Glancing over his shoulder, he smiled at his best friend, Ray Makki, who was tagging along a few paces behind him. In a slow, sludgy voice that echoed and never seemed to stop, Petey said, “Come on, Ray! We’ve gotta hurry up, or Old Lady Doyle will nail our butts.”
Ray chuckled softly.
“Heck, Petey, she’ll nail our butts no matter what we do.”
Ray’s dark, dead-looking eyes were like windows that were no longer able to reflect light. His gaze shifted over to Mr. Clain, the janitor, who was standing by one of the open classroom doors. Mr. Clain scowled deeply as he watched the boys approaching. From behind, Ray grabbed Petey’s shirt sleeve and gave it a quick tug.
“Hey, come on! Wait up! Don’t leave me behind.”
Petey drew to a halt. Glancing slowly over his shoulder, he waited until his best friend caught up with him. The corridor glowed with an eerie golden iridescence that made it look like it stretched out forever in both directions.
“Don’t worry,” Petey said with a soft laugh that echoed hollowly in the hallway. “You know I’ll always wait up for you.”
“That’s ‘cause we’re best friends, right?”
Petey nodded, his head moving slowly up and down as though on a spring.
Then they started walking again, side by side.
They glided past the motionless janitor and continued on down the hallway to where Mrs. Doyle stood waiting for them in front of her open classroom door. Her flabby arms were folded across her chest. Her pale face was set in a deep scowl as she watched them coldly, shifting her eyes without blinking or moving her head.
Petey stared at her and wondered if he and Ray would ever make it to her classroom on time, but he almost didn’t care, now that he and Ray had made it past Mr. Clain. He cringed inside, feeling the cold glare of the janitor’s gaze drilling into the back of his head; but when he turned around and looked, the janitor was gone.
“Yeah,” Petey said, his voice nothing more than a hollow whisper that rustled like dust in the empty hall.
“We’re best friends . . . forever. . . .”
—for Matt Costello
“Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
Came, as though bubbling honey, for love’s sake.
. . .
”
—Keats: Lamia
, 64-65.
L
ove can change us all, it’s true.
You know, there’s that old joke about how a woman will try and try to change the man she married, and then complain twenty years later that he’s not the man he used to be. An old joke, but true. Love
does
change us all. We all find that out sooner or later. Unfortunately for Dennis Levesque, he found it out a little too late.
I
t was springtime in Hilton, Maine, a small mill town nestled in the mountains of the central part of the state. Some folks would say that you can’t use those two words “springtime” and “Maine” in the same sentence without fear of contradicting yourself, and most years, that’s probably true. No matter what the TV weatherman says, there’s as good a chance of a blizzard in April as there is in November. Sure, the plow ridges may he gone, the Red Sox may be swinging their bats in Fenway Park; and the dirt roads may turn from ice-glazed skids to mud-slick washboards, but only the swelling buds on the trees and the song of the peepers down in the marsh can convince you that winter might truly be over.
It was a Friday evening, late in April, and a cold wind was blowing down off nearby Watcher’s Mountain. In spite of the cold, Dennis Levesque was sitting outside on his porch. He had his feet propped up on the rickety railing, and was drinking a beer as he leaned back in one of the faded lawn chairs. He had left this particular chair out on the porch all winter. The straps were frayed and sagging; they looked like they might not make it through the coming summer, but Dennis was determined to see how long they’d last. The cardboard container that held the three remaining full cans of beer lay on the splintered porch floor, within easy reach. Two empties were crumpled up beside it.
“Returnable cans be damned! Who needs the fucking nickel?” Dennis whispered as he tilted his head back and guzzled from the can he held.
When he patted his shirt pocket, feeling for his cigarette pack, his hand froze in mid-motion. Letting out a sigh that hung like a frosted mist in the night air, his fingers clamped around the small piece of paper and pulled it free. In the dim light from the kitchen window, the piece of paper looked sickly gray; but earlier that day, when Bo Wilson, his foreman at the mill, had handed it to him at the end of his shift, it had been a different color.
