The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel (12 page)

“Not you,” he answered. “Me.”

“Well, forget it,” she said angrily. “You don’t
have to take a test to be a friend, y’know. Not where I came from,
anyway. That’s stupid. Is that the way they do it here? God. That’s
so dumb I can’t believe it”

He didn’t answer.

She grabbed a clump of grass and yanked it out,
threw it down the slope.

“I don’t pass any tests,” she muttered.

It didn’t matter.

He was gone.

She didn’t wait for Drake; she started home
alone, sometimes praying that Kitt would show up so she could
ignore her, sometimes hoping she’d meet her father along the way so
he could take her someplace for an ice cream.

A man was cleaning the hardware-store window as
she passed, the sidewalk dark with splashed water. She knew him.
Mayard Chase. Besides taking her to the Travelers, he’d come to the
house a couple of other rimes to talk with her father about
building and stuff. He wasn’t very tall, but he was big. Muscle
big. And not much hair except for a red fringe above his ears.

He smiled at her.

She smiled back.

“You settling in?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“Pain in the neck, isn’t it?”

She slowed, watching him hunker down to scrub a
low corner of the glass. “What is?”

“Trying to decide if you want to stick around or
run away.”

An automatic protest choked her, and all she
could do was shake her head.

He rose with a loud groan, a hand on his lower
back. He stepped back to the curb and examined the window. “What do
you think?”

She looked. “It’s clean, I guess.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, hands on his hips now.
“Nobody ever notices when it’s clean, you know. Only when it’s
dirty.” _ A laugh just shy of being too high-pitched. “I’ve got
three boys and two girls, and they don’t even know it’s there at
all.” Another laugh, deep in his throat. “Tell your dad I said
hello, okay? I’ll call him this week.”

She nodded, and headed for the corner. As she
crossed the empty street she looked back, and he was back down
again, scrubbing at the corner. Weird, she thought, and giggled
when she realized that Mr. Chase fit. If the place was weird, and
Mr. Chase was weird, then they belonged here.

God, she hoped she’d never get weird.

The house was empty when she got there.

She didn’t have to call out; she could feel
it.

The car was gone from the driveway, the garage
was empty.

In a brief panic she ran up the stairs and
checked the bedrooms just to be sure they hadn’t changed their
minds and went back home without her. But all the clothes were
there, the beds unmade, and there was the smell of her mother’s
soap in the bathroom, the kind she used when she took a shower. So
she took a can of soda from the refrigerator and sat on the porch
railing, not caring how the sweat rolled in iceballs down her
spine, how the soda almost gave her a cramp. She sat for over an
hour, listening to how the Station sounded.

Quiet.

Dead.

Until she realized that she’d been listening for
those blaring horns and screaming kids and shrieking brakes and
sirens calling and doors slamming and airplane engines rumbling
overhead.

She blinked.

And it wasn’t quiet after all.

Leaves moved, air moved, birds and insects and
dogs and things she didn’t know about yet but would.

She leaned back against a post, one leg up, and
scratched her nose.

Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. Not too
terrible. Not as if she would kill herself or anything. Mr. Chase
was pretty okay, the postman who wore a hat the way they did in the
jungle was cranky-funny and, like Chip had said, there were other
kids. Elly may be Queen of the Club, but she wasn’t queen of
everything. She grinned, took a drink. Maybe
she
would get
to be queen of something. Have her own kingdom, boss all the
peasants, tell Elly to take her dress and stick it where the sun
don’t shine.

And there wouldn’t be any rules about how to
have a friend.

The storm woke her.

It had been muggy all evening, and she had
heard, just after supper, the old man stomping around the valley
again. Not as angrily this time. Just cranky, that’s all — stomping
and muttering and once in a while whacking a hill with his cane to
get out the lightning.

She told her mother about the Queen of the Club,
angry, and hurt, and finally hating them aloud. Her mother had
laughed at first at the rules and the way Fran described how the
girls listened to Elly, then she sobered and told her that
grown-ups are that way too, and sometimes you joined and sometimes
you didn’t. It didn’t help. Fran already knew about grown-ups. What
she wanted to know was if she should be friends with Chip anyway,
even if the others didn’t like it.

