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Terror on the Midway

Carnival

By Jamey O'DonnellPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 20 min read
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Terror on the Midway

By

Jamey O’Donnell

There wasn’t much to do in the lower desert, especially in the summer, where the temperature routinely reached 120 and above, but boys always found a way to pass the time of day, whether it be swimming to beat the heat, hunting for chuckwalla lizards to burn with magnifying glasses, or to have BB gun fights in the surrounding date palm orchards after they had completed their morning paper routes delivering the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

There was, however, one time of the year everyone looked forward to in Indio, California, along with other towns in the region, and that was February, because that is when they held the annual National Date Festival, when the average temperature was a much milder 73 degrees.

The Date Festival had its own fairgrounds on Highway 111 and it was a fun filled 10 days whenever it was in town.

Food vendors, carnival rides, the circus, and side shows would show up days before to set up, and it was always a treat for the boys to watch them construct the gigantic circus tent, ferris wheel, tilt o’ whirl, and other rides within the confines of the fairgrounds, making the experience even longer than the 10 days of the actual festival.

There were always side jobs for the boys to pick up, especially with the carneys, where you could make a few bucks as a gopher getting food for them off the fairgrounds, or moving bales of hay to feed the animals.

Once the fair was up and running, there wasn’t much to do behind the scenes, but before and after was when there was work to be had.

Hanging with the carneys and listening to them tell dirty jokes was always hilarious, but the clowns always scared the hell out of them, because they seemed to be a very weird bunch, and always looked at the boys like they were chickens out of their cages, ready to be slaughtered and eaten. Needless to say, they didn’t talk to the clowns at all.

The carneys also made it a point to tell the boys to stay away from the clowns and never go into one of their trailers with them, no matter what they said or what they offered.

You always knew who the clowns were, even without their makeup or funny clothes on, because they were always quiet and waiting in the wings, eyeballing the young teenagers working for the carney’s.

The carneys were a good bunch of men, ranging in age from their early 20’s, all the way up to their 60’s, and it was the older ones that made the set ups, tear downs, and everything in between run smoothly, and they provided a wall of protection between the clowns and the boys.

This year’s festival would prove to be a little different, as most of the rides and side shows were owned by the same company and run by a guy everyone knew by the name of Hot Shot, so he oversaw everything and made sure all the carneys and vendors knew he was the boss of them.

Steve Jessop and Mike Zamudio were already making plans to descend on the fairgrounds the minute everyone started to arrive that coming Sunday, making their algebra class at Thomas Jefferson Jr. High that much more bearable.

“I have to go to my sister’s birthday party after lunch, but then I can meet you at the back wall around 3:00. They probably won’t get there until at least that time, so I should be fine,” said Mike.

“That sounds about right. As soon as we see them driving to the back of the fairgrounds, we can jump the wall together and be the first ones on their radar, and maybe get some work in that night” said Steve.

That Sunday, just as they planned, Mike found Steve waiting outside behind the back wall, which completely surrounded the whole of the fairgrounds. None of the vendors or carnival rides had arrived yet, except one vendor that operated the sledgehammer that rang the bell, but he was small and never needed any help at all.

They waited another half an hour, and that is when their hair stood on end from excitement as they saw the long procession of semi-trucks and smaller vehicles start to make their way through the front gates of the festival fairgrounds and head to the back to where the circus and carnival would be set up.

Only minutes before, the fairgrounds were silent, but were now busy with the hustle and bustle of trucks pulling up to the various marked off spots, carneys jumping out and directing traffic, and cones being distributed throughout, signifying which vendors and rides were supposed to be where.

Mike recognized one of the older carneys from last year, Petey Wilson.

Petey was instrumental making sure the boys had plenty of work the year before, and oversaw their safety from the clowns.

Petey recognized the boys as well, and was very glad to see them there as early as they were.

“Hey boys. Glad to see you here to greet us. We’ve got some work for you tonight if you want it” said Petey. “First thing we are going to do is set up the circus tent, so we are going to need you to distribute the spikes around where they will be hammered into the ground to hold the tent up, but you’ll have to wait a while until we spread out the tent, so you boys just hang tight until we need you”

Both boys nodded that they understood and tried to stay out of the way of the carneys, not to get underfoot and interfering with them.

That is when they met Hot Shot.

“Hey boys…are you here to help?” Hot Shot asked.

“Yes sir, we are. We come here every year to help” said Steve.

“Yeah, the men said there might be some boys waiting on us when we got here. My name is Hot Shot, and I’m these men’s supervisor, so I guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you throughout the festival,” said Hot Shot.

