Authors: Carol Weekes
“Yes.”
“Good for you,” the carny man smiled wider, so wide that I thought the corners of his mouth might wrap around the sides of his face. “Something needs you to believe in order to exist.” He leaned down and whispered something in Randy’s ear. Randy went quiet for a few seconds, then nodded and smiled back at the man.
“Randy, now!” I hurried towards the two of them.
“Your boy’s coming along,” the carny man told me, his tone low and serious. “Allow the child to enjoy the wonder of the place.”
“He’s enjoying himself just fine,” I barked and caught Randy’s hand in mine, hurrying him away from the stand. “Don’t talk to strangers. What did he say to you?”
When we’d hurried away for a number of seconds, dipping in and out of the crowd, I paused and looked back. I could still see the ugly monstrous sign of the beanbag toss and the carny man looking directly at us, still watching us as other people moved about us. I shuddered and cast him a withering glance.
“Randy, tell me what he said to you.”
Randy looked a little perplexed. “He said to believe in autumn. It’s a magic time.”
I scowled, then shook my head. “He didn’t say anything else?”
“No.” Randy shook his head.
“Let’s go over to the Ferris wheel. Do you want to see our town from the top of the wheel?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
I felt relief when the rest of the crowd swallowed us up and the strange man with his ugly booth was no longer in immediate sight. I thought about what the creep had said to Randy. He said to believe in autumn. It’s a magic time. Okay, fine. I had to agree that autumn was the time of year that these carnivals often came around; that or late summer, and that autumn could elicit a kind of melancholy, almost a spooky feel in the fading of its colors and the casting away of its leaves for the stark, encroaching winter. Still, it seemed like an odd thing for an adult to say to a child.
“Trying to sound worldly and mystical,” I mumbled.
“What, Daddy?”
“Nothing, Randy. Daddy’s just thinking out loud. Here we go,” I took his hand as our Ferris chair came to a stop for us to alight, and within moments we were swept skyward, Randy laughing with glee, the metal bar of the chair holding us in firmly. Me with my arm, protective around my son, as a panoramic view of our town ascended into view.
“Look…there’s our street way over there!” I pointed out for him. “And there’s our house…the one with the bright green roof. See?”
Randy leaned forward a little, and for one terrible, heart-stopping moment I felt the Ferris chair dip too steeply. I lunged to grab him, knocking his pink gorilla from his one hand in my attempt to ensure that he didn’t slip forward in the seat.
“Daddy! My toy…”
We watched the gorilla, its brown cowboy hat and thick, stubby arms and legs pinwheel down until it fell from sight.
“I’m sorry, Randy. I didn’t mean to make you drop your toy, but I’d rather it be that toy than you. These stupid chairs shouldn’t swing this easily.” I held him closer until the wheel began its descent again, a few inches at a time. Halfway to the ground, the fair came into closer view again. I glanced around randomly, thinking we might do one more ride before calling it a night, and saw the beanbag toss stand again in the distance, its monster mouth looking wide and open for something, and its eccentric man leaning against the frame of the painting…
…watching us.
“What the hell?” I muttered, and then the chair was down and the monster stand and its worker fell from view.
“I think we should go home now,” I said to Randy.
“But Daddy, we just got here a little while ago.”
“I know, but we’ve had a few rides and it’s starting to get colder out. Daddy has to work tomorrow.”
“Can I find my gorilla?”
“We can look for it, although it could have fallen anywhere around here,” I said.
When we disembarked from the ride, we searched around the immediate vicinity of the base of the Ferris wheel, to no avail. I asked the wheel operator, a kid of about eighteen whose face sported enough acne that I felt immediate pity for him, if he’d seen a pink gorilla on the ground.
“Nope, sorry mister. Maybe somebody else picked it up.”
“That’s probably what happened,” I said. “But thanks.”
Randy began to cry. I heaved him up into my arms. “It’s okay, sport. You still have your popcorn. I can get you another stuffed animal at the mall this weekend. We can look for another gorilla or anything else that you’d like, okay?” He nodded his head and did his best not to cry. The truth was, I didn’t want him to eat the popcorn that he’d picked up from that eerie stand. I didn’t want him to have anything to do with any object that the weird carny man had given to him, or that had touched the base of the wood where that painting waited like some terrible thing with its open mouth. However, if I took the popcorn away from him, he’d become inconsolable.
