“You know, I was remembering that I saw my first cunt right here. Most any man my age probably did. It was a public service because we didn’t get to see it anywhere else. My father took me—it was cheaper than going to Montreal. And you gotta see it before you know what you’re gonna do with it, don’t you?”
“I’ll use that on the box if you want me to,” Abe said with a grin. “And if your daddy was a widower when he got bald-headed, I’ll bet you he kissed his last pussy right down here too.”
That startled the sheriff, but, knowing Abe to be an alien from deep Dixie, and having been acquainted with him for a decade, he had to actually agree. They talked about trailer tires and hitches, and crooked salesmen, and scanner frequencies, until Jake neglected to reopen his own show on time so he could stick around with the sheriff and hear Abe’s opening spiel. Abe was quiet-spoken, economical with his energies, relying on the mike instead of shouting, and never strained his memory trying to bring in the name of the particular town he was in. People didn’t pay to be flattered at a girl tent. They came for only one reason, and he was in it for the long haul.
“Gentlemen, this is the Fish House. We give you the hole show. You can smell it. We leave nothing out. You’ll either go home and enjoy the pleasures of your fist, or else your wife will thank you because we’ve primed your pump. We have Carmen and Sheba. See whose dimensions you like best. And also our redhead Samantha, who swallows silver dollars, if you know what that means. If you don’t happen to have one on your person, we’ll sell you one for five bucks.”
Laughing, the sheriff left inconspicuously. But when Jake emerged from backstage, he noticed Phil’s urgent fireplug figure, beside the grease joint down a ways, wondering why the drome had not been up and running to catch the girl show’s marks before Abe had started his pitch, not just the stragglers who were now arriving late. Cliff and Charlene dimly perceived that they had missed a phase, too, and Elizabeth Alice had resumed scouting the midway for coins, brooches, barrettes, medallions, or whatever had been dropped, while drinking a chocolate milk and chewing an onion ring Angel’s girlfriend had given her. She was having fun, trying to get ahead of an old guy who was searching for change, waving the wand of a metal detector, so Jake didn’t call her back for the “Riders’ Accident and Hospital Fund.” The screams from the Scrambler no longer frightened her, and the pitchman who ran the water-pistol game, which was her favorite, let her play, gaffing it so that she won.
Jake was surprised, therefore, to find her crying after his blow-off. She said she had wound up, on her way home, at the mud wrestlers’ tent, adjoining Jake’s drome on the opposite side from Abe’s show. Three young women performed—high-school classmates on Long Island a few years ago, and still friends—who knew who Elizabeth Alice was; and after signaling their intentions to Vickie, in the next ticket booth, they had invited her in. They were doing this stuff partly for a hoot, but the experience of seeing women fighting each other in a tub of black muck terrified Elizabeth Alice. She ran bawling out, not realizing of course that they were faking and much less likely to get hurt than Cliff or Jake. Vickie, comforting her, explained that like the Scrambler, it was only pretend, so she wouldn’t have nightmares, which she was prone to.
After a while, Vickie carried her back to meet the mud wrestlers: whom she wanted to be friends with anyway, certainly more than with the strippers on the other side. Jake resented the wrestlers a bit, as First-of-May triflers—not carnies at all, but exploiting a fad—whose act would wilt in the autumn rains and maybe never come back on the circuit next year, although he was glad to tap into the extra customers they brought. Vickie didn’t share that opinion. In fact, the organizer of it, named Alida, told Elizabeth Alice she had a little girl herself, who was staying with Grandma in Bayside, while Mamma was away. And Alida’s husband, who was their manager and also about Vickie’s age, was a building contractor, working for his father in his regular life. So he could afford to take orders from his tomboy wife, and the summer off. He’d jury-rigged a shower from the fairgrounds’ hose and a portable water heater he had brought along, and they were now kind enough to let Vickie or Charlene use it, even though they weren’t covered with mud.
Alida was a ball of fire who knew how to control her money (“very tough on the customers,” as bookkeeper for the construction company, her husband said), as well as her diet, and owned a split-level ranch house in the suburbs that she showed Vickie pictures of. Indeed, they wanted a fourth woman for tag-team wrestling or just to spell one of them off—but not to “pick up some unknown girl with a social disease,” as Alida confided. She promised no rough stuff, though her nose looked as if it had been broken (she claimed a car accident); and what with this terrible pinch for money, Vickie was tempted, but didn’t know how to broach the idea with Jake.
