by Pat Conroy
I did not know a human mouth could taste so sweet or that a human body could feel so fine as it memorized my shape. In her kisses were the hint of berries, of ripeness and salt, all the happy taste of fruit harvested near oceans. For years my own tongue had ripened for this moment. The wind blew through our hair and the spray dampened our faces. The smell of salt and Annie Kate filled my nostrils. She licked the sea water from my face and the sea was ebony and silver through the blond shining flag of her hair. She kissed my eyes and both sides of my throat, taking her time, moving slowly as she memorized the shape of my face and throat. I wanted to make myself handsome for her; I wanted my face to transform into something irresistible, something so outwardly dazzling that she would never want to leave my side again. But most of all, I just wanted to be handsome enough, handsome enough to be the man loved by Annie Kate Gervais.
Chapter Twenty-four
Beautiful cities have a treacherous nature, and they dispense inferiority to the suburbs that grow up around them with the self-congratulatory piety of a queen distributing mint among lepers. A suburb is simply a form of homage to a city’s vitality, but it rarely receives even the slightest consideration for that homage. Charleston had the democratic good will to look down on all of its suburbs, but it reserved a very special contempt for the industrial city of North Charleston, which not only had the temerity to be extraordinarily common and depressing but had also borrowed the sacred name. To live in North Charleston was an admission of defeat. Industry huddled within its boundaries and a thick miasmic smoke hovered over the tract houses and the trailer parks, infecting each breath of the working class. It was a fine city in which to develop emphysema or lung cancer, and it was a hated city. The jokes of the aristocracy were usually about Jews, niggers, and North Charleston. There was an incontestable sadness to this unpraised, homely suburb, and there was never any reason for us to pass through its ordinary streets. That is, unless we needed to drive to Columbia or the county fair set up its midway on a dusty, unused field at the edge of town.
I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. Each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.
It was the presence of the strippers that emptied the barracks of cadets. In the desperately horny climate of the Institute, it was a rare cadet, indeed, who would pass up the chance to glimpse a human vagina, no matter how debased or unpalatable. The General had granted us late leave so we could enjoy the fair. He thought it would do the troops a world of good to ride the Ferris wheel.
The smell of the phosphorous plant hung over the fairgrounds as we bought our tickets for the next burlesque show. A carousel circled nearby, the voices of small children calling to their parents above the loud, voluptuous music as they kicked their small heels against the wooden flanks of their garish, silent beasts. A barker exhorted the crowd to enter a tent fifty feet away to glimpse the ugliest woman in the world.
“I’ll buy you a ticket to that, Will,” Mark teased, nudging me with his elbow. “She may be the only woman in America who’ll go with you to the Ring Hop.”
“I didn’t know your mother was moonlighting with the fair, Mark,” I replied.
“It’s dangerous to talk about a guy’s mother,” Pig cautioned. “They’d kill you on the block I come from for saying something like that.”
“North Charleston has such an odor,” Tradd said, wrinkling his handsome nose, testing the rancid air as if it were infected.
“It’s like driving up the asshole of an elephant,” Mark said. “The whole South smells like this.”
We were eating cotton candy and drinking cheap, watered-down beer out of paper cups when the tent opened and we moved forward with the eager crowd to press close to a flimsy, makeshift stage. Well over half the crowd consisted of cadets from the Institute, and we were dressed neatly in the same salt-and-pepper uniforms we had worn to a Greater Issues Speech delivered by former President Truman the previous week.
The strippers gyrated into view, accompanied by jarring, quasisensual music and the aroused, incontinent applause of the crowd. It was not a dance we had paid money to see, for their movements were irreligious parodies of the province and spirit of dance. What we observed was a debasement of the copulatory act, a grinding, panting, anti-erotic mime of fucking itself. It took a while longer to figure out that we were watching a mother-daughter team perform in their first full season together. By then, the crowd was chanting for both of them to remove their G-strings and a flurry of silver coins thrown from every corner of the tent was bouncing across the stage. The mother and daughter exchanged glances, and both decided to postpone the moment of golden unveiling until more money littered the stage. Pulling at their G-strings, they taunted the crowd for their stinginess and the air was streaked with flying coins.
