Moonchasers and Other Stories

The Wind From Midnight

Even with the windows open, the Greyhound bus was hot inside as it roared through the rural California night. Plump ladies in sweat-soaked summer dresses furiously worked paper fans that bore the names of funeral parlors.

Plump men in sleeveless T-shirts sat talking of disappointing baseball scores (“Them goddamn Red Sox just don’t have it this year; nossir they don’t”) and the Republican convention that had just nominated Dwight Eisenhower. Most of the men aboard liked Ike and liked him quite a bit. These men smoked Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields and Fatimas and more than a few of them snuck quick silver flasks from their hip pockets.

In the middle of the bus was a slender, pretty woman who inexplicably burst into tears every twenty miles or so. It was assumed by all who watched her that she was having man trouble of some sort. A woman this pretty wouldn’t carry on so otherwise. She’d been deserted and was heading home to Mama was the consensus aboard the Greyhound.

Traveling with the pretty woman was a sweet-faced little girl who was obviously the daughter. She was maybe five or six and wore a faded white dress that reminded some of First Communion, and patent-leather shoes that reminded others of Shirley Temple. For the most part she was well-behaved, the little girl, stroking and petting her mama when she cried, and sitting prim and obedient when Mama was just looking sadly out the window.

But fifty miles ago the little girl had gone back to use the restroom — she’d had a big nickel Pepsi and it had gone right through her — and there she’d seen the tiny woman sitting all by herself in one corner of the vast backseat.

All the little girl could think of — and this was what she whispered to her mama later — was a doll that had come to life.

Before the bus pulled into the ocean-side town for a rest stop, the little girl found exactly four excuses to run back there and get another good peek at the tiny woman.

She just couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

A lot of passengers hurried to get off the bus so they could stand around the front of the depot and get a good look at her. In the rolling darkness of the Greyhound, they hadn’t really gotten much of a glimpse and they were just naturally curious, this kind of people.

She didn’t disappoint them.

She was just as tiny as she’d seemed and in her plain white blouse and her navy linen skirt and her dark seamed hose and her cute little pumps with the two-inch heels; she looked like a five-year-old who was all dressed up in her mama’s clothes.

Back on the bus they’d argued in whispers whether she was a dwarf or a midget. There was some scientific difference between the two but damned if anybody could remember exactly what that was.

From inside the depot came smells of hamburgers and onions and french fries and cigar smoke, all stale on the still summer air. Also from inside came the sounds of Miss Kay Starr singing “The Wheel of Fortune.” Skinny white cowboys clung like moths to the lights of the depot entrance as did old black men the color of soot and snappy young sailors in their dress whites and hayseed grins.

This was the scene the tiny woman confronted. And in moments she was gone from it.

The cabbie knew where the carnival was, of course. There would be only one in a burg like this.

He drove his rattling ’47 Plymouth out to the pier where the midway and all the rides looked like the toys of a baby giant.

He drove her right up to the entrance and said, “That’ll be eighty-five cents, Miss.”

She opened her purse and sank a tiny hand into its deep waiting darkness.

She gave him a dollar’s worth of quarters and said, “That’s for you.”

“Why, thank you.”

She opened the door. The dome light came on. He noticed for the first time that she was nice-looking. Not gorgeous or anything like that. But nice-looking. Silken dark hair in a pageboy. Blue eyes that would have been beautiful if they weren’t tainted with sorrow. And a full mouth so erotic it made him uncomfortable. Why if a normal-sized man was to try anything with a tiny woman like this—

He put the thought from his mind.

As she started to leave the cab, he just blurted it out. “I suppose you know what happened here a month ago. About the — little guy, I mean.”

She just looked at him.

“He stole a gun from one of the carnies here and raced back to his hotel room and killed himself.” The cabbie figured that the tiny woman would want to know about it, her being just like the little guy and all. To show he was friendly, the cabbie always told colored people stories about colored people in just the same way.

