Twilight Eyes (26 page)

I rolled onto my back, looked up, and saw Rya still upon the wheel, lashed by rain, her hair wet and tangled yet snapping like a beribboned pennant in the wind. Three stories up, her feet slipped off a beam, and abruptly she was hanging by her hands, all of her weight on her slender arms, legs kicking as she scrambled to find the unseen girder below her.

Slipping in the mud, I got to my feet, stood with head tilted back, face turned up to the rain, watching, breathless.

I had been mad to allow her to climb up there.

This was, after all, where she would die.

This was what my vision had warned against. I should have told her. I should have stopped her.

In spite of her precarious position, in spite of the fact that her arms must have been ablaze with pain and on the verge of dislocating at the shoulder sockets, I thought I heard her laughing up there. Then I realized it must be only the wind fluting through the beams and struts and cables. Surely the wind.

Lightning was hurled down at the earth again. Around me the carnival was momentarily incandescent, and above me the Ferris wheel was briefly revealed in stark detail. For an instant I was sure the bolt had struck the wheel itself and that a billion volts had seared the flesh off Rya's bones, but in the less cataclysmic sheet-lightning that followed the big flash, I saw that she had not only been spared electrocution but also had gotten her feet under herself. She was inching down once more.

Foolish as it was, I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “Hurry!”

Spoke to crossbeam, crossbeam to spoke, spoke to crossbeam again, she descended, but my galloping heartbeat was not reigned in even when she was down far enough to eliminate the threat of a killing fall. As long as she clung to any part of the wheel, she was in danger of receiving the white-hot kiss of the storm.

At last she was only eight feet from the ground. She turned to face outward, clutching at the wheel with one hand, preparing to jump the rest of the way, when a night-spearing lance of lightning stabbed into the earth just beyond the midway, no more than fifty yards distant, and the crash seemed to fling her off the wheel. She landed on her feet, stumbled, but I was there to grab her and prevent her from falling in the mud, and her arms went around me, mine around her. We hugged very tight, both of us shaking, unable to move, unable to speak, barely able to breathe.

Another night-shattering fulmination sent a tongue of fire from sky to earth, and this one did, at last, lick the Ferris wheel, which lit up along every spoke and crossbeam, each cable a blazing filament, and for an instant it seemed that the huge machine was encrusted with jewels through which raced lambent reflections of flames. Then the killing power was bled off into the earth, through the wheel's supporting frame and guy wires and anchor chains, which all served as grounding points.

The storm abruptly worsened, became a downpour, a deluge. Rain drummed on the earth, snapped and thudded against the walls of the tents, struck a dozen different notes on a variety of metal surfaces, and the wind shrieked.

We ran across the carnival, through the mud, breathing air tainted with ozone and with the scent of wet sawdust and with the not entirely unpleasant odor of elephants, off the midway and down to the meadow, into the encampment of trailers. On many spider-quick, crab-hinged legs of electricity, a monster pursued us and seemed always at our heels. We did not feel safe until we were in Rya's Airstream, with the door shut behind us.

“That was crazy!” I said.

“Hush,” she said.

“Why did you keep us up there when you saw the storm coming?”

“Hush,” she repeated.

“Did you think that was fun?”

She had taken two glasses and a bottle of brandy from one of the kitchen cabinets. Dripping, smiling, she headed for the bedroom.

Following her, I said, “
Fun
, for God's sake?”

In the bedroom she splashed brandy in both glasses and handed one to me.

The glass chattered against my teeth. The brandy was warm in the mouth, hot in the throat, scalding in the stomach.

Rya pulled off her sopping tennis shoes and socks, then skinned out of her wet T-shirt. Beads of water glimmered and trembled on her bare arms, shoulders, breasts.

“You could have been killed,” I said.

She slipped off her shorts and panties, took another sip of brandy, and came to me.

“Were you
hoping
to get killed, for Christ's sake?”

“Hush,” she repeated.

I was shuddering uncontrollably.

She seemed calm. If she had been afraid during the climb, the fear had left her the moment she had touched ground again.

“What
is
it with you?” I asked.

Instead of answering, she began to undress me.

“Not now,” I said. “This isn't the time—”

“It's the perfect time,” she insisted.

“I'm not in the mood—”

“Perfect mood.”

“I can't—”

“You can.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“See?”

Later we lay for a while in contented silence, on top of the damp sheets, our bodies tinted gold by the amber light of the bedside lamp. The sound of rain striking the rounded roof and sluicing along the curved metal skin of our cocoon was wonderfully soothing.

But I had not forgotten the wheel or the petrifying climb down through the storm-lashed girders, and after a while I said, “It was almost as if you
wanted
lightning to strike while you were hanging up there.”

She said nothing.

With the knuckles of my folded hand, I lightly traced the line of her jaw, then opened my fingers to caress her smooth, supple throat and the slopes of her breasts. “You're beautiful, smart, successful. Why take chances like that?”

No answer.

“You have everything to live for.”

She remained silent.

