The novices who handed out Arturan literature in the P.I.P. (Peace, Isolation, Purity) booths could count on being quizzed periodically about the reactions of passersby to each brochure or pamphlet.
The snack-stand vendors reported the flavors of Sno-kone or soda pop in vogue in a given locale and how the fashions varied geographically.
Sanderson watched practice sessions and rehearsals and then went to the shows to see the results. He knew the face and name and temperament of every cat Horst owned. He knew the blade capacity of each sword swallower and the octane rating of every fire eater. He knew the geek boys’ favorite philosophers and the brand of lotion that the tumblers rubbed on their aching joints before bed.
Whenever he could, he’d snag Horst or a Binewski to keep him company, to turn on the lights in the Haunted Gold Mine tunnel so he could see the springs and trip wires that triggered the sound tapes and the swooping skeletons or gaping corpses, or to walk him through the Chute describing the nature and origin of each glass-encased specimen. I myself have perched, embarrassed and bored, beside him in the stands of the variety tent, answering his endless questions as he gawked delightedly at Papa’s miniature circus, with its single ring and its dog act, jugglers, acrobatic clowns, and aerialists.
In the swallowers’ tent he watched gravely from the back and asked questions afterward.
When the Death Tower motorcyclists joined the Fabulon, he stuffed his ears with plastic foam so he could lean over the lip of the huge metal cylinder for hours, watching the riders gun their roaring machines against gravity.
He knew the twins’ repertoire by heart and could sing their most difficult and popular tune, “She Was a Salt-Hearted Barmaid,” with all its grace notes.
Of course he studied every delicate nuance of Arty’s show. He scouted the big tent well before Arty made his appearance for each session. Sanderson watched as the ten thousand places filled with the Admitted of varying status. The limbless lay on their bellies in the sawdust in front of the Holy Tank. The legless were behind them on the first slope of the risers. The bandages got ostentatiously thick further up where the ankle and knee crowd jostled each other. Beyond were the novices, all dressed in white and crushed close on the benches, waving their bandages proudly. Behind and above them in the highest bleachers were the unscathed newcomers, the curious, the scoffers, the occasional reporter, all antsy and jiggling to see Arturo the Aqua Man’s life-defying invitation to ultimate sanctity. Sanderson sketched charts of the hierarchy and wrote endlessly in his pocket-shaped notebooks.
But, of all the skims and grifts and skills and wonders of the Fabulon, Norval Sanderson’s particular favorite was a fairly new act housed in the smallish tent right next to Arty’s huge one. It was the least-spectacular turn the Fabulon had ever offered. Yet, though Sanderson would pump me or any other insider for details about the act and the actor, he didn’t want to meet the man himself or question him personally. “Some mysteries,” he’d drawl, “I’d like to preserve.” And I never resisted when Sanderson hailed me away from pumping septic tanks or counting tickets to join him in a scholarly viewing of “Mr. Ford’s luscious lariat.” I liked the Fly Roper, too.
His friends called him C. B. Ford. He was pot-bellied and bald and he tucked his pants into bright red, rose-stitched, pointy-toed cowboy boots with three-inch heels. There was a calm twinkle to his humor. He had quick hands and no interest at all in becoming an Arturan and tithing up his body parts. What he wanted, and what Arty gave him, was a permanent lease on the number 2 tent in the fairway. “Your big show and my little show,” he told Arty, “belong on the same card.”
His gift was his ability to bulldog and hogtie houseflies. He claimed to have learned it in the Shetland Islands, where the girls came thirty lonesome miles over the moors to drink nickel beer and see the flicks at the Coast Guard station. “But,” he laughed, “those girls were all set on getting to the States so you had to be careful with ’em. Nothing they’d like better than get knocked up by a Yank and have Papa herd him to the altar like one of their shit-dragging sheep.”
There isn’t much life in those dim latitudes, he would claim, but there were plenty of flies. And he learned the nature of flies from an old bosun who’d run away to sea from a meat-packing plant in Nebraska.
