by Gary Paulsen
“Close your mouth,” she said without looking at him. “You'll step on your friggin' tongue.”
He slammed his mouth shut and watched her walk away on her shower clogs, her hips rolling easily; and the man behind the food counter laughed.
“That's Ruby,” he said. “She goes with Taylor.”
“Oh.” He watched her walk past the Tilt-A-Whirl where Taylor was working and turn off to the right where he could see some small aluminum camper trailers parked. Watched her walk the whole way. Watched her hips and legs and the short-shorts the entire way. “Oh…”
NINE
THE BOY LEARNED TO USE THE TILT-A-WHIRL'S clutch to whip the cars around, which emptied change from the pockets of the farmers. The best day he had he stripped almost eleven dollars. Taylor was fair and let him keep half of what he stripped and he paid the boy every Friday so the boy always had money to spend on endless hamburgers and Cokes. Never money to save. Never money to own as he'd owned it before the deputy took it away from him. But plenty to spend on his new life. His carny life.
The boy had become a carbon copy of Taylor. He wore his dirty Levi's low, with no underwear, and with a white T-shirt tucked in and sleeves rolled up to hold a package of Camels without filters, which he could flick-light with a Zippo lighter, and his hair slicked back with Brylcreem to make an almost-controlled ducktail. And he had the look. The hard carny look that said everyone was a sucker or a farmer or both, said everybody was merely something to scorn. Even though the boy did not truly believe it he still had the look.
He had learned much in a short time. How to watch women so he seemed to know something about them, though he didn't. How to talk of them in an appraising way though he was not more knowledgeable than Bobby, who knew nothing and spoke so well he seemed an expert. The boy had learned so much and become so confident that he had become almost completely ignorant and had ceased to know new things and he might have gone on learning more and more and becoming more and more ignorant forever.
Except for Ruby.
He'd been with the carnival a month before he saw her naked.
They had moved three times, a different town in North Dakota, every weekend, and when they moved Taylor and Bobby worked the boy nearly to death. They had to break down the ride, Bobby's geek tent and setup, which doubled later as Ruby's kootch tent and dance platform. All this was loaded on the flatbed truck—and done at virtually a dead run because there was never enough time between shows—and they would drive like hell to get to the new town. Grafton, Hamilton, Minot—a blur of farmers in new overalls and white shirts and women in crisp new cotton dresses.
Taylor and Ruby always rode together in a pickup pulling the camper trailer and Bobby and the boy rode in the flatbed. Since Bobby spent all his time talking and drinking Four Roses from the endless supply beneath the seat the boy only rested now and then and the upshot of all this frantic work and travel was that he never really got to watch Ruby.
She didn't help with work but would stay in her litde trailer until they were packed and ready to leave. Then she would get in Taylor's truck cab. When they were set up and working the boy would look over at her on the stand in front of her tent before she drew the farmers inside, trying to get a glimpse. But she was always dressed in the short-shorts and T-shirt—although when parading on the platform she replaced her shower clogs with high-heeled pumps.
“The shoes get her buns up nice, don't they?” Bobby once said to the boy, who thought it was wrong to speak of her that way because he loved her.
Then there came a night when she had trouble getting a crowd. It was in a town in South Dakota and they had been there four nights. Usually when Ruby started parading and Bobby barked for her—he cranked up what he called “the hootchy-kootchy rhythms“—men and especially boys would stop whatever they had been doing and gather to watch. But this was the fourth night and everybody who was going to watch her already had. Only two men—both old—had stopped.
Taylor and the boy were by the Tilt-A-Whirl and he pushed at the boy's shoulder.
“Get your butt over there and shill for her,” he said. “We ain't made beans in this town.”
He often shilled for Bobby on the geek setup but he didn't think Taylor wanted him to see Ruby,
“You mean just outside?” he asked, holding his breath. “Or on the inside too?”
“Whatever it takes to get the sons of bitches to spend money—move.”
So the boy went to the front of Ruby's stage and looked up at her arid Ruby looked down at hint and Bobby started the scratchy phonograph with the whiny belly-dance music.
Later, when he was a man, and old, it was hard for him to look back and remember how pretty or not pretty Ruby really was. By then there had been others, and a life, in between. But he knew on that night, that first night, on that night it was not possible for Ruby to be anything but beautiful.
The music whined and scratched and Bobby pitched:
“She comes from the Orient where she was the queen of a sultan's harem—she knows all the secrets of love.…”
And the boy went out into the carnival grounds and found men in small groups and led them back the way he did when he shilled for the geek show, though he did not want to leave, even for a moment. Because he believed Bobby.
The boy watched her move back and forth on the stage, her pumps clicking in time to the music, her tight short-shorts barely containing the ripple of her, her breasts straining against the thin T-shirt as he had read about breasts straining in every Mickey Spillane book, read and reread until phrases like that were memorized from the worn pages handed from boy to boy, back when he had a home.
She was, simply, everything.
Not just everything about sex or love or lust or carnal knowledge or throbbing or straining or penetrating or moistness or any of the other intense, unbelievably focused thoughts that dominated his life.
She was everything.
Then, on that soft summer night while the boy stood and looked up at her moving to the scratchy kootch phonograph music coming from the crude PA she was just everything.
There was not another thing then in the boy's life. Not one. All thoughts, all hopes and desires and dreams and prayers, were for Ruby; life was for Ruby, death for Ruby, his heart, his soul, for Ruby.
And she smiled at him.
Not just a carny smile—or he did not see it as such—not a smile over him or around him or through him but she looked into his eyes and smiled.
“You're going to rip your pants, kid,” she said, and he looked down to where she pointed and was mortified to see the bulge.
“I'm s-s-sorry,” he stammered, but she ground and bumped her hips and laughed softly.
“It's no big thing—and I do mean it.”
No more men had arrived by this time, and since it was apparent that nobody else was going to stop, Ruby shrugged her shoulders and breasts and turned off the platform and wriggled back through the canvas curtain to begin the process of fleecing the men of their money.
The procedure was lengthy and complicated. The boy had never seen it bn% had heard Bobby talking about it with other carnies, bragging about Ruby because he said she was the best he'd ever seen.
“She hooks them like trout,” Bobby said. “Shows a little of this and a little of that and the poor bastards are broke before they know it—she pu-u-ulls the money out of them.”
It was a matter of finesse.
Men had already paid Bobby to go into the tent itself—a dollar each. With the promise, the hot promise, the hot-night-carnival promise they would see more, would see all. The boy had followed them in.
And inside the tent the world changed. Once in, once that far into Ruby's world, they were gone.
Bobby played the scratchy music and Ruby took things off but slowly, so slowly, pulling the T-shirt up an inch at a time, one … inch… at… a … time … until suddenly there they were.
Her breasts.
But not really. Not really and truly becau
se she wore a gauze kind of bra beneath the blouse and you couldn't quite see anything. It was like looking through smoke, though by this time it didn't matter to the boy.
But if they wanted more, if they wanted to see the breasts, there was only one way to do it.
More money.
Bobby circulated with an old felt hat.
“Come on—the girl's got to live. Another half a rock to see 'em.”
And he would plead and cajole, his voice a song, a siren. A fifty-cent piece here, a quarter there, bits of money to see bits of Ruby until finally, almost finally, she stood naked.
Except…
Except for a G-string, a small piece of cloth over her pubic area.
Which, of course, the boy thought of as “it“ “It“ was right there and he wanted to see all of her but he felt wrong staring and would look away and back, down and back at “it,” and back…
Right… there.
Under the litde cloth.
There “it“ was…
For more money.
They could see “it“ for just another dollar each. Everybody paid.
Of course the boy didn't have to pay except that by this time he was so caught up in what Ruby was doing that he actually reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a dollar and handed it to Bobby. Bobby looked at him like he was crazy but took the dollar and smiled and said, “Sure, kid— your money works.”
The boy had a quick thought, a flash of wonder at Bobby—how could he do this, work with her every day, see her naked every day, watch her and hear her and smell her? How could he do that and not go insane?
But it passed quickly.
Bobby started the needle on the scratchy record again. Ruby started moving and the boy was transported.
Bobby, the other men in the tent, the canvas walls, the pitifol music—everything was gone once more.
Only Ruby.
Only “it.”
She danced four or five litde steps, did some small gyrations and hooked a thumb in her G-string and pulled it down her leg.
An inch, another inch, until the hair showed, a corner of hair curly and damp-looking in the pale light from the single bulb hanging from the top of the tent.
Another inch, then a snap and the G-string was gone.
“It“ was there.
All of “it.”
The boy didn't know how long he went without breathing. Jialf a minute, a lifetime; perhaps he'd never breathe the same, quite the same again, forever.
“All right, boys, that's it.” Bobby's hoarse voice cut in. “The show's over.”
Grumbling, the old men snorted and swore and rubbed themselves but Bobby was strict and, when they left, he followed them out of the tent
The boy was transfixed. Frozen. Ruby stood there for a moment, totally nude, facing him—or rather, with her up on the small platform, “it“ faced him. She was totally unself-conscious, relaxed. She took a cigarette from a stool at the back of the stage, lit it, stared at the boy.
He realized he was staring at her, holding his breath, and he exhaled, inhaled, shook all over and forced himself to turn and leave.
“Wait a minute.”
Her voice was flat but lifted at the end-—not in question so much as speculation.
“How old are you, kid?”
He had turned away and he looked back. “Eighteen.” He lied easily but she snorted and blew smoke out of her nose.
“More likely sixteen, if that.”
She paused again, eyeing the boy slowly.
“Why do you want to know?”
She ignored the question, smiled. “Why don't you come by the trailer in about ten minutes?”
They were alone and so remote had she become, so unattainable, that the boy looked at her and said, “Why?”
“If I have to tell you, don't come.” She turned to leave the stage.
“But Taylor—“
She stopped again, looked at the boy. “We ain't talking about him. There's him and there's me and we're talking about me. You're worried about him, stay the hell away.”
There was nothing that could have kept him away—not a thing in the world.
He didn't wait the ten minutes but was at the trailer door when she came from the kootch tent, caught in the hot night, caught in lust, caught in a curiosity so intense, an anticipation so agonizing, so driven, he thought he would explode and die before she came to the trailer and took him iriside.
Her world, her life, were there in the small camper lit by a flyspecked bulb.
A makeup table at one end, a bed at the other.
He stared at the bed.
She never said a word. With one hand she guided him to the bed and with the other unzipped his pants and then she was on the bed and he was with her, oh her, in her, around her, trying to do and be all the things he had heard about in all the pool halls and all the bowling alleys and all the school hallways, in all the tall tales and lies told by all the boys who would be men.
It was all of time in the trailer, all of all the time there was.
“Once for you,” Ruby said, smiling and helping him rush, rush though never in such a hurry, never wanting something to start and never never end. “And once forme…”
It was the once for Ruby that lived, lives forever. The first to make him hurry and not believe and scream and, with corded neck, almost die— the first to end forever his boyhood and give him wonder the rest of life.
But the second to remember, to remember all the big and little things outside and inside.
A lamp in the shape of a palomino pony next to the narrow bed with the pink spread and glamour magazines (did any woman ever need them less?) scattered along a cjrude shelf on the wall and an old pair of drum majorette's boots with tassels in a corner and beer cans on windowsills with lipstick around the punched holes and a table with a round mirror stacked and covered with jars of cream and beauty oin“I'ments and oils and feminine mysteries and a clock set in the belly of a ceramic black panther with the hands stuck at 9:20 and clothing draped over books and chairs, clothing that rode next to her skin, her body, and cheap wood paneling on the walls and ceiling and the light from the carnival filtering through tired shades over slatted windows cranked up to let in all the noise, music, screaming, pulsing noise, of the midway while sinking into the wetness, the forever-warm wetness of Ruby.
Ruby.
EPILOGUE
THE RECRUITER SAT LIKE A SMUG PIMP.
“You're seventeen?”
The boy nodded.
“And these are your parents' or guardians' signatures stating they'll allow you to enlist in the United States Army?”
Another nod. This time the lie didn't show through the nod and the boy didn't think it would matter anyway. They'd taken a boy he knew who couldn't read and another he knew who was given the choice between the army and prison. How fussy could they be?
The recruiter studied him. He was a sergeant. Impossibly neat. Impossibly clean.
“What branch?”
“I don't know what you mean. I thought I was enlisting in the army.”
“Yes, but in the army there are the cavalry and the artillery and the signal corps and the infantry. Which one do you want?”
The boy shrugged. “I don't know.”
The tight smile, the pimp smile. “Can you shoot a rifle?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I'll put you down for the infantry. That's the best branch—all the promotions go for the infantry.”
“Fine.”
“You'll like the infantry.”
“Fine.”
“It'll do you a world of good.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Paulsen is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including threeNewbery Honor books: The Winter Room Hatchet änd Dogsong. His novel The Haymmdow received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award. Among his newest Delacorte Press books are Alida's Song (a companion to The Cookcamp)/Soldier's Heart, The Trans
all Saga, My Life in Dog Years, Sarny: A Life Remembered (a companion to Nightjohn), Brian's Return and Brian's Winter (companions to Hatchet), Father Water, Mother Woods: Essays on Fishing and Hunting in the North Woods and five books about Francis Tucket's adventures in the Old West. Gary Paulsen has also published fiction and nohfiction for adults, as well as picture books illustrated by his wife, the painter Ruth Wright Paulsen. Their most recent book is Canoe Days, The Paulsens live in New Mexico and on the Pacific Ocean.
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Copyright © 2000 by Gary Paulsen
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eISBN: 978-0-307-51402-8
RL:6.3
January 2002
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