Dreaming Jewels Read online

  Horty held out his elbow and she carefully put the package under it. He said, as if he had just thought of it—and indeed he had—“I will come back, Kay. Someday.”

  “Kay!”

  “’Bye, Horty.” And she was gone, a flash of taffy hair, yellow dress, a bit of lace, changed before his eyes to a closed gate in a board fence and the sound of dwindling quick footsteps.

  Horton Bluett stood in the dark drizzle, cold, but with heat in his ruined hand and another heat in his throat. This he swallowed, with difficulty, and, looking up, saw the broad inviting tailgate of a truck which was stopped for the traffic light. He ran to it, tossed his small bundle on it, and squirmed up, clawing with his right hand, trying to keep his left out of trouble. The truck lurched forward; Horty scrabbled wildly to stay on. The package with Junky in it began to slide back toward him, past him; he caught at it, losing his own grip, and began to slip.

  Suddenly there was a blur of movement from inside the truck, and a flare of terrible pain as his smashed hand was caught in a powerful grip. He came very close to fainting; when he could see again he was lying on his back on the jolting floor of the truck, holding his wrist again, expressing his anguish in squeezed-out tears and little, difficult grunts.

  “Gee, kid, you don’t care how long you live, do you?” It was a fat boy, apparently his own age, bending over him, his bowed head resting on three chins. “What’s the matter with your hand?”

  Horty said nothing. He was quite beyond speech for the moment. The fat boy, with surprising gentleness, pressed Horty’s good hand away from the handkerchiefs and began laying back the cloth. When he got to the inner layer, he saw the blood by the wash of light from a street-light they passed, and he said “Man.”

  When they stopped for another traffic signal at a lighted intersection, he looked carefully and said, “Oh, man,” with all the emphasis inside him somewhere, and his eyes contracted into two pitying little knots of wrinkles. Horty knew the fat boy was sorry for him, and only then did he begin to cry openly. He wished he could stop, but he couldn’t, and didn’t while the boy bound up his hand again and for quite a while afterward.

  The fat boy sat back on a roll of new canvas to wait for Horty to calm down. Once Horty subsided a little and the boy winked at him, and Horty, profoundly susceptible to the least kindness, began to wail again. The boy picked up the paper bag, looked into it, grunted, closed it carefully and put it out of the way on the canvas. Then to Horty’s astonishment, he removed from his inside coat pocket a large silver cigar case, the kind with five metal cylinders built together, took out a cigar, put it all in his mouth and turned it to wet it down, and lit up, surrounding himself with sweet-acrid blue smoke. He did not try to talk, and after a while Horty must have dozed off, because he opened his eyes to find the fat boy’s jacket folded as a pillow under his head, and he could not remember its being put there. It was dark then; he sat up, and immediately the fat boy’s voice came from the blackness.

  “Take it easy, kid.” A small pudgy hand steadied Horty’s back. “How do you feel?”

  Horty tried to talk, choked, swallowed and tried again. “All right, I guess. Hungry… gee! We’re out in the country!”

  He became conscious of the fat boy squatting beside him. The hand left his back; in a moment the flame of a match startled him, and for an etched moment the boy’s face floated before him in the wavering light, moonlike, with delicate pink lips acrawl on the black cigar. Then with a practiced flick of his fingers, he sent the match and its brilliance flying out into the night. “Smoke?”

  “I never did smoke,” said Horty. “Some corn-silk, once.” He looked admiringly at the red jewel at the end of the cigar. “You smoke a lot, huh.”

  “Stunts m’growth,” said the other, and burst into a peal of shrill laughter. “How’s the hand?”

  “It hurts some. Not so bad.”

  “You got a lot of grit, kid. I’d be screamin’ for morphine if I was you. What happened to it?”

  Horty told him. The story came out in snatches, out of sequence, but the fat boy got it all. He questioned briefly, and to the point, and did not comment at all. The conversation died after he had asked as many questions as he apparently wanted to, and for a while Horty thought the other had dozed off. The cigar dimmed and dimmed, occasionally sputtering around the edges, once in a while brightening in a wavery fashion as vagrant air touched it from the back of the truck.

