riders. Ben was excited about the midway, and the rides lit up with pulsing
multicolored bulbs. I looked forward to the haunted house, which you rode
through on rickety railcars while unseen things brushed your face and howled
at you in the dark. Davy Ray’s excitement concerned the freak show. I never
saw anybody who got so worked up about freaks as he did. They gave me the
creeps and I could hardly look at them, but Davy Ray was a true connoisseur of
freakdom. If it had three arms, a pinhead, crocodile-scaled skin, or sweated
blood, he went into giddy fits of delight.
So it happened that on Thursday night the park area near the baseball
field where we’d had our Fourth of July barbecue was empty when the last
Zephyr light went off. On Friday morning, kids on their way to school
witnessed the transformation a few hours could bring. The Brandywine Carnival
appeared like an island in a sea of sawdust. Trucks were chugging around, men
were hoisting up tents, the frameworks of rides were being pieced together
like dinosaur bones, and the booths were going up where food would be sold and
Kewpie dolls not worth a quarter would be won for two dollars’ worth of
horseshoes.
Before school, my buddies and I took a spin around the park on our bikes.
Other kids were doing the same thing, circling like moths in expectation of a
light bulb. “There’s the haunted house!” I said, pointing toward the bat wings
of a gothic mansion being hinged together. Ben said, “Gonna be a Ferris wheel
this year, looks like!” Johnny’s gaze was on a trailer with horses and Indians
painted on its side. Davy Ray hollered, “Looka there! Hoo boy!” We saw what he
was so excited about: a big, garishly painted canvas with a wrinkled face at
its center and in the center of the wrinkled face a single horrible eyeball.
FREAKS OF NATURE! the words on the canvas said. IT COULD’VE BEEN YOU!
In truth, it was not a large carnival. It was short of medium-sized, too.
Its tents were patched, its trailers rust-streaked, its trucks and workers
equally tired. It was the end of the carnival season for them, and our area
was almost its last stop. But we never thought that we were getting the
leftover crop of caramel apples, that the Indian ponies and trick riders went
through their routines with an eye on the clock, that the rides clattered in
need of oiling and the barkers were surly not to add flavor but because they
were damned bushed. We just saw a carnival out there, aglow and beckoning.
That’s what we saw.
“Looks like a good one this year!” Ben said as we started to turn back
for school.
“Yeah, it sure—”
And then a horn blasted behind me and Rocket zoomed out of the way as a
Mack truck passed us. It turned onto the sawdust, its heavy tires crunching
down. The truck was a hodgepodge of different-colored parts, and it was
hauling a wide trailer with no windows. We could hear the suspension groan. On
the trailer’s sides, an amateurish hand had painted crude green jungle fronds
and foliage. Across the jungle scene was scrawled, in thick red letters that
had been allowed to drip like rivulets of blood: FROM THE LOST WORLD.
It rumbled away, toward the maze of other trucks and trailers. But in its
wake I caught a smell. Not just exhaust, though of that there was plenty.
Something else. Something… lizardy.
“Whew!” Davy Ray wrinkled his nose. “Ben let one!”
“I did not!”
“Silent but deadly!” Davy Ray whooped.
“You did it yourself, then! Not me!”
“I smell it,” Johnny said calmly. Davy Ray and Ben shut up. We had
learned to listen when Johnny spoke. “Came from that trailer,” he said.
We watched the Mack truck and trailer turn between two tents and go out
of sight. I looked at the ground, and saw the tires had smushed right through
the sawdust and left brown grooves in the earth. “Wonder what’s in it?” Davy
Ray asked on the scent of a freak. I told him I didn’t know, but whatever it
was, it was mighty heavy.
On the ride to school, we formulated our plans. Parents permitting, we
would meet at my house at six-thirty and go to the carnival together like the
Four Musketeers. Does that suit everybody? I asked.
“Can’t,” Ben answered, pedaling beside me. He spoke the word like a grim
bell tolling.
“Why not? We always go at six-thirty! That’s when all the rides are
goin’!”
“Can’t,” Ben repeated.
“Hey, you got a parrot stuck in your throat?” Davy Ray asked. “What’s
wrong with you?”
Ben sighed, blowing a wisp of steam in the morning’s sunny chill. He had
on a woolen cap, his round cheeks flushed with crimson. “Just… can’t. Not
until seven o’clock.”
“We always go at six-thirty!” Davy Ray insisted. “It’s… it’s…” He looked
at me for help.
“Tradition,” I said.
