Desdemona by Tag Cavello (read e books online free .txt) 📖

back. Suddenly he noticed Dawn again. She had turned to look straight at him, that strange smile still in place, and because Sunny resembled her so much it was as if, at that moment, the perfect adult version of the tween in his lap had stolen his attention for hostage in a wave of red, a flash of green. And then she turned away to pretend like nothing untoward had happened.

CHAPTER TEN: Girl to Gorilla

A finger of land pointed north toward clean snows. On it a park had been built of six boroughs.

 

Or seven if one counted the huge parking lot, which was mostly empty on this late October afternoon. Brenton parked the Jaguar close to the gate and everybody piled out. Shockingly cold wind off the lake swept Dante’s hair. Immediately he took off his jacket and gave it to Sunny, who had begun to shiver. With a grateful smile she slipped her arms through its sleeves. The garment hung far too large on her tiny frame. Her chest had doubled in width; her hands had disappeared.

“How do I look?” she asked.

Only the truth would suffice. “Beautiful as ever,” Dante said.

Arm in arm, they followed her parents to the gate. Brown cornhusks were set up around the turnstiles. Jack-o-lanterns. Paper ghosts. In the ticket booth stood a tall girl wearing zombie make-up. Dante thought she’d done a rather decent job with the shading. Green skin faded to black eyes and bloody, drooling lips. She sold Brenton four orange tickets with cackling witches on them. He gave one to Sunny and one to Dante.

“Hooray!” Sunny yelled.

One at a time they went through the turnstiles—Sunny first, then Dawn, then Dante, then Brenton. A wide, gray midway met them on the other side, lined with shops colored for the season. Orange and black streamers fluttered from a number of small trees. Green witches grinned in yellow windows. Sunny gave a laugh. She was pointing at a maple grove to the left, where a large mannequin had been hanged by a noose from one of the branches. Its painted face gagged for air, which the teenaged couple posing next to it thought, to judge by their laughter, hilarious.

“Smile!” came the photographer’s muffled voice on the wind.

Immediately Sunny demanded that she and Dante copy their antics. Kicking through leaves, they entered the grove. The dummy swung and hit Dante on the shoulder. He pushed it back, which caused its head to loll and look straight at him. A spider crawled up his spine. The dummy’s face seemed familiar—crude, but familiar. Hairs from a messy brown wig hung across wide eyes framed with glasses. Fake, crooked teeth protruded from a frightened grimace. Frightened, or was it just being cagey?

“Say hello to Timothy Grass,” the photographer—a woman dressed like the bride of Frankenstein—said. “Then smile and hold still.”

“Got it!” Sunny said. “Hello Timothy!”

She stood on one side of the dummy, Dante the other. A Polaroid Instamatic picture was taken: Click! Bzzzz! The woman took the picture out, shook it, handed it to Dante.

“One dollar,” she said.

He paid with three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel. Then he evaluated the picture. It had come out reasonably well despite the dark day. He and Sunny were smiling, Sunny with her arm around Timothy’s waist. The dummy was not smiling, but its eyes had somehow managed to find the camera. Perhaps the wind shifted its body while Dante wasn’t looking. This could also be the explanation for its teeth, which had fallen partway out of its mouth to resemble a pair of vampire fangs. Seeing them called forth an odd memory from last year:

You’re going to get bitten, you’d better believe it. You’re going to get bitten.

“Dante?” Sunny said. “Everything okay?”

He turned to her. “Yeah,” he replied, though he wasn’t entirely sure. “Yeah. The dummy’s just creepy, that’s all.”

The remark earned him an elbow to the ribs. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Sunny told him. “No, sir.”

∞

He initially assumed she meant the park, and indeed, that assumption gained weight the further along the midway they walked. Nor could all of this be credited to the decorations. For one thing, the wind was getting stronger, swirling leaves high over the deserted fun-rides. Dante saw a number of parents herding their children into cafes for hot chocolate and began to wish he could have one, too. For another the day, though it wasn’t yet three o’clock, had turned dark enough to make most side streets off the midway look haunted. Cobblestones painted to look old beckoned from narrow, dreary passages. A few patrons, coaxed by their call, whispered from quaint marble doorsteps. Some smoked cigarettes. Others had transistor radios. From one alley a girl in a ripped skirt—a girl Sunny’s age—looked at Dante, and he could swear her eyes glowed green.

Then they were past her. Never minding the wind, the Desdemonas guided him leisurely through a smattering of less lively autumn displays—dry, dormant fountains; closed ice cream parlors—until they came to a puppet show set near the foot of Cedar Point’s giant Ferris wheel. Here two puppets, a girl and a man, were playing a scene with a mock Ferris wheel designed to look like the giant one. The girl, shaking in terror, kept looking at the ride and telling the man she didn’t want to get on.

“Don’t be silly!” the man said. “When’s the last time you saw a Ferris wheel fall over?”

“I dreamed about it!” came the girl’s squeaky reply.

“You shouldn’t put stock in dreams! They mean nothing!” The man’s plastic foot stamped on the stage. “Nothing I tell you! Now get on!”

“No!”

“Little lady!”

Suddenly the Ferris wheel began to shake. Children in the audience began to point and laugh.

“It’s falling!” the girl screamed.

And the man: “Run! Run!” Over the course of one second his opinion on Ferris wheels had done a total one-eighty.

“Oh no!” the girl screamed again in a far more sarcastic tone of voice. “No, Rudolph! Ferris wheels don’t fall over! Let’s have a picnic on the grass!”

“Are you crazy, girl! Run!”

Everyone in the audience was laughing now. Dante could feel Sunny trying to control herself but losing the battle. The Ferris wheel shook once more, slid over to where Rudolph was standing, and fell flat on top of him—SPLAT!