The boys then introduced themselves, but when they shook his hand, both boys got the willies a little bit from him, as he seemed to hold their hands a little too long for their comfort.

After a couple hours, it became dark, and the boys had just finished distributing all the tent spikes around the perimeter of the tent, and an end pole supporting the tent had just been positioned, with several carneys hammering in tent spikes to keep it standing. It would take most of the night to finish putting up the big top, but the boys had to get back home in time for supper and get ready for bed, as the morning school bell waits for no one.

Petey gave each of them a ten dollar bill and told them he’d see them tomorrow after school.

Unbeknownst to the boys, the clowns had arrived shortly after they began carrying the tent spikes to their positions. Had the boys seen them, they would have noticed the clowns eyeballing them and licking their lips, right along with Hot Shot, standing with the clowns as if he was with his own kind.

The next day school flew by, and the boys couldn’t wait to have supper, then head to the fairgrounds for an hour to do some menial tasks for the carneys. The festival was still 3 days away from opening, but there was still plenty for them to do, more than they would have time for. It was a school night, so they had to be home by 8 to bathe and do their homework.

One of the things Petey had them do was an every night chore, which was empty all the trash barrels behind the side shows where the living trailers were, into the big rolloff trash bin by the back gate of the fairgrounds. Each barrel was almost as big as they were and would have to be hand trucked over to the rolloff, then picked up by both boys to be emptied.

One of the barrels came from the area the clowns inhabited, and when they picked up the barrel and started emptying it, they noticed a pair of boys underwear, with a pair of pants and tennis shoes falling out of the barrel, and this struck the boys odd, but chalked it up to nothing important.

When they brought the barrel back to the clown area, one of the older clowns was standing in the doorway of his trailer, eagle eyeing the boys, but not saying a word, giving them both the creeps.

“Man, I hate those clowns” said Mike, with Steve agreeing with him wholeheartedly.

After emptying the barrels, Petey had the boys feed a couple of the horses with a bale of hay, then gave them each some money and sent them on their way.

The carnival and circus areas were just about all set up and ready for business, with 2 more days away from the festival’s opening.

Neither boy thought enough of the boys’ clothes they had found to say anything to anyone else, but had they known about the missing boy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the carnival had left from before arriving to Indio, they would have surely said something to Petey.

5 days before, a boy was reported missing in Santa Fe and was last seen around the carnival celebrating the shopping center’s grand opening and had been missing ever since.

The clowns, carneys, and everyone else had been questioned about the boy before the carnival left town, but were still allowed to leave for their next gig, even though the Santa Fe Police Department had their suspicions about some of the clowns. Since they had no evidence of any wrongdoing, they had to let the carnival leave town, but knew where they were heading in case any new evidence presented itself.

The Indio Police Department and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department were notified of their suspicions and were instructed to keep a watchful eye on the carnival once they hit town, but as luck would have it, the alert was buried in a mountain of other police paperwork, and was overlooked, leaving no extra eyeballs on the clowns or the carnival.

The clown standing in the doorway of his trailer eyeballing the boys emptying the trash was named Poopsie, and he had reason to be concerned about the contents of the trash can.

Poopsie had the boy from Santa Fe duct taped and naked in a cabinet under the sink in his trailer, with his mouth taped tight, so no one could hear him scream for help. The boy had not eaten for 5 days, nor had he much water, except for the two times Poopsie had taken a chance and removed the tape so the boy could momentarily get a drink of water, otherwise the boy would have died from dehydration.

Poopsie was keeping the boy alive, only for the purpose of using him as a sex slave.

What the carnival did not know about Philip Benjamin, AKA Poopsie, before hiring him on, was his conviction for child rape in Wisconsin, having served 7 years in prison there. The carnival officially had no knowledge of Poopsie’s past, but Hot Shot did, because he buried the information when he hired Poopsie on.

Hot Shot and Poopsie had a long relationship with each other, going back decades, back to Wisconsin when Hot Shot was a cashier at an adult book store in Milwaukee and Poopsie was one of the clientele. They had both formed a friendship, with a penchant they shared for young boys. When Philip Benjamin had been arrested and convicted, Hot Shot, whose real name is Royce Walters, exchanged letters with Hot Shot, with Hot Shot even putting money on Poopsie’s books, carrying him over until his sentence was completed and he was released from prison.

The day before the festival was to open its gates to the public, all the rides were constructed and running, the side shows were assembled and ready for its carnival barkers to cajole people from the midway, and the food vendors were all ready for making the corn dogs, waffle cakes, and cotton candy.

