Carny kill

3

The big luckboy with the lawyerlike aspect was hovering near the front of the Queen Anne Cottage, like a shark finning around a ship to pick up its garbage. He was looking for another likely group of marks.

I went over and buttonholed him. He was my big and looked handy, so I didn't mind pasting him if I had to.

"You and I need a talk back in the alley," I said.

He started to grin and to reach into his pocket at the same time.

"Hell man," he said, "I didn't know you belonged. Should have guessed though, the way you were in on the know."

He fished out my five and passed it over without hard feelings.

"You were asking for it though, you know," he said.

"That's right, I was," I admitted. "Was it the big guy that I bollixed with on the steps?"

"Hell no. That was just another mark. But Eddy was in the group and got him at the same time." The luckboy chuckled. "I couldn't myself. I had to put Eddy on you, once you'd challenged me."

"That Eddy must be good," I said as I handed the luckboy back his wallet.

He looked at the slab of leather like he had never seen it before. When he put it in his pocket I gave him back his watch.

"Kayriced," he whispered. "A pro of the first water. Look, Thaxton, you're in the wrong racket. You don't want to play house with walnut shells with a natural talent like that! Rob Cochrane practically gives us oldtimers a free hand. Within reason, that is."

"My name, racket and everything," I said. "You know it all already."

"Yeah," he said absently. "Word gets around. But look-"

"Uh-uh," I said. "It ain't in my line. But thanks for the offer."

I went into the Queen Anne and had a steak and showed my card to the cashier and she knocked the bill down to half. She was another one of those nice clean student employees who helped gloss over the fleecing with homey atmosphere, and she looked at me in a way that suggested she was starting to practice the look that had been handed down for thousands of years. But I ignored it, more or less, because I had promised Cochrane.

Anyhow, I had Billie on my mind.

I don't care how you cut it or how sexually degenerate you are, there's no man who can hold more than one thought in his mind at a given moment. That goes for thinking about girls. Sure you can love or want or need two or three all at once, but you can only actually activate the imagery of one at a time.

Try it. Picture yourself buried under a mound of naked girls. Strive as you will you can only imagine what one girl is doing at a time no matter how instantaneous your erotic thoughts fly.

That's how Billie struck me. All the rest of them in this great sensual world were suddenly secondary. It could be that in time, a hell of a lot of time, I would get around to a small percentage of them, but right now, Billie was the sum of the equation. Or something like that.

I wandered about for a couple of hours just to get the lay of the lot, but I got tired of it in a little while. Like most carny folk I don't like people as people but only as marks. Somebody you can trim for a dime or a buck or a bundle. If you break them down and feed them to me one by one, then maybe there will be a few I will like as individuals. But not when they flow past you like bawling cattle. Who needs a stampede?

Along about eleven thirty some hairy-lunged college boy climbed up to the lookout tower in the Viking Camp and blew through a horn that was ten feet long and suspended by rawhide thongs.

Hooo! the horn said in a fat dismal voice. Hooo!_

That meant the marks should start to clear out. Which suited me. I had to find a spot to grab some shuteye.

In my wandering I had seriously eyed Tarzan's tree house. It was summer and the breeze blowing off the sea was mild and this movie-copied replica of Tarzan's home was free. I had even showed my Open-sesame card and gone up in the bamboo-ribbed elevator to look the tree house over.

I had noted a zebra-skin bed with elephant tusks for posts, where Me Tarzan and You Jane had supposedly enjoyed their connubial bliss, and I had had to chuckle when I recalled that sex-frustrated oldmaid librarian in California who had raised such a stink about the Tarzan books simply because she hadn't bothered to read enough of them to learn that Tarzan and Jane had been legally married in the second book.

Anyhow, the connubial jungle bed looked good enough to me. You Jane or no You Jane. So I hung around there until the crowd petered out.

This Tarzan house overlooked the Swamp Ride and they had about nine nice clean kids who ran the boats through the circular swamp. One of them came by me with a polite smile and a face full of freckles.

"All closed up for the night, sir," he said.

I told him my name was Thax and showed him my wonderful Never Never card and that made him more polite than ever.

"I haven't seen you around here, sir. Are you new?"

Well, what are you going to do? If they have to call you sir how can you stop them? Beat 'em on the head with a stick? I smiled at him like foxy grandpa and admitted I was new.

"Well gosh," he said and he actually looked distressed. "I'd show you the Swamp Ride, except that-"

"Except that you have a tasty girl waiting." He probably had his little old grayhaired mother waiting but I wanted to make him feel good.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "It doesn't really matter."

I shooed him off, and when the coast was clear I went up the plank steps that curved around a phony tree like a scutellated snake, and I wobbled over the swaying bamboo footbridge to Tarzan's house.

