Carny kill

6

Cheeta swung into Tarzan's tree house that night- through the window and into his bed. It was Terry Orme, the apeman.

I struck a match and we looked at each other. I had been sitting there in the dark waiting to see if he would show up.

"I'm your roomy," I told him. "My name is Thax."

He didn't say anything. He studied me until the match began to hurt and I put it out. Then he spoke.

"There's a Coleman under that bed." His voice was like his body, a pipy little thing.

I rummaged under the zebra-clad bed and found the lantern and struck another match and ignited the two suspended bags in the lamp. A Coleman is brighter than the average lightbulb but it can throw weird shadows. Terry Orme looked a little weird sitting across the wide African room from me. He wasn't but about forty inches high.

I always think of midgets as being those poor little bastards with the large heads and the stunted arms and legs- which isn't so, because a true midget has a perfectly proportioned body, and they are a rare species.

I suppose that's why Terry Orme reminded me more of a jockey than of a midget. There was nothing foreshortened about his limbs: he was just very small. I couldn't even make a stab at guessing his age.

"You always come in through windows?" I asked him.

"You mind?" Tough little cuss.

"Uh-uh. I'm really working around to ask how come you're out climbing trees at this time of night?"

"How long have you had nose trouble?" he shot back. Some jockey.

I got up and walked over to him and he sort of hunched back on his little bed. I suppose I looked like a giant to him. And when you think of it, that's a hell of a way to go through life-living in a world where all the people around you are belt buckles.

How would you like to go swimming at the beach and have to look eye to eye with all the girls' navels?

I put out my hand.

"If we're going to be roomies, Orme, why not be friends?"

He looked at my hamsized hand but didn't take it. His small face was sullen.

"I don't have any friends."

I hung in there. I could be just as stubborn.

"You got me, Terry. All it costs is a smile." I thrust my hand closer.

"Well-" he muttered. Then he shook.

I smiled and went back and sat on my bed and gave myself a smoke. If I had him pegged right all I had to do was keep quiet and he'd emerge on his own. Because now it was his turn to make with the overtures.

He scowled at the floor and sent me a couple of covert glances.

"I got enough geetus that I don't have to live up here if I don't want," he said all at once. "I stay by myself because I don't like people. Most of 'em, anyhow."

"Same with me. You ever hear what Remarque said about that?"

"Who the hell's Remarque?" He couldn't growl in his pipy voice but he tried.

"Erich Maria Remarque. The guy who wrote _All Quiet on the Western Front_. These two guys are in a bar, see? One says to the other, 'You like Americans?' The other guy says, 'No.' 'You like Englishmen?' the first asks. 'No.' 'Germans?' 'No.' 'Spaniards?' 'No: 'Frenchmen?' 'No: The first guy gets POed. 'Well, who in hell do you like?' And right away the other guy says, 'I like my friends.'

Terry Orme smiled, a little, and said, "I guess that about covers it." He looked at me. "You must read a lot, huh?"

"Now you're talking about man's best friend. A good book will never let you down no matter how often you go back to it."

He looked down at his little hands.

"You'd get along with Mike Ransome," he said.

"He read a lot?"

"Yeah." Terry hopped down from his bed and started to pace across the leopardskin rug.

"What's Ransome's job?" I asked, but he didn't seem to hear me.

All three foot four of him stalked back and stopped in front of me. Something was bugging him bad. I don't mean just his natural frustration over being a freak. A kind of enigmatic anger and fear kept playing over his face like a little girl jumping rope.

"The marks watch me scramble around in that apesuit and they think I'm a real monkey," he said. "But as far as I'm concerned I'm making a monkey out of them."

I nodded. I figured he would look at it that way. It gave him a slice of superiority. God knows he needed it.

"I wouldn't have this job if I didn't like it." He was getting defiant now. Defiance for defense.

"I like climbing around. You see and hear things. Things you'd never dream of."

The little warped soul was climbing out of the cracked shell. He was growing bigger in his own eyes all the time. Society had put him down all his life, had looked at him and grinned and said "Look at the freak." He got back at them by spying on their tawdry secrets. Come right down to it, the poor little bastard was probably nothing more than a frustrated Peeping Tom.

"Is that what you were doing tonight?" I wondered.

He said yeah. Then he seemed to shrink inside himself again. He went back to his little bed and climbed up on it like a child.