The carny's code of privacy restrained me from coming right out and asking why she had a death wish. But the code did not prohibit me from commenting on plainly observed events and facts, and it seemed to me that her suicidal impulse was far from secret. So I said, “Why?” And I said, “Do you really think there's something . . .
attractive
about death?” Unfazed by her continued taciturnity, I said, “I think I love you.” And when even that drew no response, I said, “I don't want anything to happen to you. I won't
let
anything happen to you.”

She turned on her side, clung to me, buried her face against my neck, and said, “Hold me,” which was, under the circumstances, about the best answer I could hope for.

Heavy rain was still falling Monday morning. The sky was dark, tumultuous, clotted, and so low that I felt I could touch it with the aid of just a little stepladder. According to the weather report, the skies would not clear until sometime Tuesday. At nine o'clock, the show call was canceled, and the start of the Yontsdown County Fair was postponed twenty-four hours. By nine-thirty, card games and knitting circles and mutual misery societies had sprung up all over Gibtown-on-Wheels. By a quarter till ten, the revenue lost on account of the rain had been exaggerated to such an extent that (judging by the moaning) every concessionaire and pitchman would have been a millionaire if only the traitorous weather had not brought bankruptcy instead. And shortly before ten o'clock, Jelly Jordan was found dead on the carousel.

By the time I got to the midway, a hundred carnies were crowded around the carousel, most of whom I had yet to meet. Some wore yellow rain slickers with matching shapeless hats, and some wore black vinyl coats, a few with plastic babushkas, boots or sandals, galoshes or street shoes, and some were barefoot, and some had thrown coats on over pajamas, and about half of them carried umbrellas, which came in a variety of colors yet failed to contribute a note of gaiety to the gathering. Others had not dressed for the storm at all, rushing out in disbelief at the dreadful news, unheeding of the weather, and these now huddled in two kinds of misery—dampness and grief—soaked to the skin and spotted with mud and looking like refugees lined up at a border crossing on some war-torn frontier.

I came in T-shirt, jeans, and shoes that had not dried out from the previous night, and as I approached the crowd at the carousel, I was impressed and shaken, most of all, by their silence. No one spoke. No one. Not a word. They were doubly washed by rain and tears, and their pain was visible in their ashen faces and in their sunken eyes, but they wept without a sound. This silence was a mark of how deeply they had loved Jelly Jordan and an indication of how unthinkable it was for him to be dead; they were so stunned that they could only stand in mute contemplation of a world without him. Later, when the shock had worn off, there would be loud lamentations, uncontrollable sobbing, hysteria, mournful keening, prayers, and perhaps angry questions asked of God, but at the moment their intense grief was a perfect vacuum through which sound waves could not travel.

They knew Jelly better than I did, but I couldn't remain discreetly at the crowd's periphery. I shouldered slowly through the mourners, whispering “Excuse me” and “Sorry” until I reached the raised platform of the merry-go-round. Rain slanted beneath the red-and-white-striped roof, beaded on and trickled down the brass poles, and cooled the wooden horseflesh. I eased past upraised hoofs and enameled teeth bared in equine excitement, past painted flanks all of a piece with saddles and stirrups that could not be removed, wended through the herd on its never-ending journey, until I came to the place where Jelly Jordan's journey had ended brutally amidst this eternally prancing multitude.

Jelly lay on his back, on the carousel floor, between a black stallion and a white mare, eyes open in amazement at finding himself recumbent in the middle of this trampling drove, as if he had been done in by their hoofs. His mouth was open, too, lips split, at least one tooth broken. It almost looked as if a cowboy's red bandanna masked the lower part of his face, but it was a veil of blood.

He was dressed in an unbuttoned raincoat, white shirt, and dark gray slacks. The right leg of his trousers was bunched up around his knee, and part of his thick white calf was exposed. His right foot was shoeless, and that missing loafer was wedged in the rigidly fixed stirrup of the black stallion's wooden saddle.

Three people were with the corpse. Luke Bendingo, who had driven us to and from Yontsdown last Friday, stood by the hindquarters of the white mare, his face the same shade as the horse, and the look he gave me—blinking eyes, twitching mouth—was a stutter of grief and rage momentarily repressed by shock. Kneeling on the floor was a man I had never seen before. He was in his sixties, quite dapper, gray-haired, with a neatly trimmed gray mustache. He was behind Jelly's body, and he was holding the dead man's head, as if he were a faith healer intent on restoring health to the afflicted. He was racked by unvoiced sobs, and each miserable spasm squeezed more tears out of him. The third was Joel Tuck, who stood one horse removed from the scene, his back against a pinto, one huge hand fastened to a brass pole. On that mutant face, which was a cross between a cubist portrait by Picasso and something out of one of Mary Shelley's nightmares, the expression could not, for once, be misread: He was devastated by the loss of Jelly Jordan.

Sirens wailed in the distance, grew louder, louder, then died away with a moan. A moment later two police sedans approached along the concourse, their emergency beacons flashing through the lead-gray light and mist and rain. When they pulled up by the carousel, when I heard doors opening and closing, I looked over at them and saw that three of the four arriving Yontsdown officers were goblins.