“Yeah! That’s what it is!”
“I think there’s somethin’ Ben doesn’t want to tell us,” Johnny said,
swerving his bike up on the other side of Davy Ray. “Spit it out, Ben.”
“It’s just… I can’t…” He frowned, and with another plume of steam decided
to give up the game. “At six o’clock I’ve got a piana lesson.”
“What?” Davy Ray had fairly yelled it. Rocket wobbled. Johnny looked as
if he’d taken a Cassius Clay roundhouse punch to the noggin.
“A piana lesson,” Ben repeated. The way he said that word, I could see
legions of simpering pansies behind legions of upright pianos while their
adoring mothers smiled and patted their beanies. “Miss Blue Glass has started
teachin’ piana. Mom’s signed me up, and my first lesson’s at six o’clock.”
We were horrified. “Why, Ben?” I asked. “Why’d she do it?”
“She wants me to learn Christmas songs. Can you believe it? Christmas
songs!”
“Man!” Davy Ray shook his head in commiseration. “Too bad Miss Blue Glass
can’t teach you guitar!” Git-tar, he pronounced it. “Now, that’d be cool! But
piana… yech!”
“Don’t I know it,” Ben muttered.
“Well, there’s a way around this,” Johnny said as we neared the school.
“Why don’t we just meet Ben at the Glasses’ house? We can ride on to the
carnival at seven instead of six-thirty.”
“Yeah!” Ben perked up. “That way it won’t be so awful!”
It was settled, then, pending parental okay. But every year we all got
together and went to the carnival on Friday night from six-thirty until ten,
and our parents had always said yes. It was really the only night kids our age
could go. Saturday morning and afternoon was when the black people went, and
Saturday night belonged to the older kids. Then by ten o’clock on Sunday
morning the park area was clear again except for a few scatters of sawdust,
crushed Dixie cups, and ticket stubs the cleanup crew had left like a dog
marking its territory.
The day passed in a slow crawl of anticipation. Leatherlungs called me a
blockhead twice and made Georgie Sanders stand with his nose pressed against a
circle on the blackboard for smarting off. Ladd Devine went to the office for
drawing a lewd picture on the inside cover of his notebook, and the Demon
swore she’d fix Leatherlungs’ wagon. I sure would’ve hated to be in
Leatherlungs’ clunky brown shoes.
From my house, as the blue twilight gathered and the sickle moon
appeared, I could see the lights of the Brandywine Carnival. The Ferris wheel
was turning, outlined in red. The midway sparkled with white bulbs. The sound
of calliope music, laughter, and joyous screams drifted to me over the roofs
of Zephyr. I had five dollars in my pocket, a gift from my father. I was
wrapped up in my fleece-lined denim jacket against the cold. I was ready to
roar.
The Glass sisters lived about a half mile away, on Shantuck Street. By
the time I got there on Rocket, near quarter before seven, Davy Ray’s bike was
parked next to Ben’s in front of the house, which looked like a gingerbread
cottage Hansel and Gretel might’ve envied. I left Rocket and went up on the
porch. I could hear piano notes being banged behind the door. Then the high,
fluty voice of Miss Blue Glass: “Softly, Ben. Softly!”
I pressed the doorbell. Chimes rang, and Miss Blue Glass said, “Will you
please answer that, Davy Ray?”
He opened the door as the banging continued. I could tell by his sick
expression that listening to Ben try to hammer out the same five notes over
and over again wasn’t good for your health. “Is that Winifred Osborne?” Miss
Blue Glass called over the racket.
“No ma’am, it’s Cory Mackenson,” Davy Ray told her. “He’s waitin’ for
Ben, too.”
“Bring him in, then. Too cold to wait outside.”
I crossed the threshold into a living room that was a boy’s nightmare.
All the furniture looked like spindly antiques that wouldn’t bear the weight
of a starved mosquito. Little tables held porcelain figures of dancing clowns,
children holding puppies, and the like. A gray carpet on the floor appeared to
indelibly remember footprints. A glass curio cabinet as tall as my dad held a
forest of colored crystal goblets, coffee mugs with the faces of all the
presidents on them, twenty-odd ceramic dolls clothed in lace costumes, and
maybe another twenty rhinestone-decorated eggs each with its own brass
four-footed stand. What a crash that thing would make if it went over, I
thought. A green-and-blue-streaked marble pedestal held an open Bible as big
as my gargantuan dictionary, the type in it large enough to be read from
across the room. Everything looked too frail to touch and too precious to
enjoy, and I wondered how anybody could live in such a state of frozen pretty.