“YAY!” the children yelled.

Instantly appreciative of this, the girl puppet did a number of curtseys, pausing only to wave and say Thank you! Thank you! You’re all beautiful!

“Encore!” Sunny shouted. “Throw him off the Millennium Force!”

Rudolph heard. He crawled from under the Ferris wheel and shook his fist at Sunny. Ever the deviant juvenile, Sunny stuck out her tongue, to which Rudolph responded by turning around to shake his bottom at her. This put the audience into absolute hysterics. Wild laughter flew about in all directions. Even Sunny thought it hilarious. Tears flowing, she grabbed Dante’s shoulder for support. He laughed right along with her. Brenton and Dawn did too. Everyone was laughing like never before until Rudolph suddenly stopped shaking his butt and fell down for the second time.

Dante noticed it first. Rudolph wasn’t moving anymore. He looked, indeed, as dead as the wood that formed his essence. Gradually the laughter died down. Bemused adults blinked at the stage; children went back to their lollipops. Meanwhile Rudolph continued to be dead. Assuming the show had ended, people began to wander away. Then the girl puppet also fell over, and from behind the booth a lady began to scream:

“Gary! Gary! Oh my god!”

“What’s going on?” somebody next to Dante asked.

He opened his mouth to say he didn’t know, at which moment Brenton cut in: “I think the puppeteer had a seizure. From my angle I could see him fall down and start…you know, shaking.”

“Jesus,” the somebody said.

“A seizure?” Dante said. “Seriously?”

Brenton shrugged as if he couldn’t be less interested. “That’s what it looked like. How about we walk over to the freak shows? Those are always a hoot.”

Dante looked again towards the puppet booth. Two paramedics were now on the scene. One of them had kneeled to talk to the puppeteer. The puppeteer’s eyes were open, and he was nodding at the paramedic.

“He’ll be all right,” Sunny’s voice said at his ear. “If it’s really epilepsy then he shouldn’t have gotten everyone laughing so hard. Harsh noise can trigger seizures almost as easily as blinking lights.”

“But it was funny,” Dante told her.

Sunny’s head tilted. “Was it really?”

“Well…”

“Hey you two!” Dawn called, and Dante was surprised to see that both parents were already fifty feet down the next lane, which was sprinkled with wood chips. “We’re going to Frontier Town! Coming with us?”

“Of course we are!” Sunny cheered. She grabbed Dante’s wrist. “Come on, you. Show’s over here.”

About that he couldn’t argue. The area in front of the puppet booth looked forlorn. The audience had dispersed, leaving its used candy wrappers to dance in the wind. Not wishing to be counted among the abandoned, Dante let Sunny guide him away.

∞

Frontier Town greeted them with the smell of wood smoke. Its source lay somewhere along a dirt road made up to resemble an old west mining town. There was a saloon, a general store, a blacksmith, a tailor. Of all the boroughs at Cedar Point, this remained Dante’s favorite. Character-wise it couldn’t be beaten. From the saloon’s crooked wooden porch, littered with broken peanut shells, to the steamer from parts north that whistled in a pinewood depot, the terrain might have been authentic enough for an Eastwood picture.

As if he could read Dante’s thoughts, Brenton asked if anyone was hungry, and if so, maybe they could grab a bite in the saloon. They went inside to find a tavern filled with chatter and piano music. More peanut shells littered the floor. Brenton ushered everyone into a candlelit booth with ripped leather seats. Then he snapped his fingers at a pretty young waitress, who froze as if bitten by an insect.

“Four ham and cheese sandwiches,” Brenton said when she got to the table.

“And to drink?” the waitress asked.

Brenton tipped her a wink. “Pitcher of beer for me and the missus. Two Cokes for the kids. Oh and bring glasses for those Cokes, please.”

The waitress wrote it all down, clicked her pen, and disappeared.

“That,” Brenton said to Dante, “is how you do help.” He was no longer smiling. His eyes, in fact, had turned deadly serious. “Keep it friendly but don’t let them forget you mean business.”

“Yes, sir,” Dante replied.

“Too much patience,” the other continued, leaning forward, “and you stumble, and you fall to their level. You become content with failure, because hey”—now he leaned back, spreading his arms, smiling—“everyone likes you! What else do you need? Is that what you want, Dante? To be an amicable failure?”

“No, sir.”

The arms dropped. “Good lad. Good lad. Anyway, my Sunny’s sweet enough for the both of you. Isn’t that right, dearest?”

“Right as rain, Dad,” she said.

From under the table Dante felt her hand take his knee. She kept it there until the drinks arrived, at which point Brenton poured out, ordering him and Sunny to open the Cokes but leave their glasses alone.

“It’s dark in here,” he said, lifting the pitcher of beer. “No one’s going to notice. Or care.”

And with that, he filled Dante’s glass to the brim with foaming gold brew. Sunny’s came next, then Dawn’s, then his own.

“See them tumblin’ down!” the piano player began to sing. “Pledgin’ their love to the ground! Lonely but free I’ll be found! Driftin’ along with the tumblin’ tumbleweeds!”

“Dante?”

He looked at Brenton, who was looking back steadily. “Drink up.”

“But the waitress,” he stammered.

“What about her?”

“She’ll be coming back any minute with the sandwiches!”

“Then empty your glass quickly, before she arrives.”

“Go ahead, Dante,” Sunny said. In the candlelight her smile seemed to glow like a fire bolt struck through the heart of a lamb. “What’s wrong? Never had beer before?”

“I’ll know when night has gone! That a new world’s born at dawn! I’ll keep rollin’ along! Deep in my heart