophagus, I’ll tell you, I jumped sky-high, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew they were carnies. I caught a whiff of their ripe, sweaty clothes. When Lizzie Borden, all rosy-cheeked and crazy-eyed, swung her cardboard ax at us, and when the giant hooded executioner dangled a noose in front of us and groaned, “You’re next!” I wanted to yell back at them, “I know you’re not real. I know who you are. I can smell you.” All the same, I held Jay tightly, digging my fingers into his arm, just in case I was wrong.

  We made our way into the hall of mirrors. A fat, egg-headed Jay and a tall, skinny Cee stared back at us, plumping up and thinning out as we stepped side to side. I giggled. Jay’s eyes stretched back across his forehead like Mickey Mouse’s, and his chin disappeared into his neck. I turned to him to make sure the real Jay hadn’t lost his proportions, and behind him, just leaving the room, I saw a greasy blond head and wide shoulders that were familiar to me. For a heartbeat, I couldn’t place who it was. Then I bit my lip—I knew it! It was Billy Witherspoon.

  Was he really here? Or was I just seeing things, my real fears mingling with my pretend fears? I stepped forward, and Jay caught my arm, leading me to the exit and into the bright sun.

  “That was pretty scary,” he said. I didn’t believe him. “What scared you the most?”

  I wanted to say something about Billy, but now, in the light of day, I’d begun doubting what I saw.

  “When the Mummy popped out, my heart stopped,” I said. It had frightened the bejesus out of me. “How about you?”

  He thought about it. “The flashing lights.”

  “Huh … why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We stopped at the carousel for a minute and watched it go. The other kids were lost in the movement of the ride—up and down, around and around, their screams cut loose from the blurs of colorful clothing. I’d started to reason that if I had actually seen Billy, he wouldn’t have left us alone. There would’ve been a tussle—or at least words. I looked up at Jay. His cheeks were as pale as shaved ice, and his lips were clamped tight. I wanted him to tease me about being jumpy, about being a scaredy-cat, the way you used to, Robbie. But he was somewhere else.

  “I guess you weren’t very scared,” I said.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve seen scarier.”

  “It was swell—I just—”

  “The war was a lot scarier, I bet.”

  “That’s it. That’s it, exactly.”

  I took his hand and, as best I could, held it in mine, a little embarrassed about being so forward. He didn’t look at me, but he squeezed my hand and held it tight. My heart started thumping. I was blushing.

  At last, he let go and said, “I’ve got something to tell you. I’ll tell you at the top of the Ferris wheel.”

  So we made our way to the wheel and stood in line, not saying a word to each other. I felt uncomfortable and curious. Was it something about Lily? We hadn’t talked about her at all that day. Or was it about your journal, about him loving you? That was something I already knew. Whatever it was, it seemed like it would flow out of his darkening mood.

  The line started moving and we were ushered to a carriage by a fat, dark-haired woman with a thick Russian accent. “Keep hands and arms inside,” she growled, as we slid into the cool metal seat.

  After a minute or two, the wheel jerked to life, and our chair swung back and forth. I grabbed the edge of the seat, a little nervous. The machinery of the wheel smelled of fresh oil, but the cogs clicked and gnashed like grinding teeth. As we began to lift, the midday sun warmed my face, and I released my grip on the seat. I noticed people crisscrossing the midway, arms filled with stuffed animals and multicolored balloons. One of the latter escaped a little girl’s hand and drifted above the trees, a dot of red against the sky. I heard braying and a squawk or two from a rare bird at the petting zoo. I smelled the fresh hay and the slightly comforting, slightly repugnant odor of animals. I watched as teenage girls and boys entered the Haunted Castle, each couple stalling before the entrance, and then, after the usual pleading and joking, the boys urged the girls on, feeding themselves to the cat at its entrance, gobbled up by its smile.