The cabbie’s head was turned in profile, waiting for the woman to respond.

But the only sound, faint among the crack of air rifles and the roar of the rollercoaster and the high piping pitch of the calliope, was the cab door being quietly closed.

A lady with a beard, a man with a vagina. A chance to get your fortune told by a gypsy woman with a knife scar on her left cheek. A sobbing little blond boy looking frantically for his lost mother. A man just off the midway slapping hard a woman he called a fucking whore bitch. An old man in a straw hat gaping fixedly at a chunky stripper the barker kept pointing to with a long wooden cane.

Linnette saw all these things and realized why her brother had always liked carnivals. She liked them for the same reason. Because in all the spectacle — beautiful and ugly, happy and sad alike — tiny people tended to get overlooked. There was so much to see and do and feel and desire that normal people barely gave tiny people a glance.

And that’s why, for many of his thirty-one years, her brother had been drawn to midways.

He told her about this one, of course, many times. How he came here after a long day at the typewriter. How he liked to sit on a bench up near the shooting gallery and watch the women go by and try and imagine what they’d be like if he had had the chance to meet them. He was such a romantic, her brother, in his heart a matinee idol worthy of Valentino and Gable.

She’d learned all this from his infrequent phone calls. He always called at dinner time on Sunday evening because of the rates and he always talked nine minutes exactly. He always asked her how things were going at the library where she worked and she always asked him if he was ever going to write that important novel she knew he had in him.

They were brother and sister, and more, of course, which was why, when he’d put that gun to his head there in the dim little coffin of a room where he lived and wrote—

She tried not to think of these things now.

She worked her way through the crowd, moving slowly toward the steady cracking sounds of the shooting gallery. A Mr. Kelly was who she was looking for.

A woman given to worry and anxiety, she kept checking the new white number ten envelope in her purse. One hundred dollars in crisp green currency. Certainly that should be enough for Mr. Kelly.

Aimee was taking a cigarette break when she happened to see Linnette. She’d spent the last month trying to forget about the dwarf and the part Ralph Banghart, the man who ran the Mirror Maze, had played in the death of the dwarf.

And the part Aimee had played, too.

Maybe if she’d never gotten involved, never tried to help the poor little guy—

Aimee lit her next Cavalier with the dying ember of her previous Cavalier.

Standing next to the tent she worked, Aimee reached down to retrieve the Coke she’d set in the grass.

And just as she bent over, she felt big male hands slip over her slender hips. “Booo!”

She jerked away from him immediately. She saw him now as this diseased person. Whatever ugliness he had inside him, she didn’t want to catch.

“I told you, Ralph, I don’t ever want you touching me again.”

“Aw, babe, I just—”

She slapped him. And hard enough that his head jerked back and a grunt of pain sounded in his throat.

“Hey—”

“You still don’t give a damn that little guy killed himself, do you?”

Ralph rubbed his sore cheek. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Sure you did. You’re just not man enough to admit it. If you hadn’t played that practical joke on him—”

“If the little bastard couldn’t take a joke—”

She raised her hand to slap him again. Grinning, he started to duck away.

She spit at him. This, he didn’t have time to duck away from. She got him right on the nose.

“I don’t want you to come anywhere goddamn near me, do you understand?” Aimee said, knowing she was shrieking and not caring.

Ralph looked around, embarrassed now that people were starting to watch, shook his head and muttered some curses, and left, daubing off the spittle with his white soiled handkerchief.

Aimee tossed her cigarette into the summer dry grass and started looking around for the dwarf woman again.

She just had this sense that the woman had somehow known the little guy who’d killed himself.

Aimee just had to find her and talk to her. Just had to.

She started searching.

Mr. Kelly turned out to be a big man with an anchor tattoo on his right forearm and beads of silver sweat standing in rows on his pink bald pate.

