Carny kill

12

Billie knew where to go. I drove the MG. She sat deep in the red-leather bucket- seat with her head back on the folded tonneau and watched the sky. The wind made persistent little snatches at her candy-floss hair. It was just like platinum in the bright lemon sun.

We followed the feminine curve of the shore for a few miles. The narrow strip of pale white beach was off on our left and it looked lonely and end-of-the-woridish with its continuous line of surf quietly foaming like milk. Now and then we would come to a stand of royal palms and we would see a straggly clutter of meager huts nestled among the smooth boles. Fishermen shanties. Maybe some artists.

"Poor folks," Billie said with complacent satisfaction. "Can't live in the nice plushy Mediterranean like us." She smiled and curved her body toward mine and took my right arm possessively.

I decided I could wait to see Freckles.

We pulled into a blue-shadowed palm grove and parked in front of a deserted shack. The shack was shingle-sided and the shingles were very old and weathered and bowed. A battered dishpan hung from a nail on one wall and the window panes were opaque with scum and two of them were missing and had been replaced with age-curling squares of cardboard. A tall mending rack adrape with old rotting nets and corks stood at the north corner of the shanty, and in the blaze of noon the scene looked like a prize-winning photograph from one of the camera magazines.

"Come on," Billie said. "Let's go swimming."

"No suits," I reminded her.

"Who cares? Nobody's around."

She started stepping out of her clothes. I got so rattled I nearly fouled my zipper. I hesitated a moment in my shorts to see if she meant to go in in her bra and panties, but she didn't. She shed them with a quick smooth practiced precision and tossed them into one of the bucket-seats.

I couldn't help glancing at her underwear. They were nylon and they were very white and clean and I was very glad. I'm funny that way.

Say you meet a beautiful woman. That urgent something that is physical and yet not wholly physical and so must always go nameless sparks between you. You are both modern and sophisticated with adulthood and so you skip over that magical transitory period that other less worldly people observe which lies between the meeting and the bed. She undresses before you and she is graceful and careful and intimate about it and your passion is what the mountain was to Mallory. It must be satisfied.

And then you notice that her bra-strap is soiled.

What happens to your love? To your passion? And why?

I've seen it happen before. To me. And I never knew why. But this time I didn't have to worry about it. I reached for Billie.

"No," she said. "The sea first. The sea on our bodies."

She went away at a run, like a sea-sprite, her tan lithe legs flickering back and forth, back and forth in the sun, her hair like a shining white helmet. I went after her. I felt a little silly that way-running without any shorts on-but it was certainly time I got in the water. Who the hell knew when some idiot might drive by? My goodness, George, look at that disgusting man on the beach who isn't wearing any clothes! Yes, dear, but look at what he is wearing.

I raced across the incurve of the beach, over the lacerating hotfoot sand and took a flat-out dive into the glassy water. It was perfect. Not cold, not warm. It was invigorating and clean. I came up and looked around for Billie.

She was wading in the tropic bay. She waded until water came over her breasts and then she threw herself forward and began to swim, doing it easily with a flowing, rhythmic overhand stroke, her head half under, mouth half filled with water all the time.

She swam in the direction of the path where the sunlight lay white as scattered moonstones on the blue water. I started after her.

"Hey!" I called. "Where are you off to?"

Billie stopped swimming and looked around happily and her wet face was like a tear-blurred shine of something very beautiful and precious.

"It's glorious!" she called to me. "It's like the Mediterranean. It's like our whole future is going to be!"

Right at that moment there was only about fifteen minutes of our immediate future that intrigued me. I caught up to her and took her hand.

"C'mon, Billie. Let's go back to that deserted shack."

"No," she said. "It wouldn't be glorious there. Here, Thax. Right here."

She threw her wet arms around my neck and kissed me. If she didn't mind drowning, neither did I. Not at that exact moment.

That afternoon we drove into a remote little settlement which was a bend in a country road by land and the flowing of one swamp lake into another by water.

There was a turpentine still and a general store and a huddle of shanties which crouched back under the cabbage palms and the pawpaw trees. Old Negresses had brought baskets of fruit, vegetables, tortoise eggs and black beans to sell under the shade of a tupelo. They closed up market in the afternoon by simply packing off their merchandise on their heads. The owner of the general store didn't seem too happy with the arrangement.

"Damn nigras," he growled. "They'd undersell a giveaway sample."

I said ain't that a shame and asked where the Bentlys lived.

He was a beak-faced man in a wrinkled shirt and he gave me a sour look.

