The Merry Go Round

Does Not Merely

Go Round and Round

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By Kendall Evans
 

           Only two cars, isolated in a vast parking lot that could hold hundreds of vehicles.  Beyond the lights lining the parking lot, the foliage of trees loomed black.
           Martin Adler switched off the ignition and retrieved his briefcase from the floor in front of the passenger seat.  The leather portfolio contained photographs and file folders for each of the six missing children.
           He locked up and walked into the darkness of the park, toward the carousel.  He played his flashlight across a sign: PARK CLOSES AT EIGHT P.M.  Hills were mountainous shadows beyond, in the direction he walked.  Some trails let up into the hills and continued on up the mountain, all the way to the observatory.  The concrete path he followed led to the merry-go-round.  Ornamental path lights resembling old-fashioned gas lamps made occasional islands of light.  Above all, there was the black sky of night.
           Before driving to the park, he had stopped at the apartments where Janowski lived.  The lights were out in 14B and no one answered his knock.  So he stopped by the manager’s office, where a drab old woman with purple-looking hair had told him Aleksy often worked late.
           Just over the lip of the rise, the carousel came into view.  The carnival lights above the horses were off, but some illumination spilled from a doorway at the center of the carousel.  Detective Adler slowed his pace.  Sounds emerged, like the sounds of someone working with metal tools.  He stepped up onto the motionless elevated circle where carousel animals were mounted on poles.  A saddled lion’s eyes met his.  He played his flashlight around.  The animals possessed an eerie appearance in the darkness.  Without the crowds.  The encircling faces of adults.  The smiling, laughing children.   
           “Aleksy,” he called out.  “Aleksy Janowski.”  Louder than necessary.  Sounding self-assured.  Making it a statement rather than a question. 
           A man appeared in the doorway that had no door.  A big man, wearing a grubby shirt and oil-stained trousers.  Despite the slack flesh, his arms and shoulders were heavily muscled.  “I am Aleksy Janowski.  Who are you?”
           “I’m Detective Adler.”  
           “Is this about the missing children?  I talk to police already.  They question me.  And to some men from the F.B.I.”
           “Well, the children are still missing, Janowski.  So now I’m here to talk to you.  And you weren’t questioned by the police; you were interrogated.  And I know everything you said.  So let’s go in, where there’s light.”
           Six-foot-five, at least.  He followed the big man into the carousel’s center.  A naked bulb glared off to one side.  The engine’s housing was off.  Tools sprawled on the floor.  He stood too close to Janowski, to make him feel awkward.
           In the mostly enclosed space, he could not tell whether he was smelling the odor of the other man, or the machine oil.
           “I know they showed you photographs of the missing children.”
           “Yes.  I see so many children.”
           “Six children missing, Aleksy.  In a span of less than four months.  All of them last seen in the park.  Four of them last seen on or near the merry-go-round.  So I want you to take a close look at the photos again.”
           Janowski had a heavy, jowly face; so much stubble it was a cliché.  Adler could not read the man’s expression as he examined the photos, one by one.  “Maybe this girl.  Maybe I buckle her belt.  Sometimes I do that, ven the parents don’t bother.  Or if the kids can’t do it vithout  help.”
           “You grew up in Poland?”
           “Yes.  You know this.  I told police, ven they question me.”
           “How long have you been in America?”
           “I come ven sixteen.”  And still a thick accent.
           Adler put the photographs away.  All blonde-haired children.  All within a tight age range, from six to nine; his daughter Alicia, exactly in the middle.  “Seven and a half years old,” she liked to say.  The daughter that he visited twice a month.  Terms of the divorce.  —He did not think he could bear it if the same thing happened to her.
           “What if I told you we have a witness?  Someone who saw you with one of the children.  Leaving the scene.” 
           “Then I vould say a sad lie has been told on me.  By you?  By vitness?  If there is a vitness, like you say.”
           Adler looked away, ashamed of the lie but refusing to show it.  Feeling a little guilty.  He already had more than enough guilt.  About the divorce.  The marriage.  The fact that he could spend so little time with his daughter.
           No bodies found.  No phone calls from abductors.  Everyone getting nowhere, so he’d talked his way onto the case.  “No ransom notes have been delivered.”  That one had been leaked to the press somehow, though he doubted the man had read about it.  “Why don’t you tell me, Aleksy, how that might be?”
           “How could I know?”
           “Don’t play dumb, Janowski.  I can think of several possibilities.  I’m sure you can, too.  So why don’t you tell me some of those possibilities?”
           Nothing said in response.  The man frowned down at this hands, looking more puzzled than guilty.
