Carny kill

Then I realized Billie was standing in the doorway just behind me. She was catty mad.

'Should Jerry and I go share a bag of popcorn somewhere, sugar?' she asked Bev.

Jerry made a quick smooth pass which spun Bev around and linked their arms.

'Time to stroll, doll,' he said to her. He shot a last look at me over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows.

I smiled at Billie. She said, 'Stupid whore,' and I said, 'Take it easy. My mind is still virginal.' Then she started to smile and she said, 'You damn fool.'

'Where'll we go?' I asked her.

'I don't care. What do you want to do?'

'W-e-ll-'

'Oh honestly, Thax. Now seriously. I want to talk to you first.'

I saw great hope and promise in that magical word First. I could afford to be generous with my time. I said:

'All right, whatever you say. Just as long as we don't end up in some kind of montage, like those actors used to do in the movies of the 'Thirties and 'Forties.'

'Montage? What's that mean?'

'Well-you remember how an everyday slicker like Tyrone Power, say, would meet a poor little rich girl like Loretta Young, and how in one night he would show her the real and the entire soul and spirit of America, which was always exemplified by Coney Island?

'First we would see a brief shot of Ty and Loretta on the ferris wheel, which would blend into a brief shot of Ty and Loretta on the merry-go-round, which blended into a shot of Ty and Loretta eating floss candy, and so on. That's a montage. The art of arranging in one composition pictorial scenes borrowed from different sources which blend into a whole to create a single image.'

Billie was watching me with a fixed look.

'Thax-how did you ever end up in a sideshow?'

'Kismet.'

'No, seriously. You have brains. More than that, you have a sort of intangible understanding about people and- well-things. You shouldn't be pushing little walnut shells around.'

It was a sort of lefthanded compliment. It didn't really make me feel any too good. You come right down to it, it made me feel kind of ashamed. Anyhow, I didn't want to talk about me.

'Well, it doesn't really matter, does it? Come on, now. Let's find a pint somewhere and go have our-uh, talk.'

'We don't need a pint,' she said. 'You smell like a moonshine still as it is:, She gave me a mocking coy look.

'You don't have to ply me with liquor, you know. I'm an agreeable girl.'

That sounded promising too. I grinned and took her arm.

'Where'll we go?'

'Come on,' she said. 'I'll show you.'

The last of the marks were filing out of the lot. Their happy, or semi-happy, voices sounded thin and lonely as they trudged off into the drifting mist. Everything was closing up. Lights were going out.

One of Jerry's luckboys came by us with a mute glance, as if we were strangers. What Billie and I did was our business. He had his own problems.

Billie led me across the smoky drawbridge to Dracula's Castle, and to a side door which was like so many other doors in Neverland. It said Private. She took my hand and we went up an inky corkscrew staircase. Around and around in blackness.

I didn't make any mention of the fact that I frequently suffered from a touch of claustrophobia. Because more frequently I suffered from a compulsion of lust.

I like bed. I like the female form. I damn well like the lust of female flesh-in bed, out of bed, anywhere. I was ready to run up those stupid breakneck steps blind.

Billie opened a door. It was so goddam dark I couldn't see if it said Private or not. We stepped into a little room and it was like stepping into a page of Ivanhoe.

The floor was flagstone. There was a large Gothiclike archer-cross window in the outer wall and there was a canopy bed with high bedboards in one corner. I looked at the bed in the misty night light.

'Mr. Cochrane planned to make some kind of vampire roost out of this room,' Billie said in a subdued voice. 'The public isn't allowed up here yet. There aren't any lights.'

Lights I didn't need. But I wondered how many of Neverland's employees had used this room for assignations. I also wondered if Billie had ever used it before. Funny how perverse the human mind can be.

'A fool there was and he made his prayer-even as you and I,' I muttered.

Billie's face was a pale blur in the misty dark and her body was very close to mine.

'What's that all about?' she asked.

'An association of ideas. It's a line from Kipling's poem The Vampire.' I didn't tell her what the rest of the poem was about. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.

Even as you and I, buster. We're all saps when it comes to a woman. I reached for her.

'Not yet, Thax. Talk first.' She led me over to the canopy bed and we sat down in the dark. It squeaked.

'Talk about what, for godsake?'

Billie lay back on the bed and I looked at her in that weird smoky quarter light and the last thing I wanted to do right then was talk.

'Thax, how would you like to get away from all this?'

That sounded like a line too, from one of those unrealistic boy-meets-girl plays that flourished in the late 'Twenties. But I knew what she meant. The tinsel and phony glamour and the buck-grubbing and the unadmitted fear of the atomic age.

I leaned over her. 'How?'

'Let's run,' she said softly. 'Let's run away and not stop till we find a place so remote, so divorced from worldly problems that we'll think we're in Wonderland.'

'The Wonderland Ride has a steep price tag.'

'I've got the price of admission, Thax. Enough for both of us.'

'You? How?'

'Savings. I'm a thrifty girl, and I know how to invest. I'm not as young as I may look. I've been coining the dollars for years.'

'Still-it can't be so much that it would last us for more than a couple of years?'

'You'd be surprised,' she said.'Besides, two smart people like you and I can always make out. ' She started to sit up.

'Thax-we could go to the Mediterranean. I've always wanted to see the Mediterranean Sea.'

I pushed her down.

'Billie? Let's talk about it later? Billie-'

'Thax?' Her voice was a whisper, breathy, warm, wanton. 'I've already told them-oh, honey, wait-told them I was leaving in two weeks. Are you-_oooh God_, baby, don't-are you coming with me?'

'Yeah. Yeah. Anywhere,' I muttered. 'Anywhere.'

10

I walked Billie out to the parking lot. There were still about forty-odd cars scattered around out there and one of them was a squad car. Ferris must have been burning the midnight oil again.

Billie's car was a white Sixtyone MG. Cute little toy. I opened the door for her and she got in showing a lot of leg, which is what a girl has to do when she gets in or out of an MG.