“I don’t need no money. Banks got plenty of money.”
“Nah,” Strangler said. “I let you go, I figure I’m going to have to see you again, and I don’t want to.”
Strangler advanced with the barbell.
“Then I’ll shoot you.”
“I just don’t care,” Strangler said, and stepped forward.
Bad Tiger fired the gun.
47
The bullet hit Strangler, I knew that, but all he did was grunt and shift a bit, and then he was walking again. Blood was running down his side. His mouth was twisted up and there was spittle on his lips.
Bad Tiger looked at Strangler like he’d just discovered that a martian had landed at the carnival. He was so startled, he backed up a step.
He fired again.
This time I heard the bullet slam into something behind us. I turned my head and saw one of the teddy bears at a booth topple over, bleeding white cotton stuffing.
Strangler was less than three feet away from Bad Tiger now. He made a noise in his throat like a dog growling over a bone. People had started to understand what was happening. A lady screamed. There were yells from the spinning ride. The guy that worked the ride lever said, “Hey now, hey now,” and he made a quick retreat around the other side of the ride. I hoped he was going to get some law.
Bad Tiger yelled and pulled the trigger.
The gun barked.
Strangler staggered, but he still didn’t go down.
Bad Tiger took one more step back, and that was when it happened.
He stepped right in between the whirling seats of a ride, but he was there for less than the blink of an eye. The next seat swinging around caught him solid, and I got to tell you, it was an amazing and a horrible sight.
It lifted him so quick it was hard to believe it was happening. It was like he had learned to fly.
He was tossed like a Raggedy Ann doll. It flung him up, and he fell back down. But he didn’t hit the ground. He was struck again by another seat and bounced into a pole. That bounced him back into another spinning seat, and that one caught him in such a way that he was knocked across the lot at a height of about thirty feet. He went like he had been shot out of a cannon.
We watched with amazement as he crashed into a popcorn stand and it exploded in a rain of white puffy corn and a running man. Oily butter leaked yellow over the ground. Bad Tiger’s suit soaked it up like a fresh biscuit.
Bad Tiger didn’t move. He was facedown and one arm was twisted behind his back like he was trying to scratch a hard-to-reach spot low down.
“Oh,” Tony said. “Oh my.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Oh my.”
Dazed, we walked over to Strangler. He was holding his hand against his left side. There was a bloody spot on the right side of his bare chest as well. But Strangler, he was still standing.
A crowd gathered around Bad Tiger, but then they just stood there looking at him. One man stepped forward and nudged Bad Tiger’s body with the toe of his shoe, like he was trying to wake him up.
Someone else yelled, “Get a doctor!”
Strangler said, “I can tell you from here. Ain’t no need to check his pulse.”
48
A while later an ambulance sped up with its siren on and two men jumped out and opened the back and rolled out a stretcher, headed for where Bad Tiger lay.
They picked him up and turned him over gently, put him on the stretcher. One of the men carrying him, said, “Well, he’s ate his last pickle.”
A man in the crowd pointed at Strangler.
“He was shooting at that guy, the one without a shirt, and he backed into the ride while he was doing it.”
“Not our department,” said one of the ambulance men.
They put him in the ambulance and drove away. No siren, moving slowly. No one in a hurry now.
We walked with Strangler to his trailer. Inside, he put the false bottom in the trunk, replaced the barbells and all the rest back inside, and closed the lid. He sat on the couch and looked at Timmy. Timmy looked smaller than I remembered.
After a while, the cops came, two of them. They knocked on the door politely, and when I let them in they looked at the body on the floor, then at us. One of the cops was thin with a sweet face. The other was a stocky cop who looked like he ate bullets for breakfast and cannons for dinner. For supper, maybe the cannonballs.
Jane was wrapping Strangler’s side. There was already a bandage on his chest.
She said, “I reckon both bullets are still in him.”
“He looks spry for two bullets,” said the stocky cop.
“Yeah, well,” Jane said, “he is naturally spry.”
The cops walked over and looked at Strangler.
“Someone called a doctor,” said the thin cop. “He’s on his way.”
“I’m all right,” Strangler said. “It wasn’t much of a gun.”
“You could still use a doctor, ” Jane said.
“You know,” said the stocky cop, “we got a body on the floor, we got another one thrown through a popcorn stand, twisted up like a Boy Scout knot, but we ain’t got no explanation.”
“He tried to rob Strangler,” Jane said.
“Who are you?” the cop said.
“A fan. I run his fan club. He doesn’t know it yet, but we just started one. We came here to tell him that, and that’s how we got mixed up in all this mess. We’re from Oklahoma.”
“Oklahoma?” the stocky cop said.
“Yeah, state just above Texas,” Jane said.
The thin cop grinned. The stocky cop said, “Yeah, girlie, I know where it is. But why did you come all the way from Oklahoma?”
“We are all fans of Strangler,” she said. “Right?”
She looked at us when she said that.
Tony nodded.
I nodded.
“Fans?” said the stout cop.
“Big fans,” Jane said.
“So you heard of Strangler here, and you come all the way down from Oklahoma to tell him you’re starting a fan club?”
“Well,” Jane said, resting a hand on Strangler’s shoulder, “it’s a little more complicated than that. We didn’t like the weather, the drought, the sand, the grasshoppers, the starving rabbits, the centipedes everywhere, the scorpions, and did I mention the dust?”
“You did,” said the stocky cop. “You’re a little smarty, ain’t you?”
“I like to think so,” Jane said.
“That’s not what I meant,” said the cop.
“All I’m saying, sir, is we’ve had a hard time, and we were very excited to be here, to finally tell our hero about the fan club. And frankly, we were looking for a job with the carnival. Strangler has quite a following in Oklahoma and the South. East Texas especially. We thought a fan club would be nice. And we thought a quarter per membership could add up.”
“So it was a way to make money?” said the thin cop.
“Money,” Jane said, “and a way to honor our hero. We just came to tell him. We wanted his blessing. Course,