At the moment he was showing a woman with huge breasts how to operate an air rifle. Mr. Kelly kept nudging her accidentally-on-purpose with his elbow. If the woman minded, she didn’t complain. But then the woman’s boyfriend came back from somewhere and he looked to be about the same size but younger and trimmer than Mr. Kelly so Mr. Kelly withdrew his elbow and let the boyfriend take over the shooting lessons.

Then Mr. Kelly turned to Linnette. “What can I do for ya, small fry?”

Linnette always told herself that insults didn’t matter. Sticks and stones and all that. And most of the time they didn’t. But every once in a while, as right now for instance, they pierced the heart like a fatal sliver of glass.

“My name is Linnette Dobbins.”

“So? My name is Frank Kelly.”

“A month or so ago my brother stole a gun from you and—”

Smiles made most people look pleasant. But Mr. Kelly’s smile only served to make him look knowing and dirty. “Oh, the dwarf.” He looked her up and down. “Sure. I should’ve figured that out for myself.”

“The police informed me that they’ve given you the gun back.”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“I’d like to buy it from you.”

“Buy it from me? What the hell’re you talkin’ about, small fry?”

Mr. Kelly was just about to go on when a new pair of lovers bellied up to the gallery counter and waited for instructions.

Without excusing himself, Mr. Kelly went over to the lovers, picked up an air rifle and started demonstrating how to win the gal here a nice little teddy bear.

“A dwarf, you say?”

Aimee nodded.

“Jeeze, Aimee, I think I’d remember if I’d seen a dwarf woman wanderin’ around the midway.”

“Thanks, Hank.”

Hank then got kind of flustered and said, “You think we’re ever gonna go to a movie sometime Aimee, like I asked you that time?”

She touched his shoulder tenderly and gave him a sweet quick smile. “I’m sure thinking about it, Hank. I really am.” Hank was such a nice guy. She just wished he were her type.

And then she was off again, moving frantically around the midway, asking various carnies if they’d seen a woman who was a dwarf.

Hank’s was the tenth booth she’d stopped at.

Nobody had seen the woman. Nobody.

“So why would you want the gun your brother killed himself with, small fry?”

From her purse, Linnette took the plain white number ten envelope and handed it up to Mr. Kelly.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Look inside.”

He opened the envelope flap and peeked in. He ran a pudgy finger through the bills. He whistled. “Hundred bucks.”

“Right.”

“For a beat-up old service revolver. Hell, small fry, you don’t know much about guns. You could buy a gun like that in a pawn shop for five bucks.”

“The money’s all yours.”

“Just for this one gun?”

“That’s right, Mr. Kelly. Just for this one gun.”

He whistled again. The money had made him friendlier. This time his smile lacked malevolence. “Boy, small fry, I almost hate to take your money.”

“But you will?”

He gave her a big cornball grin now and she saw in it the fact that he was just as much a hayseed as the rubes he bilked every night. The difference was, he didn’t know he was a hayseed.

“You damn bet ya I will,” he said, and trotted to the back of the tent to get the gun.

“I’ll need some bullets for it, too,” Linnette called after him.

He turned around and looked at her. “Bullets? What for?”

“Given the price I’m paying, Mr. Kelly, I’d say that was my business.”

He looked at her for a long time and then his cornball grin opened his face up again. “Well, small fry, I guess I can’t argue with you on that one now, can I? Bullets it is.”

The carnival employed a security man named Bulicek. It was said that he was a former cop who’d gotten caught running a penny ante protection racket on his beat and had been summarily discharged. Here, he always smelled of whiskey and Sen-Sen to cut the stink of the whiskey. He strutted around in his blue uniform with big half-moons of sweat under each arm and a creaking leather holster riding around his considerable girth. His best friend in the curly was Kelly at the shooting gallery, which figured.

Aimee avoided Bulicek because he always managed to put his hands on her in some way whenever they talked. But now she had no choice.

She’d visited seven more carnies since Hank and nobody had seen a woman dwarf.

Bulicek was just coming out of the big whitewashed building that was half men’s and half women’s.