"You sound like a Northern fella. I suppose you're one of those damn nigger-lovers."

"I've never tried it. How is it?"

He gave me a baleful look and said, "Bentlys' is over there."

What he meant was a place just across a gallberry flat. It was a farmhouse and it had a simple grace of line, low and rambling and one-storied, and it had gone gray and cracked for want of paint. There was a tin roof and it was mostly rust, and the porch barely left you enough room to pass in front of the broken-backed wicker chairs.

It was Freckles' brawny brother-in-law who came to the door and he was about as cooperative as a wounded grizzly.

"Naw, you can't see Jimmy. He don't want a see nobody."

"I'm a friend of his," I said. "Just tell him it's Thaxton from Neverland. The guy who lives in the tree house."

"He don't want to see nobody from Neverland," the brawny one informed me. "Is that plain or do I got to show you?"

I had an idea he could show me. He looked like a mighty burly boy. I scratched my nose and wondered what I should say next. Then a girl from _Tobacco Road_ came out on the porch with a bottle of beer in her hand and gave us all a flat look. She was actually something to see, bare dirty feet and all. Her voice was just about as you-all as they come.

"So mebbe he is a friend a Jimmy's, Flem. Why not let him say?"

Flem got hot about it.

"He said he didn't want to see nobody, LouElla. Hit don't mean a damn to me, but that's what he said, didn't he?"

"Well, mebbe this one is a friend." LouElla looked at Billie and upped her bottle of beer. Then she looked at me. "Y'all just saying you're Jimmy's friend, mister, or you another cop?"

"Ask him," I suggested.

LouElla had another swig. "What do you do at that Neverland-besides live in a tree?"

I grinned at her and said "Step up, gents, step up. One and all. The line forms on the right. Stagger up in wheelbarrows and roll away in limousines. The farmer wins and the gambler loses. Right here, right here, folks, to join the sightseeing party that starts immediately under the parental guidance of the Bay of Bengal. See the morals-shattering hoochykooch girls in their naughty naughty native dance. See the nautch girls brought at great expense from the sandswept deserts of the Sahara, each and every one with a movement like the Sultan's dromedary. See that intrepid swamp explorer James Q (for Cute) Bently. See him enter the jungle of howling beasts like Daniel come to judgment. See how the gators crawl on their bellies like snakes in the bottom of a DT's empty glass. See the savage denizens of the swamp cower before his manly gaze. The laughing hyena that eats once a week, drinks once a month, sleeps with his wife once a year. What the hell he's got to laugh about nobody knows."

Billie and LouElla were both laughing and even bully boy Flem was grinning like a fatboy at a birthday party.

"My God," Billie said. "How long can you go on like that?"

I winked at her. "Billie Peeler, ladies and gents. The Twist Girl. She can shimmy, she can shake, she can make your oh-oh ache."

Flem was all chuckles now.

"Do some more, fella," he said. "Make another spiel."

"See the zebra, the wild ass-pardon me, lady-from the desert of Africa. Note the stripes so tightly placed on the animal from the tip of his nose to the tip of his toes that every time he winks he sneezes and breaks wind and the nasty little highschool girls amuse themselves by throwing sand in the animal's eyes. Okay?" I asked Flem. "Do I get the job?"

"You sholy do, mister! Ay-gawd, ain't he a kick, LouElla?"

LouElla admitted I was a kick.

"How about a beer for y'all?" she offered.

"We would sholy love it, Miss Scarlet honey," I said with a Civil War bow. "We would be forevermore obliged to y'all."

That got them all laughing again, and when my friend Freckles suddenly appeared in the doorway with a wondering look I went on with it to get him in the mood too.

"Wha' gawd bless ma boots, if yander ain't Massa Jim hisseif, jes' back from stompin' those no-count damn Yankees in the wo'! Jim, boy! Light down these here steps and throw a kiss on yo Aunt Billie. But mind whar y'all throw it, boy."

The two girls and Flem went off in the ha-ha's again and Freckles looked at them with a bewildered smile. I was watching him and I didn't much like what I saw. He had the same scared look Terry Orme had worn.

"Thax," Billie said. "Stop it now. You're such a damn fool!"

That was the truth. I cut it out and accepted a cold bottle of beer from LouElla. Billie received hers with a dubious look.

"My poor diet," she said. "Well, here goes one-hundred and fifty calories."

Freckles said he didn't want one and he and I and Billie sat down on the porch. LouElla told Flem to come away and mind his own business. Flem didn't want to. Flem said, "I want a hear him do it again." LouElla had to stamp her foot and squawk at him. Then we were left alone. I looked at Freckles.

