It was the only time I’d ever heard him sound so completely inane and foolish. He talked out of shock, or maybe dread, which surprised me considering all he had seen. Jolly Nell giggled, a warm and small sound like a young thin girl would make. It almost brought a smile to my face as she threw her hands up, tired of us. “If a baby can be born to a carnival, it can blossom here as well. That’s the nature of this place, I think. It’s only another sideshow.”
“Maybe you’re right, Nell,” I said. “It might explain why Nicodemus brought Jonah here.” I gritted my teeth until the hinges of my jaw hurt. Blood called to blood, and the hammer of faith would have to fall one more time before we were through. “Let’s see what this grift is all about. I’m going to find my son and then we’re getting out of here.”
“None of us will ever leave,” Juba said from far above. “Are you fully prepared for that?”
He started into the street, followed closely by the others. Fishboy Lenny splashed after them, waving his tiny flippers at me. Juba’s legs were so long that he made it across the avenue in three strides. The moon rushed into the rain and poured silver down onto him.
I tried to figure out why nobody was paying attention to any of them. Usually the whores loved freaks and made a big sloppy scene. They smoothed Hertzburg’s hair, twining it between their fingers, playing with his spots.
Then I remembered.
He’d been murdered. He was dead.
They were all dead, and 1 was consumed by ghosts.
2
I had once been the greatest child preacher in all the South. Peoplehad come from as far as Waycross, Tipton, Nashville, Greensboro, Deep River and Gainesville to listen to me wail about heavenly fire and the downfalls of sin. The blaring prayers and saving of souls had come naturally to me. Some of us are bom to judgment. I learned remorse early, but not atonement. With a ministry that brought them bustling in across the floorboards of all-night gospel sings and tent revivals, I found I had a voice given to me by God. I never called myself a healer, nor did my father, but that didn’t stop the cripples from taking pain-wracked steps across the stage. They hurled theif hickory canes and sprang from their wheelchairs and flung their hearing aids into the eleventh row. I gave the imploring, inspiring sermons needed to snap bones back into place and fling cancer into remission. It was easy when backed by thousands of the devoted, everybody speaking in tongues, music swelling, arms lifted to paradise. The brain can do amazing things, even in the dying and the maimed.
There is no mystery to Christ under the Big Top. You had plenty of proof whenever you wanted it. You needed only to watch the brain-damaged come and go without undergoing any change. See the blessed who aren’t susceptible to the power of placebo. Their parents hoped for the miracle of the ordinary and urged them forward toward me and my microphone. The retarded limped, as they always did, and hobbled beneath the lights and weight of my dedication, grinning before the shrieking audiences, and then hobbled off again.
My father’s hands were full of cash. He accepted personal checks and money orders, and he set up a system so he could take credit card donations. He liked gaudy jewelry and wore large but flawed diamond rings that flashed the sun back into the eyes of my parishioners.
When he had both Jesus and money he didn’t need the bottle anymore. Nicodemus owned forty different silk suits and enjoyed driving through the poor sections of various towns throughout the panhandle of Florida, leaving stacks of crisp dollar bills in mailboxes and stuck inside broken screen doors. He prayed with the Baptists, cleaned house with the Methodists, and baked bread in silence at a nearby monastery. He rode on donkeys and went fishing with the governor. He danced with the snake handlers yet never got close enough to the fangs.
But a child gets tired of what he’s urged to do, even if he’s started out in faith and love. A love for the Word, and an incinerating love for his own father. Eventually adolescence finds us all, and it drives most of us crazy in the wonderful way it’s supposed to.
For others it’s the inferno. I lost my golden voice when I discovered the moist tenderness of Becky May Horner and the raw rush of whiskey. I gave up God in the middle of a blow job.
I suspect it happens like that more often than anyone wants to tell you. The hidden mysteries of the tongue matter more than all the parables and allegory of the Bible. In that moment, you realize a girl with large pink nipples and a tall glass of 80-proof scotch can carry your further much faster than any archangel’s wings.
