blue cornflowers that covered her dress. He stood politely until she rose, hands on hips, a vast acreage of sun- weathered cleavage smiling at him. Her small grey eyes no longer trusted anything they saw, but softened on his face.
'Help you, boy?'
'Ma'am, my name's Billy Fleet, and I'm raising money for my college education by trying to find summer work. I know how to fix electrics, and it seems to me you need someone to work the ghost train, 'cause you got some shorts sparking out in there, and I ain't seen no one go in to repair 'em.'
'What are you, town watchdog? Got nothing better to do than spy on folks trying to earn a decent living?' Molly's bead-eyes shrank further.
'No Ma'am. I meant no disrespect, I just see you setting up from my bedroom window and know you're shy a man or two. This town's real particular about health and safety, and I figure I can save you a heap of trouble for a few bucks.'
The woman folded fat arms across her considerable bosom and rocked back to study him. 'I don't take kindly to blackmail, Billy boy.' Her eyes were as old as Cleopatra's, and studied him without judgment. 'Fairs don't take on college kids. It don't pay to be too smart around here.'
'Maybe so, but in this town a fair is a place where a guy gets a rosette for keeping a pig. This is a real carnival. It's special.'
'Ain't no big secret to it. You take a little, give a little back, that's all.' She saw the need in his eyes and was silent for a moment. 'Hell, if the town is so dog-dead you got to watch us set up from your bedroom at nights maybe we can work something out. Let me go talk to- Papa Jack.'
That was how Billy got the job on the Twilight Express.
The night the fair opened, white lights punched holes into the blue air, and the smell of sage and dust was replaced with the tang of rolling hotdogs. Susannah had planned to go with her girlfriends, to shriek and flirt on the opalescent Tilt-A-Whirl, holding down their skirts and tossing back their hair with arms straightened to the bar, bucking and spinning across the night. She agreed with just a nod when Billy insisted on taking her, and he wondered whether she would really be fussed if he just took off, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't bear the thought of people bad-mouthing him, even though he wouldn't be there to hear it. So he took Susannah to the fair.
He couldn't bring himself to place his arm around her waist, because the baby might sense his presence and somehow make him change his mind. Babies did that; they turned tough men into dishrags, and he wasn't about to let that happen. She wore a red dress covered in yellow daisies like tiny bursts of sunlight, and laughed at everything. He couldn't see what was funny. She was happily robbing him of his life and didn't even notice, pointing to the fat lady and the stilt-walkers, feeding her glossy red mouth with pink floss as if she was eating sunset clouds.
He thought she would want to talk about the baby and what it meant to them, but she seemed happy to take the subject for granted, as if she couldn't care whether there was something growing inside her or not.
At the entrance of the ghost train, Molly watched impassively as he passed her without acknowledgment. Susannah balked and tried to turn aside when she reached the steps to the car. 'No, Billy, don't make me go. It's dark in there. Let's take the rope-walk instead.'
'Don't make a big deal of it, Susannah, the ghost train's a few devils and skeletons is all.' He had stood inside the ride beside the flickering tissue-inferno, breathing in the coppery electric air, watching the cars bump over soldered tracks that should have been scrapped years ago, lines that could throw a rider like a bronco.
She saw the pressure in his eyes and gave in meekly, took her ticket and bowed her head as she passed through the turnstile, as if she was entering church. The car was tight for two adults; he was forced to place his arm around her shoulder. Her hair tickled his forearm. She smelled as fresh-cut as a harvest field. With a sudden lurch, the car sparked into life and a siren sounded as they banged through the doors into musty darkness.
