Jokers Wild Page 0,8
chance to act like one. You interested?"
Jack shook his head wordlessly, scratched the back of his hand, and walked on.
"Hey!" yelled the man to another potential customer. "Be a joker for a day! Tomorrow you can go back to being yerself " Jack shook his head. He wasn't sure now whether it would be better to go on being depressed, or just go back and rip out the hat vendor's throat. He looked at his watch. Five before seven. The bus would be in. The salesman's life was temporarily safe.
The Port Authority building was a darker gray, bulking large in the chill gray of the Manhattan morning. Then Jack noted that most of the human traffic seemed to be exiting rather than entering the building. It reminded him of an Avenue A apartment after the exterminators set off their chemical bombs-an exodus of cockroaches carpeting every exit.
He fought his way through one of the main doors, ignoring the hulking men importuning, "Hey, man, want a cab? Want an escort in to your bus?" Most of the storefronts along the interior promenade were locked and dark, but the snack bars were doing a land-office business.
Jack looked at his watch again. 7:02. Ordinarily he would have stopped and appreciated the huge "42nd St. Carousel" kinetic sculpture, a glass box enclosing a marvelous and musi cal Rube Goldberg contraption, but now there was no time. Less than no time.
He checked the arrival board. The bus he wanted was coming in at a gate three levels up. Merde! The escalators were broken. Most of the foot traffic was coming down. Jack made his way up the stationary metal flights. He felt like a salmon struggling upstream to spawn.
Only a minor current of the incoming tidal crest of humanity seemed to be the usual sorts of people who arrived in Manhattan bv bus. Most seemed either to be tourists-Jack wondered whether this many people would actually be coming into the city for this particular holiday-or jokers themselves. Jack noted wryly that the normals were obliged by the constraints of the stairs and escalator steps to associate much more closely with jokers than they might otherwise have wished.
Then someone elbowed him painfully in the side, and the opportunity for musing was over. By the time he reached the third level and stepped outside the down-traveling crowd, Jack felt as if he'd used as much energy as he would normally burn climbing to the crown of the Statue of Liberty.
Somebody in the crush patted him on the rear. "Watch it, jerk," he said without rancor, not looking.
He found the section holding the gate he wanted. The area was packed. It looked as if at least half a dozen coaches had arrived and were unloading simultaneously. He waded into the aimless melee and aimed himself at the right gate number. He stopped to allow a dozen traditionally garbed nuns to move past him at right angles. A big joker with leathery skin and pronounced tusks protruding from beneath his upper lip tried to muscle through the nuns. "Hey, move it, penguins!" he veiled. Another joker, one with huge puppy-like brown eyes and what appeared to be stigmata wounds on his palms, voiced exception. The shouting match looked as if it might escalate into something more violent. Naturally an increasingly dense crowd of onlookers stopped to gawk.
Jack tried to bypass the mess. He stumbled into an apparent normal, who shoved back. "Sorry!"
The normal was well over six feet tall, and proportionately muscled. "Buzz off."
And then Jack saw her. It was Cordelia. He knew that as surely as he knew anything, though he hadn't seen her before in his life. Elouette had sent pictures the Christmas previous, but the photographs didn't do the young woman justice. Looking at Cordelia, Jack thought, was like looking at his sister when she'd been three decades younger. His niece was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was a faded crimson with screaming yellow letters spelling out FERRIC JAGGER. Jack recognized the name even though he wasn't terribly interested in heavy metal groups. He could also make out some sort of pattern made up of lightning bolts, a sword, and what looked like a swastika.
Cordelia was about ten yards away, on the other side of a thick flow of disembarking passengers. She held a battered floral-print suitcase with one hand, a leather handbag with the other. A tall, slender, expensively dressed Hispanic man was trying to help her with the suitcase. Jack was instantly