He peered at me over the top of his glasses, not saying anything for a long moment. “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked, finally.
Principals and teachers always asked that question whenever a kid got in trouble, leading us to believe if we supplied a reasonable explanation we might go free. It never worked. It was simply the cat toying with the mouse before devouring it.
I hung my head. “I don’t deserve to pass,” I told him. “You should hold me back a year.”
Instead, I got three whacks, hard, with the paddle, and had to tell Mr. Leavitt what I’d done and pay for the duct tape to patch the vinyl roof. Plus, I was made to stay after school for a month and clean all the chalkboards, which caused my lungs to fill with chalk dust and for the next several weeks, whenever I coughed, I expelled a fine, white powder. I bore that hardship with good cheer, Miss Huddleston being worth the suffering.
I would sit in class, writing her name next to my mine, then drawing a heart around us. It took some sleuthing to learn her first name. In those days, all my teachers had one of three first names—Miss, Mrs., or Mr. But I overheard another teacher call her Rebecca, and armed with this delicious little intimacy, I imagined we were married and wrote her name in long rows up and down my notebook paper.
Mrs. Rebecca Gulley
Mrs. Rebecca Gulley
Mrs. Rebecca Gulley
Mrs. Rebecca Gulley
Mrs. Rebecca Gulley
Mrs. Rebecca Gulley
But mine was a love that dared not speak its name, students and teachers being natural enemies, adversaries since time immemorial. To cross this boundary was a serious breach of protocol, a violation of God’s plan, but Miss Huddleston was so enchanting I could not help myself.
My inappropriate longings would have remained a secret, had Tim Hadley not seen my doodles. He cornered me on the playground one Friday afternoon.
“You’re in love with Miss Huddleston, aren’t you?” he asked.
I hesitated, a dead giveaway.
He punched me on the shoulder. “You goober. You’re not supposed to love a teacher. That’s sick.”
“I can’t help myself,” I said, my sense of shame rising.
“You just need a little education, that’s all,” Tim said. “Sit behind me tonight at the movie,” he said. “Don’t say anything. Just watch.”
I met him that night at the Royal Theater, and after buying my popcorn took a seat behind Tim and his current flame, a girl named Leah. The movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, was about a gorilla inciting a civil war among the apes. It was in the romance/monkey documentary/war genre. “Guaranteed,” Tim told me, “to drive a girl into the arms of the nearest available man.”
I paid little attention to the movie, instead studying Tim’s technique, which was so casual as to appear almost indifferent. He chomped happily on his popcorn, pausing every now and then to comment on an ape and take a slurp of soda, scarcely paying any attention to Leah. This was entirely consistent with the prevailing theory of conquest—that appearing uninterested in a girl was the quickest way to secure her affection.
I imagined Miss Huddleston was seated beside me, us smooching with our popcorn-buttered lips, snuggling closer when the gorilla General Aldo, brilliantly portrayed by Claude Akins, tried to incite a simian civil war. In my fantasy I pulled Miss Huddleston to me, calming her, patting her flab-free upper arm until she was soothed.
Tim walked Leah home after the movie. I followed behind at a discreet distance, imagining Miss Huddleston’s thin, delicate fingers interlaced with mine. By now, we were on a firstname basis and I was calling her Becky. Matters didn’t seem to be going as well for Tim; his prospects for romance were fading. When they arrived at Leah’s house, she mumbled a quick good-bye and ducked inside, without even a handshake.
“There’s your first lesson,” Tim said. “Don’t ever take a girl to a monkey movie.”
While that night was a bust girl-wise, it began our fascination with simians, which culminated in my spending every Friday night at Tim’s home, watching Planet of the Apes on television and eating Pringles potato chips, falling asleep in the blue glow of late-night television, waking up in the morning to Pringle crumbs scattered on the floor around us, our teeth sticky-brown with Coke.