He smiled when he saw her. She could feel his paws on her already.

“I’m looking for somebody,” she said.

“So am I. And I found her.” Bulicek knew every bad movie line in the world.

“A woman who’s a dwarf. She’s somewhere on the midway. Have you seen her?”

Bulicek shrugged. “What do I get if I tell ya?”

“You get the privilege of doing your job.” She tried to keep the anger from her voice. She needed his cooperation.

“And nothing else?” His eyes found a nice place on her body to settle momentarily.

“Nothing else.”

He raised his eyes and shook his head and took out a package of cigarettes.

Some teenagers with ducks ass haircuts and black leather jackets — even in this kind of heat for crissakes — wandered by and Bulicek, he-man that he was, gave them the bad eye.

When he turned back to Aimee, she was shocked by his sudden anger. “You think you could talk to me one time, Miss High and Mighty, without making me feel I’m a piece of dog shit?”

“You think you could talk to me one time without copping a cheap feel?”

He surprised her by saying, “I shouldn’t do that, Aimee, and I’m sorry. You wanna try and get along?”

She laughed from embarrassment. “God, you’re really serious aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am.” He put out a hand. “You wanna be friends, Aimee?”

This time the laugh was pure pleasure. “Sure, Bulicek. I’d like to be friends. I really would. You show me some respect and I’ll show you some, too.”

They shook hands.

“Now, about the dwarf you was askin’ about?”

“Yeah? You saw her?” Aimee couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice.

Bulicek pointed down the midway. “Seen her ’bout fifteen minutes ago at Kelly’s.”

Aimee thanked him and started running.

Linnette had a different taxi driver this time.

This guy was heavy and Mexican. The radio played low, Mexican songs from a station across the border. The guy sure wore a lot of aftershave.

Linnette sat with the gun inside her purse and her purse on her lap.

She looked out the window at the passing streets. Easy to imagine her brother walking across these streets, always the focus of the curious stare and the cold quick smirk. Maybe it was harder for men, she thought. They were expected to be big and strong and—

She opened her purse. The sound was loud in the taxi. She saw the driver’s eyes flick up to his rearview and study her. Then his eyes flicked away.

She rode the rest of the way with her hand inside her purse, gripping the gun.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine her brother’s hand on the handle, on the trigger.

She hoped that there was a God somewhere and that all of this made sense somehow, that some people should be born of normal height and others, freaks, be born with no arms or legs or eyes.

Or be born dwarfs.

“Here you are, lady.”

He pulled over to the curb and told her the fare.

Once again, she found her money swiftly and paid him off.

He reached over and opened the door for her, studying her all the time. Did it ever occur to him — fat and Mexican and not very well educated — that he looked just as strange to her as she did to him? But no, he wouldn’t be the kind of man who’d have an insight like that.

She got out of the cab and he drove away.

Even in a bleak little town like this one, the Ganges Arms was grim. Fireproof was much larger than Ganges on the neon sign outside, and the drunk throwing up over by the curb told her more than she wanted to know about the type of man who lived up there.

She couldn’t imagine how her brother had managed to survive here six years.

She went inside. The lobby was small and filled with ancient couches that dust rose from like shabby ghosts. A long-dead potted plant filled one corner while a cigarette vending machine filled the other. In the back somewhere a toilet flushed with the roar of an avalanche. A black-and-white TV screen flickered with images of Milton Berle in a dress.

A big woman in a faded housedress that revealed fleshy arms and some kind of terrible rash on her elbows was behind the desk. The woman had a beauty mark that was huge and hairy, like a little animal clinging to her cheek.

She grinned when she saw Linnette.

“You don’t have to tell me, sweetie.”

“Tell you?”

“Sure. Who you are.”

“You know who I am?”

“Sure. You’re the little guy’s sister. He talked about you all the time.”

She leaned over the counter, coughing a cigarette hack that sounded sickeningly phlegmy, and said, “Linnette, right?”

