“No, I wouldn’t trade with you,” he murmured to Jake, watching his girls groom Elizabeth Alice’s hair and ruffle her dress. In the morning in the motel room, he would hand Samantha the telephone to call her children, if she woke up early, before they set off from her sister’s house for school. (“Mommy’s working, darling. Mommy will be home soon.”) Carmen had apparently stashed one or two in foster care, but didn’t or couldn’t contact them, which made her jumpy during Samantha’s conversations and yet doubly so on her behalf if she didn’t call. Those mammary organs that paid the bills did have a bedrock purpose, and Jake, to his dismay, didn’t disagree with Abe about a trade, because, after all, after six marriages, he didn’t even have Elizabeth Alice in the sense that she would acknowledge him as her brand-new stepdad. She enjoyed chasing the coins rolling across the floor of the drome, or would follow him where she wanted to go anyhow, if he had sided with her against her mom, but wouldn’t take his hand as they walked, or emotionally give him an inch.
Observing the changing hydraulics of the crowd, Abe got up and mounted his bally box. “All alive,” he said, parting a curtain to show the strawberry-haired Samantha. “The Inner Sanctum of Mystery, Gentlemen. See the Cleft That Shelters and Divides Us. We illuminate the female body for you, Gentlemen. Most of you already know what you are going to see. (And if you don’t, you better hurry in!) The Hole Show. I don’t need hyperbole. Nature doesn’t exaggerate. These ladies display the attributes God gave them. You or I may wear blue jeans or a tuxedo. They wear their birthday suits. Feast your eyes, Gentlemen. It’s cheaper than a marriage license. We have it for your pleasure for the price of one blue ticket. We do go back to good old Dixie for the winter, but we leave you warm with memories!”
The tip was so anemic, however, that Abe left Samantha out there as a come-on—Samantha, the surfer and good sport, a California girl in Pan-Cake makeup, who used a special antiseptic to wash herself when she came offstage from the show, and often muttered the doctor’s mantra, “Do no harm,” to herself, as she worked.
A mark who should have been hospitalized approached Jake and Abe, as they sat together. He talked past them irrationally for a while, until Jake pointed at Cliff’s yellow mutt, tied to the station wagon a dozen yards away, and said, “He bites.”
Then they had another visitor with a funny grin, this one supporting a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. But it wasn’t stiff like a gun, and Jake and Abe, from their decades of sizing people up, recognized that, as odd as he was, he was not a nut.
“No job,” Abe told him, as they waited for him to reveal his shtick.
“No, no, no. I’m giving you a present,” this character, sandy-faced, an enthusiast, replied. “You couldn’t buy this for less than, what, a thousand dollars?”
“How much you gonna pay us to take him off your hands?” Jake asked, who had seen the satchel move as the guy set it down.
“My bad luck is your good luck. It’s outgrown my house. I would have had to give it a room of its own.” The guy raised his eyebrows to indicate how sincere he was.
Jake glanced toward the motordrome. Vickie was stationed in her bathing suit on a stool on the bally platform, as he had asked, so that people idling by would notice the place for later reference in their mind’s eye. Abe’s bevy of strippers were re-coating themselves with sunscreen, and showing Elizabeth Alice how. It wasn’t uncommon for a boa fancier to try to unload his snake on a carnival passing through, but Abe had told Jake that only Sheba had previous experience of carny life. The other two had been hired out of Boston’s Combat Zone.
“Sheba,” Jake called, after checking with Abe. “Gentleman has a gift.”
She strolled over, handsome and tall, sashaying even though it was not yet quite her working hours, with her Cleopatra-sheeny hair, and her legs promptly assuming a stocking-ad posture, but marred overall by a certain horsey contour to her nose, which she had never found a sugar daddy who was willing to pay to fix. She held out her ring finger kiddingly, while her savvy eyes registered the slowly churning sack.
“A freebie? How heavy is he?” she asked, in that high, phone-sex voice. “You’re stuck with him, hey? Can’t sell him to save your blessed life? My limit’s fifty pounds.”
