38
Brady does know her. He does.
At first he can’t get it, it’s like a word that’s stuck on the tip of your tongue. Then, as the band starts some song about making love on the dancefloor, it comes to him. The house on Teaberry Lane, the one where Hodges’s pet boy lives with his family, a nest of niggers with white names. Except for the dog, that is. He’s named O’dell, a nigger name for sure, and Brady meant to kill him . . . only he ended up killing his mother instead.
Brady remembers the day the niggerboy came running to the Mr. Tastey truck, his ankles still green from cutting the fat ex-cop’s lawn. And his sister shouting, Get me a chocolate! Pleeeease?
The sister’s name is Barbara, and that’s her, big as life and twice as ugly. She’s sitting two rows up to the right with her friends and a woman who has to be her mother. Jerome isn’t with them, and Brady is savagely glad. Let Jerome live, that’s fine.
But without his sister.
Or his mother.
Let him see what that feels like.
Still looking at Barbara Robinson, his finger creeps beneath Frankie’s picture and finds Thing Two’s toggle-switch. He caresses it through the thin fabric of the tee-shirt the way he was allowed—on a few fortunate occasions only—to caress his mother’s nipples. Onstage, the lead singer of ’Round Here does a split that must just about crush his balls (always supposing he has any) in those tight jeans he’s wearing, then springs to his feet and approaches the edge of the stage. Chicks scream. Chicks reach out as if to touch him, their hands waving, their fingernails—painted in every girlish color of the rainbow—gleaming in the footlights.
“Hey, do you guys like an amusement park?” Cam hollers.
They scream that they do.
“Do you guys like a carnival?”
They scream that they love a carnival.
“Have you ever been kissed on the midway?”
The screams are utterly delirious now. The audience is on its feet again, the roving spotlights once more skimming over the crowd. Brady can no longer see the band, but it doesn’t matter. He already knows what’s coming, because he was there at the load-in.
Lowering his voice to an intimate, amplified murmur, Cam Knowles says, “Well, you’re gonna get that kiss tonight.”
Carnival music starts up—a Korg synthesizer set to play a calliope tune. The stage is suddenly bathed in a swirl of light: orange, blue, red, green, yellow. There’s a gasp of amazement as the midway set starts to descend. Both the carousel and the Ferris wheel are already turning.
“THIS IS THE TITLE TRACK OF OUR NEW ALBUM, AND WE REALLY HOPE YOU ENJOY IT!” Cam bellows, and the other instruments fall in around the synth.
“The desert cries in all directions,” Cam Knowles intones. “Like eternity, you’re my infection.” To Brady he sounds like Jim Morrison after a prefrontal lobotomy. Then he yells jubilantly: “What’ll cure me, guys?”
The audience knows, and roars out the words as the band kicks in full-force.
“BABY, BABY, YOU’VE GOT THE LOVE THAT I NEED . . . YOU AND I, WE GOT IT BAD . . . LIKE NOTHIN’ THAT I EVER HAD . . .”
Brady smiles. It is the beatific smile of a troubled man who at long last finds himself at peace. He glances down at the yellow glow of the ready-lamp, wondering if he will live long enough to see it turn green. Then he looks back at the niggergirl, who is on her feet, clapping and shaking her tail.
Look at me, he thinks. Look at me, Barbara. I want to be the last thing you ever see.
39
Barbara takes her eyes from the wonders onstage long enough to see if the bald man in the wheelchair is having as much fun as she is. He has become, for reasons she doesn’t understand, her man in the wheelchair. Is it because he reminds her of someone? Surely that can’t be, can it? The only crippled person she knows is Dustin Stevens at school, and he’s just a little second-grader. Still, there’s something familiar about the crippled bald man.
This whole evening has been like a dream, and what she sees now also seems dreamlike. At first she thinks the man in the wheelchair is waving to her, but that’s not it. He’s smiling . . . and he’s giving her the finger. At first she can’t believe it, but that’s it, all right.
There’s a woman approaching him, climbing the aisle stairs two by two, going so fast she’s almost running. And behind her, almost on her heels . . . maybe all this really is a dream, because it looks like . . .
“Jerome?” Barbara tugs Tanya’s sleeve to draw her attention away from the stage. “Mom, is that . . .”
Then everything happens.