He knew what was coming. After a few cheap scares of drifting knotted string and jiggling rubber spiders, the car would switch back on itself and tilt down a swirling red tunnel marked Damnation Alley, but just before it dropped into the fires of hell it would swing again, away to the safer sights of comically dancing wooden skeletons. The track was bad at the switch; a person could tip out on the line as easy as pie. The next car would be right behind, and those suckers were heavy. Papa Jack had fallen into a bourbon bottle a couple of nights back, and told him about a boy who had bust his neck when the cars had stalled in Riverton Fields, Wichita, a few seasons back. The Elysium had hightailed it out of town before their Sheriff could return from his fishing trip, had even changed its name for a couple of years. A second accident would get folks nodding and clucking about how they suspected trouble from the carnie folk all along. He would make sure Susannah didn't get bruised up, he wouldn't want that, but she had to take a spill, and land good and hard on her stomach.
As the car hit its first horseshoe she gripped his knee, and he sensed her looking up at him. He caught the glisten of her eyes in the flashbulbs, big blue pupils, daybreak innocent. They tilted into the spiralling tunnel and she squeaked in alarm, gripping tighter, as close now as when they had loved. The moment arrived as they reached the switch. The car lurched and juddered. All he had to do was push, but she was still holding tightly onto him. In an effort to break her grip, he stood up sharply.
'Billy — what —»
The car twisted and he tipped out, landing on his back in the revolving tunnel. Susannah's hands reached out toward him, her fingers splayed wide, then her car rounded a black-painted peak and was gone. The cylinder turned him over once, twice, dropping him down into the uplit paper fires of damnation, scuffing his elbows and knees on the greased tracks.
And then there was nothing beneath his limbs.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the fierce green fields behind the house. Judging by the smell of fresh grass in the morning air, it was late spring, but he was wearing the same clothes. The sun was hot on his face, his bare arms. The voice spoke softly behind him. He could only just hear it over the sound of the crickets and the rustling grass.
'Oh Billy, what a beautiful day. If only it was always like this. I remember, I remember — ' She was lying in the tall grass near the tree, running a curving green stem across her throat, her lips. Her print dress had hiked around her bare pale thighs. She stared into the cloudless sky as though seeing beyond into space.
'What have you done with the baby, Susannah?'
'I don't know,' she replied slowly. 'It must be around here somewhere. Look how clear the sky is. It feels like you could see forever.'
The day was so alive that it shook with the beat of his heart, the air taut and trembling with sunlit energy. It was hard to concentrate on anything else. 'We have to find the baby,' he told her, fighting to develop the thought. 'We went to all that trouble.'
He looked up at the sun and allowed the dazzling yellow light to fill his vision. When he closed his eyes, tiny translucent creatures wriggled across the pink lids, as mindless and driven as spermatozoa.
'I forget what I did with it, Billy. You know how I forget things. Will you make me a daisy chain? Nobody ever made me a daisy chain. Nobody ever noticed me until you.'
'Let's find the baby first, Susannah.'
'I thi'nk perhaps it was out in the field. Yes, I'm sure I saw it there.' She raised a lazy arm and pointed back, over her head. Her hair was spread around her head in a corn-coloured halo. She smiled sleepily and shut her eyes. The lids were sheened like dragonfly wings. 'I can see the stars today, even with my eyes closed. We should never leave this place. Never, ever leave. Look how strong we are together. Why, we can do anything. You see that, don't you? You see that…' Her voice drifted off.
Her watched her fall asleep. She looked a little older now. Her cheekbones had appeared, shaping her face to a heart. She had lost some puppy fat. Light shimmered on her cheeks, wafted and turned by the tiny shields of leaves above. 'I have to go and look, Susannah,' he told her. 'There are bugs everywhere.'
'You just have to say the name,' she murmured. 'Just say the name.' But her voice was lost beneath the buzzing of crickets, the shifting of grass, the tremulous morning heat.
He rose and walked deep into the field, until he came to a small clearing in the grass. Lowering himself onto his haunches, he studied the ant nest, watching the shiny black mass undulating around a raised ellipse in the brown earth. The carapaces of the insects were darkly iridescent, tiny night-prisms that bustled on thousands of