Mike and Steve were considered part of the carney’s family by this point, and they came and went anywhere as they pleased, but as they were told to do, they stayed away from the clown’s living quarters.

This year, they were also secretly warned about Hot Shot himself, that there were suspicions about his liking for young boys as well, as he seemed to spend more time around the clowns than anyone else.

That night, as they were emptying the trash barrels before going home, they heard a man’s voice yelling in Poopsie’s trailer as they hand trucked one of the barrels past the trailer, telling Poopsie he had to “get him out of there”, whatever that meant, and then saw the trailer door open with Hot Shot exiting with a scared look on his face.

“That guy scares me Steve,” said Mike. “I hope he never talks to us again.”

Mike and Steve were not the only boys working for the carnival, as there were a couple others that had signed on later, but Mike and Steve were the 2 boys most trusted by Petey to get things done, but that also meant the other boys might not be fully tuned in to the goings on with Hot Shot and the clowns.

After the two boys emptied the last barrel and put it back in its place, they heard a man’s voice talking in a low tone, coming from behind the last of one of the living trailers, next to the wall of the festival fairgrounds.

Steve decided to peek around the corner, and what he saw scared the daylights out of him.

Standing on a milk crate was one of the other two boys, with his pants and underwear down around his ankles, and Hot Shot in front of the boy on his knees, with his back to Steve.

Neither of the two saw Steve or heard him, and Steve backed away from the scene as quietly as he could, motioning for him and Mike to get away from there.

“Mike, Hot Shot is doing something nasty to one of the other boys back there. We’ve got to tell Petey” said Steve, so both boys went to find Petey over by where the carneys stayed.

As they came up on one of the back flaps of the Zambora show, they could hear Petey’s voice talking about a missing boy from their last stop in New Mexico, and they both immediately flashed on the underwear and other clothes they found in the trash bin a few nights back.

They flew open the back flap and there was Petey talking to one of the other carneys, and the carneys both clammed up about what they were talking about.

“I heard what you said about the missing boy! We found a kids underwear and clothes in the trash the other night from a barrel we picked up from the clown trailers” stammered Mike.

“And we were walking by Poopsie’s trailer and heard Hot Shot yelling at him, telling him to get someone out of here!” Steve blurted out. “And not only that, I just saw Hot Shot behind another one of the trailers doing something bad to one of the other boys!”

Both Petey and the other carney were stunned by what the boys were telling them.

“Whoa, whoa…slow down. What are you saying?” said Petey, then he turned to the other carney and told him to get the rest of the carneys over there pronto, and the carney ran from the exhibit.

“Show me where you saw Hot Shot and the boy” said Petey.

The three of them walked briskly across the midway to the other side, where the trailers were behind the other side shows, and when they got to the location of the offense, Hot Rod was nowhere to be found, but the boy was still there buttoning up his pants and crying.

“Where’s Hot Shot?” asked Petey.

“I don’t know” said the boy. “He left a couple minutes ago.

Petey then helped the boy out away from the trailer, and brought him across the midway, where they were joined by 5 or 6 other carneys, and all headed straight to the security station at the front of the fairgrounds, leaving the boy there with a security guard and telling him to call the police because there may be a kidnapped boy being held by one of the clowns, then all of the carneys, along with Mike and Steve following behind, headed straight for Hot Shot’s trailer, with Petey leading the way.

When they arrived at Hot Shot’s trailer, Petey stepped on the stairs leading to the door and knocked harshly on it, leaving no doubt someone wanted to speak to whoever was inside.

“Who is it?” asked Hot Shot from behind the door.

“It’s Petey. I need to speak with you.”

“Come back later Petey. I’m just getting ready to jump in the shower” returned Hot Shot.

“Can’t come back later Hot Shot. This can’t wait. I need to speak with you now” Petey said firmly.

You could hear the door unlock, then the door opened, and Petey immediately grabbed Hot Shot by the throat and dragged him out on to the dirt in front of Hot Shot’s trailer, where the carneys took turns punching Hot Shot in the face and kicking him all over his body, with Hot Shot beginning to scream bloody murder, asking what they were doing this for.

“You know damn well why this is happening. I just brought one of the boys out from behind your trailer and I know what you did to him. Now you are going to tell me about that missing boy from Santa Fe!” said Petey.

“I don’t know what the hell you are talking about. I don’t know anything about that boy!” screamed Hot Shot.

“You better talk now because the police are on their way. If you know anything and aren’t telling us, you’ll go down right along with Poopsie.”

A crowd was starting to form around them, with all the carnival employees, even the clowns…all except Poopsie.

