The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Patty Conklin, up in Canada, had the only other drome still operating. “So let’s make this one sing!” Jake wanted to say. Phil, his once-upon-a-time mate, had never possessed Jake’s panache, but on the other hand had never married a couple of strippers and been “twice burned,” as Jake liked to kid himself. Stick to the amateurs, he’d resolved. Vickie didn’t know he was a super-rider, on a scale of one to ten, but did guess that he frittered away time temperamentally, from the behavior of the crowds. Didn’t know that a cheap, light, little, brand-new Yamaha might have served the bread-and-butter purposes of the show for these yahoos as well as the purist, antique Indians Jake persisted in using, but recognized that a creditor like Phil must be the enemy, like the fuzz. Her young heart would never be content with a hamburger-flipper; plus, with Jake, there were no black eyes to hide, unlike with Elizabeth Alice’s dad, and if any creep had molested Elizabeth Alice on the midway Jake would have “ripped him a new asshole.”

  Cliff was loyal, too, like an auto-shop mechanic with a nest egg in the bank, out to see the world. His hero was Evel Knievel, or other people from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, not knowing about press agents, and yet he reminded Jake of those white horses in the circus that when you stuck them inside a ring loped round and around. Phil was built like a fireplug and was a one-marriage man, while Cliff was dorkier physically and probably too in-drawn to spin the wheel and marry Charlene or anybody else. But he claimed he wanted to go on from here to the Globe of Death, which was a more popular, dangerous reinvention of the Wall of Death, and for which a latticed steel ball hung over the crowd and motorcyclists sped vertically around, or every possible way, in tight tandem inside, with no floor to escape to if the signals went wrong. Split-second timing was required that would be suicidal for Cliff, but it also needed a young man with reflexes quicker than Jake’s had become. His eyes were weak from pulling so many G’s, his knees shook, and his hands trembled when he got very tired. So Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey would have to wait. Meanwhile, he liked the homey hubbub and fewer moves of these country fairs, and doing what he knew.

  Cliff’s Charlene was somewhere between Cliff’s age and Jake’s and had knocked around enough that Jake sometimes felt he had more in common with her. She was sisterly with Vickie but mildly bored by her, and when she found herself sleeping in the back of a station wagon, she offered to work for Smoky, if he had a slot for her, going to his office wagon to ask. She “liked sitting around talking to grownups,” as she unguardedly put it. Smoky was a rotund, poker-faced, muscly, cold-weather fellow with burly, hairy fists, though not as hardbitten as the real carnies, who had Florida or Alabama license plates (Alabama being the only state where you could register your car from a P.O. box). He always liked a story, and would hear you out while nursing a mug of coffee, though seldom offering any to a drop-in, or committing himself unless he needed something, until he spat out the window to tell you to move on. He could glance up and down the midway as he did so and estimate how much business every joint, large or small, was doing, and therefore his take, and kept a riot gun in his closet to protect his safe. In friendly territory like this, where the “lucky boys,” the gamblers, were permitted to emerge from the woodwork after dark and the girl show got wet, he might tell the sheriff, whether it was true or not, that he had been in Corrections himself.

  He turned Charlene away, saying what he owned were the big metal rides—the Octopus, the Scrambler, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Roll-O-Plane—and needed men for setting them up, tearing them down, and pulling the levers, but to try the concessionaires. Because he recognized her as already with it—Jake’s ticket-taker—he laughed and added that even if he didn’t pay them off, the cops would love him because he “swept up for them. Every jailbird and loose woman in town wants to join.”

  “Thank god gas guzzlers are better than a new car to sleep in,” she told him, not minding somehow if he knew that she’d lost her apartment, as well as her previous live-in boyfriend, before throwing her lot in with Cliff.

  He wasn’t rumored to be a chaser, and glanced at Charlene dispassionately. “And then you cut your hair off. Not smart. Not good.”

  It was true; she had lost her go-go gig in a club immediately. Smoky spat and fluttered a finger to dismiss her.

  Without trying the kiddie duck-ponds and bottle-pitches, the balloon-darts and airplane-swings—and disliking the smell of carnival food, she skipped those booths, too—she walked past the Tip Top and Sky Diver rides to the back end again, where the motordrome was sandwiched between the mud wrestlers’ tent and the girlie show, and presented herself at Jake’s friend, Abe’s, who presided over the latter.

