The Bones of Old Carlisle (3 page)

Lacking the money for regular admission, Karl Arrowroot snuck
into the county fair when he was 12. He was standing near the Ferris
wheel when a deep, creaky groan issued from somewhere among the guts
of the great machine.

Everyone within the sound of the noise fell silent, so that the
next words, spoken in a thick Southern drawl, rang out crystal clear:
“Well, don’t that beat all.”

It was a woman’s voice, and the young Arrowroot followed its
source to a point on the Ferris wheel high above the midway. A
disagreement among the gears below had knocked the wheel’s two rims
out of sync, forcing them apart. At the place where Arrowroot was
looking, the rims had warped so far from each other the bar between
them had come loose on one side. A seat hung from that bar, and as the
bar gave way and angled down, so did the seat beneath it.

The seat held a woman and a teenage boy, and neither said another
word as the bar gave way on the other side, flinging the pair from the
wheel as if they had annoyed it. They spun slowly through 50 feet of
emptiness, coming to earth in a fenced-in place that held a generator.

For the most noble of reasons, and for the basest, many people
ran to the fence, including Arrowroot. Three older boys reached it
ahead of him and quickly climbed up.

“Giddown!” screamed a grizzled carny with a cast on his leg, as
he shook a crutch at the lads. “Giddown!”
Arrowroot, knowing that he was too late to climb up himself,
studied the boys as they leapt down and faced him.
“Oh goddamn, y’see that?” one of the boys asked.
“Better’n a war movie!” proclaimed a second.
The third bent over, put his hands on his knees and vomited.
Too shy to ask the boys what they’d seen, Arrowroot – in the
hours that followed, at the fair and in his bed back home – concocted
countless images of what lay behind the fence, and the visions
eventually jumbled together in his mind: blood, bones, torn flesh
scattered body parts. But he never forgot the exact details of what
the woman had said, the way she and the child had spun to the ground
in silence, or the way the boys before him responded to the tragedy,
with bravado, vacant eyes, sickness and dazed smiles.
That Monday, for the first time in his life, Arrowroot sought out
the
Heligaux Herald
. He read the copy in the school library, but he
didn’t have enough time to get through it all, and when he was told he
couldn’t take it with him, he fished the same edition out of the trash
behind a tavern on his way home. There were three stories about the
accident, two on the front page, one inside, and he read all three of
them more carefully than he had ever read anything in his life.
At first, he was hoping to find some account of what the three
boys had seen, or better yet, a picture or two. He didn’t find that,
of course, but the articles offered some degree of medical insight.
The woman had died soon after the ambulance arrived, of internal
trauma. Her body had cushioned the fall of the boy, who was her son
and whose injuries included a broken back that rendered him paralyzed
below the waist. There was no retelling of her last words, nor any
clue as to why she would choose those words. In movies, people just
screamed and died, or made long unlikely speeches and died. No one
ever said “Well don’t that beat all?” and died, and that was a deep
mystery for Arrowroot.
Indeed, the Ferris wheel tragedy had imposed upon Arrowroot’s
young mind a cascade of mysteries, about humans and bodies and death
and mechanical failure, and he desperately wanted to unravel
everything. He read the next day’s paper, and the next and the next,
soon learning that newspapers never wrote what you most wanted to
read, the truly gory and horrific, but offered carefully-worded