“Right.”

The woman grimaced. “Sorry about the little guy.”

“Thank you.”

“I was the one who found him. He wasn’t pretty, believe me.”

“Oh.”

“And I was the first one who read the note.” She shook her head again and put a cigarette in her mouth. “He was pretty gimped up inside, poor little guy.”

“Yes; yes he was.”

The woman stared at her, not as if Linnette were a freak, but rather curious about why she might be here.

“I was just traveling through,” Linnette said quietly. “I thought I might stay here tonight.” She hesitated. “Sleep in my brother’s room, perhaps.”

Now the woman really stared at her. “You sure, hon?”

“Sure?”

“About wantin’ to take his room and all? Frankly, it’d give me the creeps.”

Linnette opened her purse, reached in for her bills. “I’d just like to see where he lived and worked is all. I’m sure it will be a nice experience.”

The woman shrugged beefy shoulders. “You’re the boss, hon. You’re the boss.”

Kelly was arguing with a drunk who claimed that the shooting gallery was rigged. The drunk had been bragging to his girl about what a marksman he’d become in Korea and wanted to do a little showing off. All he’d managed to do was humiliate himself.

Aimee waited as patiently as she could for a few minutes and then she interrupted the drunk — whose girlfriend was now trying to tug him away from making any more of a scene — and said, “Kelly, I’m looking for a woman who’s a dwarf. Bulicek said he saw her here.”

The drunk turned and looked at Aimee as if she’d just said she’d seen a Martian.

Aimee’s remark unsettled the drunk enough that his girlfriend was now able to draw him away, and get themselves lost on the midway.

“Yeah. She was here. So what?”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah.”

“About what?”

“What the hell’s your interest, Aimee?”

“Kelly, I don’t have time to explain. Just please help me, all right?”

Kelly sighed. “Okay, kid, what do you want?”

“What’d she say to you?”

“She said she wanted to buy a gun.”

“A gun? What kind of gun?”

“The gun her brother stole from me.”

“My God.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t you see?”

“See what, kid? Calm down.”

“If she wanted to buy the gun her brother stole from you then maybe she plans to use it on herself just the way her brother did.”

Kelly said, “Shit. You know, I never thought of that.”

“So you gave her the gun?”

Kelly seemed a little embarrassed now. “Yeah. Gave it to her for a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred? But Kelly that isn’t worth more than—”

“That’s what she offered me for it. So that’s what I took, kid. I never said I was no saint.”

“Where did she go?”

“Hell, how would I know?”

“God, Kelly, didn’t you notice the direction she was going?”

He shrugged. “Down near the entrance, I guess.” He looked chastened that he hadn’t paid attention.

“Thanks, Kelly. I appreciate it.”

And before he could say another word, she was gone, running fast toward the front of the midway.

There was a card table sitting next to the room’s only window. It had the uncertain legs of a young colt. He’d put his portable typewriter on it — the one she’d bought him for his birthday ten years ago — and worked long into the night.

The room had a bureau with somebody’s initials knifed into the top, a mirror mottled with age, wallpaper stained with moisture, a double bed with a paint-chipped metal headboard, and linoleum so old it was worn to wood in patches.

She tried not to think of all the sad lives that had been lived out here. Men without women; men without hope.

She made sure the door was locked behind her and then came into the room.

She could feel him here, now. She had always believed in ghosts — were ghosts any more unlikely than men and women who only grew to be three-and-a-half feet tall? — and so she spoke out loud to him for the first time since being told of his suicide.

“I hope you know how much I love you, brother,” she said, moving across the small, box-like room to the card table, running her fingers across the small indentations the Smith-Corona had made on the surface.

She decided against turning the overhead light on.

The on-and-off red of the neon was good enough.

“I miss you, brother. I hope you know that, too.”

She heard the clack of a ghostly typewriter; saw her brother’s sweet round face smiling up at her after he’d finished a particularly good sentence; listened to the soft sad laughter that only she’d been able to elicit from him.

