Another hour passed, and you could smell the storm on the warm night wind. It mixed with the other aromas and became a heady cocktail. You could taste electricity in the air. The machinery that wound around and around and took the children up into the sky and back down again, creaked and whined and groaned and squeaked and rattled bolts in its metal joints and made me nervous. Off in the distance, amid that swirling darkness, was the occasional flash of lightning, like a liquid tuning fork thrown against the sky.
Not long after the lightning flashes, the machineries stopped and the rides got canceled. All that was left was the petting zoo and the booths where you lost your money trying to throw softballs into bushel baskets or baseballs through hoops.
A half-hour later they canceled the whole thing and disgruntled patrons were moving toward the gate. Before we got out of there, the rain blew in, came faster and harder than anyone would have expected. Through the sheets of aluminum-colored rain, the lights of the carnival were like winking gold coins at the bottom of a fountain, and now there was nothing to smell but the rain, and the rain was cold, and within seconds Leonard and I were soaking wet.
We made our way through the crowd and out to the car. We sat there and watched as people rushed out and cars pulled away. We watched as the short church bus came through the gate and drove off. We drove off after it.
The deluge was intense, and the bus drove slowly, and so did we, and so did Leisure Suit. He was following behind us. After a little bit, we decided to beat the bus back to the church, get our parking place. As we passed, Leonard said, “Hap, the Reverend ain’t driving. It’s that woman. I don’t see him at all.”
I drove on around, tires sloshing and tossing water. “Don’t mean he isn’t there. I didn’t see the woman when they left the church. He could be in back.”
“Yeah, but… I don’t know. Something sucks the big ole donkey dick here.”
We beat the bus, got our parking place, turned off the lights, and sat there and ate from a box of M amp;Ms Leonard had left in the glove box. They had melted into a colorful mess, but we ate them anyway. We were licking our fingers when the bus drove up to the church and stopped in the driveway.
“Reckon they’re staying close to the curb to help the parents out,” Leonard said. “Kids are already soaked to the bone.”
Leisure Suit drove over to the curb opposite the church and parked facing the wrong way.
“Cop is less smart now than he was earlier,” Leonard said. “I don’t think he’s even made us yet, ain’t figured we been riding around behind him and paying his way into the carnival. Mr. Sneaky, he don’t see any connection between us and him and the bus.”
“As the day wears on,” I said, “a cop’s brain settles. It’s kind of like sediment.”
“And he ain’t fueled by the magic of melted M amp;Ms.”
“There’s that too.”
“Ain’t the green M amp;Ms supposed to do something to you?” Leonard said. “I always heard you had to watch the green ones.”
“The guy at the factory, he jacks off in the juice makes the green ones, that’s what I heard.”
“No,” Leonard said, “that’s the mayonnaise at McDonald’s, or Burger King, or one of those places. It’s supposed to be a black man does it. That way it scares the shit out of the peckerwoods, ’cause the black customers, they’re in on it, it’s a conspiracy-type thing. They know to hold the mayonnaise. The white folks, they don’t all know about it, so some of ’em eat it. Oh, and the black guy, he’s got AIDS.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Ain’t that awful, a nigger with AIDS jacking off in the poor honkie folks’ mayonnaise?”
“A queer nigger, of course?”
“Without question. And he’s ugly too.”
38.
We sat there until our asses and the seatcovers seemed one and the same, then the cars started to arrive and park at the curb, beating their wipers against the rain.
It was hard to see with the rain the way it was, but we could see kids come off the bus and rush into cars, and those cars would go away, then more would show up, and a new flock of kids would come off the bus, and pretty soon all the cars were gone, and no more came. The bus cranked up, turned on its lights, drove to the back of the church.
“What now?” Leonard said.
Before I could answer, the tan Volkswagen, which I had forgotten about, came out from behind the church and turned left. The church lights gave me enough of a view to tell the driver was the woman who had been driving the bus, and she had a little girl with her. Mom, having done her duty, was on her way home with her own child.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t think the Reverend was on the bus when it came back. He could have got off out back just now, but I don’t think so. I think he stayed at the carnival.”
“We’ve been hoodwinked, and not on purpose,” Leonard said. “I can’t figure how Fitzgerald did it exactly, but he had prearranged plans with the woman. I don’t mean she was in on it-”
“I know what you mean. He had her drive the kids back, but he had a kid in mind wasn’t on the bus.”
“Someone won’t be missed. Some kid he gave a free pass to. And he had another way of leaving the carnival other than the bus.”
“If we’re right,” I said, “where does that leave us?”
“With the clock ticking,” Leonard said.
We sat silent for a moment, then almost in unison said: “The Hampstead place.”
Leonard drove us by the cop in the leisure suit. He was still watching the church. He didn’t even blink as we went by.
We made our way to the Hampstead place from Uncle Chester’s. Up through the woods on foot. The rain hadn’t slacked, and it was slow going. The wind had picked up and turned surprisingly cool, and it tossed the rain hard as gravel. Tree branches whipped and cut us, and our single flashlight did little to punch a hole in the darkness. We hadn’t taken the time to get rain slickers, so we were soaked to the skin. I wished now we’d bothered to get guns. But all we’d brought were ourselves and the flashlight in Leonard’s car.
When we got to the Hampstead place, we were exhausted. We didn’t want Fitzgerald and his brother to see us coming, so I turned off the flashlight just before we broke out of the woods, into the partial clearing.
Out there, with no light, pitch dark without moon or starlight, the rain hammering us like ball bearings, we only had our instincts to guide us. It was rough going. We could hear the boards in the old house creaking, begging the wind to leave it alone, and we linked arms and let those sounds guide us. I barked a shin on a porch step, and Leonard followed suit. We climbed onto the porch, trying to be as quiet as possible, which was difficult when you felt like your leg was broken. We found our way along the porch to the busted-out window we had used before, cautiously crawled inside.
Rain was driving into the house from the hole in the ceiling and the hole in the roof above. It was so dark inside we couldn’t see the rain, but we could hear it and feel it. We listened for other sounds, the sounds of movement, but there was only the wind and the expected creaking of lumber.
We had no recourse but to turn on the flash, and we used it to avoid the breaks in the boards, but still they squeaked as we walked. We went through the room with the chifforobe and into the kitchen, and it was dry there, and I realized suddenly that my nerves were starting to settle. The pounding rain had been like a severe case of Chinese water torture.
But as soon as we were both inside the kitchen, not really expecting to find anyone since we’d heard neither movement or seen illumination, my flashlight caught a shadow on my left, and I whipped the light that way, and the shadow came at me. I swung the flashlight, and there was a grunt and a shattering of bulb, and the light went out. Then I felt hands on me. I shifted my body and jabbed with an elbow and then there was light on the right of me and I saw Leonard out of the corner of my eye, and he was planting a side kick in a man’s mid-section, and in that same instant my hands felt their way around my injured attacker’s body, and I hip-threw him hard against the floor.