“Fifty’s the same as seventy-five,” suggested Jake, who hadn’t realized she had experience of this kind. Abe, her boss, by his silence suggested agreement, but Sheba was a flamboyant woman. Nobody could give her orders. They both rolled their hands, signifying to her, don’t worry about it, but the towner mistook this for a go-ahead and unzipped the golf bag. He lifted out a Burmese python twice as long as he was.
Sheba turned out to actually like snakes, and stepped closer. She didn’t touch it, but didn’t jerk back when it protruded and flicked its forked tongue to scent her. Jake called to Angel, who always hung around the girl tent if Jake’s presence created a pretext.
“Go down to the farmer barns and get me a chicken. Alive.” He waved aside Angel’s question about how to accomplish this.
“Who would replace me?” Sheba asked. She and the snake were looking at each other. It was so big, as well as so habituated to captivity, that neither fear nor an attempt to escape were its primary reactions. It was a creamy color mottled with reddish brown, and Sheba—making a snake of her black thick whip of hair, holding this across her chest, then flipping it over one shapely shoulder to hang straight down her glorious back—felt no inclination to put more daylight between herself and the snake. The man who had raised it hefted the forward end, while the python kept its tail snugly anchored around his midriff.
Could Vickie, Jake wondered? Not fill in for Sheba with the dirty stuff, but could Vickie handle the python to bally his own show, perhaps? People might think he or she was going to ride with it, and come on in. He wasn’t afraid of snakes—he knew them as he knew lions, as a drawing card, and had been acquainted with half a dozen midway snake charmers—but stability was the one thing even the tamest of them required. If thrown around, they automated their tightening mechanism. That was why this individual was receptive to Sheba’s stare and her tentatively outreaching hands: because it sensed a confident reliability there.
“Tell you what we’re gonna do,” Jake suggested, when Angel returned with a chicken that he had borrowed. The sudden flapping and the manure smell had aroused the reptile to center its gaze and prick its tongue, which flickered out like a flame. Jake recognized Sheba’s intensity or empathy, too, and Abe smiled at him, because they didn’t tell you everything, did they, these kootch girls? And she might be the true type, who would tell a crowd of men that she preferred its hugs to theirs, which was good box office, and weep at the end of the season, when the snake caught pneumonia from the cold and contracted a killing fungus in its mouth.
“Tell you what we’re going to do,” Jake repeated. “Lay him on the ground, and if he eats the bird we’ll take him and only charge you for the wood for a cage.”
Everybody watched in mild surprise, as the snake looped into a jumbo coil in the grass, although some of them already knew there was no point in accepting a snake that was going to starve itself to death: which could be the case. Angel gazed toward Vickie, who was sometimes his protector in strange situations, but who was oblivious, and Jake told him to go fetch Smoky, who might have some advice. Elizabeth Alice was drifting toward her mother, but slowly, because she was fascinated.
“It’s a girl, don’t you think?” Abe remarked to Jake and Sheba, who, unlike Carmen and Samantha, had not crossed her arms self-protectively or stood up on tiptoe as if about to scoot. Her legs were out of range of a strike, but she leaned forward sympathetically. Her brother had kept king snakes, she told them. She tried a kind of Statue of Liberty pose, as if the python’s head would be her torch.
In his unhurried manner, Smoky arrived. He had booked several such attractions over the years and they did draw, for a grind, he agreed. You taped a spiel, and some bozo sold the tickets. But he glowered at Angel, with the bandaged lip.
Arms akimbo, provocatively statuesque, Sheba disclosed that at an Atlanta nightclub she had once presented a Venezuelan red-tailed boa constrictor, and had liked him better than the hairy rednecks who reached for her here. Sally being her real name, she wanted to call the snake that. They had given it a generous circle of space in the warm sun, and, when Jake swung the chicken in the air until it beat its wings, then tossed it out, the spear-shaped head reared abruptly a couple of feet and grabbed it in midair—gripped and clenched it to limpness within the moiling coils in about four seconds—and began to sniff and slather it with saliva, and stretch and lengthen it with strategic squeezes in deliberate preparation for swallowing the bird. The people watching dispersed a bit, not in tact so much as in awe of these specifics of swallowing the meal, imagining a larger one. The novices gasped.