Tim lived on a farm south of town. When school ended on Friday and I’d delivered my papers, I’d ride my bike to his house, carrying my toothbrush and a change of clothing in my bug backpack. It was a perilous journey, past Joe Johnson’s farmhouse and his pack of attack dogs. Johnson’s house was halfway up a long hill. By the time I pulled even with their driveway and entered the dogs’ killing zone, I was worn out. The dogs were waiting, their fur matted with blood from disemboweling the last child to ride past. They would swarm over me, pull me off the bike, and shred my various appendages until Joe Johnson would stick his head out the front door and call them off. I would push my bicycle the rest of the way up the hill, then coast down the opposite side all the way to Tim’s house, leaving a blood trail, like a wounded animal.
Nowadays, a dog attack would make the front page of the newspaper, the owner would be arrested, and the dog euthanized. But back then dog attacks were routine occurrences, part and parcel of the childhood experience. Dogs roamed freely about, copulating at will, terrorizing small children, and strewing garbage up and down the streets. When I showed my father my wounds, how my right arm was connected by the merest sliver of flesh, he said, “Yep, that’s a dog bite all right,” then went back to reading the Great Hoosier Daily.
All in all, my sixth grade year was a perilous time, what with plagues and dogs threatening me at every turn. I probably wouldn’t have survived, but I didn’t want to die without first kissing a girl, so I persisted, against the odds, my fantasies of Miss Huddleston a warm comfort against the chill of celibacy.
Chapter 9
Carnival
To be a child in those years was to live for the summers, freed from the manacles of education and its attendant miseries. Summers were a bacchanalian feast, one day after another of unrestrained liberty—camping overnight in Doc Gibb’s apple orchard, riding our bikes on the back roads to the next town, floating down White Lick Creek on inner tubes.
Our town’s descent into decadence reached its zenith the first week of July, when the Poor Jack Carnival landed in our town. On Wednesday evening, Merle Funk, the chief of police, would rope off the square to traffic. Later that night, well after dark, a convoy of trucks and trailers would roll in from the east on U.S. 36. Peanut and I would sit on our bicycles in front of the Dairy Queen, listening for the strain of their engines as they climbed the hill in front of the Laundromat.
They would lurch into view near the junior high school—a string of trucks covered in dust and grime from exotic locales. Dirt with a story behind it. The drivers, we knew for a fact, were escaped criminals, convicts on the lam, hiding out in the carnival. The week before the carnival came, Merle Funk wrote a letter to the local newspaper advising caution while the carnies were in town. “Chief of Police Anticipates Crime Wave,” the headline in the Republican read. We locked our doors and hid our valuables. The Minkners, Catholic to the core, would move their Blessed Virgin Mary from the flowerbed in their front yard to their garage, cover Christ’s mother with a tarp, and pile lawn furniture on top of her.
“The carnies will steal you blind,” Mr. Minkner told me. “Steal the shingles from your roof, if they weren’t nailed down.”
Smiley and Emmalyne Dinsmore owned Dinsmore’s, the basket shop on the town square, and would display wicker furniture and baskets on the sidewalk during the summer. When the carnival came to town, their son Earl stood guard over the merchandise. Earl was a huge block of a man and would have looked menacing, except that he smiled constantly, his big white teeth shining like a flashlight.
Dinsmore’s had once been a grocery store, but when Kroger hit town, they switched to baskets. In the rear of the store were remnants of their grocery days—du
sty canned goods, petrified chunks of meat, and a staggering number of hairnets. Hundreds of hairnets, as if a hairnet convention had come to town and Smiley had over-anticipated the demand. Emmalyne would wear them, hoping to launch a fad and clear their shelves, but the trend never took hold, not even among the carnies, whose hair fell into the cotton candy machine and was twirled up into a pink Pentecostal hairdo, served on a stick, then washed down with a lemon shake-up.
While Peanut and I were waiting at the Dairy Queen, watching for the carnival trucks to roll into town, he would regale me with stories of carnivals past, the near misses and tragedies of carnie life. “There was this one guy I heard about who worked for a carnival, and he got his hair caught in one of the rides, and it ripped his scalp clean off. I saw a picture of him in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. They did a skin transplant on him, but they took the skin from his butt and when his hair grew back out, it was all fuzzy.”
