A disheveled teen-age girl sat between two boys in the second boat. She noticed us looking her way. Reaching down with both hands, she unzipped both guys‘ flies, revealing their aroused conditions. She giggled loudly.
There were two males in the third gondola. They were holding hands and looking soulfully into each other’s eyes. They were oblivious.
The fourth boat contained a middle-aged couple arguing violently. They had to be married. Nobody fights like that out of wedlock.
At first glance, the fifth boat looked empty. Then I noticed the clothing shoved into the corner of the benchseat. Peering, I could just make out two entwined, undressed bodies sloshing around on the floor of the craft. The sounds of heavy breathing floated past. The sixth and last gondola was the one the black girl had boarded. Now it sailed into view. It too looked empty. It came close enough to see the whole interior, including the bottom. It was empty!
Inadvertently, the eyes of the man with the revolver met mine. A spark of realization jumped the space between us. We both turned and headed back toward the dock from which the boat had embarked.
I saw her pull herself out of the water before we were even halfway there. So did he. His pistol streaked from its holster. He got off two shots before I knocked it out of his hand. He retrieved the gun, looked toward the dock, no longer saw the black girl, and cut out while the crowd attracted by the shots was still gather- mg.
I headed for the dock. She was nowhere in sight. Once again she had vanished. And I was left with my questions:
Was the black girl Phoebe Phreeby? If so, who was trying to kill her? And why? And what did it have to do with Tom Swift?
Pondering these questions, I scuffed the dust of the midway. It hadn’t rained the entire week I’d been in Oregon. So how come the soles of my shoes all of a sudden squished mud?
Sherlock Holmes lives! Likewise the Last of the Mohicans deciphering trail signs, and Hansel and Gretel with their motto: Follow the Bread Crumbs. Only the bread crumbs were tiny rivulets and little droplets of water!
The black girl was wringing wet when she took off down the midway. She was shedding water as she ran. To find her again, all I had to do was follow the damp. Elementary, my dear Watson!
The arrows of wet trickled out in front of the Hall of Mirrors. Click! She must have sought refuge here. I bought a ticket and went inside to look for her.
The interior of the Hall of Mirrors was an inconstantly revolving maze. The mirrors reflected every kind of distorted image conceivable. They were joined at angles designed to annihilate perspective. Far-off figures seemed close at hand, nearby ones appeared in the distance, vision was warped around corners, reversed, turned upside down. Flashing lights and constantly changing color patterns added psychedelic elements to the reflected fantasies. The ramps leading through the mirrored maze tilted unexpectedly—up, down, sideways—and presented an assortment of false paths leading to dead ends.
Entering, I faced an elongated figure, a squashed blob of a man, and a Frankenstein monster all laughing at me—and all of them me doing the laughing! It was the ultimate in low self-image! Particularly when a giant foot stepped on all three versions and wiped them out. The foot was black, sandaled, and still wet. It fused into an image of the black girl—sodden clothes clinging to a toothpick body. Her head was gigantic and precarious atop it, like an oversized cocktail olive. The huge, liquid eyes were filled with fear.
She was staring at a man with horribly distorted features. He was coming toward her, hands like claws tensing a stout cord—a strangler’s cord; this was no illusion; a garrote! His ghastly face turned from green to red to purple over his turtleneck sweater as he stalked her.
He reached out, the cord-loop snapped expertly around the black girl’s neck—and closed on empty air! She dived into a smaller self which dived into a smaller self, etc. Thus she vanished into mirrors within mirrors. The strangler, trying to follow her, swelled to giant size and temporarily disintegrated.
“I’m entitled to my fetish!”
The words were spoken by a balding, middle-aged man standing on his head in the mirror directly in front of me. I recognized the shapely blond in hot pants —also standing on her head—beside him. She was a hooker who frequently hung out in a bar adjacent to the shooting gallery.
“But here, sweetie?” The blond was apprehensive. “Where everybody can see us?”
“That’s what makes it so exciting!” His tongue licked his upside-down lips.
“Gee, honey, I don’t think . . .”
“It’s worth fifty bucks.”
“For fifty bucks I don’t have to think,” she decided. “Now, what exactly . . . ?”
His dangling head moved to whisper in her topsy-turvy ear. His hand reached for the bare flesh of her breasts spilling out from the low-cut blouse she was wearing. Only the top half-moons were revealed; the rest of her bosom stayed inside the blouse in defiance of the law of gravity.
She giggled. Her hand stretched up to stroke his thigh. They dissolved into a far-off frame.
I also moved along. A hundred and one midget black girls suddenly ran past me. A hundred and one turtle-necked stranglers were right behind them. I threw a hundred and one roundhouse rights at the second group as they came by—and missed them all.
“Stop! Thief! He stole my purse! Stop! Thief!”
One of those hundred and one punches I’d thrown had hooked a large pocketbook carried by a youngish, bespectacled redhead in slacks. Now the lady’s bag was dangling from my arm. But when I turned around to give it back to her, she rolled up into a little ball and bounded away in hot pursuit of a far-off, elongated reflection of me.
“Sto-0-o-op! Thie-ie-ie-ief! I’ve been ro-o-o-o- obbed!” The redhead’s voice receded into the distance.
I tried to follow her and stumbled against a gigantic man striped red, white, and blue. I grabbed hold of him for support. His eyes lit on the lady’s handbag I was holding and filled with suspicion.
“Keep your hands to yourself, Mac!” He shoved me away violently.
“Sorry.” My image in the mirror featured exaggerated hips and a ballooning bosom topped with a face bristling in need of a shave. I backed away.
“I don’t swing that way!” the giant assured me, muscles rippling.
“I don’t either.” The handbag swung gaily as I nervously transferred it from one hand to the other. The words fell flat.
A little girl about eight years old, shaped like a pear and colored purple, called to the giant from an adjacent mirror. “Daddy! Daddy! You can’t catch me!”
“Giselle! You stop that teasing now!” The giant started for her and ran smack into the mirror glass with his nose.
I tried not to laugh. But stifling it was a bad idea. It made the laugh come out a high-pitched whinny.
The giant was offended. He turned toward me with fists like hamhocks. Still holding the lady’s handbag, I took off through a series of mirrored passages.
I braked to a halt in front of the hooker and her client. They were a jumble of geometric forms. Her hot pants covered a sharp-etched hexagon. His balding head was a pyramid. One of her breasts, bared, was a blue cube with an orange dome for a nipple. His hand was a metallic, five-pointed star rising over the dome. Both of them stood on triangular legs.
“What’s that?” Distracted, she pointed an isosceles finger at me.
“That is a mustard-colored octahedron.”
“Well, it’s watching us."
“Nonsense. It’s only an illusion. And even if it was watching us, in this place who would believe their eyes? That’s the kick! We can do what we like right under their noses, and they’ll think their minds are playing pornographic tricks on them.”