Pink.
Bright pink.
A pussy color
, Dennis had thought at the time.
“
NOTICE OF TERMINATION
”
That’s all it said at the top, both earlier today and now, as Dennis unfolded the paper and looked at it in the fading light. There were more words in the space below, but they all added up to the same damned thing. He’d been
fired
. . . “down-sized,” as Wilson had repeatedly said.
“Bullshit . . .
bull
shit . . . bull-
fucking
-shit!” Dennis sputtered.
His hand crinkled the paper into a tight little ball, which he threw over the porch edge and off into the darkness. He heard it land with a dull
plop
somewhere in the mud slick that passed for his driveway this time of year.
“You say somethin’, honey?” Sally, his wife, called out from the kitchen. She had the window open just a crack to let in the fresh, spring breeze.
Dennis twisted around to look at her through the window. She was wearing that same damned baggy gray sweater she had worn all winter, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows as she stood at the kitchen sink, washing the supper dishes. She was half turned around, and he could see the watermelon-sized swelling of her belly. Her thin, mousy brown hair dangled down over her pasty, pimply forehead. The dim light made her look much older than her twenty-two years.
“Ahh, no. I didn’t say
shit
!” Dennis said, scowling as he took another swig of beer. After draining the can, he crumpled it up and dropped it to the floor with the other empties before taking a fourth can from the box. He had popped the top and was just leaning back for a long pull when he heard . . . music.
Jumped-up Jesus H. Christ!
he thought, turning again to look into the kitchen.
Has she got that friggin’ rock ‘n roll station from Auburn on again? Before she knows it, she’ll wake up Dennis Jr., and it will be another night of the baby howling and her complaining how she’s so big now she can hardly move. And who will get puked and peed on? Why, me, of course.
“Yeah, good ole’ Dennis,” he whispered, and then spit viciously. “Christ on a cross! I might’s well be up all figgin’ night, now that I ain’t got no goddamned job to go to!”
But as he listened, the music grew steadily louder, and before long Dennis realized that it wasn’t coming from inside the house; it was coming from Moulton’s Field, across the Androscoggin River. Dennis leaned forward in his lawn chair and peered out over the porch railing, almost smiling as the music drifted to his ears out of the darkness.
“What the hell? Why, that’s friggin’
calliope
music!”
Through the line of trees along the river’s edge, he could make out a line of headlights, winking and bobbing as the caravan of trucks and trailers spread out across the wide, flat field. Taillights flashed, mixing with the glow of headlights to stain the nearby river with bloody red and goldenrod-yellow smears. The calliope music didn’t sound like the real thing. It sounded more like a tinny recording, blaring from a speaker system mounted on one of the trucks.
“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” Dennis said, smiling broadly for the first time since this afternoon. Turning toward the open window, he called out, “Hey, Sal! The friggin’ carnival’s in town! Come on out here ‘n catch a load of this!”
“Don’t yell! You’ll wake the baby,” Sally said as she snapped on the porch light and came to the screen door. She was drying her hands on a greasy dishtowel. The feeble yellow light made her face look like dead meat.
“Look over there!” Dennis said, pointing off into the darkness. “The damned carnival! Looks like they’re settin’ up ‘crost the river in Moulton’s. You hear anythin’ ‘bout it?”
“I dunno—I might’ve seen a flyer at the grocery store,” Sally said. Her voice was edged with frustration as she eased the door open and poked her head out just long enough to catch a snatch of the music; then she ducked back inside. “Well, whoop-dee-doo, huh? Is that all you’ve got to say? You lose your damned job, and all you can do is get excited that the damned carnival’s in town!”
The screen door snapped shut behind her, cutting off her words with a sharp bang as she went back into the kitchen.