“She’s a hot one, huh?” Abe told Smoky, who surveyed every problem that arose, or any event, with the same level, skeptical equanimity. Exhibitionists were his wage-earners, but he booked shows, he didn’t own them, and so he could afford to be dispassionate.
“Where’s that going to sleep?” Vickie asked, in Jake’s ear. He was remembering a mark who had tried to give him a lion that the guy had bought as a cub for a hundred dollars, but couldn’t keep in his garage any more. He hadn’t had it in the car with him, but described the mane, and Jake suggested he give it a chance—just let it go in the woods.
“It’s better than a lion,” he told Vickie. “And it could sleep in the generator wagon, where it’s warm.”
Smoky, when consulted about this, nodded neutrally, though they were all going to separate fairly soon: the iron and paraphernalia of his amusement rides, from Abe’s Girl-o-rama, and Jake’s Motordrome.
“I want her tonight,” Sheba insisted, staring persuasively for support at the other dancers, who were exotics too. When they didn’t speak in opposition, Abe grinned. “But I always wear a bra, with a snake,” she informed him.
“So would I,” he agreed, and assisted Jake and her to convince the python that the golf bag was a familiar lair to be zipped back into to digest its meal.
“I love nature,” she said.
“Porn is nature,” suggested Abe.
“Not so much as the jungle.”
“Porn is the jungle.”
Since they seemed on the verge of arguing, Jake snuggled an arm around Vickie who at least hadn’t evinced an active phobia about snakes, and walked away. She’d gradually admitted that she was never going to be able to ride with him, even as a passenger, on the Wall, so he felt in a stronger position.
“We need money, and snakes suck it in. And snakes are deaf. They don’t go into a stink from the roar.”
“I tried the wrestling,” she pointed out. “And I’m worried about Elizabeth Alice’s ears.”
So, when he had a spare minute, he fixed the child a temporary pair of plugs from candle wax. But she wouldn’t wear them unless her mother did also. And Vickie wanted Jake to, but it was hopeless coaxing him because he thought it was bad luck for a drome rider: plus might prevent him from hearing engine subtleties that he ought to know about, or where Cliff was. He’d lost considerable acuity, but would rather get clipped by a car on foot somewhere because he didn’t hear it coming up behind him than miss a motor click or a tire sound that earplugs would block out, but might have saved him on the Wall. Your act was your life.
The plugs had the unexpected effect of causing Elizabeth Alice to take a nap, whereupon her mother snuck over and spelled Alida in a match again, “for motel money,” as she muttered to Jake. “And she must be sleep-deprived. Why don’t you teach Cliff to ride better, instead of trying snakes?”
Again, he was touched rather than angry at her, but answered that the wrestlers were slummers and would beat up on her. He went over during an interlude to talk with Alida’s husband, however, and gathered the impression that it was a serious if half-assed venture. Supposedly they were tired of working for this guy’s buzz-saw of a father, and a school had been started in West Virginia to exploit the fad and coach women in how to mix it up better in mud, which they wanted to go down to attend.
Angel drove Vickie and Elizabeth Alice to their night’s sleep early, while Cliff and Charlene helped Jake milk the crowd for whatever he could. He baited several biker-clubbers in the crowd by sticking his boot out, going round at the safety stripe on top, as if to clip them if they leaned over, and got them howling mad. His right wrist held the reins of death, and his left the reins of life for himself, and thus he constantly twitched these two, as he swerved in breakneck vertical cloverleaf patterns on the rumbling wood.
In the meantime, over on the girl show, whenever a tip collected, Abe would bring out Sheba in a negligee and shorty nightie, with tan-toner lending a gloss to her yummy skin, and the ravishingly docile, Oriental, ruddy-and-heavy-cream-colored python slowly exploring every crack and cranny of her body with its flicking tongue. Jake was hoarse and coughing in exhaustion on his bally platform, but Abe was introducing “Tarzan’s Jane.” He’d shake his head. “Oh boy, Guys, I truly hate to tell you this, but there’s no accounting for taste. She prefers him to you! And so did Eve. We tell it like it is on the inside. We go ballistic at every show. That’s why I have to send my girls back to Boston next week to recuperate.”
