PART II

JANE

It warn’t- wasn’t too hard to find Russ. This is the 80s, after all, and everyone’s life is all in a bunch o’computers. If you know where to look, or if you know someone who does, you can find anyone anywhere, whether they want you to or not.

And Russ wasn’t trying too hard not to be found. Russ, or Icarus, or whoever he’s calling himself these days, when I found him he was trying to keep his dignity despite him having to wear diapers and eat applesauce for breakfast.

My job wasn’t to feel sorry for him, though. My job was to see if there was enough of that same piss-and-vinegar filled kid I knew back in the 30s who pulled a bunch of misfits together and made us into a team. If he was still in there, this job just got easier by a country mile. If he wasn’t, then the job was gonna be hard as a saddle made of sun baked trail-leather.

But tough or no, a job’s a job. And I needed the tin. I’d told Russ the tale, now I needed to find Jake.

I looked at the paper I’d gotten earlier that morning. The address was pretty easy to find, thanks to the Thomas guide. Every street in the city in one book of maps- fella must’ve gotten hisself pretty rich by thinking o’this and printing it out.

It took me about an hour to get to where I was going. Soon enough I found the strip mall, with it’s parking lot full of rides, game booths, and two-bit haunted houses that’d all fold up at the touch of a button and the turn of a key.

Made me think of the first time Mama took me to the circus when I was little. It was a tiny, fleabag operation; even as an eight year old, I could see that. But I could also see that the performers seemed a hell of a lot happier than a lot of the farmers in town who were barely putting enough food on the table to keep their families from turning into ghosts.

That’s why when I was fourteen- well, another story for another day. Now, the two-bit circuses are little-bitty carnivals that pop up in plaza parking lots and are done in a week and move on without a trace. But even in the carnivals, some things stay the same.

Most of them have rides, games, and overpriced food that could snap your arteries shut just by smelling it. But this one had something a little extra.

The human element.

It had the fat lady. And the dwarf pony. And the alligator man and, most important for me, it had the fortune teller.

Me, I’m looking to make a fortune. So I go to the teller.

I see him. He’s sitting with a customer…really, more of a mark than a customer. He’s got a white tent among a row of white tents. Every tent’s advertising local knick-knacks, henna tattoos and airbrushed t-shirts. I see him in the wheelchair long before he sees me, and I listen in on his talk with the latest person to give him their money.

“You are a very creative person,” I hear his voice saying to the twenty-something blond girl sitting in front of him, her boyfriend sitting down beside her, his eyes wandering. The girl smiles as if she’d been told she was going to get a thousand bucks in the mail, just for being alive and pretty.

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“And you’ve had to-“ he looks between her hand and her face, his bright blue eyes set like bright blue pearls in the middle of a wrinkled-apple of a face. When we were dumb kids in a filthy abandoned subway station he’d been a short, spry fellow, maybe five feet tall and trying to do the hoochy-kootchy with evry half-decent looking gal he crossed paths with. Now he's a wizened little gnome of a man sitting in a wheelchair. He’s still short, but not a dwarf. And except for whatever’s put him in a wheelchair, his body doesn’t seem to have betrayed him like poor Icarus’ has.

“You’ve had to suffer at times. With your…father? No, no, it’s your…mother? Stepfather! He hurt you somehow…yelled, cursed, made you…ah! It was that.I’m so sorry, honey. But here’s the good news…”

He must be pushing eighty, and still wearing a now very battered, dusty red turban and a moth-eaten red cape over his shoulders. It was put on hastily and covers most of the back of the wheelchair he’s sitting in. The rest of him is blocked by his mark, but I just bet he’s wearing that same vest (though I hope with the kind of chest he has today that he’s taken to wearing a shirt beneath it) and those same, baggy, poofy pants he thinks make him look like something out of the Arabian Nights.

It works. He hits all the right buttons, and the poor girl is crying within five minutes. He’s good; figured out somehow that he stepfather yelled at her when she was six, and she’s still mad about it. Figured somehow that her teacher molested her as a little girl, something she’s never told anyone. Figured out she was still sad about her mom dying a few years ago, and wanted something different in her life ever since.

Then, for the last bullet, he tells her he can sense her mom in the tent with them, right now, right over there. She’s happy and proud of her daughter, and still watching over her.

The girl leaves the tent sobbing, after giving him a hug that he holds on to just a shade too long, but it’s to be expected. Most men don’t stop wanting women- but they lose it and can’t rope ‘em in and keep ‘em after a certain age, if they don’t got the flash to do the job. And working at a two-bit, parking-lot carnival? Nope, he ain’t got the flash. You’d have more luck finding turpentine in the middle of the Painted Desert.

“And who, pray tell, is next to be found? Who is in need of the services of Manrique, the Magnificent?” he says his little spiel when he sees my shadow outside the tent wall.

Manrique?

So’s I say it when I come in. “Manrique? Jake?”

He looks at me for just a second. “Do I know you?” he says. He’s got me going. Then his face breaks into a smile, and I take a seat.

“Jane!” he says, all happy for a second before his regular face takes over again. “Been a long time, Jane,” he says. “I always felt that somehow, sometime, I’d see one of the old crew walk in on me. How’ve you been?”

JAKE

“Alright, Jake. Nice setup you’ve got here.”

Jane’s being polite. Well, polite as you get growing up on a prairie, then in a carnival like this. I give a little snort and wave my hand. “This?” I say, “A dump. But the people are nice, real nice. Nicer than the Russian mobsters I hadda go through when I had my own little tarot card place in downtown Syracuse. Can you believe the mob’s got its fingers in things even down there? Between the state of New York and Ivan, I was getting taxed so bad I coulda made double my money and still ended up in the hole each month. Here at least I get three square, a bed, and I don’t have to worry about waking up to some Russkie standing over me with a baseball bat, you know?”

She nods her head, as if she knows. She doesn’t. I’ve seen her, off and on in the news. She’s been making money- I don’t know how much, but a lot more than me and the rest of us, anyway. She somehow got the rights to making action figures of herself, along with that Cowboy hero fella and a few other folks besides. Every few years they make a new batch of Saturday morning cartoons about the guy, and I see the carny kids watching him alongside Tarzan, Batman, and those little blue squishy freaks with the white hats and the squeaky voices.

Plus, I heard she’s been making tapes and movies about staying fit at our age. Haven’t had a chance to pick one up, but . . . well, you know. An old man’s gotta take his thrills where he can get ‘em.

But I ain’t telling her that.

I watch Jane’s face- can’t really help it, ya know. Reading her, reading people in general, I mean. I been doing it for longer’n boys ‘been chasing girls on the Ameche. I look at every twitch, very muscle. She’s trying to hide it- she knows how I do what I do, but she’s not gonna be able to hide it forever. A small tug here, a tiny pull there, and I can tell rough enough what she’s thinking and how hard she’s willing to work to bury it until she’s not worried about letting too much out’ve the ba-

“Stop tryin’ to figure me, Jake.”

Dang, she’s good.

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TO BE CONTINUED...