  As we reached the top, the shape of the hills past the carnival, past the river, drew me in. They felt nearer to me, like I could just reach out and touch them, as if from this viewpoint I could understand them better. Maybe that’s why I didn’t react when Jay reached across me and placed his hand over my heart, pressing the light fabric of my dress against my skin. He leaned into me and kissed me. It was a long, motionless kiss, lips against lips, warm but not rude, not forceful. When he released me, he looked pained, his complexion flat and bloodless.

  “You smell like him,” he said.

  For a long while, there was nothing, just the sky and the mountains. Then the wheel broke forward, and we began our journey back to earth.

  “What were you going to tell me?” I said, scooting away from him, the chair tilting to one side.

  “It’s something I need to show you. I need to pull back the—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence.

  Something on the ground caught his eye and he leaned forward. His hands, wrapped around the security bar, tensed, his knuckles white as bleached bone. His forehead wrinkled with concern—or was it fear? What—or who—did he see? Was it Billy? Had I really seen him? I searched the crowd, but all I could see were dots of color moving this way and that.

  I bit my lip and felt a terrible shiver—“a presentiment of doom,” Mama had once called it. She said it was when you see the future but you can’t understand it. As I stared at the swirling crowd, was I seeing the future, all mixed up and out of order, like a spilled jigsaw puzzle?

  Once we were on the ground, Jay took my hand without saying a word and we made a beeline for the back exit of the carnival.

  7

  A DATE WITH

  DEATH

  The Present

  The rain was whipping hard against the windshield, making it difficult for Sheila to see the sign: WHITE MOUNTAIN LOUNGE, 1 MILE ON THE RIGHT. She needed to be with people. She almost missed the birds at the office. The more distance she put between herself and her aunt’s house, the better s
he felt. She thought of Kenneth and again found herself yearning for his hands, his touch. She shook the thought from her head and focused on the road.

  She was pleased to see so many cars parked at the lounge, a one-story log cabin–style building with an eight-foot carved bear on its hind legs guarding the front door and a welcoming red glow at its windows.

  As she opened her car door and popped her umbrella open, a strong gust of wind rushed at her and tugged her forward. “Oh, golly,” she said, and, after a brief struggle, she steadied herself and aimed the point of the umbrella into the wind. Her feet and arms were completely soaked, but it was only after she dashed across the parking lot and into the bar that she remembered that her feet and arms had been wet earlier that day. The thought chilled her, and it was staved off only by the promise of a drink.

  The jukebox murmured the soft, sultry squeak of Duke Ellington’s saxophonist. Couples danced together in the far corner, silhouettes against the rose-tinted light cast by dim sconces along the back wall. Sheila approached the wood-paneled bar, and a broad-shouldered bartender the size of a lumberjack glowered at her. He had a bit of food caught in his beard.

  She smiled and said, “A gimlet with a twist of lime, please.”

  “Coming up, girlie,” he said.

  She turned and looked around the room. In the corner, nestled in a booth, was a woman who reminded her of herself. She looked her age. She was laughing and flirting with a man who Sheila couldn’t see. Her hair was pushed back with a headband, and loose blond curls spilled out the back; her lips were red and full and expressive. Smoke was trailing from her cigarette, curling around the edge of the overhanging light fixture. She was enjoying herself. It was Saturday night, after all. That’s what Sheila would have been doing, if she’d been back in the city. That’s what she would be doing all over the world, once she sold Brimblevine and cashed in her inheritance.

  The gimlet warmed her stomach, and the shock of the experience had begun to subside. She had heard of this sort of thing before—extended hallucinations after an emotional event. She found a seat at the bar and leaned over her drink, swirling it with a swizzle stick. Maybe she had eaten something bad, she thought. Or perhaps it was mold? She had read somewhere about hallucinogenic mold. But then what about her aunt’s warning? “Seek not the future to escape the past”—what did it even mean? If she was being honest with herself, she didn’t believe in warnings and curses and that sort of voodoo. She was a common-sense girl at heart.