Do you like him, Lanette asked.

Yeah. Sure. He’s okay. He’s funny.

Then why should you let someone else tell you
what friends you can have and what friends you can’t?

The storm woke her.

Daddy spent most of the day in the backyard,
beating the grass down, cutting it, hauling it away in plastic bags
to the curb. Cursing. Sometimes yelling. It wasn’t like him at all,
and for a while Fran thought Elly had snuck in one night and
exchanged him for someone else. Someone Elly could add to the club
and boss around.

When she told him about talking to Mr. Chase the
day before, he only grunted and wished amid curses that the guy
would mind his own damn business.

The storm woke her, and she sat up, rubbed her
arms, knocked her hair away from her eyes; she hurried to the
window and leaned against the sill, blinking against the glaring
blue-white.

Looking for the lights of the carnival over the
houses.

Looking for Chip.

Thunder, and lightning, but this time it was the
wind that had all the fury, branches scraping against the house as
if the trees wanted to get in, the rain on a hard slant, the house
itself moaning, shifting, trembling, letting bits of the wind
inside to keep the temperature down.

A throat cleared behind her.

She turned and saw her mother in the doorway, a
ghost in a white nightgown, her hair loose and falling over her
chest. She came in while Fran stared, swallowed, and looked outside
again.

Lanette knelt on the floor, put her elbows on
the sill. “It woke me up,” she whispered, pointing to the rain that
suddenly slashed against the window. “Are you all right,
honey?”

“Yeah.”

Shadows jumped — one second here, the next
second over there.

“Mom, are you and Daddy going to get divorced?”
Lightning; she saw their faces in the pane, pale and long and
twins.

“No, honey, I don’t think so.”

“Then why are you fighting all the time?”

A sigh the wind took and turned into a
groan.

“It’s not your daddy’s fault. He was supposed to
get a better position at the firm than he was promised, that’s
all.” A hand on Fran’s arm, a quick squeeze and it was gone. “It
took about all we had to get here, move, fix the place, things like
that. I don’t like it when we don’t have something in the bank.”
She smiled; it was killed by the lightning. “I get scared and I
take it out on him sometimes.”

Fran shivered. “Are we poor?”

“No, dear, we’re not poor. It’s what’s called
being a little tight for a while.”

Shadow by the tree.

Fran squinted and strained.

“I’m sorry if we hurt you.”

The storm, for a moment, gave the shadow a
grinning face.

“It’s okay.”

Her mother kissed her cheek, hugged her
shoulders, gently hustled her back to bed and kissed her again and
whispered, “Everything’s going to be all right, don’t you
worry.”

“Okay.”

Her mother hesitated. “Look, honey, I know it
gets lonely when you don’t have many friends. I’ll find some. So
will you. Get some sleep, now. See you in the morning.”

Which came, and went.

As did the rest of the week, and the week after
that.

She went to the park sometimes, all by herself
because her mother got a job and wasn’t home much anymore; once she
went to the glade and found it empty, waited for a while and left.
She watched ball games and once in a while played with kids she
didn’t know who didn’t ask her to play again unless she asked
first. They didn’t say no; they didn’t invite her either.

She didn’t see Chip.

She walked by Kitt’s house a couple of times,
saw Drake once, mowing his lawn, and he grinned and waved and
called that Kitt was probably at the park. Fran couldn’t find
her.

One Saturday morning, all morning, her mother
sat on the porch with red eyes and puffy cheeks and blew her nose a
lot.

That night, they went to the carnival, but it
wasn’t much fun because her father kept saying how shoddy
everything looked and her mother kept telling her to stay close,
not to get lost, you never knew what kind of people worked at
places like this.

Finally she managed to get them to the
carousel.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” her mother said, shaking her
head. “Neal, you know how I am. It’ll make me sick.”

Her father only frowned, but he let Fran go
ahead and she raced on when it stopped, found her ostrich and
grabbed the pole with both hands. On the first pass, her parents
waved; they were gone the next time around, and the time after
that, and she began to feel strange, a little scared, until Chip
suddenly walked up beside her and put his hand on the bird’s skinny
neck.

