Robert Alter - Carny kill

It was one of those tourist traps that have turned the coast of Florida into a glittering facade. They hide the naked sight of the hundreds of thousands of voracious cash registers behind the tinsel. That way the innocent tourists won't be stampeded into running for cover in fear for their wallets.

This place was on the outskirts, on the tidelands, where acreage is cheap. It was a big, bristling, brawling take-off on the Disneyland idea out in Southern Cal. You might almost call it a steal.

It was owned and operated by an old carny man named Robert Cochrane, and he was a pretty canny Irishman. If Disney had a Jungle Ride, Cochrane had a Swamp Ride. The Swiss Family Robinson Tree House at Disneyland became the Tarzan House at Neverland. That was the name of the trap. Neverland. Remember Peter Pan's fun-andgames island?

Like most of those places that are designed for the tourist who wanders around with money falling out of his pockets, it looked fine on top, impressive. Then you start scratching the surface and the dirt you find under your fingernails is the same grime you'll find in any clipjoint.

That's why I felt at home.

They had a regular old fashioned carnival attraction tucked behind a monstrosity called Dracula's Castle- where all kinds of wired spooks sprang at you with earsplitting screams and where your girl's skirt was blown up around her ears so all the sailors and pimply-faced highschool dropouts could gawk at her panties. I made for it like a homing pigeon.

But something was wrong. It was like I'd walked into a familiar room and found that somebody had moved a couple pieces of furniture out of place.

They had the illusion show and the shooting gallery and the fat lady and the tattooed man and the stripshow. Everything was there but it was out of tune. The stripshow barker for example. He was as noisy and as flashy as he should be but he wasn't trying to turn his tip with that air of insistent urgency you usually expect to find in a sideshow. He seemed to be making a joke of it.

Then I got it. It was all a joke, a part of the facade. The carny attraction was only there for atmosphere. So Ma could turn to Pa and say, "Why it's just like a regular sideshow, ain't it, Elmo?" Just good wholesome fun. Something else Cochrane had learned from Mr. Disney.

A soldier and two girls and a man and wife with their two girls, and then two girls who didn't seem to belong to anybody, were all ganged around the shooting gallery and the soldier was making an embarrassed sap of himself by missing all the little white rabbits as they glided by on their pivots.

One of the soldier's girls turned and looked at me-that sort of under-and-around look that's been handed down from girl to girl for God knows how many thousands of years-and she had on a sweater that must have belonged to her little sister, it was that tight, and she might have been all of sixteen.

I decided to make the soldier look even better.

"Step aside, folks," I said in my barker voice. "Let the man see the rabbit'

The op behind the counter had the kind of mute, predatory face that belonged in a shooting gallery. He gave me a quick flat look and handed me a twentytwo in exchange for my quarter.

The soldier didn't think much of me. He said so with his eyes. I grinned at him. Then I winked at the girl on his left. The one with the sweater that wouldn't stop.

I looked at the twentytwo and it looked all right. Then I bapped at the first little rabbit and turned him aboutf ace on his pivot. It seemed to be an honest rifle. When the rabbit slid out of his burrow again I went to work on him and kept him turning right-left, right-left until the magazine was empty.

I handed the rifle back to the op.

"Where do I find The Man?" I asked.

His eyes drifted to the left as though he were thinking about something else-anything, including reaching for the billy he probably kept under the counter.

"Something wrong?" he asked quietly.

"No beef," I told him. "Need a job."

"Carny?"

"Yeah." I named a couple of outfits.

"Spiel?"

"Um. And sleight of hand. The usual."

His eyes flicked at me again. Then he raised himself against the counter and called over our heads to a girl who was passing through the outer crowd.

"Billie! 'Mere, huh?"

This girl wasn't sixteen. She wasn't wearing a sweater. She looked as sharp as a New York City model. She had floss candy hair that made you hungry. She stopped and looked toward us inquiringly, then walked our way, her highheels clicking rhythmically on the cement.

That's when the soldier decided to show his girls just who was as tough as a horseshoe around there.

"You wink at her, buddy?" He meant the sweater girl.

"No," I said.

He came a little closer and managed to give the movement a touch of swagger.

"Yeah but I seen you," he said.

"Then why ask me about it-if you sawed me?"

"Listen, buddy," he said.

I didn't want to fight him. There was no point in it. I was pretty sure I could take him, the way a fighter can sometimes tell with his opponent the first moment he comes in against him. There's no profit in proving something to yourself that you already know.

I said, "Let's forget about it," and I turned to face the girl with the cottoncandy hair.

She was looking at my face and her eyes slid over my right shoulder and widened a little. I guess the soldier had decided to exhibit some muscle about then, because I heard the shooting gallery op say, "Ixnay, soldier. Or I'll have three guards on you before you can say Jesus."

The soldier said something about my mother's marital status and gathered up his girls and left. I wasn't paying any attention. I was looking at the girl called Billie.

You meet a girl like this, who looked as if she had just stepped out of the center-spread of Playboy magazine with her clothes on, and you can damn near feel your lousy fiftytwo-dollar suit grow wrinkles and you wish to God you had shaved later in the day instead of the first thing in the morning.

"He wants to see Rob. A job. Take him, huh?" The shooting gallery op finished his telegram message and this Billie looked at me again and said, "Sure."

I said thanks to the shooting gallery op and Billie and I walked off together.

One of the things I liked about her is that she didn't use that wouldn't-you-like-to-lay-me look that's been handed down for thousands of years. When she looked at me it was straight on. It wasn't cold or to hell with you, buster. It was impersonal and it was honest.

"Billie," I said. "That's a perfect name for a prostitute."

"What's that crack supposed to mean?" A little fire came into her eyes. They were gold-flecked. It was still daylight. That's how I could tell the color of her eyes.

"No inference meant," I said. "That's just the way your name struck me. If I were going to write a book and I wanted a whore in it, I'd call her Billie."

She smiled. "Too stereotyped. Too obvious. I'd fool everyone and call her an old-fashioned name. Like Emily."

I didn't tell her I'd once known a whore named Emily. She hadn't been old-fashioned though.

The barker on the illusion show bally platform was an adenoidal-looking man who used his adenoma-voice as part of his stock in trade. He was spieling to a group of marks about the spider lady.

"She scrabbles, she climbs, she spins a web."

Then I looked at him again. He was looking over his marks at me. I didn't say anything or make a sign. I kept on walking with Billie. But she had noticed.

"Something?" she asked incuriously.

"Uh-uh." There was no sense in telling her that Bill Duff and I once worked in a carny together. That Bill Duff used to hang around my wife like a bee around honey. That Bill Duff lost an eyetooth one night when I lost my patience.