Later, still shaking from the vibrations of his machine during those hours in the centrifuge, he indulged in a lengthy shower with Vickie in the motel room, while Elizabeth Alice slept. They made love better than he could have done with any stripper, as he knew from experience, and slept as late as the management permitted, after first waking for Elizabeth Alice’s breakfast.
“We live outdoors,” he explained to her. “We tune the motors louder than you would be allowed to anywhere else. We wear clothes you’d get stopped for in the street. This is show business. We have fairies and dwarfs. We have women who are sawn in half. We have people who would be wards of the state if they were not with us,” he said. And Vickie was placated. She even tried lifting the python that next day, a Saturday, finding it “lighter than Alida,” and dry-skinned, not slimy, and patterned like the Persian rug her grandmother, the one relative who had loved her unstintingly, had owned. Tentative but serviceably pretty and twitchy-assed, she stood on the bally platform with it for a while, as Cliff’s Charlene did too, boosting their take for the afternoon, when the girl show wasn’t open, but kiddies were led by, wanting to see the loud-noise ride.
Yet an old Wall of Death carny had once told Jake that “your mother is your best friend.” Naturally he didn’t believe it until last year, when his had died, and he’d had to put her best stuff into a storage compartment, along with his own favorite relics, and realized that there was no one now to unfailingly turn to after a heart attack or a terrible shitter. He’d never mentioned the storage compartment to Vickie (this way, you had something left over after a divorce), nor the floaters in his eyes, and the double vision he sometimes experienced when he accelerated too fast. His sixth, or magnetic, sense would thereupon kick in to warn him where the iron cable was. Or perhaps he somehow felt through the fork springs and the wheel base the location of the top paint stripe, until he could distinguish its red again, then the yellow midstripe, and the seventy-seven degree slant that led to the ramp and safely to the floor—although Jake had once performed in a “bottomless” silo act, as a “Death Dodger,” in a “Circle of Death,” where the body of the structure was lifted off the floor, once the riders got into motion. This was back in his heyday, when carnivals still exhibited “Hitler’s Car,” next to a Four-Legged Girl, and a Human Pincushion, and “Tortures of the Middle Ages,” and monitor lizards as “Living Fossils.” You hoisted a reconditioned engine into your banged-up truck and hit the road, with a hand-held air-raid siren for the bally spiel, and a banner proclaiming, “The Devil’s Tub.” Once you were rotating round the bottomless cask, there was no hope of coming down until it was lowered again.
But late that balmy Saturday afternoon, as the crowds were building for fun and frolic and the entertainment principle was operative that you were going to make ninety percent of your money in ten percent of your time, Sheriff Leroy and the Chairman of the County Fair Association, both of them overfed bullfrogs in this dinky pond, began a portentous stroll down the midway. They stopped at the bingo tent, inevitably, and at the Mouse Game, where people wagered on which hole in a flat board a gray mouse, when released, ran down (the result being gaffed from below according to where the man in charge poked a thread of cheese). Bypassing the American Legion’s roulette wheel, they visited the various Lucky Boys at their portable craps or blackjack tables, pausing to josh with them and with Smoky, while palming envelopes or plain greenbacks. They also passed up the rope climb, the radar gun that measured how hard you could pitch, a walk-through trailer togged up as a Crime Caravan, with Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James, and police-warehouse bric-a-brac, and all of the kiddie games. The ritual was to raise the previously agreed-upon bribes for offences to public morals, and Abe had an envelope ready to give them, which might reduce his pot for the evening from possibly two thousand to fifteen hundred dollars or so. But the mud wrestlers were apoplectic. They didn’t know the rigamarole. This was an athletic event! This had been arranged at the beginning with Smoky, they argued.
“All right, keep your shirts on, then,” said the sheriff. “We’ll see what you earn. If you don’t, you go to jail.” So they paid him.
Jake, having no sex or gambling encysted in his act, watched these proceedings with only vestigial apprehension. He walked away. Nevertheless, the pair did stop at his bally box, walk around the outside of the drome, examining the system of struts that backed it up, and glanced inside: whereupon they told Charlene to give him the high sign.
