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Markie looked in, all the same, as he trotted down the street. No daddy. Markie kept going, all the way down the street, to stand at last outside the doors of the arcade with the yellow sign. He drew a deep breath and went in.
The minute he crossed the threshold into darkness, he wanted to clap his hands over his ears. It was the loudest place he’d ever heard. In a corner there was a jukebox booming, telling him hoarsely that Frankie and Joh
Markie stood shivering. Big boys were scary. If you were lucky they ignored you or just flicked their cigarette butts at you, but sometimes they winked at their friends and grabbed you by the arm and said Hey, Shrimp, C’mere, and then they told you jokes you couldn’t understand or asked you questions you couldn’t answer, and then everybody would laugh at you. He turned to run outside again, but at that moment a car backfired right outside the door. With a little yelp he ran forward into the gloom.
Then he had to keep going, so he pretended he’d meant to come in there all along, and made for a small machine with a viewscope low enough for him to reach. Silver letters on a red background read IN THE DAYS OF THE INQUISITION. He didn’t know what the last word was, but underneath it in smaller letters were the words One Cent, so he dug in his pocket for a pe
Clunk, a shutter dropped, and by yellow electric light he saw a tiny ma
Markie stepped back and looked around. There were other pe
“Whatcha lookin’ for, peanut?” the person shouted.
“Are you Smith?” Markie shouted back. “I got to say something to Smith.”
The person jerked a thumb behind them. “Downstairs,” he told Markie. Markie followed the direction of the thumb and found himself descending into darkness on a carpeted ramp, booming hollowly under his feet, that led to a long low room. It was a little quieter down here. There were dim islands of light over pool tables, and more dead-eyed boys leaned by them, motionless until an arm would suddenly flash with movement, shoving a cuestick forward. Markie was too short to see the colored balls rolling on the table, but he could hear the quiet clicking and the rumble as they dropped into darkness.
At the back of the room were more pinball machines, brightly lit up, and these did not feature little race horses or playing cards, like the ones upstairs. There were naked ladies and leering magicians on them, instead. There was an old man seated between two machines, resting his arms on the glass panels. Markie approached cautiously.
This was a wizened old man, heavily tattooed, in old jeans and a T-shirt colorless with dust. The dust seemed to be grained in his skin and thick in his hair and straggly beard. He wore pointed snakeskin boots and a change belt full of nickels, and he was smoking a cigarette. His eyes were heavy-lidded and bored.
“Are you Smith?” Markie asked him. The old man’s eyes flickered over him.
“Sure,” he replied. It was hard to hear him, so Markie edged closer.
“I talked to this other man, and he said I was supposed to tell you something,” he said, loudly, as though the old man were deaf. Smith took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. It smelled really bad. Markie edged back a pace or two.
“Oh yeah?” Smith studied his cigarette thoughtfully. “What’s he got to say to me, kid? He bitching about something again?”
“No, he says-” Markie scratched a mosquito bite, trying to remember. “He wants to know how you like his new servant, the one that breaks chains and stuff. He says he talks about old kings and rightness? You know? And he wants to know why he shouldn’t, um, s-s-succeed.”
“He does, huh?” Smith stuck his cigarette behind one ear and scratched his beard. “Huh. He’s baiting me again, isn’t he? Jeeze, whyn’t he ever leave well enough alone? Okay. Why shouldn’t this servant succeed?” He removed the cigarette and puffed again, then stabbed the air with it decisively. “Here’s why. His father was unrighteous, and his sins are visited on his kids, right, unto the third and fourth generation? Aren’t those the rules? So there, that’s one reason. And this man is an adulterer and lusts after the flesh, right? Reason Number Two. Hmmm…” Smith pondered a moment; then his eyes lit up. “And when his son was born dead he despaired in his heart! Sin, Sin and Sin again. That’s why his big-shot servant should fail, and you can tell him so from me. Okay, kid? Now beat it.”
Markie turned and ran, up the ramp and out through shrieking darkness, and into the clean daylight at the foot of the pier. He pounded to a stop beside the snack stand and caught his breath, looking back fearfully at the arcade. After a moment he wandered out on the pier and looked south toward the dunes. They seemed far away, and full of strange shifting lights. He shrugged and ventured further along the pier, stopping to watch with interest as a fisherman reeled in a perch and gutted it there on the spot. There were four telescopes ranged along the pier at intervals, and he stopped and climbed the iron steps to look into the eyepiece of each one, and check the coin slot to see if anyone had jammed a dime in there. No such luck. Further on, he stopped at the bait stand and bought a bag of peanuts for five cents. Just beyond the bait stand was a bench with a clean spot, and he settled down and proceeded to eat the peanuts, dropping the shells through the gaps between the pier planks and watching the green water surge down below.
The last shell felt fu
He jumped up and ran, heart in mouth, and clattered down the stairway to the beach. Near the bottom of the Ocean View Avenue ramp he had to slow down, hobbling along clutching at his side, but he was too scared to stop.
All the way down the beach he watched the place with the silver trees, and he couldn’t see the old man’s white robes anywhere. The same little kids were still playing on the sand, though, and when he put down his head and plodded across the soft sand the same silence fell over everything; so he was not really much surprised, coming to the foot of the first dune, to lift his head and see the old man leaning against one of the dead trees.