Flamethrower

by Maggie Estep

  “Honey, watching and doing is two different things,” Glenda said.

  The ash on Glenda’s cigarette was at least an inch long. Ruby stared at it, wondering when Glenda would flick it.

  “Anyway,” Glenda said, “the only shift I could give you is weekday afternoons. Ain’t much action then, and you gotta work your fucking ass off getting people to play.”

  Ruby insisted this was fine. The fact was, it would be horrible. Ruby wasn’t particularly extroverted, and she disliked noise. The idea of spending her afternoons shouting at strangers, trying to get them to play the horse-racing game, wasn’t a pleasant one. But Ruby had to work. She’d called Bob again, and in a cold voice he’d confirmed to Ruby that she was fired. Ruby had a small paycheck coming, but that was it. No savings, and the rent was due in two weeks. What’s more, Ruby didn’t know if Ed was ever coming home or paying his half of the rent.

  Glenda’s ash finally fell. Slowly, some of it sticking to the front of her pink T-shirt. Ruby watched the woman rub the ash into the fabric of the T-shirt.

  “You ain’t gonna make shit. You know that, right?” Glenda asked. “Like fifty bucks a day will be a good day.”

  “I need something to hold me over,” Ruby shrugged.

  “What happened, anyway?”

  Ruby was surprised it had taken Glenda this long to ask. There was a solid divide between people who worked the games and rides and those who worked at the sideshow and museum. The two groups almost never mingled, and it was unprecedented for someone of Ruby’s position to come slumming in the proletariat like this. The only reason Glenda was giving Ruby a job was that Ruby had been coming to play her horse-racing game since she was twelve years old.

  Ruby tried to make light of Bob’s firing her, hinting that it stemmed from a personality clash as opposed to an accusation of thievery.

  “So what are you gonna do? Live out your days working at my game?” Glenda asked. She’d lit another cigarette and was squinting at a pack of young girls idling by the balloon game across the way.

  “I have no idea,” Ruby said honestly. She didn’t have the strength to go hunting for a “real” job. She needed money, and she needed it fast. Asking Glenda had seemed her only option.

  “Here,” Glenda suddenly shoved her microphone into Ruby’s hand, “get them girls to come over here and play.” Glenda motioned at the pack of girls across the way.

  Ruby froze at the idea of shouting into the microphone.

  “Come on,” Glenda urged.

  “Ladies,” Ruby said tentatively. None of the girls looked her way. “Horse-racing game, ladies, two dollars to play.” Ruby got louder: “Every game a winner, two dollars any prize on the table.” Ruby picked up one of the immense teddy bears and brandished it above her head the way she’d watched Glenda and others do for so many years.

  “You out of your mind?” Glenda hissed at Ruby. “You can’t give out no jumbo prize unless you got at least ten players.”

  “I can win that bear?” One of the girls had sauntered over.

  “Yes, you can,” Ruby said. “I’ll take it out of my own pocket,” she whispered to Glenda.

  Glenda shrugged and started collecting money from the girl and her three friends. Glenda flicked the switches, activating each of the berths, as Ruby showed the girls how to practice rolling the small plastic balls forward and into slots.

  “Get your ball in the red slot, moves your horse three jumps, blue is two, and green is one. Remember, one ball at a time or you’re gonna get ‘em jammed,” Ruby said, getting into the flow. She’d heard Glenda and others do this speech so many dozens of times, but she never realized she’d memorized the damn thing.

  “Hold on to the balls, ladies.” Glenda’s double entendre was lost on the girls. “At the sound of the bell, start rolling. Sound of the bell,” Glenda said, then depressed the bell and the game started. One of the girls, a tiny, dark-skinned girl in a bright green outfit, was hurling the balls so violently they were popping out of her berth, and Glenda went over to scold her. Meanwhile, the apparent leader of the pack, a big girl with bleached-blond cornrows, was hitting one after another red slot, making her mechanical horse valiantly lurch forward. She won by many lengths, and before Ruby could hand her the bear, the girl was tearing it from Ruby’s arms.

  “What do I owe you?” Ruby asked Glenda, digging into her pocket to find the small wad of cash she had there.