We’d have to walk past that stand again in order to leave the fairground, given all the stands were set up on both sides of a dirt track which led to the entrance and exit points. As we edged closer to the beanbag stand, I made a point of keeping my eyes straight in an attempt to ignore the carny man that I could see peripherally, leaning against the side of his booth as other people stepped up with their tickets.
“Put your head on my shoulder, Randy,” I told my boy.
We went to move past, quickly.
“Daddy! He has my gorilla! Look!”
I felt myself freeze, even as I continued to move. My legs tingled and a feeling of dreamlike surrealism took me over. I felt myself drawn to turn around with almost magnetic force, to regard the carny man and his beanbag stand. There, propped on the edge of the stand and coated in smears of black mechanical grease (for it must have hit parts of the Ferris wheel frame on the way down) was Randy’s gorilla.
Believe in autumn. It’s a magic time.
“Someone found your boy’s gorilla and dropped it off here,” the carny man said to me, his voice low but clear. “Here it is.” A low, almost bacterial smell came to me.
“We don’t want it, thank you,” I said, curt. “It’s filthy now.”
The carny man smiled his shark-like smile again. “Suit yourself,” he said and tossed the pink gorilla into the monster’s mouth where it disappeared somewhere on the other side. Three bags a prize does be…one for you and one for me.
“So you got his gorilla, you turd,” I whispered, lifting Randy up into my arms and hurrying from the fairgrounds.
“What’s a turd, Daddy?” Randy asked.
“That man,” I hissed, knowing that what I said wasn’t a nice comment, but unable to help myself. “Never mind, Randy.”
* * *
We reached the car, one of about two hundred parked in two rows along the dirt road leading to the fairground and I got Randy hooked up behind the seat belt in the front passenger seat. Then I got in and started the car, flipping the heater on as the night had grown cold enough to elicit some sporadic snow flurries. Given it was early October, it wasn’t surprising. I reached over and zipped up Randy’s fleece jacket.
“I’m c-cold, Daddy.”
“The car will warm up in a couple of minutes,” I assured him. He opened the top of the popcorn box and I saw what looked to be normal pink sugarcoated popcorn on the inside. I relaxed a little. Yeah, the carny man was an oddball, and no doubt took great pride in depicting an aura of almost gruesome mysteriousness for adult and child alike. I’d hated his stand, the painting almost 3-D of something that almost looked animated, but enough already. Randy had chosen a box of candy popcorn with a prize inside. Let him enjoy that during the drive home. My wife and Randy’s mother, Leonora, would ensure he brushed his teeth before going to bed.
“Good?” I asked him as he unloaded one handful after another of popcorn into his mouth.
“Yup.”
“Can Daddy try a piece?”
“Yup, okay.” He poured a generous helping into my extended hand and we laughed together. “That’s very nice of you.” I tossed the kernels into my mouth and began to crunch them down. They weren’t completely fresh. The popcorn was a little spongy, probably from humidity. I bit into something hard that made me recoil from its bitterness.
“What the heck?” I said. I stopped the car near the end of the road and spat the contents out into my hand, examining the wet, desiccated pieces of popcorn. An object small and dark sat amid the rosy hue. I stared, reaching with my other hand to flip on the car’s overhead light. I retched. The crushed remains of what looked to be some kind of a beetle sat amid the partly chewed food.
“Gross!” I yelled, hurling it through the open window. “Randy, don’t eat any more of that.” I pulled the box from his hands. He’d already dumped another handful into one small fist, and amid the handful was a tiny paper box, no doubt the prize.
“It’s stale and an insect got into it,” I babbled, feeling nausea threatening to well up in me. “It’s not clean to eat.”
“Mine was fine.” His voice broke a little.
“Randy, you can’t eat any more of it. Give me the rest of it.”
Reluctant, his lower lip trembling, he handed over the popcorn, but kept the small, pale white paper box.
“Okay, you can keep the prize, as long as it isn’t something else to eat.” I tossed the rest of his popcorn through the car window, along with the box. “Ridiculous.”
I entertained the thought of driving back there and directing a verbal volley at the creep carny man—that an innocent little boy should end up with a filthy box of popcorn harboring some kind of possibly toxic or bacteria-causing insect. I thought of the oily feel of the beanbags, likely filthy from years of use by hundreds of pairs of hands, and shuddered. Everything about the guy and his stand felt wrong.