Sheba was wearing stilettos, and Abe squatted to stroke her leg and put one ticket under her heel, stroking the languid python’s twitching tail, as well.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do before we move right on and take it all off on the inside. The first admission is free to the man who’s brave enough to come up close and ask the lady nicely to please lift her shoe.”
As was usual, a bald-headed gent with gums for teeth, who already knew the drill, volunteered.
“He’s saving his three dollars to spend on the inside!” Abe crowed. And Sheba, who liked the toothless part for the cunnilingus, said, “You be right up front now, Sweetheart.” She also waved a sweet and silly drunk on through.
“We’re not going to hurt him, Ma’am,” Abe explained to his wife. “We’re only borrowing him, and we’ll return him to you a better man.”
Jake’s place benefited from Abe’s charged-up patrons, when they left. He roared the chrome-slutty Harley on its rollers, while Cliff donned a silver helmet, as if they were about to hit the Wall—Cliff was gifted with an imposing frame, at least—and Charlene, perhaps goosed on by Vickie’s absence, began to taunt the crowd from her ticket booth, in her spiky, punky haircut and back-street Baltimore accent, about whether she was lookin’ at he-men or wimps, in a way that piqued but didn’t offend them. “Show me some oomph!” she jeered.
Jake and Cliff completed bolder figure-eights than ordinarily, and afterwards—knowing that she loved the gaunt old tawny dog, and because he saw her watching Sheba flaunt the snake over on the other bally—Jake asked Charlene if she would be afraid to do the same.
“I’m not that good of a stripper.” Charlene laughed. “But you mean, would I agree to wear him, if you promised to unwind him when he got too tight? Yes; but I can’t bear to watch what he did to that chicken.”
“No, we’d feed him roadkills. When you see a rabbit or when you see a possum, you stop. Nothing bloated. And no turtles or armadillos.”
He remembered Vickie asking him, the evening when they first had realized they were going to have to sleep in the car, why he wasn’t a stunt man in Hollywood. Smart question: Why be a road warrior? He had even been offered (though, like his heart attacks, he hadn’t mentioned this to her) a steady income shilling for one of those cheapie Asian motorcycle manufacturers, with a new drome thrown in and a tractor trailer to haul it with, if he would tout their sleazy machines as part of his act, instead of the ancient Indian Scouts.
“You’ve already got a bald spot, and Evel Knievel can do anything you can do better than you,” Vickie had told him. Yet she hadn’t threatened to cart Elizabeth Alice back to Philly and let him look for a seventh wife. Wh
en she quietly cried, he had apologized that things were hard; and today he recognized that the headlocks and hip throws had shaken her more than she wished to admit, although she remained friendly with Alida, because she had quit snapping at Elizabeth Alice for mimicking Carmen or Sheba’s moves. Never having married before, and having lost track of Elizabeth Alice’s sperm-dad soon after the little girl’s birth halfway through her last year in high school, Vickie harbored modest expectations of him so long as Jake behaved better than her own dad. She watched him look at the Wall not as an occasion for dashing glamour, such as had originally attracted her, or even a cash cow, but as a craftsman’s hurdle, with a certain astonishment.
But Jake listened enviously to Abe’s patter, as Sheba virtually clothed herself with the opulently tapestried, and undulantly checkered python, which fit its form to hers in order to absorb her body’s heat, and inserted its tapered head into interesting locations in order to sample her smells: “Is that ecstasy, Gentlemen? You can kiss her satin shoes and get a red rosebud kiss on your cheek, drawn with her very own lipstick, if you break the ice and push right down in front. She won’t bite you unless you want her to. This is her boudoir. The closest gets the mostest. You’ll see on the inside what that snake does for her when they’re alone!”
The Devil's Tub Page 4