“Now the fly,” and he planted his heels and hooked out the silver tabs on his suspenders, “is not unlike the helicopter.” At this point his lariat would lift, whirling lazily, and begin to spin above his head in a convincing imitation of a fly’s orbit. “Your mother no doubt told you that you’d catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.… But we all know what flies really like best!” With his free hand he would reach over to the velvet-draped table and lift the domed silver lid off the shallow chafing dish. The candle beneath the dish would flutter slightly and the crowd would titter at the steaming pile of dung on its silver plate.
C. B. Ford was particular about the brand of shit he used. “Cow flop,” he once told me in confidence, “does not work well. It draws the flies just fine, but the folks in the audience can’t see it. It’s too runny and you can’t pile it so they can see it from the ground. It’s no good to me at all if it’s dry enough to stack. Dry I could pile it up like flapjacks halfway to the moon, but the flies don’t take much interest in it. Horse shit, of course, draws well if it’s just fresh, but it doesn’t have enough impact on the crowd. Somehow people accept horse shit. Nearly anybody would tell you that the smell is homey rather than bad. We want that bit of shock that you get with real shit shit. I won’t work with pig shit. Depends on what they’re eating but they can be loose as a cow and even when they’re firm that pig smell is too much for me. I hate it. So it comes down to either dog or human.”
The rope’s loop would hover over the chafing dish excitedly while the crowd subsided and C. B. Ford took up his bumpkin professorship. His timing was good and his chatter didn’t go over anybody’s head. He’d play the rope and talk and it was never long before the flies came. “There’s one now.… That’s the advantage of fresh bait,” he’d say. He had a screen cage full of flies—big bluebottles that were slow and easy to work with and easy for the crowd to see and hear. He had one of the boys behind the stage just crack the gate on that cage so the flies would come out in a slow drip. Five or six was all he wanted. And as soon as there were a couple of real flies buzzing that chafing dish, his rope would disappear and he’d get a long-haired girl up from the audience to giggle and assist him.
The first fly was always a big to-do. He’d jump all over the stage swiping wildly at the air, come within a frog hair of splatting his fist into the chafing dish a dozen times, get the girl volunteer to flap her arms to flush the little buzzers his way, and all the while talking his talk about the similarities and differences between Herefords and bluebottles until the audience was half-convinced that he was never going to catch the fly but was laughing anyway and jumpy as a drunk with a glass of milk waiting for him to smack a bare hand into that pile of warm dung.
Then, suddenly, he’d catch the fly and hold it, closed in his fist, up to the microphone so they could hear it buzz. Then he’d blow on his thumb knuckle and shout and shake his fist hard, “to make the fly dizzy,” and then snap his wrist as he flung the fly down hard onto the table. “Now he’s out for a second, but he’s just stunned and we’ve got to act quickly before he regains consciousness.”
Whirling on the long-haired girl and drawing small stork-shaped scissors, he would lift a strand of her hair, separate a lone thread, and snip it close to her skull before she had time to do more than squeak.
“We’ll tie a slipknot here at one end and have this big fella hobbled in a jiffy.”
The slipknot in the hair would slide over one of the stiffly splayed legs of the fly and tighten. With a quick flourish a little fluorescent paper sign was taped to the loose end of the hair. While the first fly was recovering its wits C. B. Ford would catch five more as easily as picking grapes and serve them the same way, a
ssuring his blushing assistant that her hair was so thick and lustrous that she could spare six single threads for the taming of half a dozen wild beasts.
Inside three minutes a flock of confused flies was bobbling drunkenly through the air above the audience, trailing the tiny winking streamers that read “EAT AT JOE’S” and “HOME COOKING.”
The crowd would flush out through the flaps in a good humor. Inevitably a group of young men would take it upon themselves to swat the burdened flies out of the air or smash them as they sagged down to rest. Also inevitable was the child who was indignant at having the flies killed and did his best to catch one alive to protect it, to take it home in a popcorn box and revere it for having experienced something altogether extraordinary in fly life.
