The hands closed around us so fast, from both sides, that we didn't even have time to cry out. One second we were alone at the top of the leaning staircase and the next there were filthy fingers clamped on all of our wrists and red, bearded faces leering into ours. The fingers began dragging us around in a sickening circle.
"Ring around the funny," the face nearest to me half-sang, his breath overwhelming, equal parts bad gin and sea salt and sand. "Pockets full of money. Give it. Give it. Give it NOW!"
Then, as suddenly as they had grabbed us, they let go, a hand or two at a time, fell back a step, and we got our first good look. If we hadn't been on a glorified dock at the edge of the Pacific, a hundred yards that felt like fifty miles from anywhere I knew, I think I might have laughed, or wept.
They stood before us in a clump, five decrepit men in ruined pea-coats with their noses running and their beards wild and their skin mottled with sores red and raised like octopus suckers. Probably, I thought, Long Beach — like the former People's Republic of Santa Monica, and every other Southern California town I knew — had passed and enforced a new set of vagrancy laws to keep all that fresh sidewalk pavement free of debris. And this particular quintet had scuttled down here to hide under the great steel magician's hat and sleep with the fishes and pounce on whatever drifted out to them like marine snow.
"Here," Ash started, sliding a hand into the pocket of his vest, just as Rebecca stuck an arm across his chest.
"Don't," she said.
It shouldn't have surprised me. I'd watched her do this before. Rebecca had worked with the homeless most of her adult life, and felt she knew what they needed, or at least what might be most likely to help. But I was always startled by the confidence of her convictions.
"Nearest shelter's on La Amatista," she said, gesturing over her shoulder toward the frontage road, town. "Five, maybe six blocks. They have food."
"Don't want food," one of the men snarled, but his snarl became a whine before he'd finished the sentence. "We want change."
"You won't get ours."
"Change." The five of them knotted together — coiled, I thought, and my shoulders tensed, and I could feel the streaky wetness they'd left on my wrists and their breath in my mouth — and then, just like that, they were gone, bumping past us down the steps to disappear under the dock.
For a good minute, maybe more, the three of us stood in our own little clump, and there were unsettled feelings seeping up through my stomach, and I could neither place them nor get them quiet. Finally, Rebecca said, "The most amazing merry-go-round," as though nothing whatsoever had occurred.
I glanced down the pier toward the magician's hat, which was actually the roof of an otherwise open pavilion. There were lights clustered beneath it, yellow and green and red, but they seemed to waver above the water, connected to nothing, until I realized I was looking through some sort of threadbare canvas drapery suspended from the rim of the overhang like a giant spider web, generations in the making. Between us and the pavilion lay maybe fifty yards of moldy wooden planking. Shadows of indeterminate shape slid over the planks or sank into them, and on either side of the streetlights, solitary figures sat at the railing-less edges and dangled their legs over the dark and fished.
"Is this safe, Rebecca?" I asked.
She'd seemed lost in thought, staring after our would-be muggers, but now she brightened again, so fast I felt myself get dizzy. "We'll let Ash go first. Drive everyone back with the vest." She flicked his front with her fingers, and I felt a flicker of jealousy, couldn't believe I was feeling it, and made myself ignore it.
Of course, Ash did go first. The lights and the pavilion and the curtain floating on the wind drew him. Me, too, but not in the same way. Rebecca waited for me to return her smile, then shrugged and stepped off behind our friend. I followed.
"They used to sell t-shirts from a stand right there," she said as we walked, gesturing at the empty space to her left. "Army camouflage. American flag prints. They sold candy popcorn, too. My dad always bought us the Patriotic Bag. Red cherry, blue raspberry, vanilla."
"Are there such things as blue raspberries?" Ash asked, but Rebecca ignored him.
"Lot of patriotic stuff, come to think of it. I wonder why. Bicentennial, maybe?"
If she was asking me, I had no answer. Periodically, one of the streetlamps buzzed or flickered. No moon. Our footsteps echoed strangely on the wet wood, sounding somehow lighter than they should have. Not one of the fishermen glanced our way, though one twitched as we drew abreast, hunched forward to work furiously at his reel, and yanked a small ray right up into the air in front of him. It hung there streaming, maybe a foot across, its underside impossibly white, silently flapping. Like the ripped-out soul of a bird, I thought, and shuddered while the fisherman drew the ray toward him and laid it, gently across his lap. It went on flapping there until it died.
We'd all stopped in our tracks at the fisherman's first movements, and we stayed there quite a while. Eventually, Ash turned to us and nodded his head. "I've missed you, Rebecca," he said. "You, too, Elliot." But he meant Rebecca. He'd always meant Rebecca, and had told me so once, the night before graduation, on one the rare occasions when he got high, just to see. "Count on you," he'd told me. "Worship her."
Tonight, Rebecca didn't respond, and eventually Ash started toward the pavilion and the lights beneath it. We followed. I walked beside my wife, close enough for elbow contact but not manufacturing any. Something about the flapping ray reminded me of our daughter, squirming and jerking as she scrabbled for a hold in the world, and I wanted to be back at our house. In spite of the calmer, sadder way Rebecca had been this past year-maybe even because of it, though I hated thinking that — I loved our home.
"What made the merry-go-round so amazing?" I asked.
"The guy who designed it — Rooff, I think? — he's like the most famous American carousel builder. Or one of. He did this one in Rhode Island or Vermont, when they broke it up and sold off the horses, they went on Ebay for twenty-five thousand dollars apiece. But this one …"
In the quiet of the next few seconds, I became aware, for the first time since we'd reached the pier, of the sounds. That wind, first of all, sighing out of the blackness to crash against the fortified city and then roll back. The ocean, shushing and muttering. The boards creaking as fishermen shifted or cast and seagulls dropped out of the dark to perch on the ruined railings. And, from straight ahead, under that darkly gleaming steel hat, an incongruous and unidentifiable tinkling, almost musical, barely audible, like an ice cream truck from blocks away.
"You should have seen their faces, Elliot. You would have loved them."
I blinked, still seeing the ray. "Really?"
"Rooff — the designer — he made them after his business partner died. His best friend, I guess. To keep him company, or something. I met this older man from the Carousel Preservation Assemblage who—"
"The Carousel what?" I said, and smiled. It really was astonishing, the people Rebecca knew.
"I met him at that open city planning meeting down here a couple years ago. The one about the development of the rest of downtown? The one I came home so upset from?"
"That would be every city planning meeting," I said. My smile faded, and the musical tinkling from the end of the pier got just a little louder.
"Anyway. These horses, Elliot. They were just … the friendliest horses I've ever seen. They all had huge dopey smiles on their faces. Their teeth either pointed out sideways, or else they were perfect and glowing. Their sides were shiny brown or black or pink or blue. Their manes all had painted glass rubies and sapphires sticking out of them, and the saddles had these ridiculously elaborate roses and violets carved into the seats. Hooves flying, like they just couldn't stand to come down, you know? Like it was too much fun just sailing around in a circle forever. The Preservation guy said Rooff installed every single one of them, and every cog of every machine down here, by himself, at night, by candlelight. As some kind of tribute to his friend or something. Said he was a total raving loon, too. Got involved in all kinds of séances trying to contact his friend after he died. Wound up getting publicly ridiculed by Harry Houdini, who broke up one of his little soirees, apparently. Died brokenhearted and penniless."