  Abruptly, and in a perfectly wide-awake voice, the fat boy asked him, “You lookin’ fer work?”

  “Work? Well—I guess maybe.”

  “What made you eat them ants?” came next.

  “Well, I—I don’t know. I guess I just—well, I wanted to.”

  “Do you do that a lot?”

  “Not too much.” This was a different kind of questioning than he had had from Armand. The boy asked him about it without revulsion, without any more curiosity, really, than he had asked him how old he was, what grade he was in.

  “Can you sing?”

  “Well—I guess so. Some.”

  “Sing something. I mean, if you feel like it. Don’t strain y’self. Uh—know Stardust?”

  Horty looked out at the starlit highway racing away beneath the rumbling wheels, the blaze of yellow-white which turned to dwindling red tail-light eyes as a car whisked by on the other side of the road. The fog was gone, and a lot of the pain was gone from his hand, and most of all he was gone from Armand and Tonta. Kay had given him a feather-touch of kindness, and this odd boy, who talked in a way he had never heard a boy talk before, had given him another sort of kindness. There were the beginnings of a wonderful warm glow inside him, a feeling he had had only once or twice before in his whole life—the time he had won the sack-race and they gave him a khaki handkerchief, and the time four kids had whistled to a mongrel dog, and the dog had come straight to him, ignoring the others. He began to sing, and because the truck rumbled so, he had to sing out to be heard; and because he had to sing out, he leaned on the song, giving something of himself to it as a high-steel worker gives part of his weight to the wind.

  He finished. The fat boy said “Hey.” The unaccented syllable was warm praise. Without any further comment he went to the front of the truck body and thumped on the square pane of glass there. The truck immediately slowed, pulled over and stopped by the roadside. The fat boy went to the tailgate, sat down, and slid off to the road.

  “You stay right there,” he told Horty. “I’m gonna ride up front a while. You hear me now—don’t go ’way.”

  “I won’t,” said Horty.

  “How the hell can you sing like that with your hand mashed?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”

  “Do you eat grasshoppers too? Worms?”

  “No!” cried Horty, horrified.

  “Okay,” said the boy. He went to the cab of the truck; the door slammed, and the truck ground off again.

  Horty worked his way carefully forward until, squatting by the front wall of the truck-body, he could see through the square pane.

  The driver was a tall man with a curious skin, lumpy and grey-green. He had a nose like Junky’s, but almost no chin, so that he looked like an aged parrot. He was so tall that he had to curve over the wheel like a fern-frond.

  Next to him were two little girls. One had a round bush of white hair—no; it was platinum—and the other had two thick ropes of pigtails, bangs, and beautiful teeth. The fat boy was next to her, talking animatedly. The driver seemed not to pay any attention to the conversation at all.

  Horty’s head was not clear, but he did not feel sick either. Everything had an exciting, dreamlike quality. He moved back in the truck body and lay down with his head on the fat boy’s jacket. Immediately he sat up, and crawled among the goods stacked in the truck until his hand found the long roll of canvas, moved along it until he found his paper bag. Then he lay down again, his left hand resting easily on his stomach, his right inside the bag, with his index an
d little fingers resting between Junky’s nose and chin. He went to sleep.

  3

  WHEN HE WOKE AGAIN THE TRUCK HAD stopped, and he opened unfocussed eyes to a writhing glare of light—red and orange, green and blue, with an underlying sheet of dazzling gold.

  He raised his head, blinking, and resolved the lights into a massive post bearing neon signs: ICE TWENTY FLAVORS CREAM and CABINS and BAR—EAT. The wash of gold came from floodlights over the service area of a gas station. Three tractortrailer trucks were drawn up behind the fat boy’s truck; one of them had its trailer built of heavily-ribbed stainless steel and was very lovely under the lights.

  “You awake, kid?”

  “Uh-Hi! Yes.”

  “We’re going to grab a bite. Come on.”

  Horty rose stiffly to his knees. He said, “I haven’t got any money.”

  “Hell with that,” said the fat boy. “Come on.”