“Well, whoop-dee-
fucking
-doo to you, too—bitch!” Dennis muttered before taking another pull on his beer. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he groaned as he stood up and stretched his arms over his head. He heard something snap in his neck, but it felt good. The music was drifting across the river, rising and falling in volume. Without a word to Sally, Dennis went down the steps and started across the back lawn, lured by the eerie, wavering sound. For a few seconds, he felt like a little boy again—ten years old and free, without a care in the world . . . not the twenty-two-year old, “downsized” mill-working husband and father he really was.
He didn’t notice the slight chill in the night air as he crossed the yard and headed into the fringe of woods that lined the river. He moved upstream until he found a good place to stop, then leaned against a thick-boled tree and drank the rest of his beer and watched as the carnival trailers and trucks circled around into position and parked. Dozens of people—dark silhouettes in the night—got out and began to unload. Dust rose from the ground, and over the warbling strains of the calliope music, a chorus of voices shouting commands and directions filled the night with excitement and noise. Even the heavy smell of diesel exhaust wafting across the river thrilled Dennis as he crouched in the darkness and watched.
The trailer parked farthest back, closest to the river, had a huge sign spanning from one end to the other. On it was painted a sensuous-looking black woman, obviously naked except for the huge snake that wrapped around her, strategically covering her breasts and crotch.
LaBELLE—THE VOODOO QUEEN
, the sign read.
As Dennis focused on this particular trailer, its windows curiously darkened and devoid of any activity inside, his mind began to race through several fantasies he would indulge in if only the woman inside that trailer was half as beautiful as the one pictured on the sign.
After watching for a while longer, as the roustabouts quickly and skillfully began setting up the carnival tents and booths, Dennis—whose gaze was continually drawn back to the darkened window of LaBelle the Voodoo Queen’s trailer—shivered and pushed himself away from the tree. After urinating into the river, he started back home to his pregnant wife and three-year-old child.
Tomorrow, he promised himself, if only for a while, he would forget all about being out of a job, and go to the carnival with or, preferably, without Sally and Dennis Jr.
“O
h, God! This is
horrible!
” Sally said, wrinkling her nose and pulling Dennis Jr.’s Red Sox hat down so it shielded his eyes.
She was pushing the umbrella stroller and walking alongside Dennis as they moved slowly past the lineup inside the FREAK SHOW tent. Each . . . well, “specimen” was the only word she could think of to describe them; “human being” certainly didn’t fit—was increasingly disgusting. From TABOO—THE TATTOOED MAN and VINNY—THE PIG BOY they worked their way past TOM, DICK, AND HARRY—THE THREE-HEADED MAN and MATILDA—THE FAT LADY to LUCAN—THE WOLF BOY and TONY—THE SPIDER MAN, a pathetic individual with six—”
COUNT ‘EM, BOYS ‘N GIRLS—SIX
”—vestigial arms dangling uselessly from his sides.
“I think I’m gonna puke if I don’t get out of here soon,” Sally said. Her voice had that high-pitched, nasal whine she used whenever she wanted to get her way. She was vigorously rubbing the bulge of her stomach as though fearful that exposure to such horrors could somehow mark her unborn child.
“Aww, com’on,?’ Dennis said frowning and shaking his head with disgust. “We paid our friggin’ money, so we might’s well see the rest of what they got.”
“But this is . . . This is
sick!
These things should be . . . be put out of their misery, not paraded around in public like this.” Sally covered her mouth with the back of her hand, muffling her voice. “We certainly don’t have to stand here and gawk at them!”
“What the hell did you expect? It’s a freak show,” Dennis said, his voice edged with frustration. “You had your chance to say no outside.” He was trying to keep his voice low as he eyed the people around them to make sure no one was listening to their argument.
“I—I didn’t know they were going to be real
people
,” Sally said. “I thought it’d be like—you know, two-headed cows in a bottle of formaldehyde or something. And I don’t think Denny should have to see things like this. God, it’ll give him nightmares. It’ll give me nightmares!”