Kickback and Other Stories

by Peter Sellers

  “Jesus,” I said as Zoe left the bowl and re-emerged from behind the box. “That’s fantastic. How do you do that?”

  “Well first,” Grant said, “you go to the South Seas and you get yourself a mermaid. Then you hire somebody to build you a display for it. Then you take it on the road. If you have the money.”

  Then came the new pitch.

  “Here’s the situation, buddy,” he said. “I need to take the Mermaid on the road with me in three weeks. They’re expecting her in Winnipeg on the thirtieth. They’re expecting her in Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, everywhere. And this --” he pointed at the unadorned box, “-- is as close to finished as I’m able to get it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There’s still a whole bunch of finishing that needs to be done. Structural stuff that I can’t do but the guy who built it for me can.”

  “So why not ask him to do it?”

  “I did, but he wants money.” Grant said this as if it was an unreasonable request.

  “So pay him. What happened to all the dough I loaned you?”

  “That’s long gone,” he said with a wave of his hand.

  “Well this thing is going to make a fortune.” I could imagine the people lining up and going back again and again. I could imagine the children dragging their parents along multiple times. “Can’t you pay him at the end of the season, or send him money from the road?”

  “That’s money I don’t have yet. And Mike wants it now. Besides, do you know how much it costs me up front to get out on the road every year? Without having to pay for a new attraction?” I had no idea but Grant did not bother waiting for me to tell him so. “It takes more than I’ve got. I need to get the car tuned up. I need the Wonder Wagon fixed up. I need cash for gas, for meals, for motels. I have to pay the girls for their time.” He shook his head in exasperation.

  “And I have to buy mermaid food. Do you know how much mermaid food costs these days?” He said it with a straight face that he held for some time. “Look, I just need a bit more. Just to get the thing done and get it to Winnipeg. Then the money’s going to pour in and I’ll be able to pay you back in no time.”

  I glanced at the empty goldfish bowl and pictured Zoe in a mermaid’s tale floating languidly in the water. “How much more?” I asked.

  “First off, I need a grand for Mike to finish the thing. Plus two grand for the vehicles.” The list went on from there, the figure ending up being more than I’d hoped, but I didn’t want to back out. It was important to me to be the guy who had made the mermaid happen. “Okay,” I said, sighing more heavily than I intended. “I’ll bring that tomorrow.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “If you were a chick, I’d name the mermaid after you.”

  As it was, he named the mermaid Nerissa. “It means from the sea,” he said. “I found it on Wikipedia.”

  Once we’d agreed on terms, I asked, “Is that thing you’re whittling part of the Mermaid?”

  He held up the stick, about two feet long, and becoming pointed at the end that he was carving. “This is the other thing I was telling you about.”

  “Which?” Grant had told me many stories.

  “The genuine sixteenth century vampire killing kit. This is part of it.”

  When he had first mentioned that the kit was being added to the show, I half believed it was true. Grant spoke of improbable things with a showman’s intensity, so that those listening often got caught up in the fervour, and rational thought left their heads.

  It annoyed me that I felt disappointment at this revelation, given that Grant’s original story could not possibly have been true.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m putting it in the wagon next to Otto.” He gave me no more details, just chuckled and kept whittling. Occasionally, he would stop, hold the stake up for inspection, and then continue to work. He tested the point with his fingertip and shook his head. I left him honing the sharp end.

  Two weeks later, the Living Mermaid attraction was completed, and the car and trailer pronounced roadworthy. Grant and Zoe sat in the front seat. Angela, who was travelling with them as the alternate mermaid, climbed in the back. As Grant pulled away from the curb he stuck his head out the window and yelled at me, “See you in Regina.” Then he swerved into his lane and rattled towards the highway.

  Mike, who lived nearby, was standing a few feet away from me. I was surprised to see him watching the departure. “It’s nice of you to see them off,” I said.