Becky May Homer had some God-given talent of her own, for sure. She had a way of making you hold off until streaks of light crept up from the center of your brain and lit your vision with unnamable colors. She liked to make a man cry for release, and Christ, how I wept and begged, signing over bank accounts. 1 sometimes wondered that if my first sexual encounter had been with someone less experienced I might not have fallen from heaven’s grace to an altogether different kind.
The loss of my virginity drove Nicodemus berserk. He knew it wouldn’t be only my downfall but his as well. He prayed with me long into the heated nights while the willows draped full of misgivings and the cypress led toward Becky May’s hovel. She and her mama were packing up their washboards, tubs and ladder-back chairs with money enough for greater glory. He went through receipts and bank books and stormed around the house. I’d given her more than I’d thought, and there were many other town girls as well. Some I recalled, some I had only brief images of after a couple of pints of Wild Turkey.
Once it started to go bad, he helped to ruin the rest. It was in our genetic make-up, this predilection toward self-destruction. He hung in while he could, but Nicodemus had always been at least half-crazy. It didn’t take very long. A few months and we were pretty much finished, scraping bottom and whoring together, passing the bottle back and forth.
That was enough to drive me from my father’s house, after the liquor turned us inside out and, smirking, he tried to kill me with a frying pan.
3
I found it easy going from one sideshow to another. At sixteen, no longer recognizable as the flaxen-haired, sweet-faced ivory boy preacher, I went to work in my first carnival. With my manner I made a perfect talker, calling in the marks to witness delights and grotesqueries never seen before. They put me on a little platform and let me run the patter. So long as I had a few shots of whiskey, I didn’t mind all those flaming eyes turned on me from inside the faceless mob.
I was the Talker, who hauled them in. Rubes called us “barkers,” but you could never get anybody to lay down money if you only barked in their faces. You talked, and the better you could gauge a person’s appetite—what he might be after inside the carny—then the finer you could judge which attraction he’d be drawn to, and send him on his way.
It’s why I was also a mentalist, a tarot and palm reader, a madball seer. I’d been raised surrounded by people in pain searching for a way to set down their burdens. I dressed the pan in robes and a turban and looked into the crystal ball for effect, but all 1 really needed was to catch a glimpse of their anguish to know what to say in order to hustle them into the tents. I could sense the big troubles left behind, and those that were still coming.
And all the while I was growing more insane.
I found myself dissipating as I walked through the rain. 1 hadn’t had a drink in three years but now 1 felt the way I used to after about half a bottle of 151 Rum, when my head was just starting to ease aside from the rest of my body. It still happened like that from time to time even without the booze.
The Fedex guy who’d been swallowed by the Works stood just inside the doorway, staring forlornly at the rest of the world beyond the entrance. He might’ve been crying or it might have only been mist on his face, I couldn’t be certain. He was still holding his package, whatever it was.
As 1 stepped past he whispered, “Don’t come in. This is hell. I’m way deep down inside of hell.”
“Man,” I told him, “this isn’t even close, believe me.”
“The
n, you understand?”
“Oh yeah.”
“But I—”
“It’s an old story. Really.”
“The agony, it’s … it’s … my spirit’s—”
He didn’t have the words. It always terrified me that one day I’d lose the Talk and forget the words and be exactly like him, waving my hands about my face and stuttering in my grief.
“Get used to it,” I said.
“My spirit’s in pieces!” he whined. “Listen—listen, you said you understood, but I think you made a mistake. I… I… listen—”
Suddenly the rage rose in me and I grabbed him by the neck. He made a soft gkk sound and started to go a nice shade of purple while 1 tightened my grip. He never let go of the package, though.
“Has your own father ever tried to cave in your skull with an iron skillet? You ever have your kid stolen from you? Has God ever reached down into your throat and yanked out your voice with a blazing fist?”
I eased up and he sputtered, gasping. “I—n-n-no, hey, I’ve just got to tell you this, you don’t—”
“Give it a rest.”
“You don’t grasp what it’s like, no matter what you think. You don’t have any idea.”
