Wait Until Twilight (7 page)

“That thing looks heavy. Come on,” I say. “We just wanna help.”

He looks at us like we were crazy. I’m surprised he finally accepts. That box must have been pretty damn heavy. He puts the crate in the trunk and gets in the back with Brad and me. He smells like sweat and fish.

“You gotta helluva system in here, boy,” he says.

“Yeah, I got friends that work at a car stereo shop.”

“Good to have friends,” he says.

He navigates us to a little house, half of which is covered in wisteria vines. When we pull up, a black lady comes out with four barefoot children behind her. It turns out that the crate he’s carrying is filled with fresh fish. He’s having a fish fry to commemorate the recent passing of his father.

“How’s about some fresh fried fish?” he asks us, taking the box out of the trunk. We look at one another and know none of us want to stay, so we respectfully decline. He asks us to wait and goes inside. He and his woman go in, but the four children stand there watching us shyly, curiously. They look nice, healthy, normal as can be. And I think this is the way it should be. Not like Mrs. Greenan’s ungodly babies. The old guy comes out with a little mason jar half full of what looks like water. He holds it up. “You boys ever tasted mountain dew?” he asks.

“All the time,” says David.

“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout on sodie pop.” He opens the jar and the smell of alcohol attacks our noses like hornets.

“Holy shit. What is that?” asks David.

“Mountain dew. The real mountain dew. Now, remember Barry when you’re drinkin’. Have fun, boys.”

We take the jar and head back into town. Helping that old-timer makes me feel a little less crappy about coming all the way out to the country to get harassed by a bunch of scary old perverts.

Brad’s first to spot the host of colorful moving lights coming from the Kmart parking lot. It’s one of those traveling fairs that pass through town once a year. Even from a distance we can see the Ferris wheel and tea cups twisting and turning. I haven’t been to one of those since I was kid, but we all want to go tonight. We pull into the parking lot, and Will immediately takes out the mason jar and has a drink. His face turns into a disgusted grimace like he sucked on a lemon.

“How is it?” I ask.

“Here, see for yourself,” he says.

I take a drink and it burns a trail all the way down to my stomach, bringing tears to my eyes. “Man, that’s terrible,” I say.

“Whoooeee! Skizzet!” says Brad after he drinks.

After a minute or two I feel it smoldering in my stomach. Strangely enough, it feels good, and I want more. It’s just the taste that’s the problem. Will and Brad go to buy some fountain drinks while David and I wait in the car. David takes another sip.

“Give me that,” I say. It tastes just as bad as before. They come back with four orange soda fountain drinks, which we spike with the mountain dew. The soda does a good job of masking the horrible taste, and it goes down a little easier. We take our drinks into the park and buy a bunch of tickets for rides and games. The place is packed
mostly with kids and their families, but there are some high school and college kids, too.

The line for the Ferris wheel isn’t too long, and it looks like fun. Brad and David think it looks gay for two guys to get on together, but Will and I don’t care. We give a couple tickets to the operator and get seated. The big wheel moves up each time a person is seated until Will and I are a quarter of the way to the top. Then after a moment we lurch forward, and the whole thing moans and groans as we start turning down and then come back up to the top, where we get a view of the whole town.

“Look,” I say, and point at David and Brad down below. We give them our middle fingers, and they start cheering us on. The turning of the wheel and the drinking, the crazy circus music, the lights of the town, my friends’ happy faces, the stars in the sky all go to my head. It feels like I might split open. After the ride’s over Brad and David give it a twirl, not even caring if it looks gay.

