Mystery Walk

Dr. Mirakle took the empty flask back. 'We'll look forward to it.'

Santha looked up into Billy's eyes. She decided she wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers. He seemed nervous and shy and . . . virgin? she wondered. 'Come by the show, Choctaw,' she said, and winked. 'Real soon.'

Dr. Mirakle almost had to drag him out.

Santha laughed. The two cute roustabouts were still eyeing her. 'Virgin,' she said. 'Bet you twenty bucks.'

'No takers,' the black girl told her.

And in the swirl of dust spun up by the heavy trucks Dr Mirakle shook his head and muttered, 'Entertainers indeed.'

36

'Last show of the night!' the platinum-blond female barker was bellowing through a microphone. 'Hey you in the hat! How about a thrill, huh? Well come on in! It's all right here, five lovely sensually young girls who just loooove to do their thang! Hey mister, why don't you leave your wife out here and come on in? I guarantee he'll be a better man for it, honey! Last show of the night! Hear those drums beat? The natives are restless tonight, and you never can tell who they're gonna do ... I mean what they're gonna do, ha ha!'

Billy stood with the rest of the interested males grouped around the Jungle Love show. He wanted to go in there, but he was as nervous as a cat in a roomful of rockers. A man wearing a straw hat and a flashy printed shirt drawled, 'Hey, lady! They dance nude in there?'

'Does a big bear shit in the woods?'

'You don't dance nude do you, big mamma?'

She let out a husky laugh that shook her rouged cheeks. 'Don't you wish, little boy? Last show of the night! Fifty cents, fifty cents! Half a dollar'll get you in, you provide your own sin! Come on, step in line!'

Billy paused. Dr Mirakle had told him that if he absolutely insisted in coming to the 'strip show,' then he should put his wallet in a place where light fingers couldn't get to it, and he shouldn't sit next to anybody who put a hat in his lap.

When Billy had passed the Octopus he felt a rush of dread through him, and thought he heard awful distant shrieks emanating from the covered gondola. But no one else seemed to hear them. Buck had given him a baleful glare, warning him to stay away. In motion, the Octopus cluttered and groaned, the tired engine snorting steam; the green tarpaulin covering the scabrous gondola cracked in the wind. As far as Billy knew, Buck never took the tarpaulin off; the gondola itself had to be attached to the machine, otherwise the Octopus would be off-balance and would go pinwheeling across the midway like a huge, deadly top. Buck was trying to keep riders out of that gondola, Billy knew, because the man must be fearful of what might happen should anyone get inside it. Maybe Buck was trying his best to keep it muzzled, Billy thought. What if, for lack of steady victims, it was feeding on Buck's soul and body—taking an arm, slicing a finger or an ear— while the dark ripples of its power strengthened and spread?

'Fifty cents, fifty cents! Don't be shy boys, come on in!'

At least in there he could lose himself, Billy thought. He moved forward, and the barker motioned toward a cigar box. 'Fifty cents, hon. If you're twenty-one I'm little Orphan Annie, but what the hell! ...'

Inside, in a smoky haze of green light, a dozen long benches faced a stage with a garishly painted backdrop of twisted jungle foliage. The drumbeats bellowed from a speaker hidden off to the left. He sat in a center row as the place filled up with hooting, shouting men. They started clapping in time with the drumbeats, and there were hoarse yells for the show to begin. Suddenly the blond barker was up on the stage, and the drumbeats ceased. She said through a microphone that buzzed and warbled with feedback, 'Okay, hold it down! We're gonna start in a minute! Right now I want you to take a look at these playing cards I hold in my hand, but don't look too close unless you want your eyebrows burned off! Yessir, straight from Paris, France, showing the kind of pictures that make a man want to get up and crow! You can't buy these in the local Woolworth's! But you can buy 'em right here, for only two dollars and seventy-five cents! Yessir, they know how to play cards in Paris! . . .'