It was really quite something when you thought about it- the fact that all the leaves on the two trees were fake and that each one had been placed on by hand. But I didn't think too much about it right then. I was deadbeat and that steak in my stomach still needed some repose time to digest in.

It was dark in Tarzan's house, but there were still some arc lights on down in Neverland and the bamboo and thatch walls let in light the way a sieve lets in water. I could see my way to bed.

There was another smaller bed against the other wall. That was Cheeta's bed. The bright little highschool girl in the skimpy leopard skin who was in charge of the tree house had told us so earlier. All the Ma's and Pa's had thought it was a great one. The Pa's had chuckled and the Ma's had said Oooh in that endearing way they have.

I didn't mind sleeping with a monkey, as long as he stayed on his side of the room. I was whipped. I even thought I dreamed that Cheeta swung in through his window and dropped into his bed in the late dark night.

It didn't matter. At least I didn't think it did.

I don't know how long that godawful noise had been going on before it woke me up, but when I finally consciously heard it all I could think of was a thunderstorm.

That's what a gator sounds like when he bellows. When he plants all four stumpy legs in the mud and really let go his voice has a sort of barrr-ooom to it like distant thunder.

It was morning. I looked at my wristwatch. Eight. Then I sat up. What else can you do when someone starts yelling for help?

"Help! Somebody! C'mere!"

The voice was thin and urgent and some distance off. I went out on the porch and looked down at the Swamp Ride. It was laid outin a huge figure eight but I couldn't see all of the water-ways because the jungly growth was too dense. I could see one of the little powered swamp boats scooting back to the dock though, and all the yelling seemed to be coming from it.

I went back inside and got my pants.

A couple of the rummy sweep-up men were wobbling toward me when I reached the Swamp Ride gate, and two or three of the guide girls were coming on the run too. I went around the closed ticket booth and stepped out on the dock.

The powerboat was just pulling in and my friend Freckles was at the wheel. His freckles looked like measles against the ashen color of his face. He was scared witless.

"Oh my God!" he gasped when he saw me. "It's awful! Just awful! He's dead!"

I jumped into the boat with him, nearly scalping myself on the roof rod. They had eight or nine of those little boats and each one of them was built like the _African Queen_-with the canvas tarp for a roof.

I got Freckles by the shoulders before he could come apart at the seams. He was pretty hysterical but I didn't slap him like they always do in the movies and on TV because it never works in real life. It just seems to jar loose more hysteria in the nut.

"Somebody's got to do something!" Freckles yelled in my face, spit and all. "My God those gators!"

"Yeah yeah," I yelled back at him. "But who? Who's dead? Where is he?"

"_Yes! Yes!_" the kid said frantically insistent. "_He's dead!_ I'm telling you _he's dead!_ He's in the water and those gators-"

I wasn't getting anywhere, and if I'd had any sense I would have gotten out of there because it wasn't any of my business. But who has any sense these days?

"Okay. Okay. Show me." I gave him a shake. "Show me where."

I could feel him shrinking in my hands.

"I never saw a dead man before." His voice was hoarse now, gaspy. "It's terrible!"

"Yeah. All right, kid. Get out." I didn't need a hysteric on my hands. "Where is it?"

Freckles pointed across the bow at a jungle-arched waterway. Then he scrambled up on the dock. More and more people were gathering with question marks for faces.

There was nothing to those little boats. Freckles had left the power on and I gave it a healthy goose and spun the wheel and went ripping down the waterway at about half a knot an hour. The governor on that boat must have been as tight as a virgin's something or other.

There was very little about the Swamp Ride that was phony. All the palmettos and sweet gums and tupelos and the intricate network of prehensile vines were real. There's no great trick to cultivating a swamp in Florida.

Even the gators were real. They came from a nearby gator farm. They were harmless old daddies who were used to being around people. All they wanted to do was sleep in the sun and wait for some kind man to bring them their food.

I suppose that's why they were all riled now. They didn't know what to make of this outrageous man-size bundle of meat that had been dumped in their nice little sheltered swamp.

The tangle of gaudy, suffering foliage spread open on either side and my laboring boat put-futted into a jungleribbed slough. The water was as opaque as green milk-glass and there was a little setback in the mudbank on one side.

Three bewildered gators were standing there in the shallows grunting up. There wasn't much to them. The smallest was three foot and the largest six. Their manner seemed to imply that they didn't like the thing they had found in the water and why didn't someone come along and take it away because it obviously didn't belong there.

I idled the boat toward them and they lumbered off into the water in a tail-spanking huff. I had to get out of the boat and into the gafocky water up to my knees to get the body.

It was face down and it was a large man and when I rolled it over it was Robert Cochrane. A long knife was standing jauntily in the Irishman's chest right where people usually think the bull's-eye should be.

It had a mother-of-pearl handle.