Jake called them one-season wonders, and they told her that his motordrome looked ramshackle—but also that you had to pull each other’s T-shirt off in the middle of the tussle, or nobody would come. It wasn’t advertised, but word-of-mouth promised the customers that you were going to; and possibly as a result, a snide feud had developed, these last two days, between the girl-show strippers and the mud wrestlers, as to whose stunt was more demeaning, dirtier, more disgusting, the mud fight or the muff-peddling.
“Cunt-lapping,” the mud wrestlers called it, when Alida shouted at Abe’s Sheba or Samantha, walking by. And if she did, “Eat mud!” Sheba yelled back.
Jake sided with his friend’s girls, naturally. No real carnies would waste their energy starting a spat like that unless it had been set up beforehand, building toward a “grudge cat fight” with an extra admission fee, in front of the grandstand. Which was a great idea, come to think of it, except you couldn’t trust “the mud people,” as he called them—resenting Vickie’s needing to shower there—to go easy on Abe’s girls. The staging would have to be cautiously done, and he didn’t even believe they had the split-level house and their boasts about a construction business back on Long Island. Otherwise, why eat dirt? Their credit rating was probably zilch.
“Like ours?” Vickie asked.
“Yes, like ours!” he’d muttered in anger; and that was before she ever proposed going next door to try working with them for five bucks a minute, while in the ring.
That night it was warm enough to sleep inside the drome on mattresses, with plenty of elbow room and some reefers to cheer everybody up. By the next noon, Vickie found Jake, as he pulled on his stunt pilot’s barnstorming costume, in an approachable mood, and once he had absorbed the news, he surprised her by simply saying, “If the suckers want it, and you want that. They’ll body-slam you, though. You’ll be black and blue.” Neither bossy nor pleased, he looked to Charlene to dissuade her. But Charlene didn’t oblige, though, being ten years older than Vickie, she didn’t seem miffed not to be considered, herself.
“That’s all I’d need,” she said. Yet she was sometimes so puzzlingly aloof with Elizabeth Alice that Vickie was uncertain about bringing her into a conspiracy to conceal from the child what her mother was planning to do. Who else was there, however, to help while Jake was inside on the Wall? When she asked Jake what he thought was wrong, he suggested Charlene might have given up a kid for adoption. He’d seen that reaction before.
“They don’t get over it, but they can wiggle around it.” He didn’t believe Vickie would be at this foolishness for long. Thus the lying could be over in a day or so. “That butch stuff,” he added. “You think they’re your friends, but they’ll hurt you.”
He didn’t spell out that he thought his Vickie was rather physically frail, compared to this new well-fed threesome trading on a fad, who no doubt had eaten cereal and milk every morning through their toddlerhoods, while she was being fed potato chips and Pepsi Cola, and who’d never had their daddy’s belt buckle permanently scar their breasts at fourteen, or been screamed at as a “shrimp,” punishments that didn’t make you serviceably tough, just wary and pessimistic. Also he didn’t voice
his opinion that, whatever the sins of the elegantly milky-clean Carmen, she would be a more feminine influence on a little girl Elizabeth Alice’s age than those dykes. He knew Vickie didn’t consider them bull dykes, but “liberated.”
Hoarse, and feeling nausea on the Wall from doing both the talking and the star turns for his act, Jake wanted to be able to get on the bally platform and simply tell the crowd the truth—then be done with it—saving his poor vocal cords and resting a bit while they filed in. To be able to simply say: “I’m the best there is at doing this, the best left who’s still doing the stunt. If you want to watch, pay your three bucks.” And in fact he liked having Elizabeth Alice around. More than Cliff’s predictable company, going round and around like a circus horse underneath his own looping orbits, she furnished a kind of focus or center of gravity for him, although she was never in sight during the show; she couldn’t be allowed in the drome while they rode, of course. But he would fix his mind on her. He wanted to take her out catching frogs in the field afterwards, with some water in a little coffee container.
What happened, however, was that while he, Cliff, Charlene, and Angel were busy at the drome, Elizabeth Alice went peering behind the scenes for her mom, and, from the back of the next tent, she witnessed Vickie, half-naked, calf-deep in muck and spattered all over with black, being toppled again by Alida tugging at her hair, while five dozen men were hollering for the other two young women to show off their boobies and mix it up dirty, too. Elizabeth Alice sank into desperate hysterics that lasted for over an hour.