His eyes were heavy with all his commonplace secrets and I considered his sorrow. I could read his woe as clearly as if it had been swabbed across his forehead with Day-glo paint. There wasn’t much, really, when you got down to it. “Go back home to your lackluster job and indifferent cunt of a wife and your three sneering children. They all want you dead.”
“I know,” he sobbed.
I dragged him to the door and booted his ass back out in the rain. He screamed as if I’d tossed him into an electric fence and I wondered if the shock of freedom would stop his heart. 1 turned and moved through the Works, gliding, wishing myself a little further gone with each step.
“How old am I?” I asked.
“You’re no longer a child,” Juba said as if I were a child. “You’re twenty-five years old. Your hair is already going gray. You’ve squinted too hard for too long and have deeply set wrinkle’s around your eyes.”
I hadn’t looked in a minor for months. “Yes”
“Regret is an incomparable motivation.”
“You ain’t kidding, Bubba.”
“You’re at the end of your life.”
“Am I? Finally?”
Juba nodded his oblong head and it wagged wildly in all the wrong directions. “Yes, but you’ve more to do.”
“Okay.”
“There is much to atone for, and you mustn’t fail at this hour. We won’t allow that.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
“No.”
“Thank Christ..”
“Leave him alone, Juba,” Jolly Nell said. “He’s here. We’re all here to get it done. Let’s go.”
I kept wandering.
Sex, humanity and delusion clambered side by side with the painfreaks and broken-hearted inside the Works. This was a school, a museum, a storehouse, a rent-controlled apartment building where nobody ever managed to leave. Oils and dyes spattered the floor, walls draped with speckled blood, Piles of clay and ash sat like ancient cairns and altars.
There were dozens of separate areas, all under the same big top. Private quarters, showrooms, lecture halls, and sound rooms where musicians played harpsichords and bashed gongs. Pages of poetry lay strewn in the corridors, air currents causing a drift and tide, sweeping opera scores and pornographic cartoon faxes along. There was a time when I really could’ve gotten into this.
Scattered in the darkened halls and comers people were arguing, napping, drawing charcoal sketches, reading Plath and Thoreau and Lovecraft, getting high colonic cleansings, piercings, dialysis, and scratching each others’ eyes out. It took a while to take it all in. There was a parlor where they received slowly spun glyph tattoos in nasty places, 3-D body art where the plastic jutted out of their flesh. I dug some of it. Whispers of adoration, vengeance and admonition floated by—death threats, suicide notes, French horns blaring out of tune, and a chorus of soft sobbing that made the pulse in my throat tick harder.
I was again struck by how this type of artistic coalition hadn’t been seen since Warhol’s Factory, and the Works reeked of the same posturing. They were all here in their numbers, waiting for something huge to happen. I recognized them as I did any mob. A fusion of the restless and unfulfilled, the unfortunate travelers and prying voyeurs, geniuses with and with-out talent, and the remarkably well-off and the utterly damned. I kept waiting for somebody to go by in a platinum blond wig. Jolly Nell was right, it was just another sideshow.
“Nice digs,” Hertzburg said, enjoying the action, his hair on end. He eyed the many ladies, and perhaps they eyed him as well. People laughed and pointed, maybe at me. His leopard-spotted getup wasn’t out of place, and he kept hitting poses, showing off his muscles. “I’m not sure if this is the blackest heart of Babylon, but it’s probably close enough.”
“I thought it might be too tame for you,” I said.
He sniffed the air. “They’ve been killing each other in here for years and stacking the bodies like cordwood.”
“No different than anywhere.”
“For you it’s going to be.”
“We’ll see”
“You’re never going to get out.”
“Fuck that talk,” 1 said. “Find Jonah.”
