keep me there," Buddy said. "I'll be out in a week, under that fence again."
Andy smiled. "You just get yourself back to Gibtown, then. The folks'll take care of you."
"I will," he said. Then he saw me standing in the corner and his face changed. The smile stayed on, but the life went out of it. "Hello, Mr. Sloane."
Andy looked at me; and his face smoothed into a mask just like the boy's. He nodded pleasantly, and it nearly made me shiver. I hadn't touched him, nothing that had happened had touched him. I was still a mark and he was still a carny.
"Goodbye," I said to both of them. "Good luck."
*
For reasons I didn't entirely understand I drove over to Lamar and swung off onto First Street, parking across the river from the carnival. The lights from the Ferris wheel reflected back to me from the surface of the lake, looking like a toy carnival in a paperweight.
From that distance it was easy to forget that the carnival was a message, a message to people like Frank Burlenbach, reminding him that there were people who didn't subscribe, who didn't care about his church and his Senate and his table manners, people who would take his kid away from him just because they thought they could do a better job of bringing it up. They were out there, and that was the message in Andy's frozen smile. Look out, it said. Look out.
I waited until all the lights went out, until the Ferris wheel stopped turning and went dark, and then I got back in my car and drove away.
(c) 1998 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Private Eye Action As You Like It, July 1998. Some rights reserved.
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