Billy shifted uneasily in his seat. Cigar smoke drifted in front of his face. Somebody shouted, 'Get off the stage or strip nekkid, baby!' He had the vague and unsettling sensation of being watched, yet when he looked around toward the back he saw only a mass of leering faces daubed in green light.

The show began. To a blare of rock music, a fleshy redhead in a black bikini—one of the women who'd been with Santha that afternoon, Billy realized—came strutting out on stage with a large stuffed chimpanzee doll. Her thighs quivered as she rolled her hips, letting the chimp sniff around her barely covered breasts and moving it slowly all over her body. The men were suddenly very quiet, as if mesmerized. After a minute or two of gyrating, the woman rolled around on the floor with the chimp and pretended dismay when her breasts popped free. She lay on her back, thrusting as the chimp sat astride her crotch. She began to moan and writhe, scissoring her legs into the air; her hips bucked faster and faster, her bare breasts trembling. Billy was sure that his eyes were about to pop from their sockets. Then the green lights went out and when they came back on again the barker was there, offering for sale something called Tijuana comic books.

The next dancer was the thin black girl, who contorted herself into positions that would've snapped any ordinary backbone. Most of the time her crotch, clad in flimsy panties with a cat's-eye strategically placed, was aimed toward the audience while her head was resting on the floor. The music hammered and roared, but the girl moved very slowly, as if to her own inner rhythm. Billy caught a glimpse of her eyes once, and saw they were blank of all emotion.

After the barker had tried to sell a Pecker Stretcher, a tall, big-boned girl wearing a bright yellow gown came out to dance; she had a huge mane of yellow hair that flowed down her back, and halfway into her act, when her huge breasts were peeking out from the material and it was obvious she was totally nude underneath, she suddenly whipped off the mane to show she was bald-headed. There was a collective stunned gasp, and then she made sure everybody could see that something else was bald, too.

The lion-girl was followed by a harsh-looking, slightly overweight brunette in a tiger-skin bikini; she mostly stood in one place, making her breasts bounce, flicking the nipples with her fingers, or clenching her buttocks. Then she did a few deep-knee bends that were obviously torturous for her and left her face sheened with sweat. After she'd gone offstage, the barker hawked a set of 'French ticklers,' and then she said, 'Okay, are you ready to fry? You ready to have your eggs scrambled, boiled, and turned sunny-side up?'

There was a roar of assent.

'Meet Santha ... the Panther Girl. ...'

The lights went out for a few seconds. When they came back on, there was a black shape curled up at center stage. The drums started beating again. Slowly, a shaft of red light strengthened across the stage, like the red dawn on an African veld. Billy found himself leaning forward, utterly entranced.

From the black curl a single bare leg lifted up, then sank down again. An arm reached up, stretching. The figure stirred and slowly began to rise. She was wearing a long robe made of sleek black fur, and she kept it tightly around her as she surveyed the audience, her blond curls a shining red halo. Billy saw the dark in her hair where the real color had grown out, and she seemed to have on an inch of make up, but there was a challenge and a defiance in her glowing eyes that made the Pecker Stretcher obsolete. She smiled—faintly, with a touch of dangerous promise—and then, though it hadn't appeared she'd even moved at all, the black robe dropped slowly lower and lower until it was resting on the full rise of her bosom. She clasped the robe with one hand, and now as she began to move slowly and sinuously to the drumbeats the robe would part to show a brief glimpse of stomach, thigh, or the dark and inviting V between them. She kept her eyes on the audience, and Billy knew she loved to be looked at, loved to be wanted.

And Billy, though he knew lust was a terrible sin, wanted her so badly he thought he would burst apart at the seams.

The black robe continued to drop, but slowly—at Santha's pace, not the audience's. There was a heavy silence but for the drumbeats, and smoke swirled in layers like a jungle mist. Then the robe was off and kicked aside, and Santha was naked but for a brief black G-string.

Her hips moved faster. Santha's face radiated hot need, the muscles of her smooth thighs tensing; she