The denizens paraded by, drinking coffee, discussing the Messenean War and Scooby Doo, How the Spartans marched over the Taygetus Mountains and annexed all the territory of their neighbor, Messenia. How Casey Kasem, the unheralded champion of Seventies Saturday morning cartoons, brought a hipster persona to groovy mod rocker Norville “Shaggy” Rogers. The Messenians revolted in 640 B.C. Initial childhood fantasies revolved around Daphne or Fred or both. Velma Binkley, the perfect foil. Almost defeated, controlling the territory of a subject population that outnumbered their population ten to one, it was only a matter of time before the conquerors themselves were overrun. Shaggy and Scooby were a fine pairing in a parody featuring contests to solve mysteries at various abandoned amusement parks with the aid of Batman and Robin, Laurel and Hardy. Downfall due to a culturally stagnant, sterile oligarchy. Downfall due to the interjection of Scrappy Doo,
Some were shirtless, others bare-bottomed, carting books off to Sophomore Lit, hand-correcting papers. They played with knives and carried cereal bowls, and they hummed to John Lennon and recited the poetry of Sappho. Maybe it actually was just like anywhere else, only compacted for efficiency. Hertzburg sneezed and his eyes watered. He smelled death all over the place now.
I could tell who the doomed were. Who was meant to be here and who had strayed in and accidentally been caught in the vortex. Hertzburg enjoyed the sights and kept turning, turning, his arms outstretched and bulging muscles rising higher, ready to launch into the maelstrom. Jolly Nell looked a little scared, but she was still grinning. Juba, expressionless as usual, slid among the throng as men walked between his alpine legs.
Most of the rooms appeared to be holding classes. Small gatherings of twenty or thirty people, in folding chairs taking notes. Discussions ranged from Jane Austen novels to quantum mechanics to the correct way for a matador to sever a bull’s spinal column.
Everyone enticed and taken in from the outside, together but doing their own thing, divided yet uniform in their division. I waited to hear some laughter and I kept right on waiting. People were everywhere, moving in their secured orbits, thrumming with constant activity and maneuvering.
1 looked down and watched Fishboy Lenny’s back flippers flapping wildly as he squirmed through the halls and circled back to us. His flopping, tiny body heaved against my ankle and he stared up at me, making quiet but gruesome sounds from deep in his bulbous abdominal cavity. “Mwaop, mwaopp, ffftteeee, mwwoop, ffftteeee.” The inchoate, extraneous gashes of gills opened and closed, sucking air with a coarse popping noise.
Nell cooed, too hefty to b
end and reach for him. She said, “There, shhhh, Lenny, it’s all right, calm down.”
Fishboy Lenny went into a caricature of speech, sputtering through the minuscule abscess of a mouth. “Mwaopp, ffftteeee.”
“It’s going to be fine. We’ll be on our way soon. And then we’ll go back to the carnival.”
“Mwoop.”
“Go play. It’s wonderful that you want to make friends.”
“Mwoop.”
Nicodemus was waiting somewhere close by, with his frying pan and worn verses. He’d have a Bible in the pocket of his frock coat, well-read but misremembered. Onion-skin pages would crinkle from his fetid breath. He was the only person I ever knew who actually underlined passages and check-marked chapters. You could go through and see which stories appealed to him the most.
Genesis 4:2-8 had been entirely underlined. Cain offers the fruit of the ground to God while Abel sacrifices the firstborn of his flocks. Lamentations 2:20 had a couple of check marks and a large flamboyant asterisk. Wherein one of the prophets dares to say to God, “Shall the women eat their fruit and children of a span long?” Nicodemus had been thinking of sacrificing his kid long before we ever got around to it. Chronicles 36:15-17 was highlighted with a yellow marker. After God’s prophets are mocked, the Almighty sends an army to Jerusalem to destroy the city “and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand.” Psalms 144:1 had a check mark slashed so deeply into the paper it cut though fifteen pages. God is praised for being the one that teaches hands how to conduct war and fingers how to fight and shed blood. My father had a real thing about hands. I started walking faster, slipping between couples, skimming past a troupe of jugglers who tossed sharpened objects along with eggs and a bowling ball on fire. I knew how to work through a crowd. Nobody touched me.
A few rooms had drapes or beads hanging in the doorways, but almost none of them had any doors. I found one that did and turned the knob: it was a rest home, with about forty eighty-year-olds sucking their gums and shivering in wheelchairs. The smell of shit and gruel grew more distinct and 1 went into a coughing fit.
Four Dark Nights Page 16
