“Marsha,” the woman says, with a winning smile and a negligent wave of her hand. “Don’t sweat it. I just wanted to say the brownies are really good. How do you get them not to be gritty?”
“Family secret,” January says. “It’s all about the butter. Pardon me.” She winks and turns away, as unenthralled suddenly with the technical details of infusing herb extracts into fats as she was with dadoing mahogany for tongue-and-groove construction. The line for the carousel has thinned as the evening has progressed, and since a group has just gone in, there is nobody standing at the gate. January presents herself just as the young Latina in gray coveralls who apparently came with the rental is closing the latch.
The carousel operator smiles apologetically. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Next ride?”
“I’m in no hurry,” January answers.
The woman nods and turns away to start the great machine revolving. She must have filled both hoppers with rings already, because as the music swells and the mounts begin to revolve she swings neatly up a stepladder and grabs a lever that extends both arms. The sound of wood on wood is almost buried under the Wurlitzer’s noise.
She comes back, dusting her hands, with a grin that makes January want to befriend her.
“Do you like your job?”
The woman looks down shyly. “I don’t mind it. Sometimes the kids’ birthday parties are a bit hairy, and sometimes it’s drunk college kids. We had a wedding in September. That was nice.”
“I work in a library.” January tosses her hair behind her shoulder. “I hear you about the kids.”
She extends her barely touched popcorn to the woman, who waves it off.
“Once you’ve worked here a month, you can’t get near the stuff anymore.” She wipes her hand on her trousers before she sticks it out and waits for January to clasp it. “I’m Maricela.”
“January,” January replies, giving her a little squeeze.
Maricela’s face softens with surprise—possibly even shock. “You’re pulling my leg.”
January is used to reactions, but this one seems a little over the top. “Fifty-one years,” she says. “Is there some reason it shouldn’t be?”
“No,” Maricela says, visibly gathering herself. “It’s just a little unusual, is all. A weird coincidence. Do you like carousels?”
“Love ’em,” January says. It isn’t as if she could have missed Maricela changing the subject. “More now than before. I read up on them when I found out Martin was throwing himself a kid party.”
“Everybody needs a kid party now and again,” Maricela says. “Especially people who don’t have kids. So you know about the horses having a romance side, the outside that’s all carved and pretty?”
“And a back side,” January says. “Which is so plain it doesn’t even get a pretty name.”
Maricela laughs, nodding.
Behind January, someone whoops, having caught the brass ring. It sounds like a child, but there are no kids at this party.
——
The combustion that propels the bullet—while not, properly speaking, an explosion in and of itself—is triggered by an explosion. A minuscule one: the detonation of the cartridge’s primer. That explosion is caused by the smack of the firing pin against the cartridge. It ignites the propellant, and the propellant pushes the bullet.
What causes the firing pin’s descent, of course, is the convulsive clenching of a human hand.
——
They’re not as young as they used to be: by midnight, the crowd has thinned. January’s still there, and so is Martin, and so is Jeff. In search of a place to sit, they’ve moved to the mostly empty carousel and claimed one of the carriages, really two ornately carved and gilded red-painted benches set facing each other. The boys sit together with January across, her feet tucked against the footboard and her knees between Jeff’s and Martin’s.
January’s coming down, and she’s pretty sure Martin is long grounded. It must be seriously cold outside; there was a frost warning, and the draft every time the doors open to let somebody else leave is bitter. She thinks she’ll be good to drive in another twenty minutes, anyway, and somewhere east of here her cats are probably picketing.
She’ll make her excuses after two more rounds on the carousel. The woman running it for the rental party is probably ready to go home to whomever she has, even if Martin has the place until one.
Besides, if January stays much longer, she’ll be stuck cleaning up.
The conversation has reached that point where they’re tidying up stray threads from earlier—like the end of a well-constructed movie—and Jeff has just finished telling them how the Yard Bunny defeated him as roundly as the Road Runner waxing Wile E. Coyote when she remembers something she was going to ask about earlier. Her research bump is itching: it’s a hazard of being a librarian.
“Did you ever find out what the backstory on the ghost plate was?” she asks.
“Backstory?” Jeff looks sleepy and contented, to the point where January is a little worried about him driving home. She doesn’t think he’s touched a drop of anything mood altering all night, however, which puts him on firmer ground than she and Martin, even if they’re both coming all the way back through sober and into a little cold and achy.
“You know.” She gropes dreamily after the right words. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the thump and blare of the band organ as they come around in the circle once more. They’ve been through its rolls—assuming they are rolls; the Internet tells her many band organs now run on MIDIs—so many times that she knows what order the songs come in now. She’ll be hearing them in her sleep.
One rank ahead of the red-painted chariot, the gray ponies—including the mismatched one—go up and down in little circles, riderless as horses in a funeral parade. “Provenance. History. Who put it there and where did it come from? That sort of thing.”
Jeff leans his head back, closes his eyes, and shrugs. “Houses are mysteries, and not all of those mysteries are nice things. Sometimes it’s best to not ask.”
Behind him, the brass ring glints in the dispenser, but January is so surprised to see it she doesn’t think to stand up and grab it until it has gone by. The carousel slows, song ending. She’d thought they were the only riders, but there must be somebody on the other side. Because when they come around again, the ring in the dispenser is just dull wire.
She’d swear the gray filly flicks its tail in annoyance, but of course it’s just a cold draft from the opening door. Somebody else is leaving the party for the long drive home.
——
Once the decision to fire the gun is made, the neural impulse to pull the trigger travels from brain to finger. Or possibly the action is reflexive. Possibly deep in the animal regions of the brain, electrical activity commences, leading the finger to convulse upon the trigger, the gun to discharge, and the mind—a few tremendously significant fractions of a second later—to justify the action to itself, believing it—I—has made a decision.
Or maybe those animal regions of the brain are part of its I, whether—culturally speaking—we are trained to regard them as such. Maybe those bits of ourselves that we alienate as subconscious impulses are as much I as the things Freud quantified as the ego and superego.
That I will provide reasons—motives, justifications, triggers. Jilted love or spurned advances. Money, sex, control. Any homicide cop can tell you those are the reasons people die.
In real life, it’s simple. The romance only happens in the movies.
——
All her best intentions of making a clean getaway evaporate, and January—of course—winds up staying behind to help clear. She and Martin and Jeff divide the spoils between them. Her share of the take includes a plate and a half of assorted cookies (unadulterated—January notes with a bit of pride that all of her brownies are gone), half of a tuna casserole, three deviled eggs, the heel of the saffron bread, and some shrimp dip. She won’t have to cook for a week.