We play all the games: shooting little metal ducks, throwing little rings onto Coke bottles, doing the strength test with the hammer, all of them. Then the guys want to get on the spinning cups, but just looking at those things spinning around makes me queasy. So I go for some water while they ride the whirling dishware. Along the way I pass by the funhouse, where a hawker is yelling, “Come one, come all, into the funhouse of amazements and horrors, ghouls and angels, through the labyrinth of mirrors and freaks…” The line’s empty and I have some tickets left in my pocket, so I step up and give the old scummy-looking carnie a ticket and go in with my spiked orange soda drink in hand. I follow a black painted corridor until I get to a black door, which I walk through and find an array of strange body parts floating in large bottles of formaldehyde. Snakes, a heart, a brain, kidney, even a head, which I don’t think is real. There’s a whole corridor full of them placed on black swathed podiums of different heights. I look at
them all slowly, because I’m the only one in there. One of the bottles contains a deformed fetus. It’s got two big heads, one growing out of the other like it’s trying to escape from its brother. It looks so real. It could just as well be one of Mrs. Greenan’s alien babies floating in there. Dead. Stillborn. Not even a chance. But those alien babies are still alive, breathing, squirming around. Squirming like that singer on stage having a fit. That singer is the freak. What a creepy bastard. He belongs in the jar. I move to the end of the jars, where there’s another black door. The next chamber is an assortment of cheesy relics. A little crusty-looking mummy in a coffin sits on a table. A skeleton with angelic-looking wings hangs on the wall next to a skeleton with horns. A stuffed two-headed calf and a stuffed one-eyed pig stand in a little corral full of hay. I stop a moment, taking a close look at the angel skeleton while sipping my orange drink. There’s no one around, so I touch the left wing to see if it might be real. I pinch the bone, expecting it to be brittle like plaster of Paris, but what happens is the entire wing breaks off with a
snap
and falls to the floor and splits into three pieces. I think I hear someone in the previous chamber where the pickled weirdness was. “Crap,” I say, and go through the next door. I freeze for a moment because there’s a guy looking straight at me in the flashing corridor. Flashing because there’s a bright-as-hell strobe light blinking in there, making everything look all herky-jerky, and like it’s not real. When I turn to run, so does he, in that kind of broken, discontinuous way strobe lights make things look, and I realize it’s me. It’s a mirror that leads into a labyrinth of more mirrors. I hear the door begin to open at the back of the other end so I run into the maze and start making random turns, right and then left. I feel like a laboratory rat in a bad dream. It’s hard enough to get my bearings with those mirrors making everything look like there’s more depth than there really is in there, but the strobe light makes it even harder to tell where the hell I’m going. I have to keep my hand on
the cold mirrors so I don’t run straight into them. I get caught in a dead end and backtrack a couple turns and keep going until I stop at a strange sight. My blinking reflection is all twisted up into a two-foot-tall ball and my misshapen face a bug-eyed mask of something stupid and hateful. It’s one of those distorted mirrors that bend your reflection. I step back, and my shape changes into a coiled-up snake and then back to the two-foot-tall thing. An ever-changing warping of reality, like nothing is normal, at least not for long. While I’m staring at myself, a twisted figure steps in behind me, right over my shoulder. I turn around to look behind me, but it’s just another reflection on a mirror about five feet away. At least I think it’s a reflection. It looks like a face smiling at me, but I can’t tell for sure, what with the lights and the distorted mirror and the distance. But if it was a reflection, then how the hell is it still over my shoulder? It should be in front of me now that I’m turned around. I turn back to the front and then back again. I tell myself it’s just my imagination playing tricks on me, but my heart starts to get real busy. I can feel it pounding against my rib cage. I throw my orange fountain drink at it. The cup almost looks like it’s moving in slow motion because of the lights, like a stop-motion animation reel, and it splashes open against a mirror. It’s just a reflection for sure, but that shapeless face is still there over my shoulder. “Fuck it,” I say to myself. I take off running. There’re a dozen of my reflections running alongside me in all the mirrors, but I don’t see that other figure. I keep running anyway until I reach the last black door and I’m outside on the other end of the funhouse standing on black pavement. I’m back in the real world, where people are walking around having fun at this traveling carnival. The sounds of carnival music, the smells of popcorn and hot dogs, it all floods back in.

“Damn man, you look like you just saw a ghost,” says Reed Callahan. He and Chip Callahan are standing there watching me catch my breath. They’re guys from Sugweepo City High School,
the crosstown adversaries to our Central of Sugweepo High School. We’re the Central of Sugweepo White Camels, and they’re the Sugweepo Trojans. Their school is twice as big as and much nicer than ours. If I had lived within the city limits, I would have probably gone to Sugweepo. Living outside city limits as I do requires a stiff tuition fee, which I know Dad can’t afford, so I don’t even ask. I’ve played against Reed on the junior-varsity basketball team. He comes off the bench like me, but when he gets in the game, the whole Sugweepo side would yell “Reeeeed!” He’s the most popular guy in the tenth grade over there. Chip is his cousin, not as athletic but prettier in the face. And also more ruthless. I heard he’d go down to Florida on spring break and ride around on scooters randomly punching people. They both would have made good Nazis: blond, blue-eyed über-boys. Still, they were always cool with me when I ran into them.

