Dreamland Social Club(17)

“Oh yeah?” Marcus didn’t even look up.

“Babette,” Jane said.

Marcus frowned. “Not my type. Now that other little one, I could maybe . . . well, never mind.”

“Anyway, Babette told me something weird.” She tried to get more comfortable on the couch and puffed up some dust; she sneezed, then rested her head against the sofa back. “That Harvey guy and his brother, Cliff?”

Now Marcus looked up.

“Their grandfather had this long-standing battle with Preemie about that horse.”

She nodded at the horse, and a car alarm sounded on the street: Woo-oooh-ohhh-ohh.

Marcus’s face scrunched up. “What?”

Eh-eh-eh-eh.

“Their grandfather made it. He built the carousel. And he wanted to buy it from Preemie but Preemie wouldn’t sell, and he taunted the Claveracks about it for years.”

Beep-eeeep-eeep-eeeep.

Marcus shook his head and paused the movie. “That’s ridiculous.”

Waheeee, waheeee.

“Is it?” Jane said. “What do we know?”

Whoop-whoop. The alarm clicked off.

Marcus tossed the remote aside, got up, and went into the kitchen, and Jane followed. “It’s chained to the radiator, Marcus. Doesn’t that strike you as a little bit strange?”

“Jane,” he said sternly as he opened the refrigerator and then closed it, having found nothing worth eating or drinking. “Didn’t Dad say it enough times? We’re just here for one year. So just go make some friends who are into what you’re into, whatever that is, and suck it up and keep your head down and then we’ll be on our merry way.”

“You’re not even a little interested in the fact that our grandfather had a mortal enemy whose grandkids are in school with us?” Jane followed him over to the cabinets by the sink, which didn’t reveal anything worth his stomach’s attention either.

He closed the cabinet doors, looked at his watch, then headed back toward the living room and sat down. “I just don’t know if I’d believe everything a goth dwarf told me. And I mean, whatever. They can have it, right? I seriously couldn’t care less.”

He started the movie again, and Jane settled in to watch. A woman dressed like a bird—big, pear-shaped costume and feathered headdress—walked on-screen. “Is that Grandma?” Jane asked.

Marcus gave her a look. “That’s Birdie, yes.”

“What?” she said defensively. “She was our grandmother. Where’d you find it?”

“Around.”

Jane tried to focus on Birdie alone—tried to study her countenance and manner for signs of some kind of family relation—but it was hard not to be distracted by the man who was just a torso. She wondered whether this man with no limbs had ever met the girl with no limbs from the Dreamland Social Club. She thought about telling Marcus that their mom was listed in her yearbook as the founder of their school’s Dreamland Social Club, but if he didn’t care about the history of the carousel horse, he’d hardly care about some dopey club.

The conjoined twin brunettes who kept doing interstitial song and dance numbers, their voices all warbly from the warping of the tape, gave Jane the chills, and when the final scene played out and the new sideshow act, a person with a skull that turned pointy at the top, a “pinhead,” was revealed to be Martian—not human after all—the credits rolled and Jane sighed with relief. Black-and-white movies always made her queasy, and she decided it must be because everyone in them—every actor and actress she’d seen, every name on the final credits, every orphan in the surf—was dead.

When the film ended and Marcus left the room, Jane approached the horse and ran a hand down its long mane. She thought about climbing on, but it seemed disrespectful to treat it like a toy, even though that’s basically what it was. Instead, she bent to study the lock. Picking it up—and wow, was it heavy—she tugged at the closure but it wouldn’t budge. She’d have to look around for an old key but wasn’t very hopeful.

Based on what she’d learned of Preemie, he sounded like the kind of guy who would have taken the key to his grave as a sort of final F.U.

Giddyup, Preemie, she thought. Neigh yourself.





When she heard her father come home, Jane got up from the uncushy sofa, where she’d fallen asleep, and went into the front hall to greet him. He looked windblown again. More like soul-blown, really. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “This pounding of the pavement ain’t fun.”

“Any leads?” She relieved him of his portfolio, then put it on the hall’s small table.

“Not a one.” He kicked his shoes off in the hall and padded down to the kitchen and threw a newspaper onto the table. Jane could see some help-wanted ads that had been circled with blue ballpoint but didn’t dare look at what kinds of jobs they were. It was all too depressing.

“Anyway.” He tousled her hair. “Never you mind. Something’ll turn up.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It always does.”

She found the ensuing silence in the room so awkward that she decided to fill it with this: “Hey, did Mom ever mention something called the Dreamland Social Club?”