After two months of following Arty around in a rented van, Norval Sanderson left us and took a leave of absence from his distinguished magazine. He went home to West Point, Georgia, as he explained, to see his aged mother and think. For weeks he combed her long, thin hair each night and sat drinking in the dark on the porch long after she went to bed. When Sanderson came back to the Fabulon, Arty claimed it was the cult that drew him. Lily was convinced that Sanderson was bent on writing Arty’s biography, but I had a hunch that the Fly Roper was, in some odd way, part of the pull.
Norval caught up with us again outside Ogallala, Nebraska, and knocked on the door of Arty’s van during breakfast. Arty left the straw bobbing in his orange juice to smile at Norval. I went on cutting up his ham.
Norval went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee, lifted it in salute to Arty, and then set it on the counter without sipping it. “I brought you something.” His ironic rasp was as slow and cool as ever. He reached into the unusual bulge in his tweed jacket and pulled out a green glass pint jar crammed with something. “A token,” he sneered, “of my profound respect.” He set the jar on the table beside Arty’s plate. The swollen thing inside pressed against the glass. It was thinly covered with short dark hairs. Norval grinned mischievously and loosened his slim lizard-skin belt. The flannel trousers slid down past loose silk shorts to his knees. “Excusing your presence, Miss Olympia,” he mocked, and his thumbs pushed the elastic waistband down and twitched his starched shirttail aside to show the limp circumcised penis dangling in front of a flat and ornately scarred crotch.
“The stitches are almost completely dissolved now, but I’m still bow-legged,” he complained.
Arty chuckled and nodded. “Don’t think that gives you a head start on any other novice. You still have to go through the finger and toe basics before you’ll get any credit for that grandstand play.”
Sanderson hiked his pants back up, shaking his head with mock woe. “I cut off my balls for the man and this is the thanks I get.”
“We all have to start somewhere,” Arty grinned, as I slipped a forkful of ham between his lips. Sanderson leaned on the stove drinking coffee and regaled us with an urbane description of his search for a surgeon willing to perform the task. “I ended up with an eighty-year-old veterinarian who was Grand Wheezar of his local KKK congregation. I told him that my mother had just confessed, on her deathbed, that she had gone down with a pecan picker and I was actually sired by an octoroon Catholic communist. The old gentleman agreed to do the job immediately. He pats me on the shoulder and says, ‘Yer right, son, you’d fry in the eternal oil for passing that much taint on to another generation.’ ”
Arty was still laughing when Sanderson went out to move his van into the Admitted camp. As the door closed Arty hooked a fin at the pint jar and slid it into staring range. He put his nose against the tinted glass, turned the jar for another view, and then sat back with a frown wrinkling his bare scalp.
“Goat? or calf?” He might have been asking the jar. “Maybe a colt or a big dog?”
I was scraping the plates and shaking my head, “You’re as goofy as he is.”
Arty gave me the look. “These are not Norval Sanderson’s balls.”
That stopped me. I leaned to look at the crammed jar.
Arty tapped at the lid with his fin. “That network reporter who was here after the first Now story told me about it. Sanderson lost his balls to a landmine in North Africa years ago. Fifteen years ago, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you call him on it?” My head was frozen.
“He figures I don’t know anything. Probably put iodine or something on old scars to make them look fresh. It’s kind of cute. Let’s give him some rope and see what he’s up to. And you keep your trap shut about it.”
“You like him.”
“He’s entertaining.”
Passing himself off as a convert didn’t seem to require that Norval develop anything you could rightly call reverence. He still sneered and took notes and interrogated anything with vocal cords. But he also came up with the idea for the Transcendental Maggot booth. Arty laughed and let him do it. The project earned Sanderson a modest income and kept him close to Arty. The booth was small but it had the place of pride at the pivot point between Arty’s tent and the Fly Roper. The notion was simple and surprisingly popular. Sanderson collected amputated parts from Dr. Phyllis and cut them into small chunks, one chunk in each half-pint jar. His maggot farm was reliable and easy. He’d hang fingerless or toeless hands or feet up on hooks behind his trailer for a few days and pick out the worms as they hatched. He sold a lone maggot with its own lifetime supply of guaranteed sanctified feed for five dollars. The ones that graduated to flyhood before he could sell them went to the Fly Roper’s wire cage on a dollar-a-dozen basis.