  “Ah, it’s all right, Ruby. Just don’t do it again. Minimum ten players before you give out the jumbo.”

  Ruby nodded then bummed a cigarette from Glenda. The two smoked in silence until another pack of kids walked by. Ruby watched Glenda entice them with promises of prizes and fun. They were teenagers with hard eyes that softened fractionally as they rolled the little balls into the slots.

  Ruby hung around for more than an hour, learning the ropes.

  “I know you ain’t gonna be doing this long. Just don’t leave me hanging when you decide to quit, y’hear?” Glenda said before Ruby left.

  Ruby vowed to give notice when the time came. Glenda patted Ruby on the back and sent her on her way. She slowly walked toward home. It was almost unbearably humid, and people were streaming toward the boardwalk carrying coolers, towels, and boom boxes. An attractive Puerto Rican couple walked by, the man adoringly stroking the woman’s head as they walked. Ruby felt her chest constrict.

  As she passed the sideshow, Ruby looked over to see if Bob was hanging around the way he sometimes did before the sideshow opened for business in the evening. He wasn’t. But Lucio, the fire-eater, was lying on top of the little platform out front, apparently napping.

  “Can’t say hello?” he called out as Ruby walked by.

  “Hey, Lucio, thought you were sleeping,” Ruby said.

  Lucio sat up and smiled his slow, enticing smile. He had medium brown skin, green eyes, and reddish hair that he kept cropped very short, presumably so he wouldn’t burn it off. Ruby liked watching him in the sideshow and had particularly relished the times when he’d filled in for the escape artist. She’d savored the sight of Lucio dangling by his ankles from the ceiling, working his way out of a straitjacket.

  “What’s up?” Lucio asked. He had inched to the edge of the wooden platform so he was very close to where Ruby was standing. She saw his eyes going to her forehead, but he didn’t ask about it.

  “Nothing,” Ruby shrugged. She wondered if Lucio knew about her being fired and accused of theft.

  “What are you doing now?” Lucio was looking at her like she was a Christmas ham.

  “Going home.” Ruby motioned toward Stillwell Avenue.

  “Want to have dinner?”

  Ruby admired the way he’d just come out with it.

  “I can’t,” Ruby said. She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t. It was an automatic response.

  “You married to that tall guy I seen you with?”

  “He’s my boyfriend,” Ruby said.

  “Lucky guy.”

  Ruby was at a complete loss over what to say or do next. She smiled weakly. “See you around,” she said as she walked away.

  “I hope so.”

  Ruby could feel his eyes boring into her back.

  As Ruby came within a few steps of her building, she felt eyes in her back again. She turned around suddenly and saw a man in a baseball cap a hundred yards behind her. For a moment they locked eyes; then the man turned and walked the other way. There was something horribly familiar about him, yet Ruby couldn’t place him. A chill passed through her even though it was 90 degrees outside.

  Ruby let herself into the building, looked back once more to make sure the man was gone, and walked upstairs. She’d never been so glad to see Ramirez’s door open. Even better, Ramirez himself was nowhere in sight, but Elsie was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea.

  “Oh my god, what happened to your head?” Elsie rose to her feet and waddled toward Ruby.

  “Hey,” Ruby said, gladly accepting Elsie’s hug. “Acci
dent.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “If you make me some tea, I’ll tell you,” Ruby said. Elsie was always trying to get Ruby to drink tea but rarely succeeded.

  “That bad?” She knew it had to be if Ruby was accepting the tea offer.

  “Yeah, I guess it is that bad.” Ruby sank down into one of the kitchen chairs.

  “Tell me.” Elsie put the kettle on and sat down across from Ruby, who started reciting the events of the last week.

  Elsie would now and then interject “Get out of here” or “No way.” When the kettle started whistling, Elsie got up. She motioned for Ruby to keep talking as she poured hot water into an old-fashioned teapot. Ruby brought Elsie up to the present and her new position as a worker at the horse-racing game. This seemed to upset Elsie more than anything else.

  “I don’t know why you don’t just ask Pietro for a job.”

  “We’re neighbors. No good. If he got mad at me, it would be awful. I’d feel hostility radiating through the walls.”

