Send Down the Rain(41)

“Then you started bringing in live entertainment. Bands on the Beach. Most were good and I enjoyed them, but then you brought in that screamer guy and I never could understand what attracted you to him.”

“I was trying to attract customers.”

“I’m not sure he did that.”

“In hindsight, neither am I.”

“Anyway, I didn’t like him from the first time I laid eyes on him. And given the fact that I’d been well trained to spy on people, I did. One night he slipped something in your drink. I wasn’t sure until I saw you stagger around closing time. You two were all alone. He made his move and so did I. A few minutes later I carried you to your bed, and maybe the most difficult thing I’ve ever done is not climb in there with you. But I knew me, and I knew I loved you. I also knew I needed something to make me laugh. Take my mind off you. So I bought a carnival.”

“You bought a what?”

“A carnival. You know. Merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, bright lights, popcorn?”

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind.





23

We took I-85 out of Atlanta until it intersected I-26, where we turned northwest. Jake’s address, what I had come to believe was his primary place of residence, was north of Asheville—only a few miles off the interstate. If he actually drove a semi for a living, then it’d be a smart place to live, with easy access onto and off of several main roads. If he didn’t drive a semi for a living, it’d be a good place to not be found. Either way, I felt it was strategic.

My cabin sat about an hour from Jake’s address. Rather than drive north through Asheville, I exited at Tryon and ambled through the back roads of Rutherfordton, Union Mills, Marion, and Busick. They were prettier, and we could take our time, and with it getting dark I figured we’d just wait until tomorrow to spy on Jake. Winter was still hanging on and, unlike sunny Florida, there was snow on the ground here. Allie had not brought winter clothes. I doubted she owned many.

When we exited the interstate at Tryon, she said, “So did you really buy a carnival?”

“Sure. I quit drinking cold turkey and poured myself into making people laugh. I hadn’t done a lot of that throughout my life, so I thought it sounded like a good idea. I built it up. It thrived. While everything in my personal life was a mess, every business I ever touched turned to gold. Even my mistakes made money. I had my own booth too, just for fun. I was really good at guessing people’s weights. I was usually within two or three pounds. We really took off when I hired this group of four guys out of West Virginia with a motorcycle act inside a large cage that would make your head spin. Total absurdity, but it was fun, made people laugh. And just like the Poop Coop, it made money.

“The carnival was good for me. I was approaching fifty and thought maybe I’d laid my demons to rest. When I finally got my nerve up to come back, I walked into the restaurant, just me, no wig, and found you sitting at the bar talking to a guy with a cane and a friendly smile. Looked like he couldn’t hurt a flea. You were smiling. He had grease on his hat. And I thought, Finally a good guy, one without all the anger. I thought maybe our chances were just gone. So I backed up, got a room at the motel, and watched you laugh for three days with Jake. I figured I’d better not get in your way. I returned to my carnival . . . but truth be told, I wasn’t sleeping much at night. Bright lights and sudden noises weren’t the best therapy for a guy who didn’t like bright flashing lights and sudden noises.

“Then one night I was just minding my own business. Wasn’t angry about anything. Wasn’t really thinking about anything. I’d just gotten a kid some popcorn and helped a lady win a big stuffed animal, and this guy brought his kid in. One of my machines was broken. Took his money. He wanted a refund. He wasn’t real kind in how he asked, but he was just some hardworking guy with his name on his shirt and had probably worked hard all week to take his kid to the carnival for a good time and there was my machine stealing his money, and so he got a little uppity with me. An hour later, I found myself waiting for him in the parking lot. Gun, knife, baseball bat. I wasn’t going to just hurt him, I was going to erase his scent from the earth, in front of his son.”

Allie didn’t want to hear what happened next. “And?”

“His son laughed. Just about the moment I was gonna hurt him, the boy laughed, and it reminded me of you. Right there, I knew I needed to get away from everybody. I didn’t trust me in the world in which I was living. As hard as I’d tried, I knew that the evil in me was still there, still bubbling beneath the surface. And I couldn’t just kill myself and be done with it because I had this funny feeling that killing myself wouldn’t kill it. It’d just jump from me to someone else. I’d seen it happen. Evil doesn’t die with you. It just finds somebody else to latch onto. So I thought, If I just go away, take it with me, it can’t hurt anyone else. So I shut down the carnival, locked the gate, moved into the mountains, and started my Monastery Period.”

“You became a monk?”

I laughed. “No.”

She exhaled. “Thank goodness.”

I laughed. “You worried?”

She shook her head once. “There for a minute . . .”

“They let me live in a house alongside the mountain. I tended the garden. Pruned their grapes. They left me alone and I kept quiet. Somewhere in there I found Suzy True on the radio, and Rosco found me. One of the monks was a doctor. He helped me understand my blood sugar issues and got me set up on a monitor and taught me how to give myself shots in the stomach. Feeling healthier than I had in a long time, I built myself a cabin twenty or thirty miles away on a piece of property that shouldered Mount Mitchell. And there I have spent my days quietly, trying not to think about the life I left behind.