She grinned.

He winked.

She said, “So, are we friends or what?”

“Soon,” he told her, pinched her leg playfully
as he darted away between the plunging animals.

Rules again, she thought; stupid dumb rules.

Three days later, Mr. Chase and two of his sons
came over to visit, and they spent an hour on the porch, arguing
with Daddy. Quietly, but she was up in her room and she could hear
them anyway, and she finally decided to get out of the house so she
couldn’t hear anymore. Decided to find Chip, but he wasn’t in the
park, and the carnival was closed, and when she returned home, just
before supper, her father was on the porch, reading the newspaper,
and he said he was sorry about Zera Rainer.

Fran stared. “What?”

He beckoned, and she stood beside him, and saw
on an inside page that Zera had died the night before in the
hospital, from leukemia. He explained what it was, and said he was
sorry again — wasn’t she one of her friends? and she shrugged and
went inside and stood in the middle of the living room and stared
out the window, at the back of her father’s head.

Waiting for the tears.

One finally came. Just one. Just as her mother
came home, saw her, and hugged her, and asked her if she wanted to
go to the funeral.

Fran shook her head.

Did she want to talk about it?

She shook her head again. Waiting for the
tears.

Going for a walk after a supper she knew she had
eaten though she couldn’t remember how it tasted, finding another
branch-whip and dragging it behind her until she finally just let
it drop.

In the park she started for the glade. They
would be there.

She knew it. But when she reached the trees she
veered away and walked up the low hill, kicking the heads of
grey-haired dandelions.

When she reached the top, she turned in a slow
circle, sighed, and sat.

Waiting for the tears.

Chip came instead.

“Pretty bad, huh?” he said, grabbing at grass
and tossing it into the air.

“Yeah.”

He wore the same clothes, his feet were still
bare.

“I didn’t know,” she said at last. “I didn’t
know she was so sick.”

“She didn’t either,” he told her.

His voice made her look at him, made her frown
because she couldn’t understand how he could sound so . . . not
uncaring . . . so normal. If Zera had been such a good friend, Fran
would have been screaming her head off. She knew that. But Chip,
from his eyes, hadn’t been crying at all.

It scared her a little.

Chip scared her a little.

“So,” he said, watching the grass fall, “we
gonna be friends?”

“That,” said Elly, “is for me to decide.”

Fran started. She hadn’t seen the others coming,
and they were ranged now on the slope, Elly in front, the others
fanned out raggedly behind her. Elly’s dress, pink buds on white,
slipped and swung in the breeze, making it seem as if she were
moving when she wasn’t moving at all. Maddy had a chocolate bar,
Susan’s hands were in fists, and Kitt was so mad there was a spot
of white on each cheek. Fran didn’t get it. Why were they so angry?
What did she do now, break another one of their stupid rules? Why
didn’t they just leave her alone?

“Go away,” she said.

“Shut up,” Maddy answered around a bite of her
candy. “I’ll pound you.”

“Chip,” Elly said, “go away. We’ll talk to
Frances and see what we want.”

Chip hugged his knees, looked at Fran, looked at
the girls.

He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

Scowling, Elly took a step up. “You have
to.”

Fran grabbed Chip’s arm. “My mother says I don’t
have to let anyone pick my friends for me if I don’t want to.”

Susan gasped, and Fran stared at her, puzzled,
stared at Elly, whose hands clutched and twisted her skirt She
realized then that they weren’t truly angry, just trying to be.
What they really were was afraid. Scared to death. And that didn’t
make any sense at all.

“Go away,” Elly said to Chip, her voice higher,
softer, smaller. “Please go away.”

Chip stood, and they backed off.

Fran pushed herself to her feet as a chill that
wouldn’t rub away walked her arms.

“Now look,” Chip said, “I don’t care what you
think you did, or what you think you can do, Elly, but you did not
pick Zera to be my friend. I did. Like I picked Susan’s sister. You
know that.”