  He put a firm hand under Horty’s armpit as he climbed down. A jukebox throbbed behind the grinding sound of a gasoline pump, and their feet crunched pleasantly on cinders. “What’s your name?” Horty asked.

  “They call me Havana,” said the fat boy. “I never been there. It’s the cigars.”

  “My name’s Horty Bluett.”

  “We’ll change that.”

  The driver and the two girls were waiting for them by the door of a diner. Horty hardly had a chance to look at them before they all crowded through and lined up at the counter. Horty sat between the driver and the silver-haired girl. The other one, the one with dark ropes of braided hair took the next stool, and Havana, the fat-boy, sat at the end.

  Horty looked first at the driver—looked, stared, and dragged his eyes away in the same tense moment. The driver’s sagging skin was indeed a grey-green, dry, loose, leather-rough. He had pouches under his eyes, which were red and inflamed-looking, and his underlip drooped to show long white lower incisors.

  The backs of his hands showed the same loose sage-green skin, though his fingers were normal. They were long and the nails were exquisitely manicured.

  “That’s Solum,” said Havana, leaning forward over the counter and talking across the two girls. “He’s the Alligator-Skinned Man, an’ the ugliest human in captivity.” He must have sensed Horty’s thought that Solum might resent this designation, for he added, “He’s deef. He don’t know what goes on.”

  “I’m Bunny,” said the girl next to him. She was plump—not fat like Havana, but round—butter-ball round, skin-tight round. Her flesh was flesh colored and blood-colored—all pink with no yellow about it. Her hair was as white as cotton, but glossy, and her eyes were the extraordinary ruby of a white rabbit’s. She had a little midge of a voice and an all but ultrasonic giggle, which she used now. She stood barely as high as his shoulder, though they sat at the same height. She was out of proportion only in this one fact of the long torso and the short legs. “An’ this is Zena.”

  Horty turned his gaze full on her and gulped. She was the most beautiful little work of art he had ever seen in his life. Her dark hair shone, and her eyes shone too, and her head planed from temple to cheek, curved from cheek to chin, softly and smoothly. Her skin was tanned over a deep, fresh glow like the pink shadows between the petals of a rose. The lipstick she chose was dark, nearly a brown red; that and the dark skin made the whites of her eyes like beacons. She wore a dress with a wide collar that lay back on her shoulders, and a neckline that dropped almost to her waist. That neckline told Horty for the very first time that these kids, Havana and Bunny and Zena, weren’t kids at all. Bunny was girl-curved, puppy-fat curved, the way even a four-year-old girl—or boy—might be. But Zena had breasts, real, taut, firm, separate breasts. He looked at them and then at the three small faces, as if the faces he had seen before had disappeared and were replaced by new ones. Havana’s studied, self-assured speech and his cigars were his badges of maturity, and albino Bunny would certainly show some such emblem in a minute.

  “I won’t tell you his name,” said Havana. “He’s fixin’ to get a new one, as of now. Right, kid?”

  “Well,” said Horty, still struggling with the strange shifting of estimated place these people had made within him, “Well, I guess so.”

  “He’s cute,” said Bunny. “You know that, kid?” She uttered her almost inaudible giggle. “You’re cute.”

  Horty found himself looking at Zena’s breasts again and his cheeks flamed. “Don’t rib him,” said Zena.

  It was the first time she had spoken… One of the earliest things Horty could remember was a cattail stalk he had seen lying on the bank of a tidal creek. He was only a toddler then, and the dark-brown sausage of the cat-tail fastened to its dry yellow stem had seemed a hard and brittle thing. He had, without picking it up, run his fingers down its length, and the fact that it was not dried wood, but velvet, was a thrilling shock. He had such a shock now, hearing Zena’s voice for the first time.

  The short-order man, a pasty-faced youth with a tired mouth and laugh-wrinkles around his eyes and nostrils, lounged up to them. He apparently felt no surprise at seeing the midgets or the hideous green-skinned Solum. “Hi, Havana. You folks setting up around here?”

  “Not fer six weeks or so. We’re down Eltonville way. We’ll milk the State Fair and work back. Comin’ in with a load o’ props. Cheeseburger fer the glamor-puss there. What’s yer pleasure, ladies?”