“Shit,” I say, and wipe the sweat off my face with my shirt. “I got a serious case of claustrophobia in there. Whew!”

“Claustrophobia? What’s up with that?” Chip says. Reed and Chip are flanked by some of their cronies. They all have pretty girls with them, cheerleader types. From behind me a young couple comes out of the funhouse laughing and talking about how corny that place was. I catch my breath and realize how silly I was being in there. It was all just shadows and light.

“Hell if I know,” I say. “Maybe it was the mountain dew going to my head.”

“Is that what that is? I can smell it a mile away,” says Chip.

“Mountain dew. Homemade by Barry,” I say.

“Who’s Barry?”

“Barry’s a real nice guy, lives way down south. Sorry, it’s all gone.”

“We got our own stuff,” says Chip.

“Hey, I guess I might be seeing you on the basketball court. You goin’ out for varsity?” Reed asks.

“I doubt it,” I say.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t feel like it.”

“That’s cool, man. You should hang out with us sometime. Maybe play some ball.”

“I’m down with that.” We exchange numbers, and I walk back over to the spinning tea cups. Brad and Will are sitting on the ground looking pale. David’s already puked and wiping his chin with his sleeve.

“Come on,” I urge them. “We’ve still got to go on the rock-climbing thing.”

“No more rides.”

“I’m definitely gonna climb that thing,” I point at the rock-climbing wall that has been set up down the way by the cotton candy machines. There’re four walls ranging from kiddy all the way to expert, which is not only extremely high but has a rock face jutting out from it. That means at some point I’ll have to hang off the thing without the help of my legs. I want to try it, though. I’m still all worked up from the funhouse. “Come on.” There’s quite a crowd around the wall, even a few local celebrities. I recognize the town mayor and a local radio guy I met once at one of our basketball games. We wade up to the front so I can give the operator my ticket. He soon has me suited up in a harness and helmet.

“Boy, you been drinking?” he asks me while suiting me up.

“No, sir,” I say. “This harness works, right?”

“Just hurry it up.”

The operator hooks the rope to my harness. The rope goes up and loops around a pulley at the top of the cliff and comes back down to a man holding it. Two climbers compete at a time. I’m paired up with a
very fit-looking woman who has a cheering section of a husband and three little kids. It’s too bad I’ll have to kick her butt in front of her family. We both start off real slow. It must be her first time, too. My coordination is a little off, but once I start moving I feel okay. The truth of the matter is that the guys and I haven’t drunk that much, just enough to make us feel drunker than we actually are. Once I find the grips, pulling myself up is a piece of cake. I learned from playing basketball that it’s all about using your legs.

The outcropping is where it gets hard. It’s all about arm strength, as you have nowhere to push with your feet. The lady falls off and screams but is caught by the rope and then lowered slowly. I start hearing some cheers.

“Keep goin’, Samuel!”

“Spiderman!”

“Come on, you fuckin’ monkey!”

I have to pay attention now because one misplaced grip and game over. With each successful move I grow more confident, and that confidence is magnified by my slight drunkenness. Once I work my way out from under the outcropping I climb up fast. Down below they’re cheering. The operator and harness guys start yelling at me to come down. I’m supposed to ring this bell at the top and then let go, allowing the harness holder to ease me down, but I go ahead and climb all the way to the very top. On top of the cliff there’s a toolbox and a bottle of water sitting on something engraved into the surface. It looks like a bird or phoenix. They’re still yelling at me from down below, so I grab the bottle of water and throw water on the whole lot of them. The crowd is really getting excited. I pour the remainder of the water onto the engraving. And then for a split second I see or at least I think I see a familiar-looking blue baseball cap floating at the far end of the crowd. It disappears among the excited faces looking up at me.