Shifting forces clashed, and the noise of the midway bloomed.
Just like in the carny there was a sense of history and foundation, but also the possibility of tear-down. As if it could all be folded up and carried off in a couple of hours, everything gone tomorrow. It felt as if time were running out, but I didn’t see how. Even if Nicodemus could leave whenever he wanted, he wouldn’t until I found him. He wasn’t hiding any longer, if he’d ever been. Maybe he stood just inside the next shadow, holding his skillet.
4
We were throwbacks, my father most of all. You couldn’t find a real freak show in the United States anymore, not even in the South where life still hasn’t been as homogenized as the rest of the country. Now the only freaks you were likely to come across were the sadomasochists bent on changing themselves into something different. They dreamed of becoming lizards, birds, or fiends that were other. It might not be any better, but at least it would be startling and distinct. That counted.
Their shows were inhabited by the tattooed, the pierced, the perforated, and the glorified geeks. The kids who got off on hanging bricks off their pricks, the blockheads who ate glass and nails because their uncles fondled them at six. Self-recreation. The bearded women who took hormones because they wanted the muscle mass, the shriveled tits and that look of terror in the eyes of the audience. It wasn’t fouled genetics. It was simply a way to embrace the monstrosity under your skin and still get out alive.
Timeless and resilient, yet comprised of cracked cement and chipped paint, the Works lived with a slow and steady throb. Decades of Manhattan echoes passed through and kept going. Dust rose and dissipated and resettled, all part of the same current. It was relentless yet full of mourning, I thought. The blood of the city dried here, and continued to congeal.
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art spans centuries, millennia,” Jolly Nell said. It sort of surprised me that she knew a word like “millennia,” though it really shouldn’t have. “And this place is even larger.”
“It’s devoted to more gods,” Juba said. “Different, warring.”
Nell frowned and waved him off. “I don’t know about that, but you can feel them taking the years off, adding them on, in every order here. You need to step back to see the entire picture.”
“How far?” I asked.
“Too far. That’s why it doesn’t work.”
“Perhaps you need only to step in,” Juba said.
“It’s still too far,” she said. “They’re not getting anywhere. It collapses in on itself and crumbles away.”
“Hm.”
“I was wrong, this isn’t the real sideshow yet. I don’t think you’ll be able to find your father here.”
“Yes, I will,” I said. “Juba, what’s the view like from up there?”
“Sickening.”
Hertzburg let out a small laugh, the kind he made when somebody in the audience tried to rush him. “I find it stimulating.”
And it was, in a fashion, like the midway at noon in the heart of a jasmine summer. The power came through, it bled into the air. You didn’t have to partake of it or act on it or find pleasure here—you only had to be enfolded. Whether a willing participant, a victim or only open to suggestion.
The placebo effect was already working. The crippled could wander through the Works. Pain could be suppressed, even feasted upon, for a time. Then, the collapse. I looked into faces and wondered what would happen when all their agony came crashing back in. Would it only make them love and need this place more?
Hertzburg was already in the zone, letting it get good to him, feeding off that static charge. The hair on his shoulders stood on end, veins dark and bulging along his thick forearms.
Some kids were strumming eukeleles, gagging on “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” I could imagine Hertzburg going over and grabbing the boys by their throats, holding them out at arm’s length so they couldn’t touch the floor even on tiptoe. Faces going red, then purple, then black as their swollen tongues unfurled. And the wild man almost gleeful through it all, but also a bit puzzled, trying to study the situation but being too near to see the whole thing. Bringing the dead eyes closer so he could inspect them for something new or forgotten.
“This is just a front, we’re only touching on the surface,” Jolly Nell told us. She said it as someone who knew a great deal about surfaces. No one ever looked beyond the obesity, seeing all that corpulent flesh and being completely mesmerized by it. The only questions she ever got from the audience were how could she let her self get that way, why didn’t she lose the pounds, and didn’t she fear heart disease and stroke? Even though she received at least three or four marriage proposals a month, no one ever asked her about anything except what they saw on that soft fat surface.
Juba, taking strides that carried him over three people at a time, wriggled his fingers as if trying to part the air. “I agree, this is the bally. The sideshow is always much deeper within the carny.”
“Of course,” Hertzburg said. The edges of his beard seemed to be alive with sparks, and you could smell the searing ozone in the air. “But the draw is already tugging us onward.”
“You can fight it,” Nell told me.
“You think so?” 1 asked.
“Yes.”
“Eh, why bother?”
My father’s fragile beliefs couldn’t survive intact here. The nudity and drugs and stupidity of youth itself would have scraped against Nicodemus’s tender underside and made him want to break his teeth. He’d be ravaging his Bible with red pens and dog-earing the pages about eating your kids.
He couldn’t exist without a place of safety, and that meant either the bottle or Jesus.
I stopped in front of a young couple, my age or so, when I am this age. Early twenties but already tired of what it was all about. They sat at the base of a small cardboard set that looked like a little girl’s tea room or playhouse, but there weren’t any children around. The windows had been drawn on with colored magic markers and could be opened by tugging on a piece of string.
