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“You should hear me here late nights, nothing but talk!” Charles Halloway shook his head. “Yes, you should’ve heard. I should’ve said more to you any day you name in the past. Hell. Where was I? Leading up to love, I think. Yes… love.”
Will looked bored, Jim looked wary of the word.
And these looks gave Charles Halloway pause.
What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was above all, common cause, shared experience?
That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world ru
But… how to say it?
“Look,” he tried, “put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance ru
Charles Halloway stopped, flushed, self-conscious again, knowing vaguely there was a target up ahead but not quite how to get there. He chewed his lips.
Dad, don’t stop, thought Will. When you talk, it’s swell in here. You’ll save us. Go on.
The man read his son’s eyes, saw the same look in Jim, and walked slowly around the table, touching a night beast here, a clutch of ragged crones there, a star, a crescent moon, an antique sun, an hourglass that told time with bone dust instead of sand.
“Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff. God, God, you must think I’m crazy, this talk. Probably think we should be out duck-shooting, elephant-gu
Jim was at the window now, looking out across the town to the far black tents and the calliope that played by the turning of the world in the night.
“Is it bad?” he asked.
“Bad?” cried Will, angrily. “Bad. You ask that!?”
“Calmly,” said Will’s father. “A good question. Part of that show looks just great. But the old saying really applies: you can’t get something for nothing. Fact is, from them, you get nothing for something. They make you empty promises, you stick our your neck and—wham!”
“Where’d they come from?” asked Jim. “Who are they?”
Will went to the window with his father and they both looked out and Charles Halloway said, to those far tents:
“Maybe once it was just one man walking across Europe, jingling his ankle bells, a lute on his shoulder making a hunchbacked shadow, before Columbus. Maybe a man walked around in a monkey skin a million years ago, stuffing himself with other people’s unhappiness, chewed their pain all day like spearmint gum, for the sweet savour, and trotted faster, revivified by personal disaster. Maybe this son after him refined his father’s deadfalls, mantraps, bone-crunchers, head-achers, flesh-twitchers, soul-ski
“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by death-watch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people’s salt and other people’s cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horse of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the long road out of the Gothic and Baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.”
“All those years.” Jim’s voice swallowed itself. “The same people? You think Mr. Cooger, Mr. Dark are both a couple hundred years old?”
“Riding that merry-go-round they can shave off a year or two, any time they want, right?”
“Why, then—” The abyss opened at Will’s feet—“they could live forever!”
“And hurt people.” Jim turned it over, again and again. “But why, why all the hurt?”
“Because,” said Mr. Halloway. “You need fuel, gas, something to run a carnival on, don’t you? Women live off gossip, and what’s gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones, ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn’t have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast, obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread, square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival.
“All the mea