Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

He didn’t pay any attention to the swipe. “You don’t want to come?”

I shook my head, eyes on that goddamn pink wall. I didn’t particularly want to watch Charlie get into a beat-up yellow Ford and disappear down the street while I peered through the seven-foot-tall chain-link fence. Not my idea of a good time. “See ya, Allgood.”

I heard him heft the bag, heard the faint grunt of exhalation at the weight of it. It had my lips curling slightly. Such a little guy but such big ambitions. I hoped he held on to them. It’s always you against the world, and the world cheated like hell. But it might be that Charlie could fight it to a standstill. If anyone could…

“I’ll call,” he repeated, and I felt the faint knock of knuckles against my shoulder. “And if you don’t take them, I’ll call Mr. Sugarman instead and tell him you love the pink. Adore the pink. You want to volunteer to paint the outside of the building pink.”

“Go home, asshole.” I laughed. It came out a little thick, probably from those lingering paint fumes, but it was a laugh. My first since… since a long time.

He laughed, too. “Talk to you soon, Jack.” Then the door closed, and he was gone, leaving nothing but an overly clean bed and the feeling that the room had grown into an empty, echoing space. Hard to imagine in a room the size of a broom closet, but that’s what it felt like. I could’ve jumped up, shouted my name, and not been surprised to hear echoes for days. One smart-mouthed kid lost in a space the size of the Grand Canyon. I turned back over, pulled a corner of the blanket over me, and closed my eyes. There was nothing here I wanted to see right now.

I never saw Charlie alive again, but I did meet his brother, Hector. Charlie was wrong. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him one damn bit.

I ended up in a carnival, a happy place for a happy kid.

Shit.

Although the place was a lot like me, really. There were the bright colors, the cheerful, tinny music pumped out by a mechanical calliope, all glossy surface to please the eye. Okay, none of that was like me. I was still everything I’d been two years ago at fourteen, red-haired country trash in T-shirt and jeans fished from a bin at Goodwill. Beat you like a redheaded stepchild, a good old-fashioned saying that Boyd had delighted in repeating to me over and over, snickering at his own “humor.” I had sullen dark eyes full of wary suspicion and chips on both shoulders with spares in my pockets. No, I didn’t have the external flash of the carnival, but I had the internal secretiveness and matter-of-fact larceny.

To live, you need money. There were things I wouldn’t do for cash, but not many. Practical to the very edge of ignoring my conscience altogether, I did what I had to do. I lifted a few wallets if the risk seemed low. The last thing I wanted was to be picked up and sent back to Cane Lake or someplace even worse. So while I lightened some pockets, my main source of income came from the con. There was no danger there. The rubes weren’t expecting anything but a little entertainment when they crossed my palm with silver.

I’d seen that in a movie once. “Cross my palm with silver,” a gypsy had said with dramatically arching eyebrows and hot breath fogging her crystal ball. I didn’t have a crystal ball. They were expensive, thirty bucks at least. I made do with a bowling ball. Laugh if you want. It worked. I’d found it in a garbage dump. It was chipped and cracked around the finger holes, but I simply turned that part down against the table and concealed it in the nest of threadbare velvet that cradled it. It wasn’t transparent, but the marbleized pattern was odd enough to catch the eye. Twilight blue with a glitter of silver swirling through it, it reminded me of the old days. Lying in a field of sweet-smelling clover and watching as a spray of comets crossed the night sky. I could hear the girls in the distance, laughing and squealing as they helped Mom bring in the laundry. Could feel the bread of my peanut butter sandwich give softly under my fingers as I raised it to my mouth for a bite. It was a good moment… yeah, good. And if I tried hard enough, I could live in that moment, just that one, for a while as I stared at the ball.

For two years in the carnival, years that passed more quickly than the ones in Cane Lake had, I dealt the cards and waved a hand over the makeshift crystal ball just like that movie gypsy. At first, I didn’t have a tent of my own or a trailer. I would pick a spot on the carnival outskirts, lay out my strip of velvet, ball, and cards, and wait for the ladies to come. And it was always ladies. They’d take a look at my hand-lettered sign that said a dollar a reading, my hair so very earnestly slicked back, my robe that had once been a Halloween Dracula cape, and my fake gold hoop earring that fit the lobe I’d pierced myself, and melt into a maternal puddle. At sixteen, I’d looked younger, an Opie who’d lost his way, and the women couldn’t wait to throw their money at me. I could’ve said you’ll meet a tall dark alien who will carry you off to his mothership to be his egg-laying hive queen, and they wouldn’t have batted an eye. It was all in fun… for them. For me, it was survival.

The carnival owner tried to run me off in those days, more times than I could count. He’d stomp after me, four hundred pounds of arm-waving fury. “Shoo, boy! Shoo!” he’d squeak in a voice oddly high and sweet for such a big man. “Shoo,” as if I were a stray tomcat spraying the place. It was safe to say that “Shoo” didn’t score too high on my list, damn sure not high enough to actually scare me off. A balled-up fist, a hard and heavy boot, that might’ve had me moving on. “Shoo”? Jesus. That was kiss-my-scrawny-ass territory. When I saw him coming, shaking the ground like a cranky elephant, I usually had plenty of time to gather my stuff and disappear. Half an hour later, I’d pop back up somewhere else, behind a hot-dog stand or next to the freak show. And that’s where I met Abigail.

“Why do you wear gloves all the time?”

I paused in the absent shuffling of my cards. They weren’t tarot, just a normal deck, slick and yellowed from a thousand fingers. It didn’t matter. I could’ve played at tarot until the end of time and not seen a goddamn thing. Not from a factory-fresh deck of cards, anyway. It had taken a while to learn to shuffle with the gloves on, but it was time well spent. I could’ve spent the two-fifty on a new deck and handled them with my bare hands, but it wasn’t worth it. I could’ve touched the cards, but I couldn’t have handled the money or the occasional brush of a customer’s hand. Gloves were just safer all the way around. Now I looked up at the girl who wanted to know why. I’d been lurking and working the carnival for two weeks, and she was the first person to actually talk to me… other than those unbelievably fascinating “shoo, shoo” conversations.

She was younger than me by four years at least. Eleven or twelve, probably. Dressed in a white unitard that was spangled from neck to ankle, she had a cascading mass of pale blond hair that reached her narrow hips. She also had a horn. Yeah, a horn. It was planted right on top of her head and protruding from the thick hair. Obviously papier-mache and not fastened as tightly as it could’ve been, it wobbled precariously when she tilted her head to look at me. “Do you have warts? Huge disgusting warts all over your hands?”

There in the sweltering heat and stink of roasting mystery meat, sitting cross-legged on the ground, I looked up into round amber eyes and felt my heart stutter with a painful squeeze. It wasn’t love. Hell, she was a kid, barely past the Barbie stage. No, it wasn’t love but a surge of homesickness so strong that the card in my hand bent double before falling to the velvet. I’d seen the look in her eye before. Curiosity, impatience, troublemaking through and through, she would’ve skipped hand-in-hand with Tess and Glory… perfect synch. She was older but had the same spirit, the same “Look at me, world. Just look how amazing I am.” It would’ve been annoying if it hadn’t been true.