“Where’s your safety net?” the association chairman asked. His teeny mustache, in the blankness of a very fat face, seemed to be a point of pride with him, and he emphasized this by smiling.
Some bastard must have told him that Jake had lost his sucker net that was supposed to be spread next to the safety cable to catch a fainting customer. Phil couldn’t have done it. It would run against his own interests. Was it Angel, out for revenge? Angel was down at his girlfriend’s wagon, yelling, “Stinkies! Stinky onions! Get ’em while they’re hot!” and ringing a ship’s bell.
“It’s a matter of public welfare. We may have to shut you down,” the sheriff explained pleasantly. But Jake lost his temper.
“Do you guys eat out of the same bucket?” he said.
Sheriff Leroy interrupted him: “It’s a free country. Do you want to close up right now and vacate our premises? I’ll just have to check your license, if you’re driving.”
Who else except Angel would know that his license had been suspended? Jake switched strategies quickly and slumped his shoulders in defeat, as you were supposed to do.
“Hard times,” he pleaded, indicating the responsibility of Elizabeth Alice’s presence with a placating gesture (though a lacey nothing that Samantha had tied around her neck made that seem a bit incongruous), as well as the disparity between his own bally crowd and the sex show’s, next door. So they only charged him an extra yard.
Abe was grimacing in sympathy at the spectacle, but when they turned to him, he threw them off-stride for a moment by claiming he had changed his kootch show from the audience-participation of yesterday to just an ordinary snake-charmer’s demonstration, with Sheba and the python. “Nothing unsavory. Nobody’s stripping.”
Then he laughed because bewilderment, and even disappointment, crossed both their greedy faces, and gave them their envelope to split, plus a crotch-thong he said that Samantha had worn. “You can smell it, come Christmastime.”
Jake was distracted, however. As a rider, not an owner, he hadn’t needed to deal much with this kind of bullshit before. He cut his front tire in weaving by the cable and nearly took a header. If the sucker’s net had been in place, he might have grabbed it and saved himself that way, abandoning the bike to fall, but since Cliff wasn’t yet in the drome to complicate his descent, he steered jaggedly down, feeling as if he’d gashed a leg, his links with the precious 1928 Indian were so strong. He was glad he hadn’t let it fall and get battered more. But that he, the only thrill act on the midway—there were no cats or wire-walkers in front of the grandstand, just trotting races, tractor pulls, country music, and a little demolition derby—should be singled out for a double payoff galled him. Even at only a hundred bucks, it amounted to his entire gross for a very good ride, and he had seen those porky sheriff’s deputies with their beer bellies unable to run down a pickpocket, or carry a stretcher with a stroke victim on it to the ambulance without some of the carnies helping. Smoky might be as overweight, but he could practically put up the Ferris wheel, if necessary.
When Jake had checked over the Scout and finished changing the tire, he remembered Angel and went after him. He was not in front of the drome, or at his girlfriend’s grease joint. Peering, Jake did eventually catch sight of Angel’s pinstriped railroad man’s cap among the kiddie rides, up by the Maple Sugar House, at the front end of the carny, but couldn’t find him when he finally got there. Foolishly, he had glared daggers at the boy before beginning his ride, so Angel must have figured he had best disappear.
The girlfriend selling onion rings was sniffing back her tears, but Jake did not immediately open the trailer’s possum belly to learn the worst, although the lock was askew. He growled at Cliff to try and hold the tip while he ate a cheeseburger. (You burned the cheese on the Wall, and the meat was useful for healing your bruises.) Then he hit the circumgyrations like a roulette wheel’s metal ball. It was sure a better livelihood than driving a moving van from Bridgeport to Pasadena, and back. From the waist down, he felt part-bike, and relished exercising the fingertip control that enabled him to ride perpendicularly while seated backwards, if he was in the mood for a display of stunts. He followed that with a money run, riding around the top of the barrel as slowly as centrifugal force permitted him to, his right hand outstretched for bills.
