The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

David Means Carnie

From Witness

The carnie rose slowly, a ragged display that no one seemed to notice until it was completely up; at least his daughter didn’t notice it until, passing on the way home from school (John picked her up most days when he was working the night shift buying and selling power for the local utility), she spotted the Ferris wheel and begged him to take her, to let her go. You’d have thought it was the first time she’d seen a Ferris wheel, the way she went on about it, he told his wife later. Carnivals were risky affairs, with their inept machinery, assembled in haste, and above all the hawkers and roadies, half-wits and assorted drunks, riffraff who had traveled to the ends of the earth and were worse for wear. He saw them come through town when he was growing up in Illinois: souls lost to the tedium of taking tickets and standing hours in the hot sun helping people on and off rides. Deep inside (it is safe to say) John had a healthy respect for them, a high regard for the silence which roadies were seemingly able to put up with. He loved the dusty, half-mown fields where they usually set up, the way late-afternoon light drove through the tangle of equipment.

But his respect wasn’t enough to put his fears aside.

Consider Ned Alger. Ned manned one of two machines, depending on what his partner, Zip Jones, felt like working; if Zip was running the merry-go-round, Ned would take his shift at the Romper ride, a wide spider of metal fatigue flinging kids in sloppy circles. None of the rides worked at full speed. If you were to look, you’d see Ned standing with an absent, empty look on his face watching the machine run; you’d see his nervous tic of crossing his arms over each other, up high across his chest, and heaving great bellows of air in and out, as if he’d just lifted himself from an exhausting swim. He suffered from the cigarette dangling off his lips. If you were to spend a day watching the two of them go from one machine to the other — silently changing places with an unspoken commitment to breaking up the tedium — you’d wonder what currents exactly kept Zip and Ned together. What bonds — sacred and otherwise — held them fast? Truth was, they were linked simply by their point of departure; both joined the carnie when it was passing through a small town in Ohio. Zip was hitching aimlessly from the west and needed some cash. Ned, born and raised in the town, saw a help-wanted flier in a laundromat and decided it was his chance to see the world.

More than that, though; the long-simmering nothingness of the fields beyond the edges of the towns in which they set up; bluegrass and timothy and planted hay and corn dried to a brittle song; the endless, almost needless horizon. They came from that, both men, two years of passing town to town.

The kid was begging and he agreed to take her. Simple as that. Later, he had to see it that way.

Zip was halfway through a bottle of gin. The workday was done and most of the roadies were lounging about the campers, smoking, mulling. A bit of corn had lodged between his front teeth, and he was working his tongue against them, taking pleasure in the effort, unwilling to use his fingers except as a last resort. He’d made a kind of testimony to himself this evening — working at the corn — about some things he had done a few towns back, in Pennsylvania; some things was how he thought of them, although if he wanted he could conjure up exact memories: break-ins of houses in the afternoons when most suburban folk were off earning their two-income keep, jimmying a door or kicking in a basement window and lowering himself into the damp, cobwebbed basement of some sod buster’s estate. In Ohio — two years ago — he copped a couple of off-the-cuff fondles in the bushes; he could remember the wet mouth beneath his palm as he pushed hard to smother the words trying to come out. Working at the corn in his own mouth he began to speak to himself — as he often did — in his own manner: a few tidbits of Biblical cadence and phraseology — thou arts, therefores — blended in with what the other guys called Zip-speak, or Zip-talk, because he had his own peculiar way of talking.

Don’t know likely what the bejezuse you’d be doing to be doing what you are is a good example. Or: Fuck that fuck I’m gonna fuck him until he wishes he were fucked.

Now he held his head back, way back, and let a little moan slide from his gullet. The gin was settled into the base of his gut, not enough to warm him but enough to make more necessary.

Yeah, there are myths about this kind of thing, and one wants to avoid stereotypes — plenty of good folk working the road even to this day, the very end of the century, anachronistic as all hell but there, smoking, trying to work out the general situation. So be it. This is his story. This is what happened in this particular incident.