Poopsie could hear everything going on outside and knew that his time was up, so he figured he’d get his last shots in on the boy under the sink, because he knew he'd be going to prison anyway.

“Get up you child rapist. You are coming up front with us!” said Petey, as they drug Hot Shot through the midway, with all the carnival barkers looking on with interest at the scene unfolding before them.

The crowd of carneys drug Hot Shot to the security station and had the security guard handcuff him to desk inside the office, in full view of Hot Shot’s victim in the next room over.

Just as he was handcuffed, several Indio Police Department officers rolled up with lights flashing, followed by 2 Riverside Sheriff Deputy cars, and even a California Highway Patrol car.

Steve and Mike were in the thick of it and were witnesses to everything that had transpired thus far, providing them with the most excitement they had ever seen in their lives.

After talking with all of the law enforcement officers that arrived, it was determined that the missing boy from New Mexico was probably in Poopsie’s trailer out behind the side shows off of the midway, and the question remaining had yet to be answered, and that was if the boy was still alive or dead.

Indio Police had taken charge of the boy in the office and Hot Shot, getting statements from the boy and from Steve, who had witnessed the crime being committed, then loaded Hot Shot into the back of a squad car and whisked him away to Indio City Jail, while the victim, along with Steve and Mike, were also taken there in a separate car.

Riverside Sheriff’s Department had taken control of the ongoing drama unfolding at the fairgrounds, planning their extraction of the boy and the clown in question.

They decided on a four-pronged approach, having two teams come up along each side of the fairgrounds toward the trailer, with another team going straight to the trailer through the midway, and a fourth team going around the fairgrounds to behind the trailer outside of the perimeter wall.

Once everyone was in position, it was decided that Petey would knock on the door first, so as not to alarm Poopsie of an impending raid, keeping him from hurting the boy inside.

Petey first knocked on the door softly with no response from the inside, then knocked again loudly, announcing his presence.

“Poopsie. I need to talk to you. Open the door”

There was no response from inside and it was eerily quiet.

“Poopsie! Open up. I really need to talk with you!” Petey shouted this time.

“I can’t right now. I’m not dressed. Come back later.” Said Poopsie through the door.

The police were going in, but because the trailer door was locked, they would either have to blow the lock off the door, or pry it open with a pry bar, and since there was a boy in there, shooting the lock off the door was not an option, so one of the carneys went to retrieve a big pry bar from one of the utility boxes on one of the semi-trucks.

When he came back, one of the officers positioned the bar into the doorknob of the trailer, and with a big push, he was able to pop open the trailer door, and what everyone saw inside was enough to turn the hardest of men’s stomachs.

Straddling the almost dead naked boy bound in duct tape was a naked Poopsie the Clown, still in his clown makeup from their dress rehearsal earlier in the evening, holding a large knife to the boy’s throat, and positioned in such a way that the slightest pressure put on it would slice the boy’s throat open, killing him for sure.

All of the officers’ guns were drawn and pointed at the clown, ready to fire upon him should he try to cut the boy open.

“Drop the knife or I’m going to turn your head into a canoe. I’m not kidding.” Said the closest cop to the door.

Poopsie looked at the cop, then looked down at the boy, then looked at the cop again and began laughing hysterically, and that was when the cop fired his weapon, putting a bullet into the clowns temple, exploding his head and showering the little boys face with blood, and had the impact of the bullet not thrust Poopsie back instead of downward, the knife would have surely penetrated the boys neck, killing him.

Considering all the ways this could have gone sideways, the best possible outcome was had and the boy was saved.

The boy would spend the next few days in Indio Hospital and receive treatment for dehydration and starvation before being released to his parents in Santa Fe and would undergo years of counseling thereafter.

The owner of the carnival would be sued by the family and receive millions of dollars in damages, forcing the carnival to file for bankruptcy and close its operations for good.

Hot Shot would be tried and convicted for child rape and sentenced to 20 years in the California Department of Corrections, spending most of his sentence between Folsom Prison and Chino State Prison, where he would be routinely raped and tortured by other prison inmates until his death, well short of his sentence completion.

As for Mike and Steve, they got a lot of mileage retelling the story over and over to anyone interested, and fortunately for them, none of the story they told involved them as victims, leaving them as witnesses to one of the most heinous crimes ever to go down in Indio, California.

fiction
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About the Creator

Jamey O'Donnell

In the dead of night when the creatures are lurking about outside my window, you will find me brainstorming my ideas on the computer, trying to find the right opening, then seizing on it like Dr. Frankenstein, bringing paper and ink to life

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