William Gresham - Nightmare Alley

“Sure. Now and then.”

“Did your father drink?”

“Hell, no. He was White Ribbon.”

“The first day you were here I offered you a glass of brandy to help you get hold of yourself. You said you never drank it.”

“God damn it, don’t twist everything around to making it look as if I wanted to be like my old man. Or Humphries either. I hated them-both of ’em.”

“But you wouldn’t take a drink.”

“That was something else.”

“What?”

“None of your-I-it’s something I can’t tell you.”

“I’m being paid to listen. Take your time. You’ll tell me.”

“The stuff smelled like wood alcohol to me. Not any more but the first time.”

“Did you ever drink wood alcohol?”

“Christ, no, it was Pete.”

“Pete who?”

“I never knew his last name. It was in Burleigh, Mississippi. We had a guy in the carny named Pete. A lush. One night he tanked up on wood alky and kicked off.”

“Did he have a deep voice?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Never mind. What was he to you?”

“Nothing. That is-”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Damn it, quit deviling me.”

“Take your time.”

“He-he was married to Zeena, who ran the horoscope pitch. I was-I was-I was screwing her on the side I wanted to find out how she and Pete had done their vaude mental act and I wanted a woman and I made up to her and Pete was always hanging around I gave him the alky to pass him out I didn’t know it was wood or I’d forgotten it he died I was afraid they’d pin it on me but it blew over. That’s all. Are you satisfied?”

“Go on.”

“That’s all. I was scared of that murder rap for a long time but then it blew over. Zeena never suspected anything. And then Molly and I teamed up and quit the carny and it all seemed like a bad dream. Only I never forgot it.”

“But you felt so guilty that you would never drink.”

“For God’s sake-you can’t do mentalism and drink! You’ve got to be on your toes every minute.”

“Let’s get back to Humphries. Before he ran away with your mother you preferred him to your father?”

“Do we have to go over that again? Sure. Who wouldn’t? But not after-”

“Go on.”

“I caught him-”

“You caught him making love to your mother? Is that it?”

“In the Glade. We’d found it, together. Then I went there. And I saw it. I tell you, I saw it. All of it. Everything they did. I wanted to kill my old man. He drove her to Humphries, I thought. I wanted-I wanted-”

“Yes.”

“I wanted them to take me with them! But she didn’t, God damn her, she left me with the old son-of-a-bitch to rot in his goddamned hick town. I wanted to go away with her and see something and maybe get into show business. Humphries had been in show business. But I was left there to rot with that Bible-spouting old bastard.”

“So you became a Spiritualist minister.”

“I’m a hustler, God damn it. Do you understand that, you frozen-faced bitch? I’m on the make. Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough. When you get that you’re the boss. If you don’t have it you’re the end man on the daisy chain. I’m going to get it if I have to bust every bone in my head doing it. I’m going to milk it out of those chumps and take them for the gold in their teeth before I’m through. You don’t dare yell copper on me because if you spilled anything about me all your other Johns would get the wind up their necks and you wouldn’t have any more at twenty-five bucks a crack. You’ve got enough stuff in that bastard tin file cabinet to blow ’em all up. I know what you’ve got in there-society dames with the clap, bankers that take it up the ass, actresses that live on hop, people with idiot kids. You’ve got it all down. If I had that stuff I’d give ’em cold readings that would have ’em crawling on their knees to me. And you sit there out of this world with that dead-pan face and listen to the chumps puking their guts out day after day for peanuts. If I knew that much I’d stop when I’d made a million bucks and not a minute sooner. You’re a chump too, blondie. They’re all Johns. They’re asking for it. Well, I’m here to give it out. And if anybody was to get the big mouth and sing to the cops about me I’d tell a couple of guys I know. They wouldn’t fall for your jujit stuff.”

“I’ve been shouted at before, Mr. Carlisle. But you don’t really know any gangsters. You’d be afraid of them. Just as you’re afraid of me. You’re full of rage, aren’t you? You feel you hate me, don’t you? You’d like to come off that couch and strike me, wouldn’t you?-but you can’t. You’re quite helpless with me. I’m one person you can’t outguess. You can’t fool me with cheesecloth ghosts; you can’t impress me with fake yoga. You’re just as helpless with me as you felt seeing your mother run away with another man when you wanted to go with her. I think you went with her. You ran away, didn’t you? You went into show business, didn’t you? And when you start your act you run your hands over your hair, just like Humphries. He was a big, strong, attractive man, Humphries. I think you have become Humphries -in your mind.”

“But he-he-”

“Just so. I think you wanted your mother in the same way.”

“God damn your soul, that’s-”

“Lie back on the couch.”

“I could kill you-”

“Lie back on the couch.”

“I could-Mother. Mother. Mother.”

He was on his knees, one hand beating at his eyes. He crawled to her and threw his head in her lap, burrowing in. Dr. Lilith Ritter, gazing down at the disheveled corn-colored hair, smiled slightly. She let one hand rest on his head, running her fingers gently over his hair, patting his head reassuringly as he sobbed and gasped, rooting in her lap with his lips. Then, with her other hand, she reached for the pad on the desk and wrote in shorthand: “Burleigh, Mississippi.”

In the spring darkness the obelisk stood black against the sky. There were no clouds and only a single star. No, a planet; Venus, winking as if signaling Earth in a cosmic code that the worlds used among themselves. He moved his head a fraction, until the cold, brilliant planet seemed to rest on the bronze tip of the stone shaft. The lights of a car, winding through the park, sprayed for a moment across the stone and the hieroglyphics leaped out in shadow. Car\??\touches with their names, the boasts of the dead, invocations to dead gods, prayers to the shining, fateful river which rose in mystery and found the sea through many mouths, flowing north through the ancient land. Was it mysterious when it still lived? he wondered. Before the Arabs took it over and the chumps started measuring the tunnel of the Great Pyramid in inches to see what would happen in the world.

The spring wind stirred her hair and trailed a loose wisp of it across his face. He pressed her cheek against his and with his other hand pointed to the planet, flashing at the stone needle’s point. She nodded, keeping silence; and he felt the helpless wonder sweep over him again, the impotence at touching her, the supplication. Twice she had given it to him. She had given it as she might give him a glass of brandy, watching his reactions. Beyond that elfin face, the steady eyes, there was something breathing, something that was fed blood from a tiny heart beating under pointed breasts. But it was cobweb under the fingers. Cobweb in the woods that touches the face and disappears under the fingers.

The hot taste of need rose in his mouth and turned sour with inner turmoil and the jar of forbidding recollection. Then he drew away from her and turned to look at her face. As the wind quickened he saw her perfectly molded nostrils quiver, scenting spring as an animal tastes the wind. Was she an animal? Was all the mystery nothing more than that? Was she merely a sleek, golden kitten that unsheathed its claws when it had played enough and wanted solitude? But the brain that was always at work, always clicking away behind the eyes-no animal had such an organ; or was it the mark of a superanimal, a new species, something to be seen on earth in a few more centuries? Had nature sent out a feeling tentacle from the past, groping blindly into the present with a single specimen of what mankind was to be a thousand years hence?