It was the other one, Ned, who did the real wandering. Late at night when all was shut down and the dormant machines stretched their weary metal joints (you could hear them sigh in the wind), he might steal off for a walk, a journey, a venture, a poke-around-town, working his way stealthily through fence gaps and along the backsides of hedges, toeing his way through the night-blue shadows. His travels took him along the topologies of night: garbage cans resting silently on the curb, awaiting pickup; toys left outside to gather shawls of dew; stray dogs and cats slinking on their betrayed hind legs. He walked through expensive backyards with gas grills and swimming pools and elaborate alarm systems and sensors that he was able to evade, except for once, in Canton, Ohio, when a loud siren went off and lights came on and he was chased like a fugitive (as he told it later to Zip), like Tommy Lee Jones in the movie — caught and put in the tank overnight with nothing to prove he’d actually done anything; his radar was off, he thought, he wasn’t paying his usual attention — because if there was one thing he did do, and knew he did, it was to mind, to pay heed to what was before him; it was his Indian shit, he told Zip, not getting into the details — that he’d been raised by a squaw, his old lady, old-school Indian stuff, a real squatter who’d crammed his soul with so much junk he could hardly stand to feel it there; he was a tiptoer; he’d seen it growing up — men able to find ways into the darkness, to tread lightly.

One would like to know exactly what it was that filled Ned when he walked through yards and places unspoken for by the light; perhaps it was the way he felt growing up, in the little squat in Petoskey, a patch of land they’d claimed as their own by parking the old bullet-shaped Airstreams side by side. Behind them sat the Chief’s yellow-tarnished Winnebago. And behind that, almost hidden in the wind-blind of pines, stood the two teepees, trying to make it official.

You see, there are varieties of darkness. It’s as simple as that. All day pitching the ride and smoking and looking up into the hard, ungiving eye of the sun while kids got on the Romper and rested their little rumps to be flung up and down. The eyes of the parents glimmered with their love, big, wide love, because what else would compel them to buy three fifty-cent tickets for a measly five minutes of being spun around on old rusted equipment? Neon bulbs worn out to a damp glow; music, once supplied by a real, air-piped organ, now the same crappy tunes from the Sony boom box he propped in the center of the merry-go-round. Every thirty minutes he had to go turn the tape over.

There are fears so deep and dark that to admit them is to feel the universe slip out from under your own feet; or so John thought. If touched upon too long, these fears would flower out over your skin — the very skin of your life — like a huge wart. He’d seen photographs in a porn magazine of untreated growths flowering like mushrooms from the skin. Guys in the break room were passing it around, and he sat in stunned submission to what he was seeing: a giant, cauliflower growth in the crack of a man’s ass. To think that it could go like that untreated. He stared so hard and long at the photo that finally Rick, who had bought the magazine and felt it was his to stare at long and hard like that, took it back. The next Sunday he went to church and spoke to God in the hope of never having to face any such thing in his own life; he wasn’t asking for protection; his hope was that God would forget him, pass him over, allow him to walk through his life untouched.

When, in retrospect, he saw the guy on the merry-go-round stumble back to change the cassette; when he saw the guy then move back to hold onto the pole directly behind his daughter; when he saw the way the guy was looking at his daughter, and the droop of the faded Wranglers: when he thought back and retraced everything, he was sure he should have seen it: there were wide-open empty spots all over the ride. The first swellings of a skin growth, he should have spotted it.

One theory might be that carnivals provide a natural outlet for a darker need we all have to play ourselves against the forces of transience; a neatly polished road show would go against that need. Rejects, freaks, washaways run the rides. The state inspector — halfblind with foggy cataracts — comes in for a show of civilized examination; he holds his clipboard and checks the joints of the Ferris wheel, and maybe watches the men work lug nuts onto bolts. But he avoids inspecting the undersides of the men’s souls.