  “How’s he gonna get mad at you working in a fun-house, girl?”

  It had crossed Ruby’s mind to ask Ramirez for a job working at the Hell Hole, the spook house he’d owned and operated for the last five years. But Ramirez was a little volatile, prone to getting furious with his employees. The last thing Ruby wanted was animosity from her neighbor.

  “I’m fine working for Glenda.”

  Elsie made a face. Glenda wasn’t known for her sparkling personality.

  “And I’m gonna kill that fucking boyfriend of yours,” Elsie added.

  Normally, Ruby would have defended Ed’s honor, but this wasn’t normal. She said nothing. She finished her tea, refraining from commenting on exactly how bizarre it tasted.

  “I should go.” Ruby rose from her chair. “Gotta feed the cats. Thanks for listening.”

  Elsie looked at her with pity. “Oh, baby,” she said in that warm way that only nonwhite women seemed able to pull off. Had Jane or Ruby’s friend Elizabeth said “Oh, baby,” it would have just been weird.

  “I’ll be all right, Elsie,” Ruby said, taking a few paces toward the door. “Thank you.” She smiled at her friend.

  The apartment had never seemed so depressing. Maybe because it never had been. When Ruby had moved in four years earlier, she’d been starting fresh after nearly drinking herself to death. A stint in a Texas rehab had detoxed her enough to make her realize she wasn’t happy in Texas. She’d moved back to her native Brooklyn. She hadn’t had much in the way of needs and was just damned glad to be alive. That she’d ended up getting the museum job and liking both her job and her boss had been almost shocking after a long series of menial, meaningless, and thoroughly unpleasant jobs. As months passed, Ruby got used to living comfortably. She lived a simple, almost childlike existence and had no interest in acquiring the big problems and stresses that came with big careers and big lives. When Ed had come along, he’d seemed like crowning glory in an already good life. But now that he was in the wind, that life didn’t seem so rich anymore, and the simple things that had once made Ruby happy seemed useless and slightly pathetic.

  She went over to the stereo, put a Joy Division CD on at full volume, and lay down on the floor.

  After four songs, Ruby got up, swapped Joy Division for Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, then went into the kitchen to feed the cats. All four were at her feet, staring and meowing, and as she fed them, Ruby started fuming. Ed apparently assumed she’d take care of his two cats. Ruby stormed back into the living room, picked up the phone, and called Ed. Of course he didn’t answer. She gave his voice mail a piece of her mind about abandoning cats, even though it had been only forty-eight hours and this probably didn’t technically constitute abandonment.

  “I hate that you’ve assumed I’d take care of your cats. I hate assumptions. And I hate whatever it is you’re doing.”

  Ruby hung up but felt not one iota better. She turned the music off and went to her piano, where she banged around unsuccessfully for twenty minutes. She gave up on that particular path to salvation then decided that if she stood in the house one minute longer she would explode. She put ten bucks and two Fireballs into her pocket and went out. She saw Elsie and Ramirez sitting in their kitchen. She attempted a smile, was pretty sure it came out a grimace, and without waiting to see the grimace’s effects went down the stairs two at a time. She jogged down Stillwell, across Surf, and into the Eldorado Arcade, where she got ten dollars’ worth of quarters from the change machine and started playing Skee-Ball, compulsively pumping more quarters in the moment she threw the ninth ball of each game.

  This didn’t help either. Ruby gruffly handed the two dozen prize tickets she’d won to a small chubby child then stalked out of the arcade and headed for the beach.

  She felt like she was being crushed.

  Weak waves lapped at the shore. The low-hanging yellow moon would have been pretty under most circumstances, but all Ruby could think was that it was yellow from pollution that was all the fault of George Bush, who seemed determined to rape and deplete the earth. Ruby took the opportunity to blame George Bush and his handlers for everything. The Disneyfication of New York City. The dumbing down of suburban America youth, and the ridiculous hypocritical espousal of a religion that forbade stem cell research but was just fine with killing thousands of full-grown humans. It made Ruby’s stomach hurt. She was so knotted-up she couldn’t bear staring at the dirty water any longer and started slowly walking back toward Astroland.