  He shook his head without even suggesting she peel, however. She wanted to regard this as solidarity with Jake, but in honesty she couldn’t and found there were no recriminations from Jake or anyone else who had watched her job search down the midway when she reappeared at his act. Cliff understood that she’d been after income, not deserting him, and Vickie felt affronted on her behalf that their neighbor, Abe, had so summarily decided against her. For a moment she wanted to present herself for rejection, but Jake said no.

  “Why not?” Vickie demanded in sisterhood.

  “Because it’s a wet show. They’d lick your pussy.”

  He mounted his bally platform, grabbed the microphone, straddled the gaudy chrome Harley that was stage-set on rollers and gunned it, ignoring both Vickie’s and Charlene’s astonishment. Then, “Why do you think people drive for an hour or two to this fair—to see us?” he asked.

  Pissed off because Phil, down the dirt strip selling sauerkraut, still wasn’t helping him, and his women were restive, he launched his pitch: “This isn’t a pie plate, Ladies and Gentlemen. We climb the Wall! This is the last Thrill Drome in the US. We go round like the planets!” Maybe it stung Phil, he thought, that Phil’s parents had always recognized Jake was better on the Wall than him, if not of course as good as them, with a blonde maybe piggybacked, and a lion in the sidecar.

  Inside, after the tip had been gathered and coaxed to buy tickets, he had to deliver the ding pitch: “ding” because the coins dinged. Standing humbly with Vickie, Cliff, and Elizabeth Alice in the well of the structure looking up at the circle of strangers (the “sucker net” that was supposed to protect them from falling into the drome had been lost when they left Bridgeport), he intoned in solemn, not gravel-voiced, tones: “Ladies and Gentlemen, before we go to the Wall, I must ask for your brief attention. You see us here as a family.” He had a hand on Elizabeth Alice’s six-year-old shoulder. “That no insurance company will cover. You can imagine their policies do not apply to the dangers we face for your entertainment. And so we have established our own Riders’ Accident and Hospital Fund for obvious reasons. We will take nickels, dimes, quarters, pennies, or anything bigger that you can spare to contribute, except for your mother-in-law. Please keep her up there with you!”

  A patter of coins rained down, and Elizabeth Alice scurried about, giving her mother what she picked up. Logically the appeal should have been made after the performance, but people wouldn’t pause in filing out, and Jake shrugged off the humiliation of being hit by pennies (he’d said pennies) like a spatter of flies. The procedure was great fun for Elizabeth Alice, whose natural enthusiasm for such a game was increased by being useful and seeing the change often transformed directly into supper afterwards, whereas the dollar bills and ticket sales went mostly to Smoky or Phil, she had been told. Then she and Vickie left, and Jake hollered out, gravel-voiced again, “I’m Doctor Harley and this is my living room!” He roared up the Wall—blackened and resilient, “all rubber and oil,” as he liked to say—and soon was steering with his feet in the gritty wind, hands clasped behind his neck, or just by swiveling his hips, but as if he were about to fly right out of the bowl. In fact he’d once done that. His throttle wire broke, he lost control, hit the safety cable, and flew right over the spectators’ heads, popping through the canvas rain covering and out of the drom
e, only being saved by happening to hit one of the swinging chairs of the Octopus, high up, next door.

  Other carnies, like the semi-dwarf who had run that particular Octopus, could strut the grounds wearing brass knuckles and swinging their hands like pistons, but Jake didn’t have to trifle with playing tough. He knew all kinds of carnies’ revenge, including the best, which a smalltime big shot like Smoky, from central Maine, had probably never heard of, but which Jake himself had once wreaked at a state fair in the Middle West when an amusement park owner had gypped him. In the wee, windy hours, when all the patrons had gone and a gale was brewing and the place was deserted, you picked a high ride that was stacked domino-like next to a million dollars’ worth of other rides and, wearing gloves, you unscrewed a certain key number of bolts and went home to your hotel. And that was the end of a very short season for that bastard; even the Ferris Wheel fell down. Jake’s ponytail was thinner and grayer than Vickie’s (“Only one wife at a time,” he had promised her at the Registrar’s, with Elizabeth Alice holding the bouquet), but his moves anywhere at all near the bike were direct and assured.