“I wish you would have called me, brother. I wish you would have told me what you had in mind. You know why?”

She said nothing for a time.

Distant ragged traffic sounds from the highway; the even fainter music of the midway further away in the darkness.

“Because I would have joined you, brother. I would have joined you.”

She set her purse on the card table. She unclasped the leather halves and then reached in.

The gun waited there.

She brought out the gun with the reverence of a priest bringing forth something that has been consecrated to God.

She brought out the gun and held it for a time, in silhouette, against the window with the flashing red neon.

And then, slowly, inevitably, she brought the gun to her temple.

And eased the hammer back.

At the entrance, Aimee asked fourteen people if they’d seen the woman. None had. But the fifteenth did, and pointed to a rusted beast of a taxi cab just now pulling in.

Aimee ran to the cab and pushed her head in the front window before the driver even stopped completely.

“The dwarf woman. Where did you take her?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“The woman, where did you take her?” Aimee knew she was screaming. She didn’t care.

“Goddamn, lady. You’re fucking nuts.” But despite his tough words, the cab driver saw that she was going to stay here until she had her answer. He said, “I took her to the Ganges Arms. Why the hell’re you so interested, anyway?”

“Then take me there, too,” Aimee said, flinging open the back door and diving in. “Take me there, too!”

She went over and sat on the bed.

That would make it easier for everybody. The mess would be confined to the mattress. A mattress you could just throw out.

She lay back on the bed.

Her shoes fell off, one at a time, making sharp noises as they struck the floor.

Two-inch heels, she thought. How pathetic of me. Wanting so desperately to be like other people.

She closed her eyes and let the sorrow come over her. Sorrow for her brother and herself; sorrow for their lives.

She saw him again at his typewriter; heard keys striking the eternal silence.

“I wish you would have told me, brother. I wish you would have. It would have been easier for you. We could have comforted each other.”

She raised the hand carrying the gun, brought the gun to her temple once again.

The hammer was still back.

“Can’t you go any faster?”

“Maybe you think this is an Indy race car or somethin’, huh, lady?”

“God, please; please just go as fast as you can.”

“Jes-uz,” the cab driver said. “Jes-uz.”

She said a prayer, nothing formal, just words that said she hoped there was a God and that he or she or it or whatever form it took would understand why she was doing this and how much she longed to be with her brother again and that both God and her brother would receive her with open arms.

She tightened her finger on the trigger and then—

— the knock came.

“Hon?”

Oh, my Lord.

“Hon, you awake in there?”

Finding her voice. Clearing her throat. “Yes?”

“Brought you some Kool-Aid. That’s what I drink all summer. Raspberry Kool-Aid. Quenches my thirst a lot better than regular pop, you know? Anyway, I brought you a glass. You wanna come get it?”

Did she have any choice?

Linnette lay the gun down on the bed and pulled the purse over the gun.

She got up and straightened her skirt and went to the door.

A long angle of dirty yellow light fell across her from the hallway.

The woman was a lot heavier than she’d looked downstairs. Linnette liked her.

The woman bore a large glass of Kool-Aid in her right hand and a cigarette in her left. She kept flicking her ashes on the hallway floor.

“You like raspberry?”

“Thank you very much.”

“Sometimes I like cherry but tonight I’m just in a kind of raspberry mood. You know?”

“I really appreciate this.”

The woman nodded to the stairs. “You get lonely, you can always come down and keep me company.”

“I think I’ll try and get some sleep first but if I don’t doze off, I’ll probably be down.”

The woman looked past Linnette into the room. “You got everything you need?”

“I’m fine.”

“If your brother’s room starts to bother you, just let me know. You can always change rooms for no extra cost.”

“Thanks.”

The woman smiled. “Enjoy the Kool-Aid.” She checked the man’s wristwatch she wore on her thick wrist. “Hey, time for Blackie.”

“Blackie?”