  He laughed. “I just wanted to check if he’d head in the right direction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s dumb as a post,” Mike said. “He told me where he was heading and asked me if that was west or not.” He shook his head.

  I felt protective of Grant, now that we were partners. “Well,” I said, “at least you got your thousand dollars.”

  “Thousand?” he laughed. “Bastard gave me five hundred.”

  Pioneer Days in Regina was like every other fair I had ever been to. There were the expected midway rides, games that were almost impossible to win, live music from bands that would never make it, agricultural displays that only the entrants cared about. It was the standard line up. I found Grant and the Living Mermaid at the far end of the midway, right next to his Wonder Wagon.

  I stood across the lot and surveyed Grant’s empire. With lurid images twelve feet high, the banners outside the wagon promoted the attractions on display inside. All the creatures were presented wild-eyed and maniacal. The only one that would not disappoint was Otto.

  The Living Mermaid was in a tent a few yards west of the wagon. Grant had painted a spectacular banner that proclaimed “Nerissa, the Living Mermaid” and showed her swimming with tropical fish among coral reefs. By Grant’s standards, it was only slightly hyperbolic.

  “Welcome to show business,” Grant said as I approached. “You all ready for the razzle dazzle?”

  First, he showed me the Living Mermaid’s tent. The set-up was much more impressive than it had been in Grant’s place. The box was draped in sea green cloth painted with fish and disproportionately large seahorses. In the background was a vague mermaid-like figure. Two small spotlights suspended from the top of the tent threw glowing highlights on the surface of the bowl. Mike had explained to me that the bowl contained mineral oil rather than water. Although they looked much the same to the audience, the oil was a much better reflective surface. Two carefully positioned mirrors inside the box directed the mermaid’s image onto the oil.

  What the audience saw, from several feet away, behind a thigh-high cordon of gold braid, looked like a mermaid, tail and all, floating placidly underwater. Conversely, the mermaid could see the patrons and would wave and blow the occasional kiss.

  People loved the illusion. Children squealed in delight. Teenagers scoffed at the falseness of it, even though they could not figure out how it was done and often went back again and again. Adults usually took it good-naturedly. No one seemed to mind that they’d been tricked.

  But sometimes visitors would get carried away. “I’ve had people making out,” Angela told me later, “and a bunch of guys showing me their junk.” She shook her head. “Maybe they think that because the mermaid is small, they’ll look big.”

  Grant laughed at things like that. He didn’t care what the customers did as long as they paid. “They’re rubes,” he said. “They’re meal tickets. They’re stupid enough to give me their money.”

  After the mermaid, Grant gave me the rest of the tour. Behind the scenes, the carnival was far from dazzling. He showed me the cookhouse, which was a much-repaired tent that had spent years soaking up the odours of French fries, gravy, and tobacco smoke. He showed me the communal showers, which made the bottoms of my feet start to itch. He showed me the backs of the game booths, held together with duct tape and clumsy stitches.

  Everything felt run down, worn out, and patched up. That included the people who worked there. He introduced me to h
is friends on the lot. Most of them were only halfway into a summer full of eighteen-hour days, rowdy locals, unpredictable weather, and too little sleep.

  There was George, who had run a photo booth on carnival lots for decades. There was Walter, who operated an Over/Under booth, and had two disturbingly realistic eyes tattooed on the back of his bald head. And there was Karl, who sat behind the Bust-a-Balloon game, inflating replacement targets. As we passed by, several other carnies gave Grant looks that ranged from casual indifference to outright hostility. He didn’t seem to notice. He smiled broadly and strutted by, eyes fixed on what lay ahead.

  Grant took me to Doc Graham’s Coffee Café, where the doc sold overpriced hot drinks. We took the cups that I paid for to one of the plastic tables behind the stand and sat under a tree. It was one of the few shady spots on the midway.

  “What do you think?” Grant asked me. “How’s carny life?”

  “So far so good.”

  “It’s the life, that’s for sure.”