  “Scrambled on rye toast,” said Bunny.

  Zena said, “Fry some bacon until it’s almost burned—”

  “—an’ crumble it over some peanut-butter on whole wheat. I remember, princess,” grinned the cook. “What say, Havana?”

  “Steak. You too, huh?” he asked Horty. “Nup—he can’t cut it. Ground sirloin, an’ I’ll shoot you if you bread it. Peas an’ mashed.”

  The cook made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and went to get the order.

  Horty asked, timidly, “Are you with a circus?”

  “Carny,” said Havana.

  Zena smiled at his expression. It made his head swim. “That’s a carnival. You know. Does your hand hurt?”

  “Not much.”

  “That kills me,” Havana exploded. “Y’oughta see it.” He drew his right hand across his left fingers and made a motion like crumbling crackers. “Man.”

  “We’ll get that fixed up. What are we going to call you?” asked Bunny.

  “Let’s figure out what he’s going to do first,” said Havana. “We got to make the Maneater happy.”

  “About those ants,” said Bunny, “would you eat slugs and grasshoppers, and that?” She asked him straight out, and this time she did not giggle.

  “No!” said Horty, simultaneously with Havana’s “I already asked him that. That’s out, Bunny. The Maneater don’t like to use a geek anyway.”

  Regretfully, Bunny said, “No carny ever had a midge that would geek. It would be a card.”

  “What’s a geek?” asked Horty.

  “He wants to know what’s a geek.”

  “Nothing very nice,” said Zena. “It’s a man who eats all sorts of nasty things, and bites the heads off live chickens and rabbits.”

  Horty said, “I don’t think I’d like doing that,” so soberly that the three midgets burst into a shrill explosion of laughter. Horty looked at them all, one by one, and sensed that they laughed with, not at him, and so he laughed too. Again he felt that inward surge of warmth. These folk made everything so easy. They seemed to understand that he could be a little different from other folks, and it was all right. Havana had apparently told them all about him, and they were eager to help.

  “I told you,” said Havana, “he sings like an angel. Never heard anything like it. Wait’ll you hear.”

  “You play anything?” asked Bunny. “Zena, could you teach him guitar?”

  “Not with that left hand,” said Havana.

  “Stop it!” Zena cried. “Just when did you people decide he was going to work with us?”

  Havana opened his mo
uth helplessly. Bunny said, “Oh—I thought…” and Horty stared at Zena. Were they trying to give and take away all at the same time?

  “Oh, kiddo, don’t look at me like that,” said Zena. “You’ll tear me apart…” Again, in spite of his distress, he could all but feel her voice with fingertips. She said, “I’d do anything in the world for you, child. But—it would have to be something good. I don’t know that this would be good.”

  “Sure it’d be good,” scoffed Havana. “Where’s he gonna eat? Who’s gonna take him in? Listen, after what he’s been through he deserves a break. What’s the matter with it, Zee? The Maneater?”

  “I can handle the Maneater,” she said. Somehow, Horty sensed that in that casual remark was the thing about Zena that made the others await her decision. “Look, Havana,” she said, “what happens to a kid his age makes him what he will be when he grows up. Carny’s all right for us. It’s home to us. It’s the one place where we can be what we are and like it. What would it be for him, growing up in it? That’s no life for a kid.”

  “You talk as if there was nothing in a carnival but midges and freaks.”

  “In a way that’s so,” she murmured. “I’m sorry,” she added. “I shouldn’t have said that. I can’t think straight tonight. There’s something…” She shook herself. “I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  Bunny and Havana looked at each other. Havana shrugged helplessly. And Horty couldn’t help himself. His eyes felt hot, and he said “Gee.”

  “Oh, Kid, don’t.”

  “Hey!” barked Havana. “Grab him! He’s fainting!”

  Horty’s face was suddenly pale and twisted with pain. Zena slid off her stool and put her arm around him. “Sick, honey? Your hand?”

  Gasping, Horty shook his head. “Junky,” he whispered, and grunted as if his windpipe were being squeezed. He pointed with his bandaged hand toward the door. “Truck,” he rasped. “In—Junky—oh, truck!”