“Boston Blackie. You ever watch him?”

“I guess not.”

“Great show; really, great show.”

“Well, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And remember about keeping me company.”

“Oh, I will. I promise.”

“Well, good night.”

“Good night,” Linnette said, and then quietly closed the door.

Ten minutes later, the cabbie pulled up in front of the hotel.

As always, the street reminded Aimee of a painting by Thomas Hart Benton she’d once seen in a Chicago gallery, a street where even the street lamps looked twisted and grotesque.

Aimee flung a five-dollar bill in the front seat and said, “I appreciate you speeding.”

The cabbie picked up the five, examined it as if he suspected it might be counterfeit, and then said, “Good luck with whatever your problem is, lady.”

Aimee was out of the cab, hurrying into the lobby.

She went right to the desk and to the heavyset clerk who was leaning on her elbows and watching Kent Taylor as “Boston Blackie.”

The woman sighed bitterly, as if she’d just been forced to give up her firstborn, and said, “Help you?”

“I’m looking for a woman who just came in here.”

“What kind of woman?”

“A dwarf.”

The desk clerk looked Aimee over more carefully. “What about her?”

“It’s important that I talk to her right away.”

“Why?”

“Because... because she’s a friend of mine and I think she’s going to do something very foolish.”

“Like what?”

“For God’s sake,” Aimee said. “I know she’s here. Tell me what room’s she in before it’s too late.”

The desk clerk was just about to respond when the gunshot sounded on the floor above.

Aimee had never heard anything so loud in her life.

The echo seemed to go on for hours.

“What room is she in?” Aimee screamed.

“208!” the woman said.

Aimee reached the staircase in moments, and started running up the steps two at a time.

An old man in boxer shorts and a sunken, hairy chest stood in the hallway in front of 208 looking sleepy and scared.

“What the Sam hell’s going on?”

Aimee said nothing, just pushed past him to the door. She turned the knob. Locked.

Aimee heard the desk clerk lumbering up the stairs behind her.

Aimee turned and ran toward the steps again. She pushed out her hand and laid the palm up and open.

“The key. Hurry.”

The desk clerk, her entire body heaving from her exertion, dropped the key in Aimee’s hand. The desk clerk tried to say something but she had no wind.

Aimee ran back to 208, inserted the key. Pushed the door open.

The first thing was the darkness; the second, the acrid odor of gunpowder. The third was the hellish neon red that shone through the dirty sheer curtains.

Aimee was afraid of what she was going to see.

Could she really handle seeing somebody who’d shot herself at point-blank range?

Aimee took two steps over the threshold.

And then heard the noise.

At first, she wasn’t sure what it was. Only after she took a few more steps into the dark tiny room did she recognize what she was hearing.

A woman lying face down in the bed, the sound of her sobbing muffled into the mattress.

Just now the desk clerk came panting into the yellow frame of the door and said, “She dead?”

“No,” Aimee said quietly to the woman. “No, she’s not dead.”

And then Aimee silently closed the door behind her and went to sit with Linnette on the bed.

Aimee had been with carnivals since she was fourteen years old, when she’d run off from a Kentucky farm and from a pa who saw nothing wrong with doing with her what he’d done with her other two sisters. She was now twenty-eight. In the intervening years she’d wondered many times what it would be like to have a child of her own and tonight she thought she was finding out, at least in a curious sort of way.

It was not respectful, she was sure, to think of Linnette as a child just because Linnette was so little, but as Aimee sat there for three and a half hours in the dark, breathless from holding Linnette in her lap and rocking her as she would an infant, the thought was inevitable. And then the wind from midnight came, and things cooled off at least a little bit.

Aimee didn’t say much, really — what could she say? — she just hugged Linnette and let her cry and let her talk and let her cry some more and it was so sad that Aimee herself started crying sometimes, thinking of how cruel people could be to anybody who was different in any way, and thinking of that sonofabitch Ralph Banghart spying on the little guy in the house of mirrors, and thinking of how terrified the little guy had been when he fell prey to Ralph’s practical joke. Life was just so sad sometimes when you saw what happened to people, and usually to innocent people at that, people that life had been cruel enough to already.