"How come you up and quit, Jim?"

"Well gosh, Mr. Thaxton. I just felt like it is all."

"Come on. Something's bugging you. It's as plain as those Van Johnson freckles on your map."

He tucked in his mouth, looking defiantly ashamed.

"All right. You want the truth-I was scared."

"Of what?"

"That's the whole trouble. I don't know exactly. I guess finding Mr. Cochrane like I did really upset me. And those darn cops on me all the time with questions. I mean like every time I turned around, it seemed like. That Lieutenant Ferris always sending for me, and-well-yesterday."

"What yesterday?"

"That Cheeta midget-Terry Orme? He gave me the highsign from back in the jungle when I was taking a load of customers through the Swamp Ride. So when I had a break I went back in there to see what he wanted."

"And?"

"Well, I don't know. That's the whole trouble. He was real vague and edgy about it, you know? Wouldn't really come out and say what he wanted. Kept beating around the bush, you know?"

"Well, what did he say-vague or otherwise?"

"Well, he kept trying to find out if anybody had been around asking me questions about him, see?"

"About him? Orme?"

"Uh-huh. That's what he wanted to know."

"Did he mean the cops?"

"No. I asked him that and he said no, he meant anybody else. Somebody who worked at Neverland."

"But he didn't mention any name, huh? Or anything that would give you a hint who he meant?"

"Uh-uh. Nothing. And I tried to ask him who he meant exactly, but he kept hedging." The kid looked at me with a look of appeal in his orange peppered face.

"And he was scared, Mr. Thaxton. I don't know what of, but he was real scared. He nearly had the shakes." He gave a sort of hopeless shrug.

"I guess that's what finally bugged me into quitting," he said. "I don't know anything about that murder and I don't want to know. I just want to be left alone."

"You mean you got scared because you thought there might be somebody on the lot who figured you did know something about the murder? Something that wasn't safe for you to know?"

He nodded. "I guess so. Maybe it's silly, but that's how I started to feel about it. So I up and quit."

I took out a cigarette and rolled it in my fingers. Billie gave me a match. I didn't think to offer her a smoke.

"Your sister-or whoever LouElla is-asked me if I was another cop. Have the police been out here to see you?"

"Yeah, this morning. A squad car showed up early. But I didn't want any more of that business. I skipped out the back and hid in the palmettos. Flem told 'em I'd gone north. Which is just what I think I'll do," he added grimly.

I was damn sure he would, once he heard that Terry Orme was dead. I gave Billie a warning look. The kid would find out soon enough, and he was already too scared to eat his dinner. Why spook him ahead of time?

"Then you didn't find out what it was they wanted-the law?"

"No sir."

I thought about it for a while. Then I said, "That morning you found Cochrane. Is it the usual custom to take the boats around the whole Swamp Ride every morning before opening time?"

"No, that was just a freak thing. Usually all we have to do is see if they'll start up and then line 'em up in position for the customers. But that one boat didn't seem to have any poop that morning so I decided to give it a spin around the ride to see if I could work out the kinks."

"Do most of the employees know that? I mean that you usually just warm up the boats right there at the dock?"

"Well yeah, I guess so. I guess they do."

"Did anyone ever ask you about it? I mean before you found Cochrane?"

"No. Nobody ever asked me for the time of day-until after I found him. Now that's all I get from everybody. Questions!"

I gave him a benevolent smile.

"Well, that's what makes the world go round. Questions and answers. Thanks for answering mine. Let's go, Billie."

We took our time driving back to Neverland. I must have been pretty broody and abstract because Billie finally turned in her seat with a peeved look.

"What on earth's eating you, Thax? You act like an old bear."

"I don't know, hon. It's just that I have an idea about this business but I can't seem to walk to it in a straight line. Something always gets in my way."

"Well, why don't you just leave it alone? It really isn't any of your business, you know."

"I think it is. For one thing too many people, including the law, sort of feel I might have had something to do with it. Well, that part's all right. I didn't, and I'm damned if I can see how any sonofabitch can prove otherwise. But there's something else."

"Well, what?"

"To begin with, there's Cochrane. I liked that old Irishman. I think he and I were about to be friends. Then somebody did him dirty. Then there's Terry Orme. I told the poor little guy I was his friend. Yeah, and the first time he needs me I'm too goddam drunk to help him."

"Well, it's a cinch you can't help him now. He's dead, isn't he?"

"Yeah, he's dead. But the bastard that did it to him isn't."