Strangely enough, the paths of John and Ned had crossed before, on a beach in northern Michigan, near the encampment in which Ned grew up. (No one was really sure how he got the name Ned, or even Alger, his mother going by Alger but also the Indian name of Walk Moon; and there was the man who was supposed to be standing in as his father, Jack-somebody, who came in at night with his belt already undone.) Two women sat on the beach in Petoskey State Park, at the cusp of Little Traverse Bay. It was an unusually cool midsummer day and the beach was almost empty — both women sat watching their sons play, far up, near the waterline. Of course John didn’t remember that day, amid countless other days going to the Midwest to visit his grandparents at their summer cottage, but he did remember the ragtag encampment of residual beings where Ned was reared, the warnings his grandfather had given him to stay away; a shaggy little creek wove through the myrtle along the side of the road there, loaded with broken gin bottles and potato chip bags, and through the weeds one could see the old trailers, men and women in lawn chairs drinking beer, and so on…

The idea of blind chance put a hole in John’s gut; he refused it outright as an available explanation. It just wouldn’t do. John made a vow that he would never admit in any way that the whole thing hinged on brutal good luck (from Ned’s vantage) and bad luck (from his vantage) and nothing else. The fact that his daughter had been at the carnival that day and taken a twirl (sixteen rotations) on Ned’s ride allowed him to make the connection between the two that led to a legal conviction; but that was all. Although when he tried to visualize it he came up with the image of a huge arc, a bolt of raw, blue charge going from his house to that ride. A bolt fired by fate, by forces begun by his own actions. After wandering around, Ned found himself beneath her window, hunched in the thickness of the hydrangeas, eyeing the partway-open window and getting his Exacto knife out to slice through the nylon screening with only the faintest of zips, the blade easing through the squares the way a very hot scoop curled back ice cream. Then with both hands spread out, he lay his palms on the underside of the window and lifted it slowly (the window grooves had been recently waxed to reduce friction, which caused brain-deadening lead dust), softly enough so the sound of it was actually nothing more or less than the usual movements of night: trees rasping each other in the gentle upheaval of breeze, or a raccoon scuffing the side of an overturned garbage can. He lifted himself acrobatically into the window — his footfalls on landing softened, he felt, or dreamed, by all of history, his imagined forefathers tiptoeing the wooded trails along the shore of Lake Michigan.

Jesus expelled the demons from the freaks and then sent the fuckers into a herd of swine and drove them headlong over a cliff, John read a year later, trying to find his way into some kind of answer: attending a Bible study at the local evangelical church; reading the passage and then saying fuck this and getting up and walking out to the back of the building where kiddie swings made movements in the wind; he heard the soft squeals of the pigs in the air as they made lopsided motions over the edge, the thuds as they hit the ground. They read somewhere else, too, that driving out the demons only leaves a large, vacant recess into which more evil slips.

You see to tell it as a story or even a series of actions would be to make sense of it and to lend it some kind of orderly function in the world; that’s why it is only referred to as the incident by the media — the girl’s name, of course, withheld to protect her future; and her muteness, her silence, around the event was part of that withholding. In the horrifying darkness Ned went in and did what he did, and it was the basics which held sway in the public mind: the entering of the dark room, the violation of the safe, almost sacred silence of night, the pink ruffle curtains and the canopy bed.

Zip sensed right away that Ned had gone and done it again, something mighty bad. Dawn was pink along the horizon. A brush of high ice clouds licked the sky. Both men hunched beneath blankets, unwilling to leave the herringbone, slip-proof surface of their beloved merry-go-round. They heard the tink, tink of metal adjusting to the cold and, when the wind rose, a rattling of the Ferris wheel guy wires. Might as well be any place on earth as being in this town, Zip said, softly. The talk was like that, soft, with a fibrous quality. Smell somethin’ bad coming in this air, Ned, he said. Off far in the trees, like a bit of lint in a comb, there was the sound of sirens — the rescue crews and cops, all the attendant caregivers coming to open the girl up with their interviews. He knew it would take them a while to pry out the story from her scared soul — if the truth were told, he had, for a small second, a flick of remorse for the other side of the world (as he thought about it): the dark brooding spirits that his grandmother used to mutter about through her leathery lips there is a darkness in the whiteness of that world that I shouldn’t bother with if I were you, boy. You’re a fucking Indian squat, nothing more, and don’t forget it. So he got his rucksack from the trailer, stuffed it as quickly as he could, gave Zip a kiss on the mouth, and went off to find the Interstate, where if he was lucky he might catch a hitch to someplace else. He’d change his name and identity, find a new way of showing himself to the world, and then hook back up with the carnie the way he had before, just shaving off his beard and getting his hair cut short in the back and then going right up to Nate and asking for work (Nathan knew damn well it was Ned with another name and face). The carnie was heading west, he knew, and would hit a few pathetic state fairs as sideshow backup and then a few Ohio town festivals before the tremendously boring hinterland towns of Indiana (that’s where he would finally reunite with his beloved Zip).

