Butcher's Moon

Four

Grofield fired three times, and three escaping convicts in black-and-white-striped pants and shirts flopped over on their backs. He shifted position, sighted down the short rifle barrel, and plugged five speeding getaway cars in a row. Finishing off with a bomb-toting anarchist and a rolling barrel of bootleg whiskey, he put the rifle back on the counter and nodded in satisfaction at the targets at the rear of the shooting gallery. All around him were the flat reports of other rifles, mixed with the bings and dings of targets being hit, the constant shuffle of feet going past behind him, the combined noises of several different kinds of music being played in other sections of the park, and hundreds of people talking all at once.

The shooting-gallery operator, a short man in an open black cardigan sweater, with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, eased over in front of Grofield and gave him a cool and noncommittal look, as between men of the world. “Nice shooting,” he said. The cigarette bobbed when he talked, giving the illusion of a Humphrey Bogart twitch.

Grofield fell into the role as naturally as breathing out. “Pays to keep in practice,” he said.

“For the perfect score, you get another ten shots free.”

Grofield looked around, and a couple of nearby boys about twelve years old were gaping at the targets, watching every shot in fascination. “Hey, kids,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You each get five shots here,” Grofield told them. “Compliments of the masked man.”

The kids moved closer. One of them said, “What masked man?”

“Me,” Grofield said.

“You don’t have any mask.”

In fact, he did: horn-rim glasses, bushy mustache, a bit of makeup to widen the nose and give him bags under the eyes. But he said, “You get five shots each anyway.” To the guy behind the counter he said, “Treat these kids good. They’re particular friends of mine.” Then, having segued somehow from a Humphrey Bogart movie into a western, he sauntered off, visualizing them watching him go, visualizing himself becoming lost in the crowd.

And he pretty well was lost. Fun Island Amusement Park was fairly big as such places go, and it seemed even bigger at night. The idea of the park was that it was an island, remote from civilization, far from the cares of the workaday world. Built in the shape of a large square, it was completely enclosed by a tall board fence, on the inside of which had been painted a continuous mural of ocean scenes, with ships and birds and far-off islands. Just inside the fence, a shallow moat ten feet wide made the park technically a true island, completely surrounded by water.

The space inside the moat was divided into eight pie-shape sections, each with rides and games and displays tied to a different island theme. Grofield had found a certain morbid fascination in hanging around the Alcatraz Island section, but it was now ten-fifteen, time to meet up with Parker again over in the part called Desert Island. So he’d best figure out which direction to drift in, and start drifting.

Down to the left was the fountain at the center of the park, spraying in high arches, lit with amber and red and green. Grofield walked down that way, not hurrying, letting the movement of the crowd take him, and when he reached the fountain he turned right, following an easy semicircle past the entrances to Treasure Island, New York Island, and Voodoo Island before reaching the one he wanted.

MAROONED! said great shivery neon red letters across the sky; inside that building, Grofield knew, was a black-light ride on the general desert-island theme. Half an hour ago he himself had taken the ride, without Parker, to familiarize himself somewhat with the terrain. Parker had been here before, of course, but this was Grofield’s introduction to Fun Island.

The Marooned! ride was accomplished in fake rubber rafts made of gray plastic, each holding eight passengers. The raft was pulled on a concealed chain through a shallow waterway that snaked through the dark interior of the building past the lit-up displays. There was a series of the oldest and best-known desert-island jokes; a triggering mechanism in the bottom of the raft caused the displays to light up on either side, with mechanized dolls making small movements in conjunction with the recorded gag lines. Between the displays, in the darkness, fluorescent mock-ups of various kinds of ships swooped down from the ceiling as though to collide with the raft, but always swung back up out of the way again, just in time, usually with a great gnashing noise of ratchets and gears.

All through the ride Grofield had sat brooding over the contrast between the business this tacky thrillorama was doing and the near-emptiness of his own serious theater back in Indiana. Civilization was in a decline right enough, there wasn’t any question of that.

It was the last tableau that Parker had told him to take a special interest in. It was bigger than any of the others; almost life-size, it showed a large desert island with a hill in the middle. On first coming around the corner in the raft, one saw another mechanical doll, a male castaway dressed in tattered rags, who was bobbing his head in joy over a chest of gold he’d just accidentally dug up. On floating past him and around to the far side of the island, hidden from the castaway by the hill, one saw a longboat full of pirates that had just landed; armed with picks and shovels, they were obviously here to reclaim their gold.