This jibed with the prevailing theory of carnie workers, who seemed, among all the professionals I encountered, to be uniquely visited by the weirdest, worst luck. I was captivated by the carnies, but terrified of them at the same time, and half expected them to reach across the counter, grab me by the throat, and kill me. I was especially intrigued by their indifference and studied boredom, scooping up quarters and dropping them into their aprons, carelessly sliding the .22 rifle across the counter so I could knock down three ducks and win a bullwhip. Two ducks down, but never the third. I always had to settle for a plastic troll with long wild hair, in sore need of a hairnet.
By the end of carnival week, Peanut and I had collected dozens of trolls, which we pretended were carnies, their hair caught in our bicycle chains, their squat fat bodies pulverized by the sprockets. “First thing I’d do if I were a carnie,” Peanut said, “is shave my head.”
When I was twelve I toyed with the notion of becoming a carnie, of drifting from town to town, never bathing, letting my hair grow long, getting a tattoo, and learning to blow smoke rings. Writing home every now and then to ease my parents’ minds, who were opposed to my being in the carnival, but would change their tune once I married the Wild Girl of Borneo and gave them carnie grandchildren to fuss over.
With an eye toward making the carnival our careers, Peanut and I persuaded the carnies to let us test the rides. No pay, but all the hairy cotton candy we could eat. The carnies would assemble the rides through the night—the Tilt-A-Whirl, Ferris wheel, Scrambler, and my personal favorite, the Rocket Ship. Peanut and I would show up first thing in the morning, when they needed test dummies.
“I don’t know about this,” Peanut said. “One time, over in Amo, they put this big, fat kid in the Rocket Ship, the bolts snapped, and down he went. Corkscrewed into the asphalt going two hundred. Had to scrape him off the pavement. Wasn’t enough left to put in a casket.”
Our probable deaths only added to the thrill.
The entire town square was closed for the carnival, and the business owners hated it. The smart ones closed down and went on vacation for a week, leaving Merle Funk to guard their stores. The others bellyached, wrote letters to the editor, had heart attacks, and died early from the stress.
The Scrambler was set up outside Otis Marlow’s law office. His desk sat near the front window. The cars on the Scrambler would hurtle toward him like a buzz bomb, veering away at the last second. He spent the week flinching, took up drink, and died from a pickled liver twenty years later. Killed by the carnival, just like the fat boy from Amo, but with less of a splat.
The churches were not of one mind regarding the carnival. The Catholics were generally supportive, tolerating debauchery so long as those committing it didn’t use birth control, but the Baptists and Pentecostals were sorely opposed to the carnival. Their pastors began preaching against it the month before it steamed into port, their ire building each week. Verses from the books of Leviticus and Revelation were cited—warnings against making merry when the return of the Lord was at hand. The Quakers were silent on the matter, but suspected carnival attendance bordered on sin and were embarrassed when they saw one another there, justifying their presence by praying for those attending, that they would come to the Lord while there was time. Like most young people, I considered myself invincible and planned on coming to the Lord later, when I was old and dried up and had had my fun.
The churches were united on the you-never-know policy, that life was uncertain. If the fat boy in Amo had come along five minutes later, some other kid would have landed on the asphalt. If Otis Marlow had rented a law office a week earlier, he could have gotten the one next to the Baker Hardware store, where they set up the Ferris wheel, which would have been considerably better for his nerves, and he wouldn’t have taken up drink and wrecked his life. He would have joined the Jaycees, won the John Jenner Outstanding Citizen Award, and retired to Florida. Instead, he ended up at the Buckhorn Bar, deep in the cups. Timing is everything.
If my timing had been better, I might have hit that third duck and won a bullwhip, instead of a troll. But Donny Shaw, a fourteen-year-old with a rap sheet running six pages, saw me carrying a troll, called me a pansy, and beat me up, which shot my reputation. There are people who still talk about it behind my back and snicker when they see me. Donny Shaw joined the carnival and left town, which surprised no one. Some people are born to the carnie life; others have it thrust upon them. Donny was born for it. He came out of his mother’s womb tattooed and smoking a Marlboro. When he moved away, the town laid off three policeman.
Peanut and I didn’t let trifling matters such as theft, assault, and death by Rocket Ship dampen our enthusiasm. July was our high-water mark, carnival wise. The Poor Jack Carnival on the town square was followed by the 4-H carnival, set up in the vacant field next to the county jail, which made it convenient for the carnies who’d been arrested. In the pokey one minute, bailed out and running the Scrambler the next.
The 4-H carnival was a rat-trap outfit, the rides rusted and jerry-rigged, bandaged with duct tape at critical joints. No parents with half a brain allowed their children anywhere near the place.
“It’s a death wish,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t let my dog on those rides.”*
Each summer, the 4-H carnival sported a different name to fend off creditors, new logos painted on top of old ones, but always the same operators—black-toothed, cigarette-skinny men at the end of the carnival road. They were not the kind of people to whom one could comfortably entrust their child’s safety. My mother could sense danger in the next state over—she had a nose for it—and detested the carnival to no end.
“Any mother who would let her children on those rides must not love them,” she told me.
But by the last night of the carnival, I had worn her down with my incessant pleading.
“Go ahead,” my mother would yell, after I’d asked her for the umpteenth time, “but if you end up crippled for life, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you! was my mother’s mantra, her parental aria, sung at every occasion that could even remotely end in my death or dismemberment, including running with scissors, riding a bicycle, or playing Little League baseball. Like Peanut, she knew of hundreds of children who’d been spectacularly maimed while pursuing the activities I wished to undertake. She was not only death on carnivals, repeating Peanut’s Amo fat-boy narrative, she added to it with gruesome tales of severed limbs, crushed heads, and boys, just like me, accidentally castrated by flying machine parts. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
My mother descended into a catatonic state the week before the 4-H fair, certain it would be my last week on earth, that if the carnival rides didn’t do me in, the livestock would—a rampaging bull, a mule kick to the head, a crazed chicken pecking my eyes out. Blindness by chicken had happened to the neighbor of a friend’s cousin, or so my mother claimed. The child had entered the poultry tent and was mugged by a Rhode Island Red, out of its chicken mind on growth steroids. The child was pecked blind before adults co
uld pull the chicken off. The prospect of witnessing such carnage only increased my determination to attend the county fair.
In terms of pure excitement, the Exhibition Hall ran a close second to the carnival rides. Four long rows of local businesses and organizations passing out free merchandise—refrigerator magnets, helium balloons, cups of water (which we peed out later behind the horse barn), ball-point pens, pencils, paper fans from Baker’s Funeral Home (Providing for You and Yours Since 1923!), plastic badges from the sheriff’s department, and my personal favorite—signing up to receive a home visit from the minister of the Church of Christ. Peanut and I filled out Church of Christ cards by the hour, stuffing their box with our entries, each one bearing the name of someone we didn’t like.
The Church of Christ folk were persistent. They met resistance with girded loins, interpreting opposition as Satan’s handiwork, fueling their efforts to evangelize the reluctant. “No, thank you” and “I’m not interested” only stirred them to action. They loved the carnival for its evangelical possibilities, lying in wait for the swarms of sinners it attracted. The Church of Christers were thick about the place, men in white shirts and black pants passing out tracts that described in colorful detail the ultimate destination of the spiritually suspect. I loved reading their literature, which contained vivid illustrations of Catholics and other heretics roasting in the flames. Ecumenism fell low on their list of priorities.
I’m not sure what would have distressed my mother more—my running off with the carnival or joining the Church of Christ. A staunch Catholic, she was generally alarmed by Protestantism. Years later, when I told her I wanted to be a Quaker pastor, she tried talking me out of it, urging me toward the law. It is startling now to realize my mother considered a career as a lawyer to be more virtuous than ministry.
I Love You, Miss Huddleston Page 6