He was shaking—he hoped imperceptibly—and his smoker’s cough reminded him that, when he was younger, he could have run down Angel in the field, instead of letting him escape. Death he pictured as a great, sudden shitter. Maybe death was another orbit, at right angles to everything we had imagined before.
Standing on the bally platform, Jake handed Vickie the few dollars he’d collected and surveyed the seething crowd. A slow-motion mob; but Elizabeth Alice was dodging families of wandering marks, as she shuttled in and out, searching the packed dirt for coins. Not an ideal childhood, but busier than many. Over yonder, the mud wrestlers were trying to hose the latest load of gunk out of their hair. And Abe was proclaiming that Samantha was “going to swallow a silver dollar in three different ways on the inside.” Carmen posed beside her, while Sheba rested in a chair. The feud with the moxie-driven wrestlers had simmered down of its own accord, once Abe had decided he didn’t want to risk his girls’ good health by promoting a match in front of the grandstand. He really enjoyed his sleepy, leisurely, bathrobe mornings with them in what was generally some lakeside motel room, in the annual cycle of different towns.
Sweating badly and hoarse, Jake began to tout his motordrome again into the microphone. He spoke the truth as a kind of shorthand: “This is the last there is, and I am the best there is, Ladies and Gentlemen. If you want to see a motorcycle ride the Wall, come on in. This is the last go-round.”
He had been feeling a familiar nausea, and picturing himself carted off by the sheriff’s men as a charity case to the local sawbones or hospital. And now a crushing breastbone pain shortened his breath. So he fished a nitroglycerin pill out of his shirt pocket and put it underneath his tongue. He was visualizing the embalmed body of a young carny workhand of Italian ancestry who had been killed in a fight in Laurinburg, North Carolina, and kept on public display in a loincloth as a local joke called “Spaghetti” in the undertaker’s garage for sixty years.
“This is about the last motordrome there’ll ever be, and I’m the best there is at it,” Jake recited painfully. Although Cliff had stepped away somewhere to eat, quite soon he went inside alone to start the show early and without him, anyhow, after consulting his watch to time the second tablet. He gazed up at the irregular circle of faces rimming the silo, all focusing upon him, and kicked his crank to bring the mini-motor to life—a tenth the size of the biggest Harleys’.
His left shoulder and on down his arm hurt stabbingly, as he straddled the saddle. So he fingered another bitter pill out of his pocket and laid it in his mouth, where the first was still dissolving. The usual headache started. He didn’t try to speak any further. Simply gunned himself up the curve of the ramp, onto the circuit of the Wall, and into orbit, round and round and around and around, until, dead, he fell.
The Final Fate of the Alligators
IN SUCH A CROWDED, busy world the service each person performs is necessarily a small one. Arnie Bush’s was no exception. He was living in the Chelsea district of Manhattan at this time, although he had lived in central California on several occasions, as well as Chicago, and Crisfield, Maryland, and had put in four years or more in Galveston, Texas, at a point when he was married to a woman who lived there. He’d thought of it as her home rather than his; all of her husbands, as far as he knew, had left Galveston after their marriages to her ended. She owned a laundromat and barbershop, attached, which he had helped her manage. She was a cheerful, practical woman—Ellen—and they’d lived with her two sons in the cottage and patio area behind the business establishments. When he met her, he was a merchant seaman on leave from the sea, rooming in Galveston and hanging around the parks and bars, though he already knew the trade of barbering also. He’d given her a daughter, as a matter of fact—her only daughter—whom he kept in touch with at Christmastime. The girl, whose name was Jo-ann, had grown out of her teens by now, and he was hoping she would visit him if she came north. He hadn’t seen her since babyhood, but when he thought of her he imagined that she looked like her mother. Ellen was a smally built, active woman with a bumpy complexion, a pretty figure, black, scalloped hair, and masculine blue eyes. She carped and bitched a bit too much but not so much you couldn’t stand it, and since she wasn’t as bossy in business hours as she was at home, and since the inescapably boring chores were handled by two employees of long-standing, he had not found that the setup interrupted his independence. Instead, he’d liked being married to a businesswoman; it furnished him with the chance to operate a going concern without the ball-and-chain aspects of owning property. He hadn’t married her for money reasons, however (at least, he didn’t recognize the motive if he had), but for the special, jumping, bodily impetuosity between them, never equalled for him with another woman, which really never had turned sour. Just the degree of intimacy and understanding they had reached was unforgettable; he hadn’t lived four years with anyone else, or given way so much, opened himself. He’d known what she was thinking when she didn’t say anything, and known that underneath the peremptory manner she was a homekeeping woman as well, who didn’t want to bitch at him if she did bitch, who disliked her own businesses and wanted peace and a simple household.
