The kid glanced up. "Yessir. He's really big."
"Did he give it to you hisself?"
"He sold it to me. For a dollar."
"No, I mean did he hand it to you when you bought it?"
"Yessir." The kid started edging away.
"Listen," Cooley said confidentially, "I've got a boy at home that really wants a picture like that. Would you sell it to me for five bucks?"
"I want to keep it."
"Sure, but with five bucks you can go back and get another one. See, I haven't got time to go in there myself. I'll make it six bucks -- what do you say?" He held out the money.
"Well -- all right."
The photograph showed a clean-shaven young man dressed in a business suit; standing beside him was another man, the top of whose head was level with the handkerchief in the giant's breast pocket. The photograph was inscribed, "Best wishes, Big John Kimberley." Cooley took it back to his station wagon, got out his fingerprint kit and dusted it. It was easy to pick out the giant's prints from the rest -- the thumbprint was over two inches long. He took the old Dog River flyer from its envelope in the glove compartment and compared the prints under a magnifying glass. They were the same.
Cooley went back to the carnival, bought a strip of tickets for the Ferris wheel, and waited in line. When his turn came, the young attendant threw out the clutch of his putt-putting engine, steadied the car, helped Cooley in, fastened the metal rod over his lap. The car lurched as he started the wheel and stopped it again almost immediately; Cooley hung a few feet in the air, looking down at the next car as the attendant settled a woman and two children in it. Up they went again, the car swaying, and Cooley clutched the lap rod; he hadn't been in one of these things since Paul was eight, that time in Portland, and he never had liked them. He knew the car was suspended on gimbals so that it always hung level, but it felt as if it was going to tip over, and what if the gimbals seized up?
If Paul was here he would enjoy this; he had always been crazy about rides of any kind. He would grin with pleasure and his face would get flushed, and he would be grabbing Cooley's sleeve, "Dad, do it again! Do it again!"
There was no front to the car; it was really nothing but a seat and a back and a footrest, and he could look down past the tips of his shoes at the car below where the woman and her two daughters were squeezed together with the metal rod over their laps, and then below them, as the great wheel revolved, to the empty car and then the one after that, and the next one where a young man and his girl had their arms around each other, each car smaller and farther away, each one hanging and swaying from the framework of the wheel as it turned. The cars were hung like baskets, the seat part was the basket and the footrest stuck out, and he could see that if it wasn't for the lap rod, if he could stand up on the footrest, the car would tip then, it would have to, and out he would go, like Paul, into air and distance.
All the new passengers were on the wheel now, and as it majestically turned, Cooley rose higher and higher, while the sunlit people below grew tiny and foreshortened until it looked like, if his legs were just long enough, he could step on them like ants. He could see the dirty canvas tops of the concession booths, and now, as he reached the apex of the wheel, he could look diagonally down over the sideshow tent and see the rear ends of a dozen house trailers and semis lined up there like patient elephants. One of those trailers must be the giant's, but which one? That was what he had to know, and it was worth coming up here to find out.
The Ferris wheel revolved and Cooley pursued his slow orbit, now backward and down, now forward and upward. After a long time the wheel stopped when Cooley reached the bottom; the attendant came over, and Cooley handed him another ticket. Up he went again. This time, as he approached the dizzy height of the wheel, he saw a flash of, color down there beyond the freak tent. It was the top of a brown-haired man's head, coming into view as if he had been sitting there, hidden by the tent, and had just now stood up. The head moved toward the tent and vanished.
There was the evil thing, that brown oval in the sunlight, and it gave Cooley a jolt to realize that he had seen his enemy, that there had been a connection between them just for that moment across eighty feet of air.
He had used up three more tickets before the moment came that he was waiting for. From the height of the wheel, down there in the area behind the freak tent, he saw the brown head appear again. This time it was moving the other way. The man's torso came into view, then his legs; he was wearing a brown suit, moving with long strides, and even at this distance Cooley could see that he was unnaturally tall. The man walked around the end of the last semi in the row, the one with the bright yellow cab. That one had to be his; the vehicle on the far side of it was a house trailer.
When the wheel stopped again, Cooley got off and handed his unused tickets to the first kid he saw.
"Gee, thanks."
"That's okay, son," Cooley said. He lit a cigar with a wooden match, looking at the flame bright and pale in the sunshine.
It was too bad that the giant was living in a converted semi, not a house trailer, because that meant no windows. One of his ideas, the one he had spent the most time thinking about, was to tape up a photo of Paul on a window, and then knock, and then light the match.
Along the ratty main street, a couple of blocks away from the carnival, there was a bank, a five and dime, a greasy spoon, a hardware store, and a decayed movie theater advertising a Glenn Ford double bill. Cooley bought two ten-gallon jerrycans at the hardware store, had them filled at a gas station, and asked directions to a lumber yard. It was out at the other end of town; Cooley went there and bought four two-by-fours. He paid the man in the shop a few dollars to cut them to five and a half feet, with a forty-five-degree bevel cut on the flat side. "It's for my kid," he explained, "he's building some damn thing, I don't even know what it is, and he don't know how to use a miter box."
"Well, sometimes the old man's got to help out the young ones," said the man, with a wink.
"That's right."
He stowed the two-by-fours in the wagon, parked it on a side street, and went into the greasy spoon for dinner. He was too wound up to eat much, but he bought a couple of sandwiches to go.
He already knew that the rear door of the semi had been replaced; that was standard in a semi conversion. The chances were that the doors on one side had been replaced too; there might be only one door, or depending on how the trailer had been made in the first place, there might be as many as four -- double doors on each side. The door handles were probably about five feet off the ground, not any more than that, even for a giant, which meant that five and a half would be about right to wedge them shut, with the beveled ends of the two-by-fours jammed into the ground. Then the rags piled underneath, and the match. Gasoline made a hot fire; long before those two-by-fours burned through, the metal doors would be too hot to touch.
He parked on the deserted street back of the carnival lot and ate his sandwiches while he waited. A little after midnight the carnival closed down; the white lights on the Ferris wheel and the other rides went dark. Cooley was getting out of the wagon when he saw something that made him sit down and swear. In the dark lot there were two or three pale glimmers moving. Cooley took his binoculars out of the glove compartment and managed to get one of them in the field of view: it was a man with a flashlight.