Working backwards, John went over the events of that day and made diagrams, flow charts resembling those intricate schematics of computer innards. He examined the whole day from the very start when he woke her up, nudged her softly, and gave her breakfast of frozen waffles; one thing leading to another which led eventually to that ride (because Ned had been captured, finally, in Albany, after an APB went out on him over fax machines. Irrefutable proof in the form of hair samples found on her sheets and in Ned’s trailer linked the crime to the carnie, as had been John’s first gut feeling). A crew of jaded cops and medics and social workers hung around long after the event to give some assurance to the family that they were doing all they could in every way. It was no use. Behind him John felt the web of events untangled, like an old used-up fishing net washed ashore; it was all there, in the past, gone, lost. Nothing would ever change it. And yet he felt it might be changed. He pondered it for a year, for another year, for the rest of his life. He lived simply outside the world of rational thought. He kept his toes in the magic. He pondered the electric spark and went on with his life; he even, a few years later, took her to another carnie as a way of going through the pain (as was suggested by the social workers).

The carnie went on to Indiana, to Laketon, where it set up for another firemen’s fundraiser. With rheumy eyes, the crew got the rides up during an afternoon that was as brown and hard as peanut brittle, heaving parts from the flatbed, working slowly with a bored somnolence, hammering with wooden mallets, making what used to be music to a kid’s ear but now went unheard mostly behind car windows. The edge of the town simmered with insects. To the left of the lot there was nothing but a flat field that married the horizon; to the right of them was the last house in town, in which an old man lived alone. Staring at it, Zip could tell an old fart lived there, the weathered clapboards and the rusting tools on the wooden bench out back. Indeed, the old man came out, unfolded a lawn chair, took a pipe and wedged it into his teeth. He watched them for hours on end with a blank expression. There, Zip thought. I was right.

An old codger working his way through the last of his days. His visions were coming more often since Ned had been caught, and his Zip-speak was even stranger, more fanatic, mostly incomprehensible babble to the other roadies, who avoided him completely if they could. You can’t Christ-all this fucking nothingness, he said. He’s going to hell-fuck fore I get to fuck him myself Some even admitted they were scared of the guy. For a moment, resting his back against a canopy support beam of the merry-go-round, which he was assembling himself (there were a few bolts missing), he had one of his visions again — the old man with a blade between his eyes, lodged deep, thunking the way you’d meet a piece of soft wood. In honor of Ned, I just might make this one vision come to pass, he said aloud; then he shook the thought off the way you’d shake away an ice cream headache. The carnie was going up piecemeal. A real half-assed job. It would be inspected by a bribed official of the state, who just happened to be passing through the town to visit his great aunt. It would have the usually dusty light bulbs strung from feeble infrastructure, and the people would arrive sensing the dubiousness of the whole affair, as if it were nothing but a holding pen for the castoffs of the universe. That’s what they liked about it, essentially. It gave them a sense of being ripped off, betrayed, denied. They hated it but loved it. Hoards came through the gate on opening night. Stayed a few hours. Left glad to leave. It was Zip who got to stay alone with his bottle, sprawled back on the cold plate steel, watching the old man’s house shrouded in darkness, stark against the dark horizon like a cardboard prop. It wasn’t real enough. It stood as a testament of the unreality of the world.