So were Grofield and Parker. Grofield had studied the desert island and the longboat and all the figures as the raft had slid by, and then had gone on to entertain himself in other sections of the park, and now was back to Marooned! again, drifting along, taking his time. All around, the noise and lights both were fading as the park prepared itself to close for the night. The crowd, which up to now had ebbed and flowed in all directions at once, now tended in two specific currents, one toward the fountain at the center of the park and the other toward the exit, down between the Desert Island and Island Earth.

The rear of the Marooned! building was away from any regular path, a black patch amid the brightness. Grofield turned down that way, walking along next to the featureless green-gray side of the building, and back here he became more aware of the quality of the night itself. The light and noise and movement elsewhere created an artificial daytime, but off in this corner the darkness pressed in, close and pervasive. Grofield looked up at a cloudless sky full of cold tiny stars and a thin crescent of moon, too narrow to give much light. The air was warm, but the sky looked cold and thin and very dark.

Parker was already waiting, by the back door. He was merely a darker shape in the general darkness, and Grofield took his identity on faith, whispering, “How we doing?”

“I’ve got it open. Come on.”

They stepped through into total blackness, and Grofield pulled the door closed behind him without letting it latch. They were now in a narrow corridor formed on one side by the outer shell of the building and on the other by a continuous black drape. From beyond the drape came the echoing noises of the desert-island displays, the recorded gag lines and music and sound effects.

“I deplore this place,” Grofield whispered.

Parker didn’t answer, but Grofield hadn’t really expected him to. They moved away from the door together, traveling to the right between drapery and wall, Parker leading the way and Grofield following, guided by the faint rustling sounds of Parker’s sleeve against the drape.

Parker stopped, and Grofield bumped into him. They stood in silence, listening to the tinny recordings. Then Grofield sensed Parker moving again, and a vertical strip of reddish light appeared just to his right; Parker had opened a separation in the drapery, and they could look through to the main floor of the Marooned! ride.

They were just behind that final island tableau, with its lone castaway on the one side and the longboat full of pirates on the other. Looking through the narrow slit in the drapes, reminding himself of himself checking the house before a performance back home in Mead Grove, Grofield could see past the island to a raft full of customers going by. Goggle-eyed and gape-mouthed, the people in the raft looked unhuman and feeble-minded in the red and yellow lights, being drawn along through the darkness as though they too were part of the display. They looked no less waxy and unreal than the pirates in and around the longboat.

The longboat. That was where Parker had left the money, in a suitcase stuffed down in the bottom, with one of the pirate mannequins placed on top of it. And seventy-three thousand dollars from the armored car inside it.

Another raft went by, with its red-faced humanoids. Hard to believe they were actual people, they reminded him so much of the moving targets at the shooting gallery. Pock pock pock he went, in his mind, and imagined the heads popping back on hinges, while the torsos remained upright and unmoving. In a little while the same raft would go by again with the same figures in it, their heads back in place.

A space; no raft coming. The island lighting switched off, and they stood in almost total darkness. Music, speeches, sound effects echoing all around them, muffled slightly by the draperies. Bits of isolated light here and there in the black building interior, like Indian campfires on a distant range of hills.

The island lighting snapped back on, triggered by another approaching raft. It went by, and the lights went off. The music and sound effects sounded thinner than before; there were fewer campfires.

Twice more the island appeared in its banks of red and yellow lights, and after the second time there were no more campfires at all, and only one thin wheedle of music. Then that too died, and a more anonymous general sound could be heard; the crowd, outside this building, shuffling away.

“All right,” Parker said.

Grofield already had the pencil flashlight in his hand, and now he switched it on. He held it along his palm so that he could adjust how much light he would permit to escape between his first and second fingers: ranging from all the light to none. He laid down a vague ribbon of white aimed toward the longboat, and Parker walked along it, his feet making muffled echoing noises against the platform with its fake sand.

Grofield followed close behind, keeping the light aimed ahead of the two of them. His ears were alert for other human occupancy of the building, but he heard nothing. He remained a pace back when they reached the longboat, aiming the light into the interior of the boat while he looked all around in the darkness for other lights to appear.

Parker shoved a mannequin out of the way and reached into the boat. He pushed a second mannequin, felt around, and said, “Give me more light.”

Grofield stepped closer to the boat, aiming the light directly into it, spreading his fingers more so that the full beam shone out. There was no suitcase in the bottom of the boat.

“All right,” Parker said. He turned away, walking back toward the exit, and Grofield followed him. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy, Grofield thought, but he didn’t say anything.

Outside, they walked along with the last stragglers toward the park exit. Grofield said, “What now?”

“When I was in here,” Parker said, “some local tough boys knew I was here. They tried to find me, to get the money.”

“So they must have searched after you got away.”

“Right.”

“Do you know how to find any of them?”

“I know the name of their boss,” Parker said. “Lozini.”