"The law has taken over the bunkhouse for their headquarters," he told me. "That Ferris cop was in there going around and around with Franks a little while ago. Franks wants Ferris to give him the go-ahead on opening up the Swamp Ride again."

"But Ferris still wants to play Sam Spade in there, huh?"

"Yeah. And can you imagine the trade the lot's losing by keeping it closed? The marks are just panting to get in there and see the spot where old man Cochrane was found."

I was disgusted. "As a business manager that Franks is some shrewd cooky."

"It ain't Franks," Terry said. "He just does what May Cochrane tells him to. Everybody knows that."

I said, "Jesus." There were times when May made me want to throw up.

Terry was watching me with an odd look. I had an idea that the word that got around had reached him and he knew that I had once been married to May. He asked me something out of the blue.

"You getting soft on Billie Peeler?"

I wondered if Terry had a crush on Billie, in his hopeless little way. I said, "Uh-huh."

He looked at his little hands again. "She's a good kid. We worked together in K. C. a couple years back. She-"

There was a quiet knock of noise from somewhere outside the tree house, but close by. I glanced at Terry. He gave me a start. His delicately small face was frozen terror.

I didn't say anything. I got up and walked over to the open doorway and stepped onto the porch and looked around.

Most of the lights were off in Neverland and I couldn't see much for the maze of phony leaves and the shadows they cast. A single spot was blazing over the deserted Swamp Ride dock and it made the placid water look like cold splitpea soup. I didn't see any sign of movement.

"Who is it?" Terry's thin voice piped behind me. "Is it a guy or a girl?"

"Just a noise in the night, I guess," I called back. "I don't see anyone."

I didn't see anyone when I turned back into Tarzan's hut either. Terry Orme had vanished.

I took a rowboat back to Treasure Island the next morning before the lot opened. Silly I guess, but being out there by myself made me feel at home. If any marks or sweep-up men had been around they would have spoiled it for me. Then it would have been just another Neverland attraction.

I beached the boat a few yards astern of the Hispaniola and got out to look the little island over.

"Ah," I said, quoting Long John Silver. "This here is a sweet spot, this island. A sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on."

Funny, but that's how I felt-like a kid again.

They had done a very nice job with the layout. They had humped up three scrubby little dirt hills and each one had a skull-and-crossbones sign planted at its base: Mizzenmast Hill, Spyglass Hill and Foremast Hill. Then they had Flint's Stockade, where Jim Hawkins and Captain Smolett, Doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney had held off Silver's cutthroats.

A sign reading _To Flint's Treasure Pit_ pointed down a woody path and I followed it into a sunny glen. The Treasure Pit was at the foot of a hardwood ridge. It was a shallow hole in the ground with a spade and a broken pick stuck in the dirt, and a tangle of blocks and tackle and an old half-buried sea chest with the name _Walrus_ on it.

That familiar atavistic feeling of being watched nudged me and I turned around and looked at a little scrub rise a few yards away. I didn't see anything and I shrugged it off and started to turn back into the path.

A wildman leaped right through a palmetto screen and landed like an animal smack in front of me. Honest to God I nearly wet myself.

He had a wild mop of gray hair and a beard to match and he was dressed in old bits of sailcloth and skins that were held together by brass buttons and rawhide thongs.

He hunched and hunkered and giggled and scratched himself and made erratic gestures with his hands. He shuttled toward me crabwise. And damned if I didn't back off.

"Who the hell are you?" I nearly yelled it at him.

"I'm poor Ben Gunn, I am. And I haven't spoke with a Christian these three years."

I could have kicked myself. Of course they had to have a Ben Gunn on the island. They probably had a one-legged character making like Long John Silver too. I started to laugh.

"Man," I said. "I nearly dropped my load when you jumped out like that."

The actor chuckled and straightened out of character. He was about my tall but there wasn't much heft to him. He looked as wiry and agile as a young Italian acrobat.

"It gets 'em all," he said delightedly. "Especially the young stuff. I can make them leap halfway out of their panties."

"Let me know the next time you make one leap," I said. "They won't let me in the nautch show."

He laughed. "You're Thaxton, aren't you? The new chap with the hots for Billie?"

I looked at him. I wasn't sure how I wanted to take that.

He slapped me on the back.

"Just clowning, boy. Don't get sore. Billie's a good kid."

"That's what Terry Orme told me," I said. "Maybe I should start to wonder just how good Billie is.',

"You know Terry?" He looked mildly surprised.

