That tore it. He had never heard of a carnival keeping a night watch before, but there they were. If he tried to get in there with four two-by-fours, two jerrycans of gasoline and a carton full of rags, they would catch him for sure, and even if he got away, the giant would have had a warning.
For a moment he considered the rifle. It was in the wagon, his Winchester .30-06, cleaned and oiled, with two boxes of soft-nosed ammo, and he could wrap it up in brown paper or something, take it on the Ferris wheel and wait for his chance. The range would be only about twenty-five yards, but how would he get rid of the rifle afterward? And what if the wheel happened to start or stop just as he squeezed the trigger?
All the excitement had drained out of him and he was suddenly tired. He started the car, drove to the end of town, found a tourist court and checked in. In the knotty-pine cabin, under the miserly yellow light, he looked at his road map. Between here and Elvis, where the carnival was going next, there were two possible routes, the four-lane state highway he had used coming down here, and a two-lane secondary route. Tomorrow he would see what could be done there.
Chapter Fifteen
Early the next morning Cooley drove out of town on the state highway. Forty miles out of East Anglia he came to an underpass; it was marked, "Clearance 11 feet 10 inches." Cooley turned off at the next exit, drove east until he came to the secondary route, then turned back toward East Anglia. The road was winding and hilly, with second-growth forests on either side.
After a few miles he came to a feeder road that connected the two highways. He drove down it to the state highway, and saw a sign, "Truck Route," that he hadn't noticed before. The carnival caravan would turn off here, it would have to -- eleven feet ten was not high enough for the semis. He turned the wagon around, went back to the secondary road and headed for Elvis again, driving slowly. He was looking for a place where a truck and semitrailer would be sure to go off the road if you shot out a tire. What he found was something better.
Ten miles up the secondary route, he came to a broad gravel road that went up between cut banks into the hills. On a sudden hunch, he turned up it. Three miles brought him to a T where another road branched off. There was a heavy chain stretched between concrete posts, and a rusted metal sign: "Private. No Trespassing." Cooley parked on the shoulder, got out, and listened. The air was clear and still. He stepped over the chain and began walking up the road. When he had gone only a few hundred yards, he could see the black mounds rising above the treetops; then he knew where he was.
The road made a loop that brought it back under an enormous hopper projecting from a metal building that had once been painted green. Mammoth coal trucks were in a parking area off the road; beyond them was a little green house that looked like it might be a watchman's shack, but it was padlocked and empty.
Cooley went back to his car for a flashlight and a tire iron. He used the iron to prize open the door to the tower. He wanted to make sure that the hopper was full, and it was; it was loaded with pea coal, and that was perfect.
The whole thing, or anyhow the main part of it, had come into his head as soon as he saw the coal station. What he had in mind was complicated, and there were things that could go wrong with it at every stage, but if it worked it would be better than a fire.
He couldn't help thinking how great it would be if Jerry was alive and here to help him. There were a couple of places in his scheme that really needed two people, and there was one place where he couldn't see how to do it alone. He had it all figured out except that one part, where the semi came around the loop. The semi would have to stop in just the right spot, and he had thought about putting something in the road, a sawhorse, or a sign, or maybe a bonfire, but any of those things the driver would see from way back, and you couldn't tell where he would put on the brakes. If somebody jumped out on the road suddenly, that would be perfect, but Cooley couldn't do it because he had to be in the control room. That was where Jerry would have come in. But Jerry was dead, and so was Paul, and they couldn't help, unless maybe one of them came back as a ghost.
That was what gave him the idea, or else it was seeing the scarecrow in the field. The scarecrow was just an old shirt and a pair of pants, and a round head made of two pieces of cloth sewed together, the whole thing stuffed with straw. After Cooley saw it, he drove for half a mile in a sort of trance, then turned around and took the scarecrow off its pole.
In East Anglia that afternoon he bought a hacksaw, a can of medium-weight machine oil, a long-handled screwdriver, a staple gun, a reel of copper wire, some sash weights, a pair of wire cutters, and fresh batteries for his flashlight. At the five and dime down the street, he bought scissors, needles, and carpet thread. Nobody was around when he got back to his cabin. He attached the sash weights to one end of a length of wire, opened the scarecrow's body, and inserted the weights. He threaded the wire up through the top of the scarecrow's head, wishing it had brown hair, and formed the end into a ring. Then he went back to the car for Paul's photograph, the one he had meant to tape on the giant's window. It was an enlargement of an old snapshot; the face was almost life size. He cut the face out with scissors and sewed it onto the scarecrow's face.
At six o'clock he ate a slice of ham with red-eye gravy in the greasy spoon, then drove out of town. It took him a little over an hour to get to the coal station turnoff. The chain across the entrance was heavy; it took him half an hour to cut through one link. When he was finished, he pulled the chain out of the way, got into his wagon, and drove up the road to the coal-station. He went all the way around the loop and parked just behind the hopper.
The next thing was the scarecrow. Cooley fastened the end of his copper wire to the loop at the top of the figure's head. Then he carded the reel up the outside stairway of the hopper, hoisted the figure until it hung a foot or two off the ground, cut the wire and fastened it to a rung of the stairway. The figure hung below, rotating gently. Cooley went down to look at it. He got into his car, turned on the headlights, and drove slowly under the hopper. The figure ahead was ghostly against the twilight. Cooley pictured how it would look if it suddenly appeared ahead of him; he jammed on the brakes, and now, in his mind, he heard the rattle and roar of coal falling from the hopper.
He backed up a few yards and turned off the headlights. He left the car there, climbed the stairway again and hoisted the scarecrow. He fastened another length of wire to the ring in the figure's head, passed the wire through a rung, and went down again, unreeling the wire behind him. He opened a window in the control booth, passed the wire inside, and reeled it in until the figure hung just above the bottom of the hopper. He cut the wire, secured it to a desk-leg. He studied the control board until he was sure he understood it. Then he picked up his tools and the rest of the wire, put them in the wagon, and drove back toward East Anglia on the secondary road. Before long he saw what he was looking for: a piece of white cardboard with a red arrow on it, stapled to a tree. The route man had been through here sometime in the evening, "arrowing the route" for the caravan.
Cooley stopped and got out long enough to pry loose the marker with his screwdriver. Most of these arrows were just for reassurance; there was no place to turn here anyhow. At the turnoff to the feeder road he found a cluster of three red arrows, and took one; at the state road there was another cluster, and he got one there. That made three, and he needed one more. He drove back past the coal station road until be found another one, and took it.