  She hadn’t meant to, but Ruby walked by the sideshow, stopping to watch Lucio, who was out front, on the platform, performing a few minutes of his act in order to entice passersby inside to see the full ten-in-one sideshow. His neck was arched back as he swallowed a flame from a wand he held above his head. About a dozen people were standing around him in a semicircle, and nearly all had their mouths hanging open. Eating fire wasn’t really that difficult—Ruby had even done it a few times—but Lucio did it so beautifully. And that was difficult.

  Ruby didn’t want Lucio to see her standing there admiring him. She kept walking.

  It was still early, but Ruby put on her red nightgown and got into bed with Rats for company. Eventually, sleep came.

  13. FIRE

  The next few days were a blur, time shifting but barely moving under an orb of swollen sun. In the mornings, Ruby went to The Hole, spent time with her horse, and did her chores. Afternoons, she went to bark at strangers at the horse-racing game. Some days she worked with Glenda, others with Glenda’s son, Rafael, a lecherous muscle head who was always trying to look down Ruby’s shirt even though Ruby wore sports bras.

  Ruby didn’t exactly get a lot of joy out of her work at the game. It vaguely fulfilled the fantasy Ruby had shared with many kids about running away and joining the circus. Mostly though, it was tedious and loud, and Ruby would go home with her bones hurting.

  Five days into her stint as a game worker, Ruby got a letter from Ed: “Sorry about the silence, and thank you for taking care of the cats. Here’s some money for their upkeep. I’ll be in touch soon.”

  She punched the wall so hard she broke the skin on her knuckles and scared the cats. Her hand hurt afterward, and both piano playing and yoga became painful.

  The night after her eighth day working at the horse-racing game, Ruby felt so low she wanted to crawl into a hole and die. She tried to seem normal and friendly to Glenda as the older woman paid her for the day. But even Glenda, who wasn’t exactly the intuitive sort, realized something was wrong.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked as she watched Ruby stuff the cash in her pocket.

  “Nothing,” Ruby lied.

  “Okay,” Glenda shrugged, “see you tomorrow.”

  Ruby stopped in front of the sideshow, glancing up to the second floor where the Coney Island Museum’s windows were. She remembered cheerier times when she’d take a chair and park it in front of a window, sit there smoking and staring out at all the bustling of Astrola
nd.

  It was close to seven now, and the sideshow was in full swing. Todd, one of the talkers, was outside inciting the masses to come on in and see the show. Ruby went in half hoping that Bob would be there drinking a beer with Eek, the tattooed-head-to-toe performer/ticket taker who was one of the better known denizens of Coney. Bob wasn’t there, but, judging by the speculative look Eek gave Ruby, she figured Bob had told everyone that he’d fired her from the museum. Thankfully she was long past caring.

  “Gonna watch the show,” she told Eek as she walked by the desk where he sat selling tickets. She was mentally daring him to charge her admission. Eek wisely didn’t take her up on it.

  Ruby found a seat in the bleachers. Doriana, the snake charmer, was onstage, a pair of albino pythons writhing over her light brown body as the audience sat rapt and very possibly horny. Doriana was followed by Bubbles, a thin, fortyish white man who drove nails up his nose and swallowed a sword, causing kids in the audience to erupt in grossed-out choking sounds. Finally, Lucio appeared. This is what Ruby had come for: eye candy. He was dressed in loose black pants and a tight black T-shirt. He grinned at the audience, then lit his torches and began arching his neck back, swallowing the flames. He had a beautiful neck. Objectifying the fire-eater made Ruby feel better than she’d felt all week. When Lucio finished, she got up and climbed out of the bleachers, heading for the exit. She was about to leave when the fire-eater materialized at her side.

  “Thanks for coming to watch me,” he said.

  “A pleasure.” Ruby pictured herself taking his clothes off. He was lean. He had long lovely muscles. Young skin.

  “Come on.” Lucio motioned for Ruby to follow him. Since she could think of no reason not to, she did.

  They walked in silence toward the beach. Night was coming on, dark overhead, pink at the edges. There were few people on the beach. A helicopter was passing, shining a searchlight at the sea, and Ruby idly wondered if someone had drowned of if contraband had floated to the surface.