He had appreciated her youthful bottom, her mother’s bosom, and the way she gathered her hair at the nape of her neck. They went to Matamoros together on a week’s trip, leaving the kids with the woman who cooked. They dressed in sombreros and paper shirts and saw a cockfight and a festival street dance, and in his memory this trip pretty well represented what a marriage ought to be like. He had delighted in the period when she was pregnant, too, partly because his own gravity had pleased him. And Ellen had slowed down—that ambitious, scrimping fussing—had leaned on him and showed a dreamy side, as he considered, like his. More than at the chance to run the business as he wanted, he’d been happy to see her soften, see her resemble him. And the whole weighty buildup to the baby’s arrival—the hydraulics, the clocking of it—had seemed the marvel that it ought to be; and then the hump under the blanket and the red head and skin, the sleeping and the sucking, the rooting, the tunneling, the reaching up, the funny-looking undershirt. He’d called her Joey Milkmouse. He’d hung over the crib: he’d brought home cotton lambs and rubber fish, full of a welling gentleness that mixed with the detachment that was native to him and easily passed for gentleness.
There were certain moments in the routines he detested—at breakfast, for example, which they hurried through. When they were about to get up from the table, she’d mention whateve
r was on her mind, speaking rapidly and sharply after the silence of the meal. “I want the garbage men to clean up all that stuff they’re chucking on the ground; I want you to call them about it. They can’t just drive away and leave a mess like that around. And the Bendix people were supposed to be here yesterday. He knows we have two machines out. They were supposed to service us on Monday and they didn’t.” Sometimes she felt cornered, she said, by the need to hammer at these guys and hold her own, making them do right, though she was thankful to have Bush taking over the worst of it. She wrangled with him at breakfast to get him started strong.
When she was with her kids, she didn’t hold out areas of private reserve, but, having been somebody’s wife already twice before, with Arnie she was a pensive, smiling chum at best, a speedy co-worker rather than the kind of ultimate companion he’d thought a wife would be. He resented it that what was a climax for him—his marriage—should be her third, and that she didn’t flare up angrily, for instance, when a lady called her Mrs. Westrom, which was her previous husband’s name. It reminded him of shacking up, or of an ordinary, carnally enlivened partnership, and he was disappointed, if this was marriage, even more than he admitted. He wasn’t one to raise a stew about it, however; he was a quiet, self-contained fellow. Instead he paid more attention to the females in pearly slacks who huffed and puffed about the laundromat, eating weight-saver cookies and drinking coffee from the vending machines, and remembered the sea, of course, with intensifying nostalgia. He thought of his teens in Bakersfield and of the many memories of his twenties, when he had gone to sea and knocked around the world—afterward, he’d fought in Italy as an artilleryman. Except for Ellen, the baby, and his two stepsons, he had no ties to anyone, but he discovered that these ties were not indissoluble, either. The boys were runabouts, aged ten and twelve, not lonely or fazed at all, and Jo-ann was mostly Ellen’s baby, or the cook’s. Ellen’s preoccupations were the normalities of mealtimes, meeting the mortgage bills, preserving her neighborly relationships, and seeing the children grow, whoever her husband happened to be; this was his impression anyway. She may have supposed that no husband could be held for long. She kept a bunch of photographs of herself on the coffee table and the chests of drawers to give the kids an atmosphere of family, she said. Bush, who got awfully tired of looking at them, told her she ought to go into show biz.
The Devil's Tub Page 5