Of course, there was the gleaming brown upright piano, with Ben trapped at its
keys and Miss Blue Glass standing beside the bench holding a conductor’s
baton.
“Hello, Cory. Please have a seat,” she said. She was wearing all blue, as
usual, except for a wide white belt around her bony waist. Her whitish-blond
hair was piled up like a foamy fountain, her black glasses so thick they made
her eyes bug.
“Where?” I asked her.
“Right there. On the sofa.”
The sofa, covered in velvety cloth that showed shepherds playing their
harps to prancing sheep, had legs that looked about as sturdy as rain-soaked
twigs. Davy Ray and I eased down into the sofa’s cushiony grip. The sofa
creaked ever so slightly, but my heart jumped in my throat.
“Now! Thinkin’ cap on! Fingers flow like the waves! One, two, three, one,
two, three.” Miss Blue Glass started motioning up and down with her baton as
the pudgy fingers of Ben’s right hand tried to play the same five notes with
some resemblance to rhythm. Soon enough, though, he was pounding those notes
as if trying to crush fire ants. “Flow like the waves!” Miss Blue Glass said.
“Softly, softly! One, two, three, one, two, three!”
Ben’s playing was less wavy and more sludgy. “I can’t do it!” he wailed,
and he pulled his hand away from those frightful keys. “My fingers are gettin’
all crossed up!”
“Sonia, give that boy a rest!” Miss Green Glass called from the rear of
the house. “You’re gonna wear his fingers to the bone!” Her voice was more
trombone than flute.
“You just mind your own beeswax now, Katharina!” Miss Blue Glass
retorted. “Ben’s got to learn the proper technique!”
“Well, it’s his first lesson, for pity’s sake!” Miss Green Glass walked
out of a hallway into the living room. She put her hands on her skinny hips
and glowered at her sister from behind her own black-framed glasses. She was
wearing all green, the shades varying from pale to forest. She made you feel a
little seasick just looking at her. Her blondish-white hair was piled higher
than Sonia’s, and had a vague pyramidal shape about it. “Not everybody’s a
musical genius like you, you know!”
“Yes I do know, thank you very much!” Swirls of red had crept into Miss
Blue Glass’s ivory cheeks. “I’ll thank you not to interrupt Ben’s lesson!”
“His time’s about over, anyway. Who’s your next victim?”
“Winifred Osborne is my next student,” Miss Blue Glass said pointedly.
“And if it wasn’t for your magazine subscriptions, I wouldn’t have to go back
to teachin’ piano to begin with!”
“Don’t you blame my magazine subscriptions! It’s your own self at fault!
I swear, if you buy another set of dinner plates, I’m gonna go straight out of
my head! What’re you buyin’ all those dinner plates for when we don’t ever
have anybody to dinner?”
“Because they’re pretty, that’s why! I like pretty things! And I could
ask you why you went out and bought a collection of First Lady thimbles when
you can’t even sew a stitch!”
“Because they’re gonna grow in value, that’s why! You wouldn’t know an
investment if it crawled up on one of those dumb dinner plates and begged you
to eat it with a biscuit!”
I feared the Glass sisters were going to come to blows. The timbres of
their voices sounded like a duel of slightly off-key musical instruments.
Caught between them, Ben appeared about to leap from his skin. Then something
went crooaaakk from the rear of the house. It was the kind of noise I would’ve
imagined the tentacled Martian in the bowl could make. Miss Blue Glass jabbed
the baton at her sister and snapped, “See there? You’ve upset him! Are you
satisfied now?”
The door chimes rang. “It’s probably the neighbors fussin’ about your
hollerin’!” Miss Green Glass predicted. “They can hear you all the way to
Union Town!”
Johnny stood there when Miss Blue Glass opened the door. He was bundled
up in a dark brown jacket over a black turtleneck. “I’m here to wait for Ben,”
he said.
“Lord have mercy! Is the whole world waitin’ for Ben?” She made a face as
if she’d bitten into a lemon, but she said, “He’s still got five minutes! Come
on in, then!” Johnny entered the house, and he saw our edgy faces and realized
he had stepped into something that was not a pile of roses.
Crooaaakk! Crooaaakk! the thing in the back room squawked.
“Would you see to him if you aren’t too busy?” Miss Blue Glass told her
sister. “Since you’ve stirred him up, at least see to him!”
“I swear I’d move out of here if I could find a cardboard box worth
