“He came many years ago,” Parrott murmurs, in her classroom voice. “David Roemer. When we were, all of us, young, or younger.”
Jalena is surprised that she can hear Parrott so clearly over the wind. She also understands, now, why students sometimes compare her voice to a ceiling fan. There is something insistent, and mournful, and soothing, in Darlene Parrott’s sort of quiet.
“And pretty early in his time with us, he got word of our favorite local legend. The Dark Carnival.”
“Mr. Dark’s Carnival,” Rogan corrects. Her mask flaps, and she yanks it flat.
“I’ve never liked that ‘Mr.,’ ” Parrott hums. “It’s out of rhythm.”
“But it’s what it was called. You can’t just change it because—”
“I can.” Parrott’s smile is sudden, private. “I teach poetry.”
Rogan grunts, and Parrott continues.
“But David. He was a historian through and through. At least back then. And like any good academic, he set out to prove, once and for all, that Clarkston, Montana’s favorite story was just that: a story. Not a real thing. And then, one terrible, frigid Halloween night — in his tenure year, dear, same as you — his lover—”
“Meaning, the grad student he was fucking,” Rogan snaps.
Frazee clucks at her, reaches across the truck bed, grabs one of Rogan’s hands, and strokes it, as though comforting a skittish cat.
“He loved her,” Frazee says. “I don’t even think he realized how much.”
“He loved her,” Parrott says.
“Okay, okay.” Rogan’s eyes flash under the eye holes as the rubber skin ripples against her face.
“For Christ’s sake, take that thing off,” says Frazee, still stroking her hand.
Rogan does. Her own face, underneath, is pale but also blotched red, like a newborn’s. She pats the spikes in her hair, looks down at Frazee’s hand, and holds on.
“It’s warmer in the mask,” she says.
“On that fateful night,” Parrott drones on, “David’s lover led him out of town, onto the prairie.”
“That’s not what happened,” Rogan interrupts again. “That’s not how I heard it. I heard he found tickets at—”
“Sssh,” Frazee quiets her. She quiets.
“And far out of town, way out in the frozen prairie grass, David Roemer finally found the Dark Carnival. Or, his Dark Carnival, anyway. And he came back changed.”
“Only it wasn’t the Carnival that did that,” Frazee tells Jalena, but she’s not interrupting, not like Rogan. Her voice, in fact, is a substantially muted version of her usual, laughing trumpet blast, as though she’s harmonizing around Parrott’s melody. “That was also the night his lover died, remember. That’s what changed him.”
“One of the things,” Parrott says.
The two of them exchange that look again, their secret look. And again, Jalena experiences unspecified misgivings. Maybe Frazee is right, and she really doesn’t want in on this particular secret handshake.
“How did the lover die?” Jalena asks.
“She was murdered,” says Frazee.
“Shot,” says Rogan.
“By Roemer?”
“Listen,” Frazee says.
For a moment, Jalena thinks Frazee might take her hand, and almost wishes she would. But Frazee doesn’t. The truck turns down a wooded side street. The surrounding trees mercifully cut the wind. Instantly, the occasional noise from the freeway fades. There are small, bungalow-style A-frames and ranch homes tucked back under poplar trees on tiny lots. The houses have to be half a century old, maybe more, and yet they look temporary as trailer homes, somehow. A fluke of prairie town life Jalena still hasn’t adjusted to.
Parrott has gone right on talking. “At the funeral, David gave the eulogy. He talked only about his lover’s life. He said nothing about the Carnival. Not there. Not until the very end. And then — when he was just standing at the front of the Methodist church on Highbottom, quietly crying — he suddenly held up a packet of folded papers he’d withdrawn from his pocket. ‘I loved you, Kate,’ he said.”
“ ‘I love you, still,’ ” Frazee echoes, as though this were a poem, or a childhood lullaby they all know.
“ ‘I will follow,’ ” Rogan finishes. Her participation surprises Jalena, even before she looks up and sees tears in Rogan’s angry blue eyes.
“And when they closed the casket,” Parrott continues, “David placed those papers inside with her.”
“What were they?” Jalena asks, and now she’s surprised by the sound of her own voice: defensive, as usual, but softer, too. Or younger?
“That’s just it. No one knew. Not then. But they obviously meant something to David. Because three days after the burial, he—”
“Oh, shit, what’s he doing?” Frazee snaps, head jerking up as though she’s only just noticed that they’ve turned off the frontage road. Clambering over Jalena’s legs, shoving bracelets up her arms under her coat, she bangs on the back of the cab. “Where are you going, Bill? You’re not going there. Stop!”
But when the pickup does stop, at the bottom of a leaf-littered lawn strewn with dead dandelions and rusting toy Tonka trucks tipped on their sides in the too-long grass, Frazee leaps from the bed before Bemis has even cut the motor. He starts to open his door, and she shoves it shut and glares through the window at him.
“Bill, no,” she says. “Why? Why bring any of this up for her?”
It’s the way she says it, not what she says, that finally reveals the source of one of the rip currents Jalena has always sensed running through the EMU — GP English department, and never understood. Frazee and Bemis — alcoholics, student-centered teachers first instead of researchers, amazed modernists who still love the language like the high school book nerds they must have been — have always seemed such natural allies. And aren’t.
Because they’d been married, once. Bemis was the husband Frazee had left for Rogan. Of course he was.
I am a baby, Jalena thinks, with the same stab of self-doubt that always accompanies that thought. At thirty-six. I have a doctorate, a tenured position I spent twenty years earning, and no functioning relationships of consequence. I know and understand nothing.
Somehow, Bemis has slipped from the truck. He eases Frazee back into the leaves, which close over her feet like the dark surface of a winter lake. “It just seems like we should ask, at least,” he slurs. Gently. Almost lovingly. “Don’t you think? Since we’re really going out there.”
“Why are we going out there, Bill?”
For a moment, they stay frozen, reminding Jalena of automated figures on some mechanical tower clock. His hands on her wrists, her feet in the leaves, dark hair sneaking out the side of her scarf to fly loose in the late-fall wind. Their bodies are limned in orange from the candlelit jack-o’-lanterns lining the driveway of the little wooden A-frame across the street. They stand that way long enough that Jalena thinks he isn’t going to answer, and then he does.
“I guess I still think we owe him. Don’t you?”
He lets go and starts across the yard. Frazee lets him.
A few houses down the block, where the trees lean closer over the asphalt and the houses seem to stir on their dark lawns like tumbleweeds about to tear loose, Jalena sees a group of trick-or-treaters. There are a few parents, maybe half a dozen kids. They hurry up a driveway, through tree shadows onto a lit porch. Jalena can hear the doorbell, can see the kids’ mouths moving. But their voices stay so hushed, Jalena can barely hear their trick or treats. It’s as though they are part of that mechanical clock, too. Automated, and out on their timed, yearly rounds. Leaving the house, they pause in the middle of the street and huddle, watching the truck, waiting for them to leave. As though Jalena’s little group might pose a threat. The thought is almost funny. The Lit and Comp Crew, escaped from their university tower, out to terrorize the townsfolk on this one, terrible night.