approximations if you knew what to look for. He scavenged papers from
the street every afternoon, read them secretly at night, and during
the next day’s lunch hour discretely consulted the dictionary in the
school library to look up words like “trauma,” “paralyzed,”
“fracture,” “pelvis” and “vertebrae.”
When there wasn’t news of the Ferris wheel accident, he read
other articles and learned the meaning of “sexual harassment,”
“negligence,” “indecent exposure” and “embezzlement.”
If he’d been lucky enough to have money the night of the county
fair, he often thought to himself, he probably would have ridden that
Ferris wheel, and it might have been him thrown to earth.
“God must have other plans for me,” he said to himself on a
regular basis (never wondering why God didn’t have plans for the dead
mother and her crippled son). It was a thought that sustained him
through the difficult times to come, and kept him going to church
regularly as his peers fell away.
The tragedy also made him an avid newspaper reader, and over the
next few years his interests expanded from the merely violent and
sordid to a host of other matters: white collar crime, law and taxes,
elections, and business success and failure.
As he learned about the leaders of Heligaux, scanned their
pictures and read of their victories, hopes and failings, he became
more like them and less like the other denizens of Traxie. At the
moment he fished that first beer-spattered newspaper out of the trash
behind Coleman’s Ale and Grill, Arrowroot had embarked on a new path
that would lead him to a successful commercial realty practice and,
ultimately, the Heligaux mayor’s office.
But the horrors and imagined horrors of the Ferris wheel accident
never left him, popping up at unexpected times. Having lunch before
the gate of Fort Shergawa, arguing with Major McCafferty, was just
such a moment. As he ended his phone conversation with Chief Hatfield
and began packing his truck, the faces of the three boys floated
before him, then slowly disappeared, Cheshire-cat like, until all he
could see were vacant smiles and three pairs of dazed eyes.
“Major McCafferty, I want to thank you for giving me your time
today,” he said, offering his hand and trying to see past those old
eyes to the very real face of the officer before him. “Something’s
come up I need to attend to back in Heligaux. I’m very sorry if I was
any trouble.”
“No trouble at all, Mr. Mayor,” McCafferty replied with obvious
relief. “Let’s plan to talk again sometime.”
Arrowroot agreed and hopped into his truck. He wheeled the
vehicle around before the Fort Shergawa gate, but before he hit the
gas, he stopped and rolled the window down on the passenger side. The
gate guard was still hiding his eyes under the brim of his cap, so
Arrowroot addressed his mouth:
“I just want you to know, Lieutenant Charlemagne, you didn’t fool
me for a second,” Arrowroot announced. “Top of your class at West
Point, eh? Saw that a mile off.”
The soldier nodded and offered a half-smile.
“Now, a question if you don’t mind,” Arrowroot said. “Have you
ever heard of anyone knowing their time had come, and just walking
into the wilderness, you know, to die in a peaceful way?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You know, like a natural person? A person of the earth?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Just what I expected,” Arrowroot said. “You take care now. I
meant what I said about you being a general one day.”
“Thankyousir,” Lt. Charlemagne replied, stringing the words
together in a single abrupt syllable. Arrowroot couldn’t tell if he
was being polite, grateful or insolent. It was a minor question,
insignificant beside the riddles of the crazed bride who’d just been
set loose on downtown Heligaux.