"We're roomies up in the tree house. He lives there because he doesn't like people around. I'm there because I'm tap city."

"No kidding," he said. "I never knew Terry bunked up there." He smiled and shrugged. "Well, he's not the only screwball around here. I bunk aboard the Hispaniola myself. By the by, my name's Mike Ransome."

"Oh. The guy who reads a lot. Shake, brother."

"You too?" He looked pleased about it. "What do you think of R. L. S.?"

I stalled a moment to dredge up one of the lines from my subconscious. I worked with a telepathist once and it's amazing the tricks of memory you can pick up in a racket like that.

"Flint is dead," I misquoted. "But some of his hands are aboard, worse luck for the rest of us."

"Hey!" Mike cried. "A _Treasure Island_ buff." He grabbed me by the arm. "C'mon, Thax. I want you to see my schooner."

He told me about Neverland's Treasure Island as we walked.

"It was all my idea. Old Cochrane went for it like a ton of bricks. Let me design the whole layout to suit myself. We take the marks aboard the Hispaniola over at the dock, see? Give'em a sail around the island and then we land 'em and divide'em into groups and give each group a treasure map. You know-that treasure hunt game kids play at parties? It works like that. Of course the actual treasure they finally find is only souvenirs, costume jewelry-junk like that-but it makes the marks happy."

He was as effusive as a kid about it. He practically skipped while we walked and he talked. I was beginning to wonder if he might be a trifle gay.

He trotted up the Hispaniola's gangplank like an overgrown Peter Pan, calling, "C'mon, Thax. I want you to see my cabin."

"I bet you do," I thought.

But he was all right. He didn't try any hankypanky. He pulled off his wig and beard and I could see that under the grease paint he was only about twentyfive.

He lived in the schooner's aft cabin. It was always kept locked off from the deck. That way the godawful scramble of marks couldn't pry into his home. I looked around and wondered what he used for a head. Probably the lake. There were three handy stern windows.

He had a table set into the butt of the mizzenmast and benches and a bunk bed over some lockers and the windows gave a nice light. He had bookshelves in the starboard wall. I skimmed over some of the titles. He really was a nut on Stevenson…

_The Wrecker_, _The Dynamiter_, _Prince Otto_, _Merry Men_, _Kidnapped_, _David Balfour_, _Master of Ballantrae_, six editions of _Treasure Island_, each illustrated by a different artist, and even a copy of _A Child's Garden of Verses_.

Mike Ransome was watching me, beaming like a kid.

"Know what I like about Stevenson?" he asked. "The deserving always find what they were searching for and live happily ever after. That's the way I like a story to end."

"Too bad life isn't like that," I said. "Stevenson was a romantic daydreamer. He believed in finding treasure. But who the hell says it follows you'll be happy for the rest of your life just because you stumbled on a treasure?"

"Well, Jim Hawkins lived happily ever after, didn't he?"

"I always like to think he did," I said. "But I've got my doubts. Anyhow, look at the protagonist in Ebb Tide. He didn't find his treasure."

"Not in pearls or pounds," Mike said. "But he found something better-at least better for him. Treasure, after all, is only a relative term. A loaf of bread can be a treasure to one man, and an idea can be a treasure to another. It's all in what you need."

He had me there and I admitted it.

"How about some music?" he said.

He had a hi-fi in there and he put on a record. It was a heavy-bodied instrumental and it throbbed mood through the cabin. I haven't much ear for music. I couldn't get too excited over it.

Mike heated a pot of coffee on a hotplate and we sat down at the table to talk and smoke. He drank his java black, cup after cup. He seemed to grow more effusive all the time. He damn near bubbled he was so effervescent. After a while he got on my nerves, a little.

"Well," I said, "this has been nice, but the marks are about due to arrive. I've got to get to my stand. Thanks for the jo." It was damn near floating my hind teeth.

Mike saw me to the door. He was back in character again, beard or not.

"When Ben Gunn is wanted, you know where to find him. Just where you found him today. And him that comes is to have a white thing in his hand and he's to come alone."

He even nipped me on the elbow, Gunn-style.

"Watch out for Darby M'Graw," I said. "I understand his ghost is somewhere on this island."

Mike laughed delightedly.

Halfway across the lake I looked up from my rowing and saw Mike Ransome. He had climbed the schooner's main shrouds and he was waving his wig and beard at me.

All it did for me was make me feel older than I was.