  With dancers prancing in their skivvies on the bally box only a stone’s throw away, Vickie had been watching Jake’s wandering eye a bit apprehensively, but it was not drawn to the girlie show. He seemed more interested in the local girls with pretty blouses who had paid three dollars to see him ride from up on his own walkway: which was how she had met him, after climbing those stairs. Nevertheless, she forbade Elizabeth Alice from hanging around the front of Abe’s tent, gawking at the feathery costumes and mascara the showgirls came out in. Jake suggested there was no harm in her “learning some of the moves” she was imitating that they did out front with their clothes still on. But Vickie was scandalized: “This is not going to be her life.”

  Jake didn’t argue. He didn’t want that fate for her either, but didn’t think strippers were created in such a way. He was rehearsing Cliff in memory devices for the crossovers they ought to begin using, if their show was not to go stale. People could watch the merry-go-round if that’s all a drome became. He granted him a grin afterwards and patted his shoulder; their lives might depend upon whether he had actually learned. And Angel, whose legal name nobody remembered because he wanted to be called Angel, “because I’m not one” (he claimed the chicks liked that, but so far Jake hadn’t seen any who weren’t harelipped that did), of course wanted in on the lessons.

  It was lonesome, when Jake had off-time, looking down the midway for carnies who were for real, not the man-and-wife thirty-mile-wonders who had remodeled their vans so that they could flip up a flap and sell corn dogs and egg salad at auctions, fairs, ballgames, close by, as a summer hobby and drive home to sleep in their own beds at night, or else put up a pup tent behind the stand. Other locals paid the entrance fee for their vehicles, and then simply camped at the fairgrounds, cooking over a Coleman stove for the cheapest of all change-of-scenes. The horse pulls, oxen pulls, and dairy competitions were old home week, but if a character like Jake approached to chat, it became like a foreign country for them, and as alarming as if some gypsy might steal their pots, pans, and babies.

  Then there were itinerant guys working a little pokerino booth, or a high-striker where the marks swung a sledgehammer to ring the bell, or else guessed ages and weights, but who never slid south of New Jersey for the winter, where the heart of the business lay. Smoky had no Fire Eater, or Guillotine, or Headless Woman, or Fiji Mermaid, or Two-Headed Exhibit, or waxen Hitler or Torture Show, or Sword Swallower, or pickled punks. There was a House of Mirrors, from Memphis, with papier-mache ghosts hanging in it, and a taffy booth presided over by the wife of the Hall of Mirrors owner. Also a strolling clown on retainer from Butler, Georgia; and Phil, who knew everything; and the light man, who was from Coney Island and had carried around a Half Boy on the Royal American Freak Revue, and catered to Fat Ladies and Bearded Ladies. He’d sewn dried monkeys onto dead carp to simulate The Seventh Wonder of the World, and replaced the plaster fittings in a curving framework that women lay in to be sawn in half ten times a day. But he was a solitary—unbending if you tried to strike up a conversation. Here today, gone tomorrow, was his motto, which was true but also self-defeating. He’d been a utility man on many carnivals, oiling tattooed individuals and overseeing snake-eating geeks, and now that Thalidomide Babies, pickled in jars, that you bought from a hospital, were a no-no, he was just the light man.

  So, Jake walked behind the banner line of the girl show during the 5 PM break—when so many of these farmers went home to have dinner—after prudently asking Vickie whether she’d like to come along, so as not to arouse her suspicions. Abe worked out of Birmingham and, behind that, the Big Easy milieu of New Orleans. He was mellow, vaguely chubby, always in a clean print shirt and khaki pants, smiling readily at anybody, unlike Smoky, and with money in his trailer too, but no more of a weapon than a billy club and an iron tent stake. “Bandits are scared of girls,” he liked to say, although he did employ a roughie, not just to help put up the tent and tear it down again, but to protect the girls from rowdies in the crowd, if necessary, with help from the deputy that a sheriff would usually provide, if he was being paid off. “Audience participation” kootch shows were the wildest kind, and only allowed in the same venues that still welcomed a Wall of Death, so Jake and Abe crossed routes at several engagements a year.