I alternated my gaze between the road, turning off the dirt lane and back onto a proper causeway into town, and whatever might fall from the box that Randy shook in order to extract the hidden prize.
What fell into his hand was an acorn; an ordinary, brown, dull acorn.
“An acorn,” I said, perplexed. Now I felt more irate. What if a kid attempted to eat the acorn, possibly breaking a tooth on the hard shell, or worse, choking on a solid object? What kind of joke was this? The evening adopted a veneer of the absurd—whatever fun we’d set out to obtain having long fallen away.
I thought of my wife’s feelings about circuses and carnivals and how she refused to attend one. She’s terrified of carnival types. She’d had a guy in a skeleton suit scare her at a fair when she’d been a little girl around the same age as Randy, what she remembered as ‘this towering freak with bloodshot eyes and whose breath reeked of stale booze.’ No doubt, it had been some carny worker who’d stayed up too late to party and had performed his shift trailing entrails of the previous evening’s indulgence. But she’d never gotten over it. She said he’d ‘looked at me too long,’ like he’d wanted something.
“Pervert?” I’d asked, thinking it probably wasn’t uncommon. Some of these guys were ex-cons taking work wherever they could find it.
“Maybe,” she’d said. “Or something worse.”
“Like what? A perv is bad enough.”
She’d shrugged and a little shiver danced along her spine. “Almost like he wanted a part of me, like he could look right into me. I’d rather not think about it.”
I scratched it up to her having been just a kid and overreacting, but even I had to admit that I’d often wondered what these carnival types did once the crowds went home. What went on in those tents and trailers in the off-hours, in the murk of the silent ten-in-one’s lined up like a row of black, curtained boxes with their jars of pickled dead things, their anatomical freaks, their tricks and dark enchantment. They lived on the edge of society; flaunting themselves for a few hours, then retracting behind canvas tarps and dark trailers. Maybe they made love. They probably drank too much. They cooked meals over propane burners and kept their hands warm by lighting fires inside oil drums. But I always had this creeping feeling that they did other things while a town slept.
“Throw it out the window, bud,” I told him. “I’ll bring a nice treat home for you tomorrow.” I shook my head, wondering what other dark things hid in the prizes along the shelf of the carny man and his monster. Now both my wife and my son had experienced something dreadful at a carnival. I felt like any man would when he feels his family has been slighted; I felt pissed off enough to want to do something about it.
* * *
We arrived home a few minutes later. I cut the engine and looked over at Randy who sat silent in his seat, his young face solemn.
“I’m sorry that your prize turned out to be such an awful thing, and that you lost your gorilla. I didn’t want to take it back from that man.”
Randy turned his head to look at me. “Do you think he’s a bad man, Daddy?”
I felt a little start at the words. I didn’t want to set up some future paranoia in my son like my wife suffers from, so I chose my response with care. “I don’t know if he’s bad, Randy. Odd, maybe. Carnivals can attract unusual people to work for them, people that don’t always fit in well with the rest of society. Maybe he just tries to put on this creepy act to make you feel like you got your money’s worth by going in there. “Don’t worry about it, champ. Like I said, I’ll bring something home for you tomorrow, and this weekend we can go to the mall and you can pick out a new pair of ice skates for the winter. What do you think about that?”
He grinned at me. “That would be okay.”
“Let’s get you inside and ready for bed. It’s getting late.”
In fact, it was a little before 8 PM. Randy’s only in second grade and his usual bedtime was 8:30 PM.
Randy got out of the car and ran ahead to the house where Leonora waited in the doorway to greet us.
“How was it?” she asked Randy.
“I got two prizes and I lost one,” Randy told her.
“Oh…how did you do that?” she asked. I wondered what Randy might say to her and if Leonora would question me afterwards. That’s why I don’t like those things, Dean. There’s something not right about them.
I shut the car door and went to pocket my keys when I was overcome with a feeling of unsubstantiated dread. I paused, my breath held tight in my chest and stared around me. Something didn’t feel right. I had a crawling sensation that something had followed Randy and I home, some residual essence that clung to our car like a sticky mist. I got down on one knee and peered beneath the car. I’m not sure what I’d expected to find hiding under there, perhaps clinging to the exhaust pipes or undercarriage. Some flattened out and moist thing, its eyes exaggerated disks, its fingers almost human, fingers that would flash out and grab my throat, squeezing the esophageal tube until I couldn’t breathe, strangling me in my own driveway.