  I took a sip and asked, “How does this show usually do for you? Good crowds?” I was looking out over the midway so I could not see Grant’s face. There was a pause.

  “You never know,” he said quietly. “It’s a crapshoot.” He stood up and looked at his watch. “Shit,” he said, “I have to go relieve Zoe.”

  The way the set-up was supposed to work was that Zoe and Angela would take turns as the mermaid. Being crammed inside the box took a toll on them. Their muscles would cramp. It was hot, and the air was bad. After about an hour, they would have to change up. Then, Grant closed the attraction, opened the door at the back of the box, and let one mermaid slither out and the other one take her place.

  While they alternated in the fish bowl, Grant was supposed to be out front taking tickets, rotating shifts with a local kid. That didn’t last long. Grant was not happy with the kid’s demeanour. I’m not sure what the problem was. Maybe he looked the wrong way at Zoe, but I think it was more likely that Grant realized that he didn’t actually have to pay anyone else if he made his existing staff do double duty.

  Most of the time, it didn’t work out as planned. Grant would come up with some errand that he had to run, or someone he needed to see, and disappear for hours on end. From the time the fair opened at eleven in the morning until it closed at one the next morning, Angela and Zoe worked more or less non-stop.

  There was only one mermaid tail and one wig, and as the day went on they became increasingly soaked with sweat. Neither Zoe nor Angela was thrilled about having to put on the drenched costume, and it took longer each time. This annoyed Grant. He would check his watch and scowl and mutter. Once, when Angela came out of the tent, he said, “Took you long enough. Do you know how many customers I had to turn away?”

  “Yeah? Well you try putting on that shit in a hurry.” She stormed off.

  “Hey,” Grant yelled after her, “you have to take tickets.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  There was nothing he could do. Without Angela, there was only half a show. He turned and looked at me. “Take tickets for a minute, will you? There’s something I need to do.”

  I didn’t bother asking him about getting paid. I just picked up the scanner.

  Grant was gone for three hours. His frequent absences had been a problem through the entire run. Zoe never complained much but Angela did enough for both of them. She told me that he was always going off to do something or other, never coming back when he was supposed to, never explaining, never apologizing. Once he was gone so long that Zoe was stuck in the box for almost four hours and came out too dizzy and sick to do anything else for the rest of the day. For a while, Angela thought that Zoe might have heatstroke, but by the next morning she was back waving to the crowd.

  “He is such a cheap fucker,” Angela said to me one morning over coffee.

  “So why don’t you pack up and leave?”

  She shrugged. She had walked on broken glass and eaten bugs in Grant’s stage show, and that did not necessarily open up a wealth of employment opportunities. “I dunno. What else am I going to do? Go home and work at Timmy’s?”

  In his spare time, Grant kept working on the vampire killing kit. I had never watched him work on an attraction before and was struck by how meticulous he was. He would paint and repaint, not happy with how old the various elements looked. He carved half a dozen different stakes. He would lay them out side by side and study them from various angles to determine which one looked the most genuine and made the greatest impact. He checked the look of each item in different lighting, going into the wagon before the fair opened.

  I went in with him twice as he stood staring into the space he planned to use for the display. He would say nothing, then would hold out each of the various stakes and turn them around, pointing left, pointing right, up or down. Once, with a grunt of disdain, he tossed one onto the floor and abruptly turned and walked outside.

  One morning he said to me, “I need to go downtown and run an errand. Let’s grab a cab.”

  We got in the back of the car, and Grant said, “Hey, how are you today --” he looked at the cabbie’s ID “-- Ahmed?”

  “I’m fine, sir, fine. How are you?”

  “Just great, thanks.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “You need to tell us,” Grant said, and I saw Ahmed glance into the rearview to see if he was being had.

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “I need to get a satchel,” Grant said. He was gesturing with his hands but I don’t think Ahmed could see.

  “A satchel?”