The mother had the sneering hauteur and debased professionalism of a woman who had known the more bestial instincts of men for too long. She was overweight and sweated profusely in the tent, which itself had become a greenhouse of prurient fantasy. She looked at us and smiled obscenely, and I had never seen a smile convey such unadulterated contempt; she looked at us with absolute hatred, as though she were staring into a toilet bowl filled with used condoms. I felt as though I were made of nothing but semen as I watched her and her daughter with a combination of repulsion and desire. I could hardly take my eyes off the mother and the long, thin Caesarian scar etched into her abdomen.
The daughter was a pretty girl with a ripe sensuous body, but her movements across the stage were amateurish imitations of her mother’s. She and her mother had identical brown eyes, with a dull, exhausted opacity about them. They glared sorrowfully in the brightness of the tent. Their hair was peroxided a deadly white and looked like grain planted on ruined, untended soil.
The music increased in volume and the bodies of the two women glistened as they moved and swayed in graceless ecstasies back and forth across the stage, passing each other again and again, playing to different sections of the crowd. The music itself sounded as though a convicted lecher had composed it. When they slowly and meticulously removed their G-strings and threw them into the crowd, I realized that I was seeing the first two mature female genitals of my life. Nor was I overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight. It was with something akin to genuine horror that I saw the mother snatch a cigarette out of a cadet’s mouth, stick the filter end deep inside her, moan dramatically, then replace it between the startled cadet’s lips. The other cadets roared out their approval.
“Oh gross,” Tradd moaned beside me. “I have never seen such sickness, Will. What can possibly be attractive about those two sorrowful women?”
“Pretend to be filled with lust,” I said to Tradd. “We’re part of the act.”
“Wet beavers.” Pig sighed happily as the two strippers parted their legs and began moving toward the mob in short, limbo-like hops. “This fair is so low-class that strippers show you wet beavers.”
“I sure hope my daughters can grow up and land great jobs like this,” Mark said, laughing and whistling and slapping the despondent Tradd on the back.
“I feel like a gynecologist looking at this mess,” Tradd said as the act continued toward its wild, concupiscent finale.
When the act was over the mother embraced her daughter and announced to the crowd, “She came out of my pussy naked and I knew I had a new stripper for the show. Give Sally a big hand.”
Sally. Why did she have to have a name like Sally? I thought. Why did she have to be granted so sweet and guileless a name? The Sallys of the world were gentle and innocent and shy; the Sallys I had known did not even suspect the existen
ce of such sleazy demimondes as this one beneath a tent in North Charleston. How did this Sally get here and how did her mother get here? Where do these women come from? What circumstances brought them to this point, beneath this tent, to be cheapened by the impiety and violence of boys’ eyes, to be cheapened by Will McLean’s eyes? And why had Will McLean come here and paid money and cheered with the others when the G-strings arced into the crowd? Why had I done this? I thought, as we filed out of the tent. And why does it make me sad? I had enjoyed it—or thought I had—until the mother had called her daughter Sally. By giving her a name, she had implicated me, made me responsible, guilty.
When we exited the tent, the air of North Charleston was positively exhilarating and we breathed the tangy, phosphorous-scented night air with relief. The crowd was moving down the midway toward the far end of the parade ground. As we moved with them, I could feel Pig tense up and begin talking to himself in a curt, unintelligible whisper. He began shadowboxing the air as we walked leisurely along, and cadets who walked near him began to shout encouragement and to lay bets with each other. We paid another dollar to a weasly, scrofulous man who announced the upcoming bout between Dante Pignetti and the Heavyweight Champion of the Southeast. Pig tried to get the three of us in free as his trainers, but the man cheerfully refused and cheerfully collected our money.
Pig undressed in the back of the tent, stripping down to a pair of white trunks, and put on his sweat socks and gym shoes. Over three hundred cadets had crowded into the tent to witness the main bout of the evening. On the night before, Otto the Facebreaker had knocked Grainger Sox, a defensive tackle on the football team, unconscious and he had been unable to play in that afternoon’s game against William and Mary. The cadets were rowdy and boisterous and chanting for revenge. Heavy betting between townsmen and cadets was going on all over the tent. The high exaggerated flush of sexual energy still glowed in the crowd. We pressed forward, Mark, Tradd, and I bearing Pig on our shoulders as he blew kisses to his friends. Otto emerged from the other side of the tent and mounted the flimsily constructed ring and waited impassively in the corner, leaning his considerable weight against the rope. It was easy to see why Otto the Facebreaker had not been named Sally.
He had a fleshy, scarred face that looked like a target on an artillery range. His impassive black eyes had a slightly minted cast, but they registered more boredom than malevolence. He was a tall heavyset man with an inordinately large chest and rather bunched, cream-colored muscles, and he gave the appearance of being too fat and sluggish and out of shape to give a good account of himself in a fair fight. But he also appeared to be a man who had never participated in a fair fight in his life. There was an immense power in his stillness; a strange, dispiriting confidence. He could have gotten a high-paying job scaring babies to death.
I watched him as he studied Pig, who was performing a series of calisthenics in his corner. It was as though Otto was reading a menu or looking at a plate of food. Otto ran his fingers through his long hair, which was peroxided in the same washed-out coloring as the strippers’.
“Everybody in this high-class operation has white hair except the midget with no arms and legs,” I said, wiping the sweat from Pig’s face and neck with a towel.
“That’s because he couldn’t reach for the bottle,” Mark muttered, watching the motionless giant across the ring.
“That man is an absolute animal,” Tradd whispered to Pig, who had sat down on the stool in his corner. “Don’t you dare fight him, Pig, I forbid it. It’s silly.”
“You may have to use karate on him, Pig,” I said, “and I’m not even sure that will stop him.”
“I’ve told you, Will,” Pig said, “it’s forbidden to use karate except when I’m in mortal danger. This is sport. It may turn to street fighting, but it will never turn to karate.”
“Then why do you waste two goddam hours of every day practicing the goddam worthless stuff?” Mark sneered.
“It’s a discipline,” Pig answered calmly. “It is the art form of self-defense. It’s not to be wasted on losers who punch out farm boys at county fairs.”
“I wouldn’t get in that ring with a flame thrower and a division of Marines backing me up,” I said.
Mark’s eyes had narrowed into studious slits as he watched Otto perform a few half-hearted knee bends on the other side of the ring. “Get out of the ring, Pig,” Mark suddenly ordered. “I’m not going to let you fight him.”
“I’m already in the ring, Mark,” Pig answered without surprise, as though he had anticipated Mark’s reaction.
“I’m not letting you fight him,” Mark insisted. “He’ll kill you. I’ve seen guys like him before. They make their living by beating the shit out of college boys with nice bodies.”
“Good, I agree with Mark,” said Tradd, over the noise of the crowd. “Let’s go back to my house. This fair is the tackiest thing I’ve ever been to. And the smell in here is vulgar.”
The smell was overpowering, a combination of sawdust, human perspiration, and the crushed pulp of peanut shells and half-eaten cotton candy.
“Come on, Pig,” Mark said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“I’m fighting him,” Pig said. “I need the money, Mark, and you know it. The hundred bucks could get me through the next couple of months.”
“We’ll chip in and get you the hundred, Pig,” I said. “We’ve always got the money when you needed it, haven’t we?”
“I’m sick of borrowing money from you guys. It’s no fun begging nickels and dimes from your roommates.”
“Get out of the ring,” Mark shouted urgently in Pig’s ear.
“Everyone in the school would know it,” Pig responded wearily. “I’d lose face. I can take that creep. He doesn’t keep himself in shape. I’m going to ride that turkey for five minutes.”
The referee climbed into the center of the ring and announced the fight into a rusty, wheezing microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he crowed to the womanless crowd, “the challenger who has gallantly agreed to mortal combat with Otto the Facebreaker tonight is Cadet Dante Pignetti of Carolina Military Institute, weighing in at two hundred pounds. Give Pig a big hand.”
The tent exploded with applause as Pig moved to the center of the ring, his feet dancing to the pulse of the crowd. Otto watched him as the cadets chanted deliriously, “Pig. Pig. Pig. Pig. Pig.”
Pig’s body was absolutely magnificent; he looked as though he had been carved by the hand of Michelangelo.
“It is a no-holds-barred match, ladies and gentlemen,” the referee said.
“Keep away from him, Pig,” Mark shouted as we left the ring. “Keep moving, keep low, and don’t clinch with that bastard. He’ll kill you in a clinch. Box him. Hammer his face and if he gets near you, move, move, move.”
Pig nodded that he understood Mark while the tent boomed with jeers and hisses as Otto was introduced.
Pig moved toward the center of the ring and toward Otto the Facebreaker when the referee instructed, “Shake hands, gentlemen. And come out fighting.”
“Don’t,” I heard Mark scream, but it was too late.
As Pig extended his arm to shake hands, Otto jammed two fingers directly into Pig’s eyes. Pig let out a single cry of distress and surprise and pain, and his hands went instinctively to cover his eyes. Otto chopped him to the floor with a vicious rabbit punch to the back of the neck. The slow-moving, half-awake Otto was moving with the savage, awakened grace of a leopard as he landed a kick against the side of Pig’s head. He lifted Pig’s head off the floor by cruelly grabbing a knot of Pig’s hair and was about to land a punch that easily could have broken Pig’s jaw. He was about to land the final coup de grace when a slim, frantic figure sprinted across the ring and wrapped himself around Otto’s neck and back. Otto looked up with a slow-witted expression of both surprise and amusement, as though he had been attacked by a parakeet. He was no more surprised than I was. Or Mark. It was Tradd St Croix.
“Oh, shit,” Ma
rk said, clambering into the ring.
There was an astonished and confused hum among the crowd as Otto tried to dislodge Tradd from his back. But Tradd was wrapped as tightly as a scarf, and he had shut his eyes as though he did not want to witness his own imminent execution. Otto finally reached over his back, grabbed Tradd’s uniform, and removed him as though he was drawing an arrow from its quiver. Tradd landed on his back with a breathless thump. Otto studied Tradd with a rather detached and thoughtful curiosity as though he had never had to dispose of such a thin and fragile attacker. Pig had rolled away to a far corner trying to clear his eyes. Otto was still involved in the laborious process of deciding how to kill someone as small as Tradd when he had to reverse the process and decide how to deal with someone as large as Mark Santoro.
One problem Otto did not have was how to deal with Will McLean because ol’ Willie had made a swift and instantaneous decision that Otto would only face three-fourths of the occupants of room 4428. I do not scuffle with people named Otto the Facebreaker.
Mark sent Otto reeling backward with a punch to the sternum. He then stepped between his roommates and the giant. I crawled into the ring, keeping a cold eye on Otto, grabbed Tradd by the collar, and jerked him beneath the ropes before Otto could make the terribly erroneous conclusion that I entertained any thoughts of violence toward him. I was feverish I was so afraid. The heat and noise and mayhem surrounding the ring had immobilized me and rendered me impotent, with that absurd helplessness of being a spectator to an event beyond my control.
“Have you gone apeshit?” I yelled to Tradd above the din of the crowd.
“I can’t believe I did that,” he said wondrously, jubilantly. “I just can’t believe that I did that.” He was screaming in disbelief and euphoria as cadets crowded around him, slapping him on the back and offering him drinks of whiskey. Bedlam was loose in that tent as Otto moved toward a mid-ring reckoning with Mark.