“This isn’t solving anything,” Jake protested, during the five o’clock break, after Elizabeth Alice had been extensively hugged to calm her down. Meanwhile, he had already gone to Phil’s grab joint and asked for some decent assistance from him, on the bally box, for instance, for old time’s sake—but maybe too aggressively, because Phil’s normally mousy wife helped Phil respond by stamping her foot on the idea. “No more motorcycles! Isn’t it enough that your brother died on the Wall?” Phil and Jake—who had been gingerly workmates even when they had ridden together—looked at each other quizzically, and Phil told him to cool it and take his time, skip a month in paying his debt, if he wanted to.
It was good being married—not just because at Jake’s age, your ulcer might burst on you, or your eyes might red out from pulling so many G’s on the Wall, and who else, dude, would ever take care of you then?—but to have people to protect. Yet with such limited options, he ought to search for a bigger carnival for them to join. But when he went to Smoky’s trailer to ask for either a financial incentive to stay on, or the loan of a talker from another attraction on the midway, Smoky’s small eyes twinkled bluntly. His lips bulged like a boxer’s with the mouthpiece in.
“If every single one of your customers doesn’t have a ticket stub of mine in his hand when they go in your place, I’m going to boot your butt the hell out of here.”
When Jake expressed total surprise, he said that a spotter of his had told him that “that kid”—Angel—had been letting people in if they slipped him two dollars in cash when he manned the door. If it were Vickie or Charlene, Smoky added, he would have assumed Jake knew, but, “Punch him out,” he suggested. “That’ll solve your money problems.”
Of course it didn’t at all (although Jake did split Angel’s lower lip) but was a diversion, something Smoky, like any carnival owner, was expert at, whether with a town’s Fire Inspector or Sanitation Department, or merely a carny like him.
• • •
Vickie was bruised yet not grudging about how the wrestlers had treated her. Alida had given her some motel money for a sound sleep tonight, and she felt like such a conscientious mother, compared to her own, that she needn’t fret that too much damage had been done to Elizabeth Alice, assuming her dreams turned out okay. Vickie explained to her that it had been make-believe so they could sleep in regular beds and use an indoor toilet and so on. Jake’s pride was injured, then. Needing advice, in any case, he moseyed over to Abe’s to lounge in a camp chair behind the banshee banner line, not out of horniness but loneliness. Similarly, the three strippers were too played out to care how macho Jake was. The tranquility Abe could conjure up was more attractive to them.
Abe chuckled at Jake’s account of Smoky’s imperviousness: not that he himself would really have been less. And he could remember Phil’s virtuoso parents in the motorcycle drome, with their lions shitting, spraying urine during the show, sometimes fearfully, sometimes territorially, but smelling worse than the bikes did. They laughed about it together, and living dangerously by the prowess of your body was a bond with the girls, as well. Yet the work did burn them out. Abe would start from Birmingham with three second-string tits-and-asses club dancers, and finish in Florida after Thanksgiving with none of the originals, or the first substitutes for the originals, either. In Memphis, Knoxville, Lynchburg, Pittsburgh, or places in between, he might lose a girl and pick up another one—always pros; he didn’t train them. And it was like handling Amazons, he said. Like soldiers, they tended to prefer each other’s company to any alternative, and needed their rest and recreation, such as going to a movie collectively, a swim in July, a visit to a pick-your-own apple orchard later, a kitten in a box in the dressing wagon, or enjoying a cry in common when the customers got brutish. He’d give the weeping one her money, and she’d climb onto the Hound, while he phoned the nearest agency, in Boston, St. Louis, Louisville, Buffalo, or wherever, until by and by a new six-foot “bombshell” would arrive, hair-coloring and sexpot pasties and all. If she didn’t yet know how raw this hayseed outfit that she’d jumped onto was, Sheba or Samantha—or somebody like Sheba or Samantha—or else Abe himself, would demonstrate to the new girl how to grab a guy who was going down on her by both ears in a manner that let him know he was going to lose them if he so much as hinted at a nipping. And if this discovery revolted her, it was a matter of pride with Abe that she could still leave with a little money tucked in her bra.
“Negotiate from strength” was Abe’s advice again, after hearing Jake gripe. He had a beer in his hand but, unlike Jake, had not been a drunk. “You and me are about the same age, but we’re pretending the gravy train isn’t going to end. We can squeeze it out, but pretty soon every high school kid is going to be looking at what I’m charging for on his computer at home or his girlfriend will be giving it away for free.” He motioned toward the stage. “Girlies are girls. You’d think even the bald-headed guys would know that.”
