She didn’t disappoint them.
She was just as tiny as she’d seemed and in her plain white blouse and her navy linen skirt and her dark seamed hose and her cute little pumps with the two-inch heels; she looked like a five-year-old who was all dressed up in her mama’s clothes.
Back on the bus they’d argued in whispers whether she was a dwarf or a midget. There was some scientific difference between the two but damned if anybody could remember exactly what that was.
From inside the depot came smells of hamburgers and onions and french fries and cigar smoke, all stale on the still summer air. Also from inside came the sounds of Miss Kay Starr singing “The Wheel of Fortune.” Skinny white cowboys clung like moths to the lights of the depot entrance as did old black men the color of soot and snappy young sailors in their dress whites and hayseed grins.
This was the scene the tiny woman confronted. And in moments she was gone from it.
The cabbie knew where the carnival was, of course. There would be only one in a burg like this.
He drove his rattling ’47 Plymouth out to the pier where the midway and all the rides looked like the toys of a baby giant.
He drove her right up to the entrance and said, “That’ll be eighty-five cents, Miss.”
She opened her purse and sank a tiny hand into its deep waiting darkness.
She gave him a dollar’s worth of quarters and said, “That’s for you.”
“Why, thank you.”
She opened the door. The dome light came on. He noticed for the first time that she was nice-looking. Not gorgeous or anything like that. But nice-looking. Silken dark hair in a pageboy. Blue eyes that would have been beautiful if they weren’t tainted with sorrow. And a full mouth so erotic it made him uncomfortable. Why if a normal-sized man was to try anything with a tiny woman like this—
He put the thought from his mind.
As she started to leave the cab, he just blurted it out. “I suppose you know what happened here a month ago. About the — little guy, I mean.”
She just looked at him.
“He stole a gun from one of the carnies here and raced back to his hotel room and killed himself.” The cabbie figured that the tiny woman would want to know about it, her being just like the little guy and all. To show he was friendly, the cabbie always told colored people stories about colored people in just the same way.
The cabbie’s head was turned in profile, waiting for the woman to respond.
But the only sound, faint among the crack of air rifles and the roar of the rollercoaster and the high piping pitch of the calliope, was the cab door being quietly closed.
A lady with a beard, a man with a vagina. A chance to get your fortune told by a gypsy woman with a knife scar on her left cheek. A sobbing little blond boy looking frantically for his lost mother. A man just off the midway slapping hard a woman he called a fucking whore bitch. An old man in a straw hat gaping fixedly at a chunky stripper the barker kept pointing to with a long wooden cane.
Linnette saw all these things and realized why her brother had always liked carnivals. She liked them for the same reason. Because in all the spectacle — beautiful and ugly, happy and sad alike — tiny people tended to get overlooked. There was so much to see and do and feel and desire that normal people barely gave tiny people a glance.
And that’s why, for many of his thirty-one years, her brother had been drawn to midways.
He told her about this one, of course, many times. How he came here after a long day at the typewriter. How he liked to sit on a bench up near the shooting gallery and watch the women go by and try and imagine what they’d be like if he had had the chance to meet them. He was such a romantic, her brother, in his heart a matinee idol worthy of Valentino and Gable.
She’d learned all this from his infrequent phone calls. He always called at dinner time on Sunday evening because of the rates and he always talked nine minutes exactly. He always asked her how things were going at the library where she worked and she always asked him if he was ever going to write that important novel she knew he had in him.
They were brother and sister, and more, of course, which was why, when he’d put that gun to his head there in the dim little coffin of a room where he lived and wrote—
She tried not to think of these things now.
She worked her way through the crowd, moving slowly toward the steady cracking sounds of the shooting gallery. A Mr. Kelly was who she was looking for.
A woman given to worry and anxiety, she kept checking the new white number ten envelope in her purse. One hundred dollars in crisp green currency. Certainly that should be enough for Mr. Kelly.
Aimee was taking a cigarette break when she happened to see Linnette. She’d spent the last month trying to forget about the dwarf and the part Ralph Banghart, the man who ran the Mirror Maze, had played in the death of the dwarf.
And the part Aimee had played, too.
Maybe if she’d never gotten involved, never tried to help the poor little guy—
Aimee lit her next Cavalier with the dying ember of her previous Cavalier.
Standing next to the tent she worked, Aimee reached down to retrieve the Coke she’d set in the grass.
And just as she bent over, she felt big male hands slip over her slender hips. “Booo!”
She jerked away from him immediately. She saw him now as this diseased person. Whatever ugliness he had inside him, she didn’t want to catch.
“I told you, Ralph, I don’t ever want you touching me again.”
“Aw, babe, I just—”
She slapped him. And hard enough that his head jerked back and a grunt of pain sounded in his throat.
“Hey—”
“You still don’t give a damn that little guy killed himself, do you?”
Ralph rubbed his sore cheek. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Sure you did. You’re just not man enough to admit it. If you hadn’t played that practical joke on him—”
“If the little bastard couldn’t take a joke—”
She raised her hand to slap him again. Grinning, he started to duck away.
She spit at him. This, he didn’t have time to duck away from. She got him right on the nose.
“I don’t want you to come anywhere goddamn near me, do you understand?” Aimee said, knowing she was shrieking and not caring.
Ralph looked around, embarrassed now that people were starting to watch, shook his head and muttered some curses, and left, daubing off the spittle with his white soiled handkerchief.
Aimee tossed her cigarette into the summer dry grass and started looking around for the dwarf woman again.
She just had this sense that the woman had somehow known the little guy who’d killed himself.
Aimee just had to find her and talk to her. Just had to.
She started searching.
Mr. Kelly turned out to be a big man with an anchor tattoo on his right forearm and beads of silver sweat standing in rows on his pink bald pate.
At the moment he was showing a woman with huge breasts how to operate an air rifle. Mr. Kelly kept nudging her accidentally-on-purpose with his elbow. If the woman minded, she didn’t complain. But then the woman’s boyfriend came back from somewhere and he looked to be about the same size but younger and trimmer than Mr. Kelly so Mr. Kelly withdrew his elbow and let the boyfriend take over the shooting lessons.
Then Mr. Kelly turned to Linnette. “What can I do for ya, small fry?”
Linnette always told herself that insults didn’t matter. Sticks and stones and all that. And most of the time they didn’t. But every once in a while, as right now for instance, they pierced the heart like a fatal sliver of glass.