So that’s why she mostly listened, Aimee, because when something was as overwhelming as the little guy’s life had been—

Sometimes the desk clerk made the long and taxing trip up the stairs and knocked with a single knuckle and said, “You okay in there, hon?”

And Aimee would say, “We’re fine, we’re fine,” not knowing exactly who “you” meant.

And then the desk clerk would go away and Aimee would start rocking Linnette again and listening to her and wanting to tell Linnette that she felt terrible about the little guy’s death.

And then it occurred to Aimee that maybe by sitting here like this and listening to Linnette and rocking her, maybe she was in some way making up for playing a small part in the little guy’s suicide.

“Sometimes I just get so scared,” Linnette said just as dawn was breaking coral-colored across the sky.

And Aimee knew just what Linnette was talking about because Aimee got scared like that, too, sometimes.

The Greyhound arrived twenty-three minutes late that afternoon.

Aimee and Linnette stood in the depot entrance with a group of other people. There was a farm girl who kept saying how excited she was to be going to Fresno and a marine who kept saying it was going to be good to see Iowa again and an old woman who kept saying she hoped they kept the windows closed because even on a ninety-two-degree day like this one she’d get a chill.

“You ever get up to Sacramento?” Linnette asked.

“Sometimes.”

“You could always call me at the library and we could have lunch.”

“That sounds like fun, Linnette. It really does.”

Linnette took Aimee’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “You really helped me last night. I’ll never forget it, Aimee. I really won’t.”

Just then the bus pulled in with a whoosh of air brakes and a puff of black diesel smoke.

In one of the front windows a five-year-old boy was looking out and when he saw Linnette, he started jumping up and down and pointing, and then a couple of moments later another five-year-old face appeared in the same window and now there were two boys looking and pointing and laughing at Linnette.

Maybe the worst part of it all, Aimee thought, was that they didn’t even really mean to be cruel.

And then the bus door was flung open and a Greyhound driver looking dapper in a newly starched uniform stepped down and helped several old ladies off the bus.

“I wish he could have known you, Aimee,” Linnette said. “He sure would have liked you. He sure would’ve.”

And then, for once, it was Aimee who started the crying and she wasn’t even sure why. It just seemed right somehow, she thought, as she helped the little woman take the first big step up into the bus.

A minute later, Linnette was sitting in the middle of the bus, next to a window seat. Her eyes barely reached the window ledge.

Behind Aimee, the door burst open and the two five-year-olds came running out of the depot, carrying cups of Pepsi.

They looked up and saw Linnette in the window. They started pointing and giggling immediately.

Aimee grabbed the closest one by the ear, giving it enough of a twist to inflict some real pain.

“That’s one fine lady aboard that bus there, you hear me? And you treat her like a fine lady, too, or you’re going to get your butts spanked! Do you understand me?” Aimee said.

Then she let go of the boy’s ear.

“You understand me?” she repeated.

The boys looked at each other and then back to Aimee. They seemed scared of her, which was what she wanted them to be.

“Yes, ma’am,” both boys said in unison. “We understand.”

“Good. Now you get up there on that bus and behave yourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the boys said again, and climbed aboard the bus, not looking back at her even once.

Aimee waited till the Greyhound pulled out with a roar of engine and a poof of sooty smoke.

She waved at Linnette and Linnette waved back. “Good-bye,” Aimee said, and was afraid she was going to start crying.

When the bus was gone, Aimee walked over to the taxi stand. A young man who looked like a child was driving.

Aimee told him to take her to the carnival and then she settled back in the seat and looked out the window.

After a time, it began to rain, a hot summer rain, and the rest of the day and all the next long night, Aimee tried to keep herself from thinking about certain things. She tried so very hard.