           Adler looked to the still machine at the center of the carousel.  The wheels and belts and levers and gears.  The engine that turned the merry-go-round world.  He thought again of Alicia.  The thought of her suffering a similar fate made him anxious to solve the disappearances.  A sense of desperation, when he wanted to be resolute. 
           “It carries them avay, you know.”
           He turned his head whip-snap fast to meet the immigrant’s eyes.  “What did you say?”
           “The merry-go-round.  It doesn’t just spin around and around.  It takes them places.  The ones whose parents treat them badly, the beaten ones.  The ones born wrong or crooked-boned, who will never fit in.  Sometimes, too, the ones with big imaginations.  It gallopes them off to a better world.  Maybe on a white stallion, or a pretty pinto.”
           “Gallopes,” the man had said.  A long “o”.  Like some strange combination of gallop and lope.
           “You’re a lunatic, Janowski.”
           “No, no.  I’m saying they imagine such things.”  The big man tapped his temple with an oily finger.  A red rag dangled from his other hand.  “In their heads.  You must remember what it vas like, the magic.  Ven you were a child.  Ven your parents let you ride a merry-go-round.  You must have memories like these.  How it felt.”
           The denial rang false.  What did the man truly believe?  A wildness in those eyes of his.  The man a loner.  A lonely man, isolated, living without companionship, whose life went by maintaining the carousel.
           And of course Adler remembered.  Park merry-go-rounds.  The one on Santa Monica pier.  It had not been like that at all.  His father had told him to get the gold ring.  He would win a free ride.  But the metal panel that held the rings looked like a torture device to his young eyes.  What if his finger got caught in the ring, and the ring did not come out?  Would it rip off his finger?  He wanted so much to please his father, so he tried.  And he tried pulling the ring out with the motion of the spin, rather than tugging it toward him.  His finger bent back and it hurt really bad, so he yanked it free.  But he tried again, to please his father, and he felt satisfied with himself, next time around (or had it been on a different trip to the park, a subsequent carousel ride), when he managed to get the ring.
           His father.  The big ex-Navy man.  The man who slapped Adler’s mother when he thought she was being unreasonable.  The constant arguments. 
           When the ride was over, feeling proud, he had presented the ring to his father.  “It’s not worth anything, son.  You can’t get a free ride with that.  It’s not the gold ring.  It’s one of the iron rings.”
           His father had not explained to him that there were iron rings as well as the one gold ring.  He learned years later that the so-called gold ring was really a brass ring.  His father never explained anything very well, and yet he was supposed to follow instructions.  He had held the ring in his hand, examining it and questioning its color.  So, no, he had never experienced the sense of wonder Janowski described.
           He said none of this.  He never shared memories or personal thoughts with a suspect.  His lips stayed tight shut as he considered strategies.  Tomorrow he would bring another detective with him, and they would gang up on Janowski.  Pressure him into a revealing slip.  Take him downtown again and interrogate him further.  Get a search warrant for his apartment.  There was pressure on to find a viable suspect.  Well, he’d found his suspect.
           “You get paid for this?” Adler asked.  “Working overtime?”
           “No.  But someone has to keep the motor working.  Othervise, how can I operate the merry-go-round, and get paid, if it isn’t working?  I start it.  I speed it up.  I slow it down.  I stop it ven the ride is over.  Sometimes, if I have to verk alone, I collect the tickets.”
           There was a combination tool shed / work shed on the park grounds, down near the stables.  Janowski had access.  A key.  He would get a search warrant for the shed, too.  Turn this man’s life upside down; see what evidence did or did not shake loose.  He owed it to someone.  The parents.  The kids.  Himself.  His daughter. 
           “Don’t let me bother you, Janowski.  Go ahead with your work.”
           The obvious suspects had been hauled in.  Men with a history of abusing children.  None of them could be tied to the missing kids.  And they figured Janowski, who had to be constantly on site, operating the carousel, did not have any true opportunities.  But Adler knew someone who wanted something badly enough created opportunities where they did not seem to exist.  He still liked Janowski as a suspect.  God knew they needed someone.
           Although he was not totally convinced that Janowski was guilty, he believed the man might be guilty.  Certainly it was worth pursuing search warrants to see whether any evidence could be discovered.
           He hung around for a while, watching while Janowski restored the housing to the engine.  Disappearing, eventually, when Janowski was looking the other way, without any good bye or explanation.  Let the man wonder.  Let him worry.