Arrowroot parked his car behind the Heligaux Police station,
unlocked the building’s back door and slipped inside. This was the
service entrance, and it opened to a dark hall cluttered on either
side with the random materials of law enforcement. Cones, barricades,
uniforms on hangers, boots on the floor, and the occasional piece of
evidence, including a headless manikin and what looked in the dimness
like parts from an amusement park ride.

“Floyd, you need to clean this place up!” Arrowroot barked,
stepping over a garbage bag filled with something soft. “Floyd, ya
here?”

Chief Hatfield appeared at the other end of the hall and flipped
on the light switch.
“Hell, Mr. Mayor, I was looking for you up front.”
“So which way did she go?” Arrowrood demanded, striding up the
hall to the building’s reception area.
“Out the front door,” Hatfield said, tilting his head. “Looked
like she was headed for the Promenade.”
“She didn’t take any guns, did she?”
Hatfield laughed. “No, but would you believe she asked if I had
any?”
“What’d you say?”
“Said yes, of course. And then I told her she couldn’t see ‘em.”
“Did you do an interview – you know, a little police work? Maybe
got a name, an address, found out how many people she was planning to
kill today?”
Hatfield sighed and sort of deflated, and put his elbows hard
down on the front counter. “Look, Karl, I tried to talk to her, it
didn’t go so well. She said her name’s Tamani. Just Tamani. She asked
me if I used my guns to kill people so I could eat them. She said she
was here from New Hampshire, but she pronounced it like ‘Newa
Hampster.’ Her English isn’t native, but I can’t place the accent. I
don’t think it’s Mexican, but could be. Oh yeah, and she asked if I
was going to eat her.”
“Damn,” Arrowroot exclaimed, “you think she was on something?”
“I’ve seen a lot of messed up girls,” Hatfield said. “I don’t
know. There was something happening, something behind her eyes, really
strange. The way she looked at me, like she was memorizing me. She
said she was doing a survey, she had to continue the survey. She’s
freebasing Play-Doh for all I know. Oh, and then she takes off her
Army clothes, strips down naked right where you’re standing, puts her
wedding dress back on. A razor’s never brushed up against that body,
by the way. So I asked if she was going to get married, and she looked
away for a second and then she said ‘I have fucked.’ She wasn’t
joking. Looks at me just as serious as you right now. And her dress,
it was just wrecked, dirt and sweat and maybe blood. I zipped it up
and off she goes. Left her fatigues here in a bag, she didn’t want
them.”
“And you just let her go?”
“I can’t arrest someone for being different,” Hatfield said.
“You could have asked for ID, taken her into custody on those
grounds,” Arrowroot said. “I’m confident she didn’t have a driver’s
license.”
“She wasn’t driving a car,” Hatfield said. “And if we start
arresting people just because they don’t have ID, we’re going to go
broke jailing them.”
Arrowroot nodded, agreeing reluctantly.
“And then she asks me, how many happinesses are on your list?”
Hatfield said. “Just like that. How many happinesses? How many
happinesses have you had today?”
Arrowroot laughed. “Did the guys who dropped her off have
anything to say?”
Hatfield shook his head. “They’re special ops, they don’t have
two words to say unless they need a reason not to kill you. But they
never came in, anyway, just dumped her off by the front door, told her
to come in here I guess.”
The chief rose to his full height and gestured toward the door
with an uncharacteristically shaky hand. “She’s out there, couldn’t
have gone far. Good luck.”
“Thank you, you know?” Arrowroot said, adjusting his pith helmet.
“I appreciate what you did, really do.”
“Oh, and she’s in a sheath dress, taffeta. And built like a
decathlete, by the way. Six feet tall and looks like she’s either
about to get married or toss a shot putt.”
Arrowroot nodded and headed outside, onto Pickens Bluff, one
street off the Promenade. As he blinked against the sun, now holding
forth from high overhead, he tried to put himself into the mindset of
a 20-year-old woman with a wedding dress and a grossly-distorted
perception of reality.
“Think like a nature person,” he told himself. “Cross between a
person and an animal, with maybe a little extra animal thrown in.”
Pickens Bluff was narrow, with not much but a few nondescript
buildings to see in either direction, while before him stood the
backside of City Hall, with a wide open space on the left for parking,
and a small yard and park to the right.
The park would be much more appealing than narrow streets and
buildings, either to an animal or a girl of the earth, so she would go
that way, Arrowroot thought. From there, she would see the wide swath
of the Promenade, and would smell the food of it, Arrowroot deducted,
and this would draw her to it in the same way that open places draw
ruminants, such as deer and buffalo. Would she want food? Some drugs
make you hungry, he recalled. Probably most do. Except alcohol.
Satisfied with his eliminative reasoning, Arrowroot moved through
the park to the grand stone stairs in front of City Hall, and climbed
them two at a time.
At the top, just before the massive double doors of City Hall’s
main entrance, he turned around and took in what has been called one
of North Carolina’s most beautiful riverfronts. The Promenade
stretched for a quarter mile, anchored by City Hall on one end and the
Eden Hotel on the other. Between the two old structures stood a quaint
collection of clothing and souvenir stores, a small grocery, a dozen
places to eat, and a miscellany of other businesses, all looking out
onto a broad plaza of trees and benches and patios beside the rushing
Mittelkopp. Arrowroot had done more than his share for the Promenade,
improving the drainage, cleaning it up and landscaping it. Today,
however, it was not his legacy he cared to see.
Hundreds of people swarmed before him, and he was there to find
just one of them. He saw tourists, locals, waiters, musicians, a
painter, a street preacher who called himself Prophet Banjo, and a
psychic or two, all either there to celebrate the first real day of
spring, or to get pleasure in some less direct way. No wedding girl,
however.
“How many happinesses have you had today?” Arrowroot asked
himself, and he laughed out loud. “How ‘bout none, you drugged up
hippie girl? I haven’t had a fucking happiness since the day before
forever. So how many have you had today? Drugs? Check. Prancing about
in a wedding dress? Check. Taking some poor soldier’s M-16? Check.
What a bunch of bullshit.”
Arrowroot was looking for white, and he found plenty of it in the
kaleidoscope of moving bodies down on the Promenade. But where was
she? He’d been hoping she would be obvious from up here, but this
wasn’t going to be that simple, and Arrowroot conducted the day’s
second argument between himself and himself.