Whatever his intentions, Sanderson was with us to stay. He switched from tweed to twill. He talked casual business, regularly, with C. B. Ford. It took him two years just to shed four toes—two on each foot—but he conscientiously deposited each toe, as he dropped it, in its own jar with its own worm and sold it for the usual price.
17
Popcorn Pimp
The twins were counting the miniature tomatoes in each other’s salads at dinner one night when Papa announced that they were getting their own van, “like Arty’s.” Lily was horrified. They were too young at eighteen to live alone, she protested, even in a T-shape set-up with the family van and Arty’s. The swallowers would sneak in and rape them and whatnot. The sword swallowers and the fire eaters were Lil’s bogeymen at the time. She got hot thinking of the twins at the mercy of the swallowers.
“When they were tiny morsels, still trying to crawl away from each other and getting tangled up, I said, ‘Blast the heart that takes them from me!’ ”
Iphy looked scared but Elly, cool and slow, said, “We’ll take it. I know this is Arty’s idea. He’s got something in mind. But we’ll take it anyway.”
The twins ordered carpets and walls of sea green, and sky-blue drapes and furniture, and a scintillating emerald bathroom. Their bedroom and its huge bed were dusty rose.
In honor of my fifteenth birthday, Mama moved my clothes and treasures into the twins’ old compartment in the family van. I sat there sometimes, but I went on sleeping beneath the kitchen sink because the open expanse of unsheltered bed seemed as wide and flat as Kansas.
The twins showed up in the family van for every meal. “See, Lily,” Papa said one night as the twins sat on the floor winding Mama’s embroidery thread onto cards, “you’d hardly know they moved.”
“Who moved?” asked Mama.
• • •
Elly had hold of my sleeve and was giving me her “or else” look.
“O.K., Oly, I want you to do me a favor.”
Iphy’s gentle hand lay on my other sleeve and her voice was desperate, “I don’t want you to do it, Oly! Please!”
“What?” I was flustered. Elly held out a white envelope.
“Take this over to the judges’ stand at the other end of the park.”
Iphy tried to reach the envelope but it was in Elly’s far hand, out of Iphy’s reach. “I won’t like you, Elly! I won’t speak to you!”
“This is for one of the
judges. A man named Deemer,” Elly continued, calmly fending Iphy off while tucking the envelope into my hand and folding my fingers over it. “He’s very tall and he’s bald except for a brown rim around the back. He’s wearing a suit and a name tag. Give him this and then run. Don’t say anything to him. Don’t wait for an answer.”
Iphy flattened her hands over her face. Her fingernails were nearly white. She wasn’t crying. She was hiding. I stood clutching the envelope and staring at Iphy’s long, thin fingers covering her whole face and tangling with her dark hair.
I took Elly’s envelope on the long walk down the screaming midway and through the barbecue smoke of the picnic grounds beyond, to where rows of folding chairs creaked in the grass under the fat behinds watching the crowning of Miss Dalrymple Dairy or the Catfish Queen or whatever it was.
I saw the guy on the judges’ stand next to the stage. He was young to be so bald. He had the quiet look of a storybook schoolteacher. He stood behind three fat ladies and a short man with a big belly who was blatting into a microphone hooked to a pathetic sound system. I circled behind and scraped my arm climbing up through the warped plywood at the back of the stand. The speaker’s podium and the wide folks were in front of me. I don’t think the crowd could see me. I just touched his damp, pale hand, saw the long face turn down toward me and the eyes widening. Then I jammed the envelope into his hand and scuttled back down to the ground and away as fast as I could.
I saw that thin man once more, for a single minute in the moonlight in the twins’ doorway at three the next morning. I was spying on Arty’s door when the crack of light appeared from the entry to the twins’ van five feet away. I slipped out onto the platform and saw him almost clearly as he stepped out. He was wearing the same suit. He looked tired. The door closed behind him.
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