  “Yeah, you know, like a doctor’s bag. An old one. Leather. You know, that opens from the top. A black one. Do you know any places that sell old things like that?”

  Ahmed, it turned out, knew several places. The first one we went to had something that was close. While Ahmed waited in the cab with the metre running, Grant gave the satchel his usual careful scrutiny, then said, “This might do. I’ll take it.” He turned to me. It’s for the vampire kit. “Can you put it on your card and I’ll pay you back?” And I knew what kind of day it was going to be.

  In the end, we went to six different places to look for doctor’s bags and found three that had possibilities. I paid for all of them. We also stopped at a western wear place because Grant got the notion that he wanted a cowboy shirt.

  When we pulled up out front, he said to Ahmed, “Can you turn the engine off and leave the meter going?”

  “Yes, Grant.” By that point we were all on a first name basis.

  “Great, come on in.” We went inside and Grant looked around with enthusiasm, though he tried nothing on. Ahmed seemed to enjoy himself as well. I was the only one who bought a shirt.

  When Ahmed dropped us back at the fair, I had my card out before Grant could mention it. I really did not want to hear him ask. We’d been gone for hours, and the fare was steep. I added a good tip because it wasn’t Ahmed’s fault. He thanked us profusely and drove away.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  Grant handed me the satchels. “Take these to the wagon,” he said. “There’s something I have to do.”

  Out of the blue, four days into the run, the local kid whom Grant had hired to take tickets at the Wonder Wagon quit. He’d been offered a better job at the Birthday Game. There was an unwritten rule about not poaching other people’s employees. Grant told me he was going to complain to the guys who ran the Birthday booth but he never did. I’d seen those guys, and I didn’t blame him.

  “I got a problem now that dickhead has bailed,” he said. “The girls are getting on my ass about wanting some time off. And I’m busy. I got things to do. I can’t always plan my day for their convenience, so they can just hang out while I’m taking tickets. Look, if I could put on that mermaid get up and crawl into the box, I would, but that’s not possible. One of them has to be in there, and the other one has to be taking tickets. I got the wagon to run and I can’t be two places at once.”


  He stopped for breath, and I said, “So what are you saying?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m asking you to take tickets, scan wrist bands, do like that for an hour or two so I can give Zoe a break.”

  I liked Zoe and figured she could probably use some time. “Sure, I can do that,” I said. “You don’t even have to pay me.”

  Grant looked startled. “Good,” he said, “because I had no intention of paying you. You’re doing this as a favour for a pal.”

  Taking tickets was a boring job, but it was also eye opening. I got a much better idea of how many people were going through the attraction every hour. Some had cardboard tickets that I put in a small metal box, but most had prepaid one-price wristbands with barcodes on them. I scanned each band as it was presented to me. A record of each one was kept on a database in the fair office. Grant then would be paid a percentage of the wristband cost for every entry.

  People were streaming in to see both the Wonder Wagon and the Living Mermaid. Grant must have been making money hand over fist. No wonder he was so confident about being able to pay me back quickly.

  On my second shift, everything was going well until the scanner broke. I was uncertain about what to do and the waiting people were impatient. I phoned Grant but he did not answer. Leaving a voicemail, I made an executive decision and simply let people in, keeping a count of everyone with a wristband. This seemed to be working well until Grant arrived.

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

  I held up the scanner. “It just stopped working.”

  He took it from me roughly. “Well why are these people going in?”

  “I had to make a call,” I said. “I’m keeping track.”

  He looked at me fiercely. “Well that’s no fucking good. I won’t get paid for people who aren’t scanned in.”

  “So what was I supposed to do?”

  “Shut it down until I get this fixed.” He waved the scanner at me.

  “What about people who have tickets?”

  “Fuck them,” he said.

  “Really?” I decided not to bother explaining to him that it was better to let some folks in free who might come back again and who were quite likely to tell their friends to visit. “It’s your show,” I said.