 

                                                                   # # # # #

            He would see Alicia this coming weekend.  Pick her up on Friday night; try not to argue with his ex-wife Patricia.  How could he blame her for his bitterness, or hers?  A husband never at home, always working long hours.  She had accused him of being married to his job, and he could not deny it.  They’d split up nearly a year before the divorce.
           More than once he had tried talking her into getting together again.  Promising not to work so many hours; to be at home for them.  Could he keep such a promise?  Easy to say so, yet he had the suspicion he would drift back into the same habits.  He liked being a detective.  Likely it would merely be a shorter interval, a condensed version of their previous years together.  And how long before they would separate again?
           Every time Alicia spent a weekend with him, she seemed more mature; more her own person. 
           Shortcutting off the concrete walkway, he strode diagonally into the darkness of the park, toward his old hump-backed Chrysler in the lot.
           The unexpected sound of music, calliope-like, loud in the night.  He turned to see the carousel all lit up.  The horses bobbing up and down as they spun around, to imitate a gallop.  A “gallope”, as Janowski would have it.  The bright naked carnival bulbs.  Adler knew, from when he had been close-up, that the filaments of the bulbs were visible through clear glass.
           He would not bring Alicia to this park when she spent the weekend with him.  Not to this merry-go-round.  Maybe he would take her to the Arboretum.  Or Knott’s Berry Farm.  But wherever he took her, he would keep careful track of where she was.  Stay close-by.  Protect her and not let her out of his sight.
           Watch over her like an eagle.
           Watch her like a fucking hawk.    

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       Kendall Evans, trollbridg@hotmail.com, wrote BP #58’s “Chupacabra, Chupacabra” (+BP #54’s “The Coronation of the New Gods” play excerpt, the VISHNU play excerpt for BP #53, and the poems: “Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll,” “Other Selves,” “In Shadows Drenched ,” “The Darkness,” “The Teeth of the Rose,” “Blood in the Mist,” and “If I Bring You Crimson Flowers” for BP earlier). A frequent BP contributor, he has had more than 200 poems in such publications as Asimov’s, Bare Bone Anthology, Dreams and Nightmares, Fantastic, Flesh and Blood, Illumen, Mythic Delirium, Space and Time, and Weird Tales. His chapbooks include Poetry Red-Shifted in the Eyes of a Dragon and (with David Kopaska-Merkel) Separate Destinations. Among his many other prizes, he and David won the 2006 best long science fiction poem Rhysling Award with “The Tin Men.” “In The Astronaut Asylum” by Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson won the 2010 Rhysling Award for the best long science fiction poem of the year. The poem first appeared in Mythic Delirium. The titles of his four dramas in The Ganymede Ring Cycle include: “The Mermaidens of Ceres,” “Battle Dance of the Valkyrie,” “Sieglinda’s Journey to the Stars,” and “The Rings of Ganymede.” 

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      Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in a basement, and she was well received. She is the Assistant Art Director for Yellow Mama.