Nightmare Carnival

“So, uh, you know how to shoot a gun?” Maybe he meant the rifle rattling in the window rack behind our heads. A light-gauge shotgun, nothing fabulous. “And would you say you’re fast on your feet? On a scale from a chick in high heels to Carl Lewis sprinting from a lion.”

“I hate it when dudes ask me that. The line of inquiry seldom leads anywhere pleasant.”

“You dames have all had bad experiences.”

I laughed, low and nasty.

“Yeah, it’s weird. Can’t figure what the common denominator might be.”

He shut his mouth for a while, smarting. Guy like him, pain didn’t last long. A whack upside the head with a two-by-four was positive attention.

My thoughts went to a previous fling with another brutish loner type: a coyote hunter in eastern Washington. I hoped my luck was better this go-around. I hoped Beasley’s luck was better too.

“You’re not really a carnival roadie,” I said a few miles later. “You lack that particular something or other.”

“Well, I wouldn’t get on any of the rides.”

The Gallows Brothers Carnival had set up shop in a pasture a few miles outside of town. Unfortunately, I had missed the last show. The great machinery lay cold and silent and would soon be dismantled. Beasley lived in a modular at the end of a concourse of shuttered stalls, Tilt-a-Whirls, and tents. All very Beaver Cleaver 1950s. The night breeze swirled sawdust and the burned powder of exploded firecrackers.

A wolf howled from the north where the forest began.

Then we were inside Beasley’s shack, barring the door behind us. Down, down into the darkness we dove, to the bottom of a blue hole at the bottom of the earth. The wolf howled again. Its pack answered and the ponderosa pines closed ranks, as Beasley’s Herculean arms closed me in.

A hazy nightlight fumed at the foot of the bunk. Beasley, with a physique straight from a picture book of Norse gods, could’ve wrestled bears, looked as if he’d done so on occasion. Once Beasley and I got going he held back for fear of breaking me, the fool. I wanted to tell him it was only really good once it started to hurt, but I’d gone past the vanishing point and dissolved into another, primal self, the one that doesn’t speak English.

He performed as his swagger advertised, or close enough. Afterward, he lay slick and aglow, perfectly scarred. I asked him if he did any acting, because he radiated mucho charisma. He only smiled boyishly and took a swig from the bottle, took it in like water. I suspected his fate would be to die horribly of cirrhosis, or under the claws of a beast, and young, or to turn fifty and appear as if he’d gone face first into a wall, haggard as a kerosene-swilling bum. Probably the dying-young deal: I kept seeing a bleached skull when I caught him in my peripheral vision.

“Gimme some sweet, sweet nothings,” I said to keep him from nodding off and leaving me alone with my two a.m. thoughts, and alone with the howls in the wood.

“Look, doll, I’m a man of action. Sweet talk ain’t my bailiwick.”

“Your wick isn’t going into my bailey again if you don’t humor me.”

“As you say.” He cleared his throat. “How can you be sure you’re here?”

“What, think you were humping your pillow?”

“Sorry, Jess, you started this. Maybe all of it is a projection. Or a computer program. You’re a sexy algorithm looping for eternity.”

We shared a cigarette. Not my brand.

“Kinda smart for a dumb guy,” I said. What I knew of Beasley’s past derived from a few hours over pints — ex-army, ex-footballer, a hunter, a bodyguard, expert driver. Man-at-arms slash valet and satisfied with the role. College had served as a central hub for womanizing, boozing, and playing ball.

“No offense taken, or anything.” He even made petulance sound manly.

“Don’t get riled, handsome. Playing dumb is your protective coloration. It’s how you fool the predators. Most of us are fooled.”

“My protective coloration is a surly disposition and a buffalo gun that’d blast a hole through a concrete bunker.”

“Neither of those require smarts.” I squinted at a movie poster of Robby the Robot carrying unconscious Anne Francis against a backdrop of shooting stars, and another of Lon Chaney Jr. bursting the buttons of his natty white shirt as a devil moon blared through evergreen branches.

“Wait a second. Is that wolfsbane in the pot?”

“Jessica. you’re not a hologram, you’re a dream.” He kneaded my breast. “It had to be the right woman, but I hoped it would be a flake, a bumpkin. I was afraid you’d come here. Ever since I dreamt of you there’s been a dark spot floating in my mind. A mote.”

“Make sense, man!”

“Yeah, it’s wolfsbane.” He rolled away from me, the oldest trick in the book.

I woke to a little girl screaming her heart out, out in the darkness. Beasley gently clamped his hand over my mouth, his other arm wrapped around my waist. I wasn’t going anywhere unless I took extreme measures. Not so much of a turn-on in this context.

“It’s all right.” He spoke so softly, I almost didn’t catch it. “They say an elk screams like a child. Go back to sleep.”