  “You break your neck,” he warned Jake affectionately, again. “An old geezer like you,” he said in his Cajun accent, from a boyhood spent in Lafayette, Louisiana, where his father had bought furs from the salt-marsh trappers and managed a rice farm. Otherwise his watchwords of advice were to “Negotiate from strength; the little fish gets eaten up,” and “I was a nice Jewish boy who learned one important lesson: beautiful girls need company too.” Not in high school, they didn’t, but later, in a modeling job, after the photo shoot was over and the gay guys said goodbye, assuming that they already had some other date. If you escorted them to a party, held their purse, shielded them from unseemly propositions but cleared out of their way whenever they wanted you to, you’d become an agent in a year or so. And, further down the road, if you didn’t get all huffy at bedtime at the sound of an occasional vibrator in your motel room, you could find yourself sleeping with three or four eye-popping pusses, in all the extra beds the manager could fit in, and topping off one or another, as needed.

  “Compadre,” Abe repeated, nodding with amusement at the stilted step of Vickie—who to him was just Jake’s newest, but was approaching out of curiosity or jealousy, with her arms crossed, rather as though Abe possessed x-ray eyes that saw straight through your clothing. “You, the holder of a Bronze Star for heroism, come to see this old 4-F?”

  They laughed. It was their joke that though the army hadn’t wanted him, Abe had lived almost ever since surrounded by nookie, except during the winter, when he liked and even insisted upon being alone. Had never married, no children, but enjoyed them, and, noticing Vickie upset that her daughter had followed, he said, “No, no, no, it never hurt a little one to see how the big girls can wind a man around their pinkie. The mystery of women.”

  He introduced her to Sheba and Carmen, who had emerged from their dressing room for money to go buy softie cones and boats of French fries and sloppy joes, in their high-heeled slippers and fishnet stockings, but sweatshirts and cutoffs, with hair tattily scarved, as a street disguise. Yet, spotting Elizabeth Alice, they ducked back inside, wailing for lace and ruffles to dress her in, and brought Samantha out as well. Ignoring Jake, they soon had Vickie, too, feeling proud and mollified. Abe had a canvas chair for visitors, and signaled to his roughie, a leaden-faced bouncer type, that it was okay for him to eat now. A deputy in a comic uniform loafed nearby.

  “You know, I’ve known this guy for what, probably ten years?” he told Jake, meaning the sheriff, not the carny workhand or the lunk who was the deputy. “And he says”—Abe, sotto-voiced, raised his eyebrows for emphasis—“he gets his money n
ow from letting a certain plane land once a month from Canada at the airstrip. So he doesn’t need us anymore, and just gets in trouble from the Christers at election time. So this may be our last gig here. I’m going to do a good blow-off.”

  The dancers returned with subs, and Vickie left with Elizabeth Alice. Sheba was actually a Sally, but had ebony (or more than ebony) long hair to fit her African name, as Carmen’s was fluorescent blonde, and Samantha’s flame-red. They were all tall, which made it easier for them not to have to watch their weight: which was a benefit of stripping over modeling. In the flesh, people weren’t as particular about a dab of flab, even a love handle, if you remained indoor-white. And unlike some of the Southern girls, Abe said, these Northerners didn’t chew and spit tobacco.

  When Angel tried to peep around, Jake shooed him away. But Sheriff Leroy showed up, with eye pouches as dark as a raccoon’s rings. Though not as weighty in the community as a Southern sheriff could have been, he might still be intent upon soliciting more of a kickback, if this was going to be the last go-round. They felt antsy; Jake had had to pay up too, a hundred smackers, because of “safety concerns.” Leroy’s livelihood and merriment was measuring degrees of illegality, and the three ladies, despite their legerdemain in appearing quite shapeless in sweatshirts, quickly withdrew after a chorus of Hi’s to him.

  Leroy had chimpy arms like a dairyman, but Abe’s smile merely widened. “Leroy!” he welcomed him hospitably; it was impossible to prevent your own mouth from twitching a little. And Leroy’s visit turned out not to be mercenary but sentimental. He hunched comfortably over where they were seated, leaning on the trailer’s bumper with the insinuating manner of a highway trooper looking inside a driver’s window.