Vickie stopped over to check on Jake, then left Elizabeth Alice with him while she went back to the wrestlers’ tent to chat with her friends. Abe said he had enough to retire on, but, like a good carny, omitted asking Jake how he stood for the winter; just suggested he ought to put Vickie to work.
“Right?” he asked Carmen—who had the biggest bouffant, black at the roots, iridescent-honey on top, and was now grooming Elizabeth Alice’s hair with a comb as long as most of her arm.
“That’s how they do it,” Carmen agreed. “My poppa used to put his hand in my dress every week to see how mine were developing. He thought he could live off of me, but I’ve never sent him a dime.”
“Hey,” Jake interrupted for the child’s sake.
Elizabeth Alice had a sort of primary animal energy that put the adults to shame, and maybe was why she lent him that sense of focus when he was on the Wall. He studied his blotched, blurry agglomeration of tattoos for a bare space on his arm where he could have one engraved for her. But she needed more protection than Vickie, and he meant to be faithful to both of them in their separate ways. Having grown up fatherless, but slated to work in the Navy Yard like his mother’s in-laws, he was tender on that subject. Although he’d loved his mom, he had taken off when those whirling, flashing wheels and vortexes of light, embellished by sirens, of the World of Mirth show and Goldie Restall its Wall of Death impresario, vroom-vroomed into town. His mother’s tenement windows looked out on the carny lot, and when he hit twelve he didn’t let them l
eave without him. He was perched on Goldie’s handlebars as “The Youngest Rider in the World,” until he became immunized to dizziness and, turning sixteen, could legally drive alone. Their team played the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Palisades Park, the Santa Cruz boardwalk, Soldier’s Field in Chicago, The Cow Palace in San Francisco, and Rocky Dell’s Great American Shows. Jake learned short-cut auto mechanics too, so you could buy a heap at a junkyard and make it run for a week or a month, with the doors tied shut if you had to. At that one stage in his twenties he’d crewed with the Chitwood Thrill Show, jumping cars over a row of junkers, then rolling them, and stepping out with chesty panache. But that didn’t have the intimacy of a Harley Low Rider balling into the wind, not to mention an Indian Scout climbing the Wall “like a bug,” as Goldie would say, before he retired to driving a tramcar for gimpy tourists half his age on the boardwalk at Wildwood, New Jersey. As Goldie, his foster father’s, longevity showed, it wasn’t so much the shitters that were going to wipe you out. Once Jake’s drive tire burst, and his knee went right through the floor when he came down. His whole leg was oozing blood and bodily fluids and he had needed a hundred-forty stitches on his face and head. But Jake had had two heart attacks, more recently, since turning fifty (although before he’d met Vickie, so she didn’t know), and now carried nitroglycerin tablets buttoned into his shirt pocket, even on the Wall. He’d tried driving a bread truck and working in a loblolly pine sawmill down South afterwards for a spell, but the spinning lights that could still entice a smooth-skinned young lady like Vickie pulled him back. Hugging a perpendicular wall at thirty or forty miles an hour concentrated a grandpa’s brain cells wonderfully, and if the pennies raining down on his head shamed him, he pretended they were for Elizabeth Alice.
Yet how could he hustle a gig on a better carnival than this one when he was pinned down to his impossible schedule? Abe shrugged sympathetically. Abe had traveled with a Mermaid presentation, and an Iron Lung exhibit—another grind where you employed a young broad, undressed, to hold still endlessly, while cramped in claustrophobic quarters for many hours—and had toured with Medical Curiosities (your basic Two-Headed engagement) in a trailer. But he preferred a free-standing, live act, and not just a Fat Lady, but the coziness of trouping with a trio of lively showgirls, who for their part often preferred the companionship of a dork like him to all the men they’d known that they had been scared of. Abe was backed by a moneybags in Gibsonton, Florida, who owned his equipment, but otherwise operated independently, hiring his girls, or stable of fill-ins, plus the roughies, and negotiating with every county sheriff as to whether or not “lunch” could be served, which boosted the receipts considerably and thus the lawmen’s too. In the winter he retired to his secluded hotel and got a good rest, without needing a crutch such as AA, or anybody else.
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