She had plastic flowers in her hair and was coaching him on how to play Stanley in Streetcar without sounding so much like Brando. It wasn’t going to help and she knew it. The guy wore a tight T-shirt and tried to seem sensitive without pouting, but his bottom lip hung down too far and he kind of sucked on his teeth the way Brando used to. Way too much of the American icon there to ever do it any differently. No one could play Rebel without doing Dean, either.
The girl kept trying to get him to forget the movie, and the more she pushed him, the more he started doing Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. I could picture him getting to the “Stella!” part and screaming “The honor! The horror!” instead. I sort of wanted to see that.
They both appeared to be on the gaunt side, faces thin and sallow. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of weeks, but his whispy mustache still didn’t reach the peach fuzz on his chin. She had warm but uncompromising eyes, and she was at least six months pregnant.
1 couldn’t figure out a way to frame my question without sounding stupid, so I just let it out. “Is there a church here?”
“What?” Brando asked.
“I asked if there was a church here.”
His lip hung lower. “Did 1 hear that right?”
“I suspect you did. Is there a spot to pray? A chapel?”
“It’s all holy ground, man.”
That was the kind of dull answer 1 expected, but I really couldn’t blame the guy. “How about a bar?”
“Liquor is everywhere, just look. Reach out. Ask somebody. They’ll share with you.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“Well, shit.”
Fishboy Lenny smiled as much as he could without lips and scuttled forward on his belly, waving happily to the girl, who sat there nodding.
It would take me weeks to search every area and space inside the Works. 1 wanted to sleep. I wasn’t tired after three days in the rain, but I needed to pick up Nicodemus’s tr
ail in the dream.
“Where’s the doniker?” I asked.
“The what?”
“A restroom. The toilet.”
“What the fuck language are you speaking?”
He didn’t have a clue. He looked constipated and unaware of his condition. One of these days his intestines would completely seize up and he’d keel over from a massive stroke.
Sacrifice was an inherent pan of becoming something larger, and he might just go the entire distance without ever taking a crap. I could feel the same kind of counterfeit energy in this place as in any bally. The excitement was here but none of the gamble, none of the fun. The tents would always be packed. They wanted love and remembrance, shock, communion. They asked me to glance into their palms in order to get God and their own nettling consciences off their backs. I did what I could. They wanted the freak show.
The pregnant girl, though, kept appraising. I didn’t like the way she stared at me. There was a sharpness there, a bit of derision, I thought, though not quite enough to piss me off. But for some reason it did. She cocked her head and peered over my shoulder as if glimpsing the rest of my life layered up behind me. It brought some color into her face and made her even prettier.
Brando reached into the cardboard playhouse and started tangling with something. He drew out a snake. “Meet Lester.”
“Is it hot?” I asked.
“What?”
“Is it poisonous?”
“Damn, mister, you got a fucked-up word for everything, I bet. Nah, Lester isn’t poisonous.”
“Too bad.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I used to wrangle them. There’s more gamble to it if they’re hot.”
“Still hurts like a son of a bitch if he gets a piece of you.”
I was suddenly very sick of the guy’s voice and wanted her to talk instead, but she wouldn’t. I grabbed Lester and brought him up to my face. I’d learned a lot about handling animals, especially reptiles, even before I started eating them.
Lester was easy. After a few moments of zoning the snake, I could get him to copy my motions. He’d tilt his chin when I did, (lick his tongue out at mine. Recoil and jut forward following the actions of my head. It was a trick, like everything else, but a fairly good one.
“That’s wild,” Brando said, defunct, almost dead.
“Yeah.”
“He’s even blinking when you do.”
“That’s part of the show.”
“Can you teach me?”
‘“‘It would take too long.”
That didn’t flatten him. Brando started blinking in time with the snake, in time with me. “What else can you do with Lester?”
“Nothing you’d want to see.”
“I want to see everything, man.”
He was right, they always wanted to see it all.
I could’ve bitten Lester’s head off and spit it into his lap. I had been a geek for a few years when the whiskey had worn me into a madness much different from my father’s. 1 sweated mash liquor. I smeared myself with my own shit and vomit and shoved empty beer cans up my ass. I’d chewed the heads off chickens, mice and pit vipers and puked them into the crowd.
They loved it.
So did I.
And that’s how Megan had found me.
5
I’d been dragged through the slough of cabbage palms and palmettos, where the gators clambered across the mangroves. The carnival had set up outside the broad channels of a swamp and 1 lived in a cage of gnarled roots sucking the spleens out of frogs. They poled their skiffs from miles around to come watch.
Whatever hit the din became a part of me. They thought 1 was too weak to wrestle the bull gators, but there were plenty of tricks. They expected me to die a hundred times over and I wouldn’t go. The toads they tossed me were hot. The mushrooms deadly. The murderous stews should’ve put me down but didn’t. And they loved me and hated me for it. The screams and cheers, the disgusted looks. Cats’ entrails and children’s beaming smiles. We learned a lot from one another, about how far we were all willing to go
And in the middle of the madness, at its worst and at its best, somehow the madness ended.
Megan wiped the venom and feathers out of my mouth and held my shoulders down to the mattress while she slowly fed me soup and watered-down scotch. She knew better than to try to get me to go cold turkey. I was so far into the bottle that my heart would’ve stopped without it. Which might have been a good thing considering the situation.
The dreams had always been bad, but they grew worse while 1 dried out. The D.T.’s didn’t get me shrieking or tearing at my own eyes, though. I’d eaten bugs and rats for years, what did I care if they crawled over me in my delusions?
Instead I was drawn into conversations with the prophets and lepers, kneeling at stone altars beneath a desert sun, carrying children sucking on honey-coated locusts. I decapitated the priests of Baal, climbed mountains of fire. Where was the New Testament? Where had they hidden my forgiveness? Archangel Michael aimed his fiery sword at my heart and plucked it out with one twitch of his wrist.
I was the seer, and I talked endlessly while Megan pressed icy towels to my forehead.
Two weeks passed before the hallucinations and delirium eased enough for me to realize I was no longer rolling in the mud and sawdust, covered in my own puke and blood, having pocket change heaved at me. She’d either bought or stolen me from the carny, I never found out which.
I could only see in shadow at first as she leaned over my chest, a raven figure in an even darker world.
Her silhouette moved like fluid, back-lit by silver. Occasionally I’d hear the rustle of cloth and chiming of metal. A spoon would ease between my lips as shades and dimension slowly filled my mind again.
She had caramel-colored freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks, and a smile that put me at rest like nothing ever had before it. I’d been burning my entire life—first with heavenly fire and then with lust, and finally with whiskey and poison.
But right then, in that first minute as I laid my eyes on her, she cooled my thrashing spirit, and she did it without so much as a word.
She wore a silk kimono showing off every curve, and I saw the firm muscles of her arms and neck as she dipped the spoon again and again, feeding me. I ate more slowly, watching the shape of her lips. She was a beautiful stranger.
1 scanned the room. There was a black and white television with rabbit ears in the corner, some Mexican game show flashing silently screaming faces, no sound knob. Dirty Venetian blinds were half drawn. I saw a stream of dying orange light. Her cooch costume was thrown over the back of a busted rattan chair, all sequins and chainlets and white plumes. We were in a flea-trap motel and 1 had bed sores.
She noticed that my eyes had focused on her. “You look awake. Can you see straight yet?”
“Yes.” My vocal cords felt like they’d been scoured down to threads and knotted together. I hadn’t spoken a word in over a year, and my voice sounded so much like my father’s that it made me look around for him.
“Good. You’re strong.”
Nobody had ever said that to me before. 1 didn’t know how she could even think it, having cleaned the snake piss off my neck. “No, I’m not.”
“We’ll see. Now that you’re over the worst of it you’ll be on your feet again soon.”
1 thought I recognized her from the cooch dance, but I couldn’t be sure of much anymore. Had she been in the audience watching me geek all the animals? Or had I sneaked under the hoof tent and seen her and the other girls teasing the marks? I hadn’t had a lick of pride in years, but I suddenly felt a tinge of embarrassment. It was an odd sensation.
“You’re with the carny?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Not that one. They ton; down and left town seven or eight days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” 1 told her, and 1 was. “You must know the route. You can still catch up.”
“Hell no. It wa
s the worst one I’d ever worked. I got hired on outside of Edmond six weeks ago and hated every minute of it in that show. Dyson ought to be arrested, the way he runs it.”
“Dyson?”
“The owner.”
He must’ve taken me on, but I couldn’t remember. Her accent had a nice flair. It was Southern but without any drawl. East Texas, I guessed, somewhere out in the flats and deep scrub. I kept staring at her lips, and she didn’t seem to mind. “Why’d you help me?”
“You needed it.”
“I’m nothing to you. I’m—”
That smile again, comforting and cooling as she pressed a damp rag to my throat once more. “I know who you are,” she said. “You healed me once.”
6
I felt something touch my ankle and thought it was Fishboy Lenny, but when 1 looked down I saw that Lester had followed after me and was now winding his way around my leg.
The girl walked alongside us. She was smiling in a self-satisfied way, as if she’d just found a new partner she could help through a Tennessee Williams play. I had caught her attention and felt uncomfortable with the fact. Her pregnancy reminded me that I was really only here to get back Jonah.
“You’ve got the serpent wrapped up tight,” she said.
It might’ve been a vague reference to Satan, but that sort of crap didn’t do much for me. “Not exactly. More like he’s got me wrapped.”
“He likes you.”
“Most snakes do for some reason.”
“What are you looking for here?”
“My kid.”
She moved easily, even though her belly was already protruding quite far. 1 had the urge to press my palm there, or my cheek, and rest for a while. Despite those shrewd eyes there was a trace of naivete to her. Or perhaps that was only my penchant for seeing innocence where it didn’t exist.
“You’re here to find your own kid?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a new one. Usually they drive up outside and dump them off without hardly even slowing down.”
There was also something about her that touched me in all the wrong places. “Listen—”
Four Dark Nights Page 17