The Funhouse

o'clock at the very earliest, and if she waited that long tonight, until well after dark, when the room would be illuminated by only the night-light, the trick would surely work, she would be fooled by the dummy.
        The hard part was going to be getting out of the house without drawing her attention. He took a few dollar bills from his thirty-two-dollar kitty and tucked the money into a pocket of his jeans. He also pocketed one of the carnival passes and stuck the other one under the glass-jar bank that stood on his desk. He carefully opened his bedroom door, looked both ways along the upstairs hall, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind him. He crept to the stairs and began the long, tense journey down toward the first floor.
        
        * * *
        
        Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie stopped in front of a sideshow that advertised a magician called Marco the Magnificent. The come-on was a large poster that showed a screaming woman being decapitated by a guillotine, while a grinning magician stood with his hand on the executioner's lever.
        “I love magicians,” Amy said.
        “I love anyone I can get my hands on,” Liz said, giggling.
        My Uncle Arnold used to be a stage magician,” Richie said, pushing his glasses up on his nose to take a closer look at Marco's lurid poster.
        “Did he make stuff disappear and everything?” Buzz asked.
        Liz said, “He was so bad that he made audiences disappear.”
        Amy was giddy from the spiced-up pot that she had smoked, and Liz's little joke seemed hysterically funny. She laughed, and her laughter infected the others.
        “No, now, really, honestly,” Buzz said when they finally got control of themselves. “Did your Uncle Arnold make his living that way? It wasn't just a hobby or something”
        “No hobby,” Richie said. “Uncle Arnold was the real thing. He called himself the Amazing Arnoldo. But I guess he didn't make much of a living at it, and he got to hate it after a while. He's been selling insurance for the past twenty years.”
        “I think being a magician would be neat,” Amy said. “Why did your uncle hate it?”
        “Well,” Richie said, “every successful magician has to have a trick that's all his own, a special illusion that makes him stand out in a crowd of other magicians. Uncle Arnold had this gimmick where he made twelve white doves appear, one after the other, out of thin air, in bursts of flame. The audience would applaud politely when the first dove appeared, and then they'd gasp when the second and third ones popped up, and by the time half a dozen birds had materialized, the audience was cheering. When the entire dozen had been brought out of their hiding places in my uncle's clothes, each presented in a little puff of fire, you can imagine the ovation the audience gave him.”
        “I don't understand,” Buzz said, frowning.
        “Yeah,” Amy said. “If your uncle was so great, why'd he quit and start selling insurance?”
        “Sometimes,” Richie said, “not often, but about once in every thirty or forty performances, one of the doves would catch fire and burn up alive, right there on stage. It hummed out the audience, and they booed Uncle Arnold.”
        Liz laughed, and Amy laughed, too, and Liz did an imitation of a burning dove trying to slap the flames off its wings, and Amy knew that it wasn't really funny, knew that it was a horrible thing to happen to the poor birds, and she knew she shouldn't laugh, but she couldn't help herself, because it seemed like the most hilarious story she had ever heard.
        “It wasn't very funny to Uncle Arnold,” Richie said between whoops of laughter. “Like I said, it didn't happen often, but he never knew when it was going to happen, so he was always tense. The tension gave him an ulcer. And even when the birds didn't burn up, they shit in his suit pockets.”
        They all laughed again, with renewed vigor, holding onto each other. People passing them on the midway gave them strange looks, which only made them laugh even harder.
        Richie treated everyone to tickets for Marco's next show.
        The ground inside the magician's tent was covered with sawdust, and the air was musty. Brightly colored plastic flags and posters of Marco decorated the dimly lighted